Nowhere Girl (2 page)

Fifty-two seconds and the boy drops, landing neatly in a crouch, then stretches up. He re-adjusts his loose jeans back to their position on his hips and pulls his t-shirt on when it is thrown back to him by the man running the attraction. His beautiful friend smiles but he doesn’t return to her, he walks towards Ellie. She looks around, flustered. Where are her mum and Gaynor? She can’t see them in the crowd.

There is no avoiding the boy now, he is almost in front of her, and his gaze stops her from turning away.

“
Salut
, Uncle,” he says, and then she realises that he is not greeting her after all, but someone else, someone close by. She turns and sees the bulldog man, whose scraggly eyebrows are furrowed as he looks down at her. She hadn’t realised he had moved, that he is once again right behind her.

“
Salut
, Malik. You did well.”

As she shifts out of his way the boy does notice her, and looks her yellow t-shirt over. Ellie curses Gaynor for suggesting she wear it. It’s damp from the spitting rain, and her bra is visible, she should have brought a coat like her mum said.

“
Bonjour
,” he says, and she gives the same greeting back though her accent betrays her.

“English?” he asks, baffling her that he has established so much from just one word.

“
Oui
,” she confesses. Though she doesn’t know much about the country, she has never actually lived there and they only return at Christmas, a duty trip to her mother’s relatives. She’d like to finish her A-levels in Durham, live with her grandparents, but her mother won’t agree. It’s been the source of arguments.

She’s actually half German, after her father, and has lived most of her life in Heidelberg. But now she lives in a country where she can’t speak more than twenty words of the dialect, the locals treat her like a tourist and she has never studied the history. A wanderer, a mongrel, she feels she belongs nowhere in particular. Home is somewhere else, but she hasn’t found it yet.

“
Vous êtes français
?” she asks.

Malik shakes his head, though his face seems to say he’s pleased by her mistake. “Algerian.” His eyes flick her up and down, taking in the rain-damp clothes sticking to her body. She can’t begrudge him this, she has spent fifty seconds scrutinising his torso.

Just then she hears her name being screamed, loud and shrill. “Ellie! El-lie!” Her mother has found her.

Ellie sees Gaynor’s red jacket, then her mother’s equally red face, beyond the crowd. They still haven’t seen her, she’s hidden by the bulldog man’s bulk.

“You come with me,” Malik asks, or commands, she’s not sure. Then he moves closer so his breath is warming her lips. “We can have some fun.”

Ellie’s mother sounds hysterical, calling her name again and again, but moving away in her desperate search. Ellie knows she should go to her, put her out of her misery, but she’s punishing her too. Ellie wanted to come with her friends from school, with Joe, not her kid sister. Her mother was so mad that Ellie was planning to see him again, after all the recent trouble, that she confiscated her phone. She’s seventeen, sick of being treated like a child; it’s another reason she wants to live with her grandparents in England. And this boy, he’s lovely, his smile makes her smile back and she recalls how flat his stomach was, the colour of his skin.

Suddenly, she feels a small tug on the bottom of her t-shirt, she turns around and her sister’s face is looking anxiously up at her. “Ellie! We’ve been looking everywhere, Mum is going to kill you.”

Ellie bites her lip, fearful for a second but then defiant. “I’m seventeen, Gaynor. Mum should chill out.”

But when she looks back the crowd has once again closed in on itself and she can no longer see the cute boy, or his beautiful friend, or even the bulldog man. Her chance for some fun is gone.

Gaynor tugs hard at Ellie’s t-shirt, her face scrunched. “We’ve got to find Mum, Ellie! She’s going nuts.”

Gaynor’s red mac flaps in a gust of air like a flag.

“Okay, Gaynor. Calm down. I wasn’t lost, I was just here.”

“I wanted to go on the ferris wheel,” Gaynor says petulantly, her eyes narrowing now she realises her sister wasn’t even lost, that all of the worry and shouting was for nothing. “But we were too busy looking for you. Mum’s dragged me everywhere, screaming your name. I’ve had a rubbish night and it’s all your fault.”

Gaynor’s lower lip wobbles and Ellie sees that she might cry. This trip was a treat Gaynor had been looking forward to, she’d spoken of nothing else the whole three weeks they’d watched Schueberfouer being constructed.

