The Day We Disappeared (10 page)

I watched him go, and thought,
I
don't want you to think I fancy Joe.

And then:
This is worrying
.

I didn't get a chance to tell
Becca I'd passed my trial until much later on, when we were washing down
Jolene and tacking up Harold respectively. Harold was in a very bad mood and kept
trying to bite Becca's bottom.

‘Bugger off,' she told him,
swiping at his snapping teeth. Harold responded with redoubled attempts, and Becca
had to move away. ‘What's wrong with you, pet?' she asked him,
hands on hips. ‘Have you been possessed?'

‘Mark said he's going to get
the chiropractor out,' I told her. ‘He's worried Harold's
got something wrong with his back.'

Becca stroked the horse until he stopped
biting.

‘I have news!' I
whispered.

‘What's that,
pet?'

‘I passed my trial! I'm
staying!'

Becca swung away from Harold.
‘Kate!' she cried, jumping over and hugging me. Becca didn't do
much physical contact. I was touched. ‘That's fantastic news,
pet!' I smiled happily, thanking myself once again for running away to
Somerset. ‘So you'll be staying? Indefinitely?'

‘Yes!' I scraped the water
off Jolene's quarters, keen to
have her rugged up before she got cold. ‘Your man
said he thought I was doing a grand job and even offered to pay me! He's going
to take me to Badminton and we're to have some drinks tonight to
celebrate.'

‘Really?' Becca paused.

‘Yeah!'

‘He's taking you to
Badminton? And throwing you a
drinks
party?'

‘I know! Madness!'

Becca went back to Harold's
saddle. ‘I see,' she said. Something about her tone made me turn. There
was a lovely ease and fluidity in Becca's movement normally, but suddenly she
was hunched and pinchy. Harold turned to bite her again, and this time she slapped
him hard on the shoulder. ‘STOP IT.'

Harold turned away sulkily and Becca
called over to Joe, who was approaching. ‘I've put Harold's road
studs in,' she said to him. ‘He's all yours.' And before Joe
had a chance to thank her, or I had a chance to get a proper look at her face,
she'd gone.

One of the many things I'd had to
look up recently was the World Class squad that kept being mentioned. I'd
learned it was a programme to support the horse/rider combinations that made up Team
GBR – ‘Lots of coaching and horse medicine and support,' Becca had
explained, ‘that'd cost them a fuckin' packet otherwise.'
Mark had been in the programme for five years with a succession of fantastic horses
(all owned by Maria's father) and was now in it with Stumpy: he was planning
to take him to the World Equestrian Games later this year.

From time to
time the coach, a man called Pierre, would visit the yard to train Mark, and
Caroline Lexington-Morley would come over to join in.

Today they were show-jumping in the
outdoor school.

It had turned into a warm spring day and
the sheep in the field next door were standing in the sun, comically stupefied, as
Mark and Caroline cantered around. Clouds scudded lightly overhead and pigeons
called lazily to each other from the beech copse. It should have been a perfect
afternoon, really, except Becca had sunk into a dark mood and had barely spoken at
lunchtime.

Caroline was flirting openly with Mark.
I found myself taking more notice of this than I'd have liked.

‘It's none of my
business,' I said to Joe, who was leaning on the post-and-rail fence, watching
the session with great interest, ‘but isn't Caroline married?'

Joe smiled. ‘Of course,
darlin',' he said. ‘But that seldom stops anyone in this
business.' He turned back to watch Mark, who was sailing down a hefty line of
jumps with perfect timing and balance. I knew now that the rows were called
combinations and that it was bloody tricky to do them well. Mark and Stumpy, though,
calm as clouds, made it look easy.

‘Beautiful,' Joe said.
‘Absolutely beautiful.'

Caroline – noisily confident with her
pink lipstick and expensive leather-palmed gloves – shouted, ‘God, Waverley!
Can't you be shit for even a
minute
, sweetheart?'

Mark set off and did the combination
again. ‘Gorgeous,' Caroline yelled.

Leave him alone
, I heard myself
think.

