Caller Unknown

CHAPTER 1 Simone

Simone

Your children are only ever on loan to you. Simone glimpsed this phrase last month on a billboard in London advertising a film and then spent the rest of the day arguing in her head with it. Of course that isn’t correct, she had thought. If you do it right, your children are yours forever.

But it has plagued her in the way things sometimes do when they contain an uncomfortable truth.

And so Simone is thinking of that billboard once again now as she sits cross-legged on a motionless baggage carousel in Del Rio Airport, Texas, waiting to go and meet her daughter, Lucy, who’s spent the summer here.

Everybody else’s cases have come and gone. Simone’s is, a jaded attendant told her, ‘Probably somewhere here, but honestly? Could be on the moon,’ and Simone had to do something she only recently learned at the age of forty-three: hold her tongue.

She opens a note buried deep in her phone – she’d be mortified if anybody ever found it – on which she has written the days of August to cross off. Just a simple list, no app or fanfare.

1 August – X

2 August – X

And now it’s the thirty-first, and she ought to be seeing Lucy right now, except Simone’s flight was delayed three times over, she arrived in Atlanta late, missed the connection.

And her bag is on the moon, and it is ten past ten at night, the airport sleeping.

The only person around is a porter cleaning the floor back and forth in rhythmic strokes.

She sends Lucy a text: Landed late! I think I should just grab an airport hotel?

Her phone rings immediately. ‘The lodge is remote check-in,’ Lucy says the second Simone answers.

This is how they begin conversations: in the middle.

They end them there, too, their sentences understood and finished by the other.

They have always been this way, right from when Lucy learned to talk.

‘That will be so late for you,’ Simone says, thinking painfully of her phone note ticking into September but hiding it, ‘just come tomorrow. Get some sleep. I don’t even have my bag yet; it’s lost somewhere,’ she adds. She pauses, listening. ‘What is that?’

‘Fargo.’

‘Movie or series?’

‘Movie,’ Lucy says, just a note of disparagement in her voice.

Simone’s daughter, aspiring actor, is never not watching something she would call seminal, always with the same battered brown notebook and pen out.

Lucy continues: ‘Airbnb don’t care when you check in,’ and Simone hears the movie go off, motion begin in her daughter’s voice, footsteps, doors closing.

‘Besides, it’s only ten or whatever.’ A pause.

‘Has it been a nightmare? I feel so bad if it’s been … ’

‘No,’ Simone lies. ‘Just sitting around waiting. Not half as boring as Fargo.’

‘Touché! It’s supposed to be boring. Because it reflects the bleakness of – No,’ Lucy says, and Simone can just see the hand her daughter is holding up. ‘We’ll talk Fargo later. Go find that bag.’ A pause. ‘And I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I appreciate you coming.’

Simone smiles into the phone; her daughter shows only her this vulnerability. She cares, very much in fact, and is afraid to show it.

‘They have no idea where it is. Said it could be on the moon.’

‘How stupid. Demand they go to the moon.’

Simone lets a laugh out. Lucy is so like Simone was years and years and years ago, full of verve and offbeat obsessions and humour and (sometimes) explosions of temper.

Life and Damien and running a restaurant mellowed Simone out, but nevertheless something about this similarity fills her with happiness.

She always figured her own messy childhood made her the way she is, but not so: Lucy’s childhood has been charmed, and look.

‘Anyway, I’m getting a cab now,’ Lucy says.

Simone notes the half-American lexicon, cab, born out of a summer spent over here. Or maybe she’s always said ‘cab’, and Simone just hadn’t noticed until now. ‘Let’s do it,’ she says.

‘I’ll see you at the lodge, and I’ll stop, and get you food?’

‘No need,’ Simone says, thinking how Lucy is a kinder teen than most, and they hang up. Just then, like a sign, the carousel starts up again, juddering Simone to standing, but no bags come.

She looks for the porter, but he’s gone.

She stands around, watching the conveyor belt deliver no bags to no people, then wanders to a nearby vending machine.

She’s just pondering the American snack selection – mediocre, but why do things always seem more exciting when purchased overseas?

– when a lone employee drifts by with an overstuffed burrito in one hand.

