Then You Were Gone

by Claire Moss

  ‘Let me know about Mack, won’t you?’ she said through the dry toast.

  ‘Sure.’

  Jazzy forgot about the letter until he was nearly at work, so preoccupied was he with thinking about Mack. When he had texted Simone last thing the previous night: ‘Anything?’ the reply had come simply: ‘Not yet.’ The hope embodied in those three letters ‘yet’ was what made him angry; angry at what Mack might be doing, angrier still at the thought that Mack might be in the process of proving Petra right.

  Petra had warned Jazzy all along about allowing things to go so far with Mack and Simone.

  ‘You know what’s going to happen,’ she had said. ‘He’ll do what he always does, he’ll get bored, he’ll ditch her and where will that leave you? Whose side are you going to take then?’ They both knew whose side he would take – his loyalties lay with Simone and always would – but it was left unsaid.

  ‘No,’ Jazzy had protested, ‘I really don’t think he will, not this time. I think he really likes her.’

  ‘Of course he bloody likes her. She’s beautiful, she’s cool, she’s got awesome hair – and then she also goes and has the cheek to be a really nice person. Of course he likes her. But Mack likes a lot of people, if you know what I mean.’

  Jazzy had smiled. It made him happy that Petra liked Simone. ‘Yes but you’re forgetting, Simone’s so low maintenance that she barely classes as a girlfriend at all. If anything, Mack’ll be the needy one and Simone’ll get bored and ditch him.’

  Petra had rolled her eyes. ‘Have you ever known a woman get bored of Mack before he got bored of her?’ The question did not require an answer. ‘Just…’ Petra had thrown her hands up, ‘if they’re going to get together, then fine. I just don’t think you should encourage it. Because when it all goes wrong, it’s you she’s going to blame for it.’

  And now it was looking as though it was going wrong, and Jazzy wondered if Simone would blame him for it. Jazzy would be surprised – shocked, even – if Mack had gone AWOL from everything, from London, from the business, from Jazzy, just to get rid of Simone. But, loath as he was to admit it, it was not entirely unthinkable. He and Mack had met ten years ago when they were teaching English in a high school in rural Japan, the only westerners in a fifty-mile radius, apart from a tall, outdoorsy Canadian girl who worked in the elementary school next door. She had fallen for Mack, swiftly and entirely, and he had seemed pretty smitten with her too, but when Mack went back to England among promises of undying devotion and vows to keep in touch, he had deliberately given the girl an email address and mobile number that bore no relation to his real ones. That Canadian girl had not deserved it any more than Simone would. And Petra was right; if Mack was taking a massive shit all over Simone’s feelings, then it was, at least partly, Jazzy’s fault.

  He thought back to the conversation he had had with Simone in his local pub to try and persuade her to give Mack a chance on a second date.

  ‘He really likes you. He told me. Honestly.’ This was true.

  Simone had looked unconvinced. ‘Yes, he likes me so much that he’s waited a month before getting in touch again.’

  ‘He’s been away a lot with work. He didn’t want to arrange something he might have to cancel at the last minute.’ This was only partly true. Mack had been away for three out of the preceding four weeks, but it was only when he had returned to London a few days ago that he had mentioned Simone.

  ‘I keep thinking about her,’ he had confided. ‘If I ask her out again, do you think she’ll say yes?’

  ‘I guarantee it,’ Jazzy had told him with a wink.

  And he had been determined to do so. Simone’s misgivings did not seem that serious to him, certainly nothing that could not be talked round.

  ‘Why are you so keen for me to go out with him again?’ she had asked.

  He had shrugged. ‘I think you’d be good together. You’re both quite similar if you ask me, even though it might not look like it at first glance. Free spirits, if you will.’

  Simone had raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Right, OK. But I have to say that in my experience “free spirit” is a phrase people use to describe someone they think will probably sleep with them without asking too many questions first.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Not needy or desperate or looking for someone to spend every minute of every day with. That’s what you’re both like. I just – I can see you two together. Plus,’ he had leaned forward, ‘he assures me he’s hung like a farmyard animal.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Simone had said, downing the rest of her drink, and he knew then that he had won her round. And neither of them had said what they both knew; that the real reason he was so keen to set her up with Mack was that he just wanted to see her happy, like he was with Petra. That he wanted her to have someone, like he did.

