When You Disappeared

by John Marrs

  A house clearance firm I found in the telephone directory made up the rest of the mortgage shortfall. I begged them to come late in the evening, as I was too embarrassed for the neighbours to see strange men taking our worldly goods away in the back of a truck.

  I sold the Welsh dresser from the kitchen; a sofa and television we barely used from the den; Simon’s writing bureau; two bookshelves; three wardrobes; the dishwasher; a chest of drawers, dressing table and sideboard; lamps and crockery we’d been given as wedding presents. And while it killed me to do it, I even sold the children’s bikes. By the time the removal men left an hour later, I still had a home but barely anything left to fill it.

  I sat broken-hearted, gazing at the empty floors and empty walls in our empty shell. And as I nursed my wine and glanced at my empty finger, I felt like a hopeless failure, as a wife and as a mum. It seemed like it might be harder than I thought to leave my pity party early.

  21 October

  My children gave me an unselfish, beautiful, organic love that grew as they grew. But the love Simon had given me was something altogether different. It had made me feel desired, appreciated, respected and needed. And I missed that; I missed it so much. He took with him something I didn’t believe I could hurt so badly for.

  But as each week passed, I gradually figured out I shouldn’t need another person to validate my life, no matter how much I had loved or now longed for it. It was something I could do myself and it began in our local supermarket, of all places.

  I knew checkout assistant and shelf stacker wasn’t the greatest job in the world when I saw it advertised in the window. But this beggar couldn’t afford to be a chooser, so I gagged my inner snob and applied for it.

  I stared into the staffroom mirror that first morning and barely recognised myself. I was a thirty-three-year-old bag of nerves dressed in an ill-fitting, brown Crimplene uniform and wearing a ‘Trainee’ badge.

  I’d become used to mirrors tormenting me. I made a weekly pilgrimage to the one in my bathroom for some brutal home truths. Inch by inch, I’d pull on loose skin from the stone I’d lost since Simon had gone, prod rogue folds and carefully examine my body and face for any obvious signs of collapse. I’d sigh as I charted the progression of an army of silver silkworms weaving their way across my crown. I could have lost a finger in the crevices around my eyes that had once been subtle laughter lines. Ironically, they’d only grown when the laughter died.

  Neither Simon nor youth were on my side any longer. While I was still more Jane Fonda than Henry Fonda, the gap between the two was growing closer. But, whatever the direction my new life was going to take, I was going to give it my all.

  Most of the checkout girls seemed decades younger than me. In reality, there were only a few years between us. But a missing husband and raising a family on your own ages you in a hurry.

  Working kept me busy and stopped me from feeling sorry for myself. The mums swapped parenting stories and gave each other knowing smiles when the student part-timers swapped drunken tales and complained of exam stress like they were pioneers in the field of drinking and homework. Secretly I envied them, and tried to remember what it felt like to have so few worries or battle scars.

  Sometimes I’d listen to the housewives moan about their lazy, selfish husbands, and I’d want to shout, ‘At least you still have yours!’ But I’d smile and nod along with the rest of the sisterhood instead.

  My husband’s disappearance still had a curiosity factor attached to it, like the village had its own Bermuda Triangle. It was usually the older customers coming in for their weekly shop who seemed eager to share their opinions, like only elderly people can.

  ‘Do you think he’s dead?’ ‘Did he have a bit on the side?’ ‘It’ll be hard to find another man willing to take on a girl with three little ’uns, won’t it?’ My skin grew thicker by the day, and I learned to let insensitive comments fly over my head.

  It was my supervisor Selena I had the most in common with, despite our obvious differences. She was a well-spoken, educated, bleached-blonde slip of a girl who didn’t really belong there. At twenty, she was the only young single parent in the shop, and proud of it. The father of her four-year-old had abandoned her as soon as she told him she was in the family way. But it hadn’t put her off going it alone.

