The Missing

by Daisy Pearce

By the time I got home, I’d been gone for about an hour and a half. Thunder rumbled in the distance, a warning. I entered the house quietly, put my keys on the side and walked into the living room, switching on the light on the wall with the heel of my hand.

  And there was Edie, frozen to the couch, her jeans around her thighs, her eyes comically round with shock. On top of her a boy, athletic, good-looking, his hand shoved into her knickers, moving as though searching for something. He had thick curly hair and dark, blank eyes. When he saw me he lowered his head on to Edie’s chest. I could hear his muffled swearing, could see Edie’s hands in the crotch of his trousers. His T-shirt was pulled up to reveal the skin of his torso, the muscles there clearly defined. I’d remember this scene for a long time. Every moment of it.

  ‘Edie, get dressed now.’

  ‘Mum!’ She was angry, embarrassed, her face turning a vivid red.

  I turned to the boy. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘Mum, stop it.’

  The boy looked up at me. He pulled his hands out of Edie’s knickers, wiped them discreetly on his trousers. I could feel the pulse in my throat stutter. He didn’t respond to me. He talked to Edie. ‘I thought you said she was going to be out for hours.’

  ‘Mum, what the hell?’

  ‘Right. You, upstairs. You, out.’ I pointed at him.

  He smiled slantwise. It wasn’t a very nice smile and there was no humour in it. ‘Sure.’ He raised his hands. ‘I’m going, I’m going.’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Edie said, rising from her seat.

  I laughed. ‘Are you joking? Get upstairs. Now.’

  ‘All you do is embarrass me. I hate it here. I can’t wait to live by myself.’

  ‘But you don’t, do you? You live with me, in my house, under my rules. So get dressed and go upstairs before I do something to really embarrass you.’

  There was a brief silence. I tapped my nails on the sideboard. Click, click, click.

  The boy looked shifty and caught-out. He ran his hand over his face. ‘Edie, maybe I should go.’

  ‘Then I’m coming too.’

  ‘Your mum says – uh—’

  ‘That bitch doesn’t tell me what to do.’

  I grabbed her. I grabbed her by the arm and I knew I was squeezing too hard because she looked shocked, horrified, and I was glad because that is how I wanted her to look. Later I would think about the marks I left there, red stripes on her pale skin.

  ‘Upstairs, Edie. Now. Now!’

  I heard her start to cry as she walked through the kitchen and then clattered up the stairs. I just wanted the best for her, and these boys, these eager, narcissistic boys, were not the best. I stared at him. He stared back, defiant. He sat like a man, his legs spread almost the length of the two-seater couch. His hands dangled in the gap between them.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  He mumbled.

  I made him say it louder. ‘Speak up.’

  ‘William, I said.’

  ‘So you like my daughter, do you, William?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He lifted his hand and tugged at his hair where it hung over his ears.

  ‘Well, then, you need to have some respect for her—’

  I stopped and looked at his face and I remembered that he was just a kid, and that he was just as humiliated as me, and that all he wanted was to get out of here and go home.

  ‘Get out of my house. Stay away from Edie.’

  He rose, left, closed the front door quietly. I composed myself, lit a cigarette. I had thought I was liberated, easy with my daughter’s burgeoning sexual desires. I tried to remember myself at that age but it was like catching water in a sieve. Edie had turned her music up to screaming pitch.

  We didn’t speak for a few weeks or so after that, kept our distance from each other. In September, Edie went back to school and I hoped she would forget about him, this William with the shifty eyes and fleeting, half-felt smile. Then, one bright morning barely a month later, she left for school and I never saw her again.

  Don’t talk to me about triggers. I know all about triggers.

  Frances – Now

  William’s mother has forgotten who I am. At least, that’s how it seems. Alex has told us we are to expect some mental ‘hiccups’ caused by the brain injury. They’re temporary, the doctor has reassured him, but it doesn’t make it any less difficult.

  She peers at me with watery, Arctic eyes. ‘Which one are you married to?’

  ‘The handsome one,’ William cuts in, and his brother groans in the background.

  I’m sitting beside her bed, my hand on hers, the skin paper-thin and stitched with blue veins. She is propped up on pillows, facing the French windows which lead into the walled garden. Alex has moved her into the study, setting up a bed among the polished teak and musty old books.

