by Unknown
What if it was Laura’s fault Bea couldn’t come to the party? Perhaps she had tried to phone but couldn’t. Perhaps she had been kidnapped and thought she’d call the police but then found her phone was gone.
Someone was knocking on the door. Someone was rattling the door handle and calling her name. Laura reached up and turned on the taps, stretched across and flushed the toilet so that she couldn’t hear. She held her mouth sideways beneath the tap and let the water gush into her. The cold hurt her teeth and she wished she didn’t have tracks at all because she still couldn’t speak properly, she sounded like she was stupid, it felt like she had a scourer in her mouth and her lips were always dry. She tested each toothbrush against her cheek, rejecting damp ones because it would be gross to get Frank’s. She sucked the peppermint memory from the lime-green one then put it in her pocket. The knocking on the door was getting on her nerves, and downstairs the man was singing, ‘The lady is a tramp.’ She sat down at the cupboard again and opened a Boots bag on the bottom shelf. Sanitary towels – Ultra Plus, Ultra Normal, with wings, without, and Super Plus Tampax. In another bag there were tubes and strips for dealing with unwanted hair – bikini, facial, leg and armpit. God, it looked exhausting being a woman; she was surprised Bea ever got out of the house. Finally there was a small hand-woven basket of bottles and potions. She pulled out each one and read the label. Dong Quai, Black Cohosh, Red Clover, St John’s Wort, Zinc, Calcium, B Complex and Magnesium. She opened each, shook out a tablet and put it on the back of her tongue, washing it down with water from the tap.
The door burst open and the little bolt dropped on to the carpet. Adrian looked down at her. Laura looked up disparagingly, then burped.
‘We’ve been calling you. Mum says you’ve got to come downstairs.’
‘What for?’
‘We’re going to have the cake.’
‘What’s the point? Bea’s not coming.’
‘She says it will help Granny.’
Laura dispatched a pitying look in his direction and got to her feet. ‘What’s Frank doing? Why can’t he help with the cake?’
‘He can’t.’
‘Why not? He never does anything.’
‘He’s busy.’
‘Oh yeah? Out looking for Bea, is he?’
‘He’s in charge of the balloon firework. He has to stay near it till I get back. He’s in the lilac tree.’
Laura pushed past him sucking her teeth.
Adrian said, ‘Wigga.’ Leapt into the bathroom and shut the door, pressing the entire weight of his body against it.
Laura kicked the air where his backside had been and slapped the door hard so the flat of her hand burned. Tears stung her eyes. She took a quick look down the stairs and tiptoed into Bea’s bedroom. Quietly she opened Bea’s top drawer and slipped a mobile phone right in there at the back among the scarves and bras and knickers.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘It wasn’t me.’
Venus
AFTER THE fireworks had finished, Adrian went upstairs and climbed into Bea’s wardrobe. He pulled the door shut behind him and smelt the gunpowder and woodsmoke on his sleeve. He sat down among her shoes and put his face in her clothes. The floorboards creaked and he peered through the crack in the door panel. Katharine came in and stood by the egg cups, where she ran her fingers over their rims. He heard her sniff and sit down on the bed, her feet facing the wardrobe. He waited and listened to his breath for a long time, blinking in the semi-dark. When she bent to the floor, he just saw the top of her head as she reached for something under the bed. She pulled out a pale blue slipper, bent down again and pulled out the other one. Then she sat up and held them out of sight. The bed creaked as she kicked off her own shoes and bent forward to put Bea’s slippers on the floor. Adrian saw the grubby blue fluff of them, the sole coming away at the toe on one. Slowly and with great care, Katharine slid her feet into first one, then the other. She rested her feet on the floor for a long time. Laura’s voice shouted up from the kitchen but Katharine didn’t move.
Katharine took the slippers off and put them neatly beside the bed. She went to the door and returned with Bea’s dressing gown, which she laid carefully across the quilt.
