The Missing

by C. L. Taylor

  There’s sadness in his eyes now. Sadness and pity. “No. I’m really very sorry.”

  The tension that’s been holding me upright for the length of the conversation vanishes and I slump against the desk, eviscerated. It’s all I can do not to lay the side of my face on the cool wood and close my eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says again.

  I look up. “Did you check me in?”

  He nods. “Yes. One night, paid up front. Don’t you remember?”

  “No. I don’t remember walking in, or even how I got to Weston. One minute I was talking to a friend in Bristol and the next . . .” I can’t explain what happened because I don’t understand it myself. I came to but not in the way you do when you wake up after a nap or a long sleep. And it wasn’t like the hazy slip into consciousness after a general anesthetic either. I was awake but my mind was muddled, tangled in a jumble of sounds, images and thoughts that gradually faded away. And then everything was sharp, in focus, as I became aware of my surroundings. And it was terrifying. Utterly terrifying.

  “Boozy lunch, was it?” the man asks, the sympathy in his eyes dulling.

  “No,” I say. “We were drinking tea.”

  “Sounds like you should get yourself to a doctor.”

  “I will. Just as soon as I get home.” I crouch down and pull on my boots and socks. A drop of sweat rolls down my lower back as I haul the strap of my handbag over my shoulder.

  “Thank you,” I say as I head for the door.

  “No problem.”

  I wrench the door open and then, as the sea air hits me, I turn back. The receptionist looks up, Billy’s flier still in his hands.

  “Can I just ask one more thing? Was I alone when I checked in?”

  “You were, yes.”

  “And did I seem frightened? Scared? Confused?”

  “No. You seemed . . .” He searches for the right word. “Normal.”

  Chapter 10

  The wind whips my hair across my face as I pull my handbag onto my knee and unzip it. There are five messages on my phone from Jake, each one more frantic than the last.

  “Mum. Stay where you are. We’re coming to get you.”

  “We’re half an hour away. I just tried to ring you. Could you pick up, please?”

  “Mum, where are you?”

  “Mum? We’re in Weston. WHERE ARE YOU?”

  “MUM, PICK UP OR WE’RE CALLING THE POLICE!”

  I press the button to call him. Jake answers on the first ring.

  “Mum?” I can hear the relief in his voice. “Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m on the seafront. On a bench just to the right of the pier.”

  “Okay. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right there.” He stops talking and I wait for him to hang up, but then he speaks again. “Promise me you won’t go anywhere.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Jake. I promise.”

  “Good. She’s on a bench, on the right of the pier . . .” I listen as he relays my whereabouts to Mark and then the line goes dead.

  It’s the middle of summer but the wind cuts through the thin material of my top and I wrap my arms around my body, tucking my hands under my armpits. We used to sit on this bench with the boys when they were little. They’d eat ice cream and Mark and I would drink scalding-hot tea from thin paper cups. Both boys loved our visits to Weston-super-Mare. They adored the bright flashing lights and the bleep-bleep-bleep, ching-ching-ching of the amusement arcade; Mark standing beside them, pressing two-pence pieces into their reaching palms. I’d slip outside, ears ringing, and stand on the pier, breathing in deep lungfuls of sea air, relishing the sense of freedom and space that opened within me as I looked out at the horizon.

  I was eighteen when I met Mark, nineteen when we got married, twenty-one when I had Jake, twenty-five when I had Billy. I slipped effortlessly from the family I grew up in to the one I created with Mark. I never regretted that decision, not once, but there were moments when I envied my single friends. Especially when Mark was away on a training course and whatever activity I’d dreamed up to try and entertain the boys had descended into chaos, fights and tears, and I couldn’t even escape to the toilet without small fists pounding on the door, voices begging to be let in. What would it feel like to read a book without interruption, to nurse a hangover on the sofa with a film and a mountain of chocolate, or book a holiday and just go? What would it be like to have a career where people respected you instead of taking you for granted and to have a bedroom, all of your own, where you could retreat when you’d had enough of the world? Those thoughts were always fleeting and I would dismiss them guiltily, tucking them away deep in my mind where they wouldn’t bother me. I knew how lucky I was to have a husband who loved me and two healthy children.

