Tallulah raises her gaze to the sky. She can feel herself starting to bubble up somehow, like treacle in a pan, just on the edge of burning. Overhead a fat white cloud passes slowly across the sun. She stares into the heart of it, where the sun burns a pale hole through it. She clenches her hands into fists and then relaxesthem again. It’s a question she’s always been too scared to ask herself. All her life she’s been passive. Her school reports always said she was a good student but that the teacher would love to see her contribute more to lessons, would love to hear her voice. At primary school she allowed herself to be subsumed into friendship groups with children she didn’t really like. And then she’d met Zach at a difficult age, an age where her contemporaries were stressing about Saturday-night plans failing to materialise, about boys not replying to their messages quick enough or female friends talking shit about them behind their backs. Having a steady boyfriend had just allowed her to get on with studying, get on with life, get on with putting one foot in front of the other, mindlessly, unthinkingly, day after day after day. Until the day she’d realised she hadn’t had a period for over a month and she’d bought a test from the internet and taken it on a Tuesday morning just before school at the beginning of her second year in the sixth form and seen the two lines and immediately taken another test and thought: Well, there it is. I’m pregnant. She’d mentally calculated a due date that was well beyond the date of her last A level exam and thought, Maybe I should just have it. Because that was the sort of girl that Tallulah was. Her mother might have blessed her with the name of a rebel and a river and a film star, but she had failed to live up to it. She had failed to do anything genuinely proactive until the moment she had leapt across Scarlett’s kitchen that morning after their sleepover and kissed her. It was, she knew, the only moment in her entire life that she had made happen.
She takes her gaze from the sky and directs it back at Scarlett. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, her voice an apologetic whisper.
‘Do you want me?’
She nods, but she can’t quite bring herself to say the wordyes.
‘What else do you want?’
‘Noah.’
‘And?’
‘I don’t know. I just want … I just want to be free.’
‘Yes,’ says Scarlett. ‘Yes. Exactly. That’s exactly what you want. Of course it is. You’re nineteen. You’re beautiful. You’re good. You want to be free. And having a baby shouldn’t stop you being free. Being with me shouldn’t stop you being free. Nothing should stop you being free. The last thing you want at this point in your life is a ring on your finger. You need to cut yourself away from him. And maybe this is the perfect opportunity. Let him propose. Say no. It’s kind of un-come-back-from-able. It’s a one-way exit. Seriously. Let him do it. Say no. Then your life can begin.’
Tallulah has been nodding harder and harder as Scarlett talks. As she finishes Tallulah feels a surge of electric energy pass through every element of her being and she pushes herself towards Scarlett, presses her against the wall and kisses her hard. After a minute she pulls back breathlessly. She stares at Scarlett, at the bright lights dancing behind her eyes, at the glazed wonder on her face, feels the heat of Scarlett’s caught breath against her skin, feels dazzled, beyond anything, beyond words, beyond imagination, by the beauty of her and thinks, I love her. I love her. I love her.
‘I wish,’ she says, tracing her fingers around the contours of Scarlett’s face, ‘I wish that Zach didn’t exist. I wish he would just, you know. Disappear.’
46
September 2018
Kim watches Sophie flying around the internet, her fingertips clicking lightly across the keyboard, chasing this person called Cherry.
‘Cherry,’ Sophie is saying. ‘It’s got to be Scarlett, hasn’t it?’
Kim stares at her blankly.
‘Red,’ says Sophie. ‘They’re both red.’
‘Oh God,’ says Kim, realisation dawning. ‘Of course. Shall we say something to Dom?’
Sophie sighs. ‘I don’t know. The police are using their own techniques to locate Scarlett and her family. Maybe we should just stick with this for a while. Keep out of their way.’
Kim nods. She feels instinctively that Sophie is right.
Sophie scrolls through the Instagram accounts of the main players again: Liam, Lexie, Mimi, Scarlett. Then she scrolls through the Instagram accounts of people who have commented on or liked anything in their Instagram accounts. She mutters the wordCherryrepeatedly under her breath as she does so, and then suddenly she stops. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘Look!’
She angles the screen towards Kim and points.
‘Whose account is this?’ asks Kim.
‘Ruby Reynolds. Roo. One of the Scarlett Jacques clique. She still lives in the area, according to the photos, look.’ She clicks on a photo of a dark-haired girl standing by a tree, wearing a battered leather jacket over a short dress. ‘That’s just over there, isn’t it?’ Sophie gestures towards the village. ‘On the common?’
‘Yes,’ says Kim, peering closer at the photo. ‘Yes. Just to the left of the duck pond.’
‘This was posted only ten days ago. And look.’ She jabs the screen with her finger. ‘Someone called Cherryjack has liked it. Cherryjack.Scarlett Jacques.’
The icon is a photograph of two red cherries hanging off a stalk and a tongue poking at them. The tongue is pierced. Sophie glances at Kim. ‘Scarlett has a pierced tongue,’ she says, breathlessly. ‘I spotted it in another photo on Liam Bailey’s account.’
Sophie clicks on the profile picture and an account comes up. Amazingly, it’s not private. ‘No followers,’ she says. ‘That’s weird.’ She scrolls down through the photos, faster and faster. The girl called Cherryjack appears to live on a boat. The shots are abstract: sunsets over endless ocean, the frothy tips of waves, the gleaming nub of a dolphin’s beak held in the palm of thephotographer’s hand, tanned legs outstretched on cream leather with a dog’s large paw resting on her calf.
Kim peers more closely at the photo of the legs. ‘Can you zoom in on that?’ she asks.
Sophie enlarges the image and Kim stares at it. ‘There,’ she says. ‘There. On her foot, look, can you see it? That black smudge. Look.’