First One Missing

by Cohen, Tammy

  In the months after Tilly died, Emma had struggled to keep her daughter’s voice alive in her head, holding conversations with her in which she’d answer in that clear, deliberate way she had, her ‘o’s particularly over-emphasized as if there was a ‘w’ at the end of them. Then one day Emma had forced herself to watch, for the first time, one of the hundreds of home videos she and Guy had taken of the girls over the years. The short footage showed the aftermath of Caitlin’s fifth-birthday party, and the wide oak floorboards of the living room were strewn with the remains of pink streamers, party poppers and spent balloons. Caitlin, completely overwrought, was hunched in a corner of the pewter-coloured L-shaped sofa, her still-babyish face blotchy with tears, a plastic tiara perched lopsidedly on her clammy curls, her plump hands clutching the new doll that either she didn’t like, or which didn’t make the sound she wanted it to, or which was too much like the one she already had (how easily one forgets the details of childhood). Tilly, sitting next to her in protective older-sister mode (although at only seven, she was barely past such tantrums of over-tiredness herself), was doing her best to cheer Caitlin up.

  ‘You mustn’t mind that your party is finished,’ she was saying. ‘Think of all the nice presents you got and remember it’s only three hundred and sixty-five’ – here she broke off momentarily and looked directly towards the camera for corroboration – ‘days until your next birthday.’

  Watching that video Emma had been shocked to discover that the clear voice which came from Tilly’s childishly lipsticked mouth didn’t bear any resemblance to the one she’d been hearing inside her head all this time. She remembered feeling almost sick with horror listening to her, as if all those months she’d been betraying her dead child. To whom had that high-pitched disembodied voice belonged then? Whose child had spoken to her through those sleepless early mornings when the grey light trickled in through the chinks in the curtains?

  She remembered that then, sitting at Guy’s big solid desk, gazing at the photo of Tilly, struggling to conjure up her voice, to hear what it was she was trying to say. All Emma’s powers of concentration were focused on Tilly’s eyes and her mouth, willing them to set free whatever secret they were holding, desperate to hear her speak once more inside her head, unlocking what had been so tightly shut.

  There was nothing. Of course.

  Now, listening to the sound of Guy moving around upstairs, she found herself filled with a fierce longing to see that photo again. With the image of Poppy Glover that had featured on every news bulletin still seared across her mind, she was seized once more by the ludicrous notion that Tilly had something she needed to tell her, something important. Again she was hit by a wave of irrational anger that Guy should be there at all, inhabiting the space that during the day was rightfully hers. The house was her kingdom, her territory. It felt as if he were keeping Tilly from her. Emma paced up and down in front of the folding glass doors that opened out on to the back garden, remembering how the police had swarmed all over there in the days when Guy was a suspect, pulling up the decking around the apple tree. Jemima had gone to pieces then, all the feelings she had been bottling up about her missing sister erupting into a wail of outrage – about their long-dead cat, of all things. ‘But that’s where we buried Muffin!’ she screamed, and Emma would never forget the contortion of her face. ‘Don’t let them dig up Muffin, Mummy!’ That was Guy’s doing. A neighbour reported having seen him in the garden around the time Tilly died, lurking in the darkness. Only later did he admit he’d been sneaking out for a cigarette, knowing how disappointed Emma would be if she found out he’d started smoking again. So as a result of his weakness they’d had to watch their garden being ripped up piece by piece. Anger mushroomed inside her, and she chewed furiously on the already jagged skin at the base of the nail on the index finger of her left hand. The blood, when it came, was a release. She squeezed the top of her finger savagely, enjoying the sight of the growing bulb of red, still faintly throbbing with her own angry pulse.

  Suddenly Guy appeared in the doorway. Emma was surprised to see he had his jacket on, a black leather biker-style one he wore with the self-consciousness of a girl in her first pre-teen bra.

  ‘You’ll be pleased to know I’m going out,’ he said coldly, and Emma didn’t dare look at him for fear he’d see the jolt of joy that shot through her, followed almost immediately by an irrational sense of abandonment.

