by Daisy Pearce
Tony looked at me sympathetically. ‘They all say that, sweetheart. We’ll find her. We’ll find your daughter. Girls like Edie will always find their way home.’
Frances – Now
There’s something different about Mimi when I return from town. She is clear-eyed and lucid, sitting in her high-necked dressing gown watching the afternoon news.
She turns her head to me and smiles as I come into the sitting room. Through the fine gauze of her hair the gash on her scalp is still visible, clotted with dried blood as dark as ink.
‘How are you feeling?’ I ask her.
She brushes crumbs from her chest and smiles. ‘A bit foggy. Better than yesterday, at any rate. Did you manage to get the paper?’
‘Yes, I did.’ I pull it out of my bag and her smile broadens. She was a great beauty in her younger days, according to William and Alex. It was a mystery to so many that she married Edward, a plain-thinking bureaucrat nine years her senior who liked to garden and play cribbage. There is a framed photo of the two of them on their wedding day on the mantelpiece, standing outside the town hall and smiling in a shower of confetti. Mimi was twenty-seven years old, her ash-blonde hair thrown over one shoulder like Brigitte Bardot. Edward, tall and thin beside her, unassuming, almost blends into the brickwork. He is the invisible man, dwarfed by his wife’s brightness.
‘You didn’t have babies outside of marriage then,’ she said once, slightly tipsy, her long fingers folding and unfolding a napkin on her lap. ‘You just got married and got on with it.’
‘Very romantic,’ Alex said wryly, to which she replied, ‘Darling, your father was one of the most romantic men I knew, in his own way. Here was a man who planted climbing roses outside all the windows so I could have flowers every day. Even without him, they still bloom, as he knew they would.’
Edward Thorn died one late November afternoon in 1997 when the car he was driving veered off a bank and into the chill waters of the River Ouse. It was three days before they managed to pull it out again, covered in pondweed and rushes and full of rusty-coloured water. His body was found still strapped into the front seat. He hadn’t even tried to undo the seat belt. William said that was typical of his father, to not unbuckle even as the car filled with water. Safety first.
Now Mimi picks up the paper, reads the headline and drops it in disgust. ‘Oh, how I hate politics. Bunch of bloody schoolchildren. I wish it would all go away.’
‘I got your medicines, too. I think I’ll need to talk to William about them, though, to make sure the dosage is accurate.’
‘He’s not here.’ She lifts the remote control and changes the channel. Outside, the leaves flutter against the window, making the light flicker.
‘Did he say where he was going?’
She thinks for a moment. ‘Just into town, I think. Maybe we needed some milk?’
My heart is beating so fast I feel dizzy with it. It’s her I’m thinking about, of course. Kim. Kim, with her thick glossy hair and sucked-in stomach; the tattoo, loaded with meaning, on her thigh. What’s he paying off for her now? Student loan? Month’s rent? What would that get him? I clench my fists. Anger furs my throat. I have to get out of here.
I stand up to leave, and Mimi looks up at me, surprised. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Yes, I just – I’m going to take this through to the kitchen. Can I get you anything? Have you eaten?’
‘You’re such a good girl.’ She smiles again, reaching out for my hand. Hers is soft and warm, the bones there as fragile as a bird’s. ‘I wish we could get Alex to settle down with someone like you. He needs a good woman in his life.’
I smile tightly. Her youngest son’s sexuality, while not a secret, has never been explicitly discussed in front of her. Alex explained it to William and me in a hushed voice in the kitchen one Christmas Eve. ‘It’s not that she’s a homophobe,’ he told us. ‘I just can’t bear to watch her try and hide her disappointment.’
‘I’m sure Alex will find the right person in his own time,’ I say carefully.
Mimi rearranges the cover over her legs. ‘He never gave me any trouble when he was younger. Not like that husband of yours. Alex was always the apple of my eye.’
She’s teasing, of course, smiling a little as she says it. It’s a well-rehearsed script I’ve come to know by heart. I am the straight man in this particular routine.
‘So what does that make William?’
