Elizabeth Is Missing (25 page)

“Good morning,” I say. But the words are difficult to produce. My mouth is too soft for the consonants.

“Er, well, it’s nighttime. What are you doing banging about? Have you got another bottle of gin in here or something? I thought you’d gone to bed.”

“I am awfully tired,” I say.

“It’s been a long day.” She smoothes my hair from my forehead and helps me to get under the bedcovers, where it’s warm as if someone has been sleeping there.

She definitely isn’t my mother. Perhaps she’s one of these missing women from the newspaper. Perhaps we both are. “You don’t still shop at the same fishmonger’s, do you?” The words are not quite definite: it’s annoying, but the sound somehow matches the doughlike quality of my thoughts.

“No,” she says.

I don’t think she’s understood. I put a hand out towards her and my elbow knocks a glass. The woman catches it before it falls, but liquid slops over the rim. Inside is some sort of preserved corpse. Like we had in school. Rabbits in formaldehyde, showing their guts to the class. I can smell the dull chemicals, the undertone of rotting. “That’s disgusting. What’s it doing here?” I say.

“Your teeth?” she asks.

A girl I don’t recognize pushes her head through the door. “What’s going on? Is it a midnight feast? Shall I make hot chocolate?”

“Are you missing, too?” I say.

Her eyes slip to the woman’s; she looks embarrassed, caught.

“Yes, make us some hot chocolate then, Katy,” the woman says, and she speaks to me in a low voice. She tells me she’s my daughter, that this is her house, that I live here with her. She tells me it’s late and time to be sleeping, that I am perfectly safe, that no one is missing.

“That’s not true,” I say. “That’s not true.” I pat at my sides, but I can’t get to my pockets beneath the duvet. I squeeze at it, feel under the pillows, and then reach for some discarded clothes. My feet are too hot and are beginning to sweat. “It’s not true,” I say, tangling my hands in the clothes. The woman draws back the covers, and now I can get to the notes in my pyjama pockets. I hadn’t quite known what I was looking for, but I shuffle through the pages and here, here is Elizabeth’s name. She’s the one that’s missing. It’s a relief to find out.

The girl comes back with mugs and I take a sip of my drink. It’s sweet and cloying, like melted lipstick. “What was that about Elizabeth?” she asks, grinning.

“For pity’s sake, Katy. Don’t get her started,” the woman says. “I’ve been through it umpteen times already today. You
are
aggravating sometimes.”

The girl continues to grin. She has a little foxlike face and it makes me nervous.

“You’d better go to the loo before going back to sleep,” the woman says. She takes my mug and folds the duvet away from me. The air feels cold on my feet where they are slightly damp.

“Where is the loo?” I say.

She points and I follow the direction of her finger, passing a mirror in the hallway. I’m wearing Patrick’s shirt. I’ll have to change it, but I can’t think where my room is; everything looks strange. I get a fluttering in my chest and I take a step towards a door. There’s a sign on it, loo this way, as if someone knew I’d be looking! I don’t know whether to be grateful or afraid. Through the door there’s another sign taped to the wall. This one has an arrow pointing right. The last door just has loo written on it. And here I am. I draw down my pyjama bottoms and little bits of paper flutter out of my pockets on to the floor. I reach for them, but I can’t get them back into my pyjamas while the material is bunched below my knees. I put them on the radiator next to me instead. Elizabeth’s name is on them.

“Elizabeth,” I say as I pull the flush. “Elizabeth is missing.” It’s somehow comforting to say it, but I feel the worry of it begin to pull at me, too. I have to come up with a way of finding her. I have to make a plan: I must write it down and tick off the points as I go.

The only paper I can find is a newspaper on the hall table, a
Daily Echo
, and I’m not sure if it will do. The front page comes away as I try to read the headlines, but I take it along to a sitting room anyway and settle into a comfy chair, spreading the sheets over my knees. There’s something narrow and hard lying on the cushion next to me. It’s smooth and shiny with lots of little numbered buttons. I wrap it up in the paper and look for apples, but I can’t see any, so I wrap a pen instead and then I wrap a set of keys.

“Oh, Mum,” Helen says, standing over me. “No wonder I can never find the remote.” She peels newspaper from something, letting the page fall to the floor.

