PART I: The Ransom
Chapter 1: Simone
Half past midnight, and they’re both cross-legged on one of the beds. ‘The thing was that on the very first night, after we’d finished around the piano, Bea says she’s going to take our phones off us, says she will lock them up.’ Lucy then enacts a perfect Southern American impression ‘Even vocal cords need nine hours’ sleep.’ A pause. ‘One of the other singers there was forty.’
‘God,’ Simone says.
‘Anyway, clearly, she’s just made it up because she realizes right then that she doesn’t have anywhere to lock the phones. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘So she collects them all up and she puts them in her car. Absurd. Then she has to go through with that every night. Ten tone-deaf singers’ phones into the boot. She said she could teach anyone, but she’s clearly never taught a soul in her life.’
Laughter burbles up in Simone, and she thinks several things simultaneously: God, I have missed you, and Please never leave me again, and Please don’t move away and only invite me to sit in the audience of the plays you’re going to star in.
‘Where did you even find her?’
‘She’s the aunt of someone at camp. I know.’ She holds up a hand. ‘And then she wants us to reflect on the day. That’s the point of it. Singing all day, evenings thinking about singing, watching wacky musicals where people with mad eyes sing their thoughts to no one.’ Simone stifles a laugh. ‘So we do that, we’re all in the living room or whatever. And guess what she’s doing? She’s on her phone. Every night.’
Simone can see where this is going. Lucy shifts position, the soft mattress undulating, and says, ‘So I go, “How come you can have your phone and ours are contraband?” ’ A pause while she gulps tea – Lucy drinks tea at all hours of the day, never seems to have any problem sleeping. ‘And she tells me, “An attitude like that is why you can’t sing.” At this, Lucy throws her head back and laughs.
‘And are you still tone-deaf? Bad attitude and all?’
‘Absolutely.’ Lucy sings the word, and she is; she hits a perfectly strangled note. ‘I mean, they’re phones. We’re on TikTok and our emails, not sitting on PornHub all night, screeching out our vocal cords.’
Lucy covers the top of her shaking tea with a hand as they laugh. ‘God, it’s so nice and warm in here. We’re going to have such great sleeps.’
‘I thought the same.’ Simone smiles, then adds thoughtfully, ‘I mean, you don’t know no one was on PornHub. Just because you weren’t.’
‘Maybe Bea was.’ She pauses. ‘Porn in D major.’
Simone shifts on the bed, so happy. She is so tired she feels seasick, but she doesn’t care. ‘Did you enjoy it at all?’ she asks.
Lucy makes a face in response. ‘No.’
‘Well, you’re in tune now,’ she lies. ‘It’s done.’
‘We ought to go to bed.’
Beyond the lodge, crickets shiver the air like maracas. Outside, there is only the alien desert landscape. No lights around as far as they can see, the distant sound of the main road if you listen carefully, though it’s a mile away.
‘Is there even anyone else staying here?’ Simone says as they drift out together into the hallway.
Lucy presses her face to the door. ‘I really don’t think there is. Which is just the way I want it after living with nine singers.’
‘I can imagine. Right – sleep. And then tomorrow, we camp,’ Simone says. ‘Silently. No singing.’
‘Deal.’
Simone tries to pull the front door shut. It’s a screen door, flimsy, and bounces back. She must have broken it. It had a code to enter, but now hangs loose. Unless it always did, and the code did nothing? She can’t remember. ‘Huh,’ she says, as she tries again. It has a catch on one side, a wooden frame and plastic translucent windows, but it won’t connect.
‘Well,’ Lucy says, looking at it. She tries to ram it over the catch, but it clatters and rebounds regardless. ‘It’s fine.’
‘Hmm,’ Simone says, wincing as her daughter pulls it roughly; they are about to end up with no door at all.
‘Once we’re camping, our tent won’t lock either,’ Lucy says with a shrug, leaving the door reverberating with her effort. ‘It’s fine,’ she says again, and lets it hang an inch from the catch.
‘True,’ Simone concedes.
‘But we will get loads of bugs in. There are these ones called stink bugs,’ she says, fiddling with the door. ‘One of the singers – the forty-year-old – was obsessed with them to the point of insanity. Thought they’d travel home with her on her luggage.’ She hesitates. ‘It does get pretty cold in the early hours, but –’ She looks at a box of blankets at their feet.
‘Exactly,’ Simone agrees, and Lucy picks one up, sniffs it, and makes a face.
A car begins to hum outside in the distance, then sweeps on by after several moments, lights white, then red. They watch it silently for several seconds, then Lucy indicates the room they were just sitting in. ‘You want that one?
I’ll have this one.’ She points across the hallway.
And then she wordlessly places her elbow on her mother’s shoulder, and stands there leaning, a kind of half hug. Simone rests her head against her daughter’s. And the distance between them that began this spring and continued into the summer has closed, just slightly. Simone almost asks Lucy about it, but then stops herself, knowing better.
