Fen holds her breath. She feels she does not deserve understanding.
‘What He made me realize,’ says Mrs Rees, ‘is that you didn’t have to come to me at all. Perhaps He spoke to you and told you what you should do, or maybe it was your own conscience. Either way, you came, and now that I know what happened that night, I feel able to say goodbye to Joe. I’m not waking up each morning imagining him out there, on his own, in the dark. So I am grateful to you, Fen. Things are better for me now.’
Fen swallows. Her mouth is dry.
‘I’m so glad.’
‘Do you feel better too?’ asks Mrs Rees gently. ‘Because I’ve been praying every night for you too, Fen. I’ve been praying for your burden to be lifted, as mine has been.’
Fen nods. She says: ‘Thank you.’
Mrs Rees checks her watch. ‘I’ve got to meet my supplier in half an hour,’ she says. ‘Did Lucy tell you I’ve left the college? I’m opening up my own cafe. It’s going to be aimed at young people. I want it to be the kind of place where everyone can be themselves and where everyone can feel at home.’
‘That sounds brilliant,’ says Fen.
‘Merron needs somewhere like that,’ says Mrs Rees. ‘It needs to stop pretending that everyone ought to be just like everyone else.’
‘Yes,’ Fen agrees. ‘It does.’
They stand for a moment, separated by the counter, and then Mrs Rees leans forward and kisses Fen very gently on the cheek.
‘It’s over, Fen,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to worry about this any more. Make your peace with your brother and then put the past behind you and start living your life again.’
forty-eight
Fen has been waiting for the right day, and this is it.
While Connor sleeps, she slips out of bed and goes downstairs in the green T-shirt that Sean left screwed up on her bedroom floor, in need of a wash. She loves the smell of him. At least she still has that. And she won’t wash the T-shirt until there’s no trace of Sean left.
Fen goes into the kitchen and opens the back door, then she goes barefoot down the steps into the dewy garden and picks flowers. She picks lavender sprigs and cuts the stems of the last of the roses with a knife.
She wraps the flowers in newspaper, and then she makes herself a cup of tea and goes upstairs to wake Connor.
She feeds him his breakfast of Weetabix soaked in warm milk with sugared mashed banana. She gives him diluted orange juice to drink. As he eats she tidies around him and points to the birds in the gardens, to the grey cat licking its paws in the sunshine, to the people walking up the alleyway on their way to school or work. The radio is playing happy, morning music and she hums along, she sings, she even dances a little, and Connor watches and smiles, a teardrop of sweetened milk crusting down his chin.
She wipes his face and brushes his teeth, then she tidies him and fastens his shoes, ready for the bus, and when they hear its friendly toot Connor rushes for the door, as he always does. Connor loves going to school on the bus. He likes the driver, who’s called Jean and always says: ‘Hello, me old mucker’; he likes the independence, and the grownup feeling shows on his face; he likes seeing his friends and waving to people through the windows along the way.
‘Hey, hang on a minute, you!’ Fen calls. She leans down and puts her hands on his cheeks and she kisses his forehead. He wriggles.
‘Don’t I get one?’ she asks.
‘Mum!’ Connor grumbles but he leans forward and kisses her hard, right on the lips.
‘Thank you,’ she murmurs.
He looks up at her.
‘Go on,’ she says, ‘off you go.’
He climbs the garden steps as fast as he can, holding on to the railing. Fen watches from the doorstep. At the gate he turns and waves to her. She blows him a kiss and he pretends to catch it, and he blows one back and she does the same. Then he takes the hand of the helper and turns his back and forgets about Fen. Still she watches until the bus has gone down the hill.
It’s eight-thirty.
She’s already wearing her new dress over her jeans. She puts on some make-up in front of the little mirror by the back door. It’s important that she looks her best. She pulls her hair back and holds it in one hand while she secures the ponytail with a clip with the other. Then she slips on her warm jacket and boots, picks up the flowers and leaves Lilyvale.
