by Rebecca Reid
‘No boyfriend? I presume there’s a bloke back at home crying into a pint because he let you get away.’
‘No, no boyfriend.’
Max smiled. His hand brushed her arm, his skin olive against her whiteness. ‘Why not? You’re fucking beautiful.’
A flock of questions swirled in Chloe’s mind. Was this how people like Max and Zadie spoke to each other? All the books she had read about rich people seemed to involve a certain amount of bed-hopping and loose morals, but did that mean this was okay? And the loudest question of all: why didn’t she want Max to stop looking at her like that?
Finding her resolve, she got to her feet. ‘I’m going to …’ She tailed off and the blonde girls tumbled back from the bathroom, laughing and sniffing. They sat either side of Max, even closer than before, and picked up their glasses. Either Max assumed he had missed the end of her sentence or he didn’t care where she was going. Either way, he had turned his face from her and it felt like the moment when the warm sun which was on your back moved behind a cloud and your skin seemed to glow with cold. She could see what it was that Zadie found so deeply compelling about him.
She danced. Met more of Max’s friends. Drank more. Pretended she wasn’t frustrated that Zadie had invited her and now was nowhere to be seen. Told herself that she was having fun. All the way home, putting one numb foot in front of the other and walking through the freezing wind because she didn’t have any more money for a taxi, she tried to shake off the desire that had settled into the pit of her stomach, but she couldn’t.
When she got back to her room her feet were so cold she couldn’t move her toes. She stood, her back against the door, and to her own shock put her hand between her legs, thinking of Rav’s smirk outside the bar, of Max’s eyes on her bare legs at the club. She came sharply, moments later, then stood, dazed and scandalized by her own behaviour. She hung up her dress, washed her face and hands in the little sink at the corner of the room, rubbing her fingers until they were red. Then she put on a pair of sensible pyjamas, turned off the light and tried desperately to convince herself that what she had just done meant nothing.
The next day Chloe woke to find that she had four texts. Her stomach flipped, and before she could tell herself not to think it she had brewed a fantasy about a message from Rav. Or Zadie. Which would be better? Which would make her happier? She tried to quash the voice in the back of her mind that was whispering Max’s name.
She needn’t have worried. The first one was from the phone company. The second was from Lissy: ‘i’m so sorry I was such a mess last night, thank you SO SO SO MUCH for taking me to the lounge!’ It seemed she couldn’t remember that she didn’t get in, which was a relief. Chloe could pretend that she hadn’t ditched her and sent her home alone, drunk in a taxi, and Lissy could believe that she had gone to the most exclusive club for miles around.
The next was from her mother, reminding her that she needed to ask Greg nicely if he would come and collect her from the train station, and to give him plenty of notice (as if he was ever busy).
The last one was from a number she didn’t recognize. ‘Hey, good to see you last night. Fancy a drink before the end of term? Rav.’
She sat up, wishing someone – wishing Zadie – were here to talk about it. Why had he texted her now? The butterflies over Rav’s message replaced the guilt about her flirtation with Max. She didn’t fancy Max. She fancied Rav. And it seemed like Rav might actually feel the same way – despite the vomit incident. Maybe, in time, it would become a funny story, one they told people. She imagined them both sitting around a long glass table in a house in London, laughing with their friends. Max and Zadie would be married, she and Rav wouldn’t be, but they’d have kids, eventually. She’d be a celebrated playwright, Zadie would be an artist, Max would be whatever people were when they got too old to play rugby. The fantasy teetered in her mind for a moment before reality set in. Rav had had her number for weeks. He hadn’t texted her after the party, hadn’t shown any interest at all until he realized that she was going to some private party he hadn’t been invited to. She’d heard her mum say it enough times to know that if someone is interested in you, they make it clear. She held her finger over the delete button, then forced herself to press it.
