The Missing Person's Guide to Love (11 page)

‘There was blood on his clothes,’ she said.

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

I assumed she meant the car crash. She must have seen him afterwards. Perhaps she saw his clothes in the hospital.

‘You must have known. Was there blood on your clothes too?’

‘What?’

‘That day. The day she went. He would not have hurt a fly. No, he would not. What did you make him do? You were
always together. What was it you did? I can guess, believe me, but I want to hear it from you.’

‘Nothing.’ My voice was louder than it had been all day. The sound of it surprised me. ‘Sorry, I don’t understand. What are you saying?’

‘We couldn’t go to the police, could we? It’s always the boy and not the girl. We knew who’d get the blame and it wouldn’t be you. You see? Owen would have suffered. It’s always the boy and not the girl.’

‘But I don’t know why you would think this. What did Owen say to you?’

‘He said nothing. Owen never said anything at all but he didn’t need to. He was my boy and I knew him. That day, there was blood on his clothes. Some spots on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Not many, but enough to notice. Whoever killed her would have been soaked in blood, you would think, but Owen wasn’t. I think someone else must have come home much bloodier.’ Sheila did not look at me but it was clear from the way she spoke, the wavering, high-pitched tone of her voice, whom she meant. ‘I put it in the wash and it came out fine but it never went away, not in front of these.’ She jabbed her index finger at the air in front of her eyes.

So I was right. Owen was guilty and Sheila had rinsed away the evidence.

‘And then you got him into trouble again two years later and he was taken away from us. I can’t get that time back again now, can I? I haven’t even got memories from that time, except bad ones of having to visit him in that place. Those
memories shouldn’t have to count, but they do. I don’t have enough to be able to discard a couple of years. Well, some time later you took your own life, or so Owen heard, Isabel. I would not wish to dance on anyone’s grave but I was so relieved to hear of your death. So much pain and worry just evaporated at that moment. I even managed to feel pity for you. I allowed myself a few tears of sadness. And more fool me, because now he’s dead and all of a sudden you’re alive again. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’

‘Whatever Owen did to Julia – I don’t know what that was or even that he did anything – it had nothing to do with me. I promise you.’

‘He was my son. He was good. Why did you run away from the country if you didn’t have something to feel guilty about?’

‘I wanted to live somewhere else.’
And people like you made it clear I could not stay.

‘Rubbish. You had a good home here. I knew your parents.’

‘It’s quite normal to want to move around in life. People do. And I did not have a home here, not by then.’

‘Oh, you would have stayed here if you could. You want to come back now, don’t you? Now that Owen has died you think it’s safe. Why else are you here?’

I narrowed my eyes. The rest of the mourners, the hairdresser’s shop, the graveyard and the paved path up to the church door disappeared from the edges of my vision. There was just Sheila, a dreary apparition before a wet, grey sky, saying these strange things to me and I could not respond. She
confused me. I wanted to defend myself but could not think where to begin. I decided just to start speaking and find out what I said when I said it.

‘I wanted to be at the funeral, Sheila. It’s why I came. I’m leaving tomorrow, as I told you. I have no intention of living here again. Look, I’ve upset you by coming and we shouldn’t be talking about this now. I’ll go away. I’m sure you just want to get on with the service. You don’t need this kind of distraction now.’ I turned to leave. ‘I’m very sorry about Owen’s accident.’

‘You’re not bloody well leaving.’ She hissed this at me. ‘You’re coming in. You can sit with the rest of us and see my son’s coffin. If I have to be there then so do you.’

I was about to walk away, frightened by the vehemence of Sheila’s words, but when I looked up I saw Owen’s sister emerging from the church. She left the huge oak door open behind her, half ran towards us, tottering in knee-length black boots and a tight purple skirt. She put her arm around her mother. ‘Mum, you go inside with Dad. Come on. This isn’t the right time for arguing.’

Sheila lifted her chin, turned her head to Dennis and did not look at me again. She put her arm through his and they moved into the church. I avoided the eyes of the crowd in the entrance and along the path. Some of them must have heard the whole conversation.