  I press my lips together and run my sandpaper tongue against the roof of my mouth. I’m thirsty. God knows when I last had something to drink. There’s a kiosk on the edge of the pier that sells soft drinks and tanniny tea but I can’t risk moving from my bench in case Jake and Mark miss me. I unclip my handbag and rummage around inside. Gum will help with my dry mouth. I sift through papers, tissues, receipts and oddments of makeup. Long gone are the days when I’d find a small car in the base of my handbag or a half-empty packet of wet wipes scrunched up in a pocket, but my bag is still a mess. I clear it out every couple of weeks but, no matter how hard I try to be tidy, random crap still accumulates inside.

  I shove a flier for a music event I’ll never attend to one side and something small and yellow catches my eye. It’s a bundle of paper tokens from the arcade, five of them in a row, folded over each other. The machines spit them out when you successfully throw a basketball into a hoop, bash a mole or shoot a target. Billy was obsessed with these tokens. You need to accumulate dozens just to buy a small lollipop but he had his eye on a shiny red remote-control car and he vowed, aged eight, not to trade in a single token until he had enough to buy that car. Mark tried to explain to him that it would take years to collect enough, and cost us more than the price of the car just to play the games, but Billy was resolute. The car would be his. He never did collect enough and a year later, worn down by his dad’s constant assertion that it was “all a big con,” he gave up. I bought him a similar car that Christmas but he barely looked at it, declaring that remote-controlled toys were “for kids.” I hated that he’d become so disillusioned so young.

  For a long time after Billy gave up on his quest I’d find tokens secreted under his bed, in his pockets, in the depths of his bag and squirrelled away in his sock drawer. I kept them in one of the cupboards in the kitchen, just in case Billy had a change of heart but one day, when I was looking for something else, I realized they’d gone. When I asked Mark if he’d seen them he barely looked up from his newspaper.

  “I was looking for something and there was so much crap in that drawer I couldn’t find it. I threw them away.”

  That was four or five years ago. We haven’t been to Weston as a family since. Jake and Kira have been a couple of times since they started dating but that doesn’t explain why there are tokens in my bag now. I take a closer look, examining them for a date or time stamp but they’re generic arcade tokens with the words Grand Pier printed in the center. They’re exactly the same as the ones Billy collected all those years ago. I found some more recently, a few months before he disappeared, stuffed into the pocket of his jeans when I was doing the washing. There was a receipt too, for a room in a hotel. A few days earlier the school had rung me to say he hadn’t turned up for registration and, when I called him on his mobile, he wouldn’t say where he was, just that he was fine and he was hanging out with some mates. It was a lie. He’d obviously skipped school to come to Weston with a girl. He wouldn’t say who and we grounded him for two weeks.

  So where did I get these from? Could I have won them? In the six hours between leaving Liz’s house and finding myself in a bedroom in Day’s Rest B&B did I visit the arcade and play a game? Why?

  I delve
back into my handbag, pulling out lumps of paper, tissue packets, empty paracetamol blister packs and several red lipsticks. I remove my phone, my house keys and my makeup compact. In the bottom of the bag is a shell. It is tiny, no bigger than the pad of my thumb, pale pink with darker pigment along its scalloped edges. I went down to the beach then? Another memory comes flooding back, of me walking hand in hand with Jake and Billy along the beach when they were very little—two and six years old. The tide was out and we had our shoes off, our toes squelching into the sludgy sand. Every couple of seconds one of the boys would dip down, dig around in the sand and then jubilantly offer me a shell, stone or bottle top. Anything they spotted would immediately become the most precious of spoils, thrust upon me until my pockets were full.

