Say You're sorry - Страница 3

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Mandy looks at me accusingly now, as though I’m personally responsible for her children being taken into care. For the next fifty minutes we discuss her history and I listen to her excuses. We agree to meet next week and I write up my notes.

It’s just after three. Charlie’s train arrives in half an hour and I’m going to meet her at the station. I don’t know what we’ll do in Oxford on the weekend. I’m due to talk at a mental health symposium, although I can’t imagine anyone showing up, given the weather, but the tickets have been sent (first class) and they’ve booked me into a nice hotel.

Packing my briefcase, I take my overnight bag from the cupboard and lock up the office. Bronwyn has already gone, leaving a hint of her perfume and a lump of chewing gum stuck to her mug.

At Paddington Station I look for Charlie among crowds of passengers spilling from the carriages of the First Great Western service. She’s among the last off the train. She’s talking to a boy who is pushing a mountain bike with all the nonchalance of a Ferrari driver. He’s wearing a duffel coat and is cultivating sideburns.

The boy rides away. Charlie restores a set of white earbuds to her ears. She’s wearing jeans, a baggy sweater and an overcoat left over from the German Luftwaffe.

She offers me each cheek to kiss and then leans into a hug.

“Who was that?”

“Just a guy.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“On the train.”

“What was his name?”

She stops me. “Is this going to be twenty questions, Dad, because I didn’t take notes. Was I supposed to take notes? You should have warned me. I could have written you a full report.”

The sarcasm she inherited from her mother, or maybe they teach it at that private school that costs me so much money.

“I was just making conversation.”

Charlie shrugs. “His name is Christian, he’s eighteen, he comes from Bristol and he’s going to be a doctor-a pediatrician to be exact-and he thinks he might work in the Third World for a while, but he’s not my type.”

“You have a type?”

“Yep.”

“May I ask what your type is?”

She sighs, weary of explaining things. “No girl my age should ever date a boy her parents would approve of.”

“Is that a rule?”

“Yep.”

I take her bag and check the departures board. Our train to Oxford leaves in forty minutes.

“So is there any news I should know about? Any latest developments?”

“Nope.”

“How’s school?”

“Good.”

“Emma?”

“She’s fine.”

I’m interrogating her again. Charlie isn’t a talker. Her baseline demeanor is too-cool-to-care.

We buy sandwiches in plastic triangles and soft drinks in plastic bottles. Charlie puts her headphones back in her ears so I can hear the fuzzy thunga-thunga-twang as we board the train and sit opposite each other.

She has dyed her hair since I saw her last and has an annoying fringe that falls over her eyes. I worry about her. She frowns too often. For some reason she seems compelled to figure out life too early, long before she has the equipment.

The train leaves on time and we pass out of London, the wheels playing a jazz percussion beneath my feet. Houses give way to fields-a landscape frozen into still life, where the only signs of life are smudges of smoke rising from chimneys or the headlights of cars waiting at crossings.

A couple are kissing in the seats across the aisle, locked together. Her leg is pressed between his thighs.

“That’s disgusting,” says Charlie.

“They’re just kissing.”

“I can hear suction.”

“It’s a public place.”

“They should get a room.”

I glance at the couple again and feel a Pavlovian twinge of arousal or nostalgia. The girl is young and pretty. She reminds me of Julianne at the same age. Being in love. Belonging to someone.

Just outside of Oxford, the train slows and stops. The wheels creak forward periodically and then shudder to a standstill. Charlie presses her hand against the carriage window and watches a long line of men move across a snowy field, bent at the waist, as though pulling invisible plows.

“Have they lost something?”

“I don’t know.”

The train nudges forward again. Through the sleet-streaked window I see a police car bogged axle deep in snow on a farm track. A muddy Land Rover is parked on the nearby embankment. A circle of men, figures in white, are erecting a canvas tent at the edge of a lake. Spreading a domed arch over the spars, they fight against the wind, which makes the canvas flap and snap until pegs are driven into the frozen earth and ropes are pulled tight.

