The Dead House

by Billy O'Callaghan

  I appreciated the officers’ expressions of sympathy, and the way they seemed to accept how deeply I was feeling her disappearance, but I could sense a level of detachment, too. I’d provided them with several photographs, some dating back over the previous five years or so as well as a few that Alison had taken during the house-warming weekend, and they passed them back and forth amongst themselves and finally selected one for media distribution, a snapshot that really managed to capture some essence of who Maggie was: a beautiful young woman just turning to the camera, still bright with laughter, her hair pulled back from her face, her expression alive to the unseen magic of the world. They had chosen well, yet it was clear to me that their gazes were limited to surfaces, that they weren’t trying, or were actively trying not to get to the heart of the picture, to really learn about the person smiling back at them from the glossy paper. Even as this registered with me, though, I understood their reasons.

  Missing-person cases have become such a sad but inevitable fact of life in recent years, with something like a dozen new cases a day, countrywide. A ridiculous figure for a place like Ireland, with such a small population. Some don’t want to be found. And too many turn up dead, either by their own hand or by another’s. The first forty-eight hours tend to be critical. After that, the odds of a positive outcome hit exorbitant numbers. Handling such relentlessly grim statistics demands coldness. The sheer scale and quantity of the reports will crush all but the most hardened of hearts, and embracing cases on a personal level would be tantamount to suicide.

  Our routine didn’t vary a great deal. I talked, on something like half a dozen separate occasions, and they listened, sipping tea, watching me, and took what they felt might be worth taking, which unfortunately wasn’t much. They circulated Maggie’s identity, advised garda stations across the county as to her likely state of mind, keeping to within a hundred-mile radius initially, but then, after the media had taken the story into the papers, expanding the search nationwide.

  Rosemary, her sister, flew in from Vancouver, and she did what she could to help keep the story alive. She seemed able for the media in ways that Alison and I were not, and she spoke with journalists, gave radio interviews and even organised a shop-window poster campaign. But something in her face, a bemusement in no way connected to humour, suggested a refusal not only to accept what was happening but to believe a single word of it. During her quiet moments, in the lounge of the hotel bar with a second or third vodka within reach, she’d look at us, her gaze slipping between my face and Alison’s, and considering Liz, too, if she happened to be with us, like somebody awaiting the punchline of an enormous practical joke. She knew Maggie better than anyone, of course, and yet in some ways she didn’t know her younger sister at all, because Maggie was impossible to ever really know. She existed on another plane, always had; always half in a room and half somewhere else, always dreaming. You only ever got to share a piece of her, a fact which, Rosemary insisted, over and over, had to be understood, and taken into account. I recognised these words as expressions of desperation, some staunch adherence to logic that allowed her to remain focused, and strong, but I also knew, from personal experience, that such barriers offered only temporary protection. And, eventually, fatigue broke her down, and the tears began to fall, swelling to a deluge that could not be stanched.

  There were a few initial sightings, and one in particular, towards the end of the second week, that the Gardaí decided was worthy of serious consideration, a call logged in response to some national radio discussion, claiming to have seen, within that very hour, a woman matching Maggie’s description in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Early thirties, five-two or five-three, slightly built, long dark hair, severely dishevelled appearance, apparently disoriented. The call had proven genuine but, after a frantic two-hour search of the park, was deemed a case of mistaken identity.

  And that was the closest we came to finding her.

  *

  Time passes. Days turned into weeks, and, eventually, the search was scaled back. The investigation continued to limp along for quite a while, and remained open, but the mounting stockpile of new cases meant that ours was necessarily given a low-priority status. This was upsetting to everyone concerned, but understandable. The world appreciates grief, but can only wait so long before getting back to its turning. You either climb aboard or you get left behind.

  A few days into November, back in London, I glimpsed something that left me cold. London wasn’t where I wanted to be, but I had commitments to honour and felt as if I had no choice. And once I’d touched down, work had swallowed me up, deals I’d left hanging, new work to be flaunted or sold. Everyone understood, but nobody truly understood.

  On the cold white afternoon in question, a couple of days after Halloween, I was in Piccadilly, in the back of a taxi and on my way to a late lunch with a sometime client who’d flown in from Madrid just to speak with me and who was interested in buying at least one and possibly more of Maggie’s final paintings.

  Initially, I refused to even consider parting with them, but within a few hours of bringing them home I knew they couldn’t remain in my apartment. Having them so near filled me with the most awful and inexplicable sense of dread. I’d hung a few in my living room, and immediately the apartment had darkened, as if something was being sucked out of the world. Also, they looked too right on my walls, as if they’d been painted with my living room in mind. I sat there for hours, trying not to look at them but helpless to their pull. And that night, I suffered the most vile nightmares. Upon waking, I could only recall flashes, but I remembered, on some sensual level, blood, screams and a lot of laughter. Alison was in the dream, and I’d either seen or caused some terrible thing done to her. Worse, I’d pleasured in it. The following morning, even before boiling water for tea, I took the pictures down, wrapped them in linen sheets and locked them away in a wardrobe.

