‘Like you might be hiding something.’
‘For God’s sake! I’m not.’ Hiding something. I thought about my dad. Friday nights at the dog-track in Walthamstow—he’d give me a quid to put on my favourite, and I’d spend my winnings on penny chews and Spangles—though, thinking back, I couldn’t possibly have won as often as he made out. Watching the horses together on a Saturday when my mum took Leigh to tap class, cheering on his dead cert, squeezing his hand so hard in the hope that he’d laugh and call me his Gripper Girl. Riding his mate Jack’s old pony Mildred bareback in the fields behind our estate with Robbie, while my dad and Jack smoked over by the gate and talked ‘business’, before I fell off Mildred when they weren’t watching one day and lost my nerve. I thought about the times much later; about the eternal wait for the rare and precious letters; about the hot and angry tears I cried into my pillow when the others were asleep. I remembered begging my mum to take me to see him, pleading and pleading until she finally snapped. I remembered with a shudder the visits where we weren’t even allowed to hug, where my dad tried to remain chipper as he clasped my eager little hand—he’d always combed his hair for me specially, but he’d got so very thin, and he coughed such an awful lot that I was always really worried. With good reason, it turned out.
‘Jessica?’
I struggled back to now. ‘Nothing to do with Louis anyway. Why would I hide anything?’
‘Talking about your private life—it can feel intrusive, I do understand that.’
‘Yeah. I’m not used to it, that’s all. We weren’t very good at—you know—feelings in my family. It’s—it feels weird.’ I felt weird. Inertia was creeping over me. ‘Like being on some crap chat-show.’
‘Yeah, well, Richard and Judy this ain’t, kiddo. I’m just trying to get some idea of exactly what we’re dealing with. You’re sure there’s nothing else you should have told me, anything at all that might throw any light on this?’
‘No, nothing, I keep telling you.’ I was having trouble concentrating, could feel my eyelids fluttering. I tried to focus on the road.
‘It could be someone close to you; it could be you were a particular target. It’s very likely to be maternal bereavement. And by the way, we’re checking Maxine out now. I know you were worried about those photos, but there still seems no apparent reason to—’
His voice became a drone as we slid to another stop. My brain had turned to mud. The most terrible ennui spread through my bones, torpor like I’d never known before. I felt carsick, heartsick, truly Louis-sick. I stuck my head out the window and breathed as long and hard as I could. How many pills had I swallowed before we left? And suddenly there it was, flapping on the dirty pavement, among the fast-food wrappers and the fag butts, the newspaper billboard that screamed my business to the world.
‘BABY SNATCHED—DEAD OR ALIVE?’
‘Please,’ I said indistinctly, ‘I don’t feel very well.’
He pulled up so fast he practically smacked my lolling head on the windscreen, pushed me out and dragged me onto the pavement. Then he held my tumbling hair back as I gagged into the gutter. When I thought I must have finished, he handed me a cotton handkerchief to wipe my gasping mouth.
‘It’s ironed.’ I clutched it like my life depended on it. ‘You ironed it.’
‘Someone did, kiddo. Better now?’
‘I feel a bit odd. Sort of—woozy,’ I whispered, and I staggered there against him on the pavement.
‘I’m not bloody surprised. Have you eaten anything apart from a few biscuits since Louis disappeared?’
I couldn’t remember really. I shook my head. Food when my baby screamed for me and I couldn’t help him?
‘It’s not that anyway,’ I said hollowly. ‘I think—’
‘What? You think what?’ He leant in to hear me, but the smell of his aftershave made me retch again. Down the gutter grate I could see a shiny penny among all the muck.
‘Too many pills,’ I managed in the end. My mouth was furry, the words stumbled across my heavy tongue, thick like a slab of dead meat. Thick with misery. I rested my full weight on him. Why bother standing any more?
‘For Christ’s sake!’ He practically picked me up and threw me in the car. ‘Like how many pills?’
‘Dunno. Lost count. Not used to them.’ I was falling away, falling into a pit with sides so slippery that I couldn’t grasp them. I would go and join Louis now; he needed me. My head snapped back as we screeched off in a blare of horns.
