by C. J. Skuse
And then the click. It doesn’t sound like her. It’s not the Ellis I remember. But what do I remember? A ten-year-old girl with a laugh like jingle bells and a smile like the sun coming up over the horizon. With each passing moment she’s not here, I feel more distant from her. More distant from that ten-year-old who’d been fixed in my mind like a mosquito in amber all these years. When all the time she was growing, transforming, mutating into this… liar. This girl full of stories, this depressed cat-stealer with occasional brain tumours. And it makes me sadder than I ever thought possible. I had employed someone to find her, a specialist, because I wanted her back. I wanted that little ten-year-old girl back where she belongs, with us. Her family. But I didn’t know her anymore. I had thought she could slot into one of the many gaps that had been left by other people, and make me somewhat complete again.
It never once occurred to me that she was incomplete herself.
I stand on the seafront until first light, watching. Occasionally crying. But looking out into the water, catching shadows, drifting shapes on the water, clods of white foam on the jutting rocks. Thinking I see her face in the inky black water. But I don’t. It’s only when I smell coffee that I turn around.
‘Here you go,’ says Neil, and passes me a disposable cup, warm to the touch, and a bag containing one Danish pastry.
‘Thanks. What’s the latest? Did you speak to the police?’
‘They’re gonna keep me posted,’ he says, sipping his cup and exhaling gladly. ‘We’ve got to wait. See what happens.’
See when her body turns up, he means. I don’t want that thought in my mind. I don’t want to see what the tide’s left on that shoreline when it finally retreats. I gulp my searing hot coffee and let it burn my throat, gives me something else to focus on.
‘You said you were on leave from work,’ I say. ‘Why is that?’
‘My wife died. I was her carer.’
There it is, that infuriating collision of sadness and understanding I know so well. ‘How long ago?’
‘Nearly a year now.’
I nod. ‘Cancer?’
‘Leukaemia.’
I nod again. ‘I’ll see your wife. And I’ll raise you one husband.’
He turns to me. ‘You’re young to be losing your husband.’
‘Yeah. We got married when I was 22. I lost him at 26.’
‘Cancer?’
‘Heart.’
Neil nods. ‘Jesus. OK, I’ll see your husband. And I’ll raise you both parents.’
‘You said you visited your parents in Dumfries?’
‘I visited their graves in Dumfries. And their house. I go back there sometimes. I haven’t got round to sorting out all the stuff yet.’
‘Same.’
Sunlight begins to break through a crack in the clouds and lights his face marmalade yellow. ‘Shit, you’re young to be losing your parents too.’
‘Well you’re not exactly old. What are you, thirty-seven?’
‘Thirty-nine.’
The temperature feels icy all of a sudden so I zip up my coat. ‘Thirty-nine? So you were, what, twenty-one when you started working with Ellis?’
‘She was my first case, yeah. It’s been a long time.’ He sips and doesn’t elaborate.
‘I lost my mum when I was sixteen,’ I tell him. ‘She had lung cancer. Doctors said it could have been passive smoking from working in the bar all those years. And my dad went to pieces after that. Started drinking.’
I glance at him but he sips his coffee and looks out to sea.
‘One night he drove my brother Paddy home from a twenty-first birthday party in town and they crashed. They crashed into the only tree on that stretch of road. Paddy survived but they had to remove both his legs below the knee. Dad was crushed by the steering column. He wouldn’t have felt anything.’
Neil posts his hands inside his pockets. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Yeah, it was. I went through a stage where I hated Ellis. I thought she’d caused it all. I hated Uncle Dan more. Mum was so unhappy. It was the not knowing. “The abyss,” she called it. Like they’d fallen into it and we were all supposed to forget they ever existed. That’s what did for her, I know it was. And my dad, he was the knock-on effect. Paddy suffered. Me and my other brother Isaac helped him as best we could. Then one day, when Mum and Dad’s estate had been settled and we got our inheritance, we decided to get out, peel ourselves away from all the memories.’
‘Understandable.’
