I Found You (14 page)

Derry is at the front door. She has Daniel by the hand and looks very stern. ‘What’, she says, ‘is going on? Jules says she saw you in town this morning, shopping, with that guy.’

Alice clutches her heart and throws Derry a look of mock horror. ‘Scandalous!’ she says.

Derry grimaces. ‘But, Al, it’s one thing giving him shelter, it’s another spending your bloody money on him.’

‘Christ, Derry, I spent twenty quid in the Red Cross shop.’ This isn’t strictly true. It was closer to forty once you factored in the pants and socks.

‘Is he here?’

Alice sighs. ‘So far as I know. He’s in the shed. Having a nap.’

Derry is wriggling with frustration. This is the downside of allowing a friend to manage your life for you.

Alice holds the door open and says, ‘Come on then. Let’s get this over with. And just for the record,’ she adds in a low voice, following her friend into the kitchen, ‘Griff loves him. And so does Romaine. And kids and dogs
know people
.’

‘And what about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘He’s nice,’ she says circumspectly. ‘What do you want me to say?’

Daniel finds Romaine in the back yard and Derry immediately starts tidying Alice’s kitchen. She doesn’t even know she’s doing it. ‘“Nice”,’ she mutters. ‘Well. I look forward to being able to draw my own conclusions.’ She drops a ball of chip paper into Alice’s bin, washes her hands and dries them. Peering through the window of the back door into the back yard she says, ‘He’s up.’

‘Up?’

‘Yeah. Your man. Playing with the littlies.’

Alice joins her at the back door. Romaine and Daniel have embroiled Frank in a game involving two dolls, a threadbare dog and a Transformer. He is on his haunches, following instructions very gravely.

‘See,’ says Alice. ‘He’s a fine man.’

‘That’s as maybe,’ says Derry, hanging up Alice’s tea towel and switching on the kettle. ‘But he’s an unknown quantity. And given your history, I really think you should call the police.’

Alice rubs the tips of her elbows. As much as she doesn’t want to fuel Derry’s paranoia, she does want to share. ‘I suggested it,’ she says. ‘When he first arrived. He blanched. Looked petrified.’ She shrugs.

‘Well,’ says Derry. ‘That’s not particularly reassuring.’

‘And there’s other stuff. He’s started remembering things. He remembers watching a man jumping into the sea and drowning. He remembers a teenage girl on the carousel at the steam fair.’

‘So,’ says Derry, ‘have you googled it?’

‘Googled what?’

‘Men jumping into the sea and drowning?’

‘What? No. Of course I haven’t. I don’t even know when it happened.’

Derry sighs. ‘Where’s your laptop?’

‘In my room.’

‘Bring it down.’

Alice does as she’s told. Jasmine is sitting at her desk in her room and turns when Alice walks in. ‘Sorry, love, I need the laptop.’

‘When’s he going?’ she asks, closing the browser and putting the laptop to sleep.

‘Frank?’

‘Whatever. Yeah.’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Soon. When he remembers.’

‘But what if he doesn’t remember?’

‘He will, love. It says, on the internet. It’s temporary.’

Jasmine stands up, adjusts her black-framed glasses and shrugs.

‘Griff likes him,’ she says to Jasmine’s back.

‘Right,’ says Jasmine. ‘He’s a dog.’

‘A fussy dog!’ she calls after her daughter, but she’s gone.

‘Man drowned in Ridinghouse Bay’.

Alice and Derry sit, heads almost touching, side by side at the laptop. Derry presses enter and they wait for the results to come up.

It is immediately surprising how many men have drowned off Ridinghouse Bay.

‘We need a year,’ says Derry.

‘I told you,’ says Alice. ‘I have no idea.’

‘You said he remembered a teenage girl. So maybe this happened when he was a teenager. How old do you reckon he is?’

‘Late thirties? Forty maybe?’

‘Right. So, say he was eighteen. And forty now. Twenty-two years ago. Nineteen ninety-three. Roughly.’

‘Very roughly,’ says Alice.

‘It’s better than nothing.’ She adds ‘1993’ to her search. ‘Check on them, will you?’ she instructs Alice.

