Heatstroke: an intoxicating story of obsession over one hot summer Read online

  The head was young for his role, maybe only a year or two older than Rachel, and seemed perpetually concerned with being likeable. He asked the sixth-formers to call him Graham, and kept his face in a constant, tense Tony Blair smile. It made him oddly unapproachable.

  ‘We’ve spoken to the police.’ His voice cut through, and the silence was genuine now. Rachel could hear her own breath. Graham straightened his burgundy tie. He’d come from the corporate world, and wore a dark suit every day. He paused for seconds too long – it was Blair again, those three-beat breaks in the middle of an utterance – then continued like it was a new topic.

  ‘They’ve let us know some . . . vital information.’ Rachel twisted her onyx engagement ring in full circles with her thumb.

  ‘Lily Dixon, of our Year 10, is now being treated as a missing person.’ His words began to flow more readily. ‘They’re beginning their full investigation today. I’ve agreed that our students can be questioned in school time and on school property. We’ll liaise with them and, of course, offer every support possible.’

  Rachel felt her weight slump against the wall behind her. Hearing him say those simple syllables made it real. She let the handles of her bag drop. She pressed her palms against the wall to support herself. The paint was smooth, shiny, so slick it was hard to gain traction. Lily was missing. This was no overblown teenage strop. Lily was gone. She hadn’t come back. It was real and serious and terrible. The adrenalin juddered through Rachel’s body. The white noise of the room seemed to dial up – the whirr of somebody’s laptop, the clink of spoon metal against china, the scuff of rubber-soled shoes in the corridor outside. Rachel wished that closing her eyes could stop sound as well as light, that it could deprive her of enough senses to breathe freely.

  ‘Oh, dear God.’ Rachel watched as Sandra from the History department was comforted by colleagues, arms around her shoulders. She buried her face in a handkerchief.

  A sob then came from Cressida, the Modern Languages NQT, shaking her head through shuddering sighs. ‘That poor, poor girl.’ Her pale eyelashes were so damp they became transparent, and blue veins peeped through at her temples.

  Rachel wanted to scream at them, She’s not dead, don’t act like she’s dead because that’s how you’ll make it true, but her face stayed neutral.

  Graham also kept his composure. His voice was steady. ‘We’ll host an assembly later this morning to keep the students up to speed. We have no interest in triggering any undue alarm, but we do have to make sure everyone is being vigilant. We don’t know where Lily is, or if any danger is still present. Students will be advised about not walking home alone, and reporting anything that seems unusual. We absolutely need to think about safety, but we also need to keep everyone calm. The final few Year 11 exams will continue as planned this week, and nothing will be disturbed at this stage.’

  The crowded room seemed vacant to Rachel.

  ‘We need everyone to be safe, and to behave as normally as possible. Please stay alert, but keep teaching and stick to your usual schedules.’

  Rachel sat in the empty classroom and closed her eyes. Her thoughts were too cluttered. Only days ago, in this room, she’d worked with Lily, their copies of the text bent over at the spine, key phrases highlighted in pink, blue, green. Lily had learned her lines before any of the others. Her dedication had been a surprise. Her ability had been a surprise. Rachel had expected to turn her down with a few encouraging words, but her audition had been astonishing. Her usual eagerness had fallen away, and she’d become a delicate, tremulous creature. Her words had faded to a wisp; her face had grown fragile. Rachel had hardly recognised her.

  She approached the role with rigour, arriving earlier than the others, writing every blocking note neatly. But it wasn’t just enthusiasm; she’d carved something lovely from the role of Laura Wingfield. Her eyes were wider and bluer than Rachel thought possible.

  At the start, she’d been all concern. ‘Laura’s grown up, isn’t she?’

  Rachel had known that Lily knew the answer. ‘Yeah, early twenties, I think.’

  Lily had spoken in a voice so tiny, Rachel had barely been able to make out words. ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t always feel like I’m even fifteen.’

  Rachel had tilted her head, but said nothing.

  Lily had turned away as she spoke. ‘The others seem so much more, you know, mature. I feel like a kid sometimes. What if that means I can’t play Laura properly?’

