Before the Ruins

by Victoria Gosling

  I was invited into a little room. Darren went to get tea and I was left sitting with Marcus, surrounded by misted glass, a choice of women’s mags and AutoTrader. A doctor came, a woman with streaks of gray in her hair and a no-nonsense expression. I had the sense she didn’t like me, but maybe she just didn’t like this part of her job.

  My mother had been struck by a car and died in the ambulance. The driver said she had fallen into the road.

  “How did she seem this morning?”

  “I didn’t see her. I went to work.”

  “In the last few days then? How was her speech?”

  “I didn’t speak to her.”

  The doctor squared her shoulders and tried again. “You live with your mother. When did you last speak to her?”

  “I don’t know.” They thought it was shock.

  Marcus at my side down the long hospital corridors. During the formal identification and the signing of papers, that night in his single bed at his mum’s house, at the funeral director’s, and later at the funeral, and for all that came after over the next three years. You have to love someone who stands by you like that, even if it isn’t in the right amount—not as much as they deserve, but too much to do what’s right by them. I was going under and I held on to him with a vice-like grip and he took it for love.

  But even Marcus couldn’t be there all the time, and he wasn’t there on the morning the report from the coroner arrived, the report that showed a blood alcohol level of nil, signs of malnutrition, a tumor in the brain—significant in size, affecting speech, motor function, balance—and, in addition to the injuries that killed her, not relating to her cause of death but there nonetheless, old bone fractures, multiple historic bone fractures, fingers, wrist, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, dating back to childhood.

  * * *

  Marcus stepped up, half moved in, hell-bent on being nothing like his dad. Marcus to the rescue. Marcus getting on to the council so I could keep the house, getting the bills changed over, clearing out her stuff while I sat on the back step, chain-smoking and staring at the plowed fields. Marcus painting, fixing shelves, and buying plants. Marcus suggesting holidays. Traveling. Antidepressants. Once, he even suggested a baby. Marcus at a loss, because he had got what he had wanted, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Me the problem in Marcus’s life, the thing that needed to come right. Sympathy giving way to anger, giving way to coldness because I couldn’t reward him for his efforts. Because everything else was going so well: managing some smaller projects for Darren, business booming, enough money coming in that he bought a terraced house in Swindon, renovated and sold it on at a profit. Rinse and repeat, Andy, rinse and repeat!

  I worked for Darren, as and when. He made sure I had enough. When Em came round in the evenings, Marcus would cook and we’d drink beer or wine and no matter how hard I tried to stay up and make a good show of it, by nine-thirty I’d be done, wiped out, taking the stairs like a geriatric. After I’d gone to bed, I’d lie there and hear them talking as I drifted off, not the words, but the tone, the urgent concern.

  Sometimes, I woke in the night and they were gone. Out drinking or clubbing. I didn’t resent it. I’d pretend to be asleep when he came back and would go out early to the shops, make sure there was fresh bread, bacon, and eggs for breakfast, tomato juice, milk. I found condoms in his pocket once and put them back. I didn’t begrudge Marcus that either, a girl he met in a club, an escape.

  Peter had disappeared into his life at Oxford and when he came home, he told stories of quads and balls and punting. Em did an art foundation course in Swindon while temping part-time at Nationwide. Everyone expected her to go full-time the following September, but instead she surprised us by taking up a place at Camberwell to study textiles and renting a room in Peckham.

  In some ways it was easier with her gone. One less person to hide from. I couldn’t bear people that much, not for too long. Outside of work, I walked a lot, twenty miles at a stretch, sticking to the smaller footpaths, pack of twenty Embassy and a 20 cls of vodka in my pockets. I didn’t drink in the house, smoked up only in the evenings, toeing a line Marcus had drawn. I couldn’t see beyond it.

  At best, in the fields, the spring of the earth giving under my heels or sheltering in a slate-roofed hut among the nettles as the rain fell, I would fall into a sort of animal daze, and sometimes an animal pleasure, at the breeze rattling through the beeches, at the spreading lichen in mint and peach and mustard on a fallen oak, at the red-tailed kite sailing over a wood.