  We’d hit some traffic, typical for the time of day, somewhere between noon and one. I had a newspaper and was scanning the stories without really reading them, and when I glanced out of the window Maggie was standing there. Part of the crowd, but hard against its flow, like a stepping stone in a fast stream, and not smiling, not moving, simply watching me as I slipped past.

  I panicked, and startled the driver so much with my shout to stop that he hit the brakes hard, hurtling me into the back of the passenger seat. I jumped out with the car still rolling, severely twisted my ankle and almost fell in front of a delivery van coming too fast in the other direction, but when I made it onto the footpath, she was nowhere to be found. The street was thick with people, but I worked my way back through them anyway, wincing with every step but searching faces, desperate to know.

  Finally, the taxi driver came and found me. Part of it undoubtedly had to do with securing a fare, though I think he also felt genuine concern for my well-being. At least on some level. He was my age or a little older, a short, thickset Caribbean named Albert, with deep-brown heavily-lidded eyes and a restless mouth boasting a golden lower left cuspid that seemed to skew the symmetry of his face whenever he spoke or sighed. His expression was one of wide-eyed strain, a constant underlying wince roughly equal parts curiosity and despair, as if he’d recently come through a degree of suffering and had not yet been able to let go of its sense-memory. Even if he himself had seen nothing untoward, the way he stared at me suggested that he knew I’d seen something.

  He helped me back to the taxi, which he’d parked illegally and in a hurry, blocking part of the lane, and a string of cars blew their horns at us as they crawled past, and I saw angry faces mouthing silent obscenities from behind the windscreens but could think of nothing to do except shrug my shoulders at some and try to ignore the rest. I got in and explained that I’d seen somebody I used to know, but he sat in the driver’s seat without the engine running, his body twisted into a half turn, and waited for the rest. So I told him. Some, not all. Enough. He wore a white shirt with short sleeves, nowhere near sufficient for the chill of
November, and the skin of his face and extremely thick arms was a rich, ripe chestnut brown. My words fell into a hole. When he laid an arm across the back of his seat, a pale tangle of scars revealed themselves along its underside, all the way to his wrist.

  ‘You’re searching,’ he said, finally. ‘And you should stop. Sometimes it is better not to look. Better not to see.’

  He was correct, of course, but the wound was still raw.

  And then, some five weeks later, I began to experience chest pains. At first, I tried to ignore them. Alison was coming to spend Christmas with me, and I wanted everything to be perfect. Looking back, I must have known there was a problem, but at the time it was just easier to dismiss it as a symptom of the recent stress. The truth is that we don’t give a lot of thought to our own mortality, especially with true middle age still just an insinuation. We probably can’t afford to, not if we hope to keep functioning on what passes for a normal level. We tend to deny ourselves glimpses of the end that awaits us all, at least until the big warnings come, the stab of pain running up your shoulder and neck, the moments of paralysis, the dull ache that fills your throat, that hollowed-out deadness similar to what you feel when you need to cry but can’t. Still, we cope in the ways we know, and for me that meant long shifts at the office. Chipping away at my backlogged workload with twelve- and fifteen-hour days, trying to ensure that the time I’d have with Ali would be free of distraction. It was busy work, laden with phone calls, emails, invoices, visits to galleries, meetings with gallery owners, artists and buyers, but better that way, because I needed the activity of the chase.

  Because my problems limited themselves, initially, to twinges, they seemed a natural reaction to the trauma of Maggie’s disappearance and leaned towards a diagnosis of tension coupled with some kind of delayed shock. But over the next couple of days and nights the pain grew more extreme until, finally, I became frightened enough to seek medical help.

  The doctor at the surgery was a very thin, very young-looking Indian man, dressed in a white lab coat worn open over mismatched grey-green slacks and tartan shirt, and he examined me in thorough fashion, then sat side-on to his desk and began to scrawl something on a plain white notepad. He said, without looking up, that I was on the precipice of a heart attack. That was the word he used: precipice. The word alone almost knocked me off balance. If I’d waited another day, he said, it’d probably have been too late. But the critical thing now was to get my levels stabilised. My blood pressure was brimming against some dangerous numbers. The note that he held out to me, folded in two, was not a prescription but a letter of admission to the hospital, and I was sent to sit in reception while calls were made and a bed found.

  It happens that quickly. Life can change on the spin of a coin. Much of what followed for me had the quality of a dream. I remember the hospital bed, the whiteness and silence of the room with sleet falling against the glass. I remember waking after the bypass surgery to find Alison at my bedside, her face stretched and washed out from crying but trying hard to smile, holding onto my hand as if I were a kite that would drift away when released, that could be taken by the least breeze. I remember lying there in the night, with the hallway lit yellow beyond the ward’s double doors, certain that there’d be no such thing as a new morning for me, certain with the occasional slap of every distant footstep that my time was drawing to a close. In those moments, I tried not to think about Maggie, but it seemed as if she was always there, on the edge of things, just out of sight but watching, and to be glimpsed if I was unlucky enough to turn my head quickly enough in the right, or wrong, direction.

