‘I like podcasts,’ said Savannah.
‘We never said our names! I’m Joy!’ Joy switched the headphones off and put them on the table. ‘And this is my grumpy husband, Stan.’
‘Thank you for fixing me up, Joy.’ Savannah gestured at her bandaged face. ‘Even though you’re not a medical family I think you did a tip-top job!’
Tip-top. What a funny word. A blast from the past.
‘Oh, well, thank you,’ said Joy. ‘I never – well.’ She made herself stop talking.
‘I had a good feeling about this house.’ Savannah looked around her. ‘As soon as I saw it. It just felt very warm and safe.’
‘It is safe,’ said Joy. She avoided looking at her husband. ‘Would you like something to eat, Savannah? Are you hungry? Have a banana! Or I have leftovers from dinner I could heat up.’ She didn’t give the girl time to accept the offer before she rushed into the next. ‘And then you’ll stay the night, of course.’
She was so glad her cleaning lady, Good Old Barb, had been today and that together they’d vacuumed and dusted Amy’s old bedroom.
‘Oh,’ said Savannah. She looked uneasily over at Stan and then back again at Joy. ‘I don’t know about that. I could just . . .’
But it was clear there was nowhere else for her to go at this time of night and there was no way in the world that Joy was sending this tiny barefoot girl back out into the cold.
chapter four
Now
‘We’re trying to track down that girl who stayed with Mum and Dad last year.’
The beauty therapist, dressed in immaculate white, knelt at her client’s enormous feet as she gently guided them into a footbath filled with warm scented water, floating rose petals and smooth oval-shaped pebbles manufactured to look like they came from a mountain stream.
‘She turned up on their doorstep. Late one night.’
The client, who was booked in for the Deluxe Power Pedicure, ‘a luxury experience for the busy executive’， wiggled his feet against the stones and kept talking, fortunately at an acceptable volume. He’d politely asked the beauty therapist if she minded if he made some calls while he had his pedicure. Most people just started randomly shouting.
‘She’s probably got nothing to do with it,’ he said. ‘We’re just calling everyone Mum knows.’
The client’s phone was in the pocket of his slouchy soft white shirt. He wore AirPods. The therapist’s dad said people wearing AirPods looked like peanuts. （Her dad had recently turned fifty and it was cute the way he thought his opinions still had value.） The client didn’t look like a peanut. He was very attractive.
‘It’s just strange for Mum not to be in touch for this long. Normally she calls me back within two minutes all breathless and horrified that she missed the call.’
The beauty therapist scrubbed apricot kernel exfoliator into the heel of his right foot in hard vigorous circles.
‘I know, but it’s not like she disappeared without a word. She texted us all on Valentine’s Day.’ He paused. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what it said. Hold on a sec.’
He scrolled through his phone with his thumb. ‘Here it is.’ He read out loud, ‘“Going OFF-GRID for a little while! I’m dancing daffodils 21 dog champagne to end Czechoslovakia! Spangle Moot! Love, Mum.” Heart emoji. Butterfly emoji. Flower emoji. Smiley face emoji. “Off-grid” was in capitals.’
The beauty therapist’s mother used a lot of emojis in her texts too. Mothers loved emojis. She wondered what all that ‘dancing daffodils’ stuff could possibly mean.
‘It just means she was texting without her glasses,’ said the client to the person on the phone, who must have been wondering the same thing. ‘Her texts are always filled with weird random phrases.’
The beauty therapist tried to massage his calf muscle. It was like trying to massage granite. He must be a runner.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m going over there now to talk to Dad to see if I can find out more, not that he’ll tell me anything –’
At that moment his foot gave a sudden spasm, the toes splayed at an unnatural angle.
‘Cramp!’ he cried. The beauty therapist swerved her head just in the nick of time.
chapter five
Last September
Joy closed their bedroom door with a gentle, apologetic click, as if Savannah would overhear and know they were only closing it because she was there. They had always slept with their door wide open throughout their married life: so that small anxious children could hurtle straight into their bed after nightmares, so that they could hear teenagers crashing through the house, drunk but thankfully home alive, so that they could rush to administer medication, advice, comfort, so that they could leap from their beds each morning and run straight into the action of their busy, important lives.