Is Anybody There?

by Jean Ure

  I no longer froze at every corner, expecting him to be lurking there, nor jumped at every shadow. For a while I was nervous when out on the playing field because it is bordered by trees, and trees still made my knees turn to jelly, so that I did my best to stay safely in the middle, though this wasn’t always possible, especially playing hockey. Miss Armstrong always liked to stick me way out on the wing, on account of me having these long gangly legs and her being of the mistaken opinion that this meant I enjoyed running. Unfortunately, having no aptitude whatsoever for the futile game of hockey, I generally managed to miss every pass that came my way, so that I was for ever cantering along by the side of the trees, with palpitating heart, in pursuit of that stupid little ball. And all the while, as I cantered, I would be thinking to myself how easily someone could be loitering there, in the shade of the trees, waiting to spring; and how, if they had a car ready and waiting, they could bundle a person into it and be off and away and down Gravelpit Hill before Miss Armstrong had time to shout, “Jo! Move it!” (which she shouted quite a lot).

  However, as the weeks passed by, and things jogged on just the same as always, too much homework, hockey in the freezing rain, Chloe told off a dozen times a day for talking, Mel Sanders sent home for customising her school uniform (i.e., hiking her skirt up practically to her navel), Dee being made class rep, me getting a D for a geography assignment – “Did you really expect to get away with this?” – quite honestly, in the end, I just didn’t have the time to go on being neurotic. Little by little the bad dreams faded and I really did feel, at last, that I had come through my ordeal and could start living again.

  Which I did!

  We met up most Saturdays, the three of us, to mooch round the shopping centre. We had this thing where we pretended we were getting married, or going on holiday, or had a date with someone we really fancied, and we picked out all the clothes and accessories that we would buy. One Saturday we pretended we were pregnant and went to the Mother and Baby department, but Chloe kept getting these fits of the screaming giggles, which set me off, and even Dee, so that in the end we had to leave.

  “Naked!” screeched Chloe. “We’ve got nothing to wear!”

  Which, needless to say, set us off all over again. One Saturday we had a sleepover at Chloe’s, where I was cajoled into playing The Game. I didn’t really mind as we hadn’t played it for ages. Not since that fateful night when we had decided to go for our end-of-term celebration. But it was all light-hearted. Chloe wanted me to do her and Dee.

  “I can’t remember when you last did us!”

  So Chloe gave me her favourite silver bangle to hold, and Dee gave me her watch, and I did them both, sitting in torchlight in Chloe’s bedroom. It was spooky, but it was fun. Whenever I did a session with Chloe it was like falling into a world made up of mad screen savers, all whirling and whizzing and scooting about. The inside of Chloe’s mind never really stayed still long enough for me to make much sense of it. Not very restful. Dee, on the other hand, was more like the sea: calm on the surface, but waves building up below. I usually stayed on the surface as I really didn’t want to probe too deeply; I didn’t feel ready for that.

  I had often wondered what I would say if, just by chance, I caught a glimpse of something really dark and disturbing. Would I tell them? Or would I keep quiet? I thought that I would probably keep quiet since, after all, it was only supposed to be a game. I suspected that Mum probably quite often saw things that were disturbing. I didn’t know how she dealt with that as it wasn’t something we had ever discussed, but I guessed that it must drain her and was one of the reasons she was so often worn out. It just added to my determination not to follow the same path that she had done. I mightn’t mind helping people in some other kind of way, such as teaching handicapped children, say, or saving the rain forest, but no way was I going to plumb the depths of alien minds! I didn’t even want to plumb the depths of my friends’ minds.

  “You never say anything bad, do you?” said Dee.

  I replied, “Maybe that’s because I don’t see anything bad.”

  “That’s right,” said Chloe. “Because we’re happy!”

  We were happy, that term. We’d found our feet as Year 8s, and thought that we were pretty important; we’d got used to having Mrs Monahan as our class teacher, and had learnt all her little quirks and foibles. Like, for instance, the way she insisted that whenever she came into the room at the start of the day we all had to stand up and chant, “Good morning, Mrs Monahan!” Very weird, we thought; but a small price to pay for maintaining a good relationship.

  Above all, of course, we had one another. Me and Chloe and Dee. We were so close, the three of us! Mel once sneeringly referred to us as “The Triplets”. We didn’t care. We were us, and she was no one. It is such a comfort, having friends! I was just so relieved that all the unpleasantness that had threatened us seemed to have blown over. More and more, it was like it had never been. I thought that we would be friends for ever.

  And then it happened. The incident that shattered our lives: Gayle Gardiner went missing.

  The news broke one Monday morning, the day we went back after half term. I first heard it on the radio (Mum won’t let me watch breakfast TV. She’s such a puritan.) As soon as they said the name Gayle Gardiner I just, like, froze.

  “What’s the matter?” said Mum.

  I shrieked, “She’s someone at school! She’s in Year 12. Mum, put the telly on!”

