The Day We Disappeared (17 page)

Then Stumpy stumbled on landing. He
stumbled and, in slow motion, began to somersault.

For a split second I didn't
believe it. Didn't believe that, of all the horses and riders in this
competition, of all the jumps on this course,
my
horse and rider should
have an accident. Right there, in front of my eyes.

No.

But Stumpy was flying right over in a
dreadful somersault and Mark was rocketing off him.

No.

Mark was thrown forward, but not far
enough. Half a tonne of horse landed on him with a sickening cracking sound, then
everything went quiet. My vision tunnelled; my breathing stopped.

Stumpy did not move. And, underneath
him, neither did Mark.

I was running. A steward tried to stop
me but I threw her off as if she were made of paper. As I arrived by his side Stumpy
made a terrible noise and managed to roll off
Mark, who lay still on the ground, bent at all the wrong
angles. Next to his beloved horse, he was like a child's broken doll,
forgotten in the grass. ‘HELP!' I heard myself screaming. ‘HELP
THEM! SOMEONE HELP THEM!'

Finally, as the stewards and the
vet's Land Rover arrived at the fence, I was dragged away. Terror sawed right
through me. This couldn't be happening. Not here, not in front of me.

An ambulance 4×4 came tearing over the
hill. Two of the stewards held me at a distance, sobbing and pleading, as a white
tent was erected over Stumpy and the paramedics surrounded Mark.

The day after I returned to London I
dragged my weary body up to a damp Derbyshire to see Dad. I felt like a shameful old
tramp, arriving on his doorstep after five steamy days in France, but I'd
promised to spend the weekend with him and was already a day late, having lost my
passport and then having to spend a day at the British consulate in Bordeaux getting
an emergency permit to travel.

I hugged myself all the way up to
Chesterfield, still barely able to believe the last few days. But the closer I got
to home, the sadder I felt.
I want Daddy to have this
, I thought.
I
want him to fall in love again. Let go. Be happy.

‘Some people get many
loves,' Dad often told us, ‘but not me. Georgie was my one and only. My
girl.' There was a picture of them on honeymoon by his bed. He was all shy and
handsome in shorts and a linen shirt, Mum beautiful in a cotton tunic covered with a
swirling Indian print. Apparently she'd made him try some mushrooms and
they'd had a wild night running around a tiny Greek village chasing giant
imaginary squirrels. From what I could tell, Dad would have done almost anything Mum
asked of him.

‘Hello, Flannie.' He held
out his arms at the front door.
When
Lizzy was little she'd called me Flannabel or Flannie and Dad had loved it so
much he'd never given it up.

‘Hello, Dad.' I grinned into
his shoulder. I felt his tickly beard on the side of my face and forgot everything
for a moment. I loved my daddy so much. ‘It's so nice to see
you.'

‘Likewise, my love,' he said
cheerfully. A spot of rain landed on my nose and he shook a fist at the sky.
‘Come in, come in. Let me give you some money for the taxi.'

I took it, because I knew it made him
feel better about not being able to collect me from the station any more, but I felt
a great tug of regret as I did so.

‘How are you, Dad?'

‘Very well, very well. Getting the
window boxes ready for autumn.' I smiled right through the sadness this news
brought me. In his time Dad had been a wonderful gardener; Lizzy and I had loved
digging up potatoes with him and reaching for runner beans that spiralled up tall
canes into the sky. But his grief and trauma seemed to have grown over the years,
rather than diminished, and these days Dad was pretty much trapped in his own house.
Even venturing into the garden was too much.

‘And work?' I asked
brightly. ‘How's it going?'

‘I'm on a pig of a project,
darling. An absolute honker!'

Dad translated literary Spanish novels
into English. He and Mum had met in Barcelona at a party thrown by one of his
authors, which Mum, passing by on a pedal bike, had wandered into. That was typical
of Mum, he said.

Luckily for Dad, Mum had been
backpacking for the last three years and was a little tired of living out of a
rucksack. She gave in quickly to his repeated pleas for her
to marry him, and within three months Georgie Whelan had
become Georgie Mulholland. She had moved into his house in a village called Great
Longstone near Bakewell and painted beautiful murals and patterns on the walls.

She had borne Lizzy and me, managed to
persuade Dad that we should all go travelling round Africa for a year, then been
raped and murdered on my seventh birthday.

