They came back, of course - they always come back - but it’s nothing I can’t handle. That is, if you consider turning things on and off five times a night, and checking and rechecking things you’d already checked five times, with another five times of checking, as nothing? Or adjusting your clothes in the wardrobe every night - with me in the wardrobe - or getting the angle of cushions on your sofa just right, or putting your toiletries on the bathroom cabinet in a prescribed order, or going back to check the door of your apartment is locked every time you go out.
The only time they never appeared was when my little girl was with me. She banished them as I banished her night fears, telling her I didn’t think there were such things as ghosts and ghouls and goblins and, if there were - I couldn’t tell her categorically; that would have been a lie - they couldn’t get her in the flat. She took my mind off them, gave me back a semblance of a life. I miss her terribly.
The night she disappeared, when everyone had gone, they came back with a vengeance. The WPC had left me with my ex-wife; she probably thought it was going to be one of those moments. My ex-wife sat on the sofa and buried her face in her hands and started crying. I watched her break down in front of me and couldn’t find anything to say. I hate people doing the things I do, and doing them better. As she was better than me at most things, you can imagine the hate I stored up. She asked me to go through what had happened again and I obliged, knowing that it was the kind of thing I would have asked. I knew what she was looking for: a clue, a hope, a rational explanation. I think she feared the worst even then, though she wouldn’t acknowledge it. At each twist and turn in the story, at each full stop, she measured herself against the pain and came up short. Nothing I have ever said or done had done that to her.
The male officer returned in the evening and sat us down together. He had a sombre look on his face and I knew he had no news: at least, no good news. My ex-wife’s face crumpled right in front of him. The muscles which held it together sagged under the blow; this was a fight too far. I knew she would go on, the way she always went on, but it was without hope, or heart, or conviction. When hope goes, so does life. You still perform the operations, the basic routines of existence, but there is no purpose any more. The break in the clouds you looked for as a child is filled in with dark, impenetrable grey. You clutch at anything to redeem the moment: if she’s not found today, she’ll be found tomorrow; if she’s not found then, she’ll be found the day after; if her body is found, you hope it was quick and she didn’t suffer, or if she did suffer, you hope it wasn’t for long: if some stranger got hold of her, you hope she didn’t cry for you or her mum and you hope her face wasn’t too tearful when they hurt her; you hope her little body was spared the bruises and the pain; as hope recedes your expectations recede and what you ask for gets more pathetic, and more insignificant until there is nothing left: just the truth. Then you realise it made no difference at all. No one was listening. The world went on without you; you could not stop those events from happening.
I think I’m going to cry.
‘I’m sorry, we’ve found nothing. The CCTV at the door isn’t working so we can’t be sure she didn’t leave that way, but it seems unlikely. There were lots of people going in and out. The basement is still a possibility. That door was open, as you know, but we haven’t been able to trace anyone yet. We’re doing our best.’
He paused.
‘What about inside the building?’ I said.
‘We’ve looked everywhere: risers, cupboards, shafts, anywhere a child could get.’
‘And the flats themselves?’
The officer looked at me carefully. ‘Yes, that, too. Everyone is being checked.’
My wife glanced at us. She hadn’t thought about that. ‘What are you saying?’
I couldn’t look at her.
‘You can’t tell, can you?’
You can’t tell about anyone.
Half an hour later, I was on my own. My ex-wife and the officer had gone. I said she could stay if she wanted, but she couldn’t face it, I know. It was too close to things. If things had been the other way round, I wouldn’t have stayed, either. I would have gone off, had a walk, got drunk, tried not to think about things, tried not to think about her.
It was then that my visitor arrived. I felt them come in when I took my clothes off and was trying to sleep. They were pointing at my clothes and wondering if I’d folded them correctly. I tried to ignore them but they were so insistent, I had to look, and indeed my clothes were a little awry, although not quite as bad as they’d made out. I put them down, hoping that was okay. But my visitor wasn’t having it. They insisted I do it again. I knew what was coming, but was as powerless to stop it as I had been with my daughter. I put them down five times, then another five, until twenty, thirty, fifty times had passed and I stood there so consumed with self-hatred, I could have killed myself. The lights came on and off, the pillows were turned, the duvet thrown, until the clock showed half past one and I realised I had spent an hour doing nothing but destroy myself.
Please go away.
I lay on the bed in the dark and waited. I waited for her.
My little girl is holding my hand again. She is wearing her green coat, the smart one I got her from Next, and her little feet in her black shoes are pointing towards the puddles and her dainty feet are going to step through them and I know I’m going to carry her, the way I’ll always carry her, even when she doesn’t want me to any more. Her feet are pointing to the future and we’re going to go there together. But when I try to pick her up and put her on my shoulders, I can’t feel anything. There is no weight on my shoulders and I realise she has gone.
I’m going to start crying again.
