by Bev Thomas
I stare at them, a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. But for all that I do notice, I don’t see what’s going on in front of me. I don’t pick up what Dan is doing. That in directing my attention to what he wants me to see, he is stopping me focusing on the very place I need to look.
Eight
I feel it as soon as I get up. I’m like a cat that can’t settle. Endlessly turning itself round, fidgeting this way and that until it can find a comfortable spot. But on days like today, I know there’s no comfortable spot. How can there be?
I have no plan. I rarely make plans for the weekends any more. Perhaps I should have made one. Today, the prospect of an empty weekend yawning ahead of me fills me with a kind of dread. The only event, the planned Skype call with Carolyn, was cancelled yesterday. I’d switched my phone on after my session with Dan to see her text. Unexpectedly offered another shift on the boat. Celebrating my birthday out at sea. Will call on return Cxx
The morning starts badly with indecision over breakfast, whether to have a bath or shower, then what to wear. I can’t concentrate on anything. When I pick up the notes for the paper I am presenting at a conference in June, my eyes skim over words that seem completely alien, ones I don’t recognise as my own. I open the back door and pick up a trowel to weed the pots on the patio. But I feel heavy and lethargic under the greyness of the sky and have to fight the urge to retreat inside and lie back down on my bed.
David’s text comes in when I’m making coffee. The small sound it makes into the silence of my morning is a relief, an external puncture into my solitary bubble. Most of the time it’s fine. I’m good at driving the wheels and machinations of my life single-handed. Then there are days like today when I don’t have the energy to push any more. The relentless self-direction at the weekend is exhausting and often leaves me floundering. The working week, of course, is different. The unit fills my time, it’s all-consuming. The needs of my patients are so visceral, so immediate, they drive me forwards. At the moment, I am not sure who needs whom the most.
It’s why I recoil when people are so full of admiration about the work. ‘Giving something back,’ they say. Altruistic. Worthy. They have no idea. They know nothing about the pull. The gratification that can soothe like a drug. The adrenalin rush of trauma work. For many of us, there’s a comfort in the unpredictability. It tastes familiar. Sometimes I look at my team, their own chaotic lives, and their motivation for doing this work, and I wonder if we’re all just high-functioning and better-informed versions of our patients. People who have learnt sophisticated ways to manage the chaos. My own working day is carved out into fifty-minute patient-sized chunks. Bite-sized bits of grief and pain and trauma that serve to anaesthetise my own.
In the bitter cleft that marked the end of our relationship, David said I lived for the distress of other people. He said being a therapist made me feel good about myself.
‘You’re a vampire,’ he said, ‘sucking on the pain and trauma of your patients to make yourself feel better. That way you can feel useful – like you’re actually doing something meaningful.’
‘More meaningful,’ I said, ‘than the study of long-dead poets?’
When we first got together, David used to leave notes for me to find. Quotes from poems that I’d find hidden in my bag, or on the bathroom mirror, or the one that made me laugh out loud – Do I dare to eat a peach? – that I found in my lunch box when I was studying at the library. I don’t remember when the notes stopped. Probably somewhere amidst the maelstrom of small children. But I thought about them back then, when we were simply trading insults, and wondered what poems he might have turned to if he needed inspiration. As it was, we both did fine all by ourselves, tossing words back and forth like a tedious ball game we felt compelled to keep playing. I mocked his own retreat into his books, his studies, his lectures. And of course – his students.
‘You’re a walking cliché of a midlife crisis. College professor and his late-night tutorials with his PhD students. Please …’ I said, rolling my eyes.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m delighted you’re so dedicated to your patients. At least you can have an intimate relationship, even if it is on the NHS. With people who are mad.’
And so it went on. Before Tom’s hospital admission, we used to row about him. My over-involvement. His under-involvement. His retreat. My controlling nature. His bowing out of responsibilities. After Tom came out of hospital, it was too raw. I remember the drive home as we crossed the Euston Road, sitting small and still in our seats. David driving carefully, like we were bringing home a newborn. After that, things shifted. We retreated. We skirted round it, like a couple of kids poking at a dead bird with a stick.
