Page 12 of The Island of Lost Girls

6 | Robin

Sinjora Hernandez jingles keys in her hand as Robin turns back from the window to survey her temporary home.

‘It’s lovely,’ she says, eying a garish painting of St James slaying the Moor that would render her London neighbours puce with righteous indignation. The room is hot. She’ll be glad of the rickety old standing fan in the corner.

Sinjora Hernandez nods with no great pleasure and jangles her keys again.

‘Bahnjo,’ she says, ‘this way.’ She points out onto the landing, where Robin can glimpse patterned floor tiles through an open door. She hopes whoever she’s sharing it with is as thoughtful as she intends to be.

‘Thank you,’ she replies, and puts her bag on the bed. Sinjora Hernandez hangs on, like a porter awaiting a tip.

‘Thank you,’ Robin says again, then tries the local language, to see if it’s more effective. ‘Mersi.’

‘You holiday?’ asks Sinjora Hernandez. A grumpy old bag. The eyebrows of Eleanor Bron with none of the humour.

‘Yes – I – no … ’

You have to start some time. You need to start asking.

‘I’m looking for my daughter,’ she says.

A frown. These people are fond of frowning.

‘Looking?’

She opens her bag, brings out a flyer. Gemma’s name, the last photo she ever took – her lovely curly-haired daughter laughing as she teases their idiot spaniel with a tennis ball – Robin’s phone number, the British dialling code included. Her email address.

MISSING, it reads across the top.

She offers it to the older woman, who takes it and holds it on the very corner, as though it’s contaminated with dog shit.

‘Gemma,’ she says. ‘Hanson.’

‘How old she?’

‘Seventeen.’

The sinjora looks up from the paper. ‘You lose you daughter, she only seventeen?’

Robin quails at the judgement in her voice. ‘She ran away,’ she says. ‘Last year.’

The judgement goes on. Robin has never forged armour against it. Everyone, whenever you confess to a runaway child, looks at you as though you’ve confessed to abuse. I didn’t do anything! she wants to scream. I didn’t DO anything!

The woman softens slightly. ‘She run here?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘not straight away. I’ve been looking for her since she left. But I found she was coming here. I saw a … ’

How do you explain encrypted phone apps to someone who looks as though they haven’t really grasped the concept of television yet?

‘She’s been leaving messages. On the internet. With her friends. Only they didn’t tell me because, you know … teenagers. One of them texted me, in the end.’

The woman looks blank as a rock. Too complicated. Robin gives up. She has screenshots, if she ever finds someone to show them to, but this woman – there’s no point.

‘Anyway, they all knew where she was, her friends, because she was writing to them, but then she stopped … ’

She should be grateful, she knows, that Naz got in touch with her, but she’s not. She’s angry. Ten whole months, those dim little bitches denying all knowledge. Teenage girls and their stupid fantasies. Thinking they were closing ranks to stop the Old People spoiling Gemma’s break for stardom. Enlivening their dull little journeys through the sixth form with her tales of glamour, giggling behind their hands, while Robin searched and wept and lay awake and felt the dread.

Sinjora Hernandez looks again at the photo. Robin’s lovely daughter with her creamy brown skin and her corkscrew curls, the legs that go on forever.