Twenty Questions for Gloria Read online

  We’d given ourselves away. For nothing.

  Someone else was waiting to use the ATM. We moved out of his way. Uman pulled me into a hug, kissed the side of my face—aiming for the cheek, I think, but landing on the ear. He smelled of a night spent sleeping rough in a city park, but I didn’t mind one bit. “Right,” he said, his breath warm against my skin. “That’s settled, then.”

  “We quit?” I said. I could barely get the words out.

  He unhugged me, placed a hand on each of my shoulders, and looked me square in the face. “No, no, no, Ms. Inexcelsis—I have two tickets to Penzance in one pocket and a pack of playing cards in the other.” He frowned, nodding toward the rucksacks propped against the wall. “Actually, the cards are in my rucksack—but you get my general point.”

  “Dramatic license,” I said.

  “Precisely. Dramatic license. You see, this is why I love you.”

  —

  “Shall we take a break?” DI Ryan says. “Get a stretch of our legs.”

  I just look at her.

  “We could order in some pizza, if you’d like?”

  I’m about to say we only just had lunch but I glance at the clock on the wall and see that it’s 6:35. Actually, it could be midnight, for all I know.

  “I think we should call it a day.” This is Mum. She’s holding my hand. How long has she been holding my hand? From the detective’s expression, she’d prefer to carry on, but Mum says, “Look at her—she’s wrung out.”

  DI Ryan sits back in her chair. Nods. “Sure. We can do that. Gloria?”

  Instinctively, I want to object. Who are they to decide whether I’m okay to go on? But Mum’s right, I’m dropping. A moment ago I was gabbling away and now I can barely hold my head up straight or keep my eyes open. It’s not just that, though; it’s the way she said it. Look at her—she’s wrung out. The way she held—is holding—my hand, her thumb stroking my knuckles like I’ve grazed them and she’s making them better.

  Like she’s on my side.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’d like to stop.”

  “Interview suspended, 6:36 p.m.” DI Ryan doesn’t do a great job of keeping the impatience out of her voice. She clicks off the recording machine. “Grab some food and a good night’s rest and we’ll go again in the morning. Nine o’clock.”

  “Thank you,” Mum says.

  The detective exhales. Smiles at me, softens her voice. “You’re doing really well.”

  I rub my eyes and discover that my face is wet with tears.

  “Where is he?” I ask. Pleading. “What’s happened to him?”

  But DI Ryan doesn’t have an answer for me.

  QUESTION 15: How can you still believe that?

  We don’t go home. Too many reporters, too many cameras. Instead, the police have arranged for us to stay in a smart hotel. They sneak us out of the station the back way, me and Mum ducking out of sight in the rear seat of an unmarked car. No blankets over our heads, though. Which is a pity because I’ve always wondered what that would be like. We enter the hotel through a service door. A detective constable (“DC Washington,” he says, “not to be confused with Washington, DC”) escorts us upstairs and tells Mum the telephone extension of a room along the corridor where a couple of uniforms will be on duty overnight, if we need them.

  “We had our wedding reception here,” Mum says.

  DC Washington seems to find this information unremarkable. “Order whatever you like from room service,” he says. “We’re picking up the tab.”

  If I was Uman, I’d ask for a hundred orchids, two kilos of Belgian chocolate, and enough pink champagne to fill the bath. But I’m not. I’m so spaced—and all of this is so surreal—I barely remember to mumble a thank-you to the cop as Mum ushers me through the door.

  Dad is already in the room, which surprises me but at the same time seems perfectly natural. He’s sitting at the foot of the double bed, watching the news. As we come in, he clicks off the TV. Stands up abruptly. Like we’ve caught him doing something he shouldn’t have been.

  “Hey,” he says. “You made it.” You’d think we’d traveled a thousand miles to get here.

  I gesture at the television. “Was that about me?”

  Dad looks at the blank screen, then back again. “Not unless you’re the president of the United States, no.”

