by Daisy Pearce
‘You’re not Kim.’
‘Nope.’ She looked up at me once, scanning my face. I could almost see her interest drop off. I’m old, I’m plain. I’m a hausfrau. ‘Kim’s at work.’
She extended her hand, still tapping on her phone. ‘You’ve got a package, have you?’ When I told her no, she rolled her eyes. ‘Give me your name, I’ll tell Kim you were here.’
‘Wait, hang on. Where does she work?’
‘Today she’s in Arlo’s. You might still catch her.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘God,’ she huffed. ‘Mate, you want me to draw you a map as well? It’s down on the high street.’ She pointed to the left, and without looking up from her phone, slowly closed the door in my face. I stared at it for a moment before turning and walking away.
Arlo’s was a cafe with steamed-up windows and a radio playing too loud. The dance music jarred, given the mainly geriatric clientele mopping up fried egg with slabs of white bread. I picked up a laminated menu but barely looked at it. She was here: behind the counter, that sweep of glossy hair held back from her face in a bun. I recognised the jut of her chin, the slim line of her neck, her expression giving her an air of sweeping contempt. Not William’s type at all. Oh, she is, a sneaky little voice in my head interjected; you just didn’t know it.
‘What are you after?’ she asked me. Like her friend at the door, her eyes slid away from me with disinterest. She peeled a page of her notebook back and picked up her pen.
‘Tea,’ I told her, unsmiling. I took a seat at a table near the window and swept the crumbs from it on to the floor. I watched her approach, skinny hips and ankle boots and studs in the curves of her ears. I waited, predatory. My heart raced and I liked the feel of it, that edge. When she put the cup on the table I grabbed at her hand and pinned it there, pulling her towards me in a quick, jerking motion.
‘Hey, what the fu—’ she cried out, trying to pull away, but I was too strong, too angry. Her mouth formed a neat, pink ‘o’ of surprise.
‘I know you,’ I whispered, and gave her hand a brisk squeeze that made her eyes snap up towards me. They were round and shocked. Good.
‘Let go of me!’
‘You’ve been fucking my husband.’ I said it as quietly as I could beneath the music, spitting the words into hard little bullets.
To my surprise she let out a bark of laughter. ‘What would I want with your dusty old husband?’ She clucked her tongue. ‘You better let go of my hand, yeah?’
I didn’t. I scrabbled for my phone. She watched me with nothing more than mild interest and pointed good humour.
‘This is you. Isn’t it?’
She looked over the picture I was showing her. ‘Yeah. I wasn’t well that day. Allergies. You can see my eyes are still red.’
‘Why does he have these photos?’ I spat. Her apathy was frustrating. She lifted those dewy brown eyes back to the counter and signalled to someone standing there. Just a finger raised. One minute. Then she sat in the chair opposite me, her back to the glass.
‘You want this tea or not?’
I shook my head. She pulled it towards her and tipped in packet after packet of sugar, lifting spilled grains from the table with the damp pad of her thumb and transferring them to her mouth. She examined me carefully.
‘Where you from?’
‘That’s not your business.’
‘I feel like you’ve come a long way just to confront me. Why aren’t you sitting your husband down and asking him these questions?’
It was a good point. None of this was going the way I’d thought it would. I felt myself beginning to deflate, anger hissing from me like a punctured tyre.
‘You been married a long time?’
‘Two years. But we’ve been together for six.’
She drew breath through her teeth, vexed. ‘Christ. That’s a third of my life.’
‘You didn’t answer my question. Why does he have these photos of you?’
‘He paid for them.’
‘What?’
‘He paid for them. That’s what they do. That’s the whole point.’
‘I don’t – I’m not sure—’
‘Here. Give me your husband’s name.’
I stared at her in frank disbelief. ‘You don’t know his name?’
She laughed again, but gentler this time. ‘Listen. Half these men, I don’t even know what they look like. Including your husband, probably. You know what this is, right? This arrangement?’
I shook my head, heart sinking. She sighed.
