A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  Suddenly Alice heard a voice. This time she was certain it was a girl. She was like a conspirator, hissing out words. Alice hitched up the sleeve of her dressing gown and wrapped smartly on the wall. Three times. ‘Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me…’ The voice stopped.

  It wasn’t until Alice was back in bed that she found she was hugging the newspaper to her chest. She didn’t let go and during the remainder of the night was partially woken by crackling as she turned over. Never asleep, yet not properly awake, her thoughts were tall and thin like evening shadows.

  They would look for her again. Mark Ramsay’s death would have reminded them about her. Now more than ever it was important to stay hidden. But if she didn’t want to feel forever a fugitive she must take matters into her own hands. In the middle of this, she fell into fitful sleep.

  When she awoke in the morning, Alice decided that despite the risks she would go to Mark Ramsay’s funeral.

  Seventeen

  Kathleen nearly lost her in Marks and Spencer’s. She was cross with herself, there was no excuse, she had been distracted for the pettiest of reasons. Spitting muttered admonishments she scoured the store. The sign had been practically waving to get her attention.

  Everything 60% off!

  Kathleen looked this way and that. Now she saw that the sales notice had been a test, thrown like a smoke bomb into her path, luring her to be taken in and lose the little girl. One glance at the blouses on the rack, their silky tendrils cool to the touch, and she had been caught in the spell. She had been doing so well, snaking adroitly between islands of clothes carousels, and towers of crockery, and CD racks. Now, she looked desperately about her for long fair hair and that bouncy step that had always put them in mind of a pony.

  Always helpful, always cheerful; never in a bad mood. Always.

  The shop was busy with rush-hour adults pushing and shoving, and amidst all this the child had vanished. Kathleen should not have taken her eye off her for a second. Normally she was so good. But today her heart was not in it. Indeed for once it wasn’t her reason for being in the store. She had made herself go out, if only for Doctor Ramsay’s sake, he had always been so encouraging about not giving up.

  Kathleen had learnt to ignore what wasn’t important. She blinked, trying to read a placard suspended from the ceiling by thin wire, but couldn’t make out the words. She ought to get her eyes seen to but there was no time. Each morning was taken up with preparations and making sure she left the house with everything she needed for the day. In all this she had neglected herself. Her sight was a vital tool of the trade. She could not afford to ignore it.

  Practise by walking down the street, fixing your focus on a point in the distance. Anything will do: a postbox, a leaf. Begin with objects yards ahead, then move on to further away. It would be ideal to begin with a flat place, perhaps the horizon where the earth meets the sky or lines converge. The vanishing point. At no time let your attention stray. If your point of focus is a leaf, do not look anywhere else until you are upon that leaf. You will find this harder than you expect. Small things will conspire to distract you. You will distract yourself. You are your worst enemy.

  The blouse was too good to miss. Reduced by so much and with one in her size. Clothes usually went by the board, there was never time to buy things. Kathleen was size ten now. How her younger size-twelve-self would have envied her.

  No one envied her.

  Kathleen ran the material through her middle finger and wedding ring finger. It was so soft, like butterfly wings, soft like the snippet of baby hair in her locket. Then she lifted the blouse from the rail and held it away from herself. She had to provide her own objective view. She had no shopping companion.

  It would look lovely on you, Mum. Try it on.

  The buttons were as delicate as shell, although they would be too fiddly for her. The slate blue was her shade: the colour of her eyes a teacher had once said. She had a skirt and an old navy pair of trousers it would go very well with. Surely, at sixty-four she wasn’t too old. The shirt might make her feel young. This put Kathleen off; she had a fear of becoming a grotesque parody of herself thirty years ago. When she put on her make-up she sometimes had to quell the urge to trace the cracks on her face with her eyeliner pencil. Stark, black curves, implacable dashes would criss-cross her face, then she would colour the jagged shapes inside the lines with bright red lipstick and green mascara to make a component face held together by her determination to get through each day.

  She must be alive when Alice came back.

  It was at this point, the blouse scrunched up soft against her face, that Kathleen had remembered the girl. Where had she gone? Darting forward, she changed her mind and stepped back down the aisle she had come along. Which way? Her tufted head pecking back and forth, her slate blue eyes trained to the honed skill of a store detective.

