People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  Apparently you would be mistaken.

  I move to overtake someone shuffling along with their head bowed and their eyes fixed on their iPhone, and nearly collide with someone else doing exactly the same thing coming in the other direction.

  There is no sign of Coco by the elevators. The display tells me one elevator is on the ground floor, and the other is making its way up to the top—the third floor—where I am. I run back to the balustrade and look over. I can’t see my daughter anywhere. By this time, I’m increasingly convinced that something awful has happened, something really awful. The kind of thing you read about and shudder. The kind of thing you hear about on the news.

  That’s when I see her. Coco. Standing outside a bookshop on the ground floor.

  “Coco,” I shout. She doesn’t look up. “Coco!”

  I take the stairs of the escalator three or four at a time, gripping the sides, practically throwing myself down it, pushing roughly between a young couple standing two abreast, not caring when one of them clucks their tongue after me.

  “Coco!” I shout again, leaning over the side of the balustrade on the first floor. This time she does look up, but only to try to work out where the voice calling her name is coming from. I shout it again. Finally, she glances in my direction, smiles vaguely and waves with one arm, then returns her attention to the display in the window, which is advertising the latest in that series of books about a family of wizards and witches.

  Thank God. Thank God. Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

  Not only have I located my daughter, but she has got someone with her, a grown-up. Thank God for that too. That one person in this mall, at least, at last, has shown enough common sense and enough community spirit to intervene when they see an unaccompanied three-year-old wandering about. They are standing next to each other, the two of them, apparently checking out the shop display together.

  I feel a great surge of relief.

  From this angle and distance, I can’t make out much about the person Coco is standing with—I can see them only from behind and as a vague reflection in the shop window—but I assume, I suppose because of the anorak they are wearing, that they are an older person, someone’s granny perhaps. I suppose it is the colors of the anorak—pink and purple—that give me the impression the person wearing it is female. I can already feel the apologetic words, the effusive thanks, forming in my throat.

  A pillar passes between us.

  A second or two elapses.

  My daughter is standing outside the bookshop on her own.

  For a moment, my brain flatly refuses to process this.

  All the way down the final escalator, I keep my eyes fixed on Coco, as if some very basic part of my brain believes if I take my eyes off her for a second, even to blink, she will vanish too. Thankfully, there is no one on this escalator between me and the bottom. I quick-shuffle down the steps as fast as I can, one hand hovering over the rubber banister in case I stumble.

  The last three or four steps I jump.

  I land with a grunt.

  It is about twenty feet from the end of the escalator to the entrance to the bookshop. I skid it in three long, sliding strides.

  “Ooof, Daddy,” says Coco.

  I’m aware that I am squeezing her too hard, but I can’t stop myself, just as I can’t stop myself lifting her up and swinging her around in my arms.

  “Daddy,” she says.

  I put her down. She straightens her dress.

  My heart is still thumping.

  “Coco. What have we told you, what do Mummy and I always say, about wandering off like that?”

  My aim is to sound calm but firm. Stern but not angry.

  It is that age-old dilemma: the simultaneous urge to tell them off for scaring you versus the overwhelming desire to let them know how much they are loved.

  I do my best to catch my daughter’s eye, have attempted to squat down to her level, the way the advice manuals all tell you to do when you are trying to have a serious conversation with someone Coco’s age.

  “Do you hear me?” I ask her. “You must never, never, never, never do that again, darling. Do you understand?”

  Coco nods, very slightly, half her attention still on the window display.

  She is safe—that is the main thing. My daughter is okay. As for what I thought I saw from the escalator . . .

  It must be raining again outside, because people with anoraks are everywhere. Some are old. Some are young. Some of them still have their hoods up. I look around, but no one seems to be paying us any special attention. None of the anoraks looks familiar. They are black, blue, green, yellow.

  Perhaps I was mistaken, I think. Perhaps Coco was not standing with anyone. Perhaps someone just happened to be looking at the window display at the same time as her, happened to be passing. Perhaps—perhaps—what I thought I saw was just a trick of the light, a glitch of the brain, the reflection of a reflection.

  I think it is fair to say I am not doing very much sophisticated joined-up thinking at this precise point in time.

  I give Coco another hug, a longer one this time. After a while I can feel her starting to lose patience, to squirm a little in my arms. It takes a few seconds for me to work up the will to let her go.

  And that’s when I finally notice what my daughter is holding.

  Chapter Four

  It is astonishing how much you can find out about someone, once you know their address.

  14 Chandos Road.

  Once you know someone’s address you can easily go online and find one of those property websites, see how much the house last sold for and have a look at some photos, even check out the floor plan if you are lucky. The last time 14 Chandos Road was on the market, back in the late noughties, it went for five hundred fifty thousand pounds. Emmy has written quite a bit on her blog about the changes they made to the place after she moved in—in addition to the conservatory and extension they added to the back, they knocked a wall through in the living room, got rid of the three-bar fire with fake plastic coal, the carpet in the bathroom, and the turquoise tiles in the downstairs loo, and set up the back room on the first floor as a children’s bedroom. Which means that room in the front upstairs must still be the master bedroom, the one with the en suite. It’s all so easy. It’s all just there in the public domain. Two clicks, three, and as you trace your finger on the screen it feels as if you’re walking through their house, invisible, a digital ghost. Emmy always talks about wanting a larger garden. I can see why. Goodness knows where they had room to fit a writing shed.

