Someday Find Me (21 page)

It was all lovely, building dreams, but then I remembered where I really was and all my dreams started wobbling and falling down one by one. ‘The thing is,’ I said, and it was easier to talk because I wasn’t looking at him, just at the clouds and
passing the spliff back and forth every now and again. ‘Thing is, Saffy’s not well. I don’t think we’ll be able to get away for a bit. Maybe ever.’ And there was a little choke in my voice at the end of the sentence.

‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘I hope she’s okay.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I just need to get to her and bring her home.’

He didn’t ask any questions and I was glad. It was really nice to be able to say things out loud and have somebody else’s ear for all of the words to go into instead of them bumping about inside your own head.

‘What’s going on here then, lads?’

The voice came from our feet and we both sat up and looked, me still holding out the spliff to Jack. Two policemen were standing by our toes.

It was pretty hot in the back seat of the police car and I was starting to sweat and stress and I thought I might cry any minute. The two coppers were having a fag outside. ‘Where will they take us?’ I said to Jack. ‘What’s all the fuss? It was only a spliff.’ I fidgeted around in my seat and looked across the car park to where my car was sitting all on her own, like a dream, and then I remembered the eighth stashed in my pocket and I thought the police were looking at it too, like they could see it glowing away like a big beacon in the back seat.

‘They probably think we’re bums,’ Jack said. ‘I’ll sort it, mate. Promise. We’ll have you back on the road to romance in no time.’ And he tapped on the window at the coppers and, when they turned round, smiled nicely and made an open-the-door face. The taller copper opened the passenger side front door and leant in.

‘What’s up?’

‘Look, mate,’ Jack said. ‘Is there really any need to take us in? We’ve got a car. We’ll be on our way. It was only a bit of draw.’

If I’d have said it I would’ve sounded really cocky and a twat but Jack made it sound pretty reasonable and friendly, like you’d do pretty much whatever he asked you. The copper looked at him like he kind of wanted to be nice but also like he kind of wanted not to be.

‘Problem is, there’s been a couple of reports of a nice big drug ring operating out of these very services. So you can see the dilemma
for us when “a bit of draw” wanders right under our noses. Sorry. It won’t take long, process you down the station. You’ll be back on your way soon enough if there’s nothing to keep you in for.’

I looked up at the grey roof of the car and drummed my toes inside my shoes and wiggled my knees back and forth. Jack looked at me and then back at the copper.

‘Thing is,’ he goes, ‘Fitz here has got to get to the love of his life. Poor girl’s really poorly. Isn’t there anything you can do? I’m sure you don’t want to stand in the way of true love.’

The copper raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s it they say about the path?’ he said to the other one.

‘Don’t run smooth, think it is,’ the fat one said, and they both chuckled and fiddled with their hats. But then they looked at me and I was trying a bit not to cry and they looked at each other again and then at Jack. ‘You could say it was yours,’ the front one said. ‘Then we’d just have to take you in. Romeo here could be on his way.’

I opened my mouth to say no but before anything came out Jack said, ‘Yep. All mine. Absolutely.’

‘Sure about that?’ the copper said, and before I could say anything, Jack said, ‘Yep, course. Fitz here just stopped cos I asked him for a lighter.’

And the copper nodded and got out and walked around to my side of the car and opened my door. ‘Off you go, then,’ he said, holding the door open and waving his arm sarcastically. ‘Your lucky day, Cupid.’

I turned to Jack. ‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said, but he waved my words away as well.

‘No worries, mate,’ he said. ‘Might even get a free meal if they drag it out down the yard long enough. Give my sister something else to moan about too, she loves that. Hey, listen, good luck. Hope she gets better soon.’

And I felt the tears wobbling up again. I hugged him tight round the neck, which was really wet but I just didn’t care.
‘Thank you thank you thank you,’ I said, and then I got out of the car and I ran all the way over to my rustbucket and opened the door and jumped in.

I drove the car round in a couple of little circles testing the brakes and they seemed all right so I puttered out onto the slip road and back onto the motorway, which was empty and lonely but I whacked my hazards on just in case and stayed at forty, which felt a bit risky anyway. The sky was grey and I could see blue the way I was headed but the sign up ahead said there was still sixty miles to go.

