My stomach flutters as I pull into the car park in the village. I’m nervous, I realise. I was surprised to find myself feeling buoyant this morning, the sense of optimism unfamiliar. I made the effort to scramble eggs and drink two cups of milky coffee, the cat prowling around my feet. Now it’s all still churning unpleasantly inside me. But I’d decided. This time around, I’m not going to just sit tight and wait for the police to let me know what’s happening.
I’ve got a plan.
First on my list is speaking to Holly Dixon – just to ask what she thinks, if there might be any possible factor I don’t know about that’s keeping Sophie away. And then maybe she’ll have an idea, someone else I can talk to. Isn’t that how it works? Anything to stave off that old trapped feeling. I’m determined to stay active, to hold on to this new stirring of purpose. My grief coach (Lara doesn’t like the word ‘counsellor’, she says we are partners together in this) would be proud of me. If I still saw her.
Last night I left a message on Holly’s mobile, hoping she hadn’t changed the number. We haven’t spoken in a long time. I left a long, rambling message about Sophie’s call, that I could explain properly later, but did she think we could meet? Within about twenty minutes my phone beeped.
OK. Can do 11 tmrw, coffee?
We arranged to meet in the village, as she’s still local. Not in the cutesy cafe, where you can buy the knickknacks that take your fancy. I know too many people in there. I’ve gone for the pizza chain one everyone disapproved of when it opened, staffed by breezily anonymous Australians. I like it.
I’m five minutes early but she’s already sitting there at a table in the corner. ‘You’ve changed your hair,’ I say. ‘Blue!’ Still so much make-up, I see.
‘Oh, yeah,’ she says, touching a mermaid strand. ‘Well, I got bored of the lilac. Everyone was doing it, didn’t you notice.’
I smile, looking around. Today the place is fairly empty, but there’s not a lot of purple hair around here, it’s all tasteful honey highlights, from the girls in school to their mothers.
‘It’s pretty,’ I say.
She quickly covers the flicker of surprise. Too late, I remember.
Holly used to stay over all the time. She and Sophie would disappear upstairs and there’d be screams of laughter into the small hours, the two of them doing God knows what in Sophie’s bathroom. One time, they’d emerged in the morning with pink hair – ‘It washes out, Mum, don’t worry!’ Sophie reassured me, Holly looking at me sidelong, amusement in her eyes as I tried to keep my temper.
Teenagers were always looking for a reaction, I knew. But it had been an expensive trip to the hairdresser to take Sophie’s hair back to its baby blonde. She hadn’t been grateful at all. ‘Well, I think it looks cool, Mum. I don’t want to change it.’
Holly and I order cappuccinos. Her mum’s well, she says in answer to my questions.
I’ve seen her, since Sophie went, but after the first few encounters, we seemed to make a tacit agreement to smile and nod. I heard Holly didn’t stick around in school after her GSCEs, but she seems to have done well since then. She has started at college and plans to be a nurse. Her tutor, she tells me, ‘is a total b—’ she catches herself.’ … a bit difficult’, but she’s enjoyed it.
What she doesn’t need to spell out is the reason why I’ve avoided her until now. The wound Sophie left in her life is healing over. She’s hitting milestones Sophie hasn’t. I keep asking questions, suddenly wanting to hear the detail, though it stings. But the lull’s inevitable.
‘So why did you want to meet?’ she says.
I take a breath. ‘Obviously you and Sophie were really close.’ Quickly, I tell her about the call, the bare details of what I heard at the helpline. ‘I have a feeling … that she wants to come back home.’ It sounds weak even as I say it, but Holly’s nodding, her face serious.
‘I do too,’ she says. ‘I knew she’d come back, one day.’
Another memory: Holly loved horoscopes, all that stuff – she even carried around a battered pack of Tarot cards that impressed Sophie deeply. I’d see them bent over the cards on the floor of Sophie’s room, their heads – Sophie’s pale blonde, Holly’s a bleached mirror version – close together, both girls giggling.
