When You Disappeared

by John Marrs

  ‘Arthur and Shirley!’ I fumed. ‘I’m going round there now to sort this out once and for all.’ I’d vowed never to speak to them again after our last confrontation, but I was furious enough to make an exception.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Roger replied firmly. ‘You’re going to stay in the house and let me do my job. We’re not going to find anything, but the quicker we can get this over with, the quicker we can leave before your kids and neighbours wake up.’

  I glared at him in both frustration and disgust, scared that even a tiny piece of him might believe my poisonous in-laws. But there was nothing but embarrassment in his eyes.

  ‘Just do it, then go away,’ I fired back, and left him to it. Then I hid, ashamed and humiliated, behind the dining room curtains as officers silently searched the rear garden, Simon’s shed, and prised up random patio slabs around the pond.

  They bagged samples of ashes from his bonfire heap, trawled through the boot of his car using special sticky tape to lift fibres, and sieved earth in the borders by the front lawn. But when they focused their attention on the pink rosebushes he’d planted for me during the depths of my depression, I couldn’t contain my anger any longer.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I yelled, running towards them. ‘You don’t know what they mean to me!’

  ‘The ground’s freshly dug, so we have to check,’ a faceless man in uniform replied.

  I grabbed the spade from his hand and threw it across the lawn. ‘That’s what you do in a garden – dig soil and plant things, you bloody idiot!’

  I stomped back into the kitchen and finished off a half-empty bottle of wine in the fridge, then hurled it against the wall. A frightened Oscar scarpered for safety into the living room.

  I let the children sleep in longer than normal, and two and a half hours after their arrival, the police put their tools in the back of the van and Roger reappeared on the doorstep.

  ‘We’ve finished. As I said, we didn’t expect to find anything. I’m so sorry for putting you through this, Catherine.’

  ‘So am I,’ I replied, and slammed the door on him.

  14 August

  ‘Simon is not dead,’ I told my reflection in the bathroom-cabinet mirror. ‘He is not dead. He is not dead.’

  Each time a shadow of a doubt crossed my mind, I’d say the same thing out loud over and over until I believed it again. But as each week passed, it was getting harder and harder to believe.

  I peered inside the cabinet to make sure everything was where it should be for when he came home. I did that a lot. His razor, shaving cream, brush, comb, cotton buds and deodorant stick were still lined up neatly, and all as redundant as me.

  I closed the doors and commiserated with the haunted face staring back at me. I asked myself if I’d been unfair by offering the kids false hope that he was still alive. I may have stopped feeling his presence, but intuition told me he wouldn’t be gone forever. Was that enough? And besides, what lessons would I be teaching them if I gave up on their dad so quickly?

  Simon was my first and final thought each day, and probably every other thought in between. Each night in bed I’d tell him about my day, but he never replied. Still, I was sure he was out there somewhere, waiting to be found. But I felt like I was in a shrinking minority.

  It was subtle at first, but I began to see a change in our friends. No one actually had the guts to put it into words, but I began to pick up on little signs of doubt when I brought his name up. Steven seldom mentioned his name unless it involved the business. Baishali would tug awkwardly at the dark curls touching her neck and then change the subject. Even my ever-reliable Paula began to look at me like I was naive for not considering he could’ve just walked away.

  Without her knowing it, she hurt me more anyone else because we were so close and she didn’t trust my instincts. And it made me ask myself if I shouldn’t be talking about Simon so much. But why should I stop? He was my husband and it wasn’t his fault he’d been taken away from us. Why couldn’t everyone else see that?

  I became resentful towards anyone whose sole focus wasn’t to help find him. I knew people had their own lives to live and I envied them, but their doubt frustrated the hell out of me. I wanted to tell them all to sod off. But I needed their help to keep myself together, so I got my support from a bottle of red wine instead. It understood what I needed more than any friend did.

  I led a double life as one foot sank in quicksand and the other flailed around desperately, seeking enough solid ground to keep myself stable.

