When You Disappeared

by John Marrs

  I didn’t care what WPC Williams had said: I knew Simon too well to ever consider he’d walked out on us. The strength and support he’d shown me during the worst thing that could ever happen to a parent had proved he was a fantastic husband and dad, and I desperately needed to believe that he was still alive. Fifteen months had passed since we’d last been united in grief, and there I was again, but this time I was on my own and grieving for a man whose fate was unknown.

  Northampton, today

  8.30 a.m.

  He knew his fingers would tear through the soft felt brim of his fedora if he clutched it any tighter. But he wasn’t ready to let go just yet.

  He watched as she turned back from closing the door and noted how she avoided his gaze when she walked towards the centre of the living room. Time hadn’t eroded her natural grace. The crow’s feet around the cool flint of her eyes were new to him, and the narrow lines across her forehead stretched further than he remembered, but none of it mattered. Her loveliness was altered, but not in the least bit dimmed. Her grey hairs were like perfectly placed brushstrokes in an oil painting, all the better for not being disguised by artificial colouring. Her bloom had far from faded, and that made him feel awkward and dusty in comparison.

  For Catherine’s part, she had so much to say but nowhere to begin. So she remained silent and knotted her fingers together tightly so he couldn’t see them shake. Try as she might, she did not want to look at him, but it was a struggle. Eventually she allowed her eyes to cautiously run over him.

  His face had filled out, leaving his cheeks jowlier. His waistline had expanded, but was kept under restraint by his leather belt. His feet looked larger, which she realised was a peculiar thing to focus on.

  Then her eyes became glued to him, fearing that if they became unstuck, he would vanish. And if he was to disappear again, she wanted to be there to see it. It had been years since she’d last glimpsed his image in any of the few remaining photographs left hidden in the attic. She’d forgotten how handsome he was. How handsome he was even now, she admitted, then immediately chastised herself for thinking that.

  He stood awkwardly and surveyed the living room, trying to recall what had been where when he was last inside it. The layout appeared familiar, albeit with fresh wallpaper, carpets and furnishings. But it felt so small in comparison to what he now called home.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit?’ he asked.

  She didn’t reply, so he did so anyway.

  There were pictures of people in frames scattered across the sideboard, but without his reading glasses, their faces were blurs. It was the same when he’d tried to remember what his children looked like – clouds always masked the finer details. Well, all apart from James. He knew the man James had become, and he’d never forget that.

  The silence between them lasted longer than either noticed. As the uninvited visitor, he felt the need to begin.

  ‘How are you? You look well.’

  She gave him a look of disdain, but it failed to unsettle him. He was prepared for that.

  ‘I like what you’ve done with the cottage,’ he continued.

  Again, nothing.

  He scanned the sandstone chimney breast and the wood-burning stove they’d had a devil of a time installing soon after they’d moved in. He smiled. ‘Is that old thing still working? Do you remember when we almost set the chimney alight because we hadn’t cleaned it out before—’

  ‘Don’t.’ Her curt response prevented him from reaching the end of memory lane.

  ‘Sorry, it’s just being in this room after so long brought it back . . .’

  ‘I said don’t. You do not turn up at my house after twenty-five years and begin speaking to me like we’re old friends.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  An uneasy, foggy quiet filled the room.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘What do I want?’

  ‘That’s what I asked. What do you want from me?’

  ‘I don’t want anything from you, Kitty.’ It was a partial truth.

  ‘Don’t call me that. You lost any right to call me that a long time ago.’

  He nodded.

  His voice sounded a little raspier and deeper than back then, and contained traces of an accent she couldn’t place.

  ‘And spare me your apologies,’ she continued. ‘They’re a little late in the day and unwelcome.’

  He’d played out this opening scenario dozens of times in his imagination before Luca had booked his flights over the Internet. Would she remain in shock or slap him, embrace him, yell at him, cry or just refuse to let him in? There were countless reactions she could have had, but somehow he’d failed to anticipate this icy hostility. He didn’t know how to respond to it.

  ‘Where did you go?’ she asked. ‘While I was out searching for your dead body, where the hell were you?’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SIMON

  Calais, France, twenty-five years earlier

  10 June

  I’d not made acquaintance with motion sickness before last night, locked in the back of the truck. I’d lost track of how often I vomited. My stomach had become nothing more than a hollow trunk.

  The driver had warned me the crossing would take about an hour and a half, but the festering storm outside soon put paid to his estimate. An uncaring English Channel picked up our ferry and tossed it around like a rag doll. I felt my way around in the pitch black and wedged myself behind two packing cases strapped in place to the sides of the truck.

  I’d buried my history with my mother’s bones, but to truly shed my skin, an unfettered, unspoiled me could only thrive far away from the past. France’s geographical location made for an obvious starting point. Reaching it without a passport or money was, however, an obstacle. But a haggard truck driver with a nicotine-stained moustache and disdain for authority offered me a solution.

  Earlier in the day, he’d picked me up near Maidstone and we’d enjoyed a rapport over the state of British football and the Conservative government’s penchant for privatising anything and everything. At no point did he enquire as to my hidden motives when I explained where I was headed and how my lack of means might hamper me. However, he’d come to his own conclusions.

