Someday Find Me (18 page)

Well, it took for ever to trundle my way out of London no exaggeration, with the window down to try and avoid dying of the fumes coming through the vents and slowing down instead of stopping wherever possible because it was pretty tricky moving off without stalling about five times. The radio worked which was a nice Brucie bonus, but saying that the channels danced off every once in a while and you had to twiddle the knob like a knobhead and chase them through the static. By the time I made it out onto the motorway finally it was actually still pretty hot and the sun was shining in through the passenger window, which wouldn’t open, I’d only found that out when I’d tried opening it halfway through Croydon and it had wobbled outwards and I’d had to leap across and grab it, which nearly sent me into a postbox and a little dog piddling up it. It felt pretty good being out in the air driving, even though the car whined in fifth and made a weird screeching noise when you were in between gears. Having the wind on my elbow I felt like I was finally getting somewhere after so many stale days. I stopped at a service station and bought a bottle of Coke and some cigs and then I got back out there and felt pleased with myself, driving along smoking and swigging sweet Coke and listening to the fuzzy music.

I got to Saffy’s parents’ house around eightish after getting lost a couple of times. I’d only been there twice, most notably for
a birthday party her parents threw her where she got drunk, did poppers in the loo and chucked up in the bushes in the garden, so I thought it was pretty impressive I got there at all. I parked the car carefully, not too close to her mum’s little red number. You had to yank the handbrake up with both hands and even when you shut the door really gently the car wobbled so much it was touch and go if it was all going to collapse and just leave four wheels standing there. I straightened my T-shirt and combed my hair down with my fingers in the wing mirror and walked up to the front door, which had one of those big poncy knockers on it and no bell so I rapped on it a couple of times wondering how loud was too loud and waited, but nobody came and I felt a bit weird shuffling from one foot to the other and wondering if I smelt of cigarettes. I waited a bit longer and then I knocked again harder and more times cos I was beginning to think nobody was in, and then I heard quick footsteps and the door opened and Saf’s mum was stood there with a wine glass in hand and very pink cheeks.

‘Oh!’ she goes. ‘William.’

‘Pippa,’ I said back. She looked about her trying to decide what to do because she wanted to shoo me away but her manners were getting in the way. Her mouth was twitching a bit.

‘Sorry,’ she said in the end. ‘We were in the garden. Have you, er, been here long?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not too long. I’ve come to see Saf. She about?’

Her eyes went all narrow and she said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea now, do you?’ and I felt like saying, Well, yes I do actually, PIPPA, otherwise I wouldn’t have driven all the way here in the death trap now WOULD I? but I didn’t, I just said, ‘Is she okay?’ in a weird small voice.

‘She’s fine, William,’ she said, shaping each word out with her brick-coloured lips, ‘But I have to say I’m surprised you care. Now,’ she said, closing the door just ever so slightly, ‘I know you’ve had a trip out here but I’m afraid you’re going to have to
go right on back there. Saffy’s getting the help she needs from the people who love her.’ And she shut the door but not before her English middle-classness had got the better of her and she said, ‘Drive safely,’ into the tiny crack before the door closed.

I stood there a bit longer like a lemon and tried to unglue my tongue off the top of my mouth. Well, what was I meant to do? This wasn’t part of the plan, was it? I wasn’t ever really one for fairytales but I never heard of a knight in shining armour who gets stopped at the door by the princess’s mum. Then again I s’pose Pippa was a bit of a dragon. I looked in the window after a bit but it was dark in there so they were all still in the garden. I got a couple of pebbles out one of the barrels of flowers Pippa had sitting next to the door and chucked ’em up at the window I thought was Saffy’s. But nothing. I thought I saw someone moving up there but then there was nothing again and so I kicked at the path and then I walked away. I got halfway up the road to the car, and I could hear them behind the fence in their massive garden barbecuing unicorn and sipping champagne and diamonds or whatever rich people do.

Pssst
.

I looked about but there was nobody around.

Pssst
, it goes again and then, ‘PSSSST, Willybum!’

And I look about again and then up at the tree that’s hanging over the fence and there’s Lulu sat there merry as you like, with her head poking out the little window at the back of her famous tree house.

