The Family Friend, C. MacDonald [ereader for android TXT] 📗

that clatters a Lego structure over into the occupant’s lap. She puts up a hand in apology and gets an irritated acknowledgement. As she walks off, her eyes fix on a row of different colours lining the top of the front desk’s iMac. Post-its. Blue, orange, yellow, green. Green. Sonnet 116. ‘It is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’ Raf wrote that note. Raf’s love is never-changing. Raf’s love for Amanda is unshakeable in the face of whatever it comes up against. He told Erin to stay in bed all day. He’s gone to London. And Amanda’s with her baby.

Erin slows her run as she rounds the corner onto the cliff front. She bends forward and puts her hands on her knees, breath heaving. She hasn’t run since giving birth, her hip rags, her chest feels clamped shut. Raf’s not answering his phone. Nor is Amanda. She sees a group of mums walking out of the decrepit cinema cafe that the singing group is held in. Caz is there, laughing with a woman called Carla.

Erin rushes across the road – a grey Transit van has to swerve to avoid her and hoots his disapproval, which makes the emerging mums and dads look over in her direction.

‘Where is she? Did you not get my text?’ she gasps to Caz who, seeing her friend’s distress, picks up Imogen and comes out of the scrum to meet her.

‘Not seen my phone. What do you mean? Who?’

‘Amanda, Amanda’s got Bobby, she was meant to be at the group.’

‘She wasn’t there, thought Bob must have fallen asleep at home,’ Caz says. Erin looks out to the sea. She shuts her eyes, holds them closed. Her boy is gone. ‘Erin, what’s going on?’

‘Let me look at your phone,’ Erin says, eyes still closed, voice robotic.

‘What? What’s happened?’

‘I need your phone.’ Caz hands it over. Erin goes into Instagram. Scans Sophie’s Insta-feed, Mercedes’, Kristina’s. She goes onto the feed of the group Caz has just been in to look at the group photo of the class, as if perhaps her friend somehow missed Amanda and Bobby being there. She turns and heads towards home when she realises she still has Caz’s phone. She doubles back and gives it to her.

‘Come on, get in the car,’ Caz says, ‘we’ll find them.’ Erin nods, though she feels catatonic. Where could they be? In London? With Raf? She checks her dumbphone again. Nothing. No returned call from Raf.

‘Let’s check home first.’

Erin leans her head against the cold glass of the window of Amanda’s studio. They’re not here. They’re not in the house. She clenches her fists to stop her hands shaking but it just transfers the tremors into her arms. She’s lost her baby. That woman has taken her baby. Or was it Raf that’s taken him? Or, she thinks, and she knows that even back to that moment when she walked into the house and heard the sound of moaning from Bobby’s bedroom, there was a seed in her head that this could happen, they’ve taken him together.

The shakes have spread to her shoulders now, her chest, and as she turns her head on the glass so her hair smears into it, she begins to make a sound that comes from deep inside her. She looks up and screams at the wooden patio roof, slamming her flat palms against the glass. She stops, hands still on the cold glass now, breathing huge audible huffs out of her nose. She steps away from the glass, thinks about sitting down on the edge of the decking, but then doesn’t. She gets her dumbphone out, still no messages, and is about to call the police when she notices a smear of something on the inside of the glass door. It looks like glue, a slug’s trail of glue, as if a toddler’s got excited with the Pritt Stick. She goes into the room and presses it with a fingertip. It’s not glue but it is tacky. She looks around the room and then she finds the answer. A pad of orange Post-its rests on the draining board of the tiny sink.

Erin goes over to it and sees a biro indentation but she can’t make out what it says. She races back into the main house where Caz and Imogen are waiting for her. Caz must have just watched Erin wailing at the sky because she looks bewildered.

‘We should go out and look,’ she says, ‘something might have happened to them.’

Erin waves the pad of Post-its in front of her and goes into Bobby’s room. The smell, she’d never noticed how wonderful her little boy made that room smell. She gets a physical pain in her stomach at how much she misses him. She finds what she’s looking for at the bottom of a storage box under his cot. An unopened packet of crayons, a gift from one of her mum’s friends, that she wrenches open. She pulls out the purple one and rubs it over the indentation to reveal Raf’s message.

Room 332

Premier Inn

Heathrow Terminal 4

61

15 June 1999

He didn’t come home last night. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning and I’ve got no idea where he is. Something must have happened to him and I’m terrified. I don’t know what to do. We don’t have a phone and of course I can’t call the police. If he’s not back by the evening I might have to go out to the local shop and – I don’t know. What if I give away where we are? Donny’s said that the police are on Craig’s side. That he’s enlisted them to look for us. What if Donny’s fine, what if he just got stuck somewhere? Then I will have given away where we are and we’d have to move again just as we’re getting settled. I can’t go look for him myself. If only I