Out of sight …
She straightened and scanned the room. When Lorne had gone missing the OIC had come in here with a Support Group team looking for clues to her disappearance. Zoë had read through his notes and there hadn’t been anything much. But a girl like Lorne? Tension between her and her mother? There had to be something the OIC had missed. She sat on the bed, her hands resting on her lap, and concentrated on summoning up the feeling she’d had earlier. The sudden, shuddering connection to her own teenage self. If this had been her room, where would she have hidden things?
At boarding-school the dorms had been small – just four to a room. There had been a cupboard stretching the length of one wall and each girl had been allocated a section in it for her clothes. They had also been given a small bedside table each. Not much scope for hiding things you didn’t want others to see. Zoë had found a way, though. Her eyes trailed to Lorne’s bedside table, which was piled with magazines. She pushed herself off the bed, lay down on the floor, and reached a hand up under the table. She found just the smooth wood of the base. She got up, moved to the desk and did the same. Nothing. She went to the wardrobe. This time when she pushed her fingers underneath she found, taped to the base, a solid, block-shaped object encased in a plastic bag.
She peeled away the tape, removed the package and sat on the bed with it on her lap. Inside the plastic bag she found a small book, complete with a lock in the shape of a heart, a key in it. On the front of it were scrawled the words: ‘Mum, if you’ve found this then I can’t stop you reading it. But don’t forget that you will have betrayed my trust.’ Zoë smiled for the little human part of Lorne that had just peeped out. More human than Pippa downstairs, still fretting that her daughter wasn’t remotely interested in horses.
Zoë opened the book, and leafed through the pages. Lorne had pasted the pages with paper cut-out flowers, and little stickers in the shape of eyes that blinked and jiggled when you moved them. Most of the earlier dates had no entry, but for the last few weeks it seemed Lorne had become an inveterate scribbler. Every page was crammed to the margins with notes in a tiny, barely legible scrawl. Zoë took her reading glasses from the breast pocket of her shirt, carried the book to the window, where the light was good, and read.
Most of the stuff was predictable teenage angst. Every day Lorne had recorded her weight and the number of calories she’d eaten, then a long, sometimes desperate commentary on how her hair looked awful, how fat she was getting. She made plans for how much she would eat at weekends. Zoë had read surveys that said at least seventy per cent of teenage girls were always on a diet. She’d spent her own teens worrying about the streak-of-piss insults her gangly frame got her – but to be always worrying about what food you put in your mouth, what kind of a hell prison was that?
More than once the initials ‘RH’ came up.
April fourteenth. Saw RH. He’s mega with the fat-tie thing. Christina says he likes me. I don’t know. Wore my Hard Candy blue eyeshadow. Totally lush!
RH was talking to that girl in the sixth form that’s supposed to have a flat in New York. Nela says her name is Mathilda but I thought Tillie though maybe that’s short for it. Quite pretty with blonde hair but she’s got really fat calves. She shouldn’t wear leggings. Yuk.
Went to Katinka’s after school. And got some hair colour – going to do it when Alice comes over at the weekend. Mum’s going to FREEEEEEEEEEAKKKK!!!!! EEEEEKKK!!!
Read about this girl who was on holiday in Goa with her family. She was just sitting on the beach and a scout from Storm in London saw her. Her first job she got £1,000 and the editor of Vogue saw her and put her on the front page. Now she lives in New York, New York!!!! And she’s from Weston bloody super Mare! I look at her and I think – if you can do it …
The next page was taken up with nothing but the initials ‘LW’ entwined with ‘RH’. On the page after that, on 20 April, a note said:
Kissed him!!!!! I am officially in LOVE!!!!!! Can’t tell anyone. He said his mum would kill him if she knew. She’s a complete witch. He says he’s going to apply to University College and Imperial, so when I’ve got my totally lush flat in Chelsea (ha ha!) he can come and see me anytime we feel like it and his batshit crazy mother can’t get us.
Zoë turned the page. If Debbie Harry saw this and the comments on his dominating mother, she’d hang, draw and quarter RH. Whoever he was.
Zeb Juice are going to see me!!! Can’t believe it. That’s given me a boost I can’t believe. I’m going to call some of the others too. I’m going to wear my pink heels and blue jeans. Shopping list, get Noodlehead Curl Boost, St Tropez Bronzing Mist – Marie Claire says it’s legend. £30. But, doh, brain freeze about where I’m going to get that money from. If I walk home every day and save all my bus fares and all my tuck money I still won’t have enough …
After that the pages hadn’t been written on. Instead they’d been filled with flowers and hearts and sketches of a girl – Lorne herself, presumably – dressed in bikinis and high-heeled boots. Zoë flicked through the remaining pages. There was nothing else of any interest. She closed the diary, and as she did, she noticed a small pocket on the back. When she inserted her nail she found a tiny object in there. An eight-milligram camera chip.
She sorted around on the desk until she found the camera it belonged to, plugged in the chip and began clicking through the photos. Lorne was pictured here, right in this bedroom. From the awkward position it looked as though she’d taken them herself using an automatic timer. In the first three she was dressed in a bikini – standing full length. But it was the fourth and subsequent shots that made Zoë sit down on the bed, dismayed. Lorne appeared dressed in suspenders, stockings and a basque, poised coquettishly on the floor, legs crossed. In the last two she had taken the basque off and was looking provocatively into the camera, her tongue held lightly at her glossed lips.
Zoë clicked through them twice, a huge wave of sadness coming over her. Why would a nice middle-class girl like Lorne do something like that? Lots of reasons, of course – maybe it was nothing more sinister than an impressionable schoolgirl trying to ease herself into her own sexuality. Or maybe to impress a boyfriend. But it could also be nastier than that. An old ghost came to Zoë then, going pitter-patter around the corners of her mind – thinking that it could be because Lorne had learned to dislike herself early. Maybe when she realized her brother was the star in their mother’s eyes she’d begun struggling to find a way to escape. Zoë knew what that felt like. Maybe that was what these photos were about.
Outside, the noise of Mr Wood’s chainsaw cut through the silence. She took the card out of the camera and held it in the palm of her hand, trying to decide if the photos were important – the portal to a whole separate side of Lorne that no one was mentioning. Whether they were connected to her modelling dream and just how desperate she had been to make that dream come true. No, she told herself, probably lots of teenage girls had photos of themselves like this, hidden somewhere from Mum and Dad. It would be better just to leave them in the diary, taped out of sight, never to be seen again. Or destroy the chip.