by Unknown
‘Of course,’ said Wanda, scraping Laura’s peas on to her own plate. ‘Don’t forget her tattoo.’
There was a silence. They watched her forking peas into her mouth.
‘What?’
‘Bea has a tiny one.’ She pulled up the bottom of her jumper, and drew down the top of her jeans. ‘Here. Just below the bikini line.’
‘A tattoo?’ said Laura. ‘What of?’
‘Of a bee, of course.’
Laura flicked her eyes over at Adrian. She wasn’t sure this was the Bea she knew at all.
Best
IT WAS a relief to be out of the house and moving. Katharine just wished they didn’t have to arrive. It reminded her of when the children were very small, babies really, and how she would drive round the ring road for an hour to avoid getting home. It was the mess and the clamour she couldn’t bear. She preferred to arrive home after seven when the nanny had prepared them for bed. Bea had been invaluable with the children in those days. More often than not she would be there when Katharine got back from work. Her job was so much more flexible than Katharine’s.
It wasn’t Katharine’s fault she was the clever one. She had worked damn hard to get where she was. Hours she used to spend on her homework, absolute hours, while all she remembered Bea doing was eating peanut butter sandwiches and watching Blue Peter and Magpie. Even at weekends Katharine would get up, cycle to her riding lesson, come back, do a few hours’ homework and then go into the lounge to find Bea was watching Champion the Wonder Horse in her pyjamas. That was one reason Bea was always . . . not fat exactly, but heavy. ‘A big girl,’ was what people said of Bea. ‘Stolid,’ aunts would agree, followed by, ‘Isn’t Katharine getting tall? And so slim,’ and the pride spread inside her then like a sugary drink. But there was no doubt she had worked hard to get where she was. She and Jane had been the only medical students in their year to get Firsts, and what people didn’t understand was that while her life might seem luxurious compared to Bea’s – two cars, six-bedroomed house, three foreign holidays a year – it hadn’t been without a lot of hard graft. After all, Katharine had not taken a series of gap years after school as Bea had. And Katharine had actually gone to university, unlike Bea, who, despite the gap years, never quite got round to the university part of it. ‘Gap from what?’ Katharine thought now, remembering Bea’s announcement that she was going travelling again at the age of twenty-five. She tried to recall where Bea had gone during that time. France? Spain? She had never really asked for details; she’d been too busy. She had gone straight into training after her degree, worked herself to the bone, endured that punishing housemanship for three long years, snatching a few hours’ sleep a night, woken by her bleeper at three in the morning because the twenty-three-weeker had gone into cardiac arrest. Oh, the horror of those nights, trembling so much she couldn’t work the buttons on her clothes, arriving at the intensive care unit blind and stupid with exhaustion to find a white-faced infant in its Perspex basin looped up with tubes and lines and the monitors flat-lining all around. The panic of those night calls. The wordless dread at the prospect of child death. Sometimes, often with heart cases, death had already occurred and she would have to snip at the stitches there and then, no time for gloves or iodine, her own heart beating so hard she couldn’t keep her fingers still. Somehow she would expose the tiny heart, already showing the dull blue lustre of the lifeless organ, and would try to palpate it with her own clumsy fingers the way they had practised on a sheep’s heart in medical school. Often the baby died. They were too tiny, too ill. Trying to save them was just going through the motions.
Yes, she had worked damned hard to get where she was. And as Jane was always reminding her, at least they were doing some good with their lives, giving something back. Not like Frank, pretending to be a writer and getting absolutely nowhere. What Frank needed was a job. A proper job with a salary so that Bea didn’t have to—
‘Katharine?’
She looked at Richard. He had stopped the car outside the Elliots’ house.
‘You all right?’
She rubbed her neck and stretched her head back. She just wished she could sleep. But she couldn’t. She was too angry. Rage engulfed her. Rage at Bea, at Frank, at the children’s school . . .
‘We don’t have to stay long. They’ll understand.’
