A Funeral for an Owl

by Jane Davis

  Weight over the balls of his feet, Jim couldn’t remember the mechanics of rocking backwards. Feathers exploded behind his eyes, like the aftermath of a pillow fight. He wasn’t fit for one conversation, let alone two. “No idea where. He. Is.” His voice came in rushes between gasps. “The nurses? Are. They?”

  “They’re waving back.” Bins offered a commentary. “Now they’re on their way.” His head appeared, upside-down. “I do. Tony Maloney, your brother - I know where they all are.”

  Let go of your knees. Get down before you fall down. “He won’t help.”

  The old man blinked. “I - I think he will.”

  The light was so very bright. The old man was standing over him, peering down. Jim was fading. Before closing his eyes, he thought he said, “OK.”

  He was aware of a jerking movement as he was hauled onto a trolley, an oxygen mask being placed over his mouth. Speeding footsteps accompanied his journey. People were speaking very fast, their words indistinct but, rising above the orders, he recognised Ayisha’s voice. Suddenly, it was imperative that he spoke to her. He tried unsuccessfully to raise his head but someone shouted, “Stop a moment!”

  A face loomed close, a face that from its skin colour and the sheen of hair could only be Princess Jasmine’s. His oxygen mask was moved to one side. With supreme effort, Jim managed, “Landed on a snake.” There. He had said it.

  She looked confused, disappointed even. Had she misunderstood?

  “I thought he’d be alright with you for a few moments.” Sophia was beside him too. He was in capable hands.

  “You couldn’t have stopped him,” Ayisha was saying.

  Jim willed his mouth to move: there was more. “Back to the beginning.”

  The mask replaced, the trolley was moving again. She was nodding now, keeping pace. “Alright.” She smiled, eyes bright with tears.

  “Alright.”

  Satisfied, once more he surrendered his body to the nicotine-scented staff of St Helier.

  CHAPTER 43: JIM - AUGUST 1992 - SUTTON POLICE STATION

  “Jim,” Cowley said in the cramped interview room. “How are you feeling today?”

  “Sit up straight, love,” his mother encouraged, elbows tight.

  He shuffled in the uncomfortable plastic seat, ending up back in his original position.

  “- and answer when you’re asked a question!”

  The boy shrugged. “Alright, I s’pose.”

  The policewoman nodded as if expecting more. He picked the raised edge of the table top (Formica, white, with wavy black lines running through it), the flayed skin of his knuckles on display.

  “Jim, there are no right or wrong answers here. If I ask you something and you don’t know the answer, it’s alright to say so. We just need to understand how Aimee had been feeling recently, OK?”

  It was not remotely OK, not when she said one thing and meant another, but he nodded. What else could he do?

  “Good. How long had you known each other?”

  It stung him like a slap, Cowley’s use of the past tense. After all her insistence that Aimee was only missing! “‘Bout six weeks.”

  “Only six weeks?”

  Jim felt that Cowley was implying he didn’t really know her that well at all. “We met right at the start of the holidays.” He succeeded in prising up a good section of Formica before his mother’s hand slapped his away.

  “How did that happen?”

  “I was out bird-watching, like I usually am, when she just showed up.”

  “And where was this?”

  “Down by the side of the railway.” From the corner of his eye, Jim saw his mother uncross and cross her legs. “Same place I found her shoe.”

  “Had she been there before?” Cowley continued. Jim saw that the hand holding the pen was the one that was wearing an engagement ring, a plain gold ring with a square-cut diamond: she was left-handed, like him.

  “No.” His right foot - the one further away from his mother - began to tap against a chair leg. “I would’ve seen her.” The nails of the hand that held the pen were filed square across the top and the tips were very white.

  “Why there?” It seemed like a genuine question. Aimee had asked him the same thing.

  He might have talked about the migration paths of birds. “It’s private,” he shrugged. “No one to bother you.”

  “So, you were there on your own before Aimee came along?”

