‘Bonemeal.’
‘Ugh.’
He shrugs. ‘My dad always said you’re not feeding the plants, you’re feeding the soil. Bonemeal is rich in the phosphorus and calcium that help the roses and tomatoes grow. He didn’t trust his plants to anyone else so he always made his own.’
‘His own bonemeal? How?’
‘He made friends with the owner of a slaughterhouse, took away all that was left of the carcasses. In the nineties, when mad cow disease was endemic, he switched to sheep and game and roadkill. Boiled up big pots of bones in the shed. It drove Mum crazy. He told her it was recycling. She called him Reg Christie and made him wash the surfaces down with bleach.’
‘You must miss him.’
Alex shrugs, taking a drink from his mug. I thought it was tea but I imagine I catch a whiff of whisky as he sighs. The heat in the room is growing stifling; I can feel it slowly sketching colour on my cheeks.
He looks at me with his head tilted, smiling. ‘You’re going to be all right, aren’t you, Frances? You and William.’
‘Sure.’
‘There’s that tell again.’ He grins. ‘Let me know when you work out what it is.’
I can’t help but laugh. ‘You’re so full of shit.’
‘Maybe,’ he says, his smile broadening. ‘In the meantime, do me a favour. Don’t tell William you’ve seen that picture or spoken to Nancy, okay? In fact, don’t bring up Edie Hudson at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was a bad time for him. Dad died not long after she went missing and Edie’s mother came round to the house causing trouble. Mum was in bits.’
‘But—’
‘Look, Frances, she was just a kid. Kids go running off, they do stupid things. William probably barely remembers her. I doubt he’d even know her name. What he will remember is that feeling in the days after she’d disappeared, how people looked at him and talked behind his back. How it felt to come home to find the police car outside the house and Mum at the kitchen table saying, “Boys, there’s been an accident”, and her voice not quite steady. That’s what he’ll remember.’
‘Okay,’ I tell him, but it’s not, not really. There but for the grace of God go I, I think again. That homeless woman outside the off-licence in Tufnell Park, Kim with her student debts and Miu Miu handbags posing in her underwear, Edie, the lost girl with the hard, unremitting stare right into the camera lens. They could have been me. They were, once upon a time. Something splits open inside the hard bedrock of my memories, the ones I’ve compressed over and over again until they turned black and solid and unreachable. If you put enough weight on it you’ll bury it forever. Not true. Now one is escaping: a splatter of blue paint, bright blue, the scarred wood of the front door, the word that was daubed along the hallway. Whore.
I turn to leave, but as I’m opening the door I look back and see Alex looking upward, towards that bird lying on the glass beneath a sharp spray of blood like a constellation. He looks troubled by it, haunted almost. I think about the police questioning him over his mother’s fall. It must be hard to live the way he does, so firmly in the closet, so desperate for her approval. No wonder he seems repressed.
Back inside the house I find William’s laptop and open it. Unlike our home computer there’s no password on it, and the desktop opens up to a photo of William and me in Tenerife a few years ago. I’m drinking a pink cocktail decorated with glacé cherries. It tasted like cough syrup, but I had two more that afternoon, lying on a sun lounger while my shoulders burned.
I open up the browser and after some hesitation I type in ‘Edie Hudson, Missing’. There are several matches, mainly in the smaller local papers – the Argus, the Sussex Express, the Lewes & Ringmer Herald. If Edie had gone missing today her face would’ve been all over social media in moments. A dedicated page on Facebook, a hashtag on Twitter and Instagram, a JustGiving page to fund the continued search. Back then, you relied on print media to get the story out there, and it looks as though Edie’s story didn’t circulate outside of East Sussex. I’m surprised. A vulnerable fifteen-year-old girl walks into a grove of trees and never comes out again? I would’ve thought the press would have been all over it.
All the articles have been digitised and catalogued from print, so the photographs are grainy and undefined. The first article is small, no more than two paragraphs. There’s Edie. In this photograph she’s unsmiling, almost aggressive-looking, with her arms folded in front of her. The headline reads: ‘Mother’s Plea to Missing Girl, Fifteen’.
Officers have been speaking to motorists and local residents this afternoon in the area where missing Edie Hudson was last seen. Her mother Samantha describes her as ‘dark-haired, slim build, wearing black clothes and make-up’. She added that if anyone has any information regarding Edie’s whereabouts they should contact the police.
‘If you’re reading this, Edie, please, please just come home. Come home.’
I clicked on the next article, dated a week or so later, from the Lewes & Ringmer Herald. This time the headline reads: ‘Police Question Caretaker in Teen Disappearance’.
Fifty-six-year-old Peter Liverly has been taken in for questioning following new information received by police. Liverly, who helps run the St Mary de Castro youth centre in Lewes, has previous convictions for assault. Edie Hudson, fifteen, has been missing since Thursday 9th October. She was wearing a long black skirt, black high-necked shirt and a leather jacket. She has connections to Eastbourne and Shoreham and the Wood Green area of London. She has been described by her teachers as ‘streetwise’, with