  Slowly, she made her way upstairs, pretending to herself that she might be going to take a midday nap, or collect the washing, retrieving socks from under beds and behind beanbags.

  She entered Guy’s study as if on a whim, and sat for a while in the black chair, swivelling it slowly from side to side. Only now did she allow herself to open up the drawer and once again pick out that photo of Tilly at the kitchen table.

  Immediately, she was disappointed. She had no idea what she’d been hoping to find, but whatever it was, she didn’t recognize it. There was Tilly again, there was her little mouth in its plump ‘O’, but whatever she was saying was still lost. There was nothing new. What had she been expecting? Emma felt angry at herself for indulging in a cruel and ridiculous fantasy.

  And yet … as she gazed at the photo she was struck by Tilly’s hair, pulled back into low bunches behind her ears by two thick elasticated bands – red, with a pattern of yellow and orange flowers. And now, suddenly, Tilly’s voice did come to her. Not speaking through the photo but in an echo of a conversation from around the time it was taken, when she’d been standing in front of the hall mirror, with its ornate white frame, endlessly adjusting her plaits while Emma waited in the doorway impatiently jiggling her car keys.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Tilly, your hair looks fine.’

  But Tilly hadn’t been satisfied. ‘They have to match, Mummy.’ She’d frowned, tugging at the hair bands until they were exactly the same level on both sides, her little fingers inching the left one down fractionally to mirror the right. She’d always been so particular about matching pairs of things, Emma remembered. ‘Clearly on the spectrum,’ Guy used to joke. In the days when Guy knew how to joke. And Emma knew how to laugh.

  ‘If things don’t match I feel funny all day, like there’s a worm wriggling around in my tummy.’

  Now, something was nagging at Emma. Something she couldn’t quite pinpoint, a word dancing tantalizingly on the tip of her tongue.

  ‘What?’ she asked out loud, glaring at the photograph as if it were deliberately withholding information. ‘What?’

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  Something lurched inside her. Guy had come in without her noticing. What did he mean by sneaking up like that? Men oughtn’t to sneak. Men ought to make proper noises, solid sounds by which their progress through the house could be tracked. Men ought to announce themselves, not waft through rooms like ghosts, vaporizing through outside walls so there was no click of a key turning in the lock, no thud of a door closing.

  ‘You scared me.’

  She made her voice accusing to quash the guilty feeling that it was she who was in the wrong, sitting here at Guy’s desk, the drawer open beside her, his secrets bared to the elements.

  ‘Why are you in here, going through my things?’

  ‘They’re not your things. This is a photo of Tilly. You shouldn’t have it shut away in here where I can’t see it.’ Emma’s voice grew higher, shriller. On a level completely outside of herself, she listened to it in fascination. That voice wasn’t hers. That horrible, grating noise. Even so, she continued: ‘I’ve been looking for this photograph, and all the time it was right here where you’d hidden it.’

  Framed in the doorway with the glow from the skylight behind him, Guy seemed enormous, an imposing dark shadow of a man. For a second she felt a prickling of fear. Then it was as if the air went out of him and he slumped to the right, leaning his forehead on the wooden door frame.

  ‘For God’s sake, Emma.’ His voice was sad and tired. ‘Do we have to argue about everything
? I’m not the enemy here.’

  He looked so utterly defeated standing there, she almost got up to go to him, obeying some impulse born from years of habit, but then she glanced back down at the photograph, and immediately understood that the thing she’d been on the verge of remembering, the message Tilly was trying to tell her, had been lost, the spell broken. Tears of frustration pricked her eyes, and she wiped an angry hand across them.

  ‘I’ll leave “your things” alone then,’ she said. ‘But I’m keeping this.’

  Waving the photograph in front of his face, Emma pushed past her husband as if he wasn’t even there.

