Lost Read online

  LOST

  Lucy Wadham

  for my children, Felix and Lily

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Sunday

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Monday

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tuesday

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Wednesday

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Thursday

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Friday

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Mickey da Cruz sits, his great barrelled torso tipped forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his little hands clasped between his legs. Out of his good eye he watches the swing doors of the cafeteria letting people in and out like a valve, while his weak eye keeps sliding towards his temple, his own private stress signal: their plane is late.

  A young woman in an Avis uniform walks up to the bar ahead of him, drops her bag at her feet and slides her arse on to the stool. Behind her, like a reprimand, comes a priest wearing a black soutane buttoned to the floor. Mickey thinks he sees the priest slowing at the space beside the woman, then passing on to settle two places further along.

  Mickey leans back and takes his cigarettes from his pocket. He lifts the soft packet to his lips and pulls one out with his teeth: you never know, the Avis woman might have eyes in the back of her head. He can see from the way the priest is counting out the change for his coffee that he is a foreigner; probably Italian, like the two brothers waiting for him in the car park. But there are Italians and Italians, and Mickey knows that the Scatti brothers are the scum.

  The plane comes in with a sound like wind in a tunnel and he drops his cigarette, stands up, and turns to look through the plate glass at the runway. People begin to move towards the windows to watch, the men holding their suit jackets over their shoulders. Mickey squeezes the tiny camera in his pocket. It has cost him his savings, but he believes that he will not regret the investment. With it he has the opportunity to show everyone how elaborate his mind can be. When they are still reeling he will be on his way out of here for ever.

  Through the plate glass he hears the engines moan as they slow and stop. He keeps his good eye on the door at the front of the plane. The stairs are long in coming and his anxiety grows as he watches the driver dicking around with his manoeuvre. At last the first passengers step out into the kerosene haze. His eye is aching from watching the stairs and then he spots her, on the ground, moving quickly on the outside of the crowd. Her shape is distorted for a moment by a fault in the plate glass in front of him or the heat rising from the tarmac, he is unsure which. He shifts and she is righted again. She is overtaking the other passengers making their way towards the terminal entrance beneath him. As she draws nearer, he can see the mass at her side is a bag with a coat draped over it. And there are her boys, behind and to either side of her, running to keep up. The elder seems to be wearing a pair of strange spectacles and the younger is clutching a piece of her dress.

  Mickey pushes through the swing doors and runs down the stairs. He takes up his position in the blind spot to the left of the arrivals gate where the first passengers are coming through at a shuffle. The woman is tall and holds her chin up as if to drive the point home. Her arms are long and sinewy, not his idea of how a woman���s limbs should be. And here is the child, the heir, smaller than he had imagined, his yellow rucksack bouncing on his back with each step. The glasses are swimming goggles. Now the mother is passing him, so close he could reach out and touch her. He follows them to the arrivals hall. The woman���s hair sways in one dark block from side to side. She stands still and leans down to hear what her youngest son is saying, holding her hair away from her face. The boy reaches up and locks his hands around her neck, and she straightens, gathering him up, placing him on her hip and moving straight on in one movement so graceful he suddenly feels cold inside, as though a draught were blowing on his entrails.

  As she waits for her luggage, the younger child still in her arms, he smokes another cigarette to settle himself. He notices how she watches the other passengers waiting. She is watching the little flutter of aggression as the moment approaches to grab their possessions and haul them on to the trolley they have fought for. Her eldest is circling her in ever wider orbits. Mickey watches her mother���s radar blinking on and off. He can now feel the adrenaline running to his finger-ends and his heart is booming in his oversized thorax, his body in revolt as he sets himself against the wisdom of the island. He breathes the smoke in deeply. When at last he treads on his cigarette and follows her out into the hot afternoon, he knows he is ready.

  They cross a strip of grass watered by sprinklers. The boys run back and forth through the hanging mist, but she does not wait for them and they tear themselves away and out again with her into the white sunlight that bounces off the road. Mickey turns and walks back to the car, keeping her in sight.

  He sits in the driver���s seat, the Scattis in the back as if he is their chauffeur. The three of them wait with the windows up, the air-conditioning humming. They watch the mother in silence as she emerges from the Hertz cabin. She throws the two bags and the rucksack into the boot and her handbag in through the driver���s door. They can see her irritation as the elder boy fools around. When at last he climbs in she slams the door hard behind him.

