Deceive Me

by Karen Cole

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he says, his eyes black with anger. ‘You really are a bitch sometimes, you know that?’ And he stomps past me towards the stairs.

  ‘Wait. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,’ I say, grabbing his arm. We need each other. My family is all I’ve got. ‘We shouldn’t be arguing. Not now. We should be supporting each other. It’s just that I’m so worried about her.’

  ‘And you think I’m not?’

  ‘No, I know you are. Please. Let’s not fight.’

  He sighs and sits down next to me, patting my leg. ‘Okay, Jo. I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have blamed you.’

  But what if he’s right? I think as Chris heads to bed. What if accidentally he’s hit the nail on the head? What if this is all my fault?

  Once Chris is upstairs in bed, I go to the kitchen and climb up on a chair. Right on top of the kitchen cabinets is a cardboard box. On the side I’ve written in green marker pen Grace and Jack Memories.

  I hoist the box down, dump it on the floor and brush off the dust. It hasn’t been opened since we moved here, and dust collects quickly in Cyprus. My hands are shaking as I rip off the tape and start unpacking objects, excavating layers of our own personal history. On top are Grace’s GCSE results and a photo of her as Violet Buearegarde in a school production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In the middle layers, reports, photos, paintings, cards that they made for me. To the best Mum in the World Grace has written, aged eight. I delve deeper and pull out a purple handprint (Jack’s when he was two years old). There’s a baby tooth in an envelope, I’m not sure whose, and a lock of silky black hair saved from Grace’s first haircut. Right at the bottom of the box I find what I’m looking for, wrapped carefully in tissue paper. A tiny white bodysuit with a giraffe on the front. I threw out all of Grace’s other baby clothes, but I couldn’t bear to part with this.

  ‘Gracie,’ I whisper, burying my face in the soft material and bursting into tears. ‘I’m so sorry, Gracie. I’m so, so sorry.’

  Chapter 6

  2000

  ‘So, why do you want this job, Joanna?’

  I’m sitting in this large, elegant living room trying not to get swallowed up by the sofa. I was so nervous before the interview I took two of Mum’s Valium. On reflection, that might have been too many, because I’m finding it hard to sit up straight and keep my eyes open. Everything is so remote and hazy, it’s hard to focus on what the lady just said. I think it was something about the job. Why do I want this job?

  Good question. Why do I want it? Escape is the first word that springs to mind: escape from our tiny house that always smells of damp, dogs and cigarettes; escape from Dave’s stupid fish in their murky, green tank; escape from Mum and her moods and Dave and his drug-fuelled rages. I don’t say any of that out loud, of course. I’ve got an answer all prepared. I straighten my back, smiling, and try to channel my inner Mary Poppins.

  ‘I want to travel, see a bit of the world, and of course, I’ve always loved children . . .’ My voice tails off unconvincingly. I’ve never been very good at lying. If I ever did love children, it’s been sucked out of me by the twins, with all the tantrums, snotty noses and dirty nappies.

  ‘Good, good,’ says the man. Hakan is in his thirties, I guess, good-looking, with dark curly hair and big, liquid brown eyes like Omar Sharif in Dr Zhivago. He seems nicer and more approachable than his wife, who’s giving off an ice-queen vibe, so I address most of my answers to him.

  He glances down at my CV. ‘You got good grades in your GCSEs. Why not stay on and finish your A levels, Joanna?’

  ‘Maybe I will later. I want to get some life experience first.’

  He smiles approvingly. ‘Good girl. I like that. More people should do that.’

  Helen, his wife, gives me a sharp look through narrowed lids. ‘Have you ever been to Cyprus before?’

  ‘Well, no . . .’ The truth is, I wasn’t even sure where it was until I looked it up in the Atlas last night. Before that, all I had was a vague notion of a place somewhere in the Mediterranean. I found out last night that it’s a large island shaped like a stingray in the eastern Mediterranean between Turkey, Syria and Lebanon.

  ‘How do you think you’ll handle being so far away from home in a strange country and a strange culture? Don’t you think you’ll be homesick? Won’t you miss your family?’

