The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
64
Autumn 2017
The house in Guernsey is like the house in Surrey. Tasteful. Pale. Comfortable. Elegant. More interesting lumps of sculpted metal arranged around piles of magazines on more low tables. More bronze sculptures on Perspex pedestals. More abstract art. More oversized chandeliers and light fittings. The main difference is the views from the windows: water, ink blue mostly, sometimes pastel aqua, sometimes topped with frothy peaks, sometimes still and flat as marble. Tallulah’s room has walls painted with tumbling cherry blossom and shell-pink curtains lined with thick padding, a dressing table with a stool upholstered in baby pink astrakhan. Her room has its own bathroom, with a large slab-like basin that has a wide brass tap out of which water falls in a wide sheet from a slot. It has a tear-shaped bath with another flat-mouthed brass tap positioned above it and a large walk-in shower with golden mosaic tiles and a rainforest shower head. She is brought soft towels and organic food and glasses of champagne and bottles of water with orchids printed on the front. From the window she can see that this house is not near any other houses. They are on a cliff. Miles and miles and miles from anywhere.
Scarlett brings her nice things: products to make her hair and her skin feel nice, a cheese platter, a soft toy. She brings Toby in for cuddle time. She brings in her phone and they watch funny videos together on TikTok. She keeps promising Tallulah that she will buy her her own phone, but she never does.
Scarlett tells her things from the outside world. The police are hunting for Tallulah, apparently. They have found Zach’s body and they have found her fingerprints on the statue and they have a witness, Mimi, who saw her doing it. Scarlett tells her that her father, Martin Jacques, is putting together a team of legal experts to try to counter the evidence. He knows people, says Scarlett, powerful people, who can tamper with police evidence, who can accidentally lose things. ‘Just give him a few more weeks, Lules,’ says Scarlett. ‘A few more weeks and we’ll be able to go home. Just let us look after you for now. Just let us keep you safe.’
After a few weeks the news from home dries up and Tallulah tells Scarlett that she doesn’t care about the police, that she will face the music, go to court, go to prison, that she doesn’t care any more about whether she’s guilty or not, she just wants to go home and see her baby. She tries to leave the house and from nowhere, Joss and Rex appear and bundle her back to her room.
Tallulah has not left this room for days now, maybe longer. The edges of Tallulah’s days feel ragged and unformed. Scarlett still comes and goes with food and drinks and treats but Tallulah no longer asks her about the outside world because she no longer cares, all she cares about is sleep. Scarlett holds her and tells her that she loves her and Tallulah squirms from her embrace, the way she once squirmed from Zach’s. She has a foul taste in her mouth all the time. She can feel the roots of her hair wriggle and itch even though her hair is clean. She has scaley skin on her arms that she scratches at constantly. She sleeps most of the time, and when she’s not sleeping, she’s in a kind of netherworld where things happen but she forgets them almost immediately, her brain desperately trying to keep hold of the ends of them, drag them back, keep them, but it’s always too late, they’re always gone. Sometimes she sees the cherry blossom on the walls twist and twirl.
In lucid moments, Tallulah replays the moments before the black square in her head that still obscures Zach’s death, and she feels her own culpability in all of this. She had so many opportunities to do things differently. From the moment she had sex with Zach on New Year’s Eve to the moment he landed face down on Scarlett’s kitchen floor, she had had opportunity after opportunity to do things differently, to make a good life for herself and for Noah, and she has blown each and every one of them.
And now she is here, in this pink room, with its cherry-blossom walls and its locked windows, and she knows that she is somehow being diminished, that the care she is being shown by Scarlett is warped and wrong, that Scarlett has been taught how to love by people who don’t know how to love and that everything she thinks is good is actually bad, and Tallulah knows that she needs to keep just enough of herself floating across the top of the big black pool of weirdness, just enough to keep on breathing, just enough to bring her back to her mother and to her baby boy. Just enough.