Something Might Happen (26 page)

When he and Lacey have gone, Mick and I go on sitting at the table and I smoke one of the cigarettes. Mick doesn’t even mention
it. I feel grateful for how it scoots up into my brain and steadies me. Smoke clings to every thought and I’m glad of something
to hold. I am almost dizzy with fear.

Halfway through it though I stub it out on a plate.

I can’t just sit here, I say.

No, Mick agrees.

We decide we’ll take it in turns to go out looking. One staying with the boys who are at last sleeping, the other going out
with a torch and maybe with Fletcher and just going anywhere they can think of to go.

Mawhinney has said to get a piece of Rosa’s clothing ready. Something she’s worn recently. Sniffer dogs are coming from Yarmouth.
If she’s not found during the night, they intend to cover the marshes at first light.

I slip off my shoes and go upstairs and flick on the light in her room, automatically picking up clothes from where they lie
on the floor. School skirt, bobbly school jumper, stained with something. A sock with fluff on it. Her striped
pyjama top is there among the felt pens and half-broken cassette boxes. Limp from being worn last night. I hold it to my face.
The Rosa smell is unbearable.

And so is the sight of her messed-up but totally empty and unslept-in bed—unbearable. Maria lies hunched at the end of it,
her paws folded under her and her two unblinking eyes fixed on me.

From the next room comes the loud up and down of Jordan’s breath. I turn off the light and go back down to the kitchen.

Do you think this will do? I say to Mick, dropping the pyjama top on the table.

He doesn’t look at it.

I’m going to be so fucking cross with her when all this is over, I tell him.

No you’re not.

No, you’re right, I’m not.

I go out there. I go all the way back to the pier, to the car park, to all the places that frighten me. The night is thick
and empty of light and the sea sounds wild. Fletcher runs alongside, suddenly excited, trying to bite and snap at the lead,
wanting to play. I didn’t want him with me, but Mick wouldn’t let me go alone without him.

I pull him in sharply. Maybe if Rosa could just hear him bark. Maybe—

Black wind rushes past my ears. It’s a rough night. Out there, beyond the pier, you can hear the sea chopping and slapping
its big wet jaws. A swell that would be dangerous
if you were on it. Grey clouds skidding and racing across the moon, drowning out the yellow of its light.

Rosa!

I call for her—I call out for my daughter. I call out so many times I quickly lose count as one minute of calling and calling
overlaps into the next. Every time I call, my voice is straightaway sucked in by the wind, and swallowed. My tears too, sucked
away. My hair whips all over my face and I use my free hand, the one not holding the lead, to pull it back.

Rosa!

Fletcher barks once. His lonely, mystified bark, the one he does when he’s either being left somewhere or doesn’t know what’s
going on. It has a kind of scream at the end of it. He barks like that now, just once, and then once more.

We run down the concrete steps and go crashing over the shingle under the great concrete legs of the pier, the place where
in summer kids chuck their used condoms and takeaway cartons. Water hits the graffitied sides of the pier, the breakwater,
so hard you’d think it would come loose and float away. Fletcher barks again—he barks so hard and pointedly at the water,
you really would think there was someone there.

Rosa!

We wait for a moment looking at the water, but we’re looking at nothing.

I stumble back up into the car park. Two cars are parked there at the far end, but otherwise the tarmac expanse is empty.
No one uses the car park in November, especially
not at night. Wind rattles the heavy chain on the boating-lake gate and an old fish and chip paper is lifted by the wind and
hits the side of the phone box.

I shudder and tremble. Circles of cold close around me.

The moon is wrapped up in cloud at the moment that Lacey moves out of the shadows. As his arms come around me, I gasp.

Shh. It’s OK, he says softly. Look. It’s me.

In his arms, I can’t move, can’t go forward or back. I begin to cry.

What have I done? I say to him. Oh what? What did I do?

He puts his hand on my head, on my hair.

Shh, he says. It’s not you, Tess, it isn’t, it’s not you.

But—my Rosa!

They’ll find her, he says. They will, they’ll find her.

I cry louder.

