The Weekend Away

I try to soothe the anxiety knotting my stomach by telling myself that Kate’s fine. She’s off shopping or getting groceries or she’s gone out to lunch with those two men, or she’s avoiding me for some reason I don’t fully understand. It isn’t blood spilled on the bedroom carpet; it’s red wine. I comfort myself with thoughts of the telling-off I’ll give her when she eventually turns up. I won’t hold back. She’s ruining our trip away. If she has abandoned me for a drug-fuelled weekend of partying and sex, I will be so mad I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive her.

My anger doesn’t last though. As I walk outside onto the balcony with my coffee and take in the still boiling hot tub and Kate’s discarded dress, an ominous wet cloud settles on me and douses my rage. I set the coffee down and locate the switches for the hot tub to turn it off. In the silence that fills the air after I’ve switched it off, I pick up Kate’s dress and shake off a sudden shiver that runs the length of my body. The worm in my gut has burrowed in deep. If she’s just out shopping why is her phone off and why hasn’t she called me?

In an effort to cast off my fear I head back inside and in a flurry of activity start to clear the empty wine glasses and bottle of wine, dumping the glasses in the sink. What happened last night? All these gaping black holes have me freaking out. Maybe I should go to the hospital and do a drug test, find out definitively if I was drugged. But what a waste of time. Even if it proved I had been drugged, I still wouldn’t be able to prove who by, so there’s no point and how would I even be able to explain myself when I don’t speak the language?

As I’m doing a rudimentary tidy-up I have an epiphany. Her handbag! It strikes me then that I haven’t seen it anywhere in the apartment. It’s a Hermès Birkin bag. I’d know it a mile off as I’d enviously admired it when Kate showed it off to me at the airport. I’d assumed it was a fake, given they cost the same as a down payment on a house, but she’d reassured me that it wasn’t, had bragged that it was a divorce gift to herself.

How could I have forgotten to look for it? I rush back into her room and search, then when I don’t find it, I do another more frantic search of the whole apartment, turning over cushions and opening up cupboards. It’s not here. She must have it with her. That’s a good thing I suppose. It means she has her wallet and her ID with her.

I jump in the shower – keeping the door to the bathroom and bedroom ajar, so I can hear if Kate returns. As I dry off and throw on some clothes, I decide on a plan of action. I grab my bag and slip on my sandals to run downstairs to the landlord’s apartment. I should have thought of it sooner. Maybe he’s seen her or heard something.

But there’s no answer when I knock and, thwarted, I head back upstairs. OK, I think to myself, trying to be methodical and practical rather than giving in to the mounting panic I’m feeling, I’ll call the hospital and see if anyone matching Kate’s description has been admitted.

It takes me a few minutes of searching online to find the number but when I ring I get put through to an automated system that’s in Portuguese. I wait until the very end and, as I’d hoped, the recorded voice tells me to press two for English. It takes me another five minutes to navigate the system and reach an actual human being.

‘Hello, do you speak English?’ I say, feeling embarrassed that every English speaker in the world expects the rest of the world to speak their language while making no effort to speak theirs.

‘Yes,’ the woman on the end of the phone says.

‘Great,’ I say, relieved. ‘I’m looking for my friend. I don’t know what’s happened to her.’

There’s a pause on the end of the line. ‘She has an accident?’

‘No,’ I explain, wishing I’d rehearsed this. ‘I don’t know. I wondered if I could check if anyone had been brought in last night or early this morning. Her name is Kate.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman says, clearly confused. ‘You think your friend is here in the hospital?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. Am I being ridiculous? Kate will probably burst in the door any second, her arms full of shopping bags, laughing at how much of Toby’s money she’s just spent.

‘What is her name?’ the operator asks.

‘Kate – I mean Katherine – Hayes.’

I spell it out and can hear some tapping going on in the background. ‘I cannot find in the system,’ the woman tells me.

‘OK, thank you. And no one came in without identification?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Is there anything else I can help with?’

‘No,’ I say, and the woman hangs up.