Katharine nodded, straightening her skirt, her blouse, the strap on her bag. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘We can’t duck out. It’s Jane’s birthday.’ She reached over to the back seat and lifted the wrapped gift towards her.
‘What did you get her?’
‘A fish kettle. I’ve had it for years but never took it out of its box. Who in their right mind ever uses a fish kettle? But it’ll look good with all the rest of her stainless steel.’
‘Well, Jane certainly is stainless. And made of steel.’
‘Shut up, Richard.’ She got out and gave the car door a good slam. ‘She’s my oldest friend. She’s my only friend, come to think of it.’
‘Oh darling, don’t be silly. You’ve got lots of friends.’
‘I hope to God they haven’t asked anyone else. They did say it was just us, didn’t they?’
Scream
LAURA WAS one of the outstanding screamers of her year. She had a pair of lungs on her that could rupture a tympanic membrane. She had a mouth the size of a pelican’s; a gullet with the capacity of a python’s. Screaming was her thing. She was best at it. At birthday parties, when the candles were blown out, she led the screaming; outside the sweetshop near school, when the bloke with the mangy Alsatian walked past, she led the screaming; on Thursdays, when the very nervous French assistant took the lesson and a wasp or a fly or once just a dust mote floated through the window, Laura led the screaming. It was a girl thing, as far as Adrian could work out, or maybe it was a bird thing, like the way swifts and swallows had screeching parties in the summer over the meadows. Whatever the reason, Laura Cooper was the Maria Callas of screaming.
So when Adrian and Wanda first heard the screaming as they loaded the dishwasher, they were inclined to ignore it. Usually the volume and pitch were in inverse proportion to the size of the emergency. But after approximately three bars, Adrian suspected something was amiss. The screams began as the usual long screel. Adrian looked at Wanda. Wanda looked at Adrian. Then they upgraded to a kind of staccato furioso. Wanda dropped the fish slice and took the stairs two at a time.
Laura had stopped screaming by the time Wanda reached the third floor landing and was standing outside the bathroom door, holding it shut. Nothing was coming out of her mouth but she was shaking.
‘What? What is it?’ panted Wanda.
‘There’s a man in the bath,’ said Laura.
Wanda’s mouth thinned. She took a deep breath, seized Laura by the shoulders and steered her in the direction of the staircase. Adrian was plodding up round the final turn in the stairs and Wanda called to him to take his sister down again and out into the garden. The instructions were clear and calm: Take your sister all the way down to the bottom of the garden and into the summerhouse.
‘But it’s dark.’
‘Please don’t argue.’
‘And it’s raining.’
‘I will bring you ice cream.’
‘With sprinkles on?’
‘Go.’
They went.
Wanda opened the bathroom door and said, ‘Get out.’
Urban raised his knees and sank his head back, slipping down so that the water surged over the sides and he was submerged. Wanda waited. After a few seconds, with one powerful motion, he broke the surface, rose and stood in the tub, water streaming down the gullies and ridges of his body. His torso and legs, even his scalp, were deeply tanned from his work outdoors. She pushed a towel towards him.
‘What are you doing here?’
Urban stepped from the bath and stood steaming on the mat in front of her.
‘Waiting for you to finish sitting on the babies.’ He flashed a smile
at her and rubbed his face in the towel so that she could hear the bristles. ‘Thought you might come up and join me.’
‘Get out. This isn’t funny.’
‘What’s the problem?’ He pressed himself up against her. She turned away.
‘Bea’s disappeared. I want you to go. Now.’
‘Yeah?’ He opened the bathroom cabinet, took out a razor and filled the sink.
‘The police are involved and I’m worried. It’s been three days.’
‘Three days is nothing.’ He looked at her in the mirror as he spread shaving cream over his face. ‘I’ve been gone for years.’
Wanda watched his back, the S of his spine, bound with ropes of muscle, and she thought of Frank’s wan and muted flesh, his grave look and the words in his fingers. She pulled the plug out of the bath and rubbed at the sides with a cloth.
‘It’s different. Women of her age don’t just disappear.’ She squirted cleaner over the enamel.
