He is not what Melody was expecting. Small, fragile almost. She is thinking of him next to Erin’s six-foot frame, the mismatch of them, when she hears her phone ring in the kitchen.
‘Sorry,’ she mouths to Erin.
The name Polly flashes on the screen of her mobile.
She has only ever known one Polly. Her chest tightens. Ignore it, she thinks. She has no inclination to speak to Polly. Not that it’s anything personal. They got on well. Melody relied on her, wouldn’t have coped without her, but it’s the association she makes whenever she calls. It’s unfortunate.
Maybe she’s just calling to see how I am.
This is unlikely. Polly was good at a lot of things but small talk wasn’t one of them.
The ringing stops. Relief fills her. Then it starts again.
Is that part of her training too, knowing how I will react when she calls?
‘Quick, he’s on again, this is the best part,’ Erin shouts from the living room.
She swipes her finger across the screen to answer the call.
‘Melody?’ the voice asks for confirmation. No one uses her full name any more. It’s always Mel these days.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Polly.’
‘I know. How are you?’
‘I’m good, thanks for asking.’ There is a pause, both women holding back.
‘I thought it would be a good idea if I came round to see you.’ There is no need to ask Polly if this is a social call. Not now that she hears the ‘break it to her gently’ tone. Leaning against the island she wonders why they don’t understand that she doesn’t want to know. Anything. It’s easier that way.
‘I see. Is it important?’
‘Nothing is certain, far from it, but the press have already made a few enquiries. We wanted to warn you before it hits the news.’
‘I don’t watch the news.’
‘Or gets into the papers.’
‘I don’t read them.’
‘It’s important we follow procedures, Melody.’
She wants to know but she doesn’t.
‘What has happened?’
‘A body, Melody. We’ve arrested him.’
Chapter Six
Eve
DAY THREE AND they still didn’t know my name. A trawl through the missing persons database brought up a few potential leads but they were quickly discounted. I’d like to think a few of my friends might have pondered my absence on social media, my lack of response to their texts, but I was a sporadic communicator at the best of times so I could hardly blame them for not reporting me missing. She hasn’t tweeted in days, there must be something wrong.
Had I been killed a year ago, my colleagues on APPEAL would have raised the alarm. It was a TV programme that investigated miscarriages of justice and I was a senior producer, part of a team that valued my judgement and noticed my presence or lack of it. Only APPEAL had been axed in a round of ‘efficiency savings’ last year, its place in the schedule taken by a well-known presenter extolling the virtues of making cushions and candles for your home and urging viewers to rediscover the lost art of cross-stitching. I had views about this. Still do. Police make mistakes, innocent people pay for them, and smelly candles and cross-stitching aren’t going to help. But the TV execs think injustice is too worthy, a step up from alfalfa sprouts and mung beans, and what people really want is to learn how to make a personalised doormat in a vintage font. I digress; the point I’m trying to make is that as a result of APPEAL’s demise I was a freelancer, a human plug filling gaps in rotas. No one really noticed me even when I was present. When I didn’t show up, they weren’t unduly alarmed, they just struck me off their list for being unreliable.
My mum’s attitude to communication was far more energetic than my own. She was not the kind of person to accept prolonged silences from her only daughter. A text would not go unanswered for more than a few hours without a follow-up ‘You OK?’ Likewise a phone call that wasn’t returned the same day was eyed with deep suspicion. But the week in question was one in which the normal rules of engagement didn’t apply. Her phone lay uncharged in a drawer, two thousand miles away in Greece. She was on holiday, her eighth visit to the islands in as many years, working her way through the whole archipelago (this year Zakynthos could be added to a list that included Crete, Lefkas, Samos, and Kefalonia, which remained her favourite. It’ll take a lot to top that holiday, Eve. She was prone to these fixations, or ‘destination loyalty’ as she liked to call it, going back to the same country year after year until a calamity ruined it for her. When our run of camping holidays in Scotland ended with the tent being swallowed up in a mudslide Dad and I broke open a packet of peanut M&Ms in celebration.