I check my phone again, wondering if maybe Kate’s sent an email – though God knows how she could if her phone is dead – but she hasn’t. I send her one, just in case somehow she has access to a computer. I tell her to call me or email and give her my phone number in case she doesn’t have it memorised. Finally, I scribble a note to her and leave it on the hallway table.

When I step out onto the street I have to pull on my sunglasses. The sunshine burns my eyes and exacerbates the dull throb at my temples. It’s a gorgeous day and the city looks ripe for exploring. With a pang I think about our now-shelved plans. I should be sitting at a little restaurant on a cobbled side street with Kate right now, eating tapas and drinking chilled white wine, gossiping and laughing, faces turned to the sun, hoping to catch a smattering of rays. Resentment knocks shoulders with anxiety. The ongoing refrain marching through my head gets louder; where the hell is she?

On a mission now, I start to walk in a grid pattern around the apartment, stopping in any shop, café or bar that looks like somewhere Kate might visit, but the streets are winding and labyrinthine and very soon I’m lost. Still, I keep pounding up narrow lanes and down stairs, the cobbles glossed with age and slick as ice beneath my feet, the sun blistering the sky above my head.

I know her well enough to know what Kate’s drawn to – anywhere selling handbags and shoes for one, any bar that looks sophisticated for two – definitely no tourist traps, and no restaurants with photographs of food on the menu, and doubtfully any museums or art galleries, though those would be on my list. There are lots of tacky souvenir shops and not much in the way of boutiques but I make sure to check every dark cave-like bar I pass, in case she’s decided on hair of the dog after waking up with a hangover like mine.

I wonder for a second if the e-bike tour she claimed to be enthusiastic about was actually not something she wanted to do and if she’s therefore run off for a few hours to ensure missing it. Maybe she didn’t hear the part about the bikes being electric and thought it involved actual pedalling. But that seems childish, and why would she lie to me? Kate’s blunt and to the point. She would tell me if she didn’t want to do something. She put the kibosh on us going to the monastery, laughing that it was valuable time when we could be eating or drinking or shopping; why waste it on monks?

On the corner of a small square beside a church I discover a little café selling coffee and pastries. Kate isn’t inside and I stop myself from going in and asking people if they’ve seen her and showing them a photo on my phone – taken at the airport yesterday of us grinning and drinking champagne. It feels over the top and hysterical to start asking strangers if they’ve seen my friend – the equivalent of putting up missing posters on lamp-posts. Because she isn’t missing. She’s just not in touch.

I’ve been trying her phone every five minutes or so and I try it again, though without much hope. It rings through to voicemail and I leave another message, perhaps my third or fourth, begging her to please call me back.

An hour into my search and I still haven’t found her, though what were the chances, really? We could have missed each other in passing easily enough. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and in a foreign city that I don’t know, it’s also like wearing a blindfold. I start to wish I had unspooled a red string as I walked, so it could help me find my way back to the Airbnb. Even using Google maps is difficult as the roads bend in the most frustrating ways.

Tired, I stop in a little bar with pavement tables, to have a coffee and a custard tart. The waiter takes forever to bring my order – something I realise might be the standard for Lisbon – and I eat the tart without even tasting it. I can’t focus on enjoying anything, even though I tell myself to. I may as well because otherwise when I get back to the apartment and find Kate sitting there among a pile of shopping bags, I’ll be annoyed that I spent the afternoon worrying and not making the most of it. But when I spill the coffee on the white linen tablecloth all I can think about is that red stain on the carpet in Kate’s room. Was it blood? Or was it wine? All sorts of images try to push through the meniscus of my mind, furnished by far too many true crime podcasts and documentaries, but I force them away, mentally refusing to go there.

My phone rings just then and, hope bursting, I dig it frantically out of my bag. Disappointment hits me when I see it’s Rob, video-calling. I answer.

‘Hi, wow, that looks nice,’ he comments, obviously meaning the blue sky and pavement café culture in view behind me, though possibly the remains of the custard tart I’m holding. ‘Did you find Kate?’

I shake my head. ‘No. I’ve been looking for her. I just stopped for a coffee.’ I pause. ‘I’m worried, Rob. She still hasn’t been in touch.’ I don’t tell him I already called the hospital – he’ll accuse me of over-reacting.

