A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  With Steve dead, Kathleen was alone with the loss of Alice. She was by herself with the knowledge of what it was to have a way of life wiped out, one sunny afternoon. The police had informed her that her precious little child was missing and all they could offer her in return was a nice warming cup of tea with extra sugar in.

  The isolation was her choice: she had resisted joining groups or answering sympathy letters. She had passed up the chance of conversations with other bereaved parents or with a counsellor that might have sanitised her state. To utter barely formed fears and possibilities gave them the credibility of fact. Kathleen preferred the fluidity of fiction.

  In June 1968 there had been Steve. Without speaking, they had clung to each other, sheltering in a shared language. Then, as hours and days slipped by unacknowledged, they had let go finger by finger until they were awkward strangers sharing a kitchen, hovering with polite reticence to use the bathroom. Then Steve left Kathleen by herself to hold the creaking, ticking quiet of the cottage in hands clumsy with tremor. Gradually as the palpability of his absence waned, Kathleen gave herself up to an undertow of relief: it was easier to look for Alice alone.

  When Alice went missing, they had been besieged by reporters. Kathleen had welcomed them, grateful for their interest, confident they could help. Her numb disbelief was awakened by the flow of words; the flickering phantoms of her home and her daughter on the new Radio Rentals television were an impression of life. She had grasped at every opportunity to talk and keep talking.

  Steve sat in Alice’s bedroom, in the chair he used for bedtime stories, holding the book they had been reading when she vanished. It was Alice in Wonderland, Alice’s favourite. He opened and shut it, a thumb inserted at the place they had left off – ‘A Caucus Race and a Long Tale’ – rubbing the words perhaps to make them vanish too. He only came downstairs if the police asked to speak to him. He would have nothing to do with the journalists. After a while he did not even talk to Kathleen, but retreated into silence. She understood, for silence was where Alice was.

  Kathleen wondered how her husband would have coped if Alice had gone missing today. The media interest had been less then, or perhaps it was just not so polished. Having learnt the importance of what was called the ‘oxygen of publicity’, she now regretted that Robert Kennedy had been shot dead in the same week and that there had been riots at some university in Paris in the days after. She had learnt the importance of keeping the story in readers’ minds. She knew that it was the public that caught criminals, or found missing people, hardly ever the police. People soon forgot. One missing child becomes another missing child: their fresh faces forever smiling in spotless school uniform generic as sheep.

  As the weeks went by and there was no sign of Alice, the aftermath of the death of Kennedy and the American election eclipsed the disappearance of a small girl in Sussex. In return, Kathleen forgot about most of the journalists. She did keep the newspapers, although she could not bear to read them. She had been frightened by the lack of intimacy in the black and white picture of her daughter in the papers. Alice’s face was made up of hundreds of dots. Her daughter had become a story like the ones Kathleen had read many times while drinking coffee and taking the weight off her feet. The same portrait had been in pride of place on top of the television since Alice brought it home from school the previous September, but in the newspaper it made Alice unfamiliar. Kathleen had stacked the newspapers in a cardboard box and got Steve to put it in the loft. He wanted to throw them away, but however alienating they were, she said it was like throwing away Alice. Kathleen didn’t tell Steve that she hoped one day, perhaps when Alice was about thirty, around the same age as Kathleen had been then, she would haul them down and show them to her. Then they would fall about at the pictures of Kathleen and Steve, in his postman’s cap with his stiff old-fashioned face. They would not talk about how awful it had been, but just how long ago it was. It would be a past life and they would be relieved that like in fairy stories, everything was ‘happy ever after’. Outside, Alice’s children would be playing with their grandad in the sandpit, and he would be explaining to them that he had made it for his princess in the olden days.

  But thirty-one years and four days later Alice had not come back. Thirty had passed and this year Alice would have been forty. The papers were still in the loft, probably turned to ash by mice and moths, and Steve was dead of a broken heart at the age of fifty-eight.