‘There’s just a few things I wanted to get straight in my head,’ I say now. ‘About why she left. If she calls again I just – I just want to understand. If something might be stopping her, even now?’
‘Well, it was all said at the time, wasn’t it,’ says Holly flatly. ‘In the papers.’
I flinch, remembering how exposed I’d felt. I’d gone along with it all – media appeals, articles in the evening newspaper, a video plea with Mark for Sophie to ‘Please come home. We’re not angry, we just want to know you’re OK’ that they ran on the local six o’clock news.
Then we made the nationals. There were a few pieces, the longer ones mentioning Mark’s job at the firm, and making much of the fact that Sophie’s exams were approaching. Her school, the local grammar, was described as an ‘academic hot-house’. There was a comment from a ‘neighbour’ that we were new here from London, ‘only the one child, a lot of expectation’. I’d read that article several times.
‘They’re saying she was under too much pressure,’ I’d said to Mark that morning. ‘That’s what they’re implying. From us.’
‘Well, no point worrying about what people write,’ said Mark shortly. He was starting not to like to talk about it so much.
‘A lot of expectation’ – I read the words again, in black and white.
‘Well, that’s wrong,’ Mark said aloud, reading over my shoulder. ‘That’s only what we paid for this place when we bought it, it’s worth a lot more now. See, they can’t get anything right.’ I’d nearly hit him.
The coverage dried up soon enough, anyway. A pair of boarding-school sweethearts used their parents’ credit cards to buy flights to Antigua and refused to come home, pushing Sophie’s humdrum runaway story off the newspaper pages. Even before the investigation ground to a halt.
‘Yes, they said what happened in the papers,’ I say now. ‘But what did you think?’
‘Well,’ Holly says carefully. ‘I know it was hard for her, that she needed to get good grades. But I didn’t always know exactly what was going on with her. She wasn’t always that … easy to ask.’
‘But you were so sure of yourself.’
‘I was a teenager,’ she says, with emphasis. I hide a smile – she can’t be more than eighteen, but I know what she means. ‘That’s what I wanted everyone to think. Sophie liked me when I knew what I was doing, when we were having fun. She just didn’t like it so much when I messed things up.’
‘Like when you had that pregnancy scare?’ I blurt it out.
Holly had been sitting at my kitchen table when I’d come home that night, her feet up on the chair next to her. ‘Hello, Kate. Isn’t that a nice bag, been shopping again?’ I’d said she could call me by my first name. I regretted it.
The girls had disappeared upstairs with pizza to get ready. They were going out that night, just round to Emily’s from school, they said. They’d rushed out when someone’s car beeped outside, and later I’d gone into Sophie’s room to collect their plates. I had taken the wastepaper basket with me too, seeing the liner overflowing.
They’d buried it at the bottom, so it was bad luck really that when I’d tipped the contents into the outside bin that I’d recognised the packaging immediately: ‘99% accurate’.
Mark was away with work, in a different time zone, so I poured myself a glass of cold white wine, and sat there at the kitchen table, thinking. Fifteen. Sophie still had a few months to go until her birthday. Under the age of consent, technically, but perhaps not all that surprising.
I’d still been there when the girls had clattered back in, their faces falling as they saw what I had on the table.
‘It’s mine,’ Holly said immediately, her usual swagger gone. ‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t do it at home. It’s all fine, I promise. I just had to check. Please don’t tell my mum.’
Maybe I should have. But she looked so worried, I’d just nodded. ‘You need to be more careful, Holly.’ Sophie, bless her, had looked even more scared. At least she was taking it seriously.
They’d both sat there, subdued, while I’d booked Holly in online right there and then to an appointment at the family planning centre in town. Afterwards, I’d felt pleased with myself for dealing with an awkward situation so understandingly. I could do this, I could help Sophie navigate the teenage years.
