by Will Maclean
On the third day, Abi’s disappearance was all over the news, which I first became aware of when Dad put the radio on in the morning. It was intolerable to hear the newsreader describe her, hearing her full name, hearing her called local schoolgirl and so on and so forth. Family members called, some of them tearful, some gripped by a purposeful anger towards some nebulous force or other they considered the culprit. The new role thrust upon Dad – somewhere between publicist and grief counsellor – was exhausting him, as he replaced the phone in its cradle only to have it spring into hateful life again immediately. I went up to the attic.
The attic itself was too much to look at, so filled with Abi’s presence I expected her to poke her head through the trapdoor at any moment, and so I looked down at the garden, attempting not to think.
At the bottom of the garden, a magpie and a crow fought some vitally important territorial struggle over the stone bird bath. The birds fought silently, and as I watched, the battle became more serious, more loaded with intention. They danced around the rim of the bird bath like boxers, jabbing occasionally with their beaks. The magpie started to make a series of aggressive staccato cries, and the crow responded with a single, supremely threatening sound, a mirthless dead laugh that caused the magpie to jump backwards and take off. The crow seemed to find not even the merest sliver of satisfaction in this victory, and instead paced the border of the sandstone bath with an affectedly serious air, like a respectful undertaker. I became aware that someone was standing behind me.
Watching the birds as they fought. Watching me, too. Close enough for me to feel their breath, or the warmth of their body, to hear any words they might speak. I turned, instantly and absolutely afraid, instantly and absolutely hopeful.
The attic was empty.
I was alone.
Of course I was. Who else would have been up there? And yet, I had felt, with the certainty that bypasses the mind and belongs to the memory of muscle and bone and gut, that there had been someone with me. Standing deliberately behind me, deliberately close. To see me turn. To see me gasp. No, I told myself, beating my head with a useless half-fist that fear had made for me, no. There was no way it could be anything. What you felt, you didn’t feel. Something that isn’t allowed to be grief, but desperately wants to be, is seeking release. I had felt – nothing.
And yet I had. The creeping discomfort of being looked at, scrutinised, assessed, evaluated – a feeling so central to the human experience. To discern a gaze, and recognise the intent behind that gaze.
And now, somebody was calling my name, over and over. In tones of rising annoyance. Dad’s voice.
Quietly and calmly I walked towards the trapdoor and swung myself onto the ladder, taking one last look at the attic, which seemed to seethe with scheming emptiness.
Downstairs, Dad was on the phone again. ‘Yes,’ he was saying, over and over. ‘Yes. Yes.’ I stood and waited as he listened to things I couldn’t hear.
‘Yes. One second, Richard.’ He placed a hand over the receiver. ‘Could you go down to the shops for me, Tim? Get the papers?’
‘Which ones?’
He fished in his trouser pocket with his free hand and produced a crumpled pound note.
‘All of them.’
11
Retrospectively, we give our lives shape, regardless of the chaos they seem to be at the time.
Here, then, begins the story of how I ended up having what I can now see was some kind of nervous breakdown. It all feels neat and tidy, expressed in this way, as if I understood at the time what was happening to me, and could clearly see a direction to events, but I would only realise it many years later.
It was the first time I had left the house in three days, since I had come home from school and Abi had not. Outside, the world seemed mockingly ordinary. Cars were still parked along the street, lampposts hung like question marks against a featureless sky of white wax. The houses on our street – large and Victorian and, for the most part, crumbling and time-beaten – ignored me, as they always did, haughty as duchesses. It was all familiar, but in no way comforting.
At the end of the road, a choice: go to the newsagent in the small shopping arcade by the council houses, or the one on the high street? Both were roughly equidistant, but I decided on the high street as there was a strong chance that Tony Finch and his two lieutenants would be hanging around the arcade, and meeting them was the last thing I needed that day. The streets seemed strangely empty, as if everyone had disappeared, following Abi’s example, and it took me a while to remember that today was Friday, and therefore still a school day. My parents had taken the unprecedented step of not insisting I go to school, which I had previously imagined nothing short of a full-blown world war could precipitate. Upon this realisation, I stopped, momentarily, in my tracks, reminded again that life as I had always understood it was transforming.
