Missing

by Alison Moore

  In those days, Jessie had never known how to refer to Will: she could not say boyfriend because he was not a boy, but one did not say manfriend. She had never liked the formality, the primness, of partner. He was her lover but she could not introduce him to people as her lover, a term which she always felt forced into people’s heads an image of the two of them loving one another, the two of them naked just as clearly as if these people had been standing at the foot of the bed while she and her lover were making out. That’s what it was called in the books she had read as a teenager when, directly after Enid Blyton, she had discovered Judy Bloom. Jessie had liked being married, not least because it enabled her to refer to Will as her husband, which was so much simpler. Now, if he had once been her lover, he had become her ex-lover. Her ex: how sad that sounded. They were not yet divorced but that would have to come next: she would be divorced. She had looked the word up in the thesaurus: she would be split; she would be ruptured.

  The dog accepted her, but you could tell that it was hankering after Will. When he moved in with Jessie and brought the dog with him, he told her that Kirstin would not look after it. Now he had left the dog behind, but how did he know that Jessie would look after it? The note she had found that morning in January said only that he was going, not where he was going, but presumably he was somewhere he could not easily keep a dog.

  He had given the dog the most ridiculous name. It was called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Before Will left, Jessie had never had to take the dog out on her own – either Will had done the dog-walking or the two of them had taken the dog out together. She had never heard him call out the dog’s name in public; all he had to do was whistle and the dog would come to his side. Jessie could not whistle properly, not in that same sharp way; she always sounded as if she were beginning some tune. So she had to call out the dog’s name, except that she could not bring herself to do it. She had thought about changing the dog’s name, but that seemed wrong – the dog was old and would have been confused; it would most likely not respond to a name that was not its own. So she did not change its name but she did compromise: on morning and evening walks, when the dog – a beagle, a scent hound – had gone into the undergrowth or into the water, when Jessie had had enough and wanted to go home, she would call out just ‘The Four Horsemen’, and no more than twice. ‘The Four Horsemen!’ she would shout. ‘The Four Horsemen!’ She felt like a fool.

  No one would have known, she thought, standing there on the bank, looking at the river, that the water had come so high, overwhelming the flood defences, the river bursting its banks. The flooding had been nearly a year ago, although it felt much more recent than that. The ground on which she was standing now had been underwater: dry land had become riverbed; even carpeted interiors had become riverbed, sludgy underfoot. She had seen a Land Rover that had gone through the front of a house. The outside came insistently in. Some people had evacuated their homes; others had stayed. Jessie’s house was some way from the river, but she had kept a wary eye on the situation.

  It was raining now, and she had not brought an umbrella out with her. ‘Never mind,’ she said, and then glanced around to see if anyone had heard her talking to herself. There was no one nearby. Even the dog had gone out of sight. She could see people further away, some trying to get out of the rain, some not. If you just stayed out in it, you got used to it. Once you were soaked through, you could not get any wetter; it began to feel like one’s natural medium.

  She felt tired, though, and ready to get home. She tried to see the dog, and called out, ‘The Four Horsemen!’ Her first call was never loud enough; she made the second one louder: ‘The Four Horsemen!’ The loudness made it sound desperate. The dog came running. It seemed to understand that she would not call its name a third time. It did come when it was called, she did appreciate that. They walked home together.

  In the hallway, she rubbed The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse down with a towel. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ She put a bowl of dog food and a bowl of cat food down on the kitchen floor. The cat would slink out later, from whatever nook or cranny it had found.

  Locking and bolting the front door, she thought of her Paul, when he would have been about two years old, or perhaps much less than that, more like eighteen months – a handful of months could make such a big difference. All she was really sure about was that in this memory of him he had been of walking age and suddenly able to reach door handles. One moment, babies could not even roll, and then they did: you would leave the room and return to find that they were no longer where they had been and it was a terrible shock; or they rolled right off the bed and onto the floor with a thud and a scream. One moment, they could not open the front door, and then they could, they did. She remembered standing in the kitchen, looking at the hallway, thinking that something was different, something about the quality of the light in the hallway was different; she remembered going to the kitchen doorway and seeing that the front door was standing wide open.

  She remembered Eleanor running away from home. First thing in the morning, while her mum and dad were still sleeping, Eleanor had unlocked the kitchen door. She ran away to the bottom of the garden and stayed there, in a den that she had made in a hedge. When her parents woke up, there was panic, before they looked into the garden and saw Eleanor’s legs where the hedge did not quite hide her. They made coffee to drink while they waited for her to come home, which she did as soon as she got hungry. She was home in time for breakfast.

  Jessie picked up her travel bag and climbed the stairs. Halfway up, she smelt death, the terrible stink of something that the cat had caught and brought into the house to torture and kill. Even after those little creatures were dead, the cat continued to play with them as if they were still alive in some way. She would have to find the source of the smell, some little rodent body, its tiny teeth rather long and sharp; she would have to find it and throw it out, or the smell would get worse, and quickly. Even the thought of it, even the word – rodent, a nibbling and gnawing breed of mammal – turned her stomach.