  “Yes.” He heard his mother’s slight sigh. (Her nails were filed short: she didn’t like getting ‘gunk’ stuck underneath them while she was working.)

  “We found a lot of empty bottles and cans.” Cowley smiled and lowered her head, trying to make eye contact. “It looked as if there’d been quite a party.”

  Raising his eyes, Jim found them locked on the curve of Cowley’s chest - Whether you’re ooo, or whether you’re shub-bub-do-wah - and wondered what kind of bra she would be hiding under her tightly-buttoned uniform.

  “Jim,” his mother prompted with an elbow.

  He blinked. Looking higher he located her mouth. “That’s the people who go there at night. It’s quiet in the daytime.”

  “He’s always home in time for tea,” Jean added.

  Satisfied, or simply trying a different tack, Cowley asked, “So you met the once” - here, the mouth appeared to stretch into an involuntary smile - “And then what?”

  “Aimee was interested in the birds. She started to come every day… almost.”

  “You mentioned a bird-watching club to her parents?”

  “I made that up,” he admitted.

  “Can I ask why?”

  Again, Jim didn’t feel threatened. He thought Cowley might understand, and that she would help his mother to understand. He turned up the edges of his mouth. “I thought they’d be happier that way.”

  Cowley didn’t ask who. She asked, “What way was that?”

  “Saved explaining.”

  “Go on.” Cowley’s fingers walked the pen in windmills.

  “S’embarrassing when people ask questions.” He shuffled in his seat, avoiding his mum’s gaze.

  “What sort of questions?”

  “You know.” Jim felt himself redden. “About whether anything was going on.”

  “You were friends. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  She got it. He’d hoped she might. “Yes.”

  “Did Aimee have a boyfriend that you know of?”

  Jim needed to pee. He hadn’t thought to ask before they were shown into the interview room. “No.”

  “And you thought her parents would have minded that you were friends?”

  He pressed his thighs together, but he would need more of a distraction than that. “They wouldn’t have liked it.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  His eyes moved to the single window. Its pane was frosted. There was a dead wasp on the sill. “They wouldn’t have understood why she wanted to hang out with me.”

  “And why do you think she did?”

  “How should I know?” Jim accidentally met Cowley’s eyes: blue, concerned. He looked down and her chest came back into view. Triumph’s got the bra for the way you are. Down again, until his eyes rested on the pen. A Bic. Plug missing from the end. The plastic slightly chewed.

  She had moved on. “Apart from the evening when you found the owl, can you think of anything that upset her?”

  There were lots of times, Jim now saw, that Aimee had been upset. What he was missing was reasons. “There was this one time it was getting late. These blokes turned up. I thought that they were going to rough us up, but they just swiped our money.”

  One of his mother’s hands made an appearance on the table top. “You didn’t tell me about that!”

  “You would’ve told me not to go back there. We decided that for ourselves.”

  “When was this?” Cowley refereed, biro stilled and at the ready.

  “Two, maybe three weeks ago.”

  “Did you report it?�
� Cowley asked.

  “No point.”

  “There’s always a point.”

  “I knew them.” He thought that, if he used these words, his mother might understand that Nick had been involved.

  “I see,” Cowley said. “Did they hurt either of you?”

  “One of them had me round the neck.” His hand decided to loosen his tie, which suddenly appeared to be stifling him. “They didn’t lay a finger on Aimee - but she was upset. Like I said, we decided not to go back there.”

  “Where did you go instead?”

  “The local parks. To the woods. We went all the way to Box Hill once. On the train.”

  “What did you do?”

  It seemed like an unnecessary question. “What we always did. Bird-watching.”

  “Tell her about the pictures, Jim,” his mother prompted.

  “I sketch everything. It’s like a record of what I see.”

  “There’s an entry for every day,” his mother said. “They’re very good.”

  Cowley smiled. “I don’t suppose you brought them with you?”

