by Carys Jones
‘I’m all right,’ Jake nodded, tightening his grip on the wheel as the truck roared past a sign which was briefly illuminated by its headlights;
LONDON – 208 MILES
‘I was just thinking about McAllister, that’s all.’
‘What about him?’
‘What he said about Ewan.’
Jake thought of the tiny pink bundle back home. Of the blue eyes that shone with joy whenever they reached for his thick fingers. Of the gentle gurgling sounds the boy made as he fell asleep.
‘You think he meant it?’ Jake wondered as he looked at the dashboard and checked the petrol level.
‘He said something about babies being vulnerable right?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And how shit it is to grow up without a father. Although in our case it’s arguably a lot shittier to grow up with a drunk for a dad. Your old man was as bad as mine.’
‘If not worse.’
‘Hmm.’ Billy drummed his hands against his thighs. He was so awake. The coffee he’d downed at the last service station was clearly more potent than the one Jake’d had.
‘But he was threatening Ewan, right? Like when he said either we come back with the delivery all signed off or we don’t come back at all?’
‘The man trades in threats.’
‘But he meant it, right?’
‘Jake, just try and relax and think about all the sweet, sweet cash which is coming our way.’
‘Relax?’ Jake looked away from the road to direct a dry laugh at his friend. ‘You’re so tightly wound I’d swear you were high.’
‘I’ve been clean for months,’ Billy replied with a hint of bitterness. ‘You know that.’
‘Shit man, yeah. I’m sorry. You just seem… kinda nervous.’
‘I’m just excited about turning our fortunes around.’ Billy smiled in the way that he always did; confident and brazen. It was a smile that never failed to woo women or endear him to his friends. Billy was inherently loved by all those around him. And to Jake he was like a brother.
7
Amanda watched the headlights of Shane’s car back out of her driveway and disappear down the street. Closing the front door, she breathed in, noticing that the remnants of his cologne lingered in the house like a stubborn fog. Amanda swept her hair out of her eyes and headed back up to her study.
She was so blinded by rage that her world turned red. She had so many questions for Will. They snapped at the back of her teeth, desperate to get out. Each question started the same way.
Why?
Why had he left so suddenly?
Why had he not come back?
Why had he not called? Or text?
Amanda was chewing on the word as she sat back down at her laptop. With a click of her mouse the screen came back to life, effortlessly banishing the darkness it had momentarily slid into.
An information text box told her that her hack was complete. She now had access to all of Will’s social media accounts. Holding her breath, Amanda began clicking through the relevant data. She opened up all of his accounts, checked the private messages, checked the status updates.
The more Amanda searched, the more easily she began to breathe. There was nothing to arouse any sort of suspicion. None of the accounts had been touched in days. The only messages Will had received were spam ones. It seemed that he was as aloof online as he was in real life. Will had never been one for small talk and social niceties. He belonged to a dying breed of men who clung steadfastly to old, abandoned ways.
‘Huh,’ Amanda reached the end of the entries on the accounts. She frowned at the screen and leaned towards it. She clicked her mouse repeatedly, urging the search to continue but it couldn’t. There was no more information to reveal.
Amanda checked the dates of the oldest entries, then cross-checked them across all of Will’s social media accounts. Weirdly they all lined up. Clicking back and forth, she searched for more entries but there was truly nothing. All of Will’s accounts had been set up just over three years ago. Just before he met Amanda. It had slipped her attention before, mainly because she fought the urge to digitally stalk Will when they were dating. She’d seen her friends do it and it always ended badly. She had wanted to take Will at face value, to let him divulge his secrets to her at his leisure rather than rummaging around online and hauling all of his skeletons out of the closet when they’d just started getting to know each other. She’d known Shane inside out when they dated. Will was a mystery. And she kind of wanted him to stay that way for as long as possible. But maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe she should have searched for the man behind the mask instead of enjoying the fantasy.
‘Weird,’ she muttered to herself as she began running a more thorough search on Will’s name and date of birth. Perhaps he had other, older accounts which he kept from her. The feeling that he might stoop to such duplicitous levels sent an icy sensation trickling down Amanda’s spine. She shivered against it. Will loathed technology, she highly doubted that he’d be able to conceal other accounts from her. And to what end? What could he possibly be hiding?
But in a lot of cases like these the missing person has actually just returned to another family.
Shane’s warning rang in Amanda’s ears, causing her to almost choke on the breath she’d been holding. She was shaking her head as her vision became blurred with tears. Will wouldn’t do that to her. There was just no way that he had another family hidden away somewhere. That wasn’t his style. He was a good man with an open, honest heart. It was why Amanda had fallen for him as swiftly as she had done.
‘No, no way,’ Amanda gasped as she wiped at her eyes. She wouldn’t believe it. She ran yet another search on Will’s name. All of her results kept coming back the same. Up until just over three years ago it seemed that Will Thorn hadn’t even existed. Online he’d been a ghost.
‘He just hates technology,’ she reconciled herself, angrily slamming her laptop closed.
There had to be an explanation for Will’s lack of a presence online. There had to be an explanation for everything. But Amanda knew she wasn’t going to find it sat at her laptop so late at night. Her head throbbed and her shoulders ached. She needed to rest.
