A Kind of Vanishing (19 page)

J
ust as Isabel had guessed, her children and their partners were in a tight group around the kitchen table vainly trying to weigh up the consequences of what Jon had dubbed with transparent enthusiasm ‘a total fuck up’. It was not that Jon lacked feeling, he had always been intent on gaining the admiration of his father-in-law, but he was at his most congruent full tilt in a crisis. This was his chance, now they would see him come into his own. The pity was that the one Ramsay he most wanted to impress was dead. In the hours after Mark was taken to hospital, everyone had vied for supremacy in practical prowess as lists were drawn up and then ripped up, and scenarios of the future were described and dismissed. Everything led back to the big question: what had really happened?

‘I doubt very much it was an accident.’ Jon had forgotten the emotional implications, so carried away was he with vaunting specialist knowledge and infinite capability. ‘There might have been time to get out of the car, if the windows were up. But he had wound them down. Besides what was he doing there? He’d had to drive out of his way to be in the pool.’

‘Of course it was an accident. That’s not up for debate.’ This from Lucian. ‘It’s summer, do you drive with the windows up in this heat?’

‘Well, I’ve got air-con so…’

‘That old car was knackered and Dad was tired, he works harder than you and I put together.’ He glared at Jon who failing to heed the beady scowl cantered on happily.

‘Hey, but you know, the great thing is that those camera tapes will tell us. Funny how we all banged on at the old man about them, and now he’s been proved right. We’ll have the whole thing on film. I’ll tell the police first thing tomorrow.’ Jon persisted in referring to Mark Ramsay as ‘the old man’, thinking it made him sound rakish and one of the family.

‘That film is none of their business. Besides, let me be the judge.’

Then Caroline, Lucian’s girlfriend who had never felt the precarious nature of her relationship with him more than now, and spurred on by Jon’s seeming disregard for Lucian’s authority, chose this moment to mention Mrs Ramsay’s ‘problems’. Alliances solidified. Lucian and Gina closed ranks and closed down the discussion.

The two out-laws made mumbled exits:

‘Check the garden, lock up the house, run baths…’

Soon after this Isabel appeared in the doorway. Her wispy and hesitant demeanour, one hand on her stomach, the other on the door jamb, brought their whispered conspiracy to a stop just as a little girl’s unwanted presence had done in the same room years before. Lucian screeched back his chair as he leapt up to pour his mother the last of the cocoa from the pan on the Rayburn into the mug that Gina snatched up off the dish rack.

After Isabel had returned to her bedroom with her drink, unable after all to bear the company of her children, Lucian and Gina stayed sitting at the table like statues keeping vigil in stony bewilderment, as the sun set on the last day in this world that included their father.

W
hen Chris had opened the bedroom door, Alice snapped shut her eyes, and pretended to be asleep until at last she heard her go away. Chris had not gone to the launderette, but Alice could hardly blame her. Her behaviour earlier that evening would have seemed peculiar, and in the morning she must make up for it. Alice lay on her back and tuned into the sounds of the building. The creaks, hisses, bangs and whines orchestrated the lives of residents as they did her own. The woman upstairs had gone to the lavatory five minutes ago. She had heard the intermittent trickling followed by a rushing of the waste pipes in the wall behind her head. Alice hated having such intimate knowledge of her neighbours, although perversely her distaste provoked a prurient obsession with these secret existences and she would listen out for them. Alice was the possessor of facts that no one else knew.

Then she heard Chris’s radio: a thin chattering interrupted by music emerging into a track she recognised, ‘London Calling’ by The Clash. She had once remarked that she liked it. Perhaps Chris would remember this and might now be thinking fondly of her. Alice wanted the music to do the work of reconciliation for her. It was unlikely. Finally there was nothing but thoughts inside the gothic Victorian tenement as it fell into uneasy night silence.

At one o’clock it was safe to get up.

