But, of course, then he comes back through the door with his shoulders hunched as though against a great wind and I can see the tears that are shivering in his eyes, ready to fall.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
‘Mum.’ His voice is heavy, like tar. ‘She’s had a fall. It sounds bad. Alex said she’s been taken to hospital. Thank God he was there.’
I pick up my phone. I have to do this. It’s going to eat me up if I don’t.
‘William, I—’
‘I’m sorry, Frances. Can we just – I need to . . .’
Inside me a coldness blooms, like a bite of snow.
Samantha – Now
There’s a new man working in the shop today. I like him. He smiles and charms and calls me ‘madam’. He doesn’t know me, so there is none of the bottomless sympathy that I often see in the eyes of people who know about what happened. I’m so used to seeing it I notice when it is absent. Like gravity.
This man is pleasant, although you can tell he’s bored already. He’s young, and this is just a job to cruise on, to get by. Just enough to pay his rent and get him out at the weekend maybe. Parties with his friends, some booze and some cigarettes, maybe some – I don’t know, what is it now? Ecstasy? Is that still popular? I don’t think anyone takes speed any more, do they? Whatever it is now. I never have to go through this with Edie – I suppose in a way that’s lucky. She’s frozen, isn’t she? She’ll never come home in the back of one of her friends’ parents’ cars, stinking of alcohol with sick in her hair. She’ll never fall pregnant at school, get mugged or get raped. She won’t settle for less than she’s worth or marry someone who likes the fear on her face when he hits her. I won’t ever have to smile and pretend I like her new tattoo, her life choices or her baby names. Is that meant to make me feel lucky? I don’t know.
Today my skin feels heavy and cold like clay. I’m a golem, conjured to life. I leave the shop and walk alongside the river, which is peaty-brown and fast-moving. Overhead are drifts of white clouds, as fine as lace.
I cried this morning, for the first time in a long time. A boy, up in Manchester. Eleven years old. He’d been missing over a week, his body eventually discovered weighted and dropped like an anchor in the canal. They had arrested the boy’s uncle. The news footage showed him driven into court in one of those vans with the blacked-out windows. People were throwing things at it, shouting. One man had a placard that said Burn In Hell. The crowd were chanting, ‘Die, scum, die.’ I found tears on my cheeks and wiped them away with the back of my hand.
In the days when Edie first went missing I was raw with a kind of undernourished grief, like the throb of a toothache. Back then I cried the same way, with a frequency and desperation I was only half aware of. Some days I would find myself in a queue at the supermarket or bent over a crossword and be surprised to discover my face wet with tears.
I had a grief counsellor, for a while. Some sessions my GP had organised for me. A leaflet and a cup of tea in a polystyrene cup in a small beige room that smelled of yeast and damp cloth. She didn’t last long. I’ve visited several on and off over the years, when finances will allow. They fill a need in me to be heard. To say Edie’s name in the stillness of the room. Right now, though, I am quite calm, feeling a strange sense of disintegrating, as though I’m floating apart. ‘Dissociation’, my last counsellor called it. She was worried that I wasn’t confronting my feelings, but I’ve had nearly eighteen years to confront my feelings – because that’s how long it’s been now since my little girl walked out of the door. A Thursday, October the ninth in the year 1997. Spice Girls and Titanic and Princess Diana dying in a dark Parisian tunnel and Tony Blair and Pokémon and my daughter, Edie.
I take the path across the large playing field, away from the river. From here I leave the town behind. Straight ahead past the industrial estate upon which squat concrete blocks: housing offices, carpet warehouses, depots. A thicket of brambles and nettles grows through the diamond-shaped fencing adjacent to the road, pushing through the gaps hungrily, with purpose. Serrated edges and spikes and bristles, fine white hairs that make your skin itch. The dust eddies and rises in the low breeze. Even the weeds here are virulent, rooted in the cracks of the pavement and along the side of the road in thick handfuls. I marvel at their tenacity.
I heard about the ambulance at Thorn House last night. My friend Theresa phoned me. It’s a small town, you see, and news is passed on the old way, on a grapevine. She told me its lights had been on but the sirens had not, and it had moved slowly, like a hearse.
‘Do you think she’s dead?’ Theresa asked me and I answered, ‘I hope not. I like Mimi. She taught at Edie’s school. She was the only teacher there who—’ Could stand her, I thought. I left the space empty, and Theresa glided smoothly over it, and the conversation moved on.
Still, later I found myself thinking of Mimi’s son for the first time in years. Back then he was a young man with a mess of dark hair he had a habit of pulling at, a boy who looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I swear on my mother’s life, Mrs Hudson, I don’t know anything about your daughter’, as I pressed the knife against his neck.
I walk until the road narrows and rises up, up away from the fields that cloak the valley and form the edge of the Sussex Downs. The church of St Mary de Castro is near the top of the hill at the back of a terrace of cottages. While the church is small, the grounds surrounding it are broad and ancient, with some of the yews and oaks that grow densely on the edges over five hundred years old. In parts, some of the graves are little more than hummocks in the earth, lumpen headstones marking victims of cholera and consumption and the plague.
I enter the graveyard through the old iron gates and walk through the grounds to where the trees start to thicken and crowd in overhead, freckling the pathway with sunlight. Above, a magpie barks in its harsh, staccato way. Below my feet the ground is spongy and soft with decay.
I find the place the same way I always find it. Back here the grounds aren’t maintained like the rest of the churchyard and the ferns and long grass tangle around my ankles. The large yew tree is many-limbed and sinuous, broad as a bus, trunk mottled with age. A few graves huddle in front of it, thrown crooked by the questing roots ploughing into the earth. I am not interested in graves. I come here because it was the last place Edie was seen the night she disappeared. Her friends told of how she walked into this dark grove of trees and never came out again.
I put my hand on the yew. It is smooth and warm and strong. Here at the base is a patch of bare earth no bigger than a dinner plate. It is the only spot that is free of weeds. I clear it as often as I can, which isn’t as often as I’d like. Today there is a cluster of dandelions, which I pull up and discard. They drift away like little ghosts. I’ve buried things here, in the absence of a body, of a coffin or a grave. Little things.
When she was younger Edie would dig in the garden, shallow graves for strange treasures she’d collected. I would find them half-buried, sometimes months later. Little china animals, tiny pipe-cleaner dolls, coins, a hairbrush. I found something eleven years after she vanished, while I was digging manure into the roses: a pink-and-red plastic bracelet, the elastic turned to grey, the beads cracked and faded. The shock, like being winded, was as great as if she’d walked back through the door again. I saw stars and sat down abruptly into the freshly turned flower bed. I sat with the bracelet pressed against my lips until the shadows had lengthened and the Siamese cat from next door began coiling about my calves, crying plaintively.