by Isla Dewar
She put Evie to bed, read her a story, and when she asked where her daddy was, told her he’d be home soon. Jamie would come, banging the front door shut, shouting apologies, the chill night air clinging to his coat. He’d laugh and tell her he was sorry, he’d had to work late and hadn’t time to phone her.
Eleven o’clock and still no sign. Martha sat in the living room, hands folded on her lap, nerves singing in her stomach and doom scenarios in her head – Jamie dead after being hit by a bus, Jamie suffering amnesia in hospital, Jamie attacked by thugs and lying bruised and bleeding and undiscovered in some park somewhere. She phoned every hospital in Edinburgh and, no, a Jamie Walters had not been admitted to any of them.
She phoned her mother, who told her not to worry. ‘He’ll have gone out to the pub with some workmates. He’ll come home blind drunk smelling like sin and begging your forgiveness. It happens. And, no, don’t phone the police. Not yet. You’ll both end up being embarrassed. Just remember men snore and men make stupid remarks and forget your anniversary and are annoying. And sometimes they go off on their own to do manly things like get drunk and pretend to be younger than they are. Just relax. He’ll be home soon enough.’
Martha had gone to bed unconvinced by her mother’s notions of Jamie’s whereabouts. She lay tense and listening for footsteps on the path outside. Nothing. And the night rolled on. At three in the morning she got up and made tea. She sat at the kitchen table listening to the night sounds of the house, waiting for daylight and for the world to start up again. The image in her head was of Jamie. ‘Shit,’ he’d said, ‘I’ve forgotten my LP. Left it at the diner.’ And he’d taken off running back to get it. The more she thought about it, the faster Jamie had run. Eventually, he wasn’t running he was fleeing. He was waving his arms and shouting, ‘Aaaah! No!’ It dawned on her that he wasn’t running back to the diner. He was racing away from her. Away from what she’d been talking about – the life they were going to live, the new child, the bigger house and more mouths to feed.
In the morning, after taking Evie to nursery, Martha looked in Jamie’s wardrobe. His clothes were gone. All that was left was a selection of white shirts. They looked lonely. They had nothing to do with the Jamie she knew. The rock’n’roll boy who’d driven their van, shared their music dreams. They were Jamie’s compromise shirts. The things he’d put on to go out to work at a job he’d hated. Something he’d done to pay the rent and put food on the table. She went out to the garden shed. The sweet herby smell lingered. Jamie’s dope. Martha knew all about his habit and didn’t blame him. She figured he needed the escape and smoking a little grass was something he had in common with the people whose music he loved. This morning that scent was all that remained of Jamie. His record collection was gone. Hundreds and hundreds of LPs. He must have been taking them away bit by bit for weeks. And Martha knew Jamie had left her.
The letter arrived the next day. Seven words. I’ve gone. Don’t look for me. Sorry.
‘For God’s sake, I know you’ve gone,’ Martha said. There was nobody around to hear. But speaking out loud helped. He hadn’t even written love Jamie. That hurt.
Later that day, Martha phoned Jamie’s work. He was under-manager at a Princes Street department store. She was told he’d handed his notice in last week. ‘Didn’t say where he was going,’ the girl on the end of the line said. ‘Sorry.’
Days later Martha miscarried. Sophie took her to hospital, and brought her back to her own house when it was over. ‘You’re best here where I can look after you.’ So Martha sat by the fire, pale and drained, hardly speaking. She was numb. Sophie looked after Evie, took her to nursery, and in the afternoon brought her home again. She brought Martha bowls of chicken soup and told her to rest. ‘You’re suffering from shock. It’ll pass. What you need is hot, sweet tea, soup and a bit of comfort.’
It was inevitable. Sophie suggested Martha and Evie move in permanently. ‘Well, you need to get on with your life. You’ll have to get a job and meantime you won’t be able to pay your rent.’ She sighed. ‘It’ll be company. We both need company.’
