I showered and slid into bed. I tried for five minutes not to check my phone.
One missed call, the screen advised, when I gave in. I sat up. It was a withheld number, at 4.19 a.m. A message had been left.
The message comprised two seconds of silence, followed by the sound of a human pressing the wrong button. After a brief scrabble, the caller managed successfully to hang up.
Briefly, I wondered if it was Eddie’s friend Alan, but according to Facebook he had not yet read my message.
Then who?
Eddie?
No! Eddie’s not that person! He’s a talker! Not some shady crackpot who calls at 4 a.m.!
By the time I woke at lunchtime, Alan had read my message. He had not replied.
I stared at my phone dementedly, refreshing it again and again. He couldn’t just ignore it. Nobody would do that!
But he had read it, and he had ignored it. The day passed; I heard nothing. And I felt frightened. Less, as each day passed, for Eddie, and more, as each day passed, for myself.
Chapter Fourteen
Rudi was absolutely still.
He stood and stared at the two meerkats closest to the fence, and they stood and stared at him, paws resting casually on their soft bellies. Rudi, without realizing what he was doing, had straightened up and had rested his own little paws on his own little belly.
‘Hello,’ he whispered reverently. ‘Hello, meerikats.’
‘Meerkats,’ I corrected.
‘Sarah, bequiet! You might frighten them!’
Tommy alerted Rudi to the arrival of another meerkat and Rudi whipped round, forgetting in an instant that I existed. ‘Hello, meerikat three,’ he whispered. ‘Meerikats, hello! Are you a family? Or just best friends?’
Two of the meerkats started burrowing in the sand. The third shuffled over his sandy hill to give what looked like a hug to another member of the tribe. Rudi almost trembled with wonder.
Jo took a photo of her son. Five minutes ago she’d been telling Rudi off about something; now she smiled at him with a love that had no edges. And watching her, trying to imagine that sort of towering, immeasurable devotion, I felt it again. An acute poke from the lumpy cluster of feelings I kept in a remote corner. It was right that I wasn’t going tobe a mother, of course, but the pain of lost possibility sometimes left me breathless.
I extracted my sunglasses from my bag.
My parents had found a carer for Granddad and would be back in Gloucestershire tomorrow. Rudi wanted a farewell tea at Battersea Park Children’s Zoo before I left to go and see them, although this, I suspected, had more to do with a recent television programme he’d watched about meerkats than it did with saying goodbye to Aunty Sarah.
I checked my phone, a reflex as common now as breathing. After the dropped phone call I’d had in the middle of the night last week, there’d been another one, a few days ago, and it had lasted a full fifteen seconds. ‘I’ll call the police,’ I’d said, when whoever it was refused to say anything. The caller had hung up immediately and there hadn’t been anything since, but I was certain it had something to do with Eddie’s disappearance.
I wasn’t sleeping very much at all now.
Tommy unpacked the little tea he’d made and Rudi came running over to eat, recounting a poorly remembered joke about eggy sandwiches and eggy farts. Jo told him off for talking with his mouth full. A child nearby was whingeing about missing out on feeding the coati. And I sat in the middle of them all, unable to eat my sandwiches, a miserable churning in my stomach.
Not long before leaving the sixth form, I’d studiedMrs Dallowayfor my English A level. We’d taken turns narrating the book, exploring Woolf’s ‘unique narrative technique’, as Mrs Rushby called it.
‘The world has raised its whip,’ I read aloud when my turn came; ‘where will it descend?’
I had paused, surprised, and then read the sentence again. And even though my classmates were watching me, eventhough Mrs Rushby was watching me, I had underlined the sentence three times before moving on, because those words had described so perfectly how I felt, most of the time, that I marvelled that anyone other than me could have written them.
The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?
That was it!seventeen-year-old me had thought. That perpetual alertness! Watching the skies, sniffing the air, bracing for calamity.That’s me. And yet here I was now, nineteen years on, feeling exactly the same. Had anything actually changed? Had my comfortable life in California been mere fantasy?
I had another look at my egg sandwich, but it made me heave.
