Elizabeth Is Missing (35 page)

Teeth show up white against the freckles. “You liked Frank, didn’t you?”

“He loved Sukey.”

The man takes another sip of coffee. I stare again at the wall and think of Sukey joking with the soft-faced removal man, and of the mad woman eating the hawthorn by the lane, and then I think of Frank. In a moment he will come into the room.

“And then?” the man asks. “What will happen then?”

Then Sukey will run out screaming because of the mad woman and Frank will tell her to go to the Station Hotel, only she never goes because Frank does something. Pushes her into the mantelpiece? Hits her so she falls? Brains her with the glass dome full of birds? Something that cracks her skull and makes the stuffed birds tumble about her head. I’m careful to think and not to speak, and the freckled man carries on asking me questions, but I can’t answer because if I speak I’ll say too much. I’ll say the mad woman saw it all, I’ll say Frank put Sukey into a tea chest and buried her in the garden of a house where he knew no one yet lived. I’ll say he offered to help plant the summer squash so he could control where the ground would be dug and how deep. I’ll say these things if I speak, but they can’t be true, they can’t possibly be true.

“What will happen now? Do you know?” Helen asks, taking her keys and unlocking the car.

“They’ll verify your stories,” the policeman says. “Ascertain the age of the remains found, try to trace any other witnesses, as well as possible suspects.”

“They’ll try to find Frank?”

“If that seems to be a reasonable line of inquiry.” The words sound like the correct ones, but he ruins the effect with a grin.

I rest a hand on the car, curling my fingers against the window, and try to imagine a young girl running in zigzags to avoid snails. But it’s difficult to picture yourself in a memory, and all I can think of is Frank telling me how the new houses were nice, how he’d been here to move people in and had helped with their gardens. I stare at the glass, expecting shadows to flit across the surface, like on a film screen, but the sky’s reflection obscures whatever story might be shown, and everything is still until the policeman opens the door and helps me in. He puts a hand over my head in case I bang it and leans across me to put my seat belt on. When he moves back again he winks.

“I s’pose you’ve found what you were looking for,” he says, “but I hope you still pop in from time to time, eh? Don’t be a stranger.”

He shuts the door and I’m left wondering what he was on about. The car is stifling, though it’s late in the day and the sun’s not strong. I can’t get the windows to wind down and I’m grateful when Helen opens her door and lets in a breeze.

“And. The—er—body, I mean, if it is Sukey?” she asks the policeman. “When might she be released?”

“They’ll have to establish that the body is who you say it is, there’ll be a lot of tests to do to work out an accurate date of death, any injuries, and cause of death, if possible. It might be six months, it might be longer. They’ll let you know if and when.”

She thanks him, gets in beside me, and turns the cold air on full blast. We drive a little way, the policeman waving us off as if he were an old friend, but stop once we’re round a corner. Helen is breathing as though she has been pushing the car, not driving it.

“You haven’t taken up smoking, have you?” I was always afraid of that when they were kids.

“Mum, I’m fifty-six, of course I haven’t started smoking. You do know what’s happened, don’t you?”

I pat her hand again. I pat it very carefully, but I have a falling sensation inside, as if some important organ is coming loose, as if it’s coming lose and I have to be ready to catch it before it hits the floor. “Frank stopped me falling over the banisters in the Station Hotel,” I say. “Did I ever tell you?” I remember thinking that, if I’d been killed, he’d have got the blame, even though he’d never have meant me to come to any harm.

“Yes, Mum, you did tell me. But I always had the impression he’d been the reason you were so close to falling in the first place.”

She starts the car again and drives very slowly, staying close to the side of the road, and she doesn’t seem to notice when I read out the “Ramp Ahead” and “No Footway” signs. Her hand shakes when she changes gear, and she isn’t irritated when I ask where we’re going.

“What happened to Douglas?” she asks.

“He went to America,” I tell her, watching the dark gorse and darker sea trundle by outside the window. “It’s where he always wanted to go, and that’s why he liked to test out the phrases, the accent. I thought he might write, but he never did, wanted to start afresh, I suppose. He sold everything he had for the ticket. Except the ‘Champagne Aria.’”

