‘That’s the good news,’ she said, once I’d recomposed myself. ‘But there’s some bad news as well, I’m afraid.’
‘She’s pregnant,’ I said, unsure where that thought had popped up from.
‘Not that I know of, no,’ the officer replied. ‘But I’m afraid I have to inform you that she doesn’t want to come home.’
I frowned at this. I didn’t understand what those words could possibly mean, not in the context of my daughter. ‘You mean she wants to go to her father’s?’ I asked.
The policewoman shook her head. ‘No, she’s found somewhere else to live, and she seems happy and safe . . .’
‘Somewhere else?’ I exclaimed. ‘Happy?’
‘Yes, relatively speaking.’
‘But she’s fif— she’s sixteen,’ I said. ‘She has to come home. I mean, I don’t care if she goes to her father’s, but–’
‘Actually, the fact that she’s sixteen is rather the crux of the matter,’ the policewoman explained. ‘At sixteen, as long as she’s not in danger, she doesn’t have to come home at all. She can live wherever she wants.’
‘But she’s a minor!’ I said. ‘That’s absurd.’
She sighed then, and pulled an expression one might describe as theatrical concern. It involved sticking her lips out, furrowing her brow and tipping her head to one side. ‘As a mum,’ she said, ‘I agree. I really do. But unfortunately, the law says that at sixteen she’s reached the age of discretion. She can do just whatever she wants.’
‘The age of discretion?’ I repeated.
‘Yes, that’s the legal term.’
‘Right, where is she?’ I demanded. ‘I’ll talk to her.’
‘I’m afraid that I can’t give you that information,’ the policewoman said.
‘What do you mean, you can’t give it to me?’ I muttered.
‘I’m not able to tell you where she’s living unless she authorises me to.’
‘But she’s my daughter!’ I said, my voice rising.
‘Yes, I realise that,’ the policewoman said. ‘And I understand how frustrating this must be for you.’
‘Frustrating?’ I said. ‘Frustrating! Are you out of your mind?’
‘She’s legally allowed to leave home,’ she said again. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Fuller, but that’s the law.’
‘I think you need to talk to my husband – my ex-husband, her father – about this. He’s a lawyer.’
‘A colleague of mine is doing that right now,’ she said. ‘And I think you’ll find that he’ll confirm what I’m telling you now.’
‘Ian will sort all this out,’ I said. ‘Because this: this is just nonsense.’
I phoned Ian as soon as she’d left, but to my horror he told me that he suspected the policewoman was right. ‘I’m going to check with Giles,’ he said. ‘He’s better on family law than I am. But I think that’s correct. As long as she’s not in danger, there’s nothing that we can do.’
‘How do we even know she’s not in danger?’ I asked. ‘We don’t know anything about her or where she’s staying or who she’s with or . . .’
‘No,’ Ian said. ‘But the police say she’s safe. There’s a social worker on the case we can call tomorrow, and once she’s spoken to Zoe maybe she’ll tell us something. Just try to stay calm.’
‘Calm?’ I spluttered. ‘Calm?!’
Whether we spoke to the social worker or the police, or to specialist legal advisers, all we ever got was more of the same. The law was the law. The age of discretion was a thing. Our daughter was fine, and she didn’t want to see us.
She’d stopped going to school, had moved from Buxton and was living with a friend and his father somewhere in the north of England. That was all anyone would tell us.
I was outraged at the situation. I understood for the first time ever what it meant to be spitting mad. ‘Wracked with guilt’ took on a whole new meaning, too. ‘Paralysed with fear’, as well.
Most of the time, the combination of these three left me in such a state that I worried I might be on the verge of a mental breakdown. I could quite easily imagine myself ending up in a padded room, rocking gently.
One night, about six weeks after Zoe’s vanishing act, Jude came home early. Football practice had been cancelled because of the rain, so he found me in Zoe’s room, weeping into her pillow. Even the smell of my daughter was fading.
