CHAPTER 46
One of the distant neighbours comes out, making his way to his car, an old-fashioned cigar in his hand.
Lucy arrives after several moments from the opposite direction, slightly out of breath.
‘What’s Moody like?’
‘Smart.’
‘Does he know? Can we ask him for advice?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know yet.’ She agrees with Lucy.
They have to do it. They have a duty to escape their situation.
She’s just too afraid to take the gamble right now.
‘Let’s just … let’s just sleep a night,’ she adds.
It comes out part sentence, part sigh. She can’t deal with it right now.
Right now, she needs only immediate things.
She can hardly believe she has access to them.
A shower. Shops just down the road. A bed, a bed, a bed.
And, so far, nobody knows for sure. Not yet.
Sweet anonymity, let the future be damned.
They head into the living room. She will shower, and then she will cook. And then, later, later, she will deal with Moody, the future and everything else.
But first, she needs to ask Lucy what she was searching for. ‘What is this Google search about?’ she asks.
Lucy holds the phone, standing by the leather sofa, reading. And to her credit, her face doesn’t change at all. Simone scrutinizes her daughter the actor, and waits.
‘Oh yeah, just looking for stories about kidnaps.’
‘Torture kidnapper?’ Simone says. ‘That makes no sense.’
‘I was googling loads of things. I thought I might find an account from a victim.’ Her tone is light, a politician evading a question.
She meets Simone’s gaze, her eyes clear. There is just the slightest of challenge around her chin, and Simone knows to tread carefully.
‘If it wasn’t that,’ Simone says delicately, ‘you could tell me.’
‘It was that.’
‘Hmm. Did you … did you want to find them to …?’ Simone asks, and it comes out as almost a whisper. ‘It doesn’t make any sense that you’d google that to find stories of kidnap. Sorry. But it doesn’t.’
‘Oh sure, I desire to torture the person who manhandled me.’ Her tone is dangerous.
Simone immediately takes a step back. She can’t argue with her like this, not now. She can’t accuse her of anything, not with everything … and now she’s played the card. If there is anything to hide, Lucy will surely delete her search history again. She shouldn’t have asked her. A stupid move.
‘I didn’t think that,’ she lies.
Lucy – predictably – flounces off to a bedroom off the hallway. As she closes the door, Simone remembers the lodge and shudders; she wishes this weren’t a bungalow. She scoffs at herself. As if stairs could have saved them.
The bliss of a hot shower. Scorching. The dial is digital, and Simone turns it up with a beeping button to 102, 104, 106. That is as high as it goes. The droplets feel as though they pierce her skin; she’s not felt pleasure like it.
Shampoo. Conditioner that slides like silk between her fingers. She looks up and hopes the water doesn’t run out, no, doesn’t care, because Lucy has showered before her, and she’s here and the conditioner smells of orange blossom and they’re alive.
She has to turn it off eventually. There’s a robe – her dirty clothes can stay on the floor. She might even wash them.
Once she’s dressed in other clothes, she cooks.
They haven’t been to a shop yet, so she uses what’s here.
There are eggs, but she doesn’t touch them, thinking about the omelettes she made right before everything changed forever.
Instead, she cooks a simple soup using vegetables she finds in a drawer inside a dark little cupboard.
Peeling, chopping, stirring, reducing and reducing and reducing, salt, more salt, more salt than you think you’d need, pepper.
She stirs and stirs, and tries not to think how many meals she has left to eat, before she is incarcerated or killed. Everyone has a finite number of meals left, but Simone’s must surely be less than others’.
The name of the man Simone murdered is Jon-Paul Delves. He was a delivery driver from San Angelo, Texas, and is not a known criminal, according to the news playing out quietly on Moody’s television.
‘So it was either his first run as a messenger, or he was so good he never got caught,’ Lucy says flatly, sitting on the sofa. Simone has the phone, to prevent Lucy from googling herself and seeing Damien.
Simone sits back. ‘It’s a blow,’ she says. ‘Maybe Moody can connect him to the British man.’ She has to be brave enough to do this. It’s why they’re here. Really, what does it matter that the town is so small?
‘Exactly.’
Simone can’t stop looking at photographs of him.
A smiling, living breathing man, survived by a wife and a child, say the papers.
A painful squeeze of her chest every time she reads that line which, for some masochistic reason, she goes over and over.
Gone, now, a delivery driver from San Angelo, consigned to the heavens forever, because of her.
Simone stares down at her hand in her lap, the one that fired the gun.
Then across at Lucy: her reason for doing so.
