The Missing

by Daisy Pearce

  I hope it’s not Mimi, I think, brushing leaves from my knees. I don’t know how William will cope if anything happens to her. He loves his mother with the sort of deliberateness with which he approaches paperwork; a focus that is almost entirely singular. She refers to him as her ‘precious first-born’ and tells me that he was the only thing that kept her alive when she suffered bleak post-natal depression.

  ‘Just to look at his face, those beautiful eyes, so innocent – as if he was just telling me to hold on.’

  I had to get out of the house this morning. Mimi’s taken another turn. She had her meds as usual at eight o’clock, but by half past her eyes were darting to the window, growing agitated.

  ‘Where’s that robin?’ she was saying, over and over. ‘He’s got a message for me.’ She gripped my hand with her own, fingers digging into my skin hard enough to leave marks. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘It’s me, Mimi. Frances. William’s wife.’

  Mimi turned towards me, her bony elbow knocking over the glass of water that stood on the nesting tables beside her bed. I cried out in dismay as it soaked into her sheets and lap, but she barely noticed. She looked at me curiously, her pale eyes searching my face.

  ‘Who’s William?’

  ‘Come on, let’s sit you up, get you out of that wet bed.’

  ‘He boiled the bones in pots on the stove.’

  I froze then, in the act of helping her out of the bed. That image, of bones boiling in pots on the stove, made my blood turn cold and fast-moving, like a river of melting snow. Mimi’s thin legs hung over the edge of the mattress like sticks. I could see the blue tinge of her skin, burst blood vessels beneath the surface like tangled threads. Mimi was looking straight ahead, past me, out the window into the garden. Her voice trembled.

  ‘We return to the earth. That’s why the tomatoes taste so good. Where’s that robin?’

  Mimi fell silent as I helped her into the armchair, smoothing back the wisps of grey hair that floated about her face. Her teeth chattered, although she wasn’t cold.

  I pressed on, stripping the bed quickly. ‘Did you ever see him making the bonemeal, Mimi?’

  Silence. Outside, the empty bird feeder swung gently in the breeze.

  ‘Alex said he kept the bones in the cellar. That must have been horrible. I’d say it wa—’

  Mimi turned her head towards me so slowly I could almost hear the creak of her vertebrae. Her eyes fixed on me, as pale as winter. They were no longer vague, but as precise and keen as a knife blade. Her voice was lower, denser somehow. It was like another person was speaking right through her.

  ‘You want to watch where you’re poking your nose, Mimi, he said. Someone might snip it right off!’

  She made a gesture with her fingers of scissors cutting and laughed girlishly, drawing her legs up off the floor. I stood motionless, unblinking. Who was she talking about? Edward? Is that what he said to her? My mind returned to those bones in pots on the stove, filling the air in the shed with a rich odour, leaving long grease marks down the wall. Alex had told me Edward had taken the bones from roadkill and the old meat factory, because you fed the soil, not the plant. Old bones make strong plants, I thought, watching Mimi’s scrawny hands settle into her lap as slow and delicate as feathers. Her face fell still, her eyes shifting to the right, back to the window.

  ‘There he is,’ she said quietly, and when I looked outside I saw the robin on the bird feeder, scarlet feathers ruffled by the wind.

  I walk slowly with my hands in my pockets. It’s so peaceful here, with birdsong high in the trees. I’m heading towards the small, contained woodland at the back of the churchyard, past the outbuilding painted a municipal green. The breeze stirs the grass. It feels good to be out of the house, out of that room where Mimi sits with her newspaper folded and untouched on her knees. William has told me not to mind the things she says, but she frightened me this morning, the way her voice seemed to deepen and rasp at me, so unlike her normal softness. Head injuries will do that to you, the doctor said, and then it brings my thinking round again to Mimi slipping and falling down the stairs alone and in the dark. Not quite alone, I remind myself. Alex was there. There’s something unsettling in that too, isn’t there? I take a deep breath, and then another. It’s good to be out of that house.

