One will be navy, one will be black.
Odd socks, like he always wears, the big idiot, in the visual I get of him padding without shoes through the gate at airport security.
Old battered iPad removed from his bag and then – lastly – his phone.
His phone in the basket too, still turned off.
Still ignoring me.
I have been accused many times in life of being ‘too laid-back’, which honestly when it’s delivered by someone who feels their heart rate quicken over their neighbour chopping a hedge too low or a ten-minute wait for a pizza bill gives me great pleasure. Long may I lay back.
Now though, I find it hard to imagine ever being laid-back again.
Turn your phone on, Adam. Answer it.
Since Ro messaged me I haven’t stopped calling him.
I picture him staring at his phone as it moves away from him on the conveyor belt, knowing that I will be calling him, not caring, focused on what he is going to do.
I know he’ll have to turn it on eventually, to speak to Marc if nothing else, but even then I suspect he will ignore me.
‘Screw you, Ad,’ I mutter now as I plate up a couscous salad, pour out a red juice for a regular who works from here on her laptop three days a week. My palms sweat.
He will feel bad, I know. Adam is a good person; not the type who ignores calls or warnings. But, he will reason, it’s Marc. The guy you’ll recommend to play at your wedding. Who he goes for a pint with. How can Marc be a threat? He trusts Marc. He needs to reunite Marc with his wife. The rest – at this juncture – is white noise.
Give me a break, he’ll think; I’m trying to fix my best friend’s life here; trying to heal a family. He will sort everything else, including his relationship with the woman he has lived with for three years, after he has done that.
It’s not that he’ll think he is some sort of saviour – that’s not Adam either. But just that it’ll be a relief to do something when we’ve had these days of limbo, Loll in charge of the baby, him with little to do but watch Marc’s face and hear the news come on the radio and realise another hour has passed and feel redundant.
I get it.
I’ve struggled too. Upbeat, free-as-a-bird me, suddenly dealing with an atmosphere that makes you speak in whispers, like we’re grieving, coupled with the trials of a newborn and cries and mess and anxiety. Sometimes I am desperate to leave too. Anyone would want to walk away from that environment. It traps you in its claustrophobia and winds you with its sadness. When I walk out of the front door, I suck the air.
Loll taps our legs when she wants to vacuum beneath us. She makes us stand up while she plumps a cushion or tucks a blanket. Ten years, there are between Loll and me and yet she feels like my mother.
‘Give her a break,’ I say though when Marc complains about her. ‘It’s the only way she knows how to be. People can only be the way they are.’
And then there’s Marc himself.
Most of the time Adam is happy hanging out with Marc; few beers, night at a gig, meet up at the gym. They settled into an easy friendship when we introduced them. But right now even for Adam it’s hard. Marc is in a different place to all of us, getting to know his newborn baby in circumstances that should never exist. He is unpredictable. He veers between sadness and a rage that neither I nor Adam have seen in him before. Yesterday I walked into the kitchen and he was kicking, repeatedly, at the back door.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, static in the doorway.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Sometimes you’ve just got to erupt. We’re all volcanoes at the moment, Steffie.’
And then he left the room without another word.
We haven’t mentioned it.
But isn’t it fair enough that he would be angry with the world? Scared? We all know what the risks are to Romilly with this thing, and they are the worst kind. It’s the one thing I feel bad about: I know Romilly is alive. I could give Marc that. But how can I without betraying her?
People are different, in the bad times. I am seeing sides normally reserved only for people we live with.
The ones reserved specially for Marc’s wife.
What does he kick when you’re here, Romilly?
I consider, for the first time, the idea that Romilly feared Marc.
But the thought disperses quickly because, if she feared him, she wouldn’t have walked away and left her newborn baby with him.
What about that message though?
Don’t trust Marc, Steffie. Do not trust Marc with anything.
I thought I was getting it right, being there for her family, figuring it out from the inside: now I don’t know if I’ve just made everything worse.
My mind is catapulted back to work via a hand on my arm.
And the customer looks at me as I hand her salad over, face scrunched up in my own thoughts.
‘You okay, Steffie?’ says this smiley young woman as she looks up from her laptop. ‘Thanks, yum – the hazelnuts on top look amazing.’
‘It’s so good.’ I smile. ‘I took a bowl home last night. Could have eaten three. Oh I’m fine, yes. How’s your toddler group going?’
