Pine

by Francine Toon

  She makes her way through to the utility room and sees that the dripping has stopped. She opens the chest freezer and its light shines out into the dingy room, illuminating frozen rabbit meat and polythene bags of vegetables. She slides the Ziploc bag behind an old box of raspberry ripple ice cream, something her father does not enjoy, and closes the freezer lid. She promises herself that when the bullying stops, she will take the bag out to thaw and bury it with a releasing spell. In the meantime, the freezing must happen.

  Close to ten o’ clock, long after Lauren has fallen fast asleep once more, the doorbell rings, startling Niall on the sofa. It’s the police again. Today, they searched the woods and are examining a dilapidated house, after a tip-off from a young member of the public who came across a secret annexe. Diane, Kirsty told him, has put something on social media that has been shared thousands of times. Niall only has a vague idea of what this really means. The police are interviewing a man found on the premises and have found human remains. The words don’t click into place. He clings on to fragments of sentences. Female. They were fast-tracked to a lab. He wonders if Angela and Malcolm know.

  The police pause. ‘And we’re sorry to bother you so late, but we’re working against the clock and wanted to talk to you before anyone else, reporters and the like, do.’ Their voices are smoothed out, softened.

  ‘OK, sure,’ says Niall, trying to figure out what they are getting at.

  They tell him that the DNA does not match Ann-Marie’s DNA and the search for Ann-Marie must continue. He breathes out.

  The DNA, they continue, matches with Christine Mackay, his wife. He tries to understand but his brain has slowed. He goes to the kitchen and eyes four fingers of whisky in the bottle under the sink. He pours a glass.

  ‘Niall, if we may …’ The policeman’s voice reminds him of laminate flooring, flat and colourless. ‘Our forensic team found the remains – bones, to be precise – of your wife Christine, deep underground. We had her DNA on file and it is an exact match. Therefore, her status has changed from that of a missing person to deceased. We are sorry to tell you that her skull suffered trauma.’

  ‘She was wearing a blue dress that day.’

  ‘We have not yet found evidence of clothing in the basement. There was a dressing gown near the door. We have to tell you that while we have taken in a man for questioning, you remain a suspect in this case and we are going through your interviews on file. If you want to say anything else, now is the time. We will set up another interview with you at a later date. We’re currently running tests. And we have this ring now as potential evidence.’ They put a silver Claddagh ring on the table in a clear plastic wallet. ‘It was handed in by your daughter today. But she says she found it earlier and didn’t tell anyone. Can you tell us, Niall, if this belongs to your late wife, Christine?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Niall. ‘My daughter. Why didn’t she tell me?’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Niall’s muscles are contracting. ‘And any other DNA?’ he says flatly. ‘Any other DNA. You found that? Someone else?’

  ‘We’ve found separate DNA evidence, yes, but it is inconclusive. At this moment in time. We’d like to take a fresh sample of your DNA.’

  He holds his emotions on a tight leash. ‘You don’t still have me on file?’

  ‘I’m sure we have. It’s just to make sure everything’s as up to date as it can be. We offer our sincere condolences, Mr Mackay, but we hope that you can find solace in this information, however small.’

  She had not gone far. She had not deserted him.

  ‘We’ll keep you updated with more details as soon as we have confirmation. The press are already getting wind of this, as we say, because of social media, and you may see them about – but we would ask you not to speak to them at this stage. We’ll be preparing an official statement and will keep you updated. We wanted to tell you as soon as we could.’

  He coughs like a wretch. ‘Just so … Excuse me, this is a lot to take in. The annexe?’

  ‘We cannot say much about the annexe we described as we want to interview you about it later. But we have reason to suspect … that she had been held there. Against her will.’

  Niall stays motionless, the words sloshing through his head like blood. ‘I don’t know anything about it, I can tell you that now.’

  ‘We appreciate you may need a moment. We hope you can understand that we need to see … if there’s some kind of link between Ann-Marie’s disappearance’ – the policeman raises his eyebrows – ‘and Christine’s. Have you any idea?’