‘Just stay awake, Jessica. Stay awake.’ He yanked my face round to him. ‘Do you hear me? We’re nearly at the hospital. Don’t go to sleep, okay?’
My chin banged my chest. ‘Don’t have to shout,’ I slurred.
He put the radio on loud and I forced my eyes back open. Newspaper print swam before them, wrote itself across the road. Dead or alive? Dead or alive? Dead or alive, deadoralive, dead and gone, goinggoinggone, gone, gone, gonegonegonegonegone.
CHAPTER TEN
I didn’t mean to do it. I wasn’t trying to die. I was just trying to stop the pain.
When I had Louis and the postnatal fog finally dispersed a bit, when the terror of intimacy began to fade, the terror that something terrible would happen to him, I let myself love him properly. I stopped panicking that he was mine and that I’d break him; allowed myself to relax a bit—and slowly I began to feel like I was six again. The feeling you get on Christmas Day as a kid, when you wake and you lie there for a moment and then you remember something great has happened, there are presents to be unwrapped. So I’d get up and wander into Louis’s room and see his face light up, hear his chuckles and his squeaks as he waved a hand about, a fat little hand that was mine to hold. And I loved him more than anything right then, he was all my Christmas Days rolled into one.
I woke up in a hospital bed, and I didn’t know where I was. But I did know it definitely wasn’t Christmas Day. I looked round and my friend Shirl was by my bed, she took my hand and squeezed it, and I was so pleased to see her that one fat tear rolled from my eye. She pulled some tissues from the box beside her, pushing them into my hand, and for a minute I held that hand like I would never let it go.
‘Any news?’ I croaked eventually, my throat feeling like it had swelled up tight as a straw. She bent her head to hear me.
‘News?’ I implored again, and she shook her head sadly.
‘Still no Louis, I’m afraid, not yet, sweetie, anyway,’ she said, like it was painful to actually speak it out loud. Then she brightened slightly. ‘But Mickey’s awake, I think.’
‘What day is it?’ I asked, and I clutched her hand even tighter.
‘Wednesday morning,’ she said, and I started to do the maths. Almost two whole days since I’d seen Louis. Forty-eight hours: a lifetime.
‘Why didn’t you call me, babe? I saw you on the news last night and I nearly had a bloody heart attack.’
I stared at the ceiling. Then I looked at her. ‘Because you were the one person I knew who’d have no idea where Mickey was.’
She smiled a rueful kind of smile. ‘That’s true enough.’ A beat. Then before I could ask: ‘They haven’t found Louis, but apparently the phones have been ringing off the hook. That tasty copper’s going to come and see you soon. Hundreds of calls they’ve had, he reckons. Char man, someone’s gotta know where the lovely Louis is.’
‘Don’t suppose you’ve heard from my mum?’ I asked quietly, and I tried to sit up in the bed. ‘Ow! God, my belly hurts.’
‘Yeah, well, it will, it’s been pumped.’
‘Pumped?’
‘Yeah, pumped. As in overdose.’
I looked away. From my bed I could see the corner of the London Eye, like an enormous Ferris wheel. ‘Nice view. You’d pay a lot for this in a hotel.’
‘Jessica.’
‘What?’
‘You know what.’
‘I didn’t take an overdose, Shirl. I didn’t. I just took—you know. A few too many pills.’
�
��Come on, babe. I don’t think I’ve seen you take a pill in my whole life.’
‘Yes, well. You know. Needs must.’
A nurse bustled in with a vase of flowers. ‘Aha!’ she said, all false jollity and skinny little plaits. ‘Awake at last, Miss Sleepy-head?’
Yes, I thought, awake at last. Unfortunately. ‘Nice flowers,’ I murmured politely. Then I looked at Shirl.
‘What?’
‘You don’t really think he’s tasty, do you?’
‘Who?’
‘Silver.’
‘In that sort of—what would you say? Debonair sort of a way. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed it, my girl.’
‘I’ve got more important things on my mind, actually, Shirl.’
‘Yes,’ she sighed sorrowfully, ‘I suppose you have.’