The blade scraped on Urban’s cheek. He rinsed and said, ‘But it’s easy. Women her age are invisible.’
He finished his face and then began on his scalp.
‘Please just go. It’s not safe.’
Urban examined a bottle of Richard’s aftershave. He unscrewed the top and sniffed it. ‘Perhaps she has a fancy man.’
‘Not Bea. She’s too good.’
‘Perhaps she’s gone and got herself some good loving.’ He smiled as he patted the aftershave over his face. ‘Because Frank—’
‘No.’ Wanda elbowed him aside and cleaned the sink, rubbing energetically at the tidemark he had left. ‘She was too tired for that.’
‘Ah.’
She checked the toilet, flushed it, gave it a scrub with the brush then flushed it again. She bent to tidy the floor, wiping the pools of water with a towel, hanging up the bathmat, rinsing the flannels and the sponge and arranging them over the heated towel rail. She worked fast, the way she did in people’s houses. A line of sweat beaded her hairline. She needed to decide how to handle the children. She needed to get this situation under control. When she straightened up, Urban was gone.
DOWNSTAIRS, WANDA double-locked the front door and loaded ice cream into three bowls. The doors to the garden were open. She hurried through the soft evening drizzle towards the wooded area at the far end, where she could see torchlight beams playing on the summerhouse windows.
Inside, Adrian and Laura were sitting on deckchairs, swinging their legs.
‘Here we are.’ Wanda passed them ice cream, sat on the floor and ate some herself.
Laura ate silently. Between mouthfuls she checked Wanda’s face in the half-light. Then she said, ‘I’m going to tell.’
‘Oh, I looked for the sprinkles but—’
‘I’m telling.’
Wanda dug deep into her pocket.
‘Here, I found these instead.’ She handed each of them a Flake.
There was silence while Laura ate it. An owl called over from the river. Somewhere nearby, a fox barked.
‘Still going to tell.’
‘Well that’s a pity,’ said Wanda.
‘Yeah, it is.’ Laura screwed the Flake wrapper up tight, threw it in the air and kicked it out of the door with her foot.
‘Because that means I will have to tell too.’
Adrian hesitated, then licked out his bowl.
‘What?’
‘I had planned on keeping it secret, but . . .’
Laura’s tongue was seeking a stray blob of ice cream from under her lower lip. She had got back from Hastings well before her parents arrived home from work. Nobody knew except Granny, and who would believe her?
Adrian licked his spoon clean and said, ‘Sweetened pig’s fat.’
‘But,’ continued Wanda, ‘I’m afraid that if you tell on me, then I will have to tell on you.’ She peered out into the garden.
‘If it’s not dairy,’ said Adrian. ‘The ice cream. If it’s not dairy, then that’s what it’s made of. Sweetened pig’s fat.’
‘Shut up,’ said Laura. ‘What secret?’
Wanda held her hand out for the bowls. ‘The mobile phones in your bedroom.’
Laura looked like she’d been slapped. She blinked, her mouth went slack and her face burned.
Wanda laughed. ‘You have to learn to hide things better than that.’
Gin
UNDER THE glare of the security light, they arranged their collars, their hair and their smiles and rang the doorbell.
Paul opened the door, his arms already wide, his head and face tilted in sympathy.
He embraced Katharine warmly but she slid away from his clasp. She never felt comfortable with all that. He greeted Richard. They shook hands and hugged and slapped each other on the back. They said, How are you? And Good, thank you, Very good, and laughed, and Katharine thought, what had to happen for them not to do all that?
‘Any news?’ Paul asked as he took their coats.
‘Not really,’ she said. She felt uncomfortable with pity, it made her large and clumsy, which wasn’t her at all. She prided herself on being slim and controlled. She looked down the hall to the brightly lit kitchen, where loud laughter had been cut short and people were waiting for their entry.
‘Shall we . . . ?’ said Richard.
‘Yes. Oh yes, go through,’ boomed Paul, ushering them down the hall.
