Losing You

by Nicci French

  ‘You mean those old boats near the point?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He smiled, and my skin prickled. I felt cold as ice, and scared.

  ‘Nobody goes there,’ he went on, ‘they’re too creepy. But me and Charlie like them that way.’

  The hulks were a collection of houseboats and barges that had seen better days. They’d originally been lived in by artists and sixties’ hippies. I’d seen photographs of them when they were new in the tiny library by the bookshop. Some were small, with square cabins and round wheels at the back, although they never moved away from the shore and at low tide were stranded in the mud. Some were large, and on their decks there were dogs chained to the sides, flowers in pots, chairs and tables, even ironic garden gnomes. They were made of iron and wood, painted in primary colours, and had gangplanks leading to the broad wooden jetties. I think they even used to have their own postbox. Rick had told me that on one of the barges, the couple had made pots to sell in the café; another made nut roasts, bean salads, carrot cakes.

  That was then. It had been many years since the boats had been lived in. The hippies and artists had moved away, the paint had peeled from the rusting, blistered hulls; the gangways had collapsed as the boats tipped from their moorings towards the green-grey mud on which they stood. Years of rain and wind had blasted through the cabins. Vandals had done the rest, thrown stones through the windows, ripped off steering-wheels and torn out seats, beds and tables, painted graffiti on the sodden decks, tipped rubbish into the holds. I’d walked past them a few times with Sludge, but even on a bright summer day they gave me the shivers.

  ‘Take me there now,’ I said.

  ‘What for?’ He looked at me as if I was mad.

  ‘If they’re a private hiding-place for you and Charlie, she might have gone there.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘I haven’t got a car, remember. You’re going to have to take me back on your bike anyway. I want you to come with me.’

  ‘You won’t find anything. You’re wasting your time.’

  ‘Then let’s get it over with.’

  ‘It’s stupid.’

  I pulled on the helmet and fastened the chin-strap. Still he didn’t move. I stared at him. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘Let’s go, then.’

  Without another word, he put on his helmet and started the bike. I climbed on behind him and put my arms round his waist. I tried to think: where had Charlie been, that last week of November? I couldn’t remember. The land blurred past me, I smelt the briny air. There had been a party she’d gone to with Ashleigh, and I’d collected them at midnight, but she’d seemed fine, hadn’t she? Hadn’t she? I remembered her getting into the car in her tiny grey skirt, her long legs in their ankle boots, her shining coil of hair. I closed my eyes as the wind whipped past me.

  *

  The last time I had walked past the hulks it had been with Christian, in early October. I remembered it clearly, a sharp autumn day. The tide had been low then and the hulks lay in a massed huddle on the mud. There’d been dozens of noisy, cheerful gulls perched on the smashed decks. Now, the tide was high and vicious little waves riffled round the hulls. The wind hummed among the ripped planks. There must have been eight or nine. One of the iron barges had been set on fire since I’d last been there, and now was a charred wreck.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked Jay, as I dismounted.

  ‘What?’ He seemed dazed; his face looked bruised in the chill air.

  ‘Which boat did you and Charlie go to? Jay?’

  At my sharp tone, he stared round as if he’d never been there before, then jerked his head. ‘That one there.’

  He was indicating one of the smaller wooden boats, which had to be reached by climbing over the larger boat nearer the shore; in its better days it had obviously been bottle-green. In the gloom I could see there were still small scabs of paint flaking from its side, and the trapdoor leading to the cabin had been ripped from its hinges. It listed slightly in the rising tide.

  I dropped the helmet beside the bike. ‘You go first.’

  ‘You want to go inside?’

  ‘Why do you think we’re here?’

  He placed his own helmet carefully on the seat of his bike. ‘If this is what you want.’

  We had to walk along a gangway to get to the first boat. The wood was slimy and often broken, and several times I thought we would slither into the shallow water that was lapping over the mudflats. I clambered on to the deck after Jay and made my way across to the other side, avoiding broken plant pots, a bent and rusted bicycle wheel, the dry carcass of a gull and an empty wine bottle. We climbed on to the wooden boat.

