CHAPTER 39
Simone’s back shivers deeply, her spine a centipede. Lucy is striding ahead in the way that she does. Her rucksack on her back, hands holding the straps on her shoulders, sipping constantly at water, head perfectly upright. She still hasn’t noticed Simone using the phone, and thank God for that.
‘I’m going for a wee,’ Simone calls out, and Lucy throws out a hand behind her head in acknowledgement, but doesn’t really slow her steps.
Simone will catch up. You can’t lose each other in a place where you can see two miles in every direction, where the only thing obscuring the view is the curvature of the Earth.
Simone heads behind a rock, the air above it quivering hot with sun, and opens the article in the shade. She will have only a few minutes.
Husband and father Damien today hosted a press conference pleading for their safe return. He tells the world that this was not a drugs trade. Their daughter was kidnapped, and his wife received a ransom request from an organized crime gang operating in Texas.
‘Please, please come back – facing the consequences is the only solution,’ he told the world. ‘I know none of this is your fault, but …’
When Andrew Wilson, from the Sun, asked him if he supported his wife’s actions, he replied, ‘Absolutely not. She has shot and killed a man, and has taken from me our daughter in reckless circumstances. Kidnap or no kidnap, she took the law into her own hands.’
Simone lets her arm fall to her side, the phone held loosely in her hand. She leans back against the rock, her head warm with the heat of it. She can’t breathe. She can’t think straight. What the fuck? Damien?
This is the third worst moment of her life.
The first is the ransom. The second is the moment she had to shoot a man to save her daughter.
And the third is this, except that this one feels like a true, pure and undistilled form of heartbreak.
Damien, her safe space, her forever ally, her friend; her birth family a shitty hand, the second a full house.
And they’re now divided because of a marital dispute they had in the most awful, most stressful of circumstances.
She stares out at the unforgiving landscape. Almost all blue-velvet summer sky, the moon-like desert a mere strip along the bottom.
How could he?
But has he?
Something in her doesn’t believe this. That he could, that he would …
She folds the phone back into a small and sad pebble. She’s got to get on. Lucy will notice soon. While she walks, she can think.
She was the sensible one, Damien the reckless. If she had done what he’d recommended, their daughter would be dead. Simone knows it the way she knows she is in Texas, that the sun is shining, that the sky is blue.
But Simone also knows Damien.
He hasn’t done it. That is the thought that underpins this. He – so reasonable, so considered – would not spill his heart out to the media.
Something else is going on. She looks up at that blue sky. She knows it.
The rest of the articles blur together. Her staff being stopped by journalists outside Dishes.
Timeo looking tired, dishevelled, holding a hand up to his face to avoid photographs on smartphones.
Somebody called Josephine from Lucy’s camp speaking out, saying she was ‘a nice girl, but thought the rules didn’t apply to her. ’
Lucy stops up ahead and looks around for Simone.
‘How dehydrated, on a scale of clear wee to a small brown cube of piss?’ she calls.
‘About a six,’ Simone says, putting the phone away. Lucy doesn’t need to know about any of this.
‘Not bad,’ Lucy replies, her voice high and cheerful, and Simone can’t bear to crush it, her spirit.
Simone has hardy feet from the last few years in kitchens that never hurt, but they are now sore and aching in her battered trainers.
Lucy’s back is red raw, even with suncream, and she has pulled out her cardigan and put it around her shoulders despite it being forty degrees.
Since adding the layer, she’s drinking even more.
All they do is walk, not speaking. Lucy drinks gallons, sometimes pouring a little over her chest. Simone drinks nothing.
An hour later, she turns the phone on, and there is internet signal once more. Simone has had time to think, and, this time, she walks and types in the restaurant’s Instagram handle. Only she and Damien have the login.
A pinned post reads STILL OPEN FOR BUSINESS, which is damning in itself but, after that, something else.
A new photo, a fish, not unusual – they are always showcasing dishes – but it’s not on their menu, and neither is it displayed on Dishes’ crockery.
Simone tilts her head this way and that, trying to work it out in the glare of the sun.
It’s a fish still with the head on, something like sour cream dotted in four blobs around it.
They don’t serve it, and she doesn’t know which fish it is.
It’s kippered to a deep red. It looks more like an image that’s been downloaded than created by Dishes.
