Mum doesn’t watch the reports when I’m around. ‘Too upsetting,’ she says, chucking me under the chin, then holding my face in place a beat too long, like I don’t know she’s checking if I’ve been crying.
After I’ve been sent to bed, I hear the News at Ten bongs. The presenters say the search area’s been widened, that suspects have been arrested, questioned, then released again. That Imogen’s and Amber’s parents have increased the reward. That the police don’t know where they are. Sometimes, the sound cuts out mid-sentence, and I have to check the digital display on my bedside clock to see whether Mum’s turned the TV off or if it’s another power cut. Sometimes I hear her moving about, scuffling in the drawers for the emergency candles. Sometimes I hear what could be sniffling, or the squelch of the fridge being opened and wine being poured. Sometimes there’s just nothing.
The hot summer days start blurring together. Steph at mine while I’m doing the ironing: slurping one of my home-made Ribena ice-lollies, trying to get enough of her legs out of the window to keep working on her tan. With Mum at work, I had to promise to stay in. Steph says her stepdad doesn’t care, but she only lives seven doors down, so sometimes she puts her music on, slips out the back door, and it can be hours before anyone even realises she’s gone. From her place on the windowsill, she keeps watch over what’s going on.
‘That slag from over the road’s had her hair done. Red.
Looks good.’
Then, after a bit: ‘Another two police cars.’ But not with their sirens on. We know what that means. They’re just patrolling, or doing enquiries, or arrests. But nothing urgent. Not anything that could change anything, really. Probably not even anything to do with Imogen or Amber.
More thoughtful slurps. ‘If they find them now, it’ll be ambulance, right? Not police?’
The iron hisses hot steam.
‘I don’t even know why I’m asking,’ Steph says, and her voice is that pretend-hard one she uses when she’s talking back to the teachers after being told off, or when Joey’s brother pushed her down the school steps and she landed bad but swore it didn’t hurt. ‘They’re definitely dead.’
The search continues for weeks, then the sightings start coming in. Liverpool. Edinburgh. Cornwall. Some resort in Tunisia. People phone the hotline and say they’ve seen Amber and Imogen, together or separately, in all sorts of odd places. Some say their hair is different now. Some say they’re in disguise. Some say they were there with someone else, a stranger, but then that person looked away for a second, and the girls mouthed the words ‘help me’ to some onlooker nearby.
These all get reported. The police investigate. Nothing comes of it.
‘Cranks,’ Steph says, digging her spoon into her mum’s payday chocolate ice cream that we’ve smuggled upstairs to her room. ‘They’re making it up, for attention.’
‘You said they were dead.’
‘They are.’
But Stephanie eats the entire tub in a furious sulk, muttering about nutcases telling lies to the tabloids. When she’s sick later, I hold her hair back. Later still, I hide the tub in my bag to get rid of on the walk back to mine. Stephanie will blame her brothers for its disappearance and her stepdad will shout, but with no evidence on either side, nothing will happen. Her house is too chaotic for proper investigations into these sorts of petty misdeeds.
We start big school. Stephanie is funny and popular, like she is everywhere. I am clever, but not clever enough yet to hide how smart I am. Even though I know it doesn’t do much good. Even though I know it only creates more pressure, more expectation, more disappointment when teachers think you’re not meeting your full potential.
Steph never gets told she’s not reaching her full potential.
I mention this one afternoon, after I’ve been kept back in English and told off for talking.
Steph blows a big, wet Juicy Fruit gum bubble, then cackles when it pops. ‘This is my full potential, bitch,’ she says, pulling a sexy pose like the dancers in our favourite music videos.
I laugh like I’m supposed to, and because it weirdly does make me feel better to always know what Stephanie won’t take seriously. Mum picks us up and we go back to mine to do our homework. The afternoons are starting to get darker. There are no cameras by now.
For birthday parties or big football matches, the pub relaxes its rules on under-eighteens. We’re not supposed to be in there unattended, but when its dark rooms are teeming with noise and tension and the warmth of bodies, the bar staff can’t keep count of who’s with who. Before
Amber and Imogen went missing, we’d be outside with the others, taking turns jumping from the falling-down garages behind the beer garden. It was an ongoing competition to see who could clear the wild tangle of thorns and nettles that came up halfway as high as the garage wall, to land unstung with ankles and kneecaps intact.
