What She Left

by Rosie Fiore

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. It had become almost pathological how Helen’s name was never mentioned between us. He certainly never said her name in front of the girls, and never talked to me about her either. I’d been taking my cues from him so hadn’t brought her up either. And now here he was, admitting he’d been hallucinating Helen all over town. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Why don’t you pop to the shop and get a bottle of wine?’ I said. ‘We’ll talk about this when all the kids are in bed.’

  Later, we sat together on the sofa. I usually like to sit in the curve of his arm when we watch TV, but today I found myself curled up on the far end, my legs pulled up under me. I needed a little distance for this conversation. Sam sat in his usual spot, at the other end of the sofa, staring at the blank TV screen and taking large, regular gulps from his glass of wine.

  ‘So can you tell me about these. . . sightings?’ I prompted gently.

  He related a few incidents when he’d seen someone who had resembled Helen.

  ‘I know it’s crazy,’ he said. ‘I know it can’t be her. There’s no reason at all to believe she’s stayed in London. I mean, why would she? But every time it happens, I can’t help myself. I go into full adrenaline mode and I want to chase her and stop her and. . .’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘And what?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Keep hold of her until she tells me. . . until she tells me why.’

  There was such pain in that ‘why’. There were nights and nights of analysis, of self-flagellation, of questions for which there were no answers. And all I could think was, I’m not helping him at all. There’s this pit of pain in him, and there’s nothing I can do to make it go away.

  Hesitantly, I scooted along the sofa so I could take his hand in mine. ‘I’m so sorry. I wish I could help you. Is there anyone you could speak to?’

  He glanced at me. ‘Have you been speaking to Tim? He thinks I need therapy. Can’t afford it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant isn’t there anyone you could speak to who might help you understand why she went? Or even where she might be? She must have family. Friends.’

  Sam explained to me that she didn’t. She’d had one uncle in Canada, apparently, who was now gaga and in a nursing home. No siblings, both parents dead. And no friends, other than the school-gate ones we both knew about. I knew they didn’t know any more than I did. There’d been enough gossip about it, and no one had been able to offer anything but the wildest conjecture. I agreed with Sam. There was no one in our social circle who was harbouring Helen’s dark secrets.

  ‘What about before she came to the UK? She must have had friends in Australia.’

  Again, Sam said, his searches had turned up blanks. He picked up his phone and entered a search for ‘Helen Knight Brisbane’. The speed and assurance with which he typed it suggested to me he’d done this often before. And indeed, every link on the first page showed up in that purple colour which tells you you’ve visited that page before. He showed me the one school and one university image he’d found.

  ‘Nothing else? Really?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Isn’t that weird and suspicious in itself? Who has absolutely no web presence? Everyone gets tagged in a Facebook pic by an old friend, or crops up in pictures at a company away-day. She worked before, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, in marketing. In a similar field to me. We met at work.’

  ‘And I assume that since she went missing, she hasn’t cropped up online again?’

  ‘Not once. She deleted her Facebook profile. That’s the only sign I’ve had that she’s still out there – one day it was there, and the next she deleted it.’

  I paused for a second to take in the news that Sam had obviously been watching Helen’s Facebook profile. Of course he would have been. It was understandable. I shook my head.

  ‘It makes no sense. How does she disappear off the Net for eight years, between the end of university and coming to the UK, and then disappear again?’

  ‘I. Don’t. Know,’ said Sam, and I could see he was getting tense. He didn’t want to go over all of this again. It was a hopeless, self-destructive spiral, and he never got any closer to an answer. He took a long gulp from his wine glass and emptied it. Then he pulled me to him firmly and began unbuttoning my shirt. He clearly wanted to forget, and this was the way he was going to do it.

  Sam

  ‘We met at work’. It sounds so trite, so pedestrian. Something like 15 per cent of couples meet at work. It makes the beginning of our relationship seem like one of those terrible stock photographs where a handsome guy leans against the wall by a water cooler as a pretty girl (wearing glasses to show she’s clever and serious) listens to him raptly, holding an armful of files. It was nothing like that. Neither Helen nor I were ever able to remember the first time we met – we used to laugh about that, that neither of us had been paying attention at that significant moment in our lives.

