Isolation

by Jenni Regan

  ‘What would you like to drink?’ he offered with a smile.

  ‘A glass of pinot, please, large.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t realise that you still . . .’ His voice petered out, and Rachel suddenly felt like she was being judged. Even more so when she noticed that he had a coke in front of him.

  ‘That was a long time ago, Tom, and it was never really booze that was the problem,’ she explained with a sigh.

  ‘I tell you what, I will join you. If we get a bottle, then it will work out cheaper. Did you say pinot?’

  She smiled her thanks, relieved that he would not sit and lecture her all evening.

  They were both nervous, and the first bottle went down quickly. Rachel was pleased that she had hopped on the bus rather than driving as she guessed that she was already over the limit, but the warmth of the wine seeping through her body and the sight of her little brother sitting in front of her with a smile on his face finally gave her a feeling of peace and happiness.

  Tom

  21 October 2018, 5 p.m.

  The wasted trip that Rachel had taken down to Dorset had at least one positive effect: it had lessened the canyon between siblings, a distance that would be naked to the visible eye but was a seismic shift for Tom and Rachel.

  Rachel had reported everything back to her brother. Tom had at first thought she was lying about the whole thing, but then she mentioned the tributes in Bournemouth and her reaction, and the iceberg in his heart melted a little. Tom hadn’t seen a human side to Rachel for so many years, and this show of emotion completely threw him. He was someone who saw things in black and white. His mum was evil but misguided and ignorant. Rachel was a selfish bitch who had abandoned her family and dumped her child when the allure of drugs and partying had been too much. He didn’t really want to see this human side to her, as it would upset the balance. It was much easier living on the other side of the Atlantic and not having to worry about other people—apart from Alice, that is.

  The news that Rachel had found a clearly abandoned house worried and infuriated Tom in equal measures. On one hand, he wondered if his mother’s propaganda had finally swayed Alice, resulting in her cutting him out of her life. But then, it wasn’t just him. Every time he looked on her social media platforms, searching for life, he was met with silence. There was nothing since the Bournemouth terror attack; in contrast, her pages the week before the attack had possibly hundreds of posts.

  The idea that she had been caught up in the gunfire or chaos was still a niggling worry for him. It wasn’t a completely stupid proposition. His mother wouldn’t be in touch if something had happened; they hadn’t released all the names of the dead and injured yet. For all he knew, she could have been injured and not realised how bad she was until it was too late. He knew he was probably overreacting and that she was just being a normal teenager living her life, but he couldn’t shake the dread he felt.

  It was hard to ignore the situation, particularly with all the crap that was being spouted on social media at the moment. Not a day went by without some kind of false news, whether it was someone making up a loved one who had been in the attack, bomb scares being blown way out of proportion or even reports that Korea was about to launch a nuclear weapon. He had found that sticking to the BBC generally kept his news fairly impartial, but he did still find himself switching to Twitter when something broke.

  He knew everyone else would be far too self-absorbed to see that Alice wasn’t engaging with the world. Obsessed as they were with their selfies and keeping up with the Joneses, he wondered—and not for the first time—if he should put the cat among the pigeons by alerting her friends to her lack of activity.

  A half a bottle of superb merlot later, his mind was made up. He started small, just a tweet about Alice, tagging her with just the merest hint he hadn’t heard from her. His first response was not as subtle.

  Wat is @Alicetrollydolly MISSING???? #findalice #missingperson #anuthavictim

  Tom quickly tried to backtrack, but within minutes the media had become very social and people were sharing and re-tweeting all over the place. He left them to it, thinking it couldn’t do any harm apart from embarrassing Alice if she was simply taking a break from the monotony of sharing her life online. He answered a few ‘concerned’ friends who were asking him when he had last heard from her.

