The Day We Disappeared (31 page)

I forced myself to finish my pastry. It
would all be okay. I had my plan. Dad would hopefully be none the wiser and
I'd be safe.

I turned back to my notebook.

One of the blogs I'd read had been
written by a woman whose partner had combed the internet for every tiny scrap of
information he could possibly find about her.
Google yourself
, she'd
written.
You might be surprised at what you find.

The first thing that had come up under
my name, aside from my massage website, was the blog I'd written for a short
time a couple of years ago when I was miserable about my crappy work situation. It
had been Tim's suggestion: a journal of things I loved to keep me tapped into
positivity. When I started to re-read the posts I'd realized that all of them
–
every bloody one –
had been raided by Stephen.

There was the blog about flat whites.
Stephen had been all over that! The day I met him he had been drinking a double
espresso. And the morning he called to offer me a job, I'd heard him order –
once again – a double espresso. But by the time I started work at FlintSpark it was
all flat whites. And Australian coffee. And specialist milk steaming. He just
couldn't believe that we shared the same geeky love of Antipodean coffee!

And I was too
stupid
to
notice!

Then there was the story of Stephen
having gone to Tresaith as a child for beach holidays. Eating caramel waffles from
the post office. That had been
my
story, a blog of
warm reminiscence I'd written one particularly
dark evening. As if a posh bloke from West Sussex would have gone to a tiny caravan
park in a secret corner of Wales for his holidays! For God's sake!

That was assuming Stephen was even from
West Sussex.

Another day I'd done a sweet
little blog about how desperately I'd longed for a boyfriend when I was a
teenager. How I dreamed of a man who'd send me flowers and Milk Tray and mix
tapes. Stephen had repeated that verbatim the day I started at FlintSpark! And the
piece I'd written about the Counter at Hackney Wick, how Tim and I loved to go
there for breakfast. Who had we found wandering the towpath outside?

Jesus.

Then had come the sadder, even more
repugnant discovery that Stephen had found and plundered my dad's blog too.
He'd even befriended him on Facebook, and sweet, lovely Dad had just accepted
the request. It made me blind with rage to think of Stephen infiltrating and
infecting my father, just at the time that Dad had turned a corner and started
trying to engage with the world again.

All that stuff Stephen had known,
he'd stolen from Dad's Facebook page and blog: Dad's love of Rioja
wine and Borges the writer; Lizzy's name, Le Cloob's name; my
announcement, aged twenty-one, that I was going gluten-,sugar- and dairy-free (and
had been hopeless at sticking to ever since). It was all there. Every time Stephen
had dropped one of those little nuggets of information into the conversation,
he'd convinced me I'd told him myself.

The dropped phone calls whenever
I'd visited Dad, too. Of course they weren't Dad's new girlfriend.
What
sort of middle-aged woman would put
the phone down just because her boyfriend's grown-up daughter happened to
answer the phone? No, of course it had been Stephen. The predator, just checking in
on his prey. Taking a little risk, having some fun.

The worst thing about all of these risks
that Stephen had taken, however, was that they had all paid off. I'd heard
only the things I'd wanted to hear and interpreted everything the way
I'd wanted to. It was funny how your mind could do that. Hi, Annie,
here's sign after sign that your man is crazy, but because you like him
I'll make every sign invisible. How's that, eh?

The little girl and her brother left the
café with their mother and the girl turned to wave at me again. Don't leave
me, I thought. Don't go.

They went.

I pushed my coffee to one side. Any more
stimulation and I'd take off through the roof, lost for ever in the hot smog
of Abu Dhabi city.

Poor, deluded me. I'd thought
I'd been in love: deep, cartwheeling love; the kind of love I'd barely
allowed myself to dream of. But it turned out that I was not.
Dear Annie, We
regret to inform you that, due to unforeseen circumstances, you are not in fact
in love. As you will gather from the enclosed literature, you are instead in a
‘psychopathic bond'.