Alice shrugged on her dressing gown, a size too big: a peril of mail order. Her feet fished around in the dark for slippers. Amber light from the lamppost in the quadrangle gave the living room an uncanny appearance, filtering out vitality, memories; all specificity. Alice crept in with the spatial unfamiliarity of a visitor.

She saw immediately that the casserole stain had vanished, and kneeling down she ruefully touched the damp rug in front of the fire. The gas fire was where she always heard the voices. This was how Alice knew they were real. If they had been inside her head, they would be everywhere.

At first she had assumed it was a television in one of the other flats. But then getting so close to the blue and orange flames that her cheek stung, she had worked out that they came from behind the heater and were too unruly and spasmodic to be scripted. Arguing. Shouting. Soothing tones of making up. There was a child crying, a voice that might be a man interrupting. Sometimes the voices weren’t talking to each other, but speaking in isolation, like a bedtime story or a stern lecture and then the boy or girl laughing or perhaps crying. Alice rarely caught actual words although she was certain they were speaking in English from the inflections. If Alice did hear words, like
exceptional, beautiful, special,
they were like her own thoughts.

Alice hadn’t yet told Chris about the voices but did wonder if she had heard them too. Chris would be matter of fact and say they’d come from next door. But there was a stairwell on the other side of the chimney and the voices were constant, not those of passers by. At other times she liked to imagine they were the inhabitants of the world inside the mirror. Now she put out her hand and touched the wall above the fire. Perhaps they had been trapped inside the wall. Was she hearing their ghosts forever calling, pleading, destined never to be heard or believed? Perhaps it was the people who had lived here a hundred years before. Or was it that all rooms were busy with the palimpsest natter of past conversations that the living were mostly too preoccupied to hear? Mostly Alice couldn’t think of the place beyond the gas fire as a brick tomb. She preferred it to be a room with pools of lamplight and filled with easy companionship. There were no voices tonight.

Alice had not got up to hear the voices; grabbing the newspaper she settled on the sofa, and less cautious, switched on the light.

The White House had been at its best in the summer: draped in laburnum and lilac, lattice windows flung wide, hanging baskets shapeless with so many frowsy blooms. But in the photograph the line of the diving board led the eye away from this backdrop to a large green car hanging from a crane over the water.

The word suicide was not used in the article. Lucian Ramsay insisted his father was happy. Mark Ramsay loved his family. She frowned at the gas fire; did loving people make you happy? It seemed that he had rammed his car through a fence into a swimming pool. She knew he was a strong swimmer. He had taught all his children to swim. All the Ramsays knew how to get out of their pyjamas and up to the surface in less than a minute. Alice had always been mocking. She had asked Eleanor what the point of it was. If you were in bed, why would you be likely to drown? She had argued that getting out of daytime clothes would be more realistic. Alice thought this now.

She knew how to escape from a car underwater. She had heard Dave Allen explaining it on the radio. She knew to wait until the car was almost full of water and the pressure inside the same as the pressure outside, then push open the door and swim out. Simple.

Suddenly Alice heard a voice. This time she was certain it was a girl. She was like a conspirator, hissing out words. Alice hitched up the sleeve of her dressing gown and wrapped smartly on the wall. Three times.
‘Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me…’
The voice stopped.

It wasn’t until Alice was back in bed that she found she was hugging the newspaper to her chest. She didn’t let go and during the remainder of the night was partially woken by crackling as she turned over. Never asleep, yet not properly awake, her thoughts were tall and thin like evening shadows.

They would look for her again. Mark Ramsay’s death would have reminded them about her. Now more than ever it was important to stay hidden. But if she didn’t want to feel forever a fugitive she must take matters into her own hands. In the middle of this, she fell into fitful sleep.

When she awoke in the morning, Alice decided that despite the risks she would go to Mark Ramsay’s funeral.

K
athleen nearly lost her in Marks and Spencer’s. She was cross with herself, there was no excuse, she had been distracted for the pettiest of reasons. Spitting muttered admonishments she scoured the store. The sign had been practically waving to get her attention.