Ellie looks up at the wheel, huge and majestic, glass boxes taken around at a slow pace that even she might be able to cope with. Gaynor especially wanted to ride it but Ellie has no head for heights, like her mother.

“I never got to go on,” Gaynor pouts. “I wanted to, but Mum said we had to find you and I shouldn’t be so selfish. But it wasn’t me who was selfish, it was you.” Gaynor is teetering on a tantrum now, the panic and then relief at finding her sister has turned to anger. “It was all a lie. You weren’t even lost!”

Ellie juts out her chin, but her defiance is now only for show. Gaynor has made her feel guilty.

“I’m sorry, okay. Look, why don’t I take you on the wheel now, to make up for it? But first we’d better find Mum.”

When they find her, their mother’s face is strained, her eyes almost popping with tension and her voice is hoarse from screaming. She tried grabbing a bored-looking fair official, begged for help, but he wasn’t interested in a seventeen-year-old who’s wandered off for a few minutes. She’s rung Achim, but he took that calm, measured tone that made her want to scream and told her she was overreacting as always. Bridget feels that she is the only one who cares that Ellie is lost, and her relief at seeing her daughter is both powerful and explosive, a force she cannot contain.

She hugs Ellie to her chest, once and hard, then pulls away and nips her chin in her fingers, shouting at her daughter with the last of her breath.

“Don’t walk away like that! What are you playing at?”

She braces Ellie by the shoulders, shakes her with pent-up anger, then hugs her with immense relief again, longer this time, kissing her cheek with lips as strong as a punch so Ellie jerks away.

“Mum! Stop fussing.”

“You scared me! Why do you do that to me? Don’t you know how it hurts, how it terrifies me?”

“Lighten up, Mum. This is Luxembourg, not some war zone. Remember?” Ellie is turning away when her mother grabs her, harder than before. Pulls her so mother and daughter are face-to-face, eye-to-eye.

“Don’t speak to me like that!”

Ellie’s response is as loud and angry. “Then don’t overreact. I don’t need your help! I’m fine!”

Her mother slaps her across her face. “Stop being such a little bitch or I’ll teach you a lesson you won’t forget!”

Ellie flinches, reels back. She senses that other people close by have heard the exchange and are watching too, and thinks she sees a mother from the school. She is used to shouting, even slaps are not rare, but her mother only swears when she’s drunk. Looking at her mother’s dilated pupils it occurs to Ellie that this might be the case.

“There are things you don’t know about the world. And I am trying to protect you.”

Ellie pulls away, she wants to free herself, shaken as she is by her mother’s intensity.

Gaynor is unruffled by the angry display, she’s used to seeing her mum worked up with Ellie, and the swearing hasn’t registered. She cares only about the promised ride.

“Can we go on the wheel now?” she natters her sister, demanding and feeling justified. “To make up for your selfishness?”

She sounds just like their mother, Ellie thinks.

Bridget tries to get a grip on herself, shakily opens her purse in a valiant show of normality, sighs at how little remains and pulls out her last two twenty euro notes, thrusting one at Ellie with a shaking hand.

“Go then,” she tries to smile at her daughter, but Ellie is refusing to look at her. She is ashamed now, of calling her daughter a bitch, of the slap. But still she feels aggrieved. “I’ll wait for you over there.”

She points to the wine stand, set on a rotating platform, some hundred yards away. After the search for Ellie and fighting through crowds like a crazy woman, she could do with a drink. She had a small beer twenty minutes ago, when Gaynor said she was desperate for a juice, and drank it quickly. It’s gone to her head.

“Have fun,” she calls to both her daughters. It sounds forced, a limp afterthought, even to herself.

Bridget carefully watches Ellie and Gaynor make their way to the queue and turns towards the wine bar, deciding she deserves to sit down. For the past hour she’s dragged Gaynor around the whole of the Glacis, and now she feels guilty. Ellie was fine all along, Bridget had overreacted. “Like usual” Achim had said on phone, when she’d called in the midst of her panic. This has proved him right, and he will gloat when she tells him.

But Ellie’s disappearance has wrecked Bridget, ruined the night for Gaynor too, who had wanted to go on everything, to taste all, and knew nothing of the money it cost or the fact that no amount of ping-pong balls in jars or arrows in boards were ever going to win that jelly board or huge teddy or quad bike. It was all a con, all part of the fun of the fair.

