When the phone blasted into her sleep Bel was dreaming she was back in Sudan, caught in a sudden storm: raindrops bursting like shot on her head and shoulders, making a terrifying rattle on corrugated roofs, driving the squealing shiny-faced children she was teaching to seek cover. Afterwards, with the earth fizzing yet dry as a bone, she wouldn’t have believed it had rained at all if her hair hadn’t been plastered, sopping wet, to her skull.
The clamour persisted, drilling into the effects of the Temazepam (hospital turned you into a pill popper, she’d found). Her hand floundered on the bedside table, seeking the off button. She pressed answer instead and nearly tumbled onto the floor.
‘Hiya, sweet.’
Bel righted herself, clutched the phone to her ear, adjusted her pillows. She shivered and wondered if she would ever be warm again. She recognised now that she was under the eaves, in the cool white attic. These rooms, opened up years before to create a studio space for her father, had been deemed her quarters. Her quarter. The rest of the property was Matt and Rachael’s.
‘Bel?’ said the voice, a touch impatiently.
‘Dad! I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages.’
‘You have?’
‘Since last night, anyway. You didn’t pick up!’ Frustratingly, Leo wasn’t as attached to his phone as she was to hers. He could forget where he’d put it or forget to switch it on or, worse, ignore it altogether, claiming it sapped the creative impulse.
‘So how are you?’
She shifted position, trying to get comfortable. ‘How I am is not the point. Everybody here is in a total state about Mum.’
‘Ah… yes.’
Matt had stalked up and down, rumpling his hair, as he’d told her about the visit from the police. No cause to jump to conclusions, he’d said. Since half the continent was in travel chaos they didn’t yet need a manhunt. But an image of the abandoned car had hooked into Bel’s brain, though she tried to dismiss it. ‘Good grief! Aren’t you worried too?’
‘I’m sure Julia knows what she’s doing,’ said Leo.
Bel recognised his tone of withdrawal. ‘What’s been going on? Why did she leave the Culshaws’ early? Was it because she was pissed off to find you there too? Or was it something you said? You do goad her sometimes.’
‘You know Julia,’ said Leo. ‘That tendency to seethe below the surface.’
‘So you did have a row?’
‘Darling, she just blew up.’
‘Are you going to tell me what it was about?’
There was a long silence, then a snort. She imagined him putting the mobile down, staring at the screen for a few moments before picking it up again. He refused to conform to other people’s expectations. Another snort. Then a bark. ‘You.’
When Bel was growing up, her mother used to be exasperated by her knack of finding trouble (or rather, trouble finding her). Matt was pretty good about helping her get out of it, but her father’s sense of fun sometimes made it worse. One time, giggling together, he’d painted her all over with red spots so she could pretend to have measles and stay off school. Although Julia couldn’t have been taken in for a minute, she was furious. She’d exploded at Leo, castigated him for being so juvenile, for getting acrylic paint on Bel’s tunic, which would never come out, for turning a deadly disease into a joke. ‘Lighten up, woman, for God’s sake,’ Leo had shouted. And then he’d slammed out of the house and Bel had to endure having the spots rubbed crossly from her skin.
When she’d arrived back from Sudan to find her room occupied, she’d carted her possessions to her father’s flat and settled there to look for work. As a freelance graphic designer most of her contacts were in London and they needed to be reminded she was available again. Except she wasn’t, because within days she’d collapsed with a high temperature. Leo had sent her home to Liverpool, to her mother. Real illness was alien to him and he preferred not to deal with it.
‘Me!’ she exclaimed now. ‘This is my fault?’
‘I was keeping out of her way,’ said Leo. ‘I mean, why wouldn’t I? I had a job to do. I’d been busy over Easter. But Julia let rip. She certainly knows how to lay into a person when she thinks they haven’t done their duty. She accused me of not caring for you properly, claimed you cramped my style so I stuck you on the train and left her to pick up the pieces.’
‘But, Dad, that’s what you did.’
