11 Missed Calls

by Elisabeth Carpenter

‘That could mean anything.’

  He links his arm through mine and guides me through to the kitchen.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ I hiss.

  Dad’s leaning against the kitchen cupboards – he’s already pulled out two chairs.

  ‘Ssh,’ Robert says to me, sitting on the chair nearest Dad.

  ‘Okay.’ Dad clasps his hands together. ‘Sorry about this, Anna – it being on your birthday and all.’

  ‘She hates birthdays anyway,’ says Robert.

  ‘This came through yesterday.’ He picks up a brown envelope from the kitchen counter behind him, and takes out two sheets of A4. ‘Well, Monica received it a few days ago – I only saw it yesterday. I’ve done a copy for both of you.’

  ‘Why didn’t she show it to you straight away?’ I say to Dad.

  He just shrugs.

  My brother snatches one of the sheets from Dad’s hand.

  ‘Robert!’ I say, taking the other.

  I glance down quickly. There are only a few lines.

  I read it properly.

  Dear Monica,

  It’s time to tell the truth.

  Debbie x

  The memories of shells and sweet things are sometimes all we have left.

  ‘Is this it?’ says Robert, standing up. ‘It’s a crank letter. You’ve had them before, haven’t you, Dad?’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘No one said anything to me.’

  ‘I suppose they didn’t want to upset you,’ Robert says.

  I frown at him, making a note in my mind to ask Monica about it next time I see her.

  ‘But what if it’s not?’ I say quietly. ‘My memory box is covered in shells.’

  Robert tuts. ‘That could mean anything. You’re just making it significant because it means something to you. It’s like these charlatan psychics. If Debbie were alive, why would she make contact now after so long?’

  ‘Something might’ve happened,’ I say to Dad. ‘It says it’s time. Why did she address it to Monica and not you?’

  Dad shakes his head.

  ‘I’ve no idea what it means,’ he says. ‘Neither does Monica. We’ll just have to wait and see if she sends something else.’

  ‘If it’s even a she who wrote it,’ says Robert. ‘It could be anyone.’

  ‘Did you reply?’ I say.

  We both look up at Dad.

  ‘I … I think Monica might have. I’ve been a bit shaken by it all, to be honest.’

  ‘It sounds a bit sinister,’ I say. ‘What does Monica think it means?’

  Dad takes one of the glasses of champagne and takes a large sip.

  ‘Like I said, she doesn’t know.’

  Robert looks at me and shrugs.

  ‘That’s because it’s a load of crap.’

  ‘Uncle Robert!’ Sophie runs into the kitchen and jumps onto Robert’s lap. ‘Did you just say crap?’

  ‘Of course not!’ says Robert. ‘I said slap.’

  ‘Which isn’t much better,’ says Dad, rubbing the top of Sophie’s head.

  I walk into the living room and switch off the television. I look down at the email again. Monica received it days ago, yet didn’t show Dad. I look out of the window, leaning against the glass. I don’t know what I expect to see outside. But a thought strikes me.

  Monica knows more than she is letting on.

  Chapter Two

  3 a.m. Thursday, 26 June 1986

  Debbie

  I’ve been looking at the same page of this stupid magazine for over an hour, trying to read the words under the crappy night-light above my head, but I keep daydreaming. The article’s about making the perfect chocolate roulade, and getting the timings right for all the ‘trimmings’ on Christmas day. It’s from one of the women’s magazines Mum has been saving for months – or maybe years, judging by the state of them. She’s still trying to convince me that Good Housekeeping will make me a more fulfilled person and a better mum. But there’s nothing more depressing than reading about Christmas in June. I don’t know why she thinks I’d be interested in things like this – she’s not the best cook herself. I’m nearly twenty-seven, not forty-seven. I should be reading about George Michael or the G spot.

  I throw it onto the bed tray, but it slips off. The sound is amplified by a rare moment of silence on the maternity ward. I hold my breath in the hope that it cancels out the splat of the magazine onto the floor. Please, no one wake up. This peace is mine right now, and I don’t want anyone else to ruin it. My normal life is far from peaceful.

