by Daisy Pearce
Nancy sees my disorientation, smiles a little. ‘You didn’t know?’
‘Like I said, he doesn’t often mention his old life down here.’
But that’s not quite true, is it? I’ve heard stories from his childhood, from both William and Alex. About the time William tried to make his mother breakfast in bed and nearly burned the house down. How they both nearly got arrested for climbing scaffolding in the town centre. How William once put his hand through a window, leaving a small, pale scar on his right palm. Kids’ stuff. But still. This – this is something else. How could he not have told me this?
‘It was the worst day of my life,’ Nancy continues, her voice softer. ‘Everything changed after that. Everything.’
She looks at me and smiles briskly, and just like that she seems to shrug back into the frosty, uptight woman who walked in through the door of the chemist. She grabs the white paper bag and stands, putting a five-pound note on the table.
‘This is for the drinks. Tell Alex I said hi.’
Then she turns and leaves, tall and thin as a reed nodding in the breeze. As the door closes behind her I become aware of that movement again at the corner of my vision. There’s a woman sitting at the counter, partially hidden by a pillar. She’s watching us in the mirror. I smile at her, but she doesn’t smile back. Her expression is as cold and hard as rain-soaked stone. I can feel her gaze even as I wrap my coat around me and pick up the bag from the pharmacy, and it’s not until I’m out the door and over the road that the feeling, like legions of ants crawling beneath my scalp, dissolves.
Samantha – Then
It was Nancy who interested me. Out of the three of them. She was so guarded: her folded arms, her legs wrapped around themselves, the way she stared at the floor. I wished I could talk to her alone.
The girls sat opposite me in the headmaster’s office. His name was written in gold paint on the frosted glass of his door, like a hard-bitten detective in a film noir. Mr Peterson, Head. He sat with his fingers buckled together on his desk, thin grey hair webbing his skull. He must have been due for retirement soon. Maybe this would be the incident that finished him off. Edie.
Focus. Focus. I’d had too much coffee.
Behind me were two police officers, one of whom was distractingly good-looking. He was Asian, a few inches shorter than me, long, black eyelashes. He was sitting with a notepad on his lap while the other stood, arms folded. They’d introduced themselves by their first names – Nathan and Omar – I supposed so the girls wouldn’t feel intimidated by their presence. But I wanted them to feel intimidated. I wanted them to feel so afraid they couldn’t think straight, I wanted them to carry the same fear I was being forced to carry, like a raw and bleeding heart that grew heavier with every step.
Edie had now been missing for four days.
‘One of you must have seen something,’ I said. They looked like a group of crows – what’s that called, the collective noun? A murder. How prescient. ‘You were right there when she disappeared. Think back – is there anything at all?’
No one spoke. They’d given the barest nod towards school uniform, with white shirts and ties fatly knotted against their throats. Their make-up was thick and unguent; high, arching eyebrows, long spiked lashes and lipstick so dark it made slashes of their mouths. Collectively they wore so much jewellery they rattled when they walked. I turned to the headmaster, frustrated.
‘Don’t you have rules about what the kids wear to this school? Shouldn’t you be enforcing something?’
Mr Peterson frowned, rubbed his glasses with his sleeve. ‘We see it as – uh – a means of expression which they are entirely – ah – which is entirely valid. At this age.’
He put his glasses back on, blinking. He was a mealworm of a man. I stared at him and then turned back to the girls. Charlie, in the middle, her skirt only an inch below her gusset, slid her hands between her thighs. She was wearing frilly ankle socks and Mary-Jane shoes. Her lips were plump and wet, a deep berry brown. Her gaze drifted away from me, bored. She was looking at Omar, the police officer.
‘Are we under arrest?’ she asked. Nancy looked up from beneath her fringe, caught my eye, looked away again. ‘Because if we are, you have to caution us.’
‘I want my one phone call,’ Moya added, twisting her curly hair around her finger. She had black ripped jeans on, rubbed her leg against Nancy.
‘Who would you call?’ Charlie asked her.
