AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Leaving the door open or not checking it was shut is a commonplace human error that ninety-nine times out of a hundred would have no negative consequence,’ Barbara says.
I don’t believe her.
And so I watch myself on this endless loop. Second by second. Beat by beat. A ticking clock. A metronome. A heartbeat. A clock stopped. A melody played out. A heart broken.
That morning.
Matt is on his way home. The thought calms me. At the near end of our road, a couple of mothers are wandering past, heading down towards the primary school. They are chatting, their children a few metres in front of them, sailing along on bright plastic scooters.
‘Excuse me!’ I call out, but the mothers don’t hear. Lost in their own conversation, they carry on walking, hoods up against the thickening rain.
I quicken my pace, scanning front gardens, peering over the tops of dwarf walls and hedges, through side gates. If she’d been knocked over there would be a scene. Sirens would be wailing. There’d be an ambulance, cars chequered blue and yellow, police waving people on. If someone saw her on her own, they would stop and ask her where her mummy was. And anyway, I wasn’t upstairs that long.
‘Hello!’ I call again, no more than a metre away now. They turn and look at me, eyes questioning in fleeting bemusement.
‘Hi. Sorry.’ I’m short of breath, sweating, trying to appear rational. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen a little girl, have you? Did you see a little girl heading up as you were coming down?’ I level my hand above my knee, try not to sound hysterical. ‘About this big. She’s two. She’s wearing a light blue coat and a cream woolly hat? Red ankle boots?’
They look at each other, back at me.
‘No, sorry.’ One of them shakes her head, digs a portable umbrella from her bag and flicks it open.
‘What’s her name?’ asks the other. Her eyebrows rise in encouragement.
‘Abi. It’s Abi. Listen, if you see her, I live just there, Riverside Drive. Number eighty-eight – the first semi after that big detached one on the end there.’
They nod and smile – we’ve all been there, is what they say without words. Yes. We’ve all been there, but that doesn’t make it any less frightening.
‘Hate it when they run off like that,’ the umbrella one says. ‘Hope you find her soon.’
‘I’m sure I will.’ I smile. A conditioned response, but I’m off, changing direction, running now, up towards the river. Thameside Lane is wider than our suburban street. Faster, but not fast fast. But still. Cars grind up and down, pulling into spaces between other cars parked on the right. The school run is warming up. There will be more cars soon, last-minute arrivals. The cars are bigger than they were even five years ago. Newer. Even the small ones are built like bumper cars. Matt’s lived here since he was eleven. He says the drivers don’t give way like they used to when this was just a place, not a ‘village’. These cars are too big, I think. They are bigger than they need to be. We are all protecting what is ours, enlarging what is ours, our houses, our chariots. You can’t see past them – bumpers for rogue wildlife, the odd stray lion. Often they park right on the end of streets so that they are as near as possible to where they want to be, but we, we, meanwhile, can’t see around the corner when we’re trying to pull out, or cross over on foot. We have to step right into the road to see. If you’re tiny, no chance. You’d have no chance.
I hope they’re not driving too fast. I hope they’re paying attention.
Stop it. If she’d been run over, there’d be an ambulance. Paramedics. You’d feel it in the air. That stillness that follows shock.
It’s quarter to nine. I am yesterday and today all at once forever. I am there and I am here, shouting at the memory of myself, shouting at her, the woman that was me: ‘Call the police, Ava. Call 999. Call now. Call half an hour ago. Let’s go back, let’s go back to when you had Abi with you. There. You have her. She is yours. She is enough. You don’t need to scroll through your phone, you don’t need your life. Do not answer that comment. Do not clean the bathroom. Do not strip the beds.’
There is no way on earth Abi would have got this far is what thumps in my mind to the beat of my trainers on the wet black tarmac. But she would know how is the counter-argument that slows me in my tracks. And boy, she can move fast when she has a mind to.
There are two pubs: one on the river, the Fisherman’s Arms, and one a little further back, the Thames View, as if to say, we might not be on the river but we can still see it – that’s what Matt said when he first took me there for a drink on our fourth or fifth date, when he was still living in a room in a shared house in Twickenham. God, that seems so long ago now.
I hear the river before I see it. I round the corner. Ducks bob on the water where the lane slopes down. The water is high after all the rain in the last few days, halfway to the blue barrier. To the right, on the other side of the footpath, the fence surrounding the Fisherman’s Arms garden. Beyond, the kids’ fort, endless tables and benches, all empty at this time of the morning. The rain has thinned a little, though I am wet through now anyway and don’t care. I jog up the path and peer through the fence, through the pub garden to the railings on the far side, to the river, the distant white foam of the weir. Just the sight of that furious churning water makes me feel sick, but there is nothing, no sign.
I jog up to the mouth of the footbridge. Here, the river splits, becoming tidal after the lock, heading then towards Richmond, to Westminster, out to the Thames Estuary. On the far side, dog walkers disappear up the steps to the next bridge; a cyclist coming my way lifts his bike onto his shoulder. It isn’t Matt.
Avoiding the white rush of the weir, I turn towards the luxury riverside flats, the boats bobbing on their moorings. Brown geese glide upriver towards Richmond. The lock-keeper’s cottage stands on its little green island. The sky is bulky and grey. There is no sign of my daughter. But she could have got this far, I know that. She could be over in Ham by now. We walk this way every day and she’s a bright little thing. Just because she’s never done it on her own doesn’t mean she can’t. Like Matt said: she escaped from toddler group and got all the way down a busy high street before anyone thought to ask where her mummy was.
At the time, it frightened me out of my wits.
Now, it frightens me more.
It’s after quarter to nine. The police. I need to call the police. We’re too far along now. I need to call them. There is no sign of Matt and I cannot wait any longer.
Legs pumping, lungs filling and emptying, I run back. She can/she can’t possibly… she could/there’s no way… she’s a little minx/she wouldn’t wander so far without me.
The road is busier. Windscreen wipers swipe over tinted glass. The bulbous bonnets of shiny cars curve hugely, their wheels enormous, their occupants elevated like lords and ladies in horse-drawn carriages. One speck of rain and they’re all driving their children to school. These children are orchids. I can’t ask these people anything through their smoky windows; they can’t hear me over the blast of their surround-sound stereos.
I dip into the car park of the Oasis, the private leisure centre on the river. Eyes darting across the manicured lawns, I run up to the entrance, back to the main gate. No sign. I head back to the road. Abi must have toddled into someone’s back garden. It is the only answer. She’ll be on some neighbour’s kid’s slide, having the time of her life, oblivious. Or hiding, beginning to worry now that I’ll never find her.
