The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
54
June 2017
Scarlett turns up the volume on the radio in Lexie’s car and opens the window. Tallulah is sitting on Zach’s lap squashed in the back with Liam and Mimi. Her head is spinning. She hasn’t drunk more than half a bottle of wine in months. She hasn’t taken recreational drugs since she was fourteen. She can feel the outline of the ring box in Zach’s pocket against the back of her leg. She sticks her head out of the window to suck in gulps of warm night air. Trees flash by in streaks of black and gold, lights race towards them coming the other way in blurred discs of white. The sky is still holding on to its last mouse-grey shreds of daylight.
Scarlett was meant to tell Zach about them. That was Plan B. She was going to tell Zach that she and Tallulah were in love with each other, and Zach was going to look at Tallulah with wide eyes of disbelief and stifle a harsh laugh and say, What? And Tallulah was going to say, It’s true. I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks, but I couldn’t find the right moment. And then Zach would have stormed off or thrown up or started a fight or screamed or cried or raged or something. And it would have been over. It would have been dreadful, but it would have been a moment of no return.
But Scarlett has for some inexplicable reason extended the agony by dragging everyone back to her house for a pool party. Tallulah had messaged her earlier in the pub: What r u doing???
Scarlett had replied ALL UNDER CONTROL and then sent her a conspiratorial look across the table.
They pull through the gates of Dark Place and head down the long driveway to the house, of which Tallulah can see three separate and distinct versions. She blinks to try to bring the three images into alignment, but it doesn’t work.
Lexie parks up and they all dismount, tumbling from the tightly packed car on to the gravelled driveway. Scarlett leads them all through the metal gate at the side of the house and on to the pool terrace and heads straight into the pool house where she switches on the garden lighting and the Sonos sound system and returns a moment later with a handful of cold beers from the fridge. Zach perches on the edge of a sun-lounger and Tallulah sits behind him. Scarlett is singing along loudly to the music on the system and Liam is joining in. Lexie and Mimi are on their phones.
Scarlett passes Tallulah a beer and she takes it from her. ‘Cheers,’ says Scarlett, dancing as she holds her beer bottle out towards Tallulah’s. ‘And cheers to you, too, Zach. It’s great to finally meet you.’
Zach touches his bottle against hers and says, ‘Likewise,’ but even from here, sitting behind him, Tallulah can feel the dislike emanating from him.
Scarlett dances back towards Liam and Mimi and toasts them as well. Then she rests her beer on a table and pulls off her T-shirt. She’s wearing a small vest top underneath. She unbuttons her shorts, steps out of them, revealing the unsexy black pants that Tallulah is so familiar with, and then, in a flash, she’s in the pool.
Tallulah stares as she soars across the bottom of the pool, the distorting lens of the water making her look even longer and leaner than she is. Then she emerges at the end and pulls herself up on to the pool edge, pulls her wet hair off her face and says to Tallulah and Zach, ‘Are you coming in?’
Tallulah says, ‘No. I don’t want to get my hair wet.’
And Scarlett says, ‘Oh, come on, Lula, I know how much you like getting your hair wet.’
And Tallulah sees Zach’s shoulders flinch before he tips his beer bottle to his lips, briskly, and drinks hard from it.
She laughs nervously. ‘Seriously. I washed it this morning and blow-dried it and everything. I can’t be bothered doing it all again tomorrow.’
‘Oh, Lula. You and your precious hair. Come on! Don’t be moist. Get in!’ She pulls two handfuls of water from the pool and throws them at Tallulah, splattering Zach in the process, who gets quickly to his feet, yells, ‘Fuck’s sake! Watch it!’
‘You may as well get properly wet now. Come on, Zach. Show your girlfriend how it’s done.’
Zach starts unbuttoning his shirt. He pulls it off and then he pulls off the white T-shirt he was wearing underneath and Tallulah can see the muscles in his back ripple and wriggle beneath his flesh. Then he unzips his trousers and pulls them off and he is naked apart from his fitted Lycra boxer shorts.
