Disturbing Ground

by Priscilla Masters

  As a child Megan had loved the thrill of the fairground at the same time as she had been frightened of its illusions. The Hall of Mirrors, the Cake Walk, Over the Falls. As she drew her surgery blinds together she could almost hear the faint strains of jingling, compelling music. She unlocked the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet and picked up her handbag, impatient now to be gone. But she made the mistake of glancing across at the Gericault and could have sworn it was not envy that she read in the mad woman’s face but mockery. To be taken in by such cheap illusion. Defiantly she closed the door behind her and wandered into the reception area to find that Andy and Phil had already left the surgery leaving a message that they would manage the two visits without her.

  She was free.

  And then the door opened.

  Catherine Howells, the psychiatric social worker breezed in. “Ructions,” she said, flopping into the nearest chair in the waiting room. “Absolute bloody ructions. They’re moving Esther Magellan into a flat. She can’t stay in the house now she’s on her own. It’s for dual occupancy only and nobody would share with Esther now Bianca’s gone. At least nobody in their right mind.”

  “So is Esther objecting to the move?”

  “Not to the move as such. She seems to have accepted that. It’s the junk she wants to take with her. Merthyr Crescent is stuffed absolutely full of rubbish. The backroom’s a health hazard. Full of boxes of old newspapers, bottles, washed out food tins, old clothes. You name it, she kept it. And now Esther won’t let us chuck anything away. Keeps saying they were Bianca’s. They were precious and she promised her she would keep it all. I ask you. It wants takin’ down the tip. But I can’t budge ‘er. Stubborn as an old mule she is.”

  Megan frowned. “Can’t you move Esther into her new flat and then dump the stuff?”

  “We could but I think she’d create. A couple of the boxes she’s huggin’ to her like it was worth something. And it’s all junk. The flat’s been newly decorated and I’m not having her messin’ up the new place with rubbish. Some of the stuff goes back years. The food tins are vintage, mouldy, the bottles are ancient and some of the newspapers are thirty years old. I found one boxful going back to 1971.”

  Maybe it was the mention of years gone by that awoke Megan’s interest. Or simply the detritus of Bianca’s life in the form of valueless old junk. Perhaps Megan sensed that the reason the social worker had arrived at the surgery was that she had hoped Megan would offer to help. Or maybe there was no reason that made Megan offer to act as mediator. It simply happened like that.

  “I wonder,” she said slowly, “if she’d let me dispose of some of the junk?”

  Catherine looked relieved. “We-e-ll - she does trust you. That’s for sure.” She sat up straight as though Megan had already provided a solution to her problems. “It’d be worth a try. For sure we’re getting nowhere fast. Would you?” She was already on her feet.

  So Megan followed her colleague’s bright blue VW Golf to the Llangeinor Road, winding through the estate of council houses before turning left into a crescent with a patch of sodden, muddied grass in its centre. She pulled up behind Catherine’s car outside the small, council bungalow which had until recently housed the two women. It was easy to locate the source of the social worker’s concern. Esther was standing in the middle of the front path, struggling with a man in a beige overall who was attempting to lift the armchair of a three piece suite into the back of the three ton lorry. “Don’t you dare,” Esther was screaming at him, tugging his arms. “These are my things. You can’t take them away.”

  The removal man was patient. “I’m not trying to take them away, Miss Magellan. We’re movin’ them. Like I told you. They are going to your new place.”

  Esther took a step back, hands on wide hips. “How do I know?” she demanded. “You might be stealin’ them. And me just lettin’ you.”

  The man gave a deep sigh. Catherine was already beside her, her arm around Esther’s shoulders. “It’s all right, Esther. They’re taking all your furniture to that lovely new flat I showed you last week. Remember? The one with the yellow door. And I said that all the garden belonged to the flats and you could walk through them. Remember?”

  Esther’s face looked confused for no more than a moment. Then it cleared and she beamed. “The house with the yellow door,” she repeated.

  “Flat,” corrected Catherine. “Up the stairs. Remember?”

  “I remember the garden,” Esther said, smiling. “There was a tree in it. A tree.” She registered Megan’s arrival. “Doctor?” she said uncertainly.

  “I’ve hear you’ve been a bit troubled by some stuff you promised to look after for Bianca.”

  Esther nodded vigorously “Bianca’s,” she said. “I promised. She didn’t want it thrown away.”

  “But she doesn’t need it now, does she?”

  “I said I would keep it for her.” Catherine was right. There was an air of donkey stubborness about her.

  “But you won’t have enough room in the flat.”

  “N-o-o.”

  “There aren’t many cupboards, Esther,” Catherine put in helpfully. “You won’t have anywhere to put all that junk.”

  Esther looked troubled. “But I promised,” she repeated.

  Megan touched her arm. “What about if I look after some of the things for Bianca?”

  Esther looked confused. “Which things?”

  “Let’s have a look, shall we?”

  Esther put her finger on her chin, the age old gesture of a child - puzzling. Then she beamed again. “All right, doctor,” she said. “That’ll be all right. Bianca always trusted you.” Behind her patient, Catherine’s eyebrows lifted but she said nothing.