‘All right, Lu,’ I said, a bit taken aback.

She nodded. ‘Saffy’s not here.’

‘Eh?’ I go. ‘What d’ya mean she’s not here, Luie, she gone out?’

‘No,’ she goes, shaking her head so the whole tree house shook and all the leaves around it. She really was too big for it, I reckoned her arms must have been stuck out the windows at the side and her legs hanging out the door and standing on one of the branches. ‘No,’ she goes. ‘She left.’

My head started to feel a bit fuzzy confused again. ‘Left?’ I said in a whisper so as not to be heard by the Lord and Lady of the Manor. ‘Where’s she gone?’

‘She ran away,’ she said, and just those three little words were enough to make me feel like someone had dropped an ice cube down my pants.

‘What?’ I hissed. ‘What’d do you mean, Lu?’ but before she could answer, Pippa’s voice was right next to me.

‘Bluebell! Dinner. Down you come, darling.’

And by the time I’d realised she was on the other side of the fence and not right behind me like in a horror film, Lulu was waving ’bye and shrugging her way out of the tree house.

I sat in my car and stared at the empty tree house and listened to Saffy’s number ring and ring, and when it cut out I just pressed the green phone again and then on the twenty-fourth or maybe forty-third time of ringing it just cut out and after that it went straight to her answerphone and it wasn’t even her little voice recorded at the other end but some horrible woman telling me the person I was calling was not available. I felt like there were millions of mental ants running through my head and carrying all my thoughts out my ears with them before I had time to put them together and think them through. Where had she gone? Why weren’t they looking for her? Why were they having a flipping tosspot barbecue instead of getting the police and the army and MI5 to look for her? I banged my hands on the steering wheel and tried to get myself together and stop my legs shaking and my ears sweating so that I could go back up there and bang the door down and get some answers.

And then all of a sudden the front door opened, and like a dream a figure with blonde hair and a baggy jumper on came struggling out with two big suitcases, and my heart stood still and all the air started singing and I couldn’t even move for a second and then I was opening the door and running out and running across the road to her, just as she got to the end of the path dragging the giant bags with her. ‘Babe,’ I said, and all my body was wobbling like mad. And then she looked up, and her
hair was falling in her face but she didn’t blow it up like she usually did, she pushed it off her face with her hand, and the face she pushed it off wasn’t hers.

‘Oh.’ All the air sank out of me. ‘All right, Anjelica.’

Jelli looked up in surprise, and one of her suitcases tipped over. ‘Fucking hell, Fitz, what are you doing here?’ she said, bending down to pick it up.

‘I came for Saf,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

She looked back at the house. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Right, come on. Give me a hand with these.’ And she shoved both the suitcases at me and skipped over to a little silver car parked opposite the house. She clicked her keys at the boot and the door jumped up like it was well trained. ‘Stick ’em in there,’ she said. ‘That your car?’ She was pointing down the road at it.

‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Don’t mess about, Jel. I’m fucking shitting myself here.’

She waved me away. ‘Follow me. If my mother sees you out here she’ll probably call the police.’ And she shut the boot with a sharp slam and tottered off to the driver’s door. And maybe it was because there was nothing else to do or because Jelli was hard to say no to or because I was afraid to go and shout at Pippa, which was the only other option, but I did what she said and I jogged back to my car and started the engine, and I tried to make the fear nibbling at my stomach go away.

As I followed Jelli’s zippy little car, I watched all the roads Saffy had grown up on flash past, all pretty houses and big houses and neat gardens and sprinklers raining down on silent grass and nobody around apart from mums with buggies and dads getting out of their flash motors in their suits and walking through their white front doors. Jelli’s silver bonnet whipped in and out round parked cars and round bends in the perfect streets and then we were onto a main road and the neat and perfect people were fading away behind us.

The road turned dark, trees on either side and no cars coming in the other direction, just the warming-up streetlights to light the way. As we drove on with nothing in sight and all of Saffy’s stories about how mental Jelli was starting to dance about between my ears, I turned the radio on so my fingers at least had a reason to be drumdrumdrumming on the steering wheel.