  *

  My health problems heralded some necessary lifestyle adjustments. More than that, though, they focused my mind, and Alison’s too, on what truly mattered to us. From that point on, our commitment deepened. By the time I was released from hospital, just before New Year’s Eve, she had already made herself at home in the apartment. A couple of friends were looking after the gallery, she said, and she was here to look after me. I’d given her such a fright, she added, later, during one of the nights that followed. Lying beside me in the dark, probably afraid to move. She’d been sure she was going to lose me. Up until then, she’d handled me as if afraid I’d crumble beneath her touch. To be honest, I harboured similar thoughts. The least exertion seemed to threaten me. But that night I came to the realisation that I was not fragile. I’d been through something, yes, but I’d survived. And if I wasn’t right yet, I soon would be. Time would correct the missteps. And I wasn’t going to break. I cleared my throat, stared up into the blackness and asked if she’d marry me. At first, she didn’t even answer, and for a few seconds I wondered if she might have fallen asleep, but then I felt the jerk of her breath and knew that she was crying. ‘Okay,’ she said, when she could.

  So, we settled down. Alison sold the gallery, for a price that sounded good in cash terms but left her with only modest pocket money once she’d cleared the mortgage, and I scaled back on work, slipping into a sort of semi-retirement, and made arrangements towards a permanent and complete exit. I had savings, and a pension that lived up to about two-thirds of its promises, so we’ve been able to get by. Not to live as kings and queens, but who’d really want that?

  Initially, home continued to be the apartment, which was still big enough for two and suitable for our needs, and then, a year and a half or so in, while touring the Cornish coast, we happened across Southwell, and the house we live in now, a place that seems to have been built with us in mind. Still within easy walking distance of civilisation, but rural enough, with its hulking skies, swathes of woodland and elevated sea views, to encourage the sense that the world was only us and what we could see, with nothing in between. And maybe the sea air added vigour because, by the end of year two, Ali fell pregnant, something that we’d each secretly hoped for but which neither of us had really expected, assuming, I think, without a word of discussion, that our time had passed us by.

  Details fade with the years. We don’t necessarily forget the big moments, but they lose the edge of their flavour. Life, just living, is so much more interesting. Yet even so, there are still nights, even now, when I’ll be lying awake while Ali sleeps, or sitting at the kitchen table so that I can read a book and drink tea without disturbing her, and I’ll think again about how easily I could have died, how convoluted it must have been for the stars to align themselves in my favour. If I’d stayed in bed that day instead of visiting the doctor, if I’d kept to the insistence that the pain was just exhaustion, nothing a couple of sleeping pills wouldn’t cure, I really do believe that I’d probably have slipped away. In my apartment, alone. Knowing that my heart could have burst without anyone to hold my hand or answer my strangled gasps for help is the stuff of which hauntings are made and a big part of the reason why I take so little risk with sleep even now, these nine years on. That’s the lottery. But I made it through.

  Alison and I are easy in one another’s company. Always have been, I think. We have our down days, like every couple, but they no longer define us. Contentment, as I’ve said before, is the word that probably best describes the life we found together, and that state has only deepened since Hannah was born. We are a family, and we live for one another. Which is as it should be. And given how fortunate I’ve been, I suppose it is to my shame that, over time, my thoughts have turned less and less towards Maggie. I’ve never forgotten her, of course; as well as being responsible for Alison and me finding one another, she was too important to me, and too dear a friend, to ever completely vanish from my life. The memories are never too far from reach, and if they sometimes manage to stir awake a smile then they are also invariably infused with sadness and tend to drain the light from even the most brilliant of days. But it’s been years since I’ve spoken of her with anyone, even Ali. In general, it’s fair to say that her colours have dimmed, and she simply no longer fits within my daily conversations. Perhaps if I was the praying kind she’d have remained closer to my surface, but maybe it
’s for the best that I’m not and that she hasn’t. Because, these days, my duties lie in other directions.

  *

  Our home, as I’ve already explained, sits on an acre or so of slightly sloping wood-backed land. The natural fall of the ground gives the rear of the house an elevated perspective, and from the small kitchen/conservatory doorway we are afforded stunning views of an ocean unbroken except for the tan-grey scatter-shot of some interrupting islets, an ocean that breathes and bleeds with the day and boasts a thousand different skins. Away to the east, the land bends back on itself and folds down into the harbour before rising up again beyond in a long yellow-white run of cliffs. We have a good stretch of back garden, mainly lawn but with a reasonably sized vegetable patch, off to one side, that yields the mainly summer crops of lettuce, onions and cabbage, with a couple of twenty-foot runs of potatoes coming in a little later in the year.