Now
Grace is hot. There’s the sun, like boiled breath, on the roof of her car but it’s more than that. This feeling that from nowhere she’s been set on fire from the inside out. Between her breasts a line of sweat is tracking a slow, itchy S, and she wants to jam a hand under the neck of her shirt and wipe it away. It’s gridlock, though, and she’s hemmed in on all sides, and there’s the man in the Audi, whose car window is level with hers. He’s staring at her like she’s the distraction he needs in this. Screw you, she thinks. Screw you, screw you, screw you.
‘If you’re feeling hot out there today,’ the woman on the radio is saying, ‘according to the latest report from climate think tank Autonomy, it’s only going to get hotter …’
Grace revs the engine to drown out the words and her eyes find the clock on the dashboard: 12:23. Can that be right? She checks her phone on the passenger seat. Shit. She’s late. Really late. There’s the Love Island cake to pick up, the one she’s had specially made. The cake she can’t afford but is staking everything on. One, two, three, four … She begins the CBT count that doesn’t work – the half-remembered one from the online course she abandoned after the first few sessions – then takes a deep breath in through her nose. Now her jeans are sticking to her thighs. Grace fiddles with the vents, stabs yet again at the button for the air-con she knows isn’t working. It’s the cheap heat in the synthetic fabric that’s making it all worse and she spreads her knees as wide as they’ll go, trying to get some non-existent air between her legs.
On the passenger seat her phone goes and she starts. Lotte? The thought is automatic, that it might be her. But even as she’s leaning across to check she already knows. Instead there’s the shock of a jowly face frowning from the screen, and it’s a moment before she recognizes herself, understands that Cate is trying to FaceTime her again. Grace shrinks back against the driver’s door. She doesn’t want to answer, and although she’s pretty sure she can’t be seen – Lotte has laughed at her about this a hundred times – still she has the sense that her sister is somehow watching her. Grace knows already what Cate is phoning to say: she’s left a vomit of messages over the past fortnight that somehow manage to be both compassionate and accusatory. Mum called me to say she’s been trying to get in touch, Grace. She’s worried about you. Dad too. It isn’t really fair on them to … Listen, call me and let me know you’re okay. I mean, not okay but … We’re all worried, Grace …
There’s the blast of a horn behind her and she twists in her seat. Like it’s aimed at her. The traffic is solid, stretching back as far as she can see along the skinny road that runs from the foot of Muswell Hill all the way to the Emirates Stadium. The kind of road that would be better suited to a sleepy village, or medieval times, but that’s clotted chaotically with work vans and city buses and delivery drivers and SUVs. ‘Really?’ she says, into the void of the car. ‘Really, arsehole? You want us to do what exactly?’
The sides of the car are closing in on her and she can smell burned plastic. How are they not moving yet? Sitting here like this it’s reminding her of something – a book, a TV show, a screenplay … She can’t remember. She can barely remember her own name these days. Slumping in the seat, she tries to bring to mind the things she hasn’t been able to recall recently. But, of course, she can’t. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so terrifying. Like a part of her brain dropped out when she was looking the other way.
Her phone starts to ring again, and someone is leaning into their horn. The man is still staring at her, the heat in the car … and something is trapped and buzzing in here with her now. A fat black fly vibrating against the windows. Sweat pops at her temple and she’s slapping herself because the fly is dive-bombing her, ricocheting frenetically around the car’s interior.
Suddenly a face appears at the rear window of the car in front. A little girl with a grubby doll clutched in her hand is staring at Grace, unsmiling. She can hear the hiccupping beat of a track on the radio, the bone-judder of drilling from the roadworks ahead. And the fly is on her cheek now, on her arm, in her hair, and the traffic still isn’t moving, and time is jumping forward in units that aren’t as they should be, and she can’t be late, not today, there’s just no question.
And that’s it. She’s had it.
Claggy fumes catch in her throat as Grace steps from the car, gripping her phone, and jamming her credit card and a twenty-pound note into her back pocket. It’s all she needs. She doesn’t want to lug her bag around in this heat – she’s wearing the wrong clothes as it is: too-tight denim that makes her legs feel as if they’re melting. Grace slams shut the door, points her key and – ca-chunk – the doors are locked. And she’s walking away, picking a path along the white lines in the middle of the road, when there’s a shout behind her.
‘Hey, love. Love! What d’you think you’re doing?’
She stops and turns.
It’s the man in the Audi. He has his window down and he’s raising his voice above the blast of horns starting up. She registers the threat in the pulse of the engines around her, the angry atonal soundscape, but she has the strange sense that she’s somewhere beyond it, that it’s separate from her.
