Then You Were Gone (29 page)

She looked back down at the headline on one of the pieces of paper: SECOND YOUNG MINER REPORTED MISSING. ‘I think I remember this happening. During the strike?’

I nodded. Even a quarter of a century later, even for a younger generation who had been kids at the time, it was still just ‘the strike’. It was like how 1939-1945 was just ‘the war’ to our grandparents.

‘So –’ She was still skim-reading the three cuttings I’d given her as she was speaking. ‘So, what exactly are you looking for?’

‘I – well, I don’t know really. What sort of stuff might you have? Obviously I’ve already done all the easy stuff myself – you know, Google, online news sites, that sort of thing. I just wondered if you’d have anything else on him?’

She narrowed her eyes at me again, but this time there was no smile. ‘Well, I could just go and get the Peter Milton file and we could have a look through it together.’

For a heart-stopping second I thought she was serious, that the Pete Milton file might really exist and that all the answers might be in it. ‘Are you sarcastic to all your customers?’ I asked her.

She raised her eyebrows and purposefully didn’t smile again. ‘Only the ones I like.’ The librarian was flirting with me now, I was sure of it.

‘I want to know,’ I continued, trying to remind myself why I had come here in the first place, ‘whether you might have any more information on him.’

‘Just him? Not this other lad who went missing as well?’ She pointed to the second paragraph of the article. ‘Lee Hague?’

‘No, I – erm…’ I failed to come up with a convincing reason why I might care more about Pete Milton than Lee Hague, so I let my voice trail off. ‘No, just Peter Milton.’

‘OK.’ She nodded. ‘OK then. So – you mean you want to know what happened to him after the disappearance? Do you know if he was ever found?’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. He was never – I mean, he hasn’t been found yet. What I want to know is, is there any more information on what he was doing before he disappeared? It’s too long ago for Google or any of the news sites to have stuff like that. And I was kind of hoping for – well, you know, something that everyone else might have missed.’ I gave an apologetic half-laugh.

She frowned and stuck out her bottom lip. She looked like the kind of woman who might have had her lip pierced at some point in her life, but it wasn’t pierced now. ‘The only stuff we’d really have is births, marriages, deaths, census records, that kind of thing. Probably wouldn’t tell you much new. Or,’ she gestured towards the ‘Staff Only’ door behind her, ‘we’ve got some old Coal Board files in the archive. I think there could be personnel records in among those, if you think they might be of any use? Most of it’s pretty boring though – anything really juicy would still be embargoed.’

‘Right,’ I said, trying to mask my enthusiasm. ‘And you’d have all the old newspapers and news databases, that kind of thing?’

‘Well, yeah, we have the locals on microfilm, the ones that haven’t been digitised.’ She pointed to the far end of the room where a middle-aged woman was hunched over a tall, grey machine that looked as though it should have been obsolete twenty years ago. ‘And obviously you can do a search on the online databases if I give you the passwords,’ she nodded towards a bank of computers by the window. ‘But don’t you have access to that kind of thing at your paper?’

My paper?
‘Oh, right, no, I’m – erm, I’m freelance these days.’

She looked at her watch. It was small and understated with a slim brown leather strap, looking out of place against her grown-up-punk clothes. ‘Well, how long have you got today? I’m not really supposed to, but if you like I could search some stuff out for you this afternoon and you can come back and look at it at your leisure.’ She smiled wryly. ‘It makes a nice change from dealing with all the family history nutters that normally come in here bothering me.’

‘Oh, OK.’
If only you knew
.

‘So…’ She opened a big desk diary and looked at me expectantly. ‘Do you want to make an appointment to come back so I can be sure everything’s ready for you?’ When I hesitated for a second or two she leaned back in the chair and spread her hands. ‘Come on, don’t leave me hanging. When am I going to get to see you again?’

She was flirting with me. And for once I’d picked up on it in time.

‘Or,’ I said, in what I hoped was an alluringly languid manner, ‘you could meet me for a drink on Friday night and tell me what you’ve found. Then I can decide whether it’s worth coming back.’

Too far? I worried, but there was that killer smile again.

‘OK,’ she said, as though she were doing me a massive favour. ‘I finish here at seven. Why don’t you meet me outside and I’ll bring anything good I’ve found with me.’

‘OK,’ I echoed, failing to sound as cool as she had. ‘See you then.’

I headed towards the revolving doors that led out to the street.

