How Not to Disappear

by Clare Furniss

  ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she said. But she isn’t.

  I find it hard to tell the babies apart, although Edie says that you know your own baby without even looking, just by hearing its cry. But when I go over to the cot I recognize Ted, because he has a little dimple in his chin and very long dark eyelashes. ‘Like his daddy,’ Edie had told me, winking. ‘That’s what got me into this flaming mess in the first place.’

  Ted’s little face is bright red, his eyes screwed shut, his mouth wide. He is swaddled tight, like all the babies. They say it makes them feel safe but I don’t like the idea of them being bound so tightly. The idea of not being able to move like that, to be constricted and held in one position, makes me panicky. I have dreams like that sometimes, where I can’t move and I wake up sweating. I pick him up and cradle him in one arm and loosen the blanket bundled round his body until his arms are free. He balls his hand into little fists and holds them by his face.

  ‘Shhhhh,’ I say, rocking him. ‘Come on, Ted.’

  He doesn’t shhh, though, he keeps crying. I walk around the room with him and sing to him softly as I’ve seen Edie do. ‘I know I’m not your mummy,’ I say, ‘But I’ll do for now, won’t I?’

  He looks at me with his dark eyes and I think how much they look like Edie’s. I couldn’t see it before. Babies just look like babies to me. But I can see it suddenly, in the shape and the colour and something of his expression somehow. Am I just imagining it? I think how strange it is that there is a person who will grow up looking like Edie and her Bobby because of one afternoon they spent together, because Edie’s nan had tripped on a loose paving stone and fallen and broken her hip and her mum had gone to see her. If the paving stone hadn’t been loose, if Edie’s nan hadn’t fallen, Ted wouldn’t exist. A whole person with a life of his own to live.

  And how strange it is that he will never know that he looks like her, that his eyes are hers and his chin is Bobby’s. The nuns made it clear that there can be no contact with the baby once they are with their new family. Edie asked if she could write to him but they said no, it would just make things hard for him. She didn’t want to make things hard for him, did she? She wanted the best for him, didn’t she? The new family would mean a proper home, two parents, and toys and lovely clothes and all the things she couldn’t give him. She could write him one letter to take with him, to open when he’s older. That’s all he’ll ever have of her. Edie had wept so much as she told me this that I didn’t know what to do except hold her.

  ‘I want the best for him, Gloria, I do. But I want to keep him. I want to look after him. Is that selfish?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Course not.’

  ‘I think I’d be a good mum,’ she said.

  ‘You would be,’ I said. I meant it too. Any idiot could see it. Edie’s kind and practical and devoted to Ted. ‘I know you would be.’

  Just as I know I wouldn’t be. I can’t even stop Ted crying now, he’s screaming so much I can’t think. I walk around the room with him, humming, as I’ve seen Edie do.

  Eventually his cries die down and his eyelids droop. After a while I’m brave enough to put him down. He doesn’t stir. I’ll tell Edie how I calmed him and got him off to sleep. That’ll make her pleased. She hates the fact that they won’t let her spend much time with him. She’d carry him round with her all day if she could. I look at him now, so still you can’t even tell that he’s breathing. I think of Edie’s face when she’s watching him sleep, sort of fierce, it is, but soft too.

  ‘You’ll understand when yours is here,’ she said to me once. ‘You’ll feel the same.’

  I won’t, though. I can’t. It will be a relief, when they take it away.

  The baby will be gone and I will never have to think of it again.

  My ten-minute guess turns out to be really wrong as forty minutes later we’ve still not reached the cottage. The Sat Nav has tried to make me drive into a field of unimpressed-looking cows and then across a river. I check my phone but there is absolutely no signal. In the end I have to get the road atlas out.

  ‘They weren’t kidding about it being secluded, were they?’ I say.

  ‘Don’t suppose there’s a pub for miles,’ Gloria says gloomily. ‘Didn’t you think to check?’

  ‘We’re lucky Peggy found us anywhere at all,’ I say, trying to sound calm.