He turns to Tallulah and says, ‘Come on then. Do as your friend tells you.’
There is something in the atmosphere that is so sour and so swollen that Tallulah can barely breathe. It’s formed directly in the space between Scarlett and Zach, and it’s getting bigger and bigger. She nods and pulls off her shorts but not her floaty top, feeling self-conscious in front of Mimi and Liam and Lexie. She twists her hair into a knot and then jumps straight in, water rocketing into her ear canals, gushing over her skin, blowing her top up into a billowing cotton jellyfish. She bursts out again and finds herself face-to-face with Scarlett who brushes her lips quickly against hers before going under again. Tallulah turns and sees Zach just as he emerges from the water and he makes the noise that people make when a swimming pool is colder than you expect it to be and he shakes his head, droplets of water catching the light as they fly from the tips of his hair like crystals. And now Tallulah is sitting between Zach and Scarlett and the energy between the two of them is so toxic that you could choke on it.
Once again Tallulah finds herself thinking of her baby boy, the familiarity and warmth of his tiny body, the feel of him in her arms, against her body, the smell of his night-time breath and she feels, suddenly, that she doesn’t want anyone. Not Scarlett, not Zach. She just wants to be alone.
She kicks her legs behind her to get to the steps and climbs out. As she does so, Mimi and Liam both jump in. She goes to the pool house and grabs a big black towel from a perfectly arranged stack of rolled-up towels and she wraps herself in it and sits on a lounger and watches the others in the pool for a while. The loud music drowns out the sounds of screaming and squealing and Tallulah watches with discomfort as Zach puts Scarlett on his shoulders and enters into a battle with an inflatable hammer with Mimi who sits atop Liam’s shoulders.
She shakes her head a little, to dislodge some water, but also to try and right the wrongness of watching her lover and her partner entwined in wet underwear. She sees Zach turn slightly to acknowledge her; the look he gives her is like a shot of ice. She nods and forces a smile, shivering slightly as her body temperature starts to drop. ‘I’m going to get dressed,’ she says, collecting her shorts and Zach’s shirt, her phone and her bag and heading into the house.
There’s a small room off the kitchen; Scarlett calls it the snug. It’s lined with bookshelves and lit with low-level lighting, has two small red sofas facing each other across a big walnut coffee table covered with interesting objects, big glossy hardback books and a fan of interiors magazines. She slides the door closed behind her and peels off her wet top, then puts on Zach’s T-shirt, takes off her wet knickers and pulls on her shorts. She turns her head upside down and twists the black towel into a turban over her wet hair. She wants to stay in here. It’s warm and it’s safe. She feels protected from the strangeness of the evening, from the terrible energy in the air. She checks her phone and sees that it is nearly 1 a.m. She thinks about texting her mum, but then thinks that she is probably asleep by now and that she would be waking her up unnecessarily, so she locks it again and sits down on the little red sofa and picks up one of the big glossy books and starts to flick through it, the words and images blurring in front of her eyes, reminding her that while she is less drunk than she was, she is still far from sober.
‘There you are,’ says a deep voice at the door. It’s Zach. He’s back in his shirt and trousers, his wet hair slicked away from his face. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
He slides the door closed behind him and stands framed by it, a halogen just above his head throwing sinister shadows down his face.
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Just came in to get dry and warm.’
‘And left me out there like a dick?’
‘Zach,’ she says. ‘It was your idea to come here. I wanted to go home two hours ago, remember?’
‘Yes, I do remember. But then I thought, you know, maybe you were just saying you wanted to go home for my sake, and I didn’t want your friends to think I was cramping your style.’
‘I didn’t want to come. I wanted to go home. I still want to go home. I’m calling a cab now.’
She gets to her feet and as she does so, Zach strides towards her and says, ‘No. No, we’re not going anywhere. Not yet.’
He stands close enough for her to smell the chlorine on him, to feel the heat of his breath.
‘I want to go home,’ she says again, a hint of defeat in her voice.