The kitchen smelt good and looked warm and cosy. How did they do it? wondered Katharine. Jane kissed them and hugged Katharine hard. Over Jane’s shoulder, Katharine saw another couple getting to their feet and looking stranded by the sofas. She wanted to go home. She couldn’t do this. Not with strangers. Richard marched over, stuck out his hand and introduced himself.
‘Oh, we’re not staying,’ said the man. ‘We just dropped in to say hello.’
‘Oh, but do stay,’ said Paul automatically. ‘There’s plenty to eat.’
‘We just moved in next door,’ explained the woman to Richard, gathering up her bag.
‘Don’t rush off just because we’ve arrived,’ Richard said.
‘Have one more glass.’
‘Oscar’s a life coach,’ said Paul. ‘And Suzanne is a couples counsellor.’ He beamed with pride, as if he were presenting his children. ‘Here, what’s everyone drinking?’
Paul unscrewed a gin bottle and looked at Katharine with a smile. She wandered over to him, watched as he poured over a tall glass of cubes. Sometimes, it was this smell, juniper and bitter almonds, that was on her mother’s breath when she tucked them in, both of them in bed by seven, out of the way early so their mother could get on with what she’d been waiting to do all day. To Katharine, gin was Gene Pitney played over and over again late into the night; it was not enough furniture, paraffin heaters and tinned chicken. She shook her head.
‘No?’ said Paul. He made a ridiculous curtseying sweep, taking one long stride towards Suzanne, holding the gin and tonic glass aloft like a trophy. She accepted it with a little ‘Oh!’ and a skitter of heels on the stone floor.
Katharine found a carton of orange juice and mixed herself a fizzy drink. Richard was rocking back and forwards on his heels, hands deep in his pockets, shouting ‘Ha!’ every now and then as he listened to Oscar’s tales of hilarious house-moving mishaps.
‘Any news?’ asked Jane, coming alongside her and helping herself to a drink. ‘Sorry about the others. They’ll go soon.’
Katharine shook her head. ‘The police visited Frank today. Tomorrow they’re searching the common and the river . . .’ She struggled with her face as it crumpled.
A silence opened up. The guests scanned the floor and walls for something to say.
Richard said, ‘Frank says the police keep asking him about whether they were into anything funny. They seem to think Bea has run off with a man from the internet or . . . come to some harm.’
‘But the Missing Persons man I saw yesterday was very reassuring . . .’ said Katharine.
‘And it’s been what, two days?’
‘Well it’s early still, isn’t it? I mean, she may well have just . . .’ Jane turned the gas off under the rice. ‘You did say she was pissed off with everything. Come on, let’s eat.’
Oscar was hungry for details. He wanted to hear them offered in words from Katharine’s mouth, to pick over the possibilities, taste the fear. A forty-nine-year-old woman goes missing. Just vanishes on the edge of the common at seven in the morning one October day. Well, anything could have happened. It didn’t sound good.
‘We’re fairly sure she’s done a runner. Temporarily,’ said Richard.
‘What does she do, your sister?’ Suzanne asked.
They were all aware of the need to stick to the present tense. It made them nervous so that they spoke carefully, like foreigners practising their English.
‘She works for the council.’
‘Managerial?’
‘Admin.’
‘Something to do with finance, isn’t it?’ added Richard.
Unlikely, thought Katharine, looking in vain round the table for some reminder of what it was exactly that her sister did to earn a living. Between the pepper grinder and the water jug she caught a memory of Bea at the long trestle table outside their primary school office, stacking coins – sixpences, pennies, shillings and threepenny bits, furrowing her brow over the pencilled sums to her right while Miss North watched over her, mouth a thin seam of disapproval. Dinner Money Monitor was one of the things Katharine always excelled at, whereas Bea . . .
‘Well, she changes around a bit,’ said Richard. ‘They keep restructuring.’
‘Has she worked there long?’ asked Suzanne.
‘Quite some time,’ said Richard. ‘How long would you say Bea’s worked at the council, darling?’
