chapter four
Now
‘We’re trying to track down that girl who stayed with Mum and Dad last year.’
The beauty therapist, dressed in immaculate white, knelt at her client’s enormous feet as she gently guided them into a footbath filled with warm scented water, floating rose petals and smooth oval-shaped pebbles manufactured to look like they came from a mountain stream.
‘She turned up on their doorstep. Late one night.’
The client, who was booked in for the Deluxe Power Pedicure, ‘a luxury experience for the busy executive’, wiggled his feet against the stones and kept talking, fortunately at an acceptable volume. He’d politely asked the beauty therapist if she minded if he made some calls while he had his pedicure. Most people just started randomly shouting.
‘She’s probably got nothing to do with it,’ he said. ‘We’re just calling everyone Mum knows.’
The client’s phone was in the pocket of his slouchy soft white shirt. He wore AirPods. The therapist’s dad said people wearing AirPods looked like peanuts. (Her dad had recently turned fifty and it was cute the way he thought his opinions still had value.) The client didn’t look like a peanut. He was very attractive.
‘It’s just strange for Mum not to be in touch for this long. Normally she calls me back within two minutes all breathless and horrified that she missed the call.’
The beauty therapist scrubbed apricot kernel exfoliator into the heel of his right foot in hard vigorous circles.
‘I know, but it’s not like she disappeared without a word. She texted us all on Valentine’s Day.’ He paused. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what it said. Hold on a sec.’
He scrolled through his phone with his thumb. ‘Here it is.’ He read out loud, ‘“Going OFF-GRID for a little while! I’m dancing daffodils 21 dog champagne to end Czechoslovakia! Spangle Moot! Love, Mum.” Heart emoji. Butterfly emoji. Flower emoji. Smiley face emoji. “Off-grid” was in capitals.’
The beauty therapist’s mother used a lot of emojis in her texts too. Mothers loved emojis. She wondered what all that ‘dancing daffodils’ stuff could possibly mean.
‘It just means she was texting without her glasses,’ said the client to the person on the phone, who must have been wondering the same thing. ‘Her texts are always filled with weird random phrases.’
The beauty therapist tried to massage his calf muscle. It was like trying to massage granite. He must be a runner.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m going over there now to talk to Dad to see if I can find out more, not that he’ll tell me anything –’
At that moment his foot gave a sudden spasm, the toes splayed at an unnatural angle.
‘Cramp!’ he cried. The beauty therapist swerved her head just in the nick of time.
chapter five
Last September
Joy closed their bedroom door with a gentle, apologetic click, as if Savannah would overhear and know they were only closing it because she was there. They had always slept with their door wide open throughout their married life: so that small anxious children could hurtle straight into their bed after nightmares, so that they could hear teenagers crashing through the house, drunk but thankfully home alive, so that they could rush to administer medication, advice, comfort, so that they could leap from their beds each morning and run straight into the action of their busy, important lives.
Once, closing the bedroom door had been a signal that someone thought sex might be a good idea. Now it was a signal that they had a guest.
An unexpected guest.
Savannah was hopefully warm and comfortable in Amy’s old bedroom, wearing an old pair of Amy’s pyjamas. Amy, their eldest, their ‘free spirit’ as Joy liked to call her, their ‘problem child’ as Stan liked to call her, was turning forty next year, and she hadn’t officially lived at home for two decades, but she still used her old bedroom as a kind of permanent storage unit, because she never seemed to settle at one address long enough to properly relocate her possessions. It was admittedly strange behaviour for a nearly forty-year-old, and there had been a time when Joy and Stan had talked about putting their foot down, and friends had suggested they should do so, as if it were possible to use sheer force of will to mould Amy into a regular person. Amy was Amy, and right now she had a job and a phone number, her fingernails were generally clean and her hair (albeit currently dyed blue) did not look like it was crawling with lice, and that was all Joy wanted from her, although it would be nice if she combed her hair occasionally.
‘Is she in bed?’ asked Stan as he came out of the bathroom, wearing boxers and a V-necked white t-shirt, from which sprang white chest hair. He was still a big, muscly, overbearing man, but he always looked vulnerable to Joy in his pyjamas.
‘I think so,’ said Joy. ‘She seemed sleepy after her bath.’
She had insisted on running a bath for Savannah. The taps were tricky to manage. She’d added some of the peach-scented bubble bath someone had given her for Mother’s Day, and laid out two of the fluffiest guest towels she could find, and it had been so pleasing to see Savannah come out of the bathroom, pink-cheeked and yawning, the tips of her hair wet, Amy’s dressing-gown trailing on the floor behind her.
Joy could hear the rounded notes of contentment in her voice. It was the long-ago primal satisfaction of feeding and bathing a hungry, tired, compliant child, and then tucking that clean, pyjama-clad child straight into bed.
‘Amy’s dressing-gown was so long –’ Joy stopped. What the heck? Her mouth dropped.
‘Oh my word,’ she said. ‘You didn’t.’
A pile of random objects was crammed, higgledy-piggledy, on top of their chest of drawers: Stan’s ancient laptop that she was pretty sure was broken, her iPad that she never touched, their desktop computer, including the monitor, their ten-year-old television, a calculator, and an old jar of twenty-cent coins that probably had a total value of ten dollars, if that.
‘I’m just being cautious,’ said Stan defensively. ‘We don’t know anything about her. She could rob us blind in the night and we’d feel like real dickheads calling the police in the morning. “Oh yes, that’s right, Officer, we fed her dinner, ran her a bubble bath, put her to bed, and lo and behold, we woke up this morning and all our worldly possessions have gone.”’
‘I can’t believe you crept around the house unplugging all our worldly possessions.’ She ran her fingers over the snarl of dusty electrical cords that dangled off the chest of drawers.
Oh my Lord, there was his precious laminator, which Troy got him last Christmas, thus beginning Stan’s obsession with laminating anything he could find: instructions for using the TV remote (admittedly helpful), the article in the local paper about the sale of Delaneys, inspiring sporting quotes he printed out from the internet and wanted to remember. He’d laminate Joy if he got the chance.