  Once you know someone’s postcode, you can easily figure out where their local coffee shop is, the one they talk about stopping by on their morning walk every day, the one their husband sometimes goes to to sit in and write. You can click on Street View and you can follow the route they would walk on their way to the Tube in the morning, on their way to the park. You can make a reasonable guess where their daughter goes to nursery, the quickest route for them to take to get there in the morning. You can work out pretty quickly which is the little playground Emmy talks about passing on the way and the shop where Coco always wants to buy sweets.

  It is a very strange feeling. A little dizzying, even.

  There are times when it feels like you are looking down into a pond—a fish pond, I guess, like the one we used to have at school, in front of the entrance to the science block—and all the fishes are swimming around it blithely, obliviously. You can see them going about their business, doing their thing, and a part of you knows that at any moment you could drop a stone or start poking around with a stick and see them all scatter and panic. Or you could bend down and pluck one out of the water and into the choking air, just like that, if you wanted to, and all the others would be nosing urgently around the weeds, tails flicking, turning this way, turning that. And there are times when you know that you would not be able to do that sort of thing to another living being, not really, not you.

  And then there are times when you
are not so sure.

  I used to be such a nice girl, back in those days, back at school, all those years ago. Such a polite girl. Such a kind girl. Those were the words that always got used to describe me.

  There have been times recently when the thoughts I have found myself thinking, the things I have imagined myself doing, the kind of human being into which I seem to be turning, have genuinely terrified me.

  Dan

  It is absolutely hideous. That’s the first thing that strikes me about the object that Coco is holding. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it is the ugliest, dirtiest stuffed toy I have ever seen. Its eye buttons are chipped. Its ears are grimy and sucked-looking. One of its overall straps is broken. Its mouth looks like a surgical scar. My immediate instinct is to snatch it out of Coco’s hands and chuck it as far as I can, slam-dunk it into the nearest bin, then see if there are any wipes or hand sanitizer in my backpack.

  The second thing that strikes me is that Coco was definitely not carrying it when she wandered off.

  We’ve had several conversations about not swearing in front of the kids, Emmy and I. Usually, I’d like to point out, it’s Emmy who slips up in this regard. Who drops an F-bomb when she opens a cupboard and a bag of flour leaps out and bursts on the counter. Who calls someone a wanker under her breath (not quite quietly enough to escape little ears) as they cut in front of us in a queue at an airport. Who has to wriggle out of explaining what a dickhead is at the dinner table. On this occasion—blame the adrenaline still coursing around my body, my still-jangling nerves—it’s me whose temper gets the better of them.

  “Jesus Christ, Coco, where the fuck did you get that?”

  There’s always that horrible moment after you snap at a child when you see their eyes widen, moisten, can see the child retreating into themselves. That moment when you feel yourself desperately wanting to recall the words, stop them reverberating in the air. She tries belatedly to tuck the toy behind her back.

  “Nowhere,” she says.

  “Show me.”

  Eventually, reluctantly, somewhat unexpectedly, she complies.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  I kneel down to inspect the thing. Is it meant to be a dog? A bear? A monkey? It’s impossible to tell. If it ever had a tail, it doesn’t have one any longer. I really hope it’s not my daughter who has been sucking on its ears.

  “Where did it come from, Coco?” I ask her again, a little more calmly, in a tone of voice intended to sound coaxing rather than upset.

  “Mine,” she replies.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” I tell her. “But I don’t think it is yours, is it?”

  I’m literally holding the thing between pinched forefingers.

  “Do you want to tell me where you got it, Coco? Do you remember?”

  She avoids eye contact.

  “Did you find it somewhere?”

  She shrugs one shoulder noncommittally.

  If she can remember where she found it, I tell her, we could go and put it back there again. It must belong to someone, this teddy, I point out. Another little girl or boy. And whoever it belongs to must have dropped it or lost it or maybe it fell out of the bottom of their pram, and how did she think they would feel when they got home and realized?

  “Mine,” she says again.

  “What do you mean, yours?” I ask her.

  She does not answer me.

  “If you don’t tell me where you got this thing, Coco,” I tell her in my firmest, most imposingly parental voice, “it’s going straight in the trash.”

  Coco pulls a face and shakes her head.

  “I’m serious,” I tell her.

  No response.

  “Final chance,” I say.

  She shrugs.

  Into the trash it goes.

  Stupid move. Stupid fucking move. A real parenting misstep. As we make our way through the mall, she keeps trying to slip her hand out of mine and double back. On the escalator to the Tube platform, she keeps going floppy. I have to pick her up when we actually get to our station. There are looks. When Emmy calls back, we are two minutes from home. She asks if that’s Coco howling in the background. I confirm it is and that the amateur dramatics have been going for over ten minutes now. Her first question is what the hell have I done to her.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Is everything okay?” she asks me. “I’ve got a million missed calls—you scared me. I’ve canceled my meeting and I’m in an Uber on my way back. What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I say again. “There’s no need to worry. Everything is fine now.”

