“Ach that’d be great Mrs M. Cheers.”
Danny rolled his eyes. “Have mine,” he said, indicating the tray. His mouth still tasted of Listerine, and his Ma couldn’t make tea for shit. Even if she could, he hated tea.
Steve took a sip from his cup. “Lovely tea, Mrs M,” he said brightly. Danny could have stabbed him.
“How’s wee Maggie doin?”
At any other time, Danny would have winced at the awkwardness that innocent question was sure to generate from all assembled. Right now he had more pressing things on his mind, but he still cast a reflexive glance at Steve, who met his eyes with a here we go again look that they’d shared many times before.
“Sure we broke up, Mrs M,” Steve said, awkwardly crowbarring some joviality into his tone.
“Ach!” she coloured. “So yis did. Sorry love, I keep forgetting don’t I.”
“Yeah…” Danny and Steve chorused together.
“I thought yis were a lovely wee couple as well.”
Steve’s forced smile wilted. “Yeah,” he replied. “So did I. Um. So – are the police-?”
“I phoned them earlier,“ Danny said. Another phone call he’d been thrilled to make. “They said normally it’d be too early for them to declare them missing, but because there’s a – because there’s…” he hesitated, fighting to keep his composure. His stomach lurched again. Every time he let reality back in fully he couldn’t handle it. Jesus. He was a fuckin’ mess.
“Because there‘s a baby…“ he finally completed the sentence, “they’ve taken the details, and they’re comin over to have a look around sometime tonight, assuming…”
Assuming they don’t turn up safe and well before then.
He couldn’t even say it. It was as if every time he dared to say it, it became less powerful.
“Fuck,“ he said, remembering something, “the police said not to touch anything…”
His Ma almost choked on her Tetley, looking down at the cup in horror as if the windows were about to be kicked in by a SWAT team ready to take her down for this heinous crime. “Danny I didn’t know…I’m so sorry…” she said.
Danny held up a hand to calm her down. “Not your fault Ma, it’s mine. Just…from now on, no-one touch anything.”
“Did they say anything else?”
It was the first time his Da had spoken since Steve had shown up. Danny looked over at him, fighting down a rush of anger as the maybe she’s joined a cult conversation came back to him. Whether because of that or because more and more time was ticking by with no sign of Ellie or Luke, his Da seemed more tense now than before.
“Just the same oul shite I’ve been gettin from the hospitals – very early days, try to remain calm, try phoning everyone you can think of, they’ll probably turn up in the next few hours.”
“It’s good advice,” his Da said.
“Yeah they’re probably right love,” his Ma chimed in.
“Aye,” Steve agreed. “Spot on.”
Danny couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Jesus Christ, they’ve fuckin’ vanished!” he cried out, as if talking to morons. “No coats. No purse. No pram. No nappies. No nothin’. I checked the neighbours. No-one saw them leave. Everyone sees everythin’ in this fuckin’ street. If she didn’t take the pram, she was either carrying Luke or she phoned for a taxi. I ‘phoned round the local taxi depos. Only one booking for here today – for you.”
Steve’s eyes widened in alarm as Danny’s parents turned their eyes on him at this piece of news.
“Your taxi from you bein’ here last night helpin’ me in the garden. We ‘phoned it at after twelve,” Danny elaborated.
Steve deflated with relief. “Aye, that’s right,” he said.
“Proper wee fuckin’ mystery isn’t it? Isn’t it just?” Danny said bitterly. He didn’t feel better exactly for the outburst, because it had solved nothing after all, but he did feel some relief from the pressure of having to pretend everything was almost normal. “Come on, you have to admit – it’s ab…sol….ute…ly fascinating! It’s like the Marie fucking Celeste!”
“Danny…” his Ma said. She tried to put a hand on his arm to calm him down. Fuck that. He moved away. He was only just getting started.
“What, Ma?” he asked, bright-eyed, feeling energised properly for the first time. “What? I haven’t finished. Ellie’s mobile has been giving me the same weird static signal since I came home. I thought it was my mobile but it’s not. Wait til ya hear this…”
As Danny hit keys on his phone, Steve took a step back and covered his ears. He turned to Linda and Tony. “Copy me,” he advised.
