The Devil's Staircase (15 page)

For a few hours after Celia’s failure to arrive home, Greg’s heart beat as normal. She’s just late, she’s just stopped off at the garage. She’s with a colleague, having coffee, breakfast, gone all-night-grocery shopping. No need to panic. No need to worry.

But the clock had ticked on, and the phone calls had shed no light, and his heart had no choice but to tell him the truth. She’d had an accident. He could hear it beating, giving him the energy to take action, to find her, help her – because at this stage, it could still be done. Greg’s fingers tapped numbers into handsets, his legs carried him along the canal, Ladbroke Grove, the well-lit route she took each week. His mouth spoke assertively to hospital staff and police officers who checked records – no hit and runs, no sightings. No accident.

So she’d obviously run away. His anxiety decreased a bit. Maybe she’d decided to have some space, get away for a night or two. She’d never done anything like this before, but it was possible, wasn’t it?

‘Has your wife ever had an affair?’ asked the female detective in charge of the hunt. She was around forty, of Chinese origin, with a thick cockney accent and a wandering eye. Her name was Vera Oh and she told Greg more personal information than he needed – that she lived alone, that her twenty-year-old son had left home just after his father had. To mark her new life without men, she said, she had given up smoking and taken up pottery and French.

Her left eye’s individual approach to
seeing
was disconcerting. Greg didn’t know what she was looking at. Was she looking at him? At something over his shoulder? It made him awkward, nervous. Greg didn’t realise this was why she’d never had the operation. A wandering eye was more useful for police work than a gun. It disarmed people, made her seem approachable, and caught them unawares.

‘Not that I know of,’ Greg answered, suddenly less confident of his wife’s fidelity.

Still, Vera and her team questioned friends and neighbours. At first, it itched: anger, suspicion, self-questioning. Were we happy? Had she flirted with Dr Tavendale when he’d collected her at A&E that time? Whose number was 07960055911? Why would she have taken her Mini ISA book? The questions were endless, spurred by frenzied attacks on underwear drawers (when had she bought that red silk teddy?), medicine cabinets (why did she use feminine wipes?) and email accounts:

Hey,

Do you eat lamb?

Ceils x

Hey –
a flirty intro, yes? And a kiss at the end?
Ceils?
The email was to Dr Tavendale, who was invited to dinner the following Friday with his wife.

A friend told the police she’d lost weight and dressed better recently. Had she? He hadn’t noticed. Was he the kind of husband who didn’t notice these sure signs of infidelity? Another friend from school told police Celia had complained that Greg never did the dishes and that sex had become less exciting. And a neighbour had heard an argument at 6.30 one night. Celia had used the word arsehole in front of the children.

The police noticed the older boy, Sam, seemed angry at his mother. ‘That’s true,’ the older boy told Vera Oh. ‘She did say arsehole. She doesn’t want to come home. She doesn’t love us. I’m not stupid!’

None of the happy moments seemed to be relevant anymore. Moments, like ‘family story-time’ each night, or cooking sausages at the campsite in France, or buying back their old toys at the school fête, or getting too many sweeties at the movies, or the time Johnny told the Bank of Scotland teller that he was FAT HUGE ENORMOUS! Or when the four of them had walked in Kensington Gardens playing I-spy. These moments, and millions of others, seemed to have melted just as Johnny’s oversized chocolate ice cream had. A happy, perfect family life, now a sticky puddle on the grass.

‘Has your wife ever harmed herself?’ Vera Oh asked.

‘No,’ Greg said.

‘Are you sure?’

Was Greg sure of anything anymore? ‘She’s happy. We’re happy.’ As if he had to convince himself.

They trawled the canal and other suicide hotspots.

‘I told you,’ Greg said when the nets, bridges and Samaritans’ records drew a blank.

Not long after her failure to arrive home, they found CCTV footage at the garage on her route. She had bought crisps and a
Dr Who
magazine at 4.58 a.m. She had smiled at the checkout person and walked out.