How much longer would it have gone on, I
wondered, if Claudine hadn't found him out? How much longer until he started
abusing me openly, rather than behind my back? And how could someone like me, who
was so endemically terrified of men, have let it happen?

‘Stop it,' I said quietly to
myself. It had happened
because Stephen
had decided to go after me, and that was that. Nobody, not even a highly anxious and
paranoid woman like me, would have questioned someone as humble, as
self-deprecating, as all-round lovely as the Stephen Flint laid out in front of me.
And look at Claudine! Look how she had been fooled by Sylvester!

Poor Claudine. After we'd found
Stephen in my back garden, and I'd had a panic attack, and Tim had called the
police, and I'd had to answer endless questions and eventually begged to be
allowed to go home, and pleaded with Tim to prescribe something to calm me down,
we'd all convened at Lizzy's house. I'd been so horrified by
everything that had happened that I'd implored Le Cloob not to make me talk
about it. Instead I'd spent most of the evening watching Tim and Lizzy, and
asking Claudine what in God's name was going on with her marriage.

The answer had been shocking.

‘I 'ate Sylvester,'
Claudine had said in a tiny voice. ‘He is a fat, lazy slob and 'e treats
me like his slave. I 'ave earned all the money in that 'ouse for the
last five years. He is involved in some stupid sex cult, which pretends to be some
sort of therapeutic community. They make out that it is all about
“awakening” and “dealing with trauma” and …' her slim,
manicured hand was shaking ‘… and yet it is nothing more than a group of
unwell people fucking each other and using words like “spiritual” to
excuse themselves. Sylvester defends it to the 'ilt. He says I do not
understand. He says terrible things to me, frequently. 'E would never
'it me but he 'as abused me for years. I am deeply miserable.'

She had clasped her hands until her
knuckles were sad
white points.
‘And I am a stupid, proud woman, as you know, so rather than talk to my
friends, I sign myself up for some dating.'

Lizzy had smiled sympathetically.
‘That sounds like my kind of solution,' she said. And I'd watched
Tim flinch.

Stephen, she told me, had asked her out
on an internet site a few days before I had met him. She had instantly disliked his
profile. ‘He called himself LeaderOfPeople,' she said disparagingly.
‘I mean, come
on
.'

He was still online after he and I had
started going out, so she had emailed him, making clear she was a friend of mine,
and asking what the hell he was doing. He had replied a few days later to say that
he'd thought he'd cancelled the account and hadn't logged on in
weeks. His account had been deleted the same day so she had given him the benefit of
the doubt. But recently she had joined another site, after Sylvester had gone off
for one of his sex ‘retreats', and, not recognizing her from her photo –
she had again tried to keep her identity fairly hidden – Stephen had emailed her
once more asking her out.

Stephen had actually been pestering
Claudine for a date on New Year's Eve, while dealing with all of the shit at
his New York office.

It was mindblowing. ‘We were both
taken in,' she had said softly. ‘And this does not make us stupid women.
Well, it makes me a stupid woman, because I 'ave not yet left my
'usband. But I will. I need time.'

Claudine was not stupid. Neither was
I.

I scanned the terminal again, wondering
how much longer I had. People continued to swarm past, pulling trolley bags,
dragging children, checking phones, scanning
departure boards. The coffee shop was playing Paul
Weller now. My hands had stopped shaking; they looked shrunken and old.

I didn't care.

I thought tiredly about the number of
gaps in my understanding of what had happened, the mysteries I hadn't yet
solved. There were still several things that could not be explained by Stephen
Googling me, hacking my emails or reading my texts. I wondered how I would cope when
I worked out what he'd done and I wondered, most of all, why. Why me? Why had
he decided to make me a victim?

Then, as I scanned yet again across the
terminal below me, my hat jammed down over my eyes, I saw him. He, too, was
scanning, quietly and unobtrusively, from the outskirts. Tall, tanned, eyes like
headlights. Ice-blue. Ice-cold. I turned in one movement, sliding out of sight
before those eyes swivelled upwards towards the balcony.