‘No, not the pregnancy scare,’ says Holly across the table from me, drawing me back to the present. ‘No. I mean when I would get upset. My mum and dad … I had a lot going on.’ She hunches her shoulders. ‘It was a good thing when they split up.’
‘Can I get you ladies anything else to drink?’ The waiter’s hovering over us, all smiles. ‘Tea, coffee?’ He gives a happy little shrug. ‘Nice glass of fizz?’
‘Fancy it? I will if you will,’ I say.
‘I won’t thanks. I’ve got to drive,’ she adds. ‘My parking will run out soon.’
But now she’s here in front of me, I suddenly want to keep her here, this link with Sophie.
‘Do you still keep in contact with Danny, Holly? Sophie’s old boyfriend?’
She pauses, fiddling with the pink pompom on her car keys. ‘I do, yes. Look –’ she lifts up her head, looks me in the eye – ‘I talked about this with him. That’s why I agreed to meet you. I don’t want you stirring things up for us, it’s not fair. It’s been hard as it is.’
I’m a step behind. ‘Stirring up – you’re together?’
‘Yes,’ she says, serious. ‘It’s not a secret. We just haven’t … been rubbing it in people’s faces.’
‘Since when?’ The words come out before I can stop them: ‘How do you think Sophie would feel about this?’ I am suddenly angry: my daughter’s best friend and her boyfriend. That old cliché.
‘I don’t know how she’d feel.’ Her chin’s up now, patches of red creeping up her neck. ‘She’s been gone a long time now. If she cared—’
‘Sorry,’ I say, my flash of anger receding as quickly as it came. ‘It’s not my place.’
‘… if she cared about him or me,’ she’s relentless, ‘if she cared about any of us, she’d have come back.’ She adds, softer now: ‘I missed her a lot. He did too. We started spending more time together. And, you know …’
‘Fine, I get it. I’m sorry I asked.’ I want to go home and shut the door. Sophie’s disappearing from their lives. Like a stone thrown into a pond, and even the ripples are now fading away. I motion for the bill, the waiter flapping a little – it’s obvious the mood’s changed – when it occurs to me.
‘Sophie did care about you,’ I tell Holly. I really want her to understand this, for some reason. ‘When I found the package in the bin – your pregnancy test – I wasn’t happy about it. At all. She stuck up for you.’
Sophie had been so earnest in her defence of Holly: ‘You can’t get her mum involved, you don’t understand. She’s a good girl.’ It’s hard to remember a time when the spectre of teenage pregnancy seemed like the worst thing that could happen to a family.
‘She really stuck up for you,’ I repeat.
‘Well, that was the least she could do,’ says Holly. She’s looking around to catch the waiter’s eye to hurry him, when she says it, casually: ‘After all, it was her test.’
‘It was her test? What – how?’
She shrugs, a touch impatient. ‘She was with Danny then. We were teenagers, it wasn’t such a big deal.’
It’s now my turn to feel my face grow hot. I can almost hear Sophie: ‘God, Mum, you’re so nosy. I need some space!’ Her bedroom door slammed shut.
‘I – I didn’t realise they were that … serious.’
Holly’s mouth quirks. ‘Well. It’s not something I talk about with him now. But, evidently.’
‘Why did you lie?’
‘You’d have freaked out. That would’ve been the end of Sophie going out for a while, wouldn’t it?’
I can’t argue with that.
‘Does it even matter now?’ she says. ‘It’s ancient history.’ She pushes her empty cup away. ‘You might not like it, but we don’t talk about that time – about Sophie – now. We’re thinking about the future.’ She picks up her bag, ready to go. ‘I know it must be hard. But I don’t know why she never came back.’
‘OK,’ I say, with a slow nod. ‘I understand. Let me get this bill. Bye, Holly.’
She’s already out of her chair. ‘Bye, Kate.’
It still doesn’t sound right.