‘Sorry, it’s my brother, I’d better take it.’
When he left the room I shoved my plate away from me and drained my wine. I massaged my temples, tried to steady my breathing. My pulse was ticking like a clockwork motor in my neck and outside, the car alarm, demanding, waa, waa, waa.
I know what you’ve been doing, Rattlesnake80. I’m so angry. It’s a bitter, acidic feeling that ulcerates me on the inside, the sting of deception. I can’t ignore it. It won’t go away. It will keep me awake at night, the poison of it infecting my sleep, making it toxic. Then the dreams will start again, that faceless figure with the claw hammer raised, drawing ever closer until their footsteps pound and their shadow spills over me like ink.
But, of course, then he comes back through the door with his shoulders hunched as though against a great wind and I can see the tears that are shivering in his eyes, ready to fall.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
‘Mum.’ His voice is heavy, like tar. ‘She’s had a fall. It sounds bad. Alex said she’s been taken to hospital. Thank God he was there.’
I pick up my phone. I have to do this. It’s going to eat me up if I don’t.
‘William, I—’
‘I’m sorry, Frances. Can we just – I need to . . .’
Inside me a coldness blooms, like a bite of snow.
Samantha – Now
There’s a new man working in the shop today. I like him. He smiles and charms and calls me ‘madam’. He doesn’t know me, so there is none of the bottomless sympathy that I often see in the eyes of people who know about what happened. I’m so used to seeing it I notice when it is absent. Like gravity.
This man is pleasant, although you can tell he’s bored already. He’s young, and this is just a job to cruise on, to get by. Just enough to pay his rent and get him out at the weekend maybe. Parties with his friends, some booze and some cigarettes, maybe some – I don’t know, what is it now? Ecstasy? Is that still popular? I don’t think anyone takes speed any more, do they? Whatever it is now. I never have to go through this with Edie – I suppose in a way that’s lucky. She’s frozen, isn’t she? She’ll never come home in the back of one of her friends’ parents’ cars, stinking of alcohol with sick in her hair. She’ll never fall pregnant at school, get mugged or get raped. She won’t settle for less than she’s worth or marry someone who likes the fear on her face when he hits her. I won’t ever have to smile and pretend I like her new tattoo, her life choices or her baby names. Is that meant to make me feel lucky? I don’t know.
Today my skin feels heavy and cold like clay. I’m a golem, conjured to life. I leave the shop and walk alongside the river, which is peaty-brown and fast-moving. Overhead are drifts of white clouds, as fine as lace.
I cried this morning, for the first time in a long time. A boy, up in Manchester. Eleven years old. He’d been missing over a week, his body eventually discovered weighted and dropped like an anchor in the canal. They had arrested the boy’s uncle. The news footage showed him driven into court in one of those vans with the blacked-out windows. People were throwing things at it, shouting. One man had a placard that said Burn In Hell. The crowd were chanting, ‘Die, scum, die.’ I found tears on my cheeks and wiped them away with the back of my hand.
In the days when Edie first went missing I was raw with a kind of undernourished grief, like the throb of a toothache. Back then I cried the same way, with a frequency and desperation I was only half aware of. Some days I would find myself in a queue at the supermarket or bent over a crossword and be surprised to discover my face wet with tears.
I had a grief counsellor, for a while. Some sessions my GP had organised for me. A leaflet and a cup of tea in a polystyrene cup in a small beige room that smelled of yeast and damp cloth. She didn’t last long. I’ve visited several on and off over the years, when finances will allow. They fill a need in me to be heard. To say Edie’s name in the stillness of the room. Right now, though, I am quite calm, feeling a strange sense of disintegrating, as though I’m floating apart. ‘Dissociation’, my last counsellor called it. She was worried that I wasn’t confronting my feelings, but I’ve had nearly eighteen years to confront my feelings – because that’s how long it’s been now since my little girl walked out of the door. A Thursday, October the ninth in the year 1997. Spice Girls and Titanic and Princess Diana dying in a dark Parisian tunnel and Tony Blair and Pokémon and my daughter, Edie.
I take the path across the large playing field, away from the river. From here I leave the town behind. Straight ahead past the industrial estate upon which squat concrete blocks: housing offices, carpet warehouses, depots. A thicket of brambles and nettles grows through the diamond-shaped fencing adjacent to the road, pushing through the gaps hungrily, with purpose. Serrated edges and spikes and bristles, fine white hairs that make your skin itch. The dust eddies and rises in the low breeze. Even the weeds