  ‘I did a bit of prison time back in the day,’ he began, rolling a cigarette as he steered. ‘As long as you ain’t murdered anyone or touched any kids, I’ll get you over there.’

  Minutes before he drove through the customs checkpoint, he locked the trailer doors behind me, leaving me hidden behind wooden boxes with a torch, a can of supermarket beer and his homemade cheese and chutney sandwich. But neither the food nor the drink remained inside me once the storm exploded into life.

  The conditions outside were clearly too chancy for us to dock, so we remained mid-Channel until the white squall played out. With each dip, my stomach touched my toes until the ferry finally docked safely in the port.

  ‘Look at the state of you!’ the driver laughed when he set me free in the car park of a French hypermarket.

  He helped my unsteady feet back onto land and I shed my vomit-stained clothes behind the truck, throwing them into a bin. I climbed into his cab in just my underwear and changed into new clothes I’d taken from someone else’s bag at a homeless shelter I’d slept at in London.

  ‘This is as far as I can take you,’ he said back outside. ‘Good luck, son.’

  ‘Thank you. By the way, I didn’t catch your name?’

  ‘Just call me Moses,’ he chuckled, and slowly pulled away.

  As his truck disappeared out of sight, I counted the fistful of French francs I’d stolen from the wallet on his dashboard.

  Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France

  17 June

  Waves from an inclement Atlantic Ocean lapped at my feet and made the hairs on my toes sway like a sea urchin’s spines. The rotating beams from a pair of lighthouses sliced through a bruised sky as night swept in. Three concrete walls framed the harbour and prevented the water and ho
rizon from ever meeting. Unable to catch a breeze in their sails, a handful of windsurfers straddled their boards and paddled to the shore.

  I was unsure how long my journey from the north to the south of France had taken, as without Doreen’s watch, time neither existed nor mattered. Hours blended into each other like colours in a tie-dyed T-shirt.

  I’d spent long stretches of time hovering by French roadsides searching for a friendly smile behind a moving windscreen. Sometimes I found myself hiding in train carriage toilets avoiding ticket inspectors.

  It was during my days of near solitude when the faces of those I’d left behind drifted in and out of my head. I questioned how she was coping without me. Had she presumed I was dead like I’d hoped, or was she still holding on to faint hope of my return? Because I wanted to fade from all of their memories quickly.

  However, my rational side knew I had to nip these thoughts in the bud. If I allowed them to become more frequent, they’d only hamper me. So I began to train myself to think only of the future and not of the past – and, specifically, her. It wasn’t easy, especially with copious amounts of time on my hands.

  Manipulating one’s thoughts is relatively simple for a few moments. But the part of your brain that holds in its core everything that’s amiss about one’s self doesn’t appreciate being contained for long. The longer I dwelled on the badness, the harder it would be to anticipate the good times ahead. But I had freedom to choose and I could, if I wanted to, reject those thoughts.

  So as soon as something detrimental came into my mind, I snatched it mid-air and quashed it. I reminded myself those memories belonged to a person who no longer existed.

  Of course, I couldn’t control everything I thought about, but I learned to manage and compartmentalise much of it. And by the time I disembarked at the beach in Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the south-west, the wheels were already in motion. The key was to remain conscious of and fixed upon only the present and the future. To assist in that project, I created new memories by focusing on what I saw and sensed from the moment I arrived.

  I began by inhaling the salty sea mist and the smells carried by the wind from the surrounding gastronomy. I appreciated how the beach’s harbour resembled a huge toothless grin, and I found myself smiling back at it. I was impressed at how the historic architecture of Saint-Jean-de-Luz had been kept so pristine. I could see a Basque church and longed to go inside it.

  Ahead of me lay the ocean; to the left, the Spanish border and the mighty Pyrenees; behind me, the body of France. I could run in any direction and no one would catch me. It was the place I could begin again.

  My personal hygiene had been restricted to washing myself in stained basins at truck stops and train stations, so my first priority was to walk down the concrete steps, strip off my musty-smelling clothes and run into the water in just my underwear.

  The salt stung my eyes when I lay face down, grasping a seabed that slipped through my fingers. I swam towards a white metal buoy bobbing along under the spell of the ebb and flow. Linking an arm through its scaffolding, I took in the coastline.

  I threw myself under the water and the sound of the waves tussling against the tide tore through my ears. I held my head under until my baptism was complete.

  The harbour was a popular dock for boats and trawlers that ended a day’s fishing in picture-postcard comfort. The gentle vibrations of their engines gave satisfying tingles up and down my arms and legs as my nerves sprang back to life. Closing my eyes, I flipped onto my back and slowly paddled towards the beach to dry my new skin in the setting sun’s rays.

  Instinctively I believed my new life had the potential to be perfect.

  28 June

  Fumes from the Gauloise had fused with the burning cannabis resin and floated up through my nostrils then deep into my lungs. I leaned back on my elbows, sank further into the sand and savoured the high before exhaling.

  ‘Good shit, man,’ said Bradley, who sat next to me, cross-legged.

  ‘Yep,’ I replied without looking at him, my eyes like crescent moons.