12
Now
The week after dinner at Max’s was strange. It had been stickily warm all week, but when Chloe woke one morning she felt her skin puckering with goose pimples and pulled the sheet, swapped for the oppressively hot duvet a couple of weeks ago, over her body. The sky outside was blue-grey and the sun non-existent. Summer felt like a hallucination, rather than a reality that had been entirely normal the day before. When she got up none of the summer dresses she favoured during the school holidays, strappy cotton things in various ice-cream shades, afforded the warmth she wanted. She had planned to enjoy the warm weather, to sit outside reading a book and, finally, having finished sorting out everything she had neglected in the rush of report writing and end-of-term excitement, to make use of the ‘long holidays’ everyone was so convinced she got. It was the favourite comment of Rav’s friends. ‘Three reasons to be a teacher,’ they would smirk at dinner parties or barbecues. ‘Easter, summer, Christmas.’ It was an unfair joke because it only left two options – to laugh along at her profession’s expense, or to take offence and be seen as a humourless bore. She almost always opted for the former, but it rankled. She made half what Rav did by turning ugly houses into slightly less ugly houses, and yet he seemed to have near-infinite time to chat on WhatsApp all day or to pore over online listings for houses they couldn’t afford.
Sitting outside wasn’t going to be an option, so Chloe benched the idea of enjoying herself and did several loads of laundry, washed the floors, sewed buttons back on to shirts and dresses that had been sitting in a pile for weeks or, in some cases, months. She dusted, hoovered, put some clothes in a bag to take to the charity shop, and by six thirty she was feeling practically saintly. A chink of sunlight had broken through the clouds, warming their tiny garden. Delighted with her timing, Chloe poured herself a gin and tonic and sat outside, presenting her face to the sun, feeling it soaking into her skin. Of course, the moment she relaxed, feeling her shoulders drop, Rav came bounding through the door.
‘All right for some!’ He laughed. ‘You’re making the most of the break.’
She could explain that she’d done nine hours of almost unbroken cleaning, but it just didn’t seem worth it. He should notice, but he wouldn’t. Chloe had realized that when you grew up having everything done for you you didn’t question things being perfect. You only noticed if your shirt wasn’t clean or if the sheets hadn’t been changed.
‘Good day?’ she asked instead.
‘Actually, yes. Very good.’
‘Very good?’
‘I’ve been asked to do a trip.’
Chloe sat up straighter. ‘Really? Where to?’
‘Max is interested in putting some work our way and he needs me to go to Australia for a few days. Ten days, in fact.’
‘Isn’t that quite a long way to go?’ Chloe heard the words coming out of her mouth and realized she had said the wrong thing, focused on the negative and the prosaic when Rav needed to hear praise. He looked a little wounded.
‘I guess,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’ Chloe meant it. ‘I was being selfish because I’m going to miss you. Tell me about the project, what you’re going to do out there. Are your bosses pleased?’
‘It’s gone down beyond well with the firm that I’ve brought Max in. He’s such a great guy. He made sure they knew he’d come in via me and he asked for me specifically to go on this trip. It’s done wonders for my rep. I reckon I might be able to get a promotion out of this.’
Chloe searched into the recesses of her being to find some positivity for him. ‘That’s really great,’ she tried. ‘How exciting.’
Clearly, Rav wanted to believe that she was happy for him, because he disappeared and ca
me back with a beer, brimming with enthusiasm to talk about the project, the office he’d go to, the hotel that was being booked for him. He showed her pictures of the places he would be visiting, read her the LinkedIn biographies of the people he was going to meet, and all the while she fixed a smile on her face. He deserved that. He deserved to feel happy. None of this mess was his fault, after all.
She wished this could have happened without Max, that much was true. But, she reasoned, Rav had had a shit deal with his company for years, and while neither of them had ever said it out loud they both knew it had more than a little to do with the fact that he wasn’t white. The big bosses who ran the place still talked a little more slowly when they took meetings with Rav, or mentioned that they’d had a lovely curry recently. Meanwhile, his contemporaries were starting to move past him. Asked to lunches he wasn’t invited to, or ‘impromptu’ meetings. So, while the idea of Max helping Rav made her toes curl, the idea of trying to take this away from him, or ruin the happy glow seeping off him, felt just too wrong. So, she listened and made all the right noises. And every time he said something like ‘I know you don’t really like Max, but he’s really helping us out. He’s doing us a favour. He’s really sorting us out,’ Chloe smiled and didn’t say what was really on her mind. There would, of course, be a reason Max was doing this. There would be something in it for him. Max had never done anything unselfish in his entire life, at least not as far as Chloe could see, and it seemed unlikely that he was about to start now.