‘Watch out,’ Stephanie would crow like a wrestling announcer, when I scrambled up to take my turn. ‘Cass can take you all on. She’s fearless, y’know.’ The others would make bets about how many bones I’d break, but I made it, every time. Steph sometimes talks about missing that mid-air reckless feeling of flight, but for me it was the impact that made the most sense: the spine-jarring jolt as my feet smacked back down, the sting of gravel on my palms. I liked knowing I had it in me to be brave, to hurtle myself into nothingness. To scuff my trainers on the rotting roof edge and then put two fingers up at the scoffing lads below and jump: to press my bruises or wiggle my loose teeth after and feel I’d done something important. Stephanie only did it once: she sprained her ankle and had to be given ice in a messy, wet wad of paper towels from behind the bar. After that, she’d only commentate.
When the girls were first reported missing, the garages were searched, then demolished. By now, we’ve somehow decided we should be more grown-up than that. We stay at the adults’ tables instead of joining in with the other kids’ rampages. Sometimes we take the glasses back, to be helpful, but also so we can down the last dregs of beer or rum and Coke, wincing and comparing which tastes we like. We’ve heard the phrase ‘what’s your poison’ on films and TV. We have a lot of discussions about what our poisons will be.
That Halloween, no one is allowed out to go trick-or-treating. I use Mum’s make-up to transform me and Steph into vampire queens, even though we’re not going anywhere. Our faces itch with the weight of powder, eyeliner, mascara, adulthood. Still, we keep it on. In the morning, our pillows have pale prints of our skin and twin blotted moons from our eyelids.
Tinsel and mistletoe go up, then come down. The nights get lighter again. I spend hours on my bed with pencil crayons, paintboxes, oil pastels, drawing the cherry blossom branches outside my bedroom window. The petal blizzards remind me of confetti: delicate as paper, pastel-pretty. They catch in our hair, on our clothes. They clog in the gutters and make a grimy whimsical mulch. Stephanie says she loves my pictures but that real flowers should be banned. She wheezes on her inhaler but still steals spritzes of my mum’s honeysuckle perfume whenever we’re bored, home alone, ransacking her dressing table. Pretending to be older than we are.
On the anniversary of the girls’ disappearance, there’s a big appeal. Posters everywhere: all the rain-faded ones stripped down from the lamp posts and replaced with new laminated ones that look wrong in how rich their colours are. There’s a re-enactment for Crimewatch, and although we’re at school while it’s being filmed, my guts churn all day.
‘What’s with you?’ Stephanie asks, sitting on the sinks at breaktime, when I let my rucksack fall to the tiled floor and then slump down to follow it.
‘I don’t know. I feel weird.’
‘Is it them?’
‘Who?’
‘Amber and Imogen. Maybe they’re annoyed, about the re-enactment. Wherever they are.’ She twists on the counter to look in the mirror that isn’t even proper glass, just a sheet of metal buffed to a near-shine. After a spate of the bathroom mirrors getting smashed with no culprits ident
ified, the school stopped replacing them. Steph peers into the metal murk, licks her finger and smooths her eyebrows into shape. ‘They’re sending you a message,’ she says.
My stomach clenches. I fold my arms over it hard to keep the ache in. ‘Like what?’
‘You gotta disrupt the filming. They don’t want to be found.’
Steph proclaims this with the lash-batting sincerity of the naff pretend-psychic woman on the lottery results show.
I shoot her a scowl. ‘I can’t even tell if you’re joking or not.’
Her reflection in the almost-mirror blows me a sarcastic kiss.
We didn’t know them, not really. Not enough to have a proper claim to the black fog feeling that seeps in whenever they get mentioned. But we went to the same school, shared the same playground, saw them on their skates in the street sometimes, span their skipping rope or yelled ourselves hoarse on sports day. Sack race for Amber, Imogen the undisputed champion of egg-and-spoon. By sight, we knew them: Imogen’s freckles, Amber’s big curls. That’s enough to make this weird. The proximity feels sinister and contaminating, as though we’ve been infected by something. We’re not scared, or no more than we are about other things we see on the news: the dead bodies found in binbags on the moors, the random knife attacks, the big bomb in the shopping centre. But it feels too close, a woozy, out-of-focus, edge-of-thought feeling, like the pressure before a thunderstorm. As though we should be doing something for them and aren’t.
