by Lizzy Barber
I blush and fix my eyes instead on the road ahead.
The bus pulls up to a line of shuttles and we join the crowds heading to the bank of ticket barriers which flank the entrance to the park, and William pulls the tickets out of his pocket. Ahead, above our eyeline, a sleek, silver train pulls into a station below a sign that reads: ‘This way to Mars Central.’ Beyond it, I see the most famous icon of all: the green sparkling turrets of Princess Bianca’s castle. There is noise; loud, jolly music booming from speakers and competing with the burble of crowds. I clench my fists in anticipation, and a shiver escapes down my spine: there is something unsettling, something almost hyperreal, about those iridescent green turrets.
We step out into The Time Before, the part of the park that depicts life on earth before the characters’ adventures begin. A smell of fudge wafts from one of the open doors, and we stop by a glass window, decorated in fine gold lettering, to watch a woman in a white mop cap and frilled apron stirring a huge vat of sticky liquid with a long wooden stick. Up ahead, we scoot past an open-top fifties-style car that screeches to a halt, and a group of actors in retro-style silver space suits clamber out of it. Something about it strikes me as familiar, and I try to remember where I could have seen images of the park before. I quicken my step, eager to move on.
In Rocketland, with its twisted steampunk vision of the Kennedy Space Center, we’re strapped into black shiny seats, launched upwards into the air through a dark metal tunnel so fast I shriek, gripping on to William’s hand so hard that afterwards he shows me the line of red half-moons my fingertips make on his palm. Later, we eat hot, buttered corn on the cob from a wooden cart, even though it’s nowhere near lunchtime, and William gives me a corn-ear smile, pressing the cob against his lips and tilting his face this way and that.
‘Having fun?’
I reach up on tiptoes, give him a buttery kiss on the cheek. But then a vision of myself enters my head like a picture taken in aerial, and I imagine Mamma’s face if she saw me, eating from a cart, licking melted butter off the sides of my hand as it drips over the paper napkins. I excuse myself, find a restroom and twist the taps on full, washing my hands two, three times until the smell of animal fat no longer lingers. When I rejoin William, he throws a lazy arm over my shoulder but I pull away. The thought of Mamma has unnerved me.
We stop for lunch, eat vast burgers and salty fries, drink vats of green Slush Puppies that course sugar through my veins. And then, finally, we reach the part I’ve been secretly the most excited about: Mars Central.
Despite Mamma’s attempts to stop me going to the park, and her refusal to let me watch ‘that trash’ on television, she couldn’t quite block out the existence of Astroland in my life. Over the years, be it snatched flickers between stations on Mamma’s heavily manned television set, or stolen glances at my classmates’ books, I managed to piece the stories together enough to get a sense of it all. Princess Bianca was always my favourite. I used to hang on to every word, carving out a picture in my mind of her gleaming castle in Mars Central, suspended above the ground by a blanket of fluffy blue clouds. The picture was so clear to me that when I first spotted the peak of turrets at the park entrance, it was as if I’d seen them before.
Around us, people eat vast mountains of blue cotton candy. It perfumes the air with its sugary smell. William finds my hand, gives it a squeeze. I let him. Seeing it all, it’s as if every secret glimpse I’ve had has collided together into a technicolour reality: bigger and better than I could possibly imagine.
And yet. The more I look at it, the more something scratches around the corners of my mind; an unsettling half thought, like it’s been softened over time, an oyster forming a pearl around a grain of sand. Was my childhood imagination really so strong that I could make the park come alive without seeing it in the flesh? The closer we get to the castle, the more a sense of anxiety washes over me.
‘Come on, Anna, let’s jump on the carousel!’
Part of me wants to resist, to pull away from him and flee, but William guides me carefully around the back of the castle, to what he promises is ‘the best ride of all’. A giant green carousel looms into view, teeming with silver horses, made magical with illuminated neon hooves and reins. As the carousel whirls round, the horses bob up and down on their poles, as if they’re racing each other on this never-ending loop. The colours spin together: pink and silver and yellow and silver and orange and silver, until they all blend together in a fantastical swirl.
