The Missing Years

by Lexie Elliott

  Once in the car, I put my hands on the wheel and drop the persona, feeling the anger and upset bubbling inside me. I am not magnanimous. I want to scratch and tear and bite and scream. It is not fine that a strange woman was unspeakably rude both about my mother and directly to me. I’m so livid at the injustice of it, I can almost see the emotions swirling inside me, a scarlet and black tornado. But no, that’s the painting I’m seeing. Even as rational thought regains a foothold and the bitter anger recedes, uneasiness wells up in its place. It’s abundantly clear that I can’t expect to fly under the radar here, but is everyone going to react to me like Morag? I’m abruptly aware that the sense of isolation I feel doesn’t stem purely from the implacable scenery. I know no one here. I have nobody on my side. I might as well be ten years old again, back in the hippie squat.

  A car pulls into the car park and jolts me out of my melodramatic wallowing. I start the engine, determined not to think of Morag. Instead I puzzle over the manager: Ben Rankin. The name tumbles over in my head for the short drive back to the Manse, spinning this way and that. If someone told me I ought to recognize the name, I’m sure I could convince myself I’ve heard it before, but I have no certainty. He knows me, though. I’m sure of that. But Morag knew me, too—and look how that ended.

  The Manse knows me—it’s waiting for me when I get back. I can feel its carefully reined in impatience in the silence that greets me as I cautiously enter, wondering which version will present itself. Malevolent, benevolent or indifferent: no matter which, at least the Manse knows where I am, I think, and then I stop myself. I’m building stories yet again. The house is just a heap of stones, and I am no longer ten years old.

  My father is living in a flat in Stockholm, as he’s currently separated from his wife Agata. She kicked him out when she discovered his previous family—not Karen and his daughter, but the family in Belgium that he left them for. He can tell the separation is only temporary, though, as she’s insisted he sees a counselor, and who would care about that if they were actually done with the relationship? The counseling sessions are tedious, but the flat is close to the center of the city and he’s rather enjoying the freedom to explore Stockholm’s nightlife again. In fact, when Agata comes to ask him to move back in, he’s considering telling her that it’s very important that he takes this time to really address the root problems; that should buy him both the balance of power and freedom until the end of the summer. After that, who knows? He’s moved before. He can do it again. At least there are no kids this time. That’s his rule now: no kids.

  FOUR

  The attic room.

  I’m standing at the open door, my hand on the now inert doorknob. Neutered by the efficient locksmith, it can no longer throb malevolently in my mind. After replacing the front and back door locks—Ye cannae be too careful, hen, the locksmith told me approvingly, which under the circumstances I heartily agree with—and checking all the ground-floor window locks were in working order, he unlocked the attic door in such short order that it seemed inconceivable I couldn’t have done it myself. Now he’s gone and I’m lingering in the doorway, surveying the room, which is really nothing special: just a small and poky space, with an empty blocked-up fireplace and a single narrow dormer window, that could use a good vacuuming to remove the dust. There’s a handful of cardboard boxes piled haphazardly in the middle of the floor and a folded trestle table and discarded canvases and frames resting against one wall. A box room holding boxes: nothing special at all, and certainly nothing to be deserving of such mental unease. So why am I reluctant to lift any of the lids?

  Perhaps the locksmith’s behavior is to blame. Some place, this, he said, glancing around nervously. Aye wondered what it was like inside, the things you hear . . .

  What things?

  Ach, dinnae mind me, lass. I’m haverin’ like a fishwife.

  I shrug off my disquiet and step forward to confront the contents of the topmost box. Books, mostly paperbacks. Nothing literary, mainly best sellers in the Jeffrey Archer vein, though I’m literally judging these by their covers, as I don’t recognize too many of the titles or authors. Who was the reader, though: my mother or father? My father, I decide—surely he would have taken a book on his many gemstone-buying trips, and I don’t remember my mother ever losing herself in a book. I was a voracious reader in my childhood; I’d go through four or five books a week. When did that tail off?

  The second box is the same, and the third. But not the fourth. It holds books, but not novels: these are scrapbooks, A3 size, bought in bulk, judging from the same dated floral pattern that rambles across several of the covers. The top one is labeled May 1980–Dec 1980 in my mother’s handwriting: the spiky M is unmistakable. I open it at random, the rough paper rasping at my fingers, and find myself in my father’s arms. We’re outside; he’s sitting on a wooden chair in the sunshine with me in his lap, a relaxed smile on his face and a beer bottle in one hand. 1980: I must have been around four. I’m not smiling, and I’m barely looking at the camera, as if it caught me dismissing it as something of no consequence. BBQ at the Haldanes is scrawled beneath. The photos are stuck into the album by triangular corner stickers that are losing their stick; some are floating freely between the pages.

  I turn the page and find my parents together in a selection of faded snaps, probably taken on the same day, though one is missing—three of the stickers have maintained their grip, but the photo is gone. In this sequence, my parents are lolling on a rug on the grass, my father resting back on his elbows. My mother has a perm and is wearing some kind of beaded bohemian blouse. She has her bare feet tucked sideways under her and a smile on her face; it’s unmistakably her, but no version I ever met.

