Among the Missing

by Morag Joss

  I retraced my steps to the service station. Traffic was moving past on the road again, but the car park was still full. I saw no police vehicles and, when I paused at the entrance to look around, no police officers. Inside, the concourse dormitory was waking up to serene piped music and the smell of frying. People dazed from sleep were moving slowly here and there among those still sleeping, and cleaners quietly mopped floors and pushed trolleys and wiped surfaces, trancelike in the warm, stale air. The washroom was a mess, out of soap and paper and towels, but I managed to run some hot water in a basin, and I splashed some on my face, which warmed it without getting it much cleaner. When I came out, the café was open. I was relieved to see there had been a changeover of staff, and once I was quite sure I couldn’t see anybody who had been there yesterday, I joined the others already lining up for food. New supplies had been found from somewhere. I ate a big plateful of sausages and beans, and I drank my tea so fast I scalded my mouth. Almost as soon as I’d finished I felt sick, and went outside to get some air. People were leaving in a steady stream now; I watched them as they walked past me, talking into phones, getting in their cars and driving away. They were all expected home.

  I was not like them anymore; the “I” I had been could never again be expected home, or call anyone to say how late she’d be. That woman was dead. Not one single person, not even the most primitive, empty shelter on the planet, waited in anticipation of her presence. Nowhere in the world was there a cupboard or a shelf holding a single object of beauty or practicality belonging to her that she would ever see or use again. Even last night’s cardboard, if it had dried out enough by nightfall, would tonight be drawn around another body or tipped onto the fire.

  In Portsmouth there had been a man I sometimes saw in a particular spot in the shopping center car park, a stinking recess near the doors to the stairwell on Level C. Most days he was there hunched in a heap of rags, drinking or asleep; sometimes I saw him heaving himself up or down the stairways. He never begged, but I used to drop him a coin as I went past. I suppose he was chased away from his refuge from time to time; he would disappear for a month or two, then drift back. And always, lying in his filthy nest or shuffling around the place, he would be guarding four dirty shopping bags. Always four. I suppose he replaced them as they wore out, but he always had four, clutched in both hands in a tangle of strings. What could be in them that was so precious, I used to wonder: spare shoes, a quarter bottle of booze, a lucky rabbit’s foot? Now I thought I understood why he haunted the place and why he guarded his bags as if they contained gold bullion. He wasn’t just afraid they would be stolen. In a life eked out on a patch of concrete, he was holding off the final shame of destitution, an existence that carried no trace of who he was; for as long as he occupied the same patch of concrete, and was custodian of four bagfuls of the talismans and gadgetry and keepsakes that made that life his, he was a person, not a feral animal. Though he no longer had his own roof or so much as a bed or a chair, he still had his place and his “things.” He still owned a few of those nuggets of significance or usefulness or whimsy that accrue in even the poorest of lives.

  But I no longer had even the poorest of lives. I had no life that I could lay claim to. In less than a day, I had discovered what perhaps should have been obvious: in ceasing to be the person I was, I had lost more than my life as Col’s wife. I had lost something even more crucial than her home to go to, an enclosing place to be at night, her belongings: I had lost the possibility of journey’s end. However meager it might have been, the life I had discarded had been the nearest I had to a compass, a fixed point recognizable as mine that I could travel from or toward. All that lay ahead of me now was a wearying and arbitrary moving on, in perpetuity. Being no one, I had no reason to be anywhere, and I had not expected such a falling off of purpose.

  Had it not been for the baby I would have despaired, and for the baby’s sake as well as my own I had to decide what the hell I thought I was doing. Twelve hours ago I had walked away from my life, yet I was still less than ten miles from it. What was wrong with me that I felt anchored here? Something had been overlooked, something had me in shackles. I was behaving as if I still had hopes of having the baby with Colin, as if nothing he had said was real enough to have a bearing on what would happen now. I had to get away before I started to consider asking him to forgive me. I had to start believing that, after what I had done yesterday, I even deserved my baby.