  She drives fast, hardly braking on the sharp turns that lead up into the mountains. Mickey opens the window to smoke and swears at her in admiration out of the corner of his mouth: ���Putain,��� he says. ���La garce.���

  In the back the brothers sit side by side, each looking out of his own tinted window, in their dour, foreign silence.

  Chapter One

  As they drove past the playground at the entrance to the village of Santarosa, Sam pulled off his swimming goggles, twisting his head round to get a better look.

  ���Sit down.���

  His mother���s arm came up in front of him like a barrier. He glanced at her, then turned round again to look through the dust wake of the car at the deserted playground.

  ���Sit down, Sam. Please.���

  Dan was asleep in the back, his hair glued to his forehead with sweat. Sam picked a crisp off the seat and ate it.

  ���I said please.���

  He faced forward.

  ���Can we go to the beach?���

  She looked at him. Her eyes told him she was not in a good mood.

  ���Sam. Not now.���

  She glanced at Dan in the mirror.

 
; ���How fast does a scorpion run? Does it go faster than a snake? Which is faster?���

  ���I���ve no idea.���

  ���Come on.���

  ���I don���t know.���

  ���Just say what you think.���

  ���You want me to make up an answer? What���s the point?���

  ���No, but just tell me what you think. The scorpion or the snake?���

  ���The snake.���

  ���Why?���

  ���It���s bigger and it has more muscles. Look, we���re here.���

  Sam raised himself on his hands and looked out at the main square. There were three old people, a man and two women, sitting on the fountain. His mother always made him kiss the old people in the village, one by one, four times each. That made twelve. As they drove past he slid down in his seat.

  His mother was trying to turn into the very narrow street that led up to the big house, but she was not managing. The car was too big to turn. He watched her changing gear, forward and back, forward and back, her silver bracelets clinking on her arm and her forehead worried as she looked in the mirror. He opened his window.

  ���How much can you drink before you explode?���

  ���Just be quiet.��� She changed gear and the engine made a grinding noise.

  Sam turned, took another crisp from the back seat and heard the car scraping along the wall on his mother���s side.

  ���You���ve scraped the car.���

  She jerked the car back and then climbed out. Sam turned and looked at his brother���s sleeping face. He was dribbling out of the side of his mouth. Sam reached out and touched his red cheek.

  ���Leave him!��� his mother hissed. She was at his window.

  Then he remembered: ���My fish!���

  ���Oh, Sam. You didn���t bring it.���

  He opened the door, pushed past her and ran to the boot.

  ���Quick, Mummy.���

  She opened the boot for him and he pulled out his rucksack. It was dripping.

  ���I told you not to bring him.���

  Sam dropped to his knees and unzipped the yellow rucksack. He felt inside and took out the Tupperware box, which had emptied of water, then tipped out the contents on to the road. His goldfish lay unnaturally straight among his plastic men. He picked up the fish and held it on his palm, feeling the softness of it and the coldness, and he looked at its open mouth, and his own throat dried up.

  ���It���s all right, Sam. He���s not dead.���

  She took the fish from him and was gone. He watched her disappear into the H��tel Napol��on on the other side of the square. She was gone too long, and he sat there staring at his plastic men lying stupidly on the ground and tried not to cry. Then she was there, holding out a glass of water, and they looked into it at his fish lying on the rotating surface, dead as dead could be.

  Sunday

  Chapter Two

  The morning heat sprang Antoine Stuart as he opened the wired-glass door to his flat and stepped on to the outside steps. He rented a room on the top floor of this large, clumsy house, built to resemble a chalet. The landlord had painted it peppermint green for the summer ��� to make it seem cooler, he had said, but it looked like icing sweating in the sun. Stuart locked the door and descended the steps. Behind the sound of a coffee-grinder, he could hear a child crying somewhere in the building. He had noted that parents these days seemed unable to leave their children alone.

  The place was full of summer tenants who filled their balconies with brightly coloured inflatable junk and strewed their bathing suits among the vegetation. Stuart said a brief prayer for winter, when he could be alone again and feel the cool, protective silence of the floors below. He had taken the flat for the lock-up garage. He now threw up the metal door and felt for the torch that hung from a nail just inside. A single cicada ground away in the undergrowth. He crouched down and shone the torch beneath his car to check for a bomb. He replaced the torch, then climbed into the car, closed his eyes and turned the key in the ignition.

  There were times when his fear of exploding into oblivion at the turn of the key occupied his body so powerfully it could rub out whole areas of him, shutting off parts of his nervous system so that he could not feel his fingers, his hands, his arms or his stomach. As he drove to work, all he could feel was his feet on the pedals, his physical self reduced to a pair of size forty-one shoes. He knew at such times that when his body returned it would be with one of his great white headaches.

