The Day We Disappeared (22 page)

‘Penny for your thoughts,'
Stephen asked.

I smiled sheepishly. ‘You may not
want to hear them …'

‘
Au contraire
.'

‘I panicked when I saw you with
your niece earlier,' I admitted. ‘I was terrified she was … you know.
Silly me.
I was just thinking how
pathetic it is that I got into a panic. How sad and stupid.'

‘Oh, Annie.'

‘I know.' I paused.
‘It frightens me that I can just fly off the handle like that. I don't
want to be one of those paranoid women.'

‘Have you been like that in the
past?'

I went quiet. Stephen knew that I was
not exactly flush on the ex-boyfriend front but I had yet to tell him that there had
been basically no one. ‘I've never had the chance to find out,' I
mumbled. ‘There's, um, never been anyone as amazing as you.'

‘Well, keep talking to me,'
he said gently. ‘Don't suffer all those nasty thoughts on your own.
They're destructive and horrid and they only grow in size if you keep them to
yourself.'

‘I know.'

Stephen pulled me closer to him.
‘Annie,' he whispered. ‘You're safe with me. If you're
struggling, I want to help you.'

I stroked Stephen's hair.
‘Thank you. I'm just a bit … a bit odd when it comes to men.'

Stephen watched my face but he
didn't probe further. I had yet to tell him about Mum.

He smiled suddenly. ‘If it helps,
I felt the same about Tim. He fancies you, I'm absolutely certain of
it.'

Dear God, love made you vulnerable! I
almost laughed. ‘He most definitely does not,' I told him. ‘If
I'm sure of anything, it's that Tim isn't interested in
me.'

There was just the thin edge of a frown
on the outskirts of Stephen's brilliant blue-eyed smile. ‘I'm
telling you, he fancies you! I'm a bloke. I know what we do.'

‘He
doesn't!' I insisted, less certainly.

‘Well, I can only say what I
see,' Stephen said. ‘He's a good-looking chap and a nice bloke by
all accounts, but there's something a bit … I don't know …
predatory
about him. At least around you. You probably think I'm
being a dick now.'

‘Tim! PREDATORY?' I laughed
like a drain. And then stopped laughing like a drain because even though it
wasn't true it was still a horrible thought.

‘I'm not sure I'd win
if he turned on the charm,' Stephen smiled, seeming slightly embarrassed.
‘And I'm rather poor at losing.'

‘Oh, Stephen Flint,' I said.
‘There's no battle going on between you and Tim. But if there was,
you've won it already. I'm yours! I'm the spoils of your victory!
Annie Mulholland, a paranoid, sniffling mentalist, with cheap candles and stinky
joss sticks all over her house!'

Stephen, satisfied, chucked me over his
shoulder and took me up to bed. ‘I like mentalists,' he said.

A little while after he had returned
home, Mark drove his wheelchair all the way along the drive to the beech coppice
where I was sitting under a tree, writing a letter to my family that I
wouldn't be able to send.

‘Well, would you look at
you?' I said. ‘Whizzing yourself all the way out here!'

It was a scorched, dry afternoon in
August and Mark glowed in front of me like a fine Renaissance painting:
olive-skinned, wavy-haired, humble and yet glorious.

‘If you will keep on skulking in
the woods like a hobo,' he grumbled.

I blushed at his tone: so familiar,
so unlike Mark
. It had been easier with him in the hospital bed. His
immobility had made things safer. I'd been able to get close to him without
feeling I needed to worry about what it meant. But here on his farm, the fields
ungrazed and empty, the heather blowing up on the moor and nothing else for miles –
no nurses, no machines, no fluorescent lighting – the thing between us, whatever it
was, made me anxious.

‘Sorry, I just don't like
the film crew. They make me feel …' I trailed off, waving my arms.

‘Exposed?'

I nodded gratefully. ‘That's
the one.'

Mark smiled.
‘Kate, they're making a documentary about me. How do you think I
feel?'

‘Super-exposed?'

He sighed. ‘And then some. I have
no idea why I agreed to the bloody thing.' A documentary crew had been
following Mark for the last couple of weeks as he prepared to take his first steps
since the accident. ‘We'll just blend into the background,'
they'd promised, and, of course, had done nothing of the sort. I seemed to
spend half my life dodging them: wearing baseball caps and sunglasses or hiding
behind the livery horses Joe had managed to get in for some extra cash. I'd
told them straight away that I didn't want to appear in the thing and would
not sign one of their consent forms, and they were all, like, ‘Of course! No
problem
! We're totally comfortable with that!'