  The bus was nearly at his stop before Jazzy remembered the letter. It had barely occurred to him that it could contain anything interesting, let alone anything personal. Letters never did any more.

  Even after he opened the envelope, it took him a few moments to recognise the handwriting, so rarely had he seen Mack handwrite anything. But it was unmistakably from him. The words he used, the confident, stylised penmanship, could not have come from anyone else.

  Dear J

  I know you’ll be wondering where I am by now, and I’m sorry.

  This is the most ridiculous letter I’ve ever written. (And I know, a letter? A fucking letter? Hey, Mack, 1993 called, they want their method of communication back! But the point is, you can’t hack into a letter. And I know that sounds mental, but it’s true, and that’s important).

  The thing is, and I swear, I swear on Rory’s life I’m not making this up, I’ve had to go away for a very good reason. I really, really wish I could tell you why, but I can’t, even in an unhackable letter. Just believe me when I say that you’ll be safer, and so will Petra and Rory and everyone else around you if you don’t know (again, I know that sounds like the rantings of a paranoid psychiatric patient but please, please bear with me). Believe me, if I could tell you then you know I would. But it’s a good reason.

  And the reason I’m writing to you is because I think – really, really, really – that you could be in danger too, and Petra and Rory if anyone comes looking for me. If anything happened to any of you, I couldn’t live with it. Please listen. Please, please take me seriously. If anyone comes looking for me, you have to say that you don’t know where I am. Which will be true, of course. But you have to make it sound true too, you have to make sure they believe you. And if anyone does come looking, then I think you should take Petra and Rory away for a few days, doesn’t matter where, just don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Not even Simone or Keith.

  I’ve written to Simone too, saying the same thing. If you see her, tell her I’m sorry. And, fuck it, tell her that I love her. I do.

  One last thing. If you don’t pay attention to anything else in this letter, then please, please pay attention to this. DO NOT TRY AND FIND ME. DO NOT TELL ANYONE I’VE GONE. If anyone comes looking for me you need to LIE. You need to say that I’ve gone on holiday, or quit my job to go travelling, or gone back to Japan or something. Don’t say you’ve heard from me, don’t try and guess where I am. DON’T COME LOOKING FOR ME. And I know that the first thing you’re going to do is ask Keith. Please don’t go to Keith. I mean it. It could put you in danger.

  I promise, I haven’t gone round the bend. I know this all sounds nuts but part of the trouble is that you can’t delete stuff once you’ve written it in pen. Please take me seriously.

  I wish I could say when I’d be back. I wish I could say that I’m coming back. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I want to come back, and I will if I can. I’m going to try to find a way.

  Love you, mate.

  Mack.

  Jazzy held the letter open in his hand for a few moments, then in a burst of what his rational side told him was absurd paranoia, he folded it over so the text was hidd
en, casting a surreptitious glance over his shoulder. Everybody else on the bus was looking at a phone or a tablet; nobody was paying him the slightest attention. His first thought was almost certainly the one Mack had been so keen to steer him away from. His friend had surely lost the plot. It happened. It had happened to one of Jazzy’s housemates in his final year of university – too much weed, too much stress over his finals and then one day, boom, he refused to come out of his room and was convinced that the landlord had installed a covert surveillance system inside the airing cupboard.

