Mothers & Daughters (28 page)

‘She could be in Leeds.'

‘Leeds?'

‘There's a guy.'

‘Who?' I never knew any of the boys she dated then. ‘What's he called?'

‘Not sure.'

‘Did she say she was going to see him?'

‘No. She mentioned him a few times.'

‘And he's still in Leeds?'

‘He might be.' Nat was twisting a strand of hair round and round her finger. ‘I don't know for definite. It's just, like I said, she was talking about him before she went.'

‘What did she say?'

‘I can't remember.'

The urge to rise up, grab her by the shoulders and shake her till her teeth rattled was tremendous. At the same time, my
mind was racing ahead. Where did Jaz keep her address book? Might she have left it behind?

‘Nat, is there anything else I need to know? Anything at all,
please
. Do you think he's all right, this man? Is Jaz safe?'

She gave a nervous sort of giggle. ‘I don't know him. She might not be there, anyway. I've told you all I can.'

I thought I'd better go before I slapped her again.

On the doorstep, she said to me: ‘Sorry. It must be shit.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘It is.'

I walked to the end of the road, counted thirty, then retraced my steps. This time, instead of marching up the front path, I slipped down the side of the house and round the back. I ducked under the kitchen window, then crouched down behind the door. Gingerly I rose and peered through the glass. The kitchen was empty.

I pressed the handle down by degrees, pushed, and the door gave. I opened it as stealthily as I could, holding my breath, hearing nothing over the pounding of my heart. Then I stepped inside.

‘—your fucking mother,' I heard Nat say, from the lounge. ‘Oh, going on at me, you know.'

I went faint.

‘No,' she said. ‘
No
. No, I
didn't
.'

A pause.

‘Well, where
are
you?'

Slam slam slam slam went the blood in my ears.

‘No, I won't. I
won't
. I promise.'

I moved forwards.

‘Suit yourself,' said Nat hotly. ‘But I'm not having—' That was when she turned round and saw me in the doorway.

‘Oh, fuck,' she said, taking the mobile away from her cheek.

‘Give it to me!' I shouted. ‘Give it to me!'

I don't know whether it was fear or spite made her drop the
phone, but the next second I was scrabbling across the carpet for it. My hands were shaking so badly, and the thing was so bloody tiny, I could barely pick it up.

At last I managed to jam the speaker against my ear. ‘Jaz? Jaz? Are you there? Jaz?' All the concentration I had was focused on that moment, as if I could conjure my daughter's voice by sheer force of will. My eyes were screwed tight shut, and my shoulders hunched away from Nat, blocking her out. ‘Jaz, please,' I said into the silence.

I stood that way for what seemed like a long time.

When I opened my eyes, Nat was picking up her car keys from the table, and the phone was dead in my hands.

CHAPTER 22

Photograph: unnumbered, wedged between pages
40
and
41
of
La Symphonie Pastorale,
in a box in the loft, Sunnybank

Location: Hunger Hills, Horsforth, Leeds

Taken by: Stephanie Page

Subject: a group of students in hiking gear pose at the base of a huge oak tree. Jaz is on the extreme right, in borrowed boots, borrowed socks, borrowed cagoule. Next to her stands Dr Nick Page, the youngest tutor in the department and a man who has not yet quite sorted out his staff-pupil boundaries. A hearty man, a muscular Christian
, mens sana in corpore sano
is his motto and he likes to encourage these academic young people out of the library (or the bar, or bed) and up a hillside once in a while. Luckily, his wife enjoys this sort of caper too
.

‘Having fun?' Mrs Page asks Jaz as the group begins to move apart. ‘Yes,' says Jaz, and finds, to her surprise, it's true. Up here, on this high ground, the situation with Tomasz doesn't seem quite so serious, though she knows that every step of the descent will bring it back into focus
.

But maybe it will work itself out. There must be something she can do to get Tomasz all to herself. The fresh air is helping
to clear her head, and she thinks she might be on the verge of a plan
.

She hitches up her rucksack and sets off down the track. Dr Page soon falls in next to her
.