Everson Road, which eventually connected our road with the bottom of the high street, was empty, with the white sky pressing down so tightly upon it that it felt as if the road itself was struggling to breathe. Slug-shaped blobs of dirty, unmelted snow perched on garden walls and fences, on kerbs and car bonnets.
And then, with a shock, I saw Abi. Staring back at me.
MISSING: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? Her face, on a poster, pinned to a tree. I stood and stared, as if I had seen Abi herself. She smiled out of the past, looking through me to something I couldn’t identify. It was the photo I had taken in the attic. I felt hot tears come, and chose instead to run on, run away.
The newsagent’s shop was oppressively dark. Behind the counter was Mr Edgar, a man who seemed to exist in a permanent state of apoplexy, and hated the schoolchildren whose patronage was the cornerstone of his business. For some reason – probably for the same reason that grown-ups always liked Abi and myself, because we seemed responsible and mature – he was always pleasant to me. In many ways this was worse than his dislike, as he harboured a staggering array of extremely right-wing views I always felt compelled to nod along to, out of some sense of misplaced deference and respect for my elders, and I was always terrified lest someone from school heard me agreeing with him. Today, though, he only greeted me with a watery, cowardly smile and found something urgent to do behind the counter. I soon saw why.
The same picture of Abi – my picture – was on the front page of every single paper. The same picture, over and over. Abi, taken by me, grinning with satisfaction at the thought of our fake ghost photograph, and the sheer delight at completing another strange and macabre project. Only I would ever know, ever completely understand, what that smile was for. I scooped up a copy each of all of the newspapers as best I could and placed them on the counter, now fighting back tears in earnest.
Mr Edgar didn’t return my gaze as he gathered up the newspapers, didn’t see the thin smile I had scraped together for him out of some semblance of basic courtesy. He also wouldn’t accept the pound note, and pushed it gently but firmly back into my hand.
As I walked home, laden with newspapers, folded over so I wouldn’t have to look at the picture of Abi, deliberately walking down the opposite side of Everson Road from the tree with the poster on it for the same reason, I remembered something. I remembered what Janice had said that day she came over, when she had fallen to her knees and started shouting at us with a voice that wasn’t quite hers. Most of it I recalled only vaguely – and I had the distinct impression it had been the kind of things myself or Abi might have said, if we had found ourselves attempting to achieve what Janice was attempting – but some parts had been too powerful and strange to forget.
She had said something I had never quite been able to satisfactorily quantify or accommodate, and it had marked the point at which Janice’s strange performance had genuinely started to scare me.
But you did photograph a real ghost, despite everything. Or you will have done, soon.
We had taken twenty-three pictures of our ghost, and I had taken one of Abi, the one where she looked far old
er than her nearly-fourteen years. I had taken it almost as an afterthought, to use up the roll of film. And now it was displayed everywhere – on trees and in newspapers, the icon at the centre of her disappearance. The image that people would think of when they heard her name.
But you did photograph a real ghost, despite everything. Or you will have done, soon.
I was so absorbed in thinking about this and the possible implications of it that I didn’t notice Cliff Lang appear from around the trunk of one of the leafless trees, smiling his unpleasant smile, where a crowd of too many teeth jostled for position. I inhaled sharply. He saw the shock and fear in my eyes and drank it in. I looked down the road, but there was no sign of Tony Finch or Gary Fisher. Again, I tried to walk past him; again he blocked my path.
‘Going somewhere?’
‘Leave me alone,’ I said. I was surprised at how tired I sounded. I tried to walk round him, but Cliff Lang wasn’t going to let me go, that day. He turned me round and slammed me up against the tree.
