Precious Thing

by Mcbeth, Colette

  ‘Oh God, you don’t have to tell me. Can you remember that home economics teacher … what was her name?’

  ‘Mrs Glass,’ Debbie says.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Glass,’ I say, ‘the one with a lisp. Well, Clara is so good with accents and ripping people off, she had her down to a T. She used to creep up behind me and holler in her Mrs Glass voice and scare the life out of me.’

  Sarah has to swallow her drink quickly before she spits it out. ‘Ah, you can laugh about it now,’ I say. ‘At the time she used to make me go dizzy with the giggles. I couldn’t stop and Mrs Glass would be saying, “Rachel, stop laughing this instant or I’ll throw you out,” and that would make me laugh even more. No wonder I always burnt my soufflé.’

  I think back to those days, to what we shared, Clara. I had none of your natural timing but God, did I work hard to please you. Did you ever realise that? Those moments when I’d make you giggle or smile, or the ones where I’d do something funny and you’d pat me on the back and say, ‘That’s why I love you Rachel,’ they were my proudest times because it made me believe our friendship was equal. Your laughter was like a drug, you see. It boosted and bolstered me, made me feel strong. I’d have done anything to hear it again and again and again.

  I think Sarah may be drunk or at least well on her way because her words are coming more slowly now and when she speaks her eyes look at me rather than darting around.

  ‘I mean, Rachel … and don’t take this the wrong way, but at school you two were so close nobody else could get near you. Joined at the bloody hip. It seemed a bit, oh God, I don’t know what the word is … dense, no, intense, that’s it,’ she says.

  Intense is not a word I thought Sarah would use but I run it through my head, against my checklist of memories. I think it just about sums us up.

  ‘What you’re really trying to say is you thought we were weird.’ My laugh permits them to do the same.

  ‘Well I wouldn’t go that far,’ Sarah says smiling and showing the dimples in her cheeks. ‘OK, maybe weirdly close.’

  ‘It’s all right, I get it. It must have seemed a bit odd from the outside but we just clicked,’ I say. ‘I felt like I’d met her before, like we were supposed to be friends.’ I pause and then bang the table. ‘God, would you listen to me, I’ve gone all Mills & Boon.’

  It was true though, even then we knew that what we had was a rare thing, something special to cling to. We were two missing pieces of a puzzle.

  I watch Sarah laugh, listening as she talks and talks and talks. Now that she is in her stride I realise that she must have been as wary of me as I was of her though I’m not sure why. I don’t bite.

  As she talks I watch the door for you and I lose count of how many times I check my phone or search the room for your face. I can’t understand why you wouldn’t call or pick up your phone. I wonder if it’s your idea of a practical joke, to make me suffer a night with them. Well come and see me now, Clara – I’m not so stuck up after all. I can get along with anyone just as easily as you can.

  We drain the endless jugs of orange/red summer-afternoon cocktails the waiters bring us. The alcohol smoothes me out, soothes me, and I reach a point where I surrender to the evening and soak up the gossip about people from school, who’s had four kids by different fathers, who’s going bald, who got rich. Even Debbie seems to have thawed. Only when the pink and orange and green lanterns on the tables merge into a kaleidoscope of colour do I get up to go.

  ‘No way,’ Sarah is looking at her watch, ‘you can’t.’ I am surprised by the strength of her grip. Maybe she sees my surprise because it loosens. ‘I mean it’s only ten o’clock, Clara promised us she would be here. Don’t you need to wait for her?’ I am aware that I am being moved towards the stairs and a basement I didn’t know existed.

  ‘Come on, we haven’t even had a boogie yet.’

  Before I know it we are in the bowels of the building where the ceilings are too low and the bass is so loud it vibrates through my throat.

  ‘Get this down you.’ It is Debbie, who has returned from the bar. She hands me a shot glass, standing over me as if she expects me to throw it into the yucca plant next to us. So I do as I’m told and down it. Tequila. I gag as it hits the back of my throat. It tastes of teenage Friday nights and sends flames burning through my body. I’d like to sit down, to find somewhere to close my eyes, but I’m dragged on to the dance floor where Beyoncé is playing and Sarah and Debbie are moving their hips and waving their arms. My legs seem to be moving so I go with it for I don’t know how long, until they give up on me, and I give up on the night. And give up on you.

