The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
56
June 2017
‘Zach?’
Tallulah shoves at his shoulder.
‘Zach?’
His body seems oddly solid and resistant, she thinks, as though it has been emptied and refilled with ball bearings.
‘Zach?’ she hisses into his ear. ‘Oh. Fuck. Zach.’
She puts her face to his face which is turned at a strange angle and feels for breath from his mouth and nose. But there is nothing. She tries to move him on to his back but he is too heavy. There is a small patch of blood on the tile beneath his cheeks and she sees a trickle coming from his ear canal.
‘Oh my God. Scarlett. What have you done?’
Scarlett throws her a look of dismay. ‘He was going to take your baby, Lula! He was going to take your baby!’
‘Yes. But you didn’t need to … oh my God!’ Tallulah gets to her feet and she stares from Scarlett to Zach and back again. ‘Scarlett. He’s dead. Oh Jesus Christ. Scarlett.’
‘You told me you wanted him to disappear, Lula. You told me that. Remember? You said you wished he could just disappear. That it would be easier. I heard what he said about the baby and I heard him threatening you and I just …’
They both look up at a clicking noise across the kitchen tiles and see that it is Toby. He looks at them inquisitively, and then pads towards Zach’s body. He sniffs the toes of his bare foot and then sits down and looks at Tallulah. Behind him another figure appears: a middle-aged woman with a silken kimono wrapped around her small frame, a pale pink eye mask pushed halfway up her forehead.
The woman squints and grimaces at the tableau in front of her. Then she peels off the eye mask and says, ‘I just came down to ask you kids to turn down the pool music. What the hell is going on?’
Tallulah can’t speak. She shakes her head.
‘Oh Christ.’ The woman strides towards Zach’s body. ‘Who is he? Who are you? Who is this, Scarlett?’ The woman’s eyes go to the object in Scarlett’s hand. ‘Oh,’ she says, sadly, and somewhat theatrically. ‘Not my Pipin.’
Tallulah shakes her head again. Pipin?
The woman leans down towards Zach’s face and says again, ‘Please can someone tell me who the hell this is?’ She places two fingers to the underside of his neck, and peers into his eyes.
‘He’s … Zach,’ says Tallulah. ‘He’s, he’s my boyfriend.’
‘And you are?’
‘Tallulah. I’m Tallulah.’
‘Oh Christ. He’s dead,’ says the woman. ‘Will one of you please tell me what’s going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Scarlett, looking from the strange metal object in her hand that her mother called her ‘Pipin’ to the lifeless form of Zach and back again. ‘I don’t know. He was going – he was going to take Noah. And then—’
‘Who’s Noah?’ asks the woman with a sigh.
Scarlett replies, ‘Noah is Lula’s baby. He was going to take him away from her. And then …’ Her eyes drop to the Pipin again and she stops talking.
There’s a black square in Tallulah’s head over the space where the memory of what just happened should be, like a redaction. She can remember chasing Zach into the kitchen. She can remember the dog walking into the kitchen and sniffing Zach’s toes. In between a thing happened. A terrible thing. It flashes through her head like a lightning bolt. She starts to cry. ‘Oh,’ she says in a tiny, tiny voice. ‘Oh.’ She puts her hands over her mouth and starts to rock. ‘Oh.’
‘So, right. Let’s think straight,’ says Scarlett’s mother. ‘The time is …’ She turns to look at the big metal clock on the wall. ‘Just after two a.m. Who else is here?’
‘Just Mimi. Liam and Lexie have gone.’
‘And where’s Mimi?’
‘I don’t know. She came inside a few minutes ago. To charge her phone, she said.’
‘So it’s just us. And this boy, this Zach, was he trying to hurt you?’
Tallulah shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘He was leaving.’
‘Has he ever hurt you?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘No, he’s never hurt me.’
‘And you, Scarlett. Has he ever hurt you?’
Scarlett shakes her head sullenly.
‘And did you think he was going to hurt you?’
She shakes her head again.
