My Name is Anna

by Lizzy Barber

  ‘Don’t worry.’ I haul myself up and grab fabric cleaner from under the sink in the kitchen, returning to dab at the stain with a wodge of kitchen roll. ‘It should be fine. We’ll just turn the cushion the other way around. They won’t notice for ages.’

  I see his shoulders relax a little. It’s a move that is uncannily like Dad. ‘Thanks, Rosie.’ He sits back on the wood floor and nibbles on a potato wedge.

  ‘That’s OK.’ I feel like a proper sister.

  Rob loiters on the stairs as I’m about to head up to my floor. His movements are oddly shifty, and I realise he’s thinking of hugging me. We haven’t hugged since we were little kids, forced to make up when one of us made the other cry. I lean over and wrap my arms around him. I feel him stiffen, as if he’s embarrassed about such an overt display of affection, but I hug him tighter.

  ‘It’s going to be all right, Rob. You’ll see. I bet you it’ll all be back to normal tomorrow.’ Or whatever passes for normal here.

  In my room, I listen for signs of Mum and Dad, but the house is silent. I pull up the window and look out over jumbled parcels of gardens and terraces and tower blocks. A couple of lights are on, but not many. If I look past them into the distance, I can make out the blinking lights of the City. On a clear day you can make out the very top of the Shard, rising in a sharp point into the sky. I wonder at all the thousands of people between me and there. Could one of them be MissMarple63? MikeD, are you out there now, asleep in one of those tower blocks?

  I open my bedside cabinet, feel for the back of the bottom drawer where Mum never looks, and take out a squashed rectangular packet. On the cover, a grey, moon-like pupil stares out at me, accompanied by a stark white message, telling me I’m ‘increasing the risk of blindness’. I open the packet, pull a cigarette out, then edge around my desk to lean over the window ledge and spark it up, watching the orange tip glow fiercely in the dark.

  I inhale, dragging in the crisp night air, and blow out an unconvincing smoke ring that quickly dissipates in the breeze. I imagine the little curlicues of smoke wafting through my mouth and down into my lungs as the familiar fuzziness fills my head. I don’t even like the taste, but something about it just feels viciously good. Plus, it gives me something to occupy my hands with. When I’m finished, I stub the cigarette out onto the side of the house, and reach around to feel with my fingertips for one particular loose tile, tucking the butt underneath it. I sometimes worry that something, a pigeon maybe, will work it loose, and I’ll have to explain away a rain of cigarette ends on the garden below. I creep downstairs to the bathroom, brush my teeth and wash the tips of my fingers vigorously. Mum’s never been able to tell.

  In bed, I lie in the dark, feeling the presence of the piece of paper resting on my bedside table. MissMarple63. Astro7402. MikeD. Their names have begun to feel like incantations to me, as if by saying them I’ll somehow conjure them up, and everything will be solved.

  MissMarple63. Astro7402. MikeD. Could one of them really hold the answer?

  My whole life has been a push and pull between knowing too much, and not knowing anything at all. I know what Emily receives every year for her birthday, because Mum will always buy her something – just a little trinket – and make a point of telling us what it is, as if this year, if she picks right, my sister will be returned to us. But I don’t know the sound of her voice. I know what colour her room was, because it was kept exactly the same until I turned twelve, when Mum finally relented, painted it blue and moved Rob in there. But I don’t know what she dreamed about, or the way she smelled. I know that, in reality, the only person who truly knows the answer to her mystery is the person who took her. My concrete, ineffable sister.

  Which is why I have to find her. I think of the endless theories on TheHive, spiralling out and all coming to no conclusion. If these three come up blank, will I keep going, until I’ve crossed off every lead?

  The thought of it makes my brain pulsate inside my skull. I reach across to the bedside table for a glass of water and, finding none there, reluctantly crawl out of bed to get one. I pad downstairs in the near darkness, feeling out the edge of each step with my bare feet. It’s only when I turn into the kitchen that I notice the faint sound of someone there, breaking through the stillness.

  Mum is sitting at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, crying.