  He could guarantee that few of the people responding had ever even met Alice, but he noticed that he gathered followers at an alarming rate. He had only ever used his Twitter account to keep up with work news, so suddenly becoming the centre of attention was disturbing. He noticed quite a few people mentioning the Bournemouth attack and placing Alice near the scene. This was done almost in glee as though knowing someone that had been caught up in the attack could somehow add to kudos. People were by now sharing pictures of Alice. This was not a girl he recognised; he hadn’t seen his niece in the flesh since she was a chubby-faced child, but this scary clone with her duck face and inflated lips looked nothing like her.

  By the evening, Tom had made a decision. The Twitter storm he had caused was still rumbling on but was already running out of steam. He needed to actually go to the UK and do something more than sending a few messages. He hated Halloween here anyway, with all those snotty kids knocking at the door looking for candy. This would give him a good excuse to get away. At least now he knew it wasn’t just him that was being ignored. Alice had definitely disappeared from public life, and he needed to find out why. He hoped it wasn’t for sinister reasons.

  Alice

  I had been posting pictures of my birthday day out when I first realised something was happening. I had tried to group the shots into beach, cocktails and shopping, but I wasn’t happy with the filters.

  The first indication of a problem was a sudden avalanche of posts unlike those I was used to; none of these were fluffy and there was not a cat or meme in sight. People were sharing pictures, their shock confusing. It was a never-ending stream, telling a story which felt so disjointed at the moment that it was more like a horror film.

  Each notification jolted me further into a completely frightening version of reality. The massive bang, the desperation on people’s faces all around me as they dropped to the ground. The racing heart, the sweats, the snatching away of my breath. Sirens, chaos and death, all in the space of a few moments. Suddenly, my entire body was on red alert. I could hear everything as though it was being fed through a loud speaker. The smells all around me grew overbearing and made me retch. I could feel pain all over my body, and my mind could not process where the actual injury was, if any. Most of all, I could hear the desperate screams.

  Rachel

  21 October 2018, 10.30 a.m.

  Rachel usually loved a road trip. It was a chance to sit in her rustbucket of a car by herself and listen to her own music, without constantly being asked to put on Frozen or The Jungle Book. But today, her body and mind were awash with increasing dread with every mile that brought her nearer to the coastal county of her childhood. She had told Dave that she was visiting a great aunt she had never mentioned before. He had barely looked up from daytime TV when she had left that morning, and she knew she would have to call to remind him to pick up the kids from after school club.

  She stopped at Fleet services, noticing the rebuilding that had taken place after a fire almost destroyed the building. It was a vast improvement on the memories of stinking toilets and overpriced greasy food of her youth. It even had a Waitrose now! Maybe that’s what she should do when she got to the house of horrors: burn it down and start again. She took her time drinking the ridiculously big coffee she had bought, sleep having escaped her recently. She knew she was putting off the inevitable and so eventually drained her cup, did another wee ‘just in case’ and climbed back in the car.

  She put on her favourite radio station to try to lift her mood, but the jolly demeanour of the DJ and the occasional song of her youth didn’t have the desired effect. Her brain was still flooded with thoughts and memori
es. There were some good memories, of course, like her mum making her sandwiches with the crusts cut off (sometimes even without grumbling) and summer days with her parents and Tom, spent on local beaches where dips in the freezing cold sea were rewarded with ice cream. That was before the darkness had descended.

  There were memories, too, of her life as a young mother and her surprise at the instant flood of love for this thing she had carried for so long. For the first few weeks of motherhood, Rachel had barely slept, worried that the baby would stop breathing. Rachel would have never won mother of the year back then, but she had always ensured that Alice was clean, warm and loved. She had some support, like the dreaded visits from the frosty health visitors who she felt were judging her. She even made a few friends taking Alice for long walks in her pram along the seafront. Other mothers seemed to be such naturals, bouncing babies on their hips with glossy hair and made-up faces. She got invited into people’s homes to drink cups of tea and moan about lack of sleep, but she knew she could never invite people back to her hovel.

