by Daisy Pearce
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just—’ Another sigh. I knew I wouldn’t like what was coming. ‘Just don’t go around using his name in connection with Edie’s. People won’t like you for it, and you need people on your side.’
‘On my side? Is this a competition?’
‘You know what I mean.’ He sounded irritated, worn out. Join the club, pal. ‘I’ll talk to Edward and as soon as I do I’ll let you know. As soon as anything happens I’ll let you know. But you need to rest, Sam. You sound like shit. Please. I know this is hard for you but you have to let me do my job.’
I didn’t remember dropping the handset, but I must have done because Rupert was staring at me strangely and the phone was swinging from its cord, tick, tock, tick, tock, like the pendulum of a clock. For a moment I heard Tony’s muffled voice at the end of the line saying my name over and over again and black wings fluttered at the edges of my vision and maybe I was going to pass out; in a way I hoped I would. What was it Tony had said? I would welcome a coma right now, but no, hands were gripping me firmly under my arms, my big brother. I couldn’t think clearly. He was saying Oh, Pot under his breath and I wanted to answer him but I couldn’t, I couldn’t.
Rupert must have put me to bed but I don’t remember, I only know I woke late and it was dark and the room was cold, I was cold. My head ached as if my skull had been caved in. There was a glass of water beside the bed and I sipped it, holding it in my mouth for a moment before swallowing. Outside, the night sky bristled with stars and the slender curve of the moon, white as bone. For the first time since she went missing I had a feeling that Edie would not be coming home. A shard of ice lodged in my chest, piercing my lungs. I struggled to take a breath.
Admit it.
I levered myself off the bed on legs that felt shaky and weak, using the wall to lean against as I made my way out into the hallway and down to the bathroom. I sank on to the cold toilet seat and rested my elbows on my knees as I urinated, my head in my hands.
Admit it.
I washed my hands in the sink, glancing at myself in the mirror that hung there. I saw a woman ageing badly, genetically, like her mother did, all jowls and crows’ feet, fissures of grey in her hair. Pale bloodshot eyes that couldn’t look at themselves too long. They skipped, stones on a lake, away from the woman in the glass.
It’s a relief, isn’t it?
I walked downstairs in the dark and filled the kettle, opening the kitchen drawer and rummaging inside for the cigarettes I kept there, the ones I’d hidden from Edie because she used to steal them, just one or two at first and then whole packs. When I started hiding the packs she used to steal the money to buy them. I found the carton pushed right up against the back of the drawer and lit one from the cooker, making myself a cup of tea with the cigarette clamped between my teeth.
You did your best for her, Sam, the voice said, the one I’d been blocking out ever since that first night when she didn’t come home. I didn’t like it much, that voice. It sounded cold and impersonal, not like myself at all. I dragged on my cigarette and let the cool blue smoke fill my lungs. Anyone else would have broken under the strain.
I walked over to the small patch of lawn, letting my feet sink into the damp grass. He knows, the voice continued, that policeman. His gaze will turn on you soon, Sam. The shouting, the fighting, the fear. He’ll find out. He’ll find out that you hurt her when you got angry. Then what?
‘Stop it,’ I said out loud, eyes tightly closed. ‘I didn’t hurt her. She hurt herself.’
You think he’ll believe that? You know what they do to women who beat up their kids in prison, Sam? An echo of Edie’s words that morning in the bathroom, the day she left the house and never came back. I clenched my fist so tightly I could feel the sharp pain of my nails slicing into my palm. But it’s a relief, isn’t it? That’s the worst thing. You can breathe again. You can walk around the house without fear of what mood she’s in, or how she’ll look at you with that expression she has, the flare of her nostrils, the way her eyes used to seek you out like floodlights. Waiting for her to snap, to push, to bite. Admit it. Admit it.
‘Yes,’ I said quietly. The word was small but it filled the air, the space around me, like rubber expanding.
‘Yes.’
That Monday I decided to go back to work. My smoking was getting out of control, for one thing. I’d find myself lighting a cigarette and then craving another even as I smoked it. Also, I’d run out of Valium and the doctor had refused to give me any more.
