Elizabeth Is Missing (18 page)

“What’s got into you?” Helen cries. She has dropped the phone and stands back against the window seat.

I stamp on a glass and kick my alarm clock across the room. I can feel the pulse in my neck beating, and there’s a pressure building in my head. I close my eyes and shriek.

“Mum? Stop it. What’s happened?”

Helen skirts round and puts her hands on my shoulders, but I throw her off and hit out, catching her in the stomach. “Get out!” I shout. “Get out of my house!” I pace across the room and she backs away quickly, clutching her middle, her mouth trembling.

“I can’t leave you like this,” she says. “Mum?”

I scream again and push over a chair. And then she’s gone. And my alarm clock is broken. The wires exposed, the tiny cogs biting into the carpet. I must have dropped it. I’ll have to tell Helen to get me a new one. There’s a glass broken, too. Little shards of it scattered over the rug. I find a piece of newspaper in the wastepaper bin and gather the bits up, pricking myself several times. The paper begins to darken, drawing the blood into pretty patterns around the margins. I try to piece the shards together, and I feel for a minute the sun on my back and the grass under my knees, and I listen for the pigeons’ breathy coo. I expect Ma to come out in a minute and tell me to throw the pieces in the runner-bean trench. But of course she never will, and I twist the paper closed, carrying the broken contents out of the room and up the stairs. Into my room. I shut the door and sit down at my dressing table and suddenly I can’t think what I’m doing here. I was going to the kitchen, wasn’t I? I let out a little laugh at myself. How silly to end up in the wrong room. I must be going mad.

I walk back down and put the newspaper in the bin. I push it right down as far as I can. I had to be careful to put anything dangerous well out of reach when Tom and Helen were small because, once, Helen got into a neighbour’s bin and found a cake that had been laced with rat poison. She ate it and she got Tom to eat it, too, though he was the elder and should have known better. I thought they’d both die and was out of my mind with worry, and I had to make them both be sick, pushing a spoon down along their tongues till they gagged and brought it all up. I remember their little hands hitting at me and then the terrible sound of their retching. But, thankfully, they were all right afterwards. I got them to a doctor and he said there was no damage done; I’d acted quickly enough.

Of course I was upset with Tom, but I was angry with Helen. She was always up to mischief, her fingers grubby from mucking about in the garden, digging up worms and making snail farms. Tom was more inclined to lie on the sofa, reading car magazines. Irritating when I wanted to vacuum the cushions, but not half so difficult to keep an eye on. I stayed angry at Helen for a long time after the cake incident, and laughed when Patrick made jokes, even years later, about not being able to trust anything she’d baked. “You’re not trying to poison us, are you?” he’d say, just when she would be proudly presenting her pineapple upside-down cake or her banana bread. “Because you’ve tried that once before.” Young girls don’t appreciate that kind of teasing, and there were often tears. But even that was a relief. To think they’d both been in danger like that and yet here they were, still with us, fussing over teenage romances and getting into trouble at school and making a mess of my sitting room.

Someone’s still making a mess of my sitting room. There are things all over the floor, and my coffee table lies on its side. I pick it up and put everything straight, the pens back in their pots and the notes in neat piles. Someone’s unplugged the phone and I have to stoop awkwardly to get the wire into the wall. I’m shaking as I bend down, and I feel as if something has happened. The skin in my throat is tight, the way it is after you’ve been crying, or shouting. Elizabeth says her son has a habit of shouting, has a terrible temper on him. It makes me sorry for her. Helen gets cross sometimes, but not like that, and Patrick could be brusque, but he wouldn’t yell and scream like some husbands. My parents never shouted either, even when I’d done something really naughty like jump in the river at the Pleasure Gardens. Frank shouted at me once, though.

It was at his house. Sukey and I were making a blind for the kitchen. “To keep the mad woman from peering in?” I’d asked, but Sukey didn’t seem so worried about her at that time, and she told me off again for calling her mad. Said she was a “poor thing,” said we were lucky not to be the same way. She’d not been really angry, though, and had put my hair up like the NAAFI girls’, rolled round an old stocking-top, and had even let me wear some of her perfume. I was teaching her to sing “I’ll Be Your Sweetheart” while we knelt on the floor, carefully cutting the precious material. We’d sewn the little pockets for the dowelling rods and were sliding a length of wood into each when the front door crashed open.

Frank’s face, red beneath the tan, seemed to appear feature by feature as he swayed along the hall towards us. He staggered across the kitchen to the sideboard, knocking over a chair, and I watched in horror as he picked up a knife. But he was only threatening a piece of cheese, lying half wrapped in paper, which Sukey had refused to let me finish off at lunch.

“No, Frank,” Sukey said, getting up and standing in front of me. “I’m saving that.”