When you get off the coach the cold chills you right through to your bones. You pull your clothes round you tight and start to walk up the hill. Past the clinic where in the day there are always teenage girls smoking outside and inside is full of paper sheets and plastic gloves and swabs and advice. Past pigeons flapping around a burger and chips and a man in ripped jeans and a huge T-shirt who limps from person to person saying, ‘Spare change, luv,’ like it’s not a question, just a motto, a thought. Past the windows of big suitcases, shoes, bedspreads. Up past the hospital, where people are standing outside in their pale blue gowns with their pale blue feet and their IV trolleys next to them, puffing on cigarettes and chatting just like they’re at the bus stop, and a man is rolling out of a cab with a bloody tea-towel pressed to his head and his girlfriend hurrying after him screeching. Past a church and patches of yellow grass and kids hurrying up alongside anyone walking, saying in their little voices, ‘Gizza pound for sweets, mate,’ and past an offy with its shopkeeper in her red cage and a woman pressed up against the bars trying to check the prices on the different cans of lager and her boyfriend outside smoking a fag and telling her to hurry up and his fat dog tugging at the rope round its neck and some teenager pissing in a doorway and two girls giggling into their chips and cuddling plastic bags of wine and crisps and chocolate and hurrying back home in their joggers.

Past all this, to the postbox, which is how you remember where to turn, and down the long cobbled street, across the tiny T-junctions and crossroads, and past the group of boys with hoods and dogs and bottles and tiny orange fairy-flickers of cigarette burning in the dimness. To the gate, which squeaks as you open it, and to the door with the crack in one panel and the doorbell that doesn’t work and the knocker you have to knock instead.

‘Hello, stranger!’ she says as she opens the door, and she pulls you in for a hug. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

She smells like flowers as darkness closes in around you.

My cousin Stevie was always the smart one. She wasn’t book smart like Ella, or too-smart-for-her-own-good smart like Jel, but she was street smart, my granny used to say, sharp. She’d be the one who’d solve Granddad’s riddles or find the Easter eggs first or work out how to build a den under the kitchen table that didn’t fall down when you tried to get in. When I came round on her hall carpet I thought for a second we were back in one of those dens, hiding under miles and miles of flowery sheet in a happy nest of giggling and dirty knees. She was fanning me with an old copy of the
Echo
, and even there Fate Jones smiled awkwardly down at me.

‘All right, babe?’ she said, when she saw I’d woken up. ‘Long journey, was it?’ I smiled and sat up all wobbly lamb-like.

‘Sight of you more like,’ I said, even though my voice was shaking. ‘What have you done to your hair?’

She punched me on the arm and then pulled me into another hug. ‘You twat. Good to see you.’

We hugged for a minute, which seemed to stretch on for ever, and then she said, ‘You need a drink. Come on.’

We stood up and she led me through into the little lounge. ‘Sit,’ she said, pointing at a sofa piled high with fluffy mismatched cushions. I sank into it and felt some of the heavy sad I’d been carrying with me float away. The room was stuffed full of things – stacks of DVDs in one corner, piles of folded washing on the
tiny table and each of its two tiny chairs. Photos hung on each of the walls and a big clock with sparkly hands ticked loudly above the small table. Stevie came skipping back from the kitchen with a shot of vodka in each hand, and she handed me one as she dropped into the fluffy nest next to me. ‘’Smeant to be brandy, I think, for shock. But we’ve not got any. Down in one!’

The vodka was hot and sharp at the back of my mouth but it slid down warm and filled me up and floated me away.

‘Place is looking good,’ I said, fiddling with a twirl of fluffy fabric. I’d only visited once, a year or more before, when I was still living at home and the idea of Stevie having a place of her own was too exciting to understand. She’d had a place of her own long before that, of course, but I’d been too out of it to notice. Too out of it to notice that everybody had grown up and moved on while I’d been trapped in a blossom-pink bed.

‘Thanks, babe,’ she said, and she put her arm around me and squeezed me tight. ‘So good to see you.’ She’d said that already so it must have been true. ‘What’s with the surprise visit?’

