Shallow Be Thy Grave Read online

  Lily cursed herself. Why the fuck hadn’t she picked up the call?

  “Please. Lily. Are you there? Oh, God.”

  Fiona’s last words were drowned out by her sobbing and then the connection was cut.

  “When was that?” asked Stuart.

  Jo replayed the message. The electronic voice droned out the date. “Message. Received. Thursday, May 3rd, at eleven, forty, five pm.”

  “Where the fuck were we?” asked Lily.

  “Thursday? That was The Wedding Present gig-”

  Jo stopped speaking as Lily flapped her hands to listen to Fiona repeat the same words. The last sentence sounded like, ‘I’ve got no one.’ Lily leaned forward, her head almost touching the answer machine. Fiona sounded about twelve years old. The guilt tasted like vinegar. “What’s that about?”

  No one answered.

  “What’s today?” asked Lily, standing up.

  “The 9th,” said Stuart.

  “Wednesday,” said Jo, as Lily flashed Stuart a look of confusion. “That was six days ago.”

  “Why the fuck haven’t we listened to the messages?” Lily asked no one in particular.

  The machine continued to play. A message from Lily’s boss at the Fenton asking if she could work an extra shift. Another from Jo’s mum. Then Lily heard her father’s voice, curt and clipped. “This is a message for Lily. Lily Appleyard. Could she please ring as soon as she gets this message? Thank you. It’s her father. David.”

  Like she had a plethora of fathers ringing her.

  His next two messages were the same, only more urgent, resorting on the final one to the second person, “Can you please ring.”

  Then Stuart’s voice, “Hi Lily.” Jo hit delete before the message even played, staring at Stuart as she did so. Five times. It sounded like a loop. “Hi Lily. Beep. Message deleted. Hi Lily. Beep. Message deleted.”

  Soon the only message left was Fiona’s. Jo played it again, as the three of them each wrestled their own personal demon. “I’ve got no one else.”

  “Fuck,” said Lily. The nicotine hit combined with the guilt and the remnants of last night’s tequilas made her head rush. “I’ve got to find her. Now.”

  Chapter 2

  Lily crossed the room to the wooden set of drawers in the corner and yanked the top one open. It often stuck, but Lily tugged it so hard it flew out of its housing, spilling most of its contents on the floor. Lily dropped to her knees, rummaging through the pile of unopened envelopes, handwritten lecture notes and take-away menus.

  “I could come with you,” said Stuart, “only-”

  “No, you won’t.” Jo interrupted. “I’ll go.”

  “Neither of you are coming. You’ve both got degrees to finish,” said Lily.

  “I finished mine last year,” said Stuart.

  “Oh,” said Lily, slightly taken aback by this marker of time. She didn’t look up from her task. “Well, you’re still not coming. I’ve got to do this on my own.”

  “I’ve got an interview at,” Stuart continued, “well, I’ve got an interview, on Friday. I really should go to it. But after that…”

  Jo lowered her voice and spoke directly to him. “If you think you’re going to use this as a way of getting into my best mate’s knickers...”

  Stuart scowled. “Don’t be stupid. I’m worried about Fiona.”

  “If you hadn’t have got off with her sister, she’d probably still be at school doing her A levels right about now.”

  “If you hadn’t kidnapped her...”

  “Here it is. My passport,” said Lily turning to them both. Her cheeks were flushed. After her awful experiences on the Costa del Sol last year, she’d thought she’d never need it again. She opened the cover, turned to the first page with the photograph and flinched. Short, cropped hair, a fuller face. She’d been a different person last year.

  “Mine’s upstairs,” said Jo.

  “We can go to the travel agent in the Union,” said Lily.

  “Give me ten minutes to get dressed,” Jo stood up.

  Lily didn’t even glance at Stuart. Her eyes were fixed on Jo. “What about Poly?”

  Jo crossed the room to the door, paused with her hand resting on the door handle. She turned to face Lily. “It’s pretty much finished apart from the small matter of finals. And we’ll be back before then. Besides, it’s shit anyway.”

