by Daisy Pearce
No. You didn’t. You were afraid of her.
My memories of those days at the beginning of the year were thrown-together dinners on our laps in front of the television, stunted conversation, Edie trailing me like a shadow. That was in the days after she’d taken a bite out of Amanda Litton’s ear – another time when she’d been provoked, Edie had said. Amanda had pushed and pushed until Edie had reacted. Any of us would. I felt like saying as much to Tony Marston now, his clear, hooded eyes watching me carefully. She was easily provoked, I’d say, people just didn’t understand.
It’s not me. I’m not a bad mother.
‘So you had no inkling of any of this, Samantha? You never saw this kind of behaviour at home, she never mentioned it to you, not even in passing?’
I’d catch her standing quietly behind me in the kitchen or on the stairs, silent and lethal as a shark. She’d laugh when I’d jump, one hand fluttering to my chest. Her eyes round and gleaming. A coiled snake in the shadows. I used to think she liked the look of fear on my face, but then I would remind myself that this was my daughter we were talking about. Don’t be silly, Samantha.
Tell him.
‘No, nothing at all.’
‘You don’t remember the school contacting you? The messages they left? You never saw the letters?’
My hand lifted and started to rub at my temple. My face creased in concentration. ‘Uh, maybe? There might have been a letter. I don’t know, I’ve been so busy—’
He sighs. ‘Okay, I see.’
‘Anyway,’ I told Tony firmly, ‘what’s her behaviour at school got to do with the fact that my daughter hasn’t come home?’
‘It fits a narrative.’
‘What?’
He shrugged, flicked his ash into a saucer already littered with butts. ‘Troubled teen runaway.’
‘Listen, Tony. I know she’s done this before once or twice, but she always came back within twenty-four hours. She hasn’t even picked up the phone to call me! You don’t think that’s worrying? You don’t think that’s worth looking into?’
‘What are you suggesting, Sam?’
He had his notebook out, scribbling things while I’d been talking. Now he stopped, pencil poised over the page. It was little more than a stub in his thick, blunt fingers. He looked up at me.
‘I don’t – I just – I don’t think you’re taking it seriously!’
‘I can assure you we—’
‘So why is it just you? Where’s the team of officers out looking for her? Where’s the helicopter and the dogs and the newsflashes? She’s fifteen years old, she’s got no money! What have you been doing this last week? Huh? Fuck!’
I swiped angrily at my eyes. There were tears there but they were hot and bitter, acidic.
Tony laid his pencil gently down beside his notebook. ‘Sam, I’ve spoken to her teachers, her friends at school. The last people to see her – these girls, the ones you mentioned – said she’d been acting strangely the last couple of weeks. On edge. Crying. Flying off the handle.’
‘Huh. You’ve just described an average teenage girl, for God’s sake.’
‘They all watched her walk into the copse of trees at the back of the churchyard. No one saw her come back out. What does that tell you?’
I shook my head.
‘It’s a deliberate act,’ he said, rubbing his temple with his forefinger. ‘Maybe not carefully planned, but what is when you’re fifteen? She walked away and climbed over the wall, maybe, or snuck out through the side gate there.’
‘That gate’s always locked.’
‘Well, the caretaker claims the keys went missing from his office back in June. He’s reported several break-ins. Last one was the tenth of October.’
‘You think Edie stole his keys?’ I laughed, disbelievingly. Ha! ‘You make out like she’s some sort of demon.’
Tony finished his tea and nodded towards me. ‘You want to put that down?’
I looked at my hand and saw I was holding a knife. Small, about the size of a palm. I was gripping it so hard the beds of my fingernails were white.
‘What, you – you think I’m threatening you?’ I laughed, letting the knife fall to the table. I hadn’t even realised I’d picked it up.
He smiled without humour. ‘You mind if I take another look in her bedroom?’
‘They’ve already been up there.’
‘Just – would you mind? A quick look around?’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Something that might help us.’
‘Is this about what the caretaker said? About a break-in? Tony?’
‘Partly. It would certainly help us to know if Edie was responsible.’
