A Godawful Small Affair

by J. B. Morrison

  The FLOs, who months later still came to the house now and then, bringing news on court dates and the sentence and so on, said that Craig was only ever concerned about being found out. He was looking out for himself, no one else. He joined in the search for Zoe to conceal his guilt. That was all. Craig was, according to Janet, ‘hiding in plain sight.’ Like Nathan’s school cap and his shoes in Zoe’s bedroom. The cap was still there. Nathan’s dad had found the shoes. Anne Marie called Craig a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but Nathan thought he was more like a crocodile. Craig had pretended everything.

  After Craig was sentenced there were fewer stories in the papers and nothing at all on the television, apart from a reference in a question asked on a daytime talk show: ‘Have you ever been betrayed by your best friend?’ The online chat, the speculation, hunches and conspiracy theories continued for longer, but people eventually lost interest. The notifications from Facebook, reminding Nathan’s dad that he hadn’t posted anything on the Where is Zoe Love? page, would presumably stop too at some point.

  On the first day without a single post or email about Zoe, Nathan thought the internet was broken. His dad was relieved. He said, “I think the media circus has left town, Nathan.” The publicity his dad had welcomed and encouraged when Zoe was missing had quickly become a curse when she was just gone. He had his closure, but it hadn’t quite lived up to its name.

  Nathan and his dad thought about Zoe every single day. His dad said he looked forward to only having good memories about her. Nathan knew his dad couldn’t help himself from thinking that Craig hadn’t really followed Zoe because he thought she was sleepwalking and that he’d known exactly what he was going to do. Maybe he’d been planning it for years, thinking about it every time he came to the house and saw Zoe. Nathan knew his dad must have had such thoughts because Nathan had them too. It was hard to picture Craig at the house without imagining him looking at Zoe as his first victim. Or even his next. His latest. What if there were other victims? Nathan’s dad said the only way to not allow a never-ending stream of imagined worsts to destroy him was to accept Craig’s version of events as the truth.

  There was one thing, however, that even Craig couldn’t explain. Why had Zoe gone back to the park in the middle of the night to move the branches? In the end, Nathan and his dad came up with their own reason. They were in the garden one evening, waiting for the sun to go down on the first day of summer and for the stars to come out, when Nathan asked his dad, “Are trees female?”

  “How so, mate?”

  “Like ships are called she. And Mum’s car was female.”

  His dad laughed. “Mum’s car was temperamental enough to be female,” he put his hand on his heart.

  “Sorry, Kat.”

  “What does temperamental mean?”

  His dad thought for a bit. “Moody. Was this tree a bit of a moody tree?”

  Nathan laughed. “How can a tree be moody?”

  Nathan told his dad how upset Zoe was that her favourite tree had been chopped down and dragged to the top of the park and that it had its branches cut off.

  “She called the branches the tree’s arms.”

  “That does sound like Zoe.”

  “I was thinking,” Nathan said, “that what if she went to the park to carry the tree’s arms back home down where all the other trees were? Like they were its family, the tree’s family.”

  Nathan’s dad nodded. “Maybe. Do you know what I think though? I think she was getting rid of the directions she left for the aliens because she didn’t want to go anywhere after all. She’d realised she was happy where she was. She decided she wanted to stay on Earth with her family, with her brother and her dad.”

  “And Officer Dibble,” Nathan said, looking at the cat, down on the grass shadow-boxing a wasp.

  “With her brother and her dad, and Officer Dibble,” Nathan’s dad said, “Who she loved just as much as they all loved her.”

  Nathan nodded. “That’s the best reason.”

  38

  Nathan was eleven now and at big school. He was the second smallest person there. On his birthday he went to MacDonald’s with his dad, but he felt guilty eating a burger and didn’t finish it. It was difficult to do virtually anything without thinking of Zoe. All the special occasions he’d worried about not happening when Zoe was missing, now that she was gone, Nathan dreaded them. Birthdays, Pancake Day, Easter and Firework Night, Halloween and Christmas, none of them would be quite the same without his sister.

