The Last Day I Saw Her

by Lucy Lawrie

  Waste, I seemed to hear my grandmother say.

  ‘Janey,’ said a voice.

  Steve.

  The grooves in his face seemed deeper, as though he’d worn a permanent frown since we’d last met. He was carrying a basket, which contained a packet of beansprouts, two raw beetroot and a large pack of Solpadeine, the logo visible through the thin white plastic of a pharmacy bag.

  ‘Oh, hi! Are you looking for yoghurts?’

  Shut up. Next I’d be recommending the Thomas the Tank Engine variety.

  He looked me straight in the eye.

  ‘How are you? How have you been?’

  God, he was lovely. It felt like I was melting. My edges softening and blurring away, like soap in warm water.

  ‘Oh!’ I laughed, and shook my head a little, as if thrown by the change of subject, away from yoghurts. ‘Fine! Yes, fine. Just getting a bit of shopping. This is Pip.’

  He bent down and held out a hand. ‘Pip. Nice to meet you, mate.’

  Pip studiously ignored him.

  ‘Come on, Pip. Say hello.’

  ‘Nah, leave him,’ said Steve. ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘He’s a bit tired today, aren’t you, baby?’ I stroked his silky hair, holding the curve of his head under my palm.

  ‘I was worried about you,’ Steve went on. ‘After the last class. Your forest painting and all that. A bit of a cock-up on my part.’

  I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I turned my attention to the items in the trolley, searching for inspiration.

  ‘Have you tried pak choi?’

  Oh no. He might think I was inviting him round for dinner. ‘I mean . . .’

  ‘Are you sleeping? You said you hadn’t been sleeping.’

  What was it about this man? He looked at me, and he saw me. He saw me, when I was all but invisible to the rest of the world.

  I became aware, suddenly, of the blood flowing hot and fast under my skin. Of the air flooding my lungs as I took a breath. As though I’d been a drawing, flat and grey, that had leapt off the page into three-dimensional life.

  ‘Erm . . . am I sleeping? Am I sleeping? Well, Pip’s not sleeping too well, so I guess I’m not either. He’s started coming into bed with me, though. That makes life a bit easier.’

  I’d always been strict about making Pip sleep in his own cot, but the previous week I’d read a new parenting book – Your Toddler, Your Way – that said it was fine for a toddler to share the parental bed. In fact, not allowing it could result in a catastrophic ‘mother wound’.

  But Steve raised an eyebrow and gave a wry smile. ‘Doesn’t that mean you won’t get a decent night’s sleep till he’s eighteen or something?’

  ‘It’s a big bed.’ Why was I talking about my bed? I dropped my eyes to Pip, looking bored in the trolley. ‘Isn’t it, Pippy? It’s a nice bi-i-ig bed.’

  For fuck’s sake.

  Silence, except for the distant, tuneless bleeps coming from the checkouts and the hum of the chiller cabinets. Steve looked at his watch. The brown leather of his jacket creaked as he moved his arm. ‘D’you want to grab a coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh! I thought we weren’t supposed to see each other. You being the tutor and all that.’ There was a hint of challenge in my voice, a teasing note. Where had that come from?

  His gaze slid past me, over my shoulder. Then it flicked back onto me, and he gave a tight, awkward smile.

  ‘Come on, Janey. Help me out here.’

  I felt a tiny surge of . . . something. Power?

  ‘Well,’ I began, airily. ‘I suppose there’s nothing to stop us meeting as . . . friends.’

  His expression didn’t change. Oh God, he could see through my pathetic attempt to flirt and thought it was ridiculous. ‘Or not!’ I continued. ‘Not friends, I mean, if that’s too much. You could be a . . . benevolent observer.’

  Silence.

  ‘Or if that’s inappropriate we could both be benevolent observers of each other. D’you want to come to my flat? For coffee, I mean.’

  He pressed his lips together, as though he’d decided against saying what he’d been going to say. Then, lightly – ever so lightly – he touched his hand to the small of my back, directing me down the aisle towards the checkouts.