Just like that. The record stopped, the
future cancelled.

Dad said Lizzy and me had given him a
reason to carry on but we both knew that a large part of him had died with Mum, a
part that could never come back. He'd been a wonderful father, rolling up his
sleeves and suffering princess role-play and fairy-cake baking sessions; he'd
taught himself to cook so he could feed us properly and, in later years, would
insist on picking Lizzy up from nightclubs at two or even three in the morning,
rather than have her come home with a dodgy cab driver. When, at the age of sixteen,
I ended up in a psychiatric ward he was by my side all day, every day, and if he was
frightened by what had happened to his little girl he never showed it.

He was our rock, our friend, our daddy.
But there was a hole in him that nothing and nobody could fill, or would fill, ever
again. And that was just how it was. We accommodated his increasing list of neuroses
and fears, we allowed him to abandon hope of ever writing his own novels, and we
never shamed him.

Privately, of course, it broke our
hearts. His life became smaller every time we visited.

We sat in the kitchen, which seemed a
lot tidier than it had been in recent months. Dad served homemade lemon
cake on an old willow-pattern plate
with chips in the glaze that was probably only in circulation still because it had
been one of Mum's favourites. We chatted while the house-martins scrabbled
around in the low eaves and the clouds disgorged thick sheets of rain on to the
Peaks.

Dad told me about the book he was
translating, a ‘somewhat wanky but rather beautiful' novel about a man
who bought an abandoned church in the Andean foothills in Chile, and I told him
about the new lease of life I'd taken on with work. ‘I'm thinking
of going to Tibet soon,' I told him, ‘to do some more training. I had
incredible massages there. And I'm going to talk to them about having one
afternoon per week reserved for reiki. I love it, Dad!'

‘Wonderful,' Dad said.
‘I can't tell you how happy that makes me, pet. Another piece of
cake?'

Dad passed the plate to me, then rested
his chin in his hands, watching me with a twinkle in his eye.

I watched him back. I noticed that his
eyebrows, which had begun to go a bit sprouty in recent years, had been tamed. And
he was wearing a new shirt, a lovely navy thing with orange stitching that
wouldn't have looked out of place on a cool young man. Or indeed – my stomach
flipped ecstatically – on Stephen.

The mutual watching continued.

‘Where did you get that
shirt?' I asked him.

‘The internet, of course.'
Dad grinned. ‘Enough about my shirt. Anything you want to tell me?'

‘Eh?'

He laughed, leaning back in his chair.
‘About the man?'

‘What man?'

‘The man
who's making your face go bright red, Flannie.'

I didn't want to tell him about
Stephen. Not yet. But –

‘GAH! Oh,
Daddy
!
You're a pain!'

Dad nodded. ‘And I'm your
dad. You didn't think I wouldn't notice, did you?'

‘Evil,' I muttered.

‘I'm just your old dad,
Flannie,' he repeated. ‘And I can see you've met someone. Are you
going to tell me, sweetheart? Or am I going to have to work it out for
myself?'

So I told him.

I told him almost everything, save for
the bit when Stephen and I had had sex three times in a darkening vineyard, or the
bit where we were spotted kissing passionately in a corridor at two a.m. by a big
gay chef, who had bellowed, ‘
Quel scandale!
' and had to be
given a bottle of wine worth five hundred euros to keep his silence. Neither did I
tell Dad that Stephen had told me he was in love with me. Even I – high as a kite,
and declaring the very same right back – knew that that was a bit fast.

It didn't make it any less real,
though. I was hooked right up to that drip. ‘And that's about it,'
I said. ‘Still early days, Dad. No need to write a wedding speech
yet.'

Dad frowned. ‘I'm not so
sure,' he replied. ‘You're like a live wire. I've never seen
you like this about anyone, Flannabel.'

I tried not to do the mad smile of the
smitten but it was impossible. ‘Argh,' I whimpered.

Dad chortled. ‘Oh dear,' he
said. ‘It's worse than I thought!' He sat back again, cradling his
coffee cup against his chest. ‘Sweetheart,' he began hesitantly.
‘He's a good man, isn't he? A decent man?'