Everything 60% off!

Kathleen looked this way and that. Now she saw that the sales notice had been a test, thrown like a smoke bomb into her path, luring her to be taken in and lose the little girl. One glance at the blouses on the rack, their silky tendrils cool to the touch, and she had been caught in the spell. She had been doing so well, snaking adroitly between islands of clothes carousels, and towers of crockery, and CD racks. Now, she looked desperately about her for long fair hair and that bouncy step that had always put them in mind of a pony.

Always helpful, always cheerful; never in a bad mood. Always.

The shop was busy with rush-hour adults pushing and shoving, and amidst all this the child had vanished. Kathleen should not have taken her eye off her for a second. Normally she was so good. But today her heart was not in it. Indeed for once it wasn’t her reason for being in the store. She had made herself go out, if only for Doctor Ramsay’s sake, he had always been so encouraging about not giving up.

Kathleen had learnt to ignore what wasn’t important. She blinked, trying to read a placard suspended from the ceiling by thin wire, but couldn’t make out the words. She ought to get her eyes seen to but there was no time. Each morning was taken up with preparations and making sure she left the house with everything she needed for the day. In all this she had neglected herself. Her sight was a vital tool of the trade. She could not afford to ignore it.

Practise by walking down the street, fixing your focus on a point in the distance. Anything will do: a postbox, a leaf. Begin with objects yards ahead, then move on to further away. It would be ideal to begin with a flat place, perhaps the horizon where the earth meets the sky or lines converge. The vanishing point. At no time let your attention stray. If your point of focus is a leaf, do not look anywhere else until you are upon that leaf. You will find this harder than you expect. Small things will conspire to distract you. You will distract yourself. You are your worst enemy.

The blouse was too good to miss. Reduced by so much and with one in her size. Clothes usually went by the board, there was never time to buy things. Kathleen was size ten now. How her younger size-twelve-self would have envied her.

No one envied her.

Kathleen ran the material through her middle finger and wedding ring finger. It was so soft, like butterfly wings, soft like the snippet of baby hair in her locket. Then she lifted the blouse from the rail and held it away from herself. She had to provide her own objective view. She had no shopping companion.

It would look lovely on you, Mum. Try it on.

The buttons were as delicate as shell, although they would be too fiddly for her. The slate blue was her shade: the colour of her eyes a teacher had once said. She had a skirt and an old navy pair of trousers it would go very well with. Surely, at sixty-four she wasn’t too old. The shirt might make her feel young. This put Kathleen off; she had a fear of becoming a grotesque parody of herself thirty years ago. When she put on her make-up she sometimes had to quell the urge to trace the cracks on her face with her eyeliner pencil. Stark, black curves, implacable dashes would criss-cross her face, then she would colour the jagged shapes inside the lines with bright red lipstick and green mascara to make a component face held together by her determination to get through each day.

She must be alive when Alice came back.

It was at this point, the blouse scrunched up soft against her face, that Kathleen had remembered the girl. Where had she gone? Darting forward, she changed her mind and stepped back down the aisle she had come along. Which way? Her tufted head pecking back and forth, her slate blue eyes trained to the honed skill of a store detective.

The little girl was nowhere to be seen.

She shoved the shirt back on the rack, and hurried in the direction she had last seen her.

When you have nothing to go on, rely on logic.

Kathleen had learnt to bank on predictable behaviour. If the girl had doubled back then she would never find her. All the time she grumbled childlike substitutions for swearing.
Flip. Sugar. Drat! Fool! Idiot!
Tissue-wrapped words kept along with the carefully cleaned toys arranged in greeting for the wanderer returned.

How could she have let herself be side-tracked? It was out of character. The second time in two days.

Doctor Ramsay’s death had set her back.

