The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

43

June 2017

For a few days after the night that Tallulah and Zach drink wine and talk, everything is fine between them. Zach is chilled and relaxed. He cooks dinner for them, he bathes Noah and keeps him entertained, he sits quietly at his spreadsheets playing around with his finances without constantly asking Tallulah to get involved. He gives Tallulah space to study and just to be. At night they sleep in her bed with the baby between them and he makes no attempt to be physically affectionate with her. He quietly gets ready for work every morning and quietly returns every night and all is well.

Then, at the beginning of June, just after Noah’s first birthday, Scarlett messages Tallulah to ask her to wait for her after college so that they can get the bus home together. They meet on the pavement just outside college. Scarlett is halfway through her end-of-year exams. She’s been doing a still life for two whole days.

‘An artichoke and a bone,’ she says as they stride together towards the bus stop. ‘Seriously. I have spent two days staring at an artichoke and a bone.’

‘What do they symbolise?’

‘Like, nothing. Just stuff I picked up as I left the house. The bone is Toby’s. He’s not impressed. But they look quite cool. I put them on black velvet and they look kind of, you know, Dutch master-y.’

‘When’s your last exam?’

‘Wednesday next week. Then I have to hand in my portfolio on Thursday and then it’ll be Friday and I am going to the pub to get absolutely shit-faced.’

‘Who are you going with?’

‘The usuals. And maybe Liam.’ She looks at Tallulah sideways, to gauge her response.

But Tallulah just shrugs and says, ‘Whatever. It’s not my business.’

‘No, but seriously. Just as friends. Because we are just good friends. Honestly. What happened that night, it was just stupid. Just a stupid, stupid thing, because I’m a stupid, stupid person.’

‘Scar, it’s fine. You don’t need to explain.’

‘Yeah, but I do. I do need to explain. I need to explain it to myself, if anything. I’ve always just been such a “do it first, think about it later” kind of person. I never think through the consequences of anything I do. Look.’ She draws in her breath and turns hard to face her. ‘I know you think I’ve had this charmed life and that nothing bad has ever happened to me. But something bad has happened to me. Something really bad. Not long after you and me first met. It’s why I dropped out of college. It’s why I couldn’t face anyone for so long.’

Tallulah glances at her, quizzically, and waits for her continue.

Scarlett sighs and says, ‘Come to the pub with me? When we get off the bus? I’ll tell you everything.’

They slide into a quiet corner of the Swan & Ducks with a Diet Coke for Tallulah and a hot chocolate with a shot of rum on the side for Scarlett. The pub is virtually empty at this time of the day, the summer sun bright through the windows. A man sits at the bar with a beagle spread out at his feet and Scarlett points at the dog and says, as she does about every dog she ever sees, ‘That’s a good dog.’

‘OK then,’ says Tallulah, ‘I’m ready to hear your dark confession.’

Scarlett wriggles slightly. ‘I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this. You’re going to hate me more than you already do.’

‘I don’t hate you.’

‘Whatever. Just promise me you will never, ever tell another soul what I’m about to tell you. Not ever.’

‘I swear.’

‘Seriously. Never.’

‘Never.’

Scarlett blinks slowly and composes herself. ‘Early last summer,’ she begins, ‘at the start of the holidays, I was kind of alone a lot. Liam had gone back to his farm. Mum was back and forth from London. Everyone was away and I was really bored and really lonely. I mean, really, really lonely. And one day I went into school’ – she points at the Maypole across the common – ‘just to go and say hi to Lexie Mulligan. Because I was so desperate for someone to talk to. I took the dog and we went through the woods. It was a really stunning day. I was wearing, like, a slip dress and boots and I was sweating hot, even in the shade of the trees. And then I realised there was a man coming the other way and I felt a bit scared, a bit like I wished I had a fucking Rottweiler instead of Lord Drool-a-lot, and that I was wearing more clothes. But then he got a bit closer and I realised I recognised him. He was familiar. And then I saw his dog and I knew that it was Mr Croft.’