  Ha! That’s a joke. I’ll miss them like a hole in the head.

  ‘Oh, I think I’ll handle it,’ I say chirpily. ‘I’m a very independent person.’ This is true. I’ve had to be independent. Your mother being suicidal half the time and your stepdad being a violent drug addict tends to help you grow up fast.

  ‘Do you know much about the history of Cyprus?’ Hakan asks, leaning forward and clasping his hands together in his lap.

  I shake my head mutely. I’m feeling a bit out of my depth.

  He sits back, putting his hands behind his head. ‘Cyprus is a divided nation, did you know that?’

  Again, I shake my head.

  ‘Oh, she doesn’t need to hear about all that.’ Helen flaps a hand at him impatiently.

  But Hakan ploughs on, ignoring her. ‘It’s been divided since the war in nineteen seventy-four. The Turkish Cypriots live in the North and Greek Cypriots in the South. I am a Turkish Cypriot.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. I don’t really know what else to say. I’ve never heard of any war in Cyprus. I didn’t know there were different kinds of Cypriots. It all sounds very complicated.

  Helen frowns. ‘You’re still very young, Joanna,’ she says gently. ‘Do you have any experience of looking after little children?’

  I’m on firmer ground here. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s look after young kids. ‘Yes, lots,’ I say confidently. ‘I’ve got twin brothers. They’re seven years old now. My mum was . . . ill for a while after they were born, and I looked after them all by myself. Taking care of one three-year-old will be a piece of cake.’

  Hakan throws back his head and laughs. His laugh is loud and hearty like a pirate and takes me by surprise. ‘Well, you certainly seem mature for your age, Joanna.’

  And I blush a little because no one has ever called me mature before.

  ‘So, you have experience of looking after new-born babies?’ says Helen. ‘We’re expecting in five months.’ She places a hand on her belly, smiling faintly, and for the first time I notice a small, neat swelling.

  ‘Like I said, Mum was ill after the twins were born, so I looked after them pretty much from day one.’

  In fact, my mother suffered from severe postnatal depression and wild mood swings, which the doctors later diagnosed as manic depression. She has currently committed herself to a mental hospital, but I don’t see any reason to tell Hakan and Helen that.

  Hakan looks at Helen and slaps his knees. ‘Well, what do you think? Don’t you think it’s time she met his majesty?’

  Helen nods and stands up. She’s beautiful, I realise, tall and blonde and dignified, like Grace Kelly in High Society. They make a handsome couple and suddenly I feel short, plump and awkward as I stand up next to her. ‘Why not?’ she says, smiling.

  In the conservatory a small, dark-haired boy is playing on the carpet with a bunch of plastic dinosaurs.

  ‘This’ – Helen stoops and ruffles the boy’s hair – ‘is Adam. Adam, say hello to Joanna.’

  ‘Hi, Adam,’ I say breezily.

  Adam glances up, smiles shyly, then continues playing.

  I’ve got this in the bag, I think. I know all about dinosaurs and I know all about three-year-old boys. I sit cross-legged on the floor next to him and pick up the biggest dinosaur.

  ‘Who’s this guy?’ I ask. ‘What’s his name?’

  Adam doesn’t look at me, absorbed in his game. ‘That’s T Wex,’ he says. ‘They’re having a party.’

  ‘Great,’ I say ent
husiastically. ‘Is it a birthday party? Whose birthday is it?’

  Adam frowns. He obviously hasn’t considered this. He stabs a finger at a pterodactyl. ‘It’s him’s.’

  Soon Adam and I are chatting away like old friends and I can tell that Hakan is impressed. Even Helen seems to be thawing a little.

  They ask me a few more questions about school, which I’m happy to answer. I’ve got good grades and I’ve got nothing to hide. I give them the name of my form tutor as a reference – he’s always had a soft spot for me. He totally took my side when I was accused of stealing Hannah King’s earrings from the changing rooms.

  ‘When would you like to start?’ asks Hakan, as they show me to the door.

  Helen shoots him a warning look. ‘We have a couple more people to interview,’ she says, giving me a tight smile. ‘We’ll let you know by the end of the week.’

