by Louise Voss
Amy scanned a couple of the subject headings:
Wool Enquiry – Pattern doesn’t state Gauge!
Painless Quilting; Idea for Article
She was going to have to employ someone soon. Upcycle.com – her baby, her passion – had boomed in popularity over recent months and the orders and enquiries kept her busy from dawn till midnight, seven days a week. As someone she had once worked with would have said, it was a quality problem. The site had expanded from a few magazine-type articles about crafts and hobbies to a full-blown ‘vertical portal’, or ‘vortal’, with everything from video clips on different knitting stitches or how to mosaic a garden table, to guest blogs from craft experts, an online shop and a lively forum to which women from around the world contributed.
Then she saw Becky’s email address on the list in her Inbox. There was no subject heading. Her stomach gave a small flip. Becky had not spoken to her in weeks, after the blazing argument they’d had about their parents – whose turn it was to visit them in Spain, why Amy always had to have them staying at her place when they came over, why Becky never paid back any of the loans she got from them when Amy had to … She’d spent years trying to ignore all the little slights but on this occasion had failed, and out they had all come. She and Becky were usually so close. They had always bickered, ever since they were small girls – not uncommon with such a small age gap, not quite two years – but the trouble was, this one had been a full-blown row, so bad that Amy had wondered if her little sister would ever speak to her again. She opened the email, feeling a rush of relief that Becky had contacted her.
Dear Amy
I’m going away, and I’m not coming back. Don’t try to find me. I’m going to Asia, probably. I’ve always wanted to visit Vietnam and Cambodia. Sorry about our row. It’s not your fault. Tell Mum and Dad not to worry. Look after yourself.
Love
B
Amy’s relief immediately turned to puzzlement as she tried to make sense of it. Going away to Asia? Becky had always been more prone to tantrums. She remembered her shouting, ‘I’m running away!’ at their parents, stuffing her make-up and a four-pack of Mars bars into a bag and storming off, but she never made it much further than the end of the village.
She read the email again. Don’t try to find me. That was the line that sent a little shiver up Amy’s spine. And there was something else about the email too, a little niggle that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
The time on the email was 11.27 p.m. the previous night, a Saturday. So it had probably been written and sent while drunk. She pictured Becky lying on her sofa with an almost-empty bottle of Merlot on the floor, tapping away at her phone, the TV chattering unwatched in the background. Well, she thought, hangover or not, you can’t expect to send an email like that and not get an early morning call from your sister.
Amy rang Becky’s mobile, which went straight to voicemail, then her landline, which rang out, then her mobile again, this time leaving a message:
‘Rebecca Ann Coltman, you are a pain in the arse. What the fuck is all this about going to Vietnam, eh? Call me as soon as you get this.’ She paused. Don’t try to find me. ‘I love you, though. And I’m sorry about the row too. Call me, OK?’
She put the phone on the table and returned to her emails.
An hour later, Becky hadn’t rung or texted back, and Amy couldn’t concentrate on her work at all. She made herself another cup of coffee and, while she waited, checked Becky’s Facebook page on her phone. It hadn’t been updated for a few days. She checked Twitter too. Ditto. No tweets since Wednesday. ‘End of term. Whoo-hoo! Seven weeks of freedom. #schoolsoutforsummer’
She tried to call both of Becky’s numbers again. Still no reply. She was 90 per cent sure that her sister was enjoying lie-ins for the first week of the school summer holidays, as most childless teachers in the country were probably also doing. But there was still that 10 per cent niggle …
Sod it, she was going to have to go round there. Just to set her mind at rest.
Becky’s flat was in a small boxy fifties block built in the space left by a German bomb, incongruous in a road of Edwardian semis in Denmark Hill, a stone’s throw from Ruskin Park. It took Amy seven minutes to get there on her Triumph when the traffic lights weren’t against her. This morning they were all green, and Amy arrived with the taste of coffee still in her mouth, and the day’s ‘To Do’ list scrolling through her head. This was To Do number one: get her sister out of bed, find out why she’d sent such a crazy email, smooth things over between them.
