A Kind of Vanishing (24 page)

Just as Jackie raised a peremptory hand in farewell, she hesitated and Kathleen was looking at the young woman who she had last seen in her kitchen three decades earlier, fussing with a dishcloth over the draining board. Jackie relented and said:

‘I’ll ring.’

This time Kathleen knew enough to understand that Jackie would never ring. But now she didn’t need her to. It was a chapter closed. What she had seen in the film was none of her business.

Kathleen turned to the gravestone Jackie had been reading. There was nothing special about it. A man called Leonard had died aged eighty-one, two years after Alice had gone missing. The inscription read that he was reunited with his wife who had ‘fallen asleep’ over forty years before him. The name rang a bell, but as with so many things, Kathleen couldn’t place it.

She was tired and could do with falling asleep herself. She leaned against the warm buttress and waited until everyone had left and she was alone, listening once more to the organist, and shutting her eyes to better hear the bell tolling for the doctor. Then before her drugs wore off and her feet already beginning to stick to the ground, she made her way out to the lane.

If Kathleen had trusted her balance enough to turn round and look behind her, she would have seen an inconspicuous figure in dark clothes climbing over the low wall under the oak tree, and then keeping their head down, make off across the triangular field towards the station.

E
ventually, far off in the future, Chris would come to think of Tuesday 29th June as the start of her new life. But most of the day had been the same as any other. The only difference was that she had to go home on foot because two cars had collided under the Eurostar Bridge at Waterloo and traffic was snarled up right to the Old Kent Road. She had jogged most of the way, passing eight stationary buses as she raced along. Carbon monoxide fumes made her eyes smart and every few paces she slapped dribbles of sweat from her cheeks and forehead. She invented tricks and games with herself to ward off the distance, dividing the route into gaps between lampposts and the numbers of idling cars as she dodged between them. She promised herself the manageable target of ‘just to that office furniture shop’, ‘only around this bend’ and ‘seven steps times three into the subway and up again’. At last she reached the archway to the flats, spurred on by the promise of an imminent cold shower.

As Chris unlocked the door, the cool passageway was almost reviving and for once she didn’t bemoan the lack of light in the flat. She faintly registered the ease with which the door opened. There was no draught excluder.

‘I’m back!’ She swung her bag on to her bed and had the usual brief inner tussle: bathroom or living room. Pushing back a sweat-soaked fringe Chris went to her mother.

The living room was empty.

Chris frowned at the armchair and clasped her hands in quelled disappointment. Alice must be ill. She hurried down the passage and paused outside her Mum’s door. No sound as she turned the handle.

She gasped.

The curtains were tied back and the window was open. This in itself was extraordinary; her Mum kept her bedroom window shut, disturbed by any noise, with the curtains closed because the view of the storage units depressed her. When Chris was small, there had been a disused goods station on what had been a railway line from London to Dover. Chris could just remember how the orange-pink of the setting sun picked out the castellated roof canopy, and how she had imagined making up a bunch from the wild flowers widening the cracks on the deserted platforms.

Her Mum had said it reminded her of a place she had once been to when she was a child, but the way she told it made Chris think it was one of her made-up stories. They had sat at her dressing table imagining the trains waiting at the platforms. Sometimes her Mum would press a finger to Chris’s lips and, cosy conspirators, they would pretend to hear the sneezing of a far off steam engine.

Then the station was pulled down. They couldn’t bear to watch as the great stone ball pendulumed into the sides, and slabs of wall tumbled away from twisting metal supports in huge clouds of dust. Soon in its place there was a warehouse of corrugated aluminium that gave the bedrooms a thin, insistent light. The silver cladding with its featureless surface had no magic to offer. Now, as Chris scanned the stunted view, somewhere on the industrial estate beyond the warehouse she could hear voices. Men were shouting to each other, a lone instruction reaching her above the scrambled sound of a distant transistor radio:

‘…find the hole, and pump it with mastic…’

Her Mum’s bed was unmade, a corner of the duvet flung back; she must have got up in a hurry. Chris became aware of the bedside clock ticking and heard a quick succession of car horns from the street on the other side of the building.

There was no sign of her Mum.

Although she knew she was alone, Chris checked every room, banging doors open and shut, kicking up the mats as she stormed up and down the passage in rising distress. Now she was looking for a note, a clue, any sign. If her Mum had got ill surely someone would have tried to call her, at the school, on her mobile? Why hadn’t a neighbour appeared at the front door to tell her? Chris dashed back to her bedroom, and shook her bag until everything was on the floor. She checked her mobile. The battery was charged. There were no missed calls, no messages.