  Rachel had shuffled along so their bodies touched. ‘Lily, love, I’m afraid you’re wrong on two counts. Firstly, Laura is in her twenties, but she has such an innocence that she seems much younger. You’ll nail that. Better than anyone else could. And secondly, those girls who seem so much older? Do you see them on this stage? You’re the only one who can do this. This takes guts, and it takes a hell of a lot of maturity. Don’t ever forget that.’

  Lily’s head had stayed turned away, but Rachel had felt the muscles of her back relax.

  We need everyone to behave as normally as possible. That was the edict, but there was nothing normal about this. Lily was missing. Lily, who had been here, right here, all flesh and energy and light. Lily, who Rachel could imagine the warmth of, the smell. The police were launching their investigation; every avenue was being pursued, but it still felt shamefully remiss. They shouldn’t be staying calm, doing a shaky impression of normality. They should be stamping the streets, screaming Lily’s name into the sun, into the black of the night, screaming until their throats rasped, until their breath ran out, until they found her. They should be searching every shed and bush and ditch. Every garage door should be prised open with bare fingers; every loft and cellar should be upturned, scoured, combed. Even if it was pointless, they should be looking. The child was out there somewhere and she should know that they were doing everything to reach her. If it was Mia, she wouldn’t be able to stop. If it was Mia.

  Rachel gripped her copy of the play until the spine cracked in her hands. Lily’s own copy was somewhere. It could be safe on her bedroom desk, marked with fingerprints and pencil. Or it could be destroyed, ripped and bloodied, left to pulp in some damp, unknown place.

  In the first period after assembly, Rachel was looking after Mark Webb’s Year 9 physics. She rarely ventured to the science block, rarely covered another teacher’s lesson, but the skewed summer timetable demanded it. As the class entered the room, it was the noise Rachel noticed. A sort of animal whimper, the sound of thirty teenagers struggling at once. When the news had been announced in the hall, there had been yelps from some of the girls, tears springing in an instant. They’d been instructed to silence, and obeyed, but once they were in their classroom, a rumble took hold, a low-level buzz as they gathered in small groups. They were frightened. Rachel watched a huddle of girls near the window, holding each other’s arms and stumbling through the clichés of peril: ‘. . . could be dead . . . not walking home . . . could get snatched . . . any of us . . . strike again . . .’ She couldn’t bear where imaginations were leaping.

  ‘Girls!’ They jolted as one, primed for a scare. The whole class hushed. Rachel spoke quietly and slowly. ‘Listen. None of us know what has happened to Lily Dixon, and this kind of childish speculation isn’t going to help one iota.’ They looked down, eyes still wide. ‘Now sit in your seats, and I don’t want to hear a single word more.’

  They did as they were told. Rachel stood behind a desk that wasn’t hers, feeling her breaths arriving twice as fast as they should.

  She put my arm about her waist / And made her smooth white shoulder bare. Rachel stood at the front of her Year 10 class and inched them through the poem. Line by line, she nudged them to the responses they’d need to parrot in their exam a year from now, hitting every bullet point on her lesson plan. She’d taught the poem every summer for five years. She kne
w exactly which parts to emphasise, which to gloss over, which they’d need to write down and remember. But that day, it was appalling. Rachel couldn’t process the images, couldn’t interpret the words. Her eyes were ringed with salt. The scorch of no sleep was not eased by caffeine, just made into a shriller sting.

  She turned away from them – those twenty-seven sets of eyes – and gulped water from the two-litre bottle of Evian she kept on her desk. She breathed consciously, counting the beats as her lungs filled – two, three, four – and the beats as they emptied. It was only second period, but there was no air coming from the windows, and the class was shaky. Their distress was expressed through fidgeting: hooking their feet around the legs of their chairs and tilting backwards, teetering for minutes before crashing forward when it got too precarious. The girls occasionally grabbed their hair on top of their heads, twisting it around their fists, letting the marginally cooler air hit the skin of their necks, before tumbling it all down again with a sigh. It was only ten past eleven.