  Megan’s heart sank when she opened the door to what must once have been a dining room, a room which she had never visited when both the inahitants of 42, Merthyr Crescent had been alive. Searching her subconscious she could now recall the sound of an interior door being pulled shut when she had knocked at the front door. As though a room inside the bungalow had held a secret. She scanned the contents and knew now. No secret. Only an imagined one. Behind the door had been a roomful of rubbish. Boxes were piled up in the corner, some of them collapsing under their own weight. One or two bore stains as though liquid had seeped out and soaked the cardboard. The air was sour and stale. There was a faint smell of cat pee. Megan swallowed. The room smelt like a rubbish tip. She would have to dump it all.

  Mentally she cancelled the trip to Porthcawl and felt a hollow sadness as the tinkling fairground music slowed and faded to nothing. There was a lot of junk. The boxes would need two trips. Her Calibra was hardly a load carrier. The tip was a few miles away and she would need a bath after touching this stuff. She picked up another waft of strong, animal scent. The car would probably need cleaning too. She must be mad. Public Health would have shifted it. It was hardly one of her duties. But Esther touched her arm timidly, gazed at her with trusting eyes. It was a more eloquent plea than any words that existed in the English dictionary.

  “Esther,” she said, trying to stifle her disgust as she lifted the top of the first box and pulled out a rinsed-out baked beans tin. “Some of this must be thrown away.”

  Esther moved nearer. “Not the papers,” she hissed. “I promised Bianca I’d never throw those papers away. She wanted me to keep them. They’re important. Very important.”

  “All right, all right.” Megan knew she had to agree to this. Policed by a protesting Esther she spent the next hour loading up boxes of junk into the back of her car. She had been right. There was too much for one trip. And it was going to take up the entire afternoon. The dump was only four miles away but the journey took double time due to a set of roadworks blocked by irate drivers who passed through on red only to be forced to lock bumper to bumper to assert their rights on green. Megan sat and fumed as the lights flicked through their sequence, unwillingly inhaling the stale smell of the car full of litter even though she’d opened both windows. She w
as tempted to put her hand on her horn simply to blast out her own frustration. But she would soon be recognised as the doctor. And it didn’t do to express anger. What made it worse was that above her the clouds had rolled away to reveal a Wedgwood blue sky. She checked her watch and cursed November. It might be just two o’clock but only a couple more precious hours remained of daylight. On top of that her car now stank like the municipal tip. Feeling angry with herself for having got involved, she finally reached the recycling centre, pulled up in front of a huge skip and unloaded the carload of boxes, slamming the doors shut before heading back to Esther’s house.

  Esther had vanished, presumably with Catherine to take up residence in her new home, but the van was still outside, the men almost ready to roll the doors down on the shabby contents. Megan went straight back into the dining room and loaded up the last of the boxes, four of them filled to the brim with old newspapers. She hardly glanced at them but placed them side by side on the back seat which she had protected with a green waterproof sheet usually used for picnics. And now she had a dilemma. She had promised Esther she would not throw the papers away. Hands still on the steering wheel, she turned around.

  They were just boxes of old newspapers. Nothing more. She began heading towards the tip. But the traffic was building up, the roads now clogged with cars full of schoolchildren. Megan sat impatiently in her car, fingers drumming the steering wheel, a Britney Spears tape blasting out to distract her. A swift glance at her car clock told her her journey would be fruitless anyway. It was three o’ clock and the tip closed at three thirty.

  Besides, her conscience still nagged her. “You promised Esther you would not throw these newspapers away.”

  She did a five point turn in the road provoking an angry blast of car horns before reluctantly heading for home, reasoning that in a month or two Esther would have forgotten their existence. She could dispose of them then.

  For now she could put them in her garden shed. There was plenty of room there.

  And so through a simple set of events, by a thread as fine as the blink from a set of traffic lights, lives are changed. Maybe all is coincidence. There is no divine plan except one - the law of entropy, of chance, of chaos.

  So she headed home, parked her car outside and carried the boxes into her hall one by one. One of the penalties of living in a mid terraced house was that access to her garden shed was through the house. She was ready for a drink so she stacked the boxes near the back door and opened the fridge, reaching in to the far corner of the bottom shelf for a can of Red Stripe.

  The flap of the box had dropped and the top newspaper almost slithered out. So it was that she read part of a sentence.

  “…going to buy chips…”

  She had heard that particular phrase recently.

  Smithson had used it.

  “I just want them to listen.”

  “Listen to what?”

  “The little girl was going to buy some chips.”

  Megan was intrigued. If Smithson had been referring to this case - why? What had been of such significance that he had struggled to bring it to their attention?

  She pulled the can out of the fridge, closed the door, and sat down on the floor.

  She slid the box towards her and reached out the top newspaper, flattening it with the palm of her hand until the headline was clear.

  Schoolgirl goes missing.

  In 1988 a ten-year-old girl named Marie Walker had been on her way to buy some chips and had never been seen again.

  It was a not uncommon story. She studied a school photograph of a girl with long, dark hair and a small, mean mouth and wondered what had happened to her.

