“Yes,” I say. “That’s fine. Let’s do it.”
“Mr Harper?”
“Yes. Yes. Right now.” John’s voice trembles. The light flickers again. The room is very cold. I cling hard to the hands of the two men.
“So if you can just take yourselves back to that time… that morning when you last saw him…” James’s voice is low and coaxing, like a hypnotist. “And I’m getting the very strong feeling that there was an argument, is that right? And he made some threats to run away. Okay, I can see him very clearly, he was still fair-haired, wasn’t he, more like you in appearance, Mrs Harper. I can feel there was a lot of tension in the house that day, but also a lot of love. Try and hold onto the love. The love is what connects you to your son. Keep holding onto the love.”
I concentrate on holding onto the love. It’s not easy. There is something dark and frightening in the room with us now. I don’t like the way this session is making me feel. The memories that come to me are not loving memories. I remember the fury that convulsed John’s features into an entirely new shape, the savagery of his fists as he shook the bag of weed in Joel’s face. I remember Joel’s expression as he glanced back at me through the window. Help me. And I didn’t. I didn’t go after him. I chose to stay with my husband.
“Mrs Harper? Are you all right? I’m sensing this is very difficult for you, would you like to stop?”
“No. I want to keep going.”
“All right then… so I’m with Joel. He’s running down the street. He’s got running away on his mind, but it’s not a serious thought, it’s got that teenage rage feeling to it. It’s a fantasy, not a plan. He’s going somewhere. I think he’s going to school.”
Hurry up, hurry up. We know all of this, everyone knows all of this.
“Okay, now I’m sensing a great deal of darkness. He’s very unhappy. He’s craving something, there’s a very deep hunger. He’s thinking about being very small, very very small, maybe even a baby. He’s remembering a time when he was completely looked after and had no worries at all. There’s something changing his perception now, things are getting quite fuzzy. It’s possible he’s been drinking, or maybe… I’m sorry to tell you this. Do you want me to carry on?”
“Yes.” John’s voice, low and passionate.
“Okay, there’s another journey happening now. I think he must have left school. There’s a great sense of movement, I don’t think he’s travelling on foot. I can hear shouting, there’s a man with him who’s very angry with him, someone he’s afraid of, someone with authority over him. I’m… I’m getting the word disgrace, something about what would your mother think. He’s growing very fuzzy now, very hard to keep hold of. I can sense water… it’s very cold… he’s somewhere near water, somewhere at the start of a journey, there’s a very large ship that he wants to get onto but he’s not sure if he can find a way. He’s thinking about travelling, he has a very strong call to start this journey, but he’s also afraid. He wants to take the first step but he’s afraid.”
“Is there anyone with him?” I don’t want to interrupt the flow but I have to ask, I have to know.
“I think there’s someone with him, someone he loves but who’s also quite frightening, but this might just be a memory… no, I can’t be sure. He’s concentrating very hard on what’s in his head rather than what’s going on around him, and I’m… I’m afraid I’m getting tired now, I think we all are, I’m losing the connection.” When I open my eyes for a second, his face is scrunched up tight and painful. “Mr Harper, if you could just rejoin hands I’ll try and … no, I can’t, it’s gone. I’m so sorry. If we try another time I may be able to find more.”
It’s not until James releases my hand that I realise he’s gripped tightly enough to crush my rings into my flesh. I flex my fingers beneath the table, wondering if I’ll have bruises later. I don’t care. It’s worth it. James looks pale but triumphant. Despite the clammy chill of our bare and comfortless surroundings, there’s a gloss of sweat on his forehead. He reaches for the jug, pours some water, drains it in one long swallow.
“I’m sorry I lost him towards the end.” He refills the water glass. “That was a very intense experience. Thank you for allowing me to share it. The strength of your memories of Joel were exceptionally strong. I think we’ve made some good progress, got some excellent insights that we can hopefully explore further some time.” He gulps down more water. “I’m sorry, I’m being rude. Let me—” He pours two more glasses, offers one to me. I take it and sip hesitantly. I’m afraid I might spill it.
“Mr Harper?”
John isn’t listening. Instead he’s fumbling in his pocket. Surely he’s not hunting for cash? We pay by bank transfer and we get a receipt. This isn’t some grubby cash-in-hand enterprise. He’s unfolding a sheet of paper, which he lays on the table like a loaded weapon.
“I wonder if you could take a look at this for me,” John says.
James raises an eyebrow, but reaches for the paper anyway. I strain to read what he’s looking at through the thin shadows cast by the ink as the light shines through. It looks like a screen-shot of a website. I can read the outsized title (Shared Memories) but the text beneath is a maddening small blur.
“If you wouldn’t mind reading it out loud,” John says. He’s caught James’s trick of disguising his commands as suggestions, that introduction of the unresolved if at the beginning of the sentence.
