Page 15 of 59 Minutes

MRS DABB

‘It’s me,’ she says, banging on the door and then reaching into her pocket for her set of keys. ‘I’m coming in, Mary.’

She shoves the sticky door with her shoulder.

Inside, the cottage is a hot box, causing an instant sweat on the upper lip.

The faux logs glow, the old radiators click like tongues.

The lounge curtains hang half-pulled, the television blaring at full volume.

Mary has steadily lost her hearing over the last ten years but she’s only recently got aids installed and frequently forgets to charge them – or chooses not to.

Mary is perched on the edge of her sofa, shoulders slumped in defeat. She looks as tired as this room with its heavy, old-fashioned curtains that she made herself, decades ago. The dusty school photos in their brown cardboard frames, warped with time, too painful for anyone to look at.

Mary’s face is bleached by the glare of the screen, whitewashing her lines and wrinkles, rendering her moon-white and decades younger. The smiling, jolly woman she once was, only the nub of whom is still inside this older lady. Like a fruit stone.

Mary’s eyes are pink from crying. She gestures to the screen, frowning and shaking her head. She knows.

‘Is Bunny here?’

Mary looks up with a snap of her neck.

‘No,’ Mary says, frowning. ‘She knows I always come to you on—’

‘She faked a note from me to get out of school this afternoon and then didn’t come home on the bus. Her friend Jasmine thinks the note said she had a doctor’s appointment but that could be total bollocks or just guesswork and I don’t know what to do, Mary!’

Mary claps a hand over her mouth and struggles to a stand, then reaches to grab her hands, just briefly. ‘She’s out there with all this going on?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know where she is! I hoped she might be here. She didn’t say anything to you?’

‘No,’ Mary says. A flicker of something, a question or a thought. She purses her lips, just slightly but then shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says, firmer this time. ‘Have you tried the doctor’s?’

‘It won’t be open now, you know it won’t.’

‘There might be someone there, it’s worth—’

‘Did you know she has a phone?’

‘A phone?’ The confusion on Mary’s face seems genuine.

‘Did you buy her a mobile phone?’

‘What?’

‘I don’t care, Mary, I won’t be cross I just need to know because then we can call it and—’

‘Of course I didn’t buy her a phone, I know your feelings about … all of that.’

‘Did you give her any money?’

Mary sits back down with a grunt. ‘I sometimes give her bits and bobs, you know I do,’ she says, quietly. ‘Not enough for a phone, nothing like that.’

‘She could have saved it up, she could—’

‘A couple of quid here and there, enough for sweets not gadgets.’

‘Enough for a train ticket?’

‘A train ticket?’

‘To Plymouth or London. I’m worried she’s—’

‘Oh dear god,’ Mary cries then. ‘No, darling, I haven’t given her enough for a train ticket to bloody London. That’s more than a phone would cost, these days. Why would she think to—’

‘Because …’ Because what? Because it’s a place that lures people away.

‘Darling,’ Mary says, softly. ‘Today is hard enough, but now there’s all this.’ She waves her hand at the screen. ‘You’re not thinking straight. Bunny doesn’t know anyone in London now. Or Plymouth. Or Bristol, for that matter. You need to look closer to home.’

‘What do you mean?’

The glow of the screen has already stripped Mary of any complexion, but she seems to go whiter still.

‘Nothing,’ she says, quickly. ‘Just at thirteen, girls are looking inward. You remember that, surely? And her mum is the last person to know anything. Have you tried her friends? What about her best friend?’ Mary gives her a loaded look then.

‘I know you’re close as anything but you’re still her mum.

It’s best friends that know everything about thirteen-year-olds. ’

Jasmine.