After You (24 page)

‘Lily?’ I said. Her dark, shadowed eyes met mine. ‘What – what happened?’

She looked at me, and then at Sam, her eyes huge and a little fearful.

‘We’ve been looking everywhere. We were … My God, Lily. Where were you?’

‘Sorry,’ she whispered.

I shook my head, trying to tell her that it didn’t matter. That nothing could possibly matter, that the only important thing was that she was safe and she was here.

I held out my arms. She looked into my eyes, took a step forward, and gently came to rest against me. And I closed my arms tight around her, feeling her silent, shaking sobs become my own. All I could do was thank some unknown God and offer up these silent words:
Will. Will – we found her.

That first night home I put Lily in my bed and she slept for eighteen hours, waking in the evening for some soup and a bath, then crashing out for a further eight. I slept on the sofa, the front door locked, afraid to go out or even to move in case she vanished again. Sam dropped in twice, before and after his shift, to bring milk and to check on how she’d been, and we talked in whispers in the hall, as if we were discussing an invalid.

I rang Tanya Houghton-Miller to tell her that her daughter had turned up safely. ‘I told you. You wouldn’t listen to me,’ she crowed triumphantly, and I put the phone down before she could say anything else. Or I did.

I called Mrs Traynor, who let out a long, shaking sigh of relief and didn’t speak for some time. ‘Thank you,’ she said, finally, and it sounded like it came from somewhere deep in her gut. ‘When can I come and see her?’

I finally opened the email from Richard Percival, which informed me that
As you have been given the requisite three warnings, it is considered that, given your poor attendance record and failure to carry out your contractual requirements, your employment at the Shamrock and Clover (Airport) is terminated with immediate effect.
He asked that I return the uniform (‘including wig’) at my earliest convenience
or you will be charged its full retail value
.

I opened an email from Nathan asking,
Where the hell are you? Have you seen my last email?

I thought about Mr Gopnik’s offer and, with a sigh, closed my computer.

On the third day I woke on the sofa to find Lily missing. My heart lurched reflexively until I saw the open hallway window. I climbed up the fire escape and found her seated on the roof, looking out across the city. She was wearing her pyjama bottoms, which I’d washed, and Will’s oversized sweater.

‘Hey,’ I said, walking across the roof towards her.

‘You have food in your fridge,’ she observed.

‘Ambulance Sam.’

‘And you watered everything.’

‘That was mostly him too.’

She nodded, as if that were probably to be expected. I took my place on the bench and we sat in companionable silence for a while, breathing in the scent of the lavender, whose purple heads had burst out of their tight green buds. Everything in the little roof garden had now exploded into gaudy life; the petals and whispering leaves bringing colour and movement and fragrance to the grey expanse of asphalt.

‘Sorry for hogging your bed.’

‘Your need was greater.’

‘You hung up all your clothes.’ She curled her legs neatly under her, tucking her hair behind an ear. She was still pale. ‘The nice ones.’

‘Well, I guess you made me think I shouldn’t hide them in boxes any more.’

She shot me a sideways look and a small, sad smile that somehow made me feel sadder than if she hadn’t smiled at all. The air held the promise of a scorching day, the street sounds muffled as if by the warmth of the sun. You could feel it already seeping through the windows, bleaching the air. Below us a bin lorry clattered and roared its way slowly along the kerbside to a timpanic accompaniment of beeps and men’s voices.

‘Lily,’ I said, quietly, when it had finally receded into the distance, ‘what’s going on?’ I tried not to sound too interrogative.
‘I know I’m not meant to ask you questions and I’m not your actual family or anything, but all I can see is that something’s gone wrong here and I feel … I feel like I … well, I feel we’re sort of related and I just want you to trust me. I want you to feel you can talk to me.’

She kept her gaze fixed on her hands.

‘I’m not going to judge you. I’m not going to report anything you say to anyone. I just … Well, you have to know that if you tell someone the truth, it will help. I promise. It will make things better.’

‘Says who?’

‘Me. There’s nothing you can’t tell me, Lily. Really.’

She glanced at me, then looked away. ‘You won’t understand,’ she said softly.

And then I knew. I knew.