‘There’s a website. “Secret Sugar”. You heard of it?’ When she saw my blank expression she shrugged. ‘Never mind. It’s for men who like to give their money to girls like me who need it.’
‘What do you give in exchange?’
She nodded towards my phone. ‘Pictures. Nudes, if they earn it. You’ve heard of sugar daddies, yes? Paypigs? Men with spare cash and us girls needing to pay our bills and university fees – makes sense if you think about it. If you think me working in this cafe is paying enough for me to live in London, you’re wrong.’
‘How much?’
‘Like I said, depends. I’ve got a couple of regulars who give me a monthly allowance for photos and stuff. Sometimes I let them take me on dates. Others just drop in and out, send gifts, ask for underwear pics, you know?’
‘He – my husband, Will – he bought you a bag. A Miu Miu one.’
She smiled. It was so genuine it broke my heart. ‘Oh yeah. “Rattlesnake80”. That’s his username. He’s nice. Kind. Always very polite. He helped me with my credit card bills a few months ago. I like him.’ She looked at me with concern. ‘You’re not going to leave him over this, are you? It’s just pictures, that’s all. It’s not real life. None of it’s real life.’
On the train home I sat stiffly, bag on my lap, fingers pinching the top of it so hard the tips turned white. I kept thinking of the way Kim had looked at me, a mixture of pity and agitation. Why aren’t you sitting your husband down and asking him these questions? she’d said, and I hadn’t been able to answer. I hadn’t known how to tell her about my fear of losing him, his stability and humbleness and all of it, all of it; the velvet sofas and the granite worktops and the even keel, holding steady, not drowning in debt and waking up bilious and raw with self-loathing in the shadow of a three-day hangover – he is the weight that pins me to the earth. I can’t lose him. I’d float away.
Still, I thought as I got off the train at Swindon on legs that weren’t quite steady, still. We can’t have this secret between us. My mother had told me that these sorts of secrets were like a worm in an apple, destroying it from the heart out. She’d been drunk, of course. In the days before I’d moved out, one or both of my parents had been drunk, clumsily stroking my hair and pouring their twisted wisdom into me, how love was blind, was sour, was a lie. Their breath had been wine and cigarettes and rot.
That evening I made a lasagne with a brown and bubbling crust, and opened a bottle of Merlot as William walked through the door. I heard his coat and bag slither to the floor, his keys jangle into the dish. I knew exactly how it would feel to kiss him – the coldness on his lips from the outside air, the smell of the trains and all those other people, cigarette smoke and pollution. I waited until he was sitting opposite me before I spoke, passing him his plate.
‘I went into town today. London, I mean.’
‘Oh yeah? This looks great, babe. Did you get up to much?’
‘I went shopping.’
‘Uh-huh.’
I was watching him eat. I was slow. Deliberate. ‘I went to a place in Mayfair. Porters. It’s very fancy. Long way out of our price range.’
He looked up at me, chewing slowly. Something passed over his features in that moment, a ripple. Annoyance, maybe. Fear. ‘Did you buy something?’
‘No. Like I said, we don’t have the money to be shopping in places like that. They had handbags in there that cost nearly eight hundred pounds!’
It was a joke, I knew that. I’m forever losing things – leaving them on buses, dropping them in puddles and in the road. William used to call me an urchin because I dirtied everything up. But I wasn’t laughing, not this time. I picked up my phone, jabbing in the code so I could open up the photo I’d saved on there of Kim, the one she’d sent him with her back arched and her lips just parted, looking suggestively over her shoulder. Spoiling for trouble. At that moment William’s own phone rang. He looked at it briefly, then stood up, apologising.
‘Sorry, it’s my brother, I’d better take it.’
When he left the room I shoved my plate away from me and drained my wine. I massaged my temples, tried to steady my breathing. My pulse was ticking like a clockwork motor in my neck and outside, the car alarm, demanding, waa, waa, waa.