‘Did you get in a fight with her or something?’ Rob asks.

‘No, of course not,’ I tell him, though as soon as I say it, I pause. Could that be it? Is she annoyed with me for putting up a fight last night about those two guys coming back to the apartment for a hot tub soak? I rack my sinkhole of a mind, trying to dredge up some memories of last night. I do vaguely recall arguing with Kate outside that bar I can’t remember the name of – she ignored me, or at least ignored what I had to say, but we didn’t fight exactly. I was too drunk – or drugged – to offer much resistance. I just wanted to go home to bed.

Did I say something else to her that I don’t remember? Perhaps when we got back we argued and I don’t remember it. I was so out of it, all I remember is feeling like I was going to be sick, my stomach squirming and bubbling like a cauldron on the boil and my vision blurring. The man – goddamn, what was his name? – helped me to the bathroom. I can still feel his arm locked around my waist. He almost had to haul me upright. But there’s nothing after he put me to bed except blankness, with the occasional shards of memory embedded like slivers of broken mirror that I don’t want to look at too hard in case they reveal glimpses of something I don’t want to see.

There was shouting. I can hear Kate yelling or screaming. Or am I imagining it?

I realise that Rob’s been talking this whole time I’ve been searching my memory. ‘What was that?’ I say.

‘I was asking where you went last night. Maybe Kate went back there. What if she lost her phone, left it there?’

‘Maybe,’ I muse, wondering why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. ‘But I think she had her phone,’ I tell Rob, remembering she used her phone to call a cab when we were outside the bar.

He’s planted the seed now though, and I wonder if I should head back to the bar to find out if Kate did go back for some other reason, maybe she left something else – not her phone, perhaps her wallet – or maybe after her marathon sex session she wanted to go out for more drinks. Maybe she hit up a club like she wanted to.

‘When did you see her last?’ Rob asks. ‘What time?’

‘Last night. I went to bed around two I guess.’ Should I tell him the truth now about the men we met – how Kate invited them back? ‘I was pretty drunk. I don’t remember much.’ As soon as I say the words I know it’s now too late to admit the full story. He’ll wonder why I held back from telling him to begin with and he’ll be suspicious.

‘Blimey,’ Rob says, ‘how much did you have to drink?’

I swallow and force a smile. ‘Oh, you know Kate, quite a bit. We had dinner then went to a bar.’

Rob raises his eyebrows, smiling. He knows what Kate’s antics can look like. But all I can see is the man with green eyes. What was his name? I wish I could remember. A bolt of nausea shoots through me as I remember that I thought about sleeping with him. I imagined what it would be like. I can hear Kate telling me to do it, encouraging me. What happens in Lisbon stays in Lisbon.

In the cold light of day as I look at Rob’s open, honest face and worried smile, I feel a huge wave of self-loathing. How could I have even considered it? And now it’s too late to tell him. He’ll think the worst of me and I don’t need to get into a fight with him. I’ve got enough on my plate worrying about Kate without having to deal with that too.

‘Do you think I should go to the police?’ I ask.

Rob pulls a surprised face. ‘What? No. It’s only been a few hours. She’ll turn up. You know Kate. She’s not exactly reliable. She’s probably lost track of time. That girl can party like the end of the world is coming.’

He’s right about that – but it’s not entirely fair to call her unreliable. She’s always on time for things and she does stick to her word.

She’s my best friend and has been for almost two decades, the first person I turn to when I need a shoulder to cry on or to have a bitch and moan, whether about work or relationship stuff. She always picks up the phone whenever I call and she sends me cheer-up texts when I’m down, silly things designed to make me laugh – videos of fruit porn or cats falling down stairs or Game of Thrones memes that posit that the age of men is over and heralding the end of the patriarchy.

‘Try to enjoy yourself,’ Rob says, jarring me back into the moment. I nod and try to smile but I can’t. How can I smile or enjoy myself when I don’t know where Kate is or what’s happened to her?

