Every Missing Thing

by Martyn Ford

  Back now, in room twenty-one, where we see Daniel splaying his hands – gesturing for Anna to agree.

  ‘Doubts about the relationship,’ she says. ‘Not about . . . not that he could . . .’

  ‘I hear what you’re saying, I do. You know I respect Francis. But the police must have a good reason.’ Daniel, again, reaches out and places a palm on her knee. This slows the jittering, and finally he holds her leg still.

  Anna stands. He looks up at her from the bed. ‘I need a shower,’ she says, walking out of view.

  Orange light on the carpet. It fades away as the bathroom door closes. We hear an extractor fan, then water – a sudden rush of muffled rain.

  Now alone, Daniel paces in the hotel room – he stands at the window, peers through the curtains, then sits on the bed again. He seems agitated. He rests his elbows on his knees and rubs his face.

  ‘You can fast-forward about four minutes,’ Jeremy said.

  The footage arrives at a buzzing sound.

  ‘Yeah,’ Daniel says, standing and pacing, talking into his mobile. ‘I’m with her now . . . Not particularly . . . Hmm . . . She says she’d rather stay here . . . I know, I know . . . Exactly . . . No, of course I haven’t . . . Yeah, well, believe it or not, money isn’t exactly her priority at the moment . . . If they’re interested now, they’ll still be interested next year . . . Just be patient . . . OK . . . All right. Yeah . . . yes. Bye.’ Daniel hangs up.

  ‘Who was that?’ Anna asks, coming back into the room, wearing a white hotel robe.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ There’s a pause. ‘It’s nothing . . .’

  ‘Was it June?’

  He nods.

  ‘Are they talking to producers? Now? Fucking now, Daniel?’

  ‘Calm down, I told her it was too early.’

  ‘Too early? Tell her to fuck off.’

  ‘I know, of course.’

  Anna sits on the mattress, throws her head forwards and wraps her thick, wet hair with a thick, dry towel. It appears, as she does this, that she’s counting. She rubs her scalp for three seconds on one side, three seconds on the other, then repeats the process – three sets in total. And she stands, steps towards the camera, towards the alarm clock, and hangs her towel over a chair in the bottom of the frame.

  When she returns to the bed and lifts her foot on to her knee, picking at something, Daniel sits on the opposite side. Back to back, they share a silence. Then, as though an idea has just come to him, he turns, crawls across the duvet, kneels directly behind her and begins to massage her shoulders. Anna doesn’t react.

  ‘I miss her,’ she whispers.

  ‘Me too.’

  Daniel puts his legs either side of her hips and his arms around her stomach – like they’re riding together on a motorbike. His head rests on her back.

  ‘I just dream – fantasise about what I’d do.’ She shuts her eyes and taps the air with her index finger, one, two, three imagined incisions paralysing whoever’s responsible. ‘But I think I’m physically incapable of being happy now. It’s like I’m buried. Like I’ve fallen too low to ever climb out. It hurts so fucking much.’

  When Daniel kisses her neck, which still glistens from the shower, Anna leans away. But he persists and, after two more tries, she relaxes. The intimacy is unmistakably familiar. We can tell, we can see that this is not the first time his mouth has touched her skin.

  ‘You know I’d do anything for you,’ he says, speaking into her white dressing-gown collar. Another kiss. ‘Anything.’

  ‘Stop.’ Anna unclasps his fingers, then returns to the chair.

  ‘Come stay with me. It’s crazy being here, alone.’

  She shakes her head. ‘We can’t.’

  ‘And after the trial?’

  ‘I . . .’ She pushes the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, curls forward and begins to cry.

  Francis closed the laptop. ‘I think I get the picture,’ he said.

  ‘They talk a bit more,’ Jeremy explained. ‘Seems it hasn’t been going on for very long. She says you’re basically separated?’

  ‘She’s still my wife.’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Jeremy held up a hand and retreated back over the line he knew he’d crossed. ‘If it makes you feel better, she does go on to say she’s uncomfortable about it.’