She knows just from looking that despite its arrogantly large size, it is bland, the tortilla completely unbrowned, for starters.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says to him. ‘I’ve lost my case, I bet you can’t help, but … ’

‘I’m Border Patrol,’ he says, but he does so apologetically.

‘I’m going to meet my daughter – God, I just want to get there. I’m so late already. I’ve missed her so much,’ she garbles.

‘Let me see what I can do,’ he says. He brings a radio out, says through the burrito, ‘You’re meeting tonight?’

‘Supposed to be. We have remote check-in. Please, please try to find the luggage.’

Another bite of the burrito, a kind smile around flapping tortilla. ‘Hang on,’ he says. He speaks quietly into the radio. ‘Lost luggage, flight …’ She holds out her ticket. ‘FR1839,’ he says.

He signals a hand up to her to wait, then walks away. Simone watches him leave. He scratches his behind lazily as he goes, and Simone thinks she is never getting that luggage.

She waits again by the baggage claim. Twenty minutes later, to her surprise, he arrives with her case wheeling behind him. ‘Almost ended up in another hold,’ he says with a rueful shrug. ‘Who knows what they’re thinking in this place.’

She thanks him, grabs the bag, putting an imaginary X next to 31 August: the day is almost done. Soon, she will get to press her cheek to Lucy’s. Not for long. And not as often as she wants to. But she still gets to do it for now.

Lucy has sent her a pin on a map. Like most things in Texas, there doesn’t appear to be much near to it, but Simone will be there before midnight.

Simone slides into the hire car and tries to get to grips with the controls. The parking button is on her right, not her left. She tests the pedals, the car jerks. She leaves, drives on the left, then remembers and swerves.

She turns on the radio and fiddles with the controls, trying to find a station that will keep her awake.

Different accents, different songs. She lands on country, and, suddenly, she is here, and she is excited.

A strumming guitar plays out across the airwaves, and, as it often does, Simone’s mind turns to daydreams of food.

Cooking outside on the fire just as it starts to get dark, huge steaks, warm, smoking tomatoes, and Lucy. Two weeks of just her and Lucy.

After a while, she dictates a text to Damien: ‘You awake? I’ve landed, and am driving.’ It’s five thirty there, but Damien is an early riser, the sort of person who is organized enough to go to bed on time.

Aah, he replies, I’d love to chat, but we’re in crisis over non-delivered fish!

‘Where is it?’ Simone dictates into her phone.

On route!!! Don’t worry! he replies, and Simone wants to tell him that it’s en route, and that she will worry.

About him, about the fish, the lot of it.

She thinks of the back corridor in their restaurant where the fresh produce is delivered, perhaps her favourite place on earth.

Nothing special to look at. Just a poured-cement floor, two worn stone steps, a pink back door.

But every morning she takes a builder’s tea out there – teabag left in, no sugar, drop of milk – and sits and watches the fresh food come in, the day’s potential.

‘If it’s late, make sure to smell it,’ she tells Damien. ‘It should all be odourless.’

Any other co-owner – and husband – might bristle at this, but Damien doesn’t, isn’t like that. :) he sends (‘smiley face’ reads the car’s dictation), and so Simone can’t help herself and adds, ‘And touch your hand to it – check it’s properly cold.’

He calls her, now. ‘Hey,’ he says, a long drawl as slow-moving and considered as he is.

In the background, she can hear him quietly pottering.

She’s worked with him for long enough to know what he will be doing: sorting the kitchen so the day runs smoothly.

Prepping the vegetable station. At night he washes the pots from the cooking chaos – usually hers – and sweeps crumbs off counters into the palm of his hand.

‘I’m almost at the lodge,’ she says through the hands-free.

‘Say hi to her from me. Tell her I’ve downloaded Citizen Kane to watch when she’s back,’ he says. And Simone is struck, suddenly, that in the mother/daughter bond, she sometimes forgets him, that the father/daughter relationship is just as important. Is almost as important?

‘I will, of course,’ she says. Simone knows that Lucy has already watched Citizen Kane, but she also knows that she will be kind enough to lie about it.

‘I don’t know how you do these long shifts. I’ve done one and feel like my legs are going to fall off,’ Damien remarks.

‘Cooking keeps you very fit. Offsets the calories from tasting.’

‘Anyway,’ he says. ‘Citizen Kane, tell her.’

‘She will like that.’