Then You Were Gone (22 page)

‘A trafficked prostitute?’ Simone attempted a light-hearted tone, but her words came out as black as she felt them to be. Because really she knew, and probably Jazzy knew too, the reason they had not yet tried to look for this young girl whose birth certificate had been in Mack’s flat was because they had never thought that there was a girl out there, born in London, whose name was Jessica Novak and who was busy living her own normal, happy life. But then it was the thought of this normal, happy life that gave Simone pause. ‘Are you sure this is her though? The girl in the birth certificate was only seventeen. She,’ she indicated the mother-to-be on the screen, ‘looks a bit older than that, wouldn’t you say? And, you know, having a baby? At that age?’

Jazzy shrugged. ‘Plenty of people do it at that age. And younger.’

‘I know,’ Simone sighed, and she did know. ‘But she doesn’t look like a kid.’ She nodded towards Ayanna, arms curled up under her like a baby, stick-thin legs trailing behind her to the floor, her shapeless clothes swamping her. ‘That’s what I think a seventeen-year-old looks like. This girl’s all tits and eyebrows and scarily blue eyes.’ Christ, those eyes, Simone thought. Those glacial, crystal eyes. They were something.

‘That’s what they’re like these days,’ Jazzy said. ‘The number of pictures that get taken of them every single day, they need to be close-up ready, don’t they?’

‘Oh yeah, sorry Jazz, I forgot what an expert you are on young girls now.’

‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’ he hissed, quietly so as not to wake Ayanna.

‘Nothing,’ she said sweetly, ‘I was just being sarcastic. Sorry.’ Then she sighed and reached out a hand to him. ‘No, sorry, Jazz. I didn’t mean anything. I’m just knackered, and I’m just, ah,’ she rubbed her eyes. ‘I’m pissed off with Mack. I’m so, so pissed off with him. I mean until now I thought it was just me he was mucking about, but all this stuff about Rory’s nursery, and Ayanna’s college and some creep wrecking your front door and leaving old newspapers in your house. What’s he doing to us? What could possibly matter to him so much that he would do this to us?’

Jazzy shook his head. ‘I really don’t know. I know now what people mean when they say they haven’t got a clue. But she,’ he tapped the screen, ‘is our only clue. And it must be her, she must be the same Jessica Novak from Mack’s flat. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise, surely?

Simone closed her eyes. She had never felt so tired. She wished, with that sudden primal yearning for home that sometimes hit her, that she had never left Louise’s house that morning. She wished she was still there, helping Lou grill fish fingers for the kids, then they would crack open their first beer of the evening and watch
Pointless
and they would laugh about inconsequential stuff then she would go to bed and sleep, properly sleep, in the peace and quiet, surrounded by love. She forced her eyes open again. ‘Right then. We need to find her. Where will she be?’

Deptford College was not how Simone had imagined it, or at least its Health and Social Care campus, where Jessica Novak was a student, wasn’t. It wasn’t as though Simone had expected it to be Trinity College, Cambridge or anything but she had thought there might be a bit of red-brick, perhaps it would be a municipal-style Victorian building with maybe a strip of lawn and some rose bushes separating it from the main drag. Instead it was like a light industrial unit down a side street in a residential area. On the bus on the way there that morning the three of them had decided that Ayanna would be the scouting party and she strode through the main entrance with a trickle of other students. It was mid-morning, too late for them to be arriving for the first lecture of the day, too early for anyone who did not really need to be there to be hanging around. They probably should have waited until later in the day, Simone reflected, when there would have been more people around to provide cover, but once Ayanna was awake and fully apprised of the situation as it stood, all three of them had been desperate to get out of Jazzy’s house.

She did not know if it was the lack of sleep or the rollercoaster of adrenaline highs and lows of the last few days, or just the fact of her recent conversation with Louise forcing her to finally see sense, but something made her blurt into the companionable silence that she and Jazzy sat in as they waited for Ayanna to wake. ‘I love Mack too, you know. I know I told you he said he loved me, but I never told you that. That I love him too.’

He looked at her, his eyes hooded with tiredness, but the smile on his face was full and genuine. ‘I know. Course I know. It was obvious from way you told me what he’d said to you. I’m so glad.’