  Zoe would have been sixteen now. On her birthday Nathan and his dad chose a star for her.

  “How about that one?” Nathan’s dad said.

  “That’s a planet.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s not twinkling. And it wasn’t there yesterday. Stars don’t move that much.”

  “Which star is the one we chose for your mum?” his dad said.

  Nathan screwed up one eye and pointed. His dad followed the aim of Nathan’s finger. “That one.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I remembered it.”

  The truth was Nathan couldn’t tell. But it didn’t matter. Not to either of them.

  “How about that one next to it?” his dad said. “Could that be Zoe’s star?”

  They both watched the star for a minute, to check it twinkled and to be sure it wasn’t going anywhere and it wasn’t a helicopter or a drone, and they agreed to name the star Zoe Love. They lit the candles on the cake that Maureen had made. It was shaped like a half moon. Waxing or waning, Nathan had forgotten again which was which. They sang ‘Happy Birthday’ quietly in the garden and blew out the candles. They each made a wish. Nathan was sure it was the same wish.

  They ate big slices of the cake and Nathan told his dad that NASA had programmed the Curiosity rover to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to itself on the anniversary of the day it landed on Mars. He’d meant it as a happy story, but it made his dad sad. Nathan said he was sorry, and his dad told him not to be. They were going to be sad sometimes. A few days later his dad saw a child’s glove hooked over a garden fence and started crying. Not crocodile tears either. Nathan thought he would never stop.

  Nathan’s dad got a job at the council. Even after all the awful things he’d said to them on the phone. Nathan thought that was so funny. His dad couldn’t work on the stall anymore because he’d always associate it with Craig. When the developers tried to move all the stallholders out to build flats though, his dad was right there protesting with the other stallholders. He was also more involved in the campaign to save the estate now. There was a banner hanging from the bottom of the living room window with ‘HANDS OFF OUR HOMES’ painted on it. In the summer, it was Nathan’s dad standing behind the table beneath the gazebo at the Lambeth Country Show, giving out the balloons and asking people to sign the petition.

  Nathan had expected his dad would never have wanted to go to the park again, but he said they needed to ‘reclaim it’, ‘like a bad word’. They walked through the park to the Lambeth Country Show and to the Lido on the first hot day of the year. His dad wore a verruca sock when they went swimming. Nathan knew he didn’t have a verruca and was hiding the South London Boys Forever 2013 tattoo on his ankle. In the winter his dad had the tattoo lasered off, but there was still a ghost of the crossed fingers and he rarely saw his dad without socks on. Around the same time, Nathan’s dad took his black bomber jacket to the charity shop. He went all the way to Camberwell before handing it over to a charity shop there, as though it was a mouse he’d caught, and he didn’t want it to come back to the house as soon as it was released. He threw the mantelpiece photo of himself and Craig wearing the same jackets in the bin.

  When Nathan and his dad went swimming, they took the disposable underwater camera and they finished the film, taking pictures of each other counting Mississippis underwater. When his dad collected the developed photographs, Nathan had to look at them first. His dad was worried how he might react to seeing pictures of Zoe that he
hadn’t already seen before. Watching Nathan react to them first, made his dad feel less anxious about it.

  The mystery boy who Zoe had taken a picture of eventually contacted the police. His name wasn’t Alex. It was Lucas. He was two years older than Zoe. He was Dutch and lived in Utrecht. That was why he’d missed seeing his picture on television and in the newspapers in the UK. Nathan’s dad spoke to Lucas on the phone. Lucas told him he met Zoe when he’d asked her for directions to the windmill in Brixton. Lucas hadn’t believed his friends when they told him there was a windmill right in the centre of Brixton and he wanted to see it for himself. Zoe was outside the Ritzy when Lucas asked her for directions. He said she was the friendliest looking person he saw and that was why he’d asked her. Zoe had drawn Lucas a map. He said he thought it was cool that she hadn’t just showed him on his phone. Zoe and Lucas had ended up chatting for a while. They sat on a bench in Windrush Square with the BOVRIL wall behind them, and Zoe recommended places to go and things to see for the remaining week of Lucas’s holiday. They arranged to meet the next day for coffee in Brixton Village. Lucas had joked that he couldn’t believe there was a village in the centre of Brixton as well as a windmill.