‘Let me tell you,' he says eagerly, ‘how this place got its name.'

You know the sensation when you bite down with an amalgam filling against tinfoil? That's how I felt all the time now, only from inside my chest: a poisonous, sick fizzing of nerves below my ribcage. Food lodged in my throat; trying to get to sleep was like sprawling on jagged stone. When I watched TV or read, nothing went in. I'd have liked to go to the gym, see the girls, but I couldn't face them. My own fault. I'd made Matty the centre of so many stories, it was the first question people asked.
How's your grandson?
And what could I say? ‘My daughter's so disgusted with me that she's taken him away and I don't know where he is. Yes, I'm that bad a parent.' Shame layered on grief layered on fear layered on anger. I didn't know what to do with myself.

If Jaz had been taking photographs for her unhappy album, she'd have had a field day. Daft Carol getting to the supermarket checkout and finding six pots of Splat in her basket, when there's no one now to eat them; rooting like a madwoman through her bag at two in the morning to check again for non-existent phone messages; eating toast over the sink because she can't bear to get a plate from the cupboard where Matty's cup and dish are kept; driving straight into the back of a 4 × 4 and crumpling her bonnet to buggery.

And now I was on this train to Leeds. When Jaz was at the university, I used to drive up, but my head being the way it was, I didn't trust myself not to have an accident. Aside from the prang, I'd had two near-misses in the previous three days. So
the train was safer, but on the other hand it meant there was nothing to do but stare out of the window and think. The magazine I'd bought at the station was no go: first headline in it turned out to be
My Ex Stole Our Daughters
. I rolled it up and stuck it in the bin between the seats.

We flicked past rows of terraces that reminded me of Bolton, and housing estates that made me think of Nat. Sometimes in the gardens there were ride-on toys, or climbing frames, or swings. A group of children waved from a cycle track. Look, Matty! I wanted to say. A stadium! A weir! Rabbits! Narrow-boats! The loss of him was a solid space sitting in the carriage with me, and outside it, and all around, in everything.

When I'd gone back to Jaz's, the first thing I'd done was run upstairs and check the cot again. I knew it would still be stripped, but I had to see anyway. The times I'd stood listening to Matty's wind-up night light, watching for his eyes to close. I fought the temptation to put it on – to drop the cot side, kneel with my cheek against the bare mattress – and instead turned and walked across the landing, into Jaz's bedroom.

The train jolted, bringing me out of myself. In front of me a red-headed woman about my age was struggling through the inter-connecting door with a hot drink in each hand and a large bag over the crook of one arm. She paused to hitch up the bag and, as she did so, the doors started to slide shut. I thought that, like lift doors, they'd spring apart when they encountered the least resistance, but these swept on, thumping hard into her shoulder. She stumbled against the wall and winced. But then she quickly righted herself to carry on down the aisle, her spine straight, flicking her eyes away from my gaze in a way I knew meant,
This is not how life treats me. That was not a representative scene. I'm really not the kind of person who spends her time being humiliated and pushed about. Stop looking
.

We plunged into a tunnel, and all I could see through the window was my own anxious reflection. Let me say, I would never normally have gone into Jaz's bedroom without being asked, or searched through her dressing-table drawers or the bottom of the wardrobe or under her bed. I'm not that kind of a mother. All through her teens she'd kept a candy-striped hat box full of private bits and pieces – love letters, diaries, that sort of caper – and I'd never so much as run a duster across the lid. But the shelf by the phone had been empty, her address book gone, so where else could I look? I remembered a Filofax with a pair of lips on the cover that she'd still been using in her first year at Leeds. I thought, if I could locate that, I might be in with a chance.

The train came out into daylight again, and the memory of Phil's voice:
Oh, come on, you know Jaz. She likes to make a statement. She'll be back. Try not to get so worked up
. As he'd been speaking, I'd glanced out of the kitchen door and seen Matty's tulips, straight and bright like a row of scarlet soldiers. How long would it be before the petals dropped? Would he get to see them? Would he be back playing in my garden next week, next month, never? I said to Phil, ‘It
feels
bad. She was livid with me, you've no idea. You don't understand Jaz the way I do.' ‘So you're always telling me,' he'd said.

