The Missing Years

by Lexie Elliott

  “You never cared before.” The words are stony. They have to be, to force their way through the tight hard line of her mouth. It’s the same resentment, that same issue every time: that I left, without a backward glance. I’ve been tiptoeing around it. I’ve been handling her with kid gloves, and suddenly I’m tired of it. Maybe she’ll never get over it. Maybe we’ll never be anything more than distant siblings. And if that’s the case, we might as well have this fight now.

  “All right then,” I challenge her. “Let’s talk about that. I was eighteen and I left for university. What would you have had me do? Stay at home until you were eighteen and ready to leave yourself?”

  “You could have come home at holidays! You could have called! You could have come to my concerts and plays, like you used to!”

  “Concert and plays? I was trying to start my own life. I wasn’t your parent, Carrie. That wasn’t my job.” I hear my own words, the harshness of them, but I’m no longer interested in sugarcoating.

  “You don’t get it. That’s what you were like to me. Mum was—well, Mum was Mum, but you were always there. And then you weren’t.” She turns her head away, but not before I see the teardrop suspended from one of her eyelashes.

  “You don’t get it either, Carrie.” My throat is tight now. Her tears have done that. “It seemed to me that you had everything; what did you need me for? You had Pete, and Mum was so much more involved with you than she ever was with me.” It never occurred to me that Carrie could have felt neglected by Karen too. Maybe our mothers weren’t as different as I thought. “I felt . . . I felt so jealous sometimes of the attention she gave you.” I feel mean even admitting it now, just as I felt small and mean at the time. What kind of person is jealous of the love given to a child?

  Carrie glances at me, simultaneously dashing a hand at one eye. “Really? She must have been pretty bloody absent with you then.”

  “Well, yes,” I say ruefully. “She really was.” And suddenly we are both laughing, though her eyes are overbright, and I suspect mine may be too. I take advantage of the moment to shift the focus. “About Fiona, I’m just . . . I’m worried for you, is all. I can’t promise to like her, but I promise I’ll be civil. Maybe even friendly.” For Carrie, I will absolutely try. For all that she is the reason I’m here, it has still taken me aback how much I don’t want her to leave. I must be growing accustomed to our rhythm.

  Her lips begin to curl. “Well. Best not overpromise.”

  “True. Civil it is.”

  She smiles properly, just a small one, but the tension has left her shoulders. She reaches forward for the remote, then pauses. “Oh, I meant to say, that cat was out there again. I saw it while I was on the phone. It’s getting kind of weird. Though no stone-throwing that I could see, at least.”

  “Did it come in the garden?” The cat comes by most evenings. I’ve never seen it set even a single paw on the lawn.

  “No, it stayed on the wall, looking into the garden. The same as before.”

  I know what it was looking at: the injured bird. Sometimes I see it, sometimes I don’t. The first time—well, the first time I saw it again, hopping desperately in exactly the same spot, still unable to take off—I couldn’t believe my eyes. And I know I’m right not to believe them. I know the bird’s not there, it’s never there, because Carrie has never seen it. The cat is there, though, since Carrie has seen it, too. And the cat sees the bird, so how can the bird not be there? But still, I know it’s not. And if the bird’s not there, were the flies ever there? Was the figure with triangular hair ever there? But if they were there . . . if they were there, what does that mean? Are they part of a larger whole? Are they connected to the newspaper and the stone-throwing? Is this all I have to face, or are these incidents just a portent of what is to come?

  Then Carrie presses play and I force my overtired brain to drop this feverish endless loop.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning, I open the front door to take Carrie to the station and find a raven on the doorstep.

  At first I think it’s the injured bird from the garden, the one that I might or might not have seen. But it’s much bigger, probably over a foot tall, and most definitely dead. I stop short and lean forward to take a closer look and then have to grab the doorframe to stop myself nose-diving into the carcass when Carrie cannons into me, her face in her phone.

  “What’s the—oh!” she exclaims. “Yuck!”