  I really do not want to discuss over the phone the eight and a half minutes this afternoon when I managed to misplace our three-year-old daughter.

  All the way home I have been replaying in my head my exchange with Coco, the questions I asked her, the way I framed them, the manner in which I spoke to her, wondering whether a different approach would have been more sensible. All the way home I have been trying to remember exactly what I saw from the escalator, the precise colors of the anorak, exactly what gave me the impression it was a woman. Was it the anorak that was pink, the patches on the back purple? Or was it the other way around? And if I can’t even be sure about that, then what can I be sure about, when it comes to what I thought I saw?

  Memory being what it is, it is just as likely my brain is now embroidering facts, filling in the gaps, as it is that I am actually remembering anything useful at this point.

  Every time I ask Coco what happened, where she went, why she wandered off, she just says, “Bookshop.”

  There is a part of me that can very easily imagine myself and Emmy telling this as a story, twenty years in the future, when Coco is a writer or an academic or a literary agent; can easily imagine in a distant future the rough edges of the anecdote, any tricky questions it might raise about my parenting skills, gently rounded or glossed over. I can even imagine myself or Emmy doing Coco’s inflection when we get to the word booksop. And there is a part of me that is secretly quite pleased it was a bookshop she was so excited about, not the Disney Store or McDonald’s.

  Right now, though, it is the stuffed toy on which my thoughts keep snagging.

  When we get home, I take Coco through to the kitchen and make her beans on toast, which she eats sullenly in her special chair. When I ask if she wants a yogurt for dessert, she vigorously shakes her head.

  “Bath time?” I ask her.

  No response at all to this.

  “We’ll get you another . . . bear, Coco. Another teddy. A nicer one. We can go back to the bookshop another time.”

  She turns in her chair, pretends she’s looking out at the garden. A gentle rain has begun to fall, the wet leaves glinting in the gathering gloom. Her lips are arranged in what looks very much like a pout.

  “The thing is, darling, it isn’t good to just wander around picking things up, is it? You don’t know where they’ve been.”

  “Mine,” she says yet again.

  I put on a smile and assume a reasonable, soothing tone of voice.

  “But the thing is, Coco, it wasn’t yours, was it? I didn’t buy it for you. Mummy didn’t buy it for you. So the question is, where did you get it from?”

  I know what she’s going to say in reply to this before her lips have even finished forming the word.

  I pull out a chair and sit down. Then I turn her chair so she’s facing me a little more.

  “Coco,” I say. “I have a serious question to ask you. Will you look at me? Look at me. Thank you. Coco, that teddy. I don’t suppose there is any way somebody—anybody—gave you that teddy? Like a present? Do you remember?”

  She shakes her head firmly.

  “No?”

  She shakes her head again, more vigorously this time.

  “Does that mean no, you don’t remember, or no, no one gave it to you?”

  “No,” she says again.

  I straighten up, stretch my shoulders, rub the back of my neck. It is tim
e, I decide, to try another tack.

  “Coco?” I ask her. “You know that talk we had a little while ago about telling the truth and telling stories?”

  She nods her head tentatively, not meeting my gaze.

  “And you know how important we agreed it was to always tell the truth?”

  She hesitates, still avoiding eye contact, then nods her head again.

  “Well, I’m going to ask you once again about where you got that teddy . . .”

  “Found it,” she says.

  “You found it?”

  “Found it.”

  Fine, I think. Good, I tell myself. That is a relief, a weight off my mind.

  I ask her where she found it, and she tells me in a shop. “A shop?” I say. She hesitates, looks thoughtful, and then confirms this.

  “What shop?”

  Coco is unable to tell me.

  I take a deep breath, count to twenty, announce it is time to start running a bath.

  It would appear that big talk we had about always telling the truth has not perhaps sunk in as deeply as we had hoped.

  THE NURSERY HAD SUGGESTED it might be best if both Emmy and I were present, if we all sat down with Coco to talk about things—“things” meaning, in this context, our daughter’s recently developed habit of going through the bags on other kids’ pegs and taking stuff and then claiming they’d given it to her as a present. Of knocking things over and letting other children take the blame. The outrageous claims she had taken to making about how rich and famous we were or where we’d been on holiday (the moon, apparently). The reason Coco’s teacher had called us in, she said, was to try to find out whether Coco did the same thing at home, whether there was anything that might be upsetting her or unsettling her or why we thought she might be behaving in this way. “She’s always been imaginative” was Emmy’s rather defensive response. “I was exactly the same at her age.”

  I did not doubt that at all.

  We pulled our chairs into a circle and had a very serious talk with Coco about how it’s important not to make things up or exaggerate or invent stories. That there’s no point trying to impress people by pretending to be something you’re not. About how you shouldn’t try to trick people into giving you things that don’t belong to you. Coco’s teacher was nodding her head very firmly through all this, very emphatically.