‘It’s addictive,’ she told me briskly, shaking her head. ‘It’ll make you feel worse in the end.’
Worse? I wanted to scream. Worse than lifting the rock of my daughter’s life and finding all the horrible things down there, squirming in the dark? Worse than that, you mean?
I didn’t, of course. I smiled and thanked her and left the surgery just as a brief, hectic rainstorm had begun, drenching me through my clothes to my underwear.
On my first day back at work a woman I’d never met before from the human resources department held a fifteen-minute meeting with me and gave me a leaflet titled Dealing with Grief in the Workplace.
I handed it back to her, smiling grimly. ‘I’m not grieving,’ I told her. ‘Edie’s missing, not dead.’
‘I know how you must feel. Last year our cat disappeared for three months and I was out of my mind.’
I stared at her until she squirmed uncomfortably and told me to speak to her about anything I needed. As I left I turned back and asked her if she’d ever found her lost cat.
She looked at me, struggling to formulate a reply. Finally, she smiled sadly. ‘He got hit by a car. We only found out when his collar was found in a hedge. It’s a sad world.’
I went back to my desk with a strange, sick feeling in my stomach. Worst of all was the way my heart hurt; it ached as though it was infected. If you cut my chest open, my heart would be shrivelled, dark and sticky, and crawling with flies.
I was due to meet a counsellor on Friday afternoon but instead I drove past her offices and straight on towards Brighton, parking up at the back of London Road. It’s a long stretch of neglected grimy concrete, lined with a handful of high street shops and fast-food restaurants. The squall of bus brakes and the throb of engines choke the air; pigeons throng the gutters, searching for food. It had been raining, and the pavements were glossy mirrors stippled with rings of blackened chewing gum and cigarette butts. What I’d come here for were the pawn-brokers and cash converters, the ones who will take in a valuable object – a solid silver dragonfly necklace, for instance – and trade it for cash. If Edie had sold it – the same way she’d sold my other items, the ones I’d found in the second-hand place in Lewes – she would have come out of town to do it. She’d been burned by that before, of course. Brighton was my guess; Eastbourne maybe, if she’d been able to find the train fare. If she had come here to sell it, someone might remember her, or better still, know where she was heading. At the very least it would give me a time frame of her movements. Something solid. Something good.
It took me over two hours to walk the length of both sides of the street and by the time I got back to my car I was frustrated and tired and feeling despondent. I’d visited nineteen pawn shops and none of them had seen a necklace or a pendant fitting that description. I’d even shown a photograph of it – a picture of my mother in 1964, her hair coiled and pinned to the sides of her head, wearing an evening gown of pale blue satin and standing in the doorway of our old house on Mortimer Road. Her head is turned slightly, chin tilted upward, and the necklace rests just below her exposed clavicle. I’ve always thought my mother looks beautiful in this picture, like a movie star, one of the ones from old Hollywood, Bette Davis or Lauren Bacall maybe.
I sat in my car, smoking, thinking. Tuesday night was the ritual. There was a flutter of nerves in my stomach when I thought about it, a feeling like a rising crescendo, birds taking flight. Rupert had called me earlier and asked me if I was
still intending to ‘go through with it’, as if I were contemplating hiring a hitman instead of meeting teenagers in a churchyard. He didn’t get it, and that was okay. ‘I just have to know,’ I told him. ‘I just have to slip into her skin. It might give me a clue. It might save her. It might even bring her home.’
As I drove back towards Lewes, I hesitated, just for a fraction of a second, before turning left on to the road that would take me up past the prison. I knew where Thorn House was, just outside town, over the humpback bridge. I’d driven past it before, on the days when I used to take Edie out to look at the horses in the nearby fields. She was much, much younger then, of course. Dewy-eyed but not frightened, not even with her small hand outstretched with a fistful of grass in it.