The texts from David have changed in the last year. Perhaps as Tom’s disappearance has become calcified and more of a reality in our life, he has softened towards me. We have softened towards each other. There’s more warmth, less hostility. He’s careful around me, like I might break. Ostensibly, he’s texting about picking up his old printer. But at the end: Are you around? We could meet for lunch? It’s thoughtful he’s remembered. Even more thoughtful because he’s not referred to it or asked how I am. He knows I would hate that. And because of this, I feel a sudden rush of goodwill towards him.
It also propels me out of my inert state and gives me a sense of purpose. A deadline.
Within fifteen minutes, I am dressed and out of the house. I text David on my way. My reply is friendly. That would have been nice. But I have plans. I’m out for the day. I tell him the printer’s in the garage. Pick up anytime. See you soon. It’s easier to be kind when we no longer see each other and now that the fighting is over. There’s no energy for hostility, and somehow because of that, we can enjoy the idea of each other. It may draw on the past, or it may be an entirely new construct altogether, but whatever it is, the fantasy is strengthened by seeing each other less. We slept together only once, since we separated. He came around to get some old papers from the loft. I made him dinner. We drank wine and went to bed. It was familiar, easy. A comfort at the time for both of us. But straight afterwards, we were right back into familiar terrain. The edge of recrimination seemed sharpened by our union. After we’d put our clothes back on, we just had to look at each other. No words were necessary. Just the two of us together was a reminder of what was missing, and what was lost.
When I think of David now, it’s hard to reconcile the life we shared for more than twenty-three years. As if our marriage was one of those houses that are close to a slowly eroding cliff edge. And when the marriage was finally over, the house fell away. The break so clean, you’d never know that anything else had been there before. Now I can barely even remember the rage I felt when he was seeing Kate. The repeated evening tutorials at the university. I can barely relate to that version of myself back then. A person who was so angry, so aggrieved. It’s like all the feelings have slid away into the foamy crashing sea. It seems a lifetime ago.
Now that Tom has gone, his disappearance, his departure (I still don’t know what to call it) has eclipsed everything else. There is no space for any other feelings. Carolyn, of course, would say there never was.
I walk briskly and purposefully up the hill, past Archway station. I walk with the pace and step of someone who has a destination. Over the months, walking is the only thing that helps shift the restlessness. On those days when I wake under a blanket of indecision and a low-grade unease, the simple act of walking, of putting one foot in front of the other, seems to help. Some days I walk miles and return exhausted. I know by now it’s the act of moving, of keeping going, that uproots whatever has taken refuge inside me. Sometimes I imagine it’s a sloth-like creature, heavy and slow and dragging me into inertia. Going for a long walk seems to head it off at the pass. Move. Wake up. Go. You’re not welcome, is the message. And so, it shifts. It will come back. It always does.
I keep on walking. I move through the crowds on the high street, the groups gathering outside shops. The all-night
ers grabbing breakfast before going to bed. The new parents pushing buggies who have been up since dawn, pacing the streets then sitting glassy-eyed in café windows. I keep on walking, and all the while I am looking, scanning the streets. The coffee shops, the restaurants, the staff that clean the pubs, the bodies sleeping in the doorways. I look, even though I know I won’t find Tom here. If he’s alive, he wouldn’t be so close to home. So close to me. I think about Dan, the cuts on his arm. I think about this week’s drama. Sweeping Mark Webster to centre stage. Then I think of Dan and Hayley. Hayley and Dan huddled in a conversation. As I walk, my thoughts drift lightly, they dip and dive and fall away, like swallows in the sky.