  I remember the first time I noticed her though. We were in a big team meeting and she was being perky and bright and Australian, and I thought she was one of the most irritating girls I’d ever come across. I knew who she was, obviously, but this was my first professional encounter with her. She was super-organized, with all her coloured pens lined up neatly along the edge of her notebook, and she’d come to the meeting with screeds of useful data and research and lots of well-thought-out ideas. I’d rolled in ten minutes late, and it wasn’t till I sat down and glimpsed my reflection in the glass wall of the meeting room that I realized I’d forgotten to brush my hair that morning. I was hung-over and fuzzy. Leonora had been dead for about ten months, and while I was kind of managing, I still had nights where I drank and listened to her old CDs and cried. It was partially grief and partially self-pity because I was a twenty-eight-year-old widower with two daughters under four and back living with my parents.

  So when I got to the morning meeting and Little Miss Perky Antipodean was passing around her crisp, photocopied pie charts and graphs, it got right up my nose. Someone passed me a sheaf of her notes and I deliberately pushed them away without looking at them. It was bratty and unprofessional, but I couldn’t face her shiny enthusiasm. I saw her glance at me, and her eyes narrowed a little. ‘Here we go,’ I thought. ‘She’s going to tell me off like a naughty schoolboy’. But she didn’t say anything. She talked less for the rest of the meeting, and I wondered if her more subdued manner was caused by my snub. I felt a little guilty, but I forgot about it quickly enough.

  Later that afternoon, I was starting to fall asleep at my desk, so I went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. While I was stirring in an extra spoonful of sugar, my phone rang. It was my mum, who had collected Miranda from nursery.

  ‘How is she?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so good,’ said Mum, and I could hear Miranda’s pitiful sobs in the background.

  ‘I wanna speak to Daddy!’ she wailed.

  ‘Can you have a word with her?’ said Mum.

  ‘Of course.’ I could hear the rustle as Mum bent down to hold the phone to Miranda’s ear.

  ‘Hey, poppet,’ I said, and at that moment Helen walked into the kitchen. She saw I was on the phone and indicated she didn’t mean to interrupt. She went over to the tap to refill her water bottle.

  ‘What’s up?’ I said to Miranda.

  ‘Come home, Daddy!’ she wailed. ‘I need you to come home.’

  ‘I can’t come home right now, sweetie, I’m at work. I’ll be home in a couple of—’

  ‘I need you now! I’ve got a poorly finger and a sore tummy. I need you.’ She let out another long wail.

  ‘Baby girl, I’ve got a meeting to go to. I’ll get home as soon as—’

  My mum cut in. ‘It’s me again,’ she said. Miranda had obviously pushed away the phone, distraught that I wasn’t going to drop everything and come home.

  ‘How is she really?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s under the weather
, coming down with a bug or something. It’s to be expected with all the germs at nursery.’

  ‘She’s only just got over an ear infection though.’ I rested my forehead on the cool, smooth surface of the kitchen cupboard.

  ‘Well, that’s as may be, but she’s definitely warm, and you can hear she’s upset. I’ll get her back to the house and dose her up with paracetamol. We’ll see you later.’

  My mum doesn’t do game-playing, so I knew she wasn’t trying to guilt-trip me into coming home. I couldn’t anyway.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, reluctantly. ‘Well, give her a kiss from me.’ I clicked off the phone, then turned and saw that Helen was still in the kitchen, holding her water bottle in both hands and watching me. I gave her a half-hearted, insincere smile. I didn’t appreciate her hanging around listening to my personal conversations.

  ‘Go,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Go home to your little girl. I’ll tell Chris you had to go on an urgent client visit.’

  ‘I can’t. . .’

  ‘You can. Someone needs to go and pick up a logo on a flash drive from that insurance client.’

  ‘I know, but. . .’