The following week passed, Rav fizzing with excitement about everything he was going to achieve when he was in Australia, Chloe quietly anticipating having ten days of the house entirely to herself. The smallness of the flat was becoming increasingly difficult to cope with. A couple of glasses or plates left lying around and one wet towel on the floor and the entire place looked like a tip. The school holidays were always difficult, she reminded herself. She and Rav got out of sync; he left for work while she was still asleep and wanted to go to bed before she was tired. She was left without much to tell him, no anecdotes from a day of work, which meant she ended up listening far more than she talked. It was hard not to spend money every day if you went out, which inevitably meant she stayed at home. Occasionally, she would go over the road to see Lissy, but Lissy’s single focus was Claudia, who was cute, but still a baby and therefore a limited source of entertainment.
The morning Rav left, his taxi arrived just before five. He kissed Chloe’s forehead and then slipped away, so when Chloe woke, hours later, from a blissfully deep, uninterrupted sleep, he was already in the air. The next ten days lay out in front of her, a sea of possibilities. She could do anything she wanted. She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling, trying on option after option in her mind. She could cook the various vegetarian dishes that Rav thought were boring. Rewatch old episodes of Friends. Tumble-dry clothes that could easily be put on the washing line, just to feel them all warm and static from the machine. But first of all, she felt an old desire swelling in her stomach. Her fingers itched. But there was no one here to judge her. So she put on her robe, opened up her laptop and typed ‘Zadie Lister’ into Google.
She tried to leave it at least two weeks between sessions, telling herself that you couldn’t really be addicted to something you only did once a fortnight. There had been a time when it was a daily activity, back when Zadie had first disappeared. She used to cycle to the library or pay an internet café for half an hour of uninterrupted browsing. Of course, the internet had been different, then. Emptier. It would have been easier to find results there, if any had existed. Privacy settings on social media had been more lax, too. It had been far simpler to trawl through Zadie’s friends’ photo albums, searching for a glimpse of her in the background at balls, birthday bashes and barbecues.
A year after Zadie disappeared, Rav had asked her to stop looking. ‘This isn’t healthy. She knows that you’re looking for her,’ he had reasoned. ‘If she wants to find you, she knows where to look. But if she doesn’t want to be found, then you have to allow her that.’
Chloe had agreed, at least on the face of it, and had confined her searches to when she was alone. Making it into a secret habit had made it more exciting. As her phones had become smarter, she’d been able to search whenever she wanted to, clearing her history afterwards as if she had been looking at hard-core porn. Eventually, she had started limiting herself, treating these searches like a binge when she was on a diet. A treat. Something to be permitted, but not encouraged.
She’d never found anything. Not in all the years she had been searching. No engagement announcement. No wedding. No children. No mention of Zadie on a corporate website, no personal page selling art. No books, no articles, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter. Nothing.
Until today. An announcement in the Telegraph. Right at the top of her search page, in black and white. All the years of trying to find her on the deepest, darkest fringes of the internet, and here she was. As Chloe wrestled with the enormity of the fact that something had come up, she stared at the screen, not really taking the words in. Then she blinked, and focused. All the letters made sense, but in conjunction they meant nothing.
Chloe sat up. Refreshed the page. But it was still there.
Zadie Elizabeth Henrietta Barber Lister, died, 19 August. 1985–2020.
Zadie
‘I’ll wash up,’ said Zadie, getting up from the dining table.
