by Anna Wharton
Silence.
‘I had the weirdest dream last night,’ Chloe says. She leaves it hanging there, but Patrick doesn’t bite. Maureen would. She goes on, curiosity gnawing at her insides.
‘It felt so real, more like a memory,’ she adds.
Still nothing. Chloe knows if this were Maureen beside her, meaning would already have been derived from every detail of this supposed dream. She swallows. The car hits a cat’s eye and her stomach turns over.
‘I was in a park . . . it felt so familiar.’
‘Oh yeah?’ he says, face straight ahead, too hard to read.
‘Yeah, it was a play park, just a little one. It was surrounded by tall trees and long grass and nearby, there was a lake.’
Patrick’s hands change position on the steering wheel.
‘You were there,’ she says, venturing further away from safety. ‘It was actually just the two of us.’
He laughs a little. ‘Dreams are strange things, ent they?’
‘Yes, but this one, it felt . . . different,’ she says. ‘Like I said, more like a memory. I was on the swings and you were there, you were pushing me, or I was asking you to . . . it’s all a bit fuzzy. It jumped around, the way dreams do.’ She wishes that she could open the window, but she continues: ‘The swings, they were yellow, and the ground wasn’t covered in woodchip – not like you see at parks now – it was a concrete floor. There was a car park just nearby and I saw you. I watched you as you walked over to it, and then . . . and then suddenly, you were gone.’
Patrick’s knuckles whiten. She’s describing the park as it was that day, as she had seen it in the cuttings. He knows it, she knows it. She needs him to talk, open up, like he did that day in the kitchen.
‘Yeah, well, don’t pay too much attention to dreams,’ Patrick says. ‘I tell Maureen the same. Just your subconscious playing tricks on you, like.’
Chloe sinks down in her seat, her own eyes returning to the road. Why is he not asking more? Why is he not picking apart what she’s telling him? She knows Maureen would.
‘And I just thought, I mean, that’s where . . . well, that’s where Angie—’
‘Like I said, I don’t pay too much attention to dreams.’
He turns to her and smiles. But the smile stays too long, like a warning.
Chloe looks back at the road. They drive on in silence. Chloe twiddles her thumbs in her lap. She twists in her seat, rearranges her bag in the footwell. Then the news comes on the radio and Patrick quickly turns it off.
They drive across the city, Patrick indicating this way and that in silence. The atmosphere inside the car is thick with something, though Chloe doesn’t know what.
One after another they cross roundabouts. The bus stop up ahead is her cue to relax. Patrick indicates and pulls over. Her hand is already on the seat belt catch.
‘OK then?’ he asks.
‘Thanks,’ Chloe says, and gets out of the car.
She is about to slam the door when Patrick leans across the passenger seat.
‘And Chloe?’ he says.
She stops still, her hand on the door frame. ‘Yes?’
‘We were never at the play park the day Angie went missing.’
FORTY-TWO
Chloe stands at the bus stop for a long time after Patrick drives away. She is still on the pavement exactly where he dropped her. She hears a plane cut through the clouds above, the rushing footsteps of office workers; she inhales the thick exhaust fumes of a bus that waits for passengers to alight, and still she stands there, trying to absorb exactly what Patrick had said. She knows this case inside out, she has spent hours reading through the cuttings, she can’t have got something so vital wrong. How could Angie not have been at the play park that day when that was exactly the place she disappeared from? It doesn’t make any sense. Chloe feels, standing there, as if suddenly everything she thought she knew about the Kyles’ story is wrong. She wishes the cuttings were tucked inside her bag – she needs a reference point now to stop the world from spinning. But if what Patrick said is true, everything she knows about Angie’s disappearance is mistaken. She blinks and shakes her head, ignoring the stares of people hurrying past her, though she knows her stillness uneases them.
But more worrying to Chloe is not what he said, but how he said it, and perhaps why? It seems a rather large bomb to have dropped so casually. Too casually.