  I don’t know whether to believe him. He looks as if he’s about to hug me but isn’t sure of the etiquette for welcoming his daughter to a “safe room” at a hotel after a day’s questioning by the police. For some reason, one of his shirtsleeves is rolled up and the other isn’t.

  Mum rubs my back. “Long day,” she says.

  “How did it go?” Dad asks, addressing me. He looks afraid of the answer.

  Even though I’ve been home a day or two, I haven’t adjusted to him. He seems smaller than he was before all this. Quieter. He hasn’t shaved today. Dad never fails to shave, even at weekends. Only in photos from way back—pre-kids—have I seen him stubbly.

  I shrug. “Okay, I guess. I mean, I’ve no idea.”

  “The girl done good.” This is Mum. She’s rubbing my back again.

  We’re all just standing here. Hesitant, self-conscious. It reminds me of the time Uman turned up at the house and came into my bedroom. There’s a single bed as well as the double, so I figure we’re sharing. Maybe they think I’ll run off again if I have a room to myself.

  “I brought some clothes for you.” Dad points to a holdall by the wardrobe.

  “Anything that actually goes together?”

  I’ve made him smile. “I wouldn’t have thought so,” he says.

  I see Mum’s expression. “What, I’m not allowed a sense of humor anymore?” I ask.

  She doesn’t reply. She puts her bag down, goes over to the tea-making area, and shakes the kettle to see if it has any water in it. She remains at the counter with her back to us, holding the kettle, but not replacing it on its stand or taking it over to the basin to fill it up either.

  Dad realizes before I do that she’s crying.

  “Liz, sweetheart.” He moves toward her but she shrugs off his attempted hug.

  “Can you give us a moment?” Mum wipes her face on her cuff, roughly, like she’s cross with herself. I think she’s talking to me but she means Dad. “Lor and I need to debrief.”

  Debrief. Do we?

  “Okay,” Dad says. But his tone of voice says it’s not okay, really.

  “I need to talk to her without you jumping in,” she says, turning back toward us. Her face is blotchy, shiny. “Without it turning into a—” She waves a hand in the air. She doesn’t say what it might turn into. “A few minutes, Kev, that’s all. Please.”

  —

  “You loved him,” Mum says, once Dad has left the room. She’s referring to Uman. “In all the time you were gone, that never even occurred to me.”

  “What, you thought I’d just—”

  “I thought he’d taken you. Tricked you, anyway. Manipulated you. And by the time you realized what he was up to, it was too late. But you actually loved that boy.”

  “Yeah.” The word comes out croaky.

  Mum’s eyes are still sparkly from when she was crying just now. “When he said it, by the cash machine—when he said he loved you—was it the first time a boy told you that?”

  I nod. I expect her to say you shouldn’t always believe it when a boy tells you he loves you. Or that we’re too young to be in love—that, when you’re fifteen years old, what you think of as love is nothing of the sort. Or that Uman is absolutely the wrong person to fall in love with. For Christ’s sake, you hardly even knew him. She doesn’t say any of it, though.

  She says, “The other thing I hadn’t realized, till today, was just how much you hated us.”

  Us. Her and Dad. “I didn’t. I don’t.”

  “Sounded like it, Lor, the things you said to DI Ryan.”

  “I don’t hate you, Mum.”

  “You must, to run off like that
—to let us think the worst possible things. D’you have any idea at all how worried we were? Did you even care?”

  “I phoned.”

  “A message. One bloody message—then nothing for two weeks.”

  “I know, I know. And I’m really sorry. But when I was with Uman I—I just wanted to be with him so much more than I wanted to be at home, or at school, or any of that.”

  Any of that. I want to snatch the words back as soon as I’ve said them.

  Mum looks at me for the longest time. She seems old, suddenly. Weary. We’re sitting facing each other—me at the foot of the single bed, Mum in the chair by the desk. She made herself a cup of tea after Dad left, but it has sat untouched beside her while we’ve been talking. This room is too purple. Burgundy carpet, mauve walls, maroon curtains. Even the flowers in the two paintings on the wall are lilacs, I think. Lilac-colored, anyway. The room should smell of black currants, but it smells of lemon-scented air freshener.