I got my ticket out of my wallet, the
other ticket I'd bought with cash at Heathrow earlier. No emails attached to
this one. No paper trail. No possibility of Stephen finding me.

Because right now he fully expected me
to be here, waiting nervously for my connection to Thailand. It wouldn't occur
to him that – for the first time – I was one step ahead. He'd wait here for
me, and if he couldn't see me anywhere he'd simply board the connection
to Bangkok and wait for me there. It was a plan of chilling genius.

But mine was even better.

‘Because I won't be
there,' I said to myself. ‘I'll be thousands of miles away from
Bangkok. I'll be somewhere Stephen will never, ever think to look.'

With a pleasant
fuzzy calm I walked on with my old woven little handbag, the only possession
I'd taken, and began to smile. Stephen had turned up here, proving that he had
hacked my email, proving that he was –
at very best
– deeply unstable. He
had proved that I was not going mad, that I had every reason to run.

I had doubted myself again and again
since meeting Stephen. Questioned my sanity, agreed to see a therapist, to dull my
brain with medication.

Enough. I would never again allow anyone
to tell me I was mad.

I turned off my phone and threw it into
the bin.

A girl lies awake, watching night slowly
leach into morning. Above her the ceiling still seems grey and pitted, darkening to
black at the edges.

As if she has been struck, she rolls
suddenly on to her side, clutching the striped quilt to her with knuckles whitened
by happiness. She breathes in and out, slowly and steadily, marvelling at her
body's ability to regulate itself when it feels like it's been injected
with sunlight, music, the purest oxygen. She watches the rise and fall of the
man's chest beside her and feels seismic joy shifting in her chest.

She wants more than anything to lean in
and kiss him, hold him, watch him wake, but she won't. She wants him to rest.
She worries that what finally happened last night might have put a strain on his
still-fragile bones, even though they were the gentlest, sweetest few hours of her
life.

So she lets him sleep, planting the
softest kiss on the pillow near to where his head lies.

She drops her feet cautiously to the
floor, perhaps fearing that what is inside her might rush out into the floorboards
and disappear, like earthed electricity, into the ground. It does not. It has been a
week since they first kissed and the feelings have as yet made no attempt to escape.
She is beginning to think that they might actually
stay, and with this little hope comes an entirely
different future: one of which she should never have dreamed.

She has her fears, of course, some of
which grip her with an iron fist, but now she knows what it feels like to sleep in
his arms she is certain that there is a solution to them all.

A sleepy arm slides out from under the
duvet – like a paw – and hooks around her waist, just as she prepares to rise. A
muffled sound comes from behind her and smiling, laughing, she folds back down
towards its source. There is life! ‘You're not allowed to go anywhere
without kissing me,' says the muffled voice. He's like a sleepy bear;
her heart is bursting. ‘It's a new rule. Kissing and cuddling before you
start work, even if I'm asleep.'

She curls around him, kissing the side
of his head, his ear, his hair, until a face slides into view. It may be barely
awake but it is lit up with a smile that melts her bones.

‘Hello,' says the face, and
slides across the pillow to kiss her. ‘You're my favourite,' he
mumbles, running his nose through her hair. ‘My favourite of all
things.'

‘Hello, Bear.' She kisses
the bear's paws all over.

And she thinks, I love you.

She dresses fast and effortlessly and
within minutes is in cold air that carries the sharp promise of rain. The light is
thick purple and grey; the day is drawing near.

She jumps in fright as a car pulls into
the driveway but manages to hold steady when she sees that it's just the
postman's van. She'll have to talk to Mark. To her bear. Today. She
can't leave it any longer. He has noticed how jumpy she is; how she watches
the driveway whenever she's outside.

She heads off to
the postbox and her stomach twists uneasily as she tries to imagine what he might
say.

The hedgerow is heavy with sloes,
rosehips, bryony vine. ‘It'll be okay,' she tells herself, as
swallows fly in a silent clump overhead. ‘It'll be okay.'

