Admit it.
I washed my hands in the sink, glancing at myself in the mirror that hung there. I saw a woman ageing badly, genetically, like her mother did, all jowls and crows’ feet, fissures of grey in her hair. Pale bloodshot eyes that couldn’t look at themselves too long. They skipped, stones on a lake, away from the woman in the glass.
It’s a relief, isn’t it?
I walked downstairs in the dark and filled the kettle, opening the kitchen drawer and rummaging inside for the cigarettes I kept there, the ones I’d hidden from Edie because she used to steal them, just one or two at first and then whole packs. When I started hiding the packs she used to steal the money to buy them. I found the carton pushed right up against the back of the drawer and lit one from the cooker, making myself a cup of tea with the cigarette clamped between my teeth.
You did your best for her, Sam, the voice said, the one I’d been blocking out ever since that first night when she didn’t come home. I didn’t like it much, that voice. It sounded cold and impersonal, not like myself at all. I dragged on my cigarette and let the cool blue smoke fill my lungs. Anyone else would have broken under the strain.
I walked over to the small patch of lawn, letting my feet sink into the damp grass. He knows, the voice continued, that policeman. His gaze will turn on you soon, Sam. The shouting, the fighting, the fear. He’ll find out. He’ll find out that you hurt her when you got angry. Then what?
‘Stop it,’ I said out loud, eyes tightly closed. ‘I didn’t hurt her. She hurt herself.’
You think he’ll believe that? You know what they do to women who beat up their kids in prison, Sam? An echo of Edie’s words that morning in the bathroom, the day she left the house and never came back. I clenched my fist so tightly I could feel the sharp pain of my nails slicing into my palm. But it’s a relief, isn’t it? That’s the worst thing. You can breathe again. You can walk around the house without fear of what mood she’s in, or how she’ll look at you with that expression she has, the flare of her nostrils, the way her eyes used to seek you out like floodlights. Waiting for her to snap, to push, to bite. Admit it. Admit it.
‘Yes,’ I said quietly. The word was small but it filled the air, the space around me, like rubber expanding.
‘Yes.’
That Monday I decided to go back to work. My smoking was getting out of control, for one thing. I’d find myself lighting a cigarette and then craving another even as I smoked it. Also, I’d run out of Valium and the doctor had refused to give me any more.
‘It’s addictive,’ she told me briskly, shaking her head. ‘It’ll make you feel worse in the end.’
Worse? I wanted to scream. Worse than lifting the rock of my daughter’s life and finding all the horrible things down there, squirming in the dark? Worse than that, you mean?
I didn’t, of course. I smiled and thanked her and left the surgery just as a brief, hectic rainstorm had begun, drenching me through my clothes to my underwear.
On my first day back at work a woman I’d never met before from the human resources department held a fifteen-minute meeting with me and gave me a leaflet titled Dealing with Grief in the Workplace.
I handed it back to her, smiling grimly. ‘I’m not grieving,’ I told her. ‘Edie’s missing, not dead.’
‘I know how you must feel. Last year our cat disappeared for three months and I was out of my mind.’
I stared at her until she squirmed uncomfortably and told me to speak to her about anything I needed. As I left I turned back and asked her if she’d ever found her lost cat.
She looked at me, struggling to formulate a reply. Finally, she smiled sadly. ‘He got hit by a car. We only found out when his collar was found in a hedge. It’s a sad world.’
I went back to my desk with a strange, sick feeling in my stomach. Worst of all was the way my heart hurt; it ached as though it was infected. If you cut my chest open, my heart would be shrivelled, dark and sticky, and crawling with flies.
I was due to meet a counsellor on Friday afternoon but instead I drove past her offices and straight on towards Brighton, parking up at the back of London Road. It’s a long stretch of neglected grimy concrete, lined with a handful of high street shops and fast-food restaurants. The squall of bus brakes and the throb of engines choke the air; pigeons throng the gutters, searching for food. It had been raining, and the pavements were glossy mirrors stippled with rings of blackened chewing gum and cigarette butts. What I’d come here for were the pawn-brokers and cash converters, the ones who will take in a valuable object – a solid silver dragonfly necklace, for instance – and trade it for cash. If Edie had sold it – the same way she’d sold my other items, the ones I’d found in the second-hand place in Lewes – she would have come out of town to do it. She’d been burned by that before, of course. Brighton was my guess; Eastbourne maybe, if she’d been able to find the train fare. If she had come here to sell it, someone might remember her, or better still, know where she was heading. At the very least it would give me a time frame of her movements. Something solid. Something good.
It took me over two hours to walk the length