She parked the bike, dragged off her helmet and buzzed Flat Nine. No answer. After a moment’s hesitation, she tried Flat Eight instead. While she waited she ruffled her hair wildly to make the curls spring back into place – helmet hair was the bane of her life. It was such an automatic reaction now that she wasn’t even aware of doing it. Thirty seconds later, a sleepy male voice came over the intercom: ‘Yerrghello?’
‘Hi, Gary, it’s Amy, Becky’s sister. Sorry it’s early. Can you buzz me in, please?’
The door clicked open in response, and Amy heard another door opening upstairs, the sound bouncing down the concrete stairwell. She strode up to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. Gary stood waiting for her, bare-chested in stripy cotton pyjama pants. He wasn’t bad looking, Amy thought. He and Becky were good friends, although Amy suspected this was mostly because Gary was nifty with a screwdriver and willing to unblock Becky’s U-bend at any hour of the day or night. She remembered Becky confessing this to her in a mock-suggestive comedy accent, and grinned. For the first time she felt a real pang of worry about where Becky was.
‘Sorry,’ she repeated, taking in his bedhead hair and sleepy eyes. He smelled of morning breath and slight BO.
‘S’OK,’ he replied, scratching his chest. ‘Becky all right?’
‘Probably. Just had a weird email from her last night, and now she’s not answering her—’
‘Phone,’ interrupted Gary, and Amy instantly remembered the most annoying thing about him was his habit of trying to finish people’s sentences. She wondered if he was aware he was doing it.
‘Her mobile or her landline,’ she corrected. ‘Yeah. Anyway. Do you have a key? Just want to check she hasn’t had an accident.’
‘Accident,’ he agreed, ushering her into his living room and rooting around in a drawer under a black-ash coffee table. ‘I think I’ve still got her keys, they should be in here somewhere.’
While Gary went into his bedroom to fetch a T-shirt, Amy put down her helmet and bike keys on the smoked-glass dining table. Gary was in his bedroom for a good minute, and Amy tapped her foot impatiently. When he came back he didn’t say anything apart from, ‘OK, let’s go.’
They walked from Gary’s flat to Becky’s. He put the Yale key in the top lock and the door swung open.
Amy stared at it, then at Gary. ‘It wasn’t double-locked. She always double-locks the door, even if she’s just going to bloody Sainsbury’s.’
Amy realized she was holding her breath as they stepped inside. The flat was dark and silent, blinds drawn.
‘It looks tidy,’ she said. ‘Well – as tidy as Becky’s flat ever is. Becky?’ she called out, feeling foolish and strangely light-headed. She went straight to her sister’s bedroom, dreading the sight of her spread-eagled face down on the bed. But all was in order. The bed had been made, in a perfunctory sort of way, with a few items – a bra, a T-shirt – hanging from the bedpost. She opened the wardrobe. Clothes were crammed inside, so tightly that Amy wondered how Becky ever found anything to wear. There was no sign that she had packed a suitcase, although it was difficult to tell. Amy kept her own suitcases under her bed, but Becky’s bed was too low to the ground to fit much underneath it.
In the kitchen, a mug stood in the sink, rinsed but unwashed, with no other washing-up in sight. Amy opened the fridge. It was empty apart from a jar of pickles that looked as if they would survive a nuclear holocaust. The fre
ezer was empty too and appeared to have been recently defrosted. Both signs that she had planned to go away. But the boiler, attached to the wall beside the sink, had been left on.
Gary stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching her and scratching his belly.
‘When did you last see her?’ Amy asked.
He pondered a moment. ‘Haven’t seen her for a while. She came over to ask me if I could help her set up her new computer, but that was a couple of weeks ago. What’s going on? What was this weird email all about?’
Amy walked into the living room, Gary following. Everything appeared to be in place in here. The TV wasn’t on standby but a copy of Heat was open on the armchair. ‘She told me she was going away, to Vietnam and Cambodia, and said she might not come back.’