  Annie looks like a little doll; she’s been so quiet. It must be the pethidine. She’s got the same podgy fingers that Bobby had – they’re like tiny tree trunks. I didn’t think she’d suit the name. I’d suggested Gemma or Rebecca, but Peter wanted to call her Anna after his late mother. It’s just right for her.

  I’ve lost track of time and I’ve only been here for one night. The sky is purple; is it nearly morning or is it still dusk?

  It’s hardly ever quiet in here, but they’re all asleep now. The new mothers try to feed as quietly as possible, but they’re amateurs, all three of them. And it’s never completely dark. They like to keep the light on above their heads. Perhaps they’re afraid that if it goes out, their babies will disappear.

  I pick up the magazine, as quickly as I can with damn painful stitches, and place it on my cabinet. There are seven birthday cards, still in their envelopes, ready for me to open tomorrow, or is it today? Is it terrible that I’m glad I’m not sharing my birthday – to be relieved that Annie arrived two days earlier than her due date? It probably is, but I’ll keep that selfish thought in my head. It’s one of many, anyway.

  ‘Debbie.’

  My mind wakes up, but I leave my eyes closed. It’s so hot. I’m on a beach, lying on sand in a cove that only I know about.

  ‘Debbie.’

  Was that a voice in my head? I open one eye to find a nurse bending over me.

  ‘Oh God,’ I say. ‘The baby.’

  I sit up as quickly as I can. How could I be so careless falling asleep so heavily? The nurse rests a cold hand on my wrist.

  ‘Baby’s fine,’ she says. ‘There’s a phone call for you.’

  I swing my legs so they’re dangling over the side of the bed. The nurse pushes the payphone towards me and gives me the handset.

  ‘Debs, it’s me.’ It’s Peter. ‘How’s Annie? Did she wake much in the night? I wish I could be there. Shall I ask if you can come home early?’

  It takes a few moments to digest Peter’s words. He must’ve thought of them during the night, to be saying them all at once. Being with children does that; makes you go over things in your mind, with no adult to talk to. He’s not used to it being just Bobby and him.

  ‘No, no,’ I say. ‘It’s fine. She’s being as good as gold.’

  Good as gold? I sound like my mother.

  ‘I can’t make the afternoon visiting times today,’ he says, ‘but I’ll be there at seven tonight. I’ll drop Bobby off at school, then I’ll work straight through. Is that all right? I have to make sure I can spend at least a week at home when you both come out.’

  ‘That’s fine. Monica’s visiting this afternoon.’

  ‘Good, good.’

  ‘I have to go now, though. They’re bringing lunch round.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Bye, Peter.’

  I place the handset back into the cradle. I hate making small talk, especially while a whole maternity ward can hear me shouting down the payphone. The nurse doesn’t say anything, even though when I look at the clock on the wall it’s only eight in the morning, and four hours from lunchtime. I suppose she’s seen everything, so I don’t feel as embarrassed as I should. I’ve spent so long lying to Peter – Yes, I’m fine and Yes, I’ve always wanted two children – that it comes naturally to me.

  Why is he taking a whole week off? He’s branch manager now at Woolies – surely they can’t be without him for that long. I’m sure he didn’t with Bobby,
though that time is a blur. I don’t think I can remember anything – I might’ve forgotten how to look after a tiny baby.

  The woman in the bed next to me is snoring so loudly, it’s like being at home. A silver chain her boyfriend bought her is dangling off the hospital bed. ‘I can’t wear necklaces at night,’ she said yesterday, ‘in case they strangle me in my sleep.’ I was about to tell her that I was afraid of spiders to make her feel better, but I remembered Mum saying I shouldn’t make everything about me. ‘It’s called empathy,’ I said. ‘Ego,’ she said. She’s too humble for her own good. I blame Jesus – she loves him more than life itself.

  Yesterday, she whispered, ‘Mothers are so much older these days.’ (Some of her opinions aren’t as Christian as they should be.) ‘Women want everything now,’ she said. ‘They all want to be men.’

  It was, of course, a stupid thing to say in a maternity ward. And she was an older mother herself.

  An assistant is coming round to change the water jugs.

