CHAPTER 36
They walk for two hours before exhaustion sets in, the wind picks up, and Simone is actually, genuinely frozen.
Twice she hears imagined footsteps behind them, whips around, expecting to find someone but doesn’t.
There’s nothing and no one, and, in a way, that’s worse.
Simone and Lucy have many enemies, and Mother Nature has now become one of them.
She is putting off thinking, instead simply walking, one foot in front of the other, which reminds her perversely of the way it’s easy to do this, thinking you will truly begin your life when the next thing is done, when the house renovation is finished, when the restaurant earns its Michelin star. The next, the next …
Lucy herself reminded Simone of this just recently, last year, on holiday in Italy.
Their luggage got lost. They had nothing.
They laughed about it in the car from the airport, and Simone had relaxed into the driver’s seat, Lucy in the front – claiming car sickness but Simone suspected simply wanting conversation – Damien in the back, on his phone, choosing music Lucy called insipid.
Simone had thought that she was looking forward to their holiday starting.
She’d said this to Lucy, who’d poked fun at her: ‘I hate to break it to you, but it’s started! C’est la vie!’
‘That’s French.’
‘I know. It was metaphorical.’
‘Metaphorical French,’ Damien said from the back.
It was late when they got to Venice, but they were grimy from travel and showered anyway. ‘Oh no,’ Lucy said, as she emerged wearing a towel. ‘Noooo.’
‘What?’
‘No hairbrush.’
‘No!’ Simone had said back. Their hair was washed, wet now, with nothing to brush it with, lost luggage more of a pain than they’d thought.
They’d used a fork, in the end, laughing together in the kitchen as they groomed each other like chimps and Damien watched on.
Laughter was better with a willing audience, and he was always that, easy to make laugh.
As they’d held each other’s hair to stop the strands breaking too much, giggling, Simone had thought that she was looking forward to the holiday truly beginning the next day.
The following morning, hair like straw, they headed out to an Italian supermarket, bought a hairbrush each, which Simone still owns. It’s a crappy one, loses its bristles too easily, but it has nice memories.
But, looking back, the best bits of the holiday were those parts before it truly began. The car ride, the fork, the supermarket.
That was how it always was; maybe it’s that way for everyone. Without the luxury of impending disaster, when time was spun out in front of them, endless.
And now, something completely different. They are forced, through fear, into a kind of burning mindfulness. There is only now. Tomorrow isn’t promised. Simone wouldn’t even give the odds as fifty-fifty.
The police probably won’t have found the car yet. They won’t know in which direction they have walked. She hopes the water will last. They have five large bottles each. It would’ve been enough if they were filling up at a campsite, but how can they?
They have a torch with them, but it would be stupid to use it, so instead they trudge into the desert.
Underfoot is pale dust, illuminated to white in the moonlight, which crackles like shingle, then reduces to powder that makes Simone think of the cocaine.
Plants she doesn’t recognize, dead-looking shrubs that cut her legs, their twigs bare and spindly like winter trees.
They aren’t cacti – more rough, spiked shrubs, things that grow out of shingle, of sand.
Things that grow where nothing will survive, things that creak in the wind.
And, up above, stars. An abundance of them, like the entire universe has gathered up above here, and only here, a smokescreen of a sky. There must be two million out there, a messy scatter, a rip revealing diamonds like a seam she could mine, if only she could get to it.
Simone finds a dizzying perspective in it. They’re just humans on a rock. There might be other life out there. Their suffering seems to matter less as she looks.
‘God,’ Lucy says, out of breath.
They must have walked maybe six miles. Simone’s bones ache with exhaustion.
‘How far exactly is Terlingua?’
Lucy makes a face, screwing her nose up, and Simone hates that she is having to rely on her daughter in this way. They could use the new flip phone to look, but she’s afraid to right now. It’s simple, probably not tracking their every move across internet apps, but it might have GPS.
‘Maybe thirty miles …?’ Lucy answers. ‘Three days’ walking maybe? My eyelids feel like they’re trying to close. I’m so tired.’
‘Right. I think we need to pitch the tent,’ Simone says. ‘Start again tomorrow morning.’
‘It is tomorrow morning,’ Lucy says, indicating the sky behind them, very slightly beginning to lighten, but she nods, Simone thinks gratefully.
They’ve walked right through the small hours and into the morning.
The ground hasn’t become any softer, they haven’t found anywhere to shelter from the wind, or hide from the police, but they need to close their eyes, just for a little while.
The last sleep she had was in the gazebo with the drugs.
The time before that was her six hours that she thinks she might have to pay for forever.
They need to talk to each other. They need to work things out. They need to decide what risks to take, and why, and when. But, first, they need to sleep.
As they unfold the tent from Simone’s backpack, she is struck suddenly by the certainty that it is easier to hide in a city than the wilderness.
They’re so obvious here with their pitched blue tent in this vast, open space.
If anyone sees them, they are done. There’s nowhere to conceal themselves.
Like trying to play hide-and-seek on a beach.
Simone purses her lips to stop herself from saying this, the way she has hundreds of times in parenthood. It isn’t appropriate.
Next to her, Lucy jumps. ‘That was something!’ she says, dancing from foot to foot. In the near darkness, her features are fuzzy, pale limbs, blonde hair, everything else vague. Simone can’t wait for more daylight, whatever it might bring. ‘Maybe a snake?’ Lucy says, kicking a foot out.
‘No, it won’t be a snake,’ Simone says, but it’s a platitude; it could easily be a snake. Spiders, lizards, bears, anything. She shivers.
‘Jesus,’ Lucy says. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter where we pitch it; it’s all the same open space.’ She gestures into the gloom. ‘There’s a canyon somewhere, but …’ Another hopeless hand thrown out. It could be miles away. It could be in a different direction entirely.
Lucy opens Simone’s rucksack while it’s still on her back and begins getting the tent pegs out. The wind has picked up, whipping their hair around their faces. In close proximity, Simone sees goosepimples on Lucy’s arms.
Simone takes the tent poles and begins trying to knock them into ground so hard it may as well be made of steel. As she makes botched attempts, she uses the quiet time to think of options. Anything.
One tent peg.
Get legal advice.
Another.
Talk to the police the next town over.
Another.
Contact Damien.
Another.
Get out of the country.
Another.
Hide.
The solutions keep coming from Simone’s brain in the way they always have, but she doesn’t buy into any of them. Each is so flawed as to be impossible. They can’t go to trial, not now. They can’t contact Damien – he’d be arrested along with them. They can’t leave the country.
They can’t hide forever. Ten bottles of water. Ten.
She is ashamed to find tears in her eyes as she hammers. Each peg goes less than a centimetre in, the ground cracking, poles wobbling, but it will have to do.
Pegs done, she begins to erect the tent, while Lucy looks busy but isn’t helping. One side of the tent rises up like a flag on a pole as Simone’s brain continues to whir.
Wait it out.
The next side of the tent.
Prove the kidnap.
She unrolls the foam mattresses Lucy borrowed from somebody at camp.
Find the kidnapper.
Find the kidnapper.
This is surely the answer, but isn’t it impossible?
‘You OK?’ Lucy asks her, looking closely.
‘Mm-hm.’
‘Your eyes are wet.’
‘It’s just the wind,’ Simone tells her.
‘Leave this to me,’ Lucy says. ‘Sorry, I was being useless.’
And then she makes Simone’s bed up, as nice as she can get it with the things they have.