The Day We Disappeared

by Lucy Robinson

  ‘Is it time for your train yet?’ Dad asked. He looked distinctly shifty and shot back to the kitchen.

  Holy God, I thought. Is he dating already?

  ‘I’ll order a taxi in a few minutes,’ I called. ‘Stop pretending you didn’t hear what I just said.’

  Dad cleared his throat in the kitchen. ‘My love life is none of your business,’ he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. ‘But for the record, you nosy beggar, yes. I’m dabbling.’

  I gaped at the kitchen doorway. The old fox!

  I whipped my phone out, quick as a flash, to tell Lizzy, then put it away again. God knows, it must be hard for him, I thought. The last thing he needs is us gossiping behind his back. Still, my heart soared as I heard him crashing around in the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t call a taxi,’ Dad said, popping his head round the door again. ‘I’ll take you.’

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. ‘Sure?’ I said casually. Dad hadn’t been able to drive me to the station for six years.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, and I had to fight very hard with myself not to cry.

  Just as we were preparing to leave for Chesterfield, the phone rang in the hall. Dad was poking around upstairs, trying to find me a book he wanted to lend me, so I picked it up. ‘Hello?’

  There was a short silence at the other end – not a computer silence, but a person silence – then the line went dead.

  Puzzled, I looked up the stairs in Dad’s direction. My definitely smarter-than-normal daddy, with his nicely trimmed beard, under-control eyebrows and new shirt. Daddy, who had somehow found the confidence to leave the house and drive me to Chesterfield.

  And then everything fell into place. Dad had already tried internet dating. He was past that stage now.

  Dad had a ladyfriend!

  I smiled all the way back to London. Maybe things were changing for my family. Maybe we were starting to heal.

  Shagged someone else last night, Lizzy texted me at Birmingham. Oops!

  Or maybe it’d take a little more time, I conceded. But progress was being made, I was sure of it.

  I went to bed and tried – as I did every night – to picture Mum’s face. I couldn’t imagine ever giving up.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kate

  A girl sits in the pale gold light of a summer morning, shards of sunlit dust dancing lazily around her. Apart from the slow rise and fall of breath, the morning is silent.

  It isn’t peaceful. It’s the silence of loss, of absence; the kind of silence that is noisy because of its very existence. She closes her eyes and recalls the sounds that she wants to hear: the clatter of hoofs, the gentle sounds of eating, the swishing tails and comical snorts that once filled the many cracks of her life. She adds human sounds: laughter, banter, water-bucket filling. She feels an old smile inside her, although it doesn’t get as far as her face.

  A single dog bark in the yard – in the real yard, the quiet rectangle of waiting, empty stables – brings her back to today. To this otherwise silent morning, and to the two tonnes of white-grey miracle with whom she is sitting on a straw bed.

  That bit really was like a film. He’d made it! My beautiful Stumpy had done the near-impossible. Not only had he survived a fractured pastern bone but he’d done so with courage that would have brought a tear to Mark’s eye, had he been there. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ I told him, as I did every morning.

  Slowly, careful not to frighten him, I stood up to go and make his morning feed. ‘You stay there, my man,’ I told him.

  Stumpy looked at me as if to say, ‘Seriously, will you please stop talking to me? It’s six forty-five in the bloody morning.’

  I once used to enjoy making feeds: all those smells of sweet chaff and nutty competition mix, the buckets of thick gloopy sugar beet when it was cold, but these days I couldn’t stand it. Whatever jolly spin I put on things there was no denying the sadness of making just two feeds each morning, rather than thirty. A farmer’s pony had been drafted in to live in the stable next to Stumpy’s, so he didn’t get lonely, and that was it. Two horses; two buckets.

  Stumpy made some jolly noises as I returned with his breakfast, although he looked a bit baleful. ‘You miss your dad, don’t you?’ I said, giving him his feed.

  He was already too busy eating to reply.

  ‘I miss him too,’ I said, staring sadly at the huge white bandage on the horse’s leg. ‘I miss him far too much.’

  For a moment I allowed myself to close my eyes and let Mark inhabit my mind. Those dark, secretive eyes that I had been slowly learning to read; his quiet voice talking to his horses. And, indeed, the peace I had begun to feel around him; the heart-warming realization that he found me funny and refreshing, not a thorn in his side at all.