  The path is narrowing, bordered by nettles, long whispering grasses and choking weeds. I suppose back here are the older graves, the ones left untended as family trees and bloodlines branched away. The headstones are smaller and rougher, like hewn lumps of stone. I’m looking at the inscriptions more carefully now, looking for the one in particular that both Alex and Nancy mentioned to me. Quiet Mary, the drowned girl. It was at her grave that Edie Hudson had been standing when she walked away for the last time and disappeared into the trees. Had someone been waiting in the darkness back there for her? Peter Liverly, the caretaker? How about Quiet Mary herself, wrapped in a water-stained burial shroud, hooded and silent, floating an inch or so from the ground?

  I shudder. The wind picks up. The trees sigh and press together, conspiring, whispering their perennial secrets. I don’t see the figure kneeling among them until I have almost tripped over her. In her dark coat and jeans she is barely visible in the gloom. A cap has been pulled down over her head, obscuring her face and her ashy grey hair.

  ‘Jesus!’ I jump back, heart pounding.

  She looks up at me, unfazed. ‘Watch where you’re going.’

  ‘I’m sorry! I didn’t – it’s hard to see you in the dark.’

  She turns away from me, back towards the ground. She is kneeling near the roots of a tree, carving out a little hole in the earth with a trowel.

  ‘Whatever you’re planting there is going to struggle,’ I tell her. ‘There’s not nearly enough light in here for a young plant.’

  She doesn’t turn around. ‘Are you a botanist?’

  ‘No. I’m a – a therapist.’

  ‘Pass me that bag, would you?’

  I hesitate. There’s a strange feeling in the air, like the approach of a monsoon. Anticipation and a sense of unease. Still, I lift the bag she points at and hand it to her. She rummages inside with dirt-streaked hands, finally pulling an item out. It’s a stained-glass suncatcher in the shape of a bluebird, about the size of her palm. It twists in the breeze as she holds it towards the light.

  ‘That’s lovely,’ I say.

  ‘It is, isn’t it? It’s so hard to buy for someone you don’t know.’

  Even with the brim of the cap pulled low I can see this woman is older than I’d first thought. Although her face isn’t lined, it has a weathered quality, abrasive, like her voice. She has crystal pendulum earrings and silver rings stacked on her fingers. I bet she does tarot cards, I think, and burns incense in wooden holders until the air is smoky and thick. I am about to say goodbye and turn away – hey, nice to meet you here in this dark and hallowed ground, you mad old lady scrabbling around in the dirt – but then she does something strange. She takes the suncatcher and gently, reverentially, places it in the hole she has dug. Then she lifts the trowel and begins to heap the earth back over it.

  I can’t help myself. I’ve always been nosy. Ask William. Ask Kim. ‘I can’t help but think that suncatcher would be better placed in a window somewhere,’ I say, forcing myself to laugh.

  She doesn’t look up. She pats the earth with her hands as if she is building a sandcastle, firming it. When she sits back on her heels, her knees crack like pistols. ‘It’s her birthday today. She’d be thirty-three.’ She pulls a pack of cigarettes from her bag and puts one between her teeth. ‘You have any kids?’

  ‘No. We haven’t – we haven’t got round to it yet.’

  ‘Huh. Edie wasn’t planned. I had her young. You look like a good age for a child, and you seem nice. You’d be a great mum.’

  I stand very still as she pulls herself to her feet and asks me if I want a cigarette. I shake my head, tell her no, I’m sorry, I don’t smoke. I’m thinking, Ed
ie. That name again. The disappearing girl on everyone’s lips.

  When the woman removes her cap a spill of long grey hair falls over one eye. Her face is familiar to me, and it takes me a moment in my shock to place her. Then, ‘You were in the cafe,’ I tell her. ‘You saw me talking to Nancy Renard.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Nancy Renard. You know what the girls at her school used to call her? Nancy Retard. She was a late developer, you know? Very shy. Then she started hanging out with my daughter and her friends. It brought Nancy out of her shell a little bit, I suppose you could say. She’s a different woman now.’

  ‘Kids can be mean.’