And she regales me with information about her new business, eyes giddy with success and positives and focus and the day-to-day minutiae of life not being a disaster zone.
I feel a pulse of envy.
‘So glad it’s going well,’ I tell her, then I back away before I can offend anyone, before they can offend me, before I can erupt out of nowhere. I am customer-facing out of necessity but I know there are no more chances. And I no longer trust my own reaction, if someone says the wrong thing.
I run two at a time up the stairs and head into the office, check there’s no one else around.
And I kick a wall too, then wince at the pain in the toe beneath my thin Converse.
Like Marc did.
So perhaps this can be a moment of pure frustration, and that is all.
I head out of the office and into the kitchen.
‘Where have you been?’ asks our chef, Jane. ‘The bell rang two minutes ago. That’s getting cold.’
I mutter an apology.
Pick up a plate of aubergine curry and two soups and head back down the stairs, imagining once again what Adam is doing. Picking his bag up, flinging his rucksack over his shoulder …
‘Enjoy,’ I say, serving the food then slipping my phone out of my pocket as I walk away.
It’s all he will have brought, that carry-on, not knowing how long it will be before he finds Romilly. We must have been on twenty-five, thirty flights together. He travels light.
My pulse quickens.
The smell of Jane’s curry – delicious, hearty, spiced to perfection – makes me feel ill.
I tell myself to calm down.
I might have given Adam a loose steer – aided by the woman who emailed, I caveat, not to mention the police, not all me – but we don’t have a location pinned down, do we?
Maybe I shouldn’t feel guilty at all.
I think of that message Romilly sent before she went into labour. Of the conversations that Marc and Loll have over Romilly’s mental health. How it gets brushed under the carpet when I walk into a room and they are discussing it. How I bury my head on that front sometimes; in truth, it scares me.
One time though, I googled.
Behaving out of character. Why else would Romilly leave the country if it weren’t because of postpartum psychosis? Causing her to make decisions she would never make; choices that are inexplicable?
I saw another word too: delusions.
I shudder. Every time I think of it.
Think of her distrust of Marc.
And then, the ante upped. Words that ground you.
Self-harm.
Suicide.
And suddenly, it felt like we were dealing with a ticking time bomb.
I hear it in that tap.
Feel it in the flicker of the light.
Every pick of my nail, even.
Tick, tick, tick.
What if I have done what’s best for her? What if the help she needs from me doesn’t take the form that she thinks it does?
But my gut battles those thoughts.
Hands free for a few seconds, I nip outside the café and call Adam again. His phone is on now but rings out anyway. I throw it into my bag.
‘Fucker,’ I mutter under my breath.
He knows what I am going to say. If he isn’t answering, he isn’t buying it. There is no point in him speaking to me.
He needs to stay focused on what he’s doing. My paranoia about Marc and refusal to accept that Romilly is ill will, for now, have to wait.
And so he lets his phone ring out.
It rings out as he finishes the last of his tuna sandwich, picks up his bag and checks the screen above to see which gate he is heading to.
It stays off as he walks there at his Adam ambling pace, searching in his bag for his mask as he goes. Finding it screwed up at the bottom.
Eventually, he will step onto the plane. His phone will still be off.
And then, a brief flight, the one from Manchester to Nîmes Garons, and Adam will make his way to Romilly.
I head back inside. Glance at the clock.
Think about that ticking time bomb.
I tidy up a table, smile politely.
Seconds later, the plates I am holding clatter to the floor and when Polly falls to the ground next to me and holds on, I wonder why she is doing that at first and then I realise it is because I am sobbing, uncontrollable with the burn, the hurt, with the loneliness, with missing Romilly – unsure, sure, everything tumbling out, guilty, scared, responsible, out of control.
And she clings hard to contain me, to hold my parts together, like we do to Fleur when she can’t settle but we know she needs sleep.
I am definitely no longer a laid-back person.
How can you be laid-back when you don’t know what has happened to your best friend and when she is nowhere close to find out?
How can you be laid-back when you think the man who is looking after her daughter might be a liar?
The weight of it all is too much.
I picture the look on his face as he kicked that wall.
What if something has happened in that house that means that man is not the man I think he is, at all?
Something bad enough to make a woman leave her newborn baby.
I google again.
This time it’s not about Romilly.
One word, Marc. One word.
Sociopath.