If You Get Lost

The world ended while I was ignoring my mother.

Her message slid across the top of my screen as a woman tipped strawberries into a glass bowl.

Got us a table outside. Let me know when you’re close xx

I swiped it away.

The woman was explaining how long to soak fruit in vinegar. I didn’t even buy strawberries. They were too expensive, and I usually forgot about them until they grew fur. But her kitchen was beautiful, all pale wood and sunlight, and watching someone arrange a life into organised containers made mine was oddly satisfying.

Then her hands froze and the screen went black. I pressed the side button – nothing.

At the same instant, the bus stopped humming beneath my feet. The lights went out, and the air conditioning gave a final breath against the back of my neck.

We kept rolling downhill. The driver stared at his dashboard.

Someone near the front said, “What’s going on?” in the annoyed voice people used when they expected a delay.

Then the driver hauled at the wheel.

Pain flashed as my forehead struck the plastic handle on the seat in front. My phone flew out of my hand, and I went after it without thinking, one arm stretched beneath the seat while the bus shuddered hard enough to knock my teeth together.

There was a scream and a long metallic scrape.

We stopped.

I stayed folded over my knees, fingers searching the filthy floor.

Please don’t be cracked. Please.

A stupid thought. People were screaming, something terrible had happened, and I was worrying about the phone I still had nineteen monthly payments left on.

My fingers closed around its case.

Through the windscreen, a white delivery truck rolled into a small blue car. The car disappeared between the truck and the rear of another bus. There was a thick, crushing noise, like someone twisting an empty drink can, only much louder and much longer. I waited for the blue car’s door to open.

It didn’t.

“Stay seated,” our driver shouted.

I sat up slowly. Something warm slid along my eyebrow.

The girl across the aisle was staring at me. One earbud hung against her chest. “You’re bleeding.”

I touched my forehead and looked at the red on my fingers. It seemed impossible that it was mine. I had put concealer there that morning, standing in my bathroom worrying about a spot beside my eyebrow, and now there was blood in exactly the same place.

I wanted my Mum.

The need arrived so violently that I pressed the screen to tap her name. Nothing happened. I held the power button down, released it, and tried again. Nothing.

“Open the doors!” someone shouted.

The driver was pushing buttons, his hands moving fast over the dash that wasn’t working. Cars stood crooked across the intersection, some touching, some with doors already open. A man stumbled between them holding his forearm against his chest.

Beyond the buildings, something struck with enough force to tremble through the bus floor. A woman screamed behind me.

I bent over my phone again.

Come on. Come on. Please.

The driver reached above the doors, pulled a handle and forced them apart. Hot air came in smelling of rubber and petrol.

“Everybody out.”

I couldn’t make my legs move at first. A woman behind me touched my shoulder, then pushed a little when I didn’t stand.

The blue car was worse up close. I looked away before I properly understood what I was seeing.

People were moving everywhere, but nobody seemed to be in charge. A man in a suit ran towards the wreck. Someone else ran away. The bus driver shouted for help, and three people stopped, and several more kept walking with their faces fixed straight ahead.

I stayed beside the open doors, clutching my phone.

There should have been sirens.

That was what I kept waiting for. The rising sound that meant people who knew what to do were coming. Ambulances. Police. Someone with gloves and equipment who would make everyone step back.

Instead, I heard a woman screaming, “There’s someone in there.”

I looked down at my screen. My face stared back at me, pale in the dark glass. “Mum,” I whispered.

She was sitting outside a café somewhere. She had got us a table - she was safe. She had been safe thirty seconds ago, or two minutes, or however long it had been. I couldn’t tell. The time had vanished with everything else.

I pulled my charging cable from my bag, then the little power bank Mum had given me for Christmas.

You’re always running out.

I had rolled my eyes because she’d also bought me socks. Now I pushed the cable into the phone so hard the connector scraped the case.

No charging symbol.

I pressed the button on the power bank. None of its little lights came on.

A man brushed past me, knocking my elbow, and I nearly screamed at him. Instead, I stepped closer to the bus and tried the cable again.

An older woman stood nearby, turning slowly with her phone held above her head. “Have you got anything?”

I shook mine at her. “It won’t turn on.”

“Mine either,” she breathed.

I looked along the pavement. Everyone was doing the same thing: pressing buttons, holding phones against their ears, staring down, then up at one another.

Across the road, the enormous advertising screen above the chemist was black. So were the smaller screens inside the bus shelter. The bakery’s lights were out. The traffic lights were dark. The light in the shop windows.

It’s a power cut.

But my phone had been on eighty-three per cent. I remembered checking before I left the house. Eighty-three percent – power cuts didn’t affect phones.

A woman beside the delivery truck shouted at me. “You. Can you get help?”

I looked behind me before realising she meant me.

“There’s a chemist,” she shouted. “Go and get someone.”