  The little girl was nowhere to be seen.

  She shoved the shirt back on the rack, and hurried in the direction she had last seen her.

  When you have nothing to go on, rely on logic.

  Kathleen had learnt to bank on predictable behaviour. If the girl had doubled back then she would never find her. All the time she grumbled childlike substitutions for swearing. Flip. Sugar. Drat! Fool! Idiot! Tissue-wrapped words kept along with the carefully cleaned toys arranged in greeting for the wanderer returned.

  How could she have let herself be side-tracked? It was out of character. The second time in two days.

  Doctor Ramsay’s death had set her back.

  Kathleen’s battery was draining away. Sometimes as she followed the pre-ordained paths, the red biro routes she plotted out in her A to Z each morning, she agreed with the newspaper readers, the train travellers, brick dusted builders and ungenerous housewives who all judged her delusional. Yet they would be there to shout and throw eggs in her name if there was a grey-blanket covered culprit to whisk from car to courthouse.

  With no body, there was no culprit. Perhaps, just perhaps, no crime.

  As Kathleen pushed past a group of women examining a maypole of bras, she caught her ankle on a buggy parked between nightwear and swimwear. The child had pulled one of the nightdresses over itself, and was hiding patiently, waiting for its mother to find it under the lacy tent. Kathleen caught hold of the buggy’s rubber handle to stop herself toppling on to it and the mother tore stormy-faced out of the scrum, bras dangling like exotic fronds, as the toddler – nightie snatched off with magician swiftness to reveal a boy – embarked on an obligatory howl. There was no time to explain, so holding her bag to her chest, Kathleen ploughed on to the food section. It was her last hope. The girl could already have left the shop.

  There she was.

  Kathleen stopped and gathered her breath. A girl of about eight was standing on one leg by the prepared salads, singing peacefully to herself. Her blonde hair was newly washed and beautifully brushed. It was much too short. Her dress was a lovely pink, but spoiled by a thick stripe of black that went like a sash over her back and over her shoulder. Sidling closer, Kathleen could see it was just a giant tee-shirt and looked cheap. Her black sandals had thick soles like bricks and were too high for her age. They were really quite ugly. If Kathleen had been with her when she chose them she could have talked her out of buying them.

  If you want to have pretty feet when you’re older, look after them now.

  She drew nearer to the girl. There were tattoos on her wrists. She supposed they would wash off, no one was allowed to tattoo an eight-year-old. These days they could make them so life-like. She would tell her, tattoos were for fat old men.

  ‘Tut tut.’

  The little girl whirled around, whipping her hands away from the bags of watercress with which she had been idly playing shops. She stared up at Kathleen. She had freckles on her nose and her mouth was wrong, too wide, too mocking. There was no recognition in the defensive glance, only puzzlement and worse: fear.

  She was not Alice. Nothing could make her A
lice.

  Kathleen stepped into the space made by the girl, who had dashed off to become a limpet on her mother’s trolley and was wheeled away with kicking heels. Kathleen picked up the bag of watercress the girl had dropped and joined the nearest queue. She would soak her feet in a bowl of water with Friars Balsam when she got home, and sip a lovely hot cup of tea.

  For The Best Mum in the whole world with lots and lots of love from your Alice.

  With extra sugar as today she was more tired than usual.

  A young man leaning on the rail of his heaped trolley noted the elderly woman lost in a zipped up waterproof clutching a bag of salad with both hands, like a kid with a prize. The idea of his Gran shopping on her own, her list lost along with her direction, flitted like Reuters ticker-tape across his busy mind. It was a humiliating fate for the fantastic woman who twenty-five years ago had plunged into teeming traffic to snatch up a runaway three-year-old from the wheels of a bus. Her newspaper photo was framed in his mother’s kitchen. ‘The Have-A-Go-Granny’. As the thought-tape fell in coils among the rich pickings of his hectic life, it conjured up his brushed, tightly-coated, clean-eared self teetering on the kerbside for her to return and take hold of his hand. He straightened up and shifting the heavy trolley aside, motioned the old woman through. To his astonishment, she assumed he was telling her off and hesitated before making sense of his gesture. A packet of watercress shuddered its way up the belt to the cashier. They both stared at it as if tacitly agreeing that even her shopping testified against her. He wanted to cry as she handed the cashier her money, the coins dipped for from a chunky leather purse. As he watched, her right hand began to shake while she waited for her receipt and shopping. Suddenly she stretched forward and lifted up one of the boxes of meringue nests he had stacked next to three chardonnays for the price of two. Surely she wasn’t going to nick it?