He stood and so did I, too fast. The blood rushed in my ears, making me feel dizzy. ‘You’ll need a warrant.’
Unsmiling now, he looked at me levelly. ‘And I’ll get one, if that’s how you want to do it. But Samantha, you could just let me and go and have a poke around now, and we’ll get back to the business of finding your daughter all the quicker. Won’t we?’
He left the room and I followed, calling after him up the stairs, aware that my voice was shrill and trembling. ‘I know what you’re looking for! And you won’t find it! She isn’t a thief! She’s just a little girl with a lot of problems! She’s my baby! Do you hear me, you old bastard?’
He didn’t even turn around. Just the sound of his footsteps and the stairs creaking under his weight. There was a sob in my throat so loud it was going to choke me. I was going to suffocate beneath the weight of it, beneath my love for her, beneath the fear. I covered my mouth with my hands, holding it back. I was suddenly reminded of a time I’d walked into my bedroom just out of the bath, skin still beaded with water, towel clutched about me, and Edie had been standing there alone in the dark, waiting for me. She’d stepped out from behind the door and I’d screamed, throwing my hands out defensively in front of me to ward off an expected attack. Of course, in that moment, I hadn’t known it was her, had I?
Had I?
I stood in the doorway to Edie’s bedroom and watched Tony as he opened and closed her drawers. The floor was still littered with her worn clothes and shoes, black tights twisted into knotted ropes and left discarded among the T-shirts and lace. Tony picked his way across carefully.
‘Find anything?’
‘Not yet.’ He looked back at me over his shoulder, his expression neutral. ‘You say the police have already been up here?’
I nodded. ‘The day I called them. They were trying to work out if she’d taken anything with her. You know, clothes, passport, money.’
‘Uh-huh. And had she?’
‘Not that we noticed. As you can see, it’s hard to tell. She wasn’t house-proud.’
‘I can’t make my daughters set the table for their own bloody dinner, let alone tidy their rooms,’ he said gruffly. ‘I know how it is.’
He used his pen to lift a scarf on the dressing table. ‘They ask you about Edie’s father?’
‘What about him?’
‘Is he local? Are they in contact? Could she have gone to live with him?’
‘No, no and no. He wouldn’t have her either way. Hasn’t seen her since she was three months old and he barely noticed her even then.’
‘Do you have contact details for him?’
I laughed nastily.
‘Okay.’ He straightened up with a grunt.
‘When can I talk to the press? I feel so useless sitting here doing nothing.’
Tony glanced over at me. There was a low light that day, robbing us of shadows and depth. Everything was grey and flat, as though viewed through dirty water. ‘I don’t know if that’s a great idea, although I can’t stop you.’
‘Why not? Surely any publicity is good publicity? I mean – I mean, Edie could be anywhere, with anyone! The more people looking out for her the better.’
‘There’s no evidence that anyone else is involved in your daughter’s disappearance and we have no reaso
n to believe any harm has come to her. Plus this isn’t the first occasion the police have been involved when she’s run away, is it?’
I looked at him flatly. ‘You’re joking, right? She was twelve years old. She hid in the neighbour’s garden down the road, for God’s sake. Came back once it got dark.’
It had been the first time she’d run away and the only time I’d called the police. They’d found her two doors down, hiding behind the hydrangea bush. She’d broken in by climbing on to a bin and jumping over the wall. The neighbours said they hadn’t minded, but I noticed afterwards that they’d put a layer of concrete studded with jagged shards of broken glass along the top of the wall. They hadn’t liked Edie much. I once overheard them call her ‘feral’ in the newsagent’s. It had stung.
‘Think about how it looks. From the outside.’ He turned away, started opening the little drawers of her dressing table. ‘This one’s locked.’
‘I don’t have a key.’
‘Okay, well – do you have a screwdriver?’
