The Pull of the Moon (2 page)

I make the envelope wait until I’ve finished breakfast and rinsed my swimsuit. It sits implacable, sneering almost. I can’t put it off indefinitely.

There are two sheets inside, unlined paper, each written on one side only and folded in half. Even as I extract them and smooth them flat, I still cannot imagine her reason for communicating
like this. All that we had in common is long gone.

The address in the top right is the one she’s lived at for the past decade.

Dear Katy
– a blast from the past to start us off. No one calls me Katy now. Kate, that’s me. Brief, brisk, brusque even.

At this point the long sloping letters run out of space. As I turn the page, I wonder why she thinks I would be travelling by train. Probably never realized I had passed my test. I catch myself
dwelling on the mechanics of the journey because this is a far safer area of speculation than considering the reason she wants me to make it.

The letters go fuzzy in my hand, so I put them down on the table where they dance around like a formation team, arriving back at the phrase
what happened to my son
, whenever I glance back
at them. Pyrotechnics fizz and flash in my mind.

It’s like the rule of three in a fairy story. In stories everything happens in threes. Three little pigs, three bears, two ugly sisters plus Cinderella makes three. Two idle prompts from
Marjorie, then this letter. Marjorie thinks murder is ingenious. She thinks actions in the name of love are always for good.

What does Mrs Ivanisovic think? What does she know? Why does she ask now – after so very, very long?

Too late now to return the letter unopened, marked not known at this address. Why, why had I maintained the contact? I could have dropped it years ago. Seasons Greetings. Merry Bloody Christmas.
Was it because, at the back of my mind, I was always afraid she guessed too much? Yet how could she?

‘Your son is dead,’ I said, addressing thin air above the letter. At least you have a grave to mourn at. Not like Trudie’s parents. Trudie who saw it all. Trudie whose
coincidental disappearance you scarcely remarked upon. Was she so easily forgotten? Or does some octogenarian widow still vainly await her return? Another grieving mother who has no address to
write to: someone without the means to reach into the past, demanding answers.

Every night and day I pray, in hope that I may find you.

But Trudie is not to be found. I saw the earth fall on to her, clod by clod, under the yellow light of the torch. Murder is not ingenious. Murder is cruel, dirty, fetid. Murder is sliding on
piled earth in the dark. Sights you never want to see, a dead white face in a flickering beam, not flinching when the soil hits it.

TWO

Trudie’s arrival cast a shadow over our little group from the very beginning. Literally. She appeared one afternoon while we were sitting on the beach and stood between
us and the sun.

The first thing I ever noticed about her was her feet. Bare brown feet – sunburnt rather than dirty – which protruded from beneath the broderie anglais trim around the hem of her
maxi. Each of her toenails had been varnished in a different colour: scarlet, black, fuchsia pink. One nail had pale blue glitter polish – glam rock making its mark on the beaches of
mid-Wales.

‘I thought for a minute it was Cat Stevens,’ she said. She rolled her r’s in a soft blur of an accent which I couldn’t quite place. It reminded me of summer-scented roses
and cream teas.

Danny stopped strumming and we all looked up. When I remember it now, it’s as though Trudie towered over us, a huge dark figure against the cloudless blue. I can see the sun’s rays
shooting out from around her head – thunder flashes again. Of course that wasn’t really the way of it at all. I couldn’t see her properly because I’d forgotten my
sunglasses. It was no doubt this foolish omission which rendered everything impossibly bright that day. For everyone else it was just a glorious day beside the sea.

Naturally Danny loved the Cat Stevens thing. He really did look a little bit like him – and although he always denied it, he’d played up to the likeness by growing a little goatee.
He had the same dark hair and thoughtful eyes as the singer. A lot of people remarked on it. He and Trudie immediately struck up a conversation, but I was disadvantaged by the glare: forced to
avoid looking directly at the newcomer, while conscious of a vague uneasy jealousy as she invaded our group. It was not just that until then I had been the only female. Confident people always put
me on the back foot. I could no more have walked up to a trio of strangers than sprouted wings and flown across the dunes: but Trudie – Trudie was something else. Within a matter of minutes
she had flopped down beside us on the sand and was dueting with Danny. A love song, as if you couldn’t have guessed. Some Anne Murray number about a child conceived in love.