  Family dinners became subdued affairs. I’d entice the kids into talking or give them something to focus on like empty promises of fun holidays, and birthdays and Christmases to come. But it didn’t matter what I said. All they wanted was their father. So, most nights, we’d sit quietly, shuffling chicken Kievs around our plates like chess pieces, trying to stop ourselves from staring at the empty chair at the dining room table.

  In the end, I moved the chair into the garage. It made no difference. We’d gawp at the empty space instead.

  2 September

  It took an eight-year-old boy to shame his mother into action.

  ‘Look what I’ve made, Mummy,’ said James proudly as he pushed a piece of paper into my chest.

  My heart bled when he showed me a drawing of his dad with a reward of his fifty-pence pocket money for the person who found him.

  ‘We can put it in the window,’ he suggested helpfully. It was the kick up the backside I needed.

  Three months after Simon’s disappearance, Roger admitted the police investigation had drawn a blank. I’d let them do their job, even if it meant searching my house or digging up my garden for his remains. But there was only so much I could take of feeling stupid when the children and neighbours asked me for updates and I couldn’t give them answers.

  I’d fallen into a vicious circle of feeling sorry for myself and relying on others to find him. And then I’d get frustrated when they hadn’t. James’s reward poster reminded me there was nothing stopping me from finding Simon myself.

  I sprang into action with a second wind and called our local newspaper, which sent a reporter to the house for a renewed appeal. And once the interview made it to print, regional news programme Countywide asked to come to our house and film a segment. I can’t say I was proud of it, but I used our children’s anxiety to tug at viewers’ heartstrings.

  ‘Mummy’s trying to make people feel sorry for us,’ I whispered to James and Robbie out of earshot of the cameraman.

  ‘Why?’ asked Robbie.

  ‘Because if someone knows where Daddy is but hasn’t said anything yet, then they’ll see us on the TV and realise how much we’re missing him and they might tell us where to find him. But we all have to pretend to look sad when they start filming us.’

  ‘But we don’t have to pretend,’ replied a puzzled James. ‘We are sad.’

  Of course they were. I paused to ask myself if I was exploiting their pain to prove something to myself or to help our family as a whole. Would parading them publicly heap more psychological damage on what they’d already suffered? Or did the end justify the means?

  I didn’t see I had much of a choice, so I shoved them into the living room wearing long faces. I was a terrible mother. But, fired up by a breath of fresh interest in us, I blanketed surrounding villages, bus and train stations, hospitals, libraries and community centres with posters I’d had printed with my husband’s photograph and description.

  I delivered them to each place by hand so they’d be less inclined to throw them away, having seen my worried and desperate face in person. And I wrote three dozen letters and sent his photo to homeless shelters and Salvation Army centres around the country, in case he’d turned up confused. Being proactive gave me a lift I’d not felt in a while. I was optimistic and in control. When I’d completed every bit of outreach I could think of, I told myself that all I had to do was wait.

  The police received thirty or so calls after the TV app
eal, but none of the leads came to anything. I drew a blank with the Salvation Army, and only one shelter in London recalled seeing someone with a vague similarity to Simon. But that person had left months ago.

  By the end of September, I was back to square one.

  It’s funny what the mind can do when it’s grasping at straws and only touching nettles. Down to either wine or desperation, I began coming up with ludicrous theories to explain his absence. If it offered a faint glimmer of hope, I latched on to it.

  I scanned through newspapers on the library’s microfiche to see if there were any serial killers on the loose he might have fallen victim to. I asked Roger if there was any possibility he could’ve been forced into a police witness protection programme. I spoke to a very sympathetic woman at MI6 to ask if he’d been leading a double life for years as a spy, and was now on a mission somewhere in the world. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, confirm or deny it.

  I spent a day reading interviews with people who claimed they’d been abducted by aliens and experimented on. Simon hated his doctor prodding and poking him, so in a rare moment of self-amusement, I pictured his face as E.T. tried to stick a long finger up his backside.