  Sarah tries to persuade me to stay but it is half-hearted this time. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to Clara,’ she slurs.

  ‘Neither do I, but I’m sure I’ll find out. I’m supposed to be staying with her.’ I am putting my coat on, buttoning up for the cold outside.

  ‘Tell her to call me,’ she says, holding an imaginary phone to her ear. Her feet are struggling to hold up the weight of her body. ‘And let’s do this again.’ She gives me a kiss of lemons and tequila.

  Outside I smell the sea. There is cold and salt in the air. I call you again and when you don’t answer I walk along the seafront to buy some chips from the blue-and-white café, just like we used to. All the chairs are on the table, bar one where a teenage couple are sitting holding hands, nuzzling into each other, eyes droopy from a night’s drinking. The guy serving is not much older than them. I can’t imagine he has a girlfriend. His skin is pockmarked and little whiteheads have erupted over his face. It’s not his fault, I know, but it’s not what you want to see when you’re about to eat. I try to order without looking at him too much, though I’m careful to make sure his hands don’t touch my chips. After I pay I take them outside and sit on a bench where the winds are fierce and sobering. I stay there until my fingers begin to hurt with cold and get up, putting my gloves on and pulling my scarf tight around me. I’ve only taken a few steps when I notice a guy on the next bench down, a dog, a sleeping bag and a can of Carlsberg for company. His shoes are worn, his hair grey and matted. I can’t put an age on him; he could be sixty or much younger. He could be old enough to be my father, I think, and then remember I don’t know how old my father is, or whether he is still alive. A sadness takes hold of me. In my bag I feel for my wallet. There are two twenty-pound notes left. I pull one out and clear my throat so he knows I’m there. He looks up and I hand it to him then carry on walking. I’m a few paces away when he realises what I’ve given him and he shouts out loud against the wind, ‘God bless you.’ I raise my hand in the air to wave but I don’t look back.

  People are spewing on to the street from the late-night bars, black bin liners of rubbish are piled up for collection. Short-skirt girls balance on stilettos, clinging to each other as they’re buffeted by the wind. A car drives by, windows down, shaking from the bass of the music. Every taxi I see has its lights off, shadows of people being driven home inside. I don’t even try to flag one down. I just keep on walking. To your flat. Brunswick Place, number twenty-five. Top floor. I buzz outside and wait. I am supposed to be staying with you after all. I want to see if you are OK, but most of all I want to be warm and protected from the sea winds that are screaming through me right now. And I am tired of all this. So tired. I buzz again. No answer. I can’t give up. You must be there. I buzz on number twenty-seven.

  ‘Hello.’ The voice is male and impatient.

  ‘It’s Clara, from number twenty-five, can you buzz me in?’

  ‘Where are your own bloody keys?’

  ‘My friend’s inside with them, she must have fallen asleep.’

  ‘Lucky her,’ I hear the voice say at the same time as the door buzzes. I push it open and climb the stairs to your flat. You used to keep a spare key above the door frame so I reach up and sweep my fingers along it. Nothing. Then I knock again and again before I slump down and pull my knees into my chest and my eyes close on me.

  I do
n’t stay there all night. I wake up, my back cold from leaning against the wall, my bum aching from the hard floor. I call a cab and tell the driver to take me to The Old Ship Hotel because it’s the first one that springs to mind.

  When I arrive I see the receptionist has nightshift bags under her eyes, yellow-blond hair with dark roots and a red lipstick, too bright for her pale complexion. I wait for her to say hello and when she doesn’t I ask for a room.

  ‘What kind of room? Single, twin, double?’ The questions are fired like bullets. Her accent is strong, Eastern European. I am about to interject but she carries on. ‘Breakfast? Do want a paper? What kind of paper would you want?’

  ‘Just a room thanks, that’s all.’

  She rolls her eyes and makes a pouf sound through her teeth.