  You lost your chance, Kate Brady, I thought miserably. He liked you. He just didn’t know how to say it.

  I glanced around furtively in case someone might be able to see the contents of my head. The man had been married, for crying out loud!

  ‘Galway, you old whore,’ Joe shouted, waving at me as he strode across the yard. It was going to be a hot day and he looked like something from a gay disco in jodhpurs, boots and a navy vest. A moustache and whip would have been ideal but I supposed you couldn’t have everything.

  ‘How’re ye, my princess?’

  ‘I’m grand,’ I told him, kissing the spot on his cheek he was pointing to. Nowadays Joe and I were like an old couple: we occasionally cuddled for comfort, kissed each other on the cheek every morning and drank lots of strong Irish tea on the sofa while watching shit TV. We even had our own child in the form of Sandra, who had completely fallen apart and needed watching (not to mention cooking for) every day.

  ‘Yourself?’ I ducked back into Stumpy’s stable to fetch his water bucket.

  ‘Ah, you know,’ Joe said. ‘Tolerable.’

  If Joe hadn’t stayed on at the yard – insisted on staying on, even though there were no horses for him to ride or pounds with which to pay him – things would have been considerably more grim. Within a week of the accident everyone had been given their notice by Tiggy, who had thankfully entered a shell-shocked operations mode, brokering the sale of Mark’s own horses and co-ordinating the return to their owners of the rest.

  Maria had taken hers away first, in Jochim Furst’s lorry. ‘They are moving to Oxfordshire,’ she emailed us. ‘Please don’t try to visit.’

  One by one the rest of Mark’s owners had driven their lorries sheepishly down the driveway until, one hot, empty day at the beginning of June, the yard was quite empty. Tiggy had taken a job at Sarah Hutton’s yard in Berkshire and Becca had been offered one at Caroline’s down the road.

  ‘I can’t leave,’ she’d said, when the offer had come through. Tears had trembled in her eyes. ‘I can’t leave, pet, this is my home.’ She knew I was staying to look after Stumpy; understood without asking awkward questions that there was nowhere else for me to go.

  ‘You have to,’ I’d said. ‘If you stay here we’ll both be really depressed. It sounds fun at Caroline’s yard, Becca. You’ll probably have a far better time there.’ I felt a big lump swell in my own throat. ‘And, besides,’ I said, ‘if you turn Caroline’s job down the next offer could be five hours up the motorway, not five minutes down the road.’

  She’d known she had to take it. We’d cleared out her room together, and I’d cried as I’d pushed her totally un-Becca-like flowery duvet into a black bag.

  ‘Time for a new start,’ she said, when the car was loaded. Joe, who at that point was staying ‘just for a week, to look after Sandra’, waited patiently in the driver’s seat while we cried and hugged each other.

  ‘I needed this,’ she mumbled into my shoulder. ‘I feel awful, pet, fuckin’ awful right now, but I needed something like this to happen. Time to move on, you know?’

  And then she, too, was gone. There were no pupils arriving for lessons with Mark any more. No Team GBR coaches, no vets, no reps from the horse
-feed companies, no saddlers, chiropractors or press. No Ana Luisa running round throwing comical insults at us all, playing in her tree-house or bossing her friends around when they came to play.

  Maria had left for ever, taking her daughter, and had finally shacked herself up with Jochim Furst, who’d won Badminton while Mark had been airlifted to the Major Trauma Centre at Southmead with bleeding to his brain and a body crushed like a compacted car.

  Some fairly damning articles had been written about Maria in the eventing press but she really wasn’t the sort of person to give a shit.

  What the press didn’t know, however – had I been braver, I might have told them – was that Maria had ordered that Stumpy be put down, even though he had every chance of surviving. After lying winded for a few minutes he had managed to haul himself up, holding one of his forelegs off the ground. The equine hospital had found an incomplete stress fracture in his pastern bone: nothing to do with his lameness the month before, just a nasty wearing of his pastern that could have gone at any moment. They told us his chances of survival would be much higher if they put steel pins into the bone immediately.