  ‘We’ll let you know very soon,’ says Hakan. And then, is it my imagination, or does he give me a wink as he’s closing the door?

  Tuesday, 19th September 2017

  Chapter 7

  Somebody must have seen something.

  I cling to this thought as I drive Jack to school. I need to hold on to something. It’s seven thirty in the morning and there’s still no sign of Grace. I can’t have slept more than a total of two hours last night. First thing when I woke up, I rushed into her room, hoping rather than expecting to see her in her bed, limbs sprawled everywhere, the way she always sleeps, covers tossed off in the night as if she’s been wrestling with the sheets. But her bed was empty. Everything was in the same place as yesterday. Untouched. And my world shattered. Again.

  Chris has taken the day off work and we’re all driving in together, me, Jack and Chris. I’m on autopilot. I keep reliving the last time I saw Grace over and over in my mind. Black ponytail bobbing, the brief backwards glance she gave me, before she was swept up in a sea of teenagers. What was she thinking then? Was she already planning her escape? Did she wait for me to drive off, and then turn around and walk straight out of school? Did someone call out to her – someone waiting in the street, watching her? Someone she knew or a stranger, biding their time, waiting for the right moment. My blood freezes at the thought.

  It must have been someone she knew. Grace would never go anywhere with a stranger. Not my smart, streetwise Grace. Either way, there were lots of people there that morning and someone must have noticed something.

  If any of her friends know anything, it’ll be Maria. Maria and Grace are close. They hit it off on Grace’s first day at the Academy, bonding over a shared taste in music, a love of animals and the fact that they are both outsiders of a kind. Grace because she’s English and Maria because she’s half Bulgarian, half Cypriot. I don’t know if the police have interviewed Maria yet, but I doubt it. Besides, even if they have, there’s no harm in us talking to her too.

  ‘Don’t you think we should leave the police to do their job?’ Chris said when I told him my intentions this morning.

  ‘This is too important to leave exclusively in the hands of people who don’t know or care about Grace. Maybe we’ll realise the significance of something the police have missed.’

  Chris shrugged.

  And so, the argument was settled.

  Security at the school is amazingly lax, and it’s scarily easy for us to walk onto campus and to find out from one of the teachers that Maria is in a PE lesson.

  They’re playing basketball, trainers squeaking on the wooden floor, shouts echoing around the large sports hall. Maria is too absorbed in the game to notice us. We stand by the sidelines for a moment, watching the teenagers lumbering about, until their coach, Mr Bambos, blows his whistle for a break and I take the opportunity to catch his attention.

  ‘I need to speak to Maria Lambrou for a minute, if that’s okay.’

  ‘Sure, Sure. Anything I can do to help,’ he says. He lowers his voice. ‘I heard about Grace. I hope she turns up soon.’

  Mr Bambos knows Grace well. He used to teach her badminton every Tuesday and Friday after school. Until she started skipping lessons to meet up with Tom. It was how I discovered Tom was in Cyprus, and she’d started seeing him again.

  It doesn’t rain that often in Cyprus but when it does, it really rains, thick silver strands of rain, like wire cables that flood the roads and seep in through the cracks in roofs. That day, about six months ago, it was raining so hard I could barely see out of my windscreen as I parked on the road outside. I was early to pick up Grace. I usually had my Greek lesson at the same time and was a little bit late, but that day it had been cancelled and as I was early, I thought I’d take the opportunity to watch Grace play. I dashed through the rain from the car to the hall and stood in the doorway shaking water droplets from my umbrella and my hair and looked around the room.

  No Grace.

  Perhaps she was in the toilet, I thought, so I sat on the benches at the side and waited. But after ten minutes there was still no sign of Grace and I began to get worried. When I eventually interrupted the lesson to ask Mr Bambos where she was, he seemed confused.

  ‘Grace? She hasn’t been to the lesson for a few weeks,’ he said, scratching the bald spot on his head.

  I waited in the car and watched as she ran, head down through the rain, her badminton racquet slung over her shoulder.

  ‘Good game?’ I asked casually, as she climbed into the passenger seat. There was a devil in me that couldn’t resist trapping her in her own lies, seeing how far she would go.