He dropped his schoolbag in the doorway and sat beside me on her bed and put one arm around my shoulders. ‘She’s fine, Mum,’ he told me. ‘Don’t worry. She’s fine.’
I stopped crying instantly and seized him by the shoulders. ‘Do you know something?’ I asked. ‘You do, don’t you? Tell me!’
‘You’re hurting me, Mum,’ Jude said, and it was only then that I realised I’d been shaking him. I forced my hands to release him, raising my trembling fingers to my lips instead. ‘Tell me, Jude,’ I said again. ‘If you know something, you have to tell me. I’m losing my mind here.’
‘I don’t,’ he said, and my tears started to flow all over again. ‘I don’t know anything, Mum. But the police do. That social worker woman does. And they’ve all seen her and they all say that she’s fine.’
‘But that’s not enough, Jude,’ I said. ‘I’m her mother.’
‘I know, Mum,’ he said. ‘I know.’
‘I just want to understand,’ I told him, my voice wobbling uncontrollably. ‘What did we ever do to deserve this? What did we do that was so goddamned awful?’
Jude shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s not us,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s her.’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ I told him.
‘Look, you know the way Gary’s aunt’s a bit mad?’ Jude said. ‘Or, say, that doctor on the telly. Or in Homeland, you know the mad one in Homeland?’
I wiped my eyes and looked at my son’s features. ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ I said, ‘but I’m not following.’
‘Maybe Zoe’s like them,’ he said, nodding earnestly. ‘Maybe she’s mad, too. And maybe there’s no point trying to work out why, because that’s just the way she is.’
The following weekend, while tidying Jude’s room, I found two postcards under his pillow. They gave no real information about where Zoe was living or why she had left, except to say that she was fine, that he shouldn’t worry, and that he mustn’t show the cards to anyone else. That last request for secrecy felt like having an arrow driven through my heart.
The postmarks on both cards were from Knutsford, and as it was less than an hour’s drive away, I jumped in the car immediately.
It was a drizzling April day and wandering aimlessly around the streets looking for my daughter made me feel as hopeless, I think, as I have ever felt.
I showed a photo of her to a few people in shops I imagined she might have visited, but I quickly realised that it was a pointless, soul-destroying task.
On the way home I called into the police station and asked if they could at least confirm that she was in Knutsford. I was desperate back then for even the tiniest nugget of information. I needed to be able to picture where she was and what she was doing. It seemed to me that knowing at least which town she was in would be a help.
The same woman who had come to my office appeared. She led me to a small shabby interview room.
‘You know that I can’t tell you where she is,’ she said, pulling that same fake-concerned expression I remembered from before. ‘But I will tell you that she isn’t in Knutsford. Now please, go home and look after your son. And when your daughter’s ready to get in touch with you again, and believe me, it always happens in the end, then she will.’
Within a few weeks I found a third card, this time hidden under Jude’s mattress. In it, Zoe said that she was fine, that she was moving south, and that she hoped Jude was enjoying her iPhone 4. The postcard this time was from Birmingham.
I phoned Ian that evening to tell him the news. We discussed at some length whether I should tell Jude that I’d found them, and decided that it was better
not to. We agreed to give him Zoe’s birthday gift as well. It was, after all, what she seemed to want.
The cards soon became less frequent. Sometimes a few months would go by and I’d worry that Jude was hiding them elsewhere and have to search every inch of his bedroom. But then a new card would pop up under his mattress from Bristol or Brighton or Canterbury. There seemed to be no pattern to Zoe’s movements, and I would imagine her roaming the country with a backpack, like some modern-day gipsy.
Sometimes the postmarks were from villages, and the temptation was too much to resist. I’d jump in the car and drive down to wherever it was. I’d show Zoe’s photo to the man in the post office, or the cashier at the village shop, or a busker playing a flute near a cashpoint. But there was never even a hint of recognition, and as Zoe seemed to be constantly on the move, I soon abandoned all hope.
