The Rift

by Nina Allan

  They were in Julie’s flat, part of a three-storey Victorian terrace less than five minutes’ walk from the Christie hospital. Julie’s flat was on the ground floor. The two reception rooms had been knocked together to form one large living space. French doors opened on to a chaotically overgrown back garden.

  “Alisha offered to have it cleared, but I like it like this and so do the birds,” Julie said. “In summer it’s like a jungle.”

  “Don’t they mind? The people in the other flats?”

  “They don’t have access. It’s nothing to do with them.”

  Selena gazed around the living room. Two corduroy-covered sofas, a glass-topped coffee table, TV and DVD player, a retro 1950s sideboard and rug, a large and colourful abstract painting in a stainless steel frame. The effect was striking – if the flat was being featured on one of those interior design shows they’d call it eclectic. Selena found she could not see anything of Julie in the room, but what did she know? “It’s nice,” she said.

  “It’s Alisha’s stuff mostly. I said she could keep it here. You should have seen the dump I had in Altrincham.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Not long. About a year. Look, I’m sorry about Dad. I can’t believe it, really. It’s hard to take in.”

  “It was years ago.” Julie, she wanted to say. Years ago, Julie, the way you stressed a person’s name sometimes just to get at them. Nearly ten years ago, and where were you? Dad might still be alive if it wasn’t for you.

  The kind of outburst you dream of giving way to but never do, not unless you’re in a soap opera. What purpose would it serve, anyway, what would it change? What could Julie know of what they had been through as a family, the three of them? How could she explain her father’s decline to someone who hadn’t been there, who hadn’t witnessed Ray’s transformation from one kind of person into another kind, the two Rays so different in outlook and temperament that the only way to accept the new Dad was by completely letting go of the Dad he had been?

  Margery had not been able to do that, which was why they’d divorced. Not because of some stupid affair, but because it seemed inconceivable, suddenly, that the two of them had ever shared a life together in the first place.

  “Dad never stopped hoping,” Selena said. Never believed you were dead, was what she meant, only the word didn’t seem appropriate, somehow.

  She’s dead, don’t you realise? Mum screaming at Dad, screaming that Julie had probably been dead even before they realised she was missing. Soon after they found out Dad had been fired, that was. The only time Mum had lost her temper.

  Selena hadn’t thought about that scene in years.

  “I’m sorry,” Julie repeated. She sat with hunched shoulders, staring down into her coffee cup, and all Selena could think was that she couldn’t be sorry, not really, or she would have come back sooner. Not for me. But for Dad. Dad.

  What would he have done with this moment?

  Perhaps it was better that he had died before.

  Before he could be disappointed?

  “I don’t know if I can deal with this,” Selena said. “I need to know what happened. I feel as if you don’t trust me.”

  I feel like I’m going crazy, she almost said, but didn’t, because she wasn’t sure if it was even true. Mainly she felt pissed off – pissed off, because here she was again, after everything, still tiptoeing around Julie’s feelings, afraid of losing her. She couldn’t remember ever having demanded anything of Julie – such demands had become impossible, forbidden. There had been the years of their togetherness, and then the rift – the great casting out, as if their closeness had been nothing, had never existed.

  She was damned if she meant to go through that a second time.

  “If I tell you now you won’t believe me,” Julie said, so quietly that Selena almost didn’t hear her.

  “What do you mean?” Selena said. Her own voice sounded harsh to her, harsher than she would have expected or even imagined. “Why shouldn’t I believe you? You’re here, aren’t you? You’re here because you want to tell me – you wouldn’t have come back at all otherwise.”

  Selena put down her coffee cup. Her palms were sweating, she supposed with anger. She closed her eyes, imagining her anger opening above her like a parachute, like a great red flower, like the trumpet attached to a gramophone only much, much bigger.

  Like a foghorn, blaring.

  When she opened her eyes again she saw Julie was crying. The tears oozed slowly from beneath her eyelids, like globules of glass.

  “I’m sorry,” Selena said, only she didn’t feel sorry, not yet, not exactly. Or if she did then there was something mixed in with the sorrow: something red. “This is all so new still.”

  “For me, too.” Julie rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Do you remember before I met Lucy? You and I were so close then.” She sniffed, pulled a tissue from her jeans pocket, blew her nose. Lucy, whose aunt had answered the telephone the night of Julie’s disappearance. What Selena remembered most about Lucy Milner was her hair, which reached to her waist and which Lucy always wore in a plait. The police had questioned Lucy, as they had questioned all Julie’s friends, although Lucy hadn’t even been in the country at the time. Lucy’s mother worked as a doctor in Calcutta, or somewhere. Selena wondered what had happened to Lucy, where she was living. Why Julie had brought her up now, she had no idea.

  “Shall we go for a walk?” Selena said, changing the subject. “I think it’s stopped raining.”

  “That would be perfect. We can go to the park. It’s not far.” Julie balled the tissue and stuffed it back in her pocket. “Thanks, Selena.”

