Page 11 of The Love of Our Lives

With my heart pounding against my chest, I run back to the flat, weaving in and out of people on the street as I go.

I can’t believe I was so stupid, just sauntering about for days, without a care in the world.

I have no idea what Emily does with her time – what if she’s a carer or a doctor or something?

What if I’m supposed to be somewhere right now, looking after an invalid, and I don’t even know because I’m wandering around eating porridge?

When I eventually arrive back outside Emily’s building, I stop for a moment to catch my breath. I wait for the laboured sound to start, that feeling like everything in my body might just fall apart.

But it doesn’t come. I’m barely sweating. Before I can process it fully, a figure appears across the road and my stomach flips.

Adam, as I discovered from some mail outside his door.

He’s wearing the same khaki shorts and a black t-shirt again, and he’s got shopping bags at his side, a head of celery sticking out the top of one. His eyes light up when he clocks me, and he raises a hand in greeting, smiles that lopsided smile again.

God, he’s attractive.

But it’s not the time or the place to get chatting to some guy, no matter how good-looking he is.

Giving him a small wave back, I let myself in and head to the top floor. The door downstairs opens, closes, and I quickly slip back into my flat.

Heading into the bedroom, I cast back around the space. First things first, find Emily’s phone. And I have a feeling about where it might be.

Hauling the Mulberry bag out of the cupboard now, I open it up, see something dark at the bottom.

‘Bingo.’

Pulling an old-looking handset out, I try to turn it on.

Nothing. I plug it into the charger beside the bed and dash back to the hall cupboard to check the box with the papers.

It looks heavy when I pull it out, but when I actually lift it, I find myself carrying it into the living room like it weighs nothing.

It’s unsettling and freeing in equal measures.

There’s a lot more inside than I realised, and I can’t help wondering what the paper trail’s about.

Isn’t everything online these days? Maybe she decided to go off-grid for some reason.

I can’t think why but I guess there would be something freeing about cutting yourself off from it all.

I’m just so dependent on technology to live that it’s never been an option.

At any rate, I start rifling through all the paper, find various utility bills addressed to Emily Perin at an address in Highgate.

She did move up from London then.

Concentrate, Maggie .

Rooting further down, I finally find what I think I’m looking for – an employment letter for some financial company. So, not a carer, thankfully.

Phew.

With my heart rate a little lower now, I settle down to go through this stuff properly. I probably should have checked this earlier, but I was so hungry and freaked out by everything – still am, really.

Some of the papers I find are around pension contributions, a rental agreement with a landlord called William Johnson.

Another about a promotion; congratulations on the move to Director , it says.

The pay rise printed below makes my eyes water – Emily has done really well for herself – and as I look around the room again, at the frayed rug and shabby sofa, I find myself frowning.

None of it quite adds up, though the next letter from her company explains it in part – they are formally agreeing to a one-year sabbatical, following her ‘sudden’ exit. There will be no pay given during that time, but they welcome her to come back at the end of a year.

Placing the papers gently back in the box, I pull out her passport next.

Emily Isabella Perin, born in London. The pages are absolutely littered with stamps – America, India, Japan, the list goes on, and I can’t help but feel a little jealous, even if I don’t know this person.

But then I spot a driver’s licence application form – she didn’t drive either?

I pull out a stack of photos next and take my time sifting through them all.

The ones at the bottom are in black and white, of a thin little blonde girl mainly.

There are tightly packed terraces, washing strung up across the front, lots of kids everywhere.

The next ones are colour photos of what looks like a baby Emily in the nineties.

She’s in a paddling pool in an expansive, English-looking garden, with what must be her parents behind her.

Her dad has olive skin, the same thick chestnut hair and hazel eyes as Emily, which look kind, if a little distant.

Her mum, on the other hand, stands slim and pale beside him, a stiff-looking cream dress on, and I realise she must be the little girl in the older photos.

The next photo I pull out is one of her and her parents in some grand hall, except Emily’s a bit older – perhaps early teens.

She’s stood neatly between them wearing a smart white dress, her smile set in a tight line, and she’s holding up some sort of certificate.

Another photo of her working at a desk in her late teens, one long strand of hair hanging down her still childish cheek as she concentrates, another of her graduating from a fancy-looking school with her parents on either side, her mum’s hand firmly around her waist. Then a final shot of Emily standing in a cap and gown in some sort of archaic quad (is that Oxford? ) on a sunny day.

But close to the bottom is a different kind of photo, a loose one of Emily and a pretty girl with a dark, shiny bob.

She has deep brown eyes, bronzed skin, and the two of them have their cheeks pressed up right against each other.

They look like they’re mid laugh, out on a busy street somewhere with high buildings and electric lights behind them, London, from the looks of it.

And they look vaguely similar too; could be sisters.

I turn it over to see the words – E and Fran’s summer of Elton.

Love from your favourite cousin (Fran!) .

That it explains who she is. But who is Elton ?

At any rate, this must be the Fran on the mantlepiece, the one getting married to Toby next year.

There’s something else at the bottom of the box too – one of those old disposable cameras. I pick it up, turn it over. It’s clearly been used to the end. What’s on it?

It’s only then that I look up and see what I didn’t before, because I was too panicked, too tired and hungry and utterly lost – but now with a little food in me, I do see it: a DSLR camera hanging from one of the chairs around the dining room table.

Forgetting about the disposable now, I go and pick the camera up, feel the familiar weight of it in my hands.

Turning it carefully over, words come back to me – Digital Single Lens Reflex , interchangeable lenses.

I used one of these when I did a course on photography at college once.

I can’t help thinking about the sketches I did at home just before all of this happened – how there was something more urgent about the pace of them, something odd about the content too – blurry shapes and profiles, patterns and colours, which had no resemblance to what I’d seen or done that day.

I shiver.

A phone beeping cuts through my thoughts, and, turning away from the camera, I head back to the bedroom.

I get a dull niggle again that perhaps I’m doing something wrong; after all, I would never usually look through someone else’s phone, but I’m starting to realise that I have no choice.

This is my reality right now, and more than anything, I need to know why I’m here in this body. In this time.

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, I pick up the phone and look at the screen. No password to get in, and no apps, social media or emails. Not on an old-school model like this.

But there is one message waiting, from Fran. Tentatively, I open it up.

Is everything OK, E? Xxx

I look through the rest of the messages, but there’s only one other to ‘Mum’ with the address of this flat in Edinburgh – no response back – and I wonder if Emily switched her phone from something fancier. No other contacts saved either.

But why all the changes? Why the big move?

And why hasn’t her mum replied?

For the hundredth time today, I find myself trying to solve an unsolvable riddle and I place my head in my hands, attempting to quell the rising panic. I just wish I could talk to someone.

I wish I could talk to Jess.

Pausing for a moment, I key in the number I’ve called so many times in my life that I know it by heart.

I listen to it ring once, twice.

‘Hello?’

I immediately freeze at the sound of my sister’s voice.

She won’t know who I am.

‘Hello?’ Jess says again, wearily this time. A baby-ish shout from the background, one of the boys – two years ago.

My stomach lurches.

‘Who is it, honey?’ Graham’s voice.

‘Dunno,’ Jess says, ‘no one’s there.’

And with my head on my knees now, all I want to say is, ‘I’m here, Jess.’

I’m here, somewhere.