  I pause in the open doorway, caught between letting her have her private moment and wanting to comfort her, but some maternal sense must alert her to my presence, because she raises her head from her hands and looks up at me.

  ‘Rosie?’ Her voice is cracked and thick.

  ‘Mum.’ I go to her; pull back the kitchen chair next to hers and sit.

  ‘Darling, you shouldn’t have to see me like this. I just needed a moment. I’m sorry.’ She pulls herself up and presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, wiping away the tears.

  ‘No, I …’ I feel utterly helpless. ‘Let me get you some water.’

  I get up and turn on the tap and reach up to the cabinet above the sink to pull down a couple of glasses.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I ask, setting a glass down in front of her.

  ‘Oh, my sweet girl.’ She takes my face between her two hands and plants a kiss on my forehead. I can feel the moisture from her drying tears as her cheek brushes mine. ‘Just be here. That’s all.’

  ‘I am.’ I wonder if this could be it: the moment she’ll confide in me, tell me the truth I’ve already discovered. ‘Mum,’ I prompt, ‘I’m sorry. About all this.’ I gesture pointlessly into the darkness, as if I could even begin to encompass the depths of our family’s pain within an arm span.

  She gives a tired sigh. The corners of her eyes fill with tears again, and I see her forcefully blinking them back. ‘I’m sorry too, Rosie. And I’m particularly sorry about tonight. I should never have said those things to your father. It was awful. Unforgivable. I know we try our best to go on, but this time of year dredges up all that panic and horror all over again. It’s like I’m trapped in a nightmare where I’m reliving it over and over. Only with a nightmare, at least you get to wake up.’

  I reach across the table with my hand. She takes it, giving me a grateful smile through the tears that are now rolling down her cheeks. ‘Dad knows I was just speaking out of frustration and anger. I could never blame him. Whatever happened, it was just horrible, horrible luck. There’s nothing we could have done or planned for that would have made it any different. And I guess, in a way, that’s even worse: we’re just pawns in the hands of fate.’

  ‘We are merely the stars’ tennis balls, struck and banded. Which way please them.’ The quote has loomed up at me from the marked-up copy of The Duchess of Malfi sitting in my backpack by the door. Through her sadness, Mum manages an impressed eyebrow raise. ‘See, I do pay attention in school.’

  We take simultaneous sips from our glasses. I swirl the cool water around my mouth, distracting myself from the silence as Mum sets her glass down with a soft clink.

  ‘It’s late, Rosie.’ Her chair makes a scraping sound against the tiles as she stands and takes our glasses over to the sink. ‘We should get to bed. You have school tomorrow.’

  ‘Mum,’ I venture, seizing my chance before it’s too late. ‘What do you remember about’ – I choose my words carefully – ‘that day?’

  I hear her sigh, and in the dim light I can just make out the rise and fall of her shoulders. ‘Rosie, we’ve been through it all so many times. Do you really want to hear it now?’

  ‘I want to hear it from you. Please, Mum. One more time?’

  ‘OK.’ She comes back over to the kitchen table and stands behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders.

  ‘We’d flown from Miami to Jacksonville late the night before. We knew the wedding was likely to go on quite late, so we’d planned a deliberately relaxed departure. The party had been wonderful. It was on the beach, and there were lots of other children, so Emily was in her element. I’d bought you
both the most gorgeous dresses – white with capped sleeves and tiny sequins on the skirts.

  ‘Emily fell in love with hers from the moment she put it on and insisted on twirling around in it all day. I remember watching her on the beach, running around barefoot and trying to mimic some of the older children doing cartwheels, with you fast asleep in the pram next to me, and thinking how lucky I was to have my two perfect, beautiful girls.’

  Her voice cracks, and I hear her tearful sniffs. I reach a hand back to touch her arm, confused emotions twisting and untwisting themselves in the pit of my chest: guilt at being left; anger at whoever did this to our family; grief for my lost sister; the knowledge that there is nothing I can do to take this pain away from my mother.