  Now I turn the bag upside down, attracting the attention of strutting seagulls as I litter the ground with crumbs. There is nothing else inside, no clue as to where I have spent the last six hours or what I have done. Unless . . . I lift my purse from my lap and peer inside: £25 in notes, a little over £3.50 in change, various bank, store and credit cards, and a tiny laminated photo of the boys one Christmas. Nothing unfamiliar, nothing unexpected, apart from a train ticket tucked between my Tesco card and my credit card. It’s dated today, with 13:11 as the time of purchase. Bristol Temple Meads to Weston-super-Mare, an open return.

  “Mum?” Jake appears beside me, his hair flattened to his forehead, a sheen of sweat along the bridge of his nose. He’s clutching my granddad’s walking stick in his right hand. Mark is beside him. It’s only been a few hours since I last saw him but I’m shocked by how drawn his face is, how dark the circles under his eyes.

  “Claire? Oh, thank God.” He sinks onto the bench beside me, then glances down at my lap, where the contents of my handbag are piled beneath my hands. “What’s all this?”

  “I was trying to understand how I got here.” I shovel everything back into the bag, including the arcade tokens and the shell, then zip it shut. Worry is etched into every line on Mark’s face.

  “We thought someone had taken you,” Jake says, leaning heavily on the stick. I gesture for him to sit down but he shakes his head. “We spoke to Liz and she said you suddenly got up and ran out of her house like you were on fire. Then when we rang and you didn’t know where you were . . .” He breathes heavily. “I thought whoever took Billy had taken you too.”

  Mark’s lips part and I know he wants to contradict Jake. He wants to say that we have no proof that Billy was taken by anyone. We have no idea what happened that night.

  “I did run out,” I say before my husband can speak. “I remember that much but . . . after that . . .” I shake my head. “The next thing I knew I was sitting on a bed in the B&B and then the phone rang.”

  “How did you get here?” Mark asks. “The car was still in the drive.”

  “By train.”

  “So you remember that much?”

  I shake my head again. “No. I found the ticket in my bag. Mark, I don’t remember getting the train, I don’t remember checking into the hotel. I don’t remember anything other than leaving Liz’s.”

  “Did you hit your head or something?” He gently moves my hair away from my face with his hand and my heart flutters in my chest. I can’t remember the last time he touched me so tenderly. “I can’t see any swellings or contusions.”

  I used to joke with the kids about Mark’s “medical speak” after he got a job as a medical sales rep. It was almost as though he’d become a doctor himself with all his talk of angina, stents and angioplasty. Apparently it’s very unusual for someone without a medical background or degree to get a job selling pharmaceuticals to GPs and hospitals but Mark’s never been one to let someone telling him he can’t do something get in his way.

  “We didn’t realize you were missing until tea time,” Jake says and I have to smile. I don’t imagine they would have. They’d have returned home after work and congregated in the kitchen, sniffing the air and peering into the oven and fridge. “Dad said you were probably around at Liz’s, pissed off with us for screwing up Billy’s appeal.”

  “Pissed off with who—” Mark starts but Jake interrupts.

  “And then Liz came around and told us that you’d rushed out of her house and you weren’t answering your phone. She was really upset. She thought she’d said something to upset you.”

  Mark shifts away from me now his “examination” of my head is complete, but his eyes don’t leave my face. “What did she say?” he asks.

  I shake my head. If I tell him he’ll only agree. Mark’s told me over and over again that we should assume the worst about Billy. “Six months is a long time, Claire.” It’s become his mantra, his invisible shield against hope whenever I tentatively suggest that maybe, just maybe, Billy could still be alive.

  “It doesn’t matter what she said.”

  “It does if it made you run off to Weston without telling anyone.”

  I slip my handbag across my body, then stand up and rub my upper arms. “Can we just go home? Please, I just want to go home.”

  Mark stands up too. “I think we should get you to a doctor first. Don’t you?”

