by S. E. Lynes
Faced with Neil’s bulky outline in the frosted glass, I stop, take a breath.
Another moment. I open the front door.
Shock flashes across Neil’s face. He blushes, actually blushes, as he says hello.
‘Hi,’ I reply, trying to keep it light.
He looks at the ground. The silence between us lasts a beat too long.
‘How’s things?’ He looks up, meets my eye for the briefest second before returning his gaze to his trainers, kicking at a seam of moss between the flagstones. He looks like he’s put on weight. His face is redder than I remember, a little puffy.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You know. Keeping on.’
Behind me comes the flush of the upstairs loo.
‘We’re going to the Lovegoods’ thing together, I think,’ he says. ‘Next Saturday.’
‘Oh. Is that what Matt said?’
He twitches. ‘Well, no, I mean, he said we might. I can’t remember, to be honest. Bella said she might do your hair on Friday?’
‘Oh. OK. Yes, I’ll text her.’
He shrugs. ‘Don’t have to decide now, do we? I’m sure Johnnie Fartpants will manage without us.’
Neither of us laughs. I will Matt to return downstairs, but there is no sound.
Neil opens his mouth to speak. ‘I—’
‘You guys could come here first,’ I say at the same time. ‘We could have a drink, see where that takes us.’
‘Yeah. Yeah. We’ll definitely do that.’ He nods. The tips of his ears glow deep pink; I hear a short breath of air escape his nostrils. How quiet this street is, especially at night. Really, you could hear a pin drop. It’s as if no one lives here at all.
Matt’s quick footsteps thunder on the stairs.
‘Mate,’ he calls. ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear the door.’
Thank God. He eases past, his hands warm on my shoulders. He smells of fresh laundry, a trace of sweat. He will put both kits in the machine to wash when he gets in, hang them out before he goes to bed. Quite how he keeps powering forward I have no idea.
A brief kiss on my cheek. ‘See you in an hour.’
And they’re off. I stand on the threshold of my house and watch them jog towards Thameside Lane. What they find to talk about, I cannot fathom. The party, obviously, which it appears we are going to whether I want to or not. Perhaps all Matt’s conversations with Neil are like the ones he has with me, like everyone except Jen has with me: the conscious act of not talking about that. That second-by-second, beat-by-beat morning, when my life’s rhythm collapsed, that yesterday last year today, when time slowed and quickened and warped in a million different ways and I left my body, never really to return. This is why I can see myself so clearly that day, as someone separate, some poor cow I am floating above, in space. Barbara calls it disassociation. A defence mechanism. Like watching a supernatural film from between your fingers – to lessen the fright.
Myself. That morning. That afternoon. Useless indoors while all around the police, my friends, my neighbours were useful outside: searching, searching for her – in parks, in hedges, in knoll-knuckled fields, on roadsides, in alleyways, gardens, allotments, in undergrowth, in bracken, on muddy riverside slopes. The beats keeping time as minutes melted into hours. The helicopter overhead. The lifeboats. The green swell of the river. The darkening sky. The time, the time, running, running, running away.
Running out.
Thirteen
Matt
They are running down the high street when Matt feels his chest tighten. He stops and, after a moment’s delay, Neil stops too and looks back.
‘You OK?’ he calls. A moment later, he’s jogged back and is now laying a hand on Matt’s shoulder. ‘Mate?’
‘I’m all right.’ Slowly the breathlessness subsides. Matt straightens up.
‘Just keep breathing,’ Neil says. ‘Take it slow, that’s it. Actually, you look knackered, mate. Eyes like piss holes. Have you been sleeping?’
Matt nods – a wordless lie.
‘Keep breathing. In and out, that’s it. In and out. Are you eating?’
Again, without a word, Matt nods. Another lie. He can’t remember what it’s like to sleep for a whole night, eat a whole meal.
Neil pulls at the elastic of his shorts, retrieves a bank card from the hidden pocket and grins.
‘Sod this for a game of soldiers,’ he says. ‘Let’s go for a pint.’
Matt grimaces. ‘I didn’t shower.’
‘We’re not on the pull, are we? It’s warm enough to sit outside. Come on. You need a beer.’
Matt follows Neil to the King’s Head, where, at the tables out front, small groups drink and chat. They are mostly in their forties – nicely cut clothes with no obvious logos, expensive glasses, good shoes.