  I close the scrapbook and take a deep breath as if I’m coming up for air. It takes a few more breaths before I come back to myself; I could lose myself in here, but in the end, what good would that do me? What I should be doing is sorting and separating—for recycling, binning or keeping—but that’s too much to face today. As I’m putting the scrapbook back in the box, I notice a framed photograph tucked down the side. I pull it out warily, but all it shows is a group of people sitting round a dinner table after what looks like a well-lubricated dinner, judging by the glasses and wine bottles strewn across the table. It’s a tableau that smacks of a special occasion, and my mother is at the center of it, clad in a geometric print dress and a big smile, in pride of place at the head of the table. I can make out my father, too, halfway down one side, the same compact, lean man from my bedside photograph, but this time he’s leaning back in his chair, a glass raised in his hand, a smile in place between absurdly long sideburns. He looks happy, or he looks like he’s trying to look happy. I don’t recognize any of the other revelers. I rub the dusty glass with my sleeve, but there’s nothing more to see. Like the other photograph, it’s just a sliver of time. I can’t divine a truth—any truth—from it, but still, I feel like I’m being sucked underwater. I cross quickly to the mantelpiece, which is thick with dust, to leave the photo there.

  I’m almost at the door when it strikes me. The mantelpiece was thick with dust. I turn back as if to check. The photo sits on a gray-brown carpet of it, with the only marks of disturbance those that I just made placing the photo. The horizontal edge of the trestle table has the same layer. But the box lids weren’t dusty. I look at them again. There’s no discernible dust at all on the lids of the topmost boxes, and I’m sure that’s not just down to having been disturbed by me. I would have noticed if I’d had to wipe dust off my fingers.

  Fair isolated out here, said the locksmith. You and yer sister mind take care.

  Someone has been here. It couldn’t have been a tenant; the estate agent didn’t have a key to this room. Someone has been through these things, these memories that don’t belong to them. Someone had a key. To this room, and presumably to the rest of the house.

  You want to get to know your neighbors, said the locksmith. Gl
en McCue is a good man. That daughter of his is . . . well, you’ll meet her. But Glen is a good man.

  Now I can see the young woman again. She’s leafing through the contents of the boxes, taking out certain scrapbooks and carrying them down to the master bedroom, where she sits cross-legged on the bed to peruse them at her leisure, these instants of time that she has no right to, her uncombed hair wild about her, mixing with the smoke spiraling up from the cigarette resting in the ashtray beside her. I can feel my heart thudding in my ears.

  But I’ve changed the locks. She can’t roam through this house or these memories again. I’ve changed the locks.

  I’m suddenly struck with an absolute need to escape the confines of this attic before it’s somehow too late. I take the stairs two at a time and reach the kitchen before I realize I’ve picked up the framed photograph again; I have it in my hands. I dump it on the countertop and take a few deep breaths as if coming up for air—which in truth is exactly what it feels like. Upstairs I was certain of things that down here, with the light streaming in through the wide kitchen windows, seem ludicrous. Glancing at my watch, I see it’s almost time for the lunchtime news. I’m in the living room turning on the television before the oddity of that occurs to me: surely I wasn’t in the attic room for a whole three quarters of an hour? But my watch is right; it matches the time on the strapline that runs across the bottom of the news screen. The top story is still the malevolent Icelandic ash cloud—flights have apparently been resumed, though it’s nothing like normal service yet, with planes and travelers stranded all over Europe—but the oil rig disaster is second in line, and suddenly Jonathan is filling the screen.

  It’s a live piece again. He’s on a boat, the burning rig behind him. It’s barely dawn there, and the dim light makes the fiery plumes even more striking. I can’t deny it: it grabs at my stomach to see him there without me, but I’m not sure I’m equipped to interpret the feelings. It’s all too tangled up between us anyway—the personal, the professional, the public and the private, the strands twisted again and again, with links grown over time from one to the other, like a helical coil of DNA. The DNA of us. His silver-gray hair is whipping around in the sea breeze, and he has his gravest face on. I can already tell that there are no positive developments on this story. The search-and-rescue effort is continuing, but the expression of the exhausted spokeswoman in a short insert clip betrays the fact that after nearly thirty-six hours, there can be no reasonable hope. The firefighting effort continues, too, but the rig is listing so heavily that it’s surely inevitable that it must sink. I imagine it slipping soundlessly into the black depths, the incessant fires finally quenched, sinking down and down until it at last comes to rest—a metal skeleton in the ocean’s cemetery. I imagine barnacles growing on it, some form of plant life, perhaps—but no, I’ve missed something with my daydreaming: it seems there is the possibility of a seabed leak, perhaps as much as eight thousand barrels a day . . . Now the skeleton is surrounded by clouds of thick oozing crude oil, streaming around its metal ribs on the way to the surface, a murky, greasy, billowing black cloud, seeking to stomp on all sea life.

  But Jonathan has left the screen, and the focus is now on a petty political spat. I shut down the telly with the remote and sit for a moment, reluctant to head back to the box room. I feel curiously jet-lagged, as if I’m not quite in step with the world. Or perhaps it’s that I’m not quite in time with the house. It hasn’t escaped me that I continue to feel like I’m being watched. Or maybe observed is a better word: I feel like I am being analyzed. Which is wholly ridiculous. Clearly I need to eat.