  Usually, she found the little bodies under the bed: they were either terribly soft and limp, or gone hard. One, found far too late, had been crawling with maggots. But perhaps the worst was one that felt more firmly rounded than the others – it had a certain weight – and she had felt horribly sure that it must have been pregnant. She had a dread of picking up a mouse – carefully with a piece of tissue – and seeing it twitch. They never did though. When she thought about the possibility of ghosts, she had to think of all those tiny mouse ghosts that might be in the house, accumulating under the bed.

  Although the cat never seemed to bother eating the mice, Jessie had witnessed it eating a bird. It must even have eaten the beak, and the legs and feet, because all she found afterwards was some down, left like crumbs.

  Occasionally, she managed to separate the cat from mice that were still alive. When these mice ran off, Jessie never saw them again. Perhaps they went to live in the walls. Did they really do that, did they live behind the skirting boards, or was that just in cartoons?

  The door to the spare room was standing open. Jessie preferred it closed. She used the room for storage. She pulled the door to.

  The house felt terribly cold. All year, she had been discovering things that she could not access because Will had left them password protected. When she had tried to watch their programme on television, she realised that it was inside a package that required a password that she did not know. Trying to switch on the heating, she had found that she could not: it asked for a pin code and she did not know the pin code. She had thought to herself that she would have to look through the manuals in the kitchen drawer, or she would have to phone one of those numbers that kept you on hold, one of those numbers with no humans on the other end of the line. She still had not done so though; she had managed without.

  In bed, with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse weighi
ng down her legs, Jessie checked her phone. She looked at her phone too much, as if she were expecting some message, which did not come. She needed to make more of an effort to stay in touch with her parents. She needed to phone them; she needed to see them. They had moved into sheltered accommodation that Jessie had not yet visited. Gail had told her about it in one of her postcards, sent after the New Year’s Eve party.

  She regretted going to that party, at the end of which Gary had found her asleep on Eleanor’s bed, on top of the covers. ‘Lying drunk on Eleanor’s bed,’ she heard him say to Gail. ‘The dirt from her shoes on Eleanor’s blanket.’ Jessie had not known that she had any dirt on her shoes, her new silver party shoes, until she got it all over Eleanor’s comfort blanket. Jessie had rather liked the idea of being a weightless spaceman, but she was not: she was a hundred and twenty pounds of flesh and bone, pulled by gravity to Eleanor’s bed, with mud on her soles. The blanket would have needed dry-cleaning. She ought to have offered to pay for it; she had not thought of that at the time.

  When Jessie had said to Gail, some days later, ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ Gail had looked surprised.

  ‘I thought you had a nice time,’ she said. ‘I thought the party went well.’

  ‘Gary didn’t want me there,’ said Jessie. ‘He was furious with me for falling asleep on Eleanor’s bed. He said I was drunk.’

  ‘Well,’ said Gail, ‘you were drunk. You were certainly drunk when you fell into the bath.’

  ‘When I what?’ said Jessie.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Gail. ‘It was a party.’

  ‘But I didn’t do that,’ insisted Jessie.

  ‘You did,’ said Gail. ‘And then you fell asleep on Eleanor’s bed.’

  Will had not been at the party with her; nor had he been at home when she got back to Hawick the next day. She had not known that he was going to be out, that he was going to be away overnight. She said to him later, ‘What if I hadn’t come home? What if I hadn’t been here to take the dog out?’

  ‘But you did come home,’ he said, ‘you were here.’

  ‘It’s your dog, Will,’ she told him, ‘it’s your responsibility.’ But even while she was saying this, he was, she seemed to remember, walking away from her, leaving the room; she was talking to his back. She supposed that really she had already lost him by then, even though it was more than a week before he actually went. The note he left behind was not written on paper and placed where one might expect to find such a note, next to the kettle or tucked into the fruit bowl; he wrote it with a finger in shower steam on the bathroom mirror. He would have known that she would rise at seven and see it before it disappeared, or at least that she would see it eventually, when she had her own hot shower. She supposed it was thoughtful: he would have known that she would see a message left in the bathroom before one left in the kitchen, so she would spend less time wondering where he was, at least in theory: in fact, all these months later, she was still wondering where he was. Or perhaps he had just been unable to find a pen.

  She imagined if, instead of just finding him gone, she’d had to watch him leave, how much that would hurt, saying to him, ‘How will I know where you are?’ and him replying, ‘I don’t suppose you will.’

  For a long time, she had expected to see him walking through the door, coming into the hallway, but she no longer did. The dog did though: it did not seem to realise or accept that Will had gone for good, had just gone off and left them. She had told the dog – sometimes looking into its doggy eyes and speaking to it gently, and sometimes speaking sharply as she passed it in the hallway – but still it did not realise. It thought Will was going to come back. Every time someone came to the door, the dog thought that it was Will coming home. ‘It’s not Will,’ said Jessie. ‘Will’s gone.’ But the dog did not understand; all it heard was ‘Will . . . Will . . .’ It wagged its tail and watched the door.

