Before You Were Gone

by Sheila Bugler

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s about Eamon, your dad. Are you still in contact with him?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Emer said. ‘He left us a few months after Kitty died. You know about that, right?’

  Dee nodded. Her mother, who occasionally relented and answered Dee’s questions about the Dorans, had told her about it. Emer’s older sister, Kitty, had drowned when she was eleven years old.

  ‘He left and he never bothered to keep in touch,’ Emer said. ‘I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.’

  ‘That must be hard.’ Dee thought of the relationship she’d had with her own father. He’d been a great dad, loving and interested in his only child without ever being overbearing. Dee had loved him fiercely and still missed him terribly.

  ‘I’ve got used to it,’ Emer said. ‘Mum says we’re better off without him, and I guess she’s right. I have a stepdad, Robert. He’s been pretty good to me.’

  ‘Well I’m glad to hear that.’

  They were silent for a moment. Dee was searching around for something to talk about when Emer started speaking.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, Dee. There’s a reason I got in touch with you. I need your help.’

  Something shifted inside Dee. She’d been excited about today, looking forward to taking the first steps towards being reunited with a part of her family that she’d never known. But now it seemed the only reason Emer had contacted her was because she wanted something.

  ‘Of course.’ Dee took a sip of her wine. ‘Whatever I can do. Just tell me.’

  ‘It’s about Kitty,’ Emer said.

  ‘Kitty – your sister?’

  Emer nodded.

  ‘The thing is, Dee. I think she might still be alive. I want to ask if you’ll help me find her.’

  Three

  Dee drained her glass.

  ‘I’m going to need another drink for this. Can I get you something?’

  Emer shook her head, holding up her barely touched soda and lime.

  As she waited at the bar, Dee ran back over everything she knew about her cousin, which wasn’t a lot. She knew Emer’s life hadn’t been easy. First, she’d lost her sister in a terrible accident. Soon after that, her father had abandoned her. Maybe both those tragedies had damaged her more than she realised. Because, clearly, the poor girl was damaged if she believed her sister could still be alive.

  ‘I thought Kitty drowned,’ Dee said, when she sat back down. ‘Are you telling me that’s not what happened?’

  ‘I know how mad it sounds.’ Emer smiled. ‘You must be wishing you’d never agreed to meet me, right?’

  ‘Wrong.’ Dee reached across the table and squeezed the young woman’s hand. ‘I’m glad we’ve found each other, and I’m happy to help if I can. I’m just not sure how.’

  ‘Will you at least hear me out?’ Emer said, pulling her hand away. ‘Before you decide I’m a certified nut job?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Right.’ Emer paused. ‘Sorry. It’s not easy, you know? It wasn’t the first time, you see. I was only ten when it happened. So when I told people that I’d seen her, no one believed me. They tried to convince me I’d made it up. Over the years, I accepted that maybe I had. Until two months ago. I was in London for a few days and I saw her on the Underground.’

  ‘You said this had happened before?’

  ‘They never found her body,’ Emer said. ‘Did you know that? Sorry. Why would you? Our fathers had stopped speaking long before then. Anyway, the day itself is a blur. I remember we’d had a row and Kitty went to a different part of the beach to get away from me. Our mother was with us, but she was reading magazines and she’d made it clear she didn’t want us disturbing her. I wasn’t worried, at first. We were always having silly rows, they never meant anything. I don’t know how long it was before my mother started panicking. She said she’d seen Kitty at the edge of the water earlier. I remember her running up and down the beach, calling Kitty’s name. Kitty couldn’t swim, you see. She’d always been scared of the water so I didn’t know why she’d gone in that day.

  ‘The problem was, there was no one else around. We weren’t on the main beach. We’d gone to a quiet part, away from the crowds, because our mother didn’t like crowds. When she couldn’t find Kitty, we had to go through the dunes onto the golf course. There were three men. I remember that. My mother was crying and begging them to help. Even then, I didn’t understand, not really. I thought Kitty had run off. She did that sometimes, you see. She didn’t really get on with our mother. They were always rowing and sometimes Kitty would disappear for hours.’

