The Night They Vanished, page 3
But do I like him enough? Enough to accept a second date, enough to hesitate in some doorway and wait for a kiss? See how durable the berry lip-stain is? After Liam, I’m not sure if I can be bothered. If I like him enough to bother.
“Listen,” he says, leaning forward, giving me that smile again. (Maybe I do—if he keeps smiling that smile, maybe I do like him enough.) “Do you want to see something?”
A surprised burst of laughter escapes me. “Do I want to see something? What—your penis?” I clap my hand over my mouth—did I really say that out loud?
His smile freezes, then widens. “Well, I wasn’t offering that quite yet,” he says. “I was going to suggest dinner before a full frontal.” He hesitates long enough for me to die of embarrassment, to pull off my burning skin and bury myself in the ground.
“I was actually going to show you a building.”
“A building?”
“An abandoned one. I found it a while ago—it’s not far from here.”
“So, on our first date—when we’re essentially strangers—you want to take me to an abandoned building…”
He laughs. “Dangerously brooding, remember? But I’m not planning to murder you, I promise.”
“Oh, that’s reassuring. Because of course if you were planning to murder me, you’d tell me up front.”
“Well—how about I don’t actually take you into the abandoned building—we just look through the window? It’s… it might explain better why I’m into the whole urban exploring thing. And maybe it could be something you write about? I’m always looking for features for my website if you can’t sell it elsewhere.”
I could just go home now. Pick up that pizza, watch some crap TV, call Dee and hear the disappointment in her voice when I tell her the date was over in under two hours.
Or…“Sure,” I say. “Why not? But no murdering, okay?”
The conversation flows more easily as we stroll along the brightly lit streets. He tells me about his younger brother and his parents, his friends and his job. I tell him very little, skating over the subject of family but telling him more about the writing I’ve done, how I dream of earning a full-time living from freelance writing. He seems genuinely interested in my little life: the home, the career, the friendships I’m so proud of building. Perhaps we should have done the date this way round—met somewhere a mile from the pub, talked our way there.
The streets get less well lit as we walk away from the center of town and despite my earlier joking, I do begin to feel a little on edge. I know he’s a friend of Seb’s, but to me he’s a stranger and no one has a clue where I am. My imagination paints a picture of me never making it home, of Dee calling, worried, of Adam acting surprised and pretending we parted ways at the pub while wiping my blood from his hands and stuffing my body in the freezer.
“This is it,” he says, making me jump, interrupting my macabre thoughts.
It’s obvious the house is abandoned—no secret urban explorers’ code needed—the windows are boarded up. It’s a small Victorian end-of-terrace on a quiet, badly lit street. Half the houses seem empty: they look neglected and overgrown.
“I’m not sure about this,” I say, looking back toward the brighter, busier streets.
“Come on,” he says, walking up the path and round the side of the house.
I hesitate, then follow, cursing as I almost trip over a large stone. The garden is a jungle and I have to push aside overgrown plants to catch him up. He’s in the back garden. The boards from the window here are lying on the floor, the glass in the window is smashed.
“Did you do this?” I speak softly. It’s dark and quiet and even though I know the house is empty, this feels too much like breaking and entering. I don’t want someone hearing us and calling the police.
“No—squatters or kids, I don’t know. There’s nothing worth stealing inside.”
I join him at the window. He pulls out his phone and switches on the torch app, shining it into the house.
It’s a dining room—the table still in place, two chairs, one lying on its side on the floor. There’s a vase of dead flowers in the middle of the table, a bowl and a plate, everything thick with dust. It’s weird and creepy and somehow sad and the back of my neck prickles.
“I wonder what happened,” Adam says, his voice as quiet as mine. “Who lived here? Where did they go? It’s like they just disappeared halfway through a meal.”
“Maybe the owner died and didn’t have a family to clear the house for them.” The earlier pang of sadness I felt grows.
“Yeah…” He sighs. Then he turns to me the same moment I turn to him and we’re both leaning in and then we’re kissing in the garden of an abandoned house. I shiver as he pulls me closer.
How very un-nanish. Fifteen-year-old me would have been proud.
And that’s the thought that makes me pull away.
Chapter 3
SASHA—November, three months earlier
“Mum says she’s going to go down the pub with Steve and I can have up to twenty people over.”
Expand and simplify 3(h + 2)–4
How the hell am I meant to concentrate on algebra with Carly and Seren’s nonstop whispering?
“She said I can have a bigger party next year for my sixteenth, but she’ll buy some drinks.”
“Who’s coming?”
Shut. Up. For. God’s. Sake. Shut. Up. I want to turn and stab them both with the pen clenched in my hand.
3(h + 2)–4 = 3h + 2, I write, my pen nearly going through the paper.
“Tyler, of course.”
A dick.
“And Dylan.”
A moron.
“Nathan and Finn.”
Both moronic dickheads.
“Ewan because he can get weed.”
I roll my eyes and turn the page.
“I wish Mum would hire somewhere, then I could invite the Year Elevens as well.”
Ah—Year Eleven. Even more brain-dead idiots than in Year Ten.
“But where? The holiday park?” Carly and Seren both giggle.
