Page 74 of Breaking the Dark

“I promise you.”

The call ends and Jessica stares at her phone for a few moments. Then she turns her gaze up to the sky, looking for the special light, the wonder, the soft, golden maternal glow named Miranda that had enveloped her for so many hours. But it’s not there.

It’s gone.

Seven years ago

Bristol, UK

Life without a following is untenable. Every day Polly scrolls through Instagram, her eyes systematically homing in on the number of followers each profile has, running down the adoring comments under each post. She cannot bear that she is irrelevant, that nobody cares where she is or what she’s doing. She cannot bear that she has no influence.

Polly lives in a caravan now, with Arthur and the two dogs. The caravan is modern and clean, but it is still a caravan, and is far from ideal. They needed to go into hiding after they moved out of the Farnham house a few months ago, they needed to start afresh in case there was any comeback from the Clara episode.

Polly works in a nail bar, where she doesn’t even do nails, just answers the phones: “Hello, Crystal Nails, Nails and Spa! How can I help you!”

They think her name is Rebecca. Everyone calls her Becky. They see her sitting behind that tiny front desk in her crisply ironed shirts, her fitted tops and slicked-back hair, her lips just so, her mascara-coated eyelashes separated with a pin, teeth so shiny and white, rail-thin legs crossed in tight jeans, her perfect, perfect skin, and they think, There’s Becky. They think, She’s pretty. They think, She’s the pretty girl called Becky, who takes my money once I’ve had my nails done. And that is all they think. And that’s how it needs to be, as much as Polly wants to shine, wants to shine so bright that it blinds the universe. But she has to lie low. It’s been nearly eighteen months since Clara discovered human DNA in Polly’s beauty products, and it appears that Clara took Polly’s threat seriously, as Polly never heard from her again.

Surely it’s been long enough now, she thinks.

Surely it’s time to get back out there and start to make her mark.

Then one afternoon at the tail end of May, when the nights are getting lighter and lighter and Polly’s boredom and frustration are rising like the sap in the trees, she sees her future. And her future sits in the palm of her hand, shining out at her from the black glass of her smartphone. She scrolls and toggles through the buttons at the bottom of the screen and stares at her face as it changes, depending on which lens the app is using. It’s a relatively new platform called Snapchat. All the kids are using it. It was developed to make sending photos less permanent, users can only see a photo once, and then the universe swallows it up forever. Who knows where it goes! It’s like surgery, somehow, a memory excised before it’s had a chance to take root.

Polly downloaded the app to her phone a few weeks ago and has just discovered the filters. The girls at the salon use the filters all the time and make themselves die laughing. Polly uses them to see what she’d look like if she had red hair or a round face or blond eyebrows.

There are new ones added every day by creators and she wonders how easy it would be for her to make one. Could she get famous that way? she wonders. If hers were better than anyone else’s?

But she’s not tech-savvy. She wouldn’t know where to start. She glances across the caravan at Arthur, who sits at the tiny dining table, staring at his laptop.

“What do you know about AR?”

“A what?”

“AR? Augmented reality? It’s the tech they use to make filters on apps.”

She shows him her phone and he smiles slightly as his face changes from screen to screen.

“Ha!” he calls out with delight as rabbit ears appear on top of his head. “Look!”

“Do you think you could make one of these?”

Arthur closes the lid of his laptop, a sign that he is engaged with something that exists in the real world. He scrolls through the app with his nice fingers. Polly perches next to him and watches as he navigates the app. Those dreamy eyes light up. He’s on. She feels the swell of attraction she always feels in the moments when she remembers how clever he is. Possibly the cleverest person she’s ever known. An IQ of 168, Ophelia once bragged. Highly gifted. Polly can forget how clever her boyfriend is sometimes, as it gets swallowed up by the otherwise idiocy of him, his vagueness and nonsense and strange obsessions, his total and utter lack of common sense. But when it comes to crises, his brain explodes into action.

And when it comes to tech, he cuts right into it all like a freshly sharpened knife.

TWENTY-SEVEN

BACK AT THE hotel, the receptionist looks at Jessica with concerned eyes as she unhooks her key from the board and hands it over to her. “Are you okay, Miss Allan?”

“Yeah. Big day. Need to sleep now,” Jessica says and turns to go.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to have a bite of something to eat before you head up? The dining room just opened.”

Jessica smiles wearily. “No, thank you. I’ve had plenty to eat today. But I might get a visit at some point from two police officers? Please send them up to my room. Whatever the time.”

“Oh,” says the receptionist, her eyes shining with scandal. “Yes. Of course. And actually, I hope this is okay, but Elliot Redd came in earlier. From the chemist’s? He said you’d asked him to collect the Amazon package that came for you this morning, and I did give it to him. I really hope that was okay?”

“Oh,” says Jessica, remembering telling Malcolm to order her a drone the other day. “Yeah, that was totally okay. Thank you.”

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