Just between us, p.16
Just Between Us, page 16
‘Mum, Mum!’ It is a noisy street full of chatter and drunk laughter, but surely she can hear him. Why doesn’t she turn to him? Instead she gets into a car; the old man slams the door behind her, then quickly gets in the driver’s side and drives away, swiftly. He moved really fast for such an old bloke. Seb starts to run after the car; his feet slam down hard on the pavement, his breathing is ragged and stays in his chest. At one point he is only a couple of metres away from them, but he has to keep dodging around people milling about who are just idiots and can’t see how he needs them to get out of his way. The car revs and accelerates up the hill. Seb keeps running, but the gap between them widens.
‘Seb! Seb! What the hell, Seb?’ Oli shouts.
Seb is bent double, resting his hands on his knees, trying to get his breath back, trying not to cry. The disappointment throbs through him. He thinks he is going to be sick. He feels Oli put his hand on his back, hot and heavy; he wants to shake it off. ‘Run after that car, Oli,’ he gasps.
‘Which car?’ Oli looks up the road. The car is out of sight now. Seb wants to cry. He mustn’t cry. He can’t.
‘A grey Honda. Old-looking.’
‘What? Why? Did they nick something?’ Oli looks around frantically, probably searching for their backpack. Seb knows he left it at the table; he hopes someone will have looked after it for them, but he doesn’t really care that much. There is nothing in it that he values. Everything in the world that he values is in the Honda. He feels his stomach roil and his bowels clench.
‘Mum is in the car.’ He stands up straight and stares at Oli; eye to eye, he might be believed. They are brothers. Seb still sees Oli as an extension of himself, although he is never certain this is a two-way thing. It is possibly a younger brother thing. But he needs Oli to believe him. Help him. Help their mum.
‘What?’
‘I saw her. I saw her get in the car.’
‘No you didn’t.’ Oli’s response is flat, devoid of any emotion.
‘I called out to her.’
‘Did she respond?’
‘Well, no, but …’
Oli sighs, looks at his trainers, then puts both his hands on Seb’s shoulders. ‘You imagined her. You want it so much you imagined it. You’ve thought of nothing other than her since we arrived and so you’ve seen someone who looks a bit like her and imagined it’s Mum, but it’s not her, Seb. I’m sorry, but it’s not.’
Seb shakes him off and starts running up the street after the Honda, although it is long gone and he knows it’s pointless. He stops halfway up the hill, admitting that his efforts are futile.
‘She’s cut off all her hair,’ he yells.
‘She would never. She was really vain about her hair,’ replies Oli quietly.
‘Do you think she’s hiding from someone? The person who took her?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Seb, Mum is dead. How many times do I have to tell you?’
‘She’s not. She’s really not. I saw this man put her in a car. She didn’t want to go with him.’
‘What, he forced her? Lifted her into the car?’
‘Erm, no, not exactly, but he took hold of her arm and sort of marched her towards the passenger door.’
‘Marched her?’
‘Kind of led her. She didn’t want to get in.’
‘Did this woman scream out? Did she protest at all? Why isn’t anyone else chasing this car if a man just kidnapped a Leigh lookie-likie?’
Seb can’t explain it. A blank opens up inside him, eating his words, his reason, his ability to expound. He has felt this happen before, a number of times since she left. It seems like in his life there is a massive crevasse. He’s scared there always will be this feeling. He has to find her. If there is always this emptiness, he’ll fall into it, he knows he will, sooner or later. He’s too young to avoid it without her, without his mum. He needs her.
He starts to cry. It is the worst thing he can do. It makes him seem like a kid. Then Oli puts his arms around him and that is worse still. He feels his own body quake. Oli will assume he’s crying because he is sad, but he’s not. He’s howling because he is not being heard. Because he is frustrated and because it is unfair. The whole bloody horrible, bloody stupid bloody thing is unfair and a nightmare. And he wants to scream and scream and scream. Crying is actually an act of self-control.
