Say You're Sorry(3)
As the train edges past, I see what they’re trying to shield. At first it looks like cast-off clothing or a dead animal, but then I recognize the human shape: a body, trapped beneath the ice like an insect locked in clear amber.
Charlie sees it too.
“Was there some sort of accident?”
“Looks like it.”
“Did they fall from a train?”
“I don’t know.”
Charlie presses her forehead to the glass.
“Maybe you shouldn’t look,” I say. “You might have nightmares.”
“I’m not six.”
The train shudders and picks up speed again. Snow swirls like confetti from the roof. For a brief moment, the world has tilted out of true and I feel a sense of growing disquiet. There is a void in the world… somebody not coming home.
I’m here.
I want to shout it.
Scream it.
I’m here.
I’M HERE
I’M HERE!
Three days. Something has gone wrong. Tash should be back by now. Maybe George caught her. Maybe he hit her over the head with a shovel and buried her in the forest, which he always said he’d do if we escaped.
Maybe she’s lost. Tash doesn’t have a great sense of direction. Once she managed to get lost at Westgate Shopping Center in Oxford when we were supposed to meet at Apricot to spend my Christmas money on a beaded belt and a pair of dark wash jeans.
That’s the day Tash got into a fight with Bianca Dwyer and threatened to stab her with a pen because she was flirting with Aiden Foster. She would have done it too. Tash once stabbed me with a pen, right through my school tights. I have the world’s tiniest tattoo as evidence. She was angry because I lost the friendship ring that she gave me for my twelfth birthday.
Anyway, Tash has a terrible sense of direction—almost as bad as her taste in boyfriends.
I’m so cold it’s unbelievable. I’m wearing every piece of clothing—and some of Tash’s stuff too. I know she won’t mind.
I pull the blanket over my head. Smell my stale breath. Sweat. Every little while I poke my head out and take a few gulps of clean air and then duck under again.
Maybe I will die of the cold before they find me.
It was different those first few weeks. It was summer and the attic room was hot under the tiles. We had a proper bed, decent food and could watch the TV. George told us we’d be going home soon. He didn’t seem like a monster. He brought us magazines to read and oversized chocolate bars.
I don’t know if George is his real name. Tash came up with it. She said it suited him because he looked like a younger, fatter version of George Clooney, but I think we should have called him Freddy like the guy in Nightmare on Elm Street or that other sicko who wears a hockey mask and carries a chainsaw.
In the beginning George talked a lot about a ransom.
“Your parents are rich,” he told me, “but they don’t want to pay.”
“That’s not true.”
“They don’t want you back.”
“Yes, they do.”
It was another lie. There was never going to be a ransom demand. How can you pay for something if nobody knows the price?
Chained together on the bed, we watched the TV, waiting for news. Meanwhile, the country watched their TVs and waited for news. Everybody had an opinion. Every rumor was dissected. We were kidnapped by an Internet pedophile, according to one story. He’d met us online in a chatroom and made us take off our clothes. As if!
A clairvoyant from Bristol said we were dead and our bodies had been dumped in water. The police dragged the river at Abingdon and searched dozens of wells and drainage ditches.
Mrs. Jarvis, our next-door neighbor, told police she saw a man peering through her bedroom window when she was undressing. Tash laughed at that one. “Jarvis leaves her bedroom curtains open every night, hoping someone might look.”
A London cabbie claimed he’d seen us outside a cinema in Finchley. And a motorist in High Barnet reported seeing two girls in the back of a white van pressing their hands against the windows.
Why is it always a white van? Nobody ever sees kids being snatched by people in purple vans or yellow vans.
Tash’s brother Hayden told reporters that he’d seen a man acting suspiciously in a field not far from Bingham. He took them back to the scene, pointing out the exact place. When he talked about Tash he almost cried, wiping his eyes and threatening to kill anyone who hurt her.
It’s amazing how the truth can be stretched so thin that if people turned it sideways it would probably disappear. It’s like they invented a fantasy version of our lives and pretended it was real.
The Sun offered £200,000 for information leading to our recovery. Suddenly, there were “sightings” in Bristol, Manchester, Aberdeen, Lockerbie and Dover—surges of hope and then despair.