  But when we finally turn into the drive and see the cottage I know it’s perfect. It’s an old, white-painted farmhouse, with huge windows that look out over the fells, hills rising up steeply behind it.

  I get out of the car and stretch my legs. Peggy’s cousin’s nephew or whatever it was has left the key under a particular stone according to Peggy’s notes, but it takes me a while to identify the right one. My head is fuzzy from focusing on the road for so long, but as I breathe in the fresh-smelling air and look around at the trees and the mountains and the big expanse of blue sky I feel that there’s nowhere I’d rather be. We were right to come here, I know it. We were meant to come. We’re away from everything, just the two of us. Even the lack of phone signal is a good thing. We’re out of reach. There’s space here, space for me to work out what I’m feeling and what I’m going to do next, get everything clear in my mind. And space for Gloria to tell her story.

  After I’ve hauled the cases upstairs, Gloria gives me her cash card and then goes for a rest while I drive to the nearest town to pick up some food. I’m a bit worried about leaving her on her own in the house when we’ve only just arrived, but she promises me she’ll be fine, and when I go to tell her I’m leaving she’s already fast asleep. In fact, she’s still asleep when I get back and only appears as I’m pottering about in the kitchen trying to work out how to use the Aga stove so I can cook us some pasta for dinner. She looks a bit less tired, but still seems tense.

  ‘I got you some gin,’ I say. I hadn’t risked trying to buy it in the supermarket, but I’d spotted a convenience store on the way back to the car park and decided it was worth a try. The guy behind the counter had given me a very hard stare but he hadn’t asked me for ID. ‘And some pineapple juice. They didn’t have cherry brandy, so I just got brandy. Or there’s Cava in the fridge if you’d rather have that.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. She takes her drink and goes to sit down with it on a window seat looking out over the hills.

  When the dinner’s ready we eat it at the table but Gloria just picks at her food.

  ‘Are you not hungry?’ I say.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  It’s clear she hasn’t been listening to me. Her mind is somewhere else.

  ‘Are you nervous about coming back here?’

  ‘No.’ She avoids looking me in the eye.

  ‘You know, we don’t have to go to St Monica’s tomorrow if you don’t want to. We could wait, have a sightseeing day. Go on a boat trip or something.’ This was something I’d been promised on our family holiday, but it had never happened. I’d been so disappointed. We’d had to leave early. I’d forgotten that. Why was that? I try to drag it up from my memory but I can’t remember. Mum wasn’t happy, I remember that.

  ‘We don’t have to go to St Monica’s at all,’ she says. ‘It’s up to me.’

  I look at her, anxious. After what happened in Cambridge I still worry that she might suddenly change her mind and call the whole thing off, and I’d have to drive her back to London without ever knowing the end of the story. I know I shouldn’t be treating it like a mystery I want to solve. These are Gloria’s memories and painful ones too. But I also feel certain that she does want to share the story really, that it’s fear holding her back.

  ‘Are you having doubts about going there?’

  She doesn’t answer.

  ‘I thought you wanted to remember it all while you still can.’

  ‘Well, it’s my prerogative to change my mind if I choose to.’

  I look at her face, trying to gauge what she’s feeling, but it’s blank, closed up.

  ‘Of course it is,’ I say, trying
to sound soothing. ‘It must be hard going back to somewhere that holds painful memories. But there are happy memories too, right? Tell me more about Edie. Did you two become friends? And what about Sam? Did you ever write to him, tell him about the baby when it was born?’

  ‘You’re very keen to ask questions, aren’t you?’ she says. ‘Not so keen to answer them, though.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I say, defensive. I know exactly what she means.

  ‘Well, whenever I ask about your . . . Robin—’

  ‘Reuben? I’ve told you about him.’

  She picks up the red notebook and flicks through it.

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ she says firmly, presumably having checked. ‘Not really. I’ve even written “Hattie evasive”’ – she frowns – ‘Evasive. That is the word I mean, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say flatly. She’s right, of course.

