The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
45
June 2017
Small gestures of physical affection start to proliferate over the next couple of days.
Zach tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear for her, runs his fingers across the back of her neck, slings an arm across the baby in bed at night that somehow encompasses Tallulah also. The gestures aren’t sexual and they are so fleeting that she barely has time to register them and complain. She sees her mother’s face sometimes, when she catches a glimpse of one of these encounters, the flash of a warm smile, no doubt thinking how lucky Tallulah is to have such a loving, attentive man in her life. But the gestures make Tallulah’s flesh crawl. She wants to slap his hand away, hiss at him to fuck off. And all the while, the memory of the little black box in his jacket pocket pulses through her consciousness like an insistent, low-level alarm going off somewhere in the distance. She can feel it in the air, the build-up to it. Every time Zach clears his throat or calls her name she catches her breath, terrified that he is about to propose to her.
And then, one sunny June afternoon, he glances up at her from where he’s lying on the bed with his laptop and he says, ‘You know. I’ve been thinking. I’ve been too obsessed with this flat. Too obsessed with saving up. I’m thinking I might like to splash a bit of cash.’ He smiles at her. His tone is light and playful. ‘How about a night at the pub? You and me? My treat?’
‘Well,’ she begins carefully, ‘I can’t really at the moment. I’ve still got so much work to do for my exams.’
He sits upright, eyes her eagerly. ‘When’s your last exam?’
She shrugs. ‘Friday next week.’
‘Right then,’ he says, ‘that Friday. We’re going to the pub. I’ll talk to your mum about sitting with Noah. And I’ll book us a table.’
Her heart sinks. This is it. ‘Oh,’ she says lightly. ‘Honestly. Don’t waste your money on me. I’ll be shattered that night; I’ll be shit company. Why don’t you go with your mates?’
He shakes his head. ‘No way! I’m not paying for my mates to get wankered. No, just you and me. It’s a date.’
Her gaze must have betrayed her thoughts as he sits upright and moves across the bed towards her. ‘No pressure,’ he says, taking her hands inside his. ‘No big deal. Just a nice night out because we deserve it. OK?’
She doesn’t have the energy to counter so she nods and forces a smile and she thinks that she will cross that bridge when she gets to it. And at least this way she won’t be living on her nerves expecting the proposal any moment. At least this way she has some breathing space, some time to prepare. And then he kisses her hands before letting them go again. ‘I’ll leave you to get on with it,’ he says. ‘I’ll do Noah’s tea. Yeah?’
She nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, please. Thank you.’
He leaves the room, pulling the door closed quietly behind him, a gesture so incredibly unlike Zach, who usually engages inanimate objects forcefully and noisily, that it chills her to the bone.
The following day at college she finds Scarlett at lunchtime.
She takes her to the path at the back of the art block and says, ‘I think Zach is going to propose to me.’
‘What!’
‘He bought a ring. I found it in his pocket. And now he wants to take me out on a date next week. And he’s being just super nice and attentive and sweet.’
‘Oh fuck, Lula. What are you going to do? Please tell me you’re going to say no.’
‘Of course I’m going to say no. Of course I am. But then what? He’ll go mental. He’ll threaten to take Noah away from me. He’ll make my life hell. The only reason he’s being so nice is so that I’ll say yes. Or that if I say no, he’ll be justified to go nuts.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Scarlett, clasping Tallulah’s arm. ‘It does not matter what he says or what he thinks or how he reacts. You owe him nothing. That baby is yours. Your destiny is yours. He’ll just need to accept that no means no and move on.’
Tallulah nods. But she’s not convinced. Noah is hers, but he’s Zach’s too. And Zach is the sort of father that a boy should grow up around: physically affectionate, loving, hard-working, loyal, reliable, a good role model. For a crazy moment she wishes Zach were more like the young deadbeat dads beloved of the tabloid press, the ones who spread their seed and move on, the ones who forget birthdays and don’t turn up for access visits. She’d have no qualms about keeping Noah out of his life then. She wouldn’t feel guilty about forcing them to live apart, for whittling Zach’s relationship with his son down to rushed weekend visits in a lonely flat.
