CHAPTER 37
They get inside the tent and stand in the very centre of it together, both five feet nothing, eyes level.
‘Jesus,’ Lucy says. ‘It’s not very roomy. Why were we doing this again?’ A tiny smile.
‘A fun trip, to connect with nature,’ Simone answers.
‘Two hours in, we’d google Airbnb, check into one with a hot tub,’ Lucy says, voice wistful.
‘I know,’ Simone says, thinking the last time she shared a bedroom with her child was a long time ago, but she isn’t going to let her out of her sight now.
Airbnb. This springs Simone into action.
She gets out the flip phone she bought. No Network is emblazoned across the screen.
Simone thinks of everything she could access on here if it had signal.
She could find out what the police know.
She could find out what the victim was called, which might lead her to the kidnapper himself.
Nevertheless, Simone drafts an anonymous enquiry on Airbnb ready to send to the lodge, saying she wants to book but asking if they have any CCTV as she is security conscious.
She will sound suspicious, but she is trying not to care about the risks being taken, her own traceability.
It might simply be a race against time: that she gets answers before the police do.
She closes the phone again. She’ll send it when she has signal.
Lucy sits down on one of the rolled-out yellow mattresses.
She gets into a sleeping bag, pulls it up to her thighs.
She takes the matches out and, before Simone can stop her, strikes one against the box.
It hisses and flares, illuminating her face from the centre outwards, rippling golden water across her features.
She carefully lights a miniature oil lamp they have.
It won’t last long – they didn’t bring spare oil – and Simone doesn’t think they should have it on in case somebody is actually passing in this wilderness, but she lets Lucy do it anyway.
She will let her fall asleep to light. Perhaps she needs to.
Sometimes, certain risks are worth taking, because they allow you to avoid the darkness of the mind.
Lucy pulls the sleeping bag right up to her chin, now. She lies on her back and untangles her hair from a scrunchie, then gets up and begins rooting around. ‘No hairbrush,’ she tells her mother. ‘I had one at singing prison. I don’t know where it’s gone.’
The word prison hangs stark in the air between them. Simone ignores it, getting into her own sleeping bag, which is as cold and as crinkly as a winter coat against her skin.
‘You must’ve brought it,’ Simone says absent-mindedly while the wind rages around their tent, rippling it and pulling it. Her hands are so frozen they feel clumsy, the tip of her nose is freezing. She has no idea how they are ever going to sleep.
‘No,’ Lucy says, pulling at their possessions, spreading them slowly around the tent. Food, water bottles, a couple of changes of clothes.
‘We’ll have to Venice it,’ Lucy says, flashing a grin at Simone.
‘Do we have a fork?’
‘Yeah, we have those little wooden ones,’ Lucy says, and she locates one and begins to drag it through her hair, grimacing in good humour as it pulls.
And Simone feels a mix of emotions too complex to even begin to unpick.
Lucy’s hair was shorter on that holiday.
She was younger then, obviously, different, enduring the constant, ongoing metamorphosis that is growing up.
She still needed help sometimes then to prepare meals, with homework …
Slowly, slowly, she lost that. She grew taller, her hair grew longer, the umbilical cord that once joined them so physically, so obviously, was gossamer-thin.
That’s parenthood. They begin as part of you, and they end up so far away from you, you begin to wonder if any of it ever happened.
‘You didn’t … make any enemies, at singing prison, did you?’ Simone asks, the thought having just occurred to her.
‘Plenty,’ Lucy says. ‘Everyone who heard me sing, for starters.’
‘No, really.’
‘No!’ Lucy says. ‘Oh yeah, I happened to befriend a drugs baron, and hadn’t said until you asked that exact question. Jesus, this isn’t Reservoir Dogs.’
‘Another boring movie.’
‘Not so. Every single scene is an example of dialogue perfection.’
‘What about at camp?’
‘Really not. Camp’s full of good girls.’
Simone pauses, thinking. ‘Do you want to talk about him again? Before you sleep?’ she asks gently.
Partly out of care and partly out of curiosity, but also because she is looking for solutions.
She hopes a salient detail might reveal itself.
Some clue, the way it might in the movies Lucy watches.
A tattoo, a piece of jewellery. Something about his daughter.
A location. A number plate. She is kidding herself, she knows it, but if they could find the kidnapper, they could somehow prove that this is what he does – couldn’t they?
‘OK,’ Lucy says. She sighs. ‘I want to talk about Dad …’ she says, but her voice trails off.
‘I know.’
‘Will he be in Texas? With the police?’
‘I think so,’ Simone says.
‘God,’ Lucy says, but perhaps the topic is too enormous, because she lies back and begins to talk, as requested, about the kidnap. ‘The lemon smell. The gloved hand. He – he manoeuvred me into position.’
Simone stares at her daughter’s prone form, the oil lamp burning next to her, casting the tent in a golden glow. Half of Lucy’s face is lit, half dark. ‘He didn’t … It wasn’t – sexual?’
‘No. No.’
Outside, the very early morning is still dark and porous. Simone knows they will be silhouetted from outside, a little shadow play for the world to see. She needs to blow out the flame, but she wants to wait for Lucy to wind down, relax, for her breathing to slow.
‘Anything else?’
‘The messenger’s voice I did hear. I was passed into his arms, and he found it easier to hold my weight, and I felt higher up, so I’d say the kidnapper is a smaller man than the man you …
than the messenger. But still – large and strong enough to kidnap me in the first place.
’ And this is it: information. It’s their most vital commodity, more important than their food, their water, their shelter in their tent.
‘What kind of car was it?’ Simone asks, figuring they will release the name of the dead man soon enough, and wondering if that will lead them to the kidnapper.
‘Hmm,’ Lucy says, sleepy. ‘Not sure.’ A pause. ‘Will you watch me to sleep?’ she asks, something she’s never once said. Lucy was an independent child, said, ‘Go away, Mummy,’ at her first school drop-off.
‘Of course,’ Simone answers. ‘Do you know, the police came, after you were taken. A traffic cop, by the street.’
‘Huh? Oh really?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you wish you’d called out to him – got help?’
‘No,’ Simone says honestly. ‘Because that might’ve meant I wouldn’t have you.’
‘Mmm,’ Lucy says, and she is sliding into sleep. Simone leans over and blows out the oil lamp, plunging them into a darkness so thick it is more like blindness.
She holds her breath, waiting for their tent to be ripped open at any moment by an anonymous, voiceless kidnapper. Or, worse, unzipped slowly and gleefully by somebody who gets off on taking women.
All around is silence. Before sleep comes for Simone, she entwines her hand around Lucy’s, which is already slack with slumber, powdery with desert dust. She can’t not be touching her. She would wake if somebody tried to take her, this way, mother and daughter, joined still.