The Missing Person's Guide to Love

by Susanna Jones

  – vi –

  Near the station she picked up the rental car and drove to the town. She parked outside the guesthouse. She had chosen this place because it was cheap. She had imagined dirty carpets, old smells, grimy surfaces you didn’t want to touch but, in fact, she had a clean, white-walled room with a springy bed and a clear view of the town. On the phone she had dealt with a rather sullen woman. In person, the woman was pefectly friendly.

  It was late in the evening so she would do no more work until tomorrow. She would wake early and take a walk before visiting her old friends. The funeral was today but she had arrived too late for it, on purpose. She would wear the black outfit tomorrow as a sign of respect. People round here liked that sort of gesture.

  Maggie had a desire to lay some flowers by the water, at the scene of the tragedy. It was mawkish and she had often shuddered at the sight of dried-up bouquets in lay-bys, tied to bus shelters or lamp-posts, but Isabel had been only nineteen and nineteen-year-olds are sentimental. It wouldn’t make any difference but it was one thing that she could do.

  *

  It was raining so she drove. By the cottages near the reservoir, she saw Isabel. She was certain it was Isabel. She even tapped on the window and called her name. The girl ran off. Shiny raindrops splashed up from her heels like small coins.

  Maggie came to a beech tree and laid the flowers by the trunk. As an afterthought, she scrawled a message on the card.

  – 6 –

  I am safely at Kath’s house now, directly under the room where we once lit candles for Julia. I marvel at Kath’s sticking power. She is incredible. After all the years, she is still here in this village, in this house. In the next room she sleeps soundly. Her gentle snores slip across the landing and under my door.

  I am sitting in warm lamplight. I close the window and now my feet swish back and forth against the deep carpet. There is a cosy bed where I shall soon snuggle up and sleep. The question turns over and over in my mind. What if I die while I’m here in this town? I shall never have escaped. Is that what Julia thought, if she had time to think it? What if my life ends here, in this street, less than a mile from where I was born? Who will help me out before that happens? Maggie is the answer. The Missing Girls' Club was no help at all but there is Goose Island. I’ll read it now.

  In bed I send a final goodnight text to Mete. I don’t ask about Leila. One of Maggie’s books has a pilot on the cover, crawling out of a light aircraft on the moors. He is dark and handsome, an Action Man doll. It reminds me of Mete when he was in the Turkish Air Force, before his accident. It reminds me of the café in Izmir where I worked as a waitress. Mete and his pilot friends were drinking beer and laughing round a big table. Mete pointed out the shape of the mountain peaks beyond the main part of the city on the other side of the bay and told me that they were known locally as Marilyn Monroe because they resembled a voluptuous woman lying on her back. I look at the handsome soldier on Maggie’s book cover and remember Mete’s sweet smile as he sat there in his blue uniform and cap. I kiss the air in his direction.

  Kath answered the door. She didn’t recognize me. I almost didn’t recognize her. Her face was fatter than it used to be and somehow sunken. Her hair was long. In the 1980s we’d both had short, angular cuts, occasionally permed, always dyed one colour on top of another. Kath had softened. She wore a pink, knitted jumper. It was thick and fluffy, made her look like a cuddly toy.

  ‘Kath.’ I wanted to smile but I couldn’t.

  Her eyes ran all over my face, confused. I tried to catch her gaze in mine.

  ‘Kath, don’t you remember me? It’s Isabel.’

  ‘Isabel. Isabel?’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Izzie?’ The word snagged in her throat and she gave a sudden small cough. ‘My God.’ Her fingers gripped the edge of the door and for a second I thought she was going to shut it in my face.

  ‘Well.’ She laughed, a little too loudly. ‘Let’s have a hug. How are you? It must be – I don’t even know how long. But how are you?’

  ‘I’m all right.’ I smiled.

  Kath held out her arms. It was a slippery hug. Neither of us was certain enough to embrace fully.