That sort of thought has to be banned
immediately, I
told myself, staring
determinedly at Stumpy and ignoring Mark. Twists of alarm were beginning to spiral
up my abdomen.

Stumpy was making a strange noise as he
trotted, a sort of deep, hollow squeaking. ‘What's that sound?' I
asked Joe, just as Mark pulled up next to the fence we were leaning on.

But Joe had already gone.

‘What sound?' Mark
asked.

‘Oh. Um … The noise your man makes
when he's trotting.'

‘Air in his sheath,' Mark
said, turning to watch Caroline take her turn.

‘Sheath?'

Mark turned back to me, a definite smile
in his eyes. ‘The thing that hangs down between his back legs, protecting his
penis.'

I stared at Stumpy's neck. I
daren't look at his sheath. Or Mark's sheath. Crotch. Face.
Anything.

Help.

‘Oh,' I said flatly.
‘Air. Right.'

‘Yup.'

I tried not to laugh, I really did, but
it was futile. Stumpy had a shouty crotch! You couldn't make it up! A loud
peal of laughter rolled out of me, in spite of my best efforts to stop it, followed
immediately by a similar one from Mark. Stumpy gazed at me like I was really
strange, which just made me laugh even harder. We laughed until I was actually
crying, and didn't stop until Ana Luisa marched up and shoved a posy of weeds
through the fence towards her dad, who stopped
laughing long enough to thank her profusely and instruct
me to put them in a special vase.

‘Why are you laughing?' she
asked impatiently, and I had to leave because I couldn't answer.

I took the posy and put it into an old
jam jar on top of one of the many rickety chests of drawers that lined the walls of
the tack room. And even when Maria stormed in, looking for Mark, and snapped that I
wasn't there to sit around doing nothing, the smile didn't leave my
face.

 

 

The woman watches her daughter press one of the daisy chains up to her nose. Her
face is scrunched with comic puzzlement.

‘Why are daisies so stinky, Mum,' she asks eventually, ‘when
they look so pretty?'

‘That's just how Nature made them.' Her mother smiles.
‘The daisies probably think we smell weird, too.'

Her daughter giggles. She's so
beautiful, the mother thinks. So milky pale and pretty, with those huge blue
eyes and little pixie ears, the softness in her features that is born entirely
of her rare trust in all people. She makes friends wherever she goes, this girl,
marches up to strangers on those slim little legs and tells them her name
without any of the haughty self-consciousness that cripples her elder sister.
Sometimes she'll shake their hands or even say, ‘You can kiss my
cheek, if you like.' She is a delight.
A free spirit, just like her
mother
, they say in the village.

‘Here,' the woman says. ‘Put some more sun cream on. The
sun's baking us like potatoes.'

The girl continues with her daisy chains. ‘You do it,' she demands.
‘It's my birthday.' She flashes a quick smile at her mother to
check it's been received in the spirit it was meant, and is pleased to see
that her mum is chuckling.

‘Cheeky,' Mum says. She starts with the child's slender little
arms, moving the straps of her white cotton dress so she can cover her
shoulders.

Without warning her daughter twists round and kisses her mother's
nose. ‘I love you,
Mummy,' she says, and the woman thinks, If I died today, I would die so
perfectly happy.

She decides she'll talk to Bert later about this Africa trip. Maybe
it's too soon. Maybe she should just let their beautiful little family
breathe for a while. Does she not have everything she could possibly want, right
here? Does she not know happiness that transcends every mountain daybreak, every
remote beach, every huge sky she saw travelling the world? She knows Bert will
do anything she asks, but she knows, too, that his heart isn't fully in
the plan. She feels an almost indecent swell of love for the quiet, generous man
she married, with his open face and his hopeless love for her, his long, spidery
fingers and his gentle voice. He's starting his novel today. She was so
proud this morning that she had to leave his little study so that he
wouldn't see the tears in her eyes.

‘Right,' her daughter says, hanging the final daisy chain carefully
around her neck. ‘Let's play hide and seek.'

Her mother assents, rubbing the last splodge of sun cream into the back of her
little girl's neck.

It's the last thing she will ever do for her.