It was the best thing he could ever have said and she had to close her eyes for a second to stop herself from crying. For so long, she could now see, she had assumed that Jazzy would be the only one she could ever really let in, that he was the only man she had ever met who she could really trust, who she knew beyond a doubt would never hurt her, was indeed incapable of hurting her. And the fact that he did not want her, despite the chances she had offered him over the years, despite the fact that it was obvious to every person who knew them both that he could have had her if he wanted her, that meant that there was no other man left who she could feel safe with.

She and Jazzy had lived together before they even met; they had both arrived at a terraced house in Exeter one September Saturday and found the Yale-locked bedrooms assigned to them by the university housing office, and then they had both gone separately down to the communal kitchen where they had started talking and not stopped for four hours. They were lifelong friends by the end of the first cup of tea and they both knew it. Simone, still fragile and terrified by the harm that Jed had done, had loved him immediately, something she had just as quickly dismissed as rebound freshers’ week madness. But it had lasted, even as their friendship grew deeper; it had got worse if anything. And yet Jazzy had never shown any sign of acknowledging or even noticing her desire for him. She was never forward with men, always waiting for them to make the first move, but she was sure she had been obvious enough that even someone as clueless about women as Jazzy would eventually notice that an opportunity beckoned.

Throughout their university years she had had far more sexual partners than Jazzy had – in fact she thought he had only had two, both girls that he had met through Simone and who she then had to carry on being nice to despite wishing she could be sick on them. Neither of them had graduated to becoming Jazzy’s girlfriend. And as her own closeness to Jazzy continued unconsummated beyond university and into true adulthood, she slowly began to understand, at least on an intellectual level, that it was never going to happen for them. As they grew closer, as the years went by and they became permanent fixtures in each other’s lives, temptation became easy to resist and the pain lessened. It was so obviously unthinkable to Jazzy that he and Simone should share anything more physical than a head on a shoulder, a linked arm on a cold evening’s walk home from the pub, that the idea soon moved into the realm of unrealisable fantasy for her too. It was a crush, she supposed, if such a small, teenage word could ever be sufficient to describe such life-consuming heartbreak stretching over years of her life, and even the tightest crushes must eventually loosen their grip. In fairness to Jazzy, he had tried his hardest to ensure that he never gave her false hope, but sometimes, like now, she wondered whether he had done just that simply by keeping her in his life.

And then he had met Petra, and from the first time he had introduced the two of them Simone had known that it was all over.

‘I still love you too though, you know,’ she said to Jazzy, half-asleep but with her heart racing. She tried to make it sound as if she was joking.

‘Course you do, mate,’ Jazzy said lazily, his eyes half-closed. ‘You’re only human after all.’ He was trying to sound as if he was joking too. ‘I love you too.’ She could tell he wasn’t joking any more.

‘So why didn’t you marry me then? I gave you plenty of chances.’ Her tone was still light, but they both knew that what she said was true.

Jazzy sat up straighter and opened his eyes properly. ‘I’m not man enough for you, Simone,’ he said, and she rolled her eyes.

‘You got that right, bro.’

‘Also,’ he flopped back in his seat, ‘can you really see it? You and me? I mean look at me. I’m a useless layabout. I need someone like Petra, someone who does every last little frigging thing for me, from earning the money to doing the online Waitrose shop.’

‘That’s not true. You do all the housework, you look after Rory.’

‘I know, but Petra ultimately takes responsibility for everything. She’s in charge – of me, of Rory, of everything. You would never have looked after me like that, would you?’

‘Too fucking right I wouldn’t. Jesus.’

‘Exactly,’ Jazzy said, his eyes still closed, as though that proved everything. ‘And I’m not what you want really, am I?’

Yes you are, you arrogant prick
, Simone thought.
Don’t tell me what I do and don’t want
.