  One reporter had stayed in Kathleen’s memory. Jackie Masters looked twenty, with blue eyes and fair hair. Over the years Kathleen had looked out for her name, but had never seen it. Until recently Jackie Masters had vanished as completely as her daughter.

  At the time she had been very present. Arriving with a big ‘Hullo!’, she would march in treating the cottage as her home: filling the kettle, mashing the tea, getting out the milk bottle and flicking off the foil top with such confidence. The place was her own. Kathleen had relinquished everything, her home, her habits; her life. Jackie learnt which cup Kathleen preferred, and washed up and dried and wiped down the draining board. Kathleen found she could talk to Jackie without crying, and say exactly what she meant. The words came out right, not like when she was with the police or with neighbours, when she was unable to speak or move. Jackie could nearly have been Alice’s big sister, she tossed her hair in the same way and, like Alice, she had come top in her schoolwork and had wanted to be a ballet dancer but was too small. They discussed the length of Alice’s hair, would it look good up, did she have a boyfriend? (Kathleen had not liked the question. No.) Which Beatle did she like best? Or did Alice prefer the Monkees? As they chatted Kathleen could hear Alice in her bedroom upstairs, small feet mousing about as she dressed up her dolls or rearranged her glass animals. Jackie was encouraging when Kathleen confessed she had started leaving the porch lamp on and the back door unlocked at night so Alice could get in. She told Jackie that when they were coming home after dark from her father’s in Newhaven, she would insist on putting the light on before they left, so that it would be shining if Alice turned up while they were out. Alice had called the light the ‘beacon’. Until then they hadn’t known she knew the word. Steve had put this down to the Ramsays who he didn’t like. Remembering this stopped Kathleen telling Jackie. She had wanted her to like Steve, although he never came down when she was there.

  ‘Such a grownup word for a little girl, she must have been good at reading.’ Jackie Masters had written ‘beacon’ in her notebook as if it was a new word to her too.

  Oh she was. She loved her books. She always came top at spelling. She knew so many words.

  Alice would know the beacon was a message for her. Kathleen had assured Jackie that Alice would come round to the back. They never used the front door except for special occasions. Although of course, her return would be a special occasion.

  One night Kathleen took Jackie to the kitchen door and pointed timidly at the packet of sandwiches placed next to the empty milk bottles and yoghurt jars. In case Alice was hungry, she explained. Strawberry jam, her favourite. It had felt wonderful making them, she had whispered not wanting Steve to hear. He would say sandwiches were going too far. She had almost been her old self as she laid the slices out on the board exactly square, then smeared a thin layer of butter on each one. You see she doesn’t like too much, but she likes jam right to the crust. She doesn’t like the crust, but she must have it, for her teeth. Jackie had squeezed her hand and given such a nice smile. She had no children of her own yet, but said she understood exactly.

  Alice liked Robertson’s Jam, and was collecting golliwog tokens. Kathleen had helped her send off for a brooch the Tuesday she went missing. Jackie was writing busily as Kathleen recalled Alice skipping and jumping next door to the village stores to post the tokens. Kathleen leaned on the gate, to wait for her, just as excited. Years later, Kathleen still ran this scene like a film. Sometimes it had a different ending, where Alice came home in the evening, hungry and so full of things to tell her,
sliding on to a chair at the kitchen table going on and on, like a canary let out of its cage.

  After lunch Alice had gone off to play with Eleanor Ramsay; Kathleen had not watched her leave and try as she might, she could not think what the last words Alice had said to her were, however many times Jackie asked.

  The golliwog brooch had arrived two weeks after Alice disappeared. Jackie was there and opened the envelope self-addressed in Alice’s pretty writing to save Kathleen. Jackie had behaved like a child, clapping her hands and exclaiming ‘What a surprise!’

  ‘Oh, she’ll love this.’ By now they had both forgotten that Jackie had never met Alice. Jackie had become a family friend who Alice would be so pleased to find waiting for her when she came home.