Martha got a job with a small publisher. She’d thought it would be a lively place to work. She’d meet interesting people, authors for example. But George McPherson only published dead authors whose work was long out of copyright. The books were usually about bird watching, rock climbing, geology and walking. Nothing that interested Martha; so, she was bored and lonely. George often worked from home, and she was the sole employee. A couple of months after she started at the company George joined his authors. His wife found him dead at his desk and a few days later told Martha she was no longer needed.
After that Martha found a job with a huge insurance company, working in the typing pool. Machines clattered round her, girls gossiped, bosses came and went flapping bits of paper. And Martha kept herself to herself. She arrived at nine, went home at five and rarely spoke to anyone. She didn’t make any friends. She refused to make friends. She didn’t trust people any more. And she didn’t want anyone to know her story. It was too shameful. Her husband had walked out. People would think it was her fault. She’d been a nag. Or frigid. Or both.
‘So, here I am,’ she said to the kitchen in Sophie’s house. ‘Back in the flat where I grew up. It looks the same. Smells the same. It is the same. I’ve changed. I’ve lost my sense of wonder.’ She sniffed deeply. ‘Talking of smells, the cakes are ready.’
5
You Should Be Dancing
On cue, twenty minutes after Sophie had left the flat, the phone rang. ‘Please bring the car. I can’t be bothered walking back home.’
Martha shoved her feet back into her shoes, heaved on her coat and took the car key from the hook marked B, in the hall. B for Beetle rather than C for car. Sophie thought her car deserved a small amount of recognition as she considered it to be more characterful than just a car.
The house looked out onto the sea, but the entrance was at the side. Sophie and now Martha and Evie lived on the upper two floors. The flat was large, draughty and badly in need of decorating. But that was beyond the family budget. Sophie covered the walls instead with paintings found in junk shops and collections of objects that she put together and framed – postcards, feathers found on the beach, withering flowers from her garden and selections of things she found interesting – a clipping from a newspaper alongside some Christmas wrapping and a few pebbles from the shore. She gave these groupings names that had no connection with what they contained – Yesterday’s Doubts, A Little Bit of Yearning, Waiting for Judas – and always refused to explain what was meant. Mostly because she didn’t know. The names were an assortment of words that had popped into her head.
The rain had stopped and a fresh wind was whipping off the sea. Martha pulled her coat round her as she walked up the path to the car. This rescuing of mother happened quite often. Sophie would set off striding towards Joppa. It was part of her good-health regime that she’d started when she hadn’t actually wanted to be healthy. She’d wanted to die, to join her husband, Martin. And to punish herself for being alive when he wasn’t. But she had responsibilities – a daughter who needed a mother.
So Sophie walked for Martha, though she hated it. It was purposeful but lonely. Before his death she and Martin had walked every evening. They’d discussed everything from politics to missing socks. They’d talked so much they’d always cover more ground than they intended and had sighed as they’d turned to tackle the long journey home. So walking brought painful memories. When they got too much to bear Sophie would phone home.
Martha drove up the High Street to where she knew Sophie would be waiting, at the end of the prom. She parked and joined her mother leaning on the railings, staring out at the sea.
‘Walking’s boring,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s a matter of putting one leg in front of the other and that’s all there is to it.’
‘Well, that’s easy,’ Martha said.
‘But you are just moving through the day. Air on your face is n
ice. But because you are only using your legs, your mind is free to think. It’s the thinking gets to me. I hate random thinking. It’s awful. No wonder philosophers are a bunch of fruitcakes.’
Martha said she didn’t think philosophers thought randomly and they weren’t all fruitcakes. ‘What do you think about?’
‘All the things you shouldn’t think about. Life. Loneliness. Grief. Sorrow. Regret. Stupid decisions.’
‘Goodness,’ said Martha. ‘No wonder you hate walking.’
‘And you. I think about you.’
‘You lump me in with all those awful things?’
‘I worry about you. You should be enjoying yourself. You should be going out at night mixing with people, not sitting at home with your mother. You should be dancing.’
‘I don’t want to dance.’
