After Anna

by Alex Lake

  Even in a photo it was obvious she and Brian were in love. They were leaning into each other, his arm around her. He was not looking at the camera, but at his wife, his expression protective, caring, concerned. Loving, most of all. It was a photo of a man who adored his wife and the daughter they had made together.

  When they’d left the nursery they’d hugged for a long time. It was funny what you remembered; Julia remembered the smell of the suit Brian was wearing. It was musty; odd but not unpleasant. He was starting his new job as a primary teacher, and he was wearing a suit that he’d bought from a charity store, and in the chaos of early parenthood he’d not managed to find time to have it dry-cleaned.

  He was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with and, back then, she couldn’t have imagined any future in which she didn’t.

  Not any more. Now he was a brooding presence, squatting in the spare bedroom.

  She pulled on her dressing gown and crossed the landing to the stairs. The top two creaked and, out of habit, she trod softly on them so as not to wake up Anna, who was a light sleeper. Julia often wondered whether it was because she and Brian had fussed over her sleeping arrangements so much: at nap time and bed time they ensured that she had a dark room at the correct temperature, and then they performed an elaborate routine to get her to sleep, rocking her in a specific pattern and then, when she was nearly asleep, laying her gently in her bed and patting her back until her breathing lengthened and she could be left without fear of her waking up. They would then tiptoe around the house, terrified of waking her up.

  And now she was a light sleeper: no wonder. She had only ever had to sleep in perfect conditions. All those adults who complained of insomnia would sleep like a cat on a warm flagstone if they were rocked for half an hour before bed and then given a gentle massage. She and Brian would have done things differently with a second child, Julia knew, they would have been more relaxed, both because they would have known what they were doing and because they would not have had the time to do with another child what they had done with Anna. The second child had not come, though. A miscarriage and then an ectopic pregnancy, which had left Julia unable to have more children, had seen to that. She was barren, as Edna had once put it.

  Barren. It was a horrid, vivid word that Julia hated, and it was just the kind of word that Edna would use. She could pretend that it was just what people said when she was young and she didn’t know it would upset her daughter-in-law, but Julia didn’t believe her. Edna knew exactly what she was doing. She always did.

  For a time, Julia had grieved for the loss of her fertility, but recently, as she realized she no longer loved Brian, she had come to be relieved. For one thing, divorce would be easier with one child; for another, she had always worried that she would not love the second child as much as the first. How could she? Anna and she were mother and daughter but also best friends. She knew that they wouldn’t be forever – or even much longer – but right now she loved taking her daughter to the movies or shopping or for lunch. They’d gone to see The Nutcracker at Christmas; Anna was open-mouthed. Spellbound. Julia understood the magic of theatre, the way it brought drama to life, in a way she had never done before. Anna asked frequently when Christmas was coming, so she could see it again.

  Yes – her love for Anna was all-consuming, so maybe it was best that she have only one child.

  One child who was now gone.

  And, although she would not admit it to herself, part of Julia was sure Anna was gone. Of course, she still hoped that Anna would show up. She had to. Without that hope she would probably not have been able to carry on. But, however much she tried to ignore it, she was aware that she might never see her daughter again.

  Might never meet – and disapprove of – Anna’s first boyfriend. Might never watch her fall in love, graduate, marry. Might never become a grandparent. There was an entire future at stake here, both for her and for her daughter and husband.

  Before she fell asleep, alone in the bedroom, her only company the sound of Brian’s footsteps as he walked from the kitchen table to the booze cabinet, she’d googled ‘missing children’. It was a mistake, just like it was a mistake to google your symptoms. Persistent runny nose? Not a cold – it was brain fluid leaking out of your cranium. Always tired? Not a condition of being a parent – it was a rare virus that would gradually eat away at your muscles until you wasted away to nothing. Constipation? Bowel cancer. The difference was, these were false diagnoses. In the morning, a doctor would tell you not to worry and send you on your way.

