The Missing Person's Guide to Love (14 page)

‘Yeah.’ I could feel the metal door against my head, a cold pressure. I looked but, though I had once lain by the reservoir and studied the night sky with my father, I could not make patterns out of those dots and dashes. They seemed to move as I watched them.

When our cigarettes had almost reached our fingertips, Owen whispered, ‘Come on, Isabel. It’s time to give the murdering bastard—’

‘Right.’

My voice was calm, I remember. I tied a scarf around my
hair. I’d thought of it before I left my house. I thought it might stop my hair smelling of smoke. We stood and turned to the door.

We hardly spoke from that moment. I remember the night in flashes and staccato sound. The smash of the window upstairs. Owen’s body, moving up the outside wall, quick as a spider. Our voices, making sounds, not words. The fire blazing with a roar that rose quickly and grew still louder. Objects and furni?ture toppling around us and then our escape. I ran and ran. It had nothing to do with Mr McCreadie any more, not for me. It was something bigger, wilder. I heard the crackling as I ran, then a booming sound, like thunder. We might have brought the world to an end by morning, and it didn’t matter. We didn’t know yet and we didn’t care.

I’m putting thoughts into Owen’s head there. I don’t know that he felt the same exhilaration but always believed he must have. There were patches of black on his jeans when he tumbled out of the building. He jogged away, head down, towards his house just outside the village on the edge of the hills. I waited until he had disappeared around the corner before I set off. The fire seemed to stretch up like an erupting volcano, miles into the sky.

My feet pounded against the soft Tarmac, bouncing off and returning with each step. I thought I could run for ever and not
feel tired. I did not stop running until I reached home, and even then I had energy to burn.

I climbed through the dining-room window. I had left it unlocked so that I would not have to put the key in the door and wake my parents. My clothes stank so I wrapped them in plastic and put them at the back of the wardrobe. My skin was smoky too so I went to the bathroom and, as quietly as I could, soaked a sponge with water. In my bedroom I wiped my face, my neck and my arms, then the rest of my body because I could no longer tell whether there was a smell of smoke or not, and squeezed the sponge out of the window. I patted talc all over my skin, then sprayed perfume around the room. I sat cross-legged on my bed until morning, wide awake every minute, wondering if anyone had seen me and, if so, who. All night I retraced the route, thinking of places where someone might have been looking out of a bedroom window or driving home from a late night out. I heard Mr McCreadie’s voice above the roar of the fire.
You tell me when your time of the month is and I’ll tell you when I’ve got the time.
I wondered whether it had been Julia’s time of the month when she disappeared. It meant nothing but was all mixing up in my head. Julia, Mr McCreadie and blood. I conjured shadows and figures behind fences and in street corners where there had been none. The darkness filled with eyes and cameras. I had to reassure myself many times that no one had seen me. I wondered what had happened to Owen, if he had got home safely and what strange momentum had carried us from a gentle talk in a rowing-boat to this. I couldn’t hear or see properly. I wanted Julia. My ears were ringing with
a metallic discord, my eyes were full of fire and smoke, and I wanted Julia.

Cold blocks of sky filled the spaces where the shops had stood. A whole section of the street turned to ashes. Some people went to hospital but no one was hurt badly, I heard. I did not return to the scene. We gave our reason in court but no one took it seriously and it would not have made any difference. Rumours that Mr McCreadie had kidnapped Julia sprouted up around town, then wilted. His alibi was fine. The police thought our stunt was a burglary that had gone wrong. They thought it was Owen’s idea and I was an accessory, helping him because I knew the layout of the building. We glimpsed each other’s faces one day, with a roomful of space and people between us, but we never spoke to each other again.

Owen passed within centimetres of my shoulder. I watched from the corner of my eye. The coffin floated along the nave above the shoulders of the four bearers. It was easier to imagine that Owen had been nailed up inside this shining box for the past decade and a half than it was to consider the truth, that only days ago he was moving around, getting into a car and fastening his seatbelt, his blood warm. Had I been here, I would have seen him talking. I might have seen him smiling.

We stood to sing ‘When a Knight Won his Spurs’. Appar?ently it had been Owen’s favourite hymn at primary school.
I thought of Owen and me – and Kath and our other friends – at primary school, cross-legged on the wooden floor with our hymn books open. I saw rows and rows of scabby knees and blue books. I remembered standing here in church singing the Creed and the Gloria and the Nunc Dimittis every week for years and years, not needing to read the words in the service book and not having a clue what they meant or minding about it. I once cared enough to ask the vicar what ‘very God of very God’ meant – How can God be
very
? Very
what
? – but, not receiving a clear answer, stopped worrying about it.

I wondered whether Owen had known the colour of female mallards by the time he died. I would have liked to finish that argument with him. I didn’t want to say goodbye to him now. We could have been friends after prison if I had not been so stubborn. We had understood each other. I wanted him to forgive me for doubting him. I closed my hymn book and fell to my seat. My head dropped into my hands and I let tears run through my fingers.

The church air tasted of a damp cellar or castle dungeon.
No charger have I and no sword by my side, Yet still to adventure and battle I ride.
I didn’t think whoever had chosen the hymn had thought about the words. They didn’t make much sense for a funeral.
Though back into storyland giants have fled, And the knights are no more and the dragons are dead.
The funeral was almost over and I had barely heard any of it, just something the vicar had said about Owen, that he loved gardening and growing things.

*

We made a stringy procession up the hill to the Carrs’ house, slumping along in ones, twos and threes, occasionally ensnaring passers-by, pulling them into knots, then releasing them. Some mourners passed us in cars, driving slowly, careful not to splash our legs with puddle water. A black and white cat followed us, jumping from gatepost to wall to hedge. The woman who used to work in the library was right beside me on the pavement but if she had seen me she had not recognized the girl who had come into the library sometimes to borrow books about boarding-schools and horses, and brought in the ten-pence fines for the ones her parents always forgot to return.

When we reached the cul-de-sac where Owen’s family lived, I switched on my phone. Another message.

She’s still here. Drinking more tea. She’s funny.

What was Bernadette doing or saying that was so funny? I pictured Elif looking up, with her wide, dimpled smile. Per?haps she would stretch out her fingers to touch Bernadette’s hand or face, and Bernadette would fold her arms tightly across her chest, staring at the wall in terror, and I laughed as if I were with Elif, picking her up and away from Bernadette, making Elif laugh too. The lady from the library turned and gave me a warm smile. I smiled back and reached out to stroke the cat, now just beside me on a low concrete wall. Was Mete simply trying to make me jealous? Mete feels jealousy with a pain I don’t understand. He makes things up in his head and gets angry because of them. He can raise his blood pressure
and body temperature with one irrational thought provoked, say, by my smiling at a customer. I get a headache trying to think of ways I can tell him he is wrong, but once he has thought it he can’t let it go. Perhaps now I was doing it too. I stopped, rubbed my fingers around the cat’s ears, listened to its deep purr.

Owen’s parents lived in a 1970s brick house with net curtains at the windows and vases of flowers on the sills. It was called Oakdene. There was a porcelain windmill in an upstairs window. I recognized it from the past. The front door was open so I followed the others towards it. I had stood on this doorstep many times, rung the bell and waited for Owen to come out with his coat over his shoulder and we would go rowing or walking on the hills, but I had never been inside the house before. It was never an indoor kind of friendship; I realized that Owen had probably not been inside my house either. I had not seen his bedroom or where he ate breakfast or watched television. I stepped through the doorway and into the hall.

A circle of elderly people murmured on chairs in the big square kitchen. One stood at the sink, her back to the group, organizing blue china cups and saucers into neat rows on the draining-board. Three of the four women had hair of the same shade, off-white, like dirty snow, and noses with a bump on the bridge. They must be sisters – Owen’s great-aunts or grand?mother perhaps – but I recognized no one and felt too shy to enter. It would be good to have John at my side. He had stayed in the church to talk to some people I had never seen before,
but I did not doubt that he would appear soon. I crossed the hall and tried the living room. There were eight or ten people here and I scoured the room for Owen’s sister, but she was not there. An elderly man offered me a cup of tea just as a younger woman held out a small, cold bottle of beer. In confusion, I accepted both. The cup rattled on its saucer and some of the tea sloshed out. I placed it on top of the upright piano and sipped the beer. At one end of the room, opposite the windows, there was a long table of food, one plate of triangular white sand?wiches and all the rest were cakes.

I have always tended to associate funerals with cake. I think it goes back to my grandmother’s funeral, the only other funeral I have been to. The day after Gran’s death, my mother began baking in preparation. Butterfly cakes, parkin, Victoria sponges. Bowls of icing, lemon glaze, melted chocolate, silver balls. Cake tins piled up in the kitchen and then, the night before the funeral, people from around the village knocked on the front door with more, but theirs were dark, respectful fruit cakes and malt loaves. We picked hundreds and thousands and burned sultanas off the kitchen floor for weeks. When the cakes went stale, we soaked them in alcohol and ate them with cream. ‘It’s a crime to waste food,’ my mother said, with a wink, and gobbled up more.

I smoothed my skirt and tasted cake again, sharp lemon cake.

‘Let me cut you a piece of something.’ The vicar was at my side, gesticulating over the display with a long, shiny knife.

But I was not hungry, after all. I could see a small version of
Owen sitting at the piano doing his practice, his feet stretching out for the pedals. He was playing ‘When a Knight Won his Spurs’. His head bowed slightly over the keyboard and his fingers moved heavily from note to note, resting on a chord with relief before setting off to the next. I remembered that I had come here to find his sister. I left my beer on the table, headed for the door but stopped when I saw Sheila.

She watched me with her face turned partly away, as though afraid of what I might do. It would have been rude not to approach and speak to her. I tried to think what I might say, just to repeat that I was sorry for her loss ought to be fine. She smiled. It was a shaky smile, bruised around the edges by her melting makeup. Crimson lipstick glistened from the fine lines around her mouth, like blood in tiny paper cuts.

‘Are you leaving too?’ She lifted her fingers as though about to touch my hair but left them, curled, in the air. ‘Bye-bye, Isabel love. Give my regards to your aunt. I thought she would be here today but I’m sure she’ll come up soon. I understand that she’s very busy with her latest book. I’m looking forward to reading it. I haven’t seen her in such a long time, but we do write to each other at Christmas. She’s been a dear friend to me for many years and I always think of her fondly. You’ve got a look of her, you know, Isabel. Something in the way your eyes are set. You remind me of her. It’s quite strange. I’m sorry we had words outside the church. It doesn’t matter any more. I know I’m right but I can’t keep turning it over and over. It’s not fair on Owen now and I have to put him first. I think he just wants to rest. And me. I’ve had a headache that has hardly
gone away since the day the poor girl went missing. Now is the time to think of being peaceful. What does the rest of it matter? Goodbye, Isabel.’

Sheila glided away over the polished floor. I was not planning to leave yet but she had not given me time to tell her so. I watched her blend into the group in the doorway until only her head was showing, the silver hair, neat and smooth, curving her skull into a ball-bearing.

I am sure that Maggie had said she was coming today, but she was not in the church. I would have liked to see her. I know that the day would have been easier had she been here, and perhaps I would have told her all about Owen and Julia. We could have been investigators together. Maggie has an energy that I seem to lack today. She is inventive and fearless. She knows Sheila and could have asked questions that I would not have known to ask. We might have sat in a café with tea and cakes and worked it out together. I would have had more success with Maggie at my side. I could also have asked her about someone else too, her other friend, and what the hell she is doing now with my lover and child in Turkey.

Why is Bernadette in my flat in Istanbul? How is she being ‘funny’ when I know that she hates children and, indeed, is uncomfortable with anyone she does not know well? I have been away for less than twenty-four hours. Mete and I haven’t been apart since we married and no long-lost friend has ever shown up on the doorstep before. Surely she cannot have
planned her visit to happen this way. It seems an extraordinary coincidence. When she stayed with us last week, she did not know that I would be away now, though she could have found out since then, I suppose. It is true that I had not noticed any spark between Mete and Bernadette. They hardly saw each other. To dream up some subterfuge would be irrational on my part. Indeed, I have never known Bernadette to be interested in men, apart from her ex-husband whom she has not seen for years since she gambled away their house and ended the marriage. That is not to say that she shouldn’t be interested in men. She has found work and a home after years of unemploy?ment and homelessness, why should she not now look for love? But I cannot think that she would go to Mete, of all people, for it. She doesn’t know him. He is too far away.