‘You’re living with regret. You’re hanging on to your past, hoping to find Jamie. Hoping he’ll come back. But he’s gone.’
‘I just want to know why,’ said Martha.
‘The why of it all is obvious. Jamie had an is-this-it moment. He looked round at the clutter of plastic toys and at you all tired and bedraggled after a day with Evie and at the little house you lived in and he thought, this isn’t what I planned.’
‘But we were in love. We were settled.’
‘Oh, settled.’ Sophie flapped her hand, shooing settled away. ‘Don’t be daft. Nobody’s settled. Well, Evie is. But she’s seven. That’s when you’re settled. You’re loved, but you take it for granted. You know what’s going to happen from day to day. And on good days you might get a warm plate of custard and bananas with melty brown sugar on top. It’s all you want. But once you are grown-up that’s it for being settled. You go crashing into love. Unsettled. You marry. Unsettled. Then you find yourself in a house somewhere having to clean up, wash socks and underpants and worry about paying bills. Unsettled. You have a child and it’s all guilt and more worry. Unsettled. Your child grows and grows and becomes a teenager all the while you’re getting older and wrinklier. Unsettled, very unsettled. Martha, my girl, the state of being settled doesn’t exist. It’s a myth. Accept the truth.’
Martha held her breath, waiting for more. Once her mother got going, expounding, dishing out opinions, she was hard to stop.
‘I blame the fairy tales. All that once upon a time and happily ever after. It’s implanted early and people believe it. And it’s nonsense,’ Sophie continued.
Martha sighed. ‘Still, I think about Jamie. I wonder about him. We were childhood sweethearts.’
Sophie snorted. ‘Exactly. He’d only had one girlfriend, who became his wife. Not enough getting to know the opposite sex. He should have played the field when he was young. But he didn’t, he followed you around like a love-struck puppy.’
‘He didn’t,’ said Martha. Wind from the sea swept the hair from her face, pushed round her. She gripped her coat and huddled into it.
‘He did, too. That boy was born forty. He was too sensible. I knew he’d end up working back to sixteen and start being silly. Unlike you. You were silly at seventeen, and did the stupidest thing of your life.’
‘I don’t think it was that stupid,’ said Martha.
‘No doubt you had your fun, got up to all the mischief Jamie went off to find. I think he was jealous of your naughty past.’
Martha thought about that. ‘Maybe he was.’
‘You should move on with your life, you should stop all the wondering and accept what happened.’
But Martha couldn’t stop wondering. In her head she visited the awful time daily. She was sure Jamie’s disappearance was her fault. She’d been hard to live with, demanded too much, hadn’t shown him enough love. And she couldn’t stop looking for him. On buses she stared at crowds in the street searching for that one familiar face in the sea of faces. She regularly walked the length of Princes Street scanning the people she passed. She stared at the crowd while watching football matches on television, always hoping that the assembly of familiar features she was endlessly looking for would suddenly appear and she might shout, ‘That’s him. I saw him.’ She often imagined what she’d do if she came across him in a pub or making his way along the same street as she was making her way along. ‘Oh, there you are,’ she might say casually. Or, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ They might kiss. He might come back to her and things would be as they’d been before. This, she knew, couldn’t happen. He’d walked out on her without telling her where he was going, indeed, without telling her he was going. After such a thing, it would never be the same again.
Sophie patted her arm. ‘You should put all the hurt behind you.’
Martha looked out at the sea, huge waves galloping in, white horses and the wind slicing spray off their crests. She set her face against the chilly blast, a grimace. ‘I like watching the waves. All the shapes they make, there’s a rhythm to it. It’s endless.’ She put her arm round Sophie. ‘You’re wrong about the job. Working at the insurance office, I’m a dogsbody. My only prospect is the chance to become a slightly more important dogsbody. I could even rise to be the most important dogsbody. But if I stay there it’s a dogsbody’s life for me. Besides . . .’
She wanted to say she thought it time to join the world again. She’d been numb for so long. And there was a lot going on – music, men in purple shirts and velvet jackets, long-legged girls in short skirts, people crying out for peace and love, protests, films. Oh, everything was happening and passing her by. In this new job she might see a bit of life.
