Pine

by Francine Toon

  The silence of the bus creeps into the classroom like a haar and, after interval, the deputy head visits the classrooms one by one. Everyone must now know about the sad disappearance of Ann-Marie Walker, she says. Who was local but not a pupil at the high school. It has been over twenty-four hours, but this does not mean they won’t find her soon. Lauren struggles with the double negative, pushing her pencil lead hard into the corner of her jotter until it pierces the paper. She blots out the teacher’s voice by watching the seagulls swooping and jeering outside in the clammy, dreich sky. She doodles a scraggly flower of life in the margin. Her mother’s never coming back. Absences have hewn huge chunks out of the space she lives in, making it harder to breathe.

  The teacher’s speech interrupts her train of thought. If pupils have any questions, or information, she is saying, they can come to her office at any time. They must not attempt to try and find Ann-Marie for themselves, she warns in a tone one would use for a pixie in a glen. Lauren thinks of hands in the dark. They must stay safe and let an adult know where they are at all times. An email is going out to all parents today. And if anyone has seen anything strange on the way to Raven’s Rock or near Evelix Gorge, they must let her know.

  Lauren scribbles out the flower doodle and tries to draw the moon crown of the High Priestess and star lamp of the old hermit on his lonely, secretive path.

  The deputy head is still speaking. There will be a community search party for Ann-Marie with posters and leaflets. If the children meet anyone who says they are a journalist, they should talk to a trusted adult first.

  Lauren is one of the first to return to the classroom after break time. A white bakery box is sitting on her desk. As she gets closer she sees it is printed with the pink logo of the local bread shop. She looks around as two other pupils take their seats and lifts the lid cautiously. One black, bulging eye looks up at her in the lumpen mass of a head. She springs back. Its tawny fur is half eaten away and matted with blood. Things squirm at its neck. She slams the flimsy lid back down and looks around again, her body shaking. She opens her mouth to tell the teacher, but then freezes as Maisie and her friends enter the room. Their heads are bowed towards each other as they talk in whispers. She puts her school bag on top of the box and puts them under the table together. She feels as though she is crawling with mites. For the rest of the lesson she imagines the eyes of the rabbit, watching her feet through a crack in the box.

  Niall sits motionless at the worn table. The house feels sunken. He notices how the ceiling slopes, how it needs more paint. A damp patch discolours one corner. He has flooring to fit at Catriona’s: seven square metres of bathroom tiles in ‘sea mist’ now that he has finished up in the living room. Another job building kitchen cabinets at the high school’s janitor’s house will have to wait. Sandy always says Niall is too slow and too picky with his jobs. Too scattergun. If he worked more efficiently, like he does, he’d be rich by now. Niall knows it helps that Sandy is always able to get out of bed in the mornings with a clean spring in his step. Sandy says Niall has a face on him like a wounded stag.

  Niall wonders now if he has been putting off doing the bathroom. White tiles always remind him. That day seemed to happen to a different, younger man, with a growing business, a future. He was laying hexagonal tiles, kneeling next to sacks of grout in the kitchen of a local family. He painted the room ‘absolute white’. He remembers the day Christine went missing that way, absolute white.

  He remembers, too, Ann-Marie’s dark, short hair and the way she was holding the bag of bottles. Alcohol. He scrapes his hand along one side of his arm and grabs the empty cereal bowl, clattering the spoon against the cold edge. He pushes himself up and looks out of the patio doors, past the dark fields. There are lines of people walking shoulder to shoulder, combing the undergrowth. Some are wearing white hooded suits. Three police vans and a Jeep are parked along the edge of one field. He has looked at this land every day for the best part of a decade. Now people are looking. Closer than he ever has.

  He puts his work bag together and goes out to the pickup. There are more cars in the road at the front of the house and Niall realizes he is almost hemmed in as he tries to back out. A balding man gets out of a blue car and scowls. Niall tries to place him.

  He edges close to a four-wheel drive by the gate. A woman in the passenger seat beckons to him as she winds down her window. ‘Are you coming to help us with the search?’ Her make-up is too bright.