Fletcher whimpers and Lacey takes him from me and, keeping his arms around me or at least on me, he presses me against him
and doesn’t speak. I know he is trying to keep me altogether, to stop parts of me flying off, and that he’s a good person
basically and that he knows less than I do and also that he can do nothing for me now.

Where is she? I say desperately. What can have happened?

I want him to tell me but he doesn’t answer, he just says nothing. He doesn’t say they’ve found her and he doesn’t any more
say it will be OK, he just says nothing and stands with me there.

ALEX RINGS EARLY THE NEXT MORNING. HIS VOICE IS
jagged and upset.

Where is she? he says. I don’t believe it. I mean—where the fuck could she possibly go?

I try to speak but I can’t. My head is hard and tight. I’m afraid of what I might say.

I don’t know what to do, he says. How to help. Tell me, Tess—

We’ve lost her, I hear myself whisper. Al, I just know it—she’s lost, gone.

Look, he says. Listen to me—

I try to listen. But I don’t know what he says. All the time, other things creep in. Down the street is the clink of
Doug the milkman delivering, just like any normal day. Birds doing things in the roof. Outside the window the sky is white,
stripped bare by wind.

I’m half dressed, trying to drink a glass of water. If I don’t drink, I won’t be able to feed Liv, it’s as simple as that.

We’re just—waiting, I tell him, my voice shaky with tears. Oh God, Al, oh God.

I should have come round, last night.

There was no point.

Have you slept?

No, I say. Have you?

A little. I think so, yes.

He’s silent for a moment.

Christ, he says. Jesus, Tess, I mean it. What’s Mawhinney saying? Where could she have gone—?

They’re all out there looking, I tell him. So many of them. He says if she’s out there they’ll find her—

Alex takes a breath. Or maybe he’s smoking. In the background I can hear Connor saying something to Max.

I’m sorry, I tell him.

What do you mean?

Today. That it had to be today—to have this—today.

Don’t be so fucking stupid, he says.

A beat of silence. Tears are creeping down my cheeks again.

Look, he says, I’ve got Patsy here with the boys. Bob’s shattered—I don’t know what time he got in. Do you want me to come
round?

There’s nothing you can do, I tell him.

Be with you?

I don’t need that.

Where’s Mick?

Out there, with them.

When’s he coming back?

I don’t know.

The funeral will go ahead. It can’t be postponed and no one wants it to be. Everyone’s ready. The town needs it to happen
now.

For Christ’s sake, Alex says when I tell him Mick and I are still coming, neither of you need to be there. What does it matter?
It will all happen with or without you—

We’ll see what happens, is what Mick says.

I know what he means. He means that the afternoon is an unthinkably faraway place. So much could happen between now and then.

I start to think things. I think, if Rosa’s just run away, if she’s perfectly OK and just being naughty and hiding or something,
then she will be there, she will somehow come to Lennie’s funeral, I know she will. She has a watch. She knows when it is.
She, more than anyone, would want to see Lennie buried, there beneath that spreading yew.

I want to be there, I tell Alex, panic mounting. I have to be there.

Tess, he says, why?

For Lennie.

You know what Lennie would want, he says.

* * *

The boys are watching a video, but only because I made them. Their faces are turned towards it, but they keep looking around
them—Jordan at me, into the kitchen, Nat out of the window.

Jordan woke up this morning with a stomach ache and asked immediately about Rosa. Nat wants to go out looking for her again
and he’s angry with me because I won’t let him.

Liv is asleep, but not for long. She’s hungry and my milk is going. Fast. I can feel it. When I tried to feed this morning
at about five thirty—weepy and tired—I was shocked at how little there was, just a thin blueish spurt and then a dribble,
then nothing. Liv sucked so hard it hurt, then burst into furious cries. Then so did I. So, almost, did Mick.

Now my breasts feel small, useless.

It’s the anxiety, says Maggie Farr who has kindly come over with a tin of formula. Tess, seriously—no one could keep on feeding
through all of this.

If I can just keep drinking, I tell her.

You need to eat as well.

I’m trying to eat, I say but it’s a lie. When Mick made me a sandwich last night I almost choked on it. My body is rejecting
everything.