  Rachel turned back. And all her yellow hair displaced. She enjoyed reading aloud in her classroom. If she stood in the right spot, an echo would ring, and make the words sound ancient. But that day the Browning poem – looming behind her on the interactive whiteboard – repulsed her. The assembled teenagers seemed undisturbed by the image of the beautiful, inert girl. Perfectly pure and good. Rachel assumed they simply weren’t listening, weren’t reading the words. Despite their red eyes and occasionally shaking breath, they seemed blind to the delicate corpse at the heart of the text. Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss.

  Rachel drilled them to trot out their responses, fleeting over rhyme patterns and key metaphors. A sudden thought of one so pale. She’d prepared for the lesson three days before, when it was merely a smart way to engage Year 10 on a Monday near the end of term. Now, the images were too real. The black, dead eyes of the poem-girl, the hair clinging around her neck. Three times her little throat around. Rachel couldn’t stop seeing it when she closed her eyes. The blush on her cheek faded, her skin mottling greener with every minute. The smiling rosy little head. The weight of her thighs and arms, the cold flab that might now just be meat. The minute dwelling on the flesh of the dead woman. The crawling gaze. Where was she? That lovely, pretty girl with her yellow hair and pale skin. Where was Lily now? What had happened to her, and who had taken her away? What kind of monster had snatched her, and what was he doing to her? Was she crying out into empty air for help; was she sobbing with no one to hear?

  Rachel felt it like a fist on her windpipe, a punch more than a grasp. She found herself in the corridor. The door thud resounded. There were no eyes to see her there. They were all still back in the classroom. Had they even seen her leave? She let herself slump to the ground. The linoleum was gritty, and her trousers and shirt and her ballet pumps would be filthy with the scuffs and grime of the morning, but she didn’t care. Her throat was brittle. She fought to breathe. Rachel felt calcified, as if she was gasping through stone.

  Rachel could feel the warmth pulsing from the passenger seat. The smell of black bean sauce, of chicken and mushrooms, fugged through the car, and the polythene bag was already sweating. The meal didn’t feel like a treat.

  Mia sat on the back seat, protecting their more precious cargo. Rachel had waited in the school car park for long minutes, watching the doors, scanning every face until Mia’s had finally leapt out. The car park had been choked, with every parent finding a way to leave work early. The pavements had remained untrodden; every pupil was safe within a family saloon. Rachel had waited whilst Mia kissed Aaron, her boyfriend of a few months, goodbye. She’d considered changing their plans, delaying, but the doctrine of normality had been too well imposed. She didn’t want to scare Mia. The Prom was just over two weeks away, and her dress was zipped pristine in a grey garment bag. It sat propped up, like a passenger in its own right, rigid and vacant. Mia had tried it on months before, but the tiny, crucial alterations to the neckline and hem had only just been perfected. The lilac dress had cost nearly double what Rachel had ever spent on a single item of clothing, but Tim had insisted Mia have whatever she wanted, so Rachel had smiled blithely as Mia tried on dozens of frocks, each one frothier and more revealing than the last. Next year would bring the same performance. Year 10 as well as Year 11 were invited to the event, making the girls squeal when they heard the news. The bagged dress was the bulk and height of a person, and peeked at the edges of Rachel’s peripheral vision as she drove. Its blankness spooked her.

  Rachel’s hands felt uneasy on the wheel. The vinyl was too hot to hold firmly, and her palms slipped with sweat. They’d been driving for ten minutes with little conversation. Every time she could pass it off as vigilant road safety, Rachel snuck a glimpse of Mia in the rear-view mirror. Her job had taught her nothing if not the transformational power of silence. She just had to hold out. Rather than swing onto the ring road, she turned left, taking a winding route through the back lanes. The car felt safe; its case of metal more protective than any other space. Rachel wanted to linger there with Mia only feet away. She didn’t turn the radio on. The only noise was the white blare of the air-con.