Fen walks uphill through the streets, the pretty back roads and residential rat-runs; she walks up to the lay-by at the side of the A46 where a boy sells flowers and cherries from a wooden trestle and a woman sells tea in china cups, and bacon sandwiches. She waits until a lorry stops and then asks if she can hitch a ride. She is specific: she has to get to the Severn on the M48, not the M4. The first lorry driver can’t help but soon she meets a nice man, a family man, who is on his way back to Cardiff with a wagon full of electrical goods, and he says he doesn’t mind using that route and that she’s most welcome to travel with him.
The inside of his cab smells musty, manly, of a man not washed but wearing aftershave. It’s very tidy. Everything is lined up. She sits up high on the squashy seat, so high that it’s like riding a camel, and she watches the road roll by from her new perspective. Radio 2 is coming out of the speakers. They bump and roll past Bristol and then they go out onto the lonely stretch of countryside that separates the city from the bridge.
‘You don’t say much, do you?’ the driver asks. His name is Ryan. He chews gum. He has high blood pressure, a baby daughter called Lottie and a strong Cardiff accent. There’s a copy of the Daily Mail and a plastic packet of egg and cress sandwiches on the seat between them. His wife is a teacher in a primary school. In the evenings she goes to classes – Slimming World, line dancing, GCSE Spanish – and if Ryan’s not home, his mum, who’s called Sylvia, looks after the baby.
They reach the approach to the bridge.
‘You’re sure you want me to drop you here?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘This is no-man’s-land. You can’t go anywhere from here. Only back the way we came or over the bridge.’
‘Here is perfect.’
Ryan looks uneasy. He’s worried about her. The bridge has a reputation.
She finds a breezy smile.
‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘I’ve just come to take some photographs.’
‘Oh!’ he says, relief chasing the fear from his face like sunlight following the shadow of a cloud. ‘You had me worried for a moment. Thought I might be looking at your picture in the paper tomorrow, missing person and all that.’
‘Thank you for the lift,’ says Fen, ‘and good luck with your life, and everything,’ and she slides across the seat and opens the door.
She climbs out of the cab and down the steps. Hundreds of vehicles are in the lines to pay the toll, cars and vans and lorries and coaches; holidaymakers and businesspeople, tradesmen and hauliers, men driving fuel tankers and cement mixers. The motorbikes don’t have to pay. They buzz through.
She waves to Ryan’s lorry as it accelerates towards the span of the bridge, but he probably can’t see her in his wing mirror. The light reflecting off the surface of the estuary water hurts her eyes but the bridge is magnificent, spectacular as a lightning storm, imposing as a cathedral.
Fen turns away from the bridge and she walks on, finding a path which curls up to Severn View services.
She needs to see everything.
She needs to know how it felt to be Tomas as dawn broke that morning.
They found her father’s smashed-up car in the car park. At first the attendant thought it had been vandalized and the police were called, but when they arrived and checked the number they discovered that their Welsh colleagues were searching for the car. They suspected it had been involved in a fatal accident the previous evening. The passenger-side door was missing and a hole had been punched through the shattered windscreen. The roof was buckled and twigs, leaves, mud and stone caked the bumpers and the wheel arches. The key was still in the
ignition, the little red-leather fob dangling at the end of its chain.
This is the first time Fen has been here. She has tried never to think about this place, but now she’s here, weirdly, she feels exhilarated. The anticipation of what she must do thrills her.
At the entrance is a sign saying you can only park for two hours but Fen doubts anyone ever checks. She walks around the car park. It’s not a horrible place. It’s not hectic and soulless like some motorway services, where people stop only to use the toilets or to buy coffee and sandwiches or to pass children from one separated parent to the other.
There are two bowls outside the electric doors at the entrance to the services. One contains dog food, the other, water. Fen is touched by the kindness of whoever puts out these animal refreshments.
She goes inside.
It’s small, old-fashioned, poky. Fen has a quick look round.