  Stuart backed out of the garage and down the ramp on to the road. He turned left in front of the parasol pine under which Coco Santini���s men had so often stood astride their motorbikes, smoking, watching his comings and goings, for no reason he could see other than to remind him at all times of who his enemy was. Now more and more, as testimony to his own dwindling importance, there was no one there.

  He drove over the sleeping policemen in his street, his head kissing the roof each time. His brown Datsun had lost its suspension and was a disgrace, but the car cult on the island had always sickened him and so he kept his own in protest. He wound down the window, heard sprinklers working behind the hedges and caught the strong scent of eucalyptus.

  He drove to the beach the back way to avoid town. The road wound through a series of garden suburbs in the low hills behind Massaccio. Dogs barked as he drove by. There had once been a craze for poodles, but now there was a preference for dogs that could rip your throat out. He saw Dobermanns everywhere, jogging along the beach at dawn with their skinhead masters, lying across the threshold to more and more caf��s, or walking along the pavements wearing woollen caps with holes for their ears. For most of the kids on the island a pit bull was their first weapon. Stuart had never begrudged the islanders their violence. He understood it; he had been bred for it too. And he could see that it was the only thing they had that fitted in the modern world. But since Santini the violence had become incoherent. It was no longer the simple language of grievance and revenge. It was all around them like airwaves and no one understood it any more.

  Stuart glanced at the empty road in the mirror. They were right: he was no longer worth tailing. He tried to remember when this feeling of detachment had begun. The symptoms were predominantly physical ��� a drying up in his mouth and nostrils, a tightening of his skin, as though he were withering fast, as though some hot wind were blowing and he was shrinking a little every day. Soon G��rard, his deputy, would walk into his office and discover his remains, take him for a peach stone carelessly forgotten on his swivel chair, pick him up and bowl him expertly into the metal waste bin.

  Stuart had stopped calling meetings. The secretaries, Annie and In��s, no longer hovered on the threshold of his office to ask when the next one might be. Narcotics no longer came to him to complain about Homicide, and Zanetecci from Central Office rang and rang on his direct line, but no one answered because he usually pulled it out of the wall. He would have liked to hide at work, but he had never dared close his door ��� he felt it to be somehow mean-spirited ��� and so Annie and In��s, just outside, were aware of his every move and he of theirs. On some days they chatted and laughed; on other days there were feuds and they worked in silence. Stuart often felt hemmed in by the women, affected by their moods, which flowed through the open door of his office and lapped at his feet like a toxic tide.

  He drove into the car park. It was early and there were still spaces under the bamboo awning in the centre. Stuart chose this beach because he was not likely to meet anyone he knew here. It was a family beach with a huge inflatable castle for children to bounce on and there were no bars anywhere near it. Even G��rard did not know he came here and so no one could reach him. He slammed the door of his car and took off his shoes. He walked barefoot over the hot
sand to the concrete steps that led down to the beach. He did not search for a spot but laid down his towel midway between the sea and the steps. There was a scattering of family units, arranged at neat intervals along the sand. As the sun climbed they would become less subdued and take out their beach toys, and the cries would mount and Stuart would be driven away.

  He took off his jeans and his shirt and began to make a mound for his head, pushing the sand with his feet; then he arranged the towel over it and lay down. The few women he had shared a bed with did not like the way he slept. It didn���t suit women, perhaps, if you slept on your stomach. He had sensed that he was expected to include them in his sleeping position, but to feel a head pressing down on his chest had suffocated him even then and would now be out of the question. He remembered what it felt like to be inside a woman. The memory would come to him suddenly and be followed, as now, by a sickening feeling, as though a bridge were giving way beneath him. Sometimes he saw his wife���s face below him, her eyes closed, her chin raised as though she were straining towards her own pleasure, biting her lip in concentration. With the memory of Maya always came the smell of almonds. When he had first met her she had called herself a coiffeuse-shampouineuse. That he had not jumped at the touch of her fingers, but closed his eyes, had been a sign. He had felt the cold, hard porcelain against his neck, listened to the scratching noise of her white coat while she moved, her fingers working, drawing a tree of pleasure that branched across his scalp, down his neck and down his spine, straight to his genitals. He had kept silent while the childish timbre of her voice ran on and on, and he had felt her desire for him, cold as ambition. It suited him that women seemed no longer to notice him, except for Annie at work ��� a woman, he could tell, given to pity.