  She looks at me with eyes narrowed against the smoke. My mother always told me I was a terrible judge of character (‘That’s the problem with you, Frances,’ she’d say to me, leaning in too close, her breath heavy with alcohol, cheeks flushed. ‘You’re not smart enough. You get fooled by everyone.’). Well, joke’s on you, Ma, because I got wise to people very fast. Leaving home at sixteen will do that to you.

  I’m sizing up this woman, Edie’s mother, I remind myself, right now. Tough and uncompromising, unruffled. With her wild, wiry hair and the sullen jut of her jaw, she looks like a good person to get into trouble with. Then I remember Alex telling me she’d once held a knife to William’s throat and my mouth dries up a little.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’ she asks, and immediately I lie, out of habit. It’s a legacy of being in trouble with the wrong people most of your adult life – bailiffs, dealers, nasty exes.

  I stick out my hand with a smile on my face. ‘It’s Kim.’

  ‘I won’t shake.’ She holds up her dirty hands. ‘You new to Lewes, Kim?’

  ‘Sort of. I’m here with my husband. His mother’s sick.’

  ‘That’s too bad. Is that why you’re here? Looking for a plot to put her in?’ She laughs, which immediately turns into a barking cough.

  I smile. ‘No, no. Nothing like that. I was just looking.’

  ‘You want to walk this way with me? I feel like I want to get out into the sunshine a bit. It’s so heavy in here. Oppressive.’

  ‘Sure.’

  She introduces herself as Samantha Hudson and I have to bite my tongue to stop myself telling her I already know her name. I’ve read the papers. I’m already half regretting lying to her about who I am, but I don’t want her to know about my connection to William. How did Alex describe it? ‘It was a bad time for him.’ Instead I follow her through the trees towards the churchyard, where benches sit in sheaves of sunlight. I ask why she was burying the suncatcher.

  Samantha looks back at me. ‘I’ve been doing it every year since Edie went missing. When she was a little kid she would bury things in the back garden – cotton reels, bars of soap, my fucking house keys – she was obsessed with it. Used to drive me crazy. I bought her a sand pit – you know, the kind you get in a big plastic clam shell – and told her to bury stuff in there if that’s what she wanted to do. But no, she went right on putting things in the dirt. I think she liked the way it felt in her hands.’ Samantha crushes her cigarette out underfoot. ‘In the beginning I think I went a bit mad, you know? I didn’t hold it together very well. I suppose it was a way to stay connected to her. Now, I think it’s just habit.’

  We’re out in the churchyard again, and immediately I feel my spirits lift. She was right, it was oppressive in there, the melancholy weighing down on you. Out here the sky is pale blue and endless, stretching out towards the distant Downs. Samantha hoists her bag on to her shoulder, smiling wearily. Her jaw is square and angular, the cords in her neck tight. There is a tension about her, a hypervigilance I’ve only ever seen in military victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. I recall one veteran I treated who’d been the victim of a roadside bomb in Basra. He’d seen his friend crawling away from the explosion with his intestines trailing after him in the dust. This woman, Samantha, has the same set in her shoulders; the way she carries herself is as though she is braced against an ambush, the world turning on her.

  We leave the main path and follow a smaller one, no more than a single rut worn smooth by the passage of feet. The two of us are lost in thought, contemplative. The ground rises and falls like a tide. We pass an area sectioned off by a bamboo trellis that crawls with honeysuckle and clematis. Just beyond it I can hear the low, somnolent drone of bees and see the little hives that have been built there. A metre or so further on is an old wooden bench. Samantha sits down on it with a sigh, opening her bag at her feet. I join her, the two of us looking out over the sprawling graveyard, the dense woodland, the steep hills beyond that rise and fall like music.

  ‘Here.’ She’s pulling something out of her bag. A bottle of beer. She opens it with the edge of her lighter, flipping the cap high into the air. Foam bubbles up the neck and she passes it to me hurriedly, saying, ‘Quick, quick, before it escapes’, and laughing. I take it and suck at the froth. It’s malty and good, dark-tasting like honey and old casks. She produces another bottle and opens it the same way. She clinks hers against mine and then leans across and pours a little out on to the grave in front of us.