I pass families, packs of friends. Things that were once part of my life. I keep my distance from people now. Relationships are tainted by the absence in my life. Conversations about other people’s growing families, university, jobs, relationships all feel strained because of Tom. I used to try to be interested. But I’d feel my face tense, the muscles tightening as I pretended to look interested. Something that belied my fury. My envy and my jealousy. Sometimes I tried so hard, my cheeks were left stiff and aching. It became easier not to see people.
As I walk, I think about Carolyn. On the other side of the world, it will be dusk. I picture her on the boat with friends; happy, laughing, under a starlit sky. It’s both a relief and disappointment that she has cancelled. I feel sorry for her. Sorry that her birthday joy is now eclipsed by her brother’s absence. I can’t just separate out my grief and joy. It’s not a surprise to get her text, but I can’t pretend to feel something I don’t. Neither of us was ever very good at pretending and Skype emotions are tricky at the best of times. The juddering delay seems to exacerbate the nuances of our already faltering relationship.
‘I missed that? What did you say?’ we stutter and fragment.
‘—ip. Going on a tri—’ She’s shouting now. Her face in a twist of irritation. And then we are back to square one. You never listen. I am invisible to you. You simply don’t hear me.
‘A trip?’
‘Yep.’
‘Where to?’
‘To the Daintree Forest.’
‘Where?’
‘The. Place. I. Took. Dad.’ She spells out, ‘Daintree.’
And then her face distorts. Breaks up into small fragments that scatter then re-emerge into a face. Her speech is often out of sync with her moving lips. I imagine she must find it weird to be talking back to a much older, greying version of herself.
We were at the kitchen table when Carolyn announced she’d decided to study law. I had no idea what was coming.
‘So,’ she said, ‘Durham’s offered me a place.’
Her decision had already been a surprise and a source of tension, so I was careful to hold back, to read the mood on her face. I thought I saw pleasure.
‘That’s great,’ I said.
‘But the best piece of news,’ and she paused to take a breath, ‘is that I’ve managed to defer for a year.’
She looked up at me. ‘I’m taking a year out. I’m going to Australia.’
It was the first I’d heard of Australia. The first I’d heard of any desire for a year off. It was so like Carolyn to have everything signed and sealed before she mentioned anything. Nothing. Not even a whisper of a plan. I tried and failed to hide surprise.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘just surprised. I had no idea you were planning—’
‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘I didn’t want to mention it. They might have said no. Then we’d have all been disappointed,’ she said with a strange clipped laugh.
She looked at me. That look, again – willing me, urging me to disagree, to find fault. To say something that she could pounce on. Several weeks later, she came right out with it.
‘Why are you so angry with me?’ Of course, I denied it. Looked taken aback and feigned confusion, but I knew exactly what she was talking about. I could see how we had arrived at this place, as if we’d followed an endless trail of breadcrumbs through the wood. To a place, where, in different ways, I found myself estranged from both my children.
Australia? Really?
‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘If that’s what you want – I’m so pleased for you.’ When really, I was thinking, could you have picked anywhere further away from home? Why couldn’t you have gone to Europe? Interrailing through the Italian cities. Rome? Florence? Island hopping in Greece? I could have managed a country where I could get back to London quickly, in three or four hours max, if there was any news about Tom. But a twenty-four-hour flight? It was inconceivable. We both knew it was. Why did she have to pick somewhere she knew I’d never be able to come? It seemed almost wilful.
I swallowed. I was trying to be better. I had to struggle with myself to stay silent. To look pleased for her. I knew she could see through me. That she knew me too well.
‘I want to learn to dive. Get a job on a boat …’
In an attempt not to be negative, not to say the wrong thing, I kept my face blank.
‘The Barrier Reef? In Queensland?’ she said, overarticulating, like I’m a small child that has failed to comprehend.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s great.’
‘The Coral Sea’s supposed to be one of the most beautiful places to dive. One of my friends, her brother went last year,’ she added.
Which friend? What brother? But she’d moved on. She was saying something about visibility, ‘forty metres or more.’ She was animated and excited. I wanted to feel happy for her, but had no idea what forty metres meant, or even looked like. All I could think about was how far away it was – and that I’d never be able to visit.