  I even visited a friend of Paula’s mother, a psychic who frowned when she held Simon’s comb in one hand and photo in the other. She closed her eyes and hummed.

  ‘Well, he’s not passed to the other side yet, dear,’ she began, to my relief. ‘I’m sensing that he’s safe and well, but far away. Somewhere sandy. I’m getting mountains and people speaking in funny accents. He’s smiling a lot. He seems very happy.’

  I stormed out before she finished, cursing myself for throwing money at a fraud.

  Back home, I walked through our front door, slumped across the kitchen table and, without taking my coat off, finished off a glass of wine I’d left earlier.

  Four months had passed since Simon had vanished, and I was back to the morning of June the fourth – without him, and none the wiser as to why.

  7 October

  I went to bed early and turned off the lights, hoping the wine would knock me out quickly. It didn’t. My stomach rumbled but I couldn’t be bothered even to make myself a sandwich.

  I’d long ceased closing the curtains, so that I could stare out of the window during my frequent bouts of insomnia. The moon was brighter than I’d ever seen it, as were the stars. I stared at clusters of them and tried to fit them together to form Simon’s face.

  It wasn’t anything in particular that set me off, but I’d spent most of the day at a new low. It doesn’t matter if you’re holding the hand of a loved one as the death rattle slowly dissolves into a rasp, or if the police turn up on your doorstep to tell you there’s been an accident. No matter how death happens, the pain is hideous.

  Some people build barriers to hide from themselves or those who share their pain. Some shut down completely, and others dedicate the rest of their lives to mourning. The brave ones simply get on with it.

  I couldn’t do any of that. Because when someone simply disappears into thin air with no reason, no explanation and no closure, all you’re left with is an interminable void. A gaping, aching chasm that can’t be filled with the love, sympathy or strength of others.

  Nobody knew my heart was now a black hole, swirling with the debris of unanswerable questions. Until physical proof of Simon’s death came along, I would never, ever, truly be able to let him go.

  I had no funeral to arrange; no body to bury; no one to blame; no autopsy to offer a medical answer or suicide note to explain a reason; no nothing. Just months of absolute nothingness.

  And as everyone else’s lives carried on beyond our garden gate, I was stuck in purgatory and feeling so very, very alone.

  SIMON

  Saint-Jean-de-Luz, twenty-five years earlier

  14 July

  There was an emptiness in my belly that needed to be filled. My imagination was hungry and I craved a project to sink my teeth into. Even as a boy I’d had an urge to construct. Birdhouses, dens, rabbit hutches, dams in streams – it didn’t matter so long as it was a tangible object I could build from scratch and be proud of.

  My life in France was content and free of stress. But while I’d shaken most of the trappings of my past, living in a hostel that was once so splendid and now cried out for help made my desire to design and actualize impossible to ignore. It was what I did. I made things. I created things. I restored things.

  And the more time I spent under its roof, the more familiar I’d become with its personality. I knew which floorboards creaked and which had barely enough strength to support my weight. I knew the windows to keep closed, or risk the rotting frames disintegrating. I knew on which side of the attic the mice preferred to nest. I knew the rooms to avoid in a heavy downpour and the places to find maximum sunlight for Bradley’s indoor garden of cannabis plants to thrive.

  I’d fallen in love with its every delight and failing. I’d accepted its flaws in a way I couldn’t do with a person. I also knew that papering over the cracks of something couldn’t disguise its deeper issues. I longed to transform the Routard International back into the Hôtel Près de la Côte.

  Local folklore had it that the hotel had seemed to appear from nowhere in the mid-1920s. It had been designed by a promising Bordeaux architect who’d only ever made two visits to his project – once as they broke ground, and again when the doors were declared open to paying guests. Nobody could remember his name.