“The other night John and I were discussing our best memories of Joel. What surprised me the most was that we chose to remember him in such different ways. My favourite memories are domestic: giving him his bath, reading him his bedtime stories, snuggling under the blankets in his couch-fort, playing in the garden in the sunshine. John loves to remember the adventures we had: riding on the steam-trains up on the Yorkshire Moors, taking him for his first bus ride in last few weeks before he started school, paddling in the sea and catching crabs on the beach at Hornsea. There was a beautiful comfort in sharing these memories—”
“That’s enough. And now if you can just read the description at the bottom of the page…”
“Life Without Hope. A blog by the mother of a missing child. Mr Harper, I don’t quite understand what point you’re trying to make here.”
“It’s my wife’s blog,” John says grimly.
“I don’t have a blog!”
“No, I know you don’t. But he doesn’t know that, he thinks this is your blog that you write and maintain. And if you google the name Susannah Harper, this comes up on the very first page.” John’s face is ugly with triumph, although I can’t see what he’s so happy about. What point has he proved here? What’s he trying to tell us?
“Are you saying someone’s keeping a blog and pretending to be me?”
“Mrs Harper, your husband’s telling you he created it,” says James with a sigh. “And he thinks I found it and harvested the content to create the experience we just had.”
“He’s a fraud, Susannah,” says John. “Just the same as all the rest. Think about the memories he claimed to be picking up on. You playing with Joel in the garden. That was in the entry I just made him read out.”
“But Scrap-dog, he saw Scrap-dog—”
“He guessed Scrap-dog, it’s just cold-reading, they all do it. They feed you a bit of information and they look at the signals you give off and then they add a bit more information and look again, and before you know it they’ve guessed the colour of your underwear when you first met your husband. And that bus ride… did you wonder why you didn’t remember it? I knew you wouldn’t believe me unless I showed you proof, so here it is. There never was a first bus ride to celebrate Joel starting school. I made it up last week. And the only place he could have found it out is if he read this.”
“Okay. I think I’m going to have to ask you to leave now. Mr Harper, it goes without saying that I’ll refund your payment—”
“Keep it.” John looks as if he wants to spit on the table. “Put it towards the new wiri
ng. Merry Christmas. Come on, love.”
My head feels as if it’s about to float off my shoulders. I’m frozen to the chair. Which of the two men before me has betrayed me the most?
“Come on,” John repeats.
If I keep still and stare at John for long enough, perhaps this will start to make sense.
“Mrs Harper.” James kneels in front of me. “You’re obviously very shocked by this. If you maybe take some time to think about what’s just happened to you here? I can see you’re feeling quite frightened. Is there someone I can call for you, to take you somewhere safe?”
“Shut your lying face. Get away from her. She’s coming home with me.”
“Your sister, maybe? I know she loves you very much—”
“I said, get away from my wife!”
And then I’m being lifted up, not dragged from my chair exactly but a feeling that’s separated only from this by the inherent goodness of John’s intentions, and I’m caught in his arms and we’re tearing through the door and across the hall and out into the lamplit night. I think he’ll put me down as soon as we’re outside, but instead he carries me up the street towards the green-black land of the Westwood common where we left the car. It’s not until we reach the ancient horse chestnut by the side of the road, and our car parked beneath it, that he lets me stand on my own.
Years ago, when I was hopelessly drunk among many other hopeless drunks at a party so raucous the police had been called, John carried me home. As the police knocked at the front door, he simply picked me up and carried me through the back, away from the unfolding chaos. I thought that as soon as we were safely clear of the party’s zone of influence he’d put me down and we’d look for a taxi, but instead he kept going, the whole three-mile walk, pausing sometimes to rest on garden walls or on green-painted benches that stared out across nearly empty roads to their identical twins on the other side. When we reached my parents’ house he set me down on the doorstep, found my keys in my handbag and opened the door for me, kissed me gently on the mouth, then strode off again. I remember the sensation that enveloped me as he walked, the childhood feeling of helplessness and dependence. I remember having no fear whatsoever for his own safety. I remember thinking with drunken satisfaction, My boyfriend is so strong, he could fight off anyone, even a bear, even an axe murderer. I remember thinking, This is it. The most romantic moment of my life.
Now, years later, we stand beside our expensive car and watch each other’s faces for signs of weakness and I think about my husband, my strong determined husband who could fight off a bear or even an axe murderer, and I think, If it came to it, could I stop you from doing anything that you wanted to do?
“I left our coats,” says John. “I’m sorry. Get in the car and I’ll put the heater on.”
“Why did you do that? The blog and everything? Why come along tonight if you knew it wasn’t true?”
“You wouldn’t believe me any other way.”
“But,” I whisper, “but it felt real. It was real.”
“I’m not saying he’s not talented. I’m saying he’s not psychic. He’s just a very clever man who’s very, very good at taking lots of little scraps of information and building them up into a convincing picture. And that’s all he was going to do, love. Take our money and feed you little scraps for as long as he could get away with it. And I’m not having that. I love you.”
“He saw Joel – he saw him going to water and boats – he saw him starting a journey – we have to follow that up, it might be something that will help find him—”
John thumps the roof of the car in despair.
“Well, of course he saw water and boats! We live in a bloody port city! What else was he going to see? If he’s still alive then it’s an image of him running away, and if he’s… if… well, it could be that he drowned, or it could even be an image of the ferryman, couldn’t it? You can do anything with a picture of boats and water. What? What?”