‘Grab us a table,’ Neil says and heads into the pub.
There is a small table with one chair next to the pavement, a little way from the others. Matt grabs a spare chair from another table and sits. He stretches out his back and consciously tries to loosen his shoulders. The evening is humid and still, the sky dark blue, stars lost to the haze of street lights. From the Chinese takeaway opposite, the aroma of crispy duck makes his head spin. His mouth fills with saliva. A Pavlovian response, he thinks. He wonders if he’s always this hungry actually, if this past year his brain has lost the pathway to whichever bit deals with appetite. His stomach is as hollow as a cave – he feels it, suddenly. Last time he caught sight of himself, he noticed the prominent curves of the bottom of his ribs; the premature middle-aged sag of his nipples despite all his fitness.
A grunt.
Biting two packets of crisps, Neil is putting two nut-brown creamy-topped pints on the table.
‘IPA,’ he says, once he’s plucked the crisps from his teeth and thrown them down. ‘Dunbar.’
He sits and downs half of his pint in one go. Matt does the same, closing his eyes momentarily at the taste. The beer is malty and cold, quite unbelievably delicious, and as he puts down his glass, he gasps like a bloke on a beer ad.
‘Long time since I’ve had a proper pint,’ he says.
‘Me too.’ Neil winks. ‘Not since this morning.’
‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
Matt takes another gulp. It is such a long time since he has sat like this, with anyone, so long it feels a little disconcerting. He resists putting the glass back to his lips a third time, knows he could easily down the rest, but he hasn’t brought out his cash card. Not that this would be an issue.
They have been friends since Neil stepped in to save Matt from a highly likely black eye courtesy of Robbie Timmins, the year’s hard case. It was Matt’s first day at his new school after he’d moved down with his parents from Manchester. Easter: first two terms already behind them, everyone already sorted into friendship groups – excruciating for a shy, academic boy. It was only on the way home that he and Neil realised they lived on the same street. They once tried to work out how many times they must have walked the route to school together, settling eventually for a lot.
‘Have some crisps.’ Neil opens both packets and lays them flat. ‘There you go. Tapas.’
A few seconds later, Matt has pretty much inhaled the lot. Good manners are all that prevent him from licking the salty grease directly from the packets. But he is hungrier now than he was a moment ago. Hungrier than he has been for… well, since that day. Since Abi. Now, the savoury waft of crispy duck is reaching torture levels and his pint has almost gone.
‘Things still tough then, yeah?’ Neil says.
‘Yeah.’ Words cannot possibly cover it.
‘You did everything you could, mate.’
Matt drinks but makes himself stop, leaving a drop for form’s sake. He pushes the base of his glass against the wet circle of beer on the pale beech slats of the tabletop.
‘Do you think you and Bel will ever have kids?’ he asks.
Neil leans back in his chair. ‘Jesus. Where did that come from?’
> ‘Sorry.’ Matt grins, holds up a hand in apology. ‘I suppose I was just thinking how good you were with Abi. You both were.’
Neil pushes his bottom lip up against the top and nods. ‘Once I get the business established, I reckon. A year? Two?’ He looks across the street, appears to study the cursive neon-green sign that reads China Garden. ‘Just want to get to a point where I’m financially stable, we’ve done the house, and Bella has taken over one hundred per cent from her dad. She needs a duty manager she can trust to keep things ticking over for her. But yeah, we want kids.’ He drinks, licks his lips. ‘How’s Ava?’
Matt shakes his head.
‘She didn’t seem to think she was coming to the party when I spoke to her just now,’ Neil adds. ‘Hope I didn’t drop a bollock.’
‘She said she’d think about it. She’s apprehensive obviously, but I think we should aim to go and then if she doesn’t, well, she doesn’t. The four of us can still have a drink, can’t we?’
‘That’s what she said, to be fair.’
‘I mean, she’s practically a recluse. But you know that.’
‘Down to time now, isn’t it?’
A weight settles on Matt’s chest. He’s not so sure. ‘I just…’
‘Just what?’
He shakes his head.
‘Tell you what, mate. Let me get us another one, yeah? Then you can tell me.’
Neil scrapes his chair across the paving and disappears into the pub.