‘Hey!’ she shouted after me. I turned round, bracing myself to see if she’d really been winding me up. As if a woman like that wouldn’t have anything better to do on a Friday night. ‘My name’s Tash, Tash Chaplain, by the way!’

I raised a finger to my lips and mimed an exaggerated ‘sshhhh’ then turned to go. As I stepped onto the street, I allowed myself a little swagger in my step.

Chapter 2

Tash

It was time to leave. It had actually been time to leave for a while, but I wanted to stay. Geri didn’t seem to mind. I think she hardly noticed me any more; she just cooked and tidied and got the children ready for bed around me. ‘You’re one of the family,’ she had said to me when I first came back and I’d cried with gratitude at her pretending I still had a family. I had forgotten the other side of it though, that a family is just a group of people who have carte blanche to ignore you and take you for granted.

‘Pass me that nappy, Tash,’ she said, as I was getting up the nerve to tell her.

‘Here,’ I said, picking up the one lying nearest to me on the floor.

‘No,’ she shook her head, irritated. ‘That’s one of Katie’s. I need one for Sophie.’

I hunted round for a smaller nappy, glad to have my back to her. ‘So, anyway,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be round tomorrow night after all.’

Her hand shot out to grab Katie as she made a naked dash for the stairs but, still wet from her bath, the little girl slipped past her. ‘What?’ Geri said, distracted. ‘Why not?’

‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ I said truthfully. ‘You must be sick to death of having me round here every night, eating your food, drinking your wine, winding up your kids.’

‘Tash, we love having you, I mean it. We wish you’d stay here, honestly. We hate to think of you in that big house on your own every night.’ She grabbed a handful of baby wipes in readiness. ‘And anyway, you never eat the food, and you always bring the wine.’

I laughed. ‘Well, it’s good of you to say so, but I know you and Matt will be glad of some time together.’

She rolled her eyes as she lifted the baby’s bottom and shoved the nappy under her. ‘Tash, we’re constantly together. That’s why we’re so glad you’re here to give us someone else to talk to and about.’ She didn’t seem to be joking. ‘So anyway,’ she picked Sophie up and handed her to me. I cuddled the tiny warm bundle into me, stroking her chubby neck. ‘Why aren’t you coming tomorrow?’

‘I’m – well, I’m meeting someone. A bloke.’

‘A bloke?’ It was Matt, carrying Katie over his shoulder like a sack of coal. She wasn’t laughing or wriggling, just hanging floppily as though this was how her dad put her to bed every night. From what I’d observed over the preceding weeks, this was in fact the case. ‘What bloke?’

I shot Geri an urgent look. Matt was a good guy, and after these last few months of hanging around his house every evening, talking to his wife for hour after hour while he dozed, mouth open, on the couch, I had begun to regard him as my friend. But I still didn’t want to tell him these things. I knew he must know about me and Stephen and Tim and the whole hideous mess because I’m certain Geri tells him everything, no matter how much she promises me that she won’t. But I wanted to at least be able to pretend to him – to anyone – that I was a good person.

‘Matt, mind your own business,’ Geri said, leaning forward to kiss Katie on the cheek.

‘Night, Mummy!’ she yelled.

‘Night, Katie!’ Geri yelled back.

‘Don’t worry, Tash,’ Matt said over his shoulder as he carried Katie out of the room. ‘She’ll tell me it all later anyway.’

Geri stood up and took Sophie back over to the armchair. She lifted up her top and moved the baby to her breast, saying, ‘Well? What bloke?’

‘Just someone I met at work.’

‘One of the other librarians?’

‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘A customer. He came in the library the other day and asked me to help him with some research he’s doing.’

‘What?’ Sophie’s head jerked away at the sound of her mother’s shriek, leaving Geri’s white, veiny boob staring me in the face.

‘What do you mean, “what”?’

‘You’re going out with some bloke who came in the Local Studies Library? On his own? During the day?’

I pulled a ‘fuck off’ face. ‘He’s a journalist actually, not one of the family history weirdos. He’s working on a story about a local cold case or something. Sounds pretty interesting.’

Sophie was sucking away at the boob again. ‘A journalist? Tash, are you sure?’

I knew what she was asking. Not if I was sure this bloke was really a journalist but if I was sure I should talk to a journalist ever again.

‘He’s not a Stephen kind of journalist, don’t worry.’

‘So is he the other kind of journalist?’

I felt that tight grip in my stomach that came every time anyone mentioned him. Even though Geri hadn’t used Tim’s name, I knew that was what she meant. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not that kind either.’ Nobody was a Tim kind of anything.