“What? This again?” he said, his voice thick and slurred beyond her skirt. “Can’t I have a bit of cheese in my own home? Who are you saving it for?”

“Not
for
anyone. But what would you know about keeping house, eh? I’m the one who works out the meals, so leave it to me. I am your wife.”

“My little wife,” he said, letting the knife clatter on to the plate, his voice sharpening for a moment. “My lovely little little little little little wifey.” His arm curled round Sukey’s waist, and she tried to push him away.

“Frank, you’re standing on the blind fabric,” she said. “Get off it.”

He looked down at his feet for a few seconds, his fair hair flopping over one eye, and he saw me.

“Got Maudie here, too, have we?”

I nodded, shuffling back against the cupboard out of his way.

“Making a blind?” he said, looking at his feet again.

I held up the length of dowelling rod in evidence, and he let go of Sukey.

“How d’you make a Venetian blind, eh, Maud?” he said, leaning a hand on the counter behind me and bending very close, his breath like the waft from a pub door.

I couldn’t guess. I felt too scared to breathe. The arm that had been around Sukey’s waist flexed above my head.

“Poke him in the eyes.”

The answer seemed horrible to me, and I shuffled further away, but Frank grinned, his teeth bright and keen in his tanned face.

“Eh, Sukey?” he said, pushing himself upright. “Venetian. Blind?”

“It’s not a Venetian blind, though, is it?” she said, righting the chair. “It’s a Roman blind.”

“Still works. Here, Maud. How d’you make a Roman blind?”

“Shut up, Frank,” Sukey said. “You’re drunk.” She pushed him sideways and finally succeeded in getting him off the fabric.

“Drunk? Not a chance.” He shook his head and had to reach a hand towards the counter again.

I stared up at him, trying to find the familiar Frank in this vague and fevered version. He noticed my stare and made a face, putting out his tongue and flaring his nostrils. Somehow he looked more like himself, and I laughed despite my fear.

“Yes, you are. Go to bed,” Sukey said.

“Only if you come with me.”

“Ugh, Frank, Maud’s still here. She doesn’t need to hear your filthy talk. Go to bed. Sleep it off. Go on.”

“Send your bloody little princess home then, if she’s too good to be in the same room as me.” He made another face, but this time I didn’t laugh and he turned away.

“Don’t start shouting, Frank,” Sukey said. “And don’t start that stuff again. Of course you’re good enough.”

“That baby-faced lodger of yours doesn’t think so. Always hanging about.”

“What do you care what Doug thinks of you?”

“I just don’t get what you’ve got to talk to him about all the time,” Frank said. “And I know he goes back and bad-mouths me to your parents. Your dad doesn’t like me as it is.”

Sukey sighed and turned to me. “P’raps you should go home, Mopps,” she said. “We’ll finish the blind another day.”

“Yeah. There’ll be many more days for finishing off blinds and chatting about what might have been.”

I couldn’t understand what he was talking about, but I stood up and slipped past him as quick as I could, and was almost at the front door when I remembered my coat. I tiptoed back down the hall, but Frank saw me.

“What the hell are you still doing here?” he shouted, his face truly contorted now. “Go on, bugger off!”

I gave up my coat and ran out of the house, crying until I reached the Avenue, where I stopped and wiped the tears away. Then I walked round and round Ashling Crescent until I was calm enough to go home.

S
omething’s happened. I have to get up, get out, get to Sukey. I pull on a man’s striped shirt and worn, unfamiliar trousers and push things into the pockets: tissues, a roll of Polo mints, a plastic pearl necklace. I wonder if this is a dream. I don’t think it is. My bedclothes are all of a tangle, but I can’t waste time straightening them, and I start to write a note, but I can’t think what to say. The stairs creak as I creep down and the front-door latch clanks noisily in my hand. I pause on the threshold, the muscles of my face taut, but everything is quiet as I set off towards Frank’s house.

The air outside is cold and fresh and almost sweet; I’m enjoying the feel of it on my tongue, and several minutes of walking go by before I realize I’ve lost my way, that this is not the road I thought. The next street is just as strange, and my heart gives a thud in my chest. I’m running out of time. I’ve got to get somewhere, or to someone. It’s urgent. My footsteps echo slightly in the dark and a fox runs out in front of me. He stops and looks at something on the other side of the road. I stop, too.

“Hello, fox,” I say, but he carries on staring at the opposite pavement. “Fox?” I say again, and wave my arms. For a moment it seems really important to get his attention, to have my presence acknowledged. I rummage in my pocket, working a mint out of its packet, and throw it on to the middle of the tarmac. It lands with a ticking bounce at the fox’s feet, and he turns, a point of light gleaming from each of his eyes. “Hello, fox.”

He runs off, and I walk on. It’s these acres of new houses that have me