I didn't entirely trust them,
though, so I was spending quite a lot of time in hiding.

‘Well, I'm sorry if
it's made you uncomfortable,' Mark said. He was watching me curiously.
‘I had a feeling you were just being helpful when you said you were okay with
it. I should have probed further.'

‘Ah, no problem. I did some
special ops training a few years back so I'm decent enough at staying
hidden.'

Mark chuckled. He did that quite often,
these days. ‘Are you being mysterious and odd, Kate Brady?'

‘Mysterious and odd,' I
confirmed. ‘It's our family motto.
Nescio et mirum
.'

‘You are very
nescio
, and
monumentally
mirum
,' Mark agreed. ‘Although I'm impressed
you know Latin.'

‘I'm not just a pretty face,
boss.'

Mark smiled. ‘How are your morning
walks, talking
of odd? I don't
catch sight of you, these days, what with having to sleep downstairs.'

‘Oh, grand, you know. I love
stomping around at that time of day.' I crossed my fingers behind my back.

He was pleased. ‘I bet it's
lovely before the heat settles in. Sometimes I imagine you out there at the crack of
dawn, and think, That's the first thing I'll do when I'm walking
properly.'

‘Well, if you play your cards
right I'll invite you along some time,' I said, before I had a chance to
stop myself.

Thanks to the combination of a broken
left leg and a shattered right hip socket Mark was still a few weeks off walking,
which was lucky because I wasn't actually taking my walks at the moment. Since
a police car had arrived last Thursday I'd been having nightmares: long,
traumatic dreams followed by hours of broken sleep in my hot little bedroom. It was
only when the day arrived in golden streaks under my curtains that I was finally
managing to fall into an exhausted slumber.

I yawned. I was shagged.

‘So I've decided to teach
you to ride,' Mark announced.

‘You have?'

‘I have.'

‘And can I ask why?' I was
stalling.

‘Don't you want to
ride?' he asked, puzzled.

‘I don't know.'

‘Are you being mysterious and odd
again?'

I nodded apologetically. Of course I
wanted to learn to ride. But the idea of learning with Mark felt alarmingly
intimate.

‘You do want to learn, don't
you?' he persisted.

I nodded again.
I really did.

‘But for reasons you're
obviously not going to share, you also
don't
want to ride.'

‘That's about the size of
it, boss.'

Mark shook his head despairingly.
‘Kate,' he said, ‘I'm stuck in a wheelchair and I
won't be on a horse's back for months. Perhaps ever. You can't
even imagine how much I want to jump on and ride through Allercombe Woods, just me
and the clump of hoofs on earth. If you won't learn to ride for you, is there
any chance of you learning to ride for me?'

‘You're a total
fecker,' I gasped. ‘That's blackmail!'

Mark sniggered.

‘SHOULDERS BACK!' he
roared, two hours later. ‘IT'S ME WHO'S FULL OF BROKEN BONES, NOT
YOU.'

‘I'm comfortable like
this,' I shouted back. I could see from the big mirrors on the wall of the
indoor school that I was all hunched over like Quasimodo but for some reason this
position felt safer.

‘PUT YOUR HEELS DOWN, FOR CRYING
OUT LOUD!' Mark yelled. ‘Are you listening to
anything
I'm saying?'

I jogged down to where he was sitting
and pulled up Marmalade, one of our livery horses, in front of him.
‘Mark,' I said, ‘aren't teachers meant to be nice when
it's someone's first lesson? Aren't they meant to be encouraging
and jolly and that?'

He was sitting in a shard of sunlight
that fell through a hole in the roof. ‘That was never my style.'

‘Well, if teaching is going to be
your sole source of
income until you can
ride again, I suggest you think about revising it.'

He laughed. ‘Fair. How about
“You're doing okay”?'

‘No, that sucks too.'

‘“You're on
track”?'

‘Jesus, Mark. You blackmail me
into learning to ride and then you abuse me for two
hours
when my arse
feels like someone's been at it with the cheese grater, and the nicest thing
you can say to me is that I'm on track?'

He was chuckling. ‘But you look
like a hunchback and your reins are too long, your toes are pointing down and
you're riding about as badly as it's possible to ride. Plus you're
doing it with a face of fury, which makes you look even worse. What am I meant to
say?'

‘The fury is
concentration.'