  ‘No, as I said before, I don’t, officer.’

  ‘Then we would like you to describe the nature of your relationship with your wife.’

  ‘We loved each other,’ he says. ‘I loved her, so much.’ His eyes are warm and wet. ‘I want you to know that.’

  ‘Who, can you remember, was the last person to see Christine alive?’

  A woman who lived by the beach, Clarice Egbert, had seen Christine for a therapy appointment. Christine would sit facing her clients in plastic doctor’s chairs in a windowless room. The room was part of an old building in the square above a gift shop that sold toys wrapped in cellophane. In this room she would make them go through a process of tapping. The room was mauve. Niall painted it a shade called ‘Recuperate’ and built the shelves around the edge for candles and a cabinet for the CD player. The man who rented the room was a friend of Sandy’s and let her use it for next to nothing.

  ‘Thank you for your answers, Niall. We know you would have been asked this before, but did you ever argue?’

  He looks over at the sliding door. He wants it to open. He wants her to walk through. ‘No. Well, you know, only the usual.’ Somehow any disagreement they had now seems significant.

  It is true that Christine was distant sometimes and they’d gone through periods in the four years they were together, not of arguments, but of silence. It would happen after his worst moments, the times he called her a whacko, a quack and once – and he winced at this – that she was exploiting vulnerable people. He didn’t think she ever forgave him for that one.

  He remembers a book about wolves she owned and loved. A book about wolves and wild women. She could spend whole days walking in the woods without him. Or she would hold Lauren and say, ‘I want her to be wild.’ She used to build bonfires.

  Before this, when she was heavily pregnant, she argued with him about birthing methods. She wanted to be ‘free’ of the hospital. He knew it scared her. She tried to eat natural foods and talked about ‘chemicals’ as if they were poison. She had a fear of her body being pushed into certain positions on the hospital bed. Of not being in control. She insisted on a home birth. He invoked God and the Lord Jesus Christ. ‘You realize, don’t you, you nutter, they’ll have to helicopter you to the hospital if anything goes wrong?’ he said.

  There was so much testing of each other, pushing each other, so much that was fierce. So much shouting. He thinks of it now as passion rising from their words. He never admitted he loved that she was crazy. She didn’t care about anyone’s opinion of her, let alone his.

  ‘And, just so we’re clear, Christine was the mother of your daughter Lauren?’ A voice comes out of the ether. He nods.

  In the course of the conversation he answers some of their questions with a few words, and in answer to others a story comes pouring out of somewhere, bringing details he thought he had forgotten about, like driftwood.

  He remembers that, as a baby, Lauren liked looking at the therapy CD covers. One had a picture of dolphins, another was a picture of a sunset and a third was the Tibetan mountains. Lauren’s favourite was the clàrsach album, an instrument Christine said she would learn one day. Niall remembers berating her: ‘Whatever you play, for God’s sake lay off the pan pipes.’ There could be times when he felt as though all they did was pretend to hate each other. Secretly he dreamt that she would play the clàrsach for him.

  When there were not enough massage or alter
native-therapy appointments, Christine started to read palms and tarot cards. The pack she used was battered. She kept it in a blue velvet pouch decorated with gold stars. It must be knocking around the house somewhere now. All these things she used must be. Niall had refused to let her work from their home. He suspects she used her crystal ball too, and black obelisks, but didn’t tell him. She worked from the therapy room and at the castle sometimes to entertain guests, and at fairs. He hated seeing her dress up for the occasion in her strange clothes and jewellery. It is easy to remember what annoyed him about her. She used to say, The lungs hold grief. He called her Mystic Meg and Rafiki. She called him Ozzy and Nigel, after the front man from Spinal Tap.

  ‘And can you tell us a bit about the type of therapy Christine practised?’ the bald policeman asks. Niall isn’t fully aware of how much he has answered aloud and how much he has kept silent.