  * * *

  The park was wintry and mostly empty, the concrete pathways strewn with fallen leaves. They walked slowly along, side by side, as if they came here often, Selena thought, as if they were used to walking there together, as if walking there together was something they enjoyed. She wondered how they might appear to outsiders, if they looked like sisters.

  “I wish I’d known,” Julie said. “About Dad, I mean. I know it sounds stupid but I think I expected everything to still be the same.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Selena said. “Things would have changed anyway. They always do.” A statement that was both true and not true at the same time. Julie had split the world in two when she went missing, a divide so stark you could almost see it, if you thought about it, like a fork in the road.

  They walked on for a while in silence. Selena wondered how she would feel if Julie were to disappear from her life again, as suddenly as she’d returned. She felt surprised at how painful it was, the idea. Something about the empty park, the rain, the sense that you could live your life and die and still know nothing about anything.

  What if knowing only made things worse? Perhaps it was better to remain in the dark about what had happened. There was an argument for not pursing it, for ignoring the fork in the road, and moving on.

  * * *

  Selena had read about a crime that happened in America, a case in which a young woman named Sharon Wade was kidnapped by a lumberjack and carpenter, Caleb Hatcher. The abduction was carried out with the collusion of Hatcher’s wife, Mary.

  The kidnap occurred in a small town in California called Mile Ford, an old cowboy settlement that had worn itself away almost to nothing, a gas station and a general store and a strip mall, a railway crossing on the way to elsewhere. Sharon Wade was used to hitchhiking. She thought she knew when a lift was safe and when it might not be. She felt fine about getting into Hatcher’s pickup because she could see Mary already inside, sitting in the front seat beside Hatcher with her nine-month-old baby Alicia in her lap.

  Sharon Wade was kept in captivity for seven years.

  There was a documentary about the case on the Internet. The programme featured interviews with members of Sharon’s family and with Sharon herself. Sharon sat very still with her hands in her lap, while an interviewer asked her questions about what
had happened to her. Selena was struck most of all by Sharon’s calmness. You could never have guessed from looking at her the disastrous and horrific turn her life had taken. She was softly spoken, a quiet woman. She answered each question politely and in some detail. She still seemed wary though, as if she was fully expecting the interviewer not to believe her.

  The documentary was typical of its kind: sensationalist and subtly manipulative, a slick montage of photographs and witness statements and coercive music. Selena felt uncomfortable watching it. She found she was especially uncomfortable with the way Sharon Wade was being questioned. Not with the questions themselves, but with the fact that Wade had been questioned at all. They should leave her alone, she thought. She doesn’t need this. Sharon Wade was the kind of woman – pleasant-seeming, unobtrusive, tastefully dressed – you might pass by in the local supermarket without a second glance. The language she used in answering the questions was simple and factual, the same kind of language Selena imagined she would have been taught to use on the witness stand. Yet the longer Selena listened to her the more she gained a sense of Sharon as a person apart, a woman so changed by her experience that even if she lived to be a hundred and twenty she would never see the world or be able to live in it the way her friends did, or her neighbours, or her family.

  There would always be that gap. As Sharon attempted to explain the ingenious system of mind control Hatcher had used to keep her enslaved – how even on the one occasion she had been allowed a family visit, she had felt utterly bound to him – Selena gained the impression that Sharon Wade no longer cared if people believed her or not. They could believe her or think she was lying, that was their choice. It wasn’t her job to prove her story either way. Sharon’s energies were directed elsewhere, largely towards helping other women who had found themselves in similar situations.

  Selena felt sure that Sharon felt bound to these women in ways that could never adequately be explained. Not to those on the outside, anyway.

  Sharon didn’t blame anyone for what she had been through, not even Hatcher. Hatcher was over, serving a hundred-year prison sentence for kidnap and rape. Simply reporting that fact would be revenge enough. All Sharon wanted now, Selena imagined, was to breathe clean air, to be able to walk along the street without being pointed at, to not have to give people reasons for her existence.

  Documentaries really were the new freak shows, Selena thought. Freaks could still be paraded in public, so long as you could get them to sign a contract beforehand.

  Sharon Wade had been made to sign a contract, authorising her enslavement to Caleb Hatcher. Every day for seven years, people had driven past Hatcher’s trailer on the outskirts of Mile Ford, not having a clue about what was going on inside. Selena found it difficult even to think about. What made it even harder was knowing that Julie might have been through something similar, with Steven Jimson maybe, or someone like him. Almost in spite of herself, Selena began to read up on other cases, women and girls and occasionally young men who had been captured like butterflies, then kept in basements or specially designed strongboxes or abandoned buildings. One particular girl – Selena remembered hearing about her escape on the news – had been imprisoned for more than a decade.

  For the most part, the men who perpetrated these crimes carried on as normal: working at their jobs, having drinks with friends, going on holiday. No one had anything special to say about them. It was as if anyone might be capable of such things, anyone at all.