  I couldn’t believe that it was our Gayle. But then Mum switched on to breakfast TV and I saw a picture of her, and all the familiar shivery darts of fear went zinging through my body as I heard them say how she had gone off clubbing on Saturday evening with a friend, Ruby Simpson (who is also at our school), but they had somehow or other managed to have a terrific row on the bus on the way in to town, with the result that Ruby had turned round and gone back home, leaving Gayle to go on to the club by herself. The trouble was that nobody who was at the club that night could remember seeing her, so that it was now believed she had never reached it; in which case, something must have happened to her between Hindes Corner, where she would have got off the bus, and Valley Road, just five minutes away, where the club was.

  Hindes Corner was the last stop before the bus station and people had come forward to say they remembered her getting off, but nobody had noticed where she had gone after that, whether she had taken the short cut to Valley Road up the side of Marks & Spencer and out through the multistorey (which I certainly wouldn’t have done) or whether she had gone the long way round, via the High Street.

  If she’d gone by the High Street, there must have been loads of people about, or so I would have thought. The multistorey would have been too scary for words, but I could see that if you’d just had a humongous row with your best friend and were still sizzling with fury, then the adrenalin would be pumping round your body at such a rate you might well go boldly marching into the bowels of darkness thinking you were immune. It’s the sort of stupid, reckless thing I could have done myself, once upon a time. I wouldn’t now, because I’d learnt my lesson; I’d been lucky. But I looked at the picture of Gayle on breakfast TV, happy and laughing and full of life, and I knew, with a sickening sensation of clamminess down in the pit of my stomach, that whatever had happened to her could all too easily have happened to me.

  The police were appealing for witnesses to come forward. I thought that someone surely must remember seeing her. It wasn’t like she was one of those frowsy, mouselike people. She was really striking, she had this startling red gold hair, all frizzed out like a halo, she’d been wearing (this is what they said on the TV) a bright orange-and-black checked coat with a tartan miniskirt and long red boots.

  “She couldn’t just disappear,” I said. I could hear my voice, all plaintive and appealing. “Not in the middle of a town!”

  “It’s been thirty-six hours,” said Mum.

  “Yes, but they’ve only just announced it. Someone’s bound to have seen her.�
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  Mum shook her head. Not like she was contradicting me; more like … despairing.

  “The first twenty-four hours are the crucial ones.”

  I wasn’t brave enough to ask her why; in any case, I already knew the answer. If a person isn’t found in the first twenty-four hours, it usually means it’s too late. Unless, of course, she’d simply run away from home.

  I suggested this to Mum, who agreed that it was a possibility.

  “I mean, she’s in Year 12,” I said. “She could have gone off with a boyfriend.”

  Or she could have had a row with her parents. Mum agreed that that, too, was a possibility.

  “But fancy letting a girl of that age go clubbing!”

  “Mum, she’s Year 12,” I said.

  “Oh, I know, I know,” said Mum. “You think I live in the dark ages, you think I’m just an old fusspot … but how do you imagine her mum and dad are feeling right now?”

  Next day, we all knew how her mum and dad were feeling because they were on television, pleading for Gayle to come home. Or, if someone was holding her, to let her go and not hurt her. Both her mum and her dad were crying, and it made me cry, too. It brought it all back to me, how my mum might have cried and been on television, begging someone not to hurt me.

  In the newspaper it said how the Gardiners were a “devoted family”. Gayle and her mum and dad got on really well and never had rows, and Gayle had been looking forward to helping them celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. They’d been going to have a big family gathering, but now it was probably going to be cancelled.

  Our head teacher was interviewed and said how Gayle was a good student, popular with her classmates and not in any kind of trouble. Reporters had talked to Ruby, who’d told them how she and Gayle had had this massive row because Gayle thought Ruby had been going out behind her back with her boyfriend.

  “But it wasn’t true,” sobbed Ruby.

  The paper went and interviewed the boyfriend anyway and discovered that he’d actually been at another club on Saturday night, with a totally different girl, so that put paid to my romantic notion that maybe Gayle had eloped.

  I still clung to the one shred of hope, which was something I’d once read somewhere, that by far the majority of young people who go missing have run off for reasons of their own. Like maybe they’re deep into drugs and no one knows about it, or they’ve got a secret boyfriend, or they don’t like their new stepdad, or – well, just anything, really. In other words, simply because someone has disappeared doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve been abducted. This was what I kept telling myself, but I wasn’t convinced. And all the feelings I had experienced after my close shave with Paul came flooding back.

  Gayle’s sister, Ellie, was in our class. She didn’t come to school for the first couple of days, and then when she came back almost nobody was brave enough to talk to her. We didn’t know what to say. We all felt really sorry for her and desperately wanted to show it, but we were scared in case we upset her and set her off crying. Her face was already white and pinched, and sodden with tears.

  Her best friend, Tasha, kept giving us these reproachful glares, like she thought we were cold and heartless and didn’t care; but the one time Chloe went bouncing up, full of good intentions, she snarled at her to “Just go away! Ellie doesn’t want to be bothered.” It didn’t exactly encourage the rest of us. Even Chloe, who as a rule is quite impervious to snubs, didn’t go back for a second helping.