Bridget orders a glass of Crémant, pays with her final twenty euro note, and takes a seat on the wooden turntable, half under the plastic roof so random spots of summer rain prick her face but her body remains dry. The wine, disappointingly, is over-sweet for her palate and the fix makes her feel slightly sick, especially as she hasn’t eaten yet and it’s almost ten o’clock. Still, the hit of the alcohol is welcome, it numbs the edge of the tension. She should relax, she hasn’t seen anyone else screaming at their kids. She feels the threatening pulse of a migraine around her eyes, maybe because of the wet weather, maybe the flashing lights and smells of hot machines. She shouldn’t finish the drink, but she does and buys a second even though she knows she is skirting the drink-drive limit.

She sips the dregs, wincing but swallowing just the same, watching the wheel turn slowly. Bridget is unsure which gondola her daughters are in, thinks the wheel is the only thing in the whole damned fair with proper beauty. On a stall nearest the wine bar plastic flowers are for sale, and wooden ones tinted purple and pink, but she finds them tasteless and hates the way the sellers push them under her nose so she is forced to swallow the stench of pot pourri. At least the Crémant drowns out the flower smell with citrus and grape. Bridget checks her purse, though she knows just coins remain now.

When they are off the wheel she will take the girls home and get Gaynor straight to bed, so that everything is quiet and peaceful when she tries again to talk to Ellie. That girl needs to learn about the dangers she refuses to see, about how vulnerable a teenage girl is in this world. Ellie used to listen, there was a time she respected what Bridget said, but recently she has been so difficult. Sleeping with boys, experimenting with drugs, acting like life is one big joke. Bridget has felt keenly what it means to have a husband who always works late, who comes home only to disappear into his study where he reopens his beloved laptop. It would be wonderful to share the parenting burden, just once, but this was the life she chose when she agreed to give up her nursing career and move to Luxembourg. She has to be resourceful, as she learned to be out in the field, nursing in a war zone. Ironic, she thinks, that it was easier than being a mother.

Bridget suddenly feels as though she’s being watched, her neck muscles tense and there are goose bumps down her arms. Then she turns and knows for sure, a man is staring at her. His dark face, his thick body, is familiar to her. She feels she has seen him before, and he is looking at her with such familiarity that this must be true. She plays her fingers on the stem of the empty glass, thinking she should go and fetch her girls, but before she can leave he moves towards her.

“Please forgive me for watching you,” he says, and then she sees that he has a fresh glass of wine in his hand. He removes the empty glass from between her fingers and replaces it with the full one. “I had to be sure it was really you. I was not even sure you were still alive.”

It is then that she remembers who he is. “Jak?”

He smiles, and his eyes crinkle at the edges. It is an older face, and back then she never saw him smile. He’s larger too, but he was a soldier when she knew him. The first time she met him he had a gun, and was wearing a uniform. And he was holding a baby.

The conversation ends as the third glass of wine is finished. No longer feeling so wretched, Bridget gathers herself and begins to walk slowly towards the wheel. The queue is longer now and she has to step aside, communicating with her hunched body and upturned eyes that she is not waiting for a turn, but rather for someone on the ride. There is a gated area in front of the wheel, accessed only by purchasing a ticket, and despite the fake grass and illuminated plastic benches the atmosphere is one of cattle being herded into a van. Three men, all security-bouncer beefy, are opening the door of the empty gondolas, letting new riders in. The customers who have finished their ride have already exited on the other side, which is not nearly so attractive, no grass or bench, just a muddy track leading behind a fence.

Realising her mistake, Bridget tries to backtrack, much to the annoyance of the people behind her who are impatiently brandishing their tickets. She ignores dirty looks as she moves around to the back where groups and couples and families are pouring out of the gondolas, shaky-legged, in a continuous stream.

Through the fence she watches expectantly for Ellie and Gaynor. One gondola opens and a group of teenagers run out, all wearing hats and oversized shirts, some carrying skateboards. Even the girls are dressed in the shirts workmen favour the world over, worn cotton in tartan check. One boy, handsome but angry, knocks into her. Meekly, Bridget steps aside, making herself small, and wills her daughters to be in the next box.