  ‘Charlie?’ I called, as I climbed across. ‘Charlie, are you there? It’s me. Nina. Mum. It’s Mummy.’

  My voice echoed, bouncing off all the grimy surfaces, winding its way down into the boat’s dismal interior.

  I called again, louder.

  I made my way across to the cabin’s splintered entrance and turned backwards to lower myself down the broken rungs of the narrow ladder that led into the cabin. The air was cold and clammy, and smelt of ammonia and tobacco. Everything inside seemed greasy, ancient, abandoned. The mattresses lying across the benches had foam spilling from their split surfaces; the ceiling was damp and soiled. A blanket lay on the floor.

  ‘Here? You came here?’

  Jay, peering in from the deck, gave a little grimace.

  ‘It was OK,’ he said. ‘Especially in the summer. Sometimes we brought beer. Charlie even brought hot chocolate in a flask sometimes.’

  So that was where my flask had gone.

  I pushed open the door into a foul-smelling toilet. I pulled open the cupboard doors. ‘Charlie?’ I called again, although I knew she wasn’t there. The place was rank with loneliness and neglect.

  ‘Enough?’ asked Jay.

  ‘I want to see all the others,’ I said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Now we’re here I want to look inside the others.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For Charlie.’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘It’ll only take a minute.’

  When we came back outside, the search didn’t look entirely possible. The next boat along had tipped over and brought its neighbour down with it. The two were splayed over in the mud and the rising water, their gangways shattered.

  ‘You can’t get into those,’ said Jay.

  ‘Charlie could have walked across the mud.’

  ‘There’d be tracks.’

  ‘The tide would have worn them away.’

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ said Jay. ‘They’re broken and rotten. Who would come here?’

  ‘You came here.’

  ‘It was a place to get away to,’ said Jay. ‘It’s a small island.’

  I walked on. The next boat was a huge barge that looked as if it had been rebuilt by a madman. A junkyard of chaotic objects – planks, tin baths, paint pots, fence panels, sheets of corrugated iron, car tyres – had been nailed and bolted to the boat’s upper level. The gangplank across was rickety and vertiginous and swayed when I stepped on to it.

  ‘It doesn’t look safe,’ said Jay.

  ‘You’re the teenager,’ I said. ‘I should be the one saying that to you.’

  It was little more than a plank, with no railings, so I stretched my arms out like a tightrope walker and teetered across. Once I was on what passed for the deck I found a half-open doorway, which led into the darkness below. I saw the slow shifting glint of stagnant water beneath. There was a smell of seaweed and decay. I took a deep breath and eased myself down a few steps. I looked around and saw that there was nothing I needed to bother with. I climbed back up quickly, gasping in the cold air as if I had been under water.

  ‘I’ll have to go soon,’ said Jay, shifting uneasily.

  ‘I’m almost done,’ I said, when I was back on land. The la
st of the hulks was almost respectable by comparison with its neighbours. Its hull seemed intact. I could imagine its early existence as a working vessel, transporting coal or whatever it was from the deep-water ships into the estuary. Whoever had converted it into a houseboat, a generation or two ago, had done a skilful job. The windows were smashed, the roof was falling in and the tin chimney had toppled across the deck but enough survived to suggest what had drawn people here to the far side of the island, wild, distant and isolated. With a fire in the grate and a storm raging outside, this boat would have been a cosy refuge.

  As I drew closer to the gangplank, I stopped.

  ‘Look,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Jay, coming closer.

  I pointed at the path, which was churned up and muddy.

  ‘Someone’s been here,’ I said.

  Jay seemed doubtful. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘People come with their dogs.’

  ‘But look,’ I said, pointing at the dirty gangplank. Jay shrugged. ‘Someone’s been here.’ I began to shout Charlie’s name and that there was nothing to worry about, I just wanted to see her, but it was lost in the wind. Nobody apart from Jay could have heard anything.