  She pats my hand. ‘It’s OK; I shouldn’t have taken myself there. Anyway, we got into Jacksonville very late the night before, and were all exhausted and managed to sleep in late – even you. The next day, we set off after breakfast for Astroland, which was about an hour’s drive west. The moment we stepped foot in the park … Oh Rosie, you should have seen her. Emily’s eyes just lit up! The whole place was magical – it’s hard to admit that now, but it’s true – and we all walked around in a sort of daze all morning, just taking it in.

  ‘I had you strapped to me in a papoose and you were perfectly content, watching everything. We had a novelty pushchair for Emily, shaped like a mini rocket, but she was too excited to sit still and kept clambering out, so eventually we gave up and made her hold on to the side of it instead. We stopped at a shop and she begged us to buy her a souvenir T-shirt; green, with the logo on it in silver.’ Her voice softens, remembering. ‘I can’t help thinking that was my first mistake: practically every child in the park was wearing one. Maybe if I’d insisted that she stayed in her own clothes it would have been easier for us to find her.’ She stops, lost in her thoughts now.

  ‘Mum,’ I say gently, partly to stop her blaming herself for every little detail, partly to urge her on: I’ve never heard her talking about it all so intimately before and am rapt, sickly fascinated to hear my own history playing out in such great detail. ‘I—’

  But it’s as if that has broken the spell. She steps away from me, breaking our contact, and flicks on the overhead lights, plunging us into a sudden brightness that makes me squint.

  ‘You know the rest now, Rosie. Come on: let’s go to bed.’ Wearily, she opens the dishwasher and places the empty glasses inside.

  ‘OK, OK.’ I grab her by the forearm as she starts to make her way out. ‘Just one last question: did you ever try searching yourself, or speaking to all those people who think they know what happened?’ I ask this nonchalantly, but something in my voice must alert her, because she stops dead and grasps me by the shoulders.

  ‘No.’ There’s a note of warning in her voice. ‘And neither must you, Rosie. I mean that. We have the best people possible working on the case. If anyone ever finds out what happened, it’ll be them. Don’t even think about poking around into any of these so-called “theories”.’ She practically spits out the word. ‘They’re all lunatics. The lot of them. And not just that: some of them could be downright dangerous.’ I can hear an edge of panic in her voice. She grips my shoulders even tighter, and forces me to look directly into her eyes. ‘Promise me, darling. Promise you won’t even think about it. I can’t lose another child.’

  ‘I promise, Mum.’ I speak slowly and deliberately, all the while feeling my heart beating with a deceptive thud in my chest.

  ‘Good.’ She hugs me to her with an almost violent urgency, pressing her lips to my cheek with a kiss. ‘Now, off to bed with you.’

  But I can’t sleep; my mind is alive. Blinking up at my ceiling, I follow a crack of moonlight shining through the curtains and onto my desk, and I know what I have to do.

  I open my laptop, navigate to TheHive, to MissMarple63’s page.

  It’s all still there: Hank Wilson’s lazy eyes staring vacantly out of the screen; a drawing depicting the distance between the construction site and the park entrance; the layers of comments from other users, agreeing with or protesting the evidence. I read it through again, to remind myself, all the while silently repeating, Please don’t let it be him. Whatever happened to Emily, this is amongst the most heinous of possibilities.

  I realise this is how my parents must have felt at the beginning, when each day brought a new and more terrifying lead: both the hope that finally they’d have an answer, and the sickening thought of what Emily’s fate might have been. They have been forced to think the bleakest thoughts it can be possible for a parent to have; and they have both confessed in their darkest moments that if she had been interfered with in any way, they would rather my sister was dead than having to suffer further. What an inconceivably awful choice to have to make.

  Nausea wraps itself around me and squeezes at my ribs like a boa constrictor. Hank Wilson, you bastard, I vow, fixing his image into my mind, if you have hurt my sister, I swear I will find you, and I will kill you with my own hands.