  She stuck her hand into the pocket of her skirt. ‘It so happens I did it at lunchtime, but nobody knows yet. You can bring it in first thing tomorrow. It’s your alibi. Now go home and curl up on the sofa with that little girl.’

  I looked at her, uncomprehending. ‘Go,’ she said again, and pressed the flash drive into my hand. I muttered thanks, then went back past my desk to fetch my jacket.

  ‘Just popping to the insurance client to get that logo,’ I said to Dina, the copywriter who sat opposite me. She barely looked up, just kept typing.

  I walked quickly out of the office. Helen, now back at her desk and typing away at top speed, glanced up and gave me a bright smile. As I passed through the doors and headed for the lifts, I found myself thinking how pretty she was.

  The next morning, I stopped off at the bakery on the corner of the road and bought a warm, flaky, almond croissant. I left it on Helen’s desk with a Post-it note on which I’d scrawled: ‘Thanks. From Miranda and me.’

  Fifteen minutes later, an email popped up: ‘Delicious, thanks. You didn’t need to. Hx’

  That afternoon, I waited for my coffee break until I saw her pass by to go to the kitchen for her water. When I walked in, she grinned at me.

  ‘How’s your little girl?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s fine. Nothing wrong with her that a long cuddle and a game of My Little Pony wouldn’t fix.’

  ‘My Little Pony? I used to play with those when I was small.’

  ‘You can’t keep a good pony down, you know. They’re like the Stones. Eternal classics.’

  ‘You were widowed, weren’t you?’ she asked. When I looked surprised, she said, ‘Sorry. I haven’t been here long enough. I still ask direct questions – very un-British, I know.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Yes, my wife died about ten months ago.’

  ‘How old is your daughter?’

  ‘Daughters. Miranda is three, nearly four. Marguerite is eighteen months. We live with my mum and dad at the moment. I couldn’t work without them.’

  She nodded, then waited for me to continue; her gaze was direct and warm. I liked the fact that she didn’t flinch, or look uncomfortable or offer any platitudes. I was young to be widowed, so most people my age had no idea what to say. They had no experience of death and they tended to shy away or get upset on my behalf, which was unhelpful, as I ended up comforting them as they wept about my poor tiny daughters. But Helen listened and asked sensible, calm questions. I got the feeling that she’d faced difficulties herself and was thus more grown-up than her contemporaries.

  After that, I made a point of meeting up with her in the kitchen most afternoons, trying to make it look accidental. I found myself thinking about her smile more often than I would have thought possible. Then, one sunny Wednesday, I was engrossed in typing an email when I realized she was standing beside my desk.

  ‘I’m heading out to get a sandwich for lunch,’ she said. ‘Fancy coming along?’

  I actually had my lunch already, in a Tupperware box in my bag – I was trying to save money, so I tended to bring food in from home – but I didn’t hesitate.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘Give me a minute to finish this and I’ll meet you in reception.’

  One lunch became lunch two or three times a week, an exchange of phone numbers, and a reasonable amount of light banter via text message. I couldn’t quite sort out what was going on, or indeed what my feelings about it were. I liked her, but Leonora hadn’t been dead a year, so every time I found myself looking at Helen romantically or sexually, I’d be swept away with a wave of guilt and longing for my wife. I also couldn’t read Helen’s intentions at all. Was she my work buddy? Was this a pity friendship? Or did she have feelings for me too? I couldn’t imagine it. After all, who would take me on? I was a mess. I lived with my parents, for God’s sake. I had no leisure time for dating or romance, and no money. I couldn’t expect anything more from her than I was already getting. But what I was getting – oh, it was a small ray of light in my dark life.

  And then, one particularly bad day, I had been out to see a client, who hated the designs I’d done, and I’d just got a text message from Miranda’s nursery to say they’d had an outbreak of head lice. I walked into the building feeling tired and downtrodden, only to find that the lifts were all up on the top floor. I started to trudge up the stairs and about halfway up I met Helen, who was skipping down, on her way to a meeting. As soon as she saw me, her face broke into the happiest, most infectious smile, and she dumped her satchel and sat down on the stairs to chat to me, as if she had all the time in the world. It was like the sun had come out in that dingy stairwell. I made some lame, half-hearted joke and she laughed, a bright, delightful peal, and I thought with absolute simplicity, ‘I am in love with her.’