  It was as though I was walking for the very first time. I could feel the muscles in my thighs, my calves, my feet. And in my arms, and down my sides, as I pushed Pip in the trolley. All tensing and releasing in perfect time to carry me to where I needed to be. He’d set my body singing. And it was all so ridiculous. The craziest thing in the world.

  *

  ‘So do you teach art full-time?’ I asked once we’d got back to the flat and I’d poured him a glass of water; he’d declined my offer of coffee, as though he’d thought better of it at the last moment.

  ‘Yeah, I teach at the local college. I’m doing a few classes with the adult education programme on the side.’

  ‘Oh. That must be . . . interesting.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’ve signed up for a Masters in art therapy next year, so I’m trying to get experience of working with a more diverse range of people.’

  I pictured Jody, wrapped in her bandages, and nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘Do you have family in Edinburgh?’ asked Steve.

  ‘No. I’ve just got my mother. She lives in London.’

  I slipped off the sofa and settled cross-legged on the floor beside Pip, who was kneeling over his Lego Duplo zoo. His feet peeped out behind him, toes wriggling in the soft grey socks.

  ‘Are you in touch much?’

  ‘She’s an actress. She used to be in the West End and all that, but she managed to move into TV. She’s got a part in Small Miracles . . . you know, that soap about the maternity ward. Maybe you’ve seen it?’

  He gave a noncommittal nod.

  I had a sudden vision of Steve, sitting at home eating his beetroot salad on a tray, solemnly watching the drama unfold. I need a lovely big push, Mrs Jones. Oh no . . . oh no, Nora, get Dr Stevens, we’ve got a shoulder dystocia!

  ‘Or maybe not. I mean, it probably isn’t your thing. But she’s very happy about it.’

  She was like a gushy, fake friend, phoning occasionally to dump her news on me then disappearing off to her own life with a ‘must dash, darling’. The pattern hadn’t changed since I was a child, except that then I used to sit by the phone every Sunday night, my stomach twisting in anticipation; would she or wouldn’t she call? To this day, the music to All Creatures Great and Small brings on indigestion.

  Steve sipped his water, his face unreadable.

  Pip broke the silence with an elephant noise. I clicked the zookeeper into his 4x4 and wheeled him round in a slightly frantic circle.

  ‘Does Pip go to nursery?’

  ‘Yeah, three mornings.’

  ‘So what do you get up to?’

  ‘Well, oh, goodness, what do I get up to? I usually start with a couple of hours of proofreading, then I quickly whizz round doing all the things I can’t when Pip’s around: cleaning, ironing, tidying . . .’

  Do you have to sound so tragic?

  ‘And I’ve been going swimming.’ As if that would elevate me from domestic drudge to yummy-mummy-about-town. I’d only been twice.

  ‘Swimming’s cool,’ he said softly.

  ‘Right. Well, I might make myself a cup of tea after all. Sure you don’t want anything? I’ve got some Jaffa cakes.’

  ‘Janey. What’s wrong?’

  ‘What?’ I looked up. Behind the glasses, his eyes were as black as crows.

  ‘Anxiety. You’re buzzing with anxiety. You’re . . . I just can’t . . . sorry, but I can’t keep talking like this, pretending I don’t see it.’

  As in the supermarket, he’d cut through my small talk. It was impolite, somehow, as though he’d walked through the middle of the Duplo zoo, scattering its carefully placed occupants.

  But close behind that came an unravelling sensation somewhere in my chest. What would it
feel like, to confide in him?

  ‘It’s just Hattie. My old friend Hattie. I’ve been trying to find her. I’ve been reading her old diary and it’s . . . it’s sort of stirred everything up. In my head.’

  He frowned. ‘How come you have her diary?’

  I shrugged. ‘It was in a cardboard box filled with all her stuff. I found it on my desk when I came in on the last day of term.’

  ‘Last day of term?’

  ‘Yes. 14th December, 1989.’

  Her diary had been tucked inside her history folder. There had been art work too – this mosaic thing of a waterfall she’d spent ages doing, and a clay model of a squirrel, as yet unpainted. Her music case was at the bottom of the box, with books of piano music inside. She’d even left the script of a play she was due to be in next term, with all of her lines highlighted.

