I heard about the ambulance at Thorn House last night. My friend Theresa phoned me. It’s a small town, you see, and news is passed on the old way, on a grapevine. She told me its lights had been on but the sirens had not, and it had moved slowly, like a hearse.
‘Do you think she’s dead?’ Theresa asked me and I answered, ‘I hope not. I like Mimi. She taught at Edie’s school. She was the only teacher there who—’ Could stand her, I thought. I left the space empty, and Theresa glided smoothly over it, and the conversation moved on.
Still, later I found myself thinking of Mimi’s son for the first time in years. Back then he was a young man with a mess of dark hair he had a habit of pulling at, a boy who looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I swear on my mother’s life, Mrs Hudson, I don’t know anything about your daughter’, as I pressed the knife against his neck.
I walk until the road narrows and rises up, up away from the fields that cloak the valley and form the edge of the Sussex Downs. The church of St Mary de Castro is near the top of the hill at the back of a terrace of cottages. While the church is small, the grounds surrounding it are broad and ancient, with some of the yews and oaks that grow densely on the edges over five hundred years old. In parts, some of the graves are little more than hummocks in the earth, lumpen headstones marking victims of cholera and consumption and the plague.
I enter the graveyard through the old iron gates and walk through the grounds to where the trees start to thicken and crowd in overhead, freckling the pathway with sunlight. Above, a magpie barks in its harsh, staccato way. Below my feet the ground is spongy and soft with decay.
I find the place the same way I always find it. Back here the grounds aren’t maintained like the rest of the churchyard and the ferns and long grass tangle around my ankles. The large yew tree is many-limbed and sinuous, broad as a bus, trunk mottled with age. A few graves huddle in front of it, thrown crooked by the questing roots ploughing into the earth. I am not interested in graves. I come here because it was the last place Edie was seen the night she disappeared. Her friends told of how she walked into this dark grove of trees and never came out again.
I put my hand on the yew. It is smooth and warm and strong. Here at the base is a patch of bare earth no bigger than a dinner plate. It is the only spot that is free of weeds. I clear it as often as I can, which isn’t as often as I’d like. Today there is a cluster of dandelions, which I pull up and discard. They drift away like little ghosts. I’ve buried things here, in the absence of a body, of a coffin or a grave. Little things.
When she was younger Edie would dig in the garden, shallow graves for strange treasures she’d collected. I would find them half-buried, sometimes months later. Little china animals, tiny pipe-cleaner dolls, coins, a hairbrush. I found something eleven years after she vanished, while I was digging manure into the roses: a pink-and-red plastic bracelet, the elastic turned to grey, the beads cracked and faded. The shock, like being winded, was as great as if she’d walked back through the door again. I saw stars and sat down abruptly into the freshly turned flower bed. I sat with the bracelet pressed against my lips until the shadows had lengthened and the Siamese cat from next door began coiling about my calves, crying plaintively.
I bring things up here now to bury them, but not discard them. More dissociation, I think.
I sit down beneath the tree, tucking the folds of my skirt around me. I am all alone, the sound of rustling leaves like whispering voices, the sky a soaring, polished blue. On what would have been Edie’s eighteenth birthday I carried a bottle of wine up here, drinking it too fast and getting woozy and disoriented. Last year she would have been thirty-two, and I buried a beautiful hair clip decorated with pearls. I wasn’t able to decide if it was the kind of thing a woman in her thirties would wear, but had bought it at the last minute anyway. This is my grief, lying beneath the earth. Long years of mourning unspooling like a bright red thread, running through the ground to meet the roots of trees.
But I’m wary of being maudlin. I have to measure it – ration it almost. Edie was a beautiful toddler but a difficult child. Obstinate, wilful, impossible to please. I caught her stealing money from my purse at age ten. When I asked her why, she answered simply, ‘Because I want it.’ In the months before her disappearance she was suspended from school for a week for getting into a fight and biting another girl’s ear.
No, wait. That sounds worse than it was, makes her sound like Mike Tyson. It’s true that there was a fight and it’s true that Edie, quick to provoke, got this girl into a headlock. At some point a small chunk of flesh was taken from the top of the girl’s ear, the part where it curves sweetly like an oyster shell – a tiny crescent, the slightest disruption of the curve. Edie didn’t know what happened to it, thought she may have swallowed it. Apparently, the sight of her blood-smeared mouth cleared the classroom and the headmistress found all thirty-odd children standing silently in the corridor as she raced towards them. Then I got