I thought about
the expensive flowers Stephen had sent me when I got back from Heathrow, even though
he'd had to spend six hours with me in the British consulate at Bordeaux while
I'd waited for the emergency travel permit. And the texts he'd sent me
this morning, wishing me a lovely day with my dad and just being generally sweet and
completely like nothing I'd ever imagined a CEO to be. ‘Yes, he's
decent. He's lovely. The genuine article, Dad, I don't think even you
could find fault with him.'

Dad looked slightly embarrassed.
‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I hate the idea of you seeing me as
an interfering old granny …' His beard wobbled slightly.

‘I don't think that,
Dad,' I said. ‘Not at all. I know how much you worry about me and Lizzy,
and I completely understand why.'

‘I just want to be sure that
he's a nice man. Who'll keep you safe. Never harm you.' A tear
fell from his eye and my heart twisted savagely. Even more than I wanted happiness
and freedom for myself, I wanted it for my dad.

I smiled. ‘He's great, Dad.
You don't need to worry about him at all.'

‘Do you have friends in common? Do
you know all about his past? No children, ex-wives, nothing like that?'

I sighed. ‘Dad, come on. Of course
I don't know everything about him. As I said, it's early days. But if he
has an ex-wife and child he's lied to my face, and Stephen's a very
heart-on-sleeve sort of a guy. I think his problem is more that he's incapable
of being
dis
honest!'

‘Some men are good at
lying,' Dad insisted. I could tell he hated himself for this.

‘Stop it.
You don't need to worry about me, Daddy. I've met a really, really
lovely man. He makes me laugh, he's humble, he's generous and he has
this really strong moral code. I've found a good 'un.'

Dad stared at his hands, and I went over
to crouch next to him. ‘Nobody on earth is more obsessive about my safety than
me,' I said. ‘If there was a whiff – so much as a
particle
– of
trouble with Stephen, my radar would have gone off weeks ago. Come on, Dad, you know
that.'

He sighed, and into me swung the great
weight of his grief and fear. ‘Okay,' he said eventually.
‘I'm sorry, darling. I love you so much, I just want you to be all
right.'

Later on, as we sat listening to
records in the sitting room with all of Dad's cosy lamps on I noticed – rather
to my amazement – that he had Facebook up on his laptop. ‘Really?' I
said, as he went off to wash up. ‘Facebook?'

Dad stuck his head out of the kitchen.
‘I know! Who'd have thought? I've decided to enter the world of
social media.'

‘Don't be
ridiculous!'

‘Straight up,' he called.
‘I'm rather enjoying it, you know, Flannabel. All sorts of funny stuff
out there!'

Maybe, after nearly thirty years, things
were on the move.

‘You should use your new-found
internet skills to try a bit of dating yourself,' I said gingerly, as Dad came
back.

‘Is it time for your train
yet?' Dad asked. He looked distinctly shifty and shot back to the kitchen.

Holy God, I thought. Is he dating
already
?

‘I'll order a taxi in a few minutes,' I
called. ‘Stop pretending you didn't hear what I just said.'

Dad cleared his throat in the kitchen.
‘My love life is none of your business,' he said, and I could hear the
smile in his voice. ‘But for the record, you nosy beggar, yes. I'm
dabbling.'

I gaped at the kitchen doorway. The old
fox!

I whipped my phone out, quick as a
flash, to tell Lizzy, then put it away again. God knows, it must be hard for him, I
thought. The last thing he needs is us gossiping behind his back. Still, my heart
soared as I heard him crashing around in the kitchen.

‘Don't call a taxi,'
Dad said, popping his head round the door again. ‘I'll take
you.'

I opened my mouth and shut it again.
‘Sure?' I said casually. Dad hadn't been able to drive me to the
station for six years.

‘Sure,' he said, and I had
to fight very hard with myself not to cry.

Just as we were preparing to leave for
Chesterfield, the phone rang in the hall. Dad was poking around upstairs, trying to
find me a book he wanted to lend me, so I picked it up. ‘Hello?'

There was a short silence at the other
end – not a computer silence, but a person silence – then the line went dead.

Puzzled, I looked up the stairs in
Dad's direction. My definitely smarter-than-normal daddy, with his nicely
trimmed beard, under-control eyebrows and new shirt. Daddy, who had somehow found
the confidence to leave the house and drive me to Chesterfield.

And then
everything fell into place. Dad had already tried internet dating. He was past that
stage now.