‘You hide first,' she says, and her child goes sprinting off across
the field, shouting, ‘CLOSE YOUR EYES AND COUNT TO TEN! NO, TWENTY! NO,
THIRTY! COUNT TO ONE ZILLION BILLION THOUSAND MILLION!'

For the rest of her life she will wish that she had turned round to shout those
things directly at her mother, rather than into the rippling shelves of hot air
that hover over the field. She will wish that she had seen what she knew to be
behind her: her mother sitting in that carpet of daisies at Woodford Farm, her
hands over her eyes and laughter spilling out of her.

She will wish more than anything else that this was the last memory she had of
her mother, rather than the one that, after nearly three decades, she still
can't erase.

It was Saturday and Tim and I were at the
Counter in Hackney Wick, eating
huevos rancheros
with great big blobs of
spicy chorizo and thick sourdough bread. A warm May sun was climbing rapidly into
the sky and we were sitting out on the café's higgledy-piggledy wooden jetty,
watching the light sparkle and wobble on the surface of the River Lea. Lizzy had
blown us out because she was hung-over and Claudine had said she would rather eat
swords than hang around in Hackney.

‘Wow.' Tim smiled. A narrow
boat was chugging past bearing a girl in a leopard-print leotard and bright red
lipstick. Nothing else. Behind her the Olympic Stadium squatted fatly in the
sun.

Hackney was not the place it had been
fourteen years ago when I'd rented my little house off Murder Mile. Luckily,
my ancient landlord had not seemed to notice that it had become an extremely
fashionable and expensive place to live, so I was still paying less rent than other
friends now paid for one-bedroom flats. I really must tell him what his house is
worth, I thought guiltily. The problem was that, even though he was probably
perfectly nice, I could never quite bring myself to phone him in case he wanted to
come to the house and talk to me there alone.

Tim had been
telling me about Mel, who apparently slept with her face down in the pillow and was
allergic to pork.

‘Poor thing,' I'd
said. ‘I know how she feels, with me not being able to eat wheat or
dairy.' I spread a piece of sourdough toast thickly with butter.

Tim seemed to be quite keen on Mel, and
I was pleased to find that I was truly happy for him. ‘Maybe we're
getting there,' I said. ‘Me finding a decent job and you finding a
decent girl. It only took us sixteen years, Tim.'

‘Is that how long we've
known each other? Seriously?'

It was. When I'd first met Tim on
my first day at the support group, he was wearing a hoodie and those big trainers
that always smell of wet dogs. He'd been going to the group for three weeks
already and had befriended me with a fierce desperation as soon as I'd walked
through the door. ‘If we're really as mad as these people, we should
consider killing ourselves now,' he'd said, all curtains haircut and
bum-fluff chin. He'd gestured bleakly at the collection of depressed teenagers
sitting in a circle at the far end of the church hall.

‘I'm afraid I'm
definitely mad,' I'd apologized. ‘I have a psychologist's
file to prove it.'

Tim nodded glumly. ‘Me too. Is it
not bad enough to be a teenager? Why do we have to be fucked up too?'

Now look at him. All tall and preppy,
happy and successful, a clever psychiatrist with a big flat in Bethnal Green and now
a girlfriend! ‘We just need to find you a decent man,' he said.
‘Then everything will be complete and we'll never have another difficult
day.'

I thought about saying something but
stopped short.
What exactly could I say?
Oh, I've got a crush on my boss, so hopefully I'll be all loved
up soon myself?

‘What?' Tim was watching me
in the annoying way he had, which said,
I can see what you're
thinking
. ‘What's going on in there?'

‘Meh.'

‘Don't you dare.'

‘Honestly. Nothing.'

‘Annie! You're
lying!'

I busied myself with my eggs, swirling
in the spicy red oil of the chorizo until my plate was orange, concentrating on the
clink of cutlery and the low hum of conversation around us.

‘Is it your boss?'

‘Meh.'

‘It's your boss!'

Eventually I agreed. ‘Nothing to
say, though, Tim, so don't even bother. He's just a bit fit and funny,
that's all. I shall get over it, like I always do.'

