***
On the Sunday night she drove me back to the school. For a while we sat looking at the boardinghouse, its façade shadowed a deep blue against a darkening sky. There were bright rectangles of orange light in the windows and, inside, cheerful girls who’d never had a bad thing happen to them in their entire lives. We both sat staring ahead. Laika had been missing for seven weeks and five days.
I said, “She’s not coming home, is she, Mum?”
My mother went very quiet. She turned her face to mine and the night’s shadows filled her eye sockets, the bones of her cheeks. She’d lost so much weight it scared me. I reached for her hand.
“Do you want me to come home?” I said. “I want to. I want to come home.”
“No,” she said, “absolutely not. What I want is for you to get your exams. That’s essential. And, also, I want you right here, where I know you’re safe, away from”—her hand made a vague movement before coming to rest on her arm—“all that.”
“But what about you, Mum? What about you?”
My mother seemed to gather herself. When she spoke again, her voice was firm.
“It’s very important to stay positive, Willa. No one’s given up. I certainly haven’t and you mustn’t either. The police promise me they are doing everything in their power. You have to believe she’s coming home. She is coming home. And, when she does, I will be right there, waiting for her.”
I hugged her, then got out of the car, feeling lost, as miserable as I’d ever felt in my entire life. Still wearing her seat belt, my mother leaned forward and peered out through the open car door. She paused, looking at me, her eyes shifting between mine.
“You would tell me, Willa, if you knew anything.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Mum—” I said. She waited. I looked up at the flinty sky, then back. “Of course.” Exhaustion made my bones hurt. My head slumped.
“Darling girl,” she said, “don’t go back in like that. We will find her. Meanwhile, chin up.”
***
Short autumn days rolled rapidly into winter. The clocks changed and the afternoons grew dark and wet, and cold. Fierce winter storms came through. The windows shuddered in their frames.
Every morning I lay awake on my bed, looking at the ceiling, thinking about Laika. The summer felt like a lifetime ago, another planet, somebody else’s life. I thought about how we used to muck around in the pool together, ducking each other under, counting to see who could hold their breath the longest. Laika was amazing at that. She truly loved swimming. She said she was going to be a free diver when she grew up, that she would dive the world’s blue holes just by holding her breath. She practiced by diving into our pool and holding on to the filter at the deep end, and then I would wait, counting aloud, slowly at first, then faster. One minute passed. Two. When I couldn’t bear it a second longer I would swim down and forcibly drag her to the surface.
“What d’you do that for?” she’d say. “I was fine.”
“You’re an idiot,” I said. “You’ll get brain damage.”
***
I tried to keep her safe. I really did. I told her, keep your head down, don’t bring unnecessary attention to yourself, just do what you’re told, all the things that just came naturally to me. But I was so busy keeping her safe from herself that I forgot to warn her about the outside world. I should have told her that there were people out there, men, women even, who could harm her.
So much was my fault.
***
My parents were known for their extravagant parties, over which my father would preside like some munificent dictator, handing out compliments to the women and fine cigars to the men. None was more lavish than the one they held to celebrate my mother’s thirtieth. It was a stinking hot day in July. In the early morning a catering company arrived with truckloads of food that they carried into the house on huge oval platters—bright red lobsters, black-eyed prawns with hard pink tendrils and eggs clinging to their undersides, slippery blue-gray oysters in pearly shells, slices of red-centered beef, knuckles of pork, ham, then desserts to be kept in the cool for later—custards covered in raspberries, stiff white meringues, trifles, slices of chocolate ganache topped with specks of real gold, a cake. My mother sped around the house, issuing instructions to the hired help and inspecting everything, positioning each dish on starched white tablecloths, then repositioning them somewhere better. Bottles of Bollinger chilled in vast silver buckets that glittered with bright beads of condensation; crystal glasses stood arranged in perfect rows. A team of waitresses arrived in black dresses and lace-edged aprons, sommeliers to serve the wine, a musician with a harp. The house was filled with the powerful scent of roses, gladioli, Casablanca lilies. My sister and I were buttoned into matching smocked dresses that looked sweet on her and too young on me. We had our hair tied tightly into bows. We were not to touch a thing.
