Page 107 of The Love of My Life
The idea of the shack seems like madness, now we’re here. I felt such certainty about it last night, recalling the connection between me and Janice when we’d sat watching the storm. Hours later, sleepless and wired, I feel insane. This whole thing feels insane.
‘Right,’ Charlie says. ‘Let’s do this.’ He gets out of my little car and stretches his long body, groaning with relief. I get out and look at the beach below us, the sheer scale of it. Pale gold sand and blue sea, like a child’s drawing. Dunes doming and cupping the periphery, marram grass bent almost flat in the wind.
We haven’t talked a great deal, even though we’ve been in a car together for several hours. Charlie’s veered between conviction that his mum is going to be up here in the stone shed, and certainty that she won’t. Apart from anything else, he said, his mum had never camped in his lifetime – not even for a night.
‘She doesn’t like roughing it?’ I’d asked, tentatively.
‘She just didn’t feel safe. She was paranoid someone would come into our tent and steal me while she slept.’
That had made for an uncomfortable silence.
Every time I think about Janice Rothschild, something wrenches in my abdomen. Charlie didn’t bring it up in the car, which was a relief, but it’s there: malignant, appalling. I gave up my son because of her lies.
Charlie’s zipping up a windbreaker, swapping his trainers for well-used walking boots.
I’ve always loved that brand of walking boot! I want to say, but I mustn’t bombard him with similarities. I’m scared of anything that might make him think I’m desperate. But, even more than that, I’m scared this will be a waste of time, that we will find nothing but a dusty shed full of sheep shit and picnickers’ litter.
I ask him how he’s feeling.
He thinks about it. ‘Anxious.’
‘That we won’t find her?’
There’s a pause. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Anxious that we will.’
It takes a few seconds for me to understand what he means.
‘Oh, Charlie ...’
‘It’s not just that she was buying paracetamol, it’s her diaries. The recent ones. She sounds really bad.’
I am not equipped for this. I should have kept out of it; allowed Jeremy and Charlie to find Janice. Who was I to think I understood her? That I knew how her mind worked, just because we shared some sandwiches in a shed nearly twenty years ago?
‘Look. Shall we go to your parents’ house, before we go to the shed? Take five?’
Charlie shuts the boot of my car.
‘No. I don’t want to waste another minute. I want to find her, get her to see a doctor.’
I send up a silent prayer. Let Janice be safe. The woman who stole my son, let her be safe.
It isn’t long before I see the shed. It’s not exactly as I remembered, but that’s the thing with memory: it makes up its own stories. They harden and calcify in just the same way as facts, and most of the time we have no idea which is which.
I remember the hut as much bigger, with a couple of windows and a crude chimney, and the remains of a wall circling it, where perhaps once sheep were overnighted.
Now there’s a large bush sprouting into a hole that was once a window, and the door has been boarded over. There’s the remnants of what’s probably a local teenagers’ bonfire outside, but it’s the only sign of life. Nobody has been inside this building for a very long time.
We both stop to stare at it – this tiny, ridiculous shack we have driven for hours to search. Janice was never here. There’s only the sea and the sky; the vast, knowing sky, with its circling marine birds and the secrets it never shares.
Charlie shoves his hands into his pockets and turns to look down at the waves as they fizz out across the sand.
Janice could be anywhere. Even if she’s nearby, how would we actually go about finding her? Every new beach stretches right to the horizon here; you could go hours without seeing a soul. No wonder the Vikings landed on this part of the British coast. It might as well have been the moon.
I sit down in the crook of a sand dune, overcome by exhaustion. I haven’t stopped since Jill semi-kidnapped me yesterday morning. I get out the miserable sandwich I bought somewhere near Newcastle and start eating.
I messaged Jill a couple of times, on the journey up here, but she hasn’t replied.
I know a thing or two about long-term guilt. It burns you from the inside like swallowed acid; it reaches every corner of your thinking. I just hope she’ll let me help dismantle these stories she’s told herself for so long. God knows, I owe her.