  When it came to missing children the facts – or the patterns, at least – were pretty clear.

  Kids, especially five-year-old kids, were either found in the first few hours, or not at all.

  Yes, there were exceptions (and that was where the hope came from) but for the most part (and please let Anna be different, please) five-year-old kids either showed up pretty soon after they went missing – at a friend’s house, or in the care of a concerned adult who had seen them alone – or they didn’t show up at all.

  She had read accounts of police investigations; read about the kinds of people who abducted young girls, and the reasons they did so. She read about criminal gangs who kidnapped kids into slavery, or for rich people who couldn’t have kids of their own, she read about lone wolf predators who took kids and hid them for years, until the kids grew up and lost their appeal and were murdered. She read about paedophile gangs, who took kids and passed them around their network, filmed them being raped to order, and then disposed of their broken bodies in landfill sites in the Third World.

  She’d run to the bathroom sink and vomited until there was nothing left to come out other than bile and saliva. It was funny how your body reacted to extreme emotion by emptying the stomach. She didn’t know why that would be the case; you’d think it would be better to retain the food so as to have some energy to deal with whatever crisis it was.

  Even so, she wasn’t hungry now. The thought of food held no appeal whatsoever; she wasn’t sure it ever would again. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a creak behind her. For a second, instinct took over and Julia thought it was Anna coming down for an early morning cuddle; her spirits rose, the gloom lifted. And then she turned to look and reality reasserted its grip.

  It was Brian. His eyes were red, his face unshaven. He was one of those men who grew facial hair very quickly. If they went out in the evening he would have to shave for a second time in the day. She had found it interesting, at first. Charming. Manly. Part of the husband she loved. Now she found it off-putting, and there were plenty of other things about him that had a similar effect: all his physical imperfections, the smells and blotches and sagging muscles, now repelled her.

  ‘Brian,’ she said.

  He ignored her. They had barely spoken since leaving the school. That was part of the reason she’d googled ‘missing children’. She’d been alone and unable to stop herself.

  He walked past her to the kitchen; shoulders slumped, and flicked the kettle on. He put a teabag in a mug. When the water boiled he poured it into the mug and added milk. The milk spilled on the countertop. His hand was shaking. He’d drunk a lot when they had got home, enough to pass out around midnight, but not enough, it seemed, to stay passed out.

  ‘Brian,’ she said. ‘We need to talk.’

  He looked at her over his cup of tea. ‘Do we?’ he said. His voice was broken and hoarse.

  ‘Yes. Our daughter is missing.’

  ‘Because you weren’t there to pick her up. You didn’t show up and now she’s gone.’

  Julia wanted to defend herself, out of habit. It was how things were between them: he criticized her or she criticized him and they argued. Right or wrong didn’t come into it. Not giving in was what mattered. You didn’t give an inch. You stood your ground. Sometimes she felt like Tom Petty singing ‘I Won’t Back Down’.

  But not this time. What could she say? It’s not my fault? It was her fault, at leas
t partially, and partially was enough. Maybe she had an excuse. Maybe she’d been unlucky. Maybe she could have been late a thousand times and each time Anna would have been sitting there with Mrs Jameson, eating a biscuit, and telling the teacher about her favourite place to go on the weekend. All those things could be true, but they didn’t alter the only truth that made any difference: if she had been on time, Anna would be asleep in her bed right this minute.

  So Brian was right. Cruel to point it out, but right. Perhaps if they’d been happily married, perhaps, even if they’d been unhappily married but planning to stay that way, he would have been the one to support her, to make her feel less wretched, but she had told him she wanted him out of her life, and with that she had given up any right to his support.

  She reached for her car keys. Her hands struggled to pick them up. She wiped her eyes clear of tears.

  ‘I’m going out,’ she said.

  He didn’t reply. He just leaned on the kitchen counter and looked out of the window and sipped his scalding tea.

  iii.

