Her eyes go around the room. She’s looking for something. Searching. Her eyes move everywhere but never come to rest on him. She rubs distractedly at her breast bone.
“Heartburn?” he asks her.
She still doesn’t look at him, but nods.
There’s a pair of red shoes left where someone stepped out of them on the burnt-orange rug. The left shoe is slightly in front of the other, and the toe of the right shoe nudges shyly into the left. He pictures the one that the shoes belong to. He can imagine her standing, slightly knock-kneed like a child as she hooks one shoe off the back of her foot with the toe of the other. He thinks of her standing there, back from work, ready to kick off her shoes; ready to take off her business clothes; ready to switch off from the world outside.
She speaks. “I feel nothing,” she says. Her face screws up in confusion. “Nothing.” She looks at him at last and asks, “Is that strange?”
He doesn’t know. He is still thinking about a pair of legs coming out from under a skirt, ending in a pair of red shoes. The shoes kicked off, landing where they still lie now, and her walking in stockinged feet into the kitchen.
He thinks of her laughing at the advert on the front of the free newspaper, proclaiming that their local music shop was the home of “Sax, Drums & Rock ‘n’ Roll”. Laughing and groaning and rolling her eyes. He remembers her in all her radiant beauty as she left the newspaper lying on the table and took the loaf and the butter from the fridge.
He remembers her beginning to butter the bread, spreading the butter on too thickly. He had told her off, he had made her laugh again by telling her it wasn’t healthy. She had wrinkled her nose at him in laughing protest.
He remembers the shine in her grey-green eyes. He remembers the laughter in them.
He’s aware suddenly that the room is silent. They are sitting there together, saying nothing. Neither of them can think of anything. He has run out of conversation. There are only so many ways you can say things. There are only so many things you can say in a situation like this.
His finger nails are shiny. He looks at them. Neatly manicured, polished. Clean square fingernails on a pair of manly hands. He wonders whether another pair of hands is touching her now. It’s hard not to wonder. It seems so final, and yet unfinished.
He thinks about another pair of hands. They could be hands that she has chosen. They could be hands that are touching her against her wishes.
His own hands ball into fists.
“It’s the not knowing,” he says.
“The what?” comes the reply.
He looks at her mother. “Why are you here?” he asks her.
Why is she here? He doesn’t understand her presence here, in their house, in his life.
“What do you mean, it’s the not knowing?” her mother asks him, ignoring his question.
“Just that,” he says, looking down at his hands again, held palm to palm now between his legs. “It’s the not knowing where she’s gone, whether she chose to go, who she’s with, if she’s on her own.” He looks up at her again. “It’s the not fucking knowing,” he tells her.
He remembers a story she wrote once. It was about a man. A husband. Maybe a father; he doesn’t remember. All he can recall is that the man disappeared, walking from a railway station in the city centre to a pub around the corner. Being there on the cctv and then disappearing forever.
He remembers that it sent a shiver up his spine; the way she wrote about it. He never asked her what it meant, where she had come up with the idea. He didn’t want to know. He was scared that the answer would be more than he could take.
“Why are you here?” he asks again, looking at her; suddenly seeing her clearly.
She looks back at him. “Peter, I’m here to be of help. I’m here to wait for news.” She looks away again, out towards the window, gazing at the curtain misted street beyond it. “Where else am I supposed to go?” she asks. Not particularly of him. “I’m her mother.”
Silence falls between them again, cold and uncomfortable; thin, like the air on the first frosty day of winter. He thinks about getting up and doing something. He wonders about a cup of tea. He draws breath, about to ask, but she speaks first.
“What did she say to you?” she asks again, still looking away from him, towards the window. He has lost count of the times he has been asked this now. Not just by her. By others, too. The police. Friends ringing to offer support; wanting to know the full story as quickly as possible.
He doesn’t condemn them. He knows that she would have been the same if any of their friends had disappeared. Wanting to know the story behind the tragedy, so that the ones left behind could build it higher and more ornate than it actually was. Bare facts provide the starched canvas for a more detailed needlepoint of guesses and supposition.
He thinks of her impish face behind a cheese sandwich, sitting with her knees up close on one of the dining chairs, watching him as he grilled the sausages and boiled the potatoes for his signature dish, her eyes peeping over the sandwich that was squeeed between the fingers of both hands, held in front of her face like a harmonica.
The question hangs in the air.
Just off to get some milk, was what she had said to him. She’d finished the sandwich and he was cursing at the fridge door as he realised that they didn’t have enough milk in, even for him to mash the potatoes.