I pick it up and wrap it round my hand. “Where are the apples, Helen?” I say. “We’d better get started, we’d better put them away, or they won’t last till the spring.”

I used to like wrapping apples. It was one of those jobs people gave you to do as a child, and I can still recall the sharp smell of the newspaper ink mixed with the sharp smell of the fruit. One year Ma and Douglas and I packed them together. We stood in the kitchen, newspaper in the middle of the table, apples in a tub at one end and boxes ready at the other. There was a breeze rustling through the dark hedge outside our warm and cosy kitchen, and the fire in the range was slowly dying down from dinner. The kitchen light was on the blink and kept flickering above the table as if a moth were inside the bulb.

Ma was the fastest wrapper, Douglas the slowest. He had a bad habit of reading the old newspapers. He couldn’t seem to help it, even though he’d more than likely read every article already. There’d been a horrible murder of a woman staying at the Grosvenor Hotel the month before and the reports were hard to miss, though Douglas didn’t say anything about it. The eleven-year-old king of Iraq had arrived in Britain, and Clement Attlee was coming to give a speech in our town. Douglas laughed when I asked if he thought the two were related.

“They’ve finished those new houses across the way, look,” he said, lifting a newspaper and letting the light skitter over it.

“They did that months ago,” Ma said. “That’s from February, that paper is. There’ll be people living there by now, I expect.”

“Yeah, there are. Frank moved a family in from Christchurch,” I said. “And that was March.”

“Did he, love?” Ma said, her voice faraway, calm, but her eyes wide. She pointed to the ceiling and then put a finger to her mouth, reminding me not to mention Frank in front of Dad.

I rolled my eyes. “Frank said they got him to move stuff in even before it was finished. He got to look over the whole lot, gardens and everything. Really nice they are, he says.”

Douglas looked at me and then away. “How long before?” he asked, finally scrunching his page round an apple. “Before anyone moved in or before the whole street was finished?”

“I don’t know. He helped them fix up their gardens, though. As a favour.”

“Fix them up how?”

“Well, he brought them extra soil and dug the ground over and helped them plant things. Vegetables.”

“Didn’t know Frank was green-fingered. Which vegetables did he help plant?”

The boards creaked as Dad started down the stairs. He made the steps creak in a very particular way, not like Ma or Douglas, not like me. They seemed to groan under him. He came into the kitchen and grabbed a box of apples for the loft.

“What are you all talking about?” he said.

“Those new houses,” Ma said. “Meant to be nice.”

Dad grunted, starting back up the stairs.

“They’ve big gardens, haven’t they?” Ma said. “Be nice for a family. Maybe you’ll live there one day, Maud. When you get married.”

For a second it seemed like an obscene suggestion. My face and hands went hot, and the smell of the apples seemed to thicken unbearably in the air. Ink came off my fingers, smearing on to the skin of the apple I was holding. I wiped it on my sweater, feeling I’d sullied the fruit in some way and that it wouldn’t be good to eat next year.

Douglas was studying a page of advertisements. I watched him till I’d filled a box, and then I pulled at the paper. “Why are you looking at the ads?” I asked.

He tugged it back out of my hand. “I’ve read everything else.”

Ma told me to leave him alone and keep up. “I’ve filled twice as many boxes as you,” she said.

Douglas smiled and left the rest of his paper on the table, saying he’d take a box up to Dad. I separated a sheet of newspaper from the pile and wrapped it round an apple, pressing the creases flat against the skin and reading the words that were still visible: “According to the Postmaster General the Post Office is experiencing difficulties in the aftermath of six years of unremitting warfare. Applications for telephone installations have now reached 300,000.” I thought of Mrs. Winners and how annoyed she’d be to lose her position as the only person on the street with a ’phone, and I was about to say something to Ma when I noticed a headline bunched around the apple’s stalk:
WOMEN: CONTACT YOUR HUSBANDS
.

It was another story about the Grosvenor Hotel murder. The reporter said that the town was in a panic since the discovery of a second body further along the coast, and now local people were worrying that more of their womenfolk had become victims of the vile murderer. In the opinion of the writer, police who were investigating the crimes were being kept busy by dozens of men whose wives, it turned out, had just run off. Hasty war marriages had led to even hastier departures. The article urged these women to let their anxious husbands know they were alive and well, because in light of the recent murders, it was important that they weren’t registered as missing.