Gary frowned. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t have gone without telling me.’
Amy picked up a framed photo from the bookcase, her face creasing with nostalgia at the sight of it. The photo was of her and Becky at Becky’s graduation, ten years ago. Their faces were close to the camera, smiling into the sun, so fresh-faced. They looked so alike in that photo that they could easily have passed for identical twins.
‘She’ll probably walk in the door at any moment and ask what the hell we’re doing—’
‘Here.’
Amy felt cold inside. If Becky really had gone away without discussing it with her beforehand, that would hurt. And what was wrong in Becky’s life that made her feel the need to do such a thing?
‘When did you last talk to her?’ Gary asked.
‘I haven’t seen her for about a month. We had a fight.’
Gary was clearly too English to ask what the fight had been about.
‘I’m really worried,’ she said, pulling out her phone and checking both her texts and emails, just in case something had come in from Becky. But there was nothing – just a load more emails from customers.
With all the contradictory signs in the flat, Amy didn’t know what to think. But it was the email from Becky that jarred the most. Something about it was off, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Either the way it was written or … something else. What was it? Despite the recent row, she and Becky were close. They emailed and texted each other all the time, and left comments on each other’s Facebook updates, so she was familiar with Becky’s written ‘voice’.
She hurried across to the desk where Becky’s new iMac sat. It looked as though Becky had been splashing the cash, she thought. She switched it on and waited for it to boot up.
‘She never told me she’d got a new computer.’
Gary shrugged. ‘But you said you weren’t talking …’
‘Nothing’s password-protected.’
‘She told me she’d do it herself when she could think of a suitably good password. Maybe that was just an excuse, though. I told her she must make sure she did it.’
‘I was always nagging her about that too.’
Amy went straight into her sister’s Mail program, where she checked the sent items. Because of the way the iMac synced with Becky’s phone, emails sent from either would show in the sent items of both.
There was the email. She read it again: Don’t try to find me. It was the last email Becky had sent. She scanned the list of emails sent over previous days. There didn’t seem to be anything else very interesting.
She turned away from the screen, all the energy that had propelled her since receiving Becky’s message ebbing away. At that moment, as if in sympathy, the room dimmed as a cloud passed over the sun. She was out of ideas. She looked up at Gary and was about to tell him that she was going to go home when the computer made a pinging sound.
A new email had arrived. The sender was CupidsWeb. She recognized the name – they were always advertising on TV. How did it go? True love is just a click away.
The subject line read: ‘You have a new message!’
‘What’s this?’ she said. Gary came closer to take a look as Amy opened the short email that was simply informing Becky that she had received a private message and that she needed to log in to read it. Amy clicked the link and CupidsWeb popped up, asking her for a username and password.
Amy clicked back to the email program and did a quick search for CupidsWeb. There were no emails from them other than the one that had just arrived.
‘That’s really weird,’ she said. ‘How long has she had this iMac?’ Without waiting for him to answer, she added, ‘Do you know what she did with her other one? Her laptop?’
Gary shook his head. ‘Sold it, probably. She’s into eBay and Gumtree and all that, isn’t she? In fact, I’m sure she did mention that’s what she was going to do.’
It was true, there were a few emails from various online marketplaces saying that Becky had won or sold different items. Amy had coached her on it a couple of years back and since then her sister had made quite a bit of extra cash from flogging her unwanted items.
Amy got up and started roaming around the flat, looking for Becky’s distinctive stripy laptop case. No sign of it on the bookshelves, in the cupboard, on Becky’s desk …
‘Thinking about it, though, if she’s gone away, she probably took it with her,’ Gary said, pushing his hair off his forehead. ‘Want me to look at those eBay emails for you?’
‘Sure,’ Amy called, walking into Becky’s bedroom and looking around. It was so dusty it looked as though Becky had been gone for months, not a day or two. She wasn’t even sure that her sister possessed a vacuum cleaner. All the pictures on the walls were very slightly crooked, too, and Amy shuddered. She had to straighten them all before she did anything else. No wonder she and Becky never thought of sharing a flat – they’d kill each other.