  Jazzy jumped to his feet just in time, realising that the bus was about to pull away from his stop. He hopped down to the pavement and as he walked the few hundred metres to the office, he thought about Mack’s behaviour over the previous few weeks, trying to pinpoint anything that might explain such a sudden descent into extreme paranoia. All he could think, though, was that Mack was just Mack. He was always just Mack. Mack was the kind of guy where someone would say, ‘Well, that’s Mack for you,’ and everybody would know what they meant. And for the last few weeks – for as long as Jazzy could remember in fact – Mack had been behaving entirely as he always did. He had been in and out of the office a lot, but no more than usual, and had seemed quite excited about a number of new leads that he was confident he could turn into regular clients. He had lent Petra a paperback he had just finished reading, raving about it to Jazzy first, and had asked them if they wanted to accompany him and Simone to a gig next month. When Jazzy’s housemate had lost it, although it was a huge and traumatic shock, it had not been a total surprise to Jazzy. The guy had been acting oddly for a long time, perhaps as long as a year – in fact, if he was honest Jazzy would say he had always been a little odd. But the same could not be said of Mack. Mack never acted oddly, he always knew exactly what to say and how to say it, fine-tuning his patter effortlessly depending on the company he was in. It was what made him such a fantastic salesman.

  And that stuff about Keith? That was the strangest thing. Jazzy had always thought that Mack may not have exactly liked Keith, but that he at least trusted him. Keith scared Jazzy, he would freely confess it, and he had no idea how to talk to him, knowing as he did nothing about cars, golf or how to objectify women. Keith was like an uncle to Mack; that was what Mack had told him when he first introduced him to Jazzy. What could have gone so wrong that Mack could believe he needed to keep it secret from Keith? A slow, solid feeling of foreboding grew in Jazzy’s stomach, his footsteps slowing as he continued his trudge to the office, as he mulled over that question. He had never thought it was a good idea to let themselves fall into Keith’s orbit as much as they already had. Should he have trusted his instincts? Did Mack mean that the reason he had gone away was somehow Keith’s fault?

  They had both been working for Keith for nearly two years now, Mack throwing himself into the enterprise wholeheartedly, Jazzy still insisting to himself, and anyone else, should they ask, that his job there was only a temporary measure until he found something that suited him better.

  On New Year’s Eve nearly three years ago, Mack had been drunk and a little maudlin, depressed about his dull but lucrative job as an anti-static flooring salesman, for which, let’s face it, Jazzy could hardly blame him. When Mack had first landed the job, Jazzy had had to laugh. It sounded so much like a parody of the kind of job people settle for when they have given up on life that Jazzy could scarcely believe someone as dynamic, as zestful and trendy as Mack could really have agreed to spend the majority of his waking hours doing such a thing. That New Year Mack was harping on, as he often did, about his ‘plastic business card moment’. Kind of the opposite of a light bulb moment, that was how he described it. The moment when everything went dark.

  ‘I can’t do it, Jazz,’ Mack was saying for at least the fourth time. ‘I just can’t. I could be looking at thirty-five more years of this shit. Well, I won’t because it’ll kill me long before that. I’ll drink myself into an early grave or deliberately crash my car into the central reservation or something. But I’ve got to get out. And I mean soon.’

  ‘Hmm, bit melodramatic, maybe? Even for you? Even for 11.47 p.m. on New Year’s Eve?’ Jazzy loved Mack like a brother (actually he preferred him to his actual brothers) but, Jesus, sometimes.

  ‘Mate, I’m never melodramatic. My life’s just very, very interesting.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. You’re the most interesting anti-static flooring salesman I think I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Ha fucking ha. Do you know what, though?’ Mack took a too-large gulp of champagne and winced as he tried to swallow it in one and the bubbles went up his nose. ‘I go to these godawful “networking” things they make me do, and I eat the rancid food and I act like I give a shit, and I come away thinking, yes, I am the most interesting person in this room, and I don’t care if that makes me sound like a dick, because I am a dick, and anyway it’s true.’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’

  ‘No, honestly. Do you know, I was at one the other week in fucking, I don’t know, Kendal or somewhere in the arse end of nowhere, and it was a BREAKFAST one, which are just the WORST because you either have to stay overnight in the sub-Crossroads shithole that’s hosting it or you have to get up at five a.m. and drive there, and either way you feel like Alan Partridge, and the only way not to feel like Alan Partridge is not to talk to anyone, but you’re not allowed to do that because talking to people is the only reason you’re there in the first place.’

  ‘Plus, you never stop talking, even at seven in the morning.’ Jazzy was only half-listening, looking round the kitchen to make sure Petra wasn’t going to be within kissing distance of any of Mack’s handsome hipster beardos when Big Ben struck midnight.