On the Sunday I was found, my mum and Steve, my stepdad, had been on a Turtle Island cruise, returning, salt thick on tanned skin, to toast their last afternoon with umbrella cocktails in one of the harbour bars. The day I died, they were on Xygia Sulphur Beach marvelling at the deep turquoise of the water – rumoured to contain special healing properties – while pretending not to notice the stench of rotten eggs rolling off the sulphur springs in a nearby cave.
She would never forgive herself for this, having fun while I died. Her heart was hard-wired to mine, so she thought. How could she not have heard me screaming for help thousands of miles away?
They had arrived at Stansted on the Monday, wearied by the evening flight. I was due to collect them, my mum having furnished me with all the necessary details before they left. She texted just before they took off.
Just boarded! See you soon. Love Mum Xxx
They waited in the cold for me, flimsy holiday clothes pulled tight around them. ‘She’ll be here, Steve, it’s not like Eve to let us down,’ my mum said when after twenty minutes he suggested they get a cab. ‘She’s probably stuck in traffic.’ They tried my mobile countless times: ‘Hi, it’s Eve, can’t take your call right now, leave your number and I’ll call you back.’
‘Eve, it’s Mum. Where are you? You said you’d be here.’
I did. I’m sorry.
Forty-five minutes passed before she conceded that the cab was a good idea. She sat, head turned away from Steve because she knew he was angry with me for standing them up and with her for making them wait so long.
From the window she watched the airport disappear behind them, headlights and brake lights illuminating the motorway ahead. Quickly the clear waters of Zakynthos, the fine sand and the turtles and cocktails faded to a memory. Unease grew inside her.
Oxygen, carbon and hydrogen were the biggest components in my human body, but after I died I consisted almost entirely of anger, agony and longing. The emotions were so intrinsic, I doubted if I would exist in any form without them. Maybe I was supposed to let go, be filled with forgiveness. Maybe that was what marked us out as lingerers, why we remained there when others moved on. We clung to destructive emotions. But what else was there to cling to when you’d seen what I had seen?
My mother’s love for me was fierce, Teflon-coated. Whatever I threw at her – the sulks, the strops, crashing her new car, throwing parties in her pristine house when she was away, even the teenage lies, no I am not sleeping with him – resulted in little more than minor abrasions. Underneath there was a layer, as strong and impenetrable as the earth’s mantle, that nothing could touch. This was the person I was forced to watch act on her mother’s intuition. The person who had always been there for me with soup and hot lemonade, dinners of questionable quality and financial rescue packages when I was broke; the person who had bored her friends senseless with my achievements, and hung photographs detailing my history of embarrassing haircuts on the walls of her home. She had no idea where her intuition would take her. Only I could see the juggernaut careering towards her. And there was nothing I could do. Not a thing. I couldn’t shout out to warn her. I couldn’t save her. It was going to hit no matter what. With a force that would break her in two. All I could do was watch her shatter on impact. And afterwards I
didn’t even get to hold her, help piece her back together.
When she woke on the Tuesday morning there was a moment, a sliver of time, when her mind was empty; a nanosecond when she was unburdened by worry. In the months and years ahead she’d wish she could stretch out that nanosecond to give her some kind of peace, a break from her head; just for a minute not to be my mother, not to have all the love without a channel for it. People say it is grief that burdens you, but that’s not true. It is love. There would be days when it pinned her to the bed and suffocated her with its force.
‘It’s not like her,’ she said to Steve over breakfast of toast and eggs.
‘She forgot most likely. Just you wait, she’ll be calling later today all apologetic for leaving us standing there.’
What would he know? Mother and daughter, he could never understand.