  ‘It’s good that you’re dressed,’ she says to me. ‘Makes you feel a bit more together, doesn’t it?’

  I look down at my Frankie Says Relax T-shirt and red tartan pyjama bottoms. My mouth is already open when I say, ‘Yes.’

  She looks at my birthday cards, displayed on the cabinet. I can’t even remember opening them.

  ‘Happy Birthday, lovey,’ she says.

  It’s only then I realise that Peter forgot my birthday.

  At last, Annie makes a feeble sound as though she can’t be bothered.

  ‘I know, little girl,’ I say. ‘Sometimes it’s more effort than it’s worth, waking up.’

  I pick her up and out of the plastic fish tank (that’s what Bobby called it when he visited yesterday) and put the ready-prepared bottle to her lips, settling back into the pillows. She suckles on it – probably going too fast, too much air – but I let her. She’s going to be a feisty little thing, I can tell.

  Everyone else wanted me to have a girl. No one believed me when I said I didn’t mind, that healthy was all that mattered. But I would’ve been happy with two boys, I’m sure. It seems longer than nearly six years since I had Bobby – I was only twenty-one, but I felt so grown-up. He’s so loving, so sensitive. ‘Perfect little family now,’ said Mum. ‘One of each.’ And I should feel that, shouldn’t I?

  But I don’t.

  Chapter Three

  Anna

  I used to have dreams that Debbie was dead and had come back to life. Sometimes she would be rotting, sometimes she would be an unwelcome guest as the family was sitting around the table for Sunday lunch. I don’t remember seeing her happy in my dreams. When I was eight, I used to have the same nightmare, over and over. I still remember it now. Our house was burning down, and a woman stood at my bedroom doorway screaming. Robert came to my side that night and sang ‘Hush, Little Baby’. I thought it childish the morning after, but at the time it soothed me. He said that Debbie sang it to me in the middle of the night a few times when I wouldn’t sleep.

  I can’t sleep now. My mind won’t be still.

  If Debbie were alive, then it would mean it was my fault that she left. She was fine until I came into the world. Not that anyone has said as much, but Dad, Robert – they all probably think it is down to me that she isn’t here any more. Perhaps I was a mistake.

  I can’t stop thinking about her. I wish I hadn’t put all of Debbie’s photographs in the loft. Jack would call me crazy if I got the ladder down at three o’clock in the morning.

  What would she look like now? Would she still hate me?

  Random thoughts like these always come into my head when I try not to think of her.

  A few years after we married, Jack told me I was obsessed with her.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not enough that you’re aware of it,’ he said. ‘You have to change it.’

  Yesterday, he came home after Dad and Robert had left, and Sophie had gone to bed. Dad asked why a conveyancer would be called out to work on a Saturday, but I’ve stopped probing Jack about it. He must be so busy at work that he forgot my birthday. He knows I hate birthdays, which is his usual excuse. I should tell him that it’s not enough that you’re aware of it.

  We met when I was twenty-two and Jack was twenty-four, at a Spanish evening class. I only went on Monica’s suggestion. ‘You’re too young to be stuck in all day on your own, love,’ she said. ‘I don’t like seeing you so lonely.’

  I had been desperate to meet someone, perhaps have children – a family of my own. I’m not sure I would be in so much of a rush, had I the chance to start again; I was far too young, but I had no friends and hardly ever went out. I had just finished university and was applying for at least twenty jobs a week.

  Before the first class, Monica took me into Boots to have a makeover.

  ‘Could you do something with her eyebrows?’ she said to the lady dressed in white – plastered in thick foundation and bright-red lipstick. ‘They’ve gone a bit wild.’

  ‘Monica!’ I said through gritted teeth, as I sat on a pedestal for everyone in the shop to see.

  ‘We might as well, while we’re here.’

  After my face had been transformed, Monica took me to the hairdressers: my first visit for several years.

  ‘She has beautiful hair,’ Monica said to the stylist, ‘but perhaps we could put some highlights at the front … to frame her lovely face.’

  On the way home, I caught sight of myself in her car’s vanity mirror and got a fright. I didn’t look like me any more.