  ‘That as well. But anyway, we’d all finished our flabby bacon and rock-hard eggs and we were taking it in turns to do our spiel, and the last guy up was some poor downtrodden bastard from a plastics company in Barrow in Furness, and when he’d finished talking he whipped his business card out and – ta fucking dah – the guy’s business card is made. Of. PLASTIC. Here, I’ve still got it. Check that out.’

  It was a small one, the size of a credit card with the same rounded edges. Neil Stannah, it said, Head of Sales and Business Development, Northern Region. ‘Hmm, yeah. Wow. That’s… that’s quite something.’ Jazzy handed Mack the card back and stood up, the better to survey the crowded room.

  ‘Isn’t it just? But that’s not the worst bit. That’s nowhere NEAR the worst bit. After he whipped it out, everyone else round the table started pissing themselves laughing.’ Mack himself let out a humourless bark of laughter and shook his head. ‘And not at what a loser this guy was. They genuinely thought it was funny, like, “Hey, this guy works for a plastics company and even his business card is made of plastic! Can you believe this shit? Are we having fun here or what?” I genuinely thought I might pass out, or puke up my hash browns. I saw it then, forty years of this, up and down the M6, in and out of Premier Lodges, talking the talk and eating the swill and it was like someone had flicked a switch in my head. I’ve got to get out, Jazz. I’m drowning.’

  They had had conversations along these lines many times before, even prior to the plastic business card incident, but this time there was something different. The panic in Mack’s eyes was real, there was genuine desperation in his tone. ‘I’m quitting,’ he said. It was something he had said before, and Jazzy half-ignored him. He was drunk, he was tired, it was three minutes to midnight and he had misplaced his fiancée. Plus Jazzy had his own work problems on his mind. The small, private investment bank he had been a software developer for since he returned from Japan, had put him and the whole of the IT department on notice of redundancy three weeks before Christmas. He did not particularly want to listen to someone threatening to put themselves out of work through choice.

  ‘No, really,’ Mack went on. ‘I really am this time. I’ve spoken to Keith about it.’

  Jazzy had instantly become alert. This was something he had always w
orried about, that Mack would somehow allow himself to fall into Keith’s hands. Jazzy did not know anything for definite about Keith, did not even know that how he made his money was illegal, but he could not believe that anyone could become as wealthy as Keith purely from selling second hand cars and cheap imported electrical goods. And he knew that becoming part of Keith’s world was emphatically not something that Mack wanted. He had hinted as much several times, had told Jazzy that the reason he had gone into sales was so that he could make enough money to never have to go asking his mum or Keith for anything (Jazzy had known that really Mack was only talking about Keith. Mack’s mother had no money to speak of, and nothing other than a bottle of aftershave at Christmas that Mack might need). It had seemed like a point of pride, but also of self-protection. ‘Keith?’ Jazzy said, unable to keep the shock or disapproval out of his tone.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Mack shook his head, his words smooth and fluid after all the champagne. ‘It’s legit. He’s got a new arm to the business, he thinks I’d be ideal to head up the sales section. Well, I say head up, I think to be honest I’d be it.’

  ‘What is it then? This new “arm”?’ Jazzy hoped he sounded less suspicious than he felt.

  Mack smiled. ‘Wedding dresses.’

  ‘Wedding dresses? Keith?’

  Mack laughed. ‘I know. Sounds pretty unlikely, doesn’t it? But he’s got this contact over in Russia or somewhere – some guy he used to play golf with I think, who’s gone back to the motherland. Anyway, he makes these really high-end wedding dresses – they’d retail for a few grand here – and Keith can get them at a good price. He’s been flogging a few on eBay recently and they’ve gone pretty well, but he wants to start bringing them in wholesale, selling them on to retail places. That’s where I come in.’ He flashed a grin. ‘Now, go on, admit it. Am I not the perfect guy to do that job? These shops are all run by nice ladies of a certain age. I don’t think I’m flattering myself to suggest I do have a certain way with nice ladies of a certain age. I think I’ll be able to turn their heads in the direction of Keith’s bridal gown range pretty successfully.’