  As children, Peter and I had often played detectives. We’d searched for clues—the red scrap of cotton caught on a fence, a single sheet of newspaper folded up and tucked away in the drawer of an old desk found decaying in the Savernake. Now I wondered if we’d not missed the point, missed the fact that the world itself was readable: the formations of the clouds, the tiny spray of punctures in the cross-section of a rotting trunk, rain spattering the surface of the river, the slender ribs slowly emerging through the fur of the corpse of a fox. Were these not also clues of some kind, a kind of message?

  At work I did the books. I added the figures. But what I found on the walks was a realm where there were no sums, no ledger of accounts. Outside of the human world, there is no bankruptcy. In the heart of the Savernake, among the old trees, trees that were older than the oldest standing building I’d ever seen, older than Peter’s father’s church, I sat with my head in my hands and I did not want to go back. What would have happened next I’ll never know. If I would have found a way out by myself. If I would have survived the finding of it. If David had not come back. If we had not gone to the manor in the snow and played the game again.

  CHAPTER 12

  PRIVATE DETECTIVE

  My private detective had offices near Finsbury Park. Over the years, I had had a personal trainer, a colorist, a nutritionist, even—for one whole hour—a therapist. Why not a private detective? As I took the tube up to my appointment with Mr. Hutchinson, whose listed services included video surveillance, vehicle tracking, and honey-trapping, the visit had a feeling of inevitability about it. Too much TV, I supposed, too many films. One day wouldn’t I also confront the serial killer in an abandoned building, defuse the bomb in the final seconds, untie the screaming girl from the railroad tracks? All still possible. But I would never see my mother again, not ever, not anywhere.

  I had the little telephone box in a plastic carrier bag at my feet and nearly forgot it in the press to get out of the carriage. My head wasn’t right. Lack of sleep. Unwelcome thoughts. Dredging up the past was no help to Peter, and it certainly wasn’t helping me. But now that it had started, it wouldn’t stop. In the middle of the night, just to do something, I’d called and left messages at the offices of a half-dozen private detectives suggested by Google. Mr. Hutchinson had been the first to call me back, on the dot of nine, offering to see me at twelve.

  The website had shown an aerial photo of the Thames at night, but when I found the address and rang the doorbell, I found myself climbing a dingy, narrow staircase above a fried chicken shop. The beige carpet was tacky underfoot and the whole building, part of a row of three-story late Victorian terraces, seemed imbued with grease. A film of it shimmered on the walls as though the building was sweating it out.

  By the time I got to the top, I was unsurprised when Mr. Hutchinson came to the door himself. Unbelievably, a half-eaten box of fried chicken sat on his desk next to a couple of laptops and a phone. The detective clearly outsourced the honey-trapping. Mr. Hutchinson was a slight man, hardly taller than me but a few years older, with a large forehead and bulbous, slightly hunted eyes. A door led off the office, and without looking I knew that behind it would be a single bed, a kitchenette, a bathroom with a fraying towel, a cracked bar of soap, and a single bottle of value shower gel.

  “Thank you for fitting me in.” I shook Hutchinson’s hand. He invited me to call him Steven and to sit down.

  “It’s a missing person?”

  I told hi
m about Patricia’s phone call. Old-school style, he made crabbed notes in a spiral notebook, taking down Peter’s date of birth, address, email, and phone number.

  “Corporate law?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you and Mr. White are close? But not…?”

  “Peter is gay.” He paused for a moment and then wrote that down too.

  “Do you have the contact details for any of his colleagues?”

  I did not. The interview went on. I told him about the wedding, that I believed Peter traveled a lot. I described my visit to Peter’s apartment. In answer to his questions, I said that there was nothing that led me to believe Peter was suicidal, or had problems with drugs, or money, or a relationship. I told him the names of Peter’s boyfriends, Anders the Norwegian, Karsten von Kloss who had been eaten by a cannibal, and by dredging my memory an assortment of first names—Matthew, Patrick, Juan—that could have belonged to anyone.