  She’d turned down a place studying economics at Cambridge University and was working like a trooper to feed and clothe her boy, something I related to. So I spent more time with her than the others. And I didn’t care if it was favouritism or because she thought there was more to me than checkout number seven’s chief resident, but she spoke to our deputy manager, who soon promoted me to organising float changes and working out staff rotas.

  More money and longer hours meant I had to rearrange our family life. A bossy but coordinated Paula made sure that she and Baishali took it in turns to babysit Emily during the day, and pick up the boys from school in the afternoon.

  ‘We’re going to do everything it takes to help get you back on track,’ said Paula. ‘Aren’t we, Baish?’

  Baishali nodded. When Paula was in ‘organise everyone’ mode, nobody disagreed with her, least of all Baishali.

  And when I finished work, I’d take over and finish the nightly routine, until they were bathed and in bed.

  Then, when the house fell silent, I’d open a bottle of red and begin my second and third jobs.

  30 October

  By the time summer had given way to autumn, Simon dominated my thoughts that little bit less.

  I began an ironing service for my busy neighbours who didn’t have the time to work, look after a family and make sure their clothes weren’t creased. I charged by the basket-load and spent a good couple of hours a night surrounded by other people’s shirts and blouses on hangers around the kitchen.

  I made savings where I could, buying own-brand supermarket food and the kids’ toys and games from charity shops, cutting my own hair and walking or catching the bus. I’d cinched my financial belt so tightly that it pinched like a corset. New clothes were a necessity but bloody pricey for a one-parent family, especially when they grew out of them so quickly. I decided it would be much cheaper if I made them myself.

  But the idea of picking up a needle and thread again scared me to death.

  For much of my married life, I’d earned a little extra money doing alterations to clothes for our friends. A turned-up hem here or a zipper replacement there had progressed into making clothes for the kids to play in, a few skirts for myself, and then bridesmaids’ dresses for my friend’s wedding.

  It was impossible not to think about those dresses without images of Billy flooding my mind. Of course, I knew that my sewing hadn’t been to blame for that day’s horror – I alone was to blame for that, no matter how Simon or Paula had tried to persuade me it was an accident and no one’s fault – but I’d packed away my sewing machine and materials as though they were cursed. Now, though, I had to face it: making clothes was the only practical skill I had and I needed to put food on our table. My supermarket wage was enough to cover the bills and the mortgage, but left very little else.

  I downed half a bottle of red for Dutch courage before I grabbed the material I’d bought from the market. Then I picked up my pinking shears and rustled up school shirts and trousers for James and Robbie.

  Each bouncing bobbin, each foot on the pedal and each rattle of the machine’s engine brought that day back to me. Since Simon had vanished, I’d tried my best to put it out of my mind.

  And my children needed me in the world more than I did. So I held my pain deep down and ploughed on. By the time I finished I was three sheets to the wind, but I’d done it. And if I did say so, the results were indistinguishable from – all right: superior to – the store-bought garments we could in no way afford.

  Word of mouth soon spread amongst the school-gate mums that I could save them a small fortune by making their kids’ clothes too. And soon, half the children running around the village see
med like they were dressed in something I’d sewn.

  When my friends asked if I’d make clothes for them too, a lightbulb switched on in my head. It could be the answer to my financial woes, so I gave it a bash. They arrived on my doorstep with armfuls of fabrics and torn-out cuttings of outfits they’d seen in magazines and hoped I could copy. On instinct I found I could replicate even really tricky designs without much of a problem. And it gave me the confidence to suggest my own twists and ideas.

  The supermarket students, who didn’t earn enough to buy what they saw pop stars wearing, began spending some of their wages on things I’d create for them for their favourite nightclubs. Even Selena, whose circumstances precluded anything like a social life until her son Daniel was older, took advantage of having a friend who could whip up a shoulder-padded jacket in an evening.

  It wasn’t long before all my nights found me holed up in the dining room and hunched over a sewing machine with only a bottle of wine to keep me company. I didn’t have time to stop and think how my eighteen-hour days might be affecting my health.

