It’s Friday, and Heather’s not here today, she’s threatened to call in later if she can, but I told her I’m fine, which of course is a lie but her being here won’t help. Richard’s pottering around and Jodie’s here, she turned up at 8 a.m. and set up her laptop on the kitchen counter and announced that the Facebook page now has over three thousand followers.
‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Oh, by the way, I asked Heather about the sighting in Camden. She said they’d received your info and alerted the police down there, but nothing. They asked in all the shops and homes near where she was seen and no one else saw her and CCTV showed nothing either.’
‘Oh, gutted.’
‘Yes, me too. She never said anything to you about running away to London did she?’
‘No. But she loved London.’
‘Yes she does, she likes the shops, we went there over the summer. I thought perhaps… Oh well, it doesn’t look like a lead.’
‘No, sorry – but there are a lot of sightings and I send them all to the police, but I think some are just trolls.’
‘Yeah, I suppose so. Hard to believe anyone could troll a family who have a missing child, but it’s a cruel world, Jodie.’
‘Yeah,’ she said with a sigh, as she went back to the laptop.
‘It’s so good of you, Jodie. You really don’t have to do this you know. You have uni too – Amy will feel bad when she gets back if you’re behind on your course.’
‘We have to find her, and I want to be here, Kat. I love it at your house, it feels like home – and, I dunno, I just feel closer to Amy.’
I was touched. ‘Of course you do, sweetie. It’s like old times, you sitting there on your computer.’
‘Do you remember when I used to come here dead early in the morning to finish off my homework?’ she says now from behind the laptop.
I glance over at her and smile. ‘Yes, you were such a skiver.’ I giggle. ‘Your mother would have had a fit if she’d known I was “harbouring a criminal” every morning, you desperately trying to do your homework while I made toast and tried to get Amy up.’
I’m sitting in the chair by the window, enjoying her presence, the smell of vanilla, the click of her keyboard, the way she throws her long hair over one shoulder like a one-sided shawl. Just like Amy. It makes my heart hurt.
‘Yes, Amy always hated getting up.’ She smiles at the memory.
‘She has always hated it, hasn’t she?’ I say, unwilling to talk about her in the past tense. The adults are a little more careful, but in their youth Josh and Jodie seem oblivious to the implications of this.
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s what I meant,’ she says, and I hope I haven’t embarrassed her, but we all need to keep believing and hoping. Without that there’s nothing.
Later, around noon, I heat us up some home-made onion soup from the freezer. We eat it together in big earthenware soup mugs Richard and I brought back from a holiday in France years ago.
‘I love these mugs, you used to give us your home-made tomato soup in these on winter days after school. We’d walk across the field home, it was white with snow – and me and Amy would throw snowballs and you’d join in.’
‘Mmm, I always came off worse, as I remember it,’ I say. ‘And you two would throw your snow-covered wellies all over the hall carpet.’
‘But you never told us off like Mum did.’
‘Well, your house is always spotless, I’m a bit of a mess. Your mum’s far neater and more organised than I am.’
‘More bossy too,’ Jodie suddenly says, and I realise we’re veering into territory we should perhaps steer clear of.
‘Your Mum just likes things a certain way,’ I say kindly, but assertively.
She shrugs. ‘I guess. But sometimes I wish I could run away to the circus.’ She half-laughs.
‘Do you think Amy has run away?’ I ask then.
Jodie pauses. ‘I reckon she might have, she talked about it… once.’
‘Really?’ I put down my soup, suddenly feeling very full. I see the dimpling of Jodie’s chin and know tears aren’t far away, but I push on. ‘What did she say? Was it the course, was she finding it too much?’
‘I think so.’ She nods, and drinks some soup, and I get the feeling there’s something she isn’t telling me. But if I push her, she’ll never tell.
I change tack. ‘So why do you feel like running away, Jodie? Are you happy on your course?’ She shrugs. ‘Is there something else you’d like to do?’
‘Yeah, loads of stuff, but Mum wouldn’t let me. She says I’ve already let her down. I didn’t get the grades for medicine, so, as far as she’s concerned, I failed, I’m already a failure.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t think that at all,’ I say gently, upset that she’d picked up on this. Zoe had spoken to me about her disappointment at the time, but who can blame her? Like all of us, she just wanted the best for Jodie.
‘You haven’t let anyone down, Jodie. It isn’t like you neglected your studies, in fact you had good A-levels, just not good enough to get into the university you wanted to do medicine.’
‘The university Mum wanted me to go to.’
‘But you’re happy nearer home, at Worcester, doing a different course?’
‘It’s more me, but Mum says I just want an easy life.’
I feel really uncomfortable when Jodie does this; she tries to bring me in on her conflicts with Zoe. I happen to agree that Jodie should do the course she wants to do, not the one her mother wanted her to. Jodie’s never been academic and I always thought she’d struggle with medicine, but I have to outwardly stay loyal to Zoe.