Shortly before midday my mother reappeared in an outfit my father had bought her especially for the occasion: a pure white dress with a plunging neckline and a wide belt at the waist, topped by a tiny bolero jacket with long sleeves to stop her from burning: a little Joan Collins number, according to my mother. The entire thing was covered in little sparkling crystals, and in her white stilettos she looked taller than ever. I thought she looked like a goddess. My mother was the most beautiful woman in the world, I’d always thought. We all thought that. My father called her his PP, his Prized Possession.
Soon the guests started to arrive, mostly men from my father’s various clubs and their wives, also our neighbors, a couple of minor politicians, and an aging actress who’d once had a bit part in a Bond movie. My father’s latest secretary arrived wearing a scarlet dress that was so short and so tight my mother had to tell us not to stare. Laika pronounced the word “secretary” as sexetary, which made the guests laugh like mad, so she repeated it at the top of her voice until my mother asked her to stop.
Gifts wrapped in bright paper and tied with thick ribbon bows were piled on a table in the hall. Doughy Aunt Deedee, my father’s sister, arrived with her stocky, thick-necked husband, their three boys and two mean-faced Dobermans, which my aunt kept on leads. My cousins Max, Angus and Freddie, miniature versions of their father, stood in a group with their freckly arms thrust into trouser pockets. They were the only other children who’d been invited. I was nine, so they would have been in their teens.
The noise from the party grew ever louder as ever more people arrived. Laika and I trailed around the edge of the adults, hot, tired, listless, bored. The food which had looked so beautiful on the platters was strange and inedible. Laika whined that there was nothing on those vast tables she liked to eat. She wanted to throw a ball for my uncle’s dogs, but each time she went close they showed their teeth and then Deedee would bark at Laika to leave them alone.
“They don’t like six-year-old girls,” she said, and then, with a stage wink to the other adults, “They find them highly irritating.”
Eventually she said to my mother, “Do something about her, will you, Bianka?” and when my mother appeared not to hear, Deedee sent all five of us cousins off to entertain ourselves at the bottom of the garden.
I was glad to be away from the sun trap of the terrace. There were mature trees on the lower slopes of the lawn, beneath which there were always cool puddles of shade. Max, Angus and Freddie were evidently less thrilled to find themselves with two girls in tow. Max had a tennis ball which he was kicking about, slamming into trees, throwing over Laika’s head to Angus and Freddie. They never let her catch it. Laika tugged at my arm. She wanted to go in. I wanted to go back too, but didn’t dare until we were called. I held her hand in mine. I could hear the adults in the distance, talking in loud, ugly voices, laughing in great static bursts like machine-gun fire. I could see the dogs sleeping under the chairs.
The ball sailed over our heads, over and over. Then Freddie hurled it skyward and it landed in the upper branches of an old oak tree, and stayed there, high overhead.
We stared up at the tree, its high thick canopy of dark green leaves and rugged cankers and gnarled bark.
“You bloody idiot,” Max said, “our one source of entertainment.”
“I’ll get it,” Angus said; “that tree’s easy.”
“I don’t think you should,” I said, but nobody was listening except Laika, who looked up at me, wide-eyed, then back at the towering tree, its huge trunk narrowing away into the distant sky. Angus already had his hands on its rough surface. He felt with his fingers for places he could grip, flattened his legs against the trunk, tested his weight on the trunk’s jutting lumps and slowly edged his way up, eventually finding his way into its lower branches.
“It’s easy from here,” he called down, “loads to hang on to,” and we watched as he went higher and higher, hauling himself up on the tree’s thick, crooked branches.
And then he was high, too high, impossibly high. He would break his neck if he fell. My heart scudded in my chest.
“Come down,” I shouted. “You shouldn’t be up there.”
“Found it,” he said. He turned around and waved the ball. “The view’s great,” he said. “You should come up.”
