The Missing

when she opens it the pictures inside aren’t old family portraits. They’re of me, in the past. I try to snatch them back but I can’t seem to move my hands and William’s mother’s saying, Is this you, dear, you don’t look well, and there I am aged nineteen with a nosebleed and pupils dilated to wide black saucers from the ketamine, the MDMA. There’s me in the years before I met her son, slumped in the corner of a squat party in Ilford, calling my parents crying because I couldn’t make my rent, cleaning my neighbour’s car while he sits inside and watches me and jerks off his stubby penis and when he pays me it’s five pounds short so I don’t eat that night. I’m trying to take the photos away but she has seen them all, and the bruise is spreading over her face, black threads working their way over the bridge of her nose, even into the whites of her eyes, down her neck and shoulders like the diseased roots of a plant. There’s me trying to kiss Gary Webster at the bus stop aged fifteen and he recoils and calls me a stupid bitch, there’s me thrown out of a pub for selling wraps of speed, there’s me, there’s me, there’s me. Don’t look, I tell her, don’t look at them, and when she finally turns her head towards me she says, No wonder he wants to leave you, Frances.

I walk the long way to town, past the river, which gleams like polished brass in the sun. I arrive at the chemist’s just after nine o’clock and hand over Mimi’s prescriptions to the woman behind the counter. She looks up at me, smiling. ‘Will you be waiting for these?’

‘Sure.’

She turns away from me and I find myself looking at the display of baby products: soft blankets and dummies and smooth wooden rattles. I pick up a brightly coloured octopus designed to rustle and squeak under tiny, seeking hands. I press it to my chest and hold it there, eyes closed. I think of the box room back in our Swindon home, the way it seems to hold the mellow afternoon light like spun honey. The day we moved in I sat in there on the bare floor and William came in and saw me, and he smiled.

‘I’ve never seen you so quiet,’ he said, crouching beside me. ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Where the cot could go. And the toy box. It would be so beautiful in here.’

He kissed me, slow and hard, with his hand cupping the back of my skull. But he didn’t say anything. I suppose, even then, I should have known. He didn’t want this.

The bell over the door rings and a woman walks into the pharmacy. She has shoulder-length hair that falls in amber waves, thick and bouncy. Everything about her is long and almost perfectly straight: her figure, her nose, her long, lean legs. She walks right past me as if I’m not there, trailing a cloud of floral perfume so sweet it makes my teeth hurt.

The woman behind the counter looks up and gives her a perfunctory smile. ‘Miss Renard, I’ll get your prescription. One second.’

I slide my eyes over to her from beneath my fringe. She’s tall, slender, tapping her manicured fingernails on the counter impatiently. The pharmacist comes out from behind the counter, her glasses lowered on her nose, a prescription in hand.

‘Mrs Thorn?’

‘That’s me,’ I say, stuffing the octopus back on the shelf. I’ve been feeling absurdly close to tears just holding it.

‘You’ve got a medication here that reduces intracranial pressure. I’m going to need to know if she’s taking any other medication before I can prescribe.’

‘Oh, yeah. I’ve been given a list.’

I pass it to her and she notes something on her prescription pad, making a noise under her breath. ‘Goodness. There’s a lot going on here. Was it a bad injury?’

‘She had a fall. Some stitches in her scalp but we were told it’s superficial. She’s having memory problems, though, and struggling with her speech. It looks like she’ll need to see a specialist in the next few months.’

‘Well, that’s a real shame to hear. I’ll see what we’ve got here – anything else can be ordered in.’

She turns to the woman with the auburn hair who came in after me and nods towards her. ‘Someone taking care of you, Nancy?’

‘Apparently,’ the woman says. She’s smiling as if she’s making a joke, but the words seem cold and unfunny. She looks at her gold watch. ‘Good job I paid for parking.’

‘I’m sure she’ll be with you soon.’ The pharmacist smiles, then turns back to me. ‘It’ll take us a little while to get this lot ready. Do you want to come back? There’s a cafe over the road. Shouldn’t be longer than fifteen minutes.’

Okay, I tell her. Fine. I risk another glance at the woman waiting at the counter. There it is again, that strange familiarity, like the prick of a needle. Close up I realise she’s not as old as I’d first thought; her pale skin and hooded blue eyes are only finely lined, the irises the colour of old porcelain Wedgwood plates.

Miss Renard. Nancy. I take my phone from my pocket, remembering. Alex pointed to the photo and said, ‘That’s Nancy Renard . . . She was nice. I don’t know why she hung around with that lot of bitches.’

‘Excuse me,’ I say to her. She looks at me, smiling that taut, cold smile. ‘I know this will seem strange, but – are you Nancy Renard?’

She nods. Still smiling. Still cold. Oh God, leave me alone, that smile says. I open my phone and scroll to the photograph, turning it around to face her.

‘That’s you, isn’t it? Right there on the end! Wow. So weird!’

Nancy takes the phone from me and studies the picture. There’s no light of recognition in her face, but a crease appears between her eyebrows and she smiles