by Anna Wharton
‘Archive.’
‘Chloe?’
Her stomach sinks into her seat.
‘It’s Claire Sanders, social services. I’ve been leaving messages on your mobile.’
‘Oh yes, Claire, sorry, I—’
‘We need to speak urgently about your grandmother’s care, the sale of the house . . .’
She starts talking without invitation, about ‘assessment reports’, ‘needs meeting criteria’, ‘care homes’, ‘financial eligibility’.
Chloe goes back to the article about Karen Stanmore’s tumour.
THREE
Nan shuffles through the cemetery, clutching the daffodils inside gloved hands. The bright yellow of their happy heads stands out against the grey of this Sunday morning.
‘Have I been here before?’
‘Yes, Nan,’ Chloe says.
She doesn’t argue.
Chloe walks slowly behind her, keeping hold of her at the elbow; the disease that started somewhere in her brain has worked its way into the tips of her toes, making it easier for her to fall these days.
‘Are you sure I’ve been here before?’
‘Yes, Nan.’
‘And who do we know here?’
‘Mum, Nan.’
‘My mum?’
‘No, mine, Nan.’
‘Oh, sorry to hear that, dear. Was she nice?’
Chloe guides her left up a winding path. She obeys without question, past lines and lines of neutral mottled headstones, each engraved with names and dates to sum up the soul lying beneath. Chloe has never found graveyards creepy, not like some kids. She remembers late-night dares that she was certain would reward her with friendships she wouldn’t otherwise be entitled to. She’d hear them laugh, their hurried footsteps fleeing as she wandered inside the darkness. Too humiliated to leave, she’d sit down among the stones to read them, fantasising about the people who kept her company that night, and all the ones that followed. Chloe preferred these ghosts to the living – they weren’t anywhere near so cruel. You knew where you were with dead people.
At the top of the path Chloe and Nan turn right and walk across the wet grass until they stand in front of a shiny black headstone: Stella Hudson. Who fell asleep . . .
The pair of them are silent for a moment.
‘Stella Hudson,’ Nan says with a sigh.
Chloe puts an arm around Nan and pulls her closer. She knows what to do, she has watched people in cemeteries for as long as she can remember.
‘Was she one of my old neighbours?’ Nan asks.
Chloe thinks for a second of explaining, while Nan stands looking puzzled at the grave. Instead, she tells her yes, and crouches down closer to the earth, closer to Stella.
‘Oh look, someone’s left some flowers here,’ Nan says.
Cellophane wraps the pink carnations they brought last weekend in an untidy hug, the petals curling, browning at the edges. Chloe pulls them from the vase at the foot of the stone; their slimy stems follow.
‘I know,’ Nan says, her eyes brightening with a new idea, ‘we can put these daffodils in there.’
Chloe takes them from her and peers into the vase, picking out a few dead leaves, and one long, thin slug. She fishes the creature out, examining its shiny back in the palm of her hand, before discarding it onto the grave next door.
‘Oh, there’s no water left,’ Chloe says, picking up the vase.
Nan tuts slowly.
Chloe stands up and looks round. ‘Listen, stay here, I’m going to find a tap.’
She walks away without thinking, then quickly retraces her steps back to Nan. She zips up Nan’s parka, securing it under her chin, and pulls the hood up over her white hair.
‘Stay here, OK?’ Chloe tells her. ‘I won’t be a minute.’
Nan nods.
Chloe hurries back the way they came, turns right, and takes another gravel path winding past more headstones. A wooden sign marks the Garden of Remembrance; she follows it, and sees on the other side of the garden a squat log-panelled hut. Inside there is a tap.
She fills the vase quickly, then makes her way out towards the path back to Nan. Only as she does, she spots a memorial stone. She stops and stares, then bends down for a closer look. She pulls her coat sleeve up over her hand and wipes it across the small black marble stone. It is a memorial for a little girl.
‘Not a nice job, is it?’ a voice behind her interrupts.