Chris gravitated back to her Mum’s bedroom. With her hands on her hips, she took stock as she willed the room to yield an explanation. The objects around her had acquired a vibrancy emphasising the emptiness. Alice’s procession of Russian pottery animals on the dressing table mocked Chris. The tortoise was in the lead, speaking for her Mum’s belief in the strength of the apparently least able. The glass fronted box holding a tableau depicting a sea-battered groyne with a seagull stuck on the third strut and string coiled around the base of the second, was testimony to her Mum’s model making abilities. She had made it for Chris ten years earlier, and it had returned to her, not so much rejected as reclaimed. This was flanked by a London bus commemorating the Silver Jubilee, a red
paint-chipped
Citroën DS 19, and a 1930s model of the Eiffel Tower. Chris lifted up the mouse-size, furry cat dressed in knitted pantaloons and sniffed it. Her Mum.

Never before had Chris come home to an empty flat. Her Mum was scared of the traffic, and of crowds. She had once said she was terrified of the height of the sky. She hadn’t been out for years. Now, when her Mum had needed Chris’s help, she wasn’t there for her. Chris slid to the floor, still holding the cat to her nose. She leaned against her Mum’s bed and stared at the wall, following the meandering line of a crease in the wallpaper until it petered out halfway up.

She should call the police and the local hospitals, but this was too drastic, it would make all the fear-pricking possibilities real. What did she and her Mum have to do with police? The reassuring familiarity of the bedroom had to be proof that things were normal? What did this peaceful room, with its picture by Wintz, of a village street leading to the sea, have to do with an intensive care unit, or worse, the hygienic silence of a morgue? Chris knelt over the bed and buried her face in the cotton. After a few minutes she slipped her hand under the pillow, groping for respite from her mounting dread in her Mum’s bedding.

Mum!

Where are you?

Chris realised that all her life she had known this moment would come. Sometimes she had wished for it to happen. To come home and find her Mum gone and herself released. Even in sleep, the idea was there, in the repeated images of rooms without doors. She burrowed into the bed clawing in anguish and atonement. The pillow smelt of the cream her Mum used and faintly, her perfume, so familiar it made her stomach uncoil.

There was something under the pillow.

Chris pulled out a padded envelope. It was addressed to herself, which made no sense. Then she recognised it as the envelope that had come with the copy of
To the Lighthouse
she had ordered off the internet a couple of weeks ago on the recommendation of her English teacher. Her Mum must have got it out of the dustbin. Her bloody mother was always in her wake, righting and retrieving things, getting her own way.

Not always.

Inside was a wad of cuttings. Chris saw they were from the newspapers her mother had recently asked her to buy. A creeping foreboding came over her. The stories were all about the Parkinson’s Disease specialist who had killed himself. She felt a clutch of terror and her insides became sand. Her mother was ill. She was at the hospital.

She was already dead.

Chris sat down on her Mum’s bed. Something stuck to her palm. She peeled it off. It was a return ticket to a place called Charbury, dated yesterday. The words meant nothing. It had been clipped. Chris tried to think of anything her Mum had done recently that might show that she was ill. She knew nothing about Parkinson’s Disease.

She became a ruthless detective, as she speed-read through the articles, some nine or ten in all once she had unfolded them. She went back to her bedroom and got a pen and notepad. She worked quickly to subdue her panic. Chris had always taken refuge in her work. Her talent for meticulous research and examination of the most insignificant clues would one day soon bear unwelcome fruit. Now she recorded the names that came up most often, although she didn’t think them important as proof her mother had something seriously wrong with her. At this point she dare leave nothing out.

Mark Ramsay, Isabel Ramsay, Jon Cross, Gina Cross…

Then she reached a cutting about a little girl who went missing in June 1968 and had never been found. Much later Chris described this moment as an epiphany. It seemed that time stopped still, there were no more noises outside, and the text before her eyes was subordinate to the pictures it conveyed to her. She heard her mother’s story-telling voice as she read:

The missing girl’s name was Alice, and if she had lived she would have been forty on the 25th of March 1999. This year. But one afternoon in June 1968 she had disappeared while playing hide and seek with a friend and had not been seen since. The article said that nowadays DNA would probably solve the thirty-year-old mystery, but no body had ever been found. Apart from a tramp who had been seen in the vicinity and was found drowned in the River Ouse a few days later, there had been no solid leads. Now it was a cold case.

Chris had made her mother’s card, using magazines, cutting up old birthday and Christmas cards, bits of newspaper and packaging to create a collage based around the numbers of her age. Alice had never liked celebrating her birthday, so she had been especially sulky about forty. Her birthday was on the 25th of March.