As the horses dance in front of me, the scratch in my mind becomes a grip, tightening around every fibre of every muscle in my body. I stop in my path as the sickening spin of colours intensifies. Nausea hits me: I shouldn’t have had all that food – perhaps I’ve eaten too much sugar?
But then I hear a voice in my head, and I know instantly it’s the one from my unsettling dreams. It’s calling me. That name. The one that clings to me with icy fingers, a little ghost child that won’t let go. Only here the voice becomes alive and I feel as though I can see glimmers of a person attached to it; but who is it?
The dreams and my reality interlace as scenes play out as if in front of me, every whirl of neon bringing them more sharply into focus.
Where are you? The voice becomes more urgent, but as it does, it fades into the distance.
‘William,’ my weak voice calls through the passage of time, and I clutch the air until I feel his hands on me. My whole body has come out in a sweat, but I am freezing cold.
‘Anna? What is it? You’ve gone white.’ William draws his arms around me, and I feel myself sinking into him, giving way. We stumble over towards a bench and sit down. He takes my shoulders in his hands and stares desperately into my face, but I can’t speak, I don’t know how to answer.
And as blackness plays around the corners of my vision, I say the words that sound so unbelievable, so beyond reality, that even in the depths of this horror I know I sound crazy. ‘William,’ I swallow as the blackness takes over, ‘I’ve been here before.’
ROSIE
4
The car arrives at 4.30 a.m. Dad tried to tell them we could drive ourselves, but no, no, they insisted, it was the least they could do. The interview is an exclusive, which does wonders for the expense accounts.
It’s always this early, for morning TV. In the many interactions I’ve had with it over the years, I’ve got my routine down to a fine art. I decide on all my clothes the night before, down to my knickers and socks, and have them waiting for me on my desk chair. I set my alarm for four twenty, race to the bathroom before Rob gets a chance, and am ready at the front door by the time the doorbell rings.
It’s a black Ford, with sliding doors and the acrid sweetness of fake cherry air freshener that emanates from two dangling red baubles on the rear-view mirror. The driver either doesn’t know who we are or doesn’t care. He mutters ‘Good morning’ and turns up LBC as we wind through Liverpool Road and the backstreets of Canonbury. Mum grimaces, prepared to hear our names; hers. Dad asks him to turn it off; not angrily, but with an authority that makes the driver’s hand flick instantly to the volume control. Rob falls asleep in the front seat, his hoody pulled tight around his face.
I do my make-up in the car, balancing my compact on my knee as I rim my eyes in black.
‘I don’t know how you can do that.’ Mum, next to me, rests her head on Dad’s shoulder and closes her eyes. She won’t have slept last night: I’d know that instinctively, even if I hadn’t heard the creak of her footsteps on the landing below me. ‘I’d get it all over my face.’
‘Practice,’ I shrug, not looking at her.
I don’t know what I expected from dinner last night – the dinner Mum had so insisted upon, to mark the night before the Official Anniversary. I don’t know why I thought they would have told us about the email, about the state of the trust, when they have always been so parsimonious with the information they give us. Instead, they shared stories of her. Stories that seem to grow stronger and more fi
xed each year, as they pass from reality into rote.
And the more obvious it became that they weren’t going to reveal their secret, the more I felt the little stone of hardness grow inside me, the one that stops up the other, more frightening feelings that I have long ago learned to lock away.
I know she’s not doing it on purpose, but I can’t help the knot of anger I feel for Mum. I don’t like secrets. Not when I already live my life under the shadow of one. Not after the last time.
Dad is nervously upbeat, talking in a jittery voice about anything he can think of. Anything but the reason we’re in the car. Rob rouses himself long enough to ask, in a disgruntled tone, how long the filming will last, and Dad instantly pales, remaining silent for the rest of the journey.
The building is grey; a sixties hangover in some nondescript part of White City. It is bustling by the time we arrive, and I find myself wondering if people just develop a new routine for getting up this early, or if they’re always disguising their tiredness with good concealer and lots of coffee. The lighting is fake; too white, illuminating the scurrying workers that edge their way past us and pull lanyards from their necks to swipe through the entrance gates.