  Rachel caught Mia’s eye, finally, and held it, raised an eyebrow. She knew she had to concede, had to speak first, but did so in a whisper. ‘You okay?’ Mia only shrugged. It took grit, but Rachel let the silence swell until one of them had no choice but to break it. Mia shuffled, tugging at her seat belt, pulling it away from her neck as if it was strangling her, then settled. Rachel bit down on the inside of her lower lip.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Rachel counted the fat seconds until Mia spoke again. Her voice was high.

  ‘She’ll be okay, won’t she?’ Mia’s lips twisted. ‘She didn’t tell me she was going anywhere. She didn’t say anything.’

  Slopped onto plates, the food looked repulsive. Thick sauces and hot meat seemed inedible. They both picked with forks, but lifted little. Rachel’s throat had not yet relaxed. The house, closed up all day, was stifling. Every window had been flung open, but there was no breeze to beckon in. Rachel tried to talk.

  ‘How are your friends feeling?’

  Mia shrugged, a tiny movement.

  ‘Are they scared? Is anyone upset?’

  Mia’s lips pushed together, her head twitching in a near-nod. Rachel didn’t know how to respond. Then a phone trill. Rachel grabbed it from her pocket, her body jolted by its vibrations. A name flashing on the screen. Marianne. She swiped it open.

  Marianne’s voice was as steady as ever, even more soothing so close to her ear.

  ‘We’ve got some news.’ Her tone gave nothing away.

  Rachel felt her head grow light, a buzz in her hands, her skin.

  ‘It seems that Lily took more than they thought.’

  Marianne paused, but Rachel could gather no words to respond. She just waited for the news to make sense.

  ‘Debbie just called me, I’ve just hung up from her this second. At first, they could find nothing missing except Lily’s school bag, with her wallet and a few other bits, but they’ve apparently looked more closely.’

  Rachel could only murmur, ‘Mmm?’

  ‘An overnight bag has been taken from their loft, something they hardly ever use, tucked away right at the back, they’ve only just realised.’

  The words formed meaning and Rachel felt her body come back to her. ‘Oh, God, she chose to go. She planned it.’

  Mia jumped from her seat, all alertness, and stood so close to Rachel she’d be able to hear every word of Marianne’s in miniature. Rachel couldn’t see Mia’s face, but could feel her hands on the back of the kitchen chair, tapping with no rhythm at all, an insistent random beat.

  ‘So it seems, so it seems. Debbie’s relieved, of course, as much as she can be.’

  Rachel felt her own shoulders release and the thrumming under her skin ease. She exhaled. ‘
Oh, lord.’

  ‘But the little madam went further than that.’ Marianne’s voice was measured, too calm for the news it delivered. ‘She took a few pieces of her mum’s make-up, and something quite personal of Debbie’s.’ Marianne was being overheard too. It was there in her voice. The restraint. The signal to Rachel that there were words they couldn’t say.

  Rachel needed to ask. ‘Personal?’

  ‘A lace teddy from her drawer. Debbie says it’s years old, from before Lily was born. She had no idea Lily even knew it existed.’

  ‘A teddy? Like a nightdress?’

  ‘A little more intimate, from what I can gather.’

  Mia’s tapping stopped. Rachel wished she could talk to her friend, that other mother, share their reactions far away from their daughters. With Mia there, she had to stop the conversation.

  Before the phone was away from Rachel’s ear, Mia was talking. The silence had shattered, and she was all words. ‘It’s good news, isn’t it? It’s good. It means she’s okay.’ She was jabbering. ‘It means she wasn’t taken, she wanted to go.’

  Mia hopped from foot to foot, as if unable to still her insides. Rachel watched her daughter’s jig on the kitchen’s grey slabs, and saw the food cooling and congealing on their plates.

  When Mia was in bed, and the house was still, Rachel shut herself in the downstairs toilet. She closed the door behind her, sat on the lid. Being behind a door, in the smallest room possible, felt necessary, urgent. Lily had chosen to go. There was no shadowy villain stalking their streets. No other girls were in danger. Mia was safe. The relief was nearly physical. Rachel reached over to lock the door, needing another layer of distance from anyone else. Her hands could barely turn the bolt, her weak fingers fumbling, unable to twist the metal. The lock finally clicked, and she slumped to the floor, as near to alone as she was able to be.