  ‘When she comes back, I’ll give it to her.’

  ‘Yes, make things normal again as fast as you can.’ Jackie was wise before her time.

  Kathleen had forgotten that Steve was in the house as she told Jackie how she spread out her treats, the sandwiches, switching on the beacon, changing the sheets on Alice’s bed, preparing her school bag for the new term; different tasks spread throughout each day.

  ‘That’s lovely.’ Jackie had sighed, as she noted everything down.

  Jackie had a way of listening, she looked right at Kathleen, letting her know that what she said mattered above everything.

  It had been a mistake to put the sandwiches in a paper bag.

  One morning a fox or a cat ripped it open and ate most of the contents. Kathleen had gone round the garden picking up the last scraps of bread, soil had stuck to the jam and the bag was in shreds with strips of sticky paper all over the grass. Steve had been angry. Had she gone off her head? It was when he read about the food left outside his back door by his wife in his Sunday paper that Steve stopped speaking to her.

  For some weeks Kathleen worried that Steve had upset Jackie because she didn’t come round. Kathleen kept lifting the receiver of their new telephone to check if it was working, or if the other people on the party line were making a call; this would explain why Jackie hadn’t rung. In the end she dialled the number Jackie had given her. She had said to ring if something occurred to her or of course if she just wanted a chat. After Kathleen explained who she was and that she only wanted to say ‘Hello’ and that no, there was nothing new to say, the man on the other end went away. He came back to say Jackie was out. Kathleen hated to be a nuisance and as she was rather scared of the telephone, she didn’t call again. However, even without Jackie there, Kathleen continued to talk to her. She told her how she was each day, she chatted to her as she cooked, cleaned and tidied. At first Steve would come in to see who she was talking to.

  Just thinking out loud.

  Kathleen couldn’t have said when this invisible listener stopped being Jackie and became Alice. Perhaps when Alice reached the age of her missing friend. Perhaps she had always been Alice. Certainly for as long as Kathleen could remember she had been talking to the wise and competent woman she had glimpsed on the evening of the green stick fracture. There was now a reason for getting up in the morning. Kathleen had someone who wanted to know how she spent her day and she must have something to tell her.

  Steve never approved of her searching for Alice. He was a man who called a spade a spade. Once a thing is done it’s done. He wouldn’t talk about Alice and eventually stopped going into her bedroom. He had never had a daughter. This meant they had truly lost the greatest thing they shared. Once she had overheard him telling the landlady in a bed and breakfast in Wales that no he didn’t have children, he hadn’t wanted them. After that they didn’t go on holiday.

  One night Kathleen had woken up alone in the bed. She got up, not turning on the light, finding her dressing gown and slippers with the dexterity of a person used to sneaking around in the dark. Steve was talking.

  Someone was with him.

  She had to steady herself as she reached the top of the stairs. Like Alice, Kathleen knew to avoid the creaky step, but feeling ill with hope she hardly dared admit to, she had had to cling to the banister to prevent herself pitching headfirst. Halfway down she stopped to listen to the murmuring from the living room.

  Steve was speaking to Alice. How she had cherished that voice he used – caressing and wondering – describing a miracle to Alice. The voice that had made her love Steve even more after Alice was born. Kathleen would gaze contentedly as her young husband led Alice along the edge of the beach at Newhaven or bent down with her to look for tiny creatures in the pools of shallow water at the foot of the cliffs. At barely two years old Alice could imitate his words. Caterpillar. Grasshopper. Spider.

  It was years since she had heard that voice.

  Kathleen nearly screamed. Alice is back!

  She had been right all along when she asserted Alice was alive and not buried in some hastily dug grave like everyone privately thought. Steve was a father again.

  Daddy.

  She had run down the rest of the stairs, and then as she touched the doorknob something made her stop in her tracks. Steve wasn’t saying anything.

