Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

Neither of them were setting the world alight but then whose children did? All those hopes and dreams and talk of ballerinas and pop stars, concert pianists and boundary-breaking scientists. They all ended up in an office. All of them.

Many of these highlights are merely my own personal little truisms. That’s one of the fun things about writing a book, you can just throw them in there sometimes and share them with your readers. It’s great to see when they connect with people and you know you’re not alone! I just find the disconnect between what people imagine their small children will end up doing and being and the reality of what nearly everyone in the western world ends up doing and being is quite strange. Being hugely successful or revolutionary or talented is much more the exception than the rule.

It was Saturday afternoon, May, a week before GCSEs. They were in Ellie’s bedroom, taking a break from revision. Outside the sun was shining. Teddy Bear the cat lay by their side and the air was full of pollen and hope. Ellie’s mum always said that May was like the Friday night of summer: all the good times lying ahead of you, bright and shiny and waiting to be lived.

Another of my own long held observations. Life is all in the anticipation. Friday night is something you dream about all week long. Summer is something you dream about all year long. Yet when it comes it’s often gone in a flash, before you’ve had a chance to really get a purchase on it. And after it’s gone you look back and it’s the beginning bits you yearn for. The moment that the clock finally ticks down to five o’clock on Friday afternoon, the first day warm enough to leave the house in open shoes. We have a standing joke in my family about getting to the destination airport on the first day of our holiday. As we step off the plane we say, well, that’s it the, holiday’s over. Because the anticipation is over. And that’s the best bit.

So, in retrospect, she could have blamed her sister’s friend with the loud laugh for her being there at that precise moment, but she really didn’t want to do that. The blame game could be exhausting sometimes. The blame game could make you lose your mind … all the infinitesimal outcomes, each path breaking up into a million other paths every time you heedlessly chose one, taking you on a journey that you’d never find your way back from.

I physically ached writing this paragraph, knowing as Ellie already did and (and as the reader did not) the precise nature of the path that Ellie had set herself upon with those heedless choices. I have a great sense of morbidity. My untimely death and the untimely deaths of those I love are often lingering somewhere just around the corner. And I often ask myself if this is it, is this the decision that has sealed my fate. If I run for this tube will it be the one that gets blown up? But if I don’t and I get the next tube, will that be the one that gets blown up? If I let my child get a lift in that car, will it be crushed on the motorway? But if I make her come in my car, will that be the one that gets crushed? I sometimes feel as though I’m swerving bullets, that it is only lucky choices that have conspired to keep us all safe for another day. It’s terrifying if you think about it too much, the power of those minuscule decisions, and how many we make every hour without a second’s thought.

‘As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are for ever.’

I describe Paul frequently as being ‘a lovely man’ and I felt very warm whenever I wrote him. My heart ached for him and I totally felt what he felt, his compassion and understanding, his pragmatism and his positivity. When he had a cold the day of Ellie’s disappearance and came down wearing the wrong clothes and Laurel hated him, I felt really sorry for him. But I also absolutely understood why Laurel hated him. It was as if I was a mutual friend who could see both sides of the story and just wanted them both to be happy. I loved writing the reconciliation scenes between Paul and Laurel when she finally allows him to show her his love, the love that has never died, and she finally acknowledges her own love for him. As the child of divorced parents who never properly reconciled, I found it very moving indeed.

But she is remembering now. Cooking doesn’t just nurture the recipient, it nurtures the chef.

Well, yes, absolutely! My mother was a great cook but when my father started having an affair when my sisters and I were teenagers, she stopped cooking. I lived on Smash mashed potatoes and Heinz Lentil soup for a while. My mother never had Laurel’s epiphany herself. She never rediscovered her love of cooking for other people. So again here, I may sub consciously have been writing my own version of a happy ending for my parents.

When the children were small, Laurel’s mother would occasionally make small, raw observations about gaps between phone calls and visits that would tear tiny, painful strips off Laurel’s conscience. I will never guilt-trip my children when they are adults, she’d vowed. I will never expect more than they are able to give.

When I was about twenty-two, I didn’t send my mother a Mother’s Day card. I went to visit her a few days later and as I admired the cards on the mantel from my sisters, she said to me, ‘I hope you never have to know what it feels like not to get a Mother’s Day card from your child.’ I was taken aback. I thought my mother knew how much I loved and appreciated her without needing it to be written down on a card on one arbitrary day of the year. I remember thinking, if one day my child doesn’t send me a Mother’s Day card I WILL NOT MIND. I am a mother now, of an eleven-year-old and a fifteen-year-old, and already I have set my expectations low about how I think it will be when they’re grown. I just want them to go off and be awesome. If they decide that part of their awesomeness involves regular visits to their old mother and flowers on Mother’s Day, then I will not be complaining. But I will not be devastated if they don’t. Also, I will always have a dog, so I’ll be fine …

Poppy’s hands fall on to the book. ‘Stories’, she says, ‘are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.’

