The Day We Disappeared (28 page)

I sat on the wide, flat toilet seat. I
thought distractedly about American toilets. How low and flat they were. How much
more comfortable.

I didn't think much about Stephen.
Something happened when I tried to. A sort of ripping, a fierce tearing that felt
like death.

Another text message arrived in my hand,
with a little self-important buzz.
Have you read my email?
It was
Claudine.

Stephen is a total bastard and you
need to come home
, she texted two seconds later.
Please read my email.
I do not say this often enough, but I love you, my little friend.

I wondered who I should call. I
couldn't call Claudine. I couldn't hear her voice, heavy and laden with
facts that would destroy me.

Lizzy. Lizzy would know what to do.

I stared at Stephen's washbag as
my phone tried to connect us. ‘Flannie?' she mumbled. Her voice sounded
like pillows.

‘Has Claudie called
you?'

More pillow. ‘No. What's
wrong? Is she okay?'

I took a long, shaky breath.
‘She's fine. She emailed me and told me Stephen is cheating on me.
He's internet
dating. She
forwarded me an email of him asking her out, and a screenshot of his profile. He
asked her out this afternoon, while I was having my nails done. In
orange.'

I stared hard at that washbag.

‘What?' Lizzy asked.
‘I …
What?
'

I had a feeling that tears were coming;
and with them would come the end. I pressed my eyes hard on my forearm and took a
long, shuddering breath.

‘Stephen wouldn't do that,
would he? And what do you mean Claudie found him on a dating site?'

‘I don't know what
she's up to. But there's a screengrab of his profile. He's called
himself “LeaderOfPeople”. That was his joke. He used to say to me,
“I am the Leader of the People.” Sometimes he'd call himself God.
Lizzy, I really can't do this. I'll die.'

I heard Lizzy pull herself up in bed.
‘Darling,' she said softly. ‘Darling baby girl, I am so sorry.
Come home. Get on the first available plane.'

I pressed my wrist harder into my eyes.
‘No. I think Claudie's just stirring.'

A pause.

‘Really?'

‘Really. Look how weird
she's been! She's been terrible, Lizzy! She's disliked him from
square one! From the
moment
I mentioned him!'

I could imagine my big sister: eye mask
pushed up on to her forehead like Carrie Bradshaw; soft cotton pyjamas from the
White Company. My beautiful, perfect, damaged sister.

‘Annie,' she said
eventually. ‘I think you should probably come home anyway. Just while you
figure it out. Maybe
Claudie is
stirring, but it's probably best if you find out when you're
–'

‘Pumpkin?'

Stephen was in the bathroom. All six
foot two of him, naked, blinking, confused.

‘Pumpkin? What's going on?
Are you okay?'

‘Airport,' I could hear a
voice in my ear saying. I ended the call.

‘What's going on?'
Stephen yawned.

I looked up at him. The air between us
seemed thick, heavy with my confusion and fear. ‘Claudine emailed me saying
that you were internet dating,' I said.

Not so much as a muscle moved in
Stephen's face. There was no flash of guilt, no tiny shred of worry. He just
looked at me. And then he smiled. ‘Oh dear,' he said. ‘Has she
gone mad?'

I smiled back, a tired little glow of
hope in my stomach. ‘Possibly.'

‘I mean, for starters, Claudine is
internet dating
? I thought she was married! To … What was his name …
Sylvester?'

‘Yes. She is. I think she just
doesn't like you. Which says a lot more about her than it does about you. What
a horrible, horrible thing to make up. I don't know what her agenda is.'
My eyes bulged suddenly with tears. ‘It's not true, is it?
Stephen?'

Stephen slid his hands around my face.
‘No. It is not true. It could never be true and it will never be true. Annie,
I love you. You're my One.' He pulled me into his chest. His heart was
beating faster than usual.

‘She sent me a screengrab of the
profile. And of the messages between this person and her. It was you.'

Stephen stroked
my hair. ‘It wasn't me, Pumpkin,' he said sadly. ‘Of course
it wasn't me. It might be some psycho using my photo … Or it might just be
Claudine. But it certainly wasn't me. Show me.'

I slid my hand into my pocket to get my
phone. My hand was shaking. It was shaking very hard. Stephen half carried me back
into the suite, turned a lamp on and sat me gently on a large cream sofa. Below us
Broadway hummed and growled.

Stephen's arm clamped me firmly in
place so that I couldn't leave his side and for a split second – a tiny, tiny
slice of time – I felt another, deeper, fear that went way beyond the possibility of
losing my beautiful relationship. It was the fear of a little girl crouched in a
field with prairie grass tickling her chin; a little girl waiting for something very
bad to happen.

I loaded Claudine's email photos,
looking blankly at the suite full of our things; small deposits of us all over the
polished wood floor and the elegant furniture. The hotel suddenly seemed a
disgusting extravagance.

‘Here.' I passed the phone
to Stephen. His expression was first astonished, then amused, then astonished again.
And then angry. Viscerally angry. The arm around my shoulder became a vice.

‘I need to call them,'
Stephen said quietly. ‘I need to call this website and find out who the fuck
is doing this to me, and how they let it happen. And then we need to call your
…' he paused, and I felt the anger radiate crazily out of him ‘… your
friend
to ask her what the fuck
she
's doing. How dare
she just email you like this, without any facts?'

I sat still as a
mouse, my heart pounding. I thought, I want to believe you more than I have ever
wanted anything.

Stephen read the whole thing again.
‘Fuck's sake. I do not need this. Not on top of everything else. How
dare they? How dare she?'