Kathleen’s battery was draining away. Sometimes as she followed the pre-ordained paths, the red biro routes she plotted out in her
A to Z
each morning, she agreed with the newspaper readers, the train travellers, brick dusted builders and ungenerous housewives who all judged her delusional. Yet they would be there to shout and throw eggs in her name if there was a grey-blanket covered culprit to whisk from car to courthouse.

With no body, there was no culprit. Perhaps, just perhaps, no crime.

As Kathleen pushed past a group of women examining a maypole of bras, she caught her ankle on a buggy parked between nightwear and swimwear. The child had pulled one of the nightdresses over itself, and was hiding patiently, waiting for its mother to find it under the lacy tent. Kathleen caught hold of the buggy’s rubber handle to stop herself toppling on to it and the mother tore stormy-faced out of the scrum, bras dangling like exotic fronds, as the toddler – nightie snatched off with magician swiftness to reveal a boy – embarked on an obligatory howl. There was no time to explain, so holding her bag to her chest, Kathleen ploughed on to the food section. It was her last hope. The girl could already have left the shop.

There she was.

Kathleen stopped and gathered her breath. A girl of about eight was standing on one leg by the prepared salads, singing peacefully to herself. Her blonde hair was newly washed and beautifully brushed. It was much too short. Her dress was a lovely pink, but spoiled by a thick stripe of black that went like a sash over her back and over her shoulder. Sidling closer, Kathleen could see it was just a giant tee-shirt and looked cheap. Her black sandals had thick soles like bricks and were too high for her age. They were really quite ugly. If Kathleen had been with her when she chose them she could have talked her out of buying them.

If you want to have pretty feet when you’re older, look after them now.

She drew nearer to the girl. There were tattoos on her wrists. She supposed they would wash off, no one was allowed to tattoo an eight-year-old. These days they could make them so life-like. She would tell her, tattoos were for fat old men.

‘Tut tut.’

The little girl whirled around, whipping her hands away from the bags of watercress with which she had been idly playing shops. She stared up at Kathleen. She had freckles on her nose and her mouth was wrong, too wide, too mocking. There was no recognition in the defensive glance, only puzzlement and worse: fear.

She was not Alice. Nothing could make her Alice.

Kathleen stepped into the space made by the girl, who had dashed off to become a limpet on her mother’s trolley and was wheeled away with kicking heels. Kathleen picked up the bag of watercress the girl had dropped and joined the nearest queue. She would soak her feet in a bowl of water with Friars Balsam when she got home, and sip a lovely hot cup of tea.

For The Best Mum in the whole world with lots and lots of love from your Alice.

With extra sugar as today she was more tired than usual.

A young man leaning on the rail of his heaped trolley noted the elderly woman lost in a zipped up waterproof clutching a bag of salad with both hands, like a kid with a prize. The idea of his Gran shopping on her own, her list lost along with her direction, flitted like Reuters ticker-tape across his busy mind. It was a humiliating fate for the fantastic woman who twenty-five years ago had plunged into teeming traffic to snatch up a runaway three-year-old from the wheels of a bus. Her newspaper photo was framed in his mother’s kitchen.
‘The Have-A-Go-Granny’.
As the thought-tape fell in coils among the rich pickings of his hectic life, it conjured up his brushed, tightly-coated, clean-eared self teetering on the kerbside for her to return and take hold of his hand. He straightened up and shifting the heavy trolley aside, motioned the old woman through. To his astonishment, she assumed he was telling her off and hesitated before making sense of his gesture. A packet of watercress shuddered its way up the belt to the cashier. They both stared at it as if tacitly agreeing that even her shopping testified against her. He wanted to cry as she handed the cashier her money, the coins dipped for from a chunky leather purse. As he watched, her right hand began to shake while she waited for her receipt and shopping. Suddenly she stretched forward and lifted up one of the boxes of meringue nests he had stacked next to three chardonnays for the price of two. Surely she wasn’t going to nick it?

‘They love these, don’t they! My Alice can eat a whole box, you have to keep an eye, don’t you.’

