by Matthew Crow
I wanted more than anything to disappear.
I wanted to disappear and for everybody to see.
I wanted to be the conductor of my own search party; the chill in the room at my own memorial.
Sarah had managed this. She was an absence and a presence. She had disappeared and she had pulled the attention of the world to the space she left behind.
But now she was gone, for ever.
She’d never get to enjoy her status as the most wanted girl in the country. The one we missed. The one we craved.
The cruelty of the situation weighed me down until I could see nothing else. And so I did exactly what I was so prone to doing.
I hid.
Dad tried for days afterwards to get me out of bed. He’d cook food he knew I liked, and leave my bedroom door open, aware that the promise of a feast would usually rouse at least some form of curiosity in me.
He’d sit on the end of my bed and tell me about his day, something I usually found so unbearable for so many reasons that it would have me up, dressed and out of the house in no time.
He let visitors in and out, to observe my souring lump of a body like an open casket viewing in a mausoleum.
Nothing helped.
Nothing changed.
Sometimes you just have to ride it out. Whatever shut you down will start you back up again, if you’re patient enough and lucky enough.
It took five days before something like light began to cut through the fog, and I rose from the dead like Lady Lazarus.
‘Good evening sleepy head,’ Paula said, as I made my way into the front room, where the soap operas were beginning on television.
The only thing fully penetrating the haze of confusion was the stench that was emitting from every one of my crevices, as if my body were the smelling salts to the fug of my mind. Dad was standing in front of the TV trying to plug in the new DVD player as I sat down on the sofa next to Paula.
‘Piss off,’ I mumbled.
‘Claudette,’ Dad said, before Paula raised her hand to him and shook her head.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, holding my hair flat to my ears as I began to sob. ‘I’m just so sorry.’
‘I know, my girl,’ Paula said, gently drawing me towards her and wrapping her arms around me as I leaked tears and snot into the cream wool of her jumper. ‘We all are.’ She rubbed my back gently. ‘We all are…’
‘Maybe we can just get some flowers,’ Jacob said as we sat in a pub sharing a bowl of chips.
During my lull I had ignored all of his attempts at contact. Missed opportunities from Dan and Donna stacked up on my phone’s memory, too, though these held less interest. The phone had buzzed between my legs as I lay motionless, tangled up in the shroud of sheets that held me safe. Envelopes arrived which I opened and scanned – a letter, at first: Jacob apologising for upsetting me. Then came the photographs. There were images of myself. Of the town. Of the crowds and the police.
And there were images of Sarah, captured unknowingly at first, on her way from the lighthouse. And then closer, this time aware of her observer, her eyes staring down the camera defiantly, though you could tell she was uneasy at the arrangement. Curious at the strange boy with the gentle request who expected nothing more of her.
I point and I shoot, he wrote, in his second and last missive. There’s nothing in it, or at least nothing sinister. Here is everything I have done since I got here. No more, no less. Please don’t hate me. I’m here if you ever want to talk. Your friend, J.
He told me to name the time and the place and finally I relented and texted him back.
‘I’m so sorry I frightened you,’ he said sheepishly, stroking my arm.
I shrugged and shook my head.
‘I scared myself,’ I said as dismissively as I could manage. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
There was an awkwardness to our initial exchange that didn’t even thaw with our mutual apologies. Jacob looked uneasy and eventually I snapped.
‘What is it?’ I barked, as he shifted his eyes from side to side.
‘Did you send them?’ he asked nervously as I shook my head.
‘Send what?’
The day after I had fled, he told me, he had been paid a visit whilst working at the café. Dan Vesper had timed his morning coffee-run with Jacob’s break, and at Dan’s insistence the pair had sat together in a shady corner of the café, getting to know one another.
‘He wanted to know about you,’ Jacob told me, clearly still shaken by the ordeal. ‘And about you and me. And about you and Sarah.’
‘What did you tell him?’ I asked and Jacob shrugged.
‘The truth. That I knew nothing.’