  I watched her sleeping. I knew her exhaustion was real as soon as we were inside the trailer because the first thing she did was pull off her boots. Nobody who’s planning to attack and rob you would do that. She crawled onto the bed, and her eyes were closing even before she had shrunk herself away into the covers. Soon her shivering stopped, but she lay for a long time with her eyes closed before she fell asleep. So I watched her sleeping out of wariness that I knew there was no real need for, but wariness was a habit with me.

  She wasn’t clean, but I also knew about that. I knew the hopeless filth of people accustomed to months without hot water and soap and a proper, safe space to be undressed and attend to themselves. I’d seen plenty of that on the journey to here, and after a while that loss of pride doesn’t wash off at all. It wasn’t the same as the swift, dismaying layer of dirt on someone like her, unable to wash for a single day and a night.

  And in fact there’s a third way homeless people go, and that’s the labored cleanliness of people like me, encamped in run-down places, condemned buildings, damp trailers, people who will lug buckets and light fires to heat water and scrape their skin raw and wear their clothes out with scrubbing. We’re the ones who are terrified that the dirt and shame that encroach on illegal lives might touch ours. She wasn’t like that, either. She was used to keeping clean easily and had never thought that having the means to do so might be a luxury. She was stained by sudden and brief deprivation, and as I watched her sleeping, I wondered why.

  My name isn’t Annabel. But at that moment I needed a new name and I hadn’t until that instant thought what it would be. I still wasn’t thinking when I blurted out Anna. My mouth opened in a panic and produced a sound almost involuntarily, and it was a natural pair of syllables to utter in those circumstances, I do believe that. I didn’t choose to say it. But it was the obvious association to make, stumbling toward the trailer with Anna’s mother’s arm around my shoulder, her kind, sad face looking at me like that. And although it was also unthinking—and not a piece of deliberate and hasty disguise—to add the -bel, it was also necessary, for the time being, to conceal that I knew anything about her daughter and Stefan. I would have to go into it all later, but I knew I was about to collapse. I had to get inside and lie down, and I couldn’t start to explain it then. But of course there was more to it than that.

  My mother died of a particular sorrow, which was that she took the life of a child. In a drawer in our house there was a photograph of the child, a baby girl. In the picture were also the child’s mother, Marjorie Porter, holding a cup and saucer, and my mother, Irene, with her teacup on her lap and one hand on the crucifix in the hollow of her throat. At the time Irene was forty-one, a year younger than I am, come to think of it. The women were in deck chairs on a patch of grass in a back garden; the ground around them was studded with floppy clumps of lettuce and lined by long fringes of carrot tops. In the background through a fence you could see the next-door garden sprouting the same rows of vegetables, the same pointed towers of bean plants climbing up bamboo frames; these were clearly the gardens of neighbors who shared packets of seed and swapped cuttings. A curl of smoke rose from a cigarette that rested in an ashtray on a kitchen chair beside the women. Next to the chair stood a man in suspenders holding a garden sieve up to his face and laughing through the mesh into the camera. His face couldn’t be seen very well, but he was certainly my father.

  What was also certain was that they were in the Porters’ garden and not ours, for there on a rug in front of Marjorie was five-month-old Annabel, al
l baby jowls and bandy baby legs and puffy baby feet, wearing ballooning, frilly pants and a sundress and bonnet. Marjorie’s face as she looked down at her child was weary, eternal, transparent; motherly love had opened her out, and had also laden her forever with its ballast of implications: responsibility, fertility, continuity, and all their warm, perplexing weight, their proud, dull glow. Even knowing what was about to befall her, I envied her that. (At the time I still had the photograph to look at, I believed I would never have a child myself.) The picture had captured her in new motherhood, before all this knowledge had reduced her to mereness, to that dumpy, overlooked category of numberless, undifferentiated mums. Actually, on that day, in her sleeveless dress and lacquered beehive hairdo, she looked less maternal as well as a whole generation, rather than the actual sixteen years that separated them, younger than my tightly permed and dirndl-skirted and still childless mother, whose sharp, wing-framed spectacles had caught a ray of sun and trapped her eyes as though behind small, blazing mirrors. Marjorie’s husband, Mr. Porter, whose first name I never knew, must have taken the picture. It was probably his cigarette in the ashtray.