My shoulders are so stiff now they’re actually aching.
“Oh yeah, and then I’d have to invite never-been-kissed, never-been-pissed Sasha Carter and have her pervy creep of a dad slathering over us. Urgh—can you even imagine?”
Do they not realize I can hear every word? My desk is literally a foot away from them.
More giggles.
Of course they realize.
Not that I care. It’s just annoying having to listen to their pathetic inanity during a math lesson; that’s the only reason my shoulders are so tense.
Two more years. Two more years and then Carly and Seren will be gone, sweeping hair off the floor of Classy Cuts, passing the time until Dylan or Tyler or Finn gets them pregnant and they can raise a whole new generation of inane, black-eyebrowed, bleach-haired, orange-faced morons. And then I’ll finish high school, then university, then gone, gone, gone, over the hills and far away…
But in the meantime—Seren is poking me in the back with her pen. I glance back at her.
“What’s the answer to number three?” she hisses.
I ignore her and turn back to my work.
“Bitch,” she mutters. Then I’m forgotten as she goes back to whispering with Carly, arguing about whether Sourz or WKD gets you drunk quicker or whether they should just go for neat vodka.
Thank God math is last lesson. I swear I’d have to kill myself if I had to listen to anymore plans for the precious party. Emma catches up with me in the bottleneck outside the main doors where everyone waits for rides or busses. She’s in top set for math while I am, shamefully, only set two. She doesn’t have to put up with any idiots like Carly and Seren and I’m working desperately hard to get moved up.
“Are you coming into town? Latte and a steak bake from Greggs?” she asks, getting her phone out of her bag. Everyone around us also has their phone out. Every single person, I swear. Except for me. Everyone goes to Greggs after school as well. Everyone except for me.
“I can’t,” I answer, like I always do. “I have to get home.”
“Cool,” she says, already wandering off, not looking up from her phone. “See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I say to empty air. “Tomorrow.”
I call Emma my best friend. I don’t think she’d say the same about me. I watch her now, catching up with a crowd of other girls, walking off toward town with them, talking and laughing.
I call her my best friend because she’s the only girl I hang out with, mostly in lessons when we have to do partner work, but if you asked her, what would she call me?
Dad doesn’t like me getting the school bus. Instead, he collects me every day from outside the train station because it gets too busy on the school road. So, every day I get to follow everyone as they head up to town to Greggs or the Spar or the chip shop and I get into the car with my dad and spend the five-mile drive home sharing every second of every lesson but not getting asked a single question about anything non-academic. I’m the great hope for the Carter family. Dad’s ashamed of being nothing more than the manager of a holiday park because his academic work doesn’t pay, Mum doesn’t work, and Hanna—well, no one ever talks about Hanna. Hanna non grata I call her. But not out loud.
But me—everything Mum and Dad perceive they did wrong with her, they’ve corrected when it comes to me. So, Hanna got to have her friends over, she got to go out with her friends, she got to go out full stop. Not me. I get to go to school, then I get picked up and I go home. That is it. My life. It’s for my own good, they say. Look at what happened to your sister, they say. Only I can’t, can I? Because Hanna buggered off before I ever got to know her and barely bothers with me when she does come back to visit.
I used to wonder if it was because we were only half sisters. Her mum died years before I was born, when Hanna was younger than I am now. Then Dad met my mum, and along I came. Hanna must have been jealous, must have felt left out. It could be my fault she went off the rails the way she did. That’s what I used to think, anyway, until Dad set me straight, always reminding me of the reasons I have to be the good girl, the rules girl, the girl who brings glory instead of shame to the family name.
I hate Hanna now. For leaving. For leaving me. For not thinking about the repercussions of her behavior, for being a Carly or a Seren, for the knowledge that a fourteen-year-old Hanna would think fourteen-year-old Sasha was a total loser. For getting away. For having her own home, friends, a job. For having a life that never includes me. I hate her.
I expect Dad to be waiting, leaning against his car in the station car park, all swept-back hair and scowl, arms folded, dressed up in a suit like he always is. He usually stands there, not looking for me, but frowning at groups of kids like Carly and Seren and their gang, really scowling at them, so I get why they find him creepy. But there’s nothing pervy in his attention, he’s just disgusted watching them in their skirts so short they’re barely visible under their school jumpers, listening to them shriek and swear. I know it’s disgust because I regularly get to listen to him ranting about them on journeys home as I sit next to him with my below-the-knee skirt and makeup-free face.
Today is different, though, because he’s not there. I stop in surprise. I scan the car park again—no, definitely no sign of his car. Has he ever not been there waiting for me? Once, I remember, when Mum was really poorly, and he was looking after her. I feel a twinge of alarm—what if something’s wrong? See—this is why I need a phone. I hover for ages, totally at a loss. I can’t start walking—it’s five miles home.
I glance across the road toward the high street. Emma and her friends are probably still hanging around by Greggs. Possibly even still in the queue because it’s always mad busy after school. I tense up—could I? I could, couldn’t I? I could go over there, hang out, lurk outside the shops in a dodgy manner like a proper teenager. Dad couldn’t exactly shout at me for it, when he wasn’t here to pick me up…
I don’t even manage a single step in the end (although I like to pretend I would have taken that step), because Dad pulls up next to me, looking well pissed off, even though he’s the one nearly half an hour late.