  He has some understanding of her therapy techniques. She was nineteen then. Niall used to worry that male tourists would pick up her card and think she offered more than a massage. Yet her only clients seemed to be retired women with flowery scarves who kept their grey hair long. Christine would say that there was trauma inside them. Her therapy took their trauma into her and cleansed them of it. Whenever she spoke about this to Niall they argued.

  First she would tap the top of the client’s head, then under their eyes, then above their mouth, under their mouth, under their breast bone and below their armpits (The lungs hold grief). These were points that caused ‘energy blockages’. The client all the while would be saying words that came to mind, words connected to what was troubling them. It was called Emotional Freedom Technique.

  In their early days, she showed him this. She told him how it was unhealthy to bottle up memories and pretend that painful things didn’t exist. He needed to let his emotions out into the air, otherwise they would rot inside him, making him sick. She asked him to mirror her, tap his own head, before moving down his face to his ribcage. The lungs hold grief. It was some kind of mad ritual. He felt like an ape, scratching itself under the armpits, and he remembers doing an impression: Is this The Jungle Book now, love? He rugby-tackled her on to the bed and she pushed him back, saying that if he couldn’t take things seriously, she would stop showing him.

  When she found there were not enough traumatized tourists to keep her in the black, she bought a therapy bed and increased the massages. Niall tried to stop her, saying he could support them. He didn’t want her touching other men. She said she wanted to help people. She would rather massage an attractive young man, she said, but she had yet to meet one. She was still spending her time helping old ladies with their back problems.

  ‘And,’ says Morrison, whose name is starting to stick, ‘do you remember anything more about the day she went missing?’

  He can’t remember the day. The white day. Absolute white. The day he’d tried his best to describe to the police once before. The day that felt as if there was no colour and the significance of things became untethered in fog. He’d felt as though he was floating somewhere frozen and blanched, while she evaporated. There was nothing truly surrounding him. This world showed its true self: not a place for him after all and not a place of any kindness. Any kindness in the sort of quantity that could ever match her absence: the horror and the cruelty of it. If it wasn’t for Lauren, he would be dead by now.

  Phone calls on that day, the day she disappeared, and the days following, lit up like lightning against cloud. The sound of a phone sent electric currents up his white spine. Always the doorbell, never the key in the lock. And she never came home and she never came home. White days, like being high in the mountains without oxygen, without breath, a tightness in the lungs and baby Lauren in her cot.

  Angela Walker was so distant in the days after the disappearance. Kirsty and Craig rallied round to take care of the baby. Angela never spoke to Niall about Christine’s disappearance and yet he overheard her once when she was queuing in front of him at the bakery, gossiping with another woman.

  ‘It’s been simply awful,’ she said to the lady, as if Niall’s grief somehow belonged to her. ‘She was my best friend.’

  Niall wanted to spit in her face for such a pile of shite. He carried on doing odd jobs for the family, unable to turn down work, but her braying voice on that day stayed with him.

  Seemingly satisfied, the police leave into the night, thanking him for his time. He barely registers their departure. He straightens himself on the chair and, for the first time, he tries Christine’s technique now at the kitchen table, hitting his ribs. He is glad he can’t see himself in the mirror. To his surprise, his face screws up of its own accord.

  If you do this long enough, you might find you laugh, yawn or cry …

  Something strange is happening. He feels his mouth opening. His expression changes to that of a howling baby, a silent scream. Something starts to open up and things come flooding back. He keeps hitting his sides, relentlessly, the grief coming through his face, until he feels exhausted. He takes a deep breath and steadies himself at the table. The tea is cold now; his face is wet. He remembers the night he saw Christine again.