*
The night that Louis was conceived Mickey and I fucked with a ferocity that threatened to overwhelm me; a savagery I’d never experienced with anyone before. We’d been eyeing each other for weeks, unsure since that first and last time, after the Emin exhibition, pacing the office floor between us like the cagey tigers in that song. I wanted him and yet he scared me; I wanted him but I wasn’t giving in to it. He filled me with a strange dread I couldn’t face; he reminded me of sorrows that I’d fought to escape. He skated on a surface I couldn’t pierce; something darting beneath—something too dark to fathom. He chose to hide his vulnerabilities, and he did it very well—most of the time.
That second night Mickey took me to the ballet in Covent Garden. We saw something called Coppelia, which was about dolls and a toyshop and was what Mickey called ‘frothy’, and I thought it’d be silly and I’d be bored stiff, but actually I loved it. Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were old favourites of mine—how many wet afternoons had Leigh and I spent dancing around the cluttered living room to ‘Singing in the Rain’, sending my mum’s glass animals flying with our umbrellas. Old musicals were one thing, though—I thought Fonteyn and her crowd were way beyond my ken. But once I’d overcome the nerves I dared not show, I really enjoyed the sheer splendour of the whole event—the over-dressed posh people, the champagne in the interval, the novelty of the plush red theatre. Mickey by my side, so handsome, so charming and attentive now.
Afterwards he took me to a restaurant so expensive they didn’t bother with prices on the menu, where women whispered through the door in silken clothes more costly than my rent, where the men were swollen and sanguine in their wealth, clicking for the waiters. Mickey hand-fed me oysters, which I hated, and caviar, which I loved, the salty eggs popping across my tongue—food I’d really only dreamed of. Asparagus and rare steak and cherries dipped in chocolate followed, but my heart was in my mouth throughout the meal and I soon found I’d lost my appetite. Out in the spring breeze Mickey bought me wild roses from a sweet-smelling stall on Piccadilly—so many I could hardly hold them all. Then he whistled for a taxi and sucked the blood, red as the roses that I clutched, from where I’d pricked my finger on the thorns. He took me home to Blackheath for the first time; let me into his own world a little, let his mask slip just a bit.
Mickey went to change his shirt and pour us both a drink, and I’d made my way outside into the cool night air, to admire the lush garden. By the back door I passed a faded photo of a small boy in dungarees. He was laughing at the camera, a front tooth missing, a cheeky grin below his pudding-basin hair, pigeon feathers tucked behind each small ear, Red Indian style.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked, pointing behind me as Mickey came out into the night. He didn’t turn to look.
‘My big brother, Ruari.’ I felt his fingers tighten over mine as he passed me a glass.
Later, Mickey put on some music and danced me slowly round the kitchen. I leant against his chest; I drank in his heady smell.
‘Your brother. Where is he now?’ I asked quietly, but I think I knew already. He let me go.
‘He…’ he took a sip of his whisky, moving away, ‘he died. Quite soon after that was taken. He was only eight.’ A muscle jumped in his cheek.
‘Oh God. I’m so sorry, Mickey.’
‘So am I. He drowned. Fishing. Determined to get the biggest one, stupid bugger. Hopped school that morning.’ He downed the rest of the drink in one, and wandered back out onto the porch steps. I waited, watching him. I think, for a while, he forgot I was there.
‘We were best mates, you know. But I wasn’t with him that day.’ He was talking to himself now, leaning over the railing, staring into the darkness. ‘Some things—some things you never recover from, do you know what I mean? My ma never did. It killed her in the end.’
I walked out to him, slid my arms around him, rested my head on his warm back. I could sense his heart beating through the soft cashmere of his sweater. I wanted more of this man. However much I kept fighting it, as he opened up a bit, I began to fall.
In the morning I woke sated, utterly spent, and yet still he came for more. I was limp and yielding in his hands, sticky with lust, half-asleep, basking in abandonment as his fingers played me like some instrument constructed purely for his pleasure. He looked down at me with an intensity I’d never known and I yearned for more—finally, utterly lost. So didn’t it make sense that the best sex of my life should bring me my son? Unbidden, initially unwanted—but irrefutably there, hurled suddenly into existence.
The hospital insisted I see a psychiatrist. According to them, I’d attempted suicide, and no matter how hard I denied it, they weren’t going to budge. I tried everything I could to put it off until eventually the only thing left was pleading to see Mickey before I spoke to any other doctors, and reluctantly they agreed.