  The strangest thing about any old photograph is it is all containment, all ignorance. My parents and Mrs. Porter happy and joking on the second or third day of a heat wave: of course they had no idea what was coming, how could they? Their unawareness is the most tremendous thing in the picture. I used to scan their faces for a flicker of fear assailing any of them as they posed in the blinding sun; I searched for one of those microscopic, momentary twitches of dread that can descend on someone on a summer’s day, the dread that nothing can last. I never found it. If only they could have remained there forever, in their grainy, bordered ignorance, clicked and shuttered into rectangular place by Mr. Porter’s Box Brownie, trimmed and untouchable; if only they would not be propelled, in the coming days, into the imprisoning, defining series of events that would capture and frame them in their misery for as long as they lived. And of course, in that picture, they knew nothing whatsoever about me, for there was nothing yet to know, least of all that I was, in my way, in it with them. I thought that strange, too, that I could be conceived yet not conceived of, and this was not egotism on my part but a regret that I was powerless to turn them all in another direction altogether, even though I was there. I longed to shake them all alive again and make everything come out differently. But my wish was futile, and perhaps also paradoxical; my mother would have claimed that I could only have come alive to have such a wish because what happened did happen.

  When Anna’s mother put her blanket around my shoulders and drew me against her, I was begging her silently to ask me nothing more than my name. She didn’t. When I got into the trailer, everything seemed very simple. I had no strength left, and I lay down. I knew I would sleep before long, but I lay with my eyes closed for a while, wondering about the name I had given myself—Annabel—and about the photograph.

  I didn’t have it anymore. I had put it along with everything else on a bonfire in the back garden, the same garden beyond the fence in the background of the picture, though the fence had long since been replaced by an ornamental cinder-block wall. I had been in a hurry to be done with my father’s things and get going; in three weeks I would be married. I had watched the trembling air above the flames suck the photograph upward, curl and blacken it into weightless fragments of ash, and I had been impatient with myself for noticing at all that it was fragmenting away to nothing in the very place it depicted, our back garden captured in Kodachrome more than forty years before. But I hadn’t let myself ponder any further on my strange in utero status in it, both invisible and present, or on the absence in it of any omen of the tragedy into whose tainted echoes and rhythms I would be born and grow up. I just watched it burn, and I trusted it to disappear.

  I woke her in the early afternoon. Her face was puffy and white and not healthy-looking at all, and she would have gone on sleeping, but I’d had enough of waiting. I was curious. Also I needed something else to think about, because although I knew you would be back before dark, I was puzzled at what was keeping you. I could hear that the traffic was moving again up on the road. You must have taken Anna over to the other side of the bridge, I was hoping, or maybe even to Inverness. You knew I didn’t like you doing that, and that would be why you hadn’t called. Or your phone battery had died. You’d confess to it when you were back, and after a time you’d try to make me forgive you, and after a time I would, in our usual way. Or maybe you’d caught the bus to Netherloch and got stuck there when the roads jammed up. Wherever you were, you’d be trying to get back. You would both be home soon.

  While she’d been asleep, to keep busy and warm I had wandered up the bank and brought back some wood and laid a fire, and I’d dragged over the old enamel bathtub and set it there on top of the circle of big stones. Then I hauled water up from the river in plastic canisters and filled the tub and lit the fire. When the water heats up, it sends off great clouds of steam into the cold air. All that took hours.

  When her eyes opened, I expected her to be shocked to find herself there in our trailer. I thought she would immediately be ready to go. But she lay there drowsy and half-awake and watched me as if she was in no hurry while I sorted through a bundle of clothes. I wasn’t sure if I liked or disliked that.