  ‘You’ve told me who he is but you haven’t told me how you feel about him or how it is that if you’re just good friends you’re in the family way, or what he thinks about it all and why he’s in France—’

  ‘Long story,’ I interrupt.

  ‘And do you want to tell it?’

  I don’t really. I haven’t even let myself think about the night that Reuben and I had sex. The night that meant everything in my life changed. But perhaps now is the time.

  I’d decided to surprise Reuben. It was not long after he’d announced he wasn’t coming back to college. He’d disappeared off to Norfolk, where his parents had a holiday home by the sea. It used to be his gran’s. He was always going on about how much he loved it there.

  I didn’t know what to expect. He’d been quite un-Reuben-like over the last few weeks: quiet, not getting into fights, not even flirting really. Not by his standards. He’d split up with Melody, the beautiful American girl he’d been going out with, a few weeks before. I wondered if it was that. Perhaps he’d really loved her. Or maybe it was his parents. His mum was going through a rough patch, he said, and his dad was in the south of France and wasn’t interested. He just seemed down and then one day he’d decided to jack in college and disappeared off to Norfolk.

  ‘But you can’t,’ I’d said on the phone. Now Kat was at art college Reuben was my only good friend at school. And although I missed Kat, I liked the fact that Reuben and I were now an established double act.

  ‘Course I can,’ he said. ‘School can’t stop me. And I don’t suppose they’d want to.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘Obviously. What I mean is, I don’t want you to. What about your A-levels? University? What about me?’

  ‘I’d probably fail my A-levels anyway,’ he said.

  ‘No you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘That’s typical of you,’ I said, annoyed that he’d completely ignored the ‘what about me’ bit. ‘Anything you might possibly have to try at, anything there’s the teeniest possibility you might fail at, you’re just not prepared to risk it, are you?’

  ‘You’re clever,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like for normal people.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m abnormal?’

  ‘Too bloody right. Anyway, listen, come and stay when your exams are finished,’ he said. ‘We can celebrate.’

  And then I hadn’t heard from him again. I tried not to mind. I knew the mobile network was pretty dodgy where he was and he’d given me the address, so in the end I’d just decided to go. It’s the kind of thing he’d do, I thought.

  The journey took for ever. A train, then another train, then a bus. I’d walked the last bit. Looking at the map I’d seen I could take a short cut by taking a footpath across some fields near to Reuben’s house. I’d imagined arriving all fresh-faced and sparkling-eyed but the weather was both warm and showery so I’d got there bedraggled and lightly poached inside my coat. He’d laughed when he saw me standing on the doorstep.

  ‘I knew you’d come,’ he said.

  The house was not what I’d imagined. Reuben had always made it sound like a ramshackle old place but it seemed incredibly grand to me. It’s true some of the rooms smelt a bit of damp and the garden was a bit overgrown. Everything looked as though it could do with a lick of paint. But still. There was no flat-pack furniture. Everything was an antique. There were valuable-looking but ugly oil paintings on the walls and Persian rugs on the floor. Part of the garden was an orchard and beyond that, Reuben told me, was a tennis court.

  I looked around, wide-eyed. ‘Your parents really are minted, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yep. They really are.’ He laughed, bitterly. ‘If anyone ever needed proof that money doesn’t buy you happiness, my parents are it.’

  He took a gulp out of a rather dusty bottle of what looked like expensive wine – was there an actual wine cellar? – and then picked up the paper and stared at it.

  ‘Oh sorry,’ I said. ‘Am I boring you?’

  He looked up, surprised. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t seen you for three weeks. And now I’ve made all the effort to get here and you just sit here reading the bloody newspaper.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘I was just trying to do the crossword.’

  ‘You could offer me a drink? Ask me how my exams went? Say “Thanks, Hattie, for travelling what felt like a billion miles across the fens and decoding mysterious bus timetables and actually striding across cowpat-riddled fields just to come and see me”?’