‘So, did he just ask you out?’ She sounded incredulous.

‘No, not like that. It’s not a date or anything. He just wanted to talk about this research in a bit more depth, and we’d been having a bit of a laugh, and, you know…’

‘Tash, shut up. I’m thirty-three years old, I’ve had two children, I’ve slept with fourteen men. I understand how these things work as well as you do. People don’t – men don’t ask women they meet in the course of their boring research on dead people to go out for a drink with them unless they want to get into their knickers. You might not think it’s a date, but I reckon he will do. God, I’m so jealous.’ She stood to put Sophie in her cot.

‘Geri!’

She held a finger to her lips as we crept out of the room.

‘No,’ she whispered, ‘not like that. I mean, I’ve just never been on a date. When I met Matt we’d slept together about fifteen times before we even went to the cinema together. It would never have occurred to me to go out romantically with someone I hadn’t already had sex with – it’s what people do in films or stupid books about New York.’

‘Well, there’s nothing to be jealous about,’ I said coolly, ‘because it isn’t a date!’

Geri said nothing in response, but the look on her face told me what was going on in her head. In her head she was holding up her thumbs and forefingers in front of her forehead to form a massive W and she was saying ‘whatever’ in an annoying, squeaky voice.

We went into the lounge and Geri poured me a glass of red wine without asking. ‘So anyway,’ she said as I sat down, ‘what’s he like?’

‘Erm – our age or thereabouts, I would have said. Maybe a bit older, but he’s still got all his hair. Quite tall.’

‘Taller than you?’ she put in anxiously.

‘Of course,’ I said quickly, then felt annoyed with myself for playing into Geri’s hands. She was asking about height because tallness and the lack of it had always been a central part of my decision-making process when it comes to men. I’m five foot nine and ever since I reached my full height at age fifteen had had a strict rule that anyone shorter than me was not an option. Until Stephen. I had somehow allowed Stephen to slip through, which just goes to show that rules are there for a reason.

‘And, what? Dark? Fair?’

‘Kind of – kind of sandy, I suppose?’

Geri smirked. ‘Come off it, Tash. We all know what “sandy” means. Do you mean ginger?’

‘No, not ginger. Sandy.’

‘What, like Robert Redford?’

I smiled. ‘Yes! Exactly! Well, maybe not exactly but – you know, not not Robert Redford.’

‘My God,’ she breathed, ‘a date with a journalist who looks like Robert Redford. Are you going to share secrets from the Nixon White House with him?’

‘Yes,’ I said solemnly. ‘I am Deep Throat.’

We laughed, then she said, ‘But seriously, Tash, do you think this is a good idea? If he is, you know, hoping that it is going to be a date. Is he a nice guy?’

I shrugged. I genuinely had very little idea. ‘He seemed like he was,’ I said, which was true.

She tossed her head dismissively. ‘Makes no difference really. If he’s not a nice guy then it’s a bad idea for you. If he is a nice guy – and if you say he is, then he probably is – then it’s a bad idea for him.’

‘Why? What do you think I’m going to do to him? We’re going to be looking at old newspaper clippings and making chit-chat about local history. I’m not going to break his heart just by spending a couple of hours in the same room as him. I know that I’m very beautiful and special to you, but unfortunately the rest of the world does not generally share your point of view.’ She continued to look at me sceptically. ‘Geri, you need to calm down about this. All I’m doing is meeting him for a drink so I can give him some information he asked for.’

‘About the Nixon White House?’

‘Yes.’

She smiled and rolled her eyes.

‘Look, I know what you’re worrying about.’ I reached over and squeezed Geri’s arm awkwardly. ‘But it’s fine. I’m not going to get involved with this guy, I’m not going to fall in love with him and he’s not going to fall in love with me. I’m not on the fucking rebound for Christ’s sake.’ I managed to sound really indignant as I said it, and Geri looked suitably sheepish.

It was entirely appropriate, after all, that somebody in my situation should be affronted by the idea they may be on the rebound. I had only split up with my husband three months ago, as she well knew. Only the most cold-hearted, loveless of people could rebound that quickly. What Geri didn’t know of course, and what I was too paralysed by shame to tell her, was that the thing I was rebounding from was far bigger than three years of marriage to Stephen. That the hurt was so much deeper than anything Stephen could ever have caused me, that what I was experiencing was not the brisk, rubbery bounce of a rebound but a screaming, echoing nosedive into a black, empty abyss. It was the kind of fall that people do not bounce back from.