  “Yep.” I’m irrationally enormously relieved that she can see it too, even though it’s not the injured bird. “I think it died a while ago. Look, there are maggots.” Part of the belly of the bird has been torn open, and there are pale yellow bodies squirming in the opening. A shudder runs through me.

  “Well, that’s fucking disgusting.”

  “Quite.” I find my lips are twitching. Even my melodramatic tendencies can’t withstand the fresh air of Carrie’s blunt appraisal. I straighten up and look around. “I wonder how it got here.” Carrie looks confused. “Well, it wasn’t here yesterday, and since it’s been dead awhile, it didn’t just up and walk to our doorstep.”

  “Maybe that strange cat brought it? Or another animal? A fox, or something?”

  “Could be.” I think of my unease in the living room. Did I see something bringing it then? Could the cat carry something of that size? Surely it would have had to have dragged it? I can’t see any drag marks in the gravel. “Come on, let’s get you to the station on time. I’ll clear it up later; it’s not like it’s going anywhere.”

  I go straight from dropping Carrie at the station to the hotel café, and get there a little after nine thirty. There’s no reason to be so early, but also nothing but a maggot-ridden dead bird waiting for me at the Manse, so the hotel café wins. I enter through the dedicated leisure center entrance this time, which takes me past the pool, where I linger for a moment. There’s a lady in her fifties with dyed blond hair piled atop her head doing head-up breaststrokes, and a pale, leanly muscular man with heavily freckled shoulders doing laps in an economical front crawl, but neither of them could be Glen.

  The view from the café is just as breathtaking as before, despite it being an overcast day with early-morning fog lying in wisps at the bottom of the valley. I order a black Americano from the same waitress and read the newspaper, glancing up every time I hear footsteps. None of them belong to a man in his sixties. I can’t imagine that Glen McCue will be anything other than civil with me, but I still can’t seem to get through a whole article. By ten minutes to ten I’ve given up on reading and am trying my hand at the cryptic crossword instead, but I can’t concentrate on that, either. My bladder is also feeling the effects of the large coffee, but I don’t want to go to the bathroom in case I miss him.

  At five past ten, a man enters who falls into the right age category. He scans the room then nods sharply at me and heads unsmiling directly toward my table. I stand up to greet him, and have a few seconds to study him before he’s upon me. Not as tall as Jamie but built just like both of his children, wiry and compact. I hold out my hand. “Mr. McCue?”

  “Aye.” His grip is strong but brief. He looks like a man with a deep mistrust of anything frivolous. He pulls out a chair and sits opposite me, assessing me with sharp eyes that look as if life has bleached them of color. He has an extraordinarily weathered face, with skin like thick leather, and his dark gray hair is trimmed down to mere millimeters, military fashion. “Well. There’s barely an ounce of your mother in you, is there.” There’s literally nothing I can think of to say to that, but it doesn’t matter because he turns away to address the waitress who’s approaching in his thick local accent. “Aye, hen, gie me a latte and one of them billionaire shortbread slices.”

  “Thanks for meeting me.” There’s something about his very presence which makes me feel instantly lightweight, as if nothing I could ever say or think or do could ever be of a
ny import.

  “Nae trouble,” he says, unsmiling. “My grandson would have been most upset with me if I hadnae.”

  “Callum? He’s such a sweetie.” I’ve seen him a few times since his ball landed in my garden: once in the village with a lady I didn’t know, and twice when he crossed the three fields between our houses and came to the Manse by himself, Fiona having phoned ahead to make sure Carrie was looking out for him. I would have thought Carrie was more child friendly than myself, but for some reason it’s my hand Callum reaches for and my lap he scrambles into, and my heart feels defenseless each time.

  “Aye, well, he likes you. And your biscuits.” I laugh, and the edges of his mouth lift briefly. A hard man to warm to, then, but perhaps not without kindness. “How are you settling in at the Manse?”

  “Fine.” I start to shrug, then wonder if he will disapprove. It seems like he’s the sort of man who would disapprove of elbows on the table and shrugging and addressing men of his generation as anything other than sir. “It’s only temporary, anyway.”