  She put her seat belt on slowly. ‘Okay,’ she said carefully.

  ‘Funny,’ I said. ‘Because I came early. My Greek lesson was cancelled. I thought I’d watch you play for a bit.’

  ‘Oh,’ she started and flushed guiltily. I could see the cogs turning in her mind. I watched her squirm for a bit, trying to think of a way to get out of it. Then I turned on her.

  ‘Where have you been? Your coach says you haven’t been coming for weeks. What have you been doing? Why have you been lying to me?’

  She sighed heavily, balled up her hands into fists.

  ‘Well, Mother, what else was I supposed to do? You would never have let me see him if I’d told you the truth.’

  ‘Tom?’ I said. My heart dropped like a stone in a well. ‘Tom’s here? What the hell is he doing here?’

  ‘He’s got a job. He’s going to live here until I finish school . . .’

  It was worse than I thought. ‘Jesus, Grace. What about his medical degree?’

  ‘Oh, he’s dropped that.’

  ‘You realise how mad that sounds? Do you think it’s fair to Tom? Do you think it’s fair to let him throw away his life like that?’

  She flushed red and stared out the window at the driving rain.

  ‘He wasn’t enjoying uni anyway . . . We love each other and nothing you can say will change that.’

  ‘Don’t give me that crap. He’s just using you, you know that.’

  ‘Can we just drive, Mother? This conversation is over. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.’

  I resisted the urge to chuck her out in the rain and let her walk home by herself. Instead we drove home in angry silence, Grace staring out at the raindrops sliding down the window, refusing to look at me, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts.

  Perhaps I should have handled it differently, I think as I sit watching Maria pass the ball to a friend and run up towards me. If I hadn’t been so inflexible, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe Grace would still be here, safe and sound.

  ‘Mrs Appleton,’ Maria says as she picks up the water bottle she’s left on the bench. She looks wary, almost scared of me. It’s not that surprising, I suppose. I probably look terrible. I haven’t slept or washed or even brushed my hair. I imagine I look like a madwoman.

  ‘Can I speak to you for a moment?’ I say, trying to sound as composed as
possible. ‘Outside?’

  ‘Of course.’ She wipes the sweat from her face with a hand towel, then follows me outside to where Chris is waiting on a bench and we sit next to him in the shade of a fig tree. The sun is still low in the sky but it’s insanely hot already and the air is dusty and catches in my throat.

  ‘I’m so sorry about Grace,’ says Maria, glancing from me to Chris. ‘I’m praying for her. That she’ll turn up safe and sound.’ She clasps her hands together and closes her eyes as if she’s praying right now.

  ‘Thank you, Maria.’ Praying’s unlikely to help, I think. If God exists, he or she stopped listening to my prayers a long time ago. But I suppose there’s no harm in Maria trying, if it makes her feel better.

  ‘You haven’t heard anything from her then?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’ She gazes at me. Her eyes are big and troubled.

  ‘You don’t have any idea where she might be?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Is there any place you kids go together?’ Chris says. ‘A place she likes to hang out?’

  Maria traces a pattern with her foot in the dust. ‘Sometimes we go down by the salt lake – a whole group of us used to hang out there – but Grace hasn’t been there much recently. She spends most of her time with Tom now . . .’

  ‘Whereabouts by the salt lake?’ asks Chris, leaning forward.

  ‘There’s a kind of hut for watching the birds. Near the park.’

  ‘The hide. I know it,’ I say, turning to Chris. ‘We went down there in February to look at the flamingos and Jack got his foot stuck in the mud. We had to leave his Wellington boot there, remember?’

  Chris smiles, a small sad smile. ‘I do.’

  Despite the lost boot, it was a good day. And my eyes fill with sudden tears at the memory of Jack hopping along, trying not to get his sock muddy, and Grace laughing so hard at him that she too fell over in the mud. We all ended up laughing hysterically and flinging mud at each other. That was the last time I can remember Grace coming with us on a family outing. Simpler, happier times, before Tom reappeared on the scene, before my warm, open daughter became cold and secretive.