After You Were Gone (eBook)
336 Seiten
No Exit Press (Verlag)
978-1-915798-03-9 (ISBN)
Vikki Wakefield writes fiction for young adults and adults. Her books explore family, class and relationships in a contemporary setting. Her novels All I Ever Wanted, Friday Brown, Inbetween Days and Ballad for a Mad Girl have been shortlisted for numerous awards. This Is How We Change the Ending won Book of the Year: Older Readers, Children's Book Council Awards, 2020. After You Were Gone, a psychological thriller, is her first novel for adults. She is working on her second.
Vikki Wakefield writes fiction for young adults and adults. Her books explore family, class and relationships in a contemporary setting. Her novels All I Ever Wanted, Friday Brown, Inbetween Days and Ballad for a Mad Girl have been shortlisted for numerous awards. This Is How We Change the Ending won Book of the Year: Older Readers, Children's Book Council Awards, 2020. After You Were Gone, a psychological thriller, is her first novel for adults. She is working on her second.
BEFORE
When I was a child I believed there was a place where lost things collected, the way sea-drift found its way ashore to the same sheltered cove on our beach. I never knew if it was a story I’d heard or one I had made up, but I could picture it clearly: a black hole where time stood still and the lost things lingered – socks, shoes, purses, keys, missing pets – until people stopped looking for them and they faded from memory.
After Sarah was gone, I imagined her in that place. Suspended, sleeping.
Not knowing was like living inside a well with slippery sides and the occasional crack between stones, a foothold, a scrabbling place. I yearned for answers; I tortured myself, going over the things I could have changed if only I had been paying attention.
After Sarah was gone, I moved on, but I built my house around the well. While I was busy living, it sank deeper; the distance was greater, the light dimmer. This time the climb might be impossible, but I had no choice – I let myself fall.
My life is a story in two parts.
Before.
After.
The day my daughter went missing, we were at war.
Our two-bedroom, ground-floor unit in the outer suburbs was one of twelve, close to a busy main road. I wanted to go to a weekend street market. At the time I didn’t have a car, but the buses ran hourly and our stop was only a ten-minute walk away. The bus I wanted to catch arrived in fifteen minutes, but Sarah was still standing in the hallway, facing the wall, arms folded.
‘It’s going to rain,’ I said. ‘You’ll be cold. Put on some long pants and a jacket.’
She shook her head and stamped her bejewelled flip-flops.
I tugged at her dress – pink with a leotard bodice and a tulle skirt, more suitable for a fairy-themed party than an unseasonably cool day. I’d taken her to see the fireworks at the beach the night before and she was overtired and bad-tempered.
‘We’ll miss the bus. Quickly – get changed.’
She slapped my hand. ‘You can’t make me!’
I stepped away lest I slap her in return. ‘We’re not going until you do as I ask.’
‘I don’t want to go. It’s too far. The market is just stupid people and weird fruit.’
She flounced to her bedroom. Seconds later, I heard the chime of her jewellery box and the clack of beads.
I followed, taking deep breaths, and watched her from the doorway.
Sarah didn’t look much like me except for her skin tone and build: golden and quick to tan, slim but muscular. She could hold a handstand against a wall for five minutes and turn eight cartwheels in a row, but her hair was straight and dark, unlike my tight blonde curls, and so silky it slipped from a hair tie. She had fuller lips, inscrutable expressions, and eyebrows that threatened to meet. Fierce, independent and intelligent in a way that was spooky in a child, Sarah delighted in pushing me past logic and into pure reaction. If I lost my temper, she would smile.
‘Sarah, let’s go!’
I should have given in. If there was ever a moment in my life I could change, it was then.
But I listened to that infuriating chime, let my frustration build and peak, and by the time I’d dragged her from her bedroom, her graceful neck weighed down by a string of beads, she was crying. She grabbed her ever-present drawing supplies from the dining table – a leather briefcase that made her look like a tiny office worker – and tried to stuff her doll Annie inside. The catch wouldn’t close.
I wrenched the doll away and flung it on the couch. ‘I’ll just end up carrying her around. Leave Annie here.’
The police would ask me later if I saw anyone parked outside our block of units, if it was possible we were followed. I told the truth when I said I didn’t see anyone, but I was in no frame of mind to notice details. Even hypnotherapy only gave sharper, more painful focus to the things I’d done: squeezing Sarah’s hand too tightly, barking words I meant at the time and regretted later. The time I was trying to make up with long strides, pulling her along the footpath, was counteracted by her dragging weight. Sarah retaliated by plonking herself down, but I hauled her up by the armpits and recommenced our slow progress, unwilling to give her what she wanted – to go back home, and also, I suspected, to win.
We missed the bus.
The next one came after an hour of stony silence – Sarah scribbling furiously in her scrapbook, only breaking concentration to glare at me, covering her work with her arm so I couldn’t see. Another portrait of her monstrous mother, no doubt. Sometimes she gave me a ball gown and wings; more often it was bulging eyes, claws and sharp teeth. Her mutinous expression had softened, but it had been replaced by a resoluteness that made me fear she was building towards a humiliating public tantrum.