  He’d been commissioned to design it for a wealthy Jewish German family who, after the First World War, feared their country might implode again. So they fortuitously made their property investments abroad. But when Germany crumbled for a second time, their hotel remained while they disappeared from the face of the earth. Their legacy was intact, but the hotel was orphaned and, with no owners to trace, the manager at the time retained it as his own. Upon his death, its fate lay in the hands of a succession of distant relatives who cumulatively did little to prevent it from falling into rack and ruin.

  I was dismayed at how something once so treasured could have been wilfully abandoned, before recognising the irony. But I related more to buildings than to people. If you gave structures time, detail and attention, they would protect you. You would be safe beneath their roofs. People never truly offered such guarantees. So I made it my mission to give it the help it had given me.

  Bradley put me in contact with its entrepreneurial Dutch owner, who admitted he’d blindly purchased it through auction on description alone. I wrote him a detailed, twelve-page proposition, explaining who I was, my feelings towards his property, my qualifications and skills that would enable me to resuscitate it.

  I listed the work it required and an approximate timescale and costing. Then I crossed my fingers and waited. A fortnight later, Bradley approached me over breakfast.

  ‘I don’t know what you said but the usually cheap bastard is on board.’ He smiled, and offered me a congratulatory handshake.

  ‘Really?’ I replied, genuinely surprised I’d been taken seriously.

  ‘Yep. He’s wiring the money into the hostel’s bank account on Monday, so you can get started when you like. He’ll probably sell it once you’re done, though.’

  At that point, I did not care. The news delighted and excited me in equal measure, as for the first time in months, I had something to focus my attention on other than myself.

  13 August

  The work the hotel required gave me lots of time to spend alone. And with each acquaintance I made at the Routard International, I reflected more on the ones I’d cast aside.

  I thought back to not long before Catherine and I became a couple, and the childhood friends who helped to shape me, specifically my best friend, Dougie Reynolds.

  He’d moved some five hundred miles from Inverness, Scotland to Northamptonshire with his family, after his policeman father accepted a transfer to take charge of a new unit. They uprooted to the street next to mine.

  Our friendship
wasn’t instant. Roger, Steven and I glared at the lanky, sapling-armed boy ambling into the classroom with his auburn hair and coarse, unintelligible accent, like he’d just fallen from a spaceship. During his first few days in our territory, he was given a wide, discerning berth. But he paid frustratingly little heed to our feigned lack of interest.

  I’d just reached a personal best of twenty-five keepy-uppies with a football on the village green when he wandered over to me.

  ‘Bet you I can do more,’ he said with a grin, and struck a defiant, comic-book superhero pose with his hands on his hips.

  ‘Go on then,’ I sniffed, and deliberately threw the ball too hard at his chest. By the time he’d reached fifty with ease, he’d claimed victory and headed it back to me. A little humiliated, I began to walk away.

  ‘Arch your back a little,’ he said suddenly. ‘Put your arms out for balance and focus on the centre of the ball.’

  I reluctantly followed his advice, and it was only when my bare thigh smarted from the repetition of skin against cheap leather that I stopped at fifty-one. I concealed my smile, but that was all it took to cement the foundations of a friendship.

  I was unsure whether it was his affable personality or his stable family life that captivated me the most. Dougie belonged to the perfect family, compared to mine, at least. A mother, a father, a brother and a sister – everything I’d have killed for.

  Dougie Senior greeted his wife Elaine with a kiss to the cheek on his arrival home each evening. And she’d respond with an infinite supply of hotpot dishes and mouth-watering casseroles. Their family banter filled the dining room as Michael, Isla and Dougie each told their parents all they’d done that day. No detail was too insignificant to be included.

  My friends all adored Elaine, and I think found her sexy before they knew what sexy meant. Her curls glowed like a Christmas tangerine, her skin was milky and freckled and she possessed a Monroe-like hourglass figure. She never asked me about Doreen, but I’m sure Dougie had explained to her my mother’s irregular presence in my life. I wouldn’t have been bothered if she’d pitied my circumstances at home. I was just grateful for the attention from a mother, even if it wasn’t my own. Later, Shirley would try her best to mother me, but by then, I no longer wanted a matriarch.