  “Could he have broken the law?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  “But you haven’t called the police.”

  I hesitated and shifted in my chair. “I thought this might be quicker.”

  “In your opinion, as Mr. White’s friend, where do you think he is?”

  “Perhaps he’s just gone away somewhere. Perhaps work got too much for him. I don’t think … I don’t think Peter’s very happy. He’s successful but—” I thought of how Peter had looked when I found him in the American Bar, the stillness as he had sat holding the whiskey tumbler with both hands. “People do that sometimes, don’t they? They just walk out on everything all at once, because they don’t know how to do it piece by piece. Your life doesn’t want to let you go. If you think about it too much, it won’t happen. You’ve got colleagues, projects, subscriptions, deliveries, memberships…”

  Hutchinson nodded quickly. “And there’s nothing else you can tell me about Mr. White, about Peter, that may help me find him?”

  “You don’t need to find him.” Now the detective looked lost. “I mean I just want to be able to tell his mum he’s okay, to know he’s all right. It might not be that difficult. On TV, the police just look at people’s phone records, or their email. I don’t know if that’s something you can do.” My eyes fell on the box of chicken. I could see his teeth marks. He saw me looking and I felt something shift between us. Mr. Hutchinson swallowed.

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “I found it at Peter’s place.” I was loath for him to see it, but I took it out and when he stretched out his hand, I gave the little telephone box to him.

  “What’s this about then?”

  I was suddenly overcome by weariness, a tide of it. I could have lain down on his carpet, inhaled the chip fat, and never woken up.

  “There was a phone box outside my house when I was growing up. We didn’t have a phone, well, sometimes we did, but we were always getting cut off, so people would call me at the box at prearranged times, or on the off chance. It got burnt down. Like this. People were always vandalizing it.”

  “It used to take ages to get connected again after you’d been cut off, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.” In my lap, I gripped the strap of my handbag more tightly. A suspicion took shape that there would be other elements of my childhood that Mr. Hutchinson was familiar with: empty cupboards, say, or lying at school about what you got for your birthday. I wished I had waited for one of the other detectives to call back, someone smoother with a fancier office, someone less like a forlorn hedgehog.

  “Do you think it’s relevant? The telephone box?”

  “I suppose … I suppose Peter might have done it. I didn’t want to think so at the time. But, there was a boy we both liked. It was all very many years ago.”

  “Teenage stuff then. Unrelated?”

  “It was strange that it was there. Nothing else. There was an accident. Not then, a bit later. It’s all tied up with this place, this manor we used to go to, a game we played. We all felt guilty afterward. It ruined a lot of things, friendships, trust.” I swallowed quickly.

  “So he might be upset, then.” Hutchinson put the telephone box down on the table and I scooped it up quickly and put it back in the carrier bag. “Might be … dwelling on the past?”

  “Do you usually find them? Missing persons, that is.”

  “Most of the time. The kids, teenagers I mean, they can’t keep off Facebook or WhatsApp. Half the time, they post pictures of themselves in their mates’ bedrooms. And then with adults, usually they’re just evading their other half, living half a mile away with someone else. It’s marital, most of it. And people don’t make the effort, they want to use their bank cards.” This had been his opportunity to inspire me with confidence. Instead, he sounded almost disappointed.

  “Why do you do it?” The question slipped out. “Be a detective, I mean.”

  Mr. Hutchinson blinked slowly. “Why do you do your job?” When I didn’t answer—any satisfactory kind of answer was evading me—he looked down and furrowed his brow. When he looked up, he said, “I like puzzles. Always have. Even though the answers are almost always the most obvious and boring thing you could imagine, there’s a feeling when you’re trying to solve a case, a certain feeling, especially when you’re getting closer, that is. I used to be a chef at a Wetherspoon’s. Nothing wrong with feeding people, especially when they’ve got a couple of pints inside them. This is better.”