I read the story again. Could Sukey be reading the same thing? I remembered the little flutter of hope I’d felt at the idea that she was just hiding from Frank, and I went through the pile of papers on the table with a new sense of purpose. There were several other articles about both men and women going off without saying a word to their families, and a letter to the editor from a man who’d found his wife was living just the other side of town under an assumed name. He’d only discovered her because she still went to the same fishmonger’s.

So that could be it, I thought. She might have run away from us, from Frank. But the panic that the first reporter had written about had begun to infect me, too. What if the alternative was Sukey lying murdered somewhere amongst gorse bushes? What if the murderer had attacked three women, not two?

I
f I turn left and left again I’m in the kitchen. I have that written down. And there’s a soapy smell in here that reminds me of the walk to Sukey’s house, and a woman bundling a mass of sheets and towels into a washing basket.

“That letter’s for you,” she says, straightening up and nodding to the envelope on the counter. “From Tom—and he’s sent us a photo of their cat, for some reason. I’m sure he expects us to be thrilled. What d’you want for breakfast?”

“I’m not allowed to eat,” I say, picking up the photo. “That woman told me.”

“What woman?”

“The woman,” I say. God, I’m sick of explaining myself all the time. “That woman who works here.” Is that right? “She works here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know the one . . . Yes you do. She works here. Always busy. Always cross. Always in a rush.”

“I think you mean me, Mum.”

“No,” I say. “No.” But maybe I do mean her. “What’s your name?”

She makes a face at her pile of washing. “I’m Helen,” she says.

“Oh, Helen,” I say. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. That girl you’ve hired, she doesn’t do any work. None. I’ve watched her.”

“Who are you talking about now? What girl?”

“The girl,” I say. “She leaves plates by the sink and there are clothes all over the floor of her room.”

Helen grins and bites her lip. “Pretty good description. Mum, that’s Katy.”

“I’m not bothered about her name,” I say. “I’m just letting you know what she’s like. You should ask her to leave, I think. Get someone else, if you must. I always did the housework myself at your age, but then the younger generations expect everything to be easy.”

“Mum, that’s Katy,” Helen says again. “Your granddaughter.”

“No. Can’t be,” I say. “Can’t be.”

“Yes, Mum. My daughter, and your granddaughter.”

She puts the washing basket on the table and shakes out a large piece of material. Some socks fall into the basket. I feel I’ve had a shock, but somehow I can’t quite think what it was. I stare into the half-closed eyes of the cat in this photo. It’s black and white and lolls in a mass of bright nasturtiums, crushing them beneath it, and I wish I could lie down in a bed of flowers, but Helen would tell me off. She’s very precious about the things she grows.

I move about the kitchen, opening and shutting drawers. There are a lot of orange balls stuffed into one of them, like the eggs of some exotic bird, except they’re not smooth, but crinkled like screwed-up newspaper. I begin to flatten an egg out, and find it’s made of thin plastic and there are handles at one end. I can’t think what sort of bird it is, though. I ask Helen and she grimaces.

“Oh, God. I really ought to do something with those. I don’t know how I manage to forget my reusable shopping bag
every single time
.” She looks at me for a moment, and then smiles. “Early onset, d’you think?”

The front door opens and Helen takes the flattened egg and shoves it back in the drawer. She says something I can’t catch. Something about clothes on the floor. I look at the socks in the basket.

“Hi, Grandma,” Katy says, coming to stand in front of me with outstretched arms. “This is me.”

“Hello, you,” I say.

“So do you know who I am?”

“Of course I know who you are, Katy, don’t be ridiculous.”

Katy laughs and turns to her mother. “She’s cured!”

“What is she talking about?” I say, looking over at Helen. “Your daughter’s mad.”

“Oh, Grandma,” Katy says, putting an arm around my shoulders. “One of us is.”

She takes her arm back and moves away and I follow her into the corridor, but in an instant I find I’m lost: everything is unfamiliar. I feel as though I’ve gone through the mirror in that story—what’s it called? I look at my notes and find one with directions to
the kitchen
. I follow them. Perhaps there’ll be a little bottle or a cake with an
EAT ME
label. I find Helen instead.