I felt my belly turn over so I switched the radio off. It’s funny, isn’t it? Your mum and dad spend all those years looking after you and keeping you safe from accidents and illnesses and paedophiles and sadness and all the other scary things in the world. All the time you looked around and all the mums walking along with their buggies and babies and their stroppy teenagers and crying toddlers and naughty kids had a little shiver every time they went past Fate Jones’s face on tellies, posters, papers, billboards. Everybody was sad for her and glad for them because their kids were still safe from the bogeyman. But for some people, for Saffy, the monsters under the bed lived in a place nobody else could get to them: in her head. None of us could protect her and that made me feel like just about the shit-test person in the whole frigging world. And now, thinking about what had happened to Fate Jones, it was hard not to wonder if something the same had happened to Saffy; if she hadn’t run away after all or if someone like Kay but worse had found her, and the thought made my eyes well up and my stomach turn over, so I tried to just look straight ahead at the road and stop thinking of anything at all.

The trees along the roads were starting to disappear and then all of a sudden we were turning a corner and the sea was right there in the window, just a green slope and the beach between us. The sun was almost set behind it so it looked like the water was on fire and I had to remind myself to look at the road and not just drive
wheeeee
down the hill to stare at it. Then we came to some houses and the sea disappeared behind them, and we were back nipping in and out of parked cars until Jelli suddenly slammed on her brakes and pulled in to park next to a little bungalow. I drove on a bit and found a space and indicated and tried to parallel park, which has never been my strong point so
in the end I just left it kind of pointing towards the pavement and got out and jogged back to the car where Jelli was sitting on the edge of the open boot waiting for me.

‘Bloody hell, Jel,’ I said. ‘What was that all about? You could’ve said where we were going.’

She rolled her eyes and stood up. ‘Get the cases,’ she said. ‘This way.’ And she skipped off towards the bungalow, leaving me to swear but not so she could hear and lug the two cases after her. She unlocked the door and stepped in, waiting for me with the door open as she kicked off her shoes. ‘Hurry up!’ she goes. ‘Stick ’em there.’ And then she opened another door and stuck her head in. ‘I’m back,’ she said, and suddenly I felt my ears go hot and my heart start beating fast because I was suddenly starting to wonder what if.

‘What?’ Jel was saying. ‘Oh, no, it’s …’ She opened the door properly and looked back at me and waved me forward with her hand. ‘It’s Fitz,’ she said as I stepped towards the little square of light on the carpet. ‘You remember Fitz, Nanna?’

So I had to follow Jel in and take off my shoes and leave them at the door and all the time she was shooting these little pointy looks at me but she couldn’t say anything. It was nice and cosy in there and the chef my mum likes was swearing and chopping things on the telly. I didn’t know much about Saffy’s nan really except that Saffy liked her a whole lot better than most of the other members of her family. She looked more like Jelli and Bluebell, same fair hair and cat eyes. Ella and Saf were more like Pippa, big round eyes and darkish reddish hair ’cept Saffy made hers blonde obviously. I knew that her husband, Saffy’s grandpa, had only died a few years before which was why she’d got this little pad and it was nice actually, lots of shells and pebbles about and big comfy-looking chairs.

‘Hello,’ I said, once I got in the room.

‘Nice to see you again, dear,’ she said. ‘Is Saffia with you?’

Before I got a chance to get half a word out Jelli goes, ‘No, Nanna, he’s come to see me,’ and then she thought for a second and said, ‘We’re planning a surprise for Saffy.’

Her nan raised an eyebrow but the chef bloke was letting rip at some shaking little waiter so she just said, ‘That’s nice, dear. Do you need to chat in here?’ and Jelli said, ‘No, that’s okay, Nanna, we’ll go for a walk on the front.’

‘Come on, Fitz,’ she said in a voice like sugar on sunshine, and I followed her out and wasn’t that just the way with all Truelove
women, I never got a word in edgeways. When we got out and away from the house and were walking down the green hill that went to the beach she gave me a shove. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

‘What?’ I said, holding up my hands and standing back, cos there was no stopping Jelli if she got wind of a bit of drama she could milk.