  “God,” I say. “That must have sounded so selfish.”

  “Maybe when you have kids…” She lets the sentence trail off. Then, with a half shake of the head, “I sent your father away so we wouldn’t do this.” Squabble, she must mean.

  As we’ve talked, I’ve been sipping at a can of soda from the minibar and working my way through a Toblerone. She watches me break off another triangle of chocolate and slot it into my mouth. At home, in the time before, Mum would’ve told me not to spoil my dinner, but here, now—she just looks disapproving, as if I shouldn’t have an appetite, under the circumstances.

  “Bryher,” she says. “D’you know, when the police asked me where I thought the two of you might’ve gone, that didn’t even come close to making it onto the list.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps because I find it so hard to make a connection between the girl you were back then, on those holidays, and the one you are now.”

  “Sorry for growing up, Mum. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  She sighs. “Lor, I’m trying to understand. Trying to see how it was for you.” Mum jogs the cup with her elbow and some of the tea slops onto the desk. She doesn’t appear to notice. With something close to a laugh, she says, “I’m not doing a very good job of it, am I?”

  “Sometimes, in there today, it was like you were the cop and she was my mum.”

  Even though she tries to mask it, I can see how much that hurts her. “They shouldn’t even be questioning you yet,” she says quickly. “You should spend some time at home, with us. I need to spend time with you—not sitting in a police station for God knows how many hours, watching you being interviewed.”

  “Thanks for making her stop,” I say. “I thought she was going to just carry on right through the night.”

  “Yes, well, I could see you were pooped. You’re a child. She needs to remember that.”

  Child. I let that go. “It’s not me they’re bothered about, really. It’s Uman.”

  “My point exactly. If you need to speak to anyone, after what you’ve been through, it’s a counselor, not a detective inspector.”

  “I haven’t been through anything, Mum. Seriously.”

  She looks exasperated. “How can you still believe that?”

  “He’s not what they think.”

  “And that other time, before—I suppose the police got that wrong as well, did they?”

  “Oh, so this is you ‘trying to understand.’ ”

  “Lor, chicken, the state you were in when they found you…”

  She hasn’t called me chicken since I was about eight. They didn’t find me. And the state I was in by the end wasn’t down to Uman. Not really. As for that other girl…But I don’t have the energy to argue anymore. I’m done with explaining myself for today. Anyway, I’ll have to go through all this tomorrow with DI Ryan: the final days of our fugitivery. What happened. What he did. How it finished.

  “I need a shower,” I say, getting up from the bed. “I stink of police station.”

  —

  Dad’s back. They stop talking the moment I step out of the bathroom and both turn to look at me. I’m wearing one of the (way too big, amazingly soft) white dressing gowns that come with the room, a towel turbaned on my head. My skin is tingly and I must look very pink. I thought a shower might wake me up but, if anything, I feel more tired. I presume Mum has been giving Dad the edited highlights of my day with DI Ryan. From the way he asks about the shower—the user-friendliness of the controls, water strength, temperature—I’m guessing she has also warned him to go easy on me. To talk about anything but my interview. Which is fine by me.

  “Where did you go?” I ask.

  “Just out in the corridor,” Dad says. “I didn’t risk the bar in case any reporters were in there.” Then, to Mum, “I’m not sure they’ve changed the carpets since our wedding bash.”

  I try to picture them back then, in the ballroom downstairs. The banqueting suite. I’ve seen the photos, obviously—the video—but looking at them now, after all that’s happened in the past couple of weeks, I can’t match these versions of Mum and Dad to their frilly-frocked, sharp-suited, twentysomething selves, taking to the dance floor with confetti still in their hair. That night, they couldn’t have dreamed they’d be staying in the same hotel nearly twenty years later.

  Not like this.