‘None of us wanted to talk about the past. So we moved to France. Bought a place big enough for the three of us, and got out of Carew. We’ve been doing it up. It’s been chaos at times but good chaos. Isaac got a boyfriend, who became a husband, and he moved in. Thank god he’s good with electrics cos it would have cost us a fortune in French electricians. And Paddy got a girlfriend who became a wife, Lysette, and she moved in as well. That’s what I wanted – people around me. Family again. We’d lost so much.’
‘Where does your husband come into it?’ he asks. I smell the whisky on his breath from his lidded coffee.
‘Luc. I met him in a French market one day. We got talking. I fall in love quite easily and he was easy to fall in love with. Soft, sensitive. It was a bit of a whirlwind but I was looking for a whirlwind. And one day we were in Paris, the ultimate cliché, but he proposed outside the Musée d’Orsay. An old guy was having a stroke under a tree nearby which sort of broke the mood. But for a while, it was all magical again.’
He looks at me. He knows what’s coming.
‘We were all so happy. For a good three years. In my mind I thought that maybe the curse had ended. But it had waited for my guard to go down, that was all. Then I had a miscarriage at thirteen weeks. And then another one at twenty-two weeks. We tried again but nothing happened. I was too tense, I think. And one morning I woke up to find him cold next to me as well. No warning. Undiagnosed heart condition.’
Neil puffs out his cheeks. ‘Christ almighty.’
‘Full house,’ I say to him, as a tear rolls down my cheek. ‘God, I don’t think I’ve stopped crying since I arrived.’
‘You needed to,’ he says.
‘I’m so afraid every day, Neil. I’m afraid for Isaac, for his little boy, his husband. I’m afraid for Paddy and his wife and their two girls. And I’m afraid for me. I’ll be left alone without them all one day. It was Luc’s death that made me want to find Ellis. I need to find the family I still have and cling onto them, because I don’t know how long they’ll be around.’
Neil looks at me but doesn’t speak. He lets me carry on.
‘I’d Google her relentlessly, going through every single social media account and searching for her face. Her blue eyes. Her shock of red hair. I wrote to Avon and Somerset Police, begging them to help me find her. I wrote to the Home Office six times. Kept coming up against brick walls. Then a friend of mine, Pamela, a fellow expat I met at a book group, mentioned one night that she was having her husband followed by a private detective. And she told me about Middletons, this company in London who track people down, spy on adulterers, do background checks on employees, all sorts of things.’
‘This is where Cotterill comes into it?’ asks Neil.
‘Yes. Pamela said they were very efficient. Her husband was a careful man but they still got a ton of evidence on him. So I thought Why not? Middletons have been on the case for fifteen months now. Never thought they’d find her. I’ve missed her.’
Neil places his cup down on the sea wall and puts his arm around me. I cry against him. It’s more tiredness than anything but I’m so grateful for it because I don’t really get hugs anymore. Me and the boys went through a period of hugging all the time but after a while they don’t think you need it. Maybe I come across like I don’t – I’m pretty spiky. But even the spikiest porcupines need hugs if you are brave enough to get close. And Neil does seem brave. Great ribbons of grief pour out of me as he stands there, holding me, as strong as a castle. I’m crying for all
of them – Mum, Dad, Luc, the two babies I lost. And for Ellis. Wherever she is.
‘She was always talking about you,’ he whispers, even though he doesn’t need to whisper. There’s no one else around. I don’t want to pull out of his hug. Even though he’s a perfect stranger, it’s the best hug I’ve ever had.
‘She would tell me about you two guys as kids. Your tree-house. The unicorns. The T-Rex. Riding your bikes. You were her everything. Every summer.’
‘It wasn’t only summer,’ I sniff. ‘It was every Easter, every Christmas, half terms. I didn’t know life without her. She was half my world.’
‘She still is,’ he says as he pulls back to look at me and wipes the tear from my cheek. I smell the whisky on his breath again, even stronger.
‘You need to stop drinking,’ I tell him.
‘I know, I know,’ he says, pulling right away from me, picking up his cup and sinking the dregs, probably afraid I’m going to toss it over the wall any second.
‘Seriously. I know how this ends if you don’t.’