Simone checks the restaurant’s inbox. It’s full of people tagging it in their posts, speculating about the owners, the news stories. Damien has set up an auto-reply, which Simone winces at. We’re getting a lot of traffic at the moment to this site. If you’d like to book a table please call …
Halfway down the message inbox the restaurant has messaged itself the post of the fish. It’s the only message between Dishes and itself, a strange tautology. She stares at it, but then Lucy interrupts her, and she closes it down once more.
Late afternoon, and they’re hungry. Simone doesn’t want to stop to cook again, but Lucy forces the issue at what must be four o’clock.
Simone makes them sandwiches but they continue.
Into the evening, and at first Simone thought it was her imagination that the walk was easier. She dismissed it as a kind of delirium, but, after a while, she asks Lucy.
‘I think it does go downhill because of the Rio Grande,’ she replies. ‘That runs along the entire bottom of Big Bend. It forms the border with Mexico.’
Simone nods. Relief floods her system. Lower ground might mean water, and water might mean time.
Sure enough, around eight o’clock, a small groove in the land becomes a tiny, wet tributary, then widens to a stream, then even broader.
Simone gladly fills their bottles up with it, doesn’t even think to complain about the extra weight.
The water runs down the back of her throat.
It’s warm, but it’s glassy and satisfying, too.
‘We could find a softer spot, I think, for tonight. Then we should hit Terlingua tomorrow afternoon or evening,’ Lucy replies.
Simone can’t help but notice some simplicity here: the surety that tomorrow will come, that they are not on borrowed time.
They find a patch of grass right by the stream as the sun sinks.
Lucy begins to put the tent up while they still have some light, and Simone pats the ground.
It’s slightly damp, its surface spongy, and it reminds Simone of England so suddenly and so ferociously that she has to turn away from Lucy as she unrolls a sleeping bag.
She thinks of that one time early on in her schooling with Timeo when she thought it looked so green and so verdant outside on the school run in May that she went home and made a warm green bean salad, a kind of foodie pathetic fallacy.
They’d eaten it in the garden, under the awning, watching the drizzle glisten the plants and scent the lawn.
It had been the very beginning of summer, where the weather might still be cold but has promise.
Later, she’d told Timeo, and he’d said, ‘I’m afraid you are a cook now.
’ They’d added the green bean salad to the menu that spring, and Simone is pretty sure the Michelin Guide inspector the following February ordered it.
Her humble salad, pulled from her mind by something she had never before associated with food: creativity.
‘Is it mad to rip up a load of grass and use it as a pillow?’ Lucy asks, her hands on her hips, surveying the ground outside the tent. The stream is wide here, and deep, and rushes pleasantly past. It’s nice to hear a noise that isn’t them, or the relentless desert night-time winds.
‘Yes.’
‘What do you think Dad is doing?’ she asks suddenly.
‘I don’t know,’ Simone replies, looking wistfully into the darkening blue air, thinking about the news articles and press conferences.
What would she be doing? She knows she wouldn’t be talking to the media, but what would she be doing?
If Damien had rescued their daughter but had sacrificed everything else?
She tries to tell herself that she’d appreciate it, that she would respect his decision, that he got her back alive.
But she knows that she’d be steaming mad.
That he’d rescued Lucy but in doing so would be keeping Simone from her.
‘What would you do?’ Simone asks her daughter softly. ‘In his shoes.’
Lucy thinks about this for so long that Simone begins to wonder if she heard her.
Simone begins getting out the bag of vegetables and potatoes she brought.
First, she gets a fire going easily, with sticks and matches and the same watchfulness that cooking requires, the sort of activity that is suited to busy minds, minds that need at least part of them to be absorbed by something else.
With water now in abundance, she fills a pot and brings it to boil, watching the flames leap underneath it.
And the smell. Smoked wood. The smell of England in January, of walks by country cottages with open fires, of real-ale pubs with fifteenth-century beams up above.
A distinctive chalky, wintery smell. She wishes she could bottle it.
‘I’d come,’ Lucy says simply. And here they are, arrived at the topic that they have so far avoided with other tasks: survival, running, staying hidden. Sometimes traumas are so great it takes you several days to truly witness their fallout. ‘We can’t go to him.’