She reaches into the postbox and
imagines the people who will have written to her lover today. Computers reporting
his financial affairs. A man hoping for a signature on his wife's birthday
card. A farrier needing to be paid.

Her hands hold the small bundle of
letters for maybe twenty seconds before she glances down and sees what is on the
top. And then she stops, and the cameras pull sharply away from her: a girl standing
alone in a silent corner of Somerset at seven in the morning. The other letters have
fallen lightly around her; one rests loyally against her ankle.

The girl's face is white as she
stares down at the envelope in her hand. She feels the universe cracking around her.
I was so happy, she thinks, as she stares at the handwriting she has seen in her
dreams a hundred times over. I was so happy.

‘Stephen,' I said into the
restless morning. ‘Stephen found me.' And at that moment the world, in
which
everything had started to seem
possible, slammed shut like a guillotine.

I sat down in the wet grass. I stared at
the envelope with blood pounding in my ears. Stephen Flint had found me. It had
taken him a while – nearly ten months – but he'd got there eventually.

It was the documentary, of course.
Why didn't you go?
I whispered hopelessly to myself.
Why
didn't you leave when you still could?

Of course he'd written to me. How
much more satisfying this would be, I thought, picturing myself crumpled on the
ground by the postbox, my heart pounding and my body shaking like a thin autumn
leaf. How much more satisfying than the obvious drama of his sudden arrival in the
yard, in a sleek, anonymous car, me screaming and the horses skittering around.

Almost as soon as I'd sat down I
sprang back up. He's been here, I realized. He'll have driven down and
looked around, so he can picture me right here, having this moment. His prey.

I started to walk along the hedge back
to the farm on legs that didn't really work. Somewhere near me a solitary wood
pigeon sighed. Oo-oooo, oo-oo-oo, it said. I wondered if Stephen was actually
watching me now.

I bent double, suddenly, and threw up
into the grass under the hedge, clutching wildly at the twisted branches for support
but finding only the thorns of a blackberry bush.

It took me what seemed like a lifetime
to get to my safe place. But as I approached it, I backed away. Blood from my
fingertips had smudged all over the envelope and my
breathing was ragged. I couldn't inflict this on
Stumpy.

I doubled back to the other stable
block, which was still empty, and crouched in what was once Madge's
stable.

Annie. Dearest little Annie, who stood by and watched while her friend
reported me to the police.

So here you are, my sweet lover. My girl. Here you are, hiding out on a farm
like some rural rat in a shed. An interesting choice, Pumpkin. What took you
down there? Was it the idea of another wealthy man you could fleece? Another
unsuspecting bloke trying to make an honest living from whom you could leech
money and affection and maybe free rent?

Oh, Annie. I believed you. I believed you were a genuine girl who loved me
for who I was, rather than what I had. I honestly thought you didn't
care less about my money or my position. But of course you did. They always
do! You wanted somewhere to live, someone to protect you, someone to fund
your holidays, someone to buy you expensive dinners. You wanted someone to
make your broken life feel easy.

You rinsed me, Annie, and then you ran off, fuelled by some ridiculous
accusation cooked up by a mentally unstable friend who'd found out her
husband was a bloody
sex cult leader
and
wanted to punish all men. It blows my mind that you didn't allow me to
tell you what really happened. To show you how amateurishly and spitefully
your ‘friend' had set me up. Instead you just assumed the worst
and – zoom! Gone!

In spite of everything, I never gave up. I couldn't stop loving you,
even if you could me. And so when I saw you on a late-night repeat of some
television programme, Annie, I cried. I sat there and cried, and thought,
That's my girl. How moved I was by your concern for a complete
stranger injuring himself at Badminton.
And then how surprised I was when I called the
idiotic woman at this ‘stranger's' eventing yard only to
discover that the girl who'd been pictured running screaming towards
Mark Waverley was ‘his lovely Irish groom, Kate'. She told me
she had high hopes for you and Mark. Said you laughed him back to good
health. How touching! How very nice!