Owen’s sister perched on a low headstone. It belonged to Eliza somebody who had died in 1879. I couldn’t see the full inscription. The sister drummed the top of the greenish stone
with purple nails. She had Owen’s eyes. The long, sleepy lids that turned down at the outer corners. She regarded me coolly, her eyes closing almost to slits. It’s Isabel, isn’t it?’

I nodded.

She looked away with a frown, apparently making some sort of decision, then turned back, smiled at me. ‘Isabel, will you come into the church and will you come to our house afterwards for a drink? I want to talk to you. Don’t worry about Mum. She doesn’t know where she is today. She has to blame someone for Owen’s death and she saw you from the car. You’ve brought back bad memories, but you mustn’t take any of it personally. None of that has anything to do with today. It’s good of you to come.’

‘Are you sure it’s a wise idea? I don’t want to be here if it will cause trouble. I don’t want to get in the way of things or distract anyone. I can disappear just as easily as I came.’

‘You won’t get in the way. Just join in with everyone else and avoid my parents. I’ll come and find you later.’ She pulled an elastic band from her pocket and tied her long hair into a ponytail. Then she turned and marched up the church path, passing mourners on the way but not stopping to speak.

I thought of skipping the funeral and catching Owen’s sister when she came out, perhaps returning to the Lake View guesthouse for a while, when I spotted safety. A dark prickly head moved among the soft, silvery ones. It was John. He saw me and waved. ‘You got here before me, Isabel.’ He smiled and kissed my cheek as though we were old friends. I lost sight of you.’

‘I don’t know how that happened but I’m glad to see you,’ I said. ‘I’ve just found something out.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

There is no reason for Sheila to think that it had something to do with me. I dislike Sheila so much now that it is hard to accept that she is any friend of Maggie’s. I wish Maggie had dropped her years ago, out of loyalty to me. I know that is too much to ask, but Maggie was my closest friend and I cannot bear that she may have known all this and not told me. Then again, Sheila had thought I was dead and had believed this for some years, so perhaps Maggie had not spoken to her since I left London. I must confront Maggie some time and find out what they have said. At the very least, Maggie will be able to put Sheila straight. I never considered killing myself. It did not occur to me at any time that life would not get better. Maggie knows that. She has always understood me well.

But blood on his clothes. Could there be another meaning? I see Sheila standing in the front room, peering into the hall. She watches Owen as he turns his back, stooping slightly to reach the doorknob. She notices the blood on his sleeve, wonders what has happened – a fight perhaps? – but gets no answer from Owen. He grunts and passes her. That’s nothing strange. That’s how teenage boys are. So normal. He goes to his room and
stays there for the evening. He plays his music loud. No, no, he does not. For once he does not. He doesn’t play music at all so Sheila knows something is not right. The silence from upstairs rings in her ears like tinnitus. Something has happened to her son and it is something bad.

When the police come knocking on doors to ask about Julia, perhaps Sheila feels a kind of pinprick in her chest. It unsteadies her but she knows, of course, it is nothing. She goes to the laundry basket, finds the clothes and puts them through the washing-machine at a high temperature. All the time she will be saying to herself that Owen could not have done anything – she knows her boy – but still she must protect him from idle suspicion. People are gossiping already, swapping names over the supermarket checkouts and at the doctor’s surgery. She will use more soap powder than is necessary. When the clothes come out of the wash she will run her fingers carefully over the fabric, holding it up to the light and scouring it for any faint shape of what was there before. Is the blood Julia’s? It could be Owen’s own blood, some minor accident that occurred when he was out. But the tiny pin has moved deeper between her ribs now and she repeats, under her breath, that she knows her boy, of course she does.

Maggie had a little wooden box from Turkey. She kept some of her postcards and letters inside. Leila had given it to her and she had one the same. Maggie had been to Istanbul long before her visit to Leila, when she had her Turkish lover, the professor. They stayed in a hotel so that they wouldn’t have to tell his family they were there. His brother was a wealthy plastic surgeon who lived in an old house nearby but they never saw him. They visited the Blue Mosque, the Aya Sofya, the Grand Bazaar and the palaces, Topkapi, Dolmabah
çe. ‘I’
m a historian,
’
he’d say,
‘
so you’re lucky. I’ll be your guide to the world’s most beautiful and important city.
’
She can’t have paid much attention to his words, though, for now she couldn’t remember even which palace or mosque was which any more. What she had was a picture in her mind of the city’s curving skyline, with peaks and domes like a cream-topped dessert.