  ‘She likes to watch the birds,’ he said, filling her hot-water bottle from the kettle, steaming up his glasses. ‘They’ve always given her so much joy.’

  His voice cracked then, and William stood awkwardly while I held him, running my palm up and down his back. It’s okay, I told him, it’s all right.

  Later we are together in Mimi’s room, Alex, William and I. The television plays in the corner. Her respiration is wet and noisy.

  ‘You want me to brush your hair, Mum?’ Alex has her hairbrush in his hands; old-fashioned, silver-handled, porcelain-backed and decorated with roses. It’s an oddly intimate moment, his hand so large on her bony shoulder, turning her towards him. As she turns her head I catch sight of the bruising she suffered in the fall. It’s a livid inkblot crawling over her temple. Along the side of her skull, about seven inches or so, there is a row of ugly black stitching, raw-looking.

  I wince, and Alex nods. ‘Beat yourself up pretty good, didn’t you, Ma? You want me to get the photos back out?’

  She doesn’t respond, and William asks, ‘What photos?’

  ‘The doctor said she’s going to have some short-term memory issues. I thought it might help her to look through some photos so I got some out the attic.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘The whole box. You don’t know what’ll get through to her so I thought I’d cast a wide net.’ He turns back to Mimi, who stares vacantly ahead, mouth hanging slightly open. ‘I’ll go and get them, shall I, Mum? You stay here with Will and Frances.’

  ‘Where’s your father? Is he in the greenhouse?’

  William and Alex exchange a concerned glance. The silence drips, drips, drips into the space until William turns away from Mimi to look out the window as he says, ‘That’s right, Mum. He’s just checking the tomatoes.’

  Mimi says nothing. Her eyes are sunk deep into her narrow skull. She is wearing a dressing gown over her nightdress but she still seems to be shivering and when I touch her arm it is as cold as marble.

  ‘Maybe get another blanket for her, Alex?’ I say, and he calls back, okay, sure.

  William and I drove the three hundred or so miles from Swindon beneath a gleaming cerulean sky laced with clouds as thick as whipped cream. Lewes is a small market town surrounded by the richly rolling Sussex Downs and backboned by the River Ouse. Sculpted white cliffs rise up over the tile-hung cottages and flint walls, while the smell of hops from the brewery permeates the air. Thorn House is set a couple of miles outside town, a large Georgian building of oak floors and draughty casement windows surrounded by overgrown allotment gardens and clipped hedges. Just beyond those is a meadow of wild clover and yarrow and the broad sweep of woodland descending into a valley thick with shadow. William once told me that when they were boys they’d discovered an old dry well in the forest there, partially concealed with ferns and nettles and brambles heavy with fruit. The two boys had taken their torches and shone them inside, and at the bottom, lying in the dark and the dirt, they’d found a dead sheep, partially rotted away. Twelve-year-old William had nightmares about their grisly discovery for months afterwards, but Alex, then only seven years old, had visited again and again
, fascinated by the decomposition, the slow revealing of dark, spoiled flesh and yellowed bone, the low droning buzz of flies. When Mimi had found out she’d been horrified and had immediately instructed their father, Edward, to board the old well up. Her words, according to William, had been, ‘A fall like that will snap their necks.’ Edward had done as his wife requested, despite Alex’s weeping protests, but that night he had presented Alex with a souvenir he had excavated from inside the well itself – the sheep’s skull, bleached and cleaned to a bright white. Alex had put it in pride of place on his bookshelf over his bed, and William would avoid its dread, blank-eyed gaze for years afterwards. As far as I know, it’s still there.

  William takes his phone from his pocket and examines it, frowning. One of the advantages of being down here is the limited phone reception. If you need to make a call you have to walk to the top end of the garden where the bench sits beneath the old apple trees, arthritic boughs bent and heavily knuckled. An old rope swing still hangs there, the rope grey and frayed, moving gently in the ghosts of a breeze.

  ‘I need to call work,’ William tells me. ‘Stay here with Mum, I’ll be back in a minute.’