It is a while before she pulls herself together, before she crosses the road to wait at the bus stop on the other side. Patrick’s words swim around in her head.
How could he not have been at the park with Angie? And if they weren’t there, where were they? And why would he tell her, of all people? It could only have been a test. Had she passed or failed? She hadn’t even had time to react. Had it been her talking about the park which had prompted him to correct her? Does he want her to know that, whatever Maureen says, he knows she is not his missing daughter? But how can he be so sure?
Chloe looks down the road as she waits for the bus to appear, but as she does so another thought swirls around her mind. She tries to dismiss it, she’s not ready for that. But as the bus pulls up alongside the pavement, as she buys her ticket, sits down, the thought takes its place beside her and follows her back towards town.
She gets off at the stop before the bus station and hurries through the underpass to the sound of her echoing footsteps. She takes the back streets, up and down kerbs, until finally she is there, standing outside a very familiar front door – one she hasn’t visited for almost two months, but she has to see something for herself. She knows until she checks the cuttings she mustn’t jump to any conclusions.
She takes a set of keys from her pocket, struggling to find the one that fits Nan’s door. She pushes it into the lock and feels the click, that little resistance, and by the time she opens the door, it is all coming back to her.
Nan’s house feels more like a museum these days. The air is stiff, the front door heavier than she had remembered. She looks down at the floor and understands why: envelopes and flyers, greetings cards and free newspapers have collected on the doormat.
She shuts the door behind her and starts collecting the junk mail from the floor. The curtain still hangs off the back of the door where she left it. She wanders through the house as if she has never been there before. She is scared to disturb it, afraid even for her feet to leave an impression on the carpet. Stopping in the hall and looking up into the mirror, in that split second she reminds herself that she has every right to be here. She quickly looks away from her reflection.
In the living room, everything is as she left it. Nan’s mahogany sideboard has gathered more dust, but the freeze-framed faces smile as they always have. She picks up one photograph that she recognizes, the black and white photo of Nan and Stella on the beach. It had once been her favourite, and yet now, the faces in it are more like those of strangers.
Her eyes flit from one framed photograph to the next, but she feels nothing, like she is simply flicking through a magazine filled with models. Interesting how time makes strangers of us all, eventually.
She remembers then the reason she is here. She leaves the living room and takes the stairs, two at a time, hauling herself up by the handrail. She pauses on the landing, briefly glancing into Nan’s bedroom, the light falling on her fitted wardrobes and the mirror inset within them reflecting an empty bed. She imagines Nan still here, shuffling round on her own, no one here to keep her company, to sit beside her watching television, to get up and make her a cup of tea. No one to take away that sting of loneliness. She imagines Nan dying on her own in the very same bedroom. Things could have been so very different if it hadn’t been for Chloe.
Inside her own room, the curtains are drawn, her bed is unmade. Blu-Tack still clings to the wall in places, and in others, the corners of A4 paper hang clumsily. Chloe drops to her knees and starts feeling underneath her bed, pulling out the cuttings that she had left there, that she had taken time to hide just in case. Th
ey come out, a bunch in each hand, and she turns and leans her back against the bed frame. She discards the first two – they are stories from later on in the enquiry. She even discards the update interviews that Maureen and Patrick did over the years. It’s another story she’s looking for, and as she sieves through them, Maureen and Patrick’s faces fall on the bedroom carpet in a haphazard fashion. But then, finally, she finds it. The cutting is not on top of the pile in her hands, but the edge of it sticks out of the middle. She recognizes the photograph, even photocopied, even though so many pixels blur into one another; even with the blotches of newsprint, even with the age of the original, she recognizes it, because this photograph – this location – has been so vital to every single news story, every part of the investigation, that has followed since that day Angie disappeared. She is not mistaken.