‘Good,’ I nodded, as Jacob sighed. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘after my shift I went upstairs and —’ he reached into his bag and retrieved his camera, whose lens had been cracked clean down the middle, ‘— the entire place had been ransacked. The darkroom had been cleared out, everything was a mess.’
‘Oh, God,’ I said, taking the camera and examining the smashed lens. ‘I’m so sorry. Did they find anything?’
‘Nothing to find,’ he shrugged. ‘You had all the photos by that point. I don’t like any of this.’
After a while, I told him that I knew Sarah more than most. Given what he’d just told me, I felt he deserved to know.
‘We used to talk. Sometimes. Not at school. I saw her on the beach one night,’ I told him as he leaned in closer, hungry for details. ‘And, well, we became friends.’
‘So Dan has a right to be wary?’ he asked, and I felt the blood rush to my face like fire. ‘I mean, I assume he is. He doesn’t seem like the type who’d come and welcome someone to his community just to be neighbourly?’
‘Dan has no rights. Dan has no rights whatsoever,’ I snapped, before taking hold of myself and apologising.
Jacob raised a dismissive hand and changed the subject as promptly as he could.
‘What were you doing on the beach at night?’ he asked.
‘Trying to drown myself,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘But I’m a really strong swimmer and also quite buoyant, so it would seem.’
‘Jesus,’ he whispered as I rolled my eyes.
‘Crazy does crazy,’ I said with a shrug. ‘I only tried it once, when I was really bad. After that I’d just go for a walk when I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes to be alone. Sometimes because I thought she might be there and I liked having a secret friend. Anyway, we would chat sometimes. She told me she had secret hiding places.’
‘Like where?’ he asked, as the waitress came and collected our empty bowls and ketchup bottles
The first night I saw Sarah at the beach was the night I’d jumped off the pier.
I was walking back towards the shore through the cold, low tide. I knew I wasn’t dead. But I didn’t feel alive, either.
Then I saw in the distance a pale figure. It moved slowly across the causeway from the lighthouse towards the beach.
I thought it was a ghost.
I stopped still and watched. The water was just above waist high and my legs were trembling beneath the surface, but on top my hands were stretched out flat and still, gently moving to the rhythm of the ocean.
All of a sudden it dawned on me: it was Sarah.
All of a sudden I had an anchor to the world.
She reached land and trod on the soft sand towards the dunes, where car headlights cut through the sharp grasses. She disappeared into the dunes. The car lights dimmed. And I made my way to the beach.
I don’t know how long I sat there staring out at the water before she found me. Maybe a minute. Maybe an hour. But at some point I heard the sound of a car engine starting and wheels fading on gravel, and soon afterwards Sarah was standing right behind me.
‘You’re soaking,’ she said, sitting down. I turned to look at her and then turned back to the ocean. ‘You been trying to top yourself?’ I shrugged and ignored her. ‘Stinks of shit out here. All this seaweed. Rotten…’ she went on, lighting
a cigarette and taking three long drags. She handed it to me and I shook my head, still not meeting her gaze.
‘Why do you do that?’ I asked as she extinguished her cigarette in the sand.
‘What?’
‘Do what you do? Go with those fat old men in the dunes. Let them touch you. Let them have you.’
Sarah laughed the way only tough people can. Her laugh was not a mark of joy. It was armour.
‘They don’t have me,’ she said. ‘I have them. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me,’ I said, turning to look at her. The back of her hair was ruffled and beaded with sand that caught on the moonlight like diamond fragments. Her right wrist was adorned with a bruise, where a bracelet might have gone, had her conquests been the wooing type.
‘Sometimes you just need to remind yourself that you’re alive.’
‘By shagging fat perverts in a car park?’
‘By disappearing. Going somewhere else, even if it’s just somewhere else inside your own body. Somewhere else inside your own head. It helps.’
‘Couldn’t you just do volunteer work or something?’ I asked, as my bones began to jitter and my teeth started clacking. Sarah scoffed and shook her head.