At the reception desk, a woman with shiny red hair holds a turquoise fingertip up at us as she gabbles into a telephone headset. Eventually the finger comes down and she gives us a smile. ‘How can I help?’ Behind the desk, a woman’s magazine is open on a double-page feature about some actress from a soap. I wonder what it’s like to actively want to have your face known to the world. Everyone always seems so hungry for fame; they don’t know how much I would swap it all in an instant to be anonymous.
As we sign in we are presented with plastic visitors’ badges with metal clips at the top; Rob immediately starts fiddling with his. I stick mine in my pocket, where the laminated edge digs into my upper thigh. Rosie Archer. Sister. That about sums me up.
We wait on a collection of fuzzy black chairs positioned around a coffee table. The room smells of disinfectant and instant coffee. Mum flips through a magazine in front of her, but she can’t disguise the tremble in her fingers as she reaches for a leaf of paper, and I can’t help but think, what is the point of hashing it out again, of putting ourselves through it? What do we think will come up after so long, after so many years of nothing?
Eventually, a producer comes to greet us. ‘Hi, hi.’ Her voice wavers between cheery and professional, as if she’s unsure of quite what tone to adopt. ‘Thank you so much for being with us today.’
Dad goes through the motions of introducing everyone, even though it’s entirely obvious who we all are. His voice is quieter now, more tentative, all that jitteriness washed away by the reality of actually being here, almost a year since the last time. It used to be more often, but after a certain amount of time there’s only so much you can say. But this is special. The Anniversary. Our last hope, maybe, for people to be interested in us, for someone to remember something, anything, that could give us a lead.
She takes us upstairs and into a waiting room, asks if we want anything to eat or drink. I mindlessly tear apart a blueberry muffin, knowing that if my hands don’t have something to do I’ll be inclined to tear at myself. Dig my thumb into the bruise on my knee, perhaps, enjoying feeling out the edges of the injury; chew at the hangnail I know is loose on my right thumb, right down to the nailbed, until I make it bleed. Mum sits beside me, strokes my hair, smothering me with all the excess love she has, enough for three of us, not two. I want to pull away, still keen to punish her, but I can’t help feeling soothed. I see her eye the muffin crumbs, and I know she knows why I’m doing it.
We wait in silence until a runner comes to collect us, rousing Rob awake from where he’s curled up on a grey felt sofa, and following her out. She guides us through the corridors, a blonde ponytail bobbing at her back, to the studio where Gail Peters, the presenter, is already in position under the lights. She’s wearing a white short-sleeved dress with fat, yellow daisies on it that shows off her cleavage in a way that blurs the line between provocative and morning-TV-appropriate, and a lipstick smile the same colour as the air freshener in the car that brought us. When she sees us, her smile opens up to showcase straight white teeth with her signature front-tooth gap, and she gives us a wave. She’s interviewed us before; we’re practically mates.
A team of crew members stop us in the sidelines and loop mic packs through our clothes. The black mic pack is heavy on the back of my jeans, the metal clip cool against my skin. One of them holds the wire up towards me, but I take it from him. ‘That’s OK, I’ll do it myself,’ I mutter, threading the mic through my shirt and clipping it against one of my buttonholes. I don’t like people I don’t know touching me.
The wire is loose and traces my torso, reminding me of my presence here with every movement I make.
They guide us onto the set and into position: Dad, Mum, me, Rob. Gail smiles at us with professional sympathy. ‘It’s good to see you all today – I’m so glad you could join us.’ Her teeth gleam against the studio lights.
Dad reaches across for Mum’s hand, takes it in his lap. It looks limp and frail against the grey pinstripe of his suit. I know the statistics: most couples, when something major like this happens, divorce within a year. The pressure; the media attention. It’s seen as a testament to their marriage that they are still so strong together, that they went on to have Rob and that, so far at least, I’m not a major fuck-up, bar a light dependency on picking at myself. I wonder if that’s part of the reason we’re such a continued source of interest; if people are just watching, waiting, for one or all of us to fall apart.