  Reminders of Anna were everywhere.

  Her booster seat in the rear-view mirror. A thin summer raincoat in the footwell. Biscuit crumbs on the backseat.

  Brian had told her off for letting Anna eat in the car, for making such a mess.

  Who cares now? Julia thought. Who cares about crumbs or mess or late bedtimes? We spend so much time worrying about the little things, when they don’t matter. And we let the things that do matter slip.

  When she turned the ignition a CD of kids’ songs came on. She sat back and listened.

  Do your ears hang low?

  Do they waggle to and fro?

  Can you tie them in a knot?

  Can you tie them in a bow?

  Anna had found that song particularly amusing, and had developed a dance in which she rocked from foot to foot and mimed tying her dangly ears in knots and bows.

  Julia pulled into the street. There was a light on in the house next door, and she saw the upstairs curtain twitch. Mrs Madigan: a village stalwart in her nineties, who had an opinion on everything, and who expected, by virtue of her age – as though age conferred wisdom – that people would listen to it. She was known to be both ‘formidable’ and ‘quite a character’ and widely surmised to have a heart of gold beneath her tough exterior. People often commented on how it must be ‘interesting’ or ‘fun’ or ‘quite something’ to have her as a neighbour. Julia didn’t tell them what she really thought: it was a pain. Once you got to know her you realized that Mrs Madigan’s public persona of forthright grumpiness did not, in fact, hide a beneficent and kindly old woman; it hid a sour and angry old woman. She didn’t like it when Anna was noisy in the garden and she thought nothing of shouting at her over the fence, or of complaining to Julia or Brian about their hooligan child. She would ask Brian to help when something broke in her house, and then, when he finished whatever DIY task she had assigned him, she would complain that he had done it wrong, and then ostentatiously get a tradesman in to redo the work. Above all, she complained incessantly to Julia about her two children and many more grand- and great-grandchildren, and how they were selfish and lazy and ignored her.

  Julia didn’t blame them. She would have ignored her too, had she been able to do so.

  The neighbours on the other side – a childless couple in their late-forties – were much better. They didn’t have much to do with them, which Julia was becoming convinced was the key to good neighbourly relations. Good fences make good neighbours, the saying went, and it was true.

  Julia wasn’t sure where she was going, but she found herself heading for the local playground. It was a pretty unprepossessing place: just a set of swings, a slide, and a roundabout on a patch of grass at the end of a residential street, but Anna and she went there often when they had an hour or so to fill. The police had checked it, but it was possible that, since then, Anna had found her way there.

  Possible. Not likely.

  She kept her headlights on full beam and drove slowly, scanning the streets for any sign of her daughter.

  At the park, she switched off the engine and the lights cut out. She was glad; she’d found that the yellow pools disturbed her. They illuminated only a portion of the world and it reminded her of the futility of this search. Anna could be anywhere, but Julia, like the beams of light, could look in only one place at a time.

  She was reminded of a conversation she’d had with a friend, Prissy (short for Pricilla, a boarding school nickname used only by her intimates, and retained as the name had a certain irony: Prissy had shown herself to be anything but, a reputation sealed by an affair with a young teacher, Sarah, who lost her job over it). The conversation had taken place a year or so back, just after a teenage girl had been found in the basement of a house only a few streets away from her home in some dusty Middle-American city. She’d been there for a decade; Prissy had declared that, if her son (she had a son the same age as Anna) went missing there was no chance he could be hidden for so long so close to home, because she would search every house in the vicinity from top to bottom, whether the occupants and police liked it or not. Julia had agreed. She would do the same. It was an easy thing to say, fired by indignant parental fervour, and it carried with it an implicit criticism of the mother of the American girl. Why hadn’t she done that? A good mother would have.

  A good mother would have been there to pick up her daughter, as well.

  It wasn’t as easy as she and Prissy had imagined, however. Firstly, there were a lot of houses, and secondly, it seemed that the police and occupants had more say over who entered them than expected.

