The Road to Zoe Page 3

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she says. ‘And you . . . What’s with the suit? You look like you’re going to work.’

  I shrug. The truth is that I like wearing a suit. It makes me feel sharper, more adult. I can’t really explain it, but I feel more myself, I suppose you could say, dressed this way than in just about anything else. Jess, like everyone else, assumes that I have to wear suits for work, and I’m happy to let them all think that’s the reason. In fact, everyone at work took the piss out of me to begin with. Most of my colleagues at AMP wear jeans and three-day-dirty polos. It’s one rare occasion where I’m totally happy to stand out.

  At Gatwick, we find the car-hire place quite quickly. It’s still not 8 a.m., and there are only two people in front of us.

  I fill in all the paperwork and the guy – pleasant, polite and with an accent that makes him sound like a super-cute meerkat in an insurance advert – checks his computer screen and announces enthusiastically that he has good news. ‘I have upgrade for you!’

  ‘What upgrade?’ I ask. My generation grew up on messages of the ‘Good news! You have been selected for a free iPhone’ variety. We’re vaccinated against good news.

  ‘I have no Vauxhall Corsa,’ he says, ‘so I give you Peugeot convertible. This is good, huh?’

  ‘A convertible?!’ Jess asks. ‘What, with the top that folds down and everything?’

  ‘Yes,’ the guy tells us.

  ‘And how much extra is this going to cost?’ I ask, waiting for the punchline.

  ‘None for the car,’ Mr Meerkat says. ‘Just little extra for insurance.’

  ‘We don’t want it,’ I say. ‘Just give us what we booked.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Jessica says. ‘How much extra is it?’

  ‘Only five pounds a day. It’s excellent deal.’

  ‘I’ll pay it,’ Jess says. ‘It can be my treat.’

  ‘But the original booking’s only six quid a day,’ I point out. ‘This doubles it.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ Jess says, her eyes glinting like a toddler’s at Christmas. ‘It’s a convertible! Imagine how cool it will be.’

  ‘It’s January, Jess,’ I say. ‘It’s minus five out. It’ll be cold, not cool.’ But I’ve already taken on board the fact that I’ve lost this battle.

  ‘I want it,’ Jess says.

  ‘You know what?’ I laugh. ‘I spotted that!’

  ‘Gosh, it’s brand new!’ Jess comments. We’re out on the car park loading our bags into the boot of the Peugeot. ‘It even has that new-car smell.’

  ‘It really is,’ I say, as I slide into the driver’s seat and turn on the ignition. ‘It’s brand new. Seven hundred miles on the clock.’

  ‘You make that sound like a bad thing,’ Jess says, pulling her seatbelt on.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ I explain as I adjust my seat and fiddle with the mirror. ‘One tiny scratch anywhere on it and I’ll lose my deposit. I prefer it when they give me a wreck, to be honest. I like my rental cars to be so fucked-up that no one can tell if these are new dents or old ones.’

  We navigate our way out of the airport and merge on to the M23. ‘This is back towards home, isn’t it?’ Jess asks.

  ‘Just for a bit,’ I tell her. ‘And then we head off west, round the M25. It was cheaper to rent from Gatwick, that’s all. Well, it was until you shelled out for a convertible.’

  ‘It was a fiver a day,’ Jess says. ‘Let it go.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘And I have, officially, now let it go.’

  ‘Did you bring the printout?’ Jess asks.

  ‘Of course,’ I tell her, patting my breast pocket.

  ‘God!’ Jess says. ‘How exciting! Are you excited?’

  ‘I’m nervous,’ I reply. ‘Does that count?’

  I wonder, as I drive, if I’m going to be able to stand Jess’s enthusiasm and I have to stifle a sigh – Jess is very good at picking up on sighs. I wonder if this trip together isn’t going to turn out to be a huge mistake.

  Our relationship, since we met six months ago, has been very on and off. Very up and down, too.

  Most of this is my fault, of course. I’m the one ‘with issues’, as they say. I’m the one who wakes up at 3 a.m. unable to breathe just because Jess is there beside me. I’m the one who feels trapped as soon as we spend an entire weekend together.

  So this trip is something of a test, really. And I feel more scared than excited.