  Francis noticed the clock ticking again. ‘Christmas,’ he said, sighing. ‘I saw them together – they were too close. They made it into a joke. They were drunk, just being silly. Robin said, “Everyone wants to kiss Mummy at Christmas.” We all laughed.’ Then his mind clicked back into gear and he remembered where he was, and why. He turned to Jeremy. ‘Daniel babysits her. He’s got a key to the house. I think Sam should see this.’

  ‘He already has.’

  Later, in his cell, Francis thumbed out all six pills. Fuck the dosage, he thought, swallowing them without water. Then he waited for winter to arrive again, letting himself fall into an awful fever dream. The prison made strange noises. Odd bangs and buzzing and metal clunks. Gradually, they faded away. Sleeping on the drugs was like being in hell. It was as though he was trapped in a terrible state of limbo – he was aware of everything and nothing all at once.

  Hours of comatose thought, jumbled together, leaping through time. Warm water, as warm as blood, chipped nail polish, the headlights hitting the bus, yes, yes of course, yes of course I’ll marry you. Stay away from that girl. Their wedding day – Daniel’s speech. These two are made for each other. The doo-wop playlist – a jovial soundtrack to these fractured images. They’re made for each other. Why do fools fall in love? Can you feel the water? Can you feel it? It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Wake up. Francis, wake up. Robin’s gone.

  The only clear things he kept seeing, in the midst of that night-terror storm, were all the days they’d been alone together, all the conversations they’d had, all the work Daniel had put in. All the ways he’d capitalised on this relentless tragedy. Oh Daniel. Clever, clever, clever Daniel.

  Chapter 24

  Henry Marston Junior sits on a balcony in a hospital wheelchair – everything from his waist down is rigid with plaster cast and wire. He’s alone, looking out at Hallowfield General’s sprawling car park. Windscreens below glisten in the sun, but it’s shaded here, six storeys high, on the shingled terrace. There are two large pot plants in the back corners of this space. Henry’s parked against the wall, one elbow resting awkwardly on the long metal railing and the other on the arm of his wheelchair. The camera looks down on him.

  He breathes a final drag from his cigarette, then stubs it out on the bricks and flicks it over the edge. Without a beat, he takes the packet from his lap and lifts another to his lips. He lights it and smokes. There’s no sound so, when a nurse steps out, we do not hear what she says to him. But she disapproves of something – perhaps his being out of bed, perhaps the smoking, perhaps she’s astonished to see either. However, he simply does not care and looks back across the treetops and landscaped grass surrounding the car park.

  The nurse stays and crouches at his side. She touches his arm and shakes her head. They talk silently for a few minutes and, during this conversation, Henry chain-smokes. At two separate intervals, he bursts into tears. Shoulders hunched, he searches the air, gesticulating with his hands – angry, desperate misery clear on his face. The nurse listens. Although his upper half is animated, nothing beneath his waist moves. His toes do not wiggle, his knees do not sway.

  Eventually, the nurse steps behind his wheelchair and pushes him back inside, to bed – where he really ought to be. Afternoon shadows grow long and now the evening light is dust-orange on the car windscreens below.

  Isabelle drove while Sam rode shotgun – an arrangement he preferred. She seemed prepared to humour him, to bring him along for this meeting. And it wasn’t pity, or kindness, but courtesy. He’d given that video to her – an unusual birthday gift, one he could have kept to himself. Better this way. Togethe
r.

  Initially, Sam assumed the press had planted the camera in Anna’s hotel room. It wouldn’t be the first time the family’s privacy had been invaded. But he very much doubted the culprit would retain enough conscience to share it with him before they showed the rest of the world. Footage like that would be worth a staggering sum if offered to a tabloid. So then, it was not unscrupulous journalism, but something else entirely. Something he did not understand.

  Isabelle doubted the revelation was a game changer, but agreed it warranted at least a conversation with Daniel Aiden. Although Sam understood the Clarkes’ relationship was not the wholesome union depicted in public, more a practicality for Robin, for simplicity, he hadn’t even hypothetically considered adultery to be a factor. If he’d had to put money on where dishonesty lay, if anywhere at all, he’d have placed it at Francis’s feet. Anna seemed too troubled to juggle deception, let alone an affair. But there wasn’t much ambiguity in that footage. It was indisputable – she and Daniel were something more than good friends.

