After Anna (8 page)

‘Brian,’ she said.

He ignored her. They had barely spoken since leaving the school. That was part of the reason she’d googled ‘missing children’. She’d been alone and unable to stop herself.

He walked past her to the kitchen; shoulders slumped, and flicked the kettle on. He put a teabag in a mug. When the water boiled he poured it into the mug and added milk. The milk spilled on the countertop. His hand was shaking. He’d drunk a lot when they had got home, enough to pass out around midnight, but not enough, it seemed, to stay passed out.

‘Brian,’ she said. ‘We need to talk.’

He looked at her over his cup of tea. ‘Do we?’ he said. His voice was broken and hoarse.

‘Yes. Our daughter is missing.’

‘Because you couldn’t be there to pick her up. You didn’t show up and now she’s gone.’

Julia wanted to defend herself, out of habit. It was how things were between them: he criticized her or she criticized him and they argued. Right or wrong didn’t come into it. Not giving in was what mattered. You didn’t give an inch. You stood your ground. Sometimes she felt like Tom Petty singing ‘I Won’t Back Down’.

But not this time. What could she say? It’s not my fault? It
was
her fault, at least partially, and partially was enough. Maybe she had an excuse. Maybe she’d been unlucky. Maybe she could have been late a thousand times and each time Anna would have been sitting there with Mrs Jameson, eating a biscuit, and telling the teacher about her favourite place to go on the weekend. All those things could be true, but they didn’t alter the only truth that made any difference: if she had been on time, Anna would be asleep in her bed right this minute.

So Brian was right. Cruel to point it out, but right. Perhaps if they’d been happily married, perhaps, even if they’d been unhappily married but planning to stay that way, he would have been the one to support her, to make her feel less wretched, but she had told him she wanted him out of her life, and with that she had given up any right to his support.

She reached for her car keys. Her hands struggled to pick them up. She wiped her eyes clear of tears.

‘I’m going out,’ she said.

He didn’t reply. He just leaned on the kitchen counter and looked out of the window and sipped his scalding tea.

iii.

Reminders of Anna were everywhere.

Her booster seat in the rear-view mirror. A thin summer raincoat in the footwell. Biscuit crumbs on the backseat.

Brian had told her off for letting Anna eat in the car, for making such a mess.

Who cares now?
Julia thought.
Who cares about crumbs or mess or late bedtimes? We spend so much time worrying about the little things, when they don’t matter. And we let the things that do matter slip.

When she turned the ignition a CD of kids’ songs came on. She sat back and listened.

Do your ears hang low?

Do they waggle to and fro?

Can you tie them in a knot?

Can you tie them in a bow?

Anna had found that song particularly amusing, and had developed a dance in which she rocked from foot to foot and mimed tying her dangly ears in knots and bows.

Julia pulled into the street. There was a light on in the house next door, and she saw the upstairs curtain twitch. Mrs Madigan: a village stalwart in her nineties, who had an opinion on everything, and who expected, by virtue of her age – as though age conferred wisdom – that people would listen to it. She was known to be both ‘formidable’ and ‘quite a character’ and widely surmised to have a heart of gold beneath her tough exterior. People often commented on how it must be ‘interesting’ or ‘fun’ or ‘quite something’ to have her as a neighbour. Julia didn’t tell them what she really thought: it was a pain. Once you got to know her you realized that Mrs Madigan’s public persona of forthright grumpiness did not, in fact, hide a beneficent and kindly old woman; it hid a sour and angry old woman. She didn’t like it when Anna was noisy in the garden and she thought nothing of shouting at her over the fence, or of complaining to Julia or Brian about their hooligan child. She would ask Brian to help when something broke in her house, and then, when he finished whatever DIY task she had assigned him, she would complain that he had done it wrong, and then ostentatiously get a tradesman in to redo the work. Above all, she complained incessantly to Julia about her two children and many more grand and great-grandchildren, and how they were selfish and lazy and ignored her.

Julia didn’t blame them. She would have ignored her too, had she been able to do so.