  Now she had to get used to being Jessie Noon again. She could have kept Will’s name of course, the same way she was keeping the dog’s, but she had gone rather resignedly back to Noon. She could hardly bear to write it though, and did not like to see it; she could not see it without thinking of it handwritten on police statements and printed in the newspapers.

  She shifted, stretched out, taking up some of Will’s side of the bed as well. The cat would come up later. It would sleep at her feet, or she might wake in the night with the weight of it on her stomach, or she would feel its fur against her face in the dark.

  She scrolled through her phone numbers. Will was not in there. He did not have a mobile phone. ‘We have a phone,’ he used to say, meaning the landline. ‘And if I’m out of the house, maybe I don’t want to be contacted.’

  ‘For emergencies, though,’ she had said, but she knew that he hated these shrill and insistent little devices that could find you in the middle of nowhere and disturb your peace.

  The number she had for her parents was a landline number. It might be wrong now that they had moved, now that they were in their sheltered accommodation. They would have cords to pull if anything was wrong; someone would come running. She hoped that they were happy there, and that they would be able to stay there.

  She picked up her D. H. Lawrence biography. Now he was leaving England behind and eloping with Frieda, who was leaving her children behind. Lawrence belonged to the same generation as Lenore’s son, who had emigrated as soon as he could, with plans to begin a new life in a new place, but who had died in his forties from alcoholism. Jessie wondered if he ever wrote home, or ever visited. She imagined her great-great-grandmother, living in this same house in Hawick more than a hundred years ago, waiting for word of her only son.

  Her eyes strayed from her book to a crack at the top of the wall, just where it met the ceiling. The crack ran along the wall as far as the door, where it veered down and disappeared under the doorframe, heading out into the hallway. Or perhaps it had started out there and was coming in. She imagined the crack like a river, carving a route through the house. When she switched off the light, she could not see the crack, but of course it was still there.

  Even though Jessie often did not fall asleep until the small hours, it was not unusual for her to find herself wide awake again earlier than she needed to be or wanted to be and unable to get back to sleep. Then she might get up and start cooking, making meals that she could freeze in batches to eat in the future.

  She had been preparing some cod for a fish pie when she heard a report on the radio about the languages fish spoke, and about how the oceans were becoming so noisy that the fish were having trouble communicating. Jessie finished preparing the cod and made the pie and froze it. It was still in the freezer, untouched.

  On this particular morning, though, Jessie was sound asleep when her radio came on at the same time as an alarm elsewhere was going off. She woke with her heart racing, not understanding what was happening or what she had to do to make it stop. After climbing out of her warm bed, she traced the beeping to her travel bag, to the travel alarm clock that was lying buried in amongst the clothes that she had not yet unpacked. She switched it off and unpacked her bag while she listened to On Your Farm. Growing up in the suburbs, she’d had a longing, simultaneously, for city or countryside, either and both, anything but the suburbs, which were in between and neither. She wanted to live in the middle of London, her mental image of which was Piccadilly Circus, and to be in nightclubs at four o’clock in the morning; or she wanted a farm, to watch her crops growing, to watch her cows grazing. In Hawick, she was neither in a city nor on a farm, but every Sunday she caught the end of On Your Farm, and sometimes she found it satisfying, and sometimes it was just a reminder of what she did not have, of how she had thought she might live, a reminder that she still lived in neither one place nor the other.

  She put her dirty clothes into the wicker laundry basket. The dress that she had worn to the conference and had left lying on the floor would nee
d dry-cleaning. She saw that the hem was coming down; it wanted mending. She picked up her name tag and thought of the man who had stopped her outside the cafe in Carlisle, the man who had said her name, the man who knew her.

  She took the name tag into the bathroom and dropped it into the bin. It was a pedal bin that was far too small, ridiculously small. When she pressed down on the pedal, the metal lid hit the wall, clanging like a gong. For something so little it was terribly loud. Every now and again she moved the bin away from the wall, but it always found its way back. Like the rug beside her bed, it seemed to creep when she wasn’t looking.

  She took a shower, dried and straightened her hair, and dressed. She put on a Christmas jumper; she thought it must be hard to feel miserable in a Christmas jumper. The cat and the dog were following her around; they were hungry. Jessie went out onto the landing. The door to the spare room was standing open. She could see the light of the rising sun flooding in, the shadow of the fringed lightshade bleeding down the wall. She pulled the door to.

  She let the animals go down the stairs first, so that she would not trip over them. Now that she lived alone, and seeing as she worked at home, and given that she spoke only occasionally to her family, she did sometimes imagine dying in some sudden and unnecessary way – perhaps tripping over the cat at the top of the stairs and landing broken-necked at the bottom – and nobody knowing for weeks. The neighbours or the postman would notice a smell, and after a while someone would come in and find her lying at the foot of the stairs, and in the meantime the cat would have been eating her face. She did not know about the dog, whether it would try to intervene or whether it would just join in.