‘I suppose you’d call him a little plum!’ she says, and claps her hands, delighted. Every time. Every single time.
I smile as I leave, taking the bag of medicines into the kitchen and spreading them on the counter there. Sedatives. Anticonvulsants. Painkillers; may cause drowsiness.
No wonder you’re having funny turns, Mimi dear, I think as I pour myself a glass of water from the tap. If we shook you, you’d rattle.
A movement outside catches my eye. Through the kitchen window I can make out the old greenhouse towards the end of the garden where the high stone wall separates the house from the allotments on the other side. Through the windows of the greenhouse, filmy with grime and condensation, I can see someone inside, moving slowly and deliberately. My mind turns back to William telling his mother that Edward was out in the greenhouse and a shiver crawls up me as I put the glass down and head out the back door.
The greenhouse is old, the whole structure slightly rickety-looking, as if a breath of wind could knock it askew. Leaves press up against the panes, making it difficult to see inside. The effect is almost like camouflage. I knock on the door.
‘Hello?’ I say, pushing against it. It’s stiff, the rusted hinges squealing agonisingly. I am sure it will be William, his phone in one hand with his trousers around his ankles, breathless and red in the face. I almost hope it is. I want to catch him, want to see the look on his face as all his deception falls away.
‘Frances?’
Not William.
‘Alex?’ A shard of disappointment.
He straightens up and looks at me. ‘Everything all right? Is Mum okay?’
‘She’s fine.’
I squeeze into the crowded space and notice immediately the smell. It’s bright and green like cut grass, almost sweet. It’s hot, too, pressing against you like folds of velvet, slightly damp. Everywhere there is foliage: serrated leaves of deep, mossy emerald, slightly bristly to the touch. The tomato plants swarm into one another, tangling together like drunks, spilling out of pots and clambering up bamboo-screen trellises, drooping beneath the weight of ripe, glossy fruit. There are also tomato plants hanging from the ceiling in baskets, and young plants, their leaves slightly curled at the edges, pale green, crawling out of old ceramic chamber pots balanced on a trestle table. I pick a small cherry tomato, bright red and shiny as a button, and look over at Alex.
‘Someone really likes tomatoes,’ I say.
‘Yeah. Dad.’ He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. He’s wearing old clothes – an old grey jumper fraying at the elbows and jeans splattered with paint – and in that moment I can see Edward Thorn, his father, in him. Stale and grey and sensible, obsessed with conjuring life from the earth. I put the tomato in my mouth and it pops beneath my tongue, as sweet as honey.
‘It looks like a lot of work.’
‘It is.’
‘What do you do with them all?’ I pick another. It’s not like he’s going to run out.
‘Make stuff. Soup, ketchup, passata. We tend to get a glut in the summer and so we end up giving loads away. The season’s tailing off now, though.’
‘Your mum wants you to meet a good woman.’
‘Ha! Is that what she said?’
‘She seems clear-headed today.’
‘I noticed. It’s good. We’re hoping for longer spells of clarity as she recovers.’
‘What happened?’
‘Huh?’
‘When she fell. What happened?’
Alex looks at me steadily. He peels off his gloves and picks up a mug from
somewhere among the plants in front of him, takes a long sip.
‘It was late. I thought she was in bed. I didn’t hear her on the stairs. The bulb had gone so the hallway was dark, and she didn’t know where I was. I’d say she tripped over something – a cord maybe, or just the runner where it’s frayed. Either way, by the time I got to her she was unconscious, and there was a lot of blood. Nearly stopped my heart, seeing her like that.’
‘It must have been scary.’
‘It was.’ Alex pushes his hair away from his face. ‘You sound like the policeman who spoke with me afterwards.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the hospital. “Where were you when your mother fell, sir?”, “Is it just the two of you in the house?” I told him right there that if I was planning to kill my mother I wouldn’t push her down the stairs.’
‘Why not?’
‘Too messy. Not sure enough.’