  With the aid of my pidgin French and helpful locals, I’d been directed towards a backpacking hostel on Rue du Jean. The beachfront buildings were exquisite, but the Routard International was hidden three streets back, under a shroud of dirt and dilapidation. Its cream and olive-green facade had flaked, chipped and fallen like dandruff onto the pavement.

  Inside, framed sepia photographs arranged carelessly on its reception walls revealed its previous incarnation as the Hôtel Près de la Côte – a glowing, three-storey art deco hotel. Its geometric shapes were now muddied and barely visible behind a hodgepodge of cheap, modern bookcases and dressers. And its former elegance and stylish modernism had all but vanished.

  Marble tiles had dropped from the ballroom’s walls and lay shattered around a grand piano, felled by two fractured legs. It had downgraded from a luxurious destination to an ad hoc home for fly-by-nights with limited means.

  The remainder of Moses’s money just about stretched to a dormitory bed for the week. The nights I’d spent in a homeless shelter in London had quickly acclimatised me to others’ sleep-talking, snoring, and the smells produced by six bodies in a confined space.

  It was mainly young European travellers, keen to explore beaches away from the glamour of Cannes and Saint-Tropez, who inhabited the hostel. I had more years on me than most, but I’d never looked my age. This allowed me to shave a decade from my date of birth. My hitchhiker’s tan gave me a healthy sheen and masked the weight I’d lost by irregular eating.

  I made the acquaintance of small pockets of people who spoke in tongues I often couldn’t understand. But through botched German, Italian, French and plenty of exaggerated hand signals, we muddled along until we caught each other’s drifts.

  I spent my first few days seeking potential employment, from menial and unskilled work pot-washing in café kitchens to being a trawlerman’s assistant. But the town looked after its own, and there was no place for an Englishman yet to prove his worth.

  So I filled my time by familiarising myself with my adopted home through exploratory field trips. My fascination with architecture remained and there was much to absorb, like William Marcel’s pre-First World War Hôtel du Golf, and the ochre-red country club in Chantaco I’d read about in my father’s Reader’s Digest magazines.

  My evenings were occupied by listening to hostellers reminiscing about their pre-travelling lives, while offering little about my own background. My scant smokescreen involved leaving university to spend a couple of years being part of the world, not merely studying it from the sidelines.

  It was a plausible story that I repeated so often, I’d begun to believe it myself.

  30 June

  ‘You should’ve told me you’re looking for a job,’ said Bradley, the American-born hostel manager. He was an amiable man in his late thirties with shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair and Elvis-sized sideburns. His surfer’s saline tan etched deep white lines into his face and aged him prematurely.

  ‘Yes, do you know of one?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘Well, it’s not much, but we need a janitor. Someone who can check people in and out too, and do odd jobs. It doesn’t pay much, but you’ll get your bed and board for free.’

  It sounded ideal and I began the next day. The role offered extra perks I hadn’t accounted for. I could raid the cupboard of forgotten clothes, read literature in the ‘Take a book, leave a book’ library and practise my language skills with other travellers.

  I gave walls fresh licks of paint, hammered loose floorboards, wiped vomit from bathroom toilets and welcomed new guests. Ample free time and reliable surf enabled me to learn the skills of wave riding, thanks to Bradley’s patient lessons and his collection of colourful surfboards. Once I’d mastered the basics, scuba diving became my next challenge, followed by horse-trekking excursions through the neighbouring mountain foothills.

  My evenings were golden – the day of work followed by an hour on
the beach watching the sun set over a joint or two with Bradley, and finally shots of Jack Daniels and Coke at one of the local bistros.

  I adapted to my new way of life with gusto. And with my baggage consigned to sealed boxes in my head, I was at ease living in a way I’d never dared to dream of. To the eyes of a stranger, and even myself, I had no discernible essence.

  CATHERINE

  Northampton, twenty-five years earlier

  17 June

  ‘Just tell us where he is!’ Shirley yelled as I grabbed her shoulder and shoved her out the front door.

  ‘Get out now!’ I screamed back.

  Shirley’s exasperated voice echoed around the house as I gave her and Arthur their marching orders.

  For half an hour, Simon’s dad and stepmother had subjected me to a bitter barrage of questions and accusations, and I’d had enough. My nerves were already in tatters without them sticking their oars in. I’d expected them to turn up on our doorstep sooner, but they’d clearly been too busy spending their days festering over how he could’ve vanished into thin air. And they were convinced I must have had something to do with it.

  When they’d arrived, I’d made the most of the light summer night and sent the children into the garden to play. Then I took a deep breath and slowly walked the green mile to the living room. There, Arthur and Shirley sat side by side, their arms and legs crossed.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Simon,’ I began, ‘but I didn’t want to worry you.’

  ‘You think it’s acceptable for us to hear from the police that our son is missing?’ barked Shirley. ‘We should have been told immediately.’

  ‘Yes, I know, and I apologise. But I asked Roger to keep you informed, and he’s Simon’s closest friend, so it wasn’t like you were told by a total stranger. And I’d really rather not get into an argument with you about it right now. It’s been a hideous couple of weeks.’