  ‘Well,’ he begins, ‘I’m away to work the now, but I’ll, yes, I’m coming back, for sure.’

  ‘Uh-huh. You’re Niall Mackay?’ she continues as he reverses carefully. He recognizes her from around the town, but doesn’t know her name.

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Thought if anyone knew about where to look, it would be you.’ Her expression is judgemental.

  ‘Heh?’

  ‘On you go,’ she says, waving him on sternly.

  As he drives to the town his fists are clamped to the steering wheel. People need new bathrooms and he has to put food on the table. He has to carry on for Lauren, even when it kills him inside. He stops in Catriona’s drive, his head in his hands. When he closes his eyes, he sees Ann-Marie looking up at him, startled, clutching the door handle, trying to escape.

  Catriona answers the door in a boxy jumper that touches the thighs of her neat trousers. He wants to hug her, just for the comfort of another human being. She seems distracted and does not ask whether he wants a cup of tea.

  He tries to act like someone who hasn’t just found out their wife is dead. ‘So how was Sandy then, the other night?’

  ‘Oh, fine.’ She looks flushed with happiness. ‘We had dinner, then, you know, he went on his way.’

  Sure he did, thinks Niall, but nods with what he hopes is a plausible smile. I’m not here to judge. His wife Christine is all around him now, and while his body goes through the motions part of his mind is separate, with her.

  On the radio in the kitchen, hosts Dan and Grace are playing ‘Win It Minute’ with a land surveyor to the sound of a heavily ticking clock. Catriona starts to put her coat on for work and asks him if he knows the missing girl. Her question sounds forced as she pretends to answer an email on her phone.

  ‘Aye, I knew her,’ he says. The past tense spooks him and he shakes his head. ‘I know her.’

  She looks up, genuinely surprised. ‘So, you stay out there?’ she says.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Out by that forest?’

  ‘Yup.’

  He can feel her examining him with her big brown eyes. Maybe this is the first time she has really looked.

  ‘She’s at boarding school, isn’t she?’ she says, sliding her phone into her pocket. ‘People are saying she was expelled.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Some kids online – this Diane Armstrong? – apparently she’s gone “viral”.’ Her voice adds quotation marks. ‘And lots of people are talking about it, especially her friends in Edinburgh. Saying she’s lying somewhere in a field. Twitter. The local news, you know.’ She looks at him more intently. He tries to imagine her now as a doctor, talking to a patient about a serious illness.

  She pauses. ‘As I’ve said before, people talk a lot here, Niall. A lot. Not just the internet, it’s wherever you go. They’ve been telling me you knew her. And people seem to know a lot about you too. Your past.’ She’s nodding as she talks, as if she has pieced something together, something they both have to accept.

  ‘Right.’ He turns towards the bathroom.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I just wanted you to know.’

  He ignores her, puts down his bag on the cement floor and hears her come in behind him. He switches on his radio. She begins to ask a question but stops herself. When he looks up, she is eyeing the white splatters of paint like bird shit on the radio, trying to choose her words.

  ‘Here’s a question for you: where does the rock for the Carlin Stones originate from?’ says Grace, the radio prese
nter.

  ‘Ballachulish?’ asks Dan, her colleague.

  ‘No, well, you’re not far off: Ailsa Craig.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s out in the fields. I think she’s in the forest,’ he says. ‘If it’s no bother to you, I’ll be helping them out this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ she says in a faraway tone. ‘Go now, if you’d like.’

  23

  He arrives at the search party, a group of people standing on the track, in the dry air. A woman, a secretary at the primary school, is handing out sausage rolls from a Tupperware box in the open boot of a Vauxhall Astra. She’s saying, ‘The thing is, all that snow is thawing.’

  ‘What can I do to help here?’ asks Niall.

  She thrusts the box towards him. ‘Join us, by all means, Niall, by all means.’ Then she says, more softly, ‘I know it must be hard for you.’ He’s grateful for the sympathy and the food.

  A man, a shopkeeper from the village, comes out of the field with ruddy cheeks and takes a sausage roll that is burnt around the edges. ‘We’re all here to help. Awful, i’n’t it?’ The afternoon is almost dark now, but Niall can see the outline of a little old lady walking up into the forest.