She had stood up and wiped her sandwichy hands on the legs of her jeans. She had pulled on his old Police issue hoodie; the one that drowned her and would have made her look like a teenage skater boy, except she was to pretty.
She had grabbed some change off the side and headed for the front door, calling out “Just off to get some milk, then!” as though he might have forgotten.
He smiles at the memory and catches himself just as her mother looks across and sees the smile, too.
“It’s been over 36 hours,” she says to him.
“I know,” he replies. “I’m waiting for her too.”
It has been forty three hours. Only five away from her having been gone for two days.
All those numbers. Fours and threes, and fives and sixes. He adds everything together and together and together again, coming to rest at the single digit nine.
They had been out together the weekend before. They had gone for a meal, she had taken him to her favourite club, where you sat at tables, ate pizza and tapas, drank expensive cocktails, and listened to cool jazz. She had worn a dress. She had worn heels. Her legs had been masked behind a sheen of gossamer thin black nylon. The hem of the dress had floated in the breeze, had bounced slightly with the rhythm of her hips as she walked.
Walking behind her, down the street, after they left the club, he had placed his hands over her eyes, daring her to walk blind in front of him. She had laughed and walked on fearlessly, trusting him to hold her back from any danger.
She hadn’t even had to ask. He had steered her past lamp posts, had held her back at the edge of kerbs, and helped her weave her way past couples walking arm in arm along the street.
She had laughed the whole time, and when they got into the cab, when her eyes were no longer blindfolded by his hands, he had lifted the skirt of her dress slightly and pushed aside underwear so that he could touch her. Looking into her eyes he had moved his fingers slowly and tenderly against her flesh. She held his gaze and dared him to move his fingers harder and faster. She had bitten her bottom lip, closed her eyes, released the tiniest gasp of air and sunk back into the seat of the cab.
He wonders now if someone else is touching her, making her gasp, making her chest heave and swell with the pleasure.
He wonders if someone is doing worse.
He remembers her reaction when they had watched Se7en together. He remembers the intensity with which she watched when Gwyneth was stolen away from Brad. She had sat forward in her seat. Her eyes had been fixed to the screen, watching how Pitt’s character reacted.
She hadn’t ever said anything to him in relation to the scene. She didn’t know that he had read the story that she wrote about the disappearing husband.
He wonders if this disappearance is premeditated; if she was just waiting for a chance to walk out. It was like her. A silent leaving. They had never rowed very much. Arguing was never her style. She avoided confrontation. She only wanted fun. She wanted to feel safe, enclosed. She didn’t want to feel ripped apart.
He would have chosen a blazing row to go out on. He would have gone for the full scale melodrama of raised voices, vicious words, shaken fists. He would have taken his coat and his door keys and stormed out of the house.
But he would also have calmed down in the cool of the air outside the house, in the silence that allowed him to collect his thoughts. He would have come back and carried on as though nothing had been said.
He wonders if she still loves him; if she still cares. He wonders if she has just had enough and wants something else, something newer and fresher. Something not him. Something that doesn’t threaten her with its closeness.
She wants security, but she hates it too.
He frowns. His thoughts are circling around the belief that she has chosen to do this. That nobody snatched her away. He understands it as fact somewhere deep and silent inside him. He can picture her, in his hoodie, wearing her trainers, walking to the corner shop but not going in. Never going in. Walking past it and up along the main road, away from him and their life together.
No change of clothes. No make up. No toothbrush. Just her purse and her mobile phone, which isn’t accepting incoming calls. Not even her house keys. She was going to the shop. He was cooking their tea. She didn’t need her keys.
Her mother sighs. “I wish someone would let us know what’s going on,” she says.
“Why don’t you go home, Dilys,” he asks her. “I’ll ring you as soon as I hear something.”
She looks at him. “I want to help,” she tells him. “I want to be here with you. I need to be here when she calls.”
He can’t look at her. He looks at his hands.
“Dilys,” he says, summoning up all the patience he has left in his body. “I need to wait alone. I need to be on my own.”
He looks up at her then; sees her looking at him, a confused expression floating across her face, moving muscles into tiny frowns and flickers of tension.
“She isn’t going to call, Dilys. It will be the Police who call.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s a fact, Dilys. Trust me.” He remembers the days he spent liaising with families. He remembers the phone calls and the visits, the despair on people’s faces. He wonders whether his face carries those same traces of despair.
He rubs his face with his hands, then addresses Dilys firmly.