‘Domino’s,’ replied Moya, and they both dissolved into giggles. I clenched my fists on my lap, looked back at the headmaster, exasperated. My daughter is fucking missing, I wanted to yell. I tried to stay calm.
Omar coughed. ‘No one is under arrest, but we need to know what happened. You said you saw Edie walk towards the back of the graveyard?’
‘That’s right,’ Moya said. She was tiny, maybe a little over five feet, and sinuously thin. She had a hard, flat chest and the big round eyes of a cartoon animal, almost liquid. ‘She walked away from us into the dark.’
‘Why did she do that?’ the other officer, Nathan, asked. ‘Had you fallen out?’
The girls shrugged, shook their heads, no. Earrings rattled like chains. Nancy lifted her head and for a moment I thought she would say something in her small, broken-bird voice. But it was Charlie again, with the chipped nail polish and ripped fishnet tights, turning to me this time, ignoring the question.
‘Where did she go the last time she ran away, Mrs Hudson?’
We stared at each other, Charlie and I. My hands tightened and squeezed. I heard an intake of breath over my shoulder, Omar’s tongue clicking.
‘There’s a history of this behaviour?’ he began.
I cut him off. ‘No. No, there’s – it’s not like that. Sometimes Edie plays up, goes off with a friend for the night.’
The girls stared at me. What was it they called themselves? Cobras? Pythons? It’s written there on Moya’s bag, scratched into the leather in jagged letters: Rattlesnakes.
‘Well, that would have been useful to know,’ he said, and I shrivelled inwardly.
Charlie smiled to herself, catching my eye. ‘Maybe she went looking for her dad,’ she said, sing-song, inspecting her nails. In that moment I hated her. I could cheerfully have shoved her through the wall. But the police had already asked me about the possibility of Edie trying to find her father. Can you give us his contact details, they’d asked, and I’d laughed nastily, lighting another cigarette. He walked out when she was three days old, I told them. Some men should just chop it off, you know? They hadn’t liked that. So far, I had not enamoured myself to these people. I was frightening them, too angry and shaken up, a wasp trapped in a bottle. I wasn’t sad enough, not yet weeping and needy. Give me time. I’ll get there.
‘What about drugs?’ I fired back. ‘I know you were all taking them.’
It was a cheap shot and it didn’t land the way I’d hoped. I wanted to shock them – show me some fucking contrition! – but Moya just smiled, displaying perfect white teeth, glossy enamel.
‘Which ones?’
‘What?’
‘Which drugs?’
She leaned over her legs to look me right in the eye.
‘I said, which drugs? MDMA? Speed? Meth?’
‘Crack?’ Charlie said, hiding her smile and widening her eyes, which were a deep subaqueous green.
‘Angel dust? PCP?’
‘I saw Edie snort a line of instant coffee once.’
They dissolved into laughter, looking at each other from the corners of their eyes. The headmaster straightened in his seat, adjusting his cuffs, saying girls, please, some decorum.
I heard the police officer – Nathan, I think, with his rough morning breath – sigh behind me, and Omar stood.
I turned to look at them. ‘What? We’re not done here! I thought you were questioning them?’
‘Not officially, we’re not. We can’t force them to cooperate. It’s wasting time.’
‘What about Edie?
They must know something! For God’s sake—’ I looked back at them imploringly, the Rattlesnakes, skins shed and shrivelled on the floor, mean girls with bright eyes and pouty, trembling mouths, fingers intertwined as they joined hands. Moya put her head on Charlie’s shoulder. Nancy flicked me a quick glance.
‘Are we free to go, officer?’ Charlie said in a baby voice. She was looking at Omar over my head. He must have indicated that they were done because suddenly the girls stood, a black mass, floating chiffon and tight, pinching lace, secretive smiles waxy with lipstick. The smell of them was bruises and crushed violets, cheap tobacco.
‘Mrs Hudson?’ Omar asked, his hands toying with his belt. I looked up at him. ‘How many times has Edie gone missing before?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘Which is it?’
‘Do you count the time that she snuck off to her friend’s house in the middle of the night?’
‘I count that, yes.’