She was somewhere, at least – this I knew. My daughter was alive. They say you can learn to live with anything and, though I would never have thought it possible, I did get used to having a lost daughter.
What with Ian having left and then Scott, now that even my daughter had deserted me as well, I felt hollowed out. In my saddest moments I believed that it was all my fault, that I was the monster who had driven everyone away. In my better moments I simply felt numb, as if a part of me, deep inside – the feeling part – had died. But I was still functioning, still going through the motions, still getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night. And all things considered, that felt like no small victory.
When Jude was eighteen, he, too, left home. He’d been accepted by Manchester University to do a degree in computer science. He offered to find somewhere closer to avoid leaving me on my own, but I insisted that he leave, partly because I felt it was healthier for him to be away from my moping, and partly because I felt I needed the space in which to let myself collapse entirely. The effort of holding it all together had come to feel exhausting.
Once he left, I didn’t fall apart after all. Yes, the house was big and empty, and yes, sometimes I was terribly lonely. But I’d trained myself to carry on, and that’s what I continued to do.
With Jude away, my supply of fresh postcards dried up, so when he came home that Christmas I broached the subject for the first time. I told him that I knew about the cards, and he told me that he knew that I’d been reading them, that he’d even intended for me to find them.
I explained that I didn’t need to know what she’d written – there was never any detail anyway. And I told him that I didn’t want to know where they were posted from any more either. I simply asked him to tell me when they arrived, so that I’d know that my daughter was still alive. And this he did, reliably, over the years, invariably around his birthday or at Christmas.
‘Zoe’s fine, by the way,’ he’d say. ‘No news, really. Just, you know, the usual.’
‘Good,’ I’d tell him. ‘I’m glad.’
And amazing as it will sound, this was true. I was glad. Knowing that she was alive was enough to turn a day into a good day.
Jude had often said that he wanted to return to Buxton after college, and though, deep down, I didn’t believe him (I suspected he was simply saying what I wanted to hear), it was a handy excuse not to move.
I also still held on to the tiniest glimmer of hope that Zoe would reappear, so I’d rebuff Ian’s requests that I sell up by laying a guilt trip on him about where he expected his children to live, if and when they returned home.
Once Jude had started working in London, the status quo became harder to defend. Jude, Ian would point out, was in a relationship now. Sooner or later, he’d be getting married and wanting to buy a place of his own. I was a single woman living in a three-bedroom house worth almost half a million pounds, and if I would just think about moving somewhere smaller there would be enough money to help Jude put down a deposit.
Half-heartedly, I looked at properties. But not only was I, I think, too depressed to look properly, I’d become somehow stuck where I was. I simply couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
October came, and the day before I was due to take a holiday – a break in which I had nothing whatsoever planned – my boss called me into his office. Business was slowing down, he said, and if the whole Brexit business really happened, he expected things to get even worse. We used to do a fair bit of work for Nissan back then, and they were threatening to leave the UK entirely.
So they’d decided to rationalise the business, he explained. They were closing the Buxton office. There was a job for me in Nottingham if I wanted it, but if not, the only option was redundancy. I drove home in a bit of a daze.
I parked the car outside and looked up at the house I’d lived in for so long, the house where I’d brought up my children – the house I’d planned to spend the next two weeks moping around in. It looked particularly dark and lifeless that day – almost threatening.
I climbed from the car and let myself in. Around me the house was silent.
The strangest feeling came over me. At first it was the tiniest flutter, like a little flame flickering deep within my chest. I frowned at the sensation as I started to wander around the house, going from room to room, suddenly seeing the house objectively, seeing it as a series of cool, uninhabited rooms made of bricks and plaster and wood.
The flame in my bosom grew, and soon it was strong enough that I could identify it. What I was feeling was a sense of relief, for my boss had unwittingly provided an escape route. It felt like a revelation, because up until that point, I’d never even understood that I was trapped.