I walked down the hallway to the airing cupboard, where the toolbox was kept. We’d lived in this house over fourteen years, Edie and I, moving in after an ill-advised stint living with my parents in their cramped terraced cottage. In the winter it was cold, with patches of damp blooming on the walls, and in the summer stifling hot, the old bricks absorbing and retaining the heat of the day. I pulled the toolbox open and took the screwdriver out. As I fastened the latch I discovered something on the floor, in the warm and the dark. A small elastic hairband with plastic bobbles. It must’ve been lying there for years. I reached out with trembling hands and lifted it between my fingers, blowing off the dust that clung to it.
A memory.
‘Mummy, will you plait my hair?’
I’d looked up to see Edie in my bedroom doorway. Six years old and cute as a button. She had dressed herself and one sock rode up to her knee, the other down to her ankle. She had a dress on, with a skirt beneath, legwarmers and a winter hat. Her woolly cardigan was too big and beginning to pill. And because she was mine, I thought she looked delightful. She climbed on to the bed next to me, plump hands holding my cheeks and studying my face.
‘You’ve cried,’ she’d said simply.
‘Yes,’ I’d told her. ‘Sometimes grown-ups feel sad.’
‘Your face is stripy black.’
I’d lifted my fingers to it and found mascara printed on to my cheeks.
‘It’s make-up,’ I’d told her.
‘Messy.’
‘Very messy. Shall I do your hair, Edie?’
She’d turned so I could plait her curly, unruly locks. Glossy brown, like polished mahogany. The sun had been as warm and soft as butter.
‘Sam?’ It was Tony, from down the hallway. ‘Sam? Don’t worry about the screwdriver. I got in.’
I came to as if surfacing from a fitful sleep. I was hugging my knees to my chest as if I was trying to make myself as small as possible, down there on the floor in the dark of the cupboard, among the lint balls and folded towels and sheets that smelt soapy and old. The hairband was still in my palm. That memory, it was so acute, so painful, it was like subsidence beneath my feet. I could feel the slippage like an aftershock, making it hard to grasp reality. Sometimes grown-ups feel sad, I’d told her, and now I couldn’t even remember why I’d cried, what trivial upset had reduced me to tears on that lucid summer day all those years ago. I remembered the feel of her hair, slippery and glossy in my fingers, how we’d giggled when I told her I’d once cut my brother’s hair half off with the kitchen scissors when I was five years old, the way it had fallen to his feet in white curls like feathers. I put the hairband in my pocket where I could still touch it with the tips of my fingers, holding on to her as long as possible.
‘What did you find?’ I said as I entered Edie’s bedroom. Something crunched in the junk beneath my feet. One of her CDs, cracked down the middle. There were dents in the walls where she had frisbeed them across the room. Tony was holding up a small brown bottle between his thumb and index finger. He had driven the handle of a spoon from one of Edie’s discarded cereal bowls into the edge of the drawer, pulling it open.
‘Amyl nitrate,’ he said, and looked over at me. ‘Poppers.’
‘Oh.’ I folded my arms, clutching my elbows. ‘Well. Add it to her charge sheet, I guess.’ I laughed, but it came out like a mewl, soft and weak.
‘It’s not necessary.’ Tony put the bottle back in the drawer. ‘She’s hardly Tony Montana. We already knew about the drug use. The girls I spoke with were refreshingly honest about it.’
‘The Rattlesnakes?’
‘Heh. Jesus. I know, right? The Rattlesnakes. You know, I asked one of them why they chose that name and she said, “Because it makes us sound cool.” Can’t argue with that logic.’ He walked back towards me, hands in his pockets. ‘This brings me back to the point about the press, Samantha. A young, single mother with a tearaway daughter she can’t control who’s taking drugs and beating up other kids? They’ll tear you apart. I don’t want that for you. I don’t want that for Edie. It might scare her right off coming back at all.’
I squared my shoulders. It was a defensive move, as pure and instinctive as raising my fists. I opened my mouth to dispute with him: You don’t get it, Tony, it’s not like that, you don’t understand. Only he did understand, didn’t he? They’d take us apart bone by bone, Edie and me. The fights, the absent father, her grades, our home. It made my stomach hurt to think about it.
‘Okay. What about the hospitals?’
‘What about them, Sam?’
‘Are you checking them? All of them? She might be lying in a coma somewhere.’