‘I think… as long as you’re happy, that’s what matters,’ I say, avoiding anything that may be quoted and attributed to me the next time Zoe and Jodie have a row.
‘You let Amy choose where she went to uni, you let her go out with Josh, you even let them sleep in her room together. My mum would never allow that.’
‘Who knows, perhaps I should have encouraged Amy more to go to a nearby uni? Things might have been different if I had,’ I say wistfully. ‘Everyone’s different, Jodie, and I can’t speak for your mum, but it’s her decision, and you have to respect that.’
‘I guess,’ she says, and I feel sorry for her. Jodie’s the kid who got the short straw, she’s the quiet one, who seems to struggle with academia. ‘Let me make you a cup of coffee,’ she says. ‘I know exactly how you like it, a heaped spoon, black, no sugar.’
I remember the girls being eight years old and making me a cup of coffee – both arguing about how much milk to put in and Jodie saying in Zoe’s voice, ‘Amy, she takes it bloody black!’
Zoe and I laughed about that later, when I told her. ‘I bet you talk like that to Pete,’ I said, referring to her husband at the time.
She’d laughed. ‘I bloody do! He needs someone to sort him out. Honestly, I do everything in our house, from cleaning to pulling him out of scrapes at work, because, as you know, my husband has no filter. And when I’m not saving his career, I’m talking Jodie through her friendship issues, and homework.’
Like me, Zoe went through a difficult time when Jodie was little. She was born prematurely and for a while there were concerns about her lung and brain development. Zoe wasn’t able to hold her baby until she was about six weeks old, and I can only imagine the agony she went through. But ultimately Jodie thrived, and although she’s protective of her daughter like I am, she’s a little harder. ‘I think I’ve pushed Jodie more because I always had to,’ she told me candidly, ‘she developed later than all her peers, so I had to hothouse her just to keep up.’
And, to Zoe’s credit, she transformed Jodie, a child who in the early years of primary school seemed to struggle with the most basic academic tasks. I remember the flash cards, the impromptu maths and spelling tutorials. Zoe would set Jodie mental maths tests as the four of us walked home from school together. Later, with exams looming, Zoe hired a tutor for maths and English just to help her daughter get decent grades. Poor Jodie has always had to work twice as hard as everyone else, and in my view it’s a blessing she didn’t get into the medical degree – it would have been far too challenging, though, of course, Zoe doesn’t see it that way.
When Jodie was born, she needed so much care. Zoe decided to take a career break to look after her daughter, but when she tried to go back years later, things had moved on. She found herself a job a couple of years ago but didn’t get on with the boss and was recently made redundant. I think she feels like she failed, which is why she’d hoped Jodie would become a doctor one day and redeem her, make what she refers to as her ‘career sacrifice’ worth it. I know Jodie sometimes resents her mother’s involvement, what eighteen-year-old wouldn’t? But one day she’ll realise what her mum has done for her.
I hope Amy doesn’t resent my involvement in her life. I had to leave work as a feature writer for a magazine when Amy became ill. Despite continuing to work on a freelance basis, Amy became the focus of my life, and she had to come first after the illness. I’d been delighted when Amy decided to do an English degree because I’d done the same. At the time, Richard said I had to let her make her own choices, and not live my life through her. We argued about it.
‘You always talk about your life in London working for a big magazine but how you never went back because of her,’ he’d said.
I’d never put it quite like that. When Amy asked me why I worked at home, I’d wanted her to know that I’d once had a career. I wanted her to feel she could have one too and told her I’d only stopped because I loved being with her. I hoped it would make her feel special, that I gave it all up for her, but Richard reckoned I’d made her feel guilty for being ill.
‘Can’t you see, Kat, she’s now going to do what you couldn’t? She’s doing it for you,’ he’d continued.
I’d been angry with him at the time, but this has been playing on my mind over the last couple of days. Since Amy disappeared, I’ve had time for reflection – too much reflection, really – and the more I think about the way Zoe can be with Jodie, the more I wonder if perhaps I’m guilty of using Amy to fulfil my dreams too. Had Amy felt pushed into doing the same degree as me? Was she struggling? Did she feel she’d made a mistake taking the course but didn’t like to say for fear of disappointing me?
Earlier today one of Amy’s university tutors called our landline. Her name is Laura McKenzie and she wanted to say she was thinking of us. I was touched that she’d taken the trouble and I also wondered if I could perhaps get a feel for how Amy was coping. I know the police have all spoken to the relevant university staff and students, but as a mother I feel I can ask more pertinent questions and might pick up on something they miss.
So with Jodie clicking away at her computer in the kitchen, and Richard sweeping leaves in the garden, I take the phone into the sitting room and call back to talk to Laura McKenzie.