by Kate Simants
and
his face suddenly panicked tight, and his hands on mine, grabbing,
and
his eyes starting to bulge, looking at me, not understanding,
and
a creaking sound from his open mouth, no air going in or coming out,
and
his hand, coming up to my face, his eyes still locked onto mine. Stones in the ground under my knees digging in to me as I kneel over him. Sticks and leaves the same as when Mum found Jodie and something sharp against my shin. The smell of the wet leaves and the roar of a jet engine descending, low, and his eyes wild with horror, knowing now that I am not going to stop.
I scrabbled out of the bed and stood, panting, in the middle of the tiny room, my arms brace-position around my head, eyes open. A thin, cold trail of sweat slipped down my spine.
Was it real?
I pressed my fists into my eyes to make the images go away, to scrub them out, but it persisted. I wanted to get behind my eyes and pull them from their sockets, to wipe the images away. One thing I had learned from Siggy: once something goes in your head you can never get it out again. The shaking was in my knees and everywhere.
All I could think was, let me not be the last thing he saw.
19.
Mae
No sign of Bear. With Kit at the wheel, Mae was free to make the calls: dozens of them. The pool, the cinema, the school again, and any other mates he could think of that Nadia hadn’t already rung. Phone to ear, he watched the pavements. They were heading out towards Acton, driving slow enough for Mae to check the side roads as they passed them.
‘Thanks,’ he said to the school secretary who had agreed to stay late in case Bear went back there. ‘Call if you hear anything.’
Kit was under instruction from McCulloch to stay until Bear was found. She leaned over the wheel, scanning the streets ahead of her. ‘Dark coat, you’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dark what, though? Blue? Dark grey?’
‘I don’t know, it’s very dark!’
‘But not black. You’re sure?’
‘Yes!’
‘Didn’t have any other clothes in her bag when you dropped her off this morning. Something she might have changed into?’
Mae sighed. ‘Not that I know of.’
‘Gym kit? Wasn’t a PE day?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Drama?’
He slammed a hand on the dash. ‘I said I don’t know, all right?’
‘Just trying to help.’ Kit indicated left with a sarcastically casual flick of the lever. Mae’s phone – charging now – lit up and buzzed again.
Nadia.
Where are you? Tried Molly Zach Jess Anisha Freya B Freya M and Janade, nothing.
He fired off a reply, that he’d done the school, the two closest parks, was heading to the shops. Sending it, he looked up and spotted a newsagent he knew Bear went to sometimes, where they let her leaf through the magazines. ‘Pull over,’ he said, ‘just here.’
Without wasting a second, Kit pulled in onto a bus lane, eliciting a heavy honking from a double-decker and almost causing Mae to break his nose on the dash.
He snapped off his seatbelt and launched himself out of the door. Fine rain was falling, and the temperature had dropped enough to instantly lift the hair on his arms. Bear would be cold. She hated the cold.
The shop door let out an electronic beep when Mae went inside, and the guy behind the counter at the end glanced up from his paper. Mae got out his phone, flashed the picture of Bear.
‘I’m looking for my daughter.’ He indicated just below chest-height and added, ‘About this high. Dark coat.’
The shopkeeper eyed him. ‘Dark what? Dark is not a colour.’
‘Just – dark. All right? Have you seen her?’
The shopkeeper peered at the proffered phone. Bear, grinning, holding an ice cream, from a few months back. He’d sent it to Nadia at the time, with a line about how they were having a good time, and she’d replied seconds later with ‘FFS, diet? What’s that, 300 Cals?’
On the bright side, at least that little fuck-up was no longer on the top spot.
The shopkeeper nodded. ‘Oh yes, I know her. Cherry Coke, and—’ he squinted at the ceiling as if trawling his memory, ‘ah, big Twix. On her own, like usual. Maybe half an hour ago?’
The bus was still there behind the Focus, horn blaring, when he got back in the car.
‘Well?’ Kit asked, moving back out into the traffic before he’d got his seatbelt on.
