Missing You

by Douglas, Louise

  Fen looks back at Sean. He stands in the doorway. He looks … defeated.

  ‘OK.’

  Fen switches off the television and follows him barefoot into the kitchen. She chews at the side of her thumbnail. He does not turn on the light. He opens the fridge door and the front of him is illuminated. He takes two beers out of the fridge, shuts the door, flips the lids and passes one to Fen.

  Fen does not touch him. She holds the cold beer bottle in her hand and says nothing, although her heart is thumping. Something is wrong.

  Sean drinks his drink. He doesn’t say anything either. Somehow, though, it’s important that Fen stands with him. She picks at the label on her bottle. She peels it from the glass and rolls it into a narrow pipe.

  After a long time, Sean puts his empty bottle down and leans on the counter. He looks dog-tired.

  ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ she asks, softly.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ he says. ‘We went to the zoo. Amy fed the sea lions. We had dinner in a Harvester. She went to bed and I read her five chapters from Heidi.’

  Fen bites her lip. She does not touch Sean or move closer towards him. She doesn’t speak. He takes the vodka bottle from the freezer and pours himself a large glass. He doesn’t ask if Fen would like another drink, he doesn’t apologize or explain.

  ‘Lewis and Belle have broken up,’ he says quietly.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s hard for Belle,’ he says. ‘Usually she knows what she wants, and she gets it. This time it turned out that Lewis wasn’t what she wanted after all.’

  Fen fiddles with the rolled paper in her fingers.

  ‘Does she want you back?’ she asks.

  He does not answer this directly. He says: ‘She’ll be OK. Things will sort themselves out. They always do.’

  Fen doesn’t ask again. She doesn’t need to. She knows.

  Sean drinks his vodka. She stands beside him. She watches his Adam’s apple move up and down his throat; she watches the light on the rim of the glass.

  Then he says: ‘I’m going to bed now.’

  Fen nods.

  She waits downstairs until she hears the toilet flush, the rattling of the never-mended pipes, then she goes up. Sean is standing on the landing in his boxers. Connor has made a traffic jam of toy cars along the middle of the carpet and Sean has a leg on either side of the cars, making a bridge. His knees are bony. She wonders if he wants to sleep alone tonight.

  Sean reaches out to her. She takes his hand. It’s warm. It’s strong. ‘Fen …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was it you said, about having a duty to look after the people we love?’

  ‘Not a duty,’ she says. ‘A responsibility.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Is it Belle? Are you worried about how she’ll cope on her own? Is she really unhappy?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Not Belle,’ he says. ‘She’s made her choices. It’s Amy. I can’t bear what all this is doing to Amy.’

  forty

  They see the rain coming from a long way off. The Lady Chapel is situated high up the hill and the workmen have a perfect view of the threatening clouds that move slowly and inevitably over the city towards them. They are preparing to replace the cupola. The stones have been restored and repaired and the original bell has been brought out of storage. The scaffolders have already set up a frame, but the first spots of rain spat onto the tarmac path before they had the chance to protect the chapel roof with plastic. Thunder rumbles in the throat of the cloud.

  ‘What do you think?’ asks the foreman.

  Sean checks his watch. He looks up at the sky.

  ‘Let’s call it a day,’ he says.

  The foreman nods.

  Sean helps tidy the site and checks that all the relevant safety signs and barriers are in place. He swaps his work boots for his trainers, gets into the car and drives back to Lilyvale.

  The house is empty. Fen is still at work. He goes into the living room and switches the TV on for company, then he washes his hands in the kitchen sink and opens the fridge door.

  There’s not much in it, but there’s enough to make a bacon and egg sandwich.

  So he turns on the grill and lays some strips of bacon on the tray; he takes a small pan off the drainer beside the sink, rinses it, fills it with water and sets it to boil on the hob. There are no mushrooms, but there are a couple of tomatoes in the salad drawer. He slices them in half and puts them under the grill too. He opens the back door to let out the fat smoke. The thunder is still grumbling on the other side of the valley and the air is steamy with the smell of rain.