  I met the lovely Jessica through work, during one of my first-ever assignments.

  I’d finished uni in 2018. Some of my friends were taking a year out to travel, and I’d hoped momentarily that Dad would sub me so that I could do so, too. But in the end, after pretending to consider it, he’d said, ‘No.’ He and his new wife were buying a house, and he simply didn’t have any spare cash, he said. Mum had never had any spare cash, so I didn’t even bother asking her. Instead, I grieved a bit for my lost gap year and then started applying for jobs.

  The first month at AMP had been training. It had taken place in an overheated windowless office where I struggled to even stay awake, let alone learn anything. There had been a dead spider plant in one corner and even the trainer looked at death’s door. He had grey hair and grey skin to match his grey suit, shirt and tie. He rarely modulated his tone of voice in any way.

  But I had somehow survived it, and then was out on my own, travelling around London and going to fix software programs on clients’ computers. I bought a couple of off-the-rack suits and some flashy ties and considered myself quite the man. Now I was working, I wanted to look a bit more like Dad, maybe. Dad’s always been a bit of a dandy, so perhaps it’s a way of feeling like we have at least that in common.

  Just a week after the training ended, they sent me to Haringey social services. I was to move ten people’s software from their ancient PCs on to new laptops. More and more of their staff were working from home, apparently. The third install was on Jessica’s computer, and as soon as I walked into her office, I thought, Wow.

  I’d had a few girlfriends at college but none of my relationships had been that successful. Perhaps, deep down, the whole Zoe business had affected me more than I cared to admit. Mum had gone a bit crazy for a while, and maybe that, plus my sister’s unpredictability, had created some core beliefs about women. They’re perhaps what made me run away whenever my own relationships with girls started to get serious. Women weren’t to be trusted, I suspected, and I’m sure a shrink would link that somehow to my sister disappearing or my mum’s dodgy relationships, or both.

  Anyway, Jessica struck me immediately as gorgeous. She’s from a multi-ethnic family, with deep olive skin, nice legs and a great figure. She’s got huge brown eyes peeping out from beneath a Pulp Fiction fringe (she actually irons her hair, if you can believe that), and the result is that she looks a little dangerous and more than a little cool, sort of Alesha Dixon, only with a secret-agent Villanelle edge to her. She has a unique style of her own, largely because she makes a lot of her own clothes, mixing and matching style #1, which is kind of punky, and style #2 which has a sort of K-pop vibe – candy colours and stripes galore. Anyway, she was working when I arrived, and said she had to finish what she was doing. So I sat and watched her work.

  ‘You’re not allowed to see any of this,’ she explained, pointing a fluorescent green fingernail at the screen. ‘So you’d probably better look away.’

  I asked what the data onscreen that I wasn’t allowed to look at represented, and she explained how the software she was using worked, and even pulled up some very detailed information on what she called the ‘chaotic trajectory’ of one of the women she was helping. I thought of my sister immediately.

  So even though I’d only known her for three minutes, I told Jessica a few details about Zoe and asked if her story might be in the computer, too. But Jessica, who it seemed took client confidentiality seriously, told me she couldn’t look and wouldn’t look and quickly shut down the program when I tried again to persuade her.


  At the end of the week I asked her out. I’d had lunch with her and her colleagues a couple of times, accidentally on purpose (I suppose you could say that I stalked her) and it had been fun. I was pretty sure she was into me – she’d complimented me on my clothes a couple of times, after all.

  Day after day I’d failed to ask her out, but by Friday I knew I needed to make a move because otherwise the probability was that I’d never see her again.

  ‘I don’t suppose you fancy getting a drink after work, do you?’ I finally spat out, at 5.25 p.m. I was in the process of packing up my laptop.

  ‘No,’ Jessica said. ‘Sorry, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Right,’ I muttered, throwing a bit of fake laughter into the mix. I zipped up my laptop case and swung it over my shoulder. ‘Well, at least that’s clear. You, um, have a good one.’

  But I couldn’t bring myself to walk away. Instead I stood there, smiling like an idiot, and glancing back and forth between the doorway and Jessica.