He struggles to free himself from his brother’s embrace and heads back to the café. A server is on her knees with a dustpan and brush sweeping up the pieces of broken glass. Seb thinks of the last time he saw his mum. She’d been cleaning the kitchen because their cat, Topaz, had got at the Sunday lunch chicken that was on the counter in a greasy baking tray. Topaz had made a load of oily footprints everywhere. Seb was worried she was going to choke on a chicken bone. His mum had got scratched when she tried to get the chicken carcass from the cat, and then she’d washed the floor. Seb, Oli and his dad had gone out, left her to it. He remembers looking back over and seeing her kneeling next to a bucket of hot water. Later that night, they came home and she was dancing in the sparkling clean kitchen. He tries to remember her dancing, but usually when he thinks of her he remembers her plunging her hands into the sudsy water. It makes him feel weird. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.
A group of women in their twenties are hovering around the table Oli and Seb were sitting at, waiting for the glass to be cleared up so they can swoop into their seats. A couple of them are holding the backs of chairs purloined from other tables. One of them is holding Oli’s rucksack. She hands it to him. It’s all really embarrassing. Seb keeps his head down, but he can feel their sympathetic gazes burning into him. He knows Oli will be glaring at the young women. Fury burning from his eyes. Oli hates people feeling sorry for them. Seb doesn’t care. He feels sorry for himself. He wants people to feel sorry for him. They should. He has just watched his mother disappear for a second time.
23
Oli
Coming here, to this place where they spent so many summer holidays when they were young, was a mistake. He’d triggered his brother, who is in a really fucked-up state, which was not his intention. He is trying to keep him safe. Even though Seb is as annoying as hell, on some molecular level they are attached in a way that is different from everyone else in the world. Even when they experience different things, think different things, they are in some weird way connected. And he’s the oldest, so he’s responsible. He is doing his best, but the whole thing is so fucked up, he doesn’t know if a best is even possible, and if it is, he sure as hell doesn’t know what it might look like any more.
He swears a lot in his internal monologue. As he does so, he imagines Leigh telling him off for it. ‘You’re cleverer than that, Oli. Use the vocabulary I know you have. Show the world you are brilliant and articulate.’ She was the only one who thought he was brilliant. He is dyslexic, and his teachers sometimes just think he is a fuckw— An imbecile. He self-corrects. Not that Leigh can hear him or anything. But he does it anyway.
What was the point of coming here? He stubs his toe into the pavement, grinds the end of his trainer into the kerb as though hoping to make an imprint, an impression. Why is he here? He just had to get Seb out of the house; that was the important part really. He could have gone anywhere. Once he had the cash, he could have gone to Scotland or Manchester. It’s most likely banging up there. He won’t acknowledge that he feels sentimental about Lyme Regis and that he was perhaps drawn here because it is a place where he used to be happy. Maybe it is simply habit that brought him here. He found his way here on autopilot because this is where they always came; it isn’t a stretch or a challenge. He’s simply here because he’s lazy.
Or maybe it is more than that.
The thing is, he can’t shake off Daan Janssen’s words. He doesn’t trust or believe him exactly, but he decided to test him. Just in case, because this isn’t a situation where he can risk not checking every possibility, no matter how off-the-wall the possibilities seem.
He sent Janssen a message via the PlayStation app and said that he and Seb would look for evidence to prove Janssen’s innocence and that Fiona was involved with Leigh’s disappearance, but they would need money to do so. Like resources. Daan sent a thousand pounds to Oli’s Monzo account in just minutes. It was unbelievable. A thousand pounds. Why would he do that if he was guilty? Just give away cash trying to prove something unprovable. He wouldn’t. So he had to be … well, not precisely innocent, but maybe something in between.
And if Janssen didn’t do it, someone else had to have. Because she didn’t chain herself to the radiator, did she.
Oli shakes his head. He doesn’t have a clue and it is almost too much to think about. He just wanted to have a day off. Really, the only good thing coming out of this is the fact that he’s had an all-expenses-paid day at the beach; or at least it was a good thing until Seb started hallucinating and then having a breakdown in the street. WTF?
They are sitting on a bench now. Oli has bought them both hot chocolate. They don’t need warming up exactly, but sweet things are good for shock. He remembers Leigh giving him tea with about eight sugars when he fell off his skateboard once during a particularly complex trick and needed stitches. Seb isn’t drinking the hot chocolate; he’s just staring at it. Oli hates Leigh for leaving him all the parenting. Really hates her. But he isn’t being totally fair. Then again, why should he be? What is fair about this? Truthfully, he isn’t doing all the parenting stuff. Fiona is washing their clothes and making meals.