  I feel bad for talking to Mum the way I did earlier. Bad that Dad had to stand in the corridor like a kid sent out of the classroom. Seeing them both trying so hard to make sense of all this—to love me, to do the right thing, to be there for me—I know they don’t deserve my resentment. But even as I think it, I resent them for making me feel bad for resenting them. And I hate myself for it.

  They wanted me back. Well, I’m back. This is me now. This is who I am.

  We order food from the room-service menu. While we’re waiting for it, I dry my hair.

  I catch Mum observing me in the mirror. “You should dye it back to its natural color,” she says over the noise of the dryer. “Just while the blond grows out.”

  “They don’t do mousy-brown hair dye, Mum.”

  “I think blond suits you.” This is Dad.

  Mum gives him a look as if to say, You might as well go back out in the corridor if that’s the best you can do. The hair bothered them when we were reunited. Yesterday, was it? Or the day before. I’m losing track already. They didn’t say anything, but I could tell. To them, my blondness was a sign of my “otherness”—the daughter who went away and came back a stranger.

  “Ivan texted while you were in the shower,” Mum says, changing the subject. “He’s coming home at the weekend, once he’s finished his assessments.”

  The ones my brother has to pass to progress to the second year of his degree, and which my disappearance could have (might still have) jeopardized. Apparently, he wrote one essay on the train from London, when he came up to Litchbury to sit alongside Mum and Dad at a televised press conference, pleading for my safe return.

  “He put a P.S. for you as well, sending his love.”

  Mum is my message-taker. I haven’t had a chance to replace the phone Uman threw away and the police are still holding on to my iPad and laptop—trawled through during their investigation for clues to my disappearance, or for evidence against Uman.

  “Love,” I say. “That would be Say hey to G, then.”

  Mum laughs. “Actually, that’s exactly what he said. Word for word.”

  When I came back, he phoned home and told me he was a “legend” at his uni thanks to me. The other students call him Glo-Bro, he said. He sounded drunk. I half expected him to have a go at me over my “stupid disappearing act.” But he didn’t. He said he’d shaved off his beard (he promised to send me a link to the pictures on Tumblr). What he also said was, “I hope the folks aren’t giving you too much grief, girl.”

  I wish it was the weekend. I wish he was here now.

  It crosses my mind to call Tierney from the phone in our room. But how can I,
with Mum and Dad eavesdropping? I snuck a call to her yesterday, on the home landline, but it went straight to voice mail. Just hearing the recording of her singsong, mock-ditzy voice set me off. The message I left was mostly sobs and sniffs, with “sorry” and “missed you” and “really need to talk to you” thrown in, and not much that made sense. Tier is my best friend from way back, and I feel I walked out on her almost as much as I walked out on Mum and Dad. We’ve never kept secrets from each other and yet she knew nothing about the most exciting, most outrageous, most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.

  She hadn’t returned the call by the time the police whisked me away.

  I switch off the dryer and frisk my hair, trying not to remember Uman helping me dye it in the washroom at Temple Meads. His fingers massaging my scalp.

  If I don’t change the color I’ll think of him every time I look in the mirror.

  I try to calculate how many hours it is since I saw him. But I’m too tired to focus.

  When the food comes, we eat around the coffee table: Mum and Dad on chairs, me at the foot of the single bed. I’m still in the bathrobe. I catch Mum glancing at my unshaved legs. The room smells of tuna and melted cheese, chili and chips, beer and Pepsi Max.

  There’s more silence than conversation. The sounds of three people eating.

  Most of my food is gone by the time Dad says, “We were thinking—me and Mum—that maybe we could…After all this business with the police is over, and Ivan’s home, we should go away on holiday, perhaps? Somewhere nice.” He takes a slug of beer. “The four of us.”

  “I’ve just been on holiday.” It’s meant as a joke but comes out wrong.

  They let it go. Dad thumbs the neck of his beer bottle, like it’s a microphone and he can’t figure out if it’s switched on. “New York, maybe. You’ve always wanted to go to New York.”

  New York. The effort it takes not to break down altogether and just let them hold me is almost more than I can manage.