‘Is Marlow OK?’ I ask, realising I’ve been so concerned with Kate I’ve not asked a single question about her.

‘She’s fine,’ Rob says. ‘I put her down for a nap.’

‘Don’t let her sleep too long,’ I tell him. ‘Or she’ll be up in the night.’

‘I know,’ he says, his tone edgy. He hates me telling him what to do when it comes to Marlow; he says it implies he doesn’t know how to parent. ‘I’ve got it. Everything’s fine. I better go. Call me when Kate shows up.’

‘OK,’ I say and hang up, sipping the rest of my now cold coffee.

Chapter Eight

Another thirty minutes walking the neighbourhood yields nothing except sore feet, though several times I could have sworn I’d spotted Kate in the distance, only to be disappointed when I’d drawn level and seen it wasn’t her at all but a stranger who looked like her. I’m tired and grumpy by the time I decide to call it quits. I haven’t been able to enjoy the sights or been able to browse the shops I’ve entered looking for her, and I’m annoyed about what a waste today has turned into. I think about hailing one of the many taxis that prowl the neighbourhood, obviously trying to pick up silly tourists like me who’ve walked too far and can’t handle another hill, but decide to stick it out in case I spot her en route.

When I finally make it back, the apartment feels quiet as a tomb. I call out Kate’s name anyway and even after getting no response I still check her room, hoping against hope I might find her napping on the bed. Damn you, Kate, I think to myself, when I find it empty.

Annoyed, I walk into the kitchen and drink three glasses of water, glugging them down. My body seems unable to sate my unquenchable thirst, as if whatever I drank or was drugged with last night has turned my body into a dried-out husk. Will drinking so much water affect any drug test, I wonder? But I know deep down I have already dismissed the idea of going to the hospital to get tested. It’s probably too late anyway and I can’t imagine having to explain last night to a nurse or a doctor. And the thought of a sexual assault exam is too much to bear.

I had to go with Kate one time after she was sexually assaulted by a guy on the street. He grabbed her from behind when she was walking home alone at night from the bus stop and forced her down an alley. It wasn’t full penetrative sex but he did assault her and beat her before she managed to get away and run into a petrol station for help. They never found the man and Kate, after a few shaky days and once her bruises had faded, put her own spin on it, casting herself as the plucky heroine who kicked butt and fought off her attacker, leaving out the cruder details for anyone curious. She said her attacker ‘copped a feel’ when it had been much more aggressive and terrifying than that. I knew as I’d been with her, holding her hand, when she gave her statement to the woman detective. I never saw her cry though. She was stoic throughout the interview and the exam, as well as afterwards.

I can’t claim anything as horrible as that happened to me last night. In fact, probably nothing happened at all. The man put me to bed. End of story. It seems silly to make a thing of it when lots of worse things happen to women every day.

After standing in the middle of the living room for several minutes, thoughts drifting, I decide that I need to distract myself. I do a quick bustle through the apartment and balcony picking up towels, finding a pair of boxer shorts underneath one of the sun-loungers and a pair of red lace knickers beneath the coffee table in the living room.

I start to rinse out the glasses I dumped in the sink earlier, hesitating as I dunk them in the soapy water. There’s a fine powder in the bottom of one of the glasses. I examine it closer. It might just be dishwasher powder. Or it might be something else. There’s a faint lipstick mark on the rim – a coral pink colour that I recognise as my coloured lip balm. Kate wears actual lipstick – she’s never seen without it – the brighter and more attention-grabbing red the better.

I set the glass down on the side, my hand trembling. Is this evidence I was drugged last night? But I remember being woozy before we returned home. If I was drugged it was by the man at the bar. They probably thought when we sat down with them at their table that we were easy prey. They might have gone to the bar hoping to pick up some women and we stumbled, almost literally, into their laps.

Was it their intention to rape both of us last night? Did Kate being up for sex stop that plan in its tracks? They didn’t need to force her. But did something go wrong perhaps? Did she find out they drugged me? Or did they try to drug her? All these questions flit through my mind like poison arrows. The not knowing is the difficult thing. Am I being hysterical and leaping to outlandish conclusions based on nothing? I wish I knew. I wish Kate were here so we could talk and piece it all together.