She goes to move past him, but he grabs her arms, hard. ‘Do you know what I was going to do tonight, Lula? Do you have any idea what I was going to do?’ He releases one of her arms and dips his hand into the pocket of his trousers, pulls out the small black box and shoves it against her breastbone so hard she can already feel a bruise start to form.
‘Ow,’ she says, rubbing at her sternum. ‘That hurt.’
‘Open it,’ he snarls.
She inhales deeply and unclicks the fastening, then stares in numb horror at the tiny nub of diamond glittering at her under the low halogens. There it is, she thinks. There it is. The reason for every last dreadful minute of this evening.
She clicks the box shut again, hands it back to Zach and says, ‘I would have said no.’
The power of her own response leaves her feeling winded.
He rocks slightly. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Right.’
For a moment, Tallulah thinks maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s done. Maybe her journey with Zach is finally over and it really was as simple as that. But she stares at Zach and sees his expression pass from numb acceptance through confusion and then, quickly, so quickly, into black rage.
‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘This is something to do with her.’
‘Who?’
‘That girl. Scarlett. Ever since she walked into the pub tonight you’ve been on edge. That’s why I came back here. I wanted to see what was going on. So. What’s the deal?’
Tallulah feels something surge through her, like a stampede. ‘We’re together,’ she says bluntly.
Zach’s face contorts into an ugly mask of incomprehension. ‘What?’
‘Me. And Scarlett. We’ve been seeing each other.’
There. It’s done. It’s said. It’s over. Tallulah breathes out heavily and waits.
‘You mean, like …’ He cannot find the words to describe something that he cannot countenance. ‘You and her? Like …’
‘Having sex. Yes.’
‘Oh. Oh my God.’ He stumbles slightly and groans. ‘Oh my God. Oh Jesus. I knew it. Jesus fucking Christ, from the minute I saw that photo on your phone, I knew it. It was so obvious. So, were you having sex then? You and her?’
‘No. God. No. That was only the second time I’d even spoken to her.’
‘But did it start that night?’
‘No. No. Not for ages. Not until you and me started having problems.’
‘What problems? We haven’t been having any problems.’
She blinks at him. She has no idea if he’s being deliberately obtuse or if he genuinely believes this rewriting of their history.
‘Fuck’s sake. Lula. I mean. Fuck’s sake. With her? Of all the people. She’s not even good-looking. She’s literally ugly.’
‘She’s not ugly. She’s beautiful.’
He clutches his head. ‘This is … this is insane, Lula. This isn’t you. You’re not fucking gay. This is her. She’s done this to you. She’s fucking groomed you. Can you not see that? She’s groomed you.’
He paces around for a moment and Tallulah has no idea whether he’s on the edge of calming down and cajoling her into a state of submission, or whether he’s about to kill her. But he does neither of these things. He draws himself up tall and straight, looks directly at her and says, ‘You know that’s it now, don’t you? You know you can’t be Noah’s mother any more. Not now. No court in the world would let a person like you raise a child. No court in the world. I’m going now, Tallulah. I’m going back to the house and I’m taking Noah, and you will never see him again. Do you hear me? You will never see him again.’
He hurls the ring box at her again and as he turns away, Tallulah feels her head fill with splintered shards of fear and rage. No, says every atom in her body; no, you do not get to take my baby; no, you do not get to take my baby. And she follows behind him, and she screams out, her arms outstretched, ready to pull him back, to stop him doing what he’s doing, going where he’s going. But as she leaves the room she sees that Scarlett is in the doorway in her wet underwear and that she is holding something in her hand, a bronze lump, carved into a shape that somehow resembles a group of people in a huddle, and that she is lifting it backwards over her head and then swinging it forwards again towards the crown of Zach’s head. She sees the bronze lump hit the back of Zach’s skull. She hears Scarlett’s scream of anger, Zach’s dull yell of pain. And she sees the blow fell him so that he lands in a perfect arc, face-first on to the white granite floor.