Below us it had become oddly quiet, or perhaps I could no longer hear anything beyond the few inches that separated us. ‘I’m going to tell you a story,’ I said. ‘Only one person in the whole world knows this story because it was something I didn’t feel I could share for years and years. And telling him changed the whole way I felt about it, and how I felt about myself. So here’s the thing – you don’t have to tell me anything at all, but I’m going to trust you enough to tell you my story anyway, just in case it will help.’

I waited a moment but Lily didn’t protest, or roll her eyes, or say it was going to be
boring.
She wrapped her arms around her knees, and she listened. She listened as I told her about the teenage girl who, on a glorious summer evening, had celebrated a little too hard in a place she considered safe, how she had been surrounded by her girlfriends and some nice boys who seemed as if they came from good families and knew the rules, and how much fun it had been, how funny and crazy and wild, until some drinks later she realized nearly
all the other girls had drifted away and the laughter had grown hard and the joke, it turned out, had been on her. And I told her, without going into too much detail, how that evening had ended: with a sister silently helping her home, her shoes lost, bruising in secret places and a big black hole where her recall of those hours should have been, and the memories, fleeting and dark, now hanging over her head to remind her every day that she had been stupid, irresponsible and had brought it all on herself. And how, for years, she had let that thought colour what she did, where she went and what she thought she was capable of. And how sometimes it just needed someone to say something as simple as
No. It wasn’t your fault
.
It really wasn’t your fault.

I finished and Lily was still watching me. Her expression gave no clue to her reaction.

‘I don’t know what was – or is – going on with you, Lily,’ I said carefully. ‘It might be totally unrelated to what I’ve just told you. I just want you to know there is nothing so bad that you can’t tell me. And there is nothing you could do that would make me close a door on you again.’

Still she didn’t speak. I gazed out over the roof terrace, deliberately not looking at her.

‘You know, your dad said something to me that I’ve never forgotten: “You don’t have to let that one thing be the thing that defines you.” ’

‘My dad.’ She lifted her chin.

I nodded. ‘Whatever it is that’s happened, even if you don’t want to tell me, you need to understand that he was right. These last weeks, months, don’t have to be the thing that defines you. Even from the little I know of you, I recognise that you are bright and funny and kind and smart, and that if you can get yourself past whatever this is, you have an amazing future ahead.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’

‘Because you’re like him. You’re even wearing his jumper,’ I added softly.

She brought her arm slowly to her face, placing the soft wool against her cheek, thinking.

I sat back on the bench. I wondered if I had pushed it too far, talking about Will.

But then Lily took a breath and, in a quiet, uncharacteristically flat voice, she told me the truth about where she’d been. She told me about the boy, and about the man, and an image on a mobile phone that haunted her, and the days she had spent as a shadow on the city’s neon-lit streets. As she spoke she started to cry, shrinking into herself, her face crumpling like that of a five-year-old, so I moved across the seat and brought her in close to me, stroking her hair while she kept talking, her words now jumbled, too fast, too full, broken with sobs and hiccups. By the time she got to the last day, she was huddled into me, swallowed by the jumper, swallowed by her own fear and guilt and sadness.

‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘You have nothing,’ I said fiercely, as I held her, ‘
nothing
to be sorry for.’

That evening Sam came. He was cheerful, sweet and casual in his dealings with Lily, cooked us pasta with cream, bacon and mushrooms, when she said she didn’t want to go out, and we watched a comedy film about a family who got lost in a jungle, a strange facsimile of a family ourselves. I smiled and laughed and made tea, but inside I simmered with anger I didn’t dare show.

As soon as Lily went to bed I beckoned Sam onto the fire escape. We climbed up to the roof where I could be sure I wouldn’t be heard, and as he sat down on the little wrought-iron bench I told him what she had told me in that spot, just
a few hours earlier. ‘She thinks it’s going to hang over her for ever. He still has the phone, Sam.’

I wasn’t sure I had ever been so furious. All evening, as the television burbled in front of me, I had recast the last weeks in a new light: I thought about the times the boy had hung around downstairs, the way Lily had hidden her phone under the sofa cushions when she thought I might see it, the way she had sometimes flinched when a new message came through. I thought of her stuttering words – of the way she described her relief when she thought she had been rescued – and then the horror of what was to come next. I thought about the arrogance of a man who had seen a young girl in distress and viewed it as an opportunity.

Sam motioned to me to sit down, but I couldn’t keep still. I paced backwards and forwards across the roof terrace, my fists tight, my neck rigid. I wanted to throw things over the edge. I wanted to find Mr Garside. He came and stood behind me and rubbed at the knots in my shoulders. I suspected it was his way of making me stand still.