‘Ah. Yes. Way too much sugar, but for a birthday…’ He breathed as she replaced the box exactly where she had found it, handling it cautiously as if it were a pet mouse.

‘I make my own. Once Steve got me the Kenwood, there was no going back! No use with a hand whisk, you can’t get the stiff peaks.’

‘I don’t do desserts. My Gran…’ Later he had no idea why he felt the need to introduce his dead grandmother into the conversation: perhaps she was his passport to credibility. A woman of the same species.

The old woman wasn’t listening, she retrieved her shopping and melted out of his vision as he was forced to dive into the frenzy of keeping up with the cashier and defend his personal challenge that they never had to wait for his money.

Months later the man would linger over a picture in the
Independent on Sunday
, unsure why the old woman’s face was familiar, before shaking out the business section and moving on.

When she got home Kathleen stuffed the watercress in the salad compartment of the fridge. She didn’t eat watercress. Not being an adventurous salad maker she stuck to the islands of lettuce, a spoonful of cold baked beans, a halved tomato and small blob of salad cream she had always made for Alice. She frequently came home with unwanted purchases bought to mask disappointment or explain strange behaviour.

Kathleen Howland was aware that people thought her unbalanced. Children in the village treated her warily, even adults who knew her well avoided her if they could, crossing streets, or leaving shops when they saw her coming. She helped them by looking away as they pretended to have forgotten something, patting pockets, rootling in bags, in exaggerated mimes before excusing themselves. She saw through these charades and wanted to assure them it was fine. She might do the same if things were different. If, as the saying went, the boot was on the other foot. She had read about women like herself in the papers so she knew she wasn’t alone.

Finally Kathleen did not care what anyone thought and this was one thing that was better than before. Now she could do what she liked without worrying if it was the right way, the right colour or the right accent. She was beyond right and wrong. Her life sentence had set her free.

She shut her ears to the chorus of public opinion of gaping mouths and simple minds.

Move on, it’s what she would have wanted. Start a campaign. Work for a charity. Change the world so that it doesn’t happen to other mothers.

Kathleen would start by explaining, if she had the chance, that she knew quite well that Alice was not eight any more. Alice had been missing for thirty-one years and four days. Kathleen would be the first to agree that to stalk a little girl through a shopping precinct because she looked like Alice, was the action of an unbalanced mind.

Two months after Alice disappeared in June 1968, Kathleen had been sure she would find it impossible to survive in a world without her. There were no floors or supporting walls. With no meal times or baths to run, no clothes to wash and iron, no school bag to pack or spelling tests to take, daily life had collapsed. She could not carry on without gravity, with the clocks stilled as time slipped stealthily past uncleaned windows, leaving only dust as proof of progress.

Kathleen did not see Alice all the time. She did not follow every child who might be Alice. For example, she no longer hung around outside the school or sat in the spectators’ gallery at the local swimming pool where there were plenty of young girls laughing and shouting. Alice didn’t like swimming. She loved school, but Kathleen knew the staff would ring if she came back. They had rung Kathleen at the surgery when Alice broke her arm. Teachers could tell when children weren’t right even when the children themselves made no fuss. She trusted them with her child. Alice had not cried with her green stick fracture; not wanting to miss maths, she had sat for two hours white with the pain. As a girl, Kathleen would have welcomed any excuse to miss maths. She had admired her daughter’s stoic efficiency, her easy intelligence and had stood helpless listening as Alice instructed her teacher how much food to give the fish – relinquishing her post of Pet Monitor – her face pinched and white as she clasped her limp arm. In that moment Kathleen had seen the woman Alice would one day be: a cleverer, calmer, more competent adult than herself. It was an exciting, yet disturbing, vision and Kathleen had been deliriously happy when Alice burst into tears that evening and asked for hot chocolate Nesquik. As she watched Alice take sniffing sips she had secretly welcomed her small daughter back.

It was that little girl Kathleen was determined to find. Somewhere, in a competent adult living out her life, the little girl who was Alice must exist.