  It took Jo more than ten minutes. Lily ended up banging on her bedroom door impatiently, having flung a handful of her own clothes into a small rucksack in less than half the time. As they walked down through Hyde Park in the weak May sunshine, Lily was aware of a feeling of inappropriate excitement. Her brain told her off. Told her that she should be racked with guilt and worry about her younger half sibling and how she was going to break the news of her grandfather’s death to her - she knew how much Fiona thought of him. But, for the first time in a long time, over a year, she had a reason to be up, to be doing something. She couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t woken up wondering how she was going to get through the day.

  “There are two seats on a flight from Manchester, leaving at four o’clock this afternoon,” the spotty assistant at the Union travel agency was flushed with pride at his coup. “£20 quid each, one way. Reckon you can make it?”

  “We can if we run,” said Jo.

  Lily paid cash, having drawn a chunk of money out of the Union’s branch of Barclays. She still flinched at the discomfort of being a trust fund kid. In fact, apart from the month’s deposit they’d had to pay when they rented the flat, this was the first time she’d ever touched any of the allowance she received from her maternal grandfather’s trust - preferring instead to get by on the wages she received from her job at The Fenton. Solidarity in student poverty, even though technically she wasn’t a student any more.

  Twenty minutes later, the three of them were down at the train station, south of the city. “Are you sure you’ll be ok?” Stuart asked. “What will you do?”

  “She must have told someone where they were going,” said Jo. “We’ll start with the Beaumonts. They’ve got to know something.”

  “David said they weren’t much help. You know she quit her job?”

  “No,” said Lily. She knew Fiona wasn’t much enjoying being an au pair, but she didn’t know she’d quit. She was suddenly aware of how little she knew about her half sister’s life. “When?”

  “They’ll know who her friends are. We’ll find out where she’s gone,” said Jo, with more confidence than Lily felt.

  “Ring me if you need anything,” said Stuart. “I mean it, anything. I can come over if you need me.”

  Stuart bought a platform ticket while Lily and Jo bought tickets for the Manchester train and they made their way to platform twelve together.

  “We’ve got five minutes. I’m just going to try Andy again,” said Jo, gesturing towards the line of red telephone boxes.

  Without Jo, Lily and Stuart faced each other in silence. Lily dropped her small rucksack to the floor. The platform was full of students and travellers and Lily felt safer for being in a crowd. She was aware, as the train lumbered into the station, of a feeling like she didn’t want to leave him. She picked at the skin on the side of her thumb. “Do you think she’s alright?”

  “I don’t know.” Stuart exhaled heavily. “I wish I hadn’t heard that message. I mean, she could just have been having a bad moment.”

  “She’s never rung me like that before.” Lily cursed herself again for not being there to take her half-sister’s call. “God, I wish-”

  “David said she said she was looking forward to getting a tan.”

  Lily nodded, unsure of what he was saying.

  “So she’ll probably have headed south.”

  “Right,” said Lily. South. She committed the word ‘south’ to memory, like it was the name of a hotel or something. She couldn’t help feeling she was the least qualified person to undertake this kind of search. Her grasp of world geography was limited -
she wasn’t even sure she knew what was south of France. Was it Africa?

  “And even if you don’t need anything, ring me anyway. Just to let me know what’s happening. I’ll pass messages on to your da... David if you want.” He scribbled his number onto the packet of red Marlboros that Lily had in her hand. “Promise you’ll ring?”

  He kept his eyes on Lily as Jo rejoined them, pulling a face that said she hadn’t managed to contact her boyfriend.

  “I’ll ring,” said Jo, as the crowd started to move forward towards the train. Lily picked up her rucksack. “Soon as we’ve found her.”

  “The funeral’s next Wednesday. You’ve got a week.”

  Lily didn’t look at Stuart as she stepped onto the train.

  Jo found them a table and stuffed both their rucksacks onto the overhead shelf. She pulled two cans of Castlemaine XXXX from the side pocket of her rucksack and settled her dumpy frame into one of the seats. She was so short her feet didn’t touch the floor as she sat back and popped open the beers. Her voice sounded too casual, over-rehearsed, “Must be weird, seeing him again.”

  “Did you get through to Andy?” asked Lily.

  Jo shook her head. “I left a message at the station, but he was out, you know, on the beat.” Jo supped from her can but Lily noticed her cheeks darkening, even though she’d been seeing Andy for over a year. Lily knew she still hadn’t told anyone in the Leeds Poly branch of the Socialist Workers’ Party that she was seeing a copper, and Lily had learnt the hard way not to tease her about it.

  Lily pulled the last letter Fiona had written to her out of her bag, still in the envelope but crumpled, and read it to herself again. She’d only kept it because she hadn’t got round to replying to it yet. Fiona had scribbled March 1990 across the top of it, and from reading it Lily knew she’d started it and broken off a few times. ‘I’m thinking of taking the summer off. Maybe going travelling. I’ve met this ace girl. Did I tell you about her already? She’s like my best friend over here. I can’t stand much more of the Ice Queen. I hate her. Did I tell you she wants me up at 6am now? So that I can get the laundry on before the kids get up? It’s slave bloody labour.’

  “The Ice Queen. Is that Mrs Beaumont?” asked Jo, reading the letter over Lily’s shoulder.

  “I guess.”

  “When did she leave her job?”

  “Dunno.”

  There was a lot she didn’t know, thought Lily. Like why hadn’t Fiona told her she’d left the Beaumonts? And what was she doing for money if she wasn’t working as an au pair any more? And who was the ace girl? She wished Fiona had mentioned her name. Was that who she had gone inter-railing with?

  The flight to Paris only took an hour, but it was an hour in which every nerve in Lily’s body was prepared for instant death. She kept imagining all of her fellow passengers sat in the sky minus the great metal bird around them and her brain ached at the impossibility of it all.

  “Bonjour, Pari’,” said Jo, turning to peer down through the tiny window at the landscape below as they descended down through the clouds.

  Lily marvelled at Jo’s fearlessness as she fastened her seatbelt and steeled herself for impact. How anyone could bring themselves to look out of the window of an aeroplane was completely beyond her comprehension.

  Jo beckoned to the air hostess. “Have we time for one last drink?”

  The woman frowned and shook her immaculate black hair. “No,” she said, the disapproval in her tone clear. “Please fasten your seatbelt and extinguish your cigarette. We’re coming in to land.”

  They didn’t have to bother with baggage control, as their rucksacks were both small enough to count as hand luggage. As soon as they stepped into customs though, a uniformed official beckoned them over to his table. “Please put your bag on here.”

  Lily sighed heavily. The exact same thing had happened on her trip to the Costa del Sol. She flung her rucksack down onto the bench. “Just because I have dreadlocks, doesn’t mean I smuggle drugs for a living, you know.”

  How she was going to manage without dope had been one of the anxieties of the trip over. Getting searched was just adding insult to injury.

  “Please stand with your arms out to the sides,” the man beckoned to a female colleague. She had a baton and a pair of handcuffs clipped to her belt, and as she ran her hands up and down Lily’s body, Lily felt a flash of excitement, akin to attraction. She almost giggled as the woman stroked down her inner thighs and then couldn’t stop herself spluttering with laughter as the official whisked a packet of ripped Rizla papers out of the back pocket of her trousers, with the air of the magician producing the rabbit. Lily wasn’t worried. They’d smoked their last blim of dope in the airport car park.

  “Have you brought anything with you to France?” asked the male official.

  “Clean pants.”

  He exhaled, as if trying to calm himself. “Do you smoke shit?”

  Lily raised her eyebrows. “No one calls it shit any more.”

  The female official beckoned to Jo to take her bag to another table. Jo tutted loudly, like this was all a fantastic waste of her time, and sloped off after her.

  “Do you?” asked Lily. He didn’t answer but spread the contents of Lily’s luggage out across the table. Lily realised she hadn’t even checked her rucksack before packing it, or any of the pockets of her clothes. It wasn’t like her to leave drugs lying around unsmoked, but a sudden fear gripped her stomach. What if?

  The official emptied out the contents of her wash bag. She half thought he was going to start ripping open her sanitary towels, as he picked up the packet and looked inside. He’d be strip-searching her next and then it suddenly occurred to her she wasn’t wearing knickers. She could feel her hands growing clammy. That’d learn her, as Aunt Edie would say.

  But instead, after rifling through her meagre collection of mainly black clothes and uncoupling a pair of black socks, the uniformed official nodded to her that she could pack her stuff away again. Lily raised her eyebrows at him as if to say, ‘See’.

  A moment later, Jo was back at her side, stuffing everything back into Lily’s bag without making any pretence at folding things. Lily frowned at her but Jo didn’t seem to notice, as she stuffed all Lily’s toiletries into the rucksack, without bothering to put them back into the washbag. “Are we late for a train?”

  “Come on.”

  By the time they’d found their way from Roissy train station to the Gare Du Nord, Lily’s body was aching and the adrenaline that had got her onto the aeroplane had left her system, leaving her hungry and tired.

  She stepped into the road. Jo grabbed her arm, pulled back as a car driving on the wrong side of the road blared its horn at her. “Steady, Eddie. What do you want to do? Get something to eat? Find a hotel?”

  “Let’s go to the Beaumont’s first. I need to know Fiona’s ok.”

  The Beaumonts lived in the seventh district. Jo consulted the map and they caught the Metro, got off at Champ de Mars, and then walked along in the late Parisian sunshine, the temperature much warmer than it was in Leeds. Lily took off one of her black layers and tied it around her waist. “So,” said Jo, with her over-casual voice back in place, “Sounds like your dad’s not having that good a time of it.”

  Lily didn’t answer but Jo persevered. “Did you know he’d got divorced?”

  “No. Haven’t spoken to him. Not since, you know.”

  “Weird that Fiona hasn’t mentioned it,” Jo said, as if she was musing aloud.

  Lily didn’t respond. They rounded a corner and there in front of them stood the Eiffel Tower. The sun was just setting, a golden red haze, and Lily had this feeling she’d never experienced before. Of possibility, she could almost feel her horizons expanding, her brain getting bigger. Hundreds of people milled around and the air felt warmer than that they had left behind in Leeds. Lily smiled to herself, her heart suddenly feeling lighter. Whether it was to do with the fact she was back in the same country as her sister for the first t
ime in over a year, facing up to her family, or whether it was just that feeling of being on holiday, Lily wasn’t sure. But she was suddenly excited at the prospect of seeing Fiona again. “Amazing.”

  “Will you go and see him?” Jo asked. “I mean, when we get back?”

  Lily crossed the open space to the foot of the tower and gazed up to its peak. She’d seen pictures of it before, but it was so much bigger than she’d imagined.

  Jo had followed her, was still at her side, expecting an answer. “Dunno,” said Lily. “We didn’t exactly part on good terms.”

  “He has been trying to get in touch though, Lil.” Jo glanced sideways at her best friend, like she was weighing up how far she could push it. “How many letters have you ripped up so far?”

  Lily lit a cigarette and inhaled Paris along with the smoke. “I figure I’m better off helping out like this, rather than getting in everyone’s way.” Lily exhaled and felt her shoulders drop an inch. She found a grassed area and flopped down on the knees. Jo sat next to her and pulled out her own packet of Marlboro.

  Lily closed her eyes, enjoying the feel of the sun on her face. “We find Fiona, make sure she’s ok. Tell her about Arthur. She’ll go home. She’ll be able to comfort him.”

  “Is she still a Daddy’s girl, do you think?”

  “Yeah,” said Lily with some contempt. “People don’t change that much.”

  “I’m surprised he doesn’t know exactly where she is,” said Jo.

  “Maybe getting the two of them back together will mean the whole thing won’t feel so fucked up any more.” Lily flicked her fag end into the distance.