Who should she call? Kira, my best friend, was away somewhere. The Middle East, or was it South East Asia? She always got the two confused. She phoned a few others. Elise said she hadn’t heard from me, but then she hadn’t tried to contact me either. Nat was her best bet. ‘I haven’t heard from her for over a week,’ he said. She detected a trace of guilt in his voice. ‘I’ll call a few people to see if they’ve spoken to her. Will you let me know if you get hold of her?’ he asked. My mum promised she would. Then she tried ringing my old work number but got through to the switchboard instead.
‘Can you tell me if Eve Elliot is at work today?’
‘I can try to put you through … There is no Eve Elliot listed here.’
‘She’s freelance.’
‘Well we wouldn’t have an extension for her. I suggest you try a mobile,’ the woman said as if the thought had not occurred to my mum.
She continued through her address book, scouring it for the numbers circled and marked EVE’S FRIEND. Some of them were old landlines, unobtainable mobile numbers. When a Spanish man answered one, she abandoned that particular line of investigation.
Sticking her head around the living-room door, she told Steve she was off out. ‘To the supermarket,’ she said. ‘I might be a while, there are a few jobs I need to do.’ He looked up from the sports pages of his newspaper. ‘Right-o,’ he said. The news section had been discarded on the table.
The traffic was heavy. Twickenham to Shepherd’s Bush, you could do it in twenty minutes on a good run but when did you ever get one of those? She listened to the Adele CD that I bought her for Christmas last year. That girl has got some voice, she thought as she always did when she heard her. It relaxed her for a while, warbling along. When it was finished she played it over again. There was only one other CD in the car and she wasn’t feeling up to Paul Simon.
Once she reached my street she had the notion that it might be best to turn around. Like she did on a blind date years ago, got stage fright because she didn’t know how she’d manage talking to a stranger for two hours over dinner. That was in the days before mobile phones and texts. She’d imagined him waiting for her inside the restaurant before he finally realised she wasn’t coming. Now she wondered what she would say if she found me. What if I was there with a man? Or sick in bed? Or had simply gone to work and forgotten about collecting them last night. My mobile could be lost, damaged. There were all kinds of possible scenarios to explain my absence and lack of communication. I’ll just have a quick check and go, she told herself as she turned the key in my lock.
Food smells. Cook some fish, a bit of salmon say, and your house can stink for days even with the best extractor fan on the market (I say this without any proof because my budget never stretched to the best). Put that fish in the bin and tell yourself that you’ll empty it tomorrow because tonight you’re just going to have one more glass of wine and it is Friday night and therefore OK to let your standards slip a little. Besides, you are in the middle of watching Anchorman for the fifth time. So you forget about the piece of fish you scraped from your plate into the bin; it was only a morsel after all. When the morning comes, you want to get out of the house as quickly as possible because your curiosity demands to be satisfied and you can’t wait a moment longer.
You forget about the bin.
My mum smelt it as soon as she opened the door. The leftover fish had sat there rotting for eleven days, along with assorted vegetable peelings and fruit. My domestic hygiene standards had long been a source of disappointment to her, but she knew even I had a limit. The smell, she thought. Eve couldn’t live with this.
She walked through the hallway saying my name quietly, as if to herself. The Anchorman DVD case was still lying on the sofa where I had left it. Moving on to my bedroom, she stood at the doorway, noted that my bed was made – I might have been slovenly in some areas but I would always make my bed in the mornings; I had even devised a system where I could make it while still lying in it – my favourite orthopaedic pillow sitting on top of the duvet. She walked down the hall to the kitchen. She had her arm up, protecting her nose, but the smell cloyed, permeated everything. On the table there was a bowl, the spoon stuck to the side, what was once milk and crunchy nut cornflakes hardened and moulding. A mug next to it, pale liquid with a fuzz of blue floating on the top.