‘What do you want?’ I said, exasperated.
‘What do you want?’ he repeated, in a baby voice. ‘Listen to you. You sound like a girl.’
‘Is this about the other day?’ I said. I noticed something for the first time. I was very slightly taller than Cliff Lang. Broader.
‘No, not a girl. You sound like a queer.’ Cliff Lang jabbed my face with a finger as he said these words. I wished he’d just get on with whatever he was doing and stop wasting my time. I looked down at the newspapers over my arm and sighed. Cliff Lang followed my gaze.
‘Oh yeah, your sister’s gone, hasn’t she? That’s right. Probably run away from you, you little prick. It’s a shame, she looked right dirty.’
Cliff Lang might have had other things he wanted to say on this theme, but my fist came up faster than both he and I could think. He must have bit his tongue, as he squealed, and blood burst from his mouth. He staggered back, in momentary shock, and I hit him again, inexpertly, the flat palm of my outstretched hand slamming into his nose, which also bled. He recovered enough from this to land one really excellent punch on my left eye, but then the situation became something he hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t control; I leapt on him with the full force of my anger, kicking, slapping, biting, scratching, grabbing hold of his face and tearing it. I was operating from pure fury, drawing on a vast subterranean reservoir of resentment and bile that I was unaware of, a white light that flowed through me. My animal howls rang up and down empty Everson Road. I was barely present for any of it.
I remember being pulled away from Cliff Lang, first by one pair of hands and then by another, far stronger, pair.
‘Easy there, psycho.’ It was Tony Finch. To my surprise, he was not talking to Cliff Lang. He was talking to me.
Cliff Lang got shakily to his feet. There was mud all over his clothes, and his face was a mess of blood and snot. And tears.
‘He’s crying,’ I said, sneering. ‘God, he’s crying!’ And I went for him again, but Gary Fisher anticipated this and held me back.
‘Don’t you dare talk about my sister!’ I said. ‘Not now! Not ever!’
‘Did you say something about his sister?’ said Tony Finch, in a quiet voice of pure flint. Cliff Lang looked absolutely terrified.
‘I didn’t mean it, Tony! I was just joking! It was a joke!’
Tony Finch looked almost sad. A line had been crossed. And nobody knew that more than Cliff Lang, who, having got his tears under control, looked as if he would start crying again.
‘Tony—’
Tony Finch ran his hand through his hair, a very deliberate, almost delicate gesture. It seemed to take a long time. Then, he punched Cliff Lang in the stomach, and, as he went down, kicked him twice more, in the stomach and the head. He stopped at that; justice had been served, and no more effort need be expended. With surprising grace, he picked up the sheaf of newspapers I had dropped and handed them to me.
‘See you around, psycho,’ said Tony Finch. Gary Fisher smiled a lopsided smile at me, and the two of them turned and made their way along Everson Road.
Cliff Lang gasped and sobbed at my feet.
I gave him a final kick in the stomach.
Dad was still on the phone when I got home. The way he raised his eyebrows in greeting when I came in was so redolent of normal times, of business as usual, that I felt as if I might weep. He paused when he saw my eye, but I was gone before he could properly register it. My mother bustled in soon after, having been to the doctor’s for stress and insomnia, both of which had manifested themselves since Abi’s disappearance. I waved hello but she barely saw me, instead removing a box of tablets from her bag and taking two in rapid succession.
I headed upstairs. I remembered I had been thinking about what Janice had said, and something about how it might fit together in a way I hadn’t considered before, but I was too weary and full of adrenalin to pursue it.