Laura came up the stairs, still shouting her mother’s name. Adrian watched Katharine as she went to the bed and turned down a corner of duvet. She smoothed the bottom sheet and plumped up the pillows.
‘Mum?’ Laura was at the door.
‘Just coming down,’ she said and switched off the light as she left.
Adrian eased his hip off the hard edge of a pair of boots and relaxed. Above his head hung what must be a hundred garments. Buy less crap, he had told Bea once. It’s a website. You should look at it. Bea laughed at him and nodded. I know, she said, then shook her head and looked hopelessly at the clutter around them in the kitchen. It’s true, I should buy less crap. But I can’t seem to stop right now. And she rubbed her stomach and made a face. It’s like a hunger, she said. An addiction. I want to fill my life up with stuff. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths, conjuring up Bea’s shape and form in his mind’s eye. He knew it was not possible for her to disappear unless she had been heated to a temperature of over one thousand degrees and vaporised, which was what happened to the people in the cellars and houses and streets of Dresden and Nagasaki. Then there was nothing left of them at all. No clothes, no bones, no thing. All the water in their bodies turned to steam: bones, teeth, flesh, organs made ash and dust in an instant. So unless Bea had walked into a firestorm, she would be somewhere. Whether she was alive or dead was another matter. She might be on the river bed with stones in her pockets, she might be asleep in the back of a container lorry in the Channel Tunnel, she might have gone to Hastings and be sitting in a rented room overlooking the sea. ‘I could stare at the sea for ever,’ she’d said.
‘Never?’ he had said. It was one of those times she had brought both children with her. They were on the shingle in the shelter of an upturned fishing boat.
‘No, ever.’ She didn’t look at him but she was smiling. A figure battled against the wind down near the water’s edge, a black dog loping by its side.
‘There’s no difference,’ he said.
She didn’t answer him. Perhaps she was thinking about it. Probably she was somewhere else. He threw stones, waiting for her response.
‘Between ever and never?’
She wasn’t even trying. That was probably the problem with two X chromosomes. Frank would put up a fight but Bea just gave in most of the time, although his mother never did and she had two Xs, so perhaps it was just habit or laziness.
‘Yes. They’re both expressions of time. Ever is the same as never. It’s why people say “never ever”. They’re just repeating themselves. For emphasis.’ He threw a stone, watched it fly in a low arc, enter the water and disappear.
‘Actually, they’re contradicting themselves,’ said Bea.
Adrian thought about this. ‘Are they?’
‘One is all the time in the world, for ever and ever, Amen. The other is the absence of time.’
She was right. He tried the word out loud. ‘Neverness. You probably get that in space.’
‘Probably.’ She got up. The pebbles clattered and rolled. ‘Come on, we’re late.’
Adrian ran his hand through her skirts, dresses and trousers, making the hangers click and knock. He was surprised by how cool the fabric felt, not low down near the wardrobe floor but high up towards the shoulders and lapels of them. Her clothes were mostly dark, although one or two patches of white shone through in the gloom. He rubbed jersey and rayon, wool and cotton between his fingertips, and took deep long breaths of Bea.
There would be millions of her atoms and molecules in here; he was inhaling them right now. Where was she? There had to be a trail, a trail of molecular particles. The police had used a heat-seeking helicopter yesterday when they searched the meadows and the common. They had used sniffer dogs too, but none of that was any use, it seemed
to Adrian, because the world was too full of heat and too full of smells. If there was some way of identifying her molecules here in the wardrobe, magnetising them in a centrifuge and then putting them in a canister . . . He bit his knee and thought about this. It should be possible then to call the other molecules back to the canister of collected ones like iron filings or like the way that starlings or bees will swarm and flock together. If he inhaled enough of her here, in this wardrobe, he could become the canister himself and just start walking, see where she led him, because the trail could not be entirely cold yet. It wasn’t that she had disappeared; that was obviously irrational, because everyone knew that matter could be neither created nor destroyed. It was just that they couldn’t see her. It was just that other things were obscuring her, like water over a stone or clouds across the sun.