8
The day after my daughter’s disappearance, my life began to change. People I had passed without a word or sound would stop me and say they were thinking of me, praying for my little girl’s return. Even before the newspapers took an interest and my face appeared in grainy images alongside the porn stars and politicians, everything became known. By some arcane act of freemasonry, everyone knew who I was and what had happened. When I opened my flat door in the morning, it was as if I had left the wings and taken centre stage. I was greeted with compassion and warmth and respect I had never felt before; once again I felt the awe of a captive audience, there to watch the tragedy unfold.
The fat Greek was first to arrive, with a handshake and a plate of olives. He had exchanged his string vest for a black suit and told me if I needed anything, I only need ask. I stared at his hairy hand and saw no alternative. I’ve never been good at fobbing people off. I’ve wasted years of my life - and I mean years - talking to people whose sole mission in life seemed to have been to sap me of the will to live (I include my friends and my ex-wife in that company). People presume on you too much, and I’ve always been too polite to presume otherwise.
He looked round my flat with the same air of curiosity and bemusement the WPC had. I have a picture on my wall of a man with a very large dong. At least, it seems like that; it could be there is a large crease in his trousers. When people look at the picture, they always wonder about that. My ex-wife thought she knew, but that’s maybe because she thinks like a man. She also thought it was disgusting and that I should take it down - what would our daughter think? - until I pointed out that our daughter was too young to notice things like that, and besides, the man had a dog with him, one of those regal greyhounds - I think he was a fox hunter; he certainly looked the type - which she liked.
‘Look, Daddy. Doggie.’
‘I know, sweetheart. Doesn’t he look sweet?’
Now, normally if I think of doggie and dong, I think of only one thing, but my daughter has not yet made the connection. My wife had. So had Albertine. I don’t know whether the WPC had, but I wished it. I wanted her nipples to prick up behind her starched shirt. Women say they don’t look for it, but they do. They’ll offer you the usual platitudes the way you do about their breasts and their
ass, but they’re a slave to it just like you are. It’s in the jeans, as they say.
The fat Greek was looking at it when I offered him a drink. I couldn’t care less what he thought, but he offered me his tuppence, anyway. In Greece, they’re used to nudity; they have all those statues. Small was beautiful. It suddenly made me think of her. I stared at the tea in the cups and tried to read the future in the leaves. Maybe I should have taken them out of the bags? I have no gift of prophecy. I have no need of it. He sat on the sofa with me and told me a story about a boy called Kostas who disappeared on a fishing expedition in Ithaca. The whole village went out to search for him. For days they combed the emerald waters of the Ionian, hoping he’d make it back. But each sunrise, the sea had thrown up nothing but pebbles. He must have guessed what I was thinking at this point because he put his hand on my arm and ushered me to hear him out.
‘A fortnight later, the boy turned up, right out of the blue.’
I stared at him, confused. ‘Out of the sea?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That was the thing. He’d never gone.’
‘I thought…’
‘So did they. But they were wrong. All of them. He’d gone to see his uncle on the far side of the island. They were looking in the wrong places.’ His face was wreathed in a laurel smile, his eyes twinkling. ‘So you see. You never give up. Things always turn up.’ He patted my arm comfortingly. ‘If you need anything, you let me know, okay?’
I told him I would but I was thinking about the boy in the water and how the villagers must have reacted when he came home. Were they cross with him for messing them around, or were they just glad to have him back? The fat Greek pinched an olive at the door (I was still holding the plate) and told me I must try them. They were good for my heart.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
My heart has never been my most loyal companion. Most of the trouble in my life has been because of it. I don’t owe it anything. Rather, it owes me big time. As I stood with my back against the door and thought about what the fat Greek had said, I could hear it pounding in my chest, floundering like a drowning man, looking for the film of sky above the glassy sea. I stared at the plate of olives and took one in my hand. It shone like a black pearl. I brought it to my lips but it stuck there, fast. I remembered something: beware of Greeks bearing gifts. I took the plate to the bin and emptied the lot. The olives rolled over the side into the white, plastic abyss. I think I could hear them screaming.
9
That afternoon I had to go to the police station to make a formal statement. For the first time in my life, I looked at the world from the criminal’s point of view. They were milling around, just like the scallies and smackheads who pissed on the Sears building, the people I had spent my whole life avoiding. I could smell their guilt and desperation as they could undoubtedly smell my fear. The police officers who joked with them knew them by name, and listened to their braggadocio with grunts of recognition. It struck me that they were cut from the same cloth. But for the uniforms, they were indistinguishable.
