I’m used to heat – the parched, yellow, bone-shrivelling kind that demands respect and keeps you careful. Not this all-colours-blazing, blowsy warmth that sneaks up and scorches your neck the minute you turn to admire the view. I flap my hands at my throat, push open the rusty gate and scramble on up the overgrown terraces. Another five minutes of hard climbing and I spot a ripple of roof tiles through the trees. A grey, startled bird takes off as I come around the ridge and ahead of me, just a few yards away, sits the Villa Rosa. I take in the open shutters, the red espadrilles kicked off on the step and the basket of courgettes – their buttery, star-shaped flowers still attached – and my legs give way, as if I’m going to hit the ground. Somehow I stay upright and keep walking, each step a little slower than the last until I reach the sun-bleached blue of the door. All I have to do is lift my fist and knock. I don’t. I strain to make out the song pulsing faintly from an upstairs window, glance back at the spit of white rock thrusting into the electric glitter of the Mediterranean a few hundred feet below, and try to remember how to breathe.
Roz’s voice snaps in my ear, sharp as the twigs underfoot. Go on, kiddo. Don’t bottle out now. I curl my fingers, reach for the words I’ve been mouthing on the plane from London, the bus from Marseille and all the way up the zigzag road from Cassis, and rap out a sharp double knock that jolts the lazy hush of the hillside. The music stops. A long, hot silence. Then movement. The tentative scuff of footsteps. A darkening of the pinprick of light behind the spyhole. A bolt slides back. A latch lifts. The door opens a few inches, disturbing the air just enough to send a quiver through the overhanging tendrils of vine.
It’s her. I feel it like an electric shock that leaves me seared and limp. She’s older. Of course she is – nearly thirty-six by now, the spiky wild-child glamour of those early photos long gone. But who is it that her tired eyes are seeing as they stare out at me through that tumble of dark hair? A sweaty, suntanned stranger in cut-off shorts? Or the embodiment of fifteen years of guilt and hope, and fear and dreams?
‘Yes?’ The voice is wary.
‘Kay Duncan?’
A twitch around the eyelids. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Phoebe Locklear.’ I lick the salt from my lip. ‘But I think I’m your daughter.’
An angry hiss shoots from her mouth. ‘What are you after? Money? Publicity? A sick thrill?’ She glances over my shoulder, as if she’s expecting an accomplice to spring from the bushes. Her eyes jerk back to me. ‘Leave. Right now. Or I’ll call the police.’
‘Please!’ I slam my shoulder against the closing door and thrust my hands through the gap. The pressure eases when she sees what I’m holding: a child’s yellow sou’wester, the chinstrap a grubby spiral of withered elastic. Slowly I turn back the brim and show her the name inked along the inside of the crown. Maya Jane Duncan.
‘I was in Botswana.’ The word seems unreal, out of place. ‘On a nature reserve. That’s why the police never found me.’
Her jaw moves. I shove the hat towards her. She takes it slowly, her eyes stuck fast to the smudge of lettering, her thumb pushing at the bumpy stitching along the seam. I stare at the big knobbly ring on her finger – a nugget of amber, golden and inviting as a lump of toffee.
The room is full. So much noise. So many people. I wriggle through their legs. She’s lying on the sofa, smiling up at a man in a bright white shirt. I lean across her knees and drop my mouth onto her knuckle. A gritty clink of stone against my teeth. A stab of disappointment that her ring tastes of cold and nothing. The sound of laughter and the casual warmth of her hand on my forehead as she pushes me away.
‘Where did you get this?’ She’s wagging the sou’wester in my face, eyes screwed up with what could be fury but feels more like fear.
What do I say? There’s too much to tell. Two thirds of my life to unravel and explain. ‘Roz… the woman who took me. She died. Cancer. Seven weeks ago. It was in a box of stuff she left me. And there was a letter.’ I rummage in my duffel bag and push the folded sheet into her hand. ‘Don’t be upset by what she says… I don’t blame you… not for any of it.’ I’ve rehearsed that line so many times I almost believe it’s true. I don’t blame you, Kay. Not for any of it.
Her fingers – already tight on the paper – grow rigid as she takes in the words I’ve read a hundred times.