  ‘Sign here. Address. And I will need a card from you.’

  I do as I’m told and she throws a key card across the counter. Then I am in the lift and opening a door on room 312 and falling on a bed. I may have glanced at the clock before I closed my eyes. It may have said one twenty-eight a.m. But I couldn’t be sure. I’m asleep within seconds.

  So I didn’t see you that night. I wish I had. More than anything I wish I had. Because I know now that you must have seen me.

  Chapter Three

  A NOISE DRILLED through my thoughts. A hand on my shoulder shook me gently. I heard a jumble of words. My brain struggled to assemble them in order.

  ‘You need to get ready, Rachel, they’re coming to you live in a few minutes, off the back of the press conference.’

  I waited. Something turned over in my head, then an explosion. I don’t think I screamed, not out loud but inside, that was where it was all happening. I looked up at the figure looming over me. The familiar features, the bitter chocolate of his eyes, the flop of his hair falling down on to his forehead. The ‘surfer at work’ look. Jake Roberts, my producer. His presence belonged to another day. All the other days when we worked as a team, when I could function and do my job.

  He thrust a black rectangle into my hand. ‘Get hooked up, they’ll be with you in minutes,’ he said.

  I held it out in front of me. The receiver that connected me to the gallery, to the presenter, and allowed me to hear them. The earpiece attached to it would be fitted in my ear. It was the equipment I used every day to do my job. He wanted me to go live on air and talk about the disappearance of a young woman. To talk about you.

  I couldn’t even begin to explain to Jake what had happened. The seismic shift that had taken place. Not there, not in the minute I had before I went on air. How your face had assaulted me in a way all the others didn’t. All those women, children, mothers, fathers, blond, black, smiling, scowling, all those people who had ‘everything to live for’ but didn’t live any more. People who had been abducted, murdered, attacked. I’d talked about all of them on TV. Relayed the details of each story clinically, using words like horrific, shock, brutal. They all rolled off the tongue. But I never really thought about the huge craters they left in people’s lives. Even when their relatives made desperate appeals from haunted faces all I got was a flutter of emotion that passed like wind. They were stories whose details and circumstances were a thousand times removed from me. You couldn’t have been any closer, Clara. You were real.

  ‘I’m. Not. Ready,’ I said.

  I didn’t look at Jake. I stared at the earpiece. It wasn’t my own. This one had been used by someone else, the crumb of orange/brown wax told me as much. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. ‘I can’t put this in my ear, look at it,’ I shouted.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Rach, there’s no time.’ I must have been on my feet by then because I could feel the cameraman attaching the receiver to the belt on my trousers.

  ‘Tell them I’m not ready,’ I said. I thought I might cry, just fall down on to the floor and curl up and weep without caring who saw me. Instead I sunk my teeth into my lips again, I wanted to hurt, anything but this crippling numbness. The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth but still, I couldn’t feel a thing.

  ‘It’s the lead story.’ He watched me grip a chair, something solid to hold me up. His voice softened. ‘Come on, what do you want me to say? They want you on air before Global get their correspondent on. You know, first with the news and all that shit.’ He smiled and then bent down and rummaged in my bag.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing me a bulging black purse that contained everything I needed for my TV face, ‘put some slap on, don’t want you to scare the viewers, do we? I’m going to see if DCI Gunn will do a one-to-one with you.’

  I took my make-up bag from him and glanced in the mirror of my powder compact. Blue lips on white, white skin stared back at me, swollen where I had bitten them. My eyes were lined with red. Without thinking I powdered my face with bronzer and then applied a crème blush in one shaky stroke of each cheek. And lipstick too, but my hand wouldn’t follow the contours of my mouth, so I wiped it off again. Then I heard sound waves coming through my ear. The cameraman must have slipped the earpiece in. I thought of the wax crumb sitting in my ear and shuddered.

  ‘Nice of you to join us, Rachel,’ the director’s voice said. And I wondered how I would escape now. ‘We have all of thirty seconds before we come to you, after these headlines. Give us a few words for level.’