12
A week later, Abi had still not returned. Daily life in our own home became a thing of unbelievable pressure and strain, where carrying on as normal was simply impossible, but was nonetheless the only available course of action. None of us were sleeping well, and the sleep I did manage to attain was filled with bad dreams that were less nightmares than insoluble problems from which I would awake in darkness, a frustrated scream echoing round the room. If my parents heard me scream, they didn’t mention it. And why would they? It would not have seemed unusual or incongruous. Waking hours were the mirror image of these unsettled and tormented nights, long, featureless days punctuated by the shrill ring of the telephone and my heart leaping, only for the situation to reassert itself, the atmosphere of the house instantly and totally returning to cloying claustrophobia. We were all losing weight, and none of us now ate at the same time. We only spoke to each other when we needed to. My parents did not seek me out for comfort, nor I them. And every day, Abi remained stubbornly, intractably, hatefully absent.
Over the ten days since Abi had vanished, various people had come forward to say they’d seen her, all of them utterly unreliable and useless as witnesses in their various ways. An old woman, Mrs Penrose, who lived two streets away and had always had great difficulty telling me and my sister apart, said that she had seen ‘Amanda’ accepting a ride from a young man on a motorbike, the day she vanished, or possibly the day before. Harry Belt, the locally tolerated ‘Gentleman of the Road’, who drank methylated spirits and lived on the benches outside the Town Hall, stopped my mum to say he’d seen Abi a week previously, in the park, getting followed around by a ‘gang of coloured lads’, declaring that he ‘wouldn’t be surprised if they’d kidnapped her’, because ‘you know what they’re like’. My mother, unfailingly polite at the best of times, had thanked him for this valuable information and promised to pass it on to the relevant authorities. She had smiled a smile so tight and contained I thought her teeth might crack, and I wanted to punch Harry Belt in his red, drunken face for making her pretend like that. One local busybody insisted in letters to the local paper that Abi had run away with the gypsies, or possibly joined a cult, and the correspondents of national newspapers were no less shy in advancing their own theories, always in a high-handed tone that implied they were experts on the matter.
On it went, people with no connection whatsoever to Abi or my family, voicing their idiot opinions and half-baked theories as to what might have befallen her, in pubs and shops and periodicals, local and national. I could not be expected to go to school under these circumstances, so I didn’t, instead wandering the streets, or taking trains and buses the full length of their route, disembarking at whatever far-flung terminus I found myself on and getting straight back on the same train or bus in the opposite direction. It seemed as good a use of my time as any.
And then, a week later, an apparently reliable witness came forward, and everything changed again.
The police told us about this lead before it was in the papers, thankfully. Mrs Lacey worked in the Co-op on th
e high street, which would definitely have been on Abigail’s route home from chess club that fateful night. She worked the afternoon shift, before the shop closed at 6 p.m. She knew Abi by sight, and had seen her that night.
Abi had come in to buy a can of lemonade, and had been followed around the shop by a man, who was chatting to her so animatedly that Mrs Lacey had assumed that Abi knew him, even though she said very little in return. He had moved around the shelves talking to her, whilst Abi had smiled respectfully and kept her distance. Eventually, the man had bought twenty John Player Special and a box of matches, a copy of the Daily Mirror and a packet of sweets, and had chatted a little to Mrs Lacey, whose attention was focused on ringing the items up on the till. The man had left and Mrs Lacey watched him through the plate-glass window at the front of the shop, as he leaned against a large brown van and smoked. He seemed to be waiting for something, and it was logical to presume that something might be Abi.
Mrs Lacey couldn’t recall anything else, apart from one detail. On the side of the brown van he drove was a name – his name, she assumed – which was also the name of his business. Mrs Lacey couldn’t remember the name, or what line of work the man was in, but she did remember one thing: the name started with an S. In fact, a day later, when the story found its way into the newspapers, they were already describing the man as ‘Mister S’.
In the attic, I read all of these details in a one-page spread in the Daily Express. As well as a photo of Mrs Lacey, and one of the Co-op, and the ubiquitous photo of Abi, there was an illustration accompanying the piece, an artist’s impression of the man in the shop, drawn from Mrs Lacey’s description. It sat alongside the photo of Abi, and was exactly the same size.