  They turned on to a narrow rural lane, diagonal light shining between the branches in fragmented columns, flashing at the side of his vision. To his right, the sun was low enough, pink enough, tamed enough by the atmosphere to stare at without causing harm. At least, not at a rate he could feel.

  ‘How old is Abigail?’ he asked, as the car came through the tunnel of trees and out amid wide open fields.

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘Why does she live with you?’

  Isabelle drove in silence for a few seconds. ‘Our parents are dead, there are no other siblings, and I can’t afford to have her anywhere else. I don’t qualify for much help. We have an uncle in Israel, but she doesn’t trust other people. She goes to a day centre during the week and they’re quite flexible with shifts – they send carers out for medication. Honestly, I prefer her close.’

  The satnav said they’d arrive at their destination, Daniel Aiden’s house, in six minutes.

  Sam looked down a long line of pylons, towards the sun’s fire clouds, and saw a shifting flock of starlings. Cascading, then rising, a wave of silhouettes flexing in unison like an oversized bubble in a gentle breeze. As with a lava lamp, his mind couldn’t help but see shapes, make pictures, find meaning in the birds, in the abstract haze, in anything that flew above him. Land, safety, a chance of survival should you fall and find yourself stranded and alone. As long as the sky’s not empty, it’ll be OK.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Isabelle said. ‘She’s fine. If you mean, what has she been diagnosed with – then low-functioning autism. She also suffers from epilepsy and she’s partially deaf.’

  Down a hill, down into the dark, and now the starlings were hidden. ‘So you take care of her.’ Sam blinked and looked back into the car.

  ‘Mmm-hm.’

  ‘If you could, would you change anything? Make her more like you?’

  Isabelle considered this. ‘I don’t know. When we were younger, I did feel sorry for Abigail. There’s so much she can’t do. She’ll never raise children, or have a career. She’s totally dependent on me. But then, I can’t fish, or hunt, or sow crops. And if I could, I still can’t protect myself from people who come and take those things by force. How independent can anyone be?’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘It’s a strange kind of high horse to think your accolades mean more than hers,’ she said. ‘I grew out of that years ago. The only difference between her gold-star sticker and an Oscar is the number of people clapping. As long as she’s happy, what else matters?’

  ‘When you strip this whole show down, we’re all just busy chimps, chasing serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin.’

  ‘Our gold-star stickers,’ Isabelle said. ‘She can have all of mine.’

  Sam felt they were on an honest run, so he returned to a topic he knew she would rather not revisit – the unanswered question had niggled him. ‘What happened, Isabelle?’ he asked. ‘What made you value the law more than the arts?’

  She kept her calm eyes on the road, her wise posture straight, and took a slow breath in through her nose. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t lie.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s easier.’

  ‘In the short term, undoubtedly. But it’s almost never ethical.’

  ‘You were married. Your ex-wife never ask you if her legs look good in these jeans?’

  ‘Well, what’s the question?’ Sam said. ‘Is she tacitly asking for reassurance, fishing for a compliment? If so, I’d provide one. An honest one.’

  ‘She’s not, she wants to know what you think. And they look awful, by the way.’

  ‘Then I’d tell her the truth. Would she rather deceit? Would she rather go out with me, without knowing that I believe most people will think the jeans look terrible? Or would she rather hear that, no, these other jeans look better?’

  ‘How about . . . ?’

  ‘You’re hiding Jewish refugees in your bedroom,’ Sam pre-empted, with a better scenario than whatever Isabelle was about to propose. ‘The SS are at the door. They ask if anyone’s upstairs. What do you say?’

  ‘You lie. You say no.’

  ‘And how often do situations like this occur? Odds are, you’ll never find yourself in one. You have to go to the absolute extremes for justification. Encoded in any lie – even a white lie, especially a white lie – is arrogance. You are deciding what the recipient can and can’t know.’

  ‘All right. How many sexual partners have you had?’

  ‘I’d rather not say. That’s the truth.’

