A question occurs to me then, and it comes out of my mouth before I can hesitate. ‘How do you know it was for you?’
Mimi looks up at me, face blank.
I flush, suddenly embarrassed but unable to help myself; I’m still talking. ‘I mean, how can you be sure?’
Mimi swallows, her thin fingers going to her neck, fluttering against the thin skin that hangs there. ‘He wouldn’t. Not him. Not my Edward.’
There, I think, with a jolt of surprise, you have a tell too, Mimi. For William it is the tugging of the hair that coils at his neck; for Mimi it is playing with the loose skin below her chin. Do we all have them, these little tics that betray us? I watch her eyes begin to close, her breathing deepen. The reflection of the rain plays the shadows softly across her face.
He wouldn’t. Not my Edward. Ah, Mimi. How little we know these men.
In the evening I find myself in front of William’s laptop. I’m meant to be looking for a divorce lawyer, something I’m keeping hidden from William for the time being, but instead I have spent the last hour on websites dedicated to missing people, reading up on those who vanished like ghosts or just drifted away from their lives, their jobs, their families. I learn that teenage runaways are overwhelmingly female, and that ninety-three per cent of missing teenagers are, like Edie, from single-parent families. I read that children with no siblings are more likely to disappear than those with. I find a website dedicated to missing children, which has age progression photos of the long-term missing. I find photographs of children disappeared from care homes and institutions and vulnerable teenage girls trafficked from Thailand and China and Vietnam. Slowly I discover that media coverage is mostly absent for teenagers who are black or of mixed ethnicity, those with foreign-sounding names or piercings or the skinny self-harmers, the streetwise repeat offenders, hooded and scowling, unphotogenic and tough-looking from a background of crime and estates and high-rises. These children are the dark undertow, drifting below the surface.
I find a site dedicated to the thousands of unidentified bodies on police files in the UK, listing clothing and tattoos and jewellery in the hope of a loved one being able to identify the deceased. I scroll through the contents of their pockets with a pain in my chest that burns as bright and singularly as a candle flame. ‘Unknown male, 18, Asian: Black disposable cigarette lighter, William Hill winning slip, tobacco, phonecard (for India), orange soft drink.’ ‘Unknown female, 14–20: Silver ring, conch shell design worn on index finger of right hand.’ I wonder if Samantha knows what Edie had in her pockets the night she walked out of the churchyard. I check my own, pooling their contents on the table. An apple sticker, thirty pence, a bus ticket stub. These are the things that would remain. I read until my eyes are dry and sore and my stomach feels heavy as concrete. There but for the grace of God.
I climb into bed next to William and lie very still, watching him. He lies with one hand on his chest, lifting and falling with his deep, measured breaths. Something uncurls softly inside me, a slight loosening of the tension I’ve been feeling since we arrived. His lips are parted and I have an urge to reach over and touch them with the pad of my thumb, feeling for the warmth of his breath. William would know what I was carrying in my pockets. He saved me. A resolute protector.
William stirs and looks at me in the half-light, frowning. ‘Are you okay? You’re not asleep?’
‘Will you give me a cuddle?’ I ask him, and allow myself to be folded against him, the warmth of his skin, the tight curls of his chest hair pressed firm against my cheek. All those stories have needled their way into my gut, acid burning a hole through the lining of my stomach. It’s upsetting. So many lives in limbo; I can’t sleep alone. I need the comfort of the man I married.
William falls back to sleep right away but I lie awake in the dark with my eyes wide open, listening to the night sounds: the creaking rafters, the rattle of the water pipes, the lonely, plaintive cry of a tawny owl. In the end I reach for my phone and sketch Samantha a quick text. I’ve been trying to imagine what it’s been like for her all these years with no answers, no leads. Just that emptiness, hollow as a cave. I don’t know how much longer I can sustain the hope before I fucking sink, she said, and I think of her, that slim knife in her hand, fighting against the world the way she has been for eighteen years. That hope, the kind you carry everywhere with you, gestating like a foetus. It nails you to the earth, because without it you would simply float away like smoke on the breeze.
Samantha – Now
The calls have started again.
About a year after Edie went missing I was getting as many as nine a night. My landline