  ‘I am not willing to pay for surgery,’ Maria had said on the phone, when I called to explain Stumpy’s options. ‘And a horse needing four months’ box rest is no use to me. Tell them to put him to sleep.’

  I had begun to get hysterical, which only seemed to strengthen her resolve. Indeed if it hadn’t been for Tiggy, who had confiscated the phone and reminded Maria that it would cost more to have Stumpy put down than it would just to sign the horse over to Mark, she would probably have got her way.

  Tiggy had handed me back my phone. ‘I’ll stay with Stumpy,’ she said. ‘You go to the hospital. I don’t see how Mark is going to survive this.’ Her voice rose in a desperate sob. ‘But if he does, he’ll need a friendly face when he comes round. I’ll send Becca there too, to help look after Ana Luisa. And Joe to look after Sandra. I’ll get there as soon as I can … Oh, God, Kate.’

  Joe leaned over Stumpy’s door. ‘You’re a handsome bastard, aren’t you?’ he said, patting the horse’s still-muscled neck. ‘I’m glad you didn’t croak it. Poor thing, cooking that little bastard of a fracture all that time and none of us any the wiser.’

  ‘What’s happening today?’ I asked, trying not to giggle at his outfit. Joe, knowing full well what I was thinking, flexed his muscles and did a few squats. ‘Well, Galway,’ he said, ‘I’ve thirty more companies to call and then a meeting with Terri James.’ He smirked. ‘I reckon by the time I’ve finished with her, she’ll promise us that three-year-old mare.’

  ‘You are the worst of all whores,’ I said to him. ‘You put our country to shame.’

  Joe shrugged. ‘Mark Waverley didn’t die,’ he said simply. ‘He made it, Galway. Feck knows how but he did. One day he’s going to be ready to get on a horse again and when that happens, Galway, I swear I’ll have the best feckin’ horses in the land, all up and running so he can just hop on and go.’ His eyes filled suddenly and he turned away from me. ‘And if I’ve to make tender love to Terri feckin’ James, Galway, then that’s a duty I’m ready to take on.’

  ‘I love you, Joe,’ I said tenderly. ‘You might be a whore but you’re a very, very good one.’

  His determination to keep Mark’s career alive was, I’d come to understand, simply Joe’s way of dealing with what had happened. He’d been there through those agonizing hours outside the operating theatre, holding Sandra firmly in his arms as if she might leak in all directions, like sand out of a broken egg-timer. He had looked after us – the whole team of us – when one of the surgeons finally emerged after fifteen hours to tell us that Mark had survived and we all broke down. And that night Joe had made Sandra her dinner, then put her to bed and sat on a chair in her room all night so that she wouldn’t be alone.

  Stepping into a head-of-the-family role was not what I’d ever have expected of Joe Keenan but, then, surviving a devastating trauma was not what I’d expected of Mark, and nursing a horse back to health was not what I’d expected of myself.

  We were limping on.

  ‘Right, Galway,’ Joe said, wiping his face on the back of his hand. ‘Feck off up to Bristol and see your man, now.’

  ‘He’s not my man!’

  Joe looked puzzled. ‘As in, Mark, Galway. Your man. Like we say in Ireland?’

  I blushed, swiping at my still-watery eyes. ‘Sorry. I just wouldn’t want you to think I thought he was my man. Because he’s not, never has been and never will be. I’m really not interested in him. At all. Never have been, Joe.’

  Joe stared at me. ‘Okay, Galway,’ he said. ‘Thanks for gettin’ me up to speed, princess.’

  ‘How’s he doing?’ I asked one of the nurses on Mark’s ward. His bed was rumpled and empty, which meant he must be at physiotherapy, although my heart still stopped every time I found his bed without him in it. I wouldn’t admit it to anyone but I lay awake most nights, blind with panic that he could be dying right now. That his heart might have stopped beating, or that the chest infection had come back. When I wasn’t lying awake panicking about Mark, I would be asleep having nightmares about my past. Nightmares in which the police knocked on Sandra’s door, asking if I was there. Nightmares in which my family found out what I’d done and told me they would never talk to me again.

  Sometimes I’d have to go out in the middle of the night to sit with Stumpy, and only then would I calm down.