  Eventually, she glanced up at me. She frowned and then chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I actually can’t tonight, anyway. But if I give you my number, I suppose you could try hassling me repeatedly over the weekend. To see if I give in.’

  I pulled a face. ‘You want me to hassle you?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Yeah, I suppose I do, a bit.’

  ‘Oh, um, OK,’ I said.

  ‘It’s just that . . .’ she said, chewing a fingernail, ‘we can’t have you thinking I’m too keen, can we?’

  ‘No,’ I laughed. ‘No, we can’t have that at all.’

  We dated on and off. Actually, for Jessica it was mostly on, but I’d get my weird suffocating feeling and suddenly cancel on her, or lie and tell her I was busy. And unlike most of the girls I’d dated, she took this in her stride.

  I asked her a few times if she’d reconsider looking in her computer for my sister, but she was quite adamant that it wasn’t going to happen. And then on New Year’s Eve, in a bar in Hoxton, she announced that she had some annual leave to take, and that she might as well take it at the same time as mine, in January.

  Because one of her friends had told me that, ‘The person you spend New Year’s Eve with is the person you stay the year with,’ I was already feeling a bit queasy, to be honest. The idea of spending my two-week holiday with her as well pushed me to the edge of a panic attack.

  But then, just after midnight, she pulled a folded sheet of paper from her pocket and handed it to me. ‘I thought we could maybe rent a car and go to Cornwall for a few days,’ she shouted over the top of the music. ‘For our holidays, I mean. My uncle’s got a caravan we could use for free. And on the way, I thought we could maybe go here.’

  I unfolded the page and looked at it. It had two addresses in Bristol.

  ‘Bristol?’ I asked.

  Jessica shrugged cutely. ‘Bristol!’ she said, emphatically.

  ‘Why Bristol?’ I asked.

  ‘Those are your sister’s last known addresses,’ she explained. ‘Before she vanished from the social services radar, she was in Bristol.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. Unexpected tears were welling up and I was too drunk to even begin to think about why. ‘But you said you couldn’t. You said you’d get into trouble.’

  ‘I guess I like you enough to take that risk.’

  ‘God,’ I said, looking at the sheet of paper again. ‘Really?’

  Jess grabbed my tie and used it to winch me in. ‘Really!’ she said, between kisses. ‘Happy New Year, you lovely man.’

  ‘Can we stop at the services?’ Jessica asks, dragging me from my thoughts.

  We’ve only been driving for about twenty-five minutes, so I’m reluctant.

  ‘I need chocolate,’ she says, and when she sees that I’m unconvinced, she runs her fingers through her hair, looks out of the side window and adds, ‘And the loo.’

  Once we’ve stocked up on chocolate bars and once Jess has roasted the poor cashier over the fact that there aren’t any vegan chocolate options, we return to the car.

  It’s drizzling now, and I almost say something sarcastic about how lucky we are to have a convertible, but I manage to restrain myself.

  ‘So how was Christmas?’ I ask instead, as I merge back on to the motorway. ‘You still haven’t told me about it.’

  ‘Uh!’ Jess exclaims, pulling her stripy knees up and folding her arms around them. She starts to unwrap a dark chocolate Bounty. ‘You really don’t want to know.’

  I shrug, check the mirrors, then move out to the centre lane.

  ‘Do you?’ Jess asks.

  ‘Do I what?’ I ask distractedly, thinking more about the traffic and the weather than the conversation at hand.

  ‘Do you really want to know about my horrific Christmas?’

  I shrug again. ‘I’m just struggling to understand how Christmas can be that bad, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll invite you next year,’ Jess says. ‘You can witness it first-hand. You’ll love it.’

  ‘You’re not really selling it to me.’

  ‘No,’ Jess says. ‘And at your place everyone is just, what, happy? It’s all just peace and love?’

  I laugh. ‘Well, there was only me and Mum this year, but yeah, it was fine. It’s not like it was when I was little, when there were three or four of us. Sometimes we had friends round too, so there were five or six of us. There’s no piles of presents any more either. But it’s fine. We give each other a gift; we eat Christmas dinner; we go for a walk. Some years Dad’s there, too. What’s not to like?’