  “No!” He was horrified at the thought of someone looking at his private stuff.

  “Another time. Did Aimee seem worried about anything to you?”

  She was going to have to give Jim more than that to work on. “Like what?”

  “Jim!”

  “No, that’s alright. Had she argued with any of her friends?”

  “I don’t know anything about her other friends.”

  “She hadn’t seen any of them for the best part of six weeks. Do you have any idea why that might be?”

  “She never talked about them.”

  “Did she say anything about her family?”

  “She told me what her parents did work-wise, stuff like that.”

  “Do you think she was happy at home?”

  This was where he wasn’t sure it was his business to say. What was happy supposed to mean, anyway? A brief moment - like lying in the grass with sunburn on your face - that you were too scared to acknowledge because that might chase it away.

  Cowley’s pencilled-in eyebrows, perfect semicircles, lifted. “Jim, Mrs White said that Aimee had a black eye at the beginning of the holidays. Do you know how she might have got it?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “But you saw the black eye?”

  He rubbed the inside corner of one of his eyes.

  “Jim?” she persisted.

  “Alright! Yes, I saw it.”

  “Did she tell you anything about it?”

  The small room appeared to be running short of oxygen. “She said she asked for it.” Jim felt as if the words had been squeezed out of him, but it wasn’t enough. There were more questions. More and more.

  “What did you think she meant by that?”

  “Like she said.”

  Cowley appeared to be waiting for him to expand. “Didn’t you ask her what she had done?” she asked at length.

  “Where I come from, we don’t ask questions.”

  Jim’s mother sat straight-backed, tight-lipped, almost approving.

  “How do you think she got it?”

  “Looked to me like she’d been beaten up.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Her clothes were ripped and she had a bruise on her back.” Damn!

  Cowley held the pen by both ends and rolled it between her fingers. “On her back?”

  Too late to back-track, Jim nodded.

  The policewoman’s expression suggested this was something a mother should have known about. “You saw Aimee’s back?”

  Jim would have liked the comfort of a pen to hold on to. “She showed me,” he stammered, looking from one of them to the other.

  “What did it look like?”

  He shuffled in his seat. “Like a stamp mark.”

  “It was shaped like someone’s shoe?”

  “It was more the size of it.” Fingers wouldn’t do the job: he needed hands to demonstrate.

  While Cowley sighed, Jean’s hand leapt to her mouth.

  “Jim,” the policewoman said. “You told me last night that you thought Aimee had walked onto the tracks. What made you say that?”

  He sunk further down into the seat and folded his arms.

  “Jim?” his mother prompted.

  “Jim?” Cowley asked, her voice concerned. “This is important. It sounds as if the two of you were very close.”

  “Look!” He sat up and raised his voice. “People say stuff all the time! How was I supposed to know she was serious?”

  Cowley glanced from his face to his mother’s and back again. “You’re right, Jim. People do say things like that and it doesn’t mean they’re going to do anything about it. If Aimee had been serious, we’d have found the evidence by now. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Jim’s lip twitched.

  “It’s a horrible thing to think about, I know, but, as it is, all we have is the sole of a flip-flop, and it’s a common enough type of shoe. And you pointed out yourself that a fox had already had hold of it. Even if it was hers, it might have been carried there from somewhere else.”

  Oh, yes, what a bloody marvellous coincidence that would have been: carried all the way from Beddington Park to the precise place the pair of them went bird-watching!

  “Do you hear that, Jim?” His mother put a hand on one of his shoulders. “It might not be Aimee’s.”

  “Stop treating me like an idiot!” Disappointed in his mother, he turned sideways and sat with his head in his hands. “Of course it was hers!”

  “He’s still very upset,” he heard Jean excusing his outburst, as if he was being unreasonable and not them.

  “Jim, we believe we have a good chance of bringing Aimee home, but the next forty-eight hours will be crucial. We’re throwing all of our resources at this. I know it’s hard, but you’re one of the very few people who -”

  “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time,” he mumbled.