I stand up. I need to do something. I need to go to the police. I can’t just stay in the apartment waiting for her to turn up because what if she is missing? What if something truly awful has happened to her, what if she’s somewhere needing my help right at this moment? In fact, now I’ve decided I can’t believe I’ve waited so long. What kind of a friend am I?

After quickly gathering my things I head out once more, stopping at the landlord’s apartment below ours and rapping loudly on the door. There’s a beat and I think I hear footsteps approaching the door but then there’s silence and the door doesn’t open. I stare at the spy hole directly ahead of me and feel suddenly creeped out that he might be watching me through it.

The door opens immediately. ‘Hello,’ Sebastian says. He isn’t smiling and I notice his arms are crossed over his chest and he’s blocking his doorway as though afraid I’m about to barge right past him.

‘Hi,’ I say, words suddenly deserting me. ‘Um, this is going to sound strange but have you seen my friend?’

‘Your friend?’ He shakes his head. ‘No.’

‘I don’t know where she is,’ I say. ‘I haven’t seen her since last night. And I can’t get hold of her. Her phone’s switched off.’

‘Well, I haven’t seen her,’ he says.

‘Right,’ I sigh. ‘It was a long shot. You didn’t hear anyone leaving this morning?’

He arches his eyebrows at me and purses his lips. ‘If you mean last night, yes. I heard plenty of leaving and coming.’

There’s an acid archness to his voice and a slight flare to his nostrils that puts me on the back foot, but I work in HR; I interview people all day and so I’m good at adjusting my technique depending on who I’m speaking to. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, understanding that he’s annoyed about the noise we made coming in last night and deciding to play the role of contrite and apologetic supplicant. ‘Did we wake you up last night? We tried to be quiet.’

He draws in a loud, self-righteous breath. ‘I think you woke the whole street.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I repeat, giving him an obsequious smile, while wondering how loud we actually were.

‘You only made the booking for two people,’ he says sniffily. ‘You even told me last night that only two of you were staying. Any extra guests incur a charge. You should have informed me.’

‘There weren’t extra guests,’ I say.

‘Yes, there were,’ he argues back, irritated. ‘I heard you. It sounded like you were having a party. Parties are forbidden. It’s in the rules.’

‘We didn’t have a party,’ I protest. ‘We just had two friends back for a drink.’

He rolls his eyes at me. ‘I heard the music and all the shouting and doors slamming. It was a party. And extra guests, which you’ll need to pay for.’

I ignore his last comment and latch on to the other information. Shouting? Doors slamming? What’s he talking about?

‘What time did you hear people leave?’ I ask.

‘Around three a.m. That still counts as an overnight guest.’

I couldn’t care less about his petty rules or extra costs or whatever punishment he wants to lay at our door. ‘What did you hear exactly?’ I press, suddenly excited that he might know something that could lead me to Kate.

‘Music, shouting, people running down the stairs, doors slamming,’ he says with a loud sigh.

‘Did you see who?’

‘No,’ he says, but his eyes slide sideways and I wonder if he’s telling the truth. ‘I was in bed,’ he sniffs.

‘You don’t know if it was Kate then who left at three? Or someone else?’

‘It sounded like men.’ He gives me a very pointed look and I feel my cheeks flush. It’s as if he’s implying I’m some kind of prostitute for bringing men back to our apartment. I refuse to be shamed though.

‘They were definitely running?’ I ask. ‘Like they were in a hurry to get somewhere?’

Sebastian nods. ‘Yes. It woke me up. Like elephants on the stairs.’

‘Did you hear anyone come back after that?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I put my ear plugs in.’

What could all this mean? I’m more confused now than ever.

‘I hope you don’t plan on having any more parties,’ Sebastian remarks.

I shake my head. ‘No,’ I say, stunned. It’s almost like he didn’t hear me when I told him Kate was missing.

‘Well then, I need to get on,’ Sebastian tells me, turning back into his apartment. ‘Goodbye.’ And he shuts the door firmly in my face.

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