His scalp seems to shrink as he thinks two things simultaneously. One, his father should have taken over the parenting. Two, Fiona should not have.
Oli looks about aimlessly. There is a young family sitting on the bench next to theirs. A mother with a baby in her arms and a dad with a sleeping toddler on his lap. The toddler is sprawled, exhausted no doubt after a brilliant day making sandcastles and getting high on seaside sugar treats. The dad is managing to drink from a can of beer above the kid’s head. There is a carton of chips wedged between the parents; now and again the dad feeds one of the steaming, greasy chips into his wife’s mouth, or his own. He does so silently. The wife never requests or refuses a chip, just chews them down happily. Her hands are full holding the baby, which is feeding from a bottle. The mother is playing with its toes and keeps murmuring, ‘There, there.’ Just a moment ago, the baby was screaming its head off, hungry or hot or a combination. There are still tears on its cheeks, but now it seems really content, stretched out in the mother’s arms; trusting that she can and will fix everything. Always.
Oli aches.
He wishes someone would just walk up to him and take over, fix everything. Obviously he is too old to sit on a parent’s knee, to have his feet stroked, but he longs for someone to pat him on the back and say whatever the equivalent of ‘there, there’ might be when speaking to a teenager. ‘I got this’ or ‘over to me’. The weight of it is extraordinary. He feels his life bearing down on his back like a physical load. Exhausting.
Oli starts to wonder about Fiona. Could she be responsible for Leigh’s abduction and murder? It is unimaginable. Auntie Fi a killer? He’s known her practically his whole life. She was Leigh’s best friend even before that. Would she, could she have hurt her? It is a thousand times harder to believe than blaming a stranger. Harder, but not impossible. If Fiona did have anything to do with it, how can they prove it? He doesn’t know exactly, but he supposes starting at her house is as good a place as any. The police have searched it, yes, but they don’t know the place like he and Seb do. The two of them might see something the police have missed. Like what, though? He doesn’t know. It is all mad. He doesn’t believe it. Daan Janssen is fucking with him.
His dad will go mental.
The sun is totally over itself now, drooping behind the clouds, just a sliver on the horizon in the way that a day-old party balloon drops behind a sofa. Day-trippers are slowly packing up, reluctant to leave the good times behind them. Oli watches as they file off the beach and head to their cars or the bus. He envies them their sense of purpose. Somewhere to go. The air is beginning to cool. The night feels unsettled, unsure. The plan to get a room somewhere seems unrealistic as the time to do so grows closer. Oli starts to wonder whether he actually dares to walk into a guest house and try. Won’t he draw attention to himself and to Seb if he does that? Two kids booking a room without parents is weird, right? He’s never had to do anything like it. Besides, since he’s said that’s what they’ll do, all he’s seen are signs in the window saying No Vacancies.
The streets are still full of people eating and drinking. There are more drunks now; loud and leery. He isn’t scared or anything. He lives in London and knows when trouble is likely to land. These coastal drunks aren’t looking for fights, they’re looking for hook-ups. It is just a different vibe from earlier and he doesn’t want Seb to get scared. He glances at his brother, who is still crying. Silently now, but with a sort of irritating determination to be sad. He isn’t the only one who feels like crying, but he is the only one who ever gets to do it.
This stupid obsession with thinking Leigh could still be alive is boring, and now Seb has completely lost it, imagining he’s seen her. Although, if Oli is being totally honest with himself, he might admit that he went through a stage a bit like that. The first month after she disappeared, he’d think he’d seen her at the end of the street, or jogging, or walking a dog, but the woman he thought was her never was. Obviously Leigh didn’t jog, and they didn’t have a dog. It was just a case of mistaken identity. Loads of women had long brown hair like hers. Close up, the other not-Leigh-after-all women always had funny teeth, or eyes that were too close together, or something else not quite right.