‘Whatever it is, you're
terrifying. But I tell you what, I can go one better than “You're on
track.” Kate, I still think there's hope for you.'

I tried and failed to stop myself
laughing. ‘You're a massive shitebag, Mark Waverley. A massive,
stinking, fly-infested shitebag.'

‘Oh, Galway,' said Joe – I
hadn't spotted him leaning against a metal beam. ‘You're quite the
charming little article, aren't you?' He was smiling but I could hear
his mind at work.

‘Why are you just sitting
there?' Mark asked. ‘Walk on, please. We're going to try trotting
again.'

I groaned.

‘I'm sorry, Kate,
what's that? Are you suffering executive stress again?'

‘What?'

‘Executive
stress. The thing you came here with.'

‘Oh, that!'

‘Yes, that. You look ever so
stressed by this riding business. I'd hate to bring on a relapse.'

I coloured. ‘No relapse, boss. But
my
arse
…'

‘Behave yourself,' said
Mark, with a lightness to his voice that made me want to sing. And made me also want
to turn the horse in the direction of the gate and gallop far, far away from
there.

Twelve hours later, I woke with my
heart pounding and sweat drenching my sheets.

It was that police car. That bloody
police car. They'd only come to hand out a leaflet about outbuildings
security, Sandra said. The Gillinghams had been burgled last week. But as I'd
seen it cruising slowly down the drive that day last week I'd felt a sense of
pure, unfiltered dread that had pinched at me ever since.

I sat up and drank some water, wondering
if I had the energy to change my sheets.

I would Skype my family in the
morning.

I stared at the man standing in front of
me.

Yes, it really was him.

It was Stephen Flint! Right here, at St
Pancras! And he had our train tickets in his hand!

‘Argh,' I cried.

‘Hello to you, too.'

I shook myself. ‘Are you really
here?'

Stephen looked round. ‘I think so.
I was about to get into the shower when I saw these tickets on top of the loo. I had
a feeling you'd need them.'

‘Argh,' I repeated.
‘Hang on.'

I phoned Lizzy, who had gone off to buy
us some new ones when it had become clear that I – not for the first time – had lost
our pre-booked tickets. ‘I left them on the loo and Stephen's brought
them so don't buy new ones,' I shouted.

‘Okay,' she shouted back.
‘You big freak.'

I ended the call and smiled. One of
those huge, all-consuming smiles I couldn't stop doing at the moment. ‘I
think we may need to look into hiring you a personal assistant,' Stephen
suggested. ‘I mean, the loo? Seriously?'

I snuggled in and kissed him.
‘Thank you,' I told him. ‘You're my knight in shining
armour. I must have left them there so that I wouldn't forget them.'

‘Well,
that went badly,' he observed.

I had been even more scatterbrained of
late: I'd left my phone in the fridge, I'd lost my security pass twice,
and I'd managed to leave my Annie Kingdom unlocked several times. I doubted
anyone at FlintSpark would come in and steal towels but it was poor practice and
I'd have died if Stephen found out, especially after what he'd gone
through with Jamilla earlier in the year.

Was there something you could do about
poor memory? I wondered, as Stephen kissed my forehead. My head was so unreliable at
the moment.

‘Stephen, you're our
saviour,' Lizzy said, arriving back. ‘Thank you a thousand times
over.'

‘You're welcome. She's
quite a worry, this one. But very endearing.' He slid his arm round my
waist.

‘Tell me about it. Well,
we'd better go. See you soon, Stephen.' She kissed his cheek.

‘Thank you again,' I said,
throwing my arms around my man as Lizzy wobbled off in her Peak District-unfriendly
sundress and heels. ‘I promise to stop being so useless.'

Stephen tucked my hair behind my ear.
‘I'm keeping an eye on you,' he said. ‘If it gets really bad
we'll ask Tim for a consultation. Anyway, I'm glad to be seeing you
again. I wanted to give you a special Mum's-birthday cuddle.'

He held me tight and I felt great swells
of both happiness and grief. ‘Thank you,' I whispered into his chest.
‘Thank you.' As our relationship and the summer had progressed,
I'd found myself still unable to tell Stephen about Mum. He knew she was dead,
of course – we'd
talked often
about how it felt to be in the world without a mother, but I hadn't found the
right moment to tell him how she'd died, or how it had eventually led to my
teenage crisis. Then one day a couple of weeks ago he'd arrived in my Annie
Kingdom just as I was about to break for lunch, his face white with shock.