  Chapter 11

  It’s warm in Mum’s living room. Warm and ever so slightly musty. The top of the telly is gray with dust, the magazine rack is groaning under the weight of books and magazines piled on top of it, and there are dead flowers on the windowsill; green sludge in the base of the vase instead of water. Even the spider plant on the bureau, a plant so hardy that it could survive a nuclear attack, is wilted and yellow. Its babies, trailing on the carpet on long tendrils, look as though they’ve parachuted out in an attempt to escape. Mum would declare World War III if I offered to tidy up so I do what I can whenever she leaves the room; wipe a tissue over the surfaces when she goes to the bathroom or tip my glass of water in the spider plant when the postman comes.

  I haven’t had a chance today. She hasn’t left my side since I arrived a little after 9 a.m. I haven’t told her about my blackout yet; she thinks I’m here to talk about Billy’s publicity campaign. Mark refused to go to work until I promised him I’d spend the day with her. He’s terrified I’ll go missing again.

  He’s not the only one.

  The doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong with me. She ran a series of blood tests yesterday and said I’d have to wait a week for the results. It’s terrifying, not knowing what caused me to black out. What if it’s something serious like a brain tumor? What if it happens again? When I asked Dr. Evans if it might she said she didn’t know.

  I didn’t want to leave her office. I didn’t want to step outside the doors of the surgery and risk it happening again. Mark had to physically lift me off the chair and guide me back outside to the car.

  “See that?” Mum slides the laptop from her knees to mine and points at the screen with a bitten-down fingernail. “That spike in the graph?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  “They’re the stats for the website. We had a huge peak in page views the day the appeal went out. Over seven thousand people looked at it. Seven thousand, Claire.”

  “And that’s a good thing, is it?” Dad says, appearing in the doorway to the living room.

  “Derek.” Mum shoots him a warning look. “If you can’t say something good—”

  “It’s okay, Mum,” I say. “I know what Dad’s thinking.”

  “Your dad’s not thinking anything.” Her eyes don’t leave his face. “Are you, Derek?”

  His gaze shifts toward me and I feel the weight of sadness in his eyes. There’s indecision too, written all over his face. He wants to tell me something but Mum’s warning him not to.

  “What is it, Dad?”

  “Derek!”

  “It’s okay. You can tell me.”

  Mum pulls at my hand. “It’s nothing you need worry about, Claire. Just a bunch of drunks in the pub speculating. We know no one in the family had anything to do with Billy’s disapp
earance.”

  I ignore her. I can’t tear my eyes away from my dad who looks as though he might burst from the stress of keeping his lip buttoned. “Dad?”

  He shifts his weight so he’s leaning against the door frame and bows his head, ever so slightly, finally breaking eye contact with me. “They think Jake had something to do with it. I overheard a conversation when I was coming out of the bathroom in the King and Lion the other night. No smoke without fire and all that.”

  “Absolute rot!” Mum snaps the laptop lid shut. “Everyone will have forgotten all about it by next week and then, when the dust has settled, we’ll ask the Bristol News to run a story about Billy and Jake as kids. If the Standard are going to shaft us we’ll get them onside instead. We’ll dig out some photos of the boys in their primary-school uniforms. The readers will see them when they were young and sweet and they’ll forget about Jake’s little outburst. It’s all about the cute factor. You’ll see.”

  “Cute factor?”

  “It’s a PR trick to gain public sympathy. I read about it in a book I got out of the library, the one by the PR guru who was arrested for sex offenses. Dirty bastard but he knew his stuff.”

  I can’t help but marvel at the woman sitting in front of me. Six months ago she didn’t really know what PR meant never mind the tricks “gurus” use to gain public sympathy for a client. While I could barely speak for grief she went part-time at the garden center and asked a friend’s son to create the findbillywilkinson.com website so she could post a few photos of him and include the police contact details. Now there’s a Facebook page and a crowdfunding site. She’s read every book that’s been written by the parents of other missing children and she spends hours on the Internet looking for the contact details of journalists who might be interested in covering Billy’s story.

  “So can you dig some out?” Mum asks. “Some photos?”

  I nod my head. “Of course.”

  “Are you all right, love?” Dad says. “You look a bit peaky.”