‘Where’s Saf?’ she goes.

‘I hate to point it out to you, Jel,’ I said, ‘but if I knew that, why would I be asking you?’

She sulked on this as we hopped over the railing and onto the stone walk bit that ran along the pebbles. ‘She did a runner,’ she said, once we’d hopped down again and were walking on the pebbles.

‘I got that much,’ I said. ‘When? How?’

‘Night before last,’ she said. ‘Just walked out of the house in the night.’

‘Well, where has she gone?’ I asked, and she looked at me like I was the stupidest person in the whole world, which was probably true.

‘How am I supposed to know?’

‘Why aren’t they looking for her?’ I said, and I felt myself getting hot and shaky. ‘Why haven’t they called the police?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘No idea. They seem ridiculously calm about the whole thing. And you know my mum, Fitz, she’s never calm about anything.

‘But that’s not fucking right!’ I said, and my voice got a little bit squeaky so I coughed it manly again. ‘They should be looking for her, they should’ve called the police! What are they playing at?’

She shrugged, all cross. ‘I don’t know, Fitz! I’m not a bloody psychic! They’re probably sick of her! We’ve got problems of our own, all of us.’

I got all hot in the face then, which was a bit because I don’t like being shouted at or arguing but also a bit because I felt cross – because I was hard pushed to see what problems Jelli or Pippa had. But I supposed she had a point in her own Jelli way. Not everybody’s world revolved around Saffy, and it wasn’t their fault I’d only just realised way too late that my world really really did. I trudged over and sat next to her. There was a stone in my shoe so I took it off and shook it out while I tried to get everything straight in my head.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing much we can do. She’ll turn up.’

‘What are you on about, Jel?’ I said, because I suddenly had this horrible sinking big cold feeling that Saffy was gone for good.

‘This is what she
does
, Fitz,’ she said, leaning back against the steps, bored. ‘She runs. She hides. Sooner or later, and emphasis on the sooner, she’ll be back and sorry and maybe they’ll send her back to the cuckoo’s nest for a few weeks and she’ll eat up all her peas like a good girl and then they’ll pack her off home to you and she’ll be your problem again.’

‘But I don’t want her to hide,’ I said, feeling a bit whiny and sad. ‘I don’t want her to be scared.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘not much you can do about that. Enjoy the peace and quiet while you’ve got it I say.’

‘C’mon, Jel, you can’t mean that. We should be out looking for her. Help me out here – where would she go? We could go look together, take my car, or yours, whatever.’

She turned to look at me with one pointy eyebrow raised. ‘Do you actually not know my sister at all?’ Which was starting to seem like a good question but I didn’t need to answer because she just carried right on. ‘Saffy does things her way or no way. If you go after her, she’ll just keep on running. She’s not coming back until
she
’s decided that coming back is a good idea.’

We both sat and chewed on that for a while and watched the sea licking at the stones. I wanted to tell her that she was wrong, but I wasn’t sure I could. Jelli had known Saffy ever since she’d been alive; I’d only known her for a tiny time compared to that. Maybe waiting for her to come back was the best thing. Maybe she was already on her way home and when I got back she’d be waiting for me. I looked at my phone but there was nothing, just a plain black screen next to the plain black sea. I still felt all nervous and confused in my stomach so I tried to make conversation to see if it would go away.

‘So what’re you doing here anyway?’ I said.

‘Didn’t you hear?’ she goes, laughing. ‘I’m in exile.’

‘You what?’ I said, cos I had a vague idea what that meant but I’ve been wrong about those things quite a few times and Jelli wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to get your words mixed up around.

‘Mum sent me away.’ She was leaning back on her elbows and looking up at the stars. She was pretty, Jel, in a dirty sort of way, not good dirty more like a bit in need of a wash, with dirty blonde hair in waves and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a greenish cardigan wrapped round her and bracelets jangling halfway up both arms. ‘I’m hanging out here till the WI find something better to talk about.’

‘Why?’ I asked, and it was bound to be good, Jelli was always getting into trouble from what I’d heard off Saf: chucked out of school once for cutting off a girl’s hair who was sat in front of her and then making her eat it, but she got back in because Pippa was on the board, whatever that means.