  ‘Here’s a torch,’ says the shopkeeper, taking one from the back of the van. ‘Come on. We’ve pretty much covered the fields here today, I think. But we are going to try the forest. Is there really any point, Andy was saying to me, back there, but I said yes – of course there’s a point. Of course there’s a point. We don’t want to miss a minute.’

  ‘It’s not been too long, has it?’ asks the secretary. Her voice is hoarse as she looks at each of them glumly.

  Niall lags behind as they trudge into the dense, gloomy trees. When he was a boy, Niall lived on the other side of the town, away from the forest, but he still felt it at the edges of his life like a stretching shadow. He is with five other people: two tall men, a woman and a couple of teenagers Niall thinks must be friends of Diane. He wonders why they aren’t at school, or if they’ve left.

  The group wave their torch beams in the fern banks and ditches, but it is still difficult to reach every corner of the forest. Some thickets of gorse simply grow too densely to walk through. It’s so cold out here. His nose is running. At any moment, Niall worries torch light might fall on the girl’s dead body. Images pass through his mind’s eye, of her matted hair, the whites of her rolled-back eyes, her naked, pale skin, her sliced throat. Maybe they’ll just find a body part: a hand, a leg carried away and eaten by wild animals, predatory birds. He doesn’t know how he’ll be able to live with himself. They cross the soft mossy floor, wet with melting snow. The phone signal has long gone and after a while all the trees begin to look the same: thin, tall towers.

  The quiet is broken now and again with someone shouting ‘ANN-MARIE,’ and then another, calling into the gloom, occasionally overlapping like church bells. Their line spreads deeper into the forest and crosses paths with other small groups searching as the sun is slowly swallowed by the hillside. A fluorescent tape is strung tautly between the trees like a macabre ribbon to mark their pathways.

  ‘ANN-MARIE.’

  ‘ANN-MARIE.’

  ‘AAAAAANN-MARIE.’

  ‘ANN-MARIE.’

  ‘ANN-MARIE!’

  Her name takes on an importance each time it is called. There are now eight of them walking through the blossoming dark. Now and again their identities are exposed brightly in the questioning beam of a torch.

  ‘ANN-MARIE.’

  ‘ANN-MARIE!’

  Niall takes his turn to shout, deep from his lungs: ‘ANN-MARIE.’ He looks all around as he goes. The shouting has opened something up in him and he shouts again, over another calling voice: ‘AAAAAANN-MARIE.’

  ‘Ann-Marie.’

  Niall whips round and strains his ears to catch the voice again. He counts the search party. There are still eight of them, but they don’t match the voice that spoke. It is becoming hard to see without his beam. A male tawny owl hoots deeply like a gym teacher blowing on a whistle. A female screeches back. Niall shifts the torch to his left hand and sees Vairi standing small and frail by his side.

  ‘Gave me a fright,’ he says, breathing out.

  ‘I’m listening,’ Vairi says. ‘Did you hear her too? I know you did.’

  Niall doesn’t answer as the rest of the group plough on.

  ‘It is Christine,’ she says. ‘Yes? Christine.’

  ‘What …?’ He starts to walk away to catch up and trips over a root.

  ‘She comes to say hello sometimes. She’s been here.’

  He looks back over his shoulder. ‘What?’ His voice is a growl. ‘Don’t be daft. What are you on about? You’re—’

  ‘Shhh.’ The sound comes from someone else. His torch falls on another member of the search party, their finger to their lips. He walks on in silence.

  He thinks he hears a woman singing faintly through the forest.

  ‘Ann-Marie.’

  When the children leave the school building at three thirty, hundreds of white helium balloons wait for them in the playground, provided by a local radio station. A food van is serving hot teas and coffees as surprised parents begin to gather. Dinner ladies bring out a trestle table with free squash for the children.