They part ways. Simone watches Lucy start sorting, taking wrinkled clothes out of her messy suitcase and putting them on the bed. Lucy pauses, hands on her hips, unaware Simone is still watching, and lets out a small sigh, just one. The softest, most delicate rise and fall of her shoulders, so slight Simone could have imagined it, and Simone finds herself wondering how the summer really was, beyond the bravado. But Lucy is unlikely to say. Simone watches her retreat into the bathroom, the light flickering on and humming, then Lucy closes the door and disappears once more. There’s that parental loan again.
A black room, nothingness, a jolt into consciousness, and Simone is awake and floating contextless as her brain tries to work things out. Where is she? Who’s with her? It comes back to her piecemeal. Texas. Lucy. The lodge. As she stares, items come into view in the blackness. The far corner of the bed, mussed-up blanket dripping off the end. The bedroom door with the large brass knob reflecting just a tiny square of light from somewhere.
An old-fashioned clock radio with faded red numbers says it’s 4:02, three hours after they went to bed. Simone can feel her eyes closing again in the warmth. The bed is deliciously soft, a soufflé of a mattress, the room so still and dark. How pleasant to fall back to sleep when jet lag might otherwise have kept her awake. She lets it come, lets go of the obligations: to check in on whether the fish arrived, to see how Damien is, to call out for Lucy. As sleep pulls her under, her mind unconsciously runs over memories. Outdoor date night with Damien, started in the pandemic, continued weekly since. Walks, strawberry picking, ice skating. George the cat curled like a cinnamon bun on their four-poster bed – Simone bought it the day The Times wrote up their restaurant, second-hand from eBay but still. And Lucy, too: her daughter’s monologue as Lady Macbeth earlier in the year, spotlit and striking with her red hands that Simone knew to be covered in tomato puree but forgot because she was so good.
As the memories come, her body slows and she lets her guard, always up, go down. The world becomes dreamlike, Simone unsure what’s real and what isn’t. The crickets outside. An unusual noise … is it a wave outside she can hear? No, they’re not near the ocean. Or is it a sigh, a cry, or is it a swell of sleep just coming over her head? She doesn’t know, can’t know, and then she’s gone.
Seven thirty-one according to the red numbers. Wow. Simone did not expect to have such a good night’s sleep. She lets her breath out, still lying on her back. A slow-spinning ceiling fan above rotates lazily. The light here is different. Clear and angular rather than England’s haze, everything sharply outlined by nature as artist.
“She calls Lucy again but, this time, she hears something. She pulls her own phone away from her ear, cocks her head, walks into Lucy’s room.”
It’s so quiet. Simone sits up, goosepimples covering her shoulders. That’s right: the concertina door in the hallway wouldn’t close. That’s why she can smell outside air, fresh but burning up already, like a just-lit oven.
Her suitcase is on the floor, splayed open where she left it, same as she knows Lucy’s will be. All she did last night was get out her toothbrush. She pulls a cardigan on over her pyjamas and crosses the hallway. Lucy is very quiet, she thinks, and there it begins: a humming kind of nervousness she isn’t used to feeling.
The cabin is on one floor, four rooms: two bedrooms, a bathroom and a living room/kitchen/diner. Long, flat rectangular windows reveal snatched lit-up glimpses of the vista of the desert. Lucy chose this place for them, said the location was good, the rates cheap.
Simone walks into Lucy’s room. It’s empty. Her suitcase lies open and filleted, exactly as Simone expected. She turns and heads back into the hallway and through to the kitchen. A pan, two plates, two knives, two forks, all from the omelettes, and one mug from Lucy’s bedtime tea. Cracked eggs and a teabag in the bin. But nothing else. No signs of life.
She checks the bathroom, the back garden, but she knows, somehow, that Lucy isn’t in the lodge. The specific way the air feels in an empty house: the quiet, some sort of dormant feeling, the echo of one’s thoughts? She doesn’t know. Only that she is alone, and wasn’t expecting to be.
‘Lucy?’ she calls aloud out back. The heat of the day shimmers outside in zigzags above the other cabins. The small shared pool is flat and blue, undisturbed save for a few flies littering its surface. Nothing. Crickets, literally, and the air as warm as an exhalation, clammy against her skin.
She turns around, wondering if she’s missed something, some detail, some other room, some piece of information, maybe Lucy had plans this morning that she’s forgotten …
She touches the kettle, absent-mindedly feeling for warmth: nothing. Lucy always has tea first thing. The shower is unused, cubicle dry, no steam, towels still folded on three shelves.
It’s as if she was never here.
Maybe she’s headed out for breakfast things? Simone peers through the front window, the desert a still and unforgiving backdrop. But Lucy would never head out for breakfast things. Simone would, Lucy wouldn’t. If left to her own devices, Lucy would eat a dry piece of bread for breakfast, just to get it done. In this situation she would wait for Simone to wake up and make something nice.