I wanted to drop her a signal – some casual sign of possession, just to let her know that Danny was spoken for – but there’s not a lot you can do when the object of your
affections is cross-legged on a beach, cradling an acoustic guitar. The wretched instrument sticks out in both directions, precluding all but the most overt gestures of affection. Anyway, I
didn’t want to appear completely freaked out and uncool about her presence, so I bided my time, acting the appreciative audience while I sized her up.

She was taller than me and her hair was much darker, though worn like mine in the regulation style of the moment – a long uncut mane, parted down the centre and falling halfway down her
back, where it finished in a cascade of split ends. She was wearing an embroidered cheesecloth smock over her full-length cotton skirt, and carrying two bags which she had dumped beside her when
she sat down: one a tasselled Greek bag in blues and browns; the other a small tapestry holdall – which seemed a funny thing to have on a beach.

I realized Simon was studying her too. In the normal scheme of things, I thought, Simon ought to pair up with Trudie for the rest of the day. That would transform us into a neat two boy, two
girl foursome. It would be better if Simon had a girlfriend. There was no obvious reason why he never quite clicked with girls, because he was not at all bad-looking. He had the sort of straight
blond hair which was very much admired at the time, blue eyes and a ready smile. He was thoughtful and polite in a way which had all but gone out of fashion, and he gave out an impression of
gentleness, because he was softly spoken and had an unusual delivery – with every word enunciated carefully, as if specially chosen from a vast lexicon in his head. He was also rather quiet
until you got to know him, which inevitably meant that Danny was the one people noticed.

All the same it was Simon who asked Trudie, ‘Do you live round here?’, following up her negative with ‘Where are you from?’ and getting that strange offhand reply:
‘Here and there. Nowhere in particular.’

This didn’t faze us at all. It was very 1972 to affect the persona of a mysterious hippy love child, who drifted from place to place, when you were in fact a schoolgirl from Bristol, with
a Saturday job in Wool-worth’s and a respectable career in banking ahead of you, once your O-level results were out.

Naturally, when Trudie asked similar questions of us, she got equally nebulous responses. We said we had driven across from Herefordshire, where we were currently living together in a great big
house in the middle of nowhere. We may even have given the impression it was some kind of squat or commune. I don’t think the conditions of our tenure were specified, and I’m sure the
fact that we were holidaying students, temporarily escaping the mundanities of Geography Field Trips and Teacher Training, was never mentioned at all.

The upshot of all this was that we had known Trudie scarcely half an hour before she casually suggested ‘hitching a ride’ with us. An alarm bell began to ring in my head, faint but
insistent. I blotted it out. There could be no harm in giving this girl a lift (although an affectionate display between Danny and me was a necessary precursor to avoiding any misunderstandings).
Yet still the doubt persisted – we did not know her at all, and she did not know us. My cautious mother had drilled me never to accept, still less solicit, lifts with strangers. All the more
reason to do it, said a voice in my head. You’re not a kid now, are you?

Simon offered to buy us all ice creams. He ran the words together – eyescream. It’s a Brummie thing. Trudie loved it. Not that Simon had the accent: he was well spoken enough to be
sneered at as ‘posh’, but we always said ‘eyescream’ – it was one of our catch-phrases.

Danny said he wanted mint chocolate chip as usual and I asked for tutti-frutti. In those pre-Magnum days, when ice cream had barely begun to reach out beyond strawberry and vanilla, tutti-frutti
was still a bit exotic.

‘Ooh – I love the way you said that,’ Trudie exclaimed. ‘Tutti-frutti – go on, say it again.’

The joke was clearly on me, and I wasn’t amused by the way she aped my Midland accent. ‘He knows what I want,’ I said, attempting to make light of it with a smile.