  So had Geraint Smithson been referring to this case? And if so why?

  Megan pulled more newspapers from the box. Each one contained an article about the missing ten-year-old who had vanished on November 23rd, 1988 - almost fourteen years ago. Some were entire newspapers, others carefully snipped articles. Bianca must have collected every single piece written about the disappearance of a little girl and Megan read right through them. The articles were peppered with quotations from friends and family. “Going to buy some chips, she was.” “Nice little thing she were.” “She was my best friend at school.” “We’ll miss her somethin’ awful.” For weeks the editors of the Western Mail must have racked their brains to keep the name of Marie Walker on its front page, hoping that the little girl would be found. There was a variety of headlines.

  The Parents Who Wonder.

  The School That Mourns

  The Friends Who Miss their Playmate.

  What Happened to My Little Girl?

  Each headline was accompanied by pictures of sad-faced people who stared into the camera with only one question… Where was she? Megan pulled out more and more newspapers, scattering them all over the kitchen floor, wondering whether there was, finally, an answer.

  But even though the newspapers spanned months, nowhere was there mention of Marie Walker being found, dead or alive. As time passed the articles moved from the front page towards the back, eventually resting in the “Other news” sections. The interval between features lengthened and finally rested in the Er Cof, the In Memoriam.

  Megan spread the newspapers right across the kitchen floor and read through again, this time noting every single detail.

  The basic story was this:

  On the night of November 23rd 1988 at nine o’ clock, Marie Walker had been given five pounds to fetch the chips for the family who were sitting watching an old video of Jaws. Bored with a film she had probably already seen too many times, she had offered to go to the chippie and her stepfather and two stepbrothers had thought nothing of it. It was, according to the Western Mail, a trip she made a few times a week. Her mother had been working late as a barmaid at The Oddfellows Arms - otherwise she might have insisted one of Marie’s stepbrothers accompany her daughter. By ten o’ clock the three men had grown hungry and, assuming Marie had “bunked off” with the money and the chips, had cursed the girl’s delay It was only when Marie’s mother had returned home at a few minutes before twelve that the family’s threats of tanning Marie’s hide had translated into belated and worried action. They had made phone calls - to every single one of her friends. And drawn a negative. Marie had disappeared. At half past twelve they had called the police.

  Megan swigged at the Red Stripe and continued reading.

  According to the server in the fish and chip shop, Marie had bought four large portions of chips and put the salt and vinegar on herself. Witnesses testified she had left the shop with her fingers already dipping into one of the bags as she had started walking home. She had been spotted on her way still pulling at the chips and threading them into … Megan looked again at the picture and visualised the child’s thin little mouth greedily pulling at the greasy food. Again, witnesses had seen Marie walk along the main road and turn right into St Leonard’s Terrace. This would have been the direct path home, turning right again into Railway Terrace where she lived. Somewhere between the two roads she had vanished. And never been seen again.

  The police opinion was that Marie had been heading straight home.

  Megan hunched over the papers and absorbed the stories.

  But, however deep she delved, Marie Walker never had been seen again. Years later her name cropped up only in the Er Cof column. Every year on November 23rd.

  And Bianca had preserved even this lingering contact. Strange how she had become absorbed in this case.

  Megan sat back against the wall. Why had Bianca hoarded these articles of a missing child, charging poor old Esther Magellan with their custody? What exactly had she told Smithson? Had it been these stories she had shared with the old man, adding to his agitation?

  And why had Smithson, in turn, tried to pass on the tales to the nurses and herself with such desperation?

  Had Bianca’s stories disturbed him to such an extent? After all, she reasoned, Smithson would have been familiar with the story alread
y. He would have read the newspapers. Megan glanced across the kitchen floor. There were plenty of headlines. What had made this story stick in his mind? And why did she not remember the case? Megan did some quick arithmetic. She would have been eighteen when Marie Walker had disappeared, and in the November when she was eighteen she had been a fresher at Cardiff University. That was why she didn’t even recall the child’s name. She had been living the riot of a first-year medical student. Hardly a time when she would have pored over the local newspapers. But it was strange that while she had been unaware of a child vanishing from her own home town for some reason it had been significant enough for Smithson to quote it more than ten years later.

  And Bianca had not only hoarded the relevant newspapers but had charged Esther with the custody of them. And at the back of her mind sat the words from Wainwright.

  “It is not unusual for people who have delusions to retain a good deal of perception.”

  What, Megan wondered, had Bianca “perceived”?

  She reached another Red Stripe out of the fridge.

  There were three other boxes.

  She replaced all the articles into Marie Walker’s box and studied the others. Each one had a different name on the side, all written in the same writing, in black felt-tipped pen. Bleddyn Hughes was the name on the second box; Rhiann Lewis was written on the side of the third. “Rhiann Lewis”. The name was vaguely familiar but she couldn’t quite place it…

  She lifted the lid and read the date on the top newspaper. 1980. Twenty-two years ago. Perhaps her parents had mentioned the name in front of their ten-year-old daughter as a warning.