Obediently, Alice goes to the back door and peers through the window again. The game is still very much on. Frank is voicing the threadbare dog. Romaine has one bare, olive-skinned arm draped nonchalantly around Frank’s shoulder, her hip angled against him. They look as though they could be father and daughter. No one would doubt it for a moment.

Alice sits down next to Derry. ‘He’s murdered them both,’ she deadpans. ‘Cut them to ribbons, is eating their warm flesh off the ground with the dogs.’

Derry nudges her hard. ‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘Look.’ She angles the screen towards her. ‘Not quite a drowned man, but the timings match.’

There is a story on the screen, from the
Ridinghouse Gazette
archives.

Derry is already googling the names: ‘Anthony Ross’, ‘Ridinghouse Bay’.

Nothing else comes up.

They hear the back door clatter and the children run in, high on play. Frank follows behind them and stops shyly when he sees Derry sitting there.

‘Frank,’ Alice says, ‘this is my best friend, Derry Dynes.’

‘Hi,’ she says, a softness in her voice that wouldn’t have been there if she hadn’t just read the story about a teenage boy’s father dying on the beach. ‘Mother of Daniel.’ She points at her son.

‘Nice to meet you,’ says Frank. ‘Great kids.’

‘Listen,’ says Alice, exchanging a look with Derry who nods, imperceptibly. ‘We’ve just been looking into things, on the internet, seeing what we could find out about drownings in the area. And we found a story from a good few years back. Two people feared drowned on a summer’s night. A man and his teenage son found on the beach, just here.’ She gestures towards the front door. ‘Apparently the man died of a heart attack. But the son survived. Does that ring any bells? Nineteen ninety-three? Anthony Ross?’

She is talking and talking because Frank is not responding.

‘I mean, it could be entirely the wrong time frame. We were just taking a punt. You know, you mentioned the teenage girl. So we thought it might have been something that happened when you were a teenager. If anything actually happened at all of course.’

Still he does not respond. He is leaning against the kitchen counter, but as Alice watches she realises that he is not leaning but being held up, that he is sliding, that his face has lost all its colour. She sees his hands grip the sides of the work surface, his knuckles white and hard.

‘Frank?’

Derry jumps to her feet. ‘He’s fainting,’ she says. ‘Quick. Let’s get him sitting down. Help me!’

But it’s too late. He falls to the floor like a felled tree.

1993

Mark returned two hours later. He was wearing a blazer. An actual blazer. To go to the Ridinghouse Grand.

‘What’s on?’ Tony asked, seeing them off at the door.

‘
Cliffhanger
,’ Mark replied, his hand in the small of Kirsty’s back.

‘Oh, yeah, that’s supposed to be thrilling,’ said Tony.

‘So I’ve heard,’ says Mark.

Kirsty was edging out of the door, looking keen to be on her way. She’d claimed under heavy questioning from Gray that she really did want to go to the cinema and that Gray was imagining things when he’d suggested that she hadn’t looked that keen earlier.

At the sound of their voices disappearing up the street towards town he jumped to his feet. His mum was cooking spaghetti in the kitchen and he stuck his head around to the door to say that he was popping out to buy a bottle of Coke.

‘We’ve got Sprite,’ she said.

‘I want Coke.’

‘Well then, can you get a lump of cheddar while you’re at it?’

Kirsty and Mark had been walking slowly and he was able to catch up with them halfway to the high street without running. They’d stopped to look in the window of an antique shop. There was a display of old china dolls and they were talking about how spooky they were. Mark again put his hand into the small of Kirsty’s back and gently guided her onwards towards the cinema.

He watched from a distance as Mark held the doors open for his sister and gallantly ushered her through. And then they were gone.

Mark brought Kirsty home at ten. Gray could hear them from his bedroom over the street. There was a kind of heaviness about their voices, as though they were on the verge of an argument. He peeled his curtain back a little and peered down on to the crowns of their heads. He saw Mark try to kiss her and he saw Kirsty duck to avoid the kiss.

‘Oh, come on,’ he heard Mark say. ‘Not one single kiss throughout that whole ridiculous movie. And now not even a little one outside your door? That’s not very kind.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m really tired. I just want to go to bed.’