Tony frowned. “Why, what’s-”
His question was answered a moment later as the electronic shriek ripped out from Danny’s mobile again. Danny let it blare out for a few seconds. He’d grown so accustomed to it from ringing Ellie’s mobile every fifteen minutes or so over the last few hours that its pitch no longer caused him to flinch reflexively. It had become the central symbol of this whole fuckin’ puzzle, the start of it all. And so he made no move to cut it off even as his parents and best friend staggered under its assault, seeming almost to revel in it. Only when he saw the pain written on his mother’s face as she glanced up pleadingly at him did he cut the call.
Only then did he realise that tears were streaming down his cheeks.
Luke would be asleep by now, on a normal night. He’d have lifted him up the stairs like a wee sack of coal over one shoulder and laid him gently in his cot. And then he’d have come downstairs and he’d have had that chat with Ellie about the two of them, and Christ he’d been so scared to think of it, but he wanted to have it now so badly, even if she really was going to give him The Talk. He would fight it. He would refuse.
He wasn’t finished yet.
“I called her network,” he continued. “They ran checks. There are no network problems. They haven’t got a fucking clue what’s causing the static.”
“Jesus Christ,” his father said softly. Danny ignored him. He’d heard enough of his father’s theories tonight. Something was pulling up outside. He moved to the window.
“Her ones are here,” he said simply, and moved to the door to let them in, leaving his parents and his best friend standing in silence in the room, looking at one another, none with the slightest clue what to say.
***
It was going about as well as could be expected, Danny reflected as he stood by the front window. Night was falling fast outside.
“…think that would be sensible.”
“It’s pretty fuckin’ hard to be sensible at a time like this…”
“Well we’re just as worried as everyone else! This is my daughter! Our only grandchild! We’ve spent the last – haven’t we Michael? haven’t we? – the last four hours ringing every single person we can think of, and not a single one has heard from her.”
“God help us!”
“It’s not her. It’s not her at all. She was always a headstrong girl, God knows. She had her rebellious streak…as I think we’re all well aware…but she was never one to up and leave.”
Danny could feel the eyes boring into his back as fuckface said it. He still didn’t turn. Apart from an initial few words when Michael and Christina had entered, he had lost the energy for the conversation entirely.
“Now what does th-” his father’s voice sounded.
And then the cavalry bugles sounded.
“Come on, folks, for fucks sake. Jesus Christ. I know tensions are runnin high but c’mon, y’know…pull together and all that balls. Too many cooks spoil the broth to a blind donkey. Danny…Danny?”
Danny glanced back over his shoulder to Steve, who pleaded with him silently to intervene. He should. He knew he should. But he simply didn’t have the energy to do it. And like that, the armistice was gone and hostilities were resumed. Danny could see Steve throw up his hands in disgust without actually having to do it physically.
“We rang the police,” Christina announced.
Michael harrumphed. “They’ve weren’t very helpful when I spoke to them.”
“So has Danny,” Linda piped up instantly. “They’re coming over shortly.”
There must have been some sort of facial expression exchanged, was Danny’s guess, because the temperature in the room dropped by about a hundred degrees in a fraction of a second and both of his parents began shouting and asking what the fuck that look was meant to mean and were met with outraged reiterations of how serious this situation was and how they were not going to be instructed how to behave when their only daughter and grandchild vanished-
Danny turned.
“Stop it.”
He must have hit the right tone, for even though his volume was quiet compared to the accusations and counter-accusations being hurled across the battlements before him, all four combatants fell silent immediately. Everyone’s attention turned to him.
“The police say,” he said, slowly, as if addressing morons, “that they’re doing all they can. They’ll be along later to take a statement from me and a full description from all of you, as well as to inspect the house for…well…for whatever turns up,“ he finished, unable to bring himself to say the word clues.
He paused to take a long breath. It felt like the first one he’d had in about a decade. And when he spoke again, it was in the same quiet tone as before.
“Now I’ll say this once, and not again. My girlfriend and my son are missing, and I don’t know where they’ve gone. All I want to do is get out there and look for them, turn the fucking world fucking upside fucking down for them, but I can’t because I have to wait for the police to arrive. So I stand here. Feeling useless. So useless I want to tear myself apart. If I am made, in my misery, to listen to you bickering amongst yourselves with your pointless, pedantic, posturing piss-fucking BULLSHIT for one single second more than I have already had to endure, then I will take no pleasure at all from throwing you the fuck out of my house right then and there, but I will fucking do it. Am I making myself absolutely clear to you?”
At any other time, he might have found the sheer scale of Michael Quinn’s fury at being spoken to in such a way hilarious. But not now. He thought he saw pride in his own Da’s eyes, but unfortunately gaining his long-absentee father’s approval was not high on his list of priorities either. Steve looked as if he were about to spontaneously combust into some sort of firework display of pride, though.