‘I mean,’ Jazzy went on, ‘you’re a lot better looking than me – a LOT. And I’m not being a smarmy creep, that’s the truth.’ It was true, Simone had to acknowledge. It was one of the things that had stung most about Jazzy’s implicit rejection of her over the years. She knew she was good looking; she had always known it. Any good looking people who tell you they don’t know it are liars, Simone had always assumed. So therefore, by elimination, it must be her personality that was being rejected. ‘You see,’ he shifted on the sofa, getting comfortable. It was as though he was telling the two of them a bedtime story, only it was first thing in the morning and they were both over thirty years old. ‘You see, you would have got bored of me pretty quickly.’

‘Yeah, probably. You are quite boring.’

‘Whatevs. Anyway, I know you’re joking, but…’

‘I’m not joking.’

‘I
know
you’re joking, but you would have ditched me fairly soon. Someone good looking and charming with a massive cock would have come along and turned your head. Someone like Mack.’ He said the name with a dull undertone of dislike and Simone wondered with a shudder of dread if any of them could ever see each other the same way after this. There was a pause and she wondered if Jazzy had fallen asleep, but then he half-opened one eye. ‘The thing is,’ he said without looking in her direction, ‘if I was going to have you, I would have wanted you forever. And I knew that was never going to be how it turned out. And this way, how we are now’ he gestured towards her, still without meeting her eye, ‘this way it does get to be forever. And I think I’d rather have it that way, wouldn’t you?’

She closed her eyes too, so that he wouldn’t see the tears. ‘I would,’ she said truthfully, and then they both slept.

Glad as she was to have cleared the air of the unspoken words of over a decade, Simone still felt anxious not to allow the smallest sense of awkwardness to bed in between her and Jazzy. Fortunately Ayanna had woken up shortly after they had lapsed back into silence and between bringing her up to date on what little Simone had discovered on her odyssey and getting them all fed and showered there had been no time for awkwardness.

And now here they were, sending Ayanna into the college to pose as a friend of Jessica’s wanting to pass on an urgent message. Simone had naively assumed there would be a café or shop where she and Jazzy could loiter for a few minutes until they got word from Ayanna as to whether she had found Jessica, but as it was they were left loitering like a particularly inept pair of bailiffs on the pavement outside the college door. Their discomfort did not last long however. Within five minutes Ayanna was back outside again, her face a picture of confused panic.

‘Well?’ Jazzy and Simone chorused.

Ayanna shook her head. ‘She’s not there.’

‘They told you that?’ Simone asked.

‘Yeah,’

‘So did they tell you when she will be in?’

‘No, they wouldn’t tell me shit.’ Ayanna took a deep breath. ‘I went up the stairs and followed a sign that said “Course Administrators” and went into this little office. I just asked the first woman I saw, I thought there’s no sense pissing about, I’m just going to come straight out with it.’ She leant forward and put her hands on her knees, taking deep, puffing breaths as though she had been running.

It occurred to Simone that perhaps Ayanna had run out of the building, and she felt an irrational surge of panic, looking around her almost expecting to see armed security guards slowly surrounding them. Reminding herself that they had all had several nasty scares recently and that sleep deprivation is hardly known for being beneficial for paranoia, she said, ‘OK. So what did they say?’

‘I said I was Jessica’s friend, that she’d asked her teacher if it was OK for me to come and sit in on one of her classes because I want to come to this college next term.’

Simone nodded. It was the half-arsed cover story they had all agreed on the way here.

‘But as soon as I said Jessica’s name, almost before I’d finished talking, the woman stood up and came towards me, almost like she was trying to block me from coming any further into the room. And she interrupted me before I could give her the rest of the spiel, she just said, “You can’t see Jessica.” And I asked why not, and she said, “She’s not here, and even if she was I wouldn’t be able to let you see her,” and then she kind of bit her lip and went a bit red, like she thought she shouldn’t really have said that but it was too late to take it back. I mean, don’t you think that’s a bit weird?’

Simone glanced at Jazzy who shrugged and shook his head. Was it weird? She did not know. The white noise of sleep deprivation and too much coffee was making it impossible to hear her own thoughts, if indeed she still had any. ‘Well maybe not,’ she said, not sure if she really believed what she was saying. ‘You know what it’s like with data protection and stuff now; I’m sure they’re not allowed to just let anyone who walks into the office with some bullshit story have free access to the whole college.’