‘But what if he can’t move on?’ she says. ‘What if he doesn’t take no for an answer? What if he makes a scene? What if Noah never forgives me? What if I regret it?’
‘Regret it?’ Scarlett repeats incredulously. ‘How on earth would you regret not marrying a guy you don’t love? Who wants to trap you in a box somewhere? Are you mad?’
Tallulah shakes her head. ‘No, but it’s just … I don’t know. Think how many women, girls, would love the chance to be a proper family. Would love a guy who’s prepared to put his family before everything. And if I say no, that would be like saying no to some people’s dream.’
‘Yes. But not your dream, FFS. Not your dream. Tallulah.’ Scarlett looks hard at her. ‘What do you want? What’s your goal in life? Once you’ve finished college? Once your baby’s at nursery? Where do you picture yourself?’
Tallulah raises her gaze to the sky. She can feel herself starting to bubble up somehow, like treacle in a pan, just on the edge of burning. Overhead a fat white cloud passes slowly across the sun. She stares into the heart of it, where the sun burns a pale hole through it. She clenches her hands into fists and then relaxes them again. It’s a question she’s always been too scared to ask herself. All her life she’s been passive. Her school reports always said she was a good student but that the teacher would love to see her contribute more to lessons, would love to hear her voice. At primary school she allowed herself to be subsumed into friendship groups with children she didn’t really like. And then she’d met Zach at a difficult age, an age where her contemporaries were stressing about Saturday-night plans failing to materialise, about boys not replying to their messages quick enough or female friends talking shit about them behind their backs. Having a steady boyfriend had just allowed her to get on with studying, get on with life, get on with putting one foot in front of the other, mindlessly, unthinkingly, day after day after day. Until the day she’d realised she hadn’t had a period for over a month and she’d bought a test from the internet and taken it on a Tuesday morning just before school at the beginning of her second year in the sixth form and seen the two lines and immediately taken another test and thought: Well, there it is. I’m pregnant. She’d mentally calculated a due date that was well beyond the date of her last A level exam and thought, Maybe I should just have it. Because that was the sort of girl that Tallulah was. Her mother might have blessed her with the name of a rebel and a river and a film star, but she had failed to live up to it. She had failed to do anything genuinely proactive until the moment she had leapt across Scarlett’s kitchen that morning after their sleepover and kissed her. It was, she knew, the only moment in her entire life that she had made happen.
She takes her gaze from the sky and directs it back at Scarlett. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, her voice an apologetic whisper.
‘Do you want me?’
She nods, but she can’t quite bring herself to say the word yes.
‘What else do you want?’
‘Noah.’
‘And?’
‘I don’t know. I just want … I just want to be free.’
‘Yes,’ says Scarlett. ‘Yes. Exactly. That’s exactly what you want. Of course it is. You’re nineteen. You’re beautiful. You’re good. You want to be free. And having a baby shouldn’t stop you being free. Being with me shouldn’t stop you being free. Nothing should stop you being free. The last thing you want at this point in your life is a ring on your finger. You need to cut yourself away from him. And maybe this is the perfect opportunity. Let him propose. Say no. It’s kind of un-come-back-from-able. It’s a one-way exit. Seriously. Let him do it. Say no. Then your life can begin.’
Tallulah has been nodding harder and harder as Scarlett talks. As she finishes Tallulah feels a surge of electric energy pass through every element of her being and she pushes herself towards Scarlett, presses her against the wall and kisses her hard. After a minute she pulls back breathlessly. She stares at Scarlett, at the bright lights dancing behind her eyes, at the glazed wonder on her face, feels the heat of Scarlett’s caught breath against her skin, feels dazzled, beyond anything, beyond words, beyond imagination, by the beauty of her and thinks, I love her. I love her. I love her.
‘I wish,’ she says, tracing her fingers around the contours of Scarlett’s face, ‘I wish that Zach didn’t exist. I wish he would just, you know. Disappear.’