  Then she had her neighbours, the lost boys and girls who had ended up in crappy bedsits like her. She wasn’t the only mother amongst them, and she would hear rows between mother and child at all hours of the day. Mostly everyone kept to themselves, but there was a community of sorts. She had hung around with a few of them, out of boredom more than anything. As time went by, her mood dipped so low, everything felt like a struggle. She stopped taking Alice for walks, and the invitations from the other mums had also halted.

  No one ever sets out to become an addict, and for Rachel, it was a long and slow process. It started with a shared bottle of strong cider to punctuate the weekend, a joint in the evening to send her to sleep and finally the poison in her veins to block out the black memories and long, endless poverty-filled days. Rachel only ever indulged when Alice was in bed and when there were others around, as she would never have put her daughter in danger. By the time Alice was two and a difficult toddler, Rachel had a new label: unemployed, single mother and addict.

  Alice had barely been talking when social services got involved with them. She still had no idea who had alerted them—one of her more responsible neighbours, the GP surgery who kept trying to get her to visit for various check-ups and jabs, or even her mother, who Rachel suspected in her darker moments. Given the evident drug use in her flat, Alice was considered high risk and taken into care. Rachel was given support and chances to spend time with her daughter, but it was all done in such horrific circumstances in airless rooms being watched by social workers who clearly showed what they thought of this young mum.

  And they were right, she had no idea how to actually be a parent. She was barely out of school; she would have struggled to keep a pet or house plant alive. There was so much to worry about, and trying to do it all with no money and no support felt impossible. It seemed easier just to stop trying. In her heart, she knew she didn’t deserve Alice; some other family would be able to give her a much better life.

  As Rachel finally passed the town sign that informed her she was back in her home town, she was panicking both about what would happen if her mother and daughter were at home and what she would do if she couldn’t find them. The town which had seemed so massive when she was a child seemed like a toy town now. She noticed the gentrification that had crept in with the new cafés and pedestrianised shopping areas. Her home was outside the town centre, and it had seemed like they had lived in the middle of nowhere when she was a kid, but she realised now it was less than a ten-minute walk and the neighbours were still within shouting distance. Indeed, she noticed curtains twitching as she turned off from the main road onto the bumpy track. It was also so much prettier than she remembered. After years of living in urban sprawls, it was surprisingly nice to come to a proper country town.

  The sight that greeted her was horrific. The house had always been pretty ramshackle—it was built over a century ago, after all—but this was a clearly unloved home. Ironically, although the town had seemed smaller, the house seemed to have grown in stature. Its grim, grey stone looked down upon her in disgust as its inhabitants had done for years. As she parked up and got out of her car, the stench of rotting food hit her, and she noticed bags of rubbish strewn across the overgrown lawn that her father had spent so many hours proudly maintaining. She had often thought he loved his garden more than his family. The roses were definitely given more care than his kids.

  Her parents had always been one for appearances and took great delight in telling anyone who listened that neither were born into money. This house and all that was in it was bought through hard work. Her father had worked on the railways all his life, had invested well and had spent little, so she presumed her mother was left very comfortable by his death, even if he wasn’t actually living with her at the time. She was a mean woman, though, and rather than retire in luxury, Rachel presumed she had probably hidden all the money under the mattress, leaving just enough to keep her in her beloved B&H and ready meals. She and Tom had certainly never enjoyed a penny, and while she knew her parents would have been horrified to have a daughter on benefits, they had never attempted to support her, even when Alice was in her care.

  Rachel inched gingerly up the path, the same one that had been both her escape route and salvation out of her home for many years. The stones had been engulfed by weeds. She tried the doorbell, but when she didn’t hear the usual chiming, she knocked. A few moments later, she was relieved to head back down the path and jump in her car. The house showed absolutely no signs of life. Even the letter box looked like it had been sealed. She guessed that maybe the house had been home to squatters at some point, judging by the filthy litter that had been thrown carelessly on the lawn. Rachel didn’t know what to think or how to feel as she drove away. She had been building herself up for a confrontation with her mother all day, and she even had a distant dream in the back of her head that this would be the day of reconciliation for her and her daughter.