  ‘They love these, don’t they! My Alice can eat a whole box, you have to keep an eye, don’t you.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Way too much sugar, but for a birthday…’ He breathed as she replaced the box exactly where she had found it, handling it cautiously as if it were a pet mouse.

  ‘I make my own. Once Steve got me the Kenwood, there was no going back! No use with a hand whisk, you can’t get the stiff peaks.’

  ‘I don’t do desserts. My Gran…’ Later he had no idea why he felt the need to introduce his dead grandmother into the conversation: perhaps she was his passport to credibility. A woman of the same species.

  The old woman wasn’t listening, she retrieved her shopping and melted out of his vision as he was forced to dive into the frenzy of keeping up with the cashier and defend his personal challenge that they never had to wait for his money.

  Months later the man would linger over a picture in the Independent on Sunday, unsure why the old woman’s face was familiar, before shaking out the business section and moving on.

  When she got home Kathleen stuffed the watercress in the salad compartment of the fridge. She didn’t eat watercress. Not being an adventurous salad maker she stuck to the islands of lettuce, a spoonful of cold baked beans, a halved tomato and small blob of salad cream she had always made for Alice. She frequently came home with unwanted purchases bought to mask disappointment or explain strange behaviour.

  Kathleen Howland was aware that people thought her unbalanced. Children in the village treated her warily, even adults who knew her well avoided her if they could, crossing streets, or leaving shops when they saw her coming. She helped them by looking away as they pretended to have forgotten something, patting pockets, rootling in bags, in exaggerated mimes before excusing themselves. She saw through these charades and wanted to assure them it was fine. She might do the same if things were different. If, as the saying went, the boot was on the other foot. She had read about women like herself in the papers so she knew she wasn’t alone.

  Finally Kathleen did not care what anyone thought and this was one thing that was better than before. Now she could do what she liked without worrying if it was the right way, the right colour or the right accent. She was beyond right and wrong. Her life sentence had set her free.

  She shut her ears to the chorus of public opinion of gaping mouths and simple minds.

  Move on, it’s what she would have wanted. Start a campaign. Work for a charity. Change the world so that it doesn’t happen to other mothers.

  Kathleen would start by explaining, if she had the chance, that she knew quite well that Alice was not eight any more. Alice had been missing for thirty-one years and four days. Kathleen would be the first to agree that to stalk a little girl through a shopping precinct because she looked like Alice, was the action of an unbalanced mind.

  Two months after Alice disappeared in June 1968, Kathleen had been sure she would find it impossible to survive in a world without her. There were no floors or supporting walls. With no meal times or baths to run, no clothes to wash and iron, no school bag to pack or spelling tests to take, daily life had collapsed. She could not carry on without gravity, with the clocks stilled as time slipped stealthily past uncleaned windows, leaving only dust as proof of progress.

  Kathleen did not see Alice all the time. She did not follow every child who might be Alice. For example, she no longer hung around outside the school or sat in the spectators’ gallery at the local swimming pool where there were plenty of young girls laughing and shouting. Alice didn’t like swimming. She loved school, but Kathleen knew the staff would ring if she came back. They had rung Kathleen at the surgery when Alice broke her arm. Teachers could tell when children weren’t right even when the children themselves made no fuss. She trusted them with her child. Alice had not cried with her green stick fracture; not wanting to miss maths, she had sat for two hours white with the pain. As a girl, Kathleen would have welcomed any excuse to miss maths. She had admired her daughter’s stoic efficiency, her easy intelligence and had stood helpless listening as Alice instructed her teacher how much food to give the fish – relinquishing her post of Pet Monitor – her face pinched and white as she clasped her limp arm. In that moment Kathleen had seen the woman Alice would one day be: a cleverer, calmer, more competent adult than herself. It was an exciting, yet disturbing, vision and Kathleen had been deliriously happy when Alice burst into tears that evening and asked for hot chocolate Nesquik. As she watched Alice take sniffing sips she had secretly welcomed her small daughter back.