“Yes. Okay,” I stammered.

The chemist’s automatic doors were stuck halfway open. I turned sideways to squeeze through, catching my bag on the frame. A pharmacist stood behind the counter holding a telephone receiver.

“There’s been a crash,” I said.

She looked at the blood above my eye. “Are you hurt?”

“No. A truck and a car—” My throat closed, the words catching.

She put the receiver down and reached beneath the counter for a bag. “Where?”

I pointed through the window and the pharmacist hurried outside. I followed because I didn’t know what else to do. At the wreck, she knelt beside someone I couldn’t see.

“Has anyone called an ambulance?” a man asked.

“The phones are down,” replied a woman.

“What about the landline?”

She didn’t answer.

Mum would know what was happening. It was childish, but I believed it with a desperate certainty. She would have a plan. She would look at the cut on my forehead, press something clean against it and tell me where to put my hands.

I only had to get to the café.

I tried to open my messages. My thumb swiped over my own frightened reflection. I knew the address was there. I could picture Mum’s message, the blue underlining beneath the street name. I had tapped it that morning. The map had told me where to stand, which bus to take, how many stops.

I hadn’t needed to remember. Now I couldn’t even remember the café’s name.

I turned in a slow circle. Shops, office towers, an unfamiliar side street sloping away between buildings. Above the intersection, a street sign read MARY STREET.

That didn’t help. I’d lived in this city my entire life, and without the little blue dot on my screen, I might as well have been dropped into it from a plane.

I started walking. At first, I followed a man carrying his jacket. He moved quickly, with his head up, and I mistook that for knowing something. At the next intersection he turned right. I almost turned with him.

Then I stopped.

You don’t even know him.

My heart was beating so fast it made the cut on my forehead pulse.

I needed to think.

Mum’s messages, before the address. What had she said?

Opposite the old post office.

I remembered because I’d been irritated.

That means literally nothing to me.

She had sent a laughing face.

I could see that stupid laughing face more clearly than I could see the buildings around me. Outside a bakery, a man was dragging a wooden sandwich board away from the doorway.

“Excuse me,” I called. “Where’s the old post office?”

He pointed back the way I had come. “Through the square.”

“What square?”

He looked me up and down. “The big one. With the fountain.”

I nodded, not that I had any idea what he was talking about. “How far?”

“Ten minutes, maybe. You all right?”

“Yes.”

The lie came automatically. I had spent the last year telling people I was fine, that I could manage, that moving out at eighteen didn’t mean I needed checking on every day.

The man looked at my forehead again. “Stay off Market Street. Something’s burning.”

Above the roofs, smoke had begun spreading across the sky.

I thanked him and turned around.

For a while, I counted intersections. It gave me something to do besides imagine Mum sitting at a table beside a road when a car stopped working.

One.

She might have gone looking for me.

Two.

She might have caught another bus.

Three.

She might have been crossing the street.

I stopped that thought so hard I stumbled.

At a convenience store, people crowded the entrance. A woman held nappies against her chest while the owner argued with a man carrying bottles of water.

“The card machine’s dead.”

“I’ll transfer it.”

“With what?”

They both looked at the phone in the man’s hand.

I reached into my bag. Keys. Lip gloss. Charging cable. A crushed cereal bar. No wallet. My bank card was in my bedroom drawer because I paid for everything with my phone. I couldn’t call anyone. I couldn’t buy anything. I couldn’t prove I’d paid for the bus. I couldn’t find my mother.

The phone was still in my hand, and I hated it suddenly, with a hot, helpless fury.

Then I thought about all the photographs inside it. Mum asleep on the sofa with our old dog across her feet. Mum on the beach, holding up a hand because she hated having her picture taken.

I shoved it into my pocket before I could drop it.

Ahead, the square opened between the buildings. The fountain was off, its shallow basin lay still beneath a scattering of coins.

Across it stood a building with stone columns and two carved lions.

The old post office.

I almost laughed. I had used those steps to tie my shoelace; I’d sat there eating chips. I knew those lions.

Opposite, a painted olive branch curved above a café door.

The Olive Tree.

I ran.

“Mum?”

A chair lay on its side beside an outdoor table. Water dripped from the edge onto the pavement.

“Mum?”

People looked up as I went inside. The coffee machine was silent and the air smelled of burnt milk. A waiter stood behind the counter with both hands pressed flat against it.

I checked every face.

A woman by the window had Mum’s hair from behind. I touched her shoulder and she turned.

“Oh,” I said.

She stared at me.

“Sorry.”

I went through the café, past the toilets and into a narrow passage beside the kitchen.

The owner caught up with me. “You can’t go back there.”

“My mum was here.”

“What does she look like?”

I pulled out my phone. Again. My breath hitched as I stared at the black screen, then at him, and for one awful moment I couldn’t turn her into words.