The neighbours on the other side –a childless couple in their late-forties – were much better. They didn’t have much to do with them, which Julia was becoming convinced was the key to good neighbourly relations. Good fences make good neighbours, the saying went, and it was true.

Julia wasn’t sure where she was going, but she found herself heading for the local playground. It was a pretty unprepossessing place: just a set of swings, a slide, and a roundabout on a patch of grass at the end of a residential street, but Anna and she went there often when they had an hour or so to fill. The police had checked it, but it was possible that, since then, Anna had found her way there.

Possible. Not likely.

She kept her headlights on full beam and drove slowly, scanning the streets for any sign of her daughter.

At the park, she switched off the engine and the lights cut out. She was glad; she’d found that the yellow pools disturbed her. They illuminated only a portion of the world and it reminded her of the futility of this search. Anna could be anywhere, but Julia, like the beams of light, could look in only one place at a time.

She was reminded of a conversation she’d had with a friend, Prissy (short for Pricilla, a boarding school nickname used only by her intimates, and retained as the name had a certain irony: Prissy had shown herself to be anything but, a reputation sealed by an affair with a young teacher, Sarah, who lost her job over it). The conversation had taken place a year or so back, just after a teenage girl had been found in the basement of a house only a few streets away from her home in some dusty Middle-American city. She’d been there for a decade; Prissy had declared that, if her son (she had a son the same age as Anna) went missing there was no chance he could be hidden for so long so close to home, because, she, Prissy, his mother, would search every house in the vicinity from top to bottom, whether the occupants and police liked it or not. Julia had agreed. She would do the same. It was an easy thing to say, fired by indignant parental fervour, and it carried with it an implicit criticism of the mother of the American girl. Why hadn’t she done that? A good mother would have.

A good mother would have been there to pick up her daughter, as well.

It wasn’t as easy as she and Prissy had imagined, however. Firstly, there were a lot of houses, and secondly, it seemed that the police and occupants had more say over who entered them than expected.

But at least she was doing something.

‘Anna!’ she called. ‘Anna!’

She did not have a torch, so she used the one on her iPhone and swept the park. The swings were empty, the slide a silhouetted dinosaur.

‘Anna!’ she shouted. ‘Anna!’

‘Who’s Anna?’ a voice said, the accent strong:
ooze Annoh?

She jumped and pointed the beam in the direction of the voice. Two teenage boys were sitting on the roundabout. What the hell were they doing out here at this time? One of them was holding a bottle. He took a swig from it and passed it to his friend, then lit a cigarette.

She smelled the smoke: make that a joint.

‘My daughter,’ she said.

‘Is she cute?’ the boy with the joint asked.

‘Yes,’ Julia said, then realized her error. ‘I mean, no, not in the way you mean. She’s five.’

‘
You’re
cute,’ the boy said. ‘You’re all right, anyway. Want to suck me cock?’

‘What?’ Julia said. ‘No!’

‘Then what are you doin’ here, at this time?’ the boy said. ‘That’s why people come down here.’

As far as Julia knew people came down here to play on the swings with their children, but apparently not. When Anna was home she doubted they would be playing here again.

The other boy, the one who had not spoken, stood up. He was older than she’d thought, maybe nineteen, tall, and thin, and had a pock-marked face, the result of bad, untreated acne at some point in his early teens. He sniffed, then hawked and spit on the roundabout.

They were
definitely
not coming down here again.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come wi’ me.’ He grabbed his crotch and thrust it towards her, then nodded towards the bushes. ‘You can have some of this. You’ve been missing it, I can tell. Don’t get much off your old man, right? I’ve met some of your type before, not so old you’ve give up, still need your hole busted from time to time.’

His voice was flat and toneless and he was staring at her, his face drawn in a slight sneer, as though he was looking at something faintly disgusting.

He took a step towards her. It was quick, and purposeful.

‘Come on,’ he urged, ‘you’ll like it once we get started.’

And then she imagined Anna, wandering into this park and encountering the pock-marked boy and his friends, or people like them.

If that was the world her daughter was in, she didn’t stand a chance.