Chris didn’t hear the front door so she was nearly sick with shock when a voice called out ‘Goodbye’ to someone outside on the landing.

It was her mother.

Chris sprang to life. She shovelled the papers back into the envelope, tearing some, creasing others then pushed it back under the pillow. As she was getting up off the bed, her foot catching in the duvet and ripping the material, she saw the train ticket on the carpet. She slipped it into her jeans pocket just as Alice shut the door and crossed the hall to Chris’s bedroom. Chris beat out the indentation where she had been sitting, and forgetting the original unkempt bed, straightened the duvet. She leapt to the door. An expression of agitation can easily be translated into concern.

‘Where have you been? I’ve been really worried.’ It sounded like a lie.

‘I went down to the estate office!’

Alice made only a hollow attempt to express her sense of achievement about a phobia miraculously vanquished. Rendered cunning and so playing for time, Chris was determined to show no surprise. Alice would expect her to believe anything she told her, and clearly didn’t think she needed to make an effort. Now that she was watchful, Chris could tell the excuse was feeble, her Mum’s manner too relaxed.

Chris had been robbed of the life she had taken for granted only fifteen minutes earlier. Already the existence in which Alice’s announcement would have made Chris euphoric was a foreign land. Now she didn’t have any connection with the new Alice in the hallway confidently clinking door keys she had supposedly never used before and smiling like a mental patient.

Alice kicked the door shut behind her, oblivious of the bang. Chris felt no happiness at this joyful new being; lost and found. She was winded by a treachery without precedent. Yet her mind was busy and already a plan was forming. Until that moment, she hadn’t known what it was to truly hate someone. 

C
hris walked round the side of the station and set off down the lane in the direction signposted to Charbury. She was the only person in the street. The absolute stillness was unsettling. She was further perturbed to find the village was oddly familiar. She knew it in the way she remembered places during dreams, with no association, just a tremulous familiarity. This must be because of the pictures in the newspaper articles she had found yesterday.

The lane was lined on both sides by detached cottages or larger houses, behind manicured gardens some fronted by neat hedges, or low whitewashed walls. Chris stopped by the steps of one house to examine a selection of blue plastic strawberry punnets and milk crates in which were jumbled weird looking vegetables, oversized cucumbers, misshapen potatoes. A pint mug had a label stuck on it offering ‘flowers for fifty pence’. These must have sold out, for now there were no flowers and the glass was filled with nasty brown water. A
felt-penned
notice next to an empty tray for duck eggs read ‘Egg Boxes Are Welcome’. Chris wondered dubiously whether this welcome would be extended to long-lost relatives. She regretted her spontaneous decision to find Kathleen Howland and tell her that her daughter was alive and living under an assumed name in London. It had initially been prompted by the desire to punish Alice. Now she was ashamed of this; she should have been thinking what it was like to be Kathleen, scared all these years that her daughter had been murdered. Now that she was in Charbury Chris didn’t feel equal to the task she had set herself.

At several points in her journey she had considered turning back, overcome by the violence of her mood, the temerity of her idea; everything. But then she had contemplated the prospect of going back to Alice and behaving as if everything was normal, and this was even worse. Her mother had left her with no choice. There was no one else to talk to. Chris was more cut off from her friends for she couldn’t tell them any of this. Her mother had always said action spoke louder than words. So now she was taking action that would speak bloody loud. She was capable of anything; she would put everything right.

The village could not have changed much since Alice’s childhood; there were few signs of the twentieth century. Gaping stone faces above doorways, the diamond patterns in the brickwork were like the deepest patterns of life, Chris knew them without words; they were within her. This must be
déjà vu.
Chris halted in the middle of the road.

She had been here with Alice.

Until she found the cuttings, Chris had paid scant attention to the story about the professor. She had always been unforgiving about suicide, arguing with her friends that it was a cruel thing to do to people you loved. She had shouted at Emma for saying it was fair enough if you were very unhappy. Chris had been unable to confess to Emma her morbid fear of coming home to her Mum’s body suspended from the drying rack pulley wheel over the bath. She would have been horrified to know that her friends had guessed as much.