  I watch him leave the room, ducking his head beneath the small doorway. My anger curls and uncurls inside me, burrowing deep into my chest, glowing ember-bright between my ribs. I still haven’t told him I know about Kim, the photos, the payments, the transactions making the erotic beige and mundane. He will know something’s wrong, though. Sooner or later. It comes from me in waves of cold, like a hoar frost.

  ‘Which one are you?’

  I look up at Mimi. Her head is turned towards me again. White hair floats about her patched skull in wisps of cobweb. Her skin is thin and as creased as crêpe paper.

  ‘I’m Frances, Mimi. William’s wife. Remember?’

  ‘Are you off the telly?’

  I shake my head. It’s frightening how vulnerable she looks in the big white day bed.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ I say.

  ‘Are you dead?’

  ‘I hope not!’ I laugh and after a moment she reaches up and touches my face. I try hard not to recoil from her cold fingers.

  ‘Are you real?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘Don’t let him hurt me.’

  I stare at her, fear tracing a cold finger down my spine. Her eyes are watery and pale and she looks at me with utter conviction. I think of that twisted line of stitching running up the side of her skull, the way her thoughts seem tangled in each other. Alex told us to expect confusion, but it’s still jarring to hear her talking about her husband, Edward, a man a long time dead, or for her to whisper to me with her nails digging into my cheek. I’m opening my mouth to respond when Alex walks back into the room, a box held beneath his arm.

  ‘You saying hello to Frances, Mum? We’ve got some pictures in here of their wedding. You’ll like to look at those again, won’t you?’

  Mimi’s hand drops away from my cheek. She turns back to the window and says, ‘Where’s that robin?’

  I’m making tea when Alex comes into the kitchen an hour or so later. William is upstairs setting up his laptop, turning his dad’s old study into a temporary office. I wonder if he has brought the memory stick with him. Maybe I’ll find a way to make it disappear. Maybe I’ll find the old well and toss it down.

  ‘Don’t worry about Mum,’ Alex says. ‘The doctor said this is normal after a knock to the head.’

  ‘What’s the deal with Edward? She thinks he’s still here?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He sighs, scratching the back of his head. ‘I was hoping she’d have got past that by now. She doesn’t seem to remember that Dad’s dead. That’s, like, the ninth time she’s mentioned him. Sometimes she talks like he’s just walked out the room.’

  He takes a seat at the breakfast bar, the box of photos in front of him. He starts flicking through them, still talking. ‘I’m just glad it isn’t more serious than it is. Head wounds bleed a lot. It’s a good job I wa— Hey, look at this! I knew I’d find it in here somewhere.’

  He holds up a photo. It’s William and me stood with our arms around each other in front of our first car. It was taken right outside Thorn House in the spring of 2010. We’d been together just a year, and bought ourselves an old Volkswagen to drive through Europe in. That’s where William would propose, four months later, outside a restaurant in Lisbon surrounded by orange blossoms. I take the picture from Alex and feel a lump in my throat as the room blurs and wavers through a prism of tears.

  ‘Oh! Oh no, Frances, what is it?’

  His arm around me, I wipe my face with my hands but still the tears come. I’m shaking with them, choking. I can’t believe how happy we look there. It crushes me, our wide-open faces, our anticipation. It turns me to stone.

  ‘I’m sorry. Oh God. This is embarrassing. It’s okay, Alex, I’m okay.’

  He squeezes my arm and releases me almost immediately. I’ve always liked Alex, with his faded old shirts and ripped jeans, round face beneath his crown of curly black hair. He looks so young, even now, still chubby, dumpling-shaped. Where William is dependable and sturdy, Alex flickers like a flame in a draught, unable to keep focus. It’s why he’s still here, living with his elderly mother in this big, rambling house at the age of thirty.

  ‘Let me do that. I’ll get the tea. You sit down.’

  ‘I’m not an invalid.’ I laugh, but my legs feel watery and I’m relieved to slide on to one of the stools. I put the photo back into the box and pick up the one beneath it, blotting my eyes with my T-shirt.

  ‘Is this your dad?’

  Alex comes and looks over my shoulder. ‘Yeah. Campaigning. It did his heart no good, that.’