  ‘Come in. Has it been raining? Get inside and warm up.’ Kath stepped back and I entered the dark hall. The walls were painted a deep shade of crimson. The air smelled musty, perfumed. Bowls of rose petals stood on the table and the radiator. ‘I can’t believe it. Let me take your coat.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Are you staying in the village? Are you visiting someone?’

  ‘I’m just here for the night. I’ve got a room in a guesthouse up the road.’

  Kath draped my coat over a chair in the hall. I followed her into the living room. It was the same dark colour as the hall. Around the walls and on the furniture were patchwork quilts, lace doilies, embroidered mats. Yellow balls of wool filled a large basket in front of the television. A pair of knitting needles stuck out in a V.

  Kath turned on the gas fire. Blue flames jumped and subsided. ‘Oh, but you won’t have heard about Owen Carr. He had an accident and—’

  ‘I know. I did hear. That’s why I’ve come. I was at the funeral this afternoon.’

  Then I noticed the pictures on the mantelpiece. A boy and a girl, both with fair hair and Kath’s face. ‘They’re sweet.’

  ‘Cara and Jake. Yeah, bless ’em. They’re five and seven. This week they’re with their dad. You married?’

  I told her about Mete and Elif. She seemed pleased with this news and gave me a soft pat on the shoulder. ‘And you still have family around here?’

  ‘No. No one. Not any more, thankfully.’

  ‘But someone told you about Owen. I’m glad. I thought about going to the funeral but I chickened out. It seemed hypocritical to grieve in public when I’d hardly spoken to Owen in years. And, actually, I’d forgotten it was today. I didn’t pay attention to the date when I saw it in the paper.’

  ‘But you live – lived – in the same village. You must have seen him around the place.’

  ‘I know, but it’s very easy not to see someone if you don’t want to. We’d say hello in the pub if we saw each other after a few drinks, but not in the street, cold sober. I wish I’d had a proper conversation with him. All these years and we were too embarrassed, I think, to say. “How are you?” and have a chat about old times and what we were doing. It’s ridiculous. What were we so embarrassed about?’

  I shrugged and shook my head.

  Kath rose heavily to her feet, moved around the room fiddling with light switches. Lamps came on, brightened and dimmed. She turned the gas fire up another notch. I listened for sounds outside but there was nothing. I leaned back on the sofa, half thinking I would just like to close my eyes and sleep, hoping she wouldn’t put the television or music on. Kath sat down in the armchair, upright and just on the edge of the cushion as though she were the guest, not quite comfortable in her host’s living room. It would have been perfect if we didn’t have to speak now and could rest in silence but, of course, we had to talk. Kath buried her fingers in the crocheted blanket that covered the sofa.

  ‘That’s a pretty blanket,’ I said, for something to say.

  ‘I made it. It was easy, just crocheted squares. It was an early effort. I like to make things in the evenings, if I’m watching telly and the kids are in bed.’

  I looked around the room and realized that all the cushion covers, the framed embroideries on the wall, must be her handiwork.

  ‘I’m getting better, gradually. I can start to put some of these things up in the attic as I make new ones. Quite a store of treasures growing up there. I keep them for Cara, so that she can start learning from them in another year or so. Jake’s hoping to join the church choir next year. Remember when we belonged, with Owen?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  But talk of Cara and Jake made me worry about Elif. I didn’t like to imagine her growing up here, going to my old schools, being friends with the daughters of my fr
iends. I didn’t want to go through the same old cycles, season after season, until Elif reached the age of seventeen or eighteen. If I lived here, I would surely have to take her to the lake to feed the ducks, teach her how to identify the different species. It would be my childhood all over again for Elif. And what might happen to her when she turned fifteen? I couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Your parents moved away from here, didn’t they?’

  The last time I had heard Kath speak, she must have had the voice of a seventeen-year-old, yet she sounded just the same to me as she always had. A fat, solid voice from deep in her throat.

