Renée Knight - Disclaimer

Our driver knew exactly where to go, a cheap hostel for backpackers in a back street about twenty minutes from the beach. I expected kindness from the staff at the hostel, but we didn’t receive much. They said they had barely seen Jonathan during his stay. They didn’t know him. He was a stranger who happened to die while he was their guest. I found them evasive, almost embarrassed, as if we might turn round and blame them for our son’s death. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, we kept being told. It was an accident. The sea is treacherous, the wind can suddenly come up, as it did that day. Was there a red flag flying? No one seemed to remember.

Jonathan’s rucksack was sitting on a chair in the room he had occupied. It was an inhospitable room: a single bed with a sheet and a blanket; a chipped chest of drawers which still held his clothes. The police had returned the bag he had had on the beach. They had found his room key and located his hotel. And there they had found his passport and that had led them to us.

Nancy took charge of everything. She took his clothes out of drawers and folded them, then laid them out on the bed. She wouldn’t let me help. It was her domain. While she sorted through Jonathan’s things, I sat in a chair at the window and looked out at what Jonathan would have looked out at. He didn’t have a sea view — his room was at the back of this cheap hotel. So while I was staring down at two, possibly Scandinavian backpackers sitting on white plastic chairs, at a white plastic table, on a yellow and pink crazy-paved courtyard, Nancy must have found Jonathan’s camera. Did she put it into his rucksack? I don’t know. Or did she hide it in her own bag? I will never know, but I wonder when it was that she decided to have the film developed. Was it then, or later, when we were back at home? I never saw his camera — I always assumed that it had got lost somewhere, or been stolen by someone in the hotel when they knew Jonathan wouldn’t be back for it. It was an expensive camera — the most expensive present we had ever bought him. A Nikon, top of the range, with a superzoom lens. Our gift to him on his eighteenth birthday. If he had lost it, he wouldn’t have wanted to tell us.

When I turned back from the window, Nancy was holding Jonathan’s penknife, Swiss Army, another birthday present from us. Was he thirteen? Fourteen? Anyway, it was an age when we felt he could be trusted with it. She found his aftershave and squirted it into the air, then sniffed, a last breath of our son’s scent. Why was she going through it all now? Just pack it up, please. I wanted to get out of there. Then she held up a pack of cigarettes. Neither of us knew Jonathan smoked. His girlfriend Sarah wouldn’t have approved. She wasn’t the type. Perhaps he picked up the habit once she had left. I wonder where Sarah is now? Middle aged, married probably. She was perfectly nice but I wouldn’t have wanted Jonathan to end up with her. Actually, that’s not true. If she hadn’t gone home. If she had stayed in Europe with Jonathan, then he would probably still be alive. And I would have done anything to have him still alive, even if it meant sacrificing him to marriage with an earnest, slightly humourless woman.

Robert has found Catherine, although she is Charlotte, not Catherine. He glances at his watch. He has half an hour before he must leave to be in time for his first meeting, but he can’t stop reading now. He phones ahead and tells them to put it back an hour.

One night in Tarifa, that was all John had planned. One night in the cheapest hotel and then the ferry to Tangiers early the next morning. He was in pursuit of Orwell, Bowles, Kerouac, not love. But he heard her song and he was lost. He was easy prey for a woman of her experience. A woman who was a little bored. A woman who was looking for a bit of light entertainment, just to fill in a few days before she returned home to her husband. A woman who had a child, but a child who rather cramped her style. He was a useful disguise though, this child — he allowed her to disguise herself as a mother, a woman who no longer put herself first. A good woman. Such a clever disguise. Here I am, she cried from the rocks. Looking after my child. Abandoned by my workaholic husband. I can perform the part very well. See what I’m doing? My voice is gentle when I speak to my little boy. I smile. A lot. I smile a lot. He is such a bundle of energy, a live wire, my little boy. He is happy. Because I am a good mother. Oh, but how tiring he is. He must have my attention all the time, and it is so, so exhausting. I cannot look away for a moment, his voice always calling me: Mummy, look, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy. Look at me. Look at me. And she does look at him, whenever he demands it, and she smiles and her voice is patient, but it is a performance. Her patient voice carries, she makes sure of that, so that those around her in the café will take note of what a lovely mummy she is. Now and again she glances round to check that her audience is paying attention. Look at me, she is saying, just as loudly as her little boy, but she is cleverer than he. And John heard her voice, and he was lost. He couldn’t see past the spell she was casting.

He saw her light cotton dress trailing on the ground beneath her chair; her long, tanned leg a shimmer of gold, stretching out from the split, which ran from the top of her thigh — a deliberate split, to allow her to move freely inside her long robe. It was a robe which declared modesty but whispered at the heat beneath.

The image slaps Robert across the face. He has seen it in one of the photographs — a picture of Catherine with her leg stretched out from her beach dress. Sitting in a café with Nicholas. The author really hates her and Robert detects jealousy too, seeping through the pages. He wonders again if it could have been written by a girlfriend, but didn’t Catherine say she thought it was the father? He reads on.

Charlotte bought him a beer as a thank-you for helping distract her little boy into eating his supper. And then he walked them back to their hotel; it was getting dark and he had nothing else to do. The little boy was quiet by then, sleepy, holding his mummy’s hand, and she and John talked, and he told her that he was leaving the next day to catch the ferry. She told him she was a little jealous of his freedom, but her jealousy was light-hearted, not really meant. It was still early, and she persuaded him to wait downstairs in the lobby for her while she put the little one to bed. It was his bedtime, but not hers yet, and she wanted to buy John a drink as a thank-you, and she would so enjoy some adult company. And he was flattered, at nineteen…

Robert’s hands are shaking. He holds one up and looks at the jittering fingers in surprise, as if he is holding up a specimen of something he has never seen before. Whatever he is about to read has happened. There is nothing he can do about it, and yet it holds a power over him, as if by reading it, it will happen all over again just because he is there to see it this time. He reads on, like a teenager desperate to get to the sexy bits.

… He was charmed by her shyness, her coy reluctance to let him see her naked. She had lost confidence in her body since becoming a mother, she said, and feared he might recoil at the curve of her stomach with its scar from where she’d been opened up and her son taken out and that John would be used to younger, firmer flesh. And Sarah was younger, much younger, but he didn’t tell Charlotte this or that Sarah had been his only lover. Her nervousness emboldened him, and for a moment their roles were reversed, and she allowed him to feel as if he was the one in control, leading the way.