‘Besides?’ said Sophie.
‘Besides, I’m getting a headache. I think it’s this wind. It’s cold.’
‘In which case, we better get you home. If that’s true. I don’t think it is. I think your besides is something else that you don’t want to talk about.’ She waved away whatever it was Martha was about to say. ‘Don’t argue. I’m right. I’m always right. I don’t get pleasure from this. In fact being constantly right is a burden.’
6
All the Missing People
Nine o’clock Monday morning Martha stood at the door of Charlie Gavin’s office wearing her best work outfit: a slim black skirt, crisp white high-collar shirt and black stiletto heels. She fancied she looked like the perfect efficient secretary. The office, however, was locked. She wrestled with the door handle. She knocked. Nothing. She looked up and down the street. No Charlie.
Ten minutes went by, twenty, thirty. She looked at her watch, paced, stared up and down the street. No Charlie.
It started to rain. Pulling up her coat collar, Martha ran to the café across the road and ordered a cup of coffee. She sat watching the doorway to the office through the rivulets streaming down the window, debating if she should give up and go home. In the end, she decided against it. Turning up, disappointed and damp, so soon after leaving would give her mother an opportunity to launch into her I-told-you-so routine.
Sophie wouldn’t say the actual words. She’d express her smugness in the way she moved, put on the kettle, stood waiting for it to boil with her back to Martha. Her silences were always more crushing than anything she might say. No, thought Martha, I’m not going home. She’d wait in this café, and if Charlie Gavin didn’t show up, she’d spend the day wandering the streets till five o’clock. Then she’d return to the flat and tell Sophie she’d had a wonderful day and the new job was fascinating.
She clasped her cup in both hands, eyes fixed on the door across the road. Of course, if this continued, she’d have to wander the streets every day. She planned to take the bus to Princes Street, find a murky backstreet café and sit drinking coffee while writing job applications. That would be the thing to do. Sophie need never know her shame.
The girl who’d served her traipsed from behind the counter to the jukebox and put on Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing In The Street’. It was the third time she’d played it. ‘I love that song,’ she shouted to someone who was working in the kitchen. ‘It’s wild and free, just like me.’ She jiggled
in time to the music, waved her arms over her head and sang along. Martha cringed. The record stopped. The girl put it on again. Martha’s shoulders tensed and rose in horror. There was nothing like loud music and a young girl shouting, ‘Wild and free, just like me,’ to make a tense nervous woman tenser and more nervous.
A man, short, middle-aged and paunchy, definitely not Charlie Gavin, stopped outside the office door. He tried opening it, twisting the handle this way and that. He banged furiously with his fist. Peered through the letterbox. Finally kicked the door a couple of times before walking off.
Martha thought, Goodness, perhaps my mother was right and I will be dealing with lonely hearts and losers. Sometimes very angry losers. She wondered if she should have gone across to the man and explained in her best secretarial tone that Mr Gavin had been delayed and could she take his telephone number so Mr Gavin could get in touch? But considering the force of the two kicks, she thought not. So far, this had not been a good day.
At last, at ten-fifteen on the dot, Charlie Gavin slid into view. He was on a red bicycle with a deep wicker basket attached to the handlebars. His trousers were neatly tucked into bicycle clips. He rode slowly and appeared to be talking to himself. Murphy, the cocker spaniel, trotted along the edge of the pavement, looking up at him from time to time. Perhaps adoringly, or perhaps, like Martha, he thought Charlie Gavin a little bit outré.
Martha heaved her coat from where she’d draped it over the back of her chair, went to the counter and paid for her coffee and all the while watched Charlie as he got off his bike, removed the clips from his trousers, propped the bike against the wall and searched his pockets for his keys. All this was mundane. But the meticulously precise way he conducted the routine held Martha’s interest. Meanwhile, the dog waited, eager no doubt to get on with his busy day of snoring and farting on the sofa.