‘Try the park over by Acton Station. Just down there, right at the—’
‘Yep, I know it.’ She swung a uey and took a direct path. Dark now, almost. The wipers sped up automatically. Kit opened her mouth, but he cut her off before she had a chance.
‘No, before you ask. She didn’t have an umbrella.’ He was sure of that, at least.
They drove in silence.
Kit tapped her fingers on the wheel. ‘Just the one kid you’ve got?’
‘Yeah.’
More silence.
‘Any yourself?’
‘Nope. Can’t have them, it’s a genetic thing,’ and then, hurriedly and without a trace of any baggage, ‘and that’s totally fine. It’s not for me.’
The traffic slowed along The Vale and she blipped the siren at a van blocking the flow, and they emerged along the eastern edge of the park. Scrappy huddles of naked trees obscured the swings and slides, and they both craned to see through the bushy perimeter.
‘She’ll be over there in the playground if she’s anywhere.’
Kit slowed to park. She flipped an arm around the headrest, using the heel of her hand to spin the steering wheel, sliding the squad car into a perfect parallel.
He ran, scanning the whole park as he went, a cursory check of each bush and hedge. Because she liked dens, his little girl, she liked making little houses for her soft toys still because she was eight.
She was only eight.
The playground was demarcated with a low red fence of tubular bars. Hard to work out where the gates were, but easy enough to vault. No one on the swings. No one on the pyramid she’d fallen from aged four, breaking her arm, leaving her with a narrow, puckered scar near her elbow that would be there forever. No one on the slide, but under it—
Under it was Bear.
Mae shouted her name and was there in a heartbeat and lifting her off the ground, holding her, pressing her against his chest with both arms. Thank you, Mae said in his head, as if he believed in something to thank. Thank you thank you thank you.
‘You’re hurting me,’ she mumbled, and he looked down at her. She smelled of rain and bubblegum. The slack in her arms as they hung inert from her shoulders damn near broke his heart.
‘Not as much as I’m going to hurt you when you get home.’
‘What?’ Panic on her little face.
‘With my special axe I just got sharpened—’ he said, making himself smile, but it missed its target.
She pushed the heels of her hands hard against her eyes to stem the tears. ‘You forgot me. I was all on my own.’
He set her down, knelt right in front of her, gravel biting into his knees. He took her face in his hands.
And for the first time since she was born, he looked into her face and he saw himself. Seven years old, sitting outside the flat in Leeds when he still lived with his mum, waiting for her to come home from wherever she was and let him in. Nine years old, after he’d gone to live with Nopa and Jobu, his grandparents: staring out their living room window on a Friday evening and hoping that this time, his mum really would be coming to get him for the weekend. By ten, although he’d still sit by the same window, he’d sit with his back to it like he wasn’t even waiting, like he didn’t even care.
He looked his daughter in the eye. ‘I promise you, Bear, that we’re going to do better than this. OK?’
‘You deserve better than this,’ Mae said, edging it around the choke in
his throat. ‘I’m not letting you down again.’
Bear looked at the floor.
‘Let’s get her dry,’ Kit said, standing a few feet away. Bear looked up at Mae and he nodded, held her for another second and then released her. Kit took off her own jacket, knelt down and draped it over Bear’s shoulders, then jogged ahead to get the heaters running in the car.
20.
Ellie
Full dark now. I’d checked every cupboard in the boat, gone through every shelf for a note, for a letter, anything, but there was nothing there. Frustrated, hungry and freezing, I locked up and left the boatyard via the shortcut, a hidden, muddy slope at the other end of the pontoon where Matt had shown me how to scramble down one time when he’d forgotten his key. I picked my way over the barbed wire, then paused just before emerging onto the pavement, remembering what Mum had said about the punctures on my hand.
Gingerly, I rolled up my sleeve and peeled open the dressing and turned on the torch on my phone. The skin all around the wounds was saturated and white from the lack of ventilation. But I hardly noticed the colour. What I saw was how, when I reached over to the wire to compare the spacing of the darkening, exquisitely sore craters on my palm and the barbs of the wire, they matched.
