CHAPTER 38
Simone wakes to bright daylight, the sun high, the tent neon blue with it, and she enjoys one, two, three delicious beats before she remembers.
The first clue is Lucy’s hand in hers. She’s OK: Simone’s unconscious mind was checking on her before her conscious mind caught up.
And the next thing she thinks of isn’t the ransom, the drugs; it’s that she, Simone, is a killer.
It comes back to her in broken fragments.
She stares down at her own hands. The hands of a murderer. In all of it, she has thought of this least.
A man who was previously healthy is now dead.
A man who was once a baby in the crook of somebody’s elbow, a toddler bending over to inspect insects, a schoolkid, a seven-year-old, telling stories to his mother.
She can hardly picture the moment it happened.
Simone always thought time slowed down in disasters, but for her it sped up, on warp, holding the gun, the man stumbling.
The blood. The ricochet echoing around the desert.
Simone rolls on to her stomach. She wants to offload to Damien.
She wants an outdoor date night with him.
She wants to walk and talk. She wants to chop vegetables while he goes through bookings.
She wants to gossip about how expensive their guests’ handbags are while he tries everything she’s cooking, burns his fingers and says he doesn’t care.
Lucy’s eyelashes fan semicircles across her cheeks, her breathing steady. Simone hopes it’s a good sign that her daughter has been able to sleep this first night, even though the ground is hard, the wind high.
She gets to her feet and unzips the tent. It sounds like a klaxon in the quiet, though Lucy doesn’t stir.
She escapes clumsily through the flap at the bottom.
She spins in a slow circle. There’s no one around.
They could be on Mars, the moon. There could’ve been an apocalypse.
No contact, no newspapers. She thinks of the restaurant back home, the buzz of it.
In her mind, she traces herself through that back corridor, to her step where she waits for the fresh produce.
She’s taking delivery of the fish, first thing.
She’s the only one there. It comes in from Margate, scentless, fresh and cool.
The polystyrene boxes. The slippery fat bodies.
She is here, she is happy. She is about to start cooking.
She’s making potatoes flavoured with lime.
She’s got the balance of salty and sweet and sour just right.
They’re steaming hot, a sprinkle of lime rind on the top.
And, soon, all this input, the attention to detail, it’s going to pay off, and they’re going to get that Michelin star.
There’s a flat rock near the tent, and she sits on it and watches the horizon lines.
She can’t believe they haven’t been found.
She can’t believe that, two months ago, her only looming problem was empty-nest syndrome, which inverted itself when Lucy said she didn’t want to leave.
It was uncharacteristic, and bothering Simone on multiple, complicated levels, the way things often do in parenting.
‘I’m surprised you don’t want to, you know,’ Simone had said. They had been sitting in the kitchen at Dishes, in the quiet time after the lunch service and before the evening. Simone was spatchcocking chickens, watching Lucy take a bite out of an offensive shop-bought sandwich.
‘What?’
‘Spread your wings,’ Simone had said delicately. ‘Live out.’
‘I’ve been spatchcocked.’
‘Be serious.’
‘We’re fifteen minutes from RADA. I’ll spread my wings in bed,’ Lucy said. ‘I can get up at eight forty-five for classes.’
‘Hmm.’ Simone had busied herself with the brutal chicken work – they were catering for a cricket match later that evening, had hundreds of them to do, but all through the evening she kept thinking of it, how off it had seemed for Lucy.
That night, Simone brought her home a chicken with a pea salad and pea purée.
She’d handed it to Lucy, who immediately set it on a plate and started eating it.
She regularly ate two small dinners, one at six o’clock, one when Simone got home at midnight, and never gained an ounce because she usually forgot lunch and breakfast.
‘So you’re not even going to put in for –’ Simone had started.
‘Nah. Halls are so horrible, too. Shared showers.’ Lucy made a face.
Simone had hesitated. The thing was, she didn’t want Lucy to go, either.
She was saying the right things, but not thinking them.
Simone had found it difficult when Lucy had stopped breastfeeding – just refused one day, and never asked again – and when she didn’t want to hold Simone’s hand any more.
Simone had hated it when she had lost her toddler pot belly, when she learned to put her shoes on herself.
Was it because Lucy was an only child, was it because Simone was somehow over the top compared to other mothers (to other people)?
She wasn’t sure. Everyone feels different from others in their own mind, she supposes, but this felt somehow primal to her.
A melancholia. To Simone, parental love is so very close to sadness.