Gail pours water from a bulbous glass jug on the table in front of us. It has roundels of cucumber floating in it. She gestures to the collection of glasses. ‘Please, help yourselves.’ She beams at us, and I see the make-up crinkle at the corners of her eyes. Does she know about the state of the trust? Will she use it, like a bullet point to check off, to make the pitiful Archers even more pathetic?
The water tastes disinfected, like the smell of the waiting room, but it’s cold, and it seems like the polite response to drink it.
‘I promise this is going to be nice and easy. You guys just take your time.’ As Gail says this, I feel the familiar compression in my throat, and know it’s almost time to go on air. She’s prepping us; using that well-worn media training to situate us without directly alerting us to the exterior world of the set.
She fixes her gaze in the distance and I hear the muffled counting of the producer. ‘In five, four, three, two …’ Her gap-toothed, lipsticked smile hits the centre of the camera, and it’s on; we’re ready to begin; it’s showtime.
‘Before the break, we touched on a very important occasion: the fifteen-year anniversary of the Emily Archer case. Here in the studio today we are privileged to be joined by her family, Susanne and David Archer, and their children, Rosie, who was just one year old at the time of the incident, and Rob, who was born several years later. Sue, David, kids, thank you so much for joining us today. Now, tell us: what’s going through your minds today, fifteen years on?’
Here goes. My sister Emily disappeared when I was a baby.
Snatched from a ride at an American theme park, and never seen or heard of again. We say ‘disappeared’ as if it truly means something. Like one day she was a living, human creature, and the next day – poof! – she had vanished into thin air, a plot out of a science fiction movie.
In a way, I suppose ‘disappeared’ is apt: we don’t truly know what has happened to her. We know the logistics, yes: they’ve been trotted out a million times in the papers, in blatant, formulaic detail that never really comprehends what it was like to go through it all; but there comes a point where our knowledge jumps off a cliff, leaving not even the tiniest sliver of a trail for us to follow.
There was never any body. No leads strong enough to follow. No succinct form of conclusion that would help my parents mourn her, or put searching for her to rest
.
Instead we’ve been holding a rolling funeral for her for the past fifteen years.
I know that sounds harsh. I’ve been told over the years by various professionals that my ‘apathetic attitude can come across as bitter’. That I indulge myself in behaviour that can be considered self-destructive. That particular chestnut after Mum first noticed my habit of pinching the skin on my upper arm so hard it left marks.
It’s very difficult to feel anything for a sister you barely even met, except for a vague sense that if she hadn’t gone … wherever it is she went … your life would be different. It’s painful, but it’s a fuzzy pain – the sort you get when you sleep in a funny position and wake up with a dead arm.
Instead, I live my life under the gaze of the Ultimate Older Sister, preserved for ever in perfection. There are pictures of her all over the house. Fewer than there used to be, but they’re there. Her second birthday party, in an oversized, puff-sleeved dress they were probably hoping she would grow into, but never did. One of those classic professional baby photos taken in the back of a pharmacy, with the mottled grey background trying so hard to be velvet. And there’s the one they used all over the media. Taken the same day she went missing: our first day at the park. We’d been down in the Keys for a wedding – some old university friend of Dad’s (which is the only reason, Mum says when defending herself, she was mad enough to take a baby and a toddler on an eight-hour flight) – and had decided to round off the trip with a few days at Astroland, because it was so new, so shiny, so hyped up as one of the most innovative experiences the world had ever seen. So off we went.
Pink T-shirt. Gap-toothed grin. As familiar in our living room as it is on TV sets and in newspapers around the country.
Around the world.
She can do no wrong, whilst I am always trying to play catch-up.
Sometimes I manage to convince myself I have a memory of her, but the line is blurry as to whether it really is one, or if it is just me having looked at a picture of her so hard that I imagine it’s true. I googled it: it’s called a ‘false memory’. A false memory is a psychological phenomenon whereby a person recalls something that did not, in reality, occur.