  The water is boiling so he puts in some salt and breaks an egg against the handle of the pan, then carefully slides the unformed substances into the steam. The egg white congeals as soon as it touches the water; it whitens protectively around the yolk and a lacy frill forms around it. Sean watches. He butters some bread then turns the bacon.

  He eats from a plate on his knees in front of the television.

  When he has eaten, he checks the time. He could let Fen know he is here to meet Connor off the bus. She may want to stay in the city and do some shopping. He tries her phone, but it’s switched off. He does not leave a message. He wanders into the kitchen. There’s a Bath Rugby calendar hooked under the cabinets. Amy gave it to him for Christmas. He checks the date and beside it Fen has scrawled: 4 p.m. Speech Therapist.

  She must have gone directly to the school.

  Sean yawns. He wanders into the living room. He turns down the volume on the television and picks up his guitar. He plays some chords, a blues riff.

  He left his phone on the kitchen counter and he doesn’t hear it ring the first time. The second time he goes into the kitchen and sees who it is, and he almost does not pick it up.

  It’s Belle’s number.

  She keeps calling. She keeps talking to Sean, not telling him directly what’s wrong, but complaining about trivial things that it’s in Sean’s power to resolve: squirrels in the roof, a knocking noise from her car’s exhaust, whether or not Amy should start piano lessons. Sean knows she’s lonely, he knows she needs someone to lean on but these calls drag him down. They exhaust him. So he almost doesn’t answer and when he does he says, ‘Hi’ with a sharp edge to his voice as if he is in the middle of something important and has been inconveniently interrupted.

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Amy, honey, hi! How are you?’

  ‘Daddy,’ she replies and her voice is small and terrified. ‘I came home from school and Mummy’s lying on her bed and I can’t make her wake up.’

  forty-one

  Fen checks the clock. It’s nearly midnight. She feels empty inside, hollowed out and dry like an old tree. She pours herself a glass of water from the tap, wonders if it’s too late to call Lina and decides it probably is.

  On his way out, Sean left a message on her phone telling her everything he knew. He sounded out of breath. In the background Fen heard him closing the door, running up the front garden steps, opening his car door, starting the engine. He said he’d call and let her know what’s happening but he hasn’t.

  Fen does not know how bad it is. She does not know if Belle is perfectly all right or critically ill or even … She wishes her mind would not keep thinking the worst, but she can’t help herself.

  She can’t help thinking …

  What if Belle has been so lonely, so desperate, that she’s swallowed a bottle of vodka with her antidepressants? What if she doesn’t regain consciousness? It would be Fen’s fault, wouldn’t it? It would be because Fen is with Sean.

  She goes upstairs and into Connor’s room. He’s fast asleep, his head a little sweaty on the pillow. Fen blows on his forehead to cool him down. He pulls an exaggerated face in his sleep. She sits on the window ledge and peers through the curtains out onto the street, but there’s nobody about. She can see the blue-grey screens of televisions flickering in the living rooms of the houses opposite, t
he ones whose occupants haven’t drawn their downstairs curtains. A cat creeps along the kerb and somewhere an urban owl hoots.

  Connor grinds his teeth. Fen moves back to the bed and strokes his face gently with the back of her hand.

  She’s never met Belle. She only knows her through things that Sean has said and stories Amy has recounted. She’s seen Belle’s photograph. She feels a vague sense of pity towards her because she genuinely believes that any woman who had Sean, who had his love, who had his child, and did not love him as he deserved to be loved, must be blinkered, or a fool. Much stronger than the pity is Fen’s fear of Belle. She knows that Belle has the power to change everything. Fen knows that if Belle is going to use that power, there is nothing she can do about it. And now there’s another, worse fear: the fear that something terrible has happened to Belle. Fen could not bear to see the pain on Sean’s face, or Amy’s, if Belle were to die. She does not know how she would begin to comfort Sean if he were to even taste the guilt she has experienced. She would do anything to protect him from that.