  It was that little girl Kathleen was determined to find. Somewhere, in a competent adult living out her life, the little girl who was Alice must exist.

  Alice would have been forty on the 25th of March. Seventy-five days ago, Kathleen knew exactly, she didn’t delude herself.

  Over three decades on and Kathleen had refined her search. She now looked for an essence with edges polished smooth by time and embellished with wistful properties, like generosity and limitless kindness. Kathleen knew the girls she was trailing would not be Alice. She had seen their faces, heard their voices, yet the way a girl would skip along beside her Mummy or put her arms out against the wind could be enough to bring Alice back. Then Alice’s soul would gain clarity and Kathleen would feel the back of her neck tingle and be convinced she was near. Once she had gone to the bottom of the stairs and called up to Alice in the empty cottage:

  ‘Can’t you give me a sign?’ The lights fused. She had been unafraid of the darkness, she was no longer alone. If he had been alive, Steve would have questioned why a soul would signal its presence through the electricity circuit just as once he had refused to apply for a transfer on the basis that she was convinced someone had died in the cottage. But perhaps her deep feeling of unease had been the premonition of a terrible event just around the corner, not divining of the past.

  The quality of ‘missing’ had altered; Alice’s presence in the cottage had become another prop for alleviating the pain of her absence. It managed Kathleen’s grief and fought her conscious desire to die.

  Kathleen Howland’s life had changed again the day,
eight years earlier, when she collapsed in Boots in Canterbury, falling against a life-size cut-out of a woman gaily brandishing a deodorant. As she went down Kathleen’s eyes conveyed apology to the brightly smiling image. Her chest refused to breathe. Later she tried to explain it was less a blacking out, more of a greying, a steady diminishment of sight and sound. She had been rushed to hospital. After many white-coated questions they told her what she already knew because she had seen the same symptoms in her mother. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. She confessed that the tremor in her hand had been going on for over a year. As she lay on a trolley bed while they tapped her arm for blood, Steve’s sheet white face appeared like the moon between hospital curtains glaring accusingly at her. This too was her fault.

  That day, Alice had got away.

  After that, Kathleen had been forced to recognise her limits and adapt her methods. For some time there had been plenty of time between tablets, when she was almost herself, but had to be mindful of her energy. Too much excitement and she trembled visibly, jerking involuntarily and attracting attention. Then she developed low blood pressure in the mornings, and had to lie still, her feet propped on pillows until she could rise without feeling faint. They gave her steroids, but these drained her of potassium and she had an angina attack. This time no one turned up in Accident and Emergency to claim her. She told them there was no ‘Next of Kin’. After they cut back on the steroids, Kathleen’s symptoms got worse, and she couldn’t go until the mid-morning. She was informed that her Parkinson’s was advancing fast.

  One night five years earlier, as Kathleen was writing up her activities for that day, she had flipped back through her notebook and was upset to see how her handwriting had changed: it was tighter, smaller and crabbed, only just decipherable. Like an old woman’s. Except that she was not yet out of her fifties.

  Time was not on her side.

  In the first months after he died in the summer of 1992, Kathleen would see Steve in the street too. She didn’t try to follow him, knowing how much it would annoy him. Steve was a private man whose feelings were his own business. She kept in the shadow of an awning as he stared in at the window of a hardware shop or strolled out towards the fields to merge with the sky. Although she had let Steve go, she missed him. She had howled like a wounded dog with its stomach ripped wide open to reveal a mash of ribs and spleen. She was scared of the noise, a giving birth sound that was death. Nothing could stop it as it rose up, rushing out of her, to roar about her ears like a typhoon. Steve had left without saying goodbye or leaving a note. His dying had been a subtle creeping away, a sick animal first curled irritably in a corner, then one day the corner was empty.