As the train left London, Chris had peered out of the railway carriage’s dirty windows at a shantytown of car breaker and rolling stock yards, disused offices and factories with broken windows. Even the flourishing bursts of buddleia growing between the buildings were unnatural and ugly. The Escher-tangle of viaducts and bridges, the boarded-up arches, some patched with corrugated iron, reminded Chris of the constructions she had made as a child, piling on extensions, roofing in enclosures with coasters, playing cards, and bits of cereal packet to make a warren that covered the carpet. Lying on her front, Chris would peep inside, longing to enter these labyrinths. Then it was bedtime and she was never allowed to keep them and would have to dismantle them and tidy everything away. On the train it occurred to Chris that grownups were no different, their buildings were haphazard, created without care, extensions added at random with no concern for design or beauty and then left neglected and forgotten. They were not told to clear them away before bedtime. Maybe that was the thing about growing up, you could create whatever mess you liked.

Her journey to Victoria station had been jaundiced with crazed examples of humanity. All the commuters were paltry and mean, raddled and reptilian, clammy and lantern-jawed. She could see why Alice wouldn’t go out.

Except it wasn’t true, Alice had been out of the flat many times. She had gone to the man’s funeral the day before yesterday, the train ticket proved that. Chris had been scared of how murderous she felt. Yet underneath still, like an Achilles heel, was the insidious threat to this new will power: Chris could not help speculating wistfully about what her Mum might be doing at that moment, sitting by herself in the living room, spying on the neighbours in the windows of the other flats and making up lives for them because she didn’t have one of her own.

The train had rumbled above ragged strips of back gardens, many devoured by geometric conservatories with matching patios and dotted with primary coloured children’s slides and swings, others by piles of tyres and rusting shapes heaped amidst a confetti of litter. Shaking off the city’s suburbia – a mishmash of less coveted Victorian housing, and new-build
cul-de
-sacs – the train had left London behind. At last clattering out of the tunnel that cut through the South Downs, her carriage had been flooded with sunlight as it raced through lush green pastures, alongside a river lit by dancing darts of light.

Chris had jumped down on to the platform into a place where nothing had been left to chance or erected with cold pragmatism. She was incredulous to see immaculate hanging baskets and octagonal tubs on a station platform.

She had been the only person to get off at Charbury and there was no ticket collector. She had faltered yet again as the train receded to a flat shape and vanished under the bridge, leaving her with an unremitting click replacing the
clunkety-clunk
of the carriages. The clicking had grown louder as she became aware of it, hesitating and entirely bereft on the deserted platform in the baking heat. For a ridiculous moment Chris had assumed it was her heartbeat. Two enormous digital clocks hung from the canopies. The time on both was identical and completely wrong: ten past eleven when it had been nearly one. Nothing was as it seemed or as it should be.

As she had paused outside the shuttered booking office unconsciously seeking some small interaction, it dawned on Chris that Alice would never have killed herself. All along she had only been concerned with concealment. Chris had to reassess every part of her life. Alice was not agoraphobic; she didn’t go out because she was hiding. Her parents had not been killed in a car crash on the Great West Road in Chiswick. It made a joke out of Chris’s conviction, while peeping through the wrought iron gates of the brewery, that her grandparents were present. There had never been anyone who loved her keeping watch over her. All the time Alice’s real mother was living in a cottage miles away in some village and her Dad had died only eight years ago, thinking his daughter was dead and never knowing he had a grand-daughter who would have loved him.

For some insane reason, Alice had fooled everyone.

Chris was crushed by the weight of the pretend years, she was overwhelmed by layers of fake memory, made-up names and made-up places. Her past was quicksand into which solid events like birthdays and Christmas, happy stories of her Mum’s early childhood, of her own childhood and every cherished assumption had sunk without trace. She couldn’t even trust her own experience. As the fables that had moulded her were swallowed in eternal stasis, Chris was a blank page. The terrible enormity of Alice’s deception and its far,
far-reaching 
repercussions had made it impossible for Chris to be near Alice. It was a deception beyond her imaginings. Now she knew that there were more chilling ways of absenting yourself from those who love you than committing suicide.

A young woman who survived by taking action, Chris was doing the only thing open to her. She would find Alice’s mother and put everything straight.

At Lewes where she had changed trains, Chris had bought a map covering Newhaven to Eastbourne, but now saw she wouldn’t need it. It would be easy to find Alice’s cottage. She could already see the church spire with its perky cockerel weathervane, over grey slate rooftops and a clump of silvery, green trees at the bend in the road. Halfway down the lane she spotted a sign attached to a lamp-post for the post office and church. Nothing was left to chance. She had noted down that the cottage was next to the post office from a newspaper interview with Kathleen Howland. There was a big chance that Mrs Howland wouldn’t be in, the article had described how she went out regularly searching for her missing daughter. Over the years she had been to all the cities in Britain, sticking posters to tree trunks and on to walls and lamp-posts, getting them displayed in shop windows, and tirelessly handing them to shoppers in malls and high streets up and down the country.