  It felt as though she’d given me her life, frozen at that moment in time, and for a while I found that comforting. Perhaps I was just supposed to keep it safe for a while, until one day she’d appear back in the art block to finish off her mosaic, or sweep up on stage at the last minute, resplendent in Tudor costume, to star in the play.

  I’d scoured through the diary, of course, those Christmas holidays, thinking she might have left it for a reason, that it might contain some sort of clue that would make everything clear.

  ‘Bit strange,’ said Steve. ‘Why leave you a box with no explanation?’

  ‘I don’t know, because I never heard from her again. And I’ve tried everything I can think of, the St Katherine’s Alumni Association, the—’

  ‘I was at St Simon’s,’ he said softly.

  St Katherine’s brother school, just across the playing fields.

  ‘Which year?’ I’d thought I’d recognised him, that day of the first art class. Maybe I’d seen him – even danced with him! – at one of the infamous ceilidhs.

  ‘Oh, I’m a few years older than you, I think.’

  ‘You didn’t know Hattie?’

  He shrugged. ‘I wasn’t exactly big on the whole social scene. But have you tried the obvious things to find Hattie? Have you tried finding her parents?’

  ‘Her dad was the composer Emil Marlowe.’

  ‘He did Dark Side Spectacular, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah. He hit the big time in the 1980s. He was living in New York when Hattie left. But he died a few years ago. I tried phoning the lawyers who seem to be in charge of his copyright and stuff, but that was a total dead end. I even tried phoning some charitable trust that he’d had set up. I found it on the internet, some thing for disadvantaged musicians. I asked if they could pass my details on to a member of the family with a request to contact me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She pretended to write down my details, but I bet she didn’t. She probably thought I was a disadvantaged musician trying to bypass the official channels.’

  Steve nodded and frowned. ‘I might be able to help. I’ve got one or two contacts.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I have a friend who works with the homeless. He’ll know about missing persons, or how to find people who don’t want to be found. I’ll have a word with him.’

  I thought of the rows of grim faces staring out of the missing-persons pages in The Big Issue. Hooded shapes huddled in shop doorways. Then I thought of Renee, coming to collect Hattie from school, driving the Bentley right through the school gates and up to the main entrance, even though you weren’t supposed to. And Emil, on television a few years ago, holding up his latest award – last award, as it turned out – for the cameras, displaying his perfectly symmetrical smile.

  ‘I don’t think . . .’ I began. But who knew, with that family. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That would be great. Thanks.’

  He paused, and shot me a careful look. ‘Another option, I suppose, would be to explore the non-dominant hand technique a little more.’

  As soon as I heard the words, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to say no. A hand seemed to take hold of my heart and squeeze it.

  Don’t go there, I told myself. Walk away from this. It’s smoke and mirrors, a stupid parlour game that can’t ever help you. Focus on the real world.

  A scream of frustration from Pip. He was trying to fix a Duplo tortoise onto the back of a police motorbike.

  ‘It’s okay. Mummy help you? But the thing is,’ I said lightly, pretending to be absorbed in tortoise-fixing, ‘the non-dominant hand thing is supposed to access my inner creativity, isn’t it? Other aspects of myself? Not another person.’

  He shrugged. ‘But that’s how this all started, isn’t it? Maybe there’s something there that might help you find her. Or at least shed some light on why you’ve got this thing about finding her.’

  I didn’t need anybody to shed light on that.

  ‘Of course, as I said, I’m not an art therapist. I need to be very up front about that, after . . .’

  After our frenzied hug, our stolen moment in the art classroom. I felt myself blushing.

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘It’s an ethical minefield. But you could do it by yourself. I could give you a book with some exercises to work through.’

  ‘Of course. No, I wouldn’t ask you to . . . to compromise yourself . . .’

  To compromise himself? I pictured him in my bed, naked in a tangle of sheets, as a dark-suited person – an art tutors’ ethics inspector? – peered round the door and marked something on a clipboard, shaking his head.

  ‘I mean, it’s absolutely fine. It would be great if I could borrow the book.’

  But then I remembered the inky scribble of a girl. Words bleeding across the white paper. If I was going to do this, I couldn’t do it on my own. I might drift away from the real world and never come back.

