by Stuart Evers
‘Lissa,’ Neka said. ‘Lissa, what’s—’
They sat down on the corduroy sofa. The deafening television showing something that looked like a documentary. The world was black. There were dead in the street, men in radioactive suits wandering around.
‘What’s this?’ Robin said.
‘Threads,’ Lissa said. ‘When the bomb drops this is what it’s going to be like. Just like this. I can’t take it. I can’t take it, but I can’t look away.’
A nuclear winter. A shambling woman, blasted heaths and charred bones. Lissa could not take it, but neither could she look away. Neka watched the aftermath. Neka watched the survivors. Neka saw herself in their number. She saw her father and her mother, her brother and the Carters and she saw it all, the lived experience, the quality of the air, the sense of life amongst the death.
She put her arms around Lissa. She put her arms around her to soothe her. And she saw the men below ground and she saw herself and she saw the end of the world for a second time.
2
It was a dress of her own choosing, bought with her own money from Pedley’s in the town: the uncompromising assistants swishing open the fitting-room curtains to suggest other styles. Should have gone with Daphne, but Daphne unavailable, and Gwen forgetting why she’d decided to buy a dress, remembering it was because no dress of hers now fitted.
In front of the mirror in the spare room, looking herself up and down now in the dress she’d bought, the most expensive thing she’d ever owned, scrawny and short-haired, highlights dimming, thinking of excuses. Any excuse not to go to the lunch.
Drum came into the spare room, smell of his cologne, a present from the Carters at Christmas, expensive and strong; smart trousers, his shirt well-pressed, shoes polished up, the brown brogues, a birthday present from the Carters.
‘Almost ready?’ he said.
‘Just need to do my make-up,’ she said. ‘Ten minutes.’
‘Well, whenever you’re ready,’ he said.
‘We won’t be late,’ she said. ‘We’ve got lots of time.’
He looked at her in the flesh, then in the mirror, then in the flesh.
‘You look beautiful,’ he said. ‘Absolutely beautiful.’
She looked at him first in the mirror, then in the flesh, the way he stood there, rocking on his heels, the brogues’ leather.
‘You don’t think it’s too much for lunch?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s perfect. You look wonderful.’
He stood there and she knew what he was thinking. That they did not dress any more. Did not undress either, so much as shed outer layers and collapse into bed. He sometimes said she was beautiful but when he did, it felt nostalgic, as though he was looking into deep time rather than saying it of the woman in front of him. Appreciated though. Always appreciated. The patience too. Always the patience.
He kissed her on the cheek. His lips lingered, his arm around her waist. She gently pushed him away.
‘Get off,’ she said. ‘Otherwise we will be late.’
She smiled into the mirror. He caught it and smiled back as she smoothed down the fabric of the dress.
*
She read a book that year, one that opened in glacial calm, a chair and a room by a lake, a woman alone and looking to find her ‘serious and hard-working personality’ somewhere in a secluded hotel. Gwen no longer looked for herself in books; it felt juvenile to do so, the way she had when Old Nick had schooled her, the thrill of finding herself buried in the language and manners of invented characters. She sought only escape in books now, but that escape had become limited. She avoided certain genres these days, the kind of authors who had once given her so much pleasure. P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter, even Agatha Christie.
She read about a murder and she read about the murder of her daughter; she read of disappearance and she read of the disappearance of her daughter; she read of prostitution, drug addiction, domestic violence, rape, sexual molestation, and she read the fate of her daughter. Once a safe space, books became dangerous. They offered untold imaginative harm. So she chose her books carefully, scanning blurbs for warnings, for mentions of dark secrets, family traumas, and rejected so many that she mostly stuck to re-reading the books Old Nick had recommended.
The book she’d read had won the big prize; she always read the book that won the big prize. And from the opening, in the room overlooking the lake, she saw herself waiting to find her own serious and hard-working personality. Gwen’s house resembled the same kind of out-of-season hotel, light with guests, without hope of a summer coming to banish the autumn hiatus.