You owe me, Annabel. You owe me big-time. You walked out on your contract
mid-term and thus you owe me just shy of twenty thousand pounds to buy
yourself out for the rest of the year. You owe me for all the breaks we went
on and you owe me for the many, many things I bought you while you
shamelessly used me. You owe me rent and dinners and most of all you owe me
for the grief I suffered at your sudden disappearance.

Whatever your friends may have led you to think, though, I'm a decent
bloke. I know you don't have that kind of money so I'm willing
to make a trade. In spite of all of the awful things you've done to me
– the police, the insulting lack of trust, the willingness to just walk out
of my life without any thought for me and my feelings, not to mention the
vast amount of money you owe me – I'm willing to take you back.
Because underneath it all, I'm just a normal guy who loves you. If you
come back, move back in, I will forgive it all.

Remember, Annie. You owe me.

I'll pop down to chat this through with you, very soon.

Your Stephen xxxx

I scrunched the letter up and sat
perfectly still on my heels. The stable was still. It smelt of Jeyes Fluid; Joe and
I had scrubbed it down only yesterday. Halfway through the job Mark had texted me
and told me to meet him in the hay barn in the top field. I'd run there with
my heart pounding
happily, thinking,
Jilly Cooper would totally have written a scene like this. Except we hadn't
had rampant sex and nobody had invited us to an orgy by a pool. There had been no
damp bushes or kohled eyes or women emptying bottles of Je Reviens all over
themselves.

It had really been very tame, me and
Mark just lying in a little hay cave, kissing and holding hands and laughing
guiltily about our messed-up childhoods. I'd told him about Mum dying, and it
had been the easiest thing. Mark had not tried to stop me crying, or to fix me.
Neither had he pretended that his own mother had died.

I was certain Stephen had made up his
mother's death. It was quite a common tool in the psychopath's
infidelity repertoire, apparently: ‘My family are too raw to meet you right
now,' they told their girlfriends. ‘Another time …' While they ran
off to have sex with their other victims.

I'd often wondered who
Stephen's grieving father really was. Petra? Someone else? And that
conversation on Christmas Day when he'd told me he was walking down the street
in his father's supposedly chocolate-box village and seen a dog crapping on
the pavement. Where had he actually been? Whose Christmas had he actually been
sharing?

A gust of wind blew past the stables,
carrying the smell of damp turf and wet heather from the moor. I had to get out of
there. He could be literally minutes away.

I ran inside, managing to dodge Joe who
was already out filling water buckets. I locked myself into my room and started
throwing things into my wheelie case, pausing every few seconds to check out of the
window. My phone beeped suddenly with an incoming message and I gasped with
shock.

Morning, you
very nice thing
, said the text. Mark.
No sign of you in Stumpy's
stable or the yard. I would pay good money for another cuddle. Please come out
of hiding. Mum just asked me why I'm smiling so much. xx

I began to cry. I was right back where
I'd started: a fugitive in my own life, looking over my shoulder, petrified by
the sound of a creaking floorboard. Only now I had the guilt of abandoning my family
and the heartache of losing Mark. Mark, my lovely warm bear, with the gentle paws
and the big kind eyes and the slow, sweet smile.

‘Why?' I asked the empty
room. ‘Why must my life be like this?'

The room shrugged.
That's your
lot
, it said.
You couldn't hide for ever.

That was the worst part, I thought,
tipping the contents of my dressing table into a carrier bag. I was back to being
Annie Mulholland again, couldn't pretend to be Kate Brady for a moment
longer.

But I didn't
want
to be
Annie Mulholland! I hated being her! I wanted to carry on being Kate Brady!
There'd been laughter in my time being Kate! Fun! Joy! Why was it that,
wherever I hid, Annabel bloody Mulholland – with her bereavement and her breakdown
and her small, frightened life –
always
found me?

I stuffed the contents of my little
chest of drawers into my wheelie case, holey socks, holey gloves, holey jumpers, and
with that my life was packed once again.