  “Ah. So you’re going to sell it, are you?” I nod. “Fi was born there, you ken.”

  “What?” I look at him, bewildered. Surely he doesn’t mean in the Manse?

  The corners of his mouth curl upward again, but with less warmth. “Aye. In the house itself. 1982.”

  “But—wait, I would have been six. I was living there then.” How could she have been born there?

  “She came early and too quick. I was away, following up on a case. We werenae expecting a bairn to arrive then. But she did . . . and Mary—my wife—couldnae get to the hospital, so she went to the Manse looking for help. It was the summer, though, and you were all away.” He scratches his head. “Aberdeen, I think, visiting your grandparents or the like.” I nod. Both of them died before my father disappeared. I only have vague memories of visiting them, and most of those are of the long and tiresome car journey to get there. “Anyway, she didnae find any help there after all, and then it was too late.”

  “So, your wife, she had Fiona on her own?” It’s a horrifying thought.

  “Aye. In the dining room. We tried to pay your dad for the replacement of the carpet but he wouldnae hear of it.”

  There’s approval in his voice for my father’s refusal. I try not to think of the state the carpet must have been in to need replacing. Dear God, I hope it has been replaced at some point since . . . “But . . . how did she even get in?”

  “I cannae remember.” He looks sideways, as if the mountains beyond the glass that protects us might give him the answer, then gives up. “Ach, it was a different time. Everybody left spare keys outside, under a flowerpot or a mat. Anyroad. She loves that house, does Fi. Always has. If she was able to, she’d buy it off you in a flash.” I can hear Jamie as if he’s right next to me: She has a thing about this place. The Manse. Always has. I find I’m wrapping my arms across my stomach as if I’m physically chilled. It’s a struggle to pull my attention back to Glen. You promised Carrie, I remind myself. Benefit of the doubt and all that. “Roy tells me you need the Presumption of Death certificate to be able to sell.”

  Roy is my lawyer, Mr. MacKintyre. “Yes. Without it I just own half the Manse.” Which half, I wonder feverishly. I can’t possibly have the dining room, not now that I’ve heard about the carpet, and not the box room, either. Is there any room that could be mine?

  “Well, I told him that there’s been no new evidence.” He’s eyeing me carefully as he speaks. There’s only the barest hint of blue in the steel of his irises. “In my opinion, your father is most likely dead.”

  It takes a moment to find my voice. “Based on what?” I ask, trying to sound like we’re discussing the relative merits of, say, taking the A9 to get to town as opposed to the back roads.

  “Are you sure you want to talk about this? I’ll answer any question you have, but you ken, I’m not really the sugarcoating type—”

  No kidding. “I’m sure.”

  He looks me over again then sighs in a your funeral kind of way. “Well, you have to look at the push and pull factors. For example, were your parents happy in their marriage—”

  “Were they?”

  “Not especially.” His words are blunt but delivered mildly. “But not specifically unhappy, either.” He pauses for a moment, checking my reaction, then evidently decides it’s safe to continue. “Your dad was a friend of mine; we would run together. I cannae do it now that my knee isn’t what it was . . . We even did a couple of half marathons together.” I’m looking at him in frank astonishment. I can imagine Glen running—he has a spare efficiency to his wiry frame—but I didn’t know my father had been a runner. Perhaps still is a runner, somewhere. “We’d have a pint and a blether from time to time and the idea just came from there. We were training for the Glasgow marathon when he disappeared.”

  “Did you do it without him?”

  He shakes his head. “It wouldnae have been the same.” I nod. It seems respectful that he didn’t do it, like he was acknowledging the importance of what had happened. Life can’t just go on regardless. It shouldn’t. “So what I’m saying is I ken what I’m talking about, and not just from the professional side. He wasnae having an affair or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He’s looking at me sternly now, like a school teacher belaboring the point. But I don’t feel the slightest bit ashamed: of course I’ve considered that. I even wondered in my more adventurous period whether promiscuity could be an inherited trait. “We never found any evidence of that. They had their moments, your mum and dad, but that’s marriage.” He shrugs. “You ken how it is.”