  Another TV presenter is talking into a big black camera in the weakening daylight. ‘If you see anything at all, please phone us, or the police. Help is at hand. We warn you not to approach anyone suspicious. This is a town historically hit by tragedy. Nearly a decade ago, it saw the disappearance of Christine Mackay, an event that shook this tight-knit community to its core, and now there are fears of history repeating itself. Could Ann-Marie be out there with Christine, the woman she knew as a child? Certainly, many people round here can only hope’ – here he pauses for effect – ‘that she is safe. Back to you in the studio.’

  Diane is interviewed on TV, wearing black lipstick and a dog collar. People bundled up in hats and coats walk past as she talks about why she decided to use social media. ‘She’s my best friend,’ Diane says, her hoarse voice cracking. ‘If you’re out there, watching this, please come home. We need you.’

  Ann-Marie’s parents arrive to a small group of press, shaken and gaunt, nodding at the camera while pleading for their daughter to come home.

  Lauren looks around for her father; then she remembers he texted to say he’s searching in the woods already.

  ‘You all right, Lauren?’ asks Diane, sidling up to her from the cameras when it’s over.

  ‘No. It’s … I don’t know how I’m meant to feel.’

  ‘How d’you mean? We know she’s out there. We do. She’ll be back.’

  ‘But that’s not true. My mum’s never coming back.’

  ‘You poor wee soul. I know it’s all very mixed up at the moment, but we’ve gotta think positive for Ann-Marie, you know?’ Diane doesn’t look very positive. Her face is pale and anxious.

  ‘My mum.’ The images of death are involuntary and relentless: crushed snail shells, veins in meat, vampire teeth, soil filling a mouth. She remembers how, in the spring, one of Angela’s hens hatched chicks and she put them in a rabbit run. A polecat snuck under the run and ate all the chicks, leaving their heads in the grass. They didn’t know how it had entered at first until they saw a single scratch in the ground.

  ‘Police gave me my car back,’ says Diane. ‘C’mon.’

  They leave the crowd of people with their dogs and crying children in buggies. Diane drives them through the dark lanes to her home, speaking too quickly. ‘People think I’m cool because I have my own car, you know. You don’t know. No. You’re too young. But it’s my mum’s car and I do all her shopping. I’m just trying to get my grades. I’m trying to take my mind off this.’ They drive past Lauren’s house and into the pines. ‘You don’t mind if I smoke, then we’ll go and meet your dad, shall we?’

  Without waiting for an answer, she jerks the car to a halt in the muddy mound of her driv
eway, overshadowed by hazel and holly trees. ‘I’m smoking way too much now, but it’s all that’s helping. I’ll just be a minute, then I can drop you off at the field.’

  Lauren knows that they will not be going into Diane’s house, because Diane’s mother is ill and has been ill as long as Lauren can remember. For most of her life, Diane has looked after her mother. In recent years she has worked shifts at the Black Horse, and for a while did cleaning at the Castle Hotel in a black dress and white apron that she hated. For this reason, Lauren has hardly ever been to Diane’s house. The times she has, it felt sad. An over-stuffed-cushion, lots-of-teddy-bears kind of sad, rather than the sparser sadness that could leak from the walls at her own home.

  ‘It’s nice we got to know each other better,’ says Diane forlornly, dragging on her joint and tapping the ash out of the window. Lauren watches it fly away in the biting wind. ‘Well. That was the only good thing to happen. I’m having these fucked-up nightmares.’

  She looks over at Lauren, who wants to go home. ‘Can you read the cards again, and maybe we can find out if Ann-Marie’s coming back?’ Diane’s voice is soaked in desperation. ‘There might be some cards in the car somewhere.’ The back seat is littered with clothes, old food wrappers and a make-up bag.

  ‘No.’ Lauren draws herself up. ‘My mum’s not coming back.’ Her voice is even. ‘I never even knew her.’ These words have been going through her mind on a loop until she is compelled to say them out loud. She sighs and looks down at Diane’s nails, black-purple like hard berries.

  Without a word Diane rolls up the window and carries on smoking against the windscreen. ‘It’s on the radio,’ she says with a drawl, turning it down. ‘Whenever I switch on the radio, they’re talking about her, wherever she is. It’s the least I could do, really. They’ve got to find her soon. I’ve told the police everything.’ She starts rolling another joint.