  I looked around, desperate to grab Jake’s attention, but I could see he was at the other side of the room talking to Hilary Benson and DCI Gunn. ‘Rachel, some level please.’ The director’s voice was louder, more pissed off now. ‘We’re coming to you next.’

  I was trapped in front of the camera, in this surreal and nightmarish situation. I couldn’t run now; somehow I had to get through the next five minutes.

  Five minutes, five minutes, just do your job and then it’ll all be over.

  I tried to move my tongue to form words but it was burnt and brittle and hit my scorched mouth with a click-clack sound. My lips stuck to my teeth. I grabbed a bottle of water from my bag and gulped. It ran off the sides of my mouth without soaking in. ‘I’ll be talking about this level,’ I said, click-clack, wiping the sides of my mouth. And then I sounded your name out. Slowly, each syllable a word of its own. ‘Clara O’Connor was last seen …’ I looked down the lens to focus. I had no idea what I was going to say, what questions they would ask. My breaths were shallow, I tried to regulate them. I thought of foreign correspondents reporting from war zones with bullets whistling around their heads carrying on when everything was crashing down. They could do it, so could I.

  ‘That’s great,’ said the director, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Do you have a guest with you?’

  I remembered Jake’s conversation. ‘He’s trying to get DCI Gunn,’ I said, wondering what I could ask him, more than he’d already told us.

  ‘OK, we’ll just go with the flow then. You’ll be talking to Charlie Gregson in the studio. With you in ten seconds.’

  I didn’t want to talk to any presenter in the studio but I definitely didn’t want to talk to Charlie Gregson, a bitter, out-of-favour has-been whose long questions were all about making himself look good and catching the correspondent out. But I didn’t have a choice. The next thing Charlie’s voice was in my ear.

  ‘Police in Sussex say they are seriously concerned for the safety of a twenty-eight-year-old artist who has been missing for three days. Detectives say it’s possible she may have been abducted. Well, let’s cross live now to our correspondent Rachel Walsh who is in Brighton with the very latest. Rachel what have police been saying this morning?’

  The moment that followed was filled with dead, leaden air. How long did it last? Short enough to be taken for a satellite delay? Maybe. I don’t know. I was too busy sifting and sieving one reality from another inside my head, working out what I was allowed to say. My version of events where you had flu and didn’t make it out was to be stored away. I was to talk about the alternative one where you disappeared after leaving Cantina Latina. The official version.

  On
ly then did the words come and I said your name as if I had never met you before. For those few minutes on air, Clara, you and I became strangers.

  I told whoever was watching why police were concerned, that it was out of character. I trotted out all the journalistic clichés. When my sentence came to an end, I waited, hoping there would be no follow-up question. But there was. You were being used to fill air time, Clara.

  ‘And Rachel, what about witnesses? It was a Friday night when she disappeared; police must obviously be hoping someone would have seen her leaving the bar?’

  I opened my mouth once more. Click-clack.

  At that moment I became aware of a presence by my side and turned to see DCI Gunn and Jake, standing next to him just out of shot. My lifeline. He could do the talking now; I just had to think of the questions.

  ‘Well DCI Gunn has just joined us, so let me put that to him.’ I stepped out of shot to allow the cameraman to focus on DCI Gunn. I repeated Charlie’s question. Today was no day for professional pride.

  DCI Gunn nodded as I spoke. ‘That’s absolutely right, Rachel,’ he said and I cringed at his first-name too-chummy-for-TV address. ‘There would have been lots of people leaving bars and clubs in that area on Friday night who may have come across a woman fitting Miss O’Connor’s description and we would like to hear from them. We also understand she may have been with a male that evening and we would say to that individual please come forward so we can eliminate you from our inquiries.’ I listened to him talk in that robotic police-speak and wondered who the hell had told him you were with a man. How did he know that?

  I asked him a few more questions from my stock list gathered over the years of crime reporting: were they looking at CCTV (yes); what state of mind did they think you were in? (no reason to believe you were depressed) and then I heard the director say, ‘One last question Rachel, then wrap up.’

  So I asked: ‘Why is it you think she may have been abducted?’