In the Filofax I'd found just two Leeds addresses: a crossed-out one for her personal tutor, a man I dimly remembered meeting once while she was showing me round the union, and one for a Sam Barnett. Not a name that rang any bells, but then Jaz had kept her university life strictly private and she was rarely at home, even in the holidays. Every week I'd written to her or rung, but all I ever had in return was a handful of texts and the occasional request to send up something she'd forgotten. She'd pass on odd incidents – there was this boy who played his guitar on the roof, there was this girl who got
drunk and fell down the faculty stairs – and sometimes let slip names or nicknames, but never the same one twice. Bright enquiries only made her clam up. ‘She was that way at school,' Phil had said. ‘Just be grateful she's settled. Don't keep digging.' It's hard when they're not around to keep an eye on, though.

The Sam address had been updated twice, which seemed hopeful. I'd written it down, and placed the book back in the hat box, wiping my fingermarks off the lid guiltily. As though that would make any difference.

The carriage door opened again and a young woman walked through with a boy of about seven or eight. She was holding him by the shoulders, a light, protective contact to steady him as we rocked from side to side. I wanted to put out my hand to touch him as well, but that would have looked mad. My limbs twitched uselessly. Huge smooth fields flashed by, one after another, and a line of pylons, and a scrapyard and a lake, and Phil's voice came again:
Try not to get so worked up
. Then my own voice, snapping down the phone line:
Oh, it must be marvellous not to care
. His hurt silence. My parting shot:
And while you're at it, you can tell Penny to piss off
.

‘She already has,' he'd said. ‘She walked out six days ago.'

The red-headed woman blundered past me again, a coffee stain down her blouse. She saw me looking, smiled slightly and raised her eyebrows in a gesture of complicity.
This tricky world, eh?

I turned my face away. I wasn't like her, I wasn't a victim.

I was going to find my daughter and put things right.

‘You're a girl,' I said, staring at the person who called herself Sam Barnett. The boy-toddler she was holding shifted on her hip. Her free hand was on the door, ready to close it in my face.

‘Uh huh.'

I looked round to see if my taxi was still there, but it had gone. The terraced street stretched empty.

‘Do you mind telling me who you are?' she said.

This woman could almost have been Jaz's sister. Her face was rounder, and her eyes had an oriental look about them, but her hair and colouring were the same. The likeness made me shiver. Jaz would never have worn slippers with tracksuit bottoms and a shirt with sauce stains at the cuff, though.

‘Carol Morgan. I'm looking for my daughter,' I said.

The child whimpered and squirmed. ‘Jesus,' she said under her breath.

‘I think you used to know her?'

‘Now's not very—'

‘I won't keep you. I only want to know she's OK.'

Sam let the boy slide down her body onto the tiled floor, where he sat leaning against her, whining. ‘Sorry, who are we talking about, here?'

‘Jaz Morgan. Jasmine. You were at university together.'

‘Jaz? Yeah. God. Sheesh.'

‘Do you know where she is?'

She shook her head. ‘No, no idea. Haven't spoken to her for ages; you're asking the wrong person. You should've rung, saved yourself a journey.'

Except, I could have said, when your daughter won't even answer the phone to you, your best bet is to turn up without warning and try and catch her out. I needed to come and walk these streets between Hyde Park and Headingly anyway, just in case she was magically there, simply because, once upon a time, she had been.

‘I'm looking for a man she used to know.'

‘Can't help you. That was all years ago. Another life. And like I said, now isn't a good time.' She nodded down at the boy.
‘We've only just got back from the doctor's; I've had no sleep for two nights.'

‘What's the matter with him?' I said quickly, as her hand tightened on the door.

Both of us peered at the child, who was now lolling his head from side to side and breathing noisily through his mouth. His cheeks were bright red.

‘The doctor says it's a virus. He said we have to let it run its course. There's all sorts of bugs going round. Do you reckon he's teething?'