  ‘I’ll just walk across and check it out,’ I said. ‘Then you can drop me back.’

  ‘You want me to look with you?’

  I went across the gangplank and stood on the deck. I felt high and exposed in the wind, almost as if I was out at sea. I turned to Jay. His mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I held up a finger to convey that I would only be a minute. I turned and tried to find a way inside. It wasn’t very nautical, more like a dinky wooden shack built on top of the barge. There were small windows. I couldn’t tell whether they were opaque or whether it was just dark inside. I walked round the deck until I found the little door. I turned the brass handle and it opened inwards. I stepped inside and then I felt many things at the same time. It was as if I had stepped off a precipice and was falling. There was a flashing inside my head, a buzzing. Tears prickled behind my eyes. My whole body was very hot, then ice cold, then hot again. At the same time I was able to remain calm and precise. I stepped back outside and waved my hand at Jay in a fiercely urgent gesture. I shouted something, which I knew he wouldn’t hear.

  Because what I had seen when I stepped inside that cabin, projecting out of the shadows, was the naked foot and leg of a girl. I took several deep breaths. Not that any of it mattered now. It was all for nothing. But, still, life would continue, the world would go on, things would take their course. More deep breaths. Don’t cry. Don’t be sick. This was the last thing I could do for my baby, for Charlie. One more deep breath and I stepped back inside. At first I looked away.

  ‘Charlie,’ I said faintly, but I knew it was hopeless. There was a white, waxy stillness to the foot and the leg that was as dead as the wood it was lying on. I swallowed and made myself turn round and look at the foot with its grubby sole. ‘Charlie,’ I said again, moving closer and feeling my eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. I made myself approach.

  And then, once again, a jolt and the feeling that the floor had disappeared beneath me, and there in that hulk on the edge of Sandling Island I stood and stared at the body of a young girl. With entire calmness, I walked back out on to the deck, took my phone from my pocket and clicked the number of the police station. A voice answered. I didn’t know who it was. It didn’t matter.

  ‘This is Nina,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’ said the voice.

  ‘You know,’ I said. ‘Nina.’ For a moment I couldn’t remember my second name. ‘Landry. Nina Landry. I’m at the hulks on the south-east of the island. I’ve found the body of a young girl.’

  The voice said something. Static in my ear.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No. It’s the body of a young girl but it’s not my daughter. It’s someone else. She has white skin and straight dark hair and she doesn’t look like Charlie in any way at all except that she’s about the same age. I don’t recognize her. I’m going to stay here now and wait until you come.’

  There was a blue milk crate on the deck and I sat down on it and spoke to the God in whom I don’t believe and I said sorry to him and implored him for forgiveness. Because at the moment I had looked down at that girl’s face with her blank dead eyes I had felt a rush of happiness that it wasn’t Charlie, as if a life had been snatched away from me and then restored. I thought of another mother somewhere. Had she been doing what I had been doing? Had she been searching for her daughter? What would she have thought if she knew that her daughter’s body had been found by a woman and that that woman’s first emotion had been relief and thankfulness?

  As the tide rose steadily, slapping against the hull of the boat where I sat, the light was failing. They only had to come from the station and would be here very soon, a few minutes at most. In the meantime, I had to watch over a dead girl in this twilit world. The flat, bleak landscape around me was shrouded in an indeterminate grey; all colours had faded and it was scarcely possible to make out where the sea ended and the solid ground began. I wondered what the dead girl’s name was, and who had left her there. A cold, ghastly dread settled on me so that I could barely move or even breathe. For a few moments, I had somehow let myself think that because this corpse was not Charlie’s, my daughter was safe, as if a life had been traded for hers. But, of course, it was unlikely she had simply died in there. Someone had killed her. I thought of her puffy face and blue lips. Someone had strangled her.

