by David Mark
‘Hello, hello,’ babbles Molly, unconsciously slipping into the role of ditzy mum. ‘Thanks so much for coming down and I’m so sorry to bother you, but like I said, we just wanted to take Meda out. This is her friend, Hilda. Has Meda mentioned her? They’re in the back row at Believerz together, and …’
The man wrinkles his nose slightly as she talks. He seems to be sniffing the air around her. He’s a little older than Molly. There is a dark stubble covering his cheeks and upper lip and his short black hair is speckled with grey in a way that makes it seem he has been haphazardly painting a ceiling. He has dark eyes that make Molly think of tadpoles. He is wearing a white T-shirt beneath a V-neck jumper and the hand with which he holds the door open is adorned with two heavy gold rings and a jumble of indecipherable tattoos.
‘Meda’s not here,’ says the man. He speaks quietly, and takes time over his words. ‘There is a family emergency. A sickness. It would be best to come back another time.’
‘What’s wrong?’ asks Hilda. ‘Is it Meda? Is she poorly?’
‘Poorly?’ asks the man. He’s handsome, in a brutish, brooding sort of way.
‘Ill. You know. Sick. Is she sick?’
The man turns his attention away from Hilda and back to Molly, who feels a sudden irritation at the way he dismisses her daughter without apology.
‘It’s not that weird, is it?’ asks Molly, adjusting her pose to seem more confrontational. ‘She’s her friend. She wanted to know she was OK …’
‘Why you think she not OK?’ asks the man. He steps out of the doorway and into the shadow cast by the balcony overhead. His face takes on a haunted, cadaverous aspect.
‘There was something on Facebook,’ butts in Hilda, before Molly can lead. ‘A family member. All sad. Flowers and a gun and stuff. I had a bad feeling.’
A look of irritation crosses the man’s face and he wrinkles his nose afresh. He makes a clicking sound with his tongue. ‘Facebook,’ he mutters, contemptuously. ‘A curse, no?’
Molly is surprised to see him twitch his features into the most feeling of rueful smiles.
‘I just use it for work,’ she says, and seems bemused that the thought has become a sound. ‘Maybe some pictures. Or a nice memory.’
‘You post all that motivational bullshit?’ asks the man, reaching into a pocket and retrieving a cigarette case. He retrieves a fat white cigarette and lights it with a cheap lighter. He breathes deep and huffs out a slow lungful of smoke. ‘I hate that. All that shit about the next step being the first on a road to somewhere wonderful. All that “love yourself or nobody else will”. Is that right? Have I said that right? Makes me want to puke. You let your daughter use?’
Molly shakes her head. ‘She hasn’t got an account but she still knows how to use it. Hard to stop them, isn’t it? Like banning telly when we were kids.’
‘I had no television when I was child,’ shrugs the man, watching Molly intently. ‘We had radio. Two stations. Propaganda and techno. I not like either.’
Molly finds herself smiling. She wonders where she has seen him before. She bites her lip as she tries to remember. Was he a customer?
‘I talk to Meda’s family about what they put on these websites,’ says the man, almost apologetically. ‘I tell them no. But they do anyway.’
‘You’re not part of Meda’s family?’ asks Molly.
‘You head home, yes? Meda be fine. All be fine. But stay away for now, yes? Difficult time for the family.’
Hilda shoots an anguished glance at her mother. ‘We’re not just leaving it at that, are we?’ she asks, indignant. ‘I want to see her. I need to see her.’ She stomps away from the door and on to the path. ‘Meda!’ she shouts, upwards through the rain. ‘Meda, it’s Hilda. Are you there? Are you OK?’
Molly turns to shush her daughter. As she moves, she feels the man brush past her. Gets a whiff of leather, vinegar and a pungent tobacco.
‘You wake the neighbours,’ says the man, approaching Hilda. ‘The neighbours here – they are not happy to be woken.’
‘It’s not even bedtime,’ says Hilda, turning to look at him and fixing her mouth in a defiant line. ‘You’ve got her in there, haven’t you? You’ve done something to her. Who are you anyway? I know all about her family and I don’t know about you. You’re not Uncle Steppen.’