  She sits with her son until her glass is empty. She breathes from her diaphragm – in on four counts, out on six – to make the panicky feelings stop, and she turns her thoughts over and over in her mind.

  It’s very late. The lights of the televisions up and down the street have mostly been extinguished. Most of the windows, even the upstairs ones, are in darkness now.

  Fen goes back downstairs to switch off the lights, and she’s in the kitchen, locking the back door, when her phone rings.

  ‘Sean?’

  At the other end of the connection, through all the miles that separate them, she hears him sigh.

  ‘Sean.’

  ‘It’s good to hear your voice,’ he whispers.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At home. I’ve only just got Amy off to sleep. Poor little sod.’

  Fen tries to ignore the ‘at home’ but her confidence unravels a little further.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asks.

  She imagines him. He’ll be sitting on the stairs with his knees wide apart. His elbows will be perched on his knees. His shirt sleeves will be rolled up. He’ll be holding the phone to his right ear with his right hand and he’ll be scratching the scab on his cheek with the fingers of his left hand, picking at its perimeters. His wrists are strong and hairy. He will need a shave. There’s a hole in the toe of one of the blue socks he’s wearing. Fen meant to repair it but there were no other clean socks for him this morning so he took the blue ones from her mending basket. She thinks of him and she is afraid she is losing him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Where’s Belle?’

  ‘She’s in hospital.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was an accident,’ he says slowly. ‘She says it was an accident. She was worn out and she took a mild overdose, not enough to do any damage. It was carelessness, nothing more than that. She’s going to be fine.’

  There’s a pause and she hears him swallow. Her heart contracts with love.

  ‘Oh God,’ she whispers, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No, no, it’s all right,’ says Sean with the kind of emphasis she has heard him use when he is trying to convince himself of something, rather than anyone else.

  ‘You have talked to her, then?’ Fen asks.

  ‘Yeah, I took Amy in to see her, to show Amy she’s all right. Belle’s upset, embarrassed, a bit confused, but she’s OK. They’re keeping her in hospital so she can have a proper rest tonight. Apparently she hasn’t been sleeping, that’s why she took an extra tablet. She only meant to knock herself out for a couple of hours until Amy came home. That’s what she says; she just wanted to sleep for a while.’

  ‘And you believe her?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Maybe …’

  ‘No, don’t. Don’t even think that. I can’t go down that route, OK? I cannot doubt her story. Nothing like this has ever happened before; she’s generally a together sort of person. And she’s seeing some shrink or something in the morning. They won’t let her out of hospital if they don’t think she’s up to it.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Fen, ‘OK. What about Amy?’

  ‘She’s scared. She’d walked home with her friend from down the road, and she let herself in the back door. When Belle didn’t come down she went upstairs and found her. It was only luck that I’d finished work early and my phone was switched on. That’s what keeps bugging me. What if it hadn’t been? What would she have done then? What’s this going to do to her mind? How’s she going to feel every time she comes into the house on her own now?’

  Fen knows exactly how Amy is going to feel. She knows that Amy will never again have the luxury of assuming that the people she loves are invulnerable. She knows that Amy will always, now, worry about her mother. That worry will taint her every moment.

  ‘Oh, Sean,’ Fen whispers. She looks up at the ceiling.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ he asks.

  ‘Stay there,’ Fen says. ‘Stay there for as long as they need you.’

  ‘It may be some time.’

  ‘I know.’

  Fen turns off the lights and she goes back upstairs. Sean’s bedroom door is ajar, the curtains are still open and the room is dark and empty. She goes into the room and draws the curtains. She finds the Beck CD and she slots it into the machine, then she lies awake in Sean’s bed, listening to the words.

  Fen and her brother and sister were brought up to believe in God, not karma, although Fen thinks that really it’s all the same story, the same message, just told in a different way. After the accident that killed Joe, she could not believe in anything. Now she wonders if these bad things are happening to the people she loves because of the lies she once told, and the secret she harbours. She wonders whether she has the power to change things, whether she might ever put things right and restore the balance.