  The picture is taken in front of the stile leading to Thorn Woods from the access road. Edward Thorn has his jaw set, his arms crossed, his mouth drawn down into a frown. Propped beside him is a placard reading It’s MY way, not the BY way.

  ‘I’d better take that one,’ Alex says, easing it out of my hands. ‘If Mum sees it and remembers, she’ll have a fit. She hated him doing all that stuff.’

  ‘Was this about the public access to his land?’

  Alex rolls his eyes. ‘Yes, but don’t ask for details, it’s too boring to tell you. Just know that he got his way in the end because we Thorns are tenacious motherfuckers.’

  I smile, flicking through the rest of the pile. Something catches my attention. It’s a photo I’ve never seen before. A group of people – teens, I suppose, although the ages are difficult to judge. They are standing in front of a low wall and squinting into bright sunshine. There are long shadows at their feet and their smiles are tight and self-conscious. All the girls – I count four of them – are wearing black. Not in a stylish, minimalist way, but wild and gothic: dark shaded eyes with slices of black liner, long lace veils. One of them has hair so black it appears to shine inky blue. When I see William on the end in his skinny black jeans and low-slung studded belt I actually gasp aloud.

  ‘Is that – it’s Will, isn’t it? Oh my God. He was a goth?’

  Alex peers over, laughing. ‘Nah, not really. We just hung out with a bunch of people who were for a while. We all went through weird phases. You should see the photos of us from when William and I were going out raving.’

  ‘I can’t believe it. His fringe! He’s wearing nail varnish! Look at this! This is amazing, I’m going to have to get a picture.’

  I take out my phone and snap a quick photo of the picture, still smiling.

  ‘Brilliant!’ I say, and then I notice the girl William has his arm around in the photograph. I have a strange feeling then – like the way it feels to miss a step; that lurch in the stomach, a moment of bright and fleeting anxiety. I hold the photo closer to my face. She’s shorter than William by quite a way, her hair dark and wild, eyes tilted slightly upward like those of a cat. She is looking into the camera with such stubbornness it is almost aggression. There is a tight, hungry expression on
her face. I’ve got all I asked for, it seems to be saying, but I want more. It’s William who has put his arm around her but it’s her that’s clinging to him; both her hands are tightly gripping the one he has draped casually over her shoulder. Her hip is pressed against his leg, leaning into him almost, like she is trying to fuse herself to him. Even in this snapshot, this captured moment, her expression is so familiar to me it makes me catch my breath. I’ve seen it before, in Samira laughing in that throaty, dirty way she had, pupils wide and inky, cheekbones jutting. I’ve seen it in Kim, in the photographs hidden on the memory stick, looking back at the lens of the camera with an arch, knowing smile. Pay me. Pay me. My hand is shaking slightly but I’m pleased that when I finally manage to speak my voice is not.

  ‘Who’s that girl he’s got his arm around? The one with the lace gloves?’

  ‘Ah, shit. You found it.’ Alex laughs slightly uncomfortably as he takes the picture and studies it carefully. ‘That’s her. That’s Edie Hudson.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Edie. Elizabeth, really. But she hated that name.’

  I stare at the girl in the picture. It’s funny, all the times William has spoken with me about the past it’s always my stories he ends up unspooling, my past. All the loose ends and burned bridges, what he describes as my ‘murky history’. He gets a kick out of it. I touch a finger to the photograph. Edie Hudson.

  ‘Was she his girlfriend?’

  ‘I don’t think it was ever that serious. This one’ – he points to the girl in the middle with a scowl on her face and her middle finger pointed up to the camera – ‘that’s Charlie. I gave her a Valentine once when I was ten years old and she broke my heart. And that one, on the end, looking like she doesn’t really belong there, that’s Nancy Renard. I still see her around occasionally. She was nice. I don’t know why she hung around with that lot of bitches.’

  I take the photo back from him and he brings me my tea. ‘Where was this? Round here?’

  ‘Yup. At the church in town. St Mary de Castro, at the top of Eastleigh Avenue. Back then we called it “St Scary de Castro” because of the caretaker there. He used to poison the rats and rabbits that lived in the graveyard and the whole place was just littered with the corpses of slowly decomposing animals.’