Tim finished his eggs. ‘So
he's unavailable. That's a surprise.'

It wasn't yet confirmed but I had,
rather sadly, begun to fear it was inevitable. For a while I'd allowed myself
to hope that Stephen's recent dark time had been to do with a break-up, but
yesterday his PA, Tash, had said ‘they' when she was talking about
Stephen's house, and there was a picture of a child in his wallet. Plus he had
said during his massage yesterday that he was off to Paris for the weekend, and men
only went to Paris if they had a woman in tow.

‘It's under control,'
I said. ‘A passing crush. It means nothing.'

Tim put his
fingertips together and watched me.

‘Stop it, Tim.'

‘Okay …'

‘Worry about your girlfriend
instead. She can't eat bacon sandwiches.'

Tim laughed and the little thread of
tension was cut. I would get over my crush. Although it would help if Stephen
stopped coming for massages. He'd had three this week alone – ‘I'm
completely addicted,' he said cheerfully – and the better I got to know his
body the harder it was to feel nothing about it. There was a little dink at the top
of his neck where he'd once been cut with a barber's razor, and a mole
on his left ankle with a curious ellipsis round it, like a planet. I enjoyed his
body far too much.

It also hadn't helped that, after
my first month, he'd sent me a massive hamper of beautiful food to say thank
you for ‘turning my senior management team into relaxed little puppies'.
It was full of expensive superfood supplements and lovely farmers' market
things. And a pair of Reebok shorts! He'd remembered what I'd said about
never having time to exercise or cook!

I was very confused about my
relationship with my boss.

No, I wasn't.

Yes, I was.

Oh dear.

Tim and I left the café and mooched
around the paintings in the Stour Space. After less than a minute we admitted we
hated them and moved on into the midday sun, drifting over Regent's Canal and
picking up the bank of the Lea Navigation, talking about Lizzy, who had
added a third boyfriend to her
portfolio and was somewhat manic.

‘Don't you long for a time
when everyone in Le Cloob is just normal?' I sighed. ‘There's
always at least one of us in some form of the Bad Shit.'

Tim picked up a stone and tried to skim
it across the river towards the Olympic Park. It plopped and sank straight away.
‘I don't wish we were all normal,' he said thoughtfully.
‘Although I know what you mean. Life is a rich tapestry, Pumpkin, highs and
lows, happies and sads. It's all in the natural order of things.'

‘Life is a rich tapestry,
eh?' I grinned.

‘Unfortunately I did say that,
yes. But you know what I mean.'

‘Yeah.'

‘By the way, talking of the Bad
Shit, what's the latest on Kate? Have you heard from her?'

‘No, but I think she's okay.
I called her landline and some girl answered, saying she's renting
Kate's room for a while because Kate's gone away. I guess she just
forgot to tell me. She'll be in touch.'

‘Oh, phew,' Tim said.

‘Yeah. Although she'd better
not have gone off to Asia without me.'

‘Well, if she has, you're
not allowed to go running off after her. You've got a proper job now, Pumpkin,
time to lay down some London roots for a bit.'

Tim was often on at me about my tendency
to fly to the other side of the world. Like my therapist, he thought it was
unhealthy; he claimed it only happened when my anxiety got out of hand and that it
was all about disappearing.
Disappearing
emotionally: running away, skirting off sideways, rather than continuing the uphill
battle to stay sane.

He was quite right, of course, but I
felt that was my prerogative. For all Tim's training, and for all the many
conversations we'd had about my mental state over the years, I still
didn't think he quite understood how exhausting it was for me to stay afloat.
If the work required just to feel neutral was a constant struggle, did I not have
the right to skive off from time to time? I mean, at least I disappeared to
fascinating places for six months, rather than to my bed.

Also, as I'd tried to explain to
him many, many times, it wasn't just about disappearing. I
loved
travelling. I loved the landscapes, the big skies, the freedom. Most of all I loved
the surprising feeling of safety it gave me. I'd hand over my rucksack at the
check-in desk, pass through security and …
there.
It was as if my very soul
breathed out. Suddenly I was just another girl, a nameless face in a sea of
travellers. I'd collect my bag at the other end, dive into a humid scrum of
waiting rickshaw drivers and nobody would know – or really care – who I was.