  28 October

  It hurt like someone was kicking me in the stomach over and over again. Even lifting my arm to stack the last box of cornflakes on the supermarket shelf winded me.

  My stomach had ached on and off for most of the day. But I had painful cramps and I knew it wasn’t my usual time of the month. Eventually I had to admit something was wrong. I struggled to catch my breath as I left the pallet of boxes in the aisle, headed to a toilet cubicle to unbutton my dungarees and examined what was making my groin feel damp. I panicked when I saw lots of blood in the front of my knickers.

  I clocked off and slipped out of the warehouse doors clenching my tummy, and half-walked, half-stumbled a mile and a half to the doctor’s surgery. The cramps were getting worse as I waited for Dr Willows, and almost as soon as I lay on the bed, I felt a popping inside me. Then I leaked more blood as she helped me to the toilet. And when the pain became too intense, I fainted.

  ‘You’re having a miscarriage, Catherine,’ Dr Willows explained slowly when I woke up. ‘The pains you’re feeling are contractions in the uterus. They’re dilating your cervix to get the foetus out. There’s nothing we can do but let your body do what it has to do.’

  I struggled to get a grip on what she was saying. How could I be pregnant? Was my motherly instinct now so rotten that the only time I felt my baby inside me was when it was dying?

  ‘But I’ve been having my periods,’ I argued.

  ‘It can still happen, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How far gone am I?’

  ‘I can only hazard a guess, but probably about five months.’

  I remembered the night Simon and I last made love. It was the weekend before he disappeared and, once again, I’d instigated it. Neither of us had said it, but we both knew we were still going through the motions. I’d convinced myself that if we both kept trying to make an effort, we would, in time, feel like us again. It never crossed my mind it would be the last time, or that it’d leave me pregnant.

  Dr Willows led me to the nurse’s room and I lay on my side until the pain eased. She gave me a handful of sanitary towels, a bottle of painkillers and offered me a lift home. I turned it down.

  It’s hard to explain, but instead of feeling emotional like any ordinary mother would after miscarrying, an eerie feeling of detachment came across me. It was like the trauma of what had just happened belonged to someone else, not me.

  So I calmly lifted myself up and left the surgery. I made my slow way back to the supermarket and clocked back in, and continued where I’d left off. And as I priced up a new pallet of lemonade bottles, my colleagues had no idea I’d left the aisle as two people and come back as one. Or that I’d just killed my second child in less than two years.

  That night I put Emily to bed and asked James and Robbie to fend for themselves, blaming a tummy ache on my need to hide myself away in the bedroom.

  I was still yet to shed one single, solitary tear. I shut my eyes tight and dug my fingernails deep into my palm to force them out, but still I felt nothing. I thought of a life without Billy and without Simon but that didn’t work either. I was numb. I wondered if I’d shed so many tears in my lifetime that I’d now run out.

  I rubbed my belly where my child had been hiding and wondered how I could have lost so much control of my life. I blamed losing it on the stress of worrying about Simon, the kids, my finances . . . and maybe even the bottle of wine that lay under the blanket next to me. I decided I was hopeless and defective and that my baby had had a narrow escape with me as its mother. No wonder it wanted to die – it probably had an inkling of what was to come.

  My head throbbed, so I reached over to the bedside table, took a third painkiller from Dr Willows’s packet and washed it down with a swig of wine, straight from the bottle. I hesitated, and then took a fourth pill. And a fifth. Then a sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth. But before I swallowed my tenth, I retched and vomited across the floor.

  Resting in a puddle of alcohol and bile lay all nine tablets. I couldn’t even kill myself properly.

  7 December

  ‘Bloody thing!’ I shouted as I caught my finger in the sewing machine needle for the second time in as many minutes. It was either exhaustion or one too many drinks that blurred my vision. Regardless, I sucked my finger to stem the bleeding and headed for the kitchen to find another sticking plaster.

  ‘Sod you,’ I muttered to Mrs Kelly’s unfinished skirt on the dining room table. I’d go back to it later when it had learned its lesson. I wrapped the Band-Aid around my finger and thought back to when I was a child and I’d lose myself in my mum’s fashion magazines and a world of women draped in beautiful fabrics.