I pull my knees up and rest my head on them, let the cool black of my skirt press my eyelids blank.
‘Fuck’s sake, Steph. They’re supposed to be in juniors, making pictures out of pasta or something. Learning their times tables. Writing cute poems about the rainforest.’ Steph’s had enough practice to understand my muffled voice.
‘Fuck their times tables,’ she says. ‘They could be anywhere. And they’re probably somewhere better than here. They could be in New York, or Hawaii. Maybe Tenerife. Eating McDonald’s every day.’ Her voice goes dreamy, summoning chocolate milkshakes and chips. I raise my face to meet her gaze.
‘Woah, Cass, you gonna puke or something? You’ve gone dead pale.’
I lurch upright and into a cubicle. ‘Something’s up with me. I’ll be alright in a minute, I think. Just let me have a wee, will you?’
The lock’s broken. Nearly all of them are. Without asking, Steph’s hand appears on the top edge of the door, holding it closed in case anyone comes in. I lean my head against the graffiti-scarred wall. When I try to focus on the scribbles and compass-scratches, the writing seems to swarm.
My knickers, when I pull them down, are wet with red-brown gore.
I wedge a wad of tissues in place and Stephanie walks behind me in the corridors so no one sees the stain on my skirt.
The re-enactment brings in a record number of tips to the hotline. On the estate, people talk about how the lookalikes didn’t look right. The latest theory in the tabloids is that the girls were burnt in the meat factory incinerator. The police say there’s no evidence for that. We still feel suspicious and sick whenever we smell smoke.
By the following summer, we are thirteen and convinced that’s old enough to do anything we want. On Fridays, we babysit for Steph’s cousins. We’re old enough now to prefer it to the pub, where grown-ups ask us cutesypatronising questions about homework and boys, ignore us entirely or leer when they ask our age. At Auntie Nic’s, we turn the music on loud, let the kids trampoline on their beds until they’re tired. Once they’re asleep, we’re allowed one beer each. We slurp gold bubbles from green glass and belch the alphabet. Then we find Nic’s stash of erotic novels. ‘Is this really what it’s like?’ I ask, after reading Steph a scene involving sex on horseback at sunset.
‘Definitely,’ she says, riffling through another. ‘Watch this.’ She kneels up on the settee and drops the book. It lands pages up on the cushions with a soft flump of dust. I watch her, nonplussed.
‘It’s a trick,’ she says, snatching it up. ‘To find where the dirty bits are.’
And it works: that page is the start of a chapter-long sex scene, where the woman gets tied up and the man wears a mask and makes her say please, then leaves her bound to the bed when he goes. The last line describes the growl of his motorbike as it disappears into the distance. ‘This is stupid,’ I say. ‘Like, how long is she supposed to stay there? What if she needs the toilet?’
‘You’re right,’ Steph says, but her cheeks look hot and her eyes are starry as she frisbees the book across the room. ‘It’s ridiculous.’
At age fourteen, the bad things that have happened on the estate since Amber and Imogen have all been boring and ordinary enough that we’re allowed to walk to and from school on our own. Sometimes, Steph has detention and I walk back most of the way on my own, then wait for her in the library. But it’s not just that I don’t want to go by myself past the corner where the girls were last seen. The library is cool and quiet and relieves some of the pressure that school seems to build up in my head. There are massive tables and an entire shelf of books on fashion and photography, with models like sexy skeletons in circus make-up, flower headdresses, cage skirts. I paw through them for the oddest poses and use them to practise drawing. After a few exploring sessions, I find a book on witchcraft. When I take it to the counter to borrow, the librarian gives a half-smile that she smooths away before I’ve even properly seen that it’s there. She looks like Janine from Ghostbusters and has a million badges on the denim jacket hung on the back of her chair. The smile is like a secret, or a password. I put the book in my bag. I don’t show Steph when she turns up.