You are given the love of your life and then, slowly, over a twenty-year period, you have to watch them fucking leave you.
She once said this to Damien, who had looked confused and said, ‘But that’s the whole point!
’ She’d never spoken to anybody else about it.
Everybody seemed fine with it, celebrating milestones met and school years passed through.
Simone never took a single September first-day-of-school photograph of Lucy by their front door; she couldn’t bear to think of parenthood rushing by that fast, like lightning.
A life phase made of cuddles and lunchboxes and Tommee Tippee and Crayola and rice cakes and stickers, snuffed out suddenly one day like a death, when they leave.
Nevertheless, Simone knew that good parenting required her to find out what was going on.
Lucy ought to want to live out. To play loud music late at night, to have sex with strangers, if she wanted to – Lucy is, Simone is fairly sure, a virgin, deeming most of the boys in her school ‘either hooligans or, worse, wannabe poets’ – but Lucy doesn’t want to.
‘Is this …?’ Simone started to say delicately. ‘Is that all it is, then? You want convenience?’
Lucy shrugged. ‘I suppose so,’ she had said, putting too much chicken in her mouth to talk any further.
Simone waited for her to chew and swallow, but no more information came.
Instead, she turned on the television, flicked to something, Taskmaster or something like that, but when Simone checked her phone, then looked discreetly at Lucy, she hadn’t been watching it, her eyes glassily looking to the floor.
And now it is likely irrelevant, all that navel-gazing, untangling her wants from Lucy’s. They’re here, together, no future, no phases passing them by, and Simone couldn’t feel worse about it, but also, is part of her just slightly relieved that Lucy cannot leave her? The paradox of motherhood.
Sleep is lost to her now.
And so Simone sits there and thinks some more. She runs through her tiny and stupid list of possible solutions, discounting them all once again. Getting a lawyer, handing themselves in, staying hidden. The possibilities circle until she is tired of them.
She thinks about the moment she shot the stranger. She thinks about the pink fuzzy marks the gaffer tape left on Lucy’s mouth. She thinks of the bag full of cocaine.
‘I think it’s actually a renowned stargazing point,’ Lucy says, startling Simone. ‘And I’m so entitled I forgot to even look.’
Simone turns in surprise. ‘Is it?’ Lucy’s hair is mussed-up candyfloss around a scrunchie. ‘Nice hair,’ she adds.
‘The fork has done more harm than good.’
There, in their timeless universe, Lucy sits down close to Simone’s body. Her flour-bag baby, grown up. She rests her head against Simone’s.
‘I dreamed of him,’ Lucy says. ‘The hand.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘A better woman could have escaped. In the dream I tried harder.’
‘No, they couldn’t.’
Simone allows the conversation to lapse, but after a few moments, it’s time to address it.
‘We need a plan,’ she says delicately. ‘At least for the next while.’
‘I know.’
‘I’ve been kicking it around in my mind.’
‘Come up with anything?’ Lucy says, still leaning her body against her mother’s.
‘Nothing good.’
‘The only option is exoneration,’ Lucy says, her voice so deep and full and theatrical that it carries with it an authority, too. She says nothing more for several seconds, then: ‘Until we can prove our innocence, we need to stay hidden.’
Simone waits a beat, nodding slowly. Exoneration. ‘How will we prove it?’
‘I don’t know.’ She flicks her gaze to Simone’s. ‘But what I do know is that everything that stems from it is explained by it.’
‘I’ve got a message ready to send to Airbnb about CCTV at the lodge …’ Simone thinks. ‘And we could try to find the phones he communicated with me on.’
Lucy pauses. ‘We need help,’ she says softly. ‘We need to get help.’
‘What do you mean?’ says Simone, invisible fingers walking their way up her spine.
Lucy leans away from Simone and takes her hair out of the scrunchie.
‘We know some things about him. He is probably involved with drugs. He has a daughter who I might recognize if I saw her. He had a messenger whose name will likely be released soon. I think we find him. And if necessary, we get the authorities to help us find him. Police in Terlingua. Police that aren’t his police. ’
‘I’m really not sure he’s … We don’t know he’s in with the police.’
‘I know. But –’
‘Hand ourselves in?’ Simone says.
‘Wouldn’t a lawyer help us? Or the embassy?’
‘The embassy. Hmm.’ Simone thinks about it. ‘We’d still have to confess, to the embassy. To get their help.’ She looks at Lucy. She can’t allow her to do it. She would still be arrested.