‘You’re not seriously …’ the man is yelling now, gesturing wildly so that she can see the sweat patches under his arms. ‘You need to get back in your car! You can’t leave it there!’
Grace can taste the metal heat coming off the vehicles wedged either side of her as she smiles at him. With her mouth, not her eyes.
‘Deal with it,’ she whispers.
“Grace’s mind skids from one object to the next as if they might hold the answers to where her baby went. To who this strange new person is.”
Four months earlier
Northmere Park School
London N8 6TJ
[email protected]
Dear Parent or Carer of Lotte Adams Kerr,
It has come to our attention that Lotte’s attendance has dipped below 70 per cent this term and that many of these absences remain ‘unauthorized’. This is significantly below the Ofsted targets set out in our school-parent agreement and as such is extremely concerning.
At this worrying level, Lotte’s absenteeism will be having a serious impact on their learning and achievements. As you know, research shows that for every nineteen days of school missed, a student can expect to see their GCSE results fall by a grade.
We would like to request you contact the school to make an urgent appointment with Lotte ’s tutor, as well as their head of year to discuss the matter as soon as possible. At this time no external agencies are involved. However, we do have a duty to report the repeated or prolonged absence of any pupil.
Yours faithfully,
John Power, Head Teacher
Leaning against the kitchen counter, Grace reads the letter twice and still she can’t process it. She frowns, checks the envelope. She can only assume there has been an administrative error, that they have sent the letter to the wrong person. Even so, she can feel a tightening in her lungs, as if she can’t quite catch a full breath.
‘Lotte!’ she calls. She knows, though, that her daughter will be in her bedroom with her headphones on, that there’s no way she’ll hear her. She glances at her laptop on the table. Up on screen there’s the shitty Japanese romance she’s in the middle of translating – or, rather, that she’s in the middle of not translating. She doesn’t want to think about how far past the deadline she is. She doesn’t want to think about what will happen if she doesn’t get her act together on this, because she can’t afford to mess up the translation-agency work. Quite literally. The laughable amount she earns from her other job – her anything-to-get-her-out-of-the-house job, teaching French to uninterested under-twelves at Stanhope Primary – would barely cover her gas bill.
Grace takes her phone from the side and – because this is the way they do things now – texts her daughter, who is less than ten metres away from where she stands, up a floor, through a couple of walls. Waits. Nothing.
‘Lotte!’ she tries again, louder this time, and she feels the familiar itch of irritation in her gut. Then she screws up the letter and throws it hard across the room towards the overflow that’s pooled around the recycling bin.
Grace knocks but doesn’t wait before she enters the room. Lotte is sitting on her bed and immediately slams down the lid of her laptop. Her expression is at once hostile and vulnerable. She has dyed her hair pink again and it looks so pretty on her, that colour, like spun candy floss, and Grace is struck by how beautiful she has become, her perfect-wild daughter. How, if she could, she would just stand there drinking her in. She’s wearing shorts and a green top that’s more of a bandage really, barely covering her breasts. Those braless breasts that seem held up by magic. Aren’t you freezing? Grace wants to ask. Because she has become a cliché. She has become her own mother.
‘What?’ Lotte says, lifting her headphones from one ear. ‘I’m in the middle of something.’ And Grace can tell it’s taking everything she’s got to keep her tone just the right side of politeness. That is, the newly low bar of mutually accepted ‘politeness’.
Grace opens her mouth to answer, but finds she has to pause because she feels suddenly as though she may not be able to get the words out without her voice splitting. She skates her eyes around the room, like she’s looking for clues. There’s the honey and sweat smell of dirty laundry, a knocked-over plant that has spilled most of its earth underneath the window. Posters on the wall of the girl from Stranger Things, the guy from Sherlock, the bright-painted matryoshka in the middle of the bookshelf, a tangle of hoop earrings, and the little brass Buddha on the bedside table. Grace’s mind skids from one object to the next as if they might hold the answers to where her baby went. To who this strange new person is.
‘What?’ Lotte asks again, and she isn’t trying to disguise her impatience any more. And then, under her breath, ‘Jesus.’
The word winds Grace, just a little, but she lets it go, fixes her eyes on her child’s. They have the same eyes, she knows: everyone tells them this. Th e same deep-set dark blue eyes. Eyes that could undo a person, Ben used to tell her.
‘I’ve had a letter from the school that doesn’t make sense,’ Grace says.
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