  5

  The photos were all over the television news, but Jason didn’t look at them. If he didn’t look, he might save himself from those terrible flashbacks that sent his pulse racing, sweat breaking out all over his body. Give yourself permission to block out what upsets you. He repeated it to himself like a mantra, until he could almost hear Dr Ancona’s voice in his head. It calmed him and he realized from the twinge in his jaw how tightly he’d been grinding his teeth together. Mrs Charlton, the bad-breath dentist, had told him at his last appointment that he’d been grinding them so much in the night he’d cracked one of his back teeth. ‘You’ll be needing root canal soon,’ she’d warned him, leaning right over so that her breasts were practically smothering his face. She must be well into her forties too. Gross. He’d bought one of those plastic mouth-guards that mould to the shape of your teeth and he wore it at night even though the hygiene aspect of it bothered him. It had its own light-blue plastic case that he washed out every day with a mixture of bleach and water, but still he worried about the germs. Mouths were disgusting when you thought about it. The things that went into them.

  After he finished dinner – a bowl of cereal, he never ate much in the evenings – he still had half an hour before he had to leave for the club. Some of the other bouncers didn’t like working nights but Jason preferred it. It left the days free for other things.

  Pulling his laptop out from the bottom drawer in the kitchen, Jason carried it to the table in the living room. The kitchen in this flat was tiny, a galley kitchen it was called, so the dining table was in the living room, but he preferred it that way. He could sit at the table and see everything he needed to see – the television, the street outside. He had never understood the fuss people made about eat-in kitchens. Why would you want to eat in the place where the bin is? Or where you chop raw meat?

  The table was a squarish white one from Ikea pushed against the middle of the wall exactly halfway between the twin living-room windows so that if you folded the room in half it would all match up. It felt important to him, that line of symmetry. The flat, which he got at a cheaper rent on account of it being above a laundrette, was purpose-built and all the rooms were like boxes, no feature fireplaces or alcoves. People always went on about original features like it was so great to have cornices on the ceilings and picture rails but for Jason it was all about clean lines and neat corners. No nooks and crannies where dirt and germs could hide.

  Lining up the edge of the laptop with the edge of the table, Jason noticed a smudge on the glossy black surface of the machine’s casing. Cursing, he made his way back to the kitchen to get the computer cloth from the drawer.

  Logging on to matchmadeinheaven.com, he saw he had only three unread messages in his inbox and a hard ball of disappointment formed in the back of his throat. Normally he got at least five or six overnight. He glanced at his profile photo again. Nothing wrong there. It was a studio photograph taken a couple of years ago (not ten years ago, not like some of those you got on dating sites. ‘In my late thirties,’ they said, and you knew they actually meant fifty-something. So many liars out there. People had forgotten how to tell the truth). His blond hair was a bit shorter in the picture than now, but his physique was still the same. You could tell here was someone who took staying in shape very seriously indeed. In the photo Jason was wearing a crisp white T-shirt, not queer tight, but tight enough that it stretched across his biceps, and he had a very small neat blond goatee beard. He was looking directly at the camera (he never trusted profile photos where people were looking away or, even worse, wearing sunglasses. You could tell a lot from a person’s eyes). His avatar was ToughButSensitive. Not very original, but it did the job. Jason was aware that many people tried to make their names funny but it was a mistake as far as he was concerned. Women said they wanted funny, but they didn’t really. It’s like when they said they wanted equality, but that was a lie too, because really they wanted you to take them out and buy them things and tell them they looked fantastic, but they didn’t want to do the same things for you. Oh no. So how was that equal then?

  Double-clicking on his inbox, Jason noted that one of the three messages was from Suzy, aka ButterfliesInMyTummy, and his mood lifted. It was the fourth or fifth message they’d exchanged, and they were just starting to move beyond the tedious small-talk stage. He skimmed through the message, growing increasingly impatient. Suzy favoured those little face icons. The whole page was littered with them – smiley faces, sad faces, surprised faces, embarrassed faces. Why couldn’t she just use words like everyone else? She also put five or six exclamation marks after a sentence, or added extra vowels to words, so everything was sooooooooo much fun or soooooooooo boring. It wound Jason up when people couldn’t write properly. He wasn’t asking for brain of Britain, but he liked a woman to be able to write a sentence that started with a capital letter and ended with a full stop and at least made an attempt at the Queen’s English. At least it wasn’t in text speak. He refused to answer the messages that spelled thanks ‘tnx’. Britain didn’t go through two World Wars so that the English language could be mutilated beyond recognition.