“Where were you?” I ask as I get in and do up my seat belt. “I was starting to worry.”
“Nowhere. It doesn’t matter. I had to take the car to the garage. It took longer than expected.”
I raise my eyebrows, but keep my face averted. I don’t want him to think I’m giving sass, but he sounds… agitated.
He’s silent after that, for the entire journey home, not even asking me about school. He’s driving faster than usual, as well, like he’s trying to make up the time. Yeah, definitely more weird non-Dad behavior. He went away for two days last week and has been jumping on the phone every time it rings, diving for the post ever since. I hope he hasn’t applied for another academic job. He does it at least once a year—usually at the end of a summer season—and never gets them. He has no teaching experience, so the universities don’t want him, and he’s never had anything original published in academic journals. You’d think at fifty-six he’d give up and just coast until retirement. Rent a cottage in the village with Mum—I’ll be gone by then, they won’t need anything big.
“Listen,” he says, “can you not mention me being late to your mother?”
Oh God, he has applied for another job, hasn’t he? That’s where he’s been today, at some stupid interview. I look at the clock on the dashboard. His speedy driving hasn’t made any difference.
“We’re nearly half an hour late—she’s going to know.”
He’s quiet for a minute. “Tell her you had an after-school meeting.”
“But—”
“It’s not a request, Sasha.”
Oh. Right. Yeah, definitely another interview for a job he won’t get, and he doesn’t want the humiliation of sharing that with me or Mum.
The roads get narrower as we drive toward the holiday camp, winding down toward the coast, getting darker as the trees lining the lane crowd in, arching up and over the car. It’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.
The sign for the holiday park is faded and peeling. The owners paint it every March in readiness for the season, but now, in November, the perky spring chicken in his blue coat looks sad and jaded, an unfortunate bit of peeling paint making it look like Charlie Chicken’s had his eye gouged out. His coat is all rags and someone (probably Tyler or Ewan or Finn) has graffitied over the Charlie Chicken Welcomes You To West Dean Family Fun Park sign, “hilariously” changing the N in “fun” to a CK.
Ha. The F-word is probably more accurate than Fun. I’ve overheard the kids in school talking about what they get up to here. They don’t come to the discos anymore—dancing the Macarena with poor Ross dressed as Charlie Chicken is hardly cool. But they come up on weekends in the summer with their illicit bottles, eyeing up the visiting tourists, pretending to their parents that they are coming to the discos, so they can get rides, climbing over the fence to gather at the bottom of the kids’ playground, which is hidden from the main site, especially after dark, leaving broken glass and used condoms everywhere.
But not now, not in November. Post September, it’s just us here full time: me, Mum, and Dad. No lights from the caravans or the clubhouse. No lights anywhere except our house, with the security light at the front gate unnerving us by coming on sometimes at four in the morning, bright as a UFO landing. Dad goes storming out when that happens, me and Mum huddled together, scared to death that someone’s breaking in, but there’s never anyone there. The motion detector is too sensitive, that’s all, picking up a creeping fox or badger. And the silence. God. I complain about the noise all through the summer season, kept awake until two in the morning, but in the winter the silence is absolute, only broken on stormy nights by the wind moaning through the trees.
This is my home, has always been my home—kids’ discos and bingo I never went to, a swimming pool I’m not allowed to use, a playground I was scared to go on because older kids would take over and bully the little ones.
Sometimes, during the season, Dad used to send me over to the clubhouse with messages and I’d linger, watching city kids down for a week in a caravan doing the Charlie Chicken dance while their parents drank cheap lager and spritzers. I’d walk past the swimming pool, breathing in the steamy chlorinated air, watching teenagers fly down the water slide.
Dad never sends me anymore. I think he worries I’ll get corrupted like Hanna and go off the rails. That one sneaky dance at the kids’ disco will have me dyeing my hair and starting smoking and drinking. Running off and leaving them like she did at sixteen.
He’d kill me if he knew I sometimes walk around the grounds, following Owen and Ethan, the two men he hired part time to keep the site from going full-on wild. I don’t think he sees them as a threat because they’re older and they never come to the house. Bet he wouldn’t think that if he knew how often they skived off to smoke behind the caravans, if he heard the things they say when they have spotted me.
The holiday park used to be an old manor house and grounds a billion years ago. All gone now except for the crumbling coach house, which is where we live. Such a contrast to the concrete main block and the rows and rows of static caravans. I think the house is why Dad took the job—you can’t see the gaudiness of the rest of the site from the front windows and I think he likes to pretend we’re Georgian coach-house types instead of the weirdos who run the holiday park up the hill.
My room’s at the back, which is a nightmare in the summer because everyone walks past, drunk and singing at the end of the night as they head back to their caravans. But I like it better than my old room at the front, which barely fit my bed in it. My new room used to be Hanna’s, big enough for a desk and single wardrobe.
We get back and Dad disappears into his office. Mum’s in the kitchen, preparing a casserole and listening to Radio 4.