I thought of my homes. Broken glass on the carpet, whispered conversations. Fitz crying. Fitz sending me away.

‘I needed to get away,’ I said. ‘Can I stay here?’

Stevie’s mother, my auntie Peggy, was my mother’s sister. They didn’t get on. Peggy was divorced and living with a nice boyfriend who was only a bit older than Stevie or me. She always wore brightly coloured bra straps showing, and had the front of her hair bleached. She wasn’t the kind of person my mother thought we should be mixing with. The only communication or connection they ever had was laced and looped up into six or seven words in a card at Christmas or on a birthday. I would have thought it was sad if I didn’t know I would someday end up like that with my sisters too.

‘So, you had a row with your mum and dad, then?’

I nodded, taking a sip of my drink and rolling my eyes to fill the space. ‘Of course.’

She tutted. ‘Not being funny, Saf, but your mum’s a right nightmare. What was it this time, she not like your fella?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘Surprise surprise. And I bet she’s been on your case about what you’re going to do next?’

‘Yep.’

‘Don’t blame you for wanting to get away. You can keep me company for a bit – Jenny’s away for a week anyway. Like old times, yeah?’

And that was it. I had given her the beginnings of a story and she had finished it all by herself. Sometimes it’s easier not to tell lies, just to give people the pieces to make their own.

That night in bed, I thought how much Stevie had changed, though she was still herself. Life was always moving, the backdrop and the motives shifting. Every time you looked away, things grew, things changed. People moved into the gaps and feelings faded. In the paper on the table downstairs police were still searching for Fate Jones, still dusting the car in which they’d found a lock of her hair, still watching the same old CCTV footage of her over and over. Soon, though, there would be a new case, and the car would be forgotten and the CCTV would be forgotten and someone else would move into our minds and, slowly, Fate Jones would be washed over by the tide of day-today life, like footprints on wet sand.

I hated her.

I was jealous of her. Everywhere I looked, she was lost, she was gone. But I knew the truth, and it made a hole in my heart so big I’d fallen through it. You are never lost just by being gone; you are only lost when there is nobody who thinks to look for
you. True loss is not the absence of a person or a thing, but the absence of a space where they fit. A place where they belong.

Fate Jones wasn’t lost. They were still looking for her.

The simplest of tasks seem so easy when they’re asked. They only start to unravel when you’re left alone with them.

‘Can you pick up some bits for dinner for me, babe? I’m in hospital all day.’

‘Of course. Where do I go?’

Small streets in big cities have their own order of things. The cobbles the terraces stood on had their own world, a million miles away from the shopping and the clubbing and the rest of the world. The two ginger twins who lived two doors down were skateboarding in the road, the wheels back and forth on the stones sounding like waves on the beach. Across the road, the old man who lived in the house opposite stood at his gate, resting on his elbows, watching the street go by as if he were at the front of a ship. The telephone wires that criss-crossed the sky were heavy with pairs of trainers, laces looped together and flung over the thin black lines to signify some code I didn’t understand. At the end of the street, the gang watched over it all, one creature with many heads, dogs in its folds, sitting on the dirty pavement panting as its many limbs smoked cigarettes and the heads spat into the gutter. And watched.

The road outside the terraces seemed colder. Maybe it was just the open space for the wind to cut across, but it seemed somehow like it was friendlier in the safety of the houses. Out
here, with cars speeding past and people walking fast against the wind, I was alone. When I reached the automatic doors of the supermarket, I stood in front of the sensor long enough for them to open and shut twice. When they opened for a third time I stepped in, fingering the list in my pocket. I looked around me, at people dashing back and forth, pushing trolleys in zigzag lines and stacking things in their baskets without stopping. It was as if everything had been put on fast-forward and left me behind, trapped, an island in the middle of a million streams. I took the list out and held it carefully in both hands.

Don’t be silly. How hard can it be?

The first things were vegetables. I felt relieved about this. Vegetables were good, simple, safe. The vegetables and fruit and salad things were at the front of the shop, which seemed stupid to me – as then these things, which were softest, would be at the bottom of the busy baskets and would get squashed or bruised by everything else, all the jars and the tins and the bottles. The thought made me feel sick. I stood in front of the rows of green and looked again at the list. Lettuce. I stared at the boxes stacked up on the slanty shelves, full of curly heads of pale green and yellow. The edges of the leaves were turning brown, the plastic sleeves spotted with condensation. I felt impatient with myself.