Only once have I had dealings with the police, and that happened a long time ago. It had been a habit of mine to have long walks round the city, down by the canals and waterways in the most salubrious parts of town. I had a friend who used to come with me. She’s long gone now, at least out of my life, but I can picture her like I can yesterday. She had straight, long, brown hair and wore a red, polka dot dress that was the height of fashion. It must have been the seventies, although heaven knows how it’s possible I was alive then; like the dress, it feels like yesterday, too. She had two prominent front teeth and everyone used to call her Bunny, which she took really well, but which I, at the time, chose to avoid - me being her boyfriend and all. When her mouth was closed, everything was fine; the trouble was when she opened it. It could have been that I was just rubbish at kissing - which is something that had crossed my mind, and probably hers - but neither of us was at the stage when we felt comfortable slagging off each other’s performances. We were still at the point where ‘I’ve never met anyone like you’ and ‘You’re the best’ had real coinage, though in the post-decimalisation period they definitely didn’t have the value we thought. I remember looking at her hair and her eyes and seeing what must have been love in there - and she obviously seeing the same in mine - when her teeth would emerge from out of her pink lips and bite me. I used to brush them on my way past, making for the soft pastures of her neck where I knew I was safe, and where I had more success arousing her. This was the seventies, when everyone was a bit loose under the collar, and Bunny more than most. She said it was too much for her and would try to push me away. Deep down, I think she knew the real reason I didn’t kiss her, and it must have pained her; it pained me. When I’m sad, I sometimes think of Bunny. I hope she thinks of me, although I don’t flatter myself too much. I’m pretty forgettable. If not for the police officer, I would have disappeared from her memory for good, I’m sure.
We were down by the canal, under a bridge, I think, and I had just had one of those kisses when we heard a footfall behind us and turned to look. The officer was carrying a truncheon and was measuring it against his other palm. Back then, I was too young to make a connection, but now, when I look back, it seems so obvious. Bunny had smoothed her dress down over her thighs and both of us looked pretty guilty. We didn’t know how long he’d been there but we knew we hadn’t done anything; we were just kids. He asked us to turn round and told us to put our hands on the canal rail. The water was green and brackish and you couldn’t see anything in it. It was like pea soup. We glanced over at each other, wondering what was going to happen, when we felt his hands on us, searching our pockets.
‘You know what you can get for lewd behaviour, don’t you?’
‘We weren’t doing anything.’
‘That’s not what I saw, sonny. I saw you with your hands up the girl’s dress. Normal people come walking down here. Decent people. They don’t want to be stumbling over the likes of you. There’s a time and a place for everything, and this isn’t it.’
In those days, I had more balls in me - I had a lot more of everything - and tried to protest; I hadn’t yet realised it did no good. I wanted to show Bunny I wasn’t just a kid. Well, he wasn’t having it. He was a big, slovenly guy - he wouldn’t have made the grade now-– and pressed me up against the railing and told me if I gave him any more cheek, he’d put me in the canal. It’s a lie when they tell you it was better then. It was dirtier and people got away with more, that’s all.
He told me to turn around and keep quiet. I knew he was doing something because Bunny kept jolting. Later, she told me, he’d lifted her dress. I don’t know what he made of her slender, white legs and the mole at the top of her thighs. Maybe it was better than he got at home - if he got any. She stood there for a few minutes and looked in the canal with me. I knew I should have said something or done something, but I was scared. I was scared for myself and I was scared for her. More shamefully, I was scared of authority. That’s been with me all my life. I’ve respected it too much. I thought it would keep things the way they were, but nothing can do that. My daughter challenges my authority the way I’d never have dared. I praised her for it, in a way; I saw it as sticking up for herself. I didn’t want her to be put against the railings like Bunny was.
When the officer had gone, Bunny smoothed her dress down again and we looked at each other sheepishly. Neither of us knew what to say; neither of us really knew what had happened. A few weeks later, I got my own sight of her thighs. It was in her bedroom at home and I was a quivering wreck. I wondered what would happen if her parents came back and found us. I’m not sure how far we got, but I remember the shock I got when the dress came over her head and I saw the design on her blue panties. On the side was a picture of a fluffy, pink rabbit. It had two buck teeth and a carrot in its paws. Did Bunny get the irony? She certainly wasn’t the most stupid girl I’ve ever been with - she may even have been the nicest. I like to think it was an over
sight on her part. I like to think neither of us had made those kinds of connections. I think a lot about Bunny these days. I wonder what kind of woman she became.
I wondered if the officers in the station took advantage of the young girls they arrested. I know there’s more supervision now, and checks, but I bet they do. Human nature is constant. I tried to look occupied but was relieved to see the young, urbane one coming towards me. Even the criminals moved aside as he passed. He led me down a long corridor into a spacious office. Along one wall was a huge street map of the city. This was his eye-view of the world. He surveyed it for a second as if looking for the slightest movement - it must be why they name so many of their operations after birds: hawk, eagle, dove - then invited me to sit down.
‘I’m afraid we’ve drawn a blank.’
‘Nothing?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’
I looked at him and thought he looked tired. Maybe he’d been up all night. My fingers drummed on the desk. ‘So what do we do?’
‘We keep looking.’ He got up and looked back at his map. ‘I wanted to ask you a few questions.’
‘Of course.’
‘Personal ones.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Thank you. I hope you understand, my duty is not just to you.’
My fingers started counting in fives.
‘You have no other children?’
‘No.’
‘You have your daughter every weekend?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are your relations like with your ex-wife?’
I paused. ‘We get on.’
‘Well?’
I shrugged. ‘We argue, although not as much as when we were married.’
‘Are you seeing anyone else?’
‘Seeing?’
‘Having a relationship?’
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