The Missing Person's Guide to Love (17 page)

It was not true that Owen and I did nothing more than skulk around together like a pair of zombies. Annie was wrong about that. Owen and I bought a kite, once, and took it up onto the hill. We saw it in the window of the local toy shop. We were a little embarrassed about buying it and giggled as we paid. It seemed childish to want to own a kite but we thought it would be fun, or funny. It was purple, a traditional kite shape. We raced each other out of the village and into the countryside. On top of the moor we unravelled the string to see what would happen. It was a windy day in early spring, perfect for kite-flying, but all the time we were telling each other that it would never work. We laughed about the disaster it was going to be, how it was certain to crash straight to the grass, or the string would break and it would fly away, how we hoped no one would see us. I suppose we were talking ourselves out of
enjoying it too much, preparing ourselves for disappointment, but when I ran with the kite, it rose into the sky and soared.

‘That’s ace, that is.’ Owen shielded his eyes and tipped his head back. ‘Bloody ace.’

Soon it was his turn. He took the string, leaned back and held it steady as the purple diamond swooped and twisted, not like a bird but like a child playing with us.

‘How amazing to be that high in the sky,’ he said. ‘We should have bought two and made them dance together.’

I followed him as he took the kite further up the hill, over rocks and a stream. ‘Can I have it back now, for a bit?’

‘Not if you can’t catch me,’ said Owen, and ran along the ridge of the hill. He was a fast runner but the kite slowed him. I caught up and jumped on his back. We fought for the kite string and fell together to the ground. We lay there, panting, on our backs, and watched as the kite flapped in the sky. Occasionally it dropped down and my stomach lurched as though I were falling too, but then the wind would catch it and send it high again.

‘You coming to the Snack Bar for a drink?’ Owen asked, when we sat up again.

‘Can’t. Got a dance class.’

‘Skip it.’

‘But I like it. I’m doing an exam next week. I can’t miss a class.’

‘You might be a famous dancer one day.’

‘Might be.’

‘Will you still speak to us then, here in the little village where you grew up?’

‘No.’ I laughed. ‘I won’t. Definitely not.’

‘But you’ll speak to me because I’ll be a big theatre producer and you’ll need my help.’

‘Will you? First I’ve heard of it.’

‘Might be.’

Eventually the album came crackling to an end, the needle lifted and moved itself back to its resting-place. Annie and John pulled themselves up and we looked at each other in the silence, blinking. It was as if a sleeping potion had worn off and the three of us had woken up together.

John cleared his throat. ‘So, what are you going to do?’

‘I think,’ I said, ‘it’s all about place. We should go to the grass behind the bingo hall and have a look round. You never know what might come to us. Let’s walk down there and see. John, you’re coming too.’ I stood to find my coat. ‘Wait, does the bingo hall still exist?’

Annie flopped onto the bed and rubbed her feet. ‘I think it’s there. Something’s there. It’s the same building anyway, and that scrap of grass is too small to have been turned into anything more useful. I wouldn’t mind getting out of the house for a bit.’

‘Aren’t you going to the crematorium?’

‘No. I can’t be arsed. That’s not the most important thing right now. Don’t look like that, John.’

‘You might regret it later, Annie. You won’t get another chance.’

‘I said my goodbyes in the church. He’s not really in there, you know. It’s just a dried-up pod he used to live inside. It makes no difference whether I’m there or not to see it go off to burn. That sounds callous but it’s not. I know what I’m doing. I have to be very practical about all this. Otherwise I can’t keep track of what’s happening.’

Annie picked up the brandy bottle and put it under her arm. We set off downstairs.

Sheila and Dennis were putting on their coats in the hall. Dennis mumbled about his posh shoes being too tight. Then he noticed Annie and his face softened. ‘Come on, Annie. Let’s get it over with. Auntie Joan will hold the fort here. Almost everyone’s gone now, anyway.’

Dennis held out a black jacket for her. She put the bottle on a stair and slipped on the jacket. Dennis patted her shoulders. Annie then took a black lambswool scarf from Sheila and tied it neatly around her neck. John and I waited behind her. She retrieved the brandy and held it tight.

‘Mum, I’m only going out. I’m not coming to the crematorium with you.’

‘But don’t you want to?’