Had she ever arrived at the flat? Greg scoured the five rooms for clues. Had she opened any doors? Put the loo seat down? Dropped her keys and bag in the hall? Turned on a light? It didn’t look like she’d arrived. So something had happened between the fifteen minutes or so that it would have taken her to walk from the all-night garage to Queensway Terrace.

Then there was the last option, the one none of them had wanted to embrace till all the others were crossed from the board. She’d been kidnapped, maybe raped, maybe killed, maybe taken somewhere, maybe all of the above.

The other alternatives wandered in and out of the investigation over those five weeks – an accident, a health problem that had caught her unawares, a love affair that made her feel guilty, a sudden depression that she had to bring to an end. But these options were ghost-like, weakening as time wore on.

Greg’s heart seemed only to beat fast now when the telephone or the doorbell rang. And then, the dried hard apricot that it had become would fill with blood so fast that it pained him. Even more so when the call was just his Mum, or it was only his friend at the door, and his heart emptied just as fast as it had filled.

Hell was not knowing.

The cat had not come home. And as much as Bobby liked to gallivant, he always came home in the end. The boys lay either side of their Dad in bed. The light in the hall was on, and it shone brightly into the tidy bedroom. Each noise made Sam get up to check the cat flap at the front door. But by 2 a.m. there was no sign, and Johnny was crying so loudly that Greg lost his cool and slapped him on the arm.

‘I’m so sorry. Come here.’ He cradled five-year-old Johnny under the covers and tried to stop his own tears. This wasn’t the father he wanted to be. The one who hit the child for crying over his missing cat and mother. He couldn’t hold the tears in. He cried as loudly as his little boy.

Seven-year-old Sam sighed and got out of bed. Did he always have to be the sensible one? Ever since his Mum had ruined their lives by deciding not to come home, he’d had to hold the fort. He’d had to be the one who answered the phone and opened the baked beans and now he was the only one to notice that the Australians across the road were arriving home.

‘Let’s go and ask them,’ Sam said to his crying father and brother.

I was sober again. Who were all these people, all these men? What the hell was I doing here?

I stopped at a payphone on Queensway Terrace. Ursula accepted the charges. Her voice felt like a bullbar smashing into me. I’m not sure how the conversation went, exactly, or if it could even be called a conversation, but the gist of it was that I am not an idiot, apparently, but a wonderful girl who may not be ill after all and even if I was, I would cope . . . Probably better if I faced up to it . . . In fact, the hospital had called earlier in the week. She hadn’t been told anything, don’t worry. When I begged her to stop talking about all that, she said okay, that a bit of fun and laughter till I was ready was just fine, as long as that’s what I was doing and not feeling awful all the time.

I asked her to come to London but she was just finishing her final exams. One to go, she said, then she’d be a doctor. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Why would I want to go to England? It’s too tame and too green for me. I’ve got 5,000 bucks saved. When I’m done, I’m going to get a V-dub and drive to Katherine Gorge.’

Dad got on the phone and said pretty much all of the above but in a deeper voice. ‘Ring me any time,’ he said. ‘I love you. We both love you. And we’re glad you’re having fun. We miss you Bronny, my lovely girl. Please check your email. You are bloody hopeless with email.’

Pete appeared behind the booth. He put his arm around me and helped me to the house. He took me to my room and lay me on my mattress, then sat beside me as my story exploded. ‘Huntington’s Disease . . .’ Pete repeated.

I hated hearing the name of it.

‘Fifty–fifty is not “probably”.’ He sounded like my Dad.

‘What can I do with my life? I can’t have kids – I wouldn’t do it to them. I can’t fall in love. How could I? When all I could offer a man is the pleasure of holding my hand as I die?’

Pete didn’t respond with words, but with a lovely long hug. ‘I just wonder, what’s the point of me? What’s the point of me?’

‘You know what I think?’ He pushed my hair away from my eyes. ‘I think it’s the
not
knowing that’s eating you up.’