She cooked breakfast in the morning, four eggs for her two men, before they set out to the fields and sheds; the house silent as they slammed shut the door, no one sleeping upstairs, no one breathing as she passed the bedrooms.
The silence of the house, the silence of the car, then the silence of the library, then home in the car, the dinner to prepare, her husband and her son, starving at 5 p.m., talking of cows, talking of gaskets, as she spooned out casserole, looked not at the vacant chair, not at the odd number of plates and bowls and glasses.
There were few arguments, the doors only banged on her on account of the wind, and if Anneka’s name was mentioned there were stone faces and avoided glances, a curt reminder not to mention that. Not to mention her.
Gwen and Drum had discussed finding her, had gone as far as contacting Lissa’s mother, who was unhelpful, even to Gwen. They’d gone to Liverpool to investigate, gone to Lissa, asked her if she’d seen Anneka. The look on her face. Pained and surprised, worried, almost shaking with it. Hard not to believe her. Lissa promising she’d be in touch if she heard anything, but said they’d had a falling out. Lissa said Anneka had stayed only a couple of nights. That Anneka had said something about London. Something about Birmingham.
They kept her room as it was, until enough was enough and Gwen ripped off the wallpaper and stacked Anneka’s things in the attic. How slim the life. How unlived. Her few diaries Gwen read, no revelations within them, no codes to decipher, nothing she had not known or surmised before.
The absence was the thing that got to her, the lack of mention of her. Some pages were devoted to Drum – unsurprising bouts of anger towards him – but Gwen warranted barely a mention. So little of Gwen, it would be impossible for a detective or critic to reach any conclusions save that she was a minor character who cropped up from time to time but was not material to the author. How callous to be disappeared by the disappeared.
Gwen had painted the walls of Annie’s old room a shade of lilac. Some nights she would make her way there, sleep on the bed, sleep deeply, as if to prove it were possible. She was always up before Drum though, always ready to kiss him awake and tell him breakfast was ready, before doing the same for her son.
For a time, Carter and Drum did not speak – a few months after the bunker, a crippling time for Drum, soon smoothed over – but Daphne and Gwen had continued their Wednesday afternoons. The first months, they’d talked about it. Talked of it, around it, through it, below it. Gwen would confess her worst doubts, her most terrifying of dreams, and Daphne would pour and cluck, hold her when the shaking started. For months they did not discuss anything else; Gwen saying all the things she could not say to Drum.
The days moved on and there were snags, always snags, little tears in the reality, a missed phone call, a letter from the bank, a voice like hers whispering in the library stacks. Snags in the books she read, snags in the records she heard on the radio. They faded, they sagged; but they did not go, they did not disappear. Those left behind have no agency. They cannot do anything until the disappeared decides to rematerialize. And she accepted this. Every day, she accepted this.
*
They walked the shingle path in strong sunlight, the fields refreshed by recent rain, the hedgerows smudged with the last of the brambles and blackberries. They held hands as they walked, fingers laced, arms swinging in time to their footste
ps. There was a new car outside the Carters’ house, a white Ford Sierra; Thomas standing beside it.
Gwen had not seen much of him since he left for university; drinks to celebrate his engagement, drinks to celebrate his wedding, the odd other times he popped home. She tried not to spend too much time with him, if she was able; he just made her think of Annie. Made her wish she would just pop home, now and again. Looking at him, an adult now, straighter of back, assured in his yellow Oxford shirt, pink sweater sleeves knotted around his neck, and wondering how her daughter was, whether she was as adult as him.
‘I’ve not seen the XR4i before,’ Drum said. ‘Not in the flesh at least. That’s a hell of a spoiler.’
Drum pointed to the back of the car. A pair of fins stuck out from the top of the boot and below the back window. It looked like a pair of duck lips to her; like Mick Jagger’s pout.
‘Goes like shit off a shovel,’ Thomas said, ‘if you’ll pardon my Français. No Nate?’
His fair hair fell into his eyes a little, the sides short but the fringe on the long side, like his father way back. Looked like his father, but softened by his mother’s features: less harsh in the nose, his eyes less piercing. He was the kind of man her father would have shunned at the bar, affect deafness if his attention was sought, add ice to his Scotch if not asked for; forget it if ordered. A barman’s sense of a bad egg: the kind of men who on seeing a bus wonder who they might throw under it.