  ‘What about when you say something untrue by mistake?’ she asked. ‘But you believe it.’

  ‘That’s fine too. A lie is when someone wants the honest truth, expects the honest truth, and you deliberately give them something else. It’s liberating, Isabelle. You don’t have to keep track of anything. You’ll feel so free. Give it a go.’

  Another breath, another hesitation. ‘I used to work with a charity, providing theatre workshops abroad,’ she said.

  ‘A thespian missionary?’

  ‘Sort of. Richard, my best friend growing up – the boy next door.’ She smiled. ‘He got me into it. After the last expedition, in Uganda of all places, instead of heading home, we decided to stay, trek around some national parks in the west. It was fun – we had a good time. I was always the more reserved, cautious type. I needed to know where we’d be, where we’d sleep, what we’d do. But Richard hated the beaten track. He literally threw my guidebook out the window. He thought it was so funny.’ Another smile. ‘Anyway, we hiked further west, crossed the border and entered the Congo. If we’d done our research, we’d have been warned that this was a bad idea. That part of the country was not doing well. But . . . you know.’

  ‘Adventure.’ Sam blinked.

  ‘Exactly. Our guide, Sal, this local girl we’d met just a few days before, she promised to show us gorillas in the wild. She wanted to impress us. We were with her for, I don’t know, maybe a week – bouncing around in this old jeep. Mostly dust tracks and long walks. And we were miles from the border now. God knows where. Late one afternoon, just before we stopped to camp, we drove past this group of people, maybe thirty of them. Men and women, civilians, some with guns. Others had jerry cans, machetes, ropes. They waved us down, stopped us at the side of the road and, I remember Sal’s face, she was terrified. One of the men came to the window – peered inside. She showed them some papers, and they spoke for a while – they seemed upset, and kept pointing down the track, back the way we’d come. Kept saying, “You hit the boy, you hit the boy, get out, you hit the boy.” They were shouting, trying to open the doors. I asked who they were and she just said, “We have to leave.” They started throwing rocks, she floored it, took us down this hill. We almost hit one of them on the way out.

  ‘They were . . . I guess you could call them a vigilante mob. Apparently, a few days earlier a ranger’s jeep, that matched our description close enough, had
run over a child near their village. Sal told us some horror stories she’d heard. Civilians taking matters into their own hands. Heading out in groups like that, looking for some kind of justice.

  ‘But we got away. Set up a discreet camp. The following morning, I woke up early and she was gone. She’d taken her tent and the jeep and just fucking left us there. At the edge of the rainforest. I like to think, maybe, it was for our own good. But we were beyond lost. Richard and I agreed we should head back on foot. God, it was hot, humid. We had hardly any water left. Within a few hours we’d found one of the main tracks and followed it from memory. A mile or two along, there was this noise, this crazy buzzing sound. I can still smell that smoke. We came across the jeep and the whole place – it was swarming with flies.’

  ‘What had happened?’

  ‘It had crashed into a ditch, on the side of the path, all the windows were broken and one of the front wheels had been taken off. But no sign of Sal. Then we saw a trail of litter, tissues and a few empty water bottles and broken glass, leading further towards the trees. We followed it and we found her . . .’

  Isabelle told this story with absolute detachment. She could have been reading a recipe. There was no sense of ceremony, no added drama. Just a straightforward recital.

  ‘She had a . . . a half-melted tyre around her waist, and she was lying on her side on a patch of burned grass. I could explain the violence. I’d try and tell you what they must have done to her. But . . . honestly, you wouldn’t believe it.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘No, Sam, no, you can’t.’

  ‘Was she dead?’

  Isabelle nodded. ‘She was still breathing, but . . . not for long. A minute or so and there was no pulse.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘We covered her body and left her. We kept walking, got back to the park boundary and told a ranger what had happened. Richard didn’t speak much after that. He’d always been, I guess you could say, a troubled guy – but I think that was something he just couldn’t shake. He told me he kept dreaming about that jeep, those flies – all that noise. Back in the UK, a doctor said he had PTSD. They gave him some drugs, all sorts, I don’t know what exactly. But nothing worked. He killed himself about eighteen months later.’