Amy leaned down and peered into the narrow space under the bed frame. Through all the dust bunnies she spotted a corner of the laptop case. ‘Wait, no need – I’ve found it!’ she said, sliding her hand under and dragging it out. She brought it back into the living room and switched it on.
‘Nice one,’ Gary commented. ‘But it’s not going to have anything on it that’s not on the new one, is it? I mean, she hasn’t changed her email address, has she?’
‘No … but …’ Amy sat on the sofa with the laptop open on her knee, logged in and scanned the numerous folders still on Becky’s desktop. ‘Look – she was very good at backing stuff up. Not good at filing anything – in her flat or on her computer – but I bet it’s all here. She used to get really paranoid that the computer would crash and she’d lose all her school reports and lesson plans.’
‘Good thought,’ Gary said as she clicked on a folder called ‘Old Emails Back-Up’. There they all were, with a sub-folder entitled ‘Personal’. Dozens of messages from CupidsWeb dating back two months.
‘I had no idea Becky was into Internet dating,’ Amy said.
‘Didn’t you? Well, everyone does it these days, don’t they? Every unattached person, anyway.’ Gary snorted. ‘Quite a lot of married ones too.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Yeah, well, maybe you don’t need to.’ He looked her up and down and she resisted telling him that her own love life was so nonexistent that she doubted even Internet dating could help her.
She turned back to the screen. ‘Internet dating. I wonder what other secrets she was keeping from me?’
2
Becky
Friday, 3 May
Once I’d given Shaun my mobile number, we texted continuously. His texts were dry and funny, and I felt increasingly excited as the day of the date wore on, checking my phone after each lesson period – and sometimes during, too. I managed to resist the temptation during assembly, thankfully.
The home bell finally rang and I did the minimum amount of tidying up in my classroom before bombing out to the car, to go and get ready. But then, of course, I had to bloody run into Simon Pinto in the staff car park. I literally bumped into him – I just didn’t see him, I was so busy reading Shaun’s latest. Poor little Simon, his home life is appalling an
d he’s got the sort of face that cries out, ‘Bully me!’ I think I’m the only one he talks to. I’ve tried to get him to tell me who is behind the campaign that finds him curled up, crying, behind the bins every day, but he’s too scared. He’s been crying now, and so I take him back into school and sit him down with a Coke and a stale digestive from the staff room. After half an hour, I know all about his nan’s Alzheimer’s and his dad’s drink problem, but nothing about who gave him the long scratch on his face. I give him a lift home, making a mental note to talk to the head about him tomorrow, and trying not to look at my watch to ascertain whether I’ve still got time to wash my hair before the date.
I do have time to wash my hair, just about, and I straighten it into a sheet of blonde that I then immediately worry looks too artificial. I wish I had naturally curly hair like Amy does. Our hair is the exact same shade of blonde, but she can get away with towel-drying and leaving it to dry into perfect curls, whereas mine is neither one nor the other and has to be coaxed in either direction. It’s a source of continual irritation to me.
Shaun and I meet later in a nice riverside pub I have chosen, a short bus ride from my flat. I wonder if I will recognize him – the clearest of his photographs on the website featured a very large black Labrador, with him cuddled up to it in the background. I’d probably be able to pick the Labrador out of a line-up, but Shaun himself looked distinctly blurry. I could see from the picture, though, that he appeared to have a strong jaw, and he described himself as in the six to six foot four category. Bald, but most of them are. How bad can it be, I thought?
I do recognize him, as soon as I walk into the bar, but mostly because he is the only man there alone, and he is sitting on a bar stool staring fixedly at the door. He jumps up when he sees me, bears down on me and shakes my hand vigorously. He doesn’t look anything like six foot tall, let alone six foot four.
‘Becky! You must be Becky. Lovely to meet you.’ He pauses and gazes into my eyes, dropping his voice by about an octave. ‘You look even more beautiful in the flesh than your picture.’