The man stops, his cigarette hanging from his lower lip. ‘I am a friend of Steppen,’ he says, thoughtfully. ‘An old friend.’
Molly hurries to where the two are standing. Hilda looks ready for a fight. The man does not seem bothered by the rain that has already soaked through his clothes. His jumper clings to well-defined muscles.
‘Sorry if this is all a bit odd,’ says Molly, positioning herself between them. ‘We didn’t mean to cause a bother. Do you think you could maybe call us when she is feeling better? Or when there’s a good time. I run a pub called the Jolly Bonnet …’
‘I know,’ says the man, flashing his half smile at her once more. ‘Nice real ale. Good meat in pie.’
Molly suddenly has a flash of recollection. He had been drinking in her pub as she and Hilda left this evening.
‘That’s a coincidence,’ she says, coldly.
‘No,’ says the man. ‘It’s not.’
Before Molly can reply, a shout from overhead causes all three to look up. A man with short blonde hair is leaning over the railing. His face is a yellow colour, like farmhouse butter, and despite the dark and the rain, he is wearing mirrored sunglasses.
‘Karol,’ he shouts again, and the warning tone in his voice becomes more pronounced as he lets rip with a stream of syllables in his native tongue.
Slowly, the man called Karol turns his attention to the two girls. He gives a nod that could almost be apology. ‘The football match,’ he says, by way of explanation. ‘There has been a goal. I go join my friend, yes? You go home now. Not think any more about this. Not call house for a while. Leave family to fix things, yes? Then we all be happy.’
Molly finds herself scowling. She does not like the way he spoke to her, though he has been nothing but polite.
‘He didn’t say anything about football,’ protests Hilda. ‘Meda’s been teaching me …’
‘Nice to meet you,’ says Karol, turning away and heading back towards the doors. ‘You pretty with your make-up washed away.’
Molly raises her hand to her face. She has not thought of a reply by the time the door bangs closed. She and Hilda stand still, saying nothing, unsure what to do except stand and listen to the sound of a million drops of rain thudding into the soaking ground.
They walk away in silence.
HILDA
We were back in the Bonnet by half past nine. Lottie was sitting at the bar, resting the weight of her face on the heel of her hand. Her friends had long since headed off and she had been making do with the company of strangers and the bar staff for the last couple of hours. She gave a huge grin as she saw us appear in the mirror behind the gin bottles and she turned around with her arms wide open as we pushed through the double doors. She was drinking black coffee from a pewter cup and from behind the bar Julien raised his eyebrows at Mum and nodded at her friend, indicating that Lottie had been on particularly fine form this evening.
The only other customer in the front bar was Connie. Red coat, red nails and a great tangle of fox-fur hair atop a face that looked like it had been pulled three feet away from the skull and then twanged back into position. She must have been at least ninety years old but there was nothing grandmotherly about her. She drank halves of real ale and got through three pickled eggs per session. Whether she chose to eat them with her teeth in depended upon her mood. She swore like a docker and had never heard a racial slur that she didn’t like. She called me ‘ratbag’ and was full of stories about men with names like ‘Hatchet McGinty’ and ‘Slagshagger Brown’, and she would forever say things like ‘Gawd rest him’ when telling stories about the time such capital gentlemen hacked up some interloper who had pushed in front
of her in the queue for bagels.
‘Darlings,’ said Lottie, and she elongated the ‘a’ to make herself sound like a Russian princess. ‘You came back. I knew you would. Loyal, that’s what I like about the pair of you. Committed. Decent.’ She looked at Mum as she shrugged out of her coat and clomped behind the bar to get herself a gin and tonic. ‘That dress is a poem, my dear.’