I feel as if I’m looking at a dual-image illusion. On the one hand, I can see that every word John says is true; the harvesting of images from my (John’s) blog, the slow delicate feeling for bits of information that came together to form Scrap-dog, the infinite number of possible meanings for that final image of Joel. But when I concentrate on the darker side of the picture, I remember the words James spoke. Rapid motion; someone telling Joel he was a disgrace. Someone with him who he trusted. And water…
“Susannah. Please. Come back to me.” John’s hands on my shoulders. “You’re going off into yourself again. You’re leaving me behind. Please, stay here with me. Stay here. I need you to listen.”
“I’m here. I’m with you.”
“But you’re not. You’re not with me.” There are tears pouring down John’s cheeks. “I can’t do this any more, Susannah.”
“Can’t do what?”
“I can’t live like this. Look at the way we’re living now, it’s insane. You hardly speaking, going out every night to drive around the city looking for clues. Me running round behind your back creating fake blogs to prove something to you that should be obvious anyway. And you thinking I might have had something to do with—”
“No! No, I don’t, I’ve never ever said that ever, not once.”
“You don’t need to say the words. I can see it in your face. You always did have the worst poker face in the world. And I can’t do this any longer, love. I can’t take you not believing in me. I can’t do another Christmas like the last one. Neither of us can. I’ll drive us home and then I’ll sleep on the sofa tonight and tomorrow I’ll be moving in with a mate for a while.”
“You’re leaving me?”
“I’ll love you until I die.”
“But you’re still leaving?”
“I have to. I can’t live with you and love you as much as I do, and know you don’t trust me. I’m so sorry. I’ve tried so hard. But I just can’t do it any more.”
He doesn’t want to do this, I can tell. He wants me to talk him out of it. If I said anything, anything at all, I could stop this from happening.
I take hold of the edges of my silk blouse, take a deep breath, and tear it open. I grab at the front of his shirt and rip off the buttons. The zipper of my beautiful long brown boots snaps off in my angry fingers and when I shuck off my jeans, I pull hard at the seam until they finally come apart into rags. The fastener of his chinos gives way beneath my assault.
On the back seat of the car, we bite and claw at each other. When he tries to kiss me, I slap his face, grab his penis so ruthlessly hard he yells with pain, and cram him inside me. I scratch hard at his back. When I come, I sink my teeth deep into his flesh, relishing the sudden salty pop as I break through the skin and into the wet redness beneath. He swears, pulls my hair, swears again and comes too, collapsing heavily across me so that my left buttock is painfully crushed against the seatbelt plugs. We lie there for several minutes, not caring that we’re only a few feet from the road and can easily be seen. Perhaps I want to be seen. Perhaps I want to be shamed. A car passes by, slows down, flashes its lights and honks its horn in jeering solidarity.
This is how we say goodbye to our marriage.
Chapter Thirteen
Friday 1st December 2017
The little office that looks out from the front of my house like an eyrie is cold tonight. In the black-and-silver night, an owl hunches on the branch of the giant willow, feathers ruffled to trap as much warm air as possible against the creeping frost crusting the edges of the brown leaves in the roots of the privet hedges. Human beings are the only species who look forward to midwinter, teaching our young to count down the days until the heart of the frost, hanging lights and making feasts and showering them with gifts, showing them in every way we know that the time when the world turns black and cold is the best part of the year. It’s cold, but I don’t shut the curtains. Instead I make myself small inside my cardigan and tuck my feet up beneath me. I don’t want to shut out the night. I want the companionship of these tree
s, that frost, even the owl with its fierce claws and pitiless predatory stare. I don’t want to be on my own while I do the thing I should have done years ago. I’ve spent so long holding myself utterly still, like a years-long game of musical statues, believing that if I don’t move, the truth can’t catch me. Now it’s time to move forward.
The first day of Advent. A day for opening doors and uncovering things hidden beneath.
I wake up my laptop. The room blooms with harsh electrical blue. I open up a blank document and stare at it, and the words of my GCSE English teacher swim up towards me from the pool of the past: Write something, anything, it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing more intimidating than a blank page.
All right then. Let’s start with a title:
What I know:
1. Joel went missing on 9th November, 2012. He ran away from school and was never seen again
2. On the morning he disappeared, he had a row with John about some pot John had found in his room
3. I wanted to go after Joel but John wouldn’t let me. He said that something had to change and I was frightened because he looked so angry. The police do not know this
4. Before Joel came, John and I rarely argued. Once we had Joel, we argued a lot. Most of our arguments were about Joel. In fact, I think all of our arguments were about Joel
5. John tried so hard but he never understood Joel, never. He couldn’t get him to settle when he was a baby. When they played together it usually ended in tears. Joel was frightened of John, but John never admitted that. I don’t think he wanted to accept that he would have to change
6. John was jealous of Joel. He actually used those words, ‘I’m jealous of my own son.’ This was in the context of a row where John had been secretly checking my phone and monitoring my internet history
7. At the time I forgave this but now I come to write it out it looks so terrible. How could I let him do that to me? How could I keep living with a man who trusted me so little? Although in some ways John was right, I was doing things in secret, but they were all to help Joel. The police do not know that John did this
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