The Girl Before You. Nicola Rayner

we could barely catch our breath between them.’

      Kat frowns. ‘It sounds pretty hairy.’

      ‘I thought, “This is it,”’ says Ruth. ‘That we were going to die together like in Mill on the Floss.’ She leaves a dramatic pause. ‘But thanks to a couple of dog walkers, we didn’t, in the end,’ she concludes cheerfully. ‘After that, our father made sure we had swimming lessons. Really good ones, with one of the lifeboat guys who …’ She is interrupted by a dull gonglike clang of metal hitting metal outside.

      ‘What the hell was that?’ Kat asks.

      ‘Someone out in Cathedral Square,’ says Ruth, gesturing with her cigarette towards a tiny window above her bed. ‘Some people find it hilarious to fuck about with the anchor out there.’ She climbs up on her bed and looks out of the window. ‘Hey, Kat, look at this.’

      Kat climbs up the ladder and sits next to Ruth with her nose pressed up against the cold glass. ‘What is it?’

      ‘Down there.’ Ruth taps her finger against the pane, and Kat sees George and Dan lumbering back to college, each with an arm slung around a girl.

      ‘Hmm,’ Kat says and pulls away from the window. She sits cross-legged on the bed. ‘Maybe not your Big Love …’

      ‘No,’ Ruth smiles but her voice sounds flat. ‘Maybe not him.’ She glances to where her dress is dripping by the sink.

      ‘I can’t believe you went swimming in October,’ says Kat sternly. ‘It’s actually really dangerous.’ Everyone knew how the town had almost been wiped out by the sea in the great storm of eighteen-something. ‘It’s actually called St Anthony’s because of all the fishermen who were lost here,’ she adds.

      ‘I know that,’ says Ruth chirpily. ‘There’s a rhyme: St Anthony, St Anthony, bring what I’ve lost back to me.’

      ‘I’m just saying,’ says Kat. ‘Be careful. It’s dangerous.’

      ‘Don’t worry,’ grins Ruth. ‘It won’t happen again.’

       Naomi

      Where we were from, people disappeared into the water from time to time. Once it was someone we knew – a man who used to drink at the hotel bar. I was around thirteen, Ruth fifteen. The wind was particularly wild that afternoon, filling our raincoats and puffing them up like balloons. As we headed back home along the clifftops, the hum of the search helicopter began to follow us and eventually we caught sight of it, hovering like a fly, skating the gorse bushes as it moved. When it passed we could see the face of a man squatting by the open door.

      ‘Maybe they’ve come for us,’ one of us joked weakly. But we both knew that the world felt slightly different from how it had that morning.

      Later, men in fluorescent jackets appeared at the hotel with their walkie-talkies crackling. Our mother was asked to interrupt service to find out if anyone had seen anything. She had taken off her apron and washed her hands to make the announcement.

      Speaking carefully, slowly, she said: ‘A man has gone missing. He left home this morning with his wife’s dogs: two collies. He told his wife that he’d be gone for an hour. The three of them haven’t been seen since.’

      ‘The dogs wouldn’t have left him, if he’d fallen.’ That was the general conclusion. He might have left his wife, but the dogs wouldn’t have left him. People knew about such things where we grew up.

      ‘It’s the first thing all the diners said,’ Ruth told me later, back in the kitchen. ‘And, you know, they wouldn’t.’ She started picking the dough out of a bread roll, but lost enthusiasm for it and put it back in the basket. ‘A man on his own – I mean, he’s not exactly a target.’

      ‘What do you mean: a target?’ I asked, but Ruth ignored my question.

      ‘Maybe he had an argument with his missus,’ Damien, the chef, shouted from behind the hotplate. ‘Or maybe he was still pissed from the night before …’

      ‘But if you were going to disappear, why would you take your dogs? Wouldn’t you leave them?’ Ruth asked.

      ‘And you couldn’t travel on a bus or a train with two dogs without people noticing,’ I pointed out, feeling very grown up.

      ‘Exactly!’ Ruth said with relish.

      She loved a mystery. Our father got us into Agatha Christie and we would watch Joan Hickson in classics like 4.50 from Paddington or They Do It With Mirrors on Sunday nights. It’s about imposing order on disorder, they say – the love of a murder mystery, of a Sherlock Holmes story. I don’t know about that but I do know that the memories of piecing those puzzles together as a family are some of my happiest. My father pacing up and down the room, listing the clues off on his fingers as Ruth and I shouted things out.

      The day after meeting the supermarket psychic, as I think of her, I wake with Jacques, our Jack Russell, curled into a comforting knot next to me. Carla is up, singing cheerfully. She has a lovely voice, low and tuneful. Before living with a therapist, I might have imagined them to be rather serious people, but Carla lives life lightly.

      In the kitchen, she is cracking eggs into a frying pan. Recently, she has started cooking breakfast, insisting the three of us are properly fed before work. ‘Rough night?’

      ‘Yeah, I think it must have been that nutter yesterday.’

      ‘The same dream?’

      ‘Yes.’ I put the kettle on. ‘I can’t believe it’s been fifteen years.’

      She touches my belly. ‘You’re bound to be thinking of her at the moment.’

      When we were scrolling through donors at the Danish sperm bank where we found the father, we had talked about choosing a redhead, someone who might keep the memory of Ruth alive in some small way. We decided against it, though – it felt too strange and I’d be carrying those genes myself anyway, as my mother pointed out. In the end, we opted for a dark-haired, dark-eyed father to match Carla’s colouring. Not your stereotypical Scandinavian. I wonder, though, if the child might end up looking like Ruth in any case. All sorts of unexpected things can happen in families.

      ‘I don’t want to forget her,’ I say now.

      ‘No one is asking for that.’ She puts a warm hand on my cheek. ‘Ruth will always be with you.’

      It’s a gorgeous morning. The sky is a singing blue and a cobwebby frost thaws out in the garden. The cold air stings my lungs. It’s not a long trip to the tube and I’ve timed it right, I notice, as I grab a paper and glance down the platform – there are fewer people around, I’ll probably get a seat.

      The train comes in to South Ealing from Heathrow, scooping up travellers. One, tall and pale as a ghost, sits with a bulging rucksack at her knees. A couple of other women, who are small, perhaps Spanish, are deep in conversation. I listen for a moment. No, not Spanish, Italian. One of them, with an owlish though not unattractive face, wears a hat perched on the back of her head. The other has dyed hair and a strange bald patch behind one ear. The women, I think – it was always the women for me. But I know there is another reason why I watch travellers so intently.

      I don’t look at the paper until a few stops into the journey, after my hands have warmed up a little. And there he is on page four. He has put on weight, is greying at the temples, but there’s still a smirk playing on his lips, as if he’s enjoying a private joke with himself. I stare at his photograph for a long time and think of his hands on my sister all those years ago. Then I turn the page, so I don’t have to look at him any more.

       Alice

      Today Alice has been