  I don’t, actually. Quite apart from not being in a marriage, I rather doubt that my relationship with Jonathan is typical. On top of which my parents were hardly a good example, and I could never quite understand the dynamic between Pete and my mother. “What caused their particular moments?” A furnace of the soul: perhaps my parents’ love was more the incinerator type. Perhaps it had already burned itself out by then.

  “Ah, thanks, hen.” He stirs a sugar into the coffee that the waitress has just delivered and then continues. “Mostly your mum wasnae very happy here. You’ll ken they met at Saint Martin’s, all very arty-farty, antiestablishment, what have you.” The set of his mouth tells me exactly what he thinks of the artistic community. “Then Karen gets pregnant with you. They get married and end up in rural Scotland with your dad going to work every day in a suit and tie.” His mouth twists sardonically in his leathery face. “I doubt it was exactly what your mum thought she was signing up to.”

  “What did my father think?”

  “Oh, he loved it here. Loved his job; he was doing well there. Mr. Jamieson had a lot of time for him—”

  “Jamieson?” Where have I heard that name before?

  “Aye, his boss at the jewelers. Jamieson & Sons.” I nod and he goes on. “Aye, well, he loved the land, loved having you, loved the house—that was another bone of contention, mind. Your dad was fascinated by it. He was even researching the history and the like, but your mum couldnae stand the Manse. Not at first, like, but over time she grew to hate it. She wasnae one to keep her thoughts to herself, your ma. We all heard about it.” I grimace faintly and his lips twitch in another humorless smile. “It was getting to be more of a wedge between them as time went on. If it had been your mum who disappeared, I’d have said you’d find her alive and thriving in some hippie commune in South America or somewhere. Your dad, though.” He pauses and takes a bite of his caramel-and-chocolate-topped shortbread. I watch him whilst he chews. “Aye, well, your dad . . . It just didnae stack up. I couldnae believe he would leave.” He shakes his head and takes another bite, and for a moment his businesslike facade slips, revealing something altogether more bleak. It takes him an unusually long time to get through his mouthful. “And your dad was a smart man,” he continues suddenly, as if he hadn’t paused. “He regularly
carried two or three times the value of the jewels that disappeared with him. If he was planning to do a runner, surely he would wait for a bumper occasion?”

  I nod as if I’m letting that sink in, though of course I’ve envisaged that scenario, and more, many times. “You said my father wasn’t having an affair. What about my mother?”

  He inclines his head a little, acknowledging the point. “Aye. Well. Maybe.” It sounds like mebbe. “It wouldnae have surprised me. She was young and a bonnie lass; she liked to be center of attention and she wasnae short of admirers. There were a fair few who might have been holding a torch for her.” He shrugs. “We looked into it at the time, but there was nothing . . . definitive. And even if your dad had found her up to nae good, I doubt he would have upped and left immediately. Not without at least packing a bag, or his research.”

  “Unless he had some kind of mental breakdown.”

  “Aye, possible. But I didnae see him as the type.” What is the type? I wonder. Does he think he can read it on a person’s skin, in the way they blether, in the way they drink their pint? Though Glen was a policeman for decades, he probably knows more about human psychology than I’m giving him credit for. “The problem for the investigation was that we couldnae pin down where he went missing from. We couldnae trace him after he flew back to Edinburgh Airport. And to be honest, he might not have been on the flight. The computer was down that day in Antwerp, and check-in was a disaster. It was some lassie ticking the passenger name off on a list and then writing the boarding pass with a Biro. The on-plane head count was off from the list count by three. You couldnae take off like that now, but this was the 1980s.” He grimaces and spreads his hands. “There wasnae any CCTV in operation back then. He could have got on a bus or hopped in a taxi or just walked out of Edinburgh Airport. Or maybe he never flew back to Edinburgh at all. All we know is he didnae take his car; we found that a couple of days later in one of the airport long-stay car parks. With a flat battery.”