I went to the kitchen and pulled a ready meal from the freezer and threw it in the microwave. I smiled vaguely, I think, as I watched it spinning behind the glass. And then, as I tipped it on to a plate, I remember the feeling washing over me in a wave, and I gasped. Something had snapped and something else was beginning. I felt unexpectedly submerged in joy.
I was going to Nottingham. I knew it as if I had always known it. I was going to leave Ian and his podgy yoga-teacher wife and her pretty polite girls and their ultra-cute toddler behind. I’d no longer have to pretend to not see the signposts to Bakewell as I drove around town, so I’d finally be able to forget about Scott. I was going to empty Zoe’s room so that some other little girl could live in it, and that meant that I’d stop waiting for her to forgive me for god-knows-what and come home, as well. I was leaving the whole sorry weight of it behind me, and not because I was running from it, but because a new chapter had begun elsewhere.
I opened my laptop and, fork in hand, started looking for apartments in Nottingham. I couldn’t even wait until I’d eaten to get on with it all.
Twelve
Jude
We’re on the M1 heading for London and I am having one of my panic attacks.
We’ve been driving for seven hours, which is why Jessica has taken the wheel. I’m supposed to be sleeping, but I’m way too stressed to even think about it. In fact, I can barely breathe.
Jessica checks the mirror and changes lanes. She’s an excellent driver, as luck would have it. Ironically, this is part of the problem. Because Jessica, bloody Jessica, is just so damned good at everything. It crossed my mind about an hour ago, just after we swapped seats, that she’s faultless. And if she’s faultless, how will I ever find a reason to break up with her?
This is madness, of course; I can see that. I mean, every guy hopes to meet a girl who’s sexy, clever and well balanced, right? So why does this feel like a trap?
She glances over at me now and smiles. ‘You’re not sleeping?’ she asks.
I shake my head.
We pass a sign that says, ‘London 50’, and I think about cancelling the trip and just going home instead.
Because, yes, I have let Jess convince me to fly to Nice this evening. She’s found an apartment to rent and we’ve booked expensive last-minute flights from Gatwick.
It’s just that eight hours is a long drive. And eight hours is a long time to think about the fact that I�
��m in a relationship with no visible way out, on a holiday that I don’t seem to be in control of.
I’m doing my best to work through this on my own, honestly I am. Because I can see just how idiotic I’m being, even as I fail to stop myself. So I’m doing everything I can to spare Jess this latest bout of Jude’s silliness.
I’ve reminded myself that I’m a free man and that I have chosen to come away with Jess. I’ve reminded myself that we’ve been getting on brilliantly, and having loads of really good sex.
But, for the moment at least, it’s just not working. I’m struggling to breathe, and there’s no sensible reason why.
‘You’ve gone quiet,’ Jess says. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘No, I’m just thinking,’ I say – a lie.
‘Is it Zoe?’ Jess asks. ‘Is it getting to you? Is this all a really shitty idea?’
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘So something is wrong,’ Jess says, glancing at me repeatedly despite the traffic. ‘We don’t have to look for her if you don’t want to,’ she continues. ‘We can just go to the beach or something. I mean, it would seem a bit of a waste after all this whizzing around not to go and find her, but it’s got to be up to you in the end. I can’t imagine how all of this feels to you.’
‘It’s not Zoe,’ I say, my tone of voice conveying far more irritation than I intended.
‘Oh,’ Jess says. ‘Is it me?’
I sigh and look out of the side window. We’re overtaking a livestock lorry. Pig snouts are peeping through the bars. Luckily, Jess hasn’t spotted it. She always gets upset about stuff like that.
‘So it is me,’ Jess says. ‘Am I getting on your nerves? Because, like, I know I talk too much sometimes. And we have been together a lot and everything. I wouldn’t blame you.’
‘You’re not getting on my nerves. It’s just me being me.’
‘Ah,’ Jess says. ‘You’re not panicky again, are you? You’re not feeling trapped?’
I shrug. ‘Something like that,’ I say.
The Road to Zoe Page 19