  The night that Nathan had seen Zoe leave the house, she was going to meet Lucas for a third and final time. The next day he was returning to Holland. They went for a walk together, to look at – what else – stars.

  Nathan’s dad said he was glad that Zoe had met someone she thought worthy of photographing – a human who wasn’t terrible – and when the police finally gave Nathan’s red notebook back, he completed his final unfinished entry:

  December 14th. 11:30. The subjict turned right to meet a friend.

  Nathan’s dad had been on television again. He was interviewed about the campaign to save the estate. It wasn’t the same programme or on the channel he’d been on with Nathan. There were no name badges, make-up chairs or green rooms, and no pastries or free Coke Zeros. The television channel was only a local one, watched online by a handful of viewers, but even so, Maureen said her brother would lose his job at the council if they ever saw what he was saying about them on television. Nathan told his aunt she should have heard him when the council painted the wall next to the mural, forgetting that she had. Nathan was glad his dad had found things that he felt passionate about, whether it was saving their home or some old market stalls. It helped take his mind off that awful year, when it had been one thing after another.

  Nathan hadn’t put on his orange spacesuit or packed his backpack since the night his dad found him in the park shivering and freezing inside a tree, when his dad had carried him home in his arms like Elliott’s brother, Mike, rescuing E.T.

  If Nathan looked at the clouds now, he just saw clouds. Maybe a sheep or Arthur’s mum after she’d had her hair done. But he didn’t wait for spaceships to appear. He wondered if his dad had been right all along and Zoe had made everything up and she hadn’t been taken away from Earth after all and that she only kept up the pretence for his benefit, for the amusement and entertainment of her brother. As long as Nathan enjoyed her stories, Zoe would have kept on telling them. Adding details when he asked, making things up to please him. But sometimes when Nathan was in bed, on the cusp of sleep, he did think, tonight might be the night the aliens came for him.

  Whenever there was a supermoon on the calendar or if a meteor shower was forecast or somebody talked about a comet or the International Space Station on television, of course Nathan thought of Zoe and how excited she would have been and how infectious that excitement was for him. In August there was a solar eclipse and he remembered when Zoe made him a pinhole projector out of paper plates. She might be gone but Zoe Love was everywhere. If Nathan ate a crepe or saw the ‘V’ on a takeaway menu or when the batteries in the remote control ran out or if toast popped up or if he took the lid off a pen or saw the contrails of an airplane or an alien on TV, or if he thought it was going to rain and it did, or whenever he ate Marmite on toast or walked past the BOVRIL wall, Nathan would think about Zoe. He would never be able to hear a David Bowie song without thinking of his sister.

  On the anniversary of the night Zoe became a misper – even though her dad had identified her body and even though they’d both cried their hearts out at her funeral, they would always think of her as missing – Nathan went upstairs to Zoe’s room to get the face paints.

  Nothing much had changed in her room in the past year. The carpet had been hoovered and her bed was made, but otherwise it was business as usual at the Zoe Love Museum. Her dad wasn’t ready to close it just yet. Nathan picked up the plastic box of face paints from the dressing table and put them in the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms. He pulled the chair over and climbed up to reach the clip that opened the plastic frame on the wall. He didn’t need to stretch or reach up as much as he had a year ago. He lifted the record out of the frame and climbed down from the chair. As he did, he felt something on the back of the album cover. He turned it over and looked at the picture. It was the same picture of David Bowie as on the front of the sleeve but there was no lightning bolt. No facial features at all in fact. It was just the outline of David Bowie’s head and shoulders, drawn in red on a plain white background.

  If Zoe’s Sharpie had been yellow or green, or if she’d taken the pink Post-it notes out of their dad’s desk instead of the white ones, Nathan might have noticed it before. He might not have picked the record up from her bed, early in the morning almost exactly a year ago and turned it around the right way, before shutting the record away inside the frame on Zoe’s bedroom wall. He might not have missed something that he’d been searching for ever since.