‘You can go to bed very, very soon, I promise,’ he said, looming towards her again with puckered lips.

She ducked away again and said, ‘Honestly. I’m shattered.’

‘Really?’ he said in a disbelieving tone and Gray heard him tut under his breath. Then: ‘What about tomorrow?’ He sounded sulky, petulant almost. ‘Or are you going on another
day trip
?’

And there it was, the kernel of everything that Gray had been feeling uncomfortable about all week. Mark thought they were amusingly provincial. He thought he was better than them. Yet he was pursuing his sister as though she was the love of his life.

‘I don’t know,’ he heard Kirsty reply. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well then, shall I come and call for you? We could spend the day at my aunt’s. I’ll make you lunch.’

‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘I need to ask Mum and Dad.’

‘Can you ask them now?’ His tone was clipped and impatient.

‘I’ll ask tomorrow.’

‘Why not now?’

‘It’s late. I’m tired.’

He heard Mark tut again and then say, ‘Fine. I’ll call round tomorrow morning. You can tell me then.’

His sister hesitated and then said, ‘OK. See you tomorrow.’

The door clicked shut behind her and Gray heard her talking quietly with their parents before going straight to bed. Through his bedroom window, Gray watched as Mark stood for a moment or two outside Rabbit Cottage, his hands in his pockets, staring darkly at the front door, the muscles in his hollowed-out cheeks twitching slightly. Then he turned and crossed the narrow cobbled street, looked out to sea for a moment before suddenly and fearsomely kicking the sea wall, once, twice, three times, then finally heading away from the cottage, a thin, angry silhouette disappearing from view into the misty summer’s night.

Lily wakes from her nap with a start. It’s dark and the duvet is twisted around her legs. She looks at the clock by the bed: 8:09. For a moment she has no idea if it is morning or night. Then she remembers that it’s still Saturday night. She’d been dreaming of her family. She’d been dreaming of home. She picks up the phone and calls her mother.

‘Mama,’ she says, her voice full of sleep. ‘He is still gone.’

‘Come home,’ says her mother.

‘I cannot come home. In case he comes back.’

‘If he comes back he will know where you are. He knows how to get here.’

‘He cannot get here. The policewoman still has his passport.’

‘He can phone you and you can come back.’

‘But what if he is hurt?’

‘Lily. He is in his own country. If he is hurt there are people there who will look after him.’

‘I am not so sure, Mama. They came yesterday and took his computer. They said that the kind of fake passport he had comes from the criminal underworld. So he may know dangerous people. He may have crossed them.’

Her mother makes a strange strangled noise. ‘My God. Lily. You must leave! You’re in the flat by yourself. What if they come for you? What if he comes for you and they follow him? You are a sitting target!’

‘I have nowhere to go, Mama! I know no one!’

‘Oh, I knew. I knew this was all wrong. I should have stopped it. I should have made you wait.’

‘I would still have married him and he would still have been lying to me.’

‘No. With more time you would have realised. It is like onions. People reveal themselves to you a layer at a time. That is why you should wait. Wait until you get to the layers near the bottom. Usually where the worst stuff is. And
then,
if the worst stuff is not so bad, then you marry.’

‘Carl is not a bad man, Mama! We don’t know his story! I think it is possible he was married before. I found some rings. Maybe this other woman hurt him. Maybe something bad happened to him. Maybe he
has a false identity to hide from this woman! We don’t know anything.’

She hears her mother sigh. ‘I want you to come home. I can pay for tickets.’

Lily pauses. She can’t deny that she wants to be at home now. She wants her mother and her brothers and her dog and her college friends and the bars and the lost Saturday nights. She wants to brush her hair in the mirror in the bedroom she left behind, still adorned with photos of her and her friends. She wants to link arms with those friends and walk down familiar streets, speak a familiar language, see familiar faces. She wants to be somewhere where she can talk to a stranger without being misread and treated with suspicion.

But – Carl was her ticket to the UK. Without Carl, or whoever he really is, she may not be allowed back. And for some reason, as lonely as she is, and as scared as she is, she wants to be allowed back. She wants to keep the key to the door of this life she has had such a small taste of.