The thing is, he doesn’t think Leigh is alive. But he does think the right person should go down for killing her. He lied to Daan Janssen about that when he said he didn’t care. The eternal default setting for teens. In fact he does believe in justice and people paying for what they’ve done. Loads of his mates jump the barriers on the Tube all the time, but he always pays his way. He is the sort of kid who owns up if he’s done something wrong at school, and he thinks others should do the same. There’s this one kid in his year, a total shit, Thomas Dobbs, who’s always doing sneaky-as-fuck stuff and letting other kids take the blame for it. Sports equipment stolen and sold, the smell of weed in the classroom at lunchtime, homework he’s copied, ideas he’s plagiarised – that sort of stuff. He’s a straight A-grade student, though, so teachers never think he does any of this crap. He never owns up to anything, even if it means an entire class is put on detention. It doesn’t sit right with Oli. Do crap, yeah, but own it.
‘We should go to Fiona’s after all,’ Oli says to Seb. He has to have a plan of some sort; sleeping on the street isn’t an option. He points to Seb’s mask, a dingy blue disposable one, lying forlornly on the bench.
‘You should keep it on.’
‘No way. Why would I?’
‘People will be looking for us. Dad will have called the police.’
‘Really? You think so?’ Seb checks the time. It’s 9 p.m. ‘I feel bad.’ Oli is unsure whether Seb feels bad because their dad will be worried or because the layers of treats feel heavy and sickly in his belly. The matter is cleared up when he adds, ‘Maybe we should ring him and say we’re fine. Tell him where we are.’
‘No.’
‘Then send a text message, at least.’
‘No.’
Oli has brought the key with him. When the police returned it, Fiona hung it up in the under-stairs cupboard, where there is a wooden wall-mounted key holder with the words So Good to be Home painted across it. Leigh must have bought that. Fucking hilarious if you think about it. As Oli took Fiona’s house key (easily identifiable because it was attached to a fossil key ring), he noted that Fiona had three pairs of trainers and a pair of heels, some sliders and two pairs of sandals in the cupboard too. That’s like loads of shoes. The recent days have smudged into weeks and months. Many of them hot and heavy, all of them empty and endless. He can’t remember, did Fiona move in when they were still looking for Leigh? Wasn’t the deal that she was coming just to keep them company while they waited for news? When did she bring her enormous suitcase? Her Kardashian-worthy selection of shoes? He isn’t sure. The shoes suggest she knew she was staying a while. For ever? Does she know they’re never going to find Leigh?
The thought makes his blood slow, leaves him clammy. But his next thought is worse. The next thought makes him want to find a toilet. What has his dad got involved with this time?
24
DC Clements
Mark Fletcher is frantic. His boys are missing too now. Clements’ gut response is ‘this bloody idiot man’, but she works swiftly, automatically, ever the professional; it takes just moments to conquer her gut response and bring her reason to the forefront. She has to establish whether she should pity him or distrust him. A missing wife, now two missing sons. Other people limit their carelessness to car keys or their reading glasses. Has someone taken the boys, or have they run away? No matter which, the two minors are in danger. That is Clements’ priority.
‘They’ve run away,’ Mark asserts; he must know this looks bad.
‘Is there a note?’ asks Clements.
‘No.’
‘When did you last see them?’
‘Last night when they went to bed, or at least when they went up to their rooms. They were playing video games.’
‘What time?’
‘About nine thirty.’
Twenty-three hours ago. It’s 8.30 p.m. now. Clements waits a beat. ‘You haven’t seen them or heard from them all day?’ She is aware that she sounds exasperated. She is. Many, many parents will have lost track of their teens today. Thousands, probably. Kids are desperate to flex, to hunt out some fun, some contemporary companionship, some rebellion. A lot of beat bobbies have spent the day breaking up drunken spats, encouraging worse-for-wear revellers to go home, sleep it off. When Mark says, slightly apologetically, slightly defensively, ‘It’s Super Saturday. When we got up this morning, we just assumed they’d gone out early to make the most of it,’ Clements has some sympathy, but FFS, his kids are not like everyone else’s naturally curious and buoyant teens. His kids are in the eye of a media frenzy, they are grieving, they are mixed up. He should have taken more care. She tries not to be judgy, but truthfully, it’s her default setting. Her job would be much easier if people weren’t so damned irresponsible. She possibly ought to feel sorrier for Mark – he too is in the centre of a media frenzy, he’s grieving, mixed up – but she finds she’s just a bit irritated with him. Stupid, careless man, never quite noticing what is under his nose. What isn’t.