‘Pretty difficult,’ he says. ‘I don’t actually feel like there’s any reason to stop.’
‘Then find one,’ I say. ‘Your wife wouldn’t want you to drink.’
‘Should have stayed and kept an eye on me then, shouldn’t she?’
There’s a storm brewing up out in the bay and it’s my turn to hug him then because his eyes are full of water though the tears won’t drop. It’s like he’s willing them to stay put in his eyes. He holds onto me so tightly. It feels so right to be next to him like this. To press his cold, stubbly cheek against mine. I pull back and stare into his sad grey eyes, wiping over the tear tracks on his cheeks.
‘I’ve been free falling without her. I don’t give a shit anymore, about anything. I never used to be this angry, believe it or not. I feel angry about everything now.’
‘Two tornadoes together,’ I say.
‘Huh?’
I grab my coffee off the wall. ‘Come on. You need a shave and I need a sleep.’
22
Tuesday, 5th November (8.00 a.m.)
I don’t often allow myself to think back to Carew. There are too many memories I’ve locked away, but when I hear a snippet of them from Neil, the box opens and it all comes spewing out again. Dad’s Easter egg hunts. Uncle Dan’s Christmas present hunt. Fishing in the woods. Our treehouse ‘castle’. Every memory before I was ten contains Ellis. Every single memory afterwards, she was on my mind. But when Neil said that – I never used to be this angry, believe it or not. I feel angry about everything now – it rang the loudest bell. We were the same, me and him. He dulls his pain with whisky, I open the gasket now and again and blow my top. But neither method of therapy is working.
Back at The Lalique, Neil’s bed is soft and crispy clean. He draws the curtains and settles on the armchair beside the glass table, resting his feet on his bag and covering himself with the spare blanket. I have the whole double bed to myself, something I used to crave when Luc was around but which now I detest. We had thought initially they were twin beds pushed together but they weren’t separable so he took the chair. I feel awful. I can’t get to sleep anyway. Every time I close my eyes I hear the storm whipping up in the bay and imagine Ellis out there, clinging to a rock.
And I am back there, in Carew St Nicholas. I’m eight. The bells of St Nicholas are sounding. Sunday morning. The morning after Easter. I’m racing across the beer garden after Ellis but she’s too fast for me.
‘Ellis, it’s alright, it’s alright.’
She races to the treehouse, scampers up the rope ladder and scuttles across the carpet tiles to the corner where she tucks herself into a ball.
‘It’s alright, Ellis,’ I say, peeking in the doorway. ‘Mum won’t mind.’
‘It’s one of her best plates.’ She’s crying hard. Her pink cheeks glisten with tears. ‘I just wanted to do something nice to say thank you for having me so I started to do the washing up but it slipped out of my hand.’
‘She won’t care. She probably won’t even notice it’s missing. She’s got loads.’
‘She’ll send me home and take away all my Easter eggs.’
‘Has she sent you away before?’
‘No.’
‘When we scrawled on the toilet wall with charcoal?’
‘No.’
‘When Dad caught us peeing on his runner beans?’
‘No.’
‘When we ate all Isaac’s birthday cake?’
‘No.’
‘Well then. She won’t care about it, I promise. Where are the broken bits?’
‘In my laundry bag.’
‘Okay, go and get them and we’ll hide them.’
‘Hide them where?’
‘I know just the place.’
Isaac and Paddy have gone into town on the bus so we sneak into Isaac’s bedroom and peel back the carpet where he keeps his stash of pictures of naked men. He doesn’t think I know about his hidey, but I caught him putting the carpet back one day and he shouted at me for not knocking. There’s always a reward for not knocking.
‘There you go,’ I say, wrapping the broken shards of plate up in an old pillowcase which I hate cos it makes me cheeks itch. ‘She’ll never find it in here.’
‘What if Isaac finds it?’
‘I’ll stuff it right to the back. And if he does, I’ll tell Mum about his dirty boy books and his cigarettes that he stole from the bar, won’t I?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Forget about it. Let’s go and play.’