  Emer paused and took a sip of her drink.

  ‘I thought it was my fault. We’d had a row and, because of that, Kitty was gone. Because she couldn’t swim, everyone assumed she’d drowned. I did too, at first. There were people out searching the coast. But later that evening, something happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We were on holiday at the time. In Lahinch, a seaside town in the west of Ireland. We were staying in a hotel. At some point, someone must have sent me to bed. I was lying in the room by myself, trying to understand what had happened. I couldn’t accept what they’d told me. Kitty hated the water. Why would she have tried to go in? I kept thinking someone had made a mistake and if they just looked a little harder, surely they’d find her.

  ‘Then the door opened. I thought it was my mother, coming to check I was okay. But it was Kitty. She said she’d come to say goodbye. I asked her where she was going and she said she couldn’t tell me. I begged her to stay. She told me she was sorry, and then she left.

  ‘I tried to stop her. But she’d always been faster than me. I remember chasing after her along the hotel corridor. It was like one of those dreams, you know the ones where you’re chasing someone but you can’t catch up with them no matter how fast you run?’

  Which is exactly what it sounded like, Dee thought. She’d had similar dreams herself in the months after her ex-husband’s death. Grief was a bastard that messed with your mind in all sorts of ways.

  ‘There was a fire escape at the end of the corridor. There was a staircase the other side of the door. We weren’t allowed to go there, but I knew that’s where she was. The door was open, but before I could follow her, my mother found me and took me back to my room. The next day, she convinced me I’d been sleepwalking and had imagined the whole thing. But I never forgot it, Dee. And then, when I saw that woman on the Tube, it all came back to me and I haven’t been able to think about anything else since.’

  ‘Okay.’ Dee drank some wine while she tried to work out the best thing to say. ‘Tell me about the woman. Did you speak to her?’

  ‘I didn’t get a chance. She was getting off the Tube when I saw her. I ran after her, tried to call her back, but she didn’t stop.’

  ‘It must have been an awful shock,’ Dee said, ‘after all this time. But Emer, it’s not uncommon to see someone who reminds you of another person.’

  ‘I know that,’ Emer said. ‘And I know there’s every chance I got it wrong. But I need to make sure. What if I wasn’t dreaming that night? What if Kitty’s still alive?’

  Dee didn’t bother pointing out all the reasons that was impossible. Like how unlikely it was that an eleven-year-old child could fake a drowning and disappear all by herself.

  ‘You’re a journalist,’ Emer said. ‘You’ve got experience investigating things, trying to find the truth. If Kitty really is out there, I can’t think of anyone better placed to find her.’

  ‘Well, I’m flattered you’ve got so much trust in me,’ Dee said. ‘But even I can’t work miracles. Finding a woman you saw once on the Underground? I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘There’s more,’ Emer said. ‘I followed her when she left the station.’

  Dee drank some more wine.

  ‘Keep talking. I’m listening.’

  ‘Outside the station, she got into a cab before I could catch her. So I did that classic
thing you see in films. I jumped into the next cab that came along and followed her. She didn’t go far. A few minutes later, her cab pulled up outside a pub and she went inside. But by the time I’d paid my own cab driver and gone into the pub, there was no sign of her.’

  ‘So you made a mistake,’ Dee said.

  ‘Or she knew I was following her and she was hiding from me. I asked the barman if he’d seen her but he told me no one matching that description had come into the pub. He was lying.’

  The poor girl was delusional, Dee thought. She needed counselling, not a journalist.

  ‘You checked the toilets?’

  ‘Of course,’ Emer said. ‘I know what I saw, Dee. She walked into that pub and when I followed her a few minutes later, she wasn’t there. The only possible place she could have gone was behind the bar and into the back area that’s not open to the public.’

  ‘Did you get the name of the pub?’

  ‘It was in a place called Wapping,’ Emer said. ‘Near Tower Bridge and Limehouse. I’ve googled it obsessively ever since.’

  ‘I know Wapping,’ Dee interrupted. ‘And I know most of the pubs there as well. Which one?’