Of course they matched.
I’d just finished rewrapping my hand when my phone rang. Mum.
‘I’m on my way,’ I told her, eager to hang up to conserve the last of the battery.
‘Wait,’ she said, ‘I just got back, looks like there’s something going on round the front of the estate. Police everywhere. Probably best you cut through the back way, all right?’
I said I would, and headed home, walking fast. A few streets from home, I turned right instead of the usual left, and started the loop through the Axmouth estate. It wasn’t a route I took lightly. There wasn’t a week went by without half the place being shut off with police cars and tape, then the local press alive with outrage about the almost non-existent CCTV. I put my head down and slotted my housekey between the knuckles of my fist the way Mum had shown me.
Creeping poverty and years of neglect clung to everything in the Axmouth. Tired scales of white paint peeling off the timber balustrades, and single-glazed front rooms yawned blank and curtainless onto the walkways. Potholes, graffiti, smashed and defunct lighting: even the gutters were cracked and unkempt, choking with rotting leaves no one was going to clear.
I took a wide arc around a gang of kids huddled on a low wall, their faces monochrome against the glare of their phone screens, then jogged the last few poorly lit paths until I emerged into the relief of where the roads opened out on the western edge. Home was around the next bend. Before I crossed, I checked both ways.
And then I stopped dead.
Tucked in beside the entrance to a garage was a white Volkswagen Golf, with a black roof you could fold back, a doer-upper that had never been done up. A Greenpeace sticker, the glue perished and peeling at the edges. Expired parking tickets clogging up the vents behind the windscreen.
Matt’s car.
Heart thundering, I went over, circled it slowly. Matt had driven away when he left me the night before. He dropped me here, then he was going home. So what was it doing back here?
Coming round to the driver’s door, I saw the lock pin was up. I tried the handle, and the door scraped open. Casting a quick glance behind me, I pulled myself inside, swung the door closed. I smelled bleach, cutting through what remained of the familiar mustiness.
His things were here. I reached over to pick up a dismembered newspaper, half a pack of chewing gum, a plastic fork. I listened to the emptiness inside. Held the steering wheel, closed my eyes. Rested my feet on the pedals, the way Matt had showed me to do in the ten, fifteen lessons he’d given me. They creaked and resisted just a little under my soles.
It took a moment for the implication of that to hit me. I opened my eyes, dragged my gaze up to the rear-view. It was a perfect frame of the back window.
Matt, at six foot three, had almost ten inches on me. Every time I’d had a lesson in his car, I had to make half a dozen adjustments before I even turned the key. But the mirrors were all perfectly angled to my eye level, my hands were resting at the right height on the steering wheel. My feet were on the pedals.
The car was parked a minute from my home. And the seat was set for me.
I stared at the wheel under my fingertips. Then, like an answer to the question I hardly dared to ask myself, something caught my eye. I lifted my hands, unable to believe what I was seeing. There on the steering wheel, at two and ten o’clock, were two smudges. Brown. Mud.
There was only one explanation. Siggy could drive.
I arrived at our flat, breathless. The door swung open before I got to the top step, and a man came out, thanked Mum, and jogged down the steps.
‘Locksmith,’ she explained as she hustled me inside and closed the door. There was a new, brass-coloured deadlock and an extra steel reinforcement higher up. ‘Got one you can’t open from the inside without a key,’ she told me. Then, seeing my face, she took a step back. ‘Shit, Ellie, what?’
‘Matt’s car. I just walked past it.’
‘OK?’ she said, missing the significance.
‘He said he was going straight home.’
She went immediately into her bedroom and pulled open the curtain and looked out onto the street. ‘Where?’
‘You can’t see it from here. But it’s that way.’ I pointed. ‘Back through there.’
She dropped the fabric. Looked me full in the face, scanning my eyes. ‘Does he usually park there?’