‘I actually want to kill him.’

‘It can be arranged.’

I looked round at Sam to see if he was joking, and was the tiniest bit disappointed when I saw he was.

It had grown chilly up there in the stiff night breeze and I wished I had brought up a jacket. ‘Maybe we should just go to the police. It’s blackmail, isn’t it?’

‘He’ll deny it. There are a million places he could hide a phone. And if her mother was telling the truth nobody is going to believe Lily over a so-called pillar of the community. That’s how these people get away with it.’

‘But how do we get that phone off him? She won’t be able to move forward while she knows he’s out there, while that image is still out there.’ I was shivering. Sam took his jacket
off and hung it around my shoulders. It carried the residual warmth of him and I tried not to look as grateful as I felt.

‘We can’t turn up at his office or her parents will find out. We could email him? Tell him he has to send it back, or else?’

‘He’s hardly just going to cough it up. He might not even answer an email – that could be used as evidence.’

‘Oh, it’s hopeless.’ I let out a long moan. ‘Maybe she’s just going to have to learn to live with it. Maybe we can convince her that it’s as much in his interests to forget what happened as it is hers. Because it is, right? Maybe he’ll just get rid of the phone himself.’

‘You think she’ll go with that?’

‘No.’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘I can’t bear it. I can’t bear that he’ll get away with it. That creepy, nasty, manipulative, limo-driving scumbag …’ I stood up and gazed out at the city below me, feeling briefly despairing. I could see the future: Lily, defensive and wild, as she tried to escape the shadow of her past. That phone was the key to her behaviour, to her future.

Think
, I told myself.
Think what Will would do
. He would not have let this man win. I had to strategize like he would. I watched the traffic creeping slowly past the front door of my block. I thought of Mr Garside’s big black car, cruising the streets of Soho. I thought about a man who moved silently and easily through life, confident that it would always work his way.

‘Sam?’ I said. ‘Is there a drug you could give that could stop someone’s heart?’

He let that hang in the air for a moment. ‘Please tell me you’re kidding.’

‘No. Listen. I’ve got an idea.’

She said nothing at first. ‘You’ll be safe,’ I said. ‘And this way nobody has to know a thing.’ What moved me most was that
she didn’t ask me the question I had been asking myself ever since I outlined my plan to Sam.
How do you know this will actually work?

‘I’ve got it all lined up, sweetheart,’ Sam said.

‘But nobody else knows –’

‘Anything. Just that he’s hassling you.’

‘Won’t you get in trouble?’

‘Don’t worry about me.’

She pulled at her sleeve, then murmured, ‘And you won’t leave me with him. At all.’

‘Not for one minute.’

She chewed her lip. Then she looked at Sam, and over at me. And something seemed to settle inside her. ‘Okay. Let’s do it.’

I bought a cheap, pay-as-you-go handset, called Lily’s stepfather’s workplace and got Mr Garside’s mobile number from his secretary by pretending we had arranged to meet for a drink. That evening as I waited for Sam to arrive, I sent a text to Garside’s number.

Mr Garside. I’m sorry about hitting you. I just freaked. I want to sort it out. L

He left it half an hour before responding, probably to make her sweat.

Why should I talk to you, Lily? You were very rude after all the help I gave you.

‘Prick,’ muttered Sam.

I know. I’m sorry. But I do need your help.

This is not a one-way street, Lily.

I know. You just gave me a shock. I needed time to think. Let’s meet up. I’ll give you what you want, but you have to give me the phone first.

I don’t think you get to dictate terms, Lily.

Sam looked at me. I looked back at him, then began to type.

Not even … if I’m a really bad girl?

A pause.

Now you’ve got my interest.

Sam and I exchanged a look. ‘I just did a little sick in my mouth,’ I said.

Tomorrow night then
, I typed.
I’ll send you the address when I’ve checked my friend will be out.

When we were sure he wouldn’t respond, Sam put the phone into his pocket, where Lily couldn’t see it, and held me for a long time.

I was almost ill with nerves the next day, and Lily was worse. We picked at our breakfast, and I let Lily smoke in the flat, and was almost tempted to ask for a cigarette myself. We watched a film and did some chores badly, and by seven thirty that evening, when Sam arrived, my head was buzzing so much I could barely speak.