‘Keep your hand flat, honey, so it doesn’t bite,’ I’d told her. She had seemed so small as the horse bent its giant head to her, and I’d almost snatched her away. Edie had laughed, though, as that soft velvety muzzle had pressed against her skin. ‘It tickles, Mummy!’ she’d crowed. We must have passed Thorn House a number of times, but we hadn’t even noticed it then. There was a gate, of course, separating the big Georgian property from the road, and at first I drove right past it, making a turn on the right so I could drive around again and park a little way away, with the front of the house in view.
It was a quiet street, all the houses grand and imposing and concealed behind high hedges and gates and old stone walls. Behind them the woodland stretched out towards the hem of the South Downs and the soaring cliffs beyond. I leaned my car seat back a little and lit a cigarette, rolling down the window a few inches. By now the sky was turning a pale lavender colour, dusk-stained. I turned on the radio and watched and waited.
Edward Thorn’s car pulled up on the drive at four thirty, just as the streetlights were coming on. The car was one of those big ones, a proper family car, an old, well-used four-door, spattered with mud. I watched as the brake lights flared red and winked out before opening my own car door. I didn’t climb out just yet. I wanted to surprise him. I saw a man climbing stiffly from the driver’s seat wearing a wax jacket with the collar turned up, a pair of scruffy-looking jeans. He moved to the rear of the car and opened the boot and started to rummage inside. I slid silently out of my car and crossed the road quickly, hands in my pockets, face set in a grim, hard line. There was what felt like an electrical pulse running through me, crackling with charge.
Edward was pulling something from the boot, a large white object, a rectangle. As he turned it towards the road I could make out the writing on it: Private Property – NO Entry! written in thick black strokes.
‘Hey!’ I called out, starting to jog towards him, unable to keep myself from moving; it was a propulsion. I wanted to grab him, throw him against the car. But, of course, I didn’t. He turned and for a moment I saw the expression on his face change. Eyes widening, mouth opening in a slack zero. It was just a second and then he was blinking and smiling hesitantly, eyebrows raised.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you know me?’
‘I think I do, yes.’ Up close his face was heavily lined, like the gnarled trunk of a tree. His deep-set eyes were very dark, glittering like buried jewels. ‘You’re Mrs Hudson. The missing girl’s mother.’
I wasn’t expecting that.
He nodded, placing a large hand on my shoulder, his voice softening. ‘Of course I know who you are. I was sorry to read about your daughter in the paper. Edie, is it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So. How can I help?’
‘I want to know what your car was doing at the churchyard the night Edie disappeared.’
His face fell but his expression was hard to read. Disappointment? Fear? He crossed his arms in front of his chest. ‘You know I’ve already spoken to Tony about this.’
‘Well, now you can talk to me.’
‘I don’t think that’s wise.’
‘I’m not giving you a fucking choice!’ I shouted, my voice shaking with the force of it. I was suddenly furious with him, his calmness, that reasonable tilt of the head, the sympathy in his voice, oversweet. I was furious with Tony for telling me that goodwill is a currency and that Edward Thorn had a surfeit of it. I was angry with Edie and myself and with this stupid town for swallowing her up. My fists were tight, arms stiff and thrumming with tension. Edward didn’t raise his voice or step away from me. He simply lowered the lid of the boot so I could see there was someone standing behind it, car door open. He must have climbed out while we were talking. William Thorn, the boy I’d found on the couch with Edie. His eyes were wide in the gathering dark. His school uniform hung off his skinny frame, his bag slung over one shoulder giving him a strange, lopsided look. His mouth was hanging open in shock.
‘Dad?’
‘It’s all right, William,’ Edward told him without taking his eyes off me. ‘Go inside and help your brother.’
He didn’t move.
‘What’s going on? Why is she here?’ His voice cracked as if he might be about to cry. Good, I thought.
‘She’s upset, William. As she should be.’
Was that a slight? I couldn’t tell. I took a big, deliberate step closer to Edward, head tilted so I could look him in the eye. I heard William behind him, saying, Dad, Dad, again and again, but Edward stood very still, watching me.
‘Why were you there at the churchyard? That’s all I want to know. You can tell me, and I’ll leave you alone.’