Julia turned and ran towards her car. Thankfully, she’d not locked the door, so she was inside in a couple of seconds. She slammed it behind her and locked it, then fumbled in her pocket for her keys.

They weren’t there.

She put on the cabin light and looked around. She checked her coat pockets again, then patted her jeans. Nothing.

There was a knock on the window. The pock-marked boy had his face pressed to the glass. He waggled his tongue from side to side in a gross imitation of oral sex.

‘Well, well,’ he said, his voice faint through the window. ‘Seems you might have a little problem, doesn’t it?’

iv.

He pulled his face back an inch from the window. There was a smear where his lips had been pressed to the glass.

‘Want these?’ He held up Julia’s car keys. ‘Dropped ’em, didn’t you?’

‘Give them to me,’ Julia said.

‘Open your door. They’re all yours.’

She picked up her phone.’ I’m calling the police.’

The boy shrugged. ‘I’ve done nowt wrong,’ he said.

She dialled 999, her eyes fixed on the boy’s pock-marked face. She thought he would leave now that she had the phone to her ear, but whether he did or not she wanted the police there. She was not getting out of the car on her own.

The boy examined the keys. He held a Yale between his thumb and forefinger, the bunch dangling from it.

‘This your house key?’ He unwound it from the bunch. He threw the rest of the keys into a bush and put the Yale in his pocket. ‘Maybe I’ll pay you a visit.’

‘Hello,’ Julia said, when the operator answered. ‘Police, please.’

The pock-marked face disappeared. She heard laughter as the boys went back through the gate into the park.

When the police dispatcher came on the line, Julia was shaking so violently she found it hard to keep the phone to her ear.

‘I need help,’ she said. ‘I’m at Queen Mary’s Park.’

One of the police officers found the house key by the roundabout, where the pock-marked boy had thrown it. He handed it to Julia. She didn’t like to touch it. It felt contaminated.

‘Looks like they were just trying to scare you,’ he said. ‘A lot of them are like that. Big talkers.’

He took out his notepad. ‘Can you describe them?’ he asked.

Julia had a clear picture – a picture she thought she wouldn’t forget in a hurry – of a sneering, acne-scarred face at her car window. She described it to the officer.

‘Sounds like Bobby Myler,’ he said. ‘And sounds like the kind of stunt he’d pull.’

‘You know him?’ Julia asked.

‘He’s what we call “known to the police”’, the other officer said. ‘In other words he’s a bloody yob who’s been in trouble since he first drew breath.’

‘Can you arrest him then?’ Julia said.

The officer pursed his lips. ‘What did he actually do?’ he said. ‘He was an offensive little turd, for sure, but he didn’t touch you. And you dropped your keys. ’

‘So he just gets away with it?’

‘I’m afraid so. I’m sorry. I wish it were different, I really do.’ The officer folded his notebook open. ‘Just for the record,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Julia Crowne.’

‘And what brought you to the park at this time of the morning?’

‘I’m looking for my daughter.’

His hand paused mid-word and he looked at her. ‘That’s your daughter? The little girl who’s missing?’

‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

He nodded. ‘There are a lot of people looking,’ he said. ‘We’ll find her, Mrs Crowne.’

He did a good job of reassuring. Julia supposed he’d had plenty of practice. But she didn’t believe him. In between hearing that she was Mrs Crowne, mother of Anna Crowne, and his smile of professional reassurance, there was a gap. It was a fraction of a second, but it was enough for an emotion to cross his face, and it was the worst emotion a mother in her position could witness: it was pity.

So it’s you who’s going to go through hell
, his expression said.
God help you.

And then it was gone, replaced by that studied reassurance, but she’d seen it. The same thing had happened once before so she knew what she was looking for. The first time she’d been pregnant she and Brian had gone to a gynaecologist for the first scan. A nervous first-timer, she’d pressed for it as early as possible, and they’d gone at eleven weeks.

Well
, the doctor, a woman in her fifties who smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke, had said,
the baby is due on February 3
^rd
.

No,
Julia replied
, it’s mid-January. I got pregnant on April 24
^th
. I was ovulating then.