The silence that greeted her in the bedroom was unnerving. It felt like stepping on to an ice-covered lake in the dead of winter. Everything around her was silent, as though the entire world were sucking in an anxious breath. She didn’t dare do anything to disturb the peace, because if she did, the ice would crack and she’d be plunged to her dark, frozen doom.
Amanda pulled back the bed sheets and climbed into her side of the bed. Even though it was still mild outside she reached down for the duvet which was usually stowed at the base of the bed during the summer months. Amanda pulled it up tightly to her chin and squeezed her eyes shut. She tried to imagine the sound of Will sleeping beside her, of the steady rise and fall of his relaxed breaths. But instead the silence became suffocating. The emptiness mocked her, reminding her how alone she was. Amanda burrowed herself deeper beneath the duvet as tears trickled out of the corners of her closed eyes.
She felt so afraid, like the world no longer made sense. Softly crying herself to sleep, she didn’t feel like the young married woman she was. She felt like she was twelve years old again, weeping for the father she’d lost forever.
*
The phone rang. Shrill bells bounced off the walls, staying silent for only a second before starting up again.
Amanda was in the hallway, staring down at the telephone on the sleek phone stand as though she could somehow see through the plastic of the receiver, right down the line and into the eyes of whoever was calling her.
Maybe it’s Will.
She clung to the hopeful thought like a child with a teddy bear. It gave her comfort. Made her feel safe. But Amanda had been burned before.
It had started in the night. At first Amanda had thought she was dreaming the relentless ringing as it dolled in her mind like a set of doomsday bells.
But as she stirred and groggily wiped the sleep from her eyes the ringing persisted. Amanda had leapt out of bed, her body instantly buoyed by hope. She’d practically floated along the landing towards her study, seizing the phone, already wearing a smile.
‘Hello?’
There was silence on the other end of the line. That and the giveaway crackle which told her that someone was there.
‘Hello? Is anyone there?’
Nothing.
‘Will… is that you?’
More silence.
‘Will… please… come home. Or at least say something.’
She pleaded. She cried. The line crackled some more and then went dead. Amanda hammered 1471 into the keypad.
‘The caller withheld their number,’ an automated voice told her with cool indifference.
‘Dammit!’ Amanda had slammed the phone back into its cradle so fiercely that the whole thing almost tumbled off its trendy stand.
The calls kept coming through the night. It was always the same; the ringing would pluck her from the safety of a dream and bring her down into the shadowy pit of her current reality. She’d clutch the phone to her ear; plead with her unknown caller whilst trying to decipher any trace of sound she could pick up on their end. But there was nothing. And the number was always withheld.
As the sun rose it was all becoming too much. Amanda stood barefoot in the hallway, a light cotton robe wrapped around her shoulders. She watched the phone as it continued to ring. And still, despite her exhaustion and all the disappointment of previous calls she held on to hope.
On the eighth ring she picked up.
‘Jesus, Will, if this is you say something. You’re breaking me doing this. You’re breaking us.’
The line only crackled in response. Tearfully, Amanda wasted no more time on the call. She returned the receiver to its cradle before bending down and yanking out the phone’s connecting cable from the wall.
In her heart she knew that the caller wasn’t Will. He wouldn’t torment her like that. Or at least she hoped he wouldn’t. But she had a feeling that whoever was prank-calling her was connected to her missing husband. She knew she should stay at home and do some more investigation but she was too tired, too afraid. She needed to be somewhere she felt safe.
*
Amanda stood waiting on the doorstep of what had once been her family home. A web of yellow roses bordered the bright red front door. The paint had dulled in places to a warm shade of pink. Amanda traced the woodwork with her fingertips as she waited for her mother to answer the door.
The morning sun was already burning down on the back of her neck. There was a weekend bag at her feet, hastily stuffed full of some essentials. It took over five minutes for the door to eventually creak open. Corrine peered out of the darkness, blinking into the sunlight as though it were blinding her.
When people suffer a mutual loss they either forge a stronger bond or drift apart. For Amanda and her mother, it had been the latter. While her mother dealt with being a widow, with the loss of her beloved husband, by disappearing into her garden. As her grief grew so did her attention to her roses. And each time they bloomed Corrine became a little stronger, saw beauty in the world and managed to smile a bit easier. Amanda hid within her virtual world. She spent hours upstairs in her room at her computer, enjoying the distance she felt from everything that hurt. When she played games, when she chatted online, she was no longer the girl who’d lost her Dad. On her computer she didn’t have to endure all the stares which shadowed her around school. Online she could be anybody. Nobody. And that gave Amanda a rush. It was a drug she couldn’t get enough of. The more time Amanda spent behind her computer screen the less time she spent with her mother. With the rest of the world.
And Corrine had liked Shane. He was the boy from Amanda’s past, the link to a world in which Amanda’s father used to live. When Amanda ended things with Shane it was like her mother felt that she’d permanently severed that link and resented her for it. Amanda was entering a new stage in her life. She married a man who had never even met her late father, who wasn’t even from town. He was a stranger which made her decision to wed him seem strange to Corrine. There was too much alienation for Amanda’s mother’s taste, too much distance being created between the past and the present.