People used to come here on day trips. They used to organize excursions, to eat a meal in the restaurant, to enjoy the views across the estuary. Then when they built the new bridge, further downstream, the powers that be thought people would stop coming here and they sold off some of the land. But people still come. They come for the views and to walk across the bridge.
Tomas was in the services in the early hours of the morning; the security cameras watched him come in and go out. He was inside only for a few minutes. Enough time to go into the toilets to swallow something, or sniff, smoke or inject something. Not long enough to drink a hot drink, or mingle in the cafeteria, looking for a lift.
Maybe he was lucky. Maybe he met somebody straight away who was prepared to drive him to the docks at Cardiff or Avonmouth, or to an airport. Or maybe he had already arranged to be picked up in the car park by a friend. Somebody with a false passport in his pocket for Tomas; a friend who would take him to meet his freight ship, or the plane that would take him to his new life on the beach. Maybe this is what happened.
But nobody believes this version of events any more. Not even Fen.
She retraces her footsteps back to the bridge. She notices everything. Beside the path that leads back to the motorway are pages torn from a magazine. Glossy cars photographed at arty angles. Glossy women in glossy shoes. Fen doesn’t look at the detail.
She crosses the motorway at the tollbooths. The vehicles stream into the booth-queues like migrating animals navigating an obstacle, like sand rushing towards the nip at the centre of an egg timer.
Fen climbs down the steps and she finds the path that crosses the bridge.
It’s such a long bridge that she can’t see the other side. Still, it’s pleasant, walking with the noise of the motorway – all those people, all those wheels and engines – to her right, and to her left the quiet and the calm of the air, and the sky, and the water. The fabric of the bridge vibrates beneath her feet when lorries go by. The air is cool on her cheeks; it blows loose hair into her eyes. She can smell the water, the water and the ocean at the end of the estuary, and the mud and the sea creatures that live in the water in between.
Estuary birds, so far below they are little more than white commas, feed in the mud which is as glossy as fine silk at the foot of the cliffs, and curly brown streams swirl out through the gravel towards the body of the river. The tip-tilted, blackened ribs of an old barge protrude sadly from the shallows and there’s a long, bandy-legged pier supporting a giant pylon whose reflection in the water is softer and more beautiful than the silhouette of the original, which stands stark against a pale grey sky infused with the palest blue. Its cables trail a mile above the water, drifting towards the sister pylon on the Welsh side of the estuary.
If she looks, Fen can see for miles in three directions. To her left are the flatlands, spreading out like a painting towards the motorways and the factories, chimneys, plants and warehouses in the distance. To her right is the Welsh coast, and in front of her is the estuary, so wide, so still, so ancient and so wonderful it takes away her fear and makes her feel perfectly calm.
She puts on her jacket and pulls it tight then walks for ages with the traffic beside her. She walks to the middle of the bridge, where the metal moves quite dramatically beneath her feet. It’s like being the only passenger on a boat. She holds on to the railings until she is accustomed to the movement. Then she leans on them and gazes out across the silver water and the silver-brown mud. The estuary looks entirely different from this perspective. It is immense and peaceful. Fen has forgotten the lorries and the cars hurtling along the road behind her; all she knows is the expanse of water, the air and the sea birds flying, white, below her. Land is irrelevant here. It’s a lovely place to be, suspended above the river, between the land masses, with the huge tide rising and falling invisibly beneath.
The new bridge is a pencil sketch in the distance. Sunlight makes its way dreamily through clouds the colour of the water, and the grey-silver light and the colours and the slow, slow movement of the water are beautiful together.
Fen brushes the hair out of her eyes.
She stands there, just looking, for ages, for hours.
A couple of cyclists go past. They say: ‘Are you all right, love?’ and she says: ‘Yes, I’m fine.’
Fen takes the flowers out of her bag. She throws them, one by one, over the railings. She does not see where they go. They are carried by the wind, and the water is too far below and she’s not sure which direction the tide is moving. The lavender stems spin and the petals are torn from the rose-heads and float in the air by themselves.