  ‘What was the question? Oh, yes. Years ago. I don’t know where they are. I don’t know if they are.’

  Kath smiled and exhaled a sympathetic sigh.

  ‘Well, Maggie would tell me if they’d died, I guess. So I suppose they’re still somewhere. They sold their house here some time in the nineties. I know that much but I don’t know where they went. Possibly up to Scotland where my mum was born.’

  ‘Where in Scotland?’

  ‘Near Stirling somewhere. But they never told me they’d gone.’

  ‘Would it have been easy for them to find you, though, if they’d wanted to? You’ve been living abroad for a while.’

  ‘They could have asked Maggie. They could guess that she’d kept in touch with me. There’s never been anything to stop them.’

  ‘But they probably think you don’t want to know them. I bet they feel a lot of guilt about all that stuff with Owen. Perhaps it’s that way round and if you made a move they’d be delighted.’

  ‘I don’t think so. They didn’t even hang on for the trial.’

  ‘It seems sad and it was such a long time ago,’ Kath said. ‘My dad died ten years ago and my mother’s not well. She’s deteriorated over the last couple of years but it’s a comfort to me that she’s there. It would be a pity to lose your parents without coming to some sort of peace, at least finding out whether they have regrets. I bet they do.’

  ‘I can’t say it would make that much difference now. Kath, can we sit on the floor? I don’t much like chairs.’

  Kath laughed and slipped from her chair to the carpet. I did the same. I warmed my toes in front of the fire. Fake flames danced, blue and orange, to the gentle hiss of gas.

  Kath went into the kitchen, returned a few minutes later with a tray of tea things. The teapot was wrapped in a pink knitted cosy. There was a plate of shortbread and two china mugs. We drank tea and talked. All the time I could see soil sifting through my fingers, more and more of it. It was thick and dark, smooth as it fell and fell. I tried to concentrate, none the less, and learned that Kath is now a primary-school teacher, not here in the village but a few miles away. Her children go to the local primary school, though, the one we went to. They probably sit cross-legged in the same hall and sing ‘When a Knight Won his Spurs’. Her ex-husband, Simon, is a computer engineer from Whitby and they were married for eight years.

  ‘He left, a long time ago, but lots of his things are still here, cluttering the attic and spare bedroom. I wish he’d take them so I could feel I was getting on with things, but he can’t see what the problem is. We’ve got a big attic, unfortunately.’

  I saw the attic room, bursting with Kath’s knitting and embroidery, Simon’s boxes of clothes. ‘I remember that room,’ I said. ‘It used to be your bedroom.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Kath’s voice was bright. She was not thinking about our ceremony for Julia, the candles and perfume. She had probably forgotten.

  There was a silence and we drank more tea. When the pot was empty, she went to put the kettle on again. ‘I’m an addict,’ she said. ‘I can’t have less than three cups.’

  ‘You sit down. I’ll do it.’ I went to the kitchen.

  Kath called out to me, ‘Look, Izzie, why don’t you stay here tonight? I’ve got a spare room and you don’t want to be on your own in some lonely guesthouse.’

  ‘Oh, no. I couldn’t intrude.’

  But I already knew I was not going back to the Lake View. I would rather have slept on the street than in that poky room.

  Kath stood in the doorway. ‘You wouldn’t be intruding. I’m quite lonely, actually, when the kids aren’t here. I’d love to have some company for the evening. We’ll cook a nice dinner and catch up on the past. You look so well. You haven’t aged at all. It’s amazing.’

  ‘Thanks, you too.’ In fact, Kath looked much older. She was more attractive, though, than she ever had been when I had known her before. She looked happy. I was glad I had come. ‘Let’s do that.’