  “Can you remember exactly what Aimee said?” Cowley urged. “Her precise words.”

  Jim spoke into his hands. “She said how she’d imagined doing it.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m going to have to ask you to speak up.”

  Jim cast his hands aside. “I said, she said how when she sat looking at the tracks she imagined doing it.”

  His mother shook her head. “Poor girl.”

  “And how did you reply?”

  “I told her not to be so stupid. I said she’d be electrocuted before a train got her.”

  “And then?” Cowley’s voice was gentle.

  They were both waiting. Looking at him and waiting. There was an electric buzzing in his ears. “Then we laughed.” His voice sounded too loud to him. He pushed back his chair and stood. It tipped over, clattering to the floor. “We laughed about it, alright?”

  CHAPTER 44: AYISHA - AUGUST 2010 -AT HOME

  Ayisha reached under the shade of the lamp on her bedside table and clicked the switch, releasing a bright halo. Her eyes protested. It was three thirty: half an hour since she last checked the hands of her alarm clock. Sleep had evaded her. Her mind seemed intent on providing a rolling newsreel for the scenes Jim had described.

  Like a home-movie projected onto her bedroom wall, she saw a boy and his mother buying flowers from a van. White, like the underfeathers of the owl; white, like the missing girl’s surname. A boy approaching the front garden of a large house with a bay window. Aided by recent events at the school, she had no trouble appreciating his shock at the sheer number of handwritten cards, candles and teddy bears. She pictured him running from this place that resembled a shrine, his mother calling after him, “Jim! Slow down, Jim!” He laid the bouquet by the dusty grey remains of the campfire where they had found the owl: their place. The only respectful thing to do. He looked up at the bridge and saw his mother beckoning, mouthing a silent Come on!

  Throwing her duvet aside, Ayisha launched her legs over the side of th
e bed and edged her toes into her slippers. She sat very still, the cooling heels of her hands pressed against her closed eyelids.

  She saw the boy and his mother arriving home to the sight of a police car, its engine running; doors flung open on either side, two policemen throwing their large shiny shoes out, the severe crease of their uniform trousers standing proud.

  She saw the mother clutch her handbag and identify herself.

  “We need to take the lad in for a few questions.”

  “Again?” Her voice was weary. “I suppose we may as well get it over with, then,” she sighed impatiently, then turned to Jim and whispered, “When they say that Aimee’s missing, agree with them. Understand?”

  “In the car, please.” Ayisha saw a policemen grip the boy’s arm, marching him to the car. “Duck,” he said, pushing the boy’s head free of the door frame.

  Ayisha padded into the kitchen and, distracted by moving images that wouldn’t be stilled, warmed a pan of milk. After spooning honey into a white mug she sat at the rectangular kitchen table, cradling the mug in both hands. There were three empty seats: room enough for two policemen and a mother.

  The room she saw wasn’t her kitchen. It was the interview room Jim had described. The peeling tabletop - even the dead wasp - was the same. The questions were similar. It was the intent that was different. Asked about the nature of his relationship with Aimee White, she heard the boy respond, thinking he was giving the response that would send him home.

  “She was my friend.”

  “Was?”

  “She’s gone missing, hasn’t she?”

  But that wasn’t the right answer. They wanted to know if the relationship was physical. Whatever that meant.

  “We went bird-watching. Down by the railway tracks.”

  And they said, “We’ve been down by the railway tracks and we couldn’t find any evidence of bird-watching, but -” A sealed plastic bag full of beer cans and vodka bottles and teaspoons and foil squares and foil wrappers and used condoms was dumped, unceremoniously, on the tabletop. “- we found all of this.”

  Ayisha heard the mother ask, “Is this really necessary?”

  Ignoring her protest, one demanded, “Recognise this lot?”

  “Even if I did,” the boy stammered. “It doesn’t make it mine.”