As the train edges past, I see what they’re trying to shield. At first it looks like cast-off clothing or a dead animal, but then I recognize the human shape: a body, trapped beneath the ice like an insect locked in clear amber.

Charlie sees it too.

“Was there some sort of accident?”

“Looks like it.”

“Did they fall from a train?”

“I don’t know.”

Charlie presses her forehead to the glass.

“Maybe you shouldn’t look,” I say. “You might have nightmares.”

“I’m not six.”

The train shudders and picks up speed again. Snow swirls like confetti from the roof. For a brief moment, the world has tilted out of true and I feel a sense of growing disquiet. There is a void in the world… somebody not coming home.

I ’m here.

I want to shout it.

Scream it.

I’m here.

I’M HERE

I’M HERE!

Three days. Something has gone wrong. Tash should be back by now. Maybe George caught her. Maybe he hit her over the head with a shovel and buried her in the forest, which he always said he’d do if we escaped.

Maybe she’s lost. Tash doesn’t have a great sense of direction. Once she managed to get lost at Westgate Shopping Center in Oxford when we were supposed to meet at Apricot to spend my Christmas money on a beaded belt and a pair of dark wash jeans.

That’s the day Tash got into a fight with Bianca Dwyer and threatened to stab her with a pen because she was flirting with Aiden Foster. She would have done it too. Tash once stabbed me with a pen, right through my school tights. I have the world’s tiniest tattoo as evidence. She was angry because I lost the friendship ring that she gave me for my twelfth birthday.

Anyway, Tash has a terrible sense of direction-almost as bad as her taste in boyfriends.

I’m so cold it’s unbelievable. I’m wearing every piece of clothing-and some of Tash’s stuff too. I know she won’t mind.

I pull the blanket over my head. Smell my stale breath. Sweat. Every little while I poke my head out and take a few gulps of clean air and then duck under again.

Maybe I will die of the cold before they find me.

It was different those first few weeks. It was summer and the attic room was hot under the tiles. We had a proper bed, decent food and could watch the TV. George told us we’d be going home soon. He didn’t seem like a monster. He brought us magazines to read and oversized chocolate bars.

I don’t know if George is his real name. Tash came up with it. She said it suited him because he looked like a younger, fatter version of George Clooney, but I think we should have called him Freddy like the guy in Nightmare on Elm Street or that other sicko who wears a hockey mask and carries a chainsaw.

In the beginning George talked a lot about a ransom.

“Your parents are rich,” he told me, “but they don’t want to pay.”

“That’s not true.”

“They don’t want you back.”

“Yes, they do.”

It was another lie. There was never going to be a ransom demand. How can you pay for something if nobody knows the price?

Chained together on the bed, we watched the TV, waiting for news. Meanwhile, the country watched their TVs and waited for news. Everybody had an opinion. Every rumor was dissected. We were kidnapped by an Internet pedophile, according to one story. He’d met us online in a chatroom and made us take off our clothes. As if!

A clairvoyant from Bristol said we were dead and our bodies had been dumped in water. The police dragged the river at Abingdon and searched dozens of wells and drainage ditches.

Mrs. Jarvis, our next-door neighbor, told police she saw a man peering through her bedroom window when she was undressing. Tash laughed at that one. “Jarvis leaves her bedroom curtains open every night, hoping someone might look.”

A London cabbie claimed he’d seen us outside a cinema in Finchley. And a motorist in High Barnet reported seeing two girls in the back of a white van pressing their hands against the windows.

Why is it always a white van? Nobody ever sees kids being snatched by people in purple vans or yellow vans.

Tash’s brother Hayden told reporters that he’d seen a man acting suspiciously in a field not far from Bingham. He took them back to the scene, pointing out the exact place. When he talked about Tash he almost cried, wiping his eyes and threatening to kill anyone who hurt her.

It’s amazing how the truth can be stretched so thin that if people turned it sideways it would probably disappear. It’s like they invented a fantasy version of our lives and pretended it was real.

The Sun offered?200,000 for information leading to our recovery. Suddenly, there were “sightings” in Bristol, Manchester, Aberdeen, Lockerbie and Dover-surges of hope and then despair.