Her parents both looked up, seeming surprised. ‘That’s very nice of you, darling,’ said her mother. Their apparent shock at her willingness to help rankled. She had been home for two weeks now, and every day she had tried harder to convince them that she was ‘doing well’, as they called it. Walking the dogs. Doing the laundry. On Christmas Day she had even consented to let her mother serve the food on her plate, no counting, no weighing, no checking. She had made a fuss about wanting the green Quality Street, played Charades with her little brothers and let her moody teenage sister, Louella, borrow her clothes. She had chattered away about the friends she was making at university, about the work she was doing, about how hard she had found her first essay, and how the library was the fourth biggest in the whole of the UK. In short, she had been the model child.
‘I was wondering,’ she said now, picking one of the serving bowls off the table, ‘whether Max could come for the New Year’s Eve party?’
She took the bowls into the kitchen. It was a good way to ask for things, she had found over the years. The journey from dining room to kitchen and back took about a minute and a half, giving them time to talk across the table about her request but not long enough to really think of a reason to say no.
When she came back her mother was folding her napkin and putting it back in the silver napkin ring she always used.
‘I thought his parents liked to go away for Christmas?’ She made ‘go away’ sound like ‘murder puppies’.
‘They went to Thailand. But they’re back in a few days, and we haven’t seen each other for ages. I could go to his, I suppose, but I thought it would be nice for him to come here. He’s never been to the New Year party.’
Her father refilled his wine glass. ‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Really?’ Zadie put her arms around him. ‘Thank you.’
‘And why don’t you invite some other friends as well?’
Zadie froze. ‘Other friends?’
‘The girl you share the room with, for instance?’ said her mother. ‘She seemed so sweet.’
Did they know? It was impossible to tell whether they were fully aware that she was lying to them, that she barely knew her pretty, studious room-mate. Or did they genuinely want her to invite friends to join them?
‘She might be busy.’
‘You should ask her. Or some of your other friends. The people from your course you’ve been talking about. But it would be nice if you invited Chloe. We thought she seemed a lovely girl.’
Zadie finished the washing-up then trudged upstairs to he
r bedroom. It was a beautiful room and she was lucky to have it. She knew that. But the views from the windows still reminded her of furious weekends of arguments, of hiding in here from her family, determined not to speak to any of them. At her worst, she had traced every corner of the room, walking in circle after circle, determined to burn off whatever they had forced her to eat over an enormous row.
She turned on her phone. A new one, given as one of her Christmas presents. Since she had been away they had installed a phone mast in the village and now, rather than hanging out of a window or walking up the drive, she could send messages from her bed. She would have to message Chloe. Not that having her here would be a bad thing, but wouldn’t it seem odd to Chloe to get an invitation like that, out of the blue? She probably wouldn’t want to come all that way and leave her family on New Year’s Eve. Chloe probably had parents who adored her, who were proud of her and thought she was brilliant. No mother could disapprove of anyone that diligent or neat. And she probably had loads of friends from school, too. But she would ask. And on the off chance that Chloe didn’t have a hundred better things to do, it would be nice to see her. And it would make her parents more welcoming of Max.
She sent a text: ‘What are you doing for new year? MY PARENTS ARE DRIVING ME FUCKING BONKERS xxxxx.’
13
Then
Chloe arrived home for the Christmas holidays and found herself surprised at how grateful she was to be back. The house was completely unchanged. Still perfect in its boring, semi-detached way. Cleaner than clean, scented with fabric softener and air freshener. For the first two weeks, she revelled in it all, sitting in the back of the Ford Jazz while her mother, who was an uncharacteristically brilliant driver, sat in the passenger seat and Greg drove badly. She folded laundry with her mother, followed her round the supermarket, filling the trolley with uninspiring things. It felt safe and necessary. They ate a slightly dry turkey crown on Christmas Day, exchanged practical, thoughtful gifts. Chloe and her mother shared smiles over Greg’s bald head while he snored in front of the afternoon film on BBC2. It was exactly as it always had been. But as the holiday wore on her mother seemed to grow frustrated with her. The house felt small, even though, as her mother regularly stated, it was the biggest in the cul de sac. Chloe hid in her room, claiming to have lots of work to do, but then procrastinated, reading the books she’d loved as a teenager, poring over her old diaries and staring at her phone, waiting for a message.
