He must have traveled this route a thousand times. Usually in the passenger seat, his feet poised over his extra set of pedals, suburbia conveyor-belting past as his student drove excruciatingly slowly. The same tree-lined streets and chained-up bikes; the same cars in the same drives. Smug joggers and couples pushing elaborate prams.
Chris also spent a lot of time parked in various spots around Kingston, glimpsing snapshots of other people’s lives while he waited for his learners. Sometimes he’d see a man in a designer suit taking crafty swigs from a hip flask, concealing it when his picture-perfect wife and son emerged from the pristine house behind. Or a homeless guy rummaging through the Waitrose bins, digging out a mushy avocado, shooed away by a self-important store manager. The divide between rich and poor, happy and miserable, genuine and false felt so flimsy around here. And Chris always teetered just the wrong side of the line.
Today Kingston felt watchful. Almost certainly it was Chris’s imagination, his mood, but he’d sensed it from the moment he’d left home several hours before. Neighbors herding their kids into giant Volvos had seemed to blast glances toward his house—but maybe they’d seen the police parked outside the night before and didn’t know who they’d been visiting. Even now, Chris seemed to catch the eye of every pedestrian as his student, Dylan, steered them haphazardly through the streets. He cut the lesson slightly short, needing to gather his thoughts before the next.
“Good effort, mate,” he said when they pulled up with a bump of the curb and a final stall of the engine. Dylan was a student at Kingston Uni, and one of the most timid drivers Chris had ever taught. “Just need to work on that hesitation at junctions. The stalling’s getting less frequent, though, hey?”
Dylan paid him and got out of the car, and Chris watched him trudge toward the student halls, his walk as apologetic as his driving. He wanted to shake him: You’re bloody lucky, you know. Young, free, privileged. Why hide behind that floppy fringe? At the same time, there was a twinge of something—protectiveness, almost. Sadness? Chris gazed at the student block tower and saw people cooking and chatting behind the bare windows, toasting Friday night with their beers. Loneliness shivered through him, like a reflex.
Shifting into the driver’s seat, he flipped down the visor against the low March sun and headed to Chantry High School. Kids of all ages were swarming out of the gates, unleashed for the weekend. Usually he was glad of his car’s logo, separating him from the parents in 4x4s yet assuring everyone he wasn’t some weirdo lurking outside a school, but today it made him feel conspicuous. He was glad when he spotted Jess’s short legs in black tights weaving toward him. She was riffling through her handbag, checking her phone, oversized sunglasses tobogganing down her nose. Eventually she looked up and scanned for his car. He waved and moved back into the passenger seat, wondering how many times a week he did this shuffle-over, this relinquishing of control.
As soon as she got in, he could tell she was upset. She took off her shades and her maroon school blazer but just sat there, staring at her lap.
“Jess? You okay?”
She nodded, still didn’t put on her belt.
“Ready to go? Shall we try a reverse-park again this lesson?”
At last she pulled her seat so far forward that her nose almost touched the wheel, snapped on her belt, and set off. Jess was usually a pretty vocal driver, shrieking, “Oooh, red light!” or “Where’s second gear gone?” at regular intervals. If he asked her to switch lanes or stop on a hill she’d act aghast: “Chris, really?” She was silent today, though, and when she attempted the reverse-park she ended up jutting out almost perpendicular to the pavement, then clipped the shiny Audi behind. That was the final straw: She threw up her hands and dissolved into tears. “I can’t do this!”
Chris glanced behind to check there was no visible damage to the other car’s bumper, praying there was no expensive bill to be covered. “Come on, it’s okay. Pull up over there and turn off the engine.”
She got herself under control and did as he said. They sat for a moment as the car exhaled around them.
“What’s wrong?” He reached toward her shoulder but thought better of making contact, veering awkwardly away. Jess pressed her fingertips against her cheekbones, leaving oval prints in her makeup. “If you’re worried about bumping that Audi, it’s a poser’s car anyway.”
One corner of her mouth turned up. Slowly she lowered her hands. “Haven’t you heard?” she said.
“Heard?”
“About Freya. Nobody’s seen her since yesterday.”
Freya’s image flooded Chris’s mind. Her confident posture when she drove. The healthy glow of her skin, which always made him feel flabby and light-deprived. He saw her vividly for a moment, eclipsing Jess as she sat six inches taller, shoulders relaxed, blonde ponytail fanned over the headrest. Infuriatingly confident, sometimes. Like she thought driving was no big deal.
“She hasn’t turned up?” he said. “I saw her mum last night . . .” He recalled Steph at his door, hunched inside an oversized man’s jacket that had made her look somehow diminished. A different woman from the one who’d had the gall to challenge him in the street about her daughter’s lessons.
“It’s not like Frey to go off without saying anything,” Jess said. “She’s so on it with her training. Even with her schoolwork, though she doesn’t admit it. She gets better grades than me every time, you know. We’ve got business coursework due Monday . . .”
Seeing she was getting teary again, Chris patted her arm. She stiffened and he wished he’d stuck with his earlier decision not to touch her. It was hard to know what to do with a crying seventeen-year-old girl. Impossible to console her without overstepping the mark. Next month he’d be turning forty, yet in some ways he felt the same as he had at Jess’s age. It was only the things and the people around him that had altered. Circumstances. Life.
“Her parents keep calling me.” Jess sniffed. “But I really don’t know where she could be.”
“Does she tell you everything?” Chris asked, then wondered if it was a weird question. He was suddenly conscious of the intimacy of being in a stationary car together, the usual conventions of a driving lesson stripped away. He stabbed at the button to roll down his window, air rushing into the car with the clamor of the street, a smell of petrol.
“I thought so. Maybe not so much lately. She’s seemed a bit . . .” Jess made a mysterious, looping hand gesture, then turned to him. “Did she say anything to you?”
“Me? Like what?”
She blinked, her eyes almost opaque with held-back tears. “I don’t know. Like, anything.”
“No, I . . . She seemed . . . normal.”
“In an hour she’ll officially be a missing person. Frey! This can’t be real, can it?” She shook her head and slumped forward, her forehead meeting the wheel, red hair cascading either side. It felt wrong just to watch her cry. She had confided in him after all. Driving lessons were so often full of mind-numbing small talk in between “Left here . . . Check your mirror . . . Try not to flatten that pedestrian . . .” And Vicky was so closed off these days. Sometimes Chris fantasized about letting one of his students crash into the back of a bus, just to shake things up, just so he could phone Vicky from hospital and say, Get down here. I’ve been in an accident.
His hand hovered over the bumps of Jess’s spine, visible through the thin white school shirt. She lifted her head and he withdrew.
“I . . . I’ll drive you home,” he said. “If you don’t feel up to carrying on.”
She sniffed again. “Thanks for being nice about it.”
“No problem.” He forced a smile. “And try not to worry. Freya will be home before you know it.”
They swapped places and he drove back through Kingston, past upmarket pubs painted slate gray and olive green, coming to life with after-work drinkers sitting outside as if it were a carefree summer’s day. As Jess became absorbed in her phone, Chris seemed to see and hear police sirens everywhere. But actually it was the flash of sun on a sapphire-colored scooter; the wail of a car alarm; the bright blue hair of a woman he realized was his other neighbor, Emma, standing outside a vintage clothes store with a for sale sign flapping beside her.