She left in September and David went out to see her at Christmas. It was our second Christmas without Tom. We wouldn’t have gone at the same time, but the issue of whether or not I’d go never came up. It wasn’t discussed. Once, I tried. ‘I know, Mum,’ she said, her hand up, like a stop sign. ‘It’s fine. I knew you wouldn’t be able to come.’
David called at the house the day after he got back in January. I hid upstairs when he rang the bell. I heard him walk round, pictured him peering through the back door and the garden. Then soon after, there was the sound of the letter box shuddering and the slap of something landing on the mat. The pictures were bright and sunny. I fanned them out on the bed. Impossibly turquoise water. Flat millpond seas and sunshine. Their smiling faces, laughing into the camera. Arms slung round each other’s shoulders. David was standing in between Carolyn and a young blond tanned man. David’s face was tanned and healthy. They all looked tanned and healthy. Dark sunglasses. White teeth. Bright white sand. Bright sun. Bright blue water. It all looked too fucking bright and shiny.
He rang later that afternoon. ‘Rob,’ he said, ‘he’s a really nice bloke,’ he said. ‘They seem happy.’
‘That’s good.’
‘He adores her. He’s a divemaster on the boat. She’s having the time of her life.’
The time of her life?
I wanted her to be happy. At least I think I wanted her to be – but I also wanted to ask, did any of you think about him when you were cooking Christmas lunch on the beach?
‘Sausages! Hog roast!’ he said, and in the face of my flatness, he became more animated. ‘It’s forty-two degrees and the shop windows in Cairns have these little snow scenes. Santa hats and reindeers and everything …’ he laughed.
I nodded. I said something – but all the while I’m wondering how his life could carry on as normal. How his life seemed untouched by the absence of his son. I wanted to put the phone down. It all seemed too loud. And that was always the thing. The issue I have always had with David is his ability to carry on – like he was in a parallel universe. One, where his son had disappeared off the face of the earth, and the other where he was drinking beer and cooking hog roast on the beach. They co-existed, but were separate and distinct. And just listening to him that day, to his frothy enthusiasm, made me feel so co
ld and angry that I had to get off the phone. It was stupid really, but without thinking, I picked up a book and threw it across the room. It hit the wall with a loud thump.
‘David – sorry. I must go. Someone at the door. Call you back later—’ and before he had time to say anything else, I’d ended the call. I slumped back on the bed in the sea of bright blue photos.
*
When I get back from the walk, my body aches. I snack on crisps and an old carton of olives festering at the back of the fridge. After two large glasses of wine, I’m at the computer. The wine has done its work, has dulled my senses and before I can stop myself, my fingers are on the keypad. It’s a habit I’d weaned myself off. It’s been weeks now, I justify to myself, it’s good to check, to keep in touch.
In the early days, I pored over it. Fed off it. I signed up to all the chat rooms for parents of missing children. I only look at the site now. I don’t participate. Not any more. Not after what happened with Minty, the woman from Virginia.
When I first opened up the Missing Persons website, I’d been shocked. It reminded me of those adoption sites. Rows and rows of children, their small pleading faces, all looking for a home. This is different. They are not small children looking for a home. They are posted by families who want their relatives back. The sheer volume was extraordinary. I gasped as I scrolled down through the rows of faces; missing men and women, boys and girls, some just children really. Many of the faces are familiar to me now. The purple dress of the woman from Woking with a glass of white wine in her hand. Duncan, the accountant, smiling shyly into the sunshine. The cheeky-looking tattooed man in his twenties with a stripy scarf round his neck. I know them all. I have scrutinised their faces. Spent drunken late nights studying those missing faces, as if searching for some clue, some answer to my own missing person.
Missing person. They are missing. They are missed. I like to think of Tom as missing. Missing things are a pair of glasses down the back of the sofa, misplaced keys. Lost by someone who is careless. Negligent. Missing things get found.