She holds the cutting up. It’s in two pieces so she grasps one page in each hand and fits them together into a jigsaw that at one time might have offered hope. Because right in the middle of both pieces of paper is the photograph she remembers. The one of Maureen and Patrick, her hand held tightly inside his, her head resting on his shoulder, the long grass around them almost obscuring their bodies. And in the background, just over their shoulder, the unmistakable landmark that was the park in Ferry Meadows that Angie had disappeared from. She reads the picture caption.
Devastated: Parents Patrick and Maureen Kyle join the search for Angie.
Her eyes scan the cutting, and there it is, mentioned over and over again.
Play park where Angie disappeared from
Ferry Meadows Park
Only left her for a minute
Visit to the swings
The words start to move around on the page. She drops the two halves of the cutting and they flutter down either side of her legs. She tips her head back on the mattress, staring up at the artex ceiling. The thought she had on the bus resurfaces. She pushes it away. Blinks, restarts, but it’s still there when she opens her eyes. What other explanation is there?
She sits up straight, grabbing the cuttings once again from the floor. And now when she looks at the photograph – when she really looks at the photograph – she sees something different. She doesn’t see two broken parents, each holding up the other. She sees betrayal. She sees lies. She sees that same haunted expression in Patrick’s eyes that she’d noticed in the photograph Maureen had showed her on her first night in the house. She sees Maureen’s blind faith in him. She sees the gun he keeps secret from her. She sees the room he keeps locked. She sees why he wouldn’t believe Maureen when she insisted Chloe is Angie. Because if he and Angie were never at the park that day, why had he allowed everyone to think that they were? Why had he allowed the police to comb it? Why had he been lying to everyone for nearly three decades? And the only answer Chloe can come up with is because Patrick knows what really happened to Angela Kyle.
FORTY-THREE
‘Chloe . . . is that you? I can’t . . . maybe it’s a bad line. Chloe, are you there?’
The phone lies limply in Chloe’s hand. Hollie sounds worried.
‘Chloe, speak to me. Just let me know you’re OK.’
She wants to talk to her, she really does. But where is she going to start? The beginning of it all feels decades ago now.
‘Hollie,’ Chloe says finally, her voice more of a croak. Hollie is the first person she has spoken to since Patrick dropped her off that morning. It is now nearly one o’clock. She has been sitting on her bedroom floor, combing through the discarded cuttings for hours, trying to find something – anything – that gives her an alternative explanation, one that doesn’t involve Patrick’s guilt.
‘Oh Chloe, I was worried sick for a moment, you sound terrible. Are you OK?’
Chloe nods into the phone.
She hadn’t known where to go after Patrick’s revelation had sunk in. Back to Elm House? The thought now filled her with fear. She’d briefly pictured Maureen, wondered whether she might be in danger. Every time she thought of her, all she could see was her trusting face. But how could Chloe go back there now? How could she eat at their table? Hold that plastic cutlery while Patrick watched on? His confession hadn’t just made a liar of him – perhaps that’s what was breaking Chloe’s heart.
She’d thought about going to see Park House, but what solace could Nan offer? If Chloe was really honest, what had she ever offered? Suddenly everything that Chloe thought she knew seemed different in this new light. Everything once solid now slipped through her fingers like sand.
And then there was Hollie. She’d dialled her number, not knowing what she was going to say. But she needed to reach out to the one real thing in her life. Her constant.
‘Do you remember when we were kids?’ Chloe says suddenly. ‘Those games we used to play? The ones where our real parents would come and find us.’
Hollie laughs a little from the other end of the phone. ‘I haven’t thought about that for a long time.’
‘We couldn’t believe that they’d done that, that they’d left us,’ Chloe says. ‘And so we made them into new people. We shifted the shapes around until they made a different picture. One where we could like ourselves better. You remember, don’t you?’
‘My mum and dad were always doctors. Do you remember that?’ Hollie says. ‘I used to say they were too busy saving lives to come and get me. I invented all sorts of dramas that kept them at work.’
‘We played that game for hours,’ Chloe says.
