The Missing One (30 page)

He looks at me.

‘Dangerous,' I say, in my most shocked voice. ‘Dangerous! Don't touch the dogs when they're eating. No. Dogs can bite you if they're eating.'

He looks back at the dogs, plainly wondering whether he should touch them to test out this intriguing theory.

I lean my back against the warm range, and hold him firmly between my knees. He watches the dogs.

‘Susannah. I just wanted to say sorry about earlier. If you want me to go … '

‘No!' she says, sharply. ‘NO.' Then she gives a dry laugh. ‘I mean, where to? Where would you go? The last ferry left at five.'

‘OK, but I'm sorry. I was completely out of order before. We'll go tomorrow. You've been very kind.'

Finn is trying to grab at the almond bowl now, on tiptoes. I stand up and move the bowl out of his way.

‘I had no right to ask you all those things,' I say. ‘It was none of my business.' He goes over to the chair at the round table, and bashes it with both hands.

‘Finn,' I say, pointlessly. ‘Be gentle.' I need to give him something to eat, or he's going to get very grumpy very
quickly. He hasn't eaten anything for hours. His routine is in tatters. It's the first thing the childcare books tell you: keep to a routine.

Susannah opens and shuts a cupboard above her head. She pulls down a bottle of vitamins and takes two without water, throwing her head back and closing her eyes briefly. I see the lump in her throat move up and down.

‘Would you mind if I made Finn something to eat? A boiled egg maybe?'

‘He must be hungry,' she says, eyes still shut. ‘Help yourself.'

Without toys, or a TV, it's going to be almost impossible to keep him occupied while I cook even a boiled egg. I look around. ‘Would you mind if I gave him something to play with? He likes bashing pots and pans.'

‘I have a headache.' Her eyes are still shut. I think she is doing yoga breathing again.

‘OK. Sorry. No. Of course.'

Finn is making for the sideboard with the photos on it. I run over and whisk him away; he squawks. ‘Come on, love, come over here with me.' Susannah is watching. It's as if she's just waiting for me to mess up.

‘Do you have any frozen peas by any chance?' I ask.

She turns and opens the freezer drawers, beneath her fridge, and pulls out a packet of organic peas. She holds it out to me without moving away from the fridge. Then, as I come and take it, she turns her head away, and looks out the window.

I am not sure if she's still angry, whether it's the headache.
I get out a plastic pot from the Tupperware cupboard, and tip a handful of frozen peas into it. This is Finn's favourite distraction. He will sit for ages in his high chair while I cook, picking the peas out, one by one, and sucking on them, as if they are sweets. I show him the pot and he grabs it with both hands. Peas fly into the air, then bump and roll like mercury balls across the tiles. I bend over, scrabbling to scoop them up. He is already shoving them, along with some dog hairs, into his mouth. I can feel Susannah looking down, watching.

‘No!' I say, too sharply, grabbing his hand. ‘Dirty.'

He jumps, startled.

‘OK. Wait. I'm going to get you clean peas. Those are dirty peas. Dirty. Yuk.' I scrape them out of his fist and his face clouds over. Quickly, I pour more peas into the pot and hand it to him. He looks at me steadily, from under his fringe, then tips them over the floor. He whooshes his hands through them, sending them spinning in all directions.

‘FINN! No!' She is just standing, staring, as if this is the most incompetent mothering she's ever witnessed. I feel my throat tighten; I want to cry. But I cannot possibly allow myself to do this.

‘OK. No peas then,' I say. ‘Not on the floor.'

Finn sweeps peas across the tiles and shouts, ‘No!'

I pick him up and he starts to yell.

‘Stop it,' I bark. ‘Stop shouting!'

Susannah straightens. ‘Give the child to me.'

‘What?'

‘Give him to me.'

‘It's OK, I can manage, thanks.'

‘Just give him to me, Kali.' She reaches over and pulls Finn out of my arms. He is red-faced, mouth open. His wails intensify as she pins him to her body. As she walks off with him, he holds out his arms to me over her shoulder, ‘Maaammmaaaaa!' It is a panicky cry.