‘Mr Croft?’

‘Married to Jacinta Croft. The head teacher. You know, tiny weeny woman, looks like a Polly Pocket on HRT?’

Tallulah shakes her head. She’s never paid any attention to anything that happens at Maypole House.

‘You’d recognise her if you saw her. Anyway, she’s married to Guy. He’s kind of tall and bald and quiet. He’s a web designer. Works from home. Looks after their kid. Keeps himself to himself. And I swear, I’d never even noticed him properly before that day. I only recognised him by his dog. A black Lab. Nelson. Literally, just the loveliest dog ever.’

Tallulah glances at the time on her phone from the corner of her eye. It’s nearly four. She’d normally be home about four fifteen. She can feel her window of freedom shrinking as Scarlett tells her about a dog called Nelson.

‘Anyway, so of course Toby dragged me over to say hello to Nelson and while Toby and Nelson were chatting, me and Mr Croft started chatting too and he told me he was home alone, that Jacinta was at their London house with their son for a few weeks, he was going to join them later in the summer, that he had a project to finish, yada yada yada. And as he was talking I could see his eyes kept going to my boobs and I don’t know why, because it should have been as creepy as fuck, but for some reason, it just really turned me on.’

Tallulah bangs her glass of Coke down on the table and coughs as the liquid hits the back of her throat. ‘Oh my God,’ she gasps. ‘Please stop. I don’t want to hear any more.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. It’s gross. But bear with me. It gets worse.’

‘Oh, Christ, Scarlett. I’m not sure I can.’

‘So yes, we were chatting about really boring shit and I was thinking, I want to fuck you, and I was probably ovulating or something, I dunno, but I looked at him and I thought: Now, do it to me now. And …’

Tallulah puts a hand between them and closes her eyes. ‘Honestly. I can’t.’

‘Please,’ says Scarlett. ‘I have to purge. This is important.’

Tallulah sighs again. ‘Go on then.’

‘I could tell he could feel it too. And seriously, he’s, like, in his forties. And bald. And not even that good-looking. And I told him I was walking up to the school and he said he’d walk with me and we were chatting and the sexual tension was building and then we came out of the back of the woods and we were facing the back door of his cottage in the grounds and he said, “Come in for a glass of water.” And that was that.’

Tallulah throws her an appalled look. She has no idea how to respond.

Scarlett continues: ‘We spent the whole of that month fucking. Literally, that was all I did for a month. Walk the dog through the woods, knock on the back door of Mrs Croft’s house, he’d let me in, we’d fuck. I’d leave. And it was amazing. Kind of seedy, but amazing. It’s like, you know, sex is such a weird stupid thing when you think about it, about the mechanics of it. About what a man does and what a woman does and what it’s for. If you think about it for too long you’d never want to do it again because it’s gross. But that was the thing. Neither of us was thinking. We were just bored and lonely and horny. I can’t explain it any other way. When I look back on it, I don’t even get it. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was like this warped, twisted holiday romance. And anyway, after a few weeks he went up to London and I went off sailing with Rex and my mum and then it was September and Liam came back to college and I started at Manton and me and Guy both agreed to quit it and get on with our lives. And for a while it was fine. I didn’t see him around and he didn’t get in contact. But then, kind of around the time I first met you, that day on the bus, he was in the Co-op and I was in the Co-op and our eyes met and we made some kind of inane small talk and I scuttled off feeling really confused. Next thing he’s sent me a fucking dick pic.’

Tallulah gasps again and covers her mouth with her hands. ‘No,’ she whispers through her fingers.

