Annie put her arm through mine as we walked. ‘I remember that. Two kids came round to our house with his sports bag to apologize. He sulked all night. He was a real sulker. But, you know, it’s not as if he spent his weekends dissecting neighbourhood cats on the kitchen table. He wasn’t making bombs in the garden shed or hiding behind a tree to shoot an airgun at passing toddlers. I’m not surprised he seemed like a wimp in prison. He would have been terrified. What was it like where you were, Isabel? The young offenders’ thingy place.’
‘Oh, it was pretty bad, I suppose.’
‘She doesn’t like to talk about it.’
‘Why? Is it too painful?’
I thought about that. ‘Maybe,’ I conceded, ‘but there’s another reason. I can’t remember it very clearly. It’s strange because I have a good memory but I just can’t separate the bits and pieces of the experience into things I remember. It’s a cloud, a very thick cloud that I can’t see inside. I sometimes think I must have made it all up one day.’
‘I’d like to do something destructive that causes a lot of damage but doesn’t kill anyone. Just like you did. It would make me feel good.’ Annie swayed into a privet hedge as she spoke, then bounced back as John pulled her arm.
‘It wouldn’t.’ I put my hand on Annie’s shoulder to steady her.
‘It would feel good at the time.’
The bingo hall was just ahead of us at the end of the street, but not yet visible. Five or six teenage boys walked towards us on the pavement, talking and spitting. When they noticed us they fell quiet and crossed the road. They began to speak again when they reached the other side, as though John, Annie and I had done something to frighten them. I felt bad for whatever it was we had done.
John moved ahead of Annie and me. He began to whistle, a sharp, piercing sound like some kind of insect shrieking in the rain.
When Owen came out of prison, I’d been free for months already and was living with Aunt Maggie in London. That is partly why I never wrote back to him. We were treated so differently I didn’t know what to say to him. I was a juvenile and he was an adult but there were only a few months between us. He was right to feel unlucky. But I was not having such a great time during those months. For the first few weeks after my release I had no home or job. I was waiting for something to happen. I wandered around the streets, avoiding talking to anyone but being fed up that I had no one to talk to. I remember following people around, hoping they would notice me, but ensuring they did not, groups of young women especially. I used to sit near them on the tube, in parks, and listen to their conversations of work, of boyfriends, of going to parties and to the cinema. If they carried bags of shopping I tried to see inside, to catch a glimpse of clothes, or books, or chocolates and perfume. I wanted to know how I should be living, how not to live like a ghost.
I was not planning to languish like that for ever, and did not believe that I would, but I had little thought of doing anything to change my life. Every idea in my head was a vague one. I might have wandered for ever – or collapsed to the ground and fallen apart – if change had depended on me. Fortunately it didn’t. I was rescued without ever having to scream for help.
I was in a day centre in London checking notices, I don’t know what for, jobs perhaps. I saw my own name and photograph on the missing persons’ board and at first it didn’t make sense. I’m not missing, I thought. I’m here. I looked behind me. People were milling around the building’s entrance. Two girls shared a bag of chips in the doorway and another squatted at the bottom of the stairs picking at loose skin around her nails. She was crying silently.
I was eighteen and homeless. I lived alternately in the hostel I’d been directed to, and an allotment shed I had found one evening on my own. I was alternately too much alone and too much in company. The allotment shed was freezing and too tiny to lie down in. The hostel beds were dirty, often noisy. People stole your things if you didn’t sleep on top of them. My post-office account was almost empty. I had no plan other than, somehow, to forget the last year. I had acquaintances but no friends. It was January and every day was colder than the one before. The tears of the girl on the stairs chilled me and my shoulders shook. How could I be missing?