Fen does not know where Tomas is.
But at least, she thinks, if he did come here, that morning.
If he leaned over the railings.
If he fell.
It was a beautiful place for him to fall.
The flowers fall into the water.
She hopes they find him.
forty-nine
‘More beef, Sean? Can I tempt you?’
Belle’s father is holding a bloodied piece of meat on the prongs of a carving fork. He shakes it in Sean’s direction.
‘Really, John, I can’t. I’m absolutely full.’
He turns to Belle’s mother. ‘That was a great meal, Amanda, thank you.’
Amanda primps. ‘I hope you’ve room for some dessert,’ she says. ‘Gooseberry fool, your favourite. I made it specially.’
Sean thinks it is a peculiarly ironic choice of pudding. Belle sends him an apologetic little glance, which he accepts with good grace. This is just another one of those rituals to be gone through. Everyone is pretending that nothing has changed since the last time Sean and Belle spent a weekend with her parents. The atmosphere is so heavy with good intent it’s given Sean a headache and the strain is telling on everyone’s face.
‘Belle was telling us,’ says Amanda, ‘that you’re thinking of moving house. I think that’s a very good idea.’
‘You don’t want to put your house up for sale now,’ says John briskly, ‘not while the market’s as it is.’
‘It’s all relative, Dad,’ says Belle. ‘And we haven’t made up our minds yet.’
‘It would be good for both of you, all of you,’ says Amanda, touching Amy’s shoulder, ‘to get away from those … memories.’
Sean winces.
‘Mum, please …’ says Belle. It is the closest any of them has come, so far, to mentioning any of the events of the last fifteen months.
‘I’d think you were insane if you tried to sell it now,’ John says gruffly.
‘It’s their decision, darling,’ says Amanda. ‘They must do what they think is best.’
‘I’ve never been happy in that house,’ says Belle quietly to Sean as they stack the dishwasher together.
‘Haven’t you?’ That’s news to Sean. He thought she loved it there. He thought it was her dream house.
Belle shakes her head.
‘It’s always felt like a kind of prison to me.’
Sean passes her a rinsed plate. Belle takes it without looking at him.
H
e says, confused: ‘You always said it was the perfect house for raising children and settling down. You used to tell everyone we’d found the perfect home.’
‘It was. It is. But I don’t think I was ready for all that. I think I probably should have waited a few more years before I had a child. I was too young. I didn’t want to settle down.’
Sean feels a pang of frustration. He feels somehow he’s being blamed for something, but he’s not sure what. He is certain he never railroaded Belle into marriage, or motherhood, or domesticity. It was the opposite, surely, wasn’t it? He was always so eager to make Belle happy that generally he went along with whatever she suggested.
‘I thought it was what was expected of me,’ Belle says, as if that explains everything. ‘I thought it was what I wanted.’
Sean rinses his hands under the cold tap.
‘If that’s how you feel, then I’m not sure that moving house is going to make everything right again,’ he says.
‘Never mind your father, I think it’s a lovely idea,’ says Amanda coming into the kitchen with the condiments. ‘A fresh new start for the family. You have to do what’s best for you, don’t you, Sean? You have to be true to yourself. Any less than that and it just won’t work.’
She hands a jar of mustard to Amy.
‘Put that back in the fridge for me, would you?’
Amy takes the jar. ‘Can we go and live with Fen and Connor?’ she asks.
‘Who are they, darling?’ Amanda asks. ‘Are they friends?’
‘They’re who Daddy lived with when Mummy was with Lewis. They’re really nice. Fen could look after me when Mummy needed a rest. She wouldn’t mind. She said we’re always welcome. She said …’
‘That’s nice,’ says Amanda.
‘Fen says—’
‘That’s enough Amy,’ says Belle, sharply.
Later, Sean hears voices in the living room and he goes in to find Belle leaning over Amy with a hand on each of her daughter’s shoulders.
Missing You Page 26