‘But, Stephen, she said
–'

‘I couldn't give a
fuck
what she said,' he yelled, grabbing my phone. He threw it
across the room and I yelped, terrified. ‘How dare she? And how dare you,
Annie? After all the shit and paranoia you've thrown at me, how dare you do it
again, here, now? After all I've done for you?'

I cowered. I had to get out.
I had
to get out.

‘I'm sorry,' I
whispered.

‘I've been good about your
fucking friends,' Stephen shouted. His eyes were ice-cold, furious.
‘I've never once told you what I really think, which is that you should
tell them to fucking fuck off, because they make you feel shit and anxious, but, my
God, Annie, I wish I had. Look what she's done! That bitch! And look how
easily you've believed her!'

He stared at me and I felt fissures
crack open all around me, like an ice sculpture finally beginning to melt. My chest
was ballooning with panic.

‘I can't be in a
relationship with someone who doesn't trust me,' Stephen said. His voice
was quiet now, as still as glass.

‘Don't,' I began.
‘Don't say that. I do trust you, I just don't know how to explain
what Claudie –'

‘FUCK CLAUDIE!' Stephen
yelled. ‘FUCK HER!'

He stood up, towering over me, and I
heard myself crying hysterically, begging, pleading.

And then
something was switched off.

‘Oh, God,' he said suddenly,
crouching in front of me. ‘Oh, God, I'm doing exactly what she wants.
Oh, God, Annie, I'm so sorry. Forgive me, my beautiful girl. I've played
right into her hands.' He leaned forward and held me to him.

I couldn't feel the warmth of his
body. I couldn't feel anything other than my screaming nervous system. Stephen
pulled back to look at me, and it was only then that it really hit me.

I don't know you
, I
thought.
I've never known you.

‘Come to bed,' he whispered
into my hair. ‘Come to bed, sweetheart. We'll sort it in the morning.
Please, Annie, come to bed. I will never shout at you again. I promise.'

And so we climbed into the gigantic bed
and I held him until he fell asleep and I fell into a terrible, sick trance.

When I woke up, Stephen was in the
walk-in shower, singing a song I didn't know. Behind the luxurious blackout
curtains bled razor-thin strips of daylight. 06:00, said the clock by the bed.

New York, new year.

I lay still for a few moments, feeling
each different part of my body, as if it might have disappeared.

And then I reached over and picked up
Stephen's phone and opened his emails. I ignored his BlackBerry messages: it
was the personal mails I was after. I scanned through his inbox; nothing. I scanned
down the list of his email folders; nothing. Stephen was still singing.

I clicked on his sent items.

‘Here we
go,' I said to myself in a strange voice. ‘Here they are.' Because
there they were. Responses to messages from the dating site, saying,
‘Sarah_Smiles has sent you a message'; ‘BrixtonGirl30';
‘HaleyTheSailorGirl'. Messages to girls called Roisin, Becky, Kerri.

I clicked on a recent reply he'd
sent to Arty_Girly. What a curious moniker for a girl in her thirties. Only she
wasn't. Arty_Girly looked like she couldn't be much older than twenty.
Her picture appeared automatically in every email response, a pouty, silly,
self-conscious girl, barely out of her teens, all vintage and net and samey
hairstyle. All
Hackney.

I looked at Arty_Girly with a dreadful
coldness and heard the shower stop. I thought, This girl is very familiar. And then
I thought, Oh, it's Petra. Petra is not Stephen's brother's
daughter. Petra is a girl from the internet whom he's fucking.

Stephen's replies to Arty_Girly
via the dating website became personal emails with a girl called Petra Navarro in
mid-June. Around the time we were newly ‘in love'. I picked one from
mid-July.

My psycho ex Annie is still
stalking me. For your safety I think we should carry on meeting away from
Hackney, just for now, although if you bump into her I think it'd be best
that you continue to pretend you're my niece. You saw what she was like at
that restaurant! I think about you all the time. I came again and again last
night, thinking about what we did in Berlin. You are so fucking hot, Petra,
I'm crazy about you. Let's meet up on Thursday night. Your humble
sex slave, Stephen xxxxxxxx

‘Good morning, Pumpkin,'
Stephen said, walking into the room. He was naked, apart from a fluffy white towel
round his neck. His phone was warm
beside my thigh. ‘Did you sleep okay?' He came over and kissed me long
and lovingly on the mouth.

I made a little sound.

Stephen sat in front of me on the bed.
‘Sure?'

I nodded. I needed to think, fast, yet I
couldn't think at all.

That was, until his phone, nestling
close to my thigh, started ringing. Stephen looked round, then down, and then at me.
‘Is that my phone?' he asked softly.

I nodded, and saw something tiny change
in his eyes.

Stephen reached under the duvet and took
it, staring at me with a dangerous curiosity. ‘You were snooping on me?
Checking Claudine's bullshit story out?'

I shook my head. My vision had
tunnelled.

‘I emailed the dating
website,' he said coldly. ‘And they've written back to me already
saying that I
do
appear to have had my identity stolen. The card linked to
this account apparently belongs to someone else, but they can't tell me who.
They're looking into it. In fact, they've passed it on to the
police.'

He didn't break eye contact with
me. ‘If you pass me my BlackBerry I'll show you the email they sent me
half an hour ago.'

Help. Help me. I have to get out.

‘This has been the worst
twenty-four hours of my life,' Stephen said. ‘But finding out that you
don't trust me is the worst part of it.'

I was frozen.

‘Don't do this to me,'
Stephen said. ‘Please don't let some bitch do this to us, Annie. I love
you.'

A vein bulged
above his eye.

‘But Claudine showed me your
profile. It was –'

‘Will you fucking
shut up
about Claudine?' he yelled, right into my face.

I gasped and flattened myself against
the pillow.