But Amanda couldn’t keep holding on. And beneath the smiles, the hugs and the assurances that everything was fine, she blamed her mother for what had happened that day. It was at her behest that her dad was out on the road. Amanda knew that if the tables were turned and her father had tumbled over the cliffs that Corrine would carry the same resentment in her heart. They both loved him too much not to.
‘Hey, Mum,’ Amanda tilted her head at her mother. She’d not shown up on the doorstep like this, like a stray, since she was a teenager. Back then, she would often end up on the stone step following a night drinking on the beach with Shane and John. Drunkenly she’d spread herself across the step, gazing up at the stars through the leaves of the rose bushes which grew overhead.
Either her Mum or the milkman would discover her, depending on who was up first. If it was the milkman, then Amanda had time to steal inside and climb back into bed. If it was her mother, then she had to brace herself for a royal telling-off.
‘Amanda,’ Corrine looked genuinely startled to have found her daughter on her doorstep. She glanced down at the weekend bag and her eyes widened. ‘Sweetheart, is everything okay?’
‘I just can’t bear it anymore,’ Amanda admitted as her shoulder began to quake. ‘The emptiness of the house. It’s overwhelming.’ And this was home once. The little house held many happy memories as well as sad ones. Amanda had bloomed into a woman there, had shared her first kiss with Shane down on the beach beneath the stars. Her mother’s home felt safe. It always had. Somedays Amanda felt like she could still sense her father’s presence lingering in the living room or resting beside the kitchen window, staring out to sea.
With every tick of the clock, Amanda knew it was another second passing where her husband was lost to her. Even though her house was minimally decorated she still felt Will in every room. His strong presence endured even in his absence. If the light flickered in the corner of her eye, Amanda would think he’d just walked by. She’d sprint into the next room, breathless and desperate to see him. But he was never there. Will had become the ghost that he was online. His number never connected, his van never pulled into the driveway. Amanda knew that soon people would stop believing that he was ever going to come back. And then it was only a matter of time before they pushed those beliefs on to her.
‘Come in, come in,’ Corrine quickly ushered her daughter inside. ‘You could have just let yourself in you know.’
‘Oh no,’ Amanda shook her head wildly and dropped her bag down in the hallway. ‘Never again, not since I caught you going through that tantric yoga phase.’
‘Oh, yes, that,’ Corrine’s face softened wistfully as Amanda moved past her towards the kitchen.
The home her parents had shared was a small cottage nestled on a clifftop just outside of town. The little house was regularly pelted by fierce winds and rains rolling in off the coast, but it always managed to retain its quaint charm. The small windows were leaded in a diamond pattern and the ceilings were lined with thick oak beams. Local historians estimated the house to be several hundred years old. At night it creaked with the held memory of thousands of footsteps running across its boarded floors.
‘Where do you keep the coffee these days?’ Amanda asked as she began pulling open cupboards. There was a time when she’d have known her way around the kitchen blindfolded. Back when she lived there, back when it was her home.
‘I’ve had a sort out,’ Corrine stated as she gingerly opened a cupboard at the far end of the room, above the microwave, and pulled down a barely touched jar of store-brand coffee.
Every three months or so Amanda’s mother would rearrange the entire house. The front room and the dining room were forever switch
ing places, as were the bedrooms upstairs. But there was one room which Corrine never touched, one which remained trapped in its very own time warp.
Once her coffee was made Amanda headed up there, the stairs groaning in protest as she ascended them.
‘Stay as long as you like,’ Corrine smiled at her as she kissed her daughter’s cheek before dashing off towards the bathroom. The pipes were creaking within the walls as Amanda peered into her bedroom.
Everything was just as she’d left it when she’d stormed out at eighteen with grand ideas of what her life would become. She was leaving for university; she intended to never come home again. She intended to change the world.
Leaning against the door frame, Amanda breathed in the familiar, musky scent of her room. The small single bed was still wedged up beneath her window, a faded purple duvet tucked up over it. A smile pulled on Amanda’s lips as she remembered how Shane would often climb the trellis of the rose bushes up to her window and struggle to fit his wiry frame through its small opening.
Posters of all Amanda’s favourite movies covered the walls. Edward Scissorhands, Labyrinth, Dark Crystal. These were the movies she had loved, the movies which had shaped her formative years. Stepping into the room, she carefully sat down on the edge of her bed. She was reluctant to disturb anything; the room was like a shrine. Smoothing her free hand across her duvet, she wondered how many nights she’d spent sat on her little bed, gazing out of her little window towards the ocean. She used to love how its surface glistened in the moonlight.
‘If you look real carefully you’ll see the flick of a mermaid’s tail,’ her Dad would tell her.
‘No, Dad, I won’t,’ Amanda would protest wisely.
‘Yes,’ Ivor would insist. ‘You will.’
As a little girl Amanda had stared so hard at the placid surface of the water, desperate to catch a glimpse of a mermaid tail that she feared she may go blind through such intense concentration. But a tail never broke the surface and sparkled in the sun and her Dad was no longer there to tell her to keep searching, to keep believing.