  But at least she was doing something.

  ‘Anna!’ she called. ‘Anna!’

  She did not have a torch, so she used the one on her iPhone and swept the park. The swings were empty, the slide a silhouetted dinosaur.

  ‘Anna!’ she shouted. ‘Anna!’

  ‘Who’s Anna?’ a voice said, the accent strong: ooze Annoh?

  She jumped and pointed the beam in the direction of the voice. Two teenage boys were sitting on the roundabout. What the hell were they doing out here at this time? One of them was holding a bottle. He took a swig from it and passed it to his friend, then lit a cigarette.

  She smelled the smoke: make that a joint.

  ‘My daughter,’ she said.

  ‘Is she cute?’ the boy with the joint asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Julia said, then realized her error. ‘I mean, no, not in the way you mean. She’s five.’

  ‘You’re cute,’ the boy said. ‘You’re all right, anyway. Want to suck me cock?’

  ‘What?’ Julia said. ‘No!’

  ‘Then what are you doin’ here, at this time?’ the boy said. ‘That’s why people come down here.’

  As far as Julia knew people came down here to play on the swings with their children, but apparently not. When Anna was home she doubted they would be playing here again.

  The other boy, the one who had not spoken, stood up. He was older than she’d thought, maybe nineteen, tall, and thin, and had a pock-marked face, the result of bad, untreated acne at some point in his early teens. He sniffed, then hawked and spit on the roundabout.

  They were definitely not coming down here again.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come wi’ me.’ He grabbed his crotch and thrust it towards her, then nodded towards the bushes. ‘You can have some of this. You’ve been missing it, I can tell. Don’t get much off your old man, right? I’ve met some of your type before, not so old you’ve give up, still need your hole busted from time to time.’

  His voice was flat and toneless and he was staring at her, his face drawn in a slight sneer, as though he was looking at something faintly disgusting.

  He took a step towards her. It was quick, and purposeful.

  ‘Come on,’ he urged, ‘you’ll like it once we get started.’

  And then she imagined Anna, wandering into this park and encountering the pock-marked boy and h
is friends, or people like them.

  If that was the world her daughter was in, she didn’t stand a chance.

  Julia turned and ran towards her car. Thankfully, she’d not locked the door, so she was inside in a couple of seconds. She slammed it behind her and locked it, then fumbled in her pocket for her keys.

  They weren’t there.

  She put on the cabin light and looked around. She checked her coat pockets again, then patted her jeans. Nothing.

  There was a knock on the window. The pock-marked boy had his face pressed to the glass. He waggled his tongue from side to side in a gross imitation of oral sex.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, his voice faint through the window. ‘Seems you might have a little problem, doesn’t it?’

  iv.

  He pulled his face back an inch from the window. There was a smear where his lips had been pressed to the glass.

  ‘Want these?’ He held up Julia’s car keys. ‘Dropped ’em, didn’t you?’

  ‘Give them to me,’ Julia said.

  ‘Open your door. They’re all yours.’

  She picked up her phone. ‘I’m calling the police.’

  The boy shrugged. ‘I’ve done nowt wrong,’ he said.

  She dialled 999, her eyes fixed on the boy’s pock-marked face. She thought he would leave now that she had the phone to her ear, but whether he did or not she wanted the police there. She was not getting out of the car on her own.

  The boy examined the keys. He held a Yale between his thumb and forefinger, the bunch dangling from it.

  ‘This your house key?’ He unwound it from the bunch. He threw the rest of the keys into a bush and put the Yale in his pocket. ‘Maybe I’ll pay you a visit.’

  ‘Hello,’ Julia said, when the operator answered. ‘Police, please.’

  The pock-marked face disappeared. She heard laughter as the boys went back through the gate into the park.

  When the police dispatcher came on the line, Julia was shaking so violently she found it hard to keep the phone to her ear.