  ‘It’s called the Town of Ramsgate.’

  ‘Right.’ Dee grabbed her bag and stood up.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Emer asked.

  ‘You mean where are we going,’ Dee said. ‘To Wapping, of course.’

  ‘So you believe me?’ Emer said, standing up as well.

  ‘I don’t know what I believe,’ Dee said. ‘But I know there’s only one way of finding out for sure if that woman is your sister. We’re going to the Town of Ramsgate now and we’re going to find out who she is.’

  ‘Hang on.’ Emer put her hand on Dee’s arm. ‘She can’t see me. That’s why I need you. If she sees me, she’ll try to run away again. If that happens, I may never get to find out if she could be Kitty.’

  ‘You can stay outside.’ Dee walked up the steps from the cellar bar into the searing London sunshine. On the news the other night, they’d said it had been the hottest summer on record. Something so blindingly obvious she’d wondered, at the time, why anyone had considered it a newsworthy fact. Midway into September and, so far, the heat had shown no sign of abating. She headed towards the Tube station but changed her mind. The thought of being stuck beside so many other sweaty, overheated bodies didn’t appeal to her. Besides, what was the point of getting paid ridiculous sums of money for taking part in fluffy TV shows if you couldn’t treat yourself every now and then?

  ‘We’ll get a cab,’ she told Emer. ‘Follow me.’

  She led her cousin around the corner onto Savoy Place, where she hailed the first black cab she saw and gave the driver the name of the pub in Wapping. Dee didn’t know if this was a sensible idea or not, but she knew it was the quickest way to prove to Emer that the woman she’d seen on the Tube couldn’t be her dead sister. While the cab crawled through the early evening London traffic, Dee got Emer to tell her everything she remembered about the woman.

  ‘Kitty had a condition called heterochromia,’ Emer said. Then, when Dee frowned, ‘Her eyes were two different colours.’

  ‘Like David Bowie?’

  ‘Not exactly. Bowie had something called anisocoria, which is when a person’s pupils are two different sizes. Heterochromia affects the iris, not the pupil. In Kitty’s case, it meant her left eye was blue, her right eye was green.’

  ‘I’m guessing the woman you saw had the same condition?’

  ‘She did, but it wasn’t just that. I’m not stupid. Six people in every thousand have heterochromia. It was more than the eyes. It was everything about her. Not her hair, which she’d dyed. Kitty’s hair was brown and she’d always worn it long. This woman’s hair was blond – Marilyn blond – and cropped short. But her face, the way she walked. I forgot to tell you that. Kitty had a slight limp, and so did this woman.’

  Dee refrained from pointing out that this, too, was hardly proof the woman was Emer’s dead sister. It was clear Emer had convinced herself Kitty was still alive. Until Dee could prove otherwise, Emer wasn’t going to change her mind.

  Fifty minutes later – because in London that’s how long it took to travel four miles by car during rush hour – Dee and Emer were climbing out of the black cab onto a quiet, cobbled street lined with leafy trees and yellow-brick converted warehouses. The Town of Ramsgate was situated at the end of a particularly impressive warehouse conversion that, Dee was pretty sure, had once counted Cher as one of its celebrity residents.

  ‘Okay,’ Dee said. ‘So you’re going to stay out here while I go inside and ask if anyone knows a woman with bleached blond hair and two different coloured eyes?’

  ‘One green, one blue.’

  ‘Got it.’

  The pub door was closed, but when Dee peered through the window, she was able to see the people inside. Behind the bar, a tall, striking, eighties-era Annie Lennox lookalike was pulling a pint of Guinness.

  ‘Is that her?’ she asked, stepping back from the window to make room for Emer. ‘Short blond hair, working behind the bar.’

  Emer looked through the window for a long time, without speaking.

  ‘Well?’ Dee said. ‘Is it her or not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t sound too certain.’

  ‘It’s her. One hundred per cent.’