  I think of my parents in a village in Scotland, for some reason in a brick bungalow. I see them playing bridge with friends of the same age. My father is laughing gently at a bad joke of my mother’s. She likes to pun, to play with words, and remarks that she is even better at Scrabble than she is at bridge. They pour drinks for their friends and offer snacks – nuts and chocolate – eager to please. A standard lamp casts a pool of white around the table. The bulb shines through a fringed, faded lampshade. I am filled with sadness. It ebbs and flows around my bones. Sometimes it rises up to my eyes and a little spills out. Then it passes.

  I chopped tomatoes while Kath measured fistfuls of spaghetti into a pan of boiling water. ‘Things have changed round here, you know,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to go to the foreign-food section of the shop to buy spaghetti any more. We even have a Mexican restaurant.’

  I said nothing but tipped the chunks of tomato into the frying-pan and stepped back as oil spat up at me.

  Kath continued, ‘I couldn’t live anywhere else now. It’s a small place and I don’t know why I like being here, but I do. It’s having the house, I suppose.’

  ‘Your parents left it to you?’

  ‘And that’s why I love it. It’s completely mine. I don’t have to remember my memories, you see, because I’m among them. It’s only when I go away that I’m aware of what’s past and what’s present. Except for tonight, though. I never expected this. When an old friend you heard was dead walks through the door, glowing with health and youth, well—’

  I dropped the knife into the sink. ‘Not again. Who told you I was dead?’ I turned on the tap and rinsed pink tomato juice from my fingers. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘How did I die? It’s a bloody lie anyway.’

  ‘I can’t remember where I heard it. It was a rumour that went around years ago. It wasn’t very consistent. Once I heard that you died in prison and another time that it happened afterwards.’

  ‘You’re the third person who’s said that to me today. I don’t feel very good now. And, to be pedantic, it wasn’t prison.’

  I leaned against the sink, unable to think what to say next. Kath stopped too. She perched on the back of a chair, reached out and rubbed my arm.

  ‘Sorry. I was never sure about anything I heard. Your parents left the village and that seemed to fit with the story, in a way. I didn’t like to say anything before. I thought I’d just assume that you were real and not a ghost or doppelgänger. It’s a bit eerie, though. The power ofgossip that it can make someone alive or dead.’

  ‘But where did it come from?’

  ‘I don’t remember, and I didn’t necessarily believe it at the time but it stayed in the back of my mind. Somehow it ended up as the truth.’

  ‘I suppose I spooked a few people at the funeral, then.’

  ‘Never mind that. People round here need shaking up once in a while.’ Kath opened a bottle of ruby-red wine, filled two glasses almost to the brim. ‘Cheers. To old friends.’ She held her glass up high.

  ‘Old friends.’ We clinked glasses. The wine was sweet and heavy. I savoured it. ‘So what did I die of?’

  ‘Oh. I can hardly remember what nonsense it was. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, please. What was it?’

  ‘It was terribly vague. I – um . . .’

  I could see that Kath was trying to come up with something acceptable, not too gruesome, nothing tha
t would upset me. ‘What was it? I can take it. I’m not superstitious or oversensitive. Just curious.’

  ‘They said you committed suicide. The story was that you cut your wrists in prison – sorry, detention centre, whatever it was – and bled to death.’

  ‘Oh.’ The story must have come from Owen. Why would he have said that? What kind of revenge would it be?

  ‘But the other version was that you came out of prison and had nowhere to go because your family didn’t want you, and you took an overdose somewhere. In a field, I think. A field of flowers by a lake.’

  ‘That’s nice. No, that’s sweet, isn’t it? A field of poppies, maybe. I could have drifted off to sleep. Of the two I certainly prefer that one. Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Sorry, Izzie. Have I upset you? I shouldn’t have said anything. ’

  ‘No, no.’ I tried to laugh it off. ‘I almost believed it for a second there. It was like waking from a nightmare. What a relief that I’m alive. I suppose those things could have happened to me. They will have happened to someone, after all. If you look at it objectively, perhaps there’s no difference. I wonder if I’ll show up in the funeral photographs.’ I giggled.