She’s on her own again. After years spent complaining of never having a moment to herself – always at someone or other’s beck and call – Emily realises she has wasted valuable time yearning for it. She’s incomplete without others around her. She’s less of a person without others to witness her existence. Where are they all? They were here when she went upstairs to lie down, and now they are gone. Perhaps Daisy has been found and they’ve gone to fetch her? She feels strangely detached from this possibility, and she wishes she could hate herself for it, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t feel very much at all. Maybe they’ve popped out for groceries; there’s hardly anything in the house, so that’s likely. She hopes they will remember wine. God, she could kill for a glass of chilled Sancerre right now, but at the same time her mouth is as dry as sand and she knows water is the thing she needs. Emily runs cold water into the kitchen sink and drinks straight from the tap, catching her craze-haired reflection in the shine of the chrome faucet. Did Jess polish it to such a high mirror shine? She must have done, unless James did it, having grown tired of the way Emily has let the place slip. These days Emily does nothing. She hasn’t just eased up a bit on keeping the place straight, she does absolutely nothing. She’s gone from being one of the most well-presented people she knows – in all matters – to this. She does nothing, goes nowhere, cares about nothing. What is she now? she wonders. She lifts up her T-shirt hem, perhaps simply to confirm to herself that she’s still flesh and blood. She prods at her bony ribs with a close-bitten fingernail.
‘I’m nothing,’ she says aloud, and still she doesn’t care.
Back at home, Mum and Dad were already laying the table for lunch, both dressed in their summer Sunday best, and they looked up as though synchronised, surprised to see Emily up and about.
‘I thought you two weren’t feeling well,’ Dad said, with a grey-furrowed look that told her he knew a lie when he heard one.
Emily let the silence hang in the air long enough for both her parents to halt what they were doing, knowing it would only be a matter of moments before they wondered where Jess was. Her neck felt hot and sweaty after her walk home from the train station, and now the house was heavy with the steam of cooking. Despite the heat of the day, her mother still insisted on the traditional Sunday roast. Farm-fed chicken, with all the trimmings. Emily was hungry, and she was sorry to think that what she was about to tell them would no doubt impact on her mother’s immaculate timings.
‘Where’s your sister?’ Dad asked, right on cue.
Again Emily was quiet, and she twisted her hands together as she tried to decide on the best opening sentence, to break it to them gently.
Her mum cautiously lowered her napkins, and looked from her husband to her elder daughter, the rose pattern of her summer dress drawing sharp attention to the pink spots that had started to rise in her cheeks. The tremor in her voice was heartbreaking. ‘Emily?’
Emily pulled out a chair and sat, running flat palms down the lengths of her thighs. ‘I tried to stop her,’ she said finally, and she wept, and for a little while it really did feel as if she meant it. Did she mean it? Emily has often wondered in the years that have passed. Is it possible that she meant it – that she really did feel the loss of her sister?
‘Emily! Where is Jess?’ Her mother was growing panicked now, as Dad manhandled her into a seat, and he too insisted that Emily tell them everything.
‘She’s left,’ she told them, ‘I just saw her off at the train station.’
‘Left where?’ Dad demanded, blocking Mum’s words with a stilling hand.
‘London, to start with. She’s met someone – I don’t know who he is – but she says she loves him and she doesn’t think you’d approve.’
‘She can’t just leave!’ Mum cries out, clutching at the tablecloth, her voice shrill. ‘Where in London, Emily? She must have said something about where she was going?’
‘Sorry, Mum, I really tried to get it out of her. But she said they wouldn’t be staying in London that long – I think they’re going travelling as soon as they’ve got a bit of money together.’
‘But she’s only seventeen,’ Mum whispered into a tightly clenched little fist.
‘She’s a young adult, Mum,’ Emily replied, regretting her impatient tone the moment she said it. ‘Sorry, that sounded awful. What I mean is, she’ll be fine. She’s a sensible girl, isn’t she? I’m sure she’ll be perfectly fine and I’m sure she’ll be in touch as soon as she gets herself settled. She said to tell you that she loves you, and please don’t worry about her.’