  “You’ve been asleep. Are you feeling better now?”

  She raised her head a few inches and shook it, then grunted and lay down again.

  “I don’t know.” She rubbed her hands over her face, then sat up. “I’m still so tired.”

  I picked out some things of yours and Anna’s for washing and went back outside to the fire. I drew off a few jugfuls of hot water into a basin, then I stirred in some washing soda crystals and added a few grains of detergent, for the scent. The soda is cheap and makes the powder last longer. I dropped your clothes in and let the slippery, bluish scum lap over the wet material. It always amazed me slightly, the chemically floral smell rising from a basin on the ground outside the trailer, where the real smells were of river mud and woodsmoke and sometimes frying onions and the rain drying on stones. I loved it, that house-proud, indoors scent of laundry.

  She came outside and stood watching while I kneeled down and swirled the things around, pressing Anna’s little clothes against the sides of the basin.

  “I was wondering … I mean, the bridge, if you knew,” she said. “Yesterday—I mean, you can see it from here. Did you see it happen? Has anyone—”

  “I was at work. I heard it.”

  “So you weren’t here? But was there, I mean, was there anyone—”

  “Look, who are you? What do you want?”

  “Nothing! Nothing, honestly. That is, I wanted … Are you here on your own?”

  “My husband is on his way back. With my daughter. Right now.”

  “On his way?” she said.

  “Right now. I’m expecting them soon.”

  I turned back to the washing. Now it came to it, I didn’t want her calling the hospital for me. Even asking her to would be like believing you and Anna weren’t safe and already on your way back to me. I went on knead, knead, kneading your saturated things, lifting, rubbing, squeezing, submerging them, over and over and over. She didn’t move. I looked up. She was staring at the basin of wet clothes. Tears were running down her face.

  “Oh, thank God. So it’s all okay. Well. I should go.”

  But she didn’t go. I stood up.

  “Who are you? What do you want? What were you doing down here last night?”

  “I’m sorry, I’ll go. I just needed … I was tired, I feel so sick sometimes. I’ll go.”

  “What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

  “I just wanted to make sure. Your husband … is he, I mean, where is he?”

  “My husband is fine. What is it to you? We can take care of ourselves,” I said.

  She was looking at me with her frightened, watery eyes, and suddenly she turned away and doubled over, trying to
catch and hold her breath. She was going to throw up again.

  “Oh, for God’s sake! Sit down. What’s the matter with you? Sit down and get warm.”

  “Thanks. Just for a minute.” She hunkered by the fire and wiped her eyes, then pulled a ragged bit of tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. She stuffed the tissue into the fire and held her hands over the steam for a while to warm them, rubbing her fingers together. She looked hard at her palms, then rubbed them down her jacket. Her hands displeased her. There was disgust in her eyes at the way dirt and cold were starting to cling to her.

  “Did you say your name was Annabel?”

  She nodded. She was still rubbing her hands.

  “Well, thanks. I’ll be off in a minute,” she said.

  She lifted her head and looked out beyond the yellow ring of the fire and across the river into the raw afternoon. There were a few geese on the water, and the old gray cabin stood lonely as always, the sky collapsing with the weight of low cloud into the sloping tree line above it. Sounds from the bridge and the road were muffled by cold and fog.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, look at you. You don’t have anywhere to go.”

  She looked surprised. “Oh, well, not really, not anywhere permanent.… I suppose I’ll get myself organized, find somewhere.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I didn’t know it would be this hard. I didn’t think I’d feel this bad.”

  “There’s hot water.” I nodded at the fire. “I need some of it for rinsing, but you can wash up if you want.”

  She moved in a bit closer, waving the steam away with her arm, and peered in. The river water is dark with peat, but the silt stays at the bottom. She probably didn’t know that the salt water that comes in on the flow tide is heavier than river water and runs underneath it.