‘Because I thought it was the best course of action! I wasn’t in a position to look after you and she was. I mean, Christ, malaria. What a fucking wild card that was. Why didn’t you take the fucking tablets?’
‘I did but they had these horrible side effects, remember? I was hallucinating and everything. I didn’t have any choice. I had to change to another sort.’
It had been a sly undercover assault, the mosquito bite – literally, for she had used a mosquito net. There was no single occasion to which she could pinpoint the infection. She’d been told, too often in her view, how lucky she was to be treated in England; how lucky she wasn’t holed up in some base camp clinic on the edge of the desert. Well that was true, and she was grateful. But what people didn’t realise was that being ill stank. Being ill was a complete, utter, unbearable, depressing, grinding pain in the arse. It knocked the spontaneity as well as the stuffing out of you.
‘Anyway, we’ve been through all that. Have I got this right? You’re saying it’s because of me that you and Mum fell out?’
Leo grunted.
‘And she left the Culshaws’ to get away from you? And it’s because she’s pissed off in general that she’s ignoring our calls? You don’t think she’s had her phone robbed or there’s anything suspicious going on?’
‘I doubt it very much,’ said Leo. ‘I’d let her go her own sweet way.’
Of course he would. Thunder, tempest, followed by an eerie calm: this was a familiar pattern in her parents’ relationship. ‘That’s not very helpful.’
Matt hadn’t been much use either. ‘I refuse to speculate,’ he’d said as if it indicated a triumph of will rather than sheer stubbornness. That was Matt all over: a pleasant, affable exterior and a bullish obstinacy Bel could seldom conquer.
‘Unfortunately,’ drawled Leo, ‘Julia seems to like keeping people in the dark.’ This was a dig; he was clearly sore about something not necessarily connected with her mother’s disappearance.
Bel shifted on the bed. She felt as if she were on a raft, barely afloat in the austere expanse of the attic. This impression was reinforced by the sight of her belongings dotted about on lonely islets of furniture. ‘So where are we supposed to go from here?’
‘Where are you now?’
‘I’m back at home. Squatting in your old studio.’
‘Then stay there,’ he advised. ‘Dig your heels in. Julia will turn up.’
*
It was a grim day. Bel and Rachael tuned in to the twenty-four-hour news channel and fed each other’s fears until they were both wildly on edge. They jumped at every ring on landline and mobile, hoping Matt would have something to report. They took turns to text him for information but there was no news. He was late home too.
‘Where have you been?’ demanded Rachael as soon as he came through the door.
‘I went to the flat.’
‘You mean our old one? In Canning Street?’
‘Yes, I wanted to try and catch the builders, see if they’d heard from Julia.’
‘And had they?’
‘They’d gone, unfortunately. But there’s still a lot of work to be done. The kitchen’s all loose cables and carcasses and there’s no bath. She couldn’t live in it yet.’
Bel had curled herself up on the sofa, wrapped in the borrowed pashmina. (She’d brought scarcely anything with her, which was why she had to raid Rachael’s wardrobe.) Rachael perched on the arm of a chair but leapt up every now and again to check on Danny who was playing in the garden.
Bel said: ‘Haven’t you been able to get through to anyone?’
Matt stood, arms folded, legs braced, a solid figure of authority. ‘I’ve spent most of the day on the phone to those bloody hire car people. They as good as admitted their paperwork was all over the place because there’ve been so many stranded passengers trying to get home. Carjacking’s been rife. They’re going to check the documentation again and get back to me.’
‘Soon?’
‘Well I hope so. I also rang Mum’s bank and asked them to look into the dates of her credit card transactions. That should flag up where she’s been using them. But I’ve cancelled them anyway, to be on the safe side.’
‘Why?’
He took off his glasses and polished them on the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Because it’s a sensible precaution to take. Because if they’ve been stolen along with her phone—’
Theft, hijack, kidnap. Or worse… Bel really didn’t want to go there – that ghastly tabloid hinterland peopled by victims of violent crime. She sought an alternative. ‘What if they haven’t?’