I know what you’ve been doing, Rattlesnake80. I’m so angry. It’s a bitter, acidic feeling that ulcerates me on the inside, the sting of deception. I can’t ignore it. It won’t go away. It will keep me awake at night, the poison of it infecting my sleep, making it toxic. Then the dreams will start again, that faceless figure with the claw hammer raised, drawing ever closer until their footsteps pound and their shadow spills over me like ink.
But, of course, then he comes back through the door with his shoulders hunched as though against a great wind and I can see the tears that are shivering in his eyes, ready to fall.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
‘Mum.’ His voice is heavy, like tar. ‘She’s had a fall. It sounds bad. Alex said she’s been taken to hospital. Thank God he was there.’
I pick up my phone. I have to do this. It’s going to eat me up if I don’t.
‘William, I—’
‘I’m sorry, Frances. Can we just – I need to . . .’
Inside me a coldness blooms, like a bite of snow.
Samantha – Now
There’s a new man working in the shop today. I like him. He smiles and charms and calls me ‘madam’. He doesn’t know me, so there is none of the bottomless sympathy that I often see in the eyes of people who know about what happened. I’m so used to seeing it I notice when it is absent. Like gravity.
This man is pleasant, although you can tell he’s bored already. He’s young, and this is just a job to cruise on, to get by. Just enough to pay his rent and get him out at the weekend maybe. Parties with his friends, some booze and some cigarettes, maybe some – I don’t know, what is it now? Ecstasy? Is that still popular? I don’t think anyone takes speed any more, do they? Whatever it is now. I never have to go through this with Edie – I suppose in a way that’s lucky. She’s frozen, isn’t she? She’ll never come home in the back of one of her friends’ parents’ cars, stinking of alcohol with sick in her hair. She’ll never fall pregnant at school, get mugged or get raped. She won’t settle for less than she’s worth or marry someone who likes the fear on her face when he hits her. I won’t ever have to smile and pretend I like her new tattoo, her life choices or her baby names. Is that meant to make me feel lucky? I don’t know.
Today my skin feels heavy and cold like clay. I’m a golem, conjured to life. I leave the shop and walk alongside the river, which is peaty-brown and fast-moving. Overhead are drifts of white clouds, as fine as lace.
I cried this morning, for the first time in a long time. A boy, up in Manchester. Eleven years old. He’d been missing over a week, his body eventually discovered weighted and dropped like an anchor in the canal. They had arrested the boy’s uncle. The news footage showed him driven into court in one of those vans with the blacked-out windows. People were throwing things at it, shouting. One man had a placard that said Burn In Hell. The crowd were chanting, ‘Die, scum, die.’ I found tears on my cheeks and wiped them away with the back of my hand.
In the days when Edie first went missing I was raw with a kind of undernourished grief, like the throb of a toothache. Back then I cried the same way, with a frequency and desperation I was only half aware of. Some days I would find myself in a queue at the supermarket or bent over a crossword and be surprised to discover my face wet with tears.
I had a grief counsellor, for a while. Some sessions my GP had organised for me. A leaflet and a cup of tea in a polystyrene cup in a small beige room that smelled of yeast and damp cloth. She didn’t last long. I’ve visited several on and off over the years, when finances will allow. They fill a need in me to be heard. To say Edie’s name in the stillness of the room. Right now, though, I am quite calm, feeling a strange sense of disintegrating, as though I’m floating apart. ‘Dissociation’, my last counsellor called it. She was worried that I wasn’t confronting my feelings, but I’ve had nearly eighteen years to confront my feelings – because that’s how long it’s been now since my little girl walked out of the door. A Thursday, October the ninth in the year 1997. Spice Girls and Titanic and Princess Diana dying in a dark Parisian tunnel and Tony Blair and Pokémon and my daughter, Edie.
I take the path across the large playing field, away from the river. From here I leave the town behind. Straight ahead past the industrial estate upon which squat concrete blocks: housing offices, carpet warehouses, depots. A thicket of brambles and nettles grows through the diamond-shaped fencing adjacent to the road, pushing through the gaps hungrily, with purpose. Serrated edges and spikes and bristles, fine white hairs that make your skin itch. The dust eddies and rises in the low breeze. Even the weeds here are virulent, rooted in the cracks of the pavement and along the side of the road in thick handfuls. I marvel at their tenacity.