  She had been an unappreciated seamstress with delusions of grandeur. I’d sit transfixed as she assembled beautiful dresses and coats from nothing. She’d get lost in a place a long way from the one she found herself stuck in with my dad and me. She once admitted her teenage dream had been to work for one of the great Parisian fashion houses, hand-stitching stunning haute couture creations until her fingers numbed.

  ‘That would have given me greater pleasure than anything else life has thrown my way,’ she said wistfully, then gave me a disappointed sideways glance to emphasise her point. She needn’t have.

  My mother was fascinated by the work of couture aristocrat Hubert de Givenchy and his muse Audrey Hepburn. She would copy his refined, immaculate designs in her own way. I shared her passion, but unfortunately she had little interest in sharing any of her skills with me.

  I begged her to teach me what she knew, but she’d ignore me. It was like she was afraid she’d lose her gift if she passed it on to someone else – even her only child. But as long as I kept quiet and didn’t ask questions, I was allowed to watch her work from the other side of the room.

  Even as a little girl, I never quite understood why my parents had bothered to start a family – whether it was just the done thing in those days, or because I was an unfortunate accident. Either way, they didn’t really need me. I was never physically neglected, but my mum wasn’t shy in reminding me of my place in her pecking order.

  ‘You’re a guest in this family,’ she once barked without provocation, ‘and don’t forget it.’

  Despite being aware of her many faults, it was calming watching beautiful clothes come from a cold heart. Sometimes I’d wait until she’d left the house, then sneak into her wardrobe and shut the doors so I could have them all to myself. I’d close my eyes and smell them or try to identify the materials by the muffled sounds they made when I rubbed them between my fingers.

  I remembered a gift I made for her when I was nine. I’d saved up my pocket money to buy four yards of ivory-cream polyester fabric, and every night after school, I ran to my room and hand-sewed a blouse ready for her birthday. Even then I knew it was crude, but I hoped she’d be proud of what I’d learned and add her own spit and polish to it. As she unwrapped the string and paper
, she gave me a half-baked ‘thank you’ but never tried it on for size, even to be polite.

  A few days later, she asked me to polish the fireguard, so I went to the cupboard under the kitchen sink for a tin of Brasso. Inside lay the tatters of my blouse, cut into strips to use as dusters. It was a cruel lesson. You can either learn from your parents’ mistakes, or repeat them and use them as an excuse for your own behaviour. I vowed never to blame her for my failings. And from then on, everything I made was in spite of her, and without the need of her approval.

  My mum’s dresses led long but lonely lives. Once complete, they wouldn’t be shown off at parties or to her friends; instead, they would hang in protective bags for only her to enjoy.

  Dad worshipped the ground she laid fabric on. And his obsession with keeping her happy overshadowed everything else in his life, including me. I envied my friends when they admitted they were daddy’s girls. I was nobody’s girl until I met Simon. But Dad knew my mum’s calling gave her a happiness he couldn’t match.

  ‘Mummy!’ Emily’s panicked voice brought me out of my recollections. She was standing by the door, her face scrunched up, and I could see that she’d wet her pyjama bottoms.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up and back to bed.’ I took her hand and as we walked up the stairs I racked my brains, but for the life of me, I couldn’t ever remember a time I’d felt my mother’s skin held so close against my own.

  Christmas Day

  Our house had never been so silent on a Christmas morning. In past years, I’d watch as wrapping paper spun through the air like stray fireworks on Bonfire Night. And I’d cover my ears at the deafening squeals of the kids.

  They’d normally wake Simon and I up around four o’clock in the morning, prodding our arms and anxiously whispering, ‘Has he been yet?’ And with no hope of settling them back to sleep, we’d give in to the inevitable and follow them downstairs. We’d switch on the Christmas tree lights, and take as much pleasure watching them tear open their presents as we’d had in buying them.