That night, I stay up reading. I dig out the power-cut candles and line them up on the windowsill, watching the flames sputter. By morning, I feel strange but in a good way, and I want Steph to share it too.
‘Look at this,’ I tell her, when she meets me on the corner to walk to school. There’s a smear of toothpaste on her cheek and the scent of vanilla body spray. She hands me a silver foil packet so we can share the last strawberry Pop Tart, then glances over to see me slide the book from my satchel.
‘What is it?’ ‘I got it from the library. There’s all sorts in here. How to be more psychic. How to find lost things. How to be invisible. How to be more powerful.’
‘And you reckon it’s real?’ I know her well enough to hear the layers in her voice: wafer-edge of hope muffled by uncertainty, then almost-scorn ready to tip out on top. ‘Maybe,’ I shrug, matching her tone. Knowing she’ll recognise the fizziness under the surface anyway. ‘Only one way to find out.’
For the rest of that term we share custody of the book, taking turns checking it out from the library. We go to the counter together, so it doesn’t get re-shelved in between. One of us returns it, the other one takes it back out.
‘You know,’ says the librarian, when this has gone on for months, ‘if you ever lose a book, we can just look up what the original price would have been, and you can pay to replace it. You don’t need to worry. You wouldn’t be in trouble.’
Today, she’s wearing black nail polish and a matching T-shirt with a pink triangle on it. Steph stares like the entire thing’s a trap, but the kind smirk in the librarian’s voice me tells me she’s trying to help.
‘So, say something happened to this book,’ I say, and her eyes crinkle in encouragement. ‘You know, like it got left on the bus or returned to the school library by mistake and we didn’t know how to find it again?’
‘Happens all the time,’ she soothes. ‘I’ll find the cost for you. Just in case.’
Once the book is ours, we take it to the lightning-bolt tree. More even than our bedrooms, the air there is wild and dangerous and ours. We sit cross-legged in the shadow of its branches, on brittle grass scorched by another hot summer. A red money spider crawls over the book’s pages. Sweat slicks the back of our knees. We do the spell for finding lost things: rattle the lighter until the flame catches, then ask the candle where Imogen and Amber are. Ev
ery time we finish the question, the candle flickers and goes out.
‘I told you,’ Steph says, leaning back against the tree’s blackened trunks. ‘I told you years ago. They’re gone.’ There’s a wet ripple in her voice. I put my arm around her and she leans her head on my shoulder. We’re bigger than we used to be, but still fit together perfectly. Steph rips up handfuls of grass and I stare at the jellyish puddle of melted wax cooling round the candle wick.
When we look up, I think I see something: a flash of red fabric in the overgrown weed tangle, like Imogen’s T-shirt in those last pictures of them on all the posters. From the sharp inhale next to me, Stephanie’s seen it too.
‘Come on,’ I say, pulling her up. ‘We have to look.’
Steph stays quiet and keeps tight hold of my hand as we get closer, but when we get there it’s nothing. Just an old carrier bag, snagged on brambles and breathing in and out with the wind.
By the time we’re fifteen, we’re sucked back to the pub. We still do spells sometimes. To make boys like us, or leave us alone, or to keep us safe from serial killers or getting kidnapped or being blown up with bombs. By now we wear make-up to school every day, and to the pub or wherever we go afterwards. When we pass them, we hear the little kids doing dares to summon Imogen and Amber by saying their names three times or running back and forth past their houses. Their names give us a twinge like long-ago imaginary friends.
When it’s the England game, Steph nicks twenty quid from her stepdad’s wallet. We press through the half-time scrum at the bar.
‘Two pints of lager and two rum and Cokes. Doubles.’ Not what we want, but believable.
‘These for your folks, yeah?’
‘Course.’
We take all four drinks and sit on a picnic table outside to drink them even though it’s drizzling.
‘What will he say when he realises the money’s missing?’ ‘He’ll think he spent it.’ Steph draws in the condensation on the side of her glass. ‘Or lost it, the pisshead.’ ‘You know,’ I say, remembering the spells we used to do to make ourselves invisible. ‘I bet he’s not the only one.’
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