No, she told me, she hadn’t seen Edie. Not today.
‘Did you not see her at school, love?’
Silence. She didn’t want to answer me. At the time I thought she was worried she would get Edie into trouble. I know better now.
‘Hello? Kate?’
‘I’m here.’
Her breathing, soft and snuffly like she had a cold. She was holding the phone too close to her mouth.
‘Kate, please, you have to tell me. Edie isn’t in any trouble, I just need to know.’
Her mother speaking softly to her in the background. I pictured the two of them together in their softly lit kitchen, Kate in a long nightdress that drowned her small frame, her mother reassuring her with a hand on her shoulder, stroking her hair. I envied them.
‘She wasn’t at school today.’
‘Perhaps she just had different classes to you?’
‘No. We have all the same classes. Except history and science because I have history on Thursdays and she has it on a Monday.’ She sniffed.
‘What about at lunchtime or after school?’
‘Nope. I didn’t see her, anyhow. She’s usually in the churchyard with her friends. That’s where they go. But it started raining today so . . .’ She tailed off.
‘Thank you, Kate. You can get back to bed now.’
‘You won’t tell Edie you spoke with me, will you? I don’t want her to know you spoke with me.’
‘Absolutely not. But if you do see her then you tell her that I’m looking for her and that she is to come straight home. Tell her she isn’t in trouble. Can you do that for me?’
She told me she could and hung up. I stared at the phone for a while, silent in its cradle. Something inside me had begun to fray.
I turned all the lights on in the house that night. Lit it up like Christmas. A beacon in the dark. Find your way home, baby. I wandered from room to room without thinking. I’d been here with Edie before, of course. Slammed doors and raised voices and her spiriting herself away for a day or two. But my mind kept circling back to the argument we’d had that morning, the way she’d driven her own head into the bathroom wall.
There was a dent there; I’d seen it earlier when I went to the loo. A tiny depression in the plaster like a crater, alien and somehow unreal. The way she’d laughed afterwards, even as the red mark on her forehead gave way to a darker and more livid bruise. She’d left me open-mouthed and silent, her eyes glittering with malice.
She’s just punishing you, I tried to tell myself in a calm, rational voice, she’ll be back tomorrow morning just like the last time. But still. The way she’d hurt herself, the energy she’d had, the way she’d been vibrating with it. That wasn’t normal.
Edie isn’t normal, a rogue, disloyal voice whispered, and I rummaged in the drawer for the cigarettes I kept there, the small box of matches. That first evening passed in a series of frozen images, like a slideshow. I watched a moth driving its plump body into the window pane over and over, mystified at its stupidity. That compulsion. Over and over, even when it hurt.
I stood in the garden and smoked beneath a thin rind of white moon. I slept fitfully on the sofa beneath an old blanket that smelled of mothballs and lavender. There were, mercifully, no dreams, but I woke cold and afraid in the pinkish light of dawn, her name jumping from my mouth. Ee-dee. That was the moment, that perfect pivot into helplessness, when I could do nothing but pitch forward into the longest day of my life.
When I was small, about five years old or so, I had an accident. I’d accompanied my older brothers into the woods to build a den near the stream there. The heat of the day had made the fields shimmer. My eldest brother, Rupert, had stripped to his waist and climbed the thick trunk of one of the trees which crowded about the water. There were the frayed remains of a rope swing and he tugged at it, testing his weight. Finally, he said, ‘Pot’ – ‘Pot’ was his nickname for me until I was fourteen, because of my little rounded belly – ‘I think this will take your weight. In fact I’m sure of it. Want to give it a try?’
I looked across at my other brother, Danny, older than me by a year. His jeans were stained indigo from the knees down where he had waded into the stream to fetch a stick he’d seen floating there. We called him ‘backward’ and ‘simple’ but now he would have been referred to as having ‘additional needs’. We didn’t care, though. He was our brother. He was one of us.
‘Okay,’ I said. The heat made everything still. A cloud of gnats were dancing just above the surface of the water.
Rupert tied a long, thick stick to the bottom of the rope, something for me to sit on. The wood was warm from the sun. It felt nice against my skin. The rope creaked alarmingly as I settled against it, wrapping my legs about each other. Rupert pushed me away from the tree and I swung out over the glimmering water. I can remember seeing Danny, standing as he often did with that faraway look in his eyes. I swung out in an arc, seeing minnows scatter beneath my fast-moving shadow. I didn’t feel the rope break, but I heard a snap beside my ear and became suddenly engulfed in icy water. My mouth was full of it, the sharp taste of the cold. All sound disappeared with the popping of bubbles and a vast roaring noise that sounded like the engine of a jet plane, whooooosh. I couldn’t find the ground, couldn’t find the surface. I could see sunlight flickering but didn’t know which way was up and there were stones
