Haven't They Grown(13)
He was horrified when we all said we had no desire to watch. ‘What is wrong with you freaks?’ he yelled, actually upset that we were missing out. ‘It’s the most grotesque and embarrassing thing you’re likely to see all year! You’re a bunch of fucking philistines.’
Dom was right: Lewis Braid was weird, and he could be a giant pain in the arse, but we’d have had less fun without him around, no doubt about it. Life would have been much less colourful.
I read a few of the posts he’s put on his Twitter page. There’s no hint of his more outrageous side here. It’s all bland and professional: ‘Small can be beautiful at VersaNova – great team, fantastic colleagues and a mission worth working for!’ ‘It’s a beautiful day for the opening of the ATARM conference here in Tampa, Florida. Proud to be one of the sponsors of this fantastic event, 18–20 April!’ ‘VersaNova named in @technovators Top 10 Tech Companies to Watch in 2019’ ‘Great to see our technology director Sheryl Sotork featured in CapInvest Magazine’ ‘“Patient Capital Delivers Results” – thrilled to be one of the software companies featured in this article.’
I don’t know what I was hoping for. ‘Hey, guys, it’s a bit strange but my oldest two children seem to have stopped growing …’
I keep scrolling further down, reading tweets from last week, last month, the end of last year. Lewis doesn’t post on here very often – only once or twice a month. There’s nothing interesting in December last year, or November.
Wait. What’s this?
In October, he posted a link to what looks like an Instagram account in his name. I click to open it. I have no idea what a grown man’s account might look like. I’m more familiar with Instagram than with Twitter or LinkedIn. Zannah sometimes shows me selfies posted there by girls at her school and asks me if I think they’re flames, mingers or donkeys, which apparently, as everyone who is not ‘so lame’ knows, are the only three categories.
Soon I’m staring at a photograph of Lewis on the deck of a boat, with a beautiful sunset behind him. He’s been much more active on Instagram than he has on Twitter. There are a lot of photos on his page. I work through them methodically, opening them one by one: Lewis bare-chested in denim shorts, holding up a fish, Lewis with two other people, walking along a …
Two other people.
Are they …?
I try to tell myself that I can’t possibly know for certain, but I do. It’s them. It’s Thomas and Emily. Teenagers. As they should be. This is how the children I knew twelve years ago would look now. When I look at their faces, I have the same feeling I had when I first saw Lewis’s photograph on Twitter: absolute recognition.
If this is them, then who were the Thomas and Emily you saw in Hemingford Abbots?
Suddenly I feel dizzy, as if I’m tumbling forward without anything to stop me from falling. I hold on to the sides of Dom’s desk with both hands and breathe deliberately until the fuzzy dots in my head start to clear.
Come on, Beth, get a grip. Nothing has changed, except in a good way. If these two golden, perfect, healthy-looking teenagers are Thomas and Emily Braid – and they are, I know they are – then they didn’t die and get replaced by a new Thomas and Emily. And, all right, I still don’t know who the two children were that I saw at 16 Wyddial Lane, but I never knew that, and so nothing has changed, nothing is any more frightening now than it was before. The Hemingford Abbots children could never have been Thomas and Emily Braid; they were too young. I should have known that from the start. I did know it, but I didn’t fully believe it – not until I saw these photographs.
Do all Florida teenagers look radiant, sun-kissed and wholesome or is it just Lewis Braid’s children? They certainly all seem to have a great life in America. Lewis’s Instagram is an apparently endless pictorial log of every pleasure available to humankind: glasses of champagne, cheese-and-salsa-drizzled nachos, sunsets, beaches, swimming pools, balcony terraces in fancy-looking restaurants …
I take in all these things at a glance, but I don’t care enough about the details to look at them properly. The Braids are lucky and rich; I knew that already. Now, in Florida, they’re luckier and richer. Of course they are.
Thomas and Emily are all I’m interested in. I scroll down, hoping for more photos of them.
Here’s Emily in very short black shorts, a long, floaty white blouse and a red-and-navy-blue-bead ankle bracelet. Thomas, in the most recent pictures, has a surfboard under his arm and sun-bleached hair almost down to his shoulders. Unlike his sister, he seems to favour longer shorts, right down to his knees.
His sister …
My breath catches in my throat.
Georgina. Where is she?
I search two, three times to make sure. She isn’t here. There are no children in these pictures apart from Thomas and Emily. And no Flora either.
Why would Lewis fill his Instagram with many pictures of two of his children, but none of the third? And none of his wife?
A memory surfaces suddenly, from the last time we were all together. Lewis said that if he were Thomas or Emily, he would hate Georgina, because now their parents’ sizeable estate would have to be divided between three people instead of two. Instantly, Flora looked unhappy. She often used to roll her eyes at him affectionately, as if he were a lovable but disobedient puppy, but this time she looked seriously uncomfortable. He put his arm round her and said, ‘I’m joking. Relax. There’s plenty for everyone.’