‘I’m too upset. It won’t do me any good.’

‘Oh. Oh, well, if you feel that way.’ Sheila stroked Annie’s hair. ‘I understand. Don’t worry, love. Just do whatever you feel like doing today. Are you going out with your friends? That’s a good idea. Yes, that will probably do you a lot of good.
I’m glad you have your friends here. It was nice to hear your music playing just now.’

Dennis said nothing but stared, bemused, at John and me. We filed into the front garden and closed the door.

We walked in silence towards the bingo hall, speaking only once or twice to haul John back when he started to take a wrong turning. All these years I have been thinking about what happened in 1982, as if I remember every detail so well, but I had forgotten about the bingo hall and the dirty rectangle of grass behind. I went there occasionally with Julia. We used to sit on the grass and talk about – I don’t know what. I didn’t remember Owen liking it but that is not to say that he didn’t. He once told me he’d been there on the day Julia disappeared. I could see now how he might have met her after she had said goodbye to me, followed her as she delivered the papers, and persuaded her to accompany him there. Perhaps he claimed to have news, a secret to tell. Perhaps he went there on his own and she followed, begging him to stay away for good. She might have taunted him with a letter from her soldier.

‘I still find it hard to believe that Owen could have hurt someone,’ John said. ‘Not that he wouldn’t have wanted to – I don’t know whether he would or not – but he wouldn’t have been able to do it. You need either a violent temper or a very calculating mind. He had neither.’

‘You knew him in prison but by then he wasn’t the same person. The trial broke him, I’m sure of it. I don’t think he was a wimp before that stuff happened. He was calculating. For that
matter I think he might have had a temper, not that I ever saw him hit anyone.’

‘So why do you think it? That’s not fair.’

‘I think it because of the way he looked sometimes, when he didn’t get his own way. His face would turn white, so hard and angry. I remember him walking out of school once because someone had hidden his PE kit. It was just a stupid joke and they would have got it back for him, probably, but he turned quiet and got this strange look on his face. He walked out of the room, along the corridor and out of the entrance in full view of the entire school. Even the teachers didn’t call him back. They saw him go but they just watched. Isn’t that weird? I thought it was weird at the time, but I knew from their faces that they had no idea what to do.’

Annie put her arm through mine as we walked. ‘I remember that. Two kids came round to our house with his sports bag to apologize. He sulked all night. He was a real sulker. But, you know, it’s not as if he spent his weekends dissecting neighbourhood cats on the kitchen table. He wasn’t making bombs in the garden shed or hiding behind a tree to shoot an airgun at passing toddlers. I’m not surprised he seemed like a wimp in prison. He would have been terrified. What was it like where you were, Isabel? The young offenders’ thingy place.’

‘Oh, it was pretty bad, I suppose.’

‘She doesn’t like to talk about it.’

‘Why? Is it too painful?’

I thought about that. ‘Maybe,’ I conceded, ‘but there’s another reason. I can’t remember it very clearly. It’s strange
because I have a good memory but I just can’t separate the bits and pieces of the experience into things I remember. It’s a cloud, a very thick cloud that I can’t see inside. I sometimes think I must have made it all up one day.’

‘I’d like to do something destructive that causes a lot of damage but doesn’t kill anyone. Just like you did. It would make me feel good.’ Annie swayed into a privet hedge as she spoke, then bounced back as John pulled her arm.

‘It wouldn’t.’ I put my hand on Annie’s shoulder to steady her.

‘It would feel good at the time.’

The bingo hall was just ahead of us at the end of the street, but not yet visible. Five or six teenage boys walked towards us on the pavement, talking and spitting. When they noticed us they fell quiet and crossed the road. They began to speak again when they reached the other side, as though John, Annie and I had done something to frighten them. I felt bad for whatever it was we had done.

John moved ahead of Annie and me. He began to whistle, a sharp, piercing sound like some kind of insect shrieking in the rain.

When Owen came out of prison, I’d been free for months already and was living with Aunt Maggie in London. That is partly why I never wrote back to him. We were treated so differently I didn’t know what to say to him. I was a juvenile and he was an adult but there were only a few months between
us. He was right to feel unlucky. But I was not having such a great time during those months. For the first few weeks after my release I had no home or job. I was waiting for something to happen. I wandered around the streets, avoiding talking to anyone but being fed up that I had no one to talk to. I remember following people around, hoping they would notice me, but ensuring they did not, groups of young women especially. I used to sit near them on the tube, in parks, and listen to their conversations of work, of boyfriends, of going to parties and to the cinema. If they carried bags of shopping I tried to see inside, to catch a glimpse of clothes, or books, or chocolates and perfume. I wanted to know how I should be living, how not to live like a ghost.

I was not planning to languish like that for ever, and did not believe that I would, but I had little thought of doing anything to change my life. Every idea in my head was a vague one. I might have wandered for ever – or collapsed to the ground and fallen apart – if change had depended on me. Fortunately it didn’t. I was rescued without ever having to scream for help.

I was in a day centre in London checking notices, I don’t know what for, jobs perhaps. I saw my own name and photograph on the missing persons’ board and at first it didn’t make sense. I’m not missing, I thought. I’m here. I looked behind me. People were milling around the building’s entrance. Two girls shared a bag of chips in the doorway and another squatted at the bottom of the stairs picking at loose skin around her nails. She was crying silently.

I was eighteen and homeless. I lived alternately in the hostel
I’d been directed to, and an allotment shed I had found one evening on my own. I was alternately too much alone and too much in company. The allotment shed was freezing and too tiny to lie down in. The hostel beds were dirty, often noisy. People stole your things if you didn’t sleep on top of them. My post-office account was almost empty. I had no plan other than, somehow, to forget the last year. I had acquaintances but no friends. It was January and every day was colder than the one before. The tears of the girl on the stairs chilled me and my shoulders shook. How could I be missing?

The photograph had been taken in my parents’ house. Behind my hands were the edges of the crimson crocheted shawl on the sofa. There was the silhouette of the television, the glass slipper from my parents’ wedding cake on top, and yet I knew my parents were not looking for me. I could not remember who had taken this picture. I was in my bottle green school uniform with short hair, permed and bleached into a sheep’s fleece. I wore triangular pink earrings. No one would ever recognize me from that, I thought. I looked into it and felt nothing. I blinked into the eyes of the photographed me. I didn’t like her. So far off in the past, so deeply buried under time, what right had she to be using my name any more? What was she doing here? I read the message underneath. It said,
My niece is lost.
At the bottom was a London telephone number.

So Aunt Maggie was searching for me. It was a miracle. I’d looked for Maggie’s house during my first week in London but did not know her address. I had visited her a few years earlier
and knew it was a terraced house in or near Hounslow with a small park or green nearby. I’d studied maps of London and walked the streets of Hounslow till my feet were blistered and sore. The sky was black by five and I was scared of the dark so I had given up. It was as if Maggie wanted to hide from me, as if she had picked up her house and tucked it away in a pocket somewhere.
My niece is lost.
I was not lost. Maggie was lost. I was not missing, since missing meant to be trapped in the place where Julia had gone. The missing lived in a watery nowhere just outside and in between the frames of other people’s lives. I knew all about it. They couldn’t breathe but didn’t die. I was certain of this and I was not in that place.

Even so, I was not in any place worth being. I longed to sleep in a bed in a house with someone I knew on the other side of the wall. I longed for a light that I could leave on all night. I hardly dared hope that Maggie would let me stay with her but then why else was she looking for me? Maggie had never written to me or visited me since I’d gone away but she might not have known where I was. I had no idea what my parents had told her. I joined the queue for the phone box on the street. I remember feeling sick as I dialled the number, almost put down the receiver when I heard it ring, but then Maggie’s deep voice came curling up from the earpiece, as strong and seductive as cigar smoke: ‘This is Maggie speaking. Hello?’

‘It’s me, Isabel,’ I told her. ‘I’m not missing.’

*

Within an hour Maggie had arrived. She smelled of sweet perfume and looked just as I remembered her. Her auburn hair was cut short into her neck and high on top, like a pineapple. A large amethyst dangled from a chain and nestled in her cleavage. Close up I could see the freckles on her face and chest. Mascara was smudged around her eyes. She cried as she hugged me. I breathed in her perfume and coughed. I can’t think of her today without tasting that heavy, flowery scent.