“Ha-ha-ha,” Helen says, stopping the car by the beach.

She helps me over the sand to the water. We both have soil under our fingernails and we wash it off in the waves. A tiny piece of glass, like a pebble, is nestled in the crease of my palm and I drop it through the surf to lie with the real pebbles amongst the sand. The sun is setting behind the pier and we watch it sinking for a moment. I wonder what time it is and what we’ve been doing all day. I wonder how we got soil on our hands and why Helen is shaking. She kisses me on the head and my stomach growls. I check my cardigan pockets and my bag for chocolate, but there’s nothing. My stomach growls at me again.

“And Frank?” Helen stares out at the sea.

It looks rough today, the waves misshapen boxes of colour, and I wouldn’t like to swim in it.

“What happened to him?” She twists her feet about so they sink a little way into a damp dune.

“He asked me to marry him.”

“What?” She turns quickly and one foot plunges further into the sand.

“Oh, a long time after. I was twenty-two by then. He’d been away. In prison, Dad said, but Ma and I could never be sure. Anyway, he turned up one day and asked me to marry him. Just like that. I said no, of course. I was already engaged to Patrick.”

“How did he take it?”

I think about that for a moment, though it’s painful to remember. “I suspect he was relieved.” But the sick, greyish look on his face when I said no looms up, and I wonder again whether I would have said yes if I hadn’t already been engaged, and whether I resented Patrick for being in the way. And I wonder whether I would have minded a marriage where I had to remember my sister every day.

“And of course, it’s likely he did kill her,” Helen says, a bite in her voice. “So that might have complicated things.” She stares at the blur between sky and sea. “But do you think he meant to?”

I look back up the beach. “I buried Sukey there,” I say.

“No, Mum, it was—”

“And then she buried me. And I got cross.” I always felt guilty afterwards, for getting cross, and embarrassed for being so childish. She’d only been trying to entertain me. But the sand, closing around my body, heavy on my limbs, had made me frightened, and it was too easy to imagine the dunes rising over my head. After that she was always careful to be the one who was buried, and I would heap handfuls of powdery grit on top of her, compacting it until she couldn’t move and smoothing it into shapes, giving her the tentacles of an octopus or the tail of a mermaid. And once I made her a dress. Of fingernails, which I’d gathered from the shore. I’m sure that’s right. I can picture them now, spread around her. Hundreds of pink fingernails pushed into the sand.

I
think he was hoping that one of them would turn out to be worth a fortune, but no such luck.” The voice is low, followed by stifled laughter, the direction of the speaker obscured by the mass of black-clothed bodies. “I can’t help thinking she gathered all that junk just to make him wade through it. She might have known he wouldn’t be able to resist taking the china for valuation.”

“Majolica ware, eh? One last joke from Aunt Elizabeth. Poor Peter.”

Thick dust swirls about in the heat and settles on shoulders and hips and thighs; the air is full of the smell of cheap new clothes. I’m trapped, suffocating. There seems to be no way out and nowhere to rest. I lean a shoulder on a sturdy-looking cloth-covered partition, but a fat woman makes a thin cry and moves away, turning to frown at me. I sag forwards, my face grazing the lapel of a blazer, and for a moment I see a gap in the crowd. There is a creamy wall and a patch of light, and a board, a board with legs, piled with things to eat. I push towards it, while the people in their stifling black make downturned smiles and gulp at their drinks. God knows what they’re doing packed together like this, like peaches in a tin.

When I reach the creamy wall I find that dust swirls here, too, but it rises in the light and the air is cooler. I pull up a sitting thing, for sitting on. In a minute I’ll have to go back. There’s something I must do. I can’t remember what it is just now, but I know it’s important; someone will tell me if I ask. The filled breads, the stuffed-and-buttered-breads, are cut into squares, and my stomach growls, but I can’t work out what I’m to do with them. I watch a man take one and bite into it, his fingers crushing, his lips sloppy. I feel queasy, but copy him all the same, cramming the thing into my own mouth. It slips against my tongue, cold and sharp and foetid at once. Someone comes at me, smiling, and I move hastily out of the way, into the kitchen, where the oven’s on, humming its own low, laughing comments, wearing its own hot black clothes.