My Darling Girl,
What I am about to tell you will come as a shock. It might even make you hate me but I need you to understand that I always believed I did the right thing. Your mother is no cousin of mine – distant or otherwise. Her name isn’t Locklear, it’s Duncan, Kay Duncan, and she and your stepfather, David, are still alive. They lived in Kensington, in one of the big houses opposite a flat I used to rent on Stanford Street. As far as I know they’re still there. He was something big in the music business and she was a party girl, with a drug habit she couldn’t kick, who used to flit in and out at all hours then disappear for weeks on end.
It was seven months after I lost Phoebe in that terrible car crash in Malawi and the pain of losing my only child was still raw. My contract in Malawi had come to an end and I was back in London for a few months preparing to come to Molokodi. I missed having animals around me so I used to walk a neighbour’s dog – a wheezy old Alsatian with a torn ear. Perhaps you remember him.
I often used to see you in the park, always with a different au pair who’d be sitting on the bench yacking into her phone while you kicked around in the sandpit or hung off the monkey bars – such a sad, lonely little thing. Then one day I found you there on your own. Of course I marched you straight home – you were five years old for God’s sake, far too young to be out by yourself. The girl who opened the door was contrite enough, but when I asked to speak to your mother she said she was away. A couple of weeks later it happened again. This time the house was full of people, most of them high or drunk and the ones who were sober enough to string two words together didn’t seem to know who you were. One of them shouted upstairs and a man in a suit came down. He was older, more in control, maybe a lawyer or a PR man. He tried to charm his way out of it, ruffled your hair, thanked me for bringing back ‘Kay’s kid’ and assured me it wouldn’t happen again. But he didn’t even know your name. I made some enquiries and found out that you’d spent time in care as a baby and I worried for you.
The morning I left for Botswana I was up just after six. I looked out of the window and saw you sloshing through the rain in your yellow mac and sou’wester. I ran downstairs and found you crying your little heart out. You said you were hungry and you couldn’t get any of the grown-ups to wake up. You showed me a handful of coins, a few pence, and said you’d been to the shops to buy something to eat but none of them were open, and I thought, to hell with this. It was a spur of the moment decision but I’ve never regretted it. I still had Phoebe’s passport and although she was a year or so older than you and had much fairer hair I was willing to take the risk. I don’t know how much you remember of that day but I told you your mother was going away again and she’d asked me to look after you. I booked you a ticket on my flight, cut off your hair, stuffed your yellow mac and sou’wester into my luggage and hurried you into a cab. I told you about the baby animals I was going to be looking after and said we had to pretend you were Phoebe so that you could come and help me. I made a game of it and said it would be our special secret that you used to be called Maya. I was worried you might kick up a fuss at the airport or on the flight. You didn’t, of course. You were used to keeping quiet. When we landed in Gabarone I panicked. What had I done? This was madness. Then I checked the UK news. Your mother hadn’t reported you missing until seven hours after you left the house. Seven hours! She was too busy sleeping off the excesses of the night before. So I decided to keep you. And later, when I told you that she and your stepfather had died in a fire and you’d be staying with me forever you barely seemed to remember who they were. And you’ve been happy, haven’t you? And loved, and safe?
The flat my parents left me in Fulham must be worth quite a bit by now and the investments should be enough to keep you comfortable. Be well, my darling. I hope that one day you will find it in your heart to forgive me. I did it for you and I would do it again.
Roz
Kay’s head stays bent over the letter. I step a little closer. Her words fling me back. ‘What the hell is this? Maya’s dead.’
‘No!’ I thrust out a photo, a faded polaroid of a little girl, her thick dark hair chopped jaggedly close to her head. She’s crossing a patch of scrubland, lugging a cheetah cub by its armpits. ‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘It must have been taken a few days after I arrived in Molokodi.’ I hold it up against the shot the newspapers used in the ‘Find Maya’ campaign. A school photo of a little girl with a small serious face, framed by an overlong fringe and a wiry cascade of hair.
Her eyes lift, scour my features – my heavy ponytail springing from its clips, my twitching hands – and flick back to the photographs. Something shifts in her expression, as if she knows it’s me but won’t let herself believe it. I wait for a sob, a smile, an exclamation. But she’s shying away, her chest heaving, her lips moving soundlessly. The kinder papers called her ‘fragile’, the tabloids preferred ‘junkie teen mum’ or ‘Crazy Kay’, and I get scared that I’ve snapped whatever flimsy threads have been holding her together. ‘I’m sorry… I should have written… or called… but I thought…’ What? What had I thought – that she’d welcome me with open arms? That I’d walk back into her life and make us both complete? That she’d beg my forgiveness and all her guilt and my resentment would just disappear?