The photograph had been taken in my parents’ house. Behind my hands were the edges of the crimson crocheted shawl on the sofa. There was the silhouette of the television, the glass slipper from my parents’ wedding cake on top, and yet I knew my parents were not looking for me. I could not remember who had taken this picture. I was in my bottle green school uniform with short hair, permed and bleached into a sheep’s fleece. I wore triangular pink earrings. No one would ever recognize me from that, I thought. I looked into it and felt nothing. I blinked into the eyes of the photographed me. I didn’t like her. So far off in the past, so deeply buried under time, what right had she to be using my name any more? What was she doing here? I read the message underneath. It said, My niece is lost. At the bottom was a London telephone number.
So Aunt Maggie was searching for me. It was a miracle. I’d looked for Maggie’s house during my first week in London but did not know her address. I had visited her a few years earlier and knew it was a terraced house in or near Hounslow with a small park or green nearby. I’d studied maps of London and walked the streets of Hounslow till my feet were blistered and sore. The sky was black by five and I was scared of the dark so I had given up. It was as if Maggie wanted to hide from me, as if she had picked up her house and tucked it away in a pocket somewhere. My niece is lost. I was not lost. Maggie was lost. I was not missing, since missing meant to be trapped in the place where Julia had gone. The missing lived in a watery nowhere just outside and in between the frames of other people’s lives. I knew all about it. They couldn’t breathe but didn’t die. I was certain of this and I was not in that place.
Even so, I was not in any place worth being. I longed to sleep in a bed in a house with someone I knew on the other side of the wall. I longed for a light that I could leave on all night. I hardly dared hope that Maggie would let me stay with her but then why else was she looking for me? Maggie had never written to me or visited me since I’d gone away but she might not have known where I was. I had no idea what my parents had told her. I joined the queue for the phone box on the street. I remember feeling sick as I dialled the number, almost put down the receiver when I heard it ring, but then Maggie’s deep voice came curling up from the earpiece, as strong and seductive as cigar smoke: ‘This is Maggie speaking. Hello?’
‘It’s me, Isabel,’ I told her. ‘I’m not missing.’
*
Within an hour Maggie had arrived. She smelled of sweet perfume and looked just as I remembered her. Her auburn hair was cut short into her neck and high on top, like a pineapple. A large amethyst dangled from a chain and nestled in her cleavage. Close up I could see the freckles on her face and chest. Mascara was smudged around her eyes. She cried as she hugged me. I breathed in her perfume and coughed. I can’t think of her today without tasting that heavy, flowery scent.
Maggie sniffed and ran a damp hand over my cheek. ‘Why didn’t you come to me? I would have taken care of you. I didn’t know that you were in trouble. I would never have judged you.’
I was so tired I could hardly speak. I shook my head and tried to find my voice. ‘I didn’t have your address.’ I rubbed my nose like a small child. ‘I couldn’t ask anyone. I tried to find your house but I didn’t remember it clearly. I could see bits and pieces but only like a dream. I didn’t know where it was.’
‘Well. Well. You’re here now. Whatever you do, Isabel, don’t go back up north to your home. Were you going to?’
‘I thought about it. I wasn’t sure what to do.’
‘Well, don’t. I can’t tell you how important that is. You must stay here with me.’
Then Maggie turned and began to pace down the street. Her feet moved quickly and I was afraid she would run off to the horizon and disappear again. I scuttled to keep up but there was n
o energy in my legs and I wanted to fall flat on my face and sleep. She noticed and slowed down but seemed to find it hard to walk at my speed. The pavement was crowded but somehow we steamed ahead, somehow missing the people coming towards us. As Maggie slowed, her speech became rapid to compensate and she hardly stopped for breath.
‘That bloody sister of mine told me you were travelling in Europe. France, she said, the liar. George and I were going to Paris and thought it would be fun to meet up with you so I asked for your phone number. You’ll meet George later. He’s my boyfriend and a wonderful man. But by then, apparently, you had moved to Spain. Spain, I ask you, and I believed it. She made up some daft story that you were picking fruit and studying the language. I never knew she had such an imagination. I never knew she had an imagination.’ Maggie tapped my arm. ‘I mean, that’s elaborate, isn’t it, for her?’