‘I don’t do anything for free.’ She stood up. ‘I won’t tell anybody,’ she added, steadying herself on the sand and slipping her lighter into her back pocket.
‘Tell them what?’
‘That I saw you. What you were trying to do.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said and pulled my knees close to my chest to try and bring some stillness to my juddering frame.
‘You should,’ she said. ‘Whatever. I don’t give a toss. Just don’t tell anybody you saw me either, OK?’
‘Everybody knows what you do.’
‘Yeah, but they don’t know where I do it.’
‘It’s the location that bothers you?’ I said and she breathed out with an angry, short laugh.
‘You’ve got no idea, have you?’
‘About what?’ I asked.
‘Having nowhere in the world that is just yours,’ she said. ‘This —’ she gestured to the shoreline, ‘— is the closest I’ve got, for now. And I don’t want it ruined. I need my own space. Somewhere they can’t find me. Somewhere only I can go.’
‘Where who can’t find you?’ I asked and she scowled.
‘Look, you’re nuts, yeah?’ she said ‘You’ve got problems. You’ve got, like, demons or whatever?’
I nodded.
‘Well so have I. Only mine are on the outside. If I’m smart enough and fast enough I can outrun mine, and you of all people should understand that. If you could get away from whatever it was you’re frightened of then you would, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?’ she asked, angrily, and I nodded. ‘Just don’t fuck this up for me. I’m not like you. I get the one chance and the one chance only. I need this. Please.’
We were quiet for a moment and when it became apparent that a response was expected I shrugged and turned to look up at her.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You know I wouldn’t have said anything anyway, but fine.’
‘A girl can’t be too careful,’ she said as she nodded and turned to leave. ‘There’s eyes everywhere in this town.’
‘Why haven’t you told the police?’ Jacob asked as we made our way towards the pier. In my pocket my phone buzzed and I ignored it.
‘She asked me not to.’
‘Claudette,’ he said. ‘I think the barriers have widened a bit now. Don’t you think?’
I was saved from answering by my phone vibrating again, and I pulled it out.
Hey queen, what’s happening? read the first message from Donna.
I’m bored. Come and entertain me, read the second.
Jacob was peering over my shoulder. ‘Who’s that?’ he said.
‘Donna.’ I put my phone away.
‘The girl you were with in the café?’ he said. ‘The funny one?’
A sharp breeze made my hairs stand on end.
‘Didn’t think you’d noticed,’ I said, feeling threatened for some reason, but uncertain whether I had a right to be.
‘If you know things about Sarah then you should let people know,’ Jacob said, changing the subject back.
‘It was only really the last couple of months that she’d chat to me. Besides, all I ever really knew was that she wanted to leave town, to get away from it all. To get somewhere else.’
‘But where would she go?’ he asked and I shrugged.
A family with two children wearing stormtrooper masks raced towards us and I stepped to the edge of the pier to allow them to pass. I stared down at the water below. My phone buzzed again in my hand and I glanced at the screen showing half a message before shoving it into my pocket.
The tide lapped at the concrete, leaving long strands of black seaweed as it retreated back out. ‘Will you come to the lighthouse with me tomorrow afternoon?’ I turned to lean back on the wall of the pier.
‘Why?’
‘To investigate.’
‘This is getting dark,’ he said, turning and leaving to go back to land.
I caught up with him, matching his quickened pace as we walked against the wind.
‘No one will follow us. I know the sea around here. If we go just as the tide is coming in, we’ll be sealed off. We’ll have plenty of time to look around without anybody bothering us.’
‘What if we get stuck there?’ he said.
‘For a seasoned traveller you are really unadventurous,’ I said. ‘Come on. It’ll be interesting. We might find something.’
‘And then what?’
I shrugged.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Whatever. But I’m going to see a local landmark, that’s all as far as I’m concerned. What you get up to is your business.’
‘Fine by me,’ I said. ‘Meet me at the far bus stop for half three. We’ll have enough time then.’