I sat down on the bar stool next to Lottie and rested my face on her bare arm. She smelled of gin and wet clothes. Something else too. A chemical whiff, like an air freshener dipped in bleach. I felt her stroking my hair and wondered, as I always did, how many body parts her fingers had pickled and prodded in the past few hours. Oddly enough, I didn’t mind that Mum’s best buddy spent her days with her fingers fiddling about in other people’s entrails. If I was ever on a slab with my chest pinned back like tent flaps, it’s Lottie who I would want to weigh my stomach and liver. She’s good at it and has very soft hands. She certainly gave good cuddles and she was the only person I trusted to cut my toenails. As far as I was concerned, she was the only person with sufficient professional training to be trusted with the task. Mum said she was a godsend and I couldn’t disagree. Before she became our friend it used to take half an hour of arguing just to get me to take my socks off and I wouldn’t have my big toenail trimmed unless Mum was sitting on my bum and holding my ankle like the neck of a cobra while I screamed the words ‘child abuse, child abuse’ into the carpet.
‘So sad,’ said Lottie, softly raising my face. She looked into my eyes. Her make-up was a little smudged and there was a hair stuck to her lip-gloss but she was still great fun to look at. ‘Was dancing bad, my darling? Did you slip? It’s OK if you slipped. When I was your age I was so uncoordinated that I would have thought it was a victory just to get up the stairs. How’s your friend, anyway? The big daft one who looks like she’s about to burst into a chorus of “No Cats in America”. Did you tell her the new words you’ve learned?’
Mention of Meda was enough to set me off. Lottie saw my lip wobble and pulled me into a hug and everything that had happened came pouring out as I snivelled and whispered and babbled into the warm safe cave of Lottie’s chest. I don’t think she understood half of what I was talking about but that didn’t matter because soon Mum was filling her in on the evening’s events. Julien joined us too. For the next half hour it was all ‘I’m sure that can’t be right’ and ‘that seems weird’ and ‘he said what?’ and Mum and I were overlapping and interrupting and butting in and racing to the end of our sentences. I drank another hot chocolate and ate some crisps and by the time we got to the end of the story I was feeling better all the way to my bones. That’s the bit that feels odd, now. Telling the story about Meda’s disappearance actually made me stop feeling so worried about her. I’ve never made sense of that. The doctors have told me that the nature of what is wrong with me will always make it difficult for me to understand why people act the way they do and why feelings are able to do what they want without permission or control. I should have been jiggling up and down in my stool and demanding to know when Mum was going to call the police. But being in the Bonnet, in a place I knew, with people who loved me, somehow made a silliness out of all of my previous dark imaginings. The world was nice, wasn’t it? Friendly? Comfortable? Bad things didn’t happen to little girls. Not really …
‘What are you going to do then?’ asked Lottie, and I noticed she was holding Mum’s hand in hers across the bar. She was stroking the back of her hand with her thumb. I wondered if she was picturing the layers of epidermis and assessing the elasticity of the tendons.
‘I don’t think there’s anything to do,’ said Mum, turning her empty glass around and around on the bar top.
‘Would the police think you were just being dramatic?’ asked Julien. He was pulling at the points of his moustache but hadn’t smiled as much as he usually did while we were telling him our story. He seemed concerned.
‘I’m sure there would be eye-rolls all round,’ said Mum. ‘They’d tell us there was nothing to worry about.’
‘And do you think there is or there isn’t?’ asked Lottie.
Mum noticed Lottie was holding her hand and gently slipped it free. She busied herself making more drinks, talking over her shoulder as she did so.
‘It was just the way they dismissed us,’ said Mum, and I could see her scowling at the memory. ‘There was something going on but who’s to say it’s anything that should trouble the police? I mean, I barely know the family. We don’t know Meda is missing or in any kind of trouble. They said to leave it alone. There’s only a problem if we make one.’
Lottie sucked her teeth and turned to me. ‘You said that the man in the sunglasses never mentioned football. Do you know what he did say?’
I let out a little laugh. I’d been so lost in the swirl of my thoughts I’d all but forgotten that burst of low, looping syllables and clacking consonants from the upstairs balcony.
‘Have you got your laptop, Lottie?’ I asked.
‘Bag,’ she said. ‘Second peg.’
I trotted to the coat hooks at the end of the bar and found the big rucksack with the Day of the Dead mask embossed on the front. Inside was the laptop, resting against an empty Tupperware box and a pair of battered white trainers. Lottie couldn’t walk further than a few feet in the towering, crystal-studded heels that she liked to wear in the bar. The times she stayed over at our house it was strange to see her first thing in the morning. Without her make-up or false eyelashes and at five inches shorter than she had been the night before, it was like she was two different people.