But I won.
We got off the bus and trudged the last five hundred metres to the market in Buskers Lane, a cobbled street flanked by the kind of narrow-fronted shops that relabelled and resold imported goods as designer fashion and homewares. It was a busy, crazy maze: outside the shopfronts, stalls flanked a pedestrian walkway just wide enough for four people abreast. It was mostly junk jewellery, deep-fried food, homemade crafts and cheap souvenirs, but Sarah loved the snow cones and I always headed for the fresh produce.
Despite my insistence that Sarah should wear appropriate clothes, I’d worn ridiculous shoes: wedge heels that made walking on the uneven cobblestones difficult. My ankles ached, but I was determined not to go home until I’d filled my shopping bag with weird fruit and taught my daughter a lesson.
‘Look, they have those crane kites you always wanted.’ Sarah was subdued.
‘No.’
‘Raspberry snow cone or Coke?’
She glared. ‘They make my teeth hurt.’
I pointed to a man making balloon animals, but Sarah was having none of it.
‘No.’
‘If you don’t snap out of it soon, miss, you’ll be going to bed at six o’clock for a week.’
It started to rain, a fine, floating mist that turned the cobblestones shiny and slick, enough to send people scurrying for cover.
I stopped at a stall to feel and smell the produce. The vendor held an umbrella over my head.
Sarah tugged at my arm. ‘I want to go home now.’
‘Then you’d better start walking.’ I said it without thinking, and picked up a spiky fruit. ‘What are these?’
‘Ritlee rambutan,’ the woman said. ‘They’re grown in North Queensland.’
‘Fresh?’
‘Came down yesterday. The jackfruit are from the Northern Territory. Very fresh.’
After choosing six rambutan and two jackfruit, I unfolded a canvas shopping bag and carefully placed the fruit inside. When I turned to speak to Sarah, she was gone.
‘Did you see my little girl?’ The vendor shook her head. ‘She was right here.’
I checked under the table. I looked up and down the street. No Sarah.
My temper flared again; instead of the expected tantrum, she’d pulled a disappearing act.
‘You saw her, though, right?’
She shook her head again. ‘No.’
‘She’s wearing a pink dress. If she comes back, can you tell her to wait here?’ I picked up my bag and ducked into a side street where I had a decent view of the area.
The rain was heavier now. My hair was sticking flat to my head and my arms were covered with goosebumps, but my primary concern – and I would later admit this to the police – was that Sarah was hiding somewhere, watching. I suspected she had witnessed my rising panic and found another way to punish me.
So I hid.
I stayed there for at least five minutes, hoping Sarah would blow her cover when she realised I had gone. I wanted her to be the lost child standing in the middle of the street, crying because she couldn’t find her mother. People would stop to help her. Still I’d wait, until her panic matched mine and she was inconsolable. I know I wasn’t the first parent to think about pulling this trick, but maybe I was the first to actually do it, and to have the stunt backfire in such a spectacularly devastating way.
Ten minutes later, I’d abandoned my shopping bag and my ridiculous shoes under a table. I never found them again.
I worked my way from stall to stall. ‘Have you seen a little girl?’ I described her hair, her beads, her dress. Held my hand waist-high. Told them her name. My feet were bleeding, my left big toe stubbed and shredded.
A crowd began to gather.
‘How long has she been missing?’
‘Could she have run off?’
‘Should I call the police?’ a woman asked.
‘I don’t know!’ I wailed. ‘No. Yes!’
Somewhere, an accordion was playing the ‘Beer Barrel Polka’ in an endless loop. I’d never get the tune out of my head. I watched a blue helium balloon detach itself from a bunch and sail away – I remembered that, but I couldn’t recall the faces of the people who tried to help.
It didn’t occur to me that she wouldn’t come back, or that we wouldn’t find her. My panic was still laced with guilt and, if I am honest, anger.
Despair came later.
Over the following hours the search spread from the laneway to nearby streets and parks; the police knocked on doors and searched shops, warehouses, roofs, even drains, anywhere a child might have been hurt or become lost. The sky darkened. More rain...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 6.7.2023 |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | London |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Krimi / Thriller |
| Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Dramatik / Theater | |
| Schlagworte | Australian • drama and plays • Drama and plays:thriller books • D. S. Butler • family tension • gripping • gripping books • gripping thriller • Kidnapping crime fiction • missing child • missing children • mother daughter • Murder Mystery • must read book 2023 • Mysteries • new crime • new thriller • Psychological thriller • Secrets • Stalking • strong female lead • suspenseful • suspense thriller books • thriller and crime • thriller books • Twists • Vigilante Justice • Women • women sleuths |
| ISBN-10 | 1-915798-03-5 / 1915798035 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-915798-03-9 / 9781915798039 |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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