‘I’ve already spoken to the police and I don’t have anything further to say to you.’ His voice was still gentle, as if he was talking me down from a ledge. ‘Please, Mrs Hudson, go home. Get some rest.’
A door at the front of the house opened and an oblong of warm orange light spilt out on to the drive. I saw a woman emerge holding something in her hands. She wasn’t looking at us, not really, and it was only as she drew closer that I realised what she was carrying. It was a carved pumpkin, lit from the inside with a candle. She looked up, smile fading as she took in the scene, her words falling away as if cut by a blade.
‘Look at what we did this aftern— Edward? What’s going on?’
‘It’s all right, Mimi love. Mrs Hudson just came to ask me about Edie. Take William inside.’
Mimi didn’t look as if she knew what to do with herself. She lowered the pumpkin to the ground and stared at me with large, worried eyes. She looked almost leporine in the half-light. A prey animal. There was something else too, wasn’t there? She was afraid. But of who? Me? Or Edward?
‘Mimi – now, please!’ Edward said shortly, and I saw her taking William by the arm and moving him towards the house, the two of them looking back at us over their shoulders until they were safely inside. The pumpkin sat on the drive, casting a strange, strobing aura.
‘I understand the worry and upset this has caused you. But as I said, I’ve spoken with my friends at the station and if they have any concerns with any part of my statement I trust they will get back to me. They seem to be of the mind that your daughter ran away. I must say, from what I’ve heard about Edie, I agree with them.’
I was wrong-footed. I reached out and gripped his arm. ‘What do you mean? What have you heard about her? Edward?’
He peeled my hand away firmly, taking a deliberate step away from me.
‘You should go,’ he said, lifting the sign he’d pulled from the boot and tucking it under his arm. ‘This place will be overrun with kids in a minute. You’re in no state to see them.’
I stared after him as he walked away, his shadow long in the light coming through the open doorway. Inside I could imagine the warmth of their comfortable home, the security of it, the way love can knit a family together, and something inside me worked itself loose. I felt like I might start to cry and never stop so I turned and ran back to my car, standing beside it with my head bowed and my shoulders shaking, taking big, whooping breaths.
‘Trick or treat!’ a voice shouted behind me.
I turned around and there was a
little vampire there, dressed in a frilly shirt with his hair parted to the side, slick with gel. He was smiling, his little round face pressed with talc to give it a chalky, post-death whiteness. Two runnels of blood dripped down from the corners of his mouth, which was lifted in a grin. I stared at him until someone – his mother, presumably, dressed in regular clothes but with a witch’s hat on in a nod to the season – scooped him up and walked him away towards a bigger group of kids gathering at the top of the road, looking back at me over her shoulder with a furrowed brow. There were already a few groups milling about as the darkness crowded in, a lot of shrieking and laughter, a bright high howl as a werewolf ran past, little bucket dangling at its side. Halloween. Nearly a whole month without Edie. My knees felt watery. I managed to open the car door and sit on the seat before I fell down. She’d called me. I’d heard her voice. She was out there somewhere. I looked through the windscreen as a clatter of noisy children ran past, witches and warlocks and dread vampires, all in their black finery like miniature versions of the Rattlesnakes. I watched as they approached the house to my left, the one with pumpkins cut out from orange crêpe paper strung in the trees. I heard the chorus of their voices, almost singsong, ‘Trick or Tre-eat!’, and I had an idea.
I pulled all the junk from my car boot on to the ground before I found what I was searching for. An old dust sheet, put inside when I was decorating back in February. Edie had kicked a hole in the wall of the stairs as big as a fist and I’d filled it in that same weekend. I couldn’t even remember what she’d been mad about now. It was just one of those things, those moods, fraught with violence. I pulled it out and gave it a shake, using my lit cigarette to burn two small holes into the white fabric. When I pulled it over my head I had to adjust it carefully so I could see. I could smell my own ragged breath blasted back at me; nicotine and something sour, like spoiled milk. Maybe Edward was right; maybe I was in no fit state.