  She had thought about trying to contact Alice over the years, even sending birthday and Christmas cards, although she wasn’t sure if they were ever passed on. She was so saddened by the way she had treated Alice, giving up on her as she did. When she eventually became a mother again, she was so ashamed by what she had done and who she had been that she didn’t really try. Instead, she had simply given up and locked Alice away in that box labelled ‘don’t touch’.

  Rachel had even hoped that her mum may have mellowed in old age—she may have even wanted to get to know her other grandchildren—but with the house empty, she had hit a brick wall, and she deserved nothing less. She hoped that this meant Alice was living it up somewhere with people her own age while her mum was shrivelling away in some cheap care home.

  Rachel changed her route on the way back to London away from the picturesque country roads, stopping in Bournemouth. The town had an air of sadness to it; everyone she walked past was either walking with their head down or eyes twitching all around, as though they feared another terrorist attack was imminent. The beach, usually packed to the rafters even on a coolish September day like today, was empty, bar a few dog walkers and armed police chatting with the ice-cream and fish-and-chip vendors that would be shutting up early after a disappointing day. She walked through the Winter Gardens and was suddenly faced with the public outpouring of grief that was so openly on display: mounds of withering, dead flowers with candles and photos. Rachel couldn’t help it and joined the handful of people in the square who were paying their respects and sobbing gently. Rachel took herself to a nearby bench and cried for the first time in years—for all the innocent people who had died here when a young person with a warped view of the world had decided to end their lives, for her lost childhood and for the child she herself had lost.

  Stan

  20 October 2018, 3 p.m.

  Stan loved the smell of a new car, probably even more than he loved the smell of a hot woman. Both got him feeling aroused, so the current situation of a blow job
in his new car was driving him over the edge. She wasn’t much to look at, really—scrawny with too much makeup—but the feel of his hands against the soft leather interior in between pushing her head down harder was enough to keep him feeling it.

  Stan’s life had improved considerably since he had hooked up with Alice. At first, he had been jittery, looking over his shoulder when he went to the cashpoint. Each time he fully expected an alarm to go off, be surrounded by police or at the very least for the card to stop working. But it had never happened; it really was the gift that kept giving. After a week of being cautious, Stan became more daring. Some new clothes, trainers and a few nice bits for his mum led up to this, his dream car. It wasn’t new, but it was in good nick. This was what he had been building up to his whole life, buying second-hand cars that were falling apart and spending weeks trying to transform them with blacked-out windows and huge speaker systems. He didn’t need to do that with this, as this car needed no embellishment.

  He felt like he had gone up in the ranks of the estate overnight with people presuming he was mixing with the big boys. Women almost flagged him down begging him to let them suck his dick. His mum was the only slight issue. She had given him a cold stare when he had first pulled up outside the flat, knowing most of the motors around them were bought with dirty money. However, he smiled sweetly and told her he had won a big contract. She had asked a lot of questions but eventually believed him; he knew she was loving having one over on her mate Karen from across the road as he dropped her off at her weekly Zumba class.

  Stan had soon realised that he couldn’t survive on stolen funds forever. The bank card with its seemingly unlimited magic money that he had taken from Alice was delivering so far, but he knew it might run out eventually, or she might even be clever enough to close the account. He had invested some of his ‘earnings’ in his latest business venture. He reckoned in a few months’ time he would probably have enough money to move out of the depressing high-rise building he had always called home. However, he knew he couldn’t leave his mum, not just because she provided him with all his food and washing, but also because it didn’t feel right leaving her here. He knew that the only thing to spur him into moving out was if he found himself a surrogate mum in the shape of a girlfriend, but he wasn’t ready to settle down yet and both needs were currently being met. His other dream was making some serious cash, enough to move his mum to somewhere nicer, but he knew despite her moaning what a dump their flat was, she was still a part of the community, and those ties would be hard to break.