  Ever since Lina told her about the newspaper article, ever since she said that Emma Rees would find no peace until she knew the truth about the accident, Fen has known, in her heart, what she should do. Whatever the outcome, whether or not it makes any difference to what’s going on between Sean and Belle and Amy, she must go and see Mrs Rees and tell her what happened the night her son died.

  forty-two

  The first part is easy. On Friday night she packs a bag for herself and one for Connor and on Saturday morning she locks up the house and they catch a taxi to the station, then at the station they take the train to Merron. During the journey, they play word games. Connor never tires of I Spy but when it’s his turn the word always begins with ‘c’ and the answer is always ‘cow’. Fen tries to find ways to distract him. The other passengers give her kind, amused looks. He takes his crayons out of his rucksack and together they colour in pictures of dinosaurs.

  Alan and Lucy meet them at the other end. Alan is carrying William in a sling around his neck. Connor enjoys the fuss made of him by his uncle and aunt, and he is fascinated by the sling, and by the baby.

  ‘Can I carry Baby William?’ he asks Alan, and Alan ruffles Connor’s hair and says he can help push the buggy later.

  They drive back to Alan and Lucy’s house, and Fen waits until Connor is comfortable with his aunt and uncle, lying on his tummy on the floor doing a jigsaw with Alan, before she leaves.

  ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ she tells Lucy.

  Fen has tried to tell her sister where she is going, and what she is about to do, but Lucy does not want to talk about it, she doesn’t want to know. She says she doesn’t mind looking after Connor for a couple of hours, and tells Fen not to rush back.

  Fen does not have to think which route to take; her feet lead her, one after the other, along roads which gradually fade from Victorian grandeur to 1970s pragmatism. The size of the houses, and the distance between them, gradually reduce until Fen is on the pavement of a neat road lined with terraced, brick-built former council houses. Their g
ardens are tidy, bedded with brightly coloured flowers and decorated with garden-centre ornaments. Fen did not have to check the address. She knows which house belongs to Emma Rees. She has been there a hundred times before.

  She telephoned last night. She got the number from directory enquiries, and when she heard the number she recognized it. It’s the same number she used to dial all those years ago when she wanted to speak to Joe, to pass on some message from Tomas. The same order of digits. People come and go, but phone numbers remain the same.

  She dialled the number and spoke, briefly, to Mrs Rees. She said: ‘You won’t remember me but …’

  And Mrs Rees said: ‘Hello, Fen, of course I remember you.’

  She said: ‘You can come and see me whenever you want. I’ve been hoping you’d get in touch.’

  She said: ‘You have never been far from my thoughts, Fen. I know how hard it must have been for you.’

  She said: ‘I’ll be at home tomorrow. I’ll have the kettle on.’

  And now Fen stands at the end of the short path that leads to the door of 90 Cartref Close and, before she has time to think, the door opens and a small black cat streams out, bringing the smell of warm air and washing powder with it, and there is Emma Rees in slippers and a housecoat looking even more frail and haunted than she did at Gordon’s funeral. Fen is caught off guard by a wave of pity for this broken woman. She steps forward and, awkwardly, the two embrace.

  ‘Come in, Fen,’ says Mrs Rees. ‘I was watching out for you. Come on in.’

  They sit in the conservatory, which takes up most of the tiny back garden, and talk for a while about the birds that congregate around the feeders dotted all over the lawn. Mrs Rees loves the birds. She especially likes the blue and great tits, which are sociable and feed in family groups, but also has a soft spot for the bumptious little robin, who is the self-appointed king of the garden.

  Fen sips her coffee – it is decaffeinated and too milky for her taste – and takes a biscuit, even though her mouth is as dry as sand, and when Emma Rees asks: ‘What really brought you back here after all these years?’ she is honest.

  She clasps her fingers tightly, holds her breath, then says: ‘I came to talk to you about the accident.’