We’re silent, staring at each other. The smell in the room is prickly, like the leaves. It makes me want to scratch at my skin. It’s cold too, a creeping, sinister chill. I fold my arms. I’m thinking of the story William told me, of the little boy who found a dead sheep at the bottom of a well and who went back every day to mark its decomposition. Alex, who, even now, twenty years later, keeps the polished sheep skull over his bed. People think it odd, a man his age still living at home. They talk. How strange that he wears his late father’s clothes, still sleeps in his childhood bedroom, is so close to his mother. William dismisses it as small-town gossip but I know that gossip can sometimes be the thorn on the briar that spikes the finger. Sometimes it can make you bleed.
‘How would you do it?’
He looks up through the glass of the roof, thinking. His Adam’s apple bobs in the column of his throat. ‘Poison,’ he says finally. ‘A little bit in her food each day. You do it slowly enough, it’s insidious and almost untraceable. I know enough about plants to know which ones can stop the heart or induce organ failure. You know foxgloves can kill you? Few years back a woman in Colorado was accused of attempted murder after she fed her husband a meal of spaghetti and salad that had foxglove leaves in.’
I take another tomato and put it in my mouth but this one is sharp, unripe. It floods my tongue with bitterness. Alex is pulling his gloves back on, bending over. He talks to me over his shoulder. ‘Is that why you came in here, Frances? To find out my plans for matricide?’
‘No! I – I was looking for William.’
‘He’s gone to the supermarket.’
‘Okay. Okay, great.’
‘Are you quite sure everything’s all right with you two?’
He’s talking more quietly now, not lifting his eyes. His voice is a purr; low, steady. I move closer to him, through the leaves. He is standing in front of a large earthenware pot full of black soil.
‘Everything’s fine.’
‘Sure. You want to pass me that trowel beside you?’
I do so, watching him as he drags a large plastic sack across the floor towards him, digging inside and pulling out an ashy grey powder that he sifts into the turned soil.
‘You know you have a tell, Frances?’
‘A what?’
‘A tic that gives you away. It’s subconscious. You wouldn’t even recognise it in yourself.’
‘Like William?’
‘How’s that?’
‘He pulls at his hair when he’s lying.’
Alex laughs. ‘Okay, yes. Like that. You’ve noticed him doing that, have you?’
‘Yes. Lately it seems he’s been lying a lot.’
Alex lifts his eyes to mine and then drops them again. He digs further into the bulging plastic sack. He moves with such stiffness, as if he has grown too big for his skin. His veneer is so highly polished, so constrained, you sense that at any moment it might crack. Like he is gritting his teeth against some inner flow of filth, some awful toxicity. It makes him hard to like, I’m told, but perversely, it is the reason I find myself warming to him. I like the discomfort I feel in his presence, the way it makes me alert and wary. I like the ripple of anxiety when his gaze lands on me and he does not smile, and his thoughts don’t show on his face like they do in so many other people, all the time. I’ll never look in Alex’s face and see disappointment or regret reflected back at me. He is a man who doesn’t care what I once was.
‘Oh,’ I say, twisting another tomato from the vine, ‘I bumped into your old friend in town. Nancy.’
‘Oh yeah? You talk to her?’
‘I did, yes. Just for a little while. I showed her the photo I found in the shoebox.’
‘Bet she loved that,’ he deadpanned, sifting grey ash through his gloved fingers.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Edie, Alex? About how she went missing?’
He is silent for a moment, looking up at the roof as if expecting the answer to be written there on the dusty glass. When he next speaks it is in a solemn, low voice, without looking at me, not once:
‘One, two, three, four,
rattlesnake hunters knocking at your door.
Give them meat and give them bone,
and pray that they leave you alone.’
‘Cute,’ I say. ‘What’s that? Some old nursery rhyme?’
‘It’s the song we used to sing at the grave of Quiet Mary. Other kids were playing Knock Down Ginger and there we were trying to raise the dead. Isn’t memory a funny thing? I can’t remember the names of any of my old teachers, but I can remember that song, every word. How it used to make me feel like I was hot and cold at the same time, so scared I wanted to throw up. The song scared me and the rhyme scared me and those girls scared me. God, they scared me. Moya, Charlie, Nancy and Edie. Especially Edie. You never knew what she was going to do. She was unpredictable, but in a way that made her frightening to be around.’
