Once Lost. Ber Carroll

have to pretend I’m doing something else entirely. I kept my writing pad close to his left arm so he could tell where I was at. It was a strangely intimate forty-five minutes — with quite a few surreptitious glances and smiles while we pretended to be total strangers. He gave me a discreet nod when we had all the names covered between us and carrying through with the charade, he left before me. I followed a few minutes later, and outside we grinned at each other like two kids who had got away with something very naughty. Going for a drink had been his suggestion.

      He took another long drink from his beer. ‘What are you going to do next?’

      ‘I’ll cross-check the street addresses with my phone directory spreadsheet,’ I replied, pleased that my voice sounded matter-of-fact, with no signs of the turmoil from his kiss, ‘and identify the Janet Mitchells I haven’t yet contacted. Then I’ll write to them, and hope that they have the courtesy to respond.’

      ‘Of course, this all assumes that your mother didn’t get married.’

      ‘Yes.’ I winced inwardly. He’d hit a sore spot.

      I really don’t know what I’ll do if I find out my mother is married, or — more disturbingly — if she has other children: children who are part of her life. Of course, the possibility has crossed my mind, many times, and just the thought of it is enough to make my eyes glaze over with jealousy, and my knees weaken with hurt. Sometimes, if I’m feeling negative, I imagine the happy, carefree lives these fictional children would have. I imagine my mother, looking slightly older but as beautiful as ever, throwing back her head with a tinkling laugh at these perfect children, whom she hates to be parted from, even for short periods of time.

      ‘She didn’t marry Simon.’ My voice came out sounding unduly harsh. ‘And she didn’t marry my father, so I’m not sure marriage is her thing.’

      He frowned. ‘You haven’t said much about your father. Don’t you want to track him down, too?’

      I shrugged. ‘I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I don’t know the first thing about him — not even his name.’

      According to my birth certificate, my father is a blank, another piece of missing information in my life. But at least it has always been that way, so I can’t claim to miss him. And I had Simon anyway. Not the perfect father-figure, granted, but at least he stuck around.

      ‘Going back to Simon …’ Dan said.

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘I know this sounds terrible, and I don’t want to upset you, but how can you be sure he didn’t murder her? I mean, they had quite a volatile relationship, didn’t they?’

      I shook my head. ‘You’re forgetting that she took some of her clothes. She went of her own free will, Dan.’

      ‘Simon could have staged that,’ he argued. ‘It would have been easy to go through her wardrobe, make it look like she was leaving him.’

      ‘Yes, but the police were all over Simon. They questioned him a million times. And he was too messed up back then to lie. He could barely remember his own name, let alone some kind of elaborate cover-up.’

      ‘Maybe someone else murdered her then,’ Dan suggested.

      ‘She wasn’t murdered, Dan.’

      ‘How can you be so sure?’

      For a moment I considered telling him. Why I was so sure. But the shame of it clammed me up.

      ‘I just know, that’s all.’

      He finished the rest of his beer. ‘So what else could it be? Drugs? Depression? Debt?’

      ‘I’ve considered all those possibilities. Problem is I have nothing tangible to go on. Nothing to suggest that she was addicted to drugs, or that she was sadder than most other mums, or that she was a secret gambler. Nothing stands out. I wish it did.’ I gestured to his empty bottle. ‘I’ll get the next one. As a thank you for today.’

      His help was becoming something I relied on, looked forward to, even.

      The bar was heaving with people, and it was ages before I got served.

      ‘Sorry it took so long,’ I apologised when I finally got back.

      We smiled at each other, and then it hit me like a punch to the stomach: how attractive his smile was, and his eyes too, and the muscles knotted across his shoulders, which — now that I thought about it — had caught my attention more than once as he hunched over the terminal at the AEC office. And how attractive I found his intelligence, the fact that he knew exactly what questions to ask and how he obviously, and with great care, retained the answers I supplied. But more than anything, how attractive it was that he was so helpful, so intrinsically obliging, because that quality, entirely on its own, could quite easily make me fall in love with him.

      As I handed him his beer, I found myself doing exactly as he had done earlier on: kissing him. His lips were still warm. They tasted of beer now. There was a millisecond — I think I startled him as much as he had startled me — before he responded, but within a few moments I felt like I’d been kissing Dan Connolly all my life.

      ‘I do feel the same way,’ I said, just to clarify when we finally stopped kissing.

      We grinned at each other with all the surprise and shyness and delight that come with a new relationship, and I could almost hear Emma sniggering in my ear. From thousands of miles away, ever before I had realised it myself, she had intuitively known just how much I liked Dan Connolly.

      Then again, Emma knows me better than I know myself.