“Pass me that knife, dear, would you?” a red-faced housewifely person says.

I look around the room, but I can’t think what it is she wants, and so I wander through a glass door on to a patio. Most of the space is taken up with those things, not boats, they are full of flowers, large pink flowers bobbing about in the breeze. But there is a bench at one end and I can sit down. A tall woman brings me out a slice of fruit cake. She tells me it’s fruit cake as she hands it to me, and I can see amber currants huddling under the crumbly surface.

“How are you feeling?” she asks, sitting down.

Have I been ill?

“At least you got to say goodbye,” she says.

“Oh. Have they gone already? I wasn’t there to catch the bouquet.”

“Mum, it’s a funeral. They don’t throw bouquets at funerals.”

She smiles and then covers her mouth with her hand, looking back into the house. I stare past her at the bobbing flowers. The garden is very pretty, but it’s not mine. “Where am I?” I ask.

“Peter’s house.”

I nod as if I recognize the name and pick the currants out of my cake, pinching them together. When a girl with blondish curls steps on to the patio I throw the currants at her feet. She stops and blinks, doesn’t skitter away, doesn’t peck at the fruit. Perhaps because she has no beak. I think I know her. “Is that my daughter?” I say to the woman next to me, pointing at the girl.

“Granddaughter,” the woman says.

The girl laughs. “You’re too old to be my mother, Grandma.”

“Am I?”

“You’re eighty-two.”

I wonder why she’s lying. Does she think it’s funny? “This girl’s mad,” I say. “She’ll be telling me I’m a hundred next.”

A man steps out and bends, swoops, to gather the currants, scattering them over the lawn. Two blackbirds flutter down to pierce them with their beaks and the sight pierces me, too. “Elizabeth is missing,” I say, feeling a twist of something inside me, the memory of a smile. “Did I tell you?” I catch at the woman’s sleeve before she’s out of reach. “I keep trying her house, but there’s no answer.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman says, standing to put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I have told her.”

“Poor Elizabeth,” I say. I haven’t seen her since she came to our kitchen to collect currants from my mother’s cake. Anything might have happened since. She needed the currants to feed the mad woman. The mad woman, who was really a bird and flew about my sister’s head. My sister was frightened, and she and Douglas dug a tunnel to America. I tried to follow, but I couldn’t dig that far. Perhaps they took Elizabeth with them?

The woman doesn’t think that’s the answer and the man begins to explain something to me. But I can’t concentrate. I can see they won’t listen, won’t take me seriously. So I must do something. I must, because Elizabeth is missing.

I would like to thank my parents, Kathryn Healey and Jack McDavid, and my partner, Andrew McKechnie, for all their encouragement and support.

Also Karolina Sutton and the lovely people at Curtis Brown, Claire Wachtel and everyone at HarperCollins, and Andrew Cowan and my tutors, classmates, and colleagues at UEA.

Thanks to those who read and gave feedback on the manuscript, including Anne Aylor, Oonagh Barronwell, Paula Brooke, Nick Caistor, Claudia Devlin, Hannah Harper, Tom Hill, Narelle Hill, Debra Isaac, Campaspe Lloyd-Jacob, Gerard Macdonald, Fra von Massow, Tray Morgan, Andy Morwood, Teresa Mulligan, Hekate Papadaki, Sara Sha’ath, Alice Slater, Charlotte Stretch, Beatrice Sudsbury, Catriona Ward, and Anna Wood.

And also to Annabel Elton, Billy Gray, Vicky Grut, Christopher Healey, Eoin Lafferty, Anna McKechnie, and Mabel Morris.

And I am indebted to a great many more people for their help and enthusiasm.