  There was no one else talking. Then she heard it.

  The silence was broken by a low moaning like the wind. She knew the sound. Steve was crying but Alice wasn’t comforting him. She would have tried to make him better the way she had when she was just three and Steve’s father had died suddenly of a heart attack. He had been briefly enchanted out of grief as his little princess reached up with a tea towel, and pushed through his criss-crossed fingers to dab at his face. Kathleen had prided herself on not being jealous of the way he looked at Alice. She had assured her sister that she didn’t mind that Steve never saw anyone else if Alice was there. She loved the Steve that doted on his daughter.

  ‘Daddy. Please don’t cry.’

  So why wasn’t she handing him a towel now?

  Then she heard him:

  ‘Alice. Where are you? My little Alice…’

  Kathleen had rushed back upstairs. She lay rigidly, wide-awake for the rest of the night. Steve didn’t return to bed and he left for the sorting office without coming to wake her with a cup of tea. When he had clicked shut the front door, quietly so as not to disturb her, it struck Kathleen that he hadn’t brought her a cup of tea in bed for a long time.

  After that Kathleen understood that they were lost to each other. They had taken bits of Alice away into separate places to examine and treasure. If Alice had come home she would have found it occupied by two people who didn’t know each other.

  So when Steve died Kathleen was no more alone than she had been before. She also had the comfort of knowing that for Steve at least, the gnawing pain was over.

  Thirty-one years and four days later Kathleen still kept the kitchen door unlocked with the beacon burning brightly, although she no longer tried to work out what had happened to Alice. She had gone over so many possibilities for years and had exhausted them. Was she abducted? Did she run away? Did she bang her head and lose her memory and wander off into the house of another family who took her in and brought her up as their own? Had Alice been imprisoned in someone’s basement and over time become attached to her kidnappers like Patty Hearst? Kathleen didn’t dwell long on the option of murder. She had read that statistically it was the most likely. She now knew that most abducted children are killed within hours of their kidnap, for few people want to be caught holding a child captive. She knew that whatever the police said, after a fortnight they are looking for a body. They keep that to themselves. She had also read that the more time that passes the less chance there is that the child will be found alive. Over time the clues grow fewer and the trail gets colder.

  Nowadays she noticed there were big rewards from newspapers and celebrities appeal for missing children to come home, assuring them they are not in trouble. Their favourite music is played on the radio and later, if there is a funeral, it is piped over loud speakers to silent crowds. Hollow-eyed parents, like herself and Steve, stare into the camera begging their ch
ild to come home, pleading with their child to come back, or with an anonymous abductor to release them. Kathleen would snatch hungrily at the snippets of these shattered lives to add something to her own jig-sawed world.

  Now that Doctor Ramsay had drowned, life would change again.

  Kathleen had never told anyone how important the doctor was to her. (To Kathleen he would always be Doctor Ramsay.) It would have confirmed opinions that she was not stable. Doctor Ramsay had been kind to her after Alice went. He had told her to keep hope alive and said something about hope being a flame of life. She should have written it down. He continued to make an effort with her, going out of his way to speak to her if they met in the village. Kathleen guessed that some people only talked to her because they saw that he did. He had never treated her as if she was mad. Years ago he had become an expert on her illness, although neither of them discussed this coincidence. Of course he wasn’t her doctor, he was far too important, but he always asked how she was and really seemed to want to know. Kathleen took any comment Doctor Ramsay made about health seriously. The Ramsays had sent flowers when Steve died. She knew they were really from Doctor Ramsay.

  Doctor Ramsay had volunteered to join the line of men in the second search at the Tide Mills. Half the village had taken part in the first one, but for this one they wanted only men. When she heard this, Kathleen had passed out. She had guessed it was because they expected to find her body. She had urged the Chief Inspector not to bother. Alice never went there, Kathleen had told her it was too dangerous. Then Steve had pulled her up off the floor and together with the detective helped her on to the settee: