A Kind of Vanishing (12 page)

‘Can you think of anything else to tell us, Eleanor?’ Richard the Policeman began dropping the sweets back into the bag one by one with precise movements. Isabel and Eleanor followed each sweet. Last of all, he put the lid back on his pen with a click and stabbed it into the breast pocket of his jacket. Eleanor made a mental note to practise this later with Lucian’s school blazer.

Was there anything else? She furrowed her brow. There was the old railway line that led from the Mill to the halt where the grain was picked up. There were the remains of the Mill Owner’s house, with its empty rooms and flying fireplace. The sand at the end of the beach was dotted here and there with polished pebbles that were engulfed by the incoming tide. But these and other things were secrets she could not tell them. At another of their meetings she did say that when she went down to the beach to see if Alice was there, it was empty, adding quickly that of course she couldn’t say for sure. For good measure she emphasised that no cars passed by the triangular field while she was hiding and that she suspected Alice of interfering with her den because it was very tidy.

Eleanor said nothing that helped him find Alice.

Chief Inspector Hall told Eleanor she could go and play, and that they might talk again.

Eleanor’s bare legs were stuck to the leather chair, and stung like nettles as she climbed down. She mooched into the garden and sat on the camp bed left under Uncle Jack’s tree. She couldn’t think what to play. This disconsolate feeling was unfamiliar. Anyone looking down from an upstairs window would have seen a small girl robbed of spirit, thin shoulders bowed under a bewildering weight. The house was at its best in the late afternoon sunshine, its leaded windows were blocks of molten gold and its white stucco translucent.

Eleanor did not think of her stories as lying, they were true to her and she made them true to others too. She had written a piece for Miss Skoda on the summer holidays last year. She had said how she and Isabel found shells on the beach and picked flowers for the sitting room mantelpiece. Miss Skoda said it was wonderful how she had remembered every detail. Miss Skoda did not know that Isabel had been away on one of the trips when she never sent a postcard. She didn’t know Isabel hated collecting things like shells and flowers. She didn’t know that Isabel hated dawdling and she hated clutter. If she had known, perhaps Miss Skoda would have guessed Eleanor had made it up.

Eleanor often returned to that story about the beach. It made her happy.

Mummy found a shell buried deep down in the sand and washed it clean in the sea until it was pink and white and shiny. She kissed it three times for luck and held it to my ear for me to hear the sea. She said it was a potent spell and to feel the magic. She put it in my pocket and told me to keep it forever.

Eleanor hid the shell in her Box of Secrets.

The story about Alice would be easy to write.

Alice and Eleanor had played hide and seek. It was Eleanor’s turn to hide so she had hidden. With the dragons and robbers and magic spells there was plenty to put in. She need not mention the Mill; or the Mill Owner; or what happened if villagers got home late from the pub. She need say nothing about the chatting voices of the workers in the Granary that made her think of pigeons. She would leave out the sharp scream of the seagull and how she knew that Alice had stolen her amulet. None of this made a happy story.

When Eleanor gazed up at the sky laced with speeding wispy clouds, the house appeared to be falling on top of her. 

‘… six… seven… eight… nine… ten!’

A
t each count Alice inched further round, taking care to let her hair fall forward so Eleanor wouldn’t see her eyes were open. When she was facing the other way, she could see Eleanor running towards the hedge by the triangular cornfield. Alice felt no qualms about looking. It was unfair of Eleanor to choose such difficult hiding places. Alice wouldn’t have known where to start if she had not seen which direction she went in. Besides this, she could not admit she hated shutting her eyes, even to sleep. She could not confess the terror that had closed in on her as she counted. After Eleanor had vanished into the hedge there were crackles and snaps like a fight going on in the bushes, and through strands of hair Alice saw the branches sway. Then they stopped and it was quiet. It was always quiet in the country. More than ever she wished they had stayed in Newhaven where even at night there would be dogs calling to each other over the gardens, footsteps on the street and the bleak mooing of the foghorn for the ferry.

The little girl remained in the lane, enervated by heat and immobilised by the misery of playing with someone she didn’t like. Eleanor would say she was mad if she started counting again, but Alice could think of no other way to put off looking for her. She knew exactly where to go and she didn’t want to find her. Eleanor would be cross to be found so quickly and might even accuse her of cheating. All she wanted was to go home and play with her Sindy dolls who were proper friends.

The sun burned the back of her neck, as she gazed absently at the web of cracks in the ditch: an earthquake for ants. The cracks widened and she realised she was swaying in the intense heat. She slapped the itchy prickles of sweat on her forehead. She was tired and messy which would upset her Mum. How far away her home seemed, even though there were the roofs of the cottages peeping out from behind the trees where the lane bent towards the village, ending with the church. She could walk, one step at a time, towards the beckoning chimneys and find her house. Then she would be safe.

If she balanced on her toes like Gina she could take a beaker down from the kitchen cupboard next to the shelf where her Mum had arranged the cat plates that were a present for Alice’s last birthday from her Brighton Nana. Alice could easily reach that high as everyone marvelled that she was tall for her age. She didn’t need to get on a chair. The cupboard door would creak, first low then high, as she pushed it shut. The tap would splash and splutter, wetting her face as she turned it up to make a waterfall thundering into the sink. If no one was there she could drink the water in great gulps not caring about cold liquid on her tummy. She had done it before and nothing had happened to her. She would tiptoe into the hallway, and give the barometer a tap to see if it was going to rain so she could stay at home and not go back to the Ramsays’. Then she would run quickly up the steep staircase and hide in her new bedroom. Eleanor would never find her.

It would be the first place that Eleanor would look.

Alice nearly didn’t hear the car. At first she thought the soft purring was an aeroplane, then remembering Tufty Club rules, she hurried to the side of the lane, as close to the hedge as she could be, without tipping into the ditch. She stood stiff and still, to face the oncoming traffic and be visible to the driver. A green car shot around the corner and its big silver bumper drove right at her.

She froze. As it got nearer, Alice saw there was plenty of room for it to pass and it was only the way the road looked in the heat that made it seem as if it was coming to run her down. She didn’t know if she was pleased that the driver was Doctor Ramsay.

Alice was wary of Eleanor’s family. If she had been able to be honest, or had more confidence, she would have recognised dislike but it was a fact in the village that everyone liked the Ramsays. It was impossible for Alice to articulate an opposite feeling even to herself and so she sought other reasons for her dread as she nibbled her Shreddies each morning that half term, before going up to the big house with the tall iron gates to play with Eleanor Ramsay.

It seemed to Alice that the Ramsays were everywhere at once, making loud jokes she didn’t understand in funny voices. Back at home, she told herself she would do a funny voice when she next went, but when she was at the White House, she could hardly speak. It was quite impossible to do something that might make Gina laugh or cause Lucian (who she dare not call Luke) to say ‘affirmative’ in a slow American accent. Alice would croak ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and her cheeks burned as Eleanor’s Mum told Eleanor to behave more like Alice in a voice that might have been joking. She expected Eleanor to be angry later, but she never was. In fact Eleanor didn’t look at her at all and spoke to the doors and windows beyond which she insisted there were spies and murderers. It made Alice worried that there were things she didn’t know, or worse that no one cared about what she did know. Alice had nerved herself up to refuse exploring a jungle that was a settee or fly to the moon in funny plastic chairs that looked as if they had come from the moon in the first place. By the end of two days of playing it seemed impolite to keep saying no, so on that Sunday afternoon, with home time on the horizon, Alice had felt bound to agree to do hide and seek.

As Doctor Ramsay got nearer, Alice considered hiding, but it was too late. The great car slid up to her, filling up the lane, blocking her in. Her face glided to a stop in the reflection of the window, pigtails sticking out like ears in the gleaming glass. Then the window was wound down and inch by inch she jerked out of sight. Eleanor’s father leaned across the passenger seat, with his white teeth lined up in neat rows, and his lips stretched back as he strained to hold the window winder. Alice fixed on the long arms, brown and smooth like a woman’s, with no hairs. These were doctor’s arms. Everything – his very deep voice, his big car and his black sunglasses – were to do with being a doctor. She eyed the outstretched arm. There were some freckles speckling the wrist and twisting blue veins criss-crossed up around the arm, and along the fingers. She imagined them hard to the touch like string. Her own Dad didn’t have veins and his arms were thicker and covered in hair that she stroked and patted as he held her tight around the waist and ordered her to climb off his lap, their words a wellworn ritual.

‘Hop off now.’

‘I can’t move!’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why. You’re holding on to me so I can’t escape.’

‘Stuff and nonsense. Shelves don’t put themselves up.’

‘Alice!’ Doctor Ramsay spoke to the road, like Eleanor did. She looked where he was looking but there was nothing. The strong sunlight made everything wobble. Surreptitiously she steadied herself on his car. The door was burning hot. She let go and rubbed her fingers in her other hand.

‘Yes, it is me.’ She straightened her dress and put her feet together with ankles touching. She must be on her best behaviour: the doctor was a busy man. His time was precious. Her Mum had said there was no such thing as ‘time off’ for doctors. Alice pictured Doctor Ramsay, always awake, always curing people with glasses of water and ice-lolly sticks on the tongue like the doctor at her Mum’s surgery who wouldn’t take out her tonsils because he said they were valuable.

‘Do you need a lift? Or are you on some big adventure!’ He laughed at an invisible joke. Learning now, quick as a flash, Alice laughed too.

‘I’m with Eleanor. We’re playing.’ She was intrigued at the prospect of riding in his green car. Doctor Ramsay could rescue her from Eleanor. Then Alice’s manners got the better of her. It wasn’t fair to leave her hiding. Alice imagined clasping the silver handle, and pulling open the door. It was so close. She’d tell her Dad she had ridden like a princess on the magnificent seats. Through the window came a smell that both scared and lured her: a mix of cigarette smoke, leather and a sharp scent she had smelled on the doctor before. Her mother had said it was aftershave. When she had asked her Dad why he didn’t smell like it, he snorted that it was a stupid expense and what was wrong with smelling like a man?

Alice furtively scratched the back of her calf with her foot, balancing perfectly on one leg. The Ramsays scared her. It was not fear like ‘murder in the dark’ or the fluttering dread of waiting for her turn to read in class. These were bad enough, but she could deal with them. Nor was it the disappointment of a hope shattered as the high jump bar clattered to the ground when she failed to jump three feet, seven inches at the heats for the county championships. The way Alice felt when she saw the Ramsays was worse because the Ramsays were supposed to be great fun.

This was a world where although people talked in English they made no sense, and where they saw nothing wrong with drinking milk straight from the bottle, smoking cigarettes in every room and calling people rude nicknames.

At home, as Alice vigorously brushed the nylon locks on her Sindy dolls before bedtime, she imagined helping Gina with her horse, polishing the tack, carrying her things, mucking out, sweeping up, brushing down. She would hold clever conversations with Lucian, so detailed that she was disorientated to find she was still in her bedroom and not walking through the village on his arm, or helping him catch fish by the river. She whispered to the Sindys that Lucian was in love with her and that every morning she lifted a letter off the mat that implored her to marry him and be the next Mrs Ramsay. She told them he came past her house each night and blew her secret kisses over the dining room table at the Ramsays’. She practised her name in the back of her diary with the Cliff Richard on the cover: ‘Alice Ramsay, Alice Ramsay, Alice Ramsay’ in intricate coloured letters with her Christmas felt pens. If she were married to Lucian she wouldn’t stay in bed all day like the other Mrs Ramsay.

When she was with the Ramsays, Alice was a standard lamp stuck in the corner, her limbs wooden and her neck stiff, so that easy things like drinking orange juice became difficult and daunting. Lucian never noticed her. He once passed her in the street without returning her tentative greeting. She guessed he didn’t remember who she was and was mortified.

It seemed to Alice that Eleanor’s family was constantly doing things. They were important people always expected somewhere: opening the fête, captaining the cricket team, winning the gymkhana, climbing trees and walls and driving off in their car with a bang of doors and a tooting horn. With Gina as her sister, Alice would go riding and Gina would stick up for her in squabbles. When he wasn’t her husband, Lucian was her brother, getting into fights for her and letting her carry his rods.

The foundation for Alice’s dreams about Lucian were built around the day he gave her a bubble gum after they literally bumped into each other in the village store. Lucian stepped backwards on to her foot. She had been nonplussed as he shot out a grubby hand and, opening his fingers, revealed the gum. Bazooka Joe: the neatly wrapped block that smelled sweetly delicious that she never dared to buy. She thanked him properly and accepted it. Instantly she was stunned. Bubble gum would kill her. If she swallowed it, her Mum said it would tangle itself around her intestines until she died. She gasped:

‘Thank you very much, Lucian. I really love bubble gum.’

‘Yeah, well. I’ve got lots.’ Lucian pushed a pink covered tongue briefly out of his mouth as if there was no such thing as rude.

Alice said she would save it as it was nearly lunchtime. Lucian shrugged and told her that it was up to her. Alice saved it for a day, taking it out after her parents had said ‘good night’ and closed her bedroom door. At first she was careful to keep it hidden, but then she was worried it would give her away, so sugary-pink smelling with the coloured paper that concealed a shiny comic strip. The bubble gum was a gift from one of Eleanor’s demons and she had been tricked into accepting it. Finally Alice couldn’t sleep for the guilt. Even if she buried her face under the blankets the heavy sickly smell seeped out from the bottom of her toy cupboard. That morning she had thrown it in the bin, burying it under bits of rubbish to stop it rising to the surface. She could not forget the noise Lucian had made in the road when they came out of the shop. A barking that was not funny, though she had laughed. Alice hadn’t known what to do as he staggered backwards with his arms sticking out like a sleep-walker, balancing on the edge of the kerb. At last he had run off without saying goodbye.

Alice laughed when the Ramsays laughed, but never knew why. They made up words for things and spoke in peculiar accents like foreigners. They called her names like ‘Alicia’ and ‘Allegro’ and said it was ‘splendid’ and ‘fabulous’ that she had moved into the village. When the doctor and Mrs Ramsay left the room, Lucian and Eleanor would chuck sweets or grapes at each other, and dance around calling out rude words. Fruit Salad chews flew like bullets across the lounge, pinging against windows, disappearing under the stained sofa, and once hitting Alice on the side of the head so that she had to laugh louder. She had been miserable when Lizzie told them all to calm down, especially Alice who should know better. Alice had ogled at Lizzie, like a prisoner straining behind a gag, desperately trying to convey with her eyes that it was nothing to do with her.

The Ramsays’ house was messy and muddled, and from the first day Alice had felt sorry for the doctor, who must hate it. There was dust on the window seats in the playroom, and piles of books on the floor in the living room. She had thought they were moving out and had started packing. Alice had begun writing her name in the dust, but stopped. Her mother said it was better to leave a room as if she had never been there, with everything put back in its place. The kitchen table had criss-cross scratches all over it because they had no tablecloth. The Ramsays didn’t mind about scorches from hot pans or the dents from knives and forks. Her Mum would have been upset for guests to see these marks, but they didn’t care. Yet her Mum was surely right, guests did notice dents and had opinions. Alice was a guest and she had noticed them. The Ramsays never bothered with what guests thought. As she had tucked down to sleep the night before, Alice recognised, in a scalping of innocence, that her parents were wrong. This revelation overturned her world.