I looked up at the sky, a thin sheet of
vivid blue. ‘I won't be going travelling any time soon, so you
needn't worry. Um, Tim?'

‘Yes?'

‘Are you in love with
Mel?'

Tim frowned, picking up another stone.
He did another terrible skim. ‘Love?'

‘Yes. That. Are you in that with
her?'

‘When you fall in love, it's
like being hooked up to a drip,' Tim said thoughtfully. His eyes had taken on
an
intensity that surprised me. ‘A
drip that delivers the very breath of life. I don't feel like that with Mel –
not yet … But she's great. I certainly think I could fall in love with
her.'

A naughty beagle galloped past us.
‘Wow,' I said, surprised. I glanced sideways at my friend, who was in a
world of his own. ‘I've never had that. The intravenous-drug
thing.'

Tim shrugged. ‘It just means
you've not found your One. Or, at least, you've not allowed yourself
to.'

‘Oi. No psychologizing.'

‘I'm a
psychiatrist.'

‘No psychiatrizing,
then.'

He laughed despairingly, muttering
something about me being a mad badger and testing the diagnostic capabilities of
even his cleverest colleagues.

I ignored him. Something wasn't
quite right. ‘Er, Tim, forget for a second that I'm a maddo. Can we
instead talk about who
you've
been in intravenous-drip love with,
please?'

Tim looked away.
‘Sorry?'

‘You just said a really
hair-raising thing about what love feels like. And I'm asking who, exactly,
has made you feel like that?'

Tim looked very uncomfortable. ‘I
…' he began. I waited.

‘That's just what they
say,' he said eventually. ‘In books and films. And even psychological
literature. I wasn't talking from personal experience.'

That was not how it had sounded to me.
But I left it. Tim and I were good at knowing where to stop. Maybe he
had fallen head over heels in love with
Mel already and didn't want to admit it.

We walked on.

A man up ahead was taking photos of the
water, balanced precariously on the scrubby grass of the bank with a very expensive
piece of kit dangling close to the rippling surface. ‘I'd laugh if he
fell in,' I said, even though I probably wouldn't. And then, as I saw
the set of the man's head, the slope of his nose, I realized it was
Stephen.

I stopped. I turned to walk in the other
direction, then turned back. Then turned again to walk away. Then I stopped
completely, paralysed by indecision.

‘Annie?' Tim said.

‘Come here,' I hissed,
walking away again. Tim came, obviously perplexed. ‘That's him!
That's my BOSS!'

Tim looked round. ‘DON'T
LOOK AT HIM!' I whisper-yelled.

It was too late. Stephen must have
sensed that we were stalled on the towpath and turned sideways, straightening
slightly. The lens of the camera caught the sun and flashed off my bright red
face.

‘OH!' I bellowed.
‘HI!'

Stephen hung the camera round his neck.
‘Are you stalking me?' he called, loping over to us with one of those
dazzling smiles. ‘Hello,' he added pleasantly to Tim.

‘Um, Stephen, Tim, Tim,
Stephen,' I said. I felt the same wash of pleasure that swept over me whenever
I saw Stephen. Although what on earth was a man like Stephen Flint doing out here in
the wilds of Hackney?

‘Hi, mate,' Stephen said,
shaking Tim's hand. To my
great
surprise he was wearing trainers, although they did appear to have cost five
thousand pounds.

Tim scuffed the earth with his
thirty-five-pound Converses and Stephen asked what had brought us there.

‘I live here,' I told him.
‘Well, in Lower Clapton. We were just having breakfast at the Counter Café. Do
you know it?'

Stephen beamed. ‘I do! And how
funny – we're almost neighbours.'

Tim and I stared at him. ‘You live
in Hackney?'

Stephen whipped up his camera and took a
quick photo of our stunned faces. ‘Shock-horror.' He checked his screen.
‘Corporate twat lives in EAST LONDON! I have a house in Clapton Square.'
He picked up a stone and did a perfect skim.