‘I’m sure he was a criminal,’ Lucy says softly. ‘Nobody who’s a good person drives a bound and gagged woman around.’
‘Mmm,’ Simone answers, close to tears. For Jon-Paul, for themselves, for the rental they find themselves hiding in. At least she can message Damien. It hangs brightly up ahead like the moon: contact with her husband.
Lucy is sitting cross-legged on the sofa in a dressing gown.
Hair wrapped in a towel, skin shining clean.
It was only a handful of days in the desert, but it doesn’t feel that way.
It feels like months. Lucy’s skin is burnished an unnatural pink, her hairline white, and Simone winces at the damage done.
Simone hands her the soup, with bread and salted butter. Lucy dips and takes a bite. ‘Man.’
‘Nice?’
‘Very.’
‘What would you have made if I weren’t here?’
‘Fuck all. Dry bread,’ Lucy replies. ‘Might’ve risked a delivery from the Bar and Grill.’
The lights in the living room are dim. Turquoise lamps dotted around, brass bases.
The big leather sofa, then two chairs, bright orange velvet, each with a dark blue cushion.
There are shutters which they have closed.
It’s a nice house. They’re lucky. It’s two hundred a week.
Terlingua is cheap, but their money will still run out in a matter of months, more if they pay for legal advice.
It’s windy outside as the night descends. It rattles the shutters. The porch creaks with it.
They lapse into silence.
‘It’s so weird thinking it might’ve been somebody British.
Somebody we know?’ Lucy tells Simone. ‘Details keep coming to me. I wonder if I – I don’t know.
Disassociated or something. I remember walking laps of the little room I was in, hundreds of them.
I remember, blindfolded, feeling every wall, the hinges of the door, for an escape.
I remember banging and banging on the door. ’
‘Did you sleep?’
‘No. Not really.’ A sniff. ‘He probably thought I was mental.’ She pauses. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence not to be this British man – that we both saw him, but also that he disguised his voice during my captivity. It’s a distinctive accent.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I miss Dad.’ Lucy says it out of nowhere, and Simone’s hand flutters to her chest. She misses Damien too, but this is nothing compared to what Lucy is going through.
She’s lost her father, at least temporarily.
Simone looks closely at her face as she stands and puts the soup bowl on the table, then sits back down.
Her feet are white, sock marks pale, legs brown from the shins up.
‘I’m so sorry, Luce,’ she says, thinking she still can’t tell her. It’s too dangerous. Lucy would message him herself, call him, demand he come.
‘You know, I’ve been thinking, just one more day, just one more, then we’ll figure it out, it’ll blow over, yadda yadda. Just – just – just,’ Lucy says, ‘and, right now, in the shower, I thought, how long’s it going to be?’
Simone reaches out a hand to Lucy, which she doesn’t take. So she does know. She is aware of the magnitude of the situation they find themselves in. She isn’t as naive as she seems.
‘Not long,’ Simone says. They need help. That is what she is thinking. And they’re staying in a house owned by a lawyer; they’ve got to go for it.
‘I just …’ And to her surprise, Lucy begins to cry. Bottom lip going first, then her whole face trembling. She scoots over and curls up in her mother’s lap. She is twice the size as the last time she did it. ‘Do you miss him?’ she asks. ‘I’m worried about you.’
‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. But we’ll tell Moody. First thing,’ Simone says thickly.
‘Shall we save the day?’ Lucy asks her then, standing.
‘Sure. How? What’s the best thing we can do right now?’
‘Hot chocolates,’ Lucy says with a grin.
Simone smiles back. ‘Only one thing for it, huh?’
‘I think anyone would have a nice drink in this situation.’ She pauses. ‘Might even add rum to mine.’
‘Coming up,’ Simone says, finding milk, seventy per cent dark chocolate in the pantry, rum on the drinks cart. She heats the milk on a gas hob, flames blue and deliciously responsive, grates in the chocolate slowly, watching it disintegrate to oily cocoa in the milk.
She doesn’t add any rum to hers, but she lets Lucy have some, though cooks most of it off.
Lucy clinks her mug to her mother’s, there on the sofa in their pyjamas. ‘Here’s to saving the day. And to having mattresses. Are you really OK?’
‘Yes. And guess what?’
‘What?’
‘There’s a comb in the bathroom.’
‘Yesssssss!’ Lucy shouts.
They go to bed a little later. The moonlight is a clear flashbulb in the bedroom. Simone shuts it out. After less than five minutes in separate rooms, Lucy joins her, and Simone holds her hand as they fall asleep.