She always said she loved the sun. He told her about Venus, how Venus was known as Earth’s evil twin because it was born the same time as Earth, composed of the same stuff as Earth and had a similar diameter but had evolved differently. The problem with Venus, he told her, was that it had no magnetism to protect it from the solar winds. Venus lost hydrogen and oxygen through the wake. ‘The wake?’ said Bea, who seemed to listen but didn’t always look like she did. ‘The wake the orbit leaves – like the wake on a boat.’ She was interested in the planets, she said. He told her that on Venus the runaway greenhouse effect meant it was 450 degrees, which would melt lead, and you wouldn’t like the sun if you lived there, he told her. On Venus the clouds were made of sulphuric acid and it had a slow rotation the wrong way, which was very unusual. ‘Is it?’ said Bea. Yes, he explained. It was retrograde and no one knew why, but Venus Express, the European Space Mission, would be launched in 2012. It was going to try and find out if Venus was Earth’s future in 2.6 billion years, and Mars Odyssey would find out if Mars was Earth’s past 3.8 billion years ago, and if only he was a bit older he could help.
His nose tickled and his foot had gone numb. Perhaps she didn’t want to be found. Perhaps she was hiding. He had lost all feeling in his bottom. Laura was squawking his name. He should be full of Bea particles by now. He opened the wardrobe door and climbed out.
DOWNSTAIRS, THE party mood had evaporated and the bonfire had gone out. Wanda and Richard were clearing up and Katharine was arguing with Frank. Laura had done something strange to her face and looked a little like a prostitute, but Adrian knew better than to comment because he understood that fourteen was a fragile time for girls, what with negotiating their sexual identity and everything. In the front room, Frank Sinatra was silent and Lance and Margaret were sitting side by side on the couch.
It was late. Katharine wanted to leave, but before she did, she wanted to punish Frank. Laura and Adrian hovered. Laura just slumped in a space in the room and waited, while Adrian slid slowly back and forth along the wall, his eyes fixed on the floor between his mother’s feet and Frank’s.
‘But you’re always taking snaps,’ said Katharine, her face blotchy from wine.
‘I’m not that kind of photographer,’ said Frank.
Inexplicably, she had no photographs of Bea since the wedding and had assumed that Frank would have plenty. She needed a couple for the Mispers people, for the Salvation Army Family Tracing Service, for Missing People and for more posters. Frank of course had been worse than useless, pulling out stacks of old papers and files from the ruin of his workroom, complaining that the police had left everything in a mess and failing to find anything resembling a recent photo of his wife. The posters that Precious had made used the photo from Bea’s staff pass that resembled the mug shot of that woman who drove her children into a lake in New Jersey. That was who people were currently looking out for along the Cam and around the marketplace. No wonder there was no news of her.
Katharine jangled the car keys and called to Richard that they were leaving. The party had been a mistake, of course. What they had all been thinking of, she had no idea. Now that Bea had failed to turn up to her own mother’s surprise birthday party, the situation seemed much more serious than before. Richard asked whether she was all right to drive and Katharine said she would just have to be seeing as he had been drinking all evening as far as she could see. Outside, torn strands of police tape dangled from the gatepost. Richard put his hand on Frank’s back and said goodbye. The children waved ineffectually. Katharine revved the engine and switched on the headlights. She looked at Frank. He was wanting sympathy, she could tell, but she had none to give him. Not only did he have no recent photographs of his wife but he was also clueless as to the whereabouts of her passport, which meant she might have left the country. No financial activity might mean one thing and no passport might mean another. It didn’t make sense. And Frank, it turned out, had not even slept in the same bed as Bea the night before she went, which meant that Bea might have been missing since Tuesday night, not Wednesday morning. He looked a pathetic figure to her, in the dying front garden, fiddling ineffectually with the plants on the windowsill. She felt enraged by him.
She leant across Richard and said, ‘Frank, I’m putting up posters, setting up a website, arranging a television appeal. What are you going to do?’