And random memories of things they did. He liked to eat oranges. He peeled them deftly, one after another, and pulled away segments to give to her, then licked the juice from his fingers. One hot evening they entered a dark shop and bought a bag of nuts, half a kilo, perhaps.
Could it have been a shop that sold only nuts? She couldn’t remember anything but the glass-lidded containers of nuts and seeds by the counter, large sacks of almonds in the shop’s shadowy corners. The man scooped up hazelnuts, almonds, pistachios, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, and poured them into a brown-paper bag. They left the shop and walked towards a restaurant but realized they had spent the last of their money on the nuts. The lover ran back to the shop and asked the man if he could return them. The man laughed him out of the shop.
‘
You expect me to stand here and separate all these? Get on your way, my friend.
’

Most nights they ate out in cheap, simple restaurants selling kebabs, soup, stuffed vegetables and rice. They stayed in that night. They looked out on the Bosphorus from their hotel balcony and ate the nuts with cold beer. He knelt on the floor and rested his elbows on the edge of the balcony to watch the ferries come and go. When Maggie yawned he turned and lifted her feet to remove her shoes. With his fingertips he kneaded her calves and ankles. She could smell oranges in his hair. In the bedroom they undressed. He liked to take her clothes and fold them into a soft, neat pile on the carpet. He took her earrings last, always. He lifted them carefully from her ear-lobes, just the gentlest touch of his knuckles against her hair, so that her head tilted back and her neck tingled. Now she remembered the dark green bedspread and the grey-blue view of the water far below, as if there were never a wall or balcony between but the water was lapping right there at the edge of the room.

But she remembered little else. When she returned, years later, to the palaces, they weren’t the same ones. Only their names were the same, as if new buildings had been put up but they had kept the old signs. The Dolmabah
ç
e Palace was the wrong way round. She couldn’t say what she meant by this, only that she seemed to be facing the wrong
direction all the time. Topkapi was smaller. Perhaps it was simply that he wasn’t there any more, so it couldn’t be the same. This time she preferred the streets, the dark hilly passageways, the box-room grocery shops. She liked to stop at the window of a shop selling pastries, baklava or Turkish delight, and gaze at the soft, sticky jewels. She could have lived there, she supposed. She would have been happy. But, then, her lover had never wanted to. It was not exotic to him. He’d say,
‘
The water gets cut off all the time. The streets aren’t safe after dark. Have you noticed when you walk through Sultanahmet that at least seventy per cent of the people you see are men? And when you see women, they are hardly ever on their own. You can’t have a comfortable life here, Margaret Eva. You think you want this, but you don
’t.’

She had never wanted a comfortable life, but he did. That must be why they parted from each other, though she was not sure any more. Bess and her husband had been delighted when it ended. They never met him but were anxious, none the less. Perhaps they were worried that, somehow, he would exert a dangerous influence over young Isabel.
‘
Isn’t he a Muslim?
’
Bess had asked. ‘I’m not saying it’s a problem but won’t he want you to go and live there and be like him? If you’ve never believed your own religion, how will you believe his?
’
But he had gone to live in New York and Maggie found she didn’t love him quite as much without Istanbul.

The walls and ceiling snapped and crackled again, as if someone in the attic had just woken and begun to stretch her feet. It was the other woman. It was the mad wife her husband kept hidden up there who never came out, who didn’t know what
‘
outside
’
was because she knew
nothing any more, except the dark room full of tea-chests and bookshelves. Perhaps the mad wife was standing just above her now, with a box of matches and a wedding veil. But she knew it was only the mice, eeking and scuffling in the walls. She didn’t mind them – they were just playing – but it was nicer, she thought, to imagine a woman up there in the big dark room. It was not nice, of course, to think such a crime of her husband, who was a good man, but, still, she liked to imagine. They might as well use the attic for something.