‘I don’t… I… I can’t.’ She backs against the wall, quivering like a cornered dog.
I hold up my palms and say, gently as I can, ‘I’m sorry. I’ll get a room in town and come back when you’ve had time to take it in.’ Eyes down, I hitch my duffel onto my shoulder and turn away. Numb inside, I’m five or six paces down the path when she calls after me.
‘Don’t go… please.’
I stop. Turn. She’s bracing herself in the doorway. With a small uncertain movement of her hand she stands back, leaving me to step past her through a narrow hallway into the cool gloom of a whitewashed sitting room. Slats of light seep through half-closed shutters. A scarred flagstone floor. An easel and a table of paints in one corner. A low sofa, sagging beneath a faded throw. She darts ahead of me, a slight figure in loose cotton trousers, the ends of her hair – still damp from the shower – streaking moisture across the shoulders of her shirt. I follow her into the kitchen. A clutter of bowls, plates and books on a painted dresser, dirty coffee cups by the sink. She drops into a chair, sweeps aside a magazine and lays the sou’wester, Roz’s letter, the polaroid and the cutting on the scrubbed wooden table, a shake in her fingers as she pushes back her hair and inspects each one in turn. In the quiet I hear the buzz of a small plane skimming low over the house and fading away along the coast. I focus on the tiny lines around her mouth, the fall of her hair – thick and dark but much softer than mine – the empty piercings above the hoop of gold in her ear and the array of possible futures unfolding before me.
She turns her head and looks at me. She is shivering, her breath quick and rasping. Then with one sudden movement she’s on her feet, kicking back her chair, her eyes skidding wildly across the surfaces. They land on a mobile phone. She snatches it up and jabs it in a jittery arc, taking in the fridge and the rough wooden shelves hung with jugs and mugs. ‘Eat, drink, take whatever you want I… I have to call David.’
‘David? Now?’ Heat flares along the backs of my hands. This isn’t about him. It’s about me and Kay, trying to claw back what we’ve lost, working things through.
Her eyes slide away, cowed and apologetic. She yanks open the back door. ‘I need a better signal.’
I catch a glimpse of a paved courtyard and a rocky slope topped by wind-blasted pines before the door swings shut. Seconds later it jolts on its hinges, as if she’s slumped against it for support. Emptiness settles on the kitchen. I have to give her time. It’s seven weeks since I first read that letter and I’m still dealing with the fallout from what it said, still struggling to gather up the pieces and match the Roz I’d trusted and adored with the depth of her lies; her insistence that my real mother was dead, the reason why I’d had to pretend I was her daughter, why, on the rare occasions when she came back to the UK, I was never allowed to go with her and why I’d been the only kid in my whole school forbidden to go on any kind of social media. My belief in her had been so complete that, even after her death, getting my own Instagram and Facebook accounts had made me feel sneaky and disloyal.
I take a beer from the fridge, wander through to the sitting room and throw open the shutters, hoping I’ll turn around and see some keepsake that Kay has hung on to; some reminder of me. The painting on the easel is a stormy seascape – drab swirls of brown, green and purple that look dull and oppressive beside the airy expanse of sky and sea framed by the window. The canvases stacked against the little table are just as gloomy, the only relief in the murk is a crimson ‘K’ daubed in the lower right-hand corner of each one. No child’s face peers between the tree trunks, no shadowy figure runs through the swirling undergrowth. I run my finger over the brushes, unscrew the lid of one of the bottles and inhale a burst of linseed.
A slant of light through a dormer window. A messy jumble of paint tubes, a jar of brushes. Beyond them a blurry silhouette of Kay at her easel, singing along to the radio. I curl up small behind the old blue chair. It’s cramped and dusty. I pinch my nose to hold back the sneeze because I know if she finds me she’ll send me away.