  Suzy wrote about her job as a credit controller (bored-expression face) and how she had thought she’d never want another relationship following the painful break-up of her marriage (crying face) but now she felt she might finally be ready to ‘dip a toe back in the water’ (smiley face). She went on to talk about what she did at the weekend (not a lot). She kept stressing how she went to the gym, obviously because she’d read his profile and knew he liked to keep fit. Jason saw loads of women like Suzy at the gym. They came in wearing their matching pink designer shorts and tops and their trainers that they’d bought because they liked the style not because they actually did the job they were supposed to. They walked on the treadmill for forty-five minutes while watching Loose Women on the TV and barely breaking a sweat. Then they went on the machines to do their abdominals and their biceps. And that was them done. Might as well save their money and their time and stay home and get fat. They would anyway.

  Finally, near the bottom of the message, the name Bethany came up. Jason stopped skimming and began to read more intently. Suzy had already told him how she’d struggled at first with being a single mum and having to make decisions without anyone else to bounce them off, and to lay down the law, even though being strict didn’t come naturally to her. Bethany’s birthday was coming up, Suzy now informed him (smiley face plus scared face). She’d been driving her mum mad coming up with different plans, each one more extravagant than the last. Finally Suzy had had to put her foot down, and it was decided that Bethany would just have a few friends over to the house to watch DVDs and for a sleepover.

  Jason closed his eyes for a moment. Suzy’s words had conjured up an image that he was reluctant to let go of. They’d already exchanged photographs so he knew exactly what Suzy’s daughter Bethany looked like. Suzy had sent him one with her very first message showing the two of them squashed into an armchair together. Jason reckoned it was supposed to show what a fun, ‘bubbly’ mum Suzy was, but it was Bethany who had captured Jason’s attention. Thick, wavy blonde hair, hanging down over her shoulders, big clear-blue eyes gazing out over smooth, rounded cheeks. Jason thought she was younger, but Suzy said she was ten, almost eleven. Though she’d described her as ‘very young for her age’.

  Jaso
n imagined the preparations Bethany would be making for her sleepover, the spare duvets – a heart pattern, he decided, or flowers maybe – the odd pink sleeping bag, a couple of blow-up mattresses, all heaped in a corner of her room, awaiting the big day. He envisaged her labouring over the invitations, the tip of her pink tongue protruding from between her lips. He imagined her friends talking about it at school, shiny heads bent together as they discussed which DVDs to watch.

  ‘It’s still two and a half weeks away, but she’s already counting down!!!!!!!’ Suzy had written. So. He didn’t have long to get his feet under the table and insinuate himself into the lives of mother and daughter. It was doable though, he thought. But he’d have to move quickly. Women like Suzy were ripe for the big dream, the whirlwind romance. They wanted love at first sight – and half the time they’d already decided you were it before even meeting you. Because love at first sight leads to happy ever after. It was amazing how many intelligent women actually thought like that.

  Suzy was in the market for being swept off her feet. You could always tell. Jason glanced at her profile photo again with indifference. She wasn’t bad-looking – teeth a bit too large for her mouth maybe, chin a little weak, but he wouldn’t mind too much, doing what he had to do. He’d done a lot worse, that was a fact.

  Jason clicked open the photo of mother and daughter sitting on the armchair. Suzy was slightly to the back of the photo, while Bethany was sitting on her lap, but over to one side, leaning in towards the camera. He cringed when his gaze passed over Suzy’s feet, which were crammed into a pair of those awful sheepskin boots. What would possess a woman of that age to go around in things that looked like elephant’s feet? He put his hand over the boots, and then moved it so that it covered Suzy up altogether.