I shook my head, mute.
Mum nodded, slowly. ‘OK. I guess we’ve got to tell the police then. Maybe this is good news.’ She pulled me in and hugged me. But when she let me go her face changed. ‘Baby, what?’
I told her about the pedals, the position of the seat. ‘It was me, Mum. It was Siggy.’
‘Siggy can’t drive, baby. You’re overreacting. You can’t even drive.’
I looked away.
‘Ellie,’ she said, ducking a little to hook my eyeline. ‘Oh my god. You can drive?’
In a voice I could hardly hear myself I said, ‘He gave me a few lessons.’
She threw her hands up. ‘Tell me you’re joking. Ellie! I can’t believe you lied to me about that!’
‘I didn’t lie—’
‘Withholding is the same bloody thing,’ she said, her jaw tense, furious now.
‘Mum, look, I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry.’
She sighed and took my hands. ‘This has to stop. OK? We can’t do this to each other, there has to be trust. OK? There has to be.’
‘He just thought I needed more independence. Thought it would be best if—’ I said, dropping to a whisper, ‘if I kept it between the two of us.’
She let her eyes close for a minute like she was composing herself. ‘Listen to me. He does not understand what you can do, Ellie. He hasn’t seen it. Good lord, if he knew what I know about Siggy there is no way he would have even thought about teaching you to drive. I cannot believe you made a decision like that without consulting me.’
I said nothing. Waited for it to pass. There was a long pause. ‘OK,’ she said eventually. She flexed her fingers. ‘I suppose I’ll have to call them. Only thing we can do.’
I couldn’t say no. I didn’t even want to say no, because I wanted Matt found, and anything that might help them find him had to be a good thing. But still, right down deep …
‘But what if—?’ I started.
She touched a finger to my lips. ‘It’ll be OK. OK? We deal with it. I’ll call them in the morning.’
In the hall, she took the hoody as I shrugged it off. ‘So. Where have you been?’
‘Matt’s,’ I told her, taking the post from his pocket, laying it on the radiator shelf.
She glanced at it, then back at me. ‘You said you’d stay here.’
‘I know but—’
‘If any
one sees your neck, love—’
‘Has he just left me, Mum?’ I whispered.
‘Oh, sweetheart.’ She sighed like there wasn’t enough air in the world. ‘I don’t know. I wish I did.’ She wrapped her arms around me, then, after a while, squeezed and let go. ‘Come on, got to eat.’
On the kitchen table there were two plates ready, salad with tuna and hard-boiled eggs. She ate in silence, but I just pushed mine around.
She gave me a look. ‘Eat the eggs.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Eat the eggs, you need the protein.’
I folded my arms. ‘Really? For what?’
She sighed wearily at me. ‘Everything? Healing, to start with.’ She waved her fork, indicating my hand, then took another mouthful. ‘Blood sugar. Muscle growth.’
‘Muscle growth?’ I nodded towards my bedroom. ‘I practically took a door off its hinges with my bare hands last night.’
I hadn’t meant it as a joke, but we stared at each other for a moment, and then we were laughing. She kept trying to stop but she couldn’t, and it set me off again, and then she came around the table and she hugged me.
We were going to be OK.
Right at the back of my mind, Siggy glowed a little warmer.
21.
Charles Cox Psychotherapy Ltd.
Clinical audio recording transcript
Patient name: Eleanor Power
Session date: 1 September 2006
CC: OK. Good to see you again, Ellie. How have you been getting along?
EP: Fine, I guess.
CC: You mentioned last time that there had been some conflict between you and your mum, about giving school another try. How has that been this week?
EP: Yeah, well. She’s worried about me seeing Jodie, and she knows that I’m hanging out with her still so … but. Yeah. It’s OK, most of the time.
CC: OK. Is this something … does this happen when you spend time with other friends?
EP: I don’t have any other friends. [laughs] Bet you think that’s a bit tragic, right?
[pause: 18 sec]