‘Months,’ Hollie reminds her.
‘Years.’
The two women fall silent down the handsets. In truth, their parents hadn’t left them in the foster home where they had met as children, and they knew that really. The reality was they were put there by people who knew that’s where they would be safer. Two girls the same age, they had drifted towards each other, and then clung to one another in all the storms that followed. A bond was forged, they were one another’s lifebuoys.
‘They say that when we sleep, our brains make dreams that fit what we want to believe. Did you know that, Hollie?’
‘It makes sense, I guess,’ she says.
‘But perhaps it’s not just when we’re asleep. When we were little, we had to write new stories in our heads, or make up games so that we could feel better, so that we didn’t believe we weren’t worth loving.’
‘I guess that’s why we did it,’ Hollie says. ‘I haven’t really thought about it, but Chloe, all kids make up silly games.’
‘But it wasn’t just a game, was it? Not for me,’ Chloe says.
There is silence on the other end of the phone. An understanding.
‘What’s happened, Chloe? You know you can tell me anything. You know that I’ll understand.’
‘You stopped making up stories. You had Dave and Rita. Then you met Phil. You got your house. You wrote yourself a new story and you left me.’
‘I didn’t, Chloe. I never left you, I promised you I wouldn’t. I can’t feel bad that it worked out for me . . . All that other stuff, it’s in the past. And there’s no point looking back, just forward.’
Chloe presses the phone to her ear and shakes her head. What does she have to look forward to? She feels that vulnerability then, the fear she dedicates her life to suppressing. Would she even know how to make the same life Hollie has, if she had the chance? Does she want to? She’s not like everyone else, she knows this. She has always known this.
‘It’s funny how we get away with making things fit while we sleep,’ Chloe says. ‘But we do the same when we’re awake, we sieve through everything, everyone, taking just the bits that fit what we want to believe – what we need to believe – and people think we’re mad for doing so.’
She’s not sure who she is talking about. She looks down at the photograph of Patrick and Maureen, and covers two fingers over Maureen’s face.
‘I don’t think you’re mad,’ Hollie says. ‘I’ve never thought that. Tell me what’s happened, Chloe.’
She turns
the cutting over, pressing Maureen and Patrick’s faces against the carpet.
‘I thought I could help,’ Chloe says quietly into the phone. ‘It sounds ridiculous now, doesn’t it? But I really thought that I could bring her home, that I could fix everything. But maybe it wasn’t Angie I was trying to bring home, maybe it was—’
‘Wait, Chloe, you’re not making any sen—’
‘And then the lines got blurred, everything felt so confused and yet so familiar. I let them think . . . they told me . . . well, it doesn’t matter, but then they made me think—’
‘Who did? Chloe, who are you talking about? Who’s Angie? Can you stop talking in riddles for a second?’
Chloe turns the picture back over. It was true that she had wanted to help. She always wanted to help. She looks up and around her room. She pictures the nights when she had lain here in bed, listening to Nan’s soft breathing on the other side of the wall. It was enough for so long and she really thought this would be it. She always thinks that finally, she will be sated. In the early days, they’d chat through the wall, Nan always grateful to get a reply. For so long there had been nobody. Then her mind drifts back to the Kyles, wondering if it really had gone so wrong? Disappointment is nothing but reality failing to meet expectation. Hadn’t she heard that somewhere? And what had she expected? All she’d wanted was to find out what had happened to Angie. That was it, wasn’t it? She hadn’t asked for more; it wasn’t her fault if Maureen had convinced herself of something else. And then today, after all these weeks of searching for clues, Patrick had given her something bigger than anything he’d told the police. But why?
A horrible thought comes to mind, one so ugly she pushes it away before it has time to tie itself to her. Patrick had been the one to tell her that Angie was never at the park, but was he the only one who knew this? She pictures Maureen then, in her short pinny as she serves up dinner, her hands resting on her hips as she watches Chloe eat from the plate covered in bunnies.