  Those hands now hover over the keyboard, trying to determine my next course of action. There are no contact details for MissMarple63 – no helpful email address on her profile page, or background information that may lead me to her. Only her profile handle, and the detective avatar. For all I know, she might not even be a woman. I scroll through her posts, which are dotted sporadically during the ten years of TheHive’s creation, getting thinner in number as they become more recent. My heart sinks when I see the posts dry up at the end of last year, but then to my surprise I see there’s been one posted only last week, to mark the fifteen-year anniversary: My thoughts are with the Archer family, still searching for their lost daughter. Hope springs eternal.

  I quickly open a new comment box and begin to type.

  ANNA

  11

  I open my eyes, allow myself to take William in; to fully understand the truth of what I have remembered. ‘Will, I think …’ I swallow air, forcing the reluctant words up from the base of my chest, willing them to be false. Knowing them to be truth. ‘I think I was taken. From the park.’

  I wait.

  His face is oddly sterile, the expression fixed on it as though it’s got stuck halfway between one thing and another. At last I see a slight shake of his head, and his lips move to an awkward half smile. ‘Anna, what do you mean, “taken”?’

  ‘I think …’ I breathe. ‘I think that a long time ago, I went to Astroland with another … another …’ My throat clenches around the words. ‘With other people. I was someone else. And somehow, I was taken from them. If I’d never gone to the park with you, I may never have put it together. But I have.’

  Opposite me, William exhales.

  ‘You don’t believe me.’ I feel my face go hot, embarrassment flying through my system. ‘Why would you? It sounds ridiculous. But Will, I’m telling you.’

  ‘Anna, please don’t get upset.’ Another long, careful breath escapes from him. ‘You know I love you. You know I want to believe you. But this is all jumping to a lot of quite irrational conclusions.’ His voice is calm, as if he’s trying to reason with a small child. ‘I wasn’t going to bring this up now, but when I left you on Saturday, I went home and did some research.’ He pulls his computer into his lap and starts to type, opening a page and holding it out for me to read. It’s from an online psychology journal. The title says, ‘False Memory Syndrome’. The article reads:

  False memory syndrome, or FMS, is a condition whereby a person strongly believes an event or events to have occurred, despite this being factually incorrect. The syndrome can have deep-rooted consequences for the individual, who believes so vehemently in these mistaken memories that they can become impossible to correct.

  I press the lid of the laptop shut.

  ‘So you think I’m crazy.’ I fix my gaze on my hand, resting on the laptop. The skin at the top of my splayed fingernails is torn where I have bitten at the cuticles; a habit easy to fall into, when frequent handw
ashing often makes the skin dry and cracked.

  ‘I don’t think you’re crazy, Anna. I just think you’re a bit confused; like maybe you’ve read about this kind of thing happening before, and remembered it when we got to the park, but that it didn’t actually happen to you. Like your mind fused the two things together.’

  ‘Then how do I explain the card?’ My teeth are clenched so tight I can barely get the words out. I think of my secrets, hidden under the floorboard in my room. If only I’d brought them. If only I had told him before, then he’d have to believe me.

  ‘What card?’ I can hear the sigh under his words.

  I tell him, but even as I’m speaking I see his features change; the corners of his eyes softening as he takes my hand in his and pats it gently. ‘Oh Anna.’ He strokes my skin, ignoring the cracks in the palm of my hand. ‘That was probably just the kids at school messing with you. You remember what happened last summer?’

  Last summer.

  I am so used to being invisible at school. Passing through the corridors with barely a glance from anyone. So I don’t know why they decided to pick me.

  The red. Spilling from my locker in a thick, viscous wave. Splashing my face and running down my clothes as the bucket perched inside clattered to the ground. The laughter echoing around me. The note pinned inside, calling me ‘Carrie’. I didn’t understand, had to ask William to explain. A book, he said. And I tried to block my ears when they called me that name for the rest of the school year.

  William watches me. ‘Someone probably thought it would be funny,’ he says softly.

  ‘No.’ A tear escapes and rolls down my left cheek. I wipe it away with the back of my fist. ‘It’s not that. It doesn’t explain it. What about the pendant? I remember seeing it, that day. And Mamma …’ I steel myself. I don’t want to think about that part. Instead, I say quietly, ‘If it was someone at school, how could they know that?’