‘Go on, Katy,’ Danny joined in. ‘Say tutti-frutti for us.’

‘Tutti-bloody-frutti,’ I said, affecting my Lady Muck voice. ‘Come on, Si, I’ll help you carry them.’

Simon and I set off to stumble our way through the soft sand at the top of the beach. Trudie’s barefoot approach was undoubtedly the most practical, and after a few steps I removed my
flip-flops and made much better progress.

We joined the short queue at the ice-cream kiosk.

‘Do you really think we ought to give Trudie a lift?’ I asked. ‘We don’t know anything about her. We don’t even know how old she is.’

Simon could generally be counted on to take a more sensible line than Danny. Danny had a tendency to seize the moment with the confident enthusiasm of one upon whom Dame Fortune invariably
smiles. Simon considered briefly before saying: ‘I don’t think she’s as old as she looks – but I’m guessing she’s about eighteen.’

It was halfway towards being a question, so I pretended to consider this while squinting into the distance, to see what she and Danny were up to. ‘Perhaps we should ask her,’ I
suggested.

‘Mmm.’ We were on the point of being served and Simon had become distracted by the operation of extracting coins from the pocket of his jeans – no easy task when they were such
a tight fit.

‘We might get into trouble if she’s only a school kid.’ I affected all the concern of someone not quite out of her own teens. ‘We don’t want to be accused of
kidnapping her or something.’

‘But she’s coming of her own free will,’ said Simon. ‘It was her idea. A mint choc chip, a rum ’n’ raisin and two tutti-fruttis, please,’ adding for my
benefit, ‘I’ll ask her, if it’s bugging you.’

There was no further opportunity to discuss the matter because as soon as he was handed the first two cones, Simon set off across the beach, leaving me to trudge behind him with the other two
ice creams dribbling on to my fingers.

‘Yeuch,’ I said, licking my hands. ‘Sticky.’

‘Hey, Trudie,’ said Simon, handing her ice cream across. ‘How old are you, by the way?’

Ah, that wonderful tact and guile for which the young adult male is so famous.

Trudie’s lips curved into a smile. ‘Old enough,’ she said, dropping a wink which made the others smile.

Thus the matter was settled. We would give Trudie a lift to Herefordshire. Her final destination sealed over a tutti-frutti ice cream.

THREE

I have become quite adept at appearing to give my full attention when I am only half listening. Thus while Marjorie twitters indignantly about someone called George, I ponder
the problem of the small white envelope which has been sitting for two days behind my clock, out of sight but never out of mind. George is undoubtedly one of those people I am supposed to know
about – a person Marjorie has probably mentioned many times previously, whose role in her life I am assumed to have committed to memory.

‘I said to Mary Goldinghey, his minutes bear no relation to what was actually said at the committee meeting – and it’s not the first time either.’

I make appropriate sounds of disapproval, while trying to recall what committee this can be – not the WI obviously, unless they’ve started taking men. Of course girls can join the
Scouts now, so who knows?

As far as I can recall, Marjorie sits on several committees. In fact half the world seems to spend its life sitting on committees, presumably in order to organize the other half. I am definitely
in the other half – not that I need organizing, but because I mistrust committees. Committees rely on discussions in which the most forthright get to air their views, before arriving at a
majority decision which binds everyone. Being an outvoted minority has blighted my life.

I take my shampoo (
guaranteed to revitalize coloured hair
) into the shower, and this provides a temporary escape from her bleating. The water gushes out, obliterating everything else
– Marjorie’s voice, the smell of the chlorine, the piped muzak. Hits from the musicals this morning – session singers belting out ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, for
goodness sake. When I put my head right under and close my eyes against the jets, even the harsh strip lighting is blotted out, and with it the reality of my tracery of veins and cellulite. I
didn’t have cellulite in 1972. I don’t think anyone else did either. Isn’t it one of those things that’s been invented since? We weren’t so big on things to do with
cells back then: cellulite, cell phones, stem cell research were all in the future.