‘But you were just a kid.’
‘Yup. And awkward as anything; you’ve seen the photos.’ He sighs. ‘But she – Edie, I mean – the way she behaved meant she got one of those reputations, you know? We could all see the way her life was going to go in this town. Mud sticks, doesn’t it?’
I blink rapidly, my vision doubling as tears threaten. Yes, I know.
‘I like to think she cleared out while she had the chance. Started somewhere new without all that hanging over her. It wouldn’t have been hard, not back then. Train to London in an hour, Newhaven Harbour just down the road, then the ferry to France or beyond. She could have gone anywhere.’
‘Is that what you think? That she ran away?’
He shrugs. ‘I think they should have looked more closely at the caretaker for that church. That’s what I think.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t remember his name. Liver, maybe? He was an oddball. Used to hide in the bushes and take pictures of us coming out the youth club they used to have there, although “youth club” might be selling it a bit high. Darts and warm orange squash and custard creams, sometimes table football if someone hadn’t broken it. When the police went to his house they found hundreds of pictures of us kids.’
‘Oh my God. Why didn’t they arrest him?’
‘For what? It’s not illegal. Weird, but not illegal. There was even a rumour going round that he’d kidnapped Edie on behalf of the Freemasons. Another that he was keeping her prisoner in the crypts beneath the church. Edie’s mum got arrested once in that churchyard. She held a knife up to William’s throat. I remember seeing her picture in the papers.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Listen, Frances—’ Alex begins, and then we’re cut off by a cracking sound so sudden we both flinch and put our hands up over our heads as if the roof is coming in. I cry out, and when I finally peer upward I glimpse a smear of blood on one of the panes there.
‘What the hell was that?’ I’m saying, and Alex is laughing shakily, pressing his hands to his mouth. It’s then that I see it. A bird, a blackbird maybe, or a crow. It’s flown into the glass. Slumped body lying like a shadow a
gainst the pane. For a moment I think it has survived the impact but then I see it is just the wind stirring its feathers. I can just make out one small claw curled against the dirty glass.
‘Bad omen,’ Alex says sombrely, returning his hands to the earth. ‘It foretells a death.’
‘Oh, come on. It foretells a near-sighted crow. You’ve lived in the countryside too long.’
He doesn’t say anything, but when he looks up at me he smiles. There is a faint dusting of the grey powder on one of his cheeks.
‘You’ve got some of that stuff on you. Here, let me,’ I tell him, wiping it away with my sleeve. My heart is still racing from the shock of the bird’s swift and unexpected death. ‘What is it, anyway?
‘Bonemeal.’
‘Ugh.’
He shrugs. ‘My dad always said you’re not feeding the plants, you’re feeding the soil. Bonemeal is rich in the phosphorus and calcium that help the roses and tomatoes grow. He didn’t trust his plants to anyone else so he always made his own.’
‘His own bonemeal? How?’
‘He made friends with the owner of a slaughterhouse, took away all that was left of the carcasses. In the nineties, when mad cow disease was endemic, he switched to sheep and game and roadkill. Boiled up big pots of bones in the shed. It drove Mum crazy. He told her it was recycling. She called him Reg Christie and made him wash the surfaces down with bleach.’
‘You must miss him.’
Alex shrugs, taking a drink from his mug. I thought it was tea but I imagine I catch a whiff of whisky as he sighs. The heat in the room is growing stifling; I can feel it slowly sketching colour on my cheeks.
He looks at me with his head tilted, smiling. ‘You’re going to be all right, aren’t you, Frances? You and William.’
‘Sure.’
‘There’s that tell again.’ He grins. ‘Let me know when you work out what it is.’
I can’t help but laugh. ‘You’re so full of shit.’
‘Maybe,’ he says, his smile broadening. ‘In the meantime, do me a favour. Don’t tell William you’ve seen that picture or spoken to Nancy, okay? In fact, don’t bring up Edie Hudson at all.’