Frank took a step back and scratched his head. ‘Well, I’m going to wait here in case she comes back.’
Katharine said, ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ and released the handbrake.
He came over to the car. He looked diminished in the sodium glow of the streetlight, grown old suddenly, and Katharine wondered if this was how Bea had seen him.
He put one hand on Richard’s open window and said, ‘When are you moving?’
Richard said, ‘Well . . .’ and looked at Katharine.
‘Oh, all that’s on hold now,’ Katharine snapped as she put the car into gear. She looked at him and regretted her tone.
‘Be in touch,’ she said.
Frank watched the Jeep glide away and saw its brake lights glow at the bottom of the street. As he was turning back to the house, the car reversed angrily towards him.
Richard smiled sheepishly as he climbed out.
‘Forgot to say goodbye to Margaret,’ he said.
Frank realised he had forgotten Margaret too. And Lance. He felt a little better suddenly. Lance could have his room tonight and Margaret could sleep in the children’s room. He followed Richard and Katharine back into the house. Tonight he was going to sleep in their bed, his and Bea’s.
Daddy
NOVEMBER BROUGHT storms that felled three trees along the river, a poplar on Stourbridge Common and two willows at Grantchester. In December it started to rain and didn’t stop. The days shuffled by, numbered and noted on the calendar by Katharine. Bea’s fiftieth birthday came and went. Headaches and back pain nagged and worried at Katharine and she couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was exactly that she had been good at in her job. Saving tiny babies, tubed and patched and wired up, seemed absurd to her now. More than once she had found herself standing in the neonatal unit, gazing over at the incubators bathed in their gentle uterine glow and wondering what on earth the point of it all was. Why all this effort to hold life together when to let it go at this stage could not really be so very terrible, could it? The fragile bird-like creatures in their tanks had barely weight nor substance enough to make a mark on the lives of others, not the way they could when they were grown, when years had spread their roots wide and deep, not the way she’d imagined the full six-footedness of her father had filled a whole side room and needed six men to carry it into the chapel. Not like the way the Bea-shaped vacuum threatened to pull in everyone standing at its edges.
The hospital where she worked had been very understanding and allowed her to keep an office even though her replacement had arrived. She went in most mornings and tried to finish a paper she had started in the summer, but mostly she trawled the internet for news of Bea and checked with the various agencies that there were no developments. What little media interest there had been in Bea’s disappearance was dwindlin
g and dying away. Katharine knew and dreaded this and typed Bea’s name into Google several times a day. She had a file of news about her that she hated to look at but did look at in case it held some clue she had missed. ‘Middle-Aged Woman Vanishes’, ‘Mystery of Missing Council Worker’, ‘River Search Draws a Blank’ and the one that she hated most of all: ‘Missing Woman Probably Dead Say Police’, although Jim told her they had said nothing of the sort; that was local papers for you. Pete said it was harder to remain hidden when you were dead than it was when you were alive. Bodies had a habit of making themselves known eventually. Jim apologised for Pete’s lack of tact but Katharine was glad for this information. It gave her hope.
The hospital in London where she had been due to take up her job was being less understanding. She had spoken to them of the circumstances and her start date had been delayed twice. They had explained their staffing difficulties, their teaching commitments and had written to her again. Richard had tried to persuade her it might be better for all of them if the family moved to London, but Katharine could not agree to this. She couldn’t leave Cambridge until something had been resolved, discovered, understood. It would feel like a betrayal, an abandonment of Bea. Richard muttered something that sounded like, ‘I think that’s already happened,’ and left to play squash with Paul. The house, which had been packed and ready to leave, now became partially unpacked and felt like a waiting room. More and more the children kept to their rooms or stayed over with friends. Katharine’s eczema had flared up, something that hadn’t happened since she was a girl. She lay in salt baths and smeared cortisone on her skin. When the vendors of the house in Chiswick found other buyers, Richard kicked the cat.