  I sat back on my heels and looked him in the eye.

  ‘But what if something bad happens? I know you can’t advise me, but maybe you could just . . . be here?’

  He shot a furtive glance at Pip.

  ‘Shall I come back later? When he’s gone to bed?’

  Yes. Yes, please come back. Don’t leave me in this flat alone. I can’t bear another night of it.

  ‘Okay then. He should be down by eight, but leave it until—’

  ‘Actually, no. Let me drop off the book. You should read it through first. I’ll come back on . . . how about Thursday night?’

  ‘Thursday night is fine.’

  ‘Mummy! Do chairs!’ Pip blindsided me with a green Duplo base plate that was almost as tall as him. I took it from him, absently.

  ‘Maybe, if you’re going to get into all this, you should think about talking to someone. Someone neutral, I mean. Dragging up the past can be . . . What’s that look for?’

  Mad. He thought I was mad.

  But then he smiled. He thought I was funny. What was this? I felt naked with this man for some reason – totally stripped back. But across that came that little surge of something again – power? For a moment, they seemed like two halves of the same thing.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t looking like anything.’ Realising I was hugging the base plate against my chest, I put it firmly down on the carpet. Whatever was going on between me and this man, hiding behind a large green Duplo base plate wasn’t going to help matters. ‘But okay, I’ll think about it.’

  14

  Hattie’s Diary

  Saturday, November 11th

  London trip!!! For Janey’s birthday, her mum – Martina – sent her two tickets for Cats the musical, because she’s in it just now. Mum drove us all the way down to London. We left at 5 a.m.! And she arranged for us to stay in the biggest suite on the top floor of The Blenheim . . . Janey could barely believe it when she saw it, and practically died when she saw the chocolates on the pillows. I reassured her that this was quite normal for me, because of my grandfather owning the hotel chain, that they were only Ferrero Rochers and she shouldn’t be intimidated by them.

  ‘So you’re an actual Ferrero Rocher by blood?’ said Janey in a
n awe-inspired voice.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  Turns out she thought it was a famous family, she was getting mixed up with the Rockefellers. She threw one of them at me to punish me for laughing. (A Ferrero Rocher, not a Rockefeller person.)

  Cats was at 2.30 p.m. Mum dropped us off early, because she wanted to go up to Ramplings to see James. She gave us £20, so we had an ice cream first, and Cokes, and we were in a fair old state of excitement when the curtain went up.

  But Martina, oh my goodness, she was gorgeous with her dark smoky eyes, slinking around the stage in her orange and grey stripy suit. During some of the songs, the cats came off the stage out into the audience, right behind our seats, and when she pounced up to us and flexed her claws, I thought I’d stop breathing – she was just so – I can’t even describe it. It was like she was larger than life, more than human, with ten times the impact of a human. I don’t know if it was the music, or the costume, or the sleek, cat-like movements. I just don’t know.

  Sadly, I could quite understand why she would have decided to abandon Janey if it meant she could do this instead. In some ways it’s just as well Janey’s father died early on, as he wouldn’t have stood a chance against it either. Not with him just being a pest controller. Anything else looks weak and washed out in comparison.

  There was a standing ovation at the end, and the audience were all singing along. Dad would’ve hated it. He is so jealous of Lloyd Webber.

  We went backstage afterwards, but Janey said if Martina mentioned my dad, I was just to pretend I hadn’t heard her. She’s worried her mum might ask to meet him, so she could pester him for a part in one of his musicals. Not only would that be embarrassing, because she is past it, Janey says, but she wants her career to fall flat as soon as possible so she will come home.

  As soon as we went into the dressing room, though, I couldn’t stop thinking to myself, she won’t ever come home, she won’t ever come home. It was buzzing through my fingertips. I knew it as surely as I know my own name.

  At first Martina was all mwah-mwah kisses, and she gave Janey a present – a gold Estee Lauder powder compact – which she said she’d bought at Harrods. Then she asked us how school was. Janey went red and started telling her, in a voice you could hardly hear, about the play we’re doing next term. Martina nodded and listened with a frozen smile, as though she was suspecting that Janey wouldn’t be very good in a play.