‘Then three. No, four times. But this is different.’
‘How so?’
He was being so patient with me. I could feel tears welling. I swallowed the hard rock in my throat.
‘Because the last times there were—’
‘Triggers?’
‘Conflicts. Yes.’ I nodded. I grasped the fabric of my skirt and bunched it in my hands.
‘And there wasn’t this time? A conflict? An argument of some kind?’
I hesitated, looking up at him. Tears hazed my eyes and rolled slowly down my cheeks, viscous as honey.
Omar smiled, revealing straight white teeth. ‘We can’t help you if you aren’t prepared to tell us the truth, Samantha.’
‘Yes. There was. She gets so angry,’ I said quietly, sniffing.
‘Okay, well. You see, in itself this is a good thing. It indicates a typical pattern of behaviour for Edie. There’s a problem, she runs away. Gets her head straight. Comes home. The reason she disappeared is fairly academic. We’re more interested in where she’s disappeared to. Edie’s a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, not a master criminal. She didn’t just vanish into thin air.’
He lowered himself into a crouch, putting his hand over mine. I hadn’t realised how much I was shaking until he stilled it, his skin warm and brown. ‘Whatever happens, we’ll keep looking.’
‘Thank you.’ I sniffed. ‘Thank you, Omar.’
I didn’t see Nathan or Omar again. They were assigned to another case, more high-profile – a schoolteacher had run off with a pupil to Cornwall – and so I printed my own posters, taking them as far as Worthing and Bexhill, hanging them in shop windows and on cafe noticeboards. MISSING, they said in fat black font, and underneath, printed slightly smaller, Can You Help Find Me?
The photo I’d chosen did not show Edie favourably. Part of me hoped she’d see it, maybe behind the counter of a newsagent she was buying Rizlas or pints of milk in, paying with handfuls of change held out in grubby hands. I thought she’d laugh if she did. The ‘Borstal photo’, she and I had called it, because she looked like she was on prison day release; unsmiling, arms folded, dark hair with a lopsided fringe she’d hacked herself in the bathroom one Sunday night. I’d originally looked for a photo of the two of us in France, one I’d had pinned to the noticeboard in the kitchen. I hadn’t been able to find it, even moving the sideboard away from the wall to see if it had slipped down behind. I grew more and more frustrated until I realised I wouldn’t be able to use it anyway. In it, Edie was smiling and tanned – the healthiest I’d ever seen her – but the advice I’d received from the family liaison officer had been to choose a picture to help the public recognise her, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her smiling.
The morning Edie left for the last time was sunny and dry. I remember that. The sky was as blue as cornflowers, frosted with drifts of white cloud. I remember that too. The clarity of that moment is so rich I could reach out and run my fingers through it. The radio was playing ‘Waterloo Sunset’. The garden smelled ripe, of tangled roots and the slow creep of autumn with its mists and moss and damp stones. High overhead, a lark trilled and twittered, sketching shapes against the sky. I can remember the sound of her feet on the stairs and the smell of toast and the incense she constantly burned in her room. Her carpet was pockmarked with burn holes like craters on a distant planet.
Afterwards I realised – all these small things; the brain can only take on so much. It hands it back to you in bite-sized pieces of grief. You simply cannot digest any more. The thought that she had disappeared seemed like a grand idea, something oblique and vast, and I couldn’t get a handle on it. But the little things I remember, and they strip away my armour bit by bit. The way the thrush had sung in the garden. Edie’s shoes in the hallway, lying aslant where they had been kicked off. Cotton-wool balls smeared with make-up at the bottom of the bathroom bin. The rich blue of her veins, her wet hair dripping on to her shoulders. This, it is a form of madness.
As I was getting ready for work that morning I discovered my necklace was missing. At one stage I’d almost grown accustomed to my make-up and clothes and jewellery disappearing, only to reappear in Edie’s bomb site of a room a week later. Only then she’d gone and taken a pair of my gold earrings, ones I wore only on very special occasions, and they hadn’t turned up in her room – or anywhere else, in fact. Edie had feigned ignorance, told me I was paranoid. I found them eventually, a month or so later, in the window of the jeweller’s on the high street. She’d sold them for just sixty pounds. I thought back to all the other things that had gone missing over the years – my seventies records, my pearl pendant, the silver bracelet studded with lapis lazuli – and my heart sank.