  For a year, I’d been unable to imagine a future beyond the dreadful day-to-day grind of survival, but all of a sudden there was clarity. Helen. Helen was my future. Helen, filling my arms, my bed, shining that sunshiny smile on my poor sad little girls. In a nanosecond, a whole stream of possibilities occurred to me. With two salaries, we could get a place together. I wouldn’t be living at my parents’ like a loser anymore. It’d take the pressure off me if I could share childcare with someone. Maybe I could get ahead at work? We could get married. Have a baby of our own. Build a new life. Yes. A future. Yes, there were practical ways in which this could work, but more than anything, I loved her. I really, really loved her.

  As these thoughts tumbled through my head, I must have stared at her in a particularly gormless, goggle-eyed way, because she stopped laughing and said, ‘What?’

  And I found myself saying, ‘Would you like to come to the park with me and the girls this weekend?’

  Six years later, I woke up in another woman’s bed, feeling like shit. I was much too hot under Lara’s heavy down duvet. I was dehydrated and hung-over, and Lara’s side of the bed was empty. I could feel from the stuffy air that she’d got up and put the heating on, which wasn’t helping my thirst and general misery. Downstairs I could hear all four kids yelling and thumping, and the siren wail of Marguerite beginning to throw an A-grade tantrum. More than anything, I wished I could hide in the bedroom for the next several hours, but I had a fierce need to pee and an even more urgent need to drink several pints of cold water and then several more pints of coffee.

  Was it possible to get up, pee and get some water, and somehow signal to Lara to bring me coffee, while still hiding from all the kids in the bedroom? How I wished I could. But I was conscious of taking far too much advantage of Lara’s goodwill where the kids were concerned, and also that Marguerite in particular needed some quality one-to-one time with me.

  While Marguerite ostensibly likes being part of a larger, more boisterous hou
sehold, all this hasn’t been easy for her. Frances and Miranda are inseparable and aren’t always kind in the way they force her out of their games. And sweet though Jonah is, he’s more than three years younger than Marguerite and not a proper playmate for her. A tougher kid might have fought for attention, or made their own entertainment, but Marguerite isn’t tough. She’s passive and shy and quite babyish for her age. She has taken Helen’s departure the hardest of all of us, in some ways. She’s not angry with Helen, like I am, or icily indifferent, like Miranda. She desperately misses the only mother she has ever known. And so she whines. She’s always whined quite a lot anyway, but it’s got massively worse in recent months, and it makes her – it’s hard to admit this, but it’s true – annoying and not terribly appealing.

  Lara has been endlessly patient and kind to her, but she (very sensibly) has kept a careful distance between herself and my girls. They’re not ready for another ‘mother’ figure in the same mould as Helen. As for me, all too often I’m tired and ratty with the girls, and we have such limited time to get the necessary things done – homework, baths, chores and so on – that I don’t have the time for affection, laughs, cuddles and stories, which is what Marguerite is sorely lacking.

  No matter how grim I felt, I knew that what I needed to do today was make time for my younger daughter. I’d be taking Miranda and Frances to the dance school in an hour or so, and they’d be there till past lunchtime. Normally I ended up dragging Marguerite around the supermarket with me in those few hours, or I’d make her sit quietly and watch a DVD while I got on with work. But today I’d take her for a treat – she loved to go to Claire’s Accessories and spend hours looking at the bits of jewellery and hair ornaments. I’d grit my teeth and let her browse for as long as she wanted and choose something special. Miranda would no doubt sulk about it, but that was too bad. She could have a solo indulgence another day.

  At that moment the bedroom door was flung back and Marguerite stood there, her face red with indignation and her upper lip slick with snot.