My instinct is to run after her and grab him back. Who does she think she is, whisking my child away? But I also know, on some level, that she's right. Things can only escalate from here. If I take him back I won't be able to cook his egg and he'll shout and wreck more of her belongings. Without a high chair to strap him into, it's hopeless. But I can see his little star hands, reaching out for me over her back as she carries him away, and his fearful face – open-mouthed, round-eyed – ‘Maamaaa!'

‘It's OK, love,' I call after him, slavishly, guiltily. ‘I'm just going to make you a nice egg. Look. I'm right here. A lovely boiled egg! You have a story with Susannah while I make the egg. OK? I'm right here.'

‘Maaaamaaa!'

I force myself to turn away from him and go to the cooker. My hands are shaking; I rest them on the sink. It won't kill him to cry for a minute. And after a moment or two, his wails subside. He's just hungry, that's all. Tired and hungry. The quicker I feed him the better. I peer through the archway. She has him on her hip, by the bookcase, and is showing him a bowl of smooth wooden balls.

I fill the pan with water and look for the knife to cut bread for toast soldiers. Coming here really was an appalling idea.
You can't ever know a person completely, even your own mother – perhaps especially your own mother. Susannah isn't going to help me here. Maybe nobody could. What I really wanted, when I jumped on the plane, was for my mother not to be dead.

I realize that I still haven't established when I booked the return flight. The time around the funeral is a bit of a blur now. I need to get on the internet to check, but of course Susannah has no connection here. And I have to call Doug. He'll be worried about Finn and missing him. He'll also be furious by now, about the credit card. I need to call Alice too. But it's the middle of the night in England now. I can't call either of them, or anyone else.

Suddenly, the geographical reality of where I am hits me. There are miles and miles of the earth's crust between me and my home. And nobody – not a single person in the entire world – knows that I am here, in Susannah's house.

*

Susannah bends over the fireplace, stacking up logs in a tepee shape. Thick veins worm across the surface of her bare feet; the knobs of her anklebones beneath her rolled-up jeans are smooth and white as beach stones. I hear her knees click as she reaches for the matches. Like my mother, Susannah seems to avoid footwear, even in January.

Finn is finally bathed, fed, changed and asleep. This time I've wedged the bedroom door open with our heavy bag so he can't possibly pull it out of the way. It's 8.30 now – 4.30 in the morning British time. I am light-headed, washed out.

‘OK.' Susannah straightens as the fire takes. She turns
to face me. Behind her, flames lick hungrily up the logs. ‘You find yourself a drink and put some spaghetti on to boil, while I take a shower. Then we'll eat.'

Obediently, I go to the kitchen and dig around in the cupboards, find wine glasses and the opened bottle of red from the night before. I pour two glasses. It's a Washington State Merlot but I wonder if it's been open for a long time because it smells very vinegary. I leave the wine, take a pan from the metal hooks above the cooker, fill it with water, and put it on the range.

Susannah's bedroom must look out to the side of the house. It probably has a spectacular ocean view. There is a sound of pipes and water rushing. I smell woodsmoke. There is whole-wheat spaghetti in the store cupboard, alongside glass jars of brown pasta, dried pulses, macadamia nuts, dried blueberries, flax seeds, lentils, lima beans, mung beans, evening primrose oil, multivitamins, flax oil, fish oil, sunflower seeds, iron tablets, glucosamine. No wonder she looks so robust. I take a couple of handfuls of spaghetti and slide them into the bubbling pan. The boiling water spits in my face.

What I can't understand is how my mother gave all this up – this wild ocean, the snow-capped mountains and the orcas that needed her protection. That leap – from wilderness to hedgerows, from killer whales to the school run, hydrophones to oil paints – it is just unfathomable. I suppose she was damaged by her childhood, whatever Susannah says; perhaps she knew that what she really needed was the stability and order that my father offered. But she must
have felt so hemmed in. The Sussex countryside, with its tight, knitted hedgerows, could not be further from this colossal wilderness. Then again, she did spend a lot of time by the sea.

I suddenly remember a massive fight we had – our last, in fact. I was about seventeen. We were in the kitchen. I was by the kettle and she was next to me, at the sink, peeling potatoes for a shepherd's pie. I'd just told her I wasn't going to do A levels, I was going to drop out and work on a French fish farm with my new boyfriend, who was twenty-three and had a motorbike. We were going to earn money, then go to India.