The moon sails out from behind a cloud – almost full, as it was that night – and he sees them standing in that haunted building site, him and Neil, the two of them in utter despair after their harrowing, fruitless search. Sees himself look up at that moon and think: Now? Now, at the end, when we’ve had need of your light for all these hours? Hears himself say: ‘Mate. I need to tell you something.’
A promise. A handshake.
Ava says it is hope that will kill them. But a year later, sitting outside this pub almost fainting with year-long hunger, Matt thinks it is regret that will be the end of him. It must be possible to die of it – or guilt, or whatever it is, this black thing growing inside him. He knows his failure to admit to things comes from his fear of his father. It was Ava who cured him of the little lies he didn’t even know he was telling, routinely, without thinking. She would catch him planning an excuse for not wanting to go to an event or plotting how he would wriggle out of some mistake at work.
‘Just tell them you’re too tired,’ she would say, bewildered. Or, ‘Tell them you made a mistake. It’s work. You’re all grown-ups and they’re not your dad, Matt. If you take responsibility, no one has any comeback, do they? Just tell the truth.’
It took Ava to show him that actually the truth is almost always easier. But now here he is drinking beer when he’s supposed to be running because the truth wasn’t easier and now the black thing has squashed all the breath out of him, filled his stomach, taken lodging in his brain. And Neil is asking him what’s the matter and he can barely stand to say that it’s the same, the same guilt, the same regret. That some days all he can think about is his daughter’s little blue coat being pulled from the river, himself facing the press, voice shaking, trying to hold on to a handwritten statement torn from a ring-bound notebook, while with the other hand he tried to hold up his broken wife. Her shoulders were thin, her neck collapsed into her collarbone somehow. It was as if she had been dropped. Even now sometimes when he looks at her, it seems to him that her head is lower, or her shoulders higher, or something, as if she is ducking for cover. His wife, Ava, who when he first met her laughed so much she snorted beer through her nose, then laughed so much more at that she got the hiccups. That laughing, optimistic girl is gone; he knows that. But then so is the boy he once was, the man he hoped to be. This is who they are now, who they became that day: broken shadows reading a scribbled note to a crowd of hungry journalists, a plea for information, for privacy, his eyes fixed on a dozen boom microphones like so many quivering dogs. This is who they became: those poor parents of that little girl, missing, presumed drowned.
Burying what he knows has not worked.
‘Here.’ Neil is back: two more pints, a bag of crisps and one of dry-roasted peanuts. He puts the pints down and throws the snacks on the table. ‘Five a day.’
‘Are nuts fruit?’
‘Think so.’ He raises his pint to his lips. ‘And wheat is a vegetable.’
‘No it isn’t, you plank.’
They drink more slowly this time, placing their glasses back on the table in unison. For a moment neither of them says a word.
‘So,’ Neil says. ‘What’s this nothing you’re not bothered about?’
Matt smiles. ‘Nothing. Just tired.’
‘Know what you mean. Work’s been…’
‘Mad?’
‘Too right.’ Neil’s eyes are small and pale and intense. For a moment he looks like he’s about to say something more, but instead he picks up his glass and drinks. The moment, and whatever it held, passes.
Fourteen
Ava
I’m watching a lame comedy on Netflix with Fred asleep on my lap when I hear the thump of first one trainer then the other landing in the basket we keep in the hall for what always seems like an inordinate amount of shoes for two people. A sigh, a couple of seconds, and Matt appears at the living-room door, his eyes a little droopy. I think I catch the smell of beer.
‘Good,’ he says, drumming on the door jamb, as is his way. ‘You’re awake.’
He’s speaking clearly enough. Perhaps I’m mistaken. Perhaps he’s just tired.
‘Good run?’ I ask.
‘Went for a few beers actually.’
Ah.
‘With Neil? That’s unusual.’
He is staring at some distant point on the wall. ‘Just had a chat. A few laughs.’
Which I can’t provide is what lies beneath. I say nothing.
Matt turns away, his words trailing over his shoulder. ‘I need some toast. I’m starving.’
I make myself get up off the sofa. My body is heavy, and it’s not just the baby weight. It’s in my legs, my arms, my gut. If I don’t fight against it, I will become the weight, and Matt will have no choice but to cut himself loose and float away forever.