I close my eyes, take a slow, steadying breath and let it go as I move on to the slab-stone mantelpiece. I pick through little piles of driftwood and shells that smell of the sea and study the framed photos. They are all of David, none of Kay. There’s one of him at the Brit Awards, a proud smile on his bland, shiny face, another with his star act, Lila Mendez, towering above him in impossible heels as they hold up a platinum disc, and a more recent snap on the deck of a boat – wide grin, pastel polo shirt, pressed khaki shorts, dangling a gaping black fish half as big as he is. I climb the painted wooden stairs and move along the landing, pushing open doors. An unmade bed, magazines piled on the floorboards, a damp towel hanging from the bedpost, a spritz of deodorant lingering in the air, a guitar. No threadbare teddy hidden beneath her pillows, no child’s shoe or snapshot of a skinny, dark-haired little girl in the bedside drawer, just a welcome pack from the rental agent and a tub of hand cream. I tiptoe on to a smaller, unused room; a brass bed, a wicker chair and a painted chest jammed beneath the slope of the ceiling. The third door opens onto a white-tiled bathroom.
Through the small square window I see her up by the pines, talking into her phone. She’s moving around, picking at the bark and glancing back at the house, too agitated to stay still. Me too. I sit on the loo, rubbing my knees and scratching the insect bites on my arms. I pump the ancient cistern to make it flush, turn on a juddery tap and splash my face with water. I open the cabinet above the sink. Inside there’s a blister pack of Xanax, a bottle of hair dye guaranteed to ‘wash away the grey’ and a jar of moisturiser. When I look out of the window again, Kay is off the phone, walking back to the house, her mouth still working. She stops halfway, sags against a ruined stretch of wall and dials again. She speaks urgently into the handset, beating the side of her fist against the stonework. Maybe it would be easier for us both if I just slipped away before she came back. For one weak, panicky moment I’m ready to do it but I’m still there, sitting at the kitchen table, finishing my beer when she pushes open the back door.
‘He’s coming,’ she says, before she’s fully inside.
‘When?’
‘As soon as he’s rescheduled his meetings. He was about to leave for Dubai.’ There’s a slump to her body, as if speaking to David has softened her bones.
‘Are you alright?’
‘He’s angry,’ she says, her eyes on the flagstone floor. ‘He says I shouldn’t let you stay here. Not until we’re sure.’
The heat is back, a rake of annoyance scraping my skin. I flex my fingers. ‘I can understand why he’s worried,’ I say, brisk to hide the hurt. ‘It’s not a problem. Like I said, I’ll get a room in town.’
‘No! You’re staying here!’ She raises her eyes, aims them straight into mine. ‘This time I don’t need any more proof, and neither will he. Not… when he sees you.’ Her jaw quivers, then out it comes, the question that must have gnawed at her, every moment of every day for the last fifteen years. ‘Did she… hurt you?’
I feel a burst of unbearable sadness for her, for me, for all of it. ‘The only person who got hurt was you,’ I say. ‘I was cared for, happy… loved.’
She presses her fingers into my flesh. ‘I loved you. That’s what no one understands. Not the police or the papers, or the trolls who still tell me I didn’t deserve to have a child. I was a mess. Ill, depressed. I couldn’t cope.’
Crazy Kay in Suspected Overdose Drama
Kay Duncan Back in Rehab
Drug Mum Hits Back, ‘It wasn’t my fault’
Police interview Kay Duncan under caution
Cadaver dogs search Duncan home.
‘I know,’ I say softly.
She loosens her grip. ‘You’ve been reading about me. Picking over the accusations.’
‘Yes, but I don’t believe the tabloids.’ I don’t tell her about the night Roz died, how I’d sat up devouring the huge file of cuttings she’d left me, reading all about the ‘Find Maya’ campaign, mesmerised by the blurred CCTV freeze-frame of a little girl in a too-big sou’wester that made the front page of every paper, and the shot of a traumatised, wild-haired, make-up-smeared Kay breaking down, unable to speak at the press appeal. Then I’d moved on to my laptop, raw and tearful with a box of tissues and a dusty bottle of rum and gorged myself on wobbly cam videos that claimed to reveal ‘the truth about Maya’, press reports of cruel hoaxes, false sightings, attempts at extortion, speculation about the identity, whereabouts and involvement of Maya’s biological father, interviews with ‘witnesses’ whose hazy recall improved radically with time, and years of tabloid gossip.
Duncans given false hope by fake leads
Two prosecuted in Maya Duncan ransom scam
Kay Duncan in drug-fuelled sex romp
Is this the face of evil?
Eventually I’d staggered into the yard and passed out in a pool of my own vomit. Around dawn I’d managed to drag myself back inside, although no amount of face splashing and mouth rinsing could wash away the bile the world had spewed at her. ‘Roz kept a file of articles about the investigation,’ I say, as if character assassination is somehow less hurtful when it comes with a byline.