‘He’s been in the fields all morning,’ Drum said. ‘He might join us after he’s had his nap.’
‘Sounds like our Josie to me – she’s hell if she doesn’t get her nap.’
‘So I hear,’ Gwen said. ‘Shall we go in? If we stay here any longer, Drum’ll be asking about torque and miles to the gallon.’
Thomas laughed and they laughed along with him. His daughter Josie. His darling daughter, his beautiful cherub. That fucking child.
*
A Wednesday, one of the bad days. Not so long after Natasha left for Durham University, the two of them in the kitchen. Of all the conversations they had, this the one that stuck.
‘I promised I’d leave him after the kids left,’ Daphne said. ‘And believe me, I’ve packed those bags so many times, but I just can’t do it. But one day . . .’
‘But you’d be leaving me, too,’ Gwen said.
‘Oh, doll,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ever leave you.’
Daphne did not leave, but in the space of a year was twice taken from Gwen. After his graduation, Thomas married some pony-like woman from Surrey. The wedding was, so Gwen was told by Victoria, to be a small show down in the countryside, close family only, though it was clear this was a lie. A lie, and with it relief.
Six months and all Daphne’s conversation was of the wedding: the flowers, the arrangements, the absolute lunacy of the bride’s parents. Wednesdays became truncated, the trill of things to do, things to do. Gwen saw Annie everywhere during those months. Could not read even a newspaper without seeing her.
Two months after the wedding, the pregnancy. The second loss. Worse this, so much worse. The updates on Victoria’s terrible pains and privations, the potential names, the guessing game of the sex. Months of this. There were other topics of conversation, but they were only a few roads from the subject of baby. The baby who arrived three weeks prem; Daphne scuttling off to Surrey to watch the wet wriggle of a thing in its plastic box. She called Gwen in tears, but was hopeful that the poor little mite – said so often it sounded like the infant’s full name – would pull through. Gwen never thought that. Not that. No. No she never once thought of its death. That would be too cruel.
Daphne came back armed with photographs and stories, but did not really ever come back. So much of her was down in Surrey, in the nine-pound sack of skin. Daphne missed several Wednesdays. Sometimes she was in Surrey; sometimes she was just too busy.
‘Do you ever wonder,’ Gwen said to Drum, in bed one of those bitter Wednesday nights, ‘about what Annie’s doing? Where she is?’
‘I try not to,’ he said.
‘I think she might have had a baby.’
He looked up from his book. His new spectacles made him look donnish, slightly confused.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I feel it,’ she said. ‘I can see her, big-bellied. Carrying a little boy around. Lying him down in a cot.’
‘She’d tell us,’ he said. ‘I know she’d tell us.’
‘It must be great to know everything,’ she said. ‘To be so bloody sure of everything. You said she’d be back in a week, remember?’
‘Babies change people,’ he said. ‘Your perspective changes, you remember?’
She looked down at her belly, wondered if she could conceive a child now. Still possible, surely. The child once there, a child inside of her now, the Russian dolls of it all.
The next week, Gwen walked into the Carters’ kitchen and Daphne was beaming, lighthouse-bright and radiating, though she did not look like she’d been drinking.
‘A surprise for you,’ Daphne said and led her into the living room. Connected to the television was a video camera. The television held a single image, white lines bouncing up and down over it, a woman holding a baby.
‘Now, let me see here,’ Daphne said, bending down and fiddling with buttons.
The stopped image unpaused: Victoria with Josie in her arms. Holding her up to the camera, waving her daughter’s arm as though hailing a taxi. Thomas taking the baby, throwing her up in the air, catching her, the baby giggling and gurning. Then Thomas passing the child to Daphne, and Daphne kissing the baby on the nose, holding her in the crook of her arm, laying down the kisses, raining them down.
‘Very nice,’ Gwen said and stood up.
It went on. A half-hour. Almost an hour. So much video. Gwen got up again.