Just take one.

Lettuce is on the list.

I reached out a hand, put it down again.

That one. That one looks fine.

The hand reached out again.

There’s dirt on that one. It’s dirty.

The hand went down again.

You can wash it, you idiot. It’s only dirt. Lettuces grow in dirt.

Dirt, dirt, dirt.

They grow in dirt.

They soak up dirt. They’re dirty inside. You can’t wash them inside.

I turned away. Two children were playing next to the shelves, their parents chatting over crooked trolleys in the middle of the aisle. The toddlers were lining up the brightly coloured peppers, stacking them on the dirty lino like toy blocks. I looked down and hurried into the next aisle.

It was quieter here, away from the busy front doors and the social land of salad. Just rows and stacks of boxes and bags and cans, rice and sauce and lentils. I felt better, the food packed away and safe instead of out in the open to be touched and breathed on. I looked at the list, past the green stuff. Pasta (bows or twirls!). Stevie had drawn a little bow next to it. I walked along the aisle, gazing up at the oranges and yellows of the boxes, the brown and white grains of rice packed tightly like tiny pearls under the lights. The pasta was at the end of the row, with people whistling past with trolleys full of fruit and bags of salad all waiting to be squashed and ruined. I stared at the shelves. Bows and twists and strings and stripes and nests and tubes and white and green and orange.

Bows. She wants bows. Just take the bows.

All the packets were crooked on the shelves, some pushed right back and some hanging their corners over the edge.

Just leave them. It doesn’t matter if they’re not straight. It doesn’t matter.

I fought back a horrible urge that it really really did matter, that unless the bags all sat side by side and neat, the whole shop would fall down around me. My head was beginning to hurt.

Take the bows.

I reached out and took them, put them in my basket. Let out a sigh of relief, and turned to walk away.

They’re not straight, they’re not straight, they’re not straight.

With each step I could see the packets, hanging over the edge, slipping into each other’s lines, twists muddled up with tubes and all crashing down. I kept my head down and walked.

‘Watch where you’re going!’

The metal mesh of a trolley knocked into me, sending me smash into the magazines displayed at the end of the aisle. The trolley pushed on past, loaded up with loo roll and beer and crisps and packets of mealy-looking burgers with flecks of white fat oozing up at the plastic wrap. I rubbed my elbow and stepped back into an aisle. The next thing on the list was passata, which was what Fitz called tomatoes in a box. I felt a little pang then, right in the middle of my heart, thinking about Fitz with his pinny on and a big spoon in his hand stirring a sauce and saying, ‘Here now, Saf, pass me those tomatoes in a box. That’s what we need!’ and me handing them to him and kissing his back through his T-shirt. I walked down the aisle of breakfast things and biscuits and went back to the pasta and rice and sauce row, trying hard not to look at anything for too long, so I wouldn’t see things out of their place. I found the tomatoes in a box and picked them up before I had time to think about it, the same brand as Fitz used. It felt nice, familiar in my hand. I felt myself relaxing. Here was something I knew, something safe. I felt braver. This was not so hard. I looked at the list, crumpled now in my hand. Cheese.

That was all it said. Just ‘Cheese’. Nothing else, no type of cheese, how much cheese, anything. No little picture from Stevie. As I walked down the dairy aisle, things swam in front of me. Goat’s cheese, blue cheese, crumbly cheese, cubes of cheese and shreds of cheese. They swam in front of me and numbers filled my head. Calories. Grams of fat. Weights and measurements and hours and days. Half-empty boxes, a torn corner of a packet oozing liquid onto the shelf. Labels in the wrong places, things in the wrong places. People loomed past with their baskets full and their bodies wobbling, fat cheeks moving as they talked, filling their mouths with words instead of food, filling their baskets and eating with their eyes. My hands were sweating, the list wearing thin until the ink started to run on the
letters, wiping away the things that were written there. I dropped the basket and pushed through the trolleys until I got to the pavement outside.