‘Tell me,' he'd said.
‘Annabel Mulholland, the Peak District, 1987. Tell me Georgie Mulholland
wasn't your mum. Oh, God, please tell me I've somehow got it
wrong.'

I had sighed, closing the door behind
him so that we had some privacy. I loathed it when this happened. I had yet to find
a way of coping with the horror that crossed people's faces when they realized
I was
that
Annabel Mulholland. The poor girl whose mother was raped and
murdered in the woods during a birthday game of hide and seek. The girl whose face
had been in every newspaper for weeks, whose name was branded on a generation of
minds. When I'd finally got myself sufficiently together to try a day at a
sixth-form college in Chesterfield some awful man from a tabloid had sprung out of
nowhere and taken a picture of me. ‘Daughter of Murder Victim Starts
College' the headline had read.

I had never gone back.

‘Tash just sent me a link to an
old article,' Stephen had said quietly. ‘She said she'd always
thought she recognized your name and … Oh, God. I don't even know what to say.
My poor, poor sweet little girl.'

Now in the station he held me tightly.
‘I'm sure your mum knows you go up and celebrate her birthday every
year. I bet it means the world to her to know you're both still looking after
your dad.'

Announcements
were made, tickets were bought, trains were missed. I was in a little sub-dimension
of my own. Everything felt good when Stephen was nearby, even on days like today. He
helped me on to the train, then insisted on putting my overnight bag on the luggage
rack.

We stood in the vestibule by the door so
he wouldn't get trapped, kissing and giggling like teenagers. Stephen kept
squeezing my plait. Lizzy came out and told us to get a room.

Eventually the train manager got on the
Tannoy and asked anyone not travelling to disembark, and Stephen gave me one last
lingering kiss.

Just as the doors locked.

‘Shit. I'll climb out of the
window.'

‘No!' I cried.
‘That's mad and dangerous. What if the train pulls away?' I
grabbed his pocket, as if that was going to stop him.

‘I have to get off! I have
back-to-back meetings this morning!' He pawed at the window as the train began
to move.

‘You'll die! Which is at
odds with my plans for you! You'll have to get off at Leicester.'

‘
Leicester?
'
Stephen pulled the window down, his handsome face creased with laughter. ‘I
DON'T WANT TO SPEND THE DAY IN BLOODY LEICESTER! LET ME OFF!'

It was too late. The train was gathering
pace. Stephen and I stared at each other, then burst out laughing. ‘Leicester
it is,' he said resignedly. ‘I'd better call Tash and have her
reschedule everything. Unbelievable!'

When we found
Lizzy, she was unsurprised. ‘Twatfinks,' she said. ‘You'll
have to come to see Dad, Stephen. He'll be very excited.'

Stephen smiled. ‘I doubt
that,' he said. ‘I'll get off at the next stop.'

I was thinking hard. Maybe he should
come. I'd wanted to wait until … until what? Until I knew he was someone Dad
could trust? I knew that already!

‘I actually think she's
right,' I said. ‘Dad would be thrilled to meet you. I told him about you
the other weekend and he was really pleased.'

That was a slight lie. But Dad would
have been suspicious of anyone I got involved with.

Stephen looked worried.
‘It'd be a bit rude to just barge in without having been invited,'
he said. ‘Your dad's probably really looking forward to seeing his
girls. And from the sound of it, this is quite a big deal, him going for a walk with
his daughters after being trapped for so long in his house. It should be just the
three of you.'

Lizzy brushed him aside. ‘Tosh.
He'd rather meet you.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes!'

‘Okay! But I'd have brought
something for him if I'd known. I've got a lovely book about Borges that
he'd enjoy. And some lovely Rioja. Damn.'

I slid my arms around him. ‘How
did you know he likes Rioja? And Borges?'

I could feel Stephen shaking his head
above me in Lizzy's direction. ‘This girl forgets literally
everything,' he
told her.
‘Every conversation we've had just disappears out of her mind. And she
seems to be getting worse, not better.'

Lizzy agreed. ‘She's
forgotten my birthday five times in the last ten years. Once she called me Andrew.
Andrew?
'

Having failed to persuade us to upgrade
to first, Stephen went off up the long, snaking train to buy us pastries, and Lizzy
and I settled in for a good gossip.

We'd hardly dared talk about the
changes that Dad seemed to be making in his life lest we jinx the whole thing. But
as the weeks passed it had got harder to deny that things were on the move. He was
doing his own grocery shopping, he was posting letters and he'd even started
gardening.

