Then You Were Gone. Claire Moss

she told people she worked in book preservation and restoration at the British Library, they would always use the word ‘fascinating’. ‘Oh, how fascinating’, ‘Oh wow, that must be fascinating’. But the word Simone would have used was ‘soothing’. The first time she walked into the building where she worked she had felt everything that she carried around with her in the course of her everyday life fall away. The room where she did her work was entirely white – the walls, the floor, the ceiling – and the light was carefully controlled to allow them to do their fine work without exposing precious treasures to too much damaging sunlight. The air was cool, kept at a constant temperature with no breeze, no disturbance, no noise. People often commented about Simone that she had a certain quality, a certain stillness, that they found calming – although she had sometimes suspected that when they said ‘calming’ they actually meant something else. Something more along the lines of ‘unnerving’. But the truth was, you spend a lot of your life at work. And Simone needed her work to be somewhere that was perfectly and entirely safe. She needed to be able to walk into her place of business and know that the outside world could not reach her, that nobody could hear her or see her, that nobody could come barging in off the street and start shouting and throwing things and grabbing the shift supervisor by her hair and pushing her out of the way because she had allowed one of the customers to ‘flirt with’ (speak to) Simone. This was not something that Simone had ever explicitly articulated, to anyone else or indeed to herself, but anyone who really knew her, that small collection of people who understood, never questioned why she loved to spend her days in the cool white light of this room.

      The only downside – really, the only downside Simone could think of – to her place of work was that, since all the poshing up had been done, there were too many choices of places to eat near St Pancras. Jazzy wanted sushi – Jazzy always wanted sushi. ‘OK, we know, you used to live in Japan; it was ten years ago, stop going on about it!’ Simone always wanted to say. But she understood that, even back in England, to Jazzy eating sushi meant something else. It meant you lived in London, you were young and surrounded by other young people, and you weren’t scared of a little bit of raw salmon. You could not buy sushi in Redruth – or at least you had not been able to when Jazzy was growing up round there. Simone did not care for sushi. She wanted pasta or, failing that, something that came with chips. She had barely eaten over the weekend, her stomach acidic with worry, and she needed some heavy, refined carbohydrates to settle it. Eventually they settled on a Greek place down a side street where Simone ordered moussaka and chips and Jazzy ordered deep-fried baby octopus with a side of taramasalata.

      ‘You do know you’re going to stink?’ she said to him as the food arrived.

      He shrugged, batting a baby octopus from one hand to the other as he waited for it to cool down. ‘Doesn’t matter, got no one I need to impress after this.’

      ‘So,’ Simone said, unable to wait any longer. ‘Why did you want to meet?’

      Jazzy pulled an envelope from his laptop case and handed it to Simone. ‘It’s from Mack. He says he’s sent one to you too.’

      Simone took it from him and read it, wishing she had wiped the aubergine grease from her fingers first.

      ‘What do you think?’ Jazzy asked when she had finished.

      Simone swallowed. ‘I think… Shit!’ she said, more loudly than she had intended, slapping the greasy paper back down on the table, her hands shaking. ‘Oh, shit is what I think. This is crazy, this is bullshit…’ She pointed at the letter. ‘I mean either he’s…’

      ‘Lost it?’

      ‘Well, yeah. Or he’s actually telling the truth and something really bad’s happening to him. What the fuck, Jazz?’ she said angrily. ‘What’s been going on with you guys that I don’t know about?’ She felt hot and sick and was sincerely regretting the slimy moussaka.

      ‘Nothing,’ Jazzy said, and he sounded so plaintive, so boyish and frightened that she believed him. ‘This is as much a bolt from the blue for me as it is for you. Listen, do you know someone called Ayanna?’ he asked. ‘Have you ever heard Mack mention her?’

      ‘No,’ Simone said, her voice incredulous. This was just like Jazzy, being cryptic, ignoring her, asking stupid questions rather than getting to the point. ‘No, I don’t know anyone called Ayanna.’

      ‘Or Anna?’

      ‘My sister’s daughter is called Anna.’ Simone tried her best to sound sarcastic. ‘Does that count?’

      Jazzy ignored her. ‘She’s the cleaner at Anastasia Ltd. – well, the cleaner for the whole office building. Mack was – is – pretty pally with her I think.’

      Simone closed her eyes. ‘Are you going to tell me he’s been having an affair with the cleaning lady and that’s why he’s run off?’

      Jazzy snorted a bleak laugh. ‘No. And she’s not the cleaning lady, she’s just a girl – seventeen. No, what it is, she told me this morning that Mack had been to see her at her sixth form college one day last week. He was waiting outside for her when she finished.’

      ‘What?’ Simone and Jazzy were the only diners in the restaurant and at Simone’s loud protestation all three of the waiting staff looked over. One of them, the only woman, suppressed a smirk as she looked away. She clearly thought the two of them were having a lovers’ tiff.

      A hundred thoughts shot through Simone’s brain. Hanging around outside the school gates? Surely that was what perverts did. Perverts or parents denied access to their children. Mack did not look like a pervert. He did not seem like a pervert. But… a cold, sick shiver rose from her stomach… when she thought about it, until her most of Mack’s girlfriends had been considerably younger than him. And was there a point where liking them young crossed over into something more sinister? She wiped her mouth with a wax-coated paper napkin. Her hand was shaking. Was she really questioning whether or not Mack was a paedophile? The sick feeling washed higher into her throat. Nothing she knew about him seemed stable any more, everything was lurching and tilting in her mind so that the things she thought she had understood about him had flipped around until they looked as though they could mean something else. Christ, she thought, she was losing her grip here. Mack needed to come back, and fast. Clearly she couldn’t keep her mind together without him.

      ‘So why had he gone there?’ she said lamely, at a loss for anything more pertinent to say.

      Jazzy took a deep breath. ‘Well, apparently Mack was in a right state, pale, fidgety, didn’t look like he’d slept. And then, he asked her…’

      ‘Hang on a minute,’ Simone interrupted. ‘Did she not wonder what the fuck he was doing there? Or how he’d found her there in the first place?’

      Jazzy shrugged and looked sheepish. ‘I think to be honest she might have had a little crush on our Mr Mack – you know the effect he has on young girls. And I guess she must have told him which college she goes to – maybe because she was hoping he’d turn up there one day looking for her.’

      ‘Which he did.’

      ‘Well, yes, but not for the reason she’d hoped. Like I said, Mack wasn’t himself – from what she said he was barely even making sense – but apparently he was asking her for help.’

      ‘Help for what?’

      Jazzy winced. ‘This sounds weird – well, it sounds worse than weird. Just remember that this girl has absolutely no reason to lie to us.’

      ‘For Christ’s sake, Jazzy!’ Simone wanted to reach across the table and slap him, put her hands around his throat, throttle him. Just tell me! she wanted to scream, but the waitress was looking sidelong at them and smirking again.

      ‘OK. Well… What it was… He wanted Anna to get him a credit card and passport in a false name, and to see if she could get him access to a car.’ He blurted out the last sentence in a rush, as though once he expelled the words from his mouth, they were no longer his responsibility.

      Simone