  Selena found herself returning again and again to the single black-and-white photograph of Mary Hatcher, who had made a bargain with her husband Caleb: stop torturing me and I’ll keep your secret. Mary’s eyes seemed both cunning and terrified. They made Selena think of the dog Johnny had adopted, a yellowish, dingo-like creature that had been beaten so badly by its former owner that it was afraid even to accept food. In the beginning it would snap at Johnny’s hand the instant after the meat was in its mouth. The rescue centre warned Johnny before he took the dog home that it might never be one-hundred percent trustworthy. Johnny said he was OK with that, he didn’t have kids, after all, but he did have patience.

  The first time the dog licked his hand after taking its food, Johnny had cried.

  In the end it was Mary Hatcher who went to the police. Mary was granted immunity from prosecution if she agreed to testify against Caleb. Selena did not like to think of the nightmares she must still have.

  The terrible thing was that in some ways, Sharon Wade had more in common with Mary Hatcher than she did with her own sister, Charly.

  * * *

  The women who returned from the dead were offered counselling. Some of them spent extended periods in residential care, where specially trained medical staff taught them how to readjust to the world outside. It wasn’t just the media that were a problem, but the things society at large decreed to be ordinary: paying bills, looking for work, spending the night alone in your apartment with all the lights off. What struck Selena most forcibly was how few of the women felt able to return home to their families. In some cases, they refused even to meet with them.

  Maybe it was better to think of Julie-now as a different person. Someone who’d come into her life only recently, and whose relationship to Julie-then was largely irrelevant. Selena had memories she shared with Julie-then, that was true, but it would be a mistake to see those memories as the key to understanding Julie-now.

  Could she say that Julie-now was really her sister, even?

  The questions circled in her head, never finding solace. Julie must ask similar questions of herself, all the time, Selena thought. Perhaps there were no right answers.

  * * *

  Selena felt distracted at work, which was unlike her. Normally she found being in the shop – the familiarity of it, the sameness – a powerful antidote to outside stress. Like when she’d been trying to make up her mind about Johnny, for example. In the weeks following Julie’s return she felt increasingly distanced, increasingly compromised. She even found herself getting impatient with customers – something that had rarely happened to her before.

  There were gaps in her life, she realised. She hated terms like survivor guilt because they seemed too convenient, too fashionable almost – and yet she could see she’d been living in Julie’s shadow, that was obvious, or the shadow of her disappearance, whatever.

  She’d never blamed herself for Julie’s fate, exactly – but wasn’t it true, at least in part, that she’d denied herself the right to the life she might have lived otherwise because of it?

  College had seemed pointless – or rather she hadn’t seemed good enough.

  The idea of selecting a future, rather than simply accepting the future that was offered, seemed – what? Selfish, inconsiderate, immoral even.

  She’d felt she was lucky to have a future of any kind.

  Even Johnny – had she refused to go with him to Kuala Lumpur because on some level she believed she had no right to be with a person she loved because Julie would always, however you looked at it, be alone?

  The questions coursed through her mind, swiping at its confines, like flies in a jar. She forgot things, overran her lunch break. She hoped that Vanja would not notice, but of course she did, because Vanja noticed everything. She seemed convinced that Selena’s spell of absent-mindedness had to do with Johnny, or rather the lack of Johnny, and for once Selena was content to let her think what she liked. At least it stopped her asking difficult questions.

  One evening, about a month after Julie’s return, Vanja announced she was kidnapping Selena for a girls’ night out.

  “What about Vasili?” Selena said. She knew he didn’t like it if Vanja came home late.

  “He’s in Berlin,” Vanja said. “Stuff him, anyway.”

  Selena sensed there was more tension even than usual between Vasili and Vanja. She had no idea what was going on, and preferred to keep it that way. She knew Vanja wouldn’t tell her even if she asked – she would either make something up, or shrug off
her concern by saying Vasili was an arsehole, which Selena knew already. Vanja had always made it clear that Vasili was her problem, that the best way Selena could help her was by not asking questions. Selena had always been happy to keep her side of the bargain, though she sometimes wondered if this was cowardly of her, an unspoken and selfish desire not to be involved.

  What if Vanja was in actual danger? Selena remembered something Sharon Wade’s sister Charly had said in the TV interview about Sharon’s home visit, about knowing her sister was in trouble but being afraid to do or say anything, in case her interference made the situation worse.

  Wasn’t it equally likely that Charly had kept quiet because she didn’t want to be involved, either? Selena had to admit it was at least a possibility.

  Later, in Podolsky’s – a wine bar so retro it was like stepping through a portal into the 1950s – Vanja handed Selena a small leather casket, wrapped in red tissue paper. Inside the casket was a bracelet, one of the Rina Marks line that Selena particularly admired. Rina Marks worked with found metals – natural ores, hand-polished stones. Each of her pieces was unique, off-kilter in a way that Selena found most attractive. “They are rash, but they work,” Vanja had said, when she first introduced the line. Selena had once heard Vasili refer to Rina Marks’s jewellery as an ugly mess, which only made her covet it all the more.

  “I thought you needed cheering up,” Vanja said. “You see that metal there?” She pointed to one of three metal ingots, which depended, like silver teardrops, from the bracelet’s main chain. “That’s meteorite silver, a unique allotrope. No silver on Earth is like it. I should tell you that it’s very, very slightly radioactive.”