‘I don’t bloody know what’s best,’ said Mum, annoyed at herself. Her shoulders slumped a little. She’d never pretended to be one of those parents with all the answers. She was happy to say ‘I don’t have a clue’ and habitually started her apologies with the words ‘You know how I’m a bit shit …’
‘There’s a website,’ I said, opening the laptop and passing it to Lottie so she could type in her password. She was permitted to use all sorts of encrypted websites and had special Home Office clearance for the kind of databases where you could find out how many days it takes for a bluebottle to eat its way out of an eyeball. I know this because she once left it logged in while she took a shower and I couldn’t help having a little look. That night I dreamt I was sneezing out great handfuls of live maggots. I had to tell Mum that the reason for my nightmares was a scary movie I had watched on YouTube.
‘Facking incredible.’
We turned to see whether old Connie was going to follow this up. She had half turned from her position by the window. The traffic outside had momentarily let up and through the condensation on the hazy, darkened glass, I saw all of our reflections. The hunched, talon-fingered crone in the rickety wooden chair. The glamorous, big-chested vamp. The moustachioed dandy in braces and bow tie. The elegant, thin-framed beauty in the black dress. It was a scene from another time. A time of steam and clockwork, of lives that could be bought cheap and sold even cheaper. A time of oil lamps and pestilence, mud and blood. I was the anachronism. I was the little girl in the pink hooded top, tapping away at a laptop on the bar. I was the wrong note – the only thing stopping the image from being a perfect recreation of a time long since dead.
‘Incredible, Connie?’ asked Julien.
‘People vanish. Disappear. Die. Some come back, some don’t. Sometimes you get answers, sometimes you don’t. All this hand-wringing. All this “should I put meself forward” … Christ. What is she, this Meda girl? Ukrainian? Latvian?’
‘Lithuanian,’ I said, typing the website address into the search engine.
‘That’s one of the Soviet Union ones, isn’t it? Russian, near enough. Bad lot. All of ’em.’
‘You can’t say a whole people are bad,’ Mum began automatically. She had been through similar conversations with Connie plenty of times before.
‘Yes you can! You can say what you like. Doesn’t mean you have to agree with me or li
ke it but I can say it if I fancy. What’s anyone gonna do about it, eh? Tell me off? Facking hell, I used to live in the same block as Maurice the Mentalist and I wasn’t scared to tell him to keep the noise down when he used to be torturing his cats during Last of the Summer Wine. So if I want to say the Russians are a bad lot then I bloody will. And you want to know why I know that? ’Cause my Hilary runs a building company and they’ve half put him out of business. They either work for next to nothing and he can’t compete, or he gets the heavies coming along and insisting he employ this person or that person and could he do this favour for their uncle … And the facking Albanians! Christ, the scam they were running a while back. Would have Ronnie and Reggie turning in their graves, if they ain’t already spinning on a spit in Hell …’
I turned big eyes on Mum. Suddenly I was cold again.
‘Mum, we’re wasting time. There are messages on her Facebook page. Tears and roses. There are bad men at her house. They won’t let us talk to her. What do you think is happening to her right now?’
A huge wave of images rose up inside me. Suddenly all I could see was my big, lanky friend, hugging her dirty knees and dressed in a dirty grey shift, huddling in the dank corner of some terrible underground cell; snot and blood and tears on her cheeks and a desperation in her closing eyes. I felt it. Felt every tremble of fear that the character in my imagination was enduring. I felt an urge to reach into myself, to take the ugly fantasy in my great fist and pluck it from the darkness of my mind.
‘Sounds a right facking nasty bastard,’ said Connie, and there was a clink as her false teeth hit the lip of her glass. ‘Told you, can’t trust ’em. Like the facking United Nations out there …’
‘Go back on the Facebook page,’ said Lottie.
I did as I was asked, following the links back to the site I had visited earlier. I raised my eyes in surprise. The thread of messages and emojis had vanished.
‘It was there,’ I protested. ‘I’m not making it up, I promise …’