Missing. Can you help?

Chris recalled the words with mounting anger. Alice could have helped.

Mrs Howland had scoured districts in London, ridden the Circle line in both directions, even struck up conversation with beggars in the streets. The reporter had hinted that her searching was indiscriminate, driven by Mrs Howland’s certainty,
‘call it a mother’s instinct’
that Alice was alive. She would not rest until she found her. It was clear to Chris that the man who had written the story thought Alice Howland was dead and Mrs Howland in need of medical help.

Alice was not dead.

An
Evening Argus
headline outside the village stores declared
‘Death Crash: Car was Flying’
. There were more flowering tubs outside the shop, Chris was hemmed in by flowers, fresh and sweet smelling. She had never seen so much trouble taken in a street before. She crossed the road and went up to the shop window. Now that she was here, she was cowed by what she was about to do and keen to put off arriving. It had been the hardest thing Chris had ever achieved, to smile, to help with tea, and to appear to share in Alice’s supposed triumph in leaving the flat for the first time in at least ten years. It was only later in bed, her body thrilling with inchoate fury at her Mum’s betrayal, that Chris reached her decision. Indeed it was less of a decision than a viciously inspired impulse for revenge.

Now Chris was the one who knew the facts. Now she knew more than Alice. Except that once she was here in the village where Alice had lived, she was overawed by the mundane actuality of the deserted lane, the tidy cottages and of Charbury Stores with its adverts for first day covers and a jaunty poster for the summer fête. Chris pressed her nose to the glass to read the postcards slotted in a plastic holder dangling from a rubber sucker. The items advertised were eclectic and eccentric: a motorised mobility buggy with waterproof shopping basket for £900, hardly used; piano lessons at £10 per half hour; domestic help required for six and a half hours at £40 plus travel expenses; purple bunk beds hardly used.

An elderly woman with a florid complexion emphasised by her sixties-style make-up, tightly clad in a bright blue overall, bustled out of the shop and shut the door behind her making the bell inside jangle discordantly. She stopped in surprise when she saw Chris:

‘Oooh! Did you want something, dear? Post office counter’s shut, but anything else?’

‘No, that is…’

‘Only I’m closing for lunch. Back in an hour, but if you’re quick…’

Chris cast around for something trivial to explain her presence. Whatever she came up with would inconvenience the postmistress who was moving away from the door. All Chris could think of were the bunk beds.

‘I’m fine, thank you. Just looking.’ The cliché fitted her new counterfeit self.

The woman appeared satisfied and muttering words that sounded to Chris like
‘two Russians flats’
vanished around the corner of the building. Chris put her hands to her cheeks. She had so nearly given herself away. One of the articles had said that since Alice Howland had disappeared, the village had been ‘overrun’ by the media and sightseers, many with teddy bears and other stuffed animals, on anniversaries, on Alice’s birthday, when Mr Howland had died; or when another child went missing. So the villagers were less friendly to outsiders, they no longer welcomed them as allies in the search for Alice. They guarded their privacy, and were frustrated by invasions from as far away as America and Australia.

Would Mrs Howland guess her connection to Alice? Chris knew she looked like Alice. She had been proud of this when she was little; with no other family, at least she belonged with her Mum. When she became a teenager the idea had horrified her. Did she too have that grim expression and do that stupid thing with her mouth when she was thinking? Did she roll a sweet wrapper into a tight ball between two praying mantis hands? Chris wanted to break the news to Kathleen in her own time and not have her uncanny resemblance to the missing girl do it for her. Although she was twice the age that Alice had been when she went missing, still Mrs Howland might see her little daughter in her. Chris was the only person who knew Alice’s hair had darkened and was cut into a short bob that didn’t suit her. She was the only person who knew that Alice was smaller than might have been expected, since one of the articles had said she was tall for her age. Chris was the only person who knew what Alice looked like now.

She sensed a holding of breath in the air and glanced up and down the lane. It was lunchtime in the middle of the week, which could explain why there was no one around. Few cars were parked, which added to the timeless impression. An old motor scooter by the kerb was padlocked to a bucket of set concrete. So they did expect some crime here.

Apart from Charbury Stores there were only houses on this stretch of the lane. Chris knew from the map that the road went past the church. It was a village, but she would have expected to see at least one person driving or perhaps walking from the station. Chris began to suspect she was being observed, but all the windows were blank. She thought of Alice behind her lace curtains but the image had no substance. She didn’t know Alice, so she couldn’t imagine her.