‘Let’s keep looking.’ Their conversation has dried up. What more is there to say, other than: Where is she? Is she OK? Is she safe?
They head into the hotel grounds. Uplighters pick out the shapes of topiary hedges arranged around a wide lawn. Adam and Becky walk in silence over its sprawling softness. It is a warm night, a light breeze pushing clouds out of the way of the stars. Night-singing birds call to each other.
Becky decides, then and there. If Maisie is found – if she is not drowned, stabbed, strangled or otherwise destroyed – then she must be done with her questions. She has to know.
She had hoped that time would close the gap in her.
Well, that hasn’t worked, she thinks with a hard, unsparing voice. All it’s done is chew her up and spit her out again.
But she is definitely ready now. She will face it and fight it. Let it be agony. Let there be violence. Let the stitching show afterwards, but things cannot stay the same. She cannot go on damaging herself and those around her.
Give me back my girl, and I will seek out Scott in real life.
No more digital toxicity, no more distraction, no more procrastination, no more weakness. She will take the risk, risk it hurting, and so start to heal. That is the deal she cuts with the universe.
Then, things will be different.
‘I told Kate that I’m in love with you,’ says Adam, taking her hand. ‘She said she already knew that. She said she thought we’d all been kidding ourselves for a long time.’
Becky puts her hand to his chest to quieten him. There – close by – voices.
‘What will you say to her?’ says Adam.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Try not to kill her.’
They move in a wide arc and Adam speeds up toward the sounds.
‘Wait,’ says Becky, holding him back, taking his hand and guiding him past great topiary animals, to where black and white flagstones make a hedge-rimmed chessboard. Maisie and the boy from the pool are sitting on it, cross-legged, facing each other. In the starlit darkness, the end of a joint flares as he inhales then passes it to her. Becky watches her little girl take it and smoke it with assurance. She has done this before. Obviously she has. There are no coughing fits. Maisie licks a finger and damps down the side of the Rizla paper where it is burning too fast.
‘We were doing exactly the same at her age,’ Adam whispers. ‘Come on, shall we go get her?’
She hesitates.
‘No,’ she says, gripping his hand. ‘Let’s leave them. I have to trust her.’
And I don’t have to be governed by my past.
When Adam lets go of her hand and puts his arm around her, kissing the top of her head, she knows she can do it. She believes with every breath, in every cell, that it is time to trust herself again.
When Maisie returns to the room, Becky is tucked up under the covers and watching a film on TV, eating from the bag of popcorn Adam dropped on the floor earlier. She had kissed Adam goodbye at his door an hour ago and it had felt exhilaratingly teenage and special, the idea that she would see him again soon, as if there was only History and double Geography to get through.
Maisie drops her handbag on the floor and sets off toward the bathroom.
Becky switches off the TV and kicks her duvet away. ‘Mais, wait. I’m sorry.’
Maisie turns around and fixes her mum with a bloodshot gaze. Her face is crumpled and smudged and Becky thinks she can see blades of grass in her hair. An image of her daughter and aftershave boy tumbling on the lawn spreads quickly in Becky’s mind like ink dropped on blotting paper. But she bids it leave. A blank page. She must trust that her daughter dealt with whatever happened in the best way she knew how.
‘You look very stoned,’ says Becky, smiling.
Maisie still doesn’t say anything and Becky wonders whether she is almost too stoned to speak. ‘I’m truly sorry for earlier.’ She tries again. ‘I messed up. Just because I’m scared, doesn’t mean you should be, in fact I want the opposite for you. I want to make sure you’ve got everything you need for the world of adults, I …’
‘Do you think you might be finding it a bit hard to let go?’ Maisie asks gently.
‘Yes,’ Becky blinks back her tears. ‘You may have been an adult for all of eleven minutes but in my eyes you’re still my baby.’
Maisie walks toward her mum. ‘I grew out of bootees, like, years ago.’
‘You never really wore them. Always kicked them off. You liked to have free feet. Happy birthday, darling.’
Maisie perches on the edge of the bed. ‘Thanks, Mum. Are you not now incredibly pissed off with me that I’m stoned?’
‘No. Just incredibly jealous. Did you have a nice time?’
‘I had a fine time. Seb is fine but, turns out, not all that.’
‘I love you,’ says Becky. Maisie jumps onto the bed and lays her head down on Becky’s stomach. That’s where you came from, thinks Becky, as she strokes her daughter’s hair. I was your first home.
Chapter 22
Becky wakes before Maisie. Her daughter is sixteen now, asleep in the adjoining double bed, looking like she did when she was a baby, her cheeks smooshed into the pillow, peaceful.
Becky runs her hands over the bedsheet beneath her own body, feeling for the small patch where the cotton hardens, as if glued. It did happen, after all. She did it with Adam. And today they are going to walk around Dungeness and get fish and chips for lunch. She is looking forward to seeing him. She is starving hungry. A bag of popcorn for dinner was not enough.
Daylight streams through the top of the curtains. She wonders how late they have slept.