I could see her quite clearly, this other version of me, travelling around Europe, climbing ladders to pluck scarlet apples from trees and dropping them into wicker baskets. Or bunches of purple grapes from vines. And it might have been possible. It was so much likelier than what did happen that I wanted to believe it. I still do, and sometimes tell people that I spent a year picking fruit and travelling in France and Spain. I’m not lying exactly. It has been part of me for so long now that it has almost become true. It is one of my pasts, if not the one I know best.
‘How did you find out I hadn’t gone anywhere? I mean, I hadn’t gone—’
‘No postcards.’ Maggie began to go fast again. I hurried along, just a pace behind. ‘I went up to see your parents for the weekend and to catch up on the village gossip. Not a single postcard on the walls or mantelpiece. I asked for your whereabouts but they wouldn’t tell me. Not that I could have guessed the truth in a million years. I was afraid you had a fatal illness and your mother was keeping you hidden in the attic. You know what she’s like.’
I didn’t know what Maggie meant by this but it was true that my mother liked to get her hands on invalids. She was a retired staff nurse and now, or at least the last time I’d seen her, did voluntary work with the sick and elderly. They tended to fear her. She liked to pray for them, they said. She prayed for them a bit too hard.
‘But I winkled it out of the neighbours, piece by piece. I put all the bits together and bingo. There you were, locked away in the dark. Sheila came clean and told me the whole thing, and about Owen going to prison too. We’ll get a cab straight to Hounslow, if that suits you.’
Maggie hailed a taxi. I climbed in after her and sank into the corner, looking out at the road, feeling safe and distant from the people and buildings I was leaving. The allotment shed was already part of another story. A couple of hours earlier I had been stuck in that life. Now I was in a new one.
‘Maggie, is it all right for me to stay with you for a little while?’
‘Yes, love. It’s not all right for you to stay anywhere else. I haven’t had time to get your room ready but I think it’s in a reasonable state.’
‘Thank you. It doesn’t matter what state it’s in.’
‘Perhaps at the weekend we could get some green paint and decorate it for you. I know green is your favourite colour. The walls are white with a hint of apricot at the moment.’ Maggie looked at me in apology and patted my arm. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘That’s all right. I don’t mind white with a hint of apricot. It’s fine by me.’
For the rest of the journey it bothered me. I didn’t know that green was my favourite colour, or that I even had a favourite colour. I didn’t see how I could. It depended on what the thing was. I was as sure that it was as impossible to have a favourite colour as Maggie was certain that my favourite colour was green. Perhaps someone else liked green and Maggie had confused me with that person. No wonder she still loved me.
The taxi pulled up outside a terrace of Victorian houses, just like the one I had searched for. There was the parade of shops I remembered – still a hairdresser’s at the end – and there was the park. Someone had returned them to their places while my back was turned. I thought I saw a curtain twitch in the front bedroom of the house next door.
‘You won’t tell people, I mean the neighbours, about me, will you? I don’t want anyone to know what’s happened.’
‘You’re my niece who has come down from the north to try life in London for a little while. What could be wrong with that? Oh, by the way, I have a lodger. Don’t worry about her. You’ll get on fine.’
I stood behind Maggie on the step as she unlocked the door. I could hardly wait to get inside. She told me about her shop. It was a second-hand-book shop in Richmond. She always used to say, ‘Rare and antiquarian, no tatty paperbacks. We sell to very reputable collectors, as well as ordinary readers on the street.’ She ran the shop with George. She said that I could work there for as long as I wanted. This would cover my rent and give me some spending money.
I climbed the stairs. The house smelled of perfume and polish and cinnamon. It smelled of people, of women. I stepped into my new bedroom. I had slept here before when I had visited with my parents. I was about fifteen then. Maggie had just moved in and it was exciting. My parents kept looking out of the windows to see the bright lights of London. They didn’t mind that it was Hounslow and not the West End.