I’d considered getting a lock on my bedroom door but hadn’t got round to it. It had seemed excessive, and besides, I’d told myself, she’d grown out of it now. I lifted my jewellery box and tipped the contents over my bed, raking through them with my fingers. I checked the drawers and my handbag and even the pockets of my coat, getting more and more agitated. All the while Edie was in the bathroom. I’d heard the shower run briefly, and the rattle of the curtain rail. When she didn’t come out after half an hour I banged on the door with the flat of my hand.
‘Edie!’
‘In a minute!’
‘Not in a minute, now! What are you doing in there? Are you ill?’
‘I’m fine!’ The toilet flushed. ‘I just need a minute!’
‘You did this yesterday! Tied up the bathroom for nearly an hour! Other people live here too, you know!’
Silence. I paced outside the door, the small hallway closing in on me, twisting my anger tightly. Finally, the door opened a crack. Her face was pale-looking, with bright spots of colour high up on her cheeks. She’d pierced another hole in her ear, red and raw-looking, a scab of blood building up around the silver stud.
I held out my hand. ‘Where is it?’
‘What?’
‘You know what. My necklace. My favourite one, the one my mum left me.’
‘With the dragonfly on it?’ She shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen it.’
‘You’re lying.’
She rolled her eyes and tried to close the door on me. I pushed back and for a second there was a tense stand-off.
She relented with a sneer. ‘Ugh. I hate it when you’re like this.’
‘I left it in my jewellery box and now it’s not there.’
‘I said I haven’t seen it! I hate it, I wouldn’t wear it anyway!’
‘It’s not you wearing it I’m worried about, Edie, it’s you selling it.’
‘Oh, here we go—’
‘I want it put back where you found it by the time I leave the house.’
‘You need a hobby, Mum. You’ve started to imagine things.’
‘I said, put it back!’
‘I told you I don’t fucking have it!’
I reached out and grabbed her. My nails sank into her damp skin. I saw the wince of pain that pinched her face, quickly replaced by something harder and
meaner.
‘Put it back or I’ll call the police.’
‘Do it. Go on! And I’ll show them the black eye you’ve given me!’
‘Wha—’
Edie lifted her hand and slapped at her own face. The air rang with the sound of it, sharp and brisk. I stared at her in horror as she did it again, her eyes watering. The right side of her face glowed brick-red.
‘Edie, stop – what are you doing?’
‘Let’s see how you like it in prison, huh? You know what they do to women in there who beat up their kids?’
This time she drove her head against the wall, staggering for a moment at the impact. I was filled with a cold horror as a trickle of blood seeped from one nostril and there was a strange, distant look in her eye. I forgot the necklace and grabbed her with panicky tightness, hard enough to leave red imprints on her skin, pulled her towards me, wrapping my arms around her as tightly as I could so her hands were pinned against her sides. Although she didn’t fight against me, she was filled with a stiffness, a rigidity that meant I had to lean her against me so that we didn’t both fall down. It was like clinging on to a plank of wood.
‘Don’t, Edie. Don’t,’ I said, again and again. She started laughing and her spittle flecked my cheeks, settled in my hair like snowflakes. Something shrivelled in me, a withered rosehip turning black.
That day I didn’t even see her leave, although the front door slammed so hard the house shook. I went to work and thought nothing, felt nothing. My ears seemed to ring all day with the shock of seeing her drive her head into the plaster. By the time I got home that evening it had started to rain. I can remember seeing her coat, the big winter one, still hanging on the hook, and I thought, She’ll be cold without that. I wasn’t surprised when she wasn’t home before me. She often went to friends’ houses after school, or down to the shops in town or the youth club. Later I would see my own words repeated over and over again in print: I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t come home. They had made me sound neglectful, careless. A half-mother.