The ICU was as quiet as ever as Sister Kwame took me in to see my husband. Despite the sun that shone so bright outside the shuttered windows, it was completely dim in here, church-like in its reverence for the sick.
‘He’s sleeping now,’ she murmured, looking down at him with fondness. ‘Why don’t you wake him, my dear? Just do it gently, yes?’ Then she vanished, starched skirt whispering, left me standing alone there by his bed.
Mickey’s bruises were starting to change colour now, purples starting to yellow just a little round the sides like some over-ripe exotic fruit. Tentatively I put my hand out and softly stroked the skin around his sore eye. He stirred a little and I resisted a strange urge to press down hard.
‘Mickey,’ I said quietly, after a while. He muttered incoherently and rolled his head from side to side. He was breathing without the machines now and his mouth twisted in discomfort. Pain flashed across his face and I wondered where he was, what world he walked. And then suddenly his eyes snapped open. I stepped back in shock.
I steeled myself. I tried to be the strong person I once was.
‘It’s me, Mickey. It’s Jessica,’ I said, and I leant down to him a little, as if he was a child. ‘How’re you feeling?’
For a moment he just looked at me blankly and I saw nothing behind his eyes. Panic filled my chest, pressed against my lungs. Oh God, I’ve lost my husband too, I thought. We stared at one another and then slowly, very slowly, he brought one scraped hand up to touch my face.
‘Jessica,’ he whispered, and I could have sworn I saw a tear glinting in his sore eye. ‘My Jess.’ He took me unawares. ‘I’m so pleased to see you, darling.’
I swallowed, nervous, stroking his hand while I racked my brain for something sensible to say. His face contorted again, like he was struggling to remember something gone. Then he said, ‘How’s Louis? I can’t wait to see him. Is he here?’
The bile rose again, burning my damaged throat. What the hell did he mean? I clenched my fists and bit my tongue; I turned from the bed. I fought the impulse to run away. Instead I found a chair, pulled it slowly up to sit beside him. I took a deep breath and then I said it. ‘Louis is missing, Mickey.’ I couldn’t spare him my pain. I couldn’t do it on my own any more.
‘Missing?’ He tried to sit up. ‘What do you mean, “missing”?’
&
nbsp; I felt my chest contract again as I stared at him, searching for the words. I knew he needed comfort, but I didn’t know where to find it.
‘I mean missing. Gone. Someone—someone’s taken him. Don’t you remember anything?’
He shook his head slowly, and the tear that had been pooling in the corner of his dark, swollen eye finally escaped. I watched with horrified fascination as it tracked down his cheek and hit the scar below, seeped through the neat stitches that puckered there. Then it was lost.
‘Louis has been missing for almost—for two days now. He was with you when he disappeared.’
He looked back up at me blankly.
‘You had him.’ My voice was climbing. ‘I lost you both, don’t you remember that at least?’ I was sweating now.
There was an unearthly pause.
‘I think I remember a train,’ he said then, almost hopefully, brow knitted with anxiety; the effort it took tangible.
‘Yeah, well, we went to the Tate. To see the Hopper exhibition. I lost you both in the gallery. The next time I saw you, you were here, and Louis—’ I couldn’t bear to say the words again ‘—Louis was missing. I haven’t—no one’s seen him since. Apart from five hundred nutters, apparently.’
‘Five hundred nutters?’
‘Yeah, five hundred bloody nutters. The nutters phoning the police since the appeal.’ He still looked blank. ‘I can’t believe you can’t remember.’
‘The appeal?’
‘I’ve been depending on you, Mickey. On you remembering what happened.’
‘For pity’s sake, Jessica. I—’
One of Mickey’s machines began to beep loudly, fighting his words for supremacy. Sister Kwame padded to his side and fiddled with it for a while. Then she took Mickey’s pale hand in her own dark one, circled his wrist.
‘And you?’ he whispered, but his eyes couldn’t quite connect with mine. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Oh yes, I’m grand,’ I said numbly, ‘to coin your phrase.’
The nurse spoke softly. ‘His blood pressure’s rocketing. I think he needs some calm, my dear.’
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