‘Dad's really gone to war
with agoraphobia,' Lizzy said proudly. ‘And all without our
interference. Isn't he wonderful?'

‘Beyond wonderful,' I
agreed. ‘Today is huge.'

Dad had emailed last week asking if we
were planning to come up for Mum's birthday, as usual. We'd both said
yes and then – to our absolute astonishment – he'd replied saying that he
wanted to go for a
walk
along Froggatt Edge, Mum's favourite in the
Peaks, and afterwards he wanted to go for a cream tea at a pub Mum used to take us
to when we were tiny.

Lizzy and I had called each other and
cried.

‘… and I didn't want to say
anything,' I told her now, ‘but I have a feeling he might have a
girlfriend.'

Lizzy was gob-smacked. ‘WHAT? Tell
me everything you know!' she hissed.

I told her
everything I knew and she looked slightly disappointed. ‘Oh. Is that
it?'

‘What do you mean, is that it?
There's more than enough evidence here! He's admitted he's dating,
he's cleaned the house and he's buying new clothes. No jogging bottoms
in sight! The dropped call was the clincher, though.' I giggled. ‘The
sly old fox.'

‘But how do you know it
wasn't a marketing call?' Lizzy still wasn't convinced.

‘I just knew. Remember when we
were teenagers? Calling boys? We'd always put the phone down if one of their
parents picked up!'

‘I didn't.' Lizzy
snorted.

‘Oh. Well, I did.'

‘Of course you did, Flannie. God,
I'll be so happy if Dad's met someone.'

‘Me too. I love him so
much.'

‘Well, he loves you too,'
Lizzy reminded me. ‘He loves you very much.'

‘Who's that?' Stephen
asked. He bore a bag of pastries and a smile. ‘Tim?'

‘Eh?'

‘Tim loves you very
much?'

Lizzy looked confused. ‘No, we
were talking about Dad.'

‘Oh! Silly me. Sorry.'

‘Although I'm convinced Tim
does too,' Lizzy muttered.

‘Oh, Lizzy, don't
…'

‘Me too!' Stephen jumped in.
‘I'm certain of it! Didn't I tell you, Annie?'

‘You did.
And I'm telling you. Both of you. There's about as much chance of Tim
fancying me as there is of Lizzy seducing Boris Johnson.'

Lizzy frowned. ‘I've always
had a bit of a thing about Bozza, as it goes …' She looked preoccupied.
‘Stephen, this is really interesting. Do you really think Tim's pining
after Annie? Because I've thought that for bloody years.'

Stephen looked at me, to check I
didn't mind this conversation happening. I did mind. ‘Stop it,' I
said. ‘Both of you.'

‘He turned up at her house the
night before last,' Stephen stage-whispered to Lizzy. ‘Late.'

‘
Eh?
' Lizzy and I
said, at the same time.

‘You went to bed before me,
remember? I was downstairs catching up on emails and he knocked. I saw him through
the peephole. He was visibly drunk so I crept away. Does he do that often? Because
it seemed a bit weird to me.'

I was thrown. Why on earth had Tim
turned up at my house? Could Stephen actually be on to something?

Lizzy was pretty grossed out, too.
‘That's just weird,' she said. ‘Doesn't sound like
Tim. God, Annie, maybe you've made him lose his mind.'

‘I'm not having this
conversation. This is Tim we're talking about, not some freak. He often works
late at Homerton Hospital – he was probably just walking past.'

‘Walking past your house on his
way to Bethnal Green? Really?'

After a long pause, during which I had
to admit to myself that it was indeed quite strange, Stephen said, ‘Just
keep an eye on him. We men are pretty
determined when we want something!'

Lizzy shoved a pastry into her mouth.
She didn't like it either.

Dad and Stephen got on like a house on
fire. Dad had lent Stephen a summer waterproof and some walking boots from his own
sizeable collection – which had sat unused for more than a decade – and thought
Stephen looked ‘very fine' in them. I agreed readily. Every now and then
I weakened and tried to kiss him unobtrusively, and every time Dad clocked us and I
felt like a teenager caught groping her spotty boyfriend.

Dad and Stephen walked together for a
good hour while Lizzy and I trailed behind. Froggatt Edge was beautiful today:
rugged and scrubby, the heathery wildness of White Edge looming off to our left and
the Derwent snaking through the valley far below. Only tiny shreds of cloud broke up
the vast blue sheet of sky overhead.