  As I’m trying to understand the hob in the kitchen with a view to making some soup, my phone rings: Jonathan. I feel something in me unwind as his name flashes on my BlackBerry screen. “Hey, you, I’ve just been watching you,” I say lightly.

  “How was I?” There’s a smile in his voice, but exhaustion too.

  “Good. Of course. Though more needed on the missing workers and the families, I think.” The pinched white faces of the wives and children silently demand it. I don’t know why he can’t see it, why he can never see it.

  “They won’t find them. That’s not the story now.” He sounds testy. I won’t be the first person to have told him that; I expect he’s been on the receiving end of a pretty firm directive from the head of the newsroom as to where he should be focusing his time. He’s building up a head of steam, though. I let him rant. It’s not my job to talk him round this time.

  “How’s Rod doing?” I ask when he’s finished venting. Rod is his field producer on this trip.

  “He’s not you.” He’s still testy.

  “I’m reassured that you noticed.” I’ve deliberately adopted an amused tone. Rod is fifty with a ginger beard and a large beer belly.

  There’s a whiff of a reluctant chuckle down the phone. “He really isn’t you, though. He’s good enough, I suppose, it’s just . . . If I had to put my finger on it, there’s just not the same attention to detail.” Or perhaps there’s not the same attention to Jonathan. A silence falls between us. I realize he’s waiting for me to say something reassuring. Something like Don’t worry, it’s only for a few weeks. Or perhaps I’ll be back with you before you know it. He can’t ask me when I’m coming back, not without at least some sideswipe of acknowledgment of what brought me to Scotland—and he doesn’t want to bring that up at all, because then I will remember what he said in the dim light of the hotel room in Cairo . . . I close off the memory, but I still can’t find a voice for the platitudes. “Anyway,” he says eventually. “How’s the house?”

  “Well, it could certainly use a repaint.” I grab on to this subject like a lifeline. “It actually borders the land of Kingrossie Hotel—you know, the five-star golf place? I might be able to sell to them; I’m guessing they might want the fishing lake if not the Manse itself.”

  “You’ve sorted that certificate thing already?” I can hear the sudden hope in his voice.

  “No, not yet. I meant when that’s sorted out.” A faint crunching noise grabs my attention. Footsteps on gravel, from the front of the house I think, though I’m slightly disoriented by the background noises coming through the phone. Someone is speaking close by to Jonathan—probably Rod. “I’m meeting the lawyer this afternoon.” There’s a sharp bang from the front of the house; I move to peer down the corridor to the front door. Something is lying on the welcome mat. Post, presumably. It must have been the postman.

  “Good luck.” Jonathan yawns down the phone.

  “You sound dead on your feet.” I’m closer to the front door now, and I can see it’s not post. It’s a newspaper. Presumably a freebie circular, since there would be no reason to pay for papers to be delivered here regularly.

  “Yeah. But this thing is moving so fast.” I hear a louder snatch of a male voice. “Look, I have to go. I’ll call you when I can.”

  “Okay. Stay safe.”

  “You too.” It’s our habitual sign-off. Not I love you, or I miss you. We do say those, too, like all couples, but Stay safe is just for us. We initially became romantically involved when covering the Seattle WTO conference in 1999; it was my first experience of rioting, of the speed at which violence can rip through a crowd. I remember Jonathan’s hand on my arm when I had to be separated from him, the intensity in his eyes as he said those words, the dryness in my mouth as I nodded back. Stay safe. Back then it meant everything. It doesn’t quite seem enough, now.

  There’s something odd about the paper in my hand. I look at it more closely and realize that not only is it not neatly folded in half at the front page, as you’d expect from a new issue, but instead it has been roughly folded to quarter size at a different page. And it’s old; the paper has yellowed. I look for the date: 20 October 1983.

  October 1983. A month after my father disappeared.

  I open the door and look out for a moment, but whoever put this through my fr
ont door has gone. I can hear nothing but a vague hum of traffic from the distant main road, and the inscrutable hills across the glen are keeping silent about whatever they have seen. I close the front door again. I have an idea of what I might be about to see, and it’s right there when I open out the paper, circled three times in violent thick red marker pen: an article on my father. No Leads in Case of Missing Jeweler. It’s a large piece on page three; I read it through quickly, then again, slower. The writer has done his level best to underline all the tawdry details without actually accusing my father of theft; professionally I can admire his agility even while despising his gutter journalism. To be fair, the police spokesman is quoted as saying that currently they are pursuing all avenues, but that doesn’t counterbalance the four separate mentions of the diamonds. Karen and I are mentioned, too—“distraught wife and young daughter”—but only once. Abandoned family members are clearly much less interesting than a missing fortune in gemstones.

  There’s nothing in the article I didn’t know, of course, but the article itself isn’t the point. The point is that someone kept it: there’s a fury inherent in that which stops my breath. Someone kept it, for over a quarter of a century, and still felt angry enough today to make sure that I saw it. The real message is very clear: I am unwelcome here.