The room was neat and tidy. Beside the bed were two books. I sat on the bed and looked at them. Jane Eyre and Little Women. I had read parts of Jane Eyre as a child but usually stopped when Jane left Lowood. After that Jane became an adult and, though I sometimes tried to read on, I found her love for Mr Rochester boring and couldn’t understand the point of it. Now I held the book in my hands and believed that perhaps I was ready to read the rest of the story. Perhaps I should like to read about love.
There was a washbasin in the corner with a round mirror above it and a vase of dried flowers on the window-sill. I slipped out of my shoes and put them in the corner. The cream carpet was soft under my socks. All this for me? I walked around the small room, one corner to the next, letting my feet sink into the carpet. Maggie knocked on the door. I waited for a moment, then realized I was supposed to open it. I had to force my hand to turn the handle and I was still afraid as I pulled the door back.
Maggie beamed. On her arm was a pile of neatly folded pea-green towels. ‘Do you like it? You might want a bookcase, I suppose, or a desk, but I can get them if you need them. Have you looked out of the window? You’ve got a view of the park. See?’
Maggie drew back the curtains, gazed out with an expression of wonder, as if she had never seen the park before. My father and I had strolled through the horse-chestnut leaves on our way to the station at the other side, talking of autumn and cold weather. The memory came to me for the first time. I’d picked up a conker and put it into my pocket. I liked the feel of it and kept it there for the rest of the trip. I couldn’t see the park clearly now, just a gap where there was nothing else. I saw the string of lights along the road, the tops of houses, traffic-lights. I felt as if I ought to be able to walk into the park and find my younger self with my father, crunching through the leaves.
‘It’s lovely.’ I turned to the books. ‘Were you reading these?’
‘No, they’re Leila’s.’
I assumed Leila to be the lodger.
‘Will she want them back?’
Maggie seemed confused for a moment. Then she laughed. ‘Leila isn’t real. You must excuse me. I have a few imaginary friends.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Leila’s a character I’m writing about in my new novel. I gave her this room and put some things inside so that I could get to know her better. She was very distant for a long time but eventually she came in. I know it sounds batty and it probably is, but it’s just like having a doll’s house, only life-sized. That’s why I chose a pale colour for the walls in here, even though it’s not to my taste. I thought it would suit Leila.’ Maggie fingered the doorframe thoughtfully. ‘A brighter colour would have frightened her
.’
‘Has she gone now? I mean, is it all right for me to have this room?’ I’d had a few imaginary friends before I started primary school. My parents put it down to the fact that I was an only child and I always believed them. Now I wondered if the tendency might be hereditary.
‘Certainly. She just came here as a refugee – a bit like Bernadette and you – but soon grew tired of it so a few months ago I packed her off to New York. She became a journalist. She’s really blossomed and will soon be on her way to other countries. The room is all yours and you can do anything you like with it. Of course,’ Maggie nudged me with her elbow, ‘I’m not mad. You could have had the room even if she was still here.’
I imagined the spirit-like Leila sleeping in this pale room, twisting under the white sheet, in fear of bright colours.
‘My lodger is real, though. Her name’s Bernadette. You’ll meet her later on. She comes and goes but she won’t bother you. She’s homeless – well, she was until I persuaded her to move in for a little while. She was sleeping in the doorway of our shop for months. George or I would bring her breakfast or a coffee but she didn’t have much to say for herself. Then we had a cold snap in winter and she got the most terrible cough. I’m not a soft touch. I wouldn’t let in anyone I found on the streets but I felt I already knew Bernadette quite well by then. Her story is very sad and, to tell the truth, Isabel, I can’t see it getting any happier.’
‘Does she have any friends or family?’
‘I suspect she does but she doesn’t want to talk about them. She has very specific problems that she can’t solve. No one can. I’d help her if I could but I can’t – not beyond giving her a room with a bed. She doesn’t stay every night, just two or three times a week. I have no idea where she goes on the other nights. To be honest, I’d never ask her, in case she told me. I’d rather remain in the dark. At least I know you’ll be no trouble.’
The Missing Person's Guide to Love Page 14