‘So, you hit him on the head from behind because he said he was going to take your friend’s baby?’
‘Yes.’
‘And why was he going to take your baby?’ she asks Tallulah.
‘Because … I told him …’ She looks at Scarlett, who nods, just once. ‘I told him that I was in love with Scarlett.’
She waits to see what this pronouncement does to the perfect angles of Scarlett’s mother’s face, but it does nothing. Her face does not move in any way or register any kind of reaction. Instead, she simply sighs and says, ‘OK. So he was angry. And hurt. And maybe slightly disgusted. He said he was going to take your baby. He went to leave and then …’ All three of them look again at the body on the floor.
For a moment, nobody says anything. Then Scarlett’s mother sighs and says, ‘What a fucking mess. Right. Who knows you two were here?’ she asks Tallulah.
Tallulah tries to arrange her thoughts. ‘Er, nobody. My mum knows I’m at someone’s house, but I didn’t tell her whose.’
‘And what about your friends, Scarlett?’
‘Well, they all knew because we were all at the pub together. And Liam and Lexie, obviously, because they were here. And Mimi. And maybe some other people.’
‘Right, so eventually, people are going to realise that something’s up when this boy doesn’t come home.’
Tallulah nods and thinks of her mother and thinks of her baby and thinks of her bed and thinks that all she wants is her baby and her mother and her bed.
‘What time was your mother expecting you home?’ Scarlett’s mother asks Tallulah.
‘I don’t know, really. No particular time.’
‘Right, so we have a few hours at least before we need to make an account of ourselves.’
‘Aren’t we going to call the police?’ Tallulah asks.
‘What? No. This is manslaughter. Scarlett will end up in prison. You too, probably. And you’ll never see your baby grow up. No, this is a disaster, this is an absolute fucking disaster.’ She puts her hands on her hips and surveys the area. ‘So,’ she begins. ‘Mimi. What are we going to do about Mimi? Where is she?’
‘I told you. I don’t know. She came indoors to charge her phone.’
‘Go and find her,’ she says to Scarlett, without turning around. She goes to the sink, pours herself a glass of water and knocks back two painkillers with it. ‘Urgh. My head.’
Scarlett nods and disappears. Then for a moment or two, it is just Tallulah, Scarlett’s mother and the dog. ‘Well, life is never dull with Scarlett around, that’s for sure,’ says her mother. ‘Jesus Christ. One thing after another after another. From the moment she was born. I was so excited when I found out I was having a girl after the whirlwind of Rex. I thought it would be all calm afternoons doing crafts and playing with each other’s hair. But no, Scarlett was even worse than Rex, if anything, always wanting to be outdoors, always wanting to run, to disobey, to talk. Oh my God, to talk.’ She rests a delicate hand against her cheekbone and then rubs it across her forehead. ‘Such a nightmare of a child. And then the teenage years. Oh my goodness. The boys – you know, she lost her virginity when she was thirteen. Thirteen. She was obsessed with boys. Then came the girls. Then more boys. More girls. Always being suspended from school after school. Never where she said she was going to be. Never cared, that was the thing. As much as I broke the rules when I was a teenager, I always cared about the consequences. But Scarlett never did. And what can you do with a child like that?’
Scarlett returns. ‘She’s out cold on my bed,’ she says.
‘Good,’ says Scarlett’s mother. ‘Leave her there. OK. Now. First things first. We need to get rid of him.’
Tallulah shakes her head. Although she is almost entirely numb, she also can’t quite accept that Zach is now an object, that he is no different from the strange piece of bronze on the floor next to him, the Pipin, a thing to be got rid of. It feels wrong. She battles with these sickening, dizzying emotions for a short moment, trying to untwine them from each other, then feels weak with the realisation that there is only one solution and it is the one that Scarlett’s mother is suggesting.
She sees Scarlett and her mother exchange a look, an almost imperceptible nod. ‘The tunnel?’ says her mother.
‘Yes,’ says Scarlett. ‘The tunnel.’