‘Lucy?’ she calls again. Nothing.
In the hallway, the concertina door catches her eye. It is open more than she remembers. An odd amount. Not enough to walk comfortably through. But definitely not how they left it last night, is it? She can’t quite remember. Lucy did it. Look, well, obviously she’s out, so she’s gone out of that door, Simone tells herself, in a particularly stern voice she invented in childhood in order to cope with the way her parents were.
She wrenches the door open fully. It squeaks along the wooden floor. She walks outside, on to the porch, descends the steps, and looks around. Nothing. No sign she’s left, but no sign she hasn’t, either. Simone’s hire car, nothing else. Terracotta tiles hot underneath her feet, even at this hour, none of England’s dew. Craggy plants, patchy grass. She ventures further, stands barefoot on the dusty road, no markings, and stares. It’s miles long, straight and totally empty. The sandy gravel is tinged red. It could be the sunrise; it could be just the way it is, Mars-like and eerie. Where would Lucy even be? You can’t walk anywhere around here.
Her thoughts begin to shift from pragmatic to panicked. She gets her phone and dials. An international calling code that Simone has become used to this summer but still dislikes. It’s different. Everything here is different.
Voicemail.
She texts. Two ticks. She pauses, watching, but nothing. It doesn’t get read.
That is when the confusion and worry morph into something else, a desert flower that explodes suddenly and unnaturally into bloom.
Is her daughter missing? Or is she merely out, will return in ten minutes with a bag of American cinnamon rolls? Simone can almost feel the earth moving, turning on a dime. She calls Lucy again but, this time, she hears something. She pulls her own phone away from her ear, cocks her head, walks into Lucy’s room.
Where is it coming from? A muffled and rhythmic vibration, a phone on a soft surface. She palms the sheet and discovers two things: Lucy’s mobile, ringing quietly at the foot of the bed, and that the sheets are cold.
Simone’s back begins to prickle with fear. And then, before she can fully digest it, she sees something else: Lucy’s shoes. The Crocs she was in last night. Simone looks at them, blinking. She doesn’t understand. No. Maybe she … Does she … She curses not knowing her daughter’s entire wardrobe right now. She is her mother. She ought to know how many pairs of shoes she has. She ought to still be doing her laundry. They’ve separated too early. This is the feeling Simone has all the time, the heartbreak that sits at the centre of parenthood: if Lucy’s independence is so natural, then how come it feels so wrong?
Why would she not take her phone? Even if she was just going … No. There’s nowhere Lucy doesn’t take her phone. She was balking about it being locked away from her, after all. Lucy’s mobile prompts her for a passcode she doesn’t know. Six digits. She tries her date of birth – 310308 – but it fails. Two attempts remaining.
Simone spins around. Stupid questions fill her mind. How long does it take a bedsheet to return to a cool temperature after being slept in? How many pairs of shoes does somebody bring camping – surely more than one? And more than just Crocs?
Maybe she left something at Bea’s. But that’s miles away, not walking distance. Would she have called another cab? Left her phone here?
Simone stands there, her hands on her hips in her daughter’s room, and she lets herself feel it. Creeping monstrous fingers reaching towards her. Dark storm-cloud maternal instinct telling her: a hurricane is coming. Watch out.
Simone would say that nothing like this has ever happened to her before, but is that quite right? No, it isn’t, she thinks, doing a thorough walk around the pool, looking – absurdly – under sun loungers, and wondering at what point she calls someone. Damien. The police.
No. This feels familiar. It feels this way, Simone realizes, peering into a little shed to the left of the pool, because you never forget your near misses. That time Lucy ran off in Sainsbury’s when she was two and a half and Simone couldn’t find her for over three minutes. When Damien slammed on the brakes on the motorway, and Simone watched the car behind them fail to realize, and then do so just in time. The near misses are almost-lived experiences, the beginnings of tragedies that just do not quite, by luck, take off, like a single spark that sometimes causes a wildfire and sometimes doesn’t. These are what Simone remembers. This is what she hopes this will be. A near miss. An ember that might catch but doesn’t, no rhyme or reason to it, a grim reaper simply passing them by, unacknowledged.
It’s been half an hour. If by ten past eight nothing has happened, she will ring Damien. She puts a hand to the back of her head. It reminds her of him, is something he does to her sometimes during stressful times. He cups the back of her head soberly, absent-mindedly, with his huge hand, like a priest.
She heads outside again, where the sun heats her skin with a fierce pressure, like somebody has their hands all over her body. Next door, she climbs the porch steps and knocks, but there’s nothing. No answer, either, from the cabin opposite that. They are all empty; faceless houses around a deserted pool. A red life ring sits next to that and Simone stares at it, completely alone in the wilderness, thinking the worst.
Back in, through the hallway, and what she sees stops her dead.