  I frown at the headstone. ‘Who’s Tony Marston?’ I ask, peering at the inscription. It gives the year of his death as 2001 and below that, in looping cursive, May he find peace.

  I read it aloud and Samantha snorts derisively. ‘You know what he wanted on his headstone? Here lies the last fuck I ever gave. His wife said no, so now he’s stuck with that.’ She kisses her two dirty fingers and leans forward, pressing them briefly against the marble. It’s genuinely touching, without affectation, and I find myself looking away as tears threaten. Samantha gulps her beer.

  ‘Was he a friend of yours?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Heart attack. He smoked a pack a day. He was the detective in charge of Edie’s case back in the beginning.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What for?’ She looks at me with her keen blue eyes.

  I sip the beer again. ‘For your loss. Both your losses.’

  ‘You know, after Edie went missing Tony convinced me to go to a local group for bereaved parents. They ran it in Brighton. This would have been about 1999, I think, a couple of years after she first disappeared. As soon as I walked in, this man asked me to help make the teas. He said he’d read Edie’s story in some of the papers. As I was washing the cups, he said something that has always stayed with me. He said, “It’s all right for you, isn’t it? You still have hope. You don’t know what it’s like for us. You can’t even begin to imagine.”’

  ‘That seems harsh.’

  ‘The point is, she’s not dead. She’s missing. The loss is a limbo. It’s fucking purgatory.’

  I take another sip of beer. A plane crosses the sky, trailing white vapour. I wonder where it’s going.

  ‘You know, I might be able to help you,’ I say. ‘I’m a therapist. I mainly deal with anxiety disorders, OCD, stuff like that. If I can—’

  ‘Aw, that’s nice of you, pet. But you’re about twenty years too late. I’ve had psychologists and psychoanalysts and forty-pound-an-hour hypnotists look inside my brain and all of them have said the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with you, you just need to move on. Okay, I’d say, sure. Tell me how I’m meant to do that. You know what happens next?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Samantha makes her face go slack, her mouth fall open, aping stupidity. She lowers her voice and says, ‘Uh, gee, Mrs Hudson, uh, we can’t really help you with that part. That’ll be nine hundred pounds, please.’ She smiles, breaking the charade. It doesn’t soften her face, that smile. It simply changes it without emotion, like arithmetic.

  ‘I get it,’ I tell her, draining my bottle of beer. ‘Trauma freezes you. It makes you a rock in a river. The water flows around it, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but the rock doesn’t move. It can’t. It’s stuck in one particular point in time, just getting worn down by the constant pressure.’

&
nbsp; She looks at me carefully. I know that look. It’s cautious, but not hopeful. Kindred.

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ she says. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘That’ll be nine hundred pounds, please,’ I say, imitating her, and we both laugh throatily.

  ‘You want another, Kim?’ she asks me, pulling a bottle from her bag. I hesitate, but only for a moment. I can smell the alcohol coming off her, her eyes slightly glazed-looking. She’s already on her way to being drunk. Still, who can blame her? I take the bottle. She watches me uncap it the same way she did, against the edge of a lighter.

  She laughs. ‘That’s a wasted childhood right there.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘By the time I was fifteen I could roll a joint blindfolded and had six types of fake ID. I wasn’t a good kid.’

  ‘Well, you seem to have turned out okay.’ She smiles at me again. Her narrow eyes are faded, washed-out sea glass. ‘I saw Edie going down a similar path. I always wonder how she would have turned out. Oh, don’t get me wrong. She was a good kid—’

  There’s a hesitation there. I hear it a lot. It’s pre-emptive, a ‘but’ you forget to swallow. He hit me but I provoked it. I want to but I’m frightened. She was a good kid, but she made bad choices.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Nothing. Just that. She was a good kid.’

  The silence settles softly between us again. She lights another cigarette and points it towards the church wall running opposite. Just visible beyond it is a low roof. ‘See that house? This man’ – she jerks her cigarette in the direction of Tony Marston’s grave – ‘thought the man who lived there had something to do with Edie’s disappearance. He was convinced of it.’