In the kitchen, he is eating a packet of salt and black pepper Kettle Chips by the handful and watching the toaster with a determined gaze. It’s the first time in… well, since… that I’ve seen him greet the prospect of food with anything even close to enthusiasm. In the fridge, I find the butter and a rustic-effect wooden box of Camembert that Matt must have ordered. There are herb-covered olives in a clear plastic tub, two restaurant-chain pizzas boasting roasted Mediterranean vegetables, and a pack of luxury creamy fruit yoghurts. Chorizo sausages nestle optimistically in a cardboard tray, bursting burnt orange in their tight skins. In happier, funnier times, Matt used to call them fox bollocks. Next to them, slick red peppers stuffed with feta cheese swim under oil in a jar – like specimens in formaldehyde. Matt’s supermarket orders are full of food like this: French cheese, expensive salty snacks, thick biscuits in classy packaging claiming to be hand-made – incentives to keep eating, to try to enjoy food, enjoy life, if we can.
I slide the butter and cheese across the counter towards him, trying not to notice that he has no bottom at all now; the fabric of his running shorts hangs like an ice-skater’s skirt.
‘So did Neil have something on his mind?’ I ask.
‘Not at all. We were both too tired to run, and you know what he’s like. Hardly had to twist his arm. I’d forgotten how fast he drinks; he’s like a hoover attachment.’
‘So it was your suggestion?’
‘Yeah, I wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t sleep well last night.’
Nor any night. I know this because neither do I. I hear him: turning over, slapping the pillows, giving up and going downstairs, returning cold and tense to the bed. I should reach out to him in these moments, I know. But I pre
tend to be asleep – eyes closed, breathing regular. I have even faked snoring. Never something I would have imagined faking in bed, but it’s incredible how convincing you can be when the need arises.
Did you talk about Abi?
Did Neil apologise for being so distant?
Did either of you come up with any new ideas as to where she might be?
Matt doesn’t reply. I realise I didn’t ask the questions out loud. I’ve asked him every question there is, over and over. Talking about it only revives the pain, he tells me, and he’s right – we have to somehow find a way to go forward, to live, for our son.
‘Listen,’ I say as he takes a mammoth bite of toast. ‘I’ve thought about it and I will come to the party.’ I look away. It is enough that I’ve said it out loud without having to face the hope I know will show on his face.
Fifteen
Ava
It feels weird to be out without Fred. It’s weird to have a hair appointment. It’s weird to exist in any way in the world, but then I don’t, I don’t think. I hover over it. Swim through it maybe. Drown. Whatever, this morning, I barely know how to walk. Without the pram, my arms swing, self-consciously as a clown’s. My feet look strange, the unending left, right, left, right of my white Converse absurd on the wide grey pavement. Also absurd is the memory of the me who used to covet these shoes, or any shoes, the me who, whilst not overly materialistic, I think, still derived pleasure from physical things. I remember getting these trainers home. I remember the small electric pulse when I pulled the iconic starred box from the bag, the almost illicit thrill of the tissue paper within, the ah that left my mouth when I pulled out the pristine canvas pumps. That person is entirely gone, I know that. This one, the me I am now, walks on surreal feet, disoriented, ethereal, too light in the heaviness of my being.
But the joyful she of that time, the time before, is me, I know that. Just as the wretched woman of that terrible morning is me too; just as the dazed automaton is me now, in this present. And here I am, stomach a fist, marching towards a hair appointment I’m not sure I can face for a party I don’t want to go to, my mind performing its daily, hourly loops: the second by second, the beat by beat, the yesterday, last year, today. And just as the me of long, long before would try to master a fiendishly difficult piece – Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3, say, whose massive chords my hands could never hope to span, whose rushing arpeggios used to leave my fingers in knots; or Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, which would make me weep with frustration at college – so the me of now tries, raging, to get to grips with my episodic memory, to make sense of the unresolved devil’s chord that is my daughter’s disappearance. The empty buggy in the hall, the open front door, the deserted street, the hot, swelling mass of my panicked heart. Matt’s face, the sound that left me when he told me the police were on the way, the chequerboard cars, the vans, the uniforms, a little black lens on a lapel, the barking of the dogs, the neighbours, the helicopter, the clamour of the press, the flash of cameras, the quiet surrender to the darkening sky. My husband and his best friend crying on the front step at midnight.