  She was so close by. The softness of the headlights flood back to him and he saw her body emerging from the passing place. He remembers how beautiful she looked, how alive. He remembers what she smelled like when he saw her again, how he thought himself mad. How bruised she was and how cold. The thought of it makes him weep some more. When he gently washed her hair with the shower. Her beautiful hair. The curls of it through his fingers. How he held her and washed her and how he washed away blood and teeth fell out, and he was crying. Her bones as thin as a rabbit’s. Her sad blue eyes looking at him again. He can think this without questioning any of it. The how. Just the anxious joy of being with her again. The way he tried to make her safe again. He never wanted to stop holding her. This shivering woman was different from the one who had grown in his memory.

  In her dream that night, Lauren makes her way downstairs again in blinding sunlight. It shines through her hair and she wonders if she is in heaven. She notices a strange smell coming from the utility room and opens the chest freezer, leaking mist. Inside are frosted flowers, tulips, roses and marigolds growing out of glittering crushed ice. She pushes back their icy stems and sees Ann-Marie, curled in a ball underneath, her head tilted up, her skin faintly blue like a Smurf. She is wearing the crown of the High Priestess as she sleeps.

  Niall lies awake, the edges of his eyes raw, his heart beating like a trapped bat.

  He heaves himself out of the bed and takes the key to the living room that is always kept locked. It is so neat in there: a yellow sofa and a circular coffee table, facing a stone fireplace he installed himself. There is a framed poster from an Edinburgh art exhibition they went to; a tie-dye dress draped over the sofa. In the middle of the floor are two cardboard boxes. He touches the dress, entwining his fingers around its thin spaghetti straps, and holds it to his chest in a bundle. He buries his face in the fabric and whispers, ‘Christine, I’m here, Christine. Come and see me.’ He looks around, then places the dress carefully back on the sofa, as if it is frail.

  From the next box he takes out her crystals and midnight-blue candles and lights them. Christine. I’m here, Christine. I want to see you. He lets the candles flicker in the dark room. He slides out a photo album and peels through the pages. All his pictures of Christine are in this room and Lauren has never seen them. He used to tell himself she was too young. That she would only miss her if she saw her smiling face. Her face and her Claddagh ring on her slender hand.

  He stares deep into one flame and holds the glassy stones in purple, amber and green. ‘I know,’ he breathes, ‘I know somewhere you’ll be laughing at me. But for the love of God come to me. I’m ready for you. Come to me.’

  He crouches like a lump of rock until his shins and spine ache. There is a rustle outside the window, but it passes. A full moon shines fit to bust in the black.

 
; He sinks into the armchair that she used to love to read in. He takes a deep breath and shuts his eyes. Once again he tries to feel her here, with all his concentration. Please. But when he opens his eyes he is alone. The dress does not smell of her. It hasn’t for years.

  Back in bed, he holds the duvet tightly, twisting it in his hands, and tries to remember that what he has been desperate for has in fact happened. He tries to maintain a new feeling, that mortality can be traded, that death is finite and part of a circle.

  22

  When Lauren comes down for breakfast, her father is sitting with his back to her. Shiny photographs are spread all over the table. Some have fallen on the floor. When she gets close, she sees her mother. He looks up at her, tear-streaked, as if she is a strange girl in his house.

  ‘Your mum’s not coming back, Lauren, she’s not coming back. Christine, your lovely mum.’

  From his tone, she feels as though she has been thrown into freezing water. She pats him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry.’ It is all she can think to say amid a world that is breaking like a huge wave around her, its force crushing.

  ‘Why don’t you stay at home today?’ His voice is wobbly, unnerving.

  She can’t face the idea of spending the rest of the day in the house with him, so gets ready for school again. He kisses her cheek as she leaves.

  She boards the bus under a faded sky, finding a place in one of the unpopular seats, close to the front. Today there is a cold, unhappy silence below the rumble of the engine. She spends the journey scanning the passing farmland, trying not to think about the basement and looking for something that could be a clue. Miniature bodies of moles hang in lines from the wire fence that runs parallel to the road. Lauren wonders at their lack of eyes. She wonders whether they smelled death if they were not able to see it. When the bus passes the brown hillside, she sees a young wildcat hidden in the broom like a gift.