‘Then she can get them activated again, can’t she? They’ll run a security check and it means we can flush her out. I don’t see what else we can do.’
Could her mother have chosen to go into hiding? Could she really have the mysterious illness Dorothy Culshaw had suggested? Beneath her layers, Bel’s flesh erupted into goose pimples. She could do without another calamity. She caressed the mobile on her lap, willing it to burst into a jingle of good news.
When the ring came on the doorbell the sound was both a shock and a relief. For a moment the three of them stared at each other, stunned. Then Matt went to answer it.
They heard a murmur of voices and he came back, not with any official messenger, but with a teenage girl none of them seen before. Her hair was scraped into a tight band, exposing a face that looked sharp and wary. She was wearing a skimpy vest and a strip of skirt. A stud glittered in her navel and a snake tattoo coiled around her ankle. Her mouth was making rapid chewing movements; she pushed the gum into the corner of her cheek. ‘I’ve come for our Nathan,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Our Nath.’
‘I think you’ve got the wrong house,’ said Rachael.
‘Nah. He’s playing out with your little lad.’
Matt said, ‘Oh, then they’ll be in the garden.’
‘What’s going on?’ said Rachael. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Nath’s sister. It’s time he came home for his tea.’ The girl was looking with interest around the room and at the darker patches on the walls, which marked the outlines of Leo’s absent canvases. They’d been taken down and stored at the back of the garage until Julia decided their fate.
‘But Danny’s on his own.’ Rachael stumbled as she made her way to the window and peered out. ‘Oh God, it’s that boy again.’
‘What boy?’
‘The one who was here yesterday. You met him too, Bel. And did you see what he was doing?
‘Yeah! Gross, wasn’t it?’ She’d gone outside for an illicit smoke (which had tasted foul) and found him in the midst of operations. ‘But he was only trying to help. I told him he didn’t need to. Birds can manage on their own. That’s how they’re programmed. And that if he fed the birds, he’d encourage the cats.’
‘Why did you say he could come in the first place?’
‘I didn’t. I don’t know what it is with children, they just seem to latch on to me. I guess they think I’m non-threatening. What’s it matter anyway?’
‘Because he’s much older than Danny. It really isn’t a good idea.’
Bel thought Danny might be lonely; he could do with more friends to play with. She didn’t see the harm in his getting to know new neighbours. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked the girl.
‘Kelly.’
‘And you’ve moved nearby, is that right?’
‘It’s only temporary like. We had to find somewhere quick ’cos our house burned down.’
‘No? Really?’
‘Yeah, it’s totally wrecked, all our stuff melted to bits or up in smoke, the lot.’
Bel wanted to hear more – was it a gas explosion? An electrical fault? A firework through the letter box? An arson attack? – but Rachael said, ‘He must have come through the hedge again. We need to fix it, Matt. I mean, suppose Danny escaped? We don’t want anyone else to go missing.’
‘Who’s missing?’ asked Kelly, scratching the back of her thigh.
Nobody answered. Rachael flung open the French doors and Kelly clumped across the room. ‘Hey, Nath!’ she yelled from the top of the steps. ‘Move it.’
Danny came up sulkily and tugged at the hem of Rachael’s top. ‘Why does Nathan have to go now? We were in the middle of our game. It’s not fair.’
‘His sister wants to take him home.’ To Kelly, she added: ‘Can you tell your mother to keep a better eye on Nathan so he doesn’t go round being a nuisance?’
‘We live with me nan.’
Bel twirled her collection of bracelets. The knob of her wrist bone gleamed palely through the coloured beads. ‘Does your mother live somewhere else then?’
Kelly said, ‘Me nan looks after us because me mum’s dead.’
There was a moment’s silence.
Matt said, ‘God, I’m sorry.’ It was a knee-jerk reaction and Bel could see he was annoyed with himself. It used to happen a lot when they were younger. People would apologise to him when they heard about his father and afterwards he’d mutter: ‘Why do they always say that? It wasn’t their fault!’ What they meant, of course, was that they were sorry they’d asked. They wished the question had never left their lips.