‘Oh, just a bit of fun,’ she said, but then she looked at me with a little cat wink. ‘Mr Grubbins,’ she goes.

‘Grubbins! The old perv next door?’ I was shocked I can’t deny.

‘Oi,’ she said, giving me a little push but she was only messing.

‘Jeez,’ I said, getting my face together. ‘He must be sixty, easy.’

‘Don’t be ageist,’ she said. ‘He’s still got the moves.’ But you could tell she wasn’t all that bothered.

I laughed but maybe that was more out of surprise than anything else. ‘Bugger me, Jel,’ I said. ‘Talk about pushing the boat out. You trying to get your mum in an early grave? She doesn’t even drink tap water.’ And then we both laughed.

‘What’s it like living with your nanna?’ I said. ‘Rock and roll, eh.’

She laughed again and dug her feet into the stones right up to the ankles. ‘Nanna’s pretty cool,’ she said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ she goes. ‘She was a WAAF, you know.’

‘A WAAF?’ I said. ‘Is that like a WAG?’

‘Ha,’ she goes. ‘No. Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. In the war.’

‘Oh,’ I went. ‘Didn’t even know that was allowed.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ she goes. ‘Went off when she was nineteen, no intention of settling down and getting married like her parents wanted her to. She’s always been like that.’ Then she said, with a rare little real smile on her face, ‘We’ve got a lot in common.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said, with my own little smile because it was nice.

‘Hey,’ she said, sitting up to squeeze my arm. ‘Why don’t you stay here tonight? Go back to the flat tomorrow and wait a few days and she’ll be back. You look knackered.’

‘Oh, ta very much!’ I said, but I nodded and suddenly I did feel really tired and being around Jelli was making it seem like maybe she was right and maybe everything would be okay and right about then I felt like clinging to that as tight as I could. ‘Yeah, that’d be good. Thanks, Jel.’

By the time we got back over the railings and up the hill I really was knackered and the nanna had gone to bed so Jel grabbed a nannish flowery quilt out of the airing cupboard and I bedded down on the sofa. After she’d gone I lay there for a bit,
and I thought it was nice for Jelli, having somewhere else to go, and I wondered where Saf was and if she was okay. And I thought about my nan a bit, which I never really did because I don’t remember her, apart from this time when I was five and we got taken in to see her and I hid behind my dad’s legs but Hannah was braver and she went up and gave her a kiss on her yellow wrinkly cheek but she cried the whole way home after. No one had really mentioned Granny Brown for years, not till Han and the terrorists, and then for weeks Granny Brown was all Mum would talk about, Granny Brown and the curse. Well, that sounds exciting, doesn’t it, like I’m a council-estate Harry Potter? Well, ’fraid not, nothing exciting like that, no, ‘Ooh, you’re a wizard, William’, although it would’ve been good come to think of it if a nice friendly giant had delivered the news that my family were batshit crazy, rather than my mum from behind a snotty tower of J-cloths. There’s no point beating about the bush, is there? My mum’s nan – well, you’d have heard of her. I hadn’t but then I never did pay much attention to the news or history or anything. Charlotte Brown (Charlie to her mates) kiddie-killer and great-nan. Out on the moors and all over the papers and that. Anyway, for years and years people used to scratch things on the house or on her grave after she’d died, you know just ‘murderer’ and ‘devil worshipper’ that kind of thing. Well, it was a bit much for my nan to put up with, as it would be for most people, I guess. She started hitting the sherry and Mum’d always be coming home in her school uniform and finding her mam drunk and lying on the linoleum and that. One of the times, Mum told me once when she’d had a sherry herself, she went to go and move the glass out of her mam’s hand when she’d fallen asleep with her head on the table, and just as she leant down her mum suddenly jerked up and her eyes were open and she goes, ‘The devil’s in you, Anna my girl, it’s in us all,’ and then she vommed brown sherry sick all on the plastic tablecloth. And that’s gotta freak anyone out. In fact it was freaking me out
then, lying in the dark with the flowery quilt up to my ears and the smell of sea-salty Grandma in the air, so I closed my eyes tight and went to sleep.