We were silent for a moment before we kissed and when we did I forgot all about the rules I’d made on the basin beside the toilet in Kilburn. Angles and lips and teeth and tongues and movements . . . who gave a shit? It just
was.
And I might never have let it end had the doorbell not rung.

I looked at Pete’s watch. ‘Half-two?’ I dragged myself from his arms and went to open the front door. It was Greg from across the road. His thick brown hair was wild, as if something had thrown him around by it in his sleep. The two little boys were with him in their dressing gowns and slippers. Johnny, sleepy and sweet. Sam, serious and angry.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Greg said. ‘The boys have been upset all night and we noticed the lights were on . . . It’s Bobby . . . He didn’t come home and we thought he might be in your garden again?’

‘Bobby!’ the littlest yelled with the cutest voice I’ve ever heard in my life. We were in the back yard. Pete had retrieved his torch (he seemed to have everything you’d ever need in his room), but there was no sign of the cat.

‘Bobby!’ the older, more serious one, called, bumping into the yellow potted eucalyptus tree Pete had bought me. It was dry. I filled a glass and gave it some water.

‘Bobby!’ Greg yelled.

We scoured the place, but we didn’t find anything.

Johnny sat on my lap while Pete made some toast and vegemite.

‘Yuk!’ Sam said when he saw the brown smears on his toast. ‘It’s like poo!’

‘Your hall smells like poo!’ Johnny said sleepily.

‘Shhh!’ his older brother said. ‘Don’t be rude.’

Johnny fell asleep in my arms. I’d never been into kids – never had any nieces or nephews or cute cousins to hang out with, and I was surprised how it made me feel, having this warm bunch of snuggledom in my arms. It was beautiful. I found myself looking at Pete as he made toast (without vegemite) and smiling. What would it be like for us to be together, to have a family?

I left Pete to do the dishes and walked across the road carrying Johnny carefully so he wouldn’t wake up. I put him in the huge bed in the master bedroom. After I put him down and kissed him on the forehead, I smiled at Sam who was lying in the dark beside his brother and staring intensely at the ceiling.

‘Don’t worry, he’ll come back,’ I said.

‘You don’t know, do you?’

‘What?’

‘Turn on the light,’ seven-year-old Sam ordered.

Johnny was sleeping soundly and Greg was in the bathroom, so I turned on the light.

‘Turn around.’

I did as I was told, wondering what the hell could be behind me but a wall or a wardrobe.

There was a wall, and a wardrobe . . . and both were completely covered with newspaper clippings, maps, scribbles and photographs . . . a face was looking at me, a beautiful, happy, smiling face.

‘That’s my Mummy,’ Sam said, pointing to the one that said ‘MISSING’, then the one that said: ‘HAVE YOU SEEN OUR MUMMY?’ Then the one that said: ‘POLICE CALL OFF SEARCH’.

I sat down on the edge of the bed with my hand on my mouth and looked at her picture. I felt Sam sitting up behind me and moving closer.

I heard Greg come into the bedroom, felt his presence watching me. I turned and held Sam.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘She doesn’t love us anymore,’ Sam said.

I held his head in my hands and looked at him. His eyes were not the eyes of a seven-year-old. They were red and tired and sad. One of his front teeth was missing, but he still looked like a downtrodden adult.

‘Of course she loves you,’ I said.

‘If she loves me then why has she done this?’

He was cross-legged on the bed. His serious eyes were begging for an answer.

‘Sometimes things happen we have no control over.’ ‘That’s what everyone says.’

‘I tell you what, why don’t you write to her and ask her? Why don’t you tell her you miss her?’

I don’t know where this came from. But it seemed to me that he was aching inside and needed some way to get it out.

‘No one writes letters anymore and anyway, where would I send it?’

‘Do you believe in Santa?’

‘I’m not stupid.’

‘I know, but do you believe in Santa?’

He paused.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you write to him?’

‘I email.’

‘Well I bet your Mum has an email address.’

I looked at Greg, who was still standing in the doorway. He smiled at me and turned on the computer in the corner.