In the sink: water, dark brown, filmed with grease. The whole scene, its cumulative effect, the mess, the smell, the dust, left my mum, who could not let a moment pass without plumping a sagging cushion or banishing a stray crumb, with the impression I had not been here for years. She found herself calculating how long she had spent in Zakynthos (fourteen days), how long it was since she had been here, seen me in the flesh (was it really three weeks?). Had I not been here all that time? Her natural instinct was to start cleaning immediately but she stopped herself, deciding to leave everything as it was. Something was wrong and she didn’t give a bugger what Steve would say, because she was calling the police.
Instinctively she bashed 999 into her phone, pausing just before she pressed dial. Her only other experience with the 999 number had been a few years ago when a group of teenagers in the street were kicking at bins and shouting loudly close to midnight. She had been told that the number was only for real emergencies. Was this a real emergency? She believed I was missing but she had no proof of it. Then again, how do you prove a person is missing? Would they measure the emergency by the number of unanswered calls or the mould growth on teacups? She put the phone down. Call the local police, that was what they told her last time. But she didn’t have the number for the local police and her phone was a phone that made calls and didn’t do any of those other fancy things like search the internet that everyone told her was so important now.
She left the flat, locked it, got in the car and set off to find a police station.
The nearest one was Shepherd’s Bush, but even if my mum had known where it was, which she didn’t, she wouldn’t have stopped there, couldn’t have stopped there in fact. It’s on the Green, which makes it sound leafy and pleasant when really it is a patch of grass surrounded by a traffic-clogged artery. There is nowhere to stop even if you wanted to, and the interweaving lanes of traffic constituted ‘London driving’, which my mother avoided at all costs. She headed in the direction of her Twickenham home.
She passed through Richmond on the way and this she decided was a good place to stop. Parking was easier, and when she’d reported the unanswered calls and the dirty flat and they’d laughed at her for overreacting – maybe not to her face, but afterwards when she had gone – she could nip to Waitrose, get the groceries she’d promised Steve she would collect and he would have no idea she had spent the afternoon wasting police time.
There was one person ahead of my mum, a woman wearing a hooded sweatshirt, occasionally raising her voice so it was impossible not to hear her slurred words. In normal circumstances Mum would have been tutting at the rudeness, the lack of manners, whispering to me or Steve, whoever happened to be next to her, ‘Three sheets to the wind, I’ll bet,’ while making the universal hand movement for drink.
Instead she practised what sh
e should say. None of it sounded right. ‘I just know,’ she could say, but the police were all about evidence so she’d have to do better than that. She was still trying to formulate her words when the drunk woman shuffled away from the desk. ‘Waste of bloody time,’ she shouted as she left.
My mum moved to the counter.
‘How can I help you?’ the receptionist said.
‘I can’t seem to find my daughter,’ she said. Immediately she regretted her choice of words, which seemed more appropriate to describe the temporary misplacing of an object such as her keys or purse. She needed to elaborate quickly so she began the story about Zakynthos and the airport and the no-show and the mouldy plates in my flat. The receptionist raised her hand to stop the flow.
‘I can take the details from you now.’
The woman, who my mum quickly realised was not an actual police officer but a civilian clerk, introduced herself as Gladys and in a gentle lilting accent asked for my name.
‘Eve Elliot,’ my mum said.
Gladys ran through the list of questions. Age – 30; mobile phone number (for this Mum had to check her own phone). A physical description – how long did Gladys have? She wanted to tell them about the gap in my teeth that she loved and that sometimes made a whistle when I talked, or how my lips were so red that when I was a child people asked her if she had put lipstick on me. As if. Or my laugh, which was never hard to draw out; even when I was down and upset it always burst through, a deep and gusty cackle that reminded her of Carry On films. She could say my voice always bordered on the loud side of acceptable, that as a child I only had one volume setting. She’d even taken me to have my hearing tested, and sat shamefaced as the doctor told her I was a normal child who simply wanted to be heard. As an adult she’d say I didn’t need a phone to call her because she could hear me all the way from Shepherd’s Bush anyway.
The Life I Left Behind Page 5