Mick has already put the bottles in the steriliser. Seeing that pink and blue tin of powdered milk and knowing what it means
makes me cry all over again.

I don’t want to get into all that, I tell Mick.

All what?

I don’t want to start boiling kettles and sterilising.

He looks at me with a strained face.

But you said—

I know what I said.

You won’t manage, he says, if she’s hungry and crying.

I know, but I didn’t want to stop yet. I wanted to keep going a bit longer.

She’s quite old enough, Tess—

It’s so final.

Tess.

I just don’t want it to be—like this.

By lunchtime nothing has changed except that Liv has done it, she’s taken a bottle. Mawhinney and his men are still out. Mick
goes to take a shower and Maggie sits with me in the kitchen. I can’t speak or think but Maggie doesn’t seem to expect it.
All I want to do is to sit by the phone and wait and Maggie lets me do it.

My two girls, I tell her and then I stop myself. Words, bursting up to the surface, but pointless. My two girls.

Maggie takes my hand.

She has on her black clothes already, even though Alex has expressly asked for people not to wear black. The brighter the
better, he says, especially as Lennie hated black. A colour that sucked out the light, she said it was.

Maggie’s black dress has red piping.

A compromise, she tells me. I know, I chickened out. I couldn’t dress in bright colours. I just don’t feel it, I just can’t.

Tears slide down her face. I lean forward and tuck in her label which is sticking out at the back.

I feel I’m doing more harm than good being here, she says.

No, I tell her. No, it’s not true.

She makes us some coffee. She makes it too weak because she’s not used to making it in an espresso pot. She opens her handbag
and gets out her sweeteners, clicks a couple into hers. We sit there and neither of us touch our cups.

There’s washing-up piled in the sink. Maggie is so desperate to load the dishwasher and start washing pans that she keeps
on touching the apron that Mick has flung down on a chair. Eventually I give in and let her. It’s easier.

Rosa knows when the funeral is, I tell Maggie. And where.

Yes, Maggie agrees, but she carries on standing with her back to me. I long for her to turn so I can see if there is hope
on her face.

When Maggie has gone, Mick comes back down. He has on his dark clothes, the suit we got dry-cleaned, the white pressed shirt
that belonged to his father. I can feel him looking at me, trying to decide whether to say something or not. I feel him decide
not.

The service is to begin at two. Lennie’s body, already on its way from Halesworth, is to start the slow and winding journey
towards Blackshore at one. The bells will start ringing
then. An hour of bells. A sound not heard in the town since the last lifeboat tragedy, two decades ago.

Alex phones and I know what he’s doing is telling Mick for fuck’s sake to forget being a pall bearer, to go and carry on looking
for Rosa instead.

I hear Mick start to argue.

There’s all those police out there, Al, I hear him say. It makes no difference whether I’m with them for that hour or not.

Mick pauses while Alex says something, I don’t know what.

I’m already changed, he says uselessly.

He’s silent a moment, listening to Alex. Then he says OK, then he puts down the phone.

I look at him.

Are you doing it?

No, he says. No, of course I’m not.

I hear him cross the hall and go into the downstairs toilet. I hear him shut the door. I hear him being sick.

After a misty, rainy start, the day has brightened and it’s a lot like yesterday, with great sudden floods of sun swooping
over the rooftops.

I make the boys eat a plate of sandwiches. Peanut butter and honey, anything they’ll eat. I make too many—I am programmed
always to make food for three. Jordan insists on putting two sandwiches on a plate for Rosa. He gets the clingfilm out to
cover it and drops the box. The film unravels and gets in a mess. He begins to cry.
I wipe his tears and tell him it’s OK. His hair is cool against my face. Together we smooth the clingfilm back over the plate
and put the sandwich next to the bottles of formula in the fridge.

Nat sighs and looks down at his plate. His eyes are circled with tiredness.

What is it, Nat?

You know I don’t like crunchy peanut butter, he says.

The bells have started. Mick comes down again, in jeans now, and finds me standing in the kitchen and holding a dishcloth
and staring at the wall. He takes the cloth from my hands and gently pushes me into a chair.

No, I tell him, I don’t want to. I don’t want to sit.