‘I think I could spend a lifetime with you and never get to know you any better, Claudette,’ he said, after a long pause.
‘And that’s just how I like it,’ I said as I turned to leave.
‘I really did think for a moment that I’d find her, you know,’ I said, with a small laugh as Dad poured me a cup of tea and wiped the spout, so that nothing spilled on the freshly washed couch.
Paula was taking her Pensioners T’ai Chi class for their annual night out – a Chinese set meal and happy hour at the chain pub behind the supermarket – and having ignored six missed calls from Dan, and had as many texts ignored by an increasingly absent Ross, he and I were alone for the evening.
‘That you’d just happen upon her.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, dunking two biscuits at once and sliding them sideways into my mouth, which stretched around them then demolished the soggy mess in one go. ‘I know it sounds mad,’ I said through biscuity mush, ‘but I thought. I don’t know. I just thought… she had to be somewhere. I thought I had as good a chance as anyone.’
‘I think everyone knew, deep down, that this wasn’t going to end well.’
‘I think I want that on a tattoo,’ I said, ‘on my forehead.’
‘You’ve had a rough week. Maybe we should talk about something else.’
‘Who will arrange her funeral?’ I asked. ‘The school? The police?’
‘That’s a no on the breezy chat then?’ Dad asked and shook his head. ‘The children’s home, I suppose. Social services. Her parents.’
‘They shouldn’t be allowed to go.’
‘You don’t know their circumstances.’ he said. ‘Maybe what they did they did for the best.’
‘Why can’t you just hate like everyone else, Dad?’
‘Stricken with joy at the richness and beauty of the world,’ Dad said, drinking the last of his tea. ‘Why is this affecting you so much?’ he asked, with concern in his voice, as he poured himself a second cup.
It was hard to put into words how Sarah had affected me. I tried.
‘You kn
ow when I was a kid?’ I asked. ‘When I wouldn’t sleep?’
Dad shuddered. ‘All too well.’
‘I used to think if I never went to sleep then I’d never die.’
Dad smiled and nodded. ‘You told me that once when we were sat on the sofa at four in the morning in tears.’
‘I know, and you lulled me to sleep with the soothing promise that whatever I did I’d die anyway.’
‘Not a vintage year for parenting.’
‘Yeah well. I think one more night and you’d have killed me anyway. The thing is, I really believed it at the time. Like if I didn’t stop then I’d never stop, or something. I knew there was no logic there, not really. But I just felt it, felt like I could get around it. And with Sarah, I don’t know, it was like that. I thought if I found her, if she was safe, then… maybe I’d get better.’ I made an uncertain face. ‘It’s ridiculous, I know.’
‘Not really. We all pin our hopes on impossible things,’ Dad said. ‘Put chance to the test, then blame the rules we’ve set ourselves.’
‘Yeah but it’s different at five than seventeen,’ I said. ‘I really did think it would work. I still sort of do. Like, what if I know who killed her, what if I find them?’
‘You think you’ll find yourself?’ said Dad. ‘Is that it? That it will make everything clear?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘You’re going about things the wrong way, Claudette.’
‘But —’
Dad raised a hand, a rare forbidding look on his face.
‘This is not negotiable,’ he said sternly. ‘Enough.’
We were quiet again as outside birdsong carried in the soot of dusk.
‘A boy at my school died when I was about your age,’ Dad said, getting up and handing me the packet of biscuits again by way of apology for his sudden and uncharacteristic severity, ‘and nobody quite knew how to react. We were sheltered,’ he said.
‘I don’t think anyone is ever ready for that kind of thing to happen, especially not children.’
‘He wasn’t taken or killed or anything quite as horrible as your friend,’ Dad said. ‘He fell off his motorbike. Had no helmet. All too familiar. Anyway, we couldn’t make sense of it, but people kept talking about him. Everyone had a story, no two ever quite the same. So before long someone had an idea to make a memorial booklet for the leaving year. Commemorating his life.’