“If Kathy has decided to leave, then she isn’t going to call. She’s decided to go for a reason. She won’t want to discuss it with any of us.” Least of all you, was what he thought. Least of all the woman who bore her and brought her into the world. “And if she hasn’t decided to leave. If someone has taken her, then the chances are that she’s dead by now.”
“You can’t say that,” Kathy’s mother says. “You can’t say that.”
Peter looks at her. There is no point in trying to reason with her, so he doesn’t even try.
“Just go home, Dilys,” he says. “Please.”
She sits on for a while longer, not looking at him, unwilling to move. She has the same jawline as Kathy. Stubborn and fixed.
He remembers them coming home, leaving the taxi. She had put some Latin groove on when they got into the house, some Salsa. She had started to mambo, lost in the music, not even acknowledging his presence in the room. He had stood in the doorway from the hall, leaning against the doorframe, watching the way her body moved. He watched the sway of her hips, the movements of her arms, her legs.
He thinks now that he knew then that she was leaving.
The phone rings. Dilys looks at him.
He answers it and her voice fills the earpiece, fills his head.
“I thought I should let you know,” her voice says. “I’m alive, I’m okay. All those things.”
“It’s her, isn’t it?” Dilys asks, standing up, moving over towards him.
He holds out a hand, tries to ward her off, wishes for an evil eye painted in the centre of his palm to keep the witch at bay.
“Thanks,” he says to her, on the other end of this phone call.
“No point in wasting Police time,” she says. “I won’t ask how you are. I can probably guess.”
He can’t think of anything to say to her.
“Have I wrong-footed you?” she laughs. “You didn’t think I would call, did you?”
He is listening to the noises in the background. He is hearing silence. No traffic. No tv. No other voices. She is in a building somewhere. She is on her own.
“I couldn’t do it any more, Pete,” she says. “I just couldn’t live with you. I can’t live that way.”
He listens to her voice, to her words, and to the silence that follows them. Dilys is in the background, demanding to be allowed to speak to her daughter; demanding to know that she is alive and well and safe. He knows that Kathy can hear all this.
“I told her to go home,” he says to her. She laughs. He turns towards Dilys, holding the phone away from his mouth. “She’s fine, Dilys. Go home,” he says.
Kathy laughs again. She is just the same, she just isn’t here with him.
“I miss you,” he says, and it is her turn to be silent.
“Then stop,” she says eventually, and there is a hardness in her voice that he recognises as hate. It shocks him into reality.
The silence stretches out. Even her mother is silent behind him. Even she has sensed that something important has just happened. The absence of man-made noise lies heavy over the background hum of appliances and traffic.
The phone line goes dead. Peter hears the dial tone buzzing in his ear.
“Has she gone?” Dilys whispers.
“I’d better ring the Police,” he says. I’d better function, is what he means. Better to do something practical. Better not to dwell.
Dilys listens to him giving the information to the Family Liaison Officer over the phone. She absorbs the information. Pete lets her. He doesn’t care how she reinterprets it. He doesn’t want to discuss any of it with her. He just wants her to go.
When he comes off the phone, Dilys has already put her coat on and is halfway to the door. She looks at him before she leaves. They have nothing to say to each other.
He is left alone. He puts his phone onto the coffee table and sits back down on the sofa.
For the first time in forty three hours, he allows himself to weep. He doesn’t know what he’s weeping about, but he calls it loss just to keep his brain happy.
He stops trying to remember things about her. He has no need to wonder where she is, or who with, or why. He knows now. He knows part of it. He will never know it all. That much he understands.
There is beer in the fridge, and wine in the rack in the kitchen. There’s a bottle of red that they opened to drink with the Beef Wellington she had cooked on Tuesday. He decides to finish that.
He needs to think about food. He needs to think about sleeping in their bed instead of on the sofa. He needs to think about going back to work, because a missing wife is one thing, being left by her is another.
He needs to think about all these things, but first he needs to drink.
He pulls the cork from the bottle and pours out a large glass of the cabernet
“Here’s to you,” he toasts the thin air, and he’s not sure if he means her or if he means himself. He drinks and savours the roundness of the wine in his mouth, the tingle of it at the back of his tongue, the gentle warmth as it passes down his throat.
It will be a long night. He switches off his phone. He unplugs the landline. He sits back on the sofa and swings his legs up onto the coffee table. He takes the remote control and switches on the tv.
Images dance and flicker in front of his eyes. Voices wash over each other, and over him.
He drinks.
© J R Hargreaves October 2006
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