“Brown hair. Grey at the sides. Blue shirt, I think. She’s got a silver watch.”

“There was a woman outside.”

“Where did she go?”

“I didn’t see.”

“When did she leave?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

No. No.

People didn’t just disappear. You checked when they were last online. You called. You sent another message. There was always another small thing you could do before you had to be frightened.

I went back outside and sat in the chair that was still upright. On the table sat a cup on a saucer. Pale lipstick marked its rim.

Mum’s colour.

I bent over it, making horrible, breathless noises I couldn’t stop. I wanted to go back to the bus, to the strawberries, to the message sliding across my screen.

I would answer it. I would tell her exactly where I was and I would ask which street to walk down. Ask for the name of the café again.

“Are you Evie?”

I looked up.

The waiter stood beside me with a folded slip of paper. “She left this. I didn’t realise, sorry. I put it under the till.”

I took it so quickly it tore a little at the edge.

On the back of a receipt, Mum had written:

Evie.

Go to the library in the square. They’re helping people find each other. If I’m not there, stay put. I’ll come back.

Love you. Mum.

I rubbed my thumb over the last line. It was her handwriting: the tiny loop in the y, the way she always squeezed Mum into whatever space she had left.

She’d been here.

The waiter was still talking, but I was already running.

The library doors had been wedged open with chairs. Inside, the air was warm, full of voices that sounded too loud beneath the high ceiling. Someone had taped handwritten signs to the shelves.

WATER.

FIRST AID.

MISSING PEOPLE.

My stomach dropped at the last one.

Missing people were faces on posters and news stories you flicked past. They weren’t your mum, who still reminded you to take washing out of the machine before it smelled.

A woman near the entrance stepped towards me. “Who are you looking for?”

“Mum?” I called.

I’d seen a blue sleeve between the shelves.

She turned.

For a moment, neither of us moved. There was dirt on her cheek, one elbow of her shirt was torn. She held a paper cup in both hands.

“Evie.”

She put the cup down so fast it tipped over.

I reached her before it finished spilling. Her arms closed around me, and I grabbed fistfuls of her shirt like a little kid, like I had fallen and needed picking up.

“Where were you?”

“The bus stopped. There was a crash.”

She pulled back. “Were you in it?”

“No. Yes. We hit the kerb. I’m okay.”

She touched my forehead. “Look at me.”

“I’m okay.”

“Evie. Look at me.”

I did. Her eyes moved over my face. I could feel her checking me, counting pieces, making sure I was all there.

Then she pulled me against her again. I could hear her heart pounding through her shirt.

“I couldn’t find you,” I sobbed.

“I know.”

“I couldn’t remember where we were going.”

“You found the note.”

“I didn’t answer your message.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

Her hand moved over my hair.

Behind us, someone was asking for a doctor. A child cried. A chair scraped across the floor, and we both flinched. Finding her hadn’t stopped any of it. That was more terrifying than I thought it would be.

For hours, I had believed everything would be all right when I reached her. But the lights stayed off. Smoke pressed against the high windows. Somewhere in the city, people were still trapped inside cars, and nobody’s phone worked.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“When will it come back?”

She didn’t answer.

I looked up. “Mum?”

“I don’t know, Evie.”

I had never hated an answer more.

We stayed long enough for someone to clean my forehead. Mum filled two bottles in the staffroom while I held her bag. The tap coughed, spat a thin brown trickle, then ran clear.

She waited before putting the bottle under it.

“We should fill something else,” she said.

Her voice was calm, but she was looking around the room too quickly. We found an empty soft-drink bottle beside the sink. She rinsed it and filled that too.

“How are we getting home?”

“We’ll walk.”

“It’s miles.”

“I know.”

“What if it’s like this there?”

She tightened the lid. “We’ll work it out.”

I watched her hands. They were shaking so badly she had to start again. For the first time, I understood that she was making herself sound like my mum. That whatever was happening had scared her as much as it had scared me.

I took the bottle and screwed the lid on.

At the entrance, a librarian had spread a street map over a table. Mum bent above it, tracing roads with one finger.

I stood beside her. “Show me.”

She glanced up.

“The way home,” I said. “Show me.”

We marked the route in pencil. I made her point out the turns twice. The bridge. The hospital. The road beside the park. Things that would still be there when we reached them.

Outside, the air had cooled. Smoke scraped at the back of my throat. The streetlights stood dark above the abandoned cars and shop windows reflected a sky draining slowly of colour. Far down the road, a building burned without a single siren coming towards it.

Mum took my hand.

I didn’t tell her I was too old.

We walked into the street together, stepping around glass, following the route I was trying to hold inside my head.

At the first crossing, I glanced up at the pedestrian signal and waited for the green man. Mum pulled me forward.

Nothing was going to tell us when it was safe now.