‘Yes. And I just immediately deleted it and typed back NO. In caps lock. And then it went quiet again for a while and then one night, I guess he must have been drunk, he started bombarding me with text messages and dick pics and declarations of love and hate and everything in between. He said Mrs Croft was never at home and his son had gone to boarding school and he missed me and he couldn’t live without me. And I just deleted everything and stopped replying and then the night of the Manton Christmas party, after I met you, I just really, really couldn’t think straight any more. You’d just blown my mind and my inbox was full of all this crazy shit from Mr Croft and I just didn’t want to go anywhere near Maypole House or the village, I just wanted to stay away from everyone and everything so I finished with Liam a couple of days later and then it was Christmas and I just hunkered down with my family, kept my head down. I was going to come back to college in January. Fresh start. Clear head.

‘But then one day, in that weird bit between Christmas and New Year, I took Toby out in the woods and I had my AirPods in, it was kind of early afternoon, starting to get dark, darker still in the woods, and I was close to my house so I thought I was safe and then suddenly …’ She pauses and her gaze drops to the table. ‘Someone came up behind me and put their hand over my mouth, like this, and pulled me back and I nearly died of a fucking heart attack. And it was him, of course, it was Mr Croft, Guy. And he was smiling at me, like it was all a cute joke; he pointed at my AirPods, to take them out, tried to make out it was normal to put your hand over a teenage girl’s mouth in the woods in the dark. So I took them out and said, “What the fuck?” And he said, “I’m leaving her.” I said, “What?” He said, “I’m leaving Jacinta. There’s nothing left between us. It’s over. I’ve got a flat. Come with me.” And I kind of laughed and said, “I’m eighteen years old. I’m a student. I live with my mum. I can’t go anywhere with anyone.” I might have sounded a bit flippant, I don’t know. But seriously, it was just nuts. And then he started crying and Toby started whining because he always whines when people cry and that sort of made me laugh because, fuck’s sake, a grown man crying and a Saint Bernard dog whining is funny. And then he threw me this look, this look that said Shut up and he started kissing me, and it was kind of rough and desperate. And I just went into this sort of trance. I can’t explain it. I went into a trance and just did the movements. Just did the movements, like a pre-programmed doll. I just thought: Let it happen. Just let it happen. I think, in a way, that I was just stopping it from being rape because I couldn’t fucking deal with it being rape. So I just turned it into sex in my head. And afterwards—’ She stops and pulls in her breath. Tallulah can hear tears catching at the back of her throat. ‘Afterwards, he just sort of stared at me, breathlessly. He said, “I’m going now.” And I just nodded and he went and I could tell he was really freaked out because we’d just done this weird thing that was so grey, you know, so ambiguous, impossible to know where the consent was in it or even if there had been any consent. And he knew and I knew it but neither of us acknowledged it. And then he just went. And I never saw him again.’

Tallulah doesn’t know what to say. ‘God, that’s horrible. Are you OK?’

Scarlett stirs her hot chocolate and shrugs. ‘I don’t know. I felt, like, raw … exposed after. I didn’t know who I was or what I was. I kept thinking I’d wake up the next morning and I’d feel normal but I never did. I couldn’t tell my mum; I couldn’t tell anyone. I finally snapped one day, thought I was having a nervous breakdown, called Liam, begged him to come over. I was going to tell him everything. But then he got there and all I wanted to do was just climb into his arms and hold on to him and let him rock me. But every time I closed my eyes I felt Guy’s hand over my mouth; I felt him on me. Every time I looked at Toby I’d think, you were there. You were a witness. What did you see? What did you think? Did he rape me? Am I a victim? Or am I a whore …?’

Scarlett rubs tears from her face with the backs of her hands. She sighs and drops the teaspoon, picks up her hot chocolate and drinks it.

Tallulah puts her hand against her arm and says, ‘That sounds like a nightmare.’