  ‘Right,’ Jess says. ‘Well, to start with, we don’t do gifts.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Jess says, offering me a bite of Bounty, and then feeding it into her own mouth when I decline. ‘We used to, till I was about ten. Actually, that’s when Dad left – on Christmas Day when I was ten. So I suppose that’s why Mum just sort of cancelled Christmas after that. I don’t think we were very well off, but I mean, you can always find something to wrap up if you want to. She just got a downer on the whole thing, and from that point on Christmas never really happened again. Or not in any recognisable form, anyway.’

  ‘That’s harsh,’ I say. I think about Jessica’s dad leaving when she was ten. I knew he’d gone back to Jamaica, but until now I hadn’t known when. It feels like a little something we have in common. ‘Particularly tough when you’re only ten.’

  ‘I know,’ Jess says. ‘It wasn’t good. Anyway, we just eat a normal meal nowadays, really. I had a fake turkey thing and Mum and Winston had chicken. I usually argue with Mum about something. This year it was the fact that she cooked the potatoes with the meat.’

  ‘Meaty juices not being veggie.’

  ‘Exactly. And then Mum argued with Winston.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘His job, mainly,’ Jess says. ‘Mum thinks he should aim higher than Pret. But, I mean, at least he has a job now, right? And then I argued with Winston as well. I was actually trying to defend him, but he took it all the wrong way. Which was probably at least partly my fault. I tend to suffer from foot-in-mouth disease where my brother’s concerned.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Do I really have to tell you?’ Jess asks.

  ‘Not if you don’t want to,’ I say. But I know that of course, she will.

  ‘I just said that not everyone can be a bloody astronaut,’ Jess says. ‘Like I say, I was trying to defend him. To Mum.’

  ‘And that didn’t go down well?’

  ‘No. Winston was all, like, “Oh, and of course you are an astronaut, aren’t you? Because social services is soooo important.” And I said that no, I wasn’t, and nor did I feel I needed to be an astronaut because I have a perfectly good job, and I was actually helping people and I like that and I was just saying that Mum should respect our choices and blah blah, and so Winston got all uppity and said he had a perfec
tly good job at Pret as well, and that he was helping people too, even if he was only helping them to eat shitty sandwiches, and even if it was just a zero-hours contract, he’s happy, and that the zero-hours thing was hardly his fault, was it? It was Mum’s fault for voting Conservative, and so Mum got all spiky about that and everyone ended up sulking. Honestly, we could argue about the weather in our family. Actually, we quite often do.’

  ‘Sounds great,’ I say. ‘Full of Christmas cheer.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Jess replies.

  ‘And your mum’s a Conservative voter? That can’t be easy for you.’ Jess is one of the most political people I know. And Conservative, she is not.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jess says. ‘Mum thinks that voting the same way as rich people somehow makes her one of them. Something like that, anyway.’

  ‘Right,’ I say.

  ‘God, I love Bounties,’ Jess says. ‘I wish they’d make them vegan, though, because they do make me feel guilty.’

  ‘So what about if you took loads of gifts for everyone?’ I say. ‘If you tried to force them to have a proper Christmas? What would happen?’

  ‘They’d just turn their noses up at whatever I brought,’ Jessica says. ‘Honestly, it’s a no-hoper. It can’t be fixed. I’ve tried.’

  By the time we arrive in Bristol, it’s bucketing down. The windscreen wipers are sloshing the rain back and forth, and occasionally lorries coming the other way chuck whole buckets of water in our direction making navigating the city streets, where major roadworks are in progress, anything but easy. Still, at least it isn’t snowing, I suppose. The Peugeot’s thermometer is only reading two degrees, so things could get worse at any minute.

  Google Maps, into which Jess has fed the address of our Airbnb, leads us around the edges of the city, and then on south into what appears to be a massive, endless council estate.

  Jess, who has taken control of the music, is playing The Cat Empire, her absolute favourite band of the moment. They’re really not my favourite band at all, but due to forced and repeated exposure I’m starting to at least get used to some of the songs. Today, as the grey rainy streets slide past, the contrast between the upbeat ‘Steal The Light’ and everything beyond the windscreen makes it seem like a kind of depressing, post-apocalyptic music video. The kind of thing Ken Loach would produce. If he did music videos, obviously . . .