Page 4 of The Man Who Didn't Call
To make matters worse, Jo’s seven-year-old, Rudi, was next to me on the back seat. His father had been offered a job interview and Jo hadn’t had time to find childcare. He had been listening with great interest to our conversation about Eddie’s disappearance.
‘So, Sarah thinks her boyfriend’s dead and Mum’s getting cross,’ Rudi surmised. He was going through a phase of distilling awkward adult conversations into neat one-liners, and he was very good at it.
‘He’s not her boyfriend,’ Jo said. ‘They spent seven days together.’
The car fell silent again. ‘Sarah. Think seven-day boyfriend dead,’ Rudi said, in his Russian voice. Rudi had a new friend at school, Aleksandr, who had recently come to London from somewhere near the Ukrainian border. ‘Killed by secret service. Mum disagree. Mum cross with Sarah.’
‘I’m not cross,’ Jo said crossly. ‘I’m just worried.’
Rudi considered this, and then said, ‘I think you tell lie.’
Jo couldn’t deny it, so remained silent. I didn’t wish to antagonize Jo, so I remained silent as well. And Tommy hadn’t said anything for two hours, so he remained silent, too. Rudi lost interest and returned to his iPad game. Adults were rife with baffling and pointless problems.
I watched Rudi obliterate what looked like a cabbage and was blasted suddenly by a great longing: for his innocence, his seven-year-old’s worldview. I imagined Rudi Land, in which mobile phones were gaming stations rather than instruments of psychological torture, and the certainty of his mother’s love was as solid as a heartbeat.
If there was any point to becoming an adult, it eluded me today. Who wouldn’t prefer to be killing cabbages and talking in a Russian accent? Who wouldn’t prefer to have had their breakfast made and their outfit chosen, when the alternative was malignant despair over a man who’d felt like everything and somehow become nothing? And not the man I’d been married to seventeen years; a man I’d known precisely seven days. No wonder everyone in this car thought I was mad.
‘Look, I know it sounds like a teenage saga,’ I said eventually. ‘And I don’t doubt that you’re pissed off with me. But something has happened to him, I’m certain of it.’
Jo opened Tommy’s glove compartment to extract a large bar of chocolate, from which she snapped off a chunk with some force.
‘Mum?’ Rudi said. ‘What’s that?’
He knew perfectly well what it was. Jo handed her son a square without saying anything. Rudi smiled at her, his biggest, toothiest smile, and – in spite of her growing impatience – Jo smiled back. ‘Don’t ask for more,’ she warned. ‘You’ll only end up being sick.’
Rudi said nothing, confident she’d give in.
Jo turned back to me. ‘Look, Sarah. I don’t want to be cruel, but I think you need to accept that Eddie is not dead. Nor is he injured, or suffering a broken phone, or battling a life-threatening illness.’
‘Really? You’ve called the hospitals to check? Had a chat with the local coroner?’
‘Oh God,’ she said, staring at me. ‘Tell me you haven’t done any of those things, Sarah! Jesus Christ!’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Rudi whispered.
‘Stop that,’ Jo told him.
‘You started it.’
Jo gave Rudi more chocolate and he went back to his iPad. It had been my present to him from America, and he told me earlier on that he loved it more than anything else in the world. Which had made me laugh and then, to Rudi’s bafflement, cry a little, because I knew he’d have learned that phrase from Jo. She had turned out to be a remarkable mother, Joanna Monk, in spite of her own upbringing.
‘Well?’
‘Of course I haven’t been calling hospitals,’ I sighed. ‘Come on, Jo.’ I watched a row of crows scattering from a telephone wire.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. My point was just that you don’t know any more than I do what’s happened to Eddie.’
‘But men do this all the time!’ she exploded. ‘You know they do!’
‘I don’t know anything about dating. I’ve been married the last seventeen years.’
‘Well, you can take it from me: nothing’s changed,’ Jo said bitterly. ‘They still don’t call.’
She turned to Tommy but found him unresponsive. Any residual confidence he’d feigned about today’s big launch had evaporated like the morning mist and he’d barely said a word since we’d set off. There had been a brief display of bravado at Chieveley Services when he’d had a message telling him that three local newspapers had confirmed attendance, but a few minutes later he’d called me ‘Sarah’ in the queue at WHSmith, and Tommy only called me Sarah when he was extremely anxious. (I had been ‘Harrington’ since we turned thirteen and he’d started doing press-ups and wearing aftershave.)
The silence thickened, and I lost the battle I’d been fighting since we left London.