  When I walked into the classroom that evening, I thought Jack was the teacher. He was standing at the front, talking to the students with such confidence. But when he opened his mouth, he spoke with a broad Yorkshire accent and was worse at Spanish than I was. I learned that he’d stayed in Lancashire after university, after his parents abandoned him to go and live in Brighton.

  Jack said I wasn’t like other women he met. ‘You’re an innocent, Anna. It’s like you’ve been sheltered from the world.’

  But that was my act – the character I chose to present to others at that time. Self-preservation. I didn’t even look like the real me. I could act like I had no silly fears − of heights, swimming pools, and other irrational things. But I couldn’t pretend forever. When I confessed my greatest fears three months later, Jack hadn’t laughed at me. ‘They’re perfectly reasonable phobias,’ he’d said. ‘But life’s about risk sometimes.’

  Jack’s parents moved away so long ago – Sophie has only met them six times. They think it’s enough to send my daughter ten pounds in a card for her birthday and Christmas.

  I think because Jack isn’t close to his parents, there’s no love lost between him and my dad. When he’s drunk, Jack often ponders out loud whether my dad had anything to do with my mother’s disappearance, and rolls off the possible ways in which it could have happened.

  ‘Why else,’ he said one night, ‘would he end up married to Debbie’s best friend?’

  I switch off when he starts talking like that. He has stopped saying sorry about it in the morning – if he remembers saying it at all. I console myself that he’s only so boorish when he’s had a drink.

  ‘Dad … well, Monica … got an email from someone saying they’re my mother,’ I said to him when he got in last night. I was sitting at the kitchen table – the champagne, which had long gone flat, still in three glasses.

  ‘Is that why you’ve taken to drink?’ he said, shrugging off his suit jacket and hanging it on the back of a chair.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ I said.

  I thought he would be more surprised. It was like his mind was elsewhere.

  He grabbed the glass with the most wine in, and downed half of it. He winced.

  ‘It’s flat.’ He pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Do you think it’s really her? It can’t be, surely. It must be some lunatic wanting a bit of attention.’

  ‘I’ve no idea if it is or isn’t. How would
I know that?’

  Jack raised his eyebrows. He hates anything that borders on histrionic.

  ‘If it is,’ I said, ‘then it means she left us … That she left me.’

  I saw the briefest flicker of irritation on his face. He gets like that when I talk about Debbie in that way. He hates people with a poor me attitude. It’s bad enough that I have a fear of swimming pools and spiders. I don’t want to be a victim. I have tried to overcome that feeling all my life.

  He pulled off his tie, in the way he always does: wrenching it off with one hand, while grimacing as though he were being strangled. Who’s the victim now, eh? I thought to myself.

  ‘What a day,’ he said, as usual. ‘Have you got a copy of the email?’

  ‘Yes. Dad gave me and Robert a print-out. I wonder if we could trace the email address. Do you think I should ring Leo?’

  ‘Will he care?’

  ‘Course he’ll care … he grew up with us. At least, until I was ten.’

  ‘Sharing a bedroom with your brother would make anyone want to flee the country.’

  I don’t laugh.

  ‘I’ll look at the email later,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a really long day. Is there anything in for tea?’

  I looked at him for a few seconds, waiting for him to realise. But he didn’t. Sophie had claimed the balloon my dad gave me; it was floating from her bedpost. My cards were on top of the fridge, but Jack hadn’t noticed them.

  I stood.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. ‘There’s a new volunteer starting tomorrow.’

  He snorted. ‘Ah, the ex-con. And on a Sunday as well.’ He made the sign of the cross with his left hand. ‘Lock up your handbag.’

  ‘Yes, very funny,’ I said as I walked towards the door. ‘It’s part of the offender-rehabilitation programme Isobel’s been going on about.’

  His chair scraped on the stone floor as he stood.

  ‘Guess I’ll just stick a pizza in the oven then.’

  I tried to stomp up the stairs, but failed in bare feet. Happy sodding Birthday, Anna.

  I look at him next to me in bed now, jealous of his ability to sleep soundly at this hour. He’s never had anything big to worry about. It’s 3.45 a.m. If I get up now, I’ll be a wreck later, but I can’t lie here with only my thoughts.