Authors: Grace Wynne-Jones
My mobile phone rings. I almost leave it, but at the last minute I grab it and lift it to my ear. It’s my mother. She sounds a bit out of breath; her voice is high and unnatural. ‘Sally, dear...’
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘I thought I should phone you ... but I’m only going to tell you this if you promise not to worry.’
Oh dear God, it’s April. She’s going to say that April has reverted to her old habits and started stealing from shops and getting tattoos and drinking cider in parks. I was the one who used to check up on her; who’s checking up on her now, out there in California?
‘What is it?’ I am twitching with anxiety. ‘Tell me!’
‘It’s all under control.’ Mum is trying to sound calm. ‘They’re searching for her now. They’ll probably find her any minute. She can’t have gone far.’
‘Who?’ I am jumping up and down. ‘Is it April? Has April run off with someone she met in a singles bar?’
Mum takes a deep breath. ‘It’s Aggie. She’s gone missing from the home – they went into her room after lunch and couldn’t find her. The door must have been off the latch. She’s gone. She’s disappeared.’
Chapter
Eighteen
Where could she be
? Mum keeps saying not to worry, they’ll find her any minute, but Dad and the people from the nursing home and the police have been searching for over an hour already. How can she have gone far? She only totters very short distances with her walking frame, and that’s on a good day. She hasn’t used that frame for weeks. Most of the time she’s just been lying on the bed, propped up with pillows.
Could someone have taken her? I stare at the cars careering by. Who would want an eighty-nine-year-old woman who thinks angels are flying around her room? They’ve already been to her old home – it’s the most obvious place to look, and it’s nearby – and they’ve searched the roads that lead to it. They’ve rung up the local taxi companies to check if anyone has had a very frail and opinionated old lady as a passenger – an old lady wearing a smart navy raincoat over her nightgown. She may still be wearing her slippers. She can’t have gone far. Of course she can’t have.
But what if someone took pity on her and stopped his car and drove her somewhere – somewhere she and DeeDee used to go? That’s it: she’s gone to find DeeDee. I get an awful lurching sensation in the pit of my stomach.
‘I don’t know where DeeDee used to live,’ Mum says briskly, when I ask her.
‘Ask Marie,’ I plead. ‘Is she there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, ask her. She’ll know.’
I hear a whispered conversation.
‘She doesn’t know either.’ Mum sounds even more irritated. ‘Apparently DeeDee left home and went to some flat in Ballsbridge before she… she went off. We don’t know where the flat was.’
‘What about the family home, then – where Aggie and DeeDee were brought up?’ I suggest desperately.
‘They’ve already looked there. Try not to worry so much, dear. Of course she isn’t looking for DeeDee. She probably just decided to go for a walk. You know how addled she’s been lately. They may be trying to phone me this very minute to say they’ve found her. I’ll ring as soon as I hear anything.’ The line goes dead.
I stare at the phone in bewilderment. I must look very dazed and strange, standing by the roadside, because someone approaches me and asks me if I’m lost. She’s not Irish; I can tell from her expression, the down-at-heel look of her clothes, that she isn’t a tourist, but she knows what it feels like to stand like this, wondering where on earth to go. ‘Thank you.’ I smile at her. ‘Thank you, but… no, I’m not lost. I’m just… worried about something. A relative.’
She pats my arm gently. I can see she doesn’t really understand what I’ve said. Then she walks on.
Diarmuid. I must phone Diarmuid. He’ll be home now; around this time on Sunday afternoons, he cleans the mice’s cages. He likes to keep to a routine with them; he says it makes them more secure and comfortable. Diarmuid will calm me down. He’ll state the options, explore the possibilities, get out one of his maps and study the small side roads. He’s good at this kind of thing. He’s very organised and reassuring.
His phone is out of range again. I can’t believe it. He’s never there any more… Tears of anger spring to my eyes. He’s never been there, not really.
I can’t bear to think of Aggie lost and alone somewhere, saying crazy things to strangers. Maybe she’s forgotten who she is; even if someone wanted to help her, they wouldn’t know where to take her. Maybe she’s injured, lying somewhere, cold and shivering and desperate.
I need to sit somewhere quietly and think about the places where she might want to go. I walk in a stupor towards the beach, across the road with the whizzing cars and then along a quieter, smaller road. I look for the small shady cement path that leads to the bridge across the railway tracks and the steps down to the waterside.
I used to walk here with Aggie. She showed me this place. It was only minutes from her beautiful, rambling old house. She loved walking by the ocean with Scamp racing along in front of her. The nursing home is near here, too. That’s why she went there; people thought it would comfort her to be in a familiar area. My parents are just a quick drive down the dual carriageway, and my own seaside cottage isn’t that far away either. It’s like we all wanted to be near Aggie, near her warmth and her welcome, her shining, hopeful eyes.
I sit on the shingle and think. They’ve looked in all the obvious places, so wherever she is, it isn’t anywhere obvious. I feel I
should
know where she is, but I don’t. Maybe I should just join Mum and Marie. I’m about to get up and head for my parents’ home when, as a last resort, I decide to talk to Aggie’s angels. I know they aren’t there, but I have to talk to somebody, and maybe speaking to them in my mind will help me to calm down.
The sun is shining fitfully as the clouds scud across the sky. How do you talk to angels? I used to know how, when we lived in California. Astrid used to ask them all sorts of things – what size breasts she’d end up with, whether the turquoise powder eyeshadow suited her better than the purple cream stuff, whether Rory Bennett from the high school football team would ever kiss her. I just used to ask them if Mum and Dad would ever love each other again, and they didn’t seem to have any particular opinion on the matter.
‘Look, angel… or angels… or whatever you are,’ I whisper. ‘I’m sorry for bothering you, especially since I don’t even believe in you, but…’ I’m wondering what to say next when my mobile rings. I grab it from my bag. Maybe they’ve found her –
‘What’s up?’ It’s Nathaniel’s voice.
‘Oh… oh, it’s you.’ Why couldn’t it have been Mum saying they’d found Aggie?
‘Your message – you said to drop off the notebook, but you didn’t say where.’
I stare at the gulls gliding over the waves. ‘I thought I had. I thought I said you could leave it at Greta’s.’
‘Well, you didn’t.’
‘I’m sorry. I… I must have got distracted.’
‘What’s wrong, Sally? You sound strange.’
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I’m just… busy. Leave the notebook at Greta’s, like I meant to say. I’ll collect it tomorrow.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I have to go now.’
‘You’re by the sea. I can hear the waves. Are you thinking about DeeDee again? Is that why you’re sad?’
‘I can’t talk now, Nathaniel.’ Oh, God, I’m crying. Tears are pouring down my cheeks. ‘I really can’t talk.’
‘Why? Why can’t you talk? Why are you crying?’
‘It’s nothing. Please…’
‘I’m not going to get off the phone until you tell me.’
It doesn’t seem to occur to him that I could just switch the phone off. It doesn’t occur to me, either. ‘Aggie’s gone missing. She’s… she’s my great-aunt. She’s eighty-nine.’
‘The one who thinks her room is full of angels.’
‘Yes.’
‘Stay there. I’ll drive over and collect you, and we’ll look for her together.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘There’s every need.’
‘No, really… a whole bunch of people are looking for her.’
‘But you’re the one who knows her best,’ Nathaniel says. How does he know that? How does he know all these things I didn’t tell him? ‘Where are you?’
‘Look, Nathaniel –’
‘Where are you?’ he repeats firmly.
I tell him. I tell him because I don’t know how not to. He’s so insistent, and I need someone like him, someone who cares and wants to be here with me, someone who isn’t out of range or too busy. Erika will have her answering machine on because she’s attending to Lionel’s ankles, and I can’t phone Fiona or Zak for obvious reasons. As I sit and wait for Nathaniel, I wonder how this has happened. How can I know so many people and end up turning to a man who is almost a stranger?
Minutes later, I hear the crunching sound of his footsteps. He seems so tall and bright, standing with the sun streaming on his face, that I get the old shyness – the wish to hide and be found, all in the same moment. ‘How did you find me so quickly?’ I look into his bright-blue, honest eyes.
‘You gave me very specific instructions.’ He smiles. ‘Over the iron footbridge, along the road by the row of old grand houses, the grassy spot and the rocks and the bench… and here.’ He sits down beside me, his lanky, jean-clad legs stretching out on the shingle. ‘I know this place too. I’m staying just down the road with Greta.’
‘Oh.’ I don’t know what else to say to him. I don’t know what we’re doing here together. But I don’t have that cold feeling inside me any more, that feeling that I’m lost too and no one will ever find me. Nathaniel is so
here
, so present. I rest in the warmth of him.
‘Where do you think we should look for her?’ he says softly.
‘I don’t know. They’re looking everywhere already, all the obvious places. There’s a whole bunch of them. They should have found her by now. I just don’t understand it.’
He picks up a pebble and throws it towards the waves. ‘And what about places that aren’t obvious?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that, but I don’t know where they are. Aggie’s an obvious kind of person.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s straightforward. She’s not complicated like…’ I hesitate. ‘Like me.’
‘But now she’s old,’ Nathaniel says gently. ‘So she might be a bit more complicated than she was.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, her mind sort of strays sometimes, doesn’t it?’ He is being very tactful.
‘Yes, it does,’ I sigh. ‘She’s very different from the Aggie we used to know.’
‘So where is she?’
I have a pebble in my hand. I don’t even remember picking it up. I grip it so hard that it hurts my palm.
‘I don’t know.’ It is a whisper. I feel so helpless, as though I’m somehow letting Aggie down, failing her at the worst possible moment, by not knowing where she is.
‘If you were Aggie now, what would you be feeling?’
I stare at Howth Lighthouse in the distance; at the shimmering sea where there is no land behind it and the water seems to go on forever. ‘I can’t do this.’
‘Yes, you can.’
‘How do you know?’
He doesn’t answer.
I feel like getting up and walking away. This is pointless. We should be in his battered old car, scouring the streets, instead of sitting here talking rubbish. We should be ringing places, checking if Aggie has ended up somewhere and they don’t know what to do with her. The old Sally would tell Nathaniel to feck off… but this Sally, the one sitting beside him, can’t do that. I feel the glimmer of something. Another kind of knowing.