  Every day we listened to the news, hoping that the police would have uncovered some clues, but nobody had come forward and they seemed as baffled as ever.

  “Couldn’t your mum help them?” said Dee. She said she’d once seen a film where a medium had been given something to hold that had belong to a girl who had disappeared, and the medium had “gone into a trance”and been able to tell the police that they would find the girl “buried in some woods by the side of a stream.”

  “And was she?” said Chloe.

  Dee said she couldn’t remember.

  “Well, that was a lot of help,” I said.

  “Yes, but mediums are sometimes called in by the police,” said Dee. “If we got something that belonged to Gayle and gave it to your mum—”

  “Mum doesn’t work that way,” I said. “She has to have the person there, in front of her.”

  “You don’t,” said Chloe.

  “Why don’t we try it,” urged Dee.

  “Look, if Mum thought she could be of help, she’d go to the police herself,” I said. “But she doesn’t do that sort of thing.”

  “So what, exactly does she do?” said Chloe.

  I explained that Mum tuned in to people’s emotions.

  “Their hopes and fear. Dreams. Ambitions. Sort of … more psychological, I suppose.”

  I could tell from their silence that Dee and Chloe weren’t too impressed.

  “She really does help people get themselves sorted,” I said. “She just doesn’t do police-type stuff.”

  By Friday, it was almost a week since Gayle had disappeared. Still no one had come forward. The police had announced that they were going to stage a reconstruction on Saturday night, in the hope of jogging someone’s memory. Dee and Chloe were coming to my place on Saturday for a sleepover. Last time we had gone to Chloe’s, and next time would be at Dee’s, which I was dreading as I didn’t know how I would feel, sleeping under the same roof as her brother. I wasn’t sure that I would be able to face it, and was already thinking up excuses why I couldn’t go.

  We sat upstairs in my bedroom that evening (Mum was in her consulting room with a client), wondering how the police reconstruction was going.

  “There’s got to be someone who remembers seeing her,” I said. “I mean, how could you not notice someone like Gayle? She looks like a model!”

  “Oh, do let’s stop talking about it,” begged Chloe. “It makes me feel all creepy. Let’s play The Game!”

  “We played it last time,” I said.

  “I know, but it’ll take your mind off things.” Chloe shot a glance at Dee. “What d’you reckon?”

  “Yes, let’s play it,” said Dee. “It’s better than just sitting here being morbid.”

  “But there’s no point doing you two again,” I said. “And I can’t do anyone else ’cos you haven’t brought anything.”

  “I have.” Chloe plunged a hand into her bag and emerged triumphant with a gold locket on a chain. She dangled it before me. “See?”

  “Who’s it belong to?” I said.

  “It’s this girl my cousin knows. She’s always asking me if you’ll do her.”

  “We might as well,” said Dee. “Otherwise we’ll just spend all night glooming.”

  Between them, in the end, they talked me round. I was quite reluctant, and couldn’t think why; but I took the locket and sat back on my heels on the bedroom floor while Dee and Chloe crouched on either side of me; Chloe cross-legged, Dee hugging her knees to her chest, waiting expectantly for me to perform.

  I closed my eyes, letting the chain slip through my fingers. Concentrating. Focusing. Directing my energies. Something was there. Something …

  Out of the ordinary. Something …

  Powerful. Something –

  And then it hit me. Fear. Wave upon wave of it. Cold, and gut-churning, drenching me in sweat; and somewhere a voice that screamed out in the darkness. Help me! Help me! But what could I do? Fear became panic. My mind thrashed in a frenzy, trying to find a way out, to break the connection.

  “Jo? Jo?” Someone was shaking me. I dropped the chain and covered my face with my hands. I was trembling all over, and couldn’t seem to stop.

  “Jo!” Dee squatted in front of me, her face scrunched in concern. “What is it? What happened?”

  “I – don’t know. Who is this person?” I turned angrily, on Chloe. “Where does she come from? What do you know about her?”

  Chloe darted an anxious look at Dee.

  “What’s going on?
” I cried. “What have you done?”

  “It’s my fault as much as Chloe’s,” said Dee.

  “What is? What are you talking about? Whose is it?” I picked up the locket and hurled it as hard as I could across the room. “Where did you get it from?”

  Then they told me. They confessed what they had done. They had gone to Ruby Simpson and asked her if she could lend them something that belonged to Gayle.

  “We thought perhaps a … a book, or something. You know?”

  A book might not have had so strong an impact; but Ruby had handed over the locket. It seemed she had borrowed it from Gayle the night they’d set out to go clubbing.

  “What did you get from it?” whispered Dee.

  I said, “Nothing. I don’t know! I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Chloe leaned in, closer. “Was it something scary?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it! You promised you’d never cheat me. You don’t know what you’re meddling with! I’m not ready for this sort of thing.”

  Dee looked downcast and said that she was sorry. Chloe muttered that they’d “just wanted to do something to help Gayle”.