Scarlett nods forcefully. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes. That’s exactly it. Exactly. The setting, the dusk. The unexpectedness of it. The way he disappeared afterwards. No one ever talked about him; I never heard his name mentioned. Like maybe he’d never really existed; maybe he was just a figment of my imagination. It had that quality of a really unsettling dream, one of those ones that haunts you for days afterwards, and I was lost, just totally lost until that moment a few weeks later when the doorbell rang on a Sunday morning and there you were. Tallulah from the bus, come to save me.’

She stops talking then, and Tallulah glances at her curiously. It feels, strangely, as though she has something else to share with her, as if she hasn’t quite finished offloading.

‘And that was that?’

Scarlett nods, forcefully. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘And that was that.’

It’s nearly half past four when Tallulah leaves the pub. She feels warped and out of sorts. She glances at her phone briefly to check that nobody’s been trying to get hold of her and then she puts it in her jeans pocket and starts across the common. As she does so she glances across at Maypole House. Somewhere in there, she ponders, is Jacinta Croft, the woman whose husband Scarlett had a tawdry affair with last summer. Somewhere in there is Liam Bailey, the man Scarlett cheated on with the head teacher’s husband. And here she is, Tallulah Murray, a local teenage mum having her first gay love affair, and over there – she glances at her own home – is a boy called Zach Allister who is the father of her child and somewhere else is her own father who loves his mother more than he loves his wife and children, and over there – she glances at the road out of the village – are Megs and Simon Allister, parents to five children, none of whom they know how to love properly. And over there, beyond the village, are the woods: the shadowy half-world where Scarlett may or may not have been raped by a man old enough to be her father. And there are no answers to anything, anywhere, no clear paths through. The only thing, she ponders as she walks, the only thing that is clear and plain and simple, is Noah.

She picks up her pace as she gets closer to home, desperate to hold him in her arms. As she nears the cul-de-sac she hears the familiar rumble of the bus pulling up at the stop outside the Maypole. The doors hiss open and she sees a familiar shape climb off the bus and turn left. It’s Zach. He’s late home from work; she thought he’d be back by now. That explains why she hasn’t had any messages or missed calls from him. She picks up her pace and catches up with him. As he turns and looks at her, his face contorts slightly and she sees him stuff something into the pocket of his jacket, a small bag. She pretends not to have noticed and smiles as she approaches him. He seems so thrown by her having almost caught him with something that he didn’t want her to see that he has not noticed she is returning home late and from the wrong direction.

‘You’re late back,’ she says.

‘Yeah. I went into town after work. Needed a new phone charger.’

They pause to cross the road to let a car pass by. It’s Kerryanne Mulligan, the matron from the Maypole. She knows everyone and everyone knows her. She puts her hand up and waves at them from the window. They wave back. As they enter the house, Zach takes off his jacket, hangs it from a hook and goes straight through to the living room where she can hear him cooing at Noah. She quickly puts her hand inside the pocket of Zach’s coat and pulls out the bag. It’s a dark green plastic carrier bag with the words Mason & Son Fine Jewellery printed on it. She peers inside and sees a small black box with the same logo printed on it in gold. She’s about to open the box when she feels someone appear in the hallway. She stuffs the bag back in the pocket and looks up. It’s her mum.

‘Are you OK, baby? You’re late back.’

She forces a smile. ‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Exam started late, overran a bit.’ She smiles again and moves away from Zach’s jacket, which now feels as though it is sending out radioactive particles that could burn her flesh, and heads into the living room where Noah is in Zach’s arms and Zach is kissing his fingers and blowing raspberries into the palm of his hand, and even though she didn’t open the box, she knows what’s in it and she feels for a moment like she can’t breathe, like someone is sitting on her chest because she knows what it means and she knows that Zach will never ever leave her, that he is just pretending to be making plans to go. He’s playing a game with her, she realises, keeping her sweet, keeping her on side, biding his time.

Noah’s face opens up into a huge gappy smile when he sees Tallulah and he puts his arms out to her. She grabs him from Zach and tries not to flinch when Zach encircles all three of them inside his arms, trying to make a family of them, trying to make them one.