We kept all sorts of stuff down the hidey that year – treasure maps, broken plates, DVDs we aren’t allowed to rent but which the boys let us watch when Mum and Dad were down in the bar, like The Terminator and American Pie. If the pub’s still there, so are all our secrets, hidden in the floor.
I must get to sleep at some point because when I wake up it’s gone 10.30 a.m. I got a few hours in at least. That’s enough. I look across at Neil in the chair, his blanket rucked up around his feet. He lies all crunched up for warmth, uncovered. I get up and tuck him back in. I shower and dry my hair and he still doesn’t stir.
I lean down to him and listen to his short breaths – he still stinks of whisky. I whisper, ‘Neil? I’m going to nip out for a bit, why don’t you take the bed?’
Across the bay, another storm brews and gunmetal grey clouds gather to form an enormous dark mass on the horizon. It’s raining hard against the windows – I can’t even open one because the wind’s too strong. The wetlands are circled by litter and great big clumps of sea foam. It’s on the rocks too. No signs of life though. Or death.
I scribble Neil a message on the phone pad and head out.
In the corridors, an assortment of activity is going on – women in black and white uniforms with the Lalique logo on the left hand pocket scurry about with vacuum cleaners and piles of bedsheets. Men in business suits saunter along to the lifts with small suitcases on wheels. Two kids run to be first to press the button, their families trailing along behind. I remember that: when all that mattered in life was to get there first and press the button. That button was everything.
A grey-haired janitor man in navy shorts and Aertex shirt appears with a stepladder under his arm and a bunch of keys on his belt and sets it up beneath a vent outside one of the rooms. Air conditioning’s on the blink, if I hear correctly.
He says ‘Good morning’ as I pass him, and I make a mental note to seek him out later. First I want to start with the housekeepers, the people Ellis works alongside. There’s a short blonde pock-marked one with a ferocious ponytail that tapers to a point, a painfully thin black-haired one who moves at the speed of light, and a brunette with holes in her trainers who seems to find everything funny.
I attempt her first. ‘Hello.’
‘Morning,’ she says, a fake smile shuffling into the place of a real one.
‘Can I ask you some questions about your colleague, Ellis?’
�
�Who?’
‘Ellis Kemp. She works here?’
‘Don’t know her. Vanda will if she’s new though. Are you police?’
‘No, nothing like that. She might have used a different name. Maybe Mary?’
‘Don’t know a Mary, soz.’
‘Which one’s Vanda?’
‘She’s on the second floor. Blonde hair, short. Quite serious-looking.’
The ferocious ponytail.
‘Yeah, I’ve seen her. Okay, thanks.’
I head up in the escalator to the second floor and locate the room with the housekeeping cart outside, but the woman who comes out with a bundle of laundry is black with yellow hair accessories and a slight limp.
‘Hello,’ I say, ‘could you tell me where Vanda is please?’
‘She’s on Floor 4, I think. What’s up?’
‘I’m trying to find some information about a colleague of yours, Ellis Kemp?’
The woman frowns, like the brunette had done. ‘Don’t know her, sorry.’
‘She’s been working here for the past couple of months? Quite quiet, I believe? Red hair? Blue eyes?’
She frowns harder. ‘No one like that here, sorry.’
Another dead end. ‘Oh, okay, thanks.’ I’m at the escalator when I remember the black hair dye from Ellis’s flat. The contact lenses. I turn back to the woman’s cart – she’s inside the bedroom, laying out a fresh bedsheet.
‘She might have had black hair and brown eyes the last few months.’
‘Sounds like Genevieve. Yeah I know her. Right weirdo.’
‘Genevieve?’ I remember the only other time I’ve heard that name. I haven’t thought about that name for years. ‘Genevieve Syson?’
‘Yeah, that’s her. Is she in trouble or owt?’
‘No, I’m a relative, wanting to get in touch. I’m sorry to bother you.’
‘Vanda worked with her more than me,’ she calls out. ‘She’s on Floor 4, probably sneaking a vape through the end window.’
So I head for Floor 4 remembering vaguely that Genevieve Syson’s headstone was the one with the angel. My chest fills with poison, imagining Ellis’s name on a block of stone. No, she is still alive, I know she is.