  She certainly didn’t sound 100 per cent convinced, Dee thought, as she pushed open the door and walked inside. The door swung shut behind her and she waited for her eyes to adjust after the bright sunshine. The pub was a long, narrow room with the bar running down one side. Original stained glass panels on wooden partitions separated the space into cosy snugs. It had been updated since Dee’s last visit, sometime around the millennium, but it was familiar enough to trigger a host of memories.

  At this time in the afternoon, it was quiet. Dee walked through the pub slowly, scanning the faces of the few drinkers, pretending she was looking for someone. At the back, there was a tiny beer garden that overlooked the banks of the River Thames. It was busier out here than inside, afternoon drinkers taking advantage of the sunshine. Again, Dee made a show of scanning the faces before going back to the welcome cool inside the pub.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, approaching the woman behind the bar. ‘I wonder if you can help me.’

  ‘I can try.’

  She was beautiful. The contrast of her eyes – one green, one blue – enhanced her exceptional good looks. She was the sort of woman who’d turn heads wherever she went and Dee understood why she’d captured Emer’s attention on the Tube that afternoon.

  ‘I’m looking for directions,’ Dee said. ‘I’m meant to be meeting a friend but I think I’ve come to the wrong pub, and now I can’t get the map app working on my phone.’

  ‘Where are you trying to get to?’

  ‘I think it’s called the Captain Kidd?’ Luckily, Dee knew the area well enough to know several other pubs close by.

  ‘You’re not far,’ the woman said. ‘Ten minutes, maybe? A bit of a walk in the heat but most of the street’s pretty shaded at this time of the day.’

  ‘Ten minutes is fine,’ Dee said.

  As the woman gave directions to a pub Dee already knew how to find, she started thinking about how she was going to get Emer to see the sad truth – that her sister was dead and wasn’t here in London, or anywhere else.

  ‘You got that?’ the woman said.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Dee said. ‘Thanks so much. You’ve been really helpful.’

  ‘A pleasure.’ The woman smiled again. ‘Hope you’re not too late meeting your friend.’

  ‘Me too.’ Dee paused. ‘I’m sorry. You look really familiar. Do I know you from somewhere?’

  The woman’s body stiffened and the smile disappeared.

  ‘Definitely not,’ she said. ‘I never forget a face, and I’m sure I haven’t seen you before. Good luck meeting your friend.’

  She moved along the bar and st
arted collecting glasses. Dee waited for a moment, until it became clear the woman wasn’t going to engage with her, and walked back outside.

  ‘So?’ Emer asked. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Well she looks nothing like you,’ Dee said. ‘Although that doesn’t mean much. Sisters don’t always look alike. And she doesn’t have any trace of an Irish accent, either.’

  ‘People can learn new accents,’ Emer said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Dee agreed. ‘But apart from the eyes, there’s really no reason to think she could be Kitty. I’m sorry, Emer, but I really think you need to let this go. There’s another pub a bit further along, why don’t we go there and have a drink?’

  But Emer was peering through the pub window and didn’t answer.

  ‘She’s not there,’ she said. ‘Where could she have gone? The only way out of the pub is through the front. If she’d come out this way, we’d have seen her.’

  ‘She’s probably just nipped to the loo,’ Dee said. Then, realising Emer wasn’t ready to let this go, ‘Okay, come on. Let’s go back in there, both of us, and ask her who she is and if she recognises you.’

  She pulled open the door of the pub for the second time that afternoon and went back inside. The first thing she noticed was that there was a different person working behind the bar, and there was no sign of the woman who’d been here a few minutes earlier.

  ‘I’ll get us a drink,’ she said, but she was speaking to herself. Emer was still standing outside, just visible through the tinted glass window.

  A man was serving behind the bar now. Tall and thin, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Jarvis Cocker.

  ‘I’m looking for the woman who was serving a few minutes ago,’ Dee said, when she approached the bar.

  ‘She’s gone home. Her shift’s finished for the day. Can I get you something to drink? If not, I’ve got other customers to serve.’

  Not actually true, Dee observed. Apart from two solitary men with drinks already in front of them, she was the only person standing at the bar.

  ‘Any chance you could tell me her name?’ she persisted. ‘She’s the image of someone I used to know.’