‘Lucky her,’ Tony said, and shook his head. ‘I’d welcome a coma right now.’
Me too, I thought. A long sweet coma, like falling backward on to a cushion of velvet and black mink. My numbness was starting to give way. Soon the pain would come, like splinters dug deep into the softest parts of me, and with it the slow certainty that Edie was dead. Not missing, not absent, but dead.
A hand on my arm, gentle. Tony was looking at me earnestly. ‘Sam? You going to get that?’
Distantly, I heard the phone ringing. I scrambled down the hallway and into my bedroom, no Edie waiting to jump out at me behind my bedroom door, and picked up the phone from its place on my bedside table.
‘Hello?’ I was breathless, desperate. I could hear the pleading in my voice even as I said it. ‘Edie? Honey? Is that you?’
More silence. The line crackled.
‘Say something. Please!’ I said. Tony came into the room and peered out the window into the street.
‘I know where she is,’ a voice said. It was a woman’s voice, but deep and bronchial-sounding, as though she had a bad cold.
‘Oh my God. You do?’
‘Yes.’
I clutched the phone and motioned to Tony. ‘Tell me! Tell me what you know! Where is she?’
‘Your daughter is in a house. It’s rural. A lot of ground. Farmhouse, maybe? I can see dogs, but not sheepdogs. Big ones, guard dogs.’
Tony was looking at me, his hands on his hips.
‘What do you mean, you see it? Are you looking at it now? Where is it? Hello?’
‘You got someone in your family with a lost limb?’
‘A what?’
‘A missing arm? I’m getting a missing arm. A man with no arm. Does that sound familiar to you?’
‘I don’t – I don’t think so.’
‘She’s been taken, but she’s alive.’
The phone was snatched from me. It was Tony. His eyebrows were drawn together, mouth quivering in a bow of distaste.
He lifted the phone to his ear. ‘Who is this?’ He waited while she talked, smoothing down the front of his shirt with the palm of his hand. Finally he said, ‘Piss off, pal.’ And hung up.
I stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s a fucking psychic. You’re going to get
a lot of these calls. Fuck’s sake. You need to go ex-directory.’
‘She said she knew where Edie was.’
‘Yeah, sure she does. They’re touched in the head, these people. You start listening to them, you’re going to tie yourself into knots.’ He squatted in front of me, taking my hands in his. His knuckles bristled with dark hairs. ‘You got an answerphone?’
I nodded, my heartbeat finally beginning to slow. That woman, she had sounded so sure.
‘Use it to screen calls. You’ll get plenty of weirdos calling you now that word’s got out. They think they’re helping, but they’re parasites, so don’t give them anything you can’t afford to lose. That goes for your money, your energy or your time. Understand?’
His eyes drifted to the left, towards my bedside table. The drawer was half-open there, just a few inches, but enough to see inside. Tony leaned across me and pulled it open a little further. The object in there rolled forward and he picked it up, looking at me with interest.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked me.
I shrugged awkwardly. ‘A friend brought it back from the States for me.’
‘Take Down Spray,’ he read aloud. ‘What is it, Mace?’
‘Yeah. Pepper spray.’
‘Why do you keep it there? You afraid of burglary?’
‘Sure.’
He studied me carefully and I gave him a smile, folding my arms, elbows on my knees. Your body language, Sam, I told myself, is going to give you away. He’s a policeman; he must see people lie all the time. I’d asked Theresa to get it for me when she went to New York last year. I’d told her it was because I was frightened, living alone, and partly that was true. Partly.
‘You know this is illegal. You shouldn’t have this. And Sam, if someone’s going to break into your house, chances are you’d be better off hiding the pepper spray from them. And what if your daughter found it?’
My mouth was so dry it clicked when I swallowed. Finally I said, ‘It makes me feel safe.’
‘Jesus. Who’d be a woman?’ he said, and slid it back into the drawer. But he was still looking at me strangely. Like he knew.
Edie got violent sometimes, I thought of telling him, but I didn’t. Instead I said, ‘That woman. The psychic. She said Edie was still alive. She said she knew where she was.’