  ‘Can we just imagine I’ve done all that?’

  I sigh and sit down.

  ‘Since when did you do crosswords anyway?’

  ‘Since last week. I decided I want to be the sort of person who can do cryptic crosswords.’

  ‘Okaaay,’ I said. ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘I liked the idea of being cryptic. I thought it would make me more like Sherlock Holmes.’

  He stared at the crossword a while longer. ‘“Quaker on board vessel finds fellow-feeling.” ’

  He stared at it a while longer. ‘Quaker? Vessel?’

  I shrug. ‘No idea.’

  ‘Bollocks.’ He threw the newspaper across the room, where it landed next to a very beautiful stained-glass lamp.

  ‘I’m no crossword expert but I’m pretty sure that’s not right,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not funny.’

  ‘Sherlock Holmes was a coke addict anyway, wasn’t he?’ I said, consolingly.

  ‘True,’ he said, as if considering the possibility that this might be where he’s been going wrong.

  ‘No, Reuben. That wasn’t a suggestion. That was me explaining why it’s good that you’re not like Sherlock Holmes. I’m not sure he even did crosswords, did he?’

  ‘I didn’t say he did. I just wanted to do something that would give the impression that I was that sort of person. You know, clever and a bit weird. And I thought it would be easier than solving loads of mysteries that had thwarted Scotland Yard. And quicker than learning the violin. Just something so that people would say, “Oh, yeah, Reuben, he may be a twat but that’s just because he’s a Flawed Genius.” ’ He took another drink from the bottle. ‘It’s the genius bit that’s important really. Without that you’re just flawed, like everyone else.’

  ‘You do flawed fantastically well though, to be fair,’ I said, grabbing the bottle off him and taking a gulp.

  He sighed heavily.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Reuben?

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’ He was silent for a while, thinking. ‘Do you ever feel like you don’t know who you’re supposed to be?’

  I laughed. ‘God, Reuben, you’re the living embodiment of ennui.’

  ‘What’s ennui?’

  ‘It is you, Reuben. Bored. Stagnating.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said and looked at me, smirking.

  I stuck my tongue out at him. He laughed and then just as suddenly stopped and sighed again.

  ‘You haven’t got back together with William, have you?’ he said, suspicious.r />
  ‘No, Reuben, I haven’t and never will get back together with William.’

  Reuben pulled the hideous face that he always refers to as ‘William’s sex face’. I hit him and he laughed. Then he stopped laughing and sank into gloom again.

  ‘Melody said she thinks I’m cold. Do you think I’m cold?’

  ‘No,’ I said, honestly. ‘I don’t think you’re cold. But I think sometimes you act in a way that makes people think you’re cold.’

  ‘Yes. That’s it. Trust you to know,’ he said, gloomily.

  ‘Is this what it’s all about? Melody?’

  ‘No. She’s a symptom, not a cause.’

  ‘Reuben, what’s the matter with you? Really?’

  ‘Nothing. Everything. I dunno.’

  I look at him.

  ‘I’m the matter with me,’ he said.

  ‘Meaning . . . ?’

  ‘Do you ever feel like you don’t know who you really are?’

  ‘Ummm . . .’

  He smiled. ‘No, of course you don’t. That’s what’s so brilliant about you, Hats. You know exactly who you are. And you don’t care what anyone else thinks.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? That everyone else thinks I’m a loser?’ The whole accountant thing came flooding back.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘That’s not what I meant. I just meant, you’re confident in who you are.’

  ‘I do care what people think, actually. Of course I do. Everyone does.’

  ‘But you don’t change yourself to try to fit in or stand out or get attention, do you?’

  I thought about this. ‘I guess not.’

  ‘But I do. I feel like I’ve been putting on the Reuben Wilde show for so long I don’t know what would happen if I stopped. And it’s exhausting. And boring. The thing is, how I feel inside doesn’t always match what people see on the outside. I don’t always like myself very much, Hats.’