‘I can forward it,’ Daph said. ‘They videoed me giving Josie a bath. She looks so—’
‘I’m sorry, Daphne,’ Gwen said, ‘but I just don’t fucking care.’
She thought the video had paused, the people on screen watching them, not each other. Silence on video, silence in the room.
‘And don’t I know it!’ Daphne said. ‘The whole time you’ve been sitting there, not even pretending to care. You’ve shared in none of this. You’ve just sat there looking bored, like you’d rather be anywhere else.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Isn’t it? All the times I listened to you, comforted you, and you can’t share in my happiness. You just sit there, jealously sucking all the joy from it.’
That face. The fire in the eyes. The righteousness of the anger. The same face shared between them.
‘You think this is easy for me?’ Gwen said. ‘Watching you with your precious Josie? My daughter’s gone, Daphne. She could be dead for all I know, and all I hear is that Surrey’s so far away and how much you miss that child. It’s all I ever hear! And you don’t for one single moment think how that makes me feel. You think it just ends? You think I don’t think about her all the time? And you have the fucking nerve to be angry with me. To be disappointed in me? Well fuck off, Daphne. Fuck off, with your fucking children and fucking Josie.’
Gwen slammed out of the back door, went home and straight to the attic. She read Anneka’s diaries again, saw herself disappeared again, removed again, not there, not there at all.
*
‘Well hello you two,’ Carter said, coming out from the kitchen. ‘Better late than never.’
‘Tom’s just been telling us about his car,’ Drum said.
‘Ah, that explains it then,’ Carter said. ‘Daph’s in the kitchen wrestling a chicken the size of Stockholm.’
Gwen watched the three men leave her, Carter throwing a lazy arm over Drum’s shoulder, a joke or something, the three of them laughing. How would Annie feel if she came back now to find her parents wetting the head of Thomas Carter’s daughter, making nice with his new wife? Come back, let us find out.
The kitchen smel
led of roasting meat, sage and onion, thyme and rosemary, the perfume Poison. Daphne looked up from stirring gravy. She picked up a glass of wine and poured it into the pan.
‘I was wondering if you’d come,’ Daphne said. ‘I thought you might have a migraine or something.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Gwen said. ‘I shouldn’t have—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No you shouldn’t. Shouldn’t have had to. I’m sorry too. But no more on it. Forgotten, yes?’
She turned to Daphne, they embraced; the gravy began to simmer.
‘Gwen,’ she whispered in her ear. ‘Don’t let me drink any more. Please don’t. I’m really, really drunk, Gwen. I’m really fucking drunk.’
*
Victoria handed Josie to Gwen. Little Josie. The body so small, the head so heavy. Forgot at first, so long since she’d held one, then back to the old routine, looking down into the eyes, the dark eyes miraculously open, and like holding Annie, back when she was small, the gentle weight of her, the promises made in the darkness, the small room in which she gurgled, screamed sometimes. Not so much, not a bad sleeper. You never forget, but never quite remember. Imagine Annie with her own child, holding him, nursing him. Imagine that. Her own daughter, her own daughter in her lap. Annie. Come home. Only once. Only once to think it. Just allow me this once. A prayer of sorts. A prayer yes, to be answered, Lord please. Bring her back to me. Her and her child. The child I do not yet know. I will be there, Lord. I will be there, Annie. There is nothing we cannot overcome. So, home, Annie. Back here, Annie. Understand me, Annie. Reappear me, Annie. Bring me back, Annie.
THREADS, SISTERHOOD AND THE BOMB
We were gathered and told our positions: the lucky pointed to stations in the shade; the unfortunate to those in the full glare of the sun. Our group was a broad church: a family with two small children, a clutch of twenty-somethings, four or five who had been in the original film, a few fellow writers, pretending not to recognize each other. This was not surprising. Had more of us known of the reconstruction, the whole ensemble would have probably been made up of journalists. For writers of my generation, the film we were there to reshoot is a cultural totem unlike any other. Mention it – mention Threads – and our faces form the same horrified mask; mention it and silence meets shudder.