I heard about the ambulance at Thorn House last night. My friend Theresa phoned me. It’s a small town, you see, and news is passed on the old way, on a grapevine. She told me its lights had been on but the sirens had not, and it had moved slowly, like a hearse.
‘Do you think she’s dead?’ Theresa asked me and I answered, ‘I hope not. I like Mimi. She taught at Edie’s school. She was the only teacher there who—’ Could stand her, I thought. I left the space empty, and Theresa glided smoothly over it, and the conversation moved on.
Still, later I found myself thinking of Mimi’s son for the first time in years. Back then he was a young man with a mess of dark hair he had a habit of pulling at, a boy who looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I swear on my mother’s life, Mrs Hudson, I don’t know anything about your daughter’, as I pressed the knife against his neck.
I walk until the road narrows and rises up, up away from the fields that cloak the valley and form the edge of the Sussex Downs. The church of St Mary de Castro is near the top of the hill at the back of a terrace of cottages. While the church is small, the grounds surrounding it are broad and ancient, with some of the yews and oaks that grow densely on the edges over five hundred years old. In parts, some of the graves are little more than hummocks in the earth, lumpen headstones marking victims of cholera and consumption and the plague.
I enter the graveyard through the old iron gates and walk through the grounds to where the trees start to thicken and crowd in overhead, freckling the pathway with sunlight. Above, a magpie barks in its harsh, staccato way. Below my feet the ground is spongy and soft with decay.
I find the place the same way I always find it. Back here the grounds aren’t maintained like the rest of the churchyard and the ferns and long grass tangle around my ankles. The large yew tree is many-limbed and sinuous, broad as a bus, trunk mottled with age. A few graves huddle in front of it, thrown crooked by the questing roots ploughing into the earth. I am not interested in graves. I come here because it was the last place Edie was seen the night she disappeared. Her friends told of how she walked into this dark grove of trees and never came out again.
I put my hand on the yew. It is smooth and warm and strong. Here at the base is a patch of bare earth no bigger than a dinner plate. It is
the only spot that is free of weeds. I clear it as often as I can, which isn’t as often as I’d like. Today there is a cluster of dandelions, which I pull up and discard. They drift away like little ghosts. I’ve buried things here, in the absence of a body, of a coffin or a grave. Little things.
When she was younger Edie would dig in the garden, shallow graves for strange treasures she’d collected. I would find them half-buried, sometimes months later. Little china animals, tiny pipe-cleaner dolls, coins, a hairbrush. I found something eleven years after she vanished, while I was digging manure into the roses: a pink-and-red plastic bracelet, the elastic turned to grey, the beads cracked and faded. The shock, like being winded, was as great as if she’d walked back through the door again. I saw stars and sat down abruptly into the freshly turned flower bed. I sat with the bracelet pressed against my lips until the shadows had lengthened and the Siamese cat from next door began coiling about my calves, crying plaintively.
I bring things up here now to bury them, but not discard them. More dissociation, I think.
I sit down beneath the tree, tucking the folds of my skirt around me. I am all alone, the sound of rustling leaves like whispering voices, the sky a soaring, polished blue. On what would have been Edie’s eighteenth birthday I carried a bottle of wine up here, drinking it too fast and getting woozy and disoriented. Last year she would have been thirty-two, and I buried a beautiful hair clip decorated with pearls. I wasn’t able to decide if it was the kind of thing a woman in her thirties would wear, but had bought it at the last minute anyway. This is my grief, lying beneath the earth. Long years of mourning unspooling like a bright red thread, running through the ground to meet the roots of trees.
But I’m wary of being maudlin. I have to measure it – ration it almost. Edie was a beautiful toddler but a difficult child. Obstinate, wilful, impossible to please. I caught her stealing money from my purse at age ten. When I asked her why, she answered simply, ‘Because I want it.’ In the months before her disappearance she was suspended from school for a week for getting into a fight and biting another girl’s ear.