  HELLO SPACEBOY

  IN CASE YOU WAKE UP BEFORE

  I’M BACK. I HAVE DECIDED TO

  STAY ON EARTH WITH YOU AND DAD.

  GONE TO PARK TO REMOVE

  THE ARROWS AND BOTH OUR

  NAMES. JUST IN CASE.

  DO NOT LEAVE THE HOUSE.

  AND DON’T TELL DAD

  Zx (THE SUBJICT)

  Nathan slumped down on the chair and read the Post-it note again. His dad was right. Zoe had gone to the park to get rid of the directions because she wanted to stay with her brother and her dad. Only Officer Dibble was missing from Zoe’s note.

  It had taken Nathan a long time to not believe Zoe had died because of him. Even when his dad had made up the story about why she’d gone back to the park, Nathan hadn’t been able to get finding the lid of her pen out of his head. He’d been back to Zoe’s favourite tree many times to look for the missing Sharpie or for something written with it. The tree had changed with the seasons. Someone had carved cute animals into the longer section of trunk – a smiling caterpillar, a snail and a frog. Then, just before the Lambeth Country Show, that section of the tree was cut into small logs too. The logs were arranged in a circle like Stonehenge and a hog was roasted at the centre. Hipsters lit barbecues at the centre of the circle of logs all through the summer. Nathan could smell the cooking meat from his bedroom. He was glad Zoe wasn’t there to smell or see what had happened to her tree and what it was used for.

  When Nathan looked at the message Zoe had written to him on the Post-it note and stuck to the back of the album cover, he decided she hadn’t replaced the lid on the pen properly before leaving the house again for the park. She must have dropped the lid by the dog poo bin by accident. The pen could be anywhere. Nathan looked at the note. If he’d seen it when he was supposed to, could he have saved his sister?

  His dad called out from downstairs, “Hurry up, mate.”

  Nathan peeled the Post-it note away from the record sleeve, slowly, like he was removing a plaster from David Bowie’s face using his mum’s method. He rolled the small square of paper into a thin tube shape and put it in the zip pocket of his tracksuit bottoms. He went downstairs and gave the David Bowie record and the face paints to his dad. His dad read the song titles on the back of the record sleeve, chuckling and sighing to himself at the memory of the son
gs and what they in turn reminded him of.

  “Do you actually know what this is?” his dad said.

  “A record.”

  “But have you ever heard it, I mean? Have you seen a record play?”

  Nathan shook his head. He’d seen records on shelves and shut away in frames. He’d watched them being used as flat surfaces for Luigi boards and he’d seen them used to copy make-up designs from. But he’d never actually seen a record doing what it had been designed and made to do.

  “We should get a record player,” his dad said. He looked at the track listing on the back of the sleeve again. “‘Prettiest Star’, that’s what your mum used to call Zoe, just after she was born.” He flipped the album over between his fingers, like he was making a pizza base. He looked at the picture on the front, at the lightning bolt on Bowie’s face. “Oh well,” he said. He passed the record and the face paints to Nathan. “Do your worst, Picasso.”

  39

  There weren’t as many people at the mural as there were the previous year, and no one sang while Nathan and his dad were there. His dad lit three candles and left one in front of the mural and the other two on the ground in front of the wall where Zoe’s message was. It was Nathan who’d pointed out to his dad that although they couldn’t see them, Zoe’s words were still there underneath all that ugly white council paint.

  Nathan almost gave his dad Zoe’s Post-it note message when they were at the mural. He even thought about unrolling it and sticking it on the wall and pretending to find it there. But showing it to his dad wouldn’t really change anything. It would only confirm a story they’d both already accepted to be true. And Nathan didn’t want to spoil the day by needlessly upsetting his dad. He decided to keep the note somewhere safe until one day when he thought his dad was ready, and then Nathan would give it to him. He hoped though, that he’d forget all about the Post-it note, or his dad or Maureen would wash his trousers with it still in the pocket. It would make it easier to stay true to Zoe’s last words: