Rudi was absolutely still.
He stood and stared at the two meerkats closest to the fence, and they stood and stared at him, paws resting casually on their soft bellies. Rudi, without realizing what he was doing, had straightened up and had rested his own little paws on his own little belly.
“Hello,” he whispered reverently. “Hello, meerikats.”
“Meerkats,” I corrected.
“Sarah, be quiet! You might frighten them!”
Tommy alerted Rudi to the arrival of another meerkat and Rudi whipped round, forgetting in an instant that I existed. “Hello, meerikat three,” he whispered. “Meerikats, hello! Are you a family? Or just best friends?”
Two of the meerkats started burrowing in the sand. The third shuffled over his sandy hill to give what looked like a hug to another member of the tribe. Rudi almost trembled with wonder.
Jo took a photo of her son. Five minutes ago she’d been telling Rudi off about something; now she smiled at him with a love that had no edges. And watching her, trying to imagine that sort of towering, immeasurable devotion, I felt it again. An acute poke from the lumpy cluster of feelings I kept in a remote corner. It was right that I wasn’t going to be a mother, of course, but the pain of lost possibility sometimes left me breathless.
I extracted my sunglasses from my bag.
My parents had found a carer for Granddad and would be back in Gloucestershire tomorrow. Rudi wanted a farewell tea at Battersea Park Children’s Zoo before I left to go and see them, although this, I suspected, had more to do with a recent television program he’d watched about meerkats than it did saying good-bye to Aunty Sarah.
I checked my phone, a reflex as common now as breathing. After the dropped phone call I’d had in the middle of the night last week there’d been another one, a few days ago, and it had lasted a full fifteen seconds. “I’ll call the police,” I’d said, when whoever it was refused to say anything. The caller had hung up immediately and there hadn’t been anything since, but I was certain it had something to do with Eddie’s disappearance.
I wasn’t sleeping very much at all now.
Tommy unpacked the little tea he’d made and Rudi came running over to eat, recounting a poorly remembered joke about eggy sandwiches and eggy farts. Jo told him off for talking with his mouth full. A child nearby was whining about missing out on feeding the coati. And I sat in the middle of them all, unable to eat my sandwiches, a miserable churning in my stomach.
Not long before leaving the sixth form, I’d studied Mrs. Dalloway for my English A level. We’d taken turns narrating the book, exploring Woolf’s “unique narrative technique,” as Mrs. Rushby called it.
“The world has raised its whip,” I read aloud when my turn came; “where will it descend?”
I had paused, surprised, and then read the sentence again. And even though my classmates were watching me, even though Mrs. Rushby was watching me, I had underlined the sentence three times before moving on, because those words had described so perfectly how I felt, most of the time, that I marveled that anyone other than me could have written them.
The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?
That was it! seventeen-year-old me had thought. That perpetual alertness! Watching the skies, sniffing the air, bracing for calamity. That’s me. And yet here I was now, nineteen years on, feeling exactly the same. Had anything actually changed? Had my comfortable life in California been mere fantasy?
I had another look at my egg sandwich but it made me heave.
“Oi,” Jo said, in my direction. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I’m just enjoying my tea.”
“Interesting,” said Jo, “given that you’re not actually eating it.”
After a pause I apologized. Told them I knew I must seem insane. Told them I was trying so very, very hard to pull myself together, but that I wasn’t having much luck.
“Did he break your heart?” Rudi asked. “The man?”
Everyone stopped talking. Neither Jo nor Tommy could look at me. But Rudi did, Rudi with his little almond eyes and his perfect child’s understanding of the world.
“Did he break your heart, Sarah?”
“I . . . Well, yes,” I said, when I found my voice. “Yes, I’m afraid he did.”
Rudi wheeled from side to side on his heels, watching me. “He’s a villain,” he said, after careful consideration. “And a fart.”
“He is,” I agreed.
Rudi gave me a hug, which brought me to the very edge of tears.
Tommy was holding my phone, staring thoughtfully at Eddie’s Facebook page. “I do wonder about this man,” he said, after a long silence.
“You and me both, Tommy.”
“The WheresWally hashtag, for starters,” Tommy said. “Isn’t that a bit odd? His name’s Eddie.”
Jo opened a packet of dried fruit and nuts for Rudi. “Eat them slow,” she told him, before turning to Tommy. “Where’s Wally? is a series of books, you plonker,” she said. “Don’t you remember? All them pictures of crowds with Wally hidden in them?”
Rudi began picking out raisins and discarding the nuts.
“I know what Where’s Wally? is,” Tommy said. “I just think it’s a strange thing to say about someone whose name is meant to be Eddie.”
I shook my head. “That’s just what you say when you’re looking for someone. Scouring crowds. Needle-in-haystack job.”
Tommy shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s someone else entirely.”
Rudi perked up. “Do you think Eddie is a murderer?” he asked.
“No,” Tommy said.
“A vampire?”
“No.”
“A gas man?” Jo had recently explained Stranger Danger.
Tommy stared thoughtfully at my phone. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “But there’s something fishy about this man.” Then suddenly he sat up straight. “Sarah!” he whispered. “Look!”
I took the phone from him and found he’d opened up my Messenger. Then everything surged forward and into free fall, like water from a weir. Eddie was online. He had read my messages. Both of them. He was online now.
He was not dead. He was somewhere. “What were you doing in my messages?” I hissed.
“I was being nosy,” Tommy said. “I wanted to see what you’d been saying to him, but who cares? He’s read your messages! He’s online!”
“What did he say?” Rudi was trying to grab the phone. “What did he say to you, Sarah?”
Jo confiscated the phone and took a good long look.
“I hate to tell you this,” she said, “but he read your messages three hours ago.”
“Why hasn’t he written back?” Rudi asked.
It was a good question.
“I’m getting tired of your boyfriend, Sarah,” Rudi said. “I think he’s a really horrible person.”
There was a long silence.
“Let’s go down the meerkat tunnel,” Jo said.
Rudi looked at me, and then at his precious meerkats, ten yards away—ten yards too far.
“Go,” I told him. “Go and be with your people. I’m fine.”
“Just walk away, Sarah,” Jo repeated, as her son scampered off. She sounded exhausted suddenly. “Life is too short to run around after someone who makes you miserable.”
She went to join Rudi. Tommy and I stared at the screen. Impulsively, I typed, Hello?
Seconds later, Eddie’s picture dropped down next to the message. “That means he’s read it,” Tommy said.
I won’t bite, I wrote.
Eddie read the message. And then—just like that—he went offline.
I stood up. I had to see him. Talk to him. I had to do something. “Help,” I said. “What do I do, Tommy? What do I do?”
After a beat, Tommy stood up and put his arm around my shoulders. If I closed my eyes, we could be back in 1997 at LAX, me crumpled against him in the arrivals hall, him carrying the keys for a huge, air-conditioned car, telling me everything would be okay.
“Maybe his mum got really bad with her depression,” I said desperately. “He told me she was on a downward spiral when I met him. Maybe it got really scary.”
“Maybe,” Tommy said quietly. “But, Harrington, if he was serious about you two, he’d still have sent a message. Explained. Asked you to give him a few weeks.”
I didn’t argue, because I couldn’t.
“See if he replies,” Tommy said, squeezing my shoulder. “But unless he does soon, and unless something really quite extraordinary has happened to him, I think you should consider very seriously whether or not you want to see him again. It’s not kind to have put you through this.”
Awkwardly, but with much tenderness, he kissed the side of my head. “Maybe Jo’s right,” he said. “Maybe you do need to let go.”
My oldest friend had his arm around my shoulder. The man who’d helped me glue myself back together, all those years ago, who’d watched me lose everything and somehow rebuild my life. And now we were only a few short years from forty, and it was happening again.
“She is right,” I said dully. “You both are. I have to let go.”
And I meant it. The only problem was, I didn’t know how.