She put down the peeler, slowly. ‘Just tell me one thing.' She turned her green eyes on my face. ‘Without an education, what do you intend to do with your life?'

‘What's so great about an education?' I snapped back. ‘You got an education and it didn't do much for you, did it? Are you saying I should slave away at university so I can become a housewife and spend my days making bloody shepherd's pie? Anyway – isn't this just a tiny bit hypocritical? I mean, you dropped out, didn't you? I'm just saving myself several years of hassle by doing it now.'

Her lips went white, her face tightened and her hands bunched into fists – and for a moment I thought that – for the first time – she was actually going to hit me. But she didn't, and the contempt in her voice was worse than anything physical she could have done. ‘You have no idea what you are talking about, Kali. You have
no fucking idea
.' She turned, and walked away.

I wanted her to forbid me to go to the fish farm. I wanted
her to order me to finish my A levels and ban me from ever seeing the boyfriend again. I wanted her to reach out and hold on to me and tell me that she loved me and wouldn't let me do this under any circumstances. But she didn't. She left the peeler on the draining board, and walked away.

I finished making the shepherd's pie, but she didn't come back until late at night, and by then my bag was packed.

I never lived at home again. I never went to India, either. A few months later, when things didn't work out with the boyfriend or the fish farm, I came back to England. She said I could come home, but I was too proud. I moved into a dismal student flat in Brighton and became a waitress. Doug is right: it was never one-way. And I didn't even say sorry.

*

I look up. Susannah is in the doorway, half in the shadows. She is watching me with a disconcerting blank face. I don't know how long she's been there.

‘Oh!' I jump up. ‘Hi.'

She doesn't move or speak. Her hair is wet and combed back. Her forehead is high and hardly wrinkled except for the deep crease between her brows. Her mouth is a long line and her colourless eyes are fixed on my face.

Then I notice that the spaghetti is bubbling away, and its water is thick and pasty. I've made nothing to go with it. I haven't laid the table even, or got plates.

‘God, sorry. I sort of stalled … '

She flares her nostrils, takes a breath, nods once, briefly, then walks past me and opens the fridge.

A moment later she has me chopping onions. ‘We'll make clam sauce,' she says, ‘It's pretty good.' She doesn't sound angry. Just neutral, calm, as if she has made a decision, and is happy with it.

The tears stream down my cheeks as I chop the onions. She's standing right next to me with her pile of tomatoes, but her eyes aren't affected at all. She slices into the tomato flesh with her chef's knife. Her hand is fast and efficient as she chops.

‘So. I'm curious about something,' she says. ‘What is going on with your husband?'

I stop slicing the onion.

‘You might as well tell me, Kali; get it off your chest.' She shrugs. ‘It's eating you away, I can see that. And you'll probably never see me again – so why not?'

I don't want to stay in touch with her either, but it seems brutal just to say it outright, like this.

‘So?' she asks. ‘Tell me.'

My first instinct is no way – no way am I going to discuss Doug with this woman.

But actually she has a point – I do have nothing to lose. I'll never see her again after this and if I open up a bit, maybe she will too. I take a breath. ‘Well, I think he might be having an affair.' I pick up another onion and wipe tears out of my stinging eyes with the back of my hand, which only makes it worse. ‘I'm not sure, though, really. He tried to explain on the phone, but I couldn't – wouldn't – let him. To be honest, I'm not sure what's happening between us.'

She starts to chop herbs, rapidly, like a professional chef.
‘Huh? I wondered what made you run all the way out here. So, are you leaving him?'

‘No! Well, I don't know, I don't think so. I just found this … and then my mother died the very next morning … and I just couldn't face confronting him.'

‘So how did you find out about his affair?'

‘The woman sent him some text messages.' I feel my face growing hotter. It sounds tawdry. Texts. Infidelity. It doesn't sound like Doug.

‘Huh? What do they call that these days? Sexting?'

‘No. No – no. Nothing like that. She just, well, she texted to say she missed him … in a particular way.'