‘So she could gloat about getting away with it?’
‘She wasn’t like that, she was—’
‘What? What kind of woman steals someone else’s child and keeps up the lie for fifteen years?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. I can’t justify what Roz did. It seems mad to even try but there was a logic to it, a strange, Roz kind of logic that spins me away, even now, to a place of certainty where her very presence made everything clear and sharp. No fuzzy-edged compromises, no murky greys or hesitations, no room for questions, regrets or doubts; just rust-coloured soil, the hum of the water pump, lizards in the thatch, and Roz’s pink determined face prickling with sweat as she hauls a sack of feed off the pickup.
‘She was a… maverick,’ I say. ‘She didn’t believe in other people’s rules. She was independent, resourceful. She had to be to run a massive nature reserve single-handed.’
‘So that makes it alright? You were a child. My child. Not some stray animal that was hers for the taking.’
‘I know what she did was wrong, crazy, fucked-up, but she was grieving for her daughter and she thought…’
‘Go on. Say it. That you needed rescuing, that being with her was better than staying with a mess like me.’ Kay’s mouth folds in, a dazed look on her face, like she can’t even see me. ‘Every night since the day I lost you I’ve dreamed that you came back to me and you’re still a little kid and I get the chance to start over and make things right.’
‘We can still make things right,’ I say gently.
She blinks and refocuses, snapping back from wherever it was she’d drifted away to. ‘No. Once the press find out there’ll be reporters banging at the windows, hanging from the trees, dredging it all up again. Judging me.’ She drums frantic fingertips on the table. ‘Kay Duncan, the spoiled, self-obsessed junkie who took seven hours to notice her child was missing.’
‘They won’t. I haven’t told anyone else who I am.’
Kay snatches up a pouch of tobacco and fumbles to roll a cigarette. ‘Not even the police?’
‘No.’
‘But this woman, this Roz.’ She spits out the name before running her tongue across the Rizla. ‘Someone in her life must have known you weren’t her real daughter.’
‘It was always our secret.’
‘Didn’t she have a husband… a boyfriend?’
I laugh. I can’t stop myself. ‘Roz didn’t have much time for human beings. Especially not men.’
‘What about her kid’s father?’
‘If Roz knew who he was she never let on.’
Kay starts back, startled by the rev of a motorbike straining up the track to the house. ‘Stay here.’ She drops her half-rolled cigarette in a saucer and darts outside, slamming the door behind her. There’s a crunch and grind of gravel as the bike pulls up. I cross to the window, hear the rumble of voices, and pull back quickly as the bike swings a noisy U-turn around the courtyard and roars away. Kay stays outside for what seems like an age after it’s gone. When she finally comes back she’s holding a white plastic carrier bag, thrusting it forward, a handle in each hand, like a child eager to please. ‘Sardines,’ she says. ‘Straight from the sea.’
I’m looking down at the silvery fish packed on a bed of ice when she lets the bag drop, suddenly tearful again. ‘When I heard that bike I thought the press hunt had started. They’re going to make our lives hell when they find out. You know that, don’t you? Every tabloid and every mindless troll falling over themselves to rake up the past.’
‘Who cares what they say?’
Her lips quiver and turn down. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be vilified for every breath you’ve ever taken, accused of killing your own kid, spat at in the street, despised as a woman, a mother, a human being.’
‘No, I don’t. But now we can tell the world the truth and put an end to it.’
‘They’ll make you hate me.’
‘No one can do that.’
She takes my hand and clasps it between both of hers. ‘Can’t it stay our secret? Please, just for a few more days. So we can get to know each other before they turn you against me?’
‘If that’s what you want,’ I say, as gently as I can, though from the moment I read Roz’s letter I’ve been longing to end the hazy lie of being Phoebe and reclaim the sharp reality of being Maya, however fraught and painful that transition might turn out to be.
She hears my disappointment and draws back to look me in the eye. ‘You’ve sold your story to the papers.’
Her accusation cuts deep. ‘I swear. I haven’t told anyone.’
‘I wouldn’t blame you. You could get a book deal, sell the film rights, make thousands.’
‘No!’ I hate that she thinks I might be lying, and it hits home that she doesn’t know me at all – at least not the grown-up me. ‘I don’t need money. You read Roz’s letter. She left me everything she had.’ A wave of grief . . .
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