‘That was it?’ Dad asked. ‘Jess would never simply leave without a word. That was all she said? Have you spoken to her friends? Sammie? Or Jane? Surely they’ll know something.’
Emily shook her head and pushed her chair back to leave the room. ‘Let me see what I can find out,’ she said with calm reassurance in her voice, hoping to stall them a while. ‘I’m sure she’ll be back before you know it. Maybe we should give it a week before we start panicking? She’ll run out of money and come home in no time – you’ll see.’
She hoped that Mum wouldn’t let the gravy spoil, but thought better of mentioning it, under the circumstances. In the doorway, she paused, to witness her father’s arm reaching around her mother’s shoulders for the first time in years, to console her as she wept for her lost daughter. Perhaps this would bring them closer together, Emily pondered, feeling hopeful again, noticing the way the sunlight sent dark outlines of Mum’s Staffordshire figurines across the parquet floor. God knew they needed something to reunite them, something significant enough to mend the bridges he’d weakened after his years of infidelity. Emily left them to it, and headed straight for the living room, where she picked up the telephone receiver and called Simon.
‘It’s me!’ she said when he answered on the fifth ring, her voice sounding young and high. She twirled the diamond stud of her free ear, still glowing with the thrill of finding Simon’s gift, left discreetly on their doorstep that morning. ‘What are you up to? I thought we could meet up later? Yes, of course, I love them, silly. I’ve missed you.’
With just a few notable exceptions, Emily has always been blessed with the ability to shut off her feelings at will. For the most part she can control it, through a combination of detachment and justification, and she is certain it has made for a happier existence, a calmer life. She knows plenty of people who don’t share her gift, who live their lives under the reckless rule of their every emotion, destined to be soaring with happiness one minute, floored by bad news the next. People who waste weeks on misplaced guilt, feeling anxious that they’ve caused offence or that they’ve let a friend down through thoughtlessness. What is wrong with these people? Emily has often wondered, and she thinks of Jess back in their teenage years, the way in which she’d badger Emily constantly, paranoid that she’d upset her older sister. ‘Is everything OK?’ she’d ask, or, ‘Have I done something wrong?’ or ‘Are you mad at me, Emi?’ The response Emily would have liked to give was, yes, of course I’m mad at you, but she rarely spoke the words because then she’d have to articulate exactly why she was mad at Jessica, and really, she didn’t always have an answer. From experience, she knew that ‘I just am’ didn’t wash, because then Jess would go on and on until Emily was forced to make up an answer, and she’d end up saying something far crueller than she’d ever intended. Mostly, she would rather blank Jess for a few days, until her irritable mood had passed and she was ready to accept her sister again. And she wouldn’t feel guilty, because Jess was annoying and everyone needed a bit of space from time to time, didn’t they?
So Emily thinks of herself as fairly controlled when it comes to her feelings. But when that journalist lifted the flap of the letterbox today and called out the words, ‘Emily, did you know a body’s been washed up on the beach?’ she found herself incapable of keeping a lid on her natural responses. She flung open the door and demanded, ‘What? What did you say?’ and she thought about grabbing the scrawny-bearded little bastard by the shirt, but he told her straight, ‘We’ve got colleagues down at Alum Bay, and they say a baby’s body has been washed up on the shore.’ Emily saw the ravenous expression on his face. She knew he was starving for her reply, for something dripping in grief for his mucky publication, and she shoved him in the chest so hard he stumbled from the step, and she slammed the door between them.
Now, of course, she knows it was nothing. Just a doll, for God’s sake, a washed-up baby doll. She hates herself for the madness she allowed to creep into her voice when she phoned James and ranted down the phone; she hates that she let herself down. And still, she sits here alone in last night’s pyjamas, imagining where James is – where Jess is – contemplating what she should do next. But she doesn’t have to deliberate too long, because the phone rings again and it’s DCI Jacobs, and this time she has real news. Someone has reported seeing Avril on the Lymington-to-Yarmouth ferry in the past hour. She’s heading this way, and, DCI Jacobs is happy to confirm, she has Daisy with her.