  Jay was trying to light a cigarette. He had his back turned to the wind and his fingers were cupped round the flame of each match he struck. Was his hand trembling? I watched him for a few seconds, then stood up and called his name. He didn’t hear: the wind wiped away my words. Eventually I left the deck and crossed the narrow gangplank towards him. I called his name sharply.

  He spun round as if I’d slapped him. He tossed away another spent match and tucked the unlit cigarette behind his ear. ‘Are you done?’

  ‘I’ve found something.’

  The features didn’t move but his face changed: his green eyes seemed to darken, the muscles round his mouth to tighten.

  ‘To do with Charlie?’ he asked, after a beat.

  ‘I’ve found a body,’ I said bluntly. Again, I watched his expression. His face paled. He lifted a hand to cover his mouth but stopped it half-way, so that he stood for a moment in a gesture like a frozen salute, or as if he was warding me off, stopping me coming any closer. I stood quite still and waited, not taking my eyes off his face.

  ‘Is it Charlie?’ he asked at last, in a voice that broke, so he started the question a young man and ended it still a boy.

  ‘No.’

  His hand made it to his mouth. He closed his eyes and I noticed his long lashes. ‘But…’ he said, and stopped. Then he sprang into activity, fumbling urgently at his jacket for his phone with quivering fingers. ‘We’ve got to call the police.’

  ‘I’ve called them,’ I said. ‘They’ll be here any minute. Before they arrive, I want you to come and see if you know her.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘The girl who’s in there.’

  ‘Girl? You want me to…?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You might know her.’

  ‘No,’ he said again. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Just one quick look.’

  ‘I want to go now. I’ve done everything I can. This isn’t right.’

  ‘It’s all right. She looks as if she’s sleeping, that’s all,’ I lied.

  ‘Why do you want me to do that? What’s wrong with you?’

  I held him by the forearm and tugged him towards the gangplank. ‘I’ll go first. You follow.’

  ‘I want to go home,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel good at all. I want to help find Charlie, but this is sick.’

  ‘Wait till I’m across before you get on, otherwise we’ll both fall in.’

  I walked steadily across, arms akimbo, and a
t the other side turned to him.

  Jay mounted the plank. His face was screwed up as if he was about to cry and his arms flapped as he fought for balance. Just before he got to me he slipped and stumbled. His foot shot out and for a few seconds he wavered in the air, arms flailing. He half fell, catching himself so that he lay along the plank, legs dangling, cheek pressed into the slimy wood. He lifted himself carefully and crouched, staring at me. His eyes looked like black holes in his mud-streaked, pale face. His black leather jacket was smeared with an unlovely grey and his biker boots were scummy.

  ‘Here,’ I said briskly, reaching out to him. ‘Just a few more inches.’

  He put his thin, cold hand into mine. I yanked him towards me and he clambered on to the deck.

  ‘She’s in here,’ I said.

  I pulled my sleeve over my hand, pushed the cabin door and went in. I heard Jay behind me, his breathing coming in great gasps. I crouched beside the girl.

  ‘We mustn’t touch her,’ I said, although I wanted to. I wanted to stroke her long black hair and her waxy white cheek. I saw that there were dark red marks on her throat, like violent bruises.

  There was a noise behind me, like a door creaking open after decades of disuse, and a shadow fell over her empty face. Jay was bent double in the opening to the cabin, one hand pressed into his stomach. His mouth was half open and out of it came a strange, rusty groaning.

  ‘Just one look,’ I said. ‘Do you know her? Jay?’

  He brought up his face in a sharp jerk and stared wildly.

  ‘No,’ he managed, then turned away from me and ran across the deck. I heard vomiting. I took a last look at the girl, lying so still in the dimness of the cabin: her long white legs, her full breasts, her uncurled hand with the bangle on its wrist, her dark hair, her open eyes staring at me, through me, beyond me. I held my breath.

  I turned away and went out into the icy air to join Jay, who was crouched by the side of the boat, holding on to its railings and staring out to sea. He shrank away as I approached him.