  ‘Mark’s doing well,’ the nurse said carefully, ‘but it’s a tough journey that he’s on.’

  He’s still immobile and extremely depressed, was what she meant. ‘Do you think he’s at least where you’d expect him to be, given the scope of his injuries?’

  She frowned. ‘To be honest, I’ve never seen trauma injuries as bad as his,’ she admitted. ‘So I’ve no informed idea of where he should be at. But that’s because I’ve spent a lot of my career in oncology,’ she added, as my face crumpled. ‘I’m still new to this unit, love. I think that, given the number of fractures he sustained, he’s probably doing brilliantly. Chat to the consultant, okay?’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I will.’

  Up the corridor a trolley emerged from the lift. Was it him? Was it Mark? My stomach fluttered nervously. ‘Thank you for all you’re doing for him,’ I added. ‘You guys have been quite wonderful. I’m sure he’s not an easy patient.’

  The nurse smiled. ‘It’s a pleasure and an honour,’ she said. ‘And you should be thanking yourself too. He lives for your visits!’

  I looked up the corridor. It was Mark. In a panic, I slipped sideways into the toilet. He was at his lowest and most vulnerable when he was being wheeled around the place, furious and trapped in a body that no longer worked. The last time I’d witnessed him being brought back after a scan he’d gone white and not spoken to me at all. He’d just lain there, staring at the ceiling, battling angrily with the tears he would never allow to fall.

  I had cried those tears for him later, my face buried in Stumpy’s soft white mane.

  Mark did not live for my visits, I thought, listening to the trolley as it trundled past the toilet door. I didn’t really know what Mark was living for any more. He was desperately low. He barely ate. I knew his lawyer had been in a few times to talk about custody of Ana Luisa but Mark never mentioned it to me. He didn’t talk about his little girl at all, or his soon-to-be ex-wife, or any of the horses he’d lost. He didn’t talk about Sandra, or the financial peril that hung over the farm, or the pain he must be in. He just answered my questions. If it weren’t for his interest in Stumpy’s recovery, we would have sat in silence every day.

  Not that that would have stopped me coming.

  I left it for a few minutes, then slipped through his curtains, pretending just to have arrived. Mark shared a ward with two other beds and, in typical Mark style, always kept his curtains firmly closed.

  ‘Top of the morning to you,’ I said, in my very worst leprechaun accent. ‘It’s
nice to see you, so.’

  Mark looked briefly at me. ‘Hi.’

  ‘How are you on this glorious day?’

  ‘Shit.’

  That was fair enough. The man was recovering from a head injury, a pelvic fracture, a broken hip socket and a broken arm and leg. He’d also suffered something called a flail chest, which – like the head injury – should really have killed him but, miraculously, it hadn’t. That injury, in turn, had bruised his lungs and caused a major chest infection; the damage to his pelvis and hip joint meant that he still couldn’t really move his legs, and the fact that he’d broken his right arm and left leg meant that he wouldn’t be considered safe enough to go home for at least another three weeks. Oh, and he’d had plastic surgery to his leg where the tibia had broken through and his skin was still laced with the eerie shadows of faded bruising.

  ‘Shit’ was fair enough.

  I hovered by the end of his bed. ‘I could go and get some lunch and come back later?’

  He stared at the ceiling.

  ‘Or I could just come back tomorrow …’

  Mark shrugged. ‘Up to you,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to take up your time.’

  I smiled, even though he was refusing to look at me. ‘I’m not all that busy with just the one horse and his friend.’

  Mark, as I’d predicted, couldn’t resist. ‘How is he doing?’ he asked, turning his head carefully towards me. A little light had appeared in his dark, watery eyes.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said, unable to hide my excitement. ‘The vet came to change his bandage yesterday – it’s so huge – and although it’s far too early to tell, she said it was all looking good. He’s so patient, Mark. So brave!’

  Mark nodded, and I knew he wasn’t speaking now because he couldn’t.

  ‘We’re all very proud of him,’ I said softly. ‘He’s fighting.’

  Mark resumed his silence. I sat there for a few minutes, humming a non-existent tune and digging out some dirt from my fingernails.