“Please, no nodding. Speak up.”
“Yes, son. I’m sorry,” his Da spoke up first.
“Son, I’m-”
His Ma was upset, and his heart softened to see it. He stepped forward and squeezed her arm with his hand. “I know, Ma,” he said, and managed to give her a semi-smile.
The remainder of the room was conspicuous in its silence. He turned his attention to Michael and Christina. As ever, she was deferring to him to colour her stance.
“Very eloquently put. Perhaps that half a degree of yours wasn’t a total loss.”
Steve, perhaps – but only perhaps – believing himself to be whispering, very clearly said the word wanker in response to this. The reactions of everyone else in the room to this quickly revealed to him that he’d been a bit louder than he’d thought. He went crimson, but not as much as Michael Quinn.
As the police pulled up outside, wonder of wonders, it was Christina who prevented their first act being to pick the bones of an assault charge. “What my husband meant to say was yes,” she said, arching her eyebrows at Michael as if daring him to disagree.
“Yes. Yes, it was,” he agreed, but only after he’d sighted the officers moving up the path. The doorbell rang a second later.
He thinks I had something to do with this. There was no getting round it, and even as Danny opened the door and waved the police inside, he knew that if it were possible, his day had just gotten more complicated.
***
He had just gone to sleep when she did it. For a moment, in his slumber, the sensations of coldness and wetness became part of his dreamscape and then his mind, as if underwater, kicked up towards the surface. As he broke through and was no longer submerged in his subconscious, he was presented with the sight of her standing above the bed, holding a wet towel a few feet above his head, allowing it to drip water on his face. Another huge droplet landed on his nose and splashed, sending little frigid fingers of shock through him.
Seeing he was awake now, Ellie jerked the towel away like a matador and stuck her tongue out at him. He came to terms with the scene in only a few seconds and his first urge was to howl in outrage and lunge from the bed for her, seeking his revenge. She squealed in delighted terror and scampered for the stairs, with him in hot pursuit. She was shouting incoherently, begging him not to catch her and get her and that she was going to tell on him if he did something to her, and he was growling like a madman.
He caught her at the bottom of the stairs, his searching fingers locking around her fleeing elbow as she was forced to turn and bolt for the back door and he rounded the bend that signalled the end of their staircase. She wriggled in his grasp deliciously and he pulled her to him and proclaimed his right for revenge and she pouted and told him that he was meant to be helping her strip the living room wallpaper, not falling asleep on her…to which he pointed out, mildly, as he held her close, that it was her fault for finding alternative physical activity the moment Luke had been wheeled from the house by Danny’s mother not an hour before…
Phantoms.
As Danny stared at the spot at the bottom of the stairs where he and Ellie had kissed, where they had more than kissed, the memory-ghosts of he and Ellie faded. They didn’t do so voluntarily, but by a conscious effort of will. He ignored their insistence to return as he walked upstairs, having some vague notion of brushing his teeth because it seemed like a nice and normal night-time thing to do.
The police had been…well, they’d been professional, which was as much as could be expected. They had asked him to describe the events of the day several times, and then they had asked him some follow-up questions, which had been asked very nicely and very calmly - details of friends and relatives, their favourite places to go.
They’d asked him for the bank account details and the credit card numbers, where Ellie could collect any benefits they were on; which was none - they were moral, or dopey, enough not to be claiming any save the usual family tax credit and family allowance, and those went straight into the bank account.
And then the questions and the information gathering had switched from this track to a parallel track, so subtly that he had to applaud the transition, but it didn’t fool him for a second. How had they put it - events that could be linked with the disappearance.
How were things between you and your family, Danny? Feeling particularly happy with life recently, Danny? How about Ellie? Any history of depression there?
Under any stress, Danny?
“Stress,” he echoed.
Yes, stress. We all know how things get on top of us sometimes eh? Financially? What do you work at, Danny?
“I work for Lircom.”
Wow, Lircom. They’re going well, aren’t they. Saw them on the news there tonight. I’m a customer myself. Don’t suppose you could get me a discount – ha ha, just my little joke there. Do you like it there?
“I did,” he said, and even as he said it he knew he’d just dug himself in a little deeper. Sure enough, that had gotten everyone’s attention.
“I’m being let go,” he said. “I found out today.”
Folk'd Page 10