I could go really deep here. I mean this is pretty deep. The older I’ve got the more I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no point to anything. Everything is a big fat nothing. A rose in full bloom is only beautiful because our chemical and neurological make up tell us it is so. A lion does not find it beautiful. An alien might find it repellant. It’s only perceived to be beautiful and thus important because it makes us peculiar and aberrative creatures known as human beings feel good when we look upon it. Without our gaze it is irrelevant. I used to think that ‘everything happens for a reason’. I used to believe in fate. I spent a lot of time wondering about God and his existence or lack of existence. I used to think that someone somewhere cared about us all and was somehow ‘writing the narrative’. Once your realise that there is no narrative, that all is chaos and that if the human race ceased to exist it would matter not a jot, that we are none of us important other than to each other for brief fleeting periods of time and that this thing that matters so much to us all could in fact be no more than a dream, or a crazy arcade game where the only rules surely are to be good, have fun and try not to fall off, then you realise the immense power of a story. A story has a God, a God who cares about the people therein and creates a meaningful destiny for them. All the connections within a story have import, all the turns in the story lead somewhere, everything really does happen for a reason, and unlike in so called real life, the reader is witness to the end of everything when they read the final pages.

‘When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream.’

This is what Ellie used to say about reading, which echoes almost exactly what Poppy says at the birthday dinner, foreshadowing a very significant relationship between the two girls. Interestingly, my own fifteen-year-old daughter has started to voice some of my own inner thoughts about chaos and nihilism and the sheer stunning futility of everything, proving that maybe things like world view and philosophy can be hereditary.

days. I’m not going to tell you that in ten years you’ll look back and wonder what the hell you were thinking, because I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing. So whatever you’re feeling now, it’s temporary.

My daughter hasn’t quite picked up on this one yet though. She is convinced that when she is forty it will be utterly shocking to her because she will be her fifteen-year-old self in a forty-year-old body, with forty-year-old friends and a forty-year old’s lifestyle. Which, if it were true would indeed be appalling. I try to explain to her that she won’t be her by the time she’s forty. She’ll be a different person. Not just a changed person or evolved. But completely rewritten. Even things like fears are fluid. I have been scared of spiders all my life, but that does not mean that by next year I might not have got over my fear. I used to think that pizza was a waste of calories, now I spent half my life dreaming of pizza. Ditto chicken wings. Fifteen-year-old me was obsessed with music - I barely listen to music any more. I used to be unbearably shy. I am no longer shy. I was convinced I was ugly. I now like the way I look. At fifteen I had no desire ever to have children. Now I have two of them and it turns out I quite like it. At twenty-three I married someone I didn’t love just to be polite. The person who did that thing no longer exists. I don’t even know who that was. Pacifists can kill. Religious zealots can lose their faith. Men can become women. People can decide they like chicken wings. We’re all made of Play-Doh.

‘I meant’, says Blue, ‘that a man who can’t love but desperately needs to be loved is a dangerous thing indeed.

I suppose really this would apply to your common or garden narcissist. And common or garden narcissists are indeed dangerous; they can destroy people. That wasn’t in fact the case with Floyd. He wasn’t a narcissist at all. I don’t think Blue was quite on the money here. Blue was an odd character, a blend I think of people I’ve met across the years who concern themselves hugely with matters of the spiritual world but have very little to offer the real world in terms of charm or friendship. It is almost as though they are using the spiritual world as an escape from reality rather than as a way to understand reality (whatever that may be). I rewrote this chapter (where she is trying to warn Laurel against Floyd) quite a few times. I couldn’t quite pitch her properly or work out her intentions. She was being very clumsy and I think that was partly my fault as a writer! Often the subsidiary characters can be the easiest and the most complete on the page. But with Blue I felt there was still a lot for me to know about her.

Did you love Then She Was Gone? Read on for a sneak peek of Lisa’s thrilling new novel …

I’ve never looked at my kindle highlights before and as a writer I must say that I’ve found it very gratifying. They’re all pieces of prose that gave me pleasure to write (so often writing can feel like laying up the dining table or emptying the dishwasher, or worse, like pushing a truck up a hill or pulling teeth out of your own head) but some paragraphs have a little energy of their own that transcends the day to day mechanics of writing and seeing readers make a connection with those paragraphs is just wonderful. So, thank you all for not just reading but for engaging on a deeper level. And for noticing when I was doing my job well! My new book, Watching You, is out now in the UK and the US. You can learn more at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38355282-watching-you. I’m currently at work on my seventeenth novel, to be published in 2019.