  After we’d sat with that for a bit, I asked, “What will you do? To find Peter.”

  “As you say, I’ll start with the phone. I know people at the providers. It could be very quick. I’ll let you know as soon as I have anything. If we don’t get anywhere, there are other steps we can take.”

  He cleared his throat and told me both his hourly and his day rate. I gave him my credit card details, which seemed to cheer him, and saw myself out, fleeing off down the stairs and then out into the street. Despite the difference in surroundings—the therapist had had sunny rooms in a villa in Chelsea—there was something similar about the two encounters, the stream of questions, the flood of weariness.

  Only in the presence of the therapist lady, in her pleasant consulting room hung with tasteful abstract prints, with her fresh flowers on the coffee table, with her acronyms—PTSD, OCD, CBT, there were others—after the weariness had come the rage. Her theory, carefully laid out, made sense. She put forward that there were defenses, defense mechanisms, established in our vulnerable childhoods, necessary at the time, but unhelpful and restrictive in adulthood, needing, via the painstaking work of therapy, dismantling. But the nicer she had been, the gentler, the more it made me want to kill her.

  The last thing she said to me was “People often make the mistake of thinking that children who have neglectful or abusive parents must love them less. It’s more bearable.”

  I walked for a while. It was mizzling a bit. My wanderings took me into the park. The characters were eternal, familiar to everyone. The mothers with their prams. The man in a cheap suit staring vacantly at a flower bed from one of the benches. Teenagers dodging school, playing some kind of game. One had turned away, was trudging off toward the gates, shoulders hunched in misery. He was not playing anymore. The game was spoiled. What can I say? It struck me as familiar.

  The mad man waving his hands as he raged at the pigeons. What language was he speaking? What was he saying—something about daughters? And her, why didn’t she have a coat on? Why was she chasing that man, and plucking at his clothes? That yellow lady, yellow for her eyes, and skin, and teeth. When he shoved her, she fell, but was up again, quick as a flash, yelping until he turned and shook his fist at her and she slunk away.

  I passed him further on. He had taken up a place on a bench, beer in hand. Tattoos were crawling up his arms, climbing up his neck. He sat at the center of a pool of shattered glass. When would I be finished with the likes of him?

  Men were like dogs. Once you’d been bitten a couple of times, you just couldn’t feel the same ab
out them as a whole, not deep down, no matter how appealing some of them were.

  I came out the other side of the park and kept going through quiet residential streets. Turning a corner I recognized a house. I had, I realized, rented a room in it for a couple of months. There, on the corner, was the shop where I bought cans of beer and two-for-a-fiver bottles of wine. There was the front garden with a low wall, the one I hid behind from the enraged cabbie I was doing a runner from, while he paced meters away. Between arriving in London and my current existence, there had been a few lives, short-lived, each one sealed off from the next by a slew of burned bridges.

  On the next street was a church, redbrick and dumpy. The door was open and I went in. It was inferior to our church, our church being mine and Peter’s. This one was brightly lit and had a carpet. I took a seat. There were chairs rather than pews. Peter and I would have scoffed at that. Not Peter’s father though. The vicar said God was at home everywhere, even in the Methodist church where they served the elderly dinner on Fridays and which smelled of gravy.

  Sitting there, I wondered when Peter lost his faith. While I knew these things happen gradually—the doubts, the whole things starting to feel like an ill-fitting suit you’d inherited from a relative—there must be a moment when the faith you have can no longer keep subdividing, the moment when the thing is actually gone. And in that moment, when the thing is gone, if your heart doesn’t heave, if there wasn’t a kind of grief that remained in spite of logic and reason.

  It was all coming back: the hard pews, the ridiculous singing—Mr. Harris, a verse ahead of everyone else and twice as loud—Peter’s father’s sermons. The He with a capital H. Our Lord. His Son. The intoning. The sitting and standing, the kneeling and Amens. But I had paid attention. Children are all ears, aren’t they?