She turns to see a man in his seventies, wearing a flat cap and wiping at his rheumy blue eyes with a white handkerchief. He points at the plaque. ‘But we’ve got to remember them somehow, ent we? The only way we know how.’
Chloe nods. She looks up towards the path where she had left Nan.
‘Irene usually does this for our Katy – our granddaughter, like – but winter’s got her bad this year, terrible chest infection, so I said I’d come up here today, just check on the babby. We don’t get up as often as we’d like – perhaps why we haven’t met before. It makes you feel bad, dun’it, when you can’t come as often? Still, you never forget, you always carry them in here.’ He pats his chest, and coughs a little as he does. He glances at her vase then. ‘Be careful you don’t put too much water in there, otherwise the birds come and get a drink and, well, it makes the plaque messy, like, them doing their business and all, if you know what I mean.’
Chloe tips a little water away onto the grass. She is about to hurry back to Nan when he starts talking again.
‘Relative, is she? Daughter?’
Chloe doesn’t reply.
He bends forward, squinting a little, and takes a closer look at the stone. ‘Oh, 1979, must make you . . . a sister?’
‘Oh, I . . .’ She looks down at the daffodils in her hand and realizes how he came to this conclusion.
‘Ah, well, she’ll be glad to have you looking out for her, that’s what big sisters are for, ent they?’ He smiles and wipes at his eyes once more with the handkerchief. ‘You want to get some plants in here, you could spread out a bit—’
‘Oh, I’m not—’
‘Oh, don’t worry about having green fingers.’ He lifts his hands in protest as Chloe shuffles from foot to foot. ‘There ent much you need to know. First of all, take a look at the soil.’ He picks up some and rubs it between his fingertips; his fingers are a reddish purple, the years having hardened them against the cold. ‘The type of plants that will grow and thrive all depend on the soil at your feet. You want to think, is it gritty, sandy, or does it form a solid mass – like clay?’
Chloe shuffles on the gravel path.
‘You could have a lovely perfumed rose bush here,’ the old man continues, ‘or annuals, lots of bright colours. You could plant them every summer and then . . . whoop, up they’d come in spring. Cheer the place up a bit. And don’t matter about nature, worms keep the soil aerated, birds eat the greenfly, only thing you don’t really want are ants’ nests – millions of them you’ll have, all those tiny creatures hard at work underneath, yet never a good look crawling all over the soil. My Irene can’t stand the things – can’t say I blame her. Anyway, talking of Irene, she’ll be wondering where I got to. I’d better stop chatting and get off.’
Chloe watches him cross the garden to pick up a trowel he’d left by Katy’s grave. He pats the top of the stone as tenderly as if it were his lost granddaughter’s own warm head, then follows the gravel path out towards the exit, lifting his arm as if he knows she’s watching.
Chloe turns back to the stone then. She takes one daffodil and trims the stem with her fingernails, leaving it inside the vase, then hurries back up the gravel path towards Nan.
She turns left at the top, retracing her steps, just as she had taken them a few moments before. Only something is different. Her eyes scan the cemetery, quickly, then frantically. She spins on the spot, looks behind her, in case she had taken a wrong turn. But she knows this place. She wouldn’t make a mistake. But then, if she hadn’t, something is missing. That’s the moment when the dr
ead begins to swell inside, starting in the soles of her feet and spreading right up to the top of her head, collecting with it her blood, the sound of which bangs inside her eardrums.
‘Nan!’ she calls out to the empty cemetery. She is nowhere to be seen.
Chloe spins this way and that. She squints, staggering between the headstones, sure that she’ll see it, that flash of navy – Nan’s parka – but there is just grass and stillness, the odd petal that has blown in from the latest floral tribute.
‘Nan!’
She runs back the way she came; perhaps Nan has gone looking for her. But the path is empty. Her heart thudding now, she runs back, all the way to Stella’s grave, as if by some miracle Nan is small enough to be hiding behind it. Of course not. But that’s when she notices it, a copse at the back of the cemetery, an opening just large enough for Nan to squeeze through, yet the trees are knitted together too tightly to get a look in from here. She runs over to it, hesitating at the entrance. Surely Nan wouldn’t have gone inside. But now she’s had that thought she can’t leave it unattended. She takes a first step in, dry leaves crunching underfoot; a twig from underneath her own step causes Chloe to start.
‘Nan, please,’ she cries.
Silence answers her.
She goes further into the undergrowth. There is no path in here and so she kicks at bushes, hearing the sound of berries and leaves dropping within each footprint she leaves behind. The deeper she goes, the denser it becomes. A mossy, damp, earthy smell fills her nose.
‘Nan?’
She looks back. She can’t see the cemetery now. What if Nan has reappeared? What if she’s looking in the wrong place? She can’t think when she panics. Instead she goes deeper, dipping and ducking under branches; she snaps several in two to pass, scanning the undergrowth for a swatch of Nan’s white hair. Perhaps she’s slipped. Perhaps she’ll find her hurt. The thought flashes more panic through her veins. She walks, she calls. Sometimes, where tendrils have stitched themselves together, she almost has to crawl to make a path through, bending and folding herself under low-slung branches, pushing on through the bramble.
‘Nan?’ she calls, and stops. Was that her voice? She scrambles to turn around, to listen, and a thorny bush nips her skin, tearing the flesh in a neat, straight line. She’s tangled now, in brambly twine, nature’s own barbed wire. She fights to free herself, pushes back through the bush until she sees the light and she hopes – no, she prays – that Nan will be waiting where she left her.
She emerges to the stillness of the cemetery, bleached grey headstones and the odd tumbled-earth grave. But no Nan. She sinks to the ground. She’s gone.
FOUR
The hard plastic chairs at the police station are pinching the back of Chloe’s thighs. Finally, an officer opens the door into reception and calls her name.
‘I hear you’d like to report a missing person?’
‘Yes . . . yes,’ she says.
He leads her down a long corridor to a small room. They sit each side of the table, upon which there is a recording device – not that he switches it on. But Chloe’s eyes quickly dart around the room and she slides her hands underneath her legs.
‘I hear your grandmother went missing at the city cemetery?’ the officer says, flicking through a small black notepad.
‘Yes, that’s right. I was just getting some water and . . . well, when I went back . . . I mean, I searched, everywhere, I even went into this little wood at the back of the—’
‘And you say she has dementia?’
‘Alzheimer’s, yes. She was diagnosed two years ago.’ Chloe taps the top of the desk quickly. ‘I mean, I don’t know how she just disappeared like that. She can’t even walk that well . . . I only turned my back for a second.’
‘And you’re her primary carer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does she have a social worker’s contact details that we could take?’
Chloe hesitates. She knows what this will mean. She sits forward in her seat.
‘Look, can’t you just get out there and find Nan?’
The officer sighs and takes his notepad in one hand. ‘Chloe, officers have already been given a description of your grandmother and they’ll be keeping a good eye out for her. I’m sure they’ll find her safe and sound soon enough. In the meantime, you and I just need to complete the relevant paperwork here at the station. Now, if you don’t mind, her social worker’s details . . .’
Chloe wakes with a start, shaking off the rest of a dream she’s had a thousand times before. Anxiety is somehow always waiting for her in the night; it’s constantly there, just under her skin. She opens her eyes quickly as she remembers Nan. She quickly leans over and finds her mobile on the floor beside her bed, but the screen is blank. It is still only 5 a.m. She lies back down on her pillow, but when she closes her eyes the same faces are there. She feels helpless. She gets out of bed, gathers her clothes up from the floor and dresses quickly. But at the bottom of the stairs she looks out the window, onto a dawn that has yet to fully rise, and wonders what she is supposed to do. Nan is still out there. There has been no news overnight. Or at least she has heard nothing. Should she stay here and wait for her? It feels as if she should be doing something else, something more practical. But what? The police insisted they would do everything they could.
She pulls the thick curtain back from the door, wondering why she’d even bothered to draw it across last night when Nan was still out there. She opens the front door and feels the cold rush in. She shivers at the thought of Nan wandering the streets.
By the time she leaves, the sun is dyeing the night sky orange. She pulls the front door shut behind her and looks up at Nan’s little semi, darkness behind each window. The adjacent houses still sleep, families that haven’t long moved into the area tucked safely behind each of them. The neighbours’ front door is right next to her own; their path is decorated with glazed terracotta pots and in one a rainbow windmill smiles out at the morning. It belongs to the little girl who sleeps in the room above the front door. She’s five or six, and she always stops to say hello. Chloe couldn’t describe what she looked like – her eyes are always trained on the little girl’s hands, one always locked tight inside her mother’s.
A small wind blows and the plastic sails spin happily. Chloe tightens the belt on her coat and heads up the path towards the road.
In the lift up to the office Chloe studies her reflection in the mirror. The cold morning still clings to her cheeks and there’s little she can come up with to comfort herself that Nan is safe and warm somewhere. She plucks a stray leaf still tangled in strands of her dark hair; she must have collected it in the copse yesterday. She goes back over the scene, asking again how Nan could have just disappeared. It doesn’t feel right to come to work on a day like today. But what else is she going to do? Perhaps the right thing is to stay busy. She imagines that’s the advice they’d give in films. The lift announces the third floor, and she steps out towards the newsroom, leaving more foliage from under her footstep.
It’s still early and the beep of her security pass announces her arrival. The editor, Malc, stands by the news desk, hands in his pocket, swivelling on his heels between the news editor and the assistant editor as they decide on that day’s splash. He doesn’t look up as she makes her way towards the archive. No one ever does.
Chloe reaches her desk and checks her phone again for missed calls, just like she had when she got into the lift three minutes earlier. There’s nothing, no news. She places it on her desk beside her keyboard.
She’s not due in to work for another hour and a half, but she knows she needs to keep busy to distract herself from checking her mobile phone. She’s always preferred the archive without people. Her eyes fall to a plastic orange crate beside Alec’s desk – a job they’ve both been avoiding. The crate contains some of the oldest files that need scanning ready for the new electronic system. She turns the scanner on and watches as the bright white light beams back from beneath
the flatbed.
She works on automatic; she knows how things operate here. Each file is a small brown gusset envelope, just slightly bigger than a postcard. Most have a few dozen cuttings folded neatly inside, the girth of the envelope a giveaway to the stories that have dominated the headlines over the decades. Some have even multiplied, giving birth to one or even two more envelopes. In those cases the files will be marked cont. and numbered. But the first one she picks up, although thick, has only one line on the front: KYLE; ANGELA. It’s written as all the others are: neat capitals in black marker, double underlined in the top right-hand corner. Just the way Alec likes it. She has always appreciated the archive for that, the safety within the order of everything. How she needs that today.
Chloe turns the file over in her hands, noticing how some of the seams have started to give way. She pulls its insides out as carefully as a surgeon, the envelope collapsing without them. Dozens of cuttings scatter across the light grey melamine of her desk, fanning out like a neutral paint chart, instantly revealing the length of time this particular story has dominated the headlines. The older cuttings are various shades of pale yellow and ivory – daffodil white, perhaps; the newer ones are magnolia.
Chloe picks a cutting at random. It’s an old one, she can tell from the folds that have been impressed over and over by the hammy thumbs of reporters. She takes extra care not to tear the fine newsprint as she peels it open, stirring it again with oxygen. The cutting resists as she stretches it awake, but a second later it is laid bare in front of her.
POLICE GIVE UP SEARCH FOR MISSING ANGIE
She immediately thinks of Nan and glances at her phone. Nothing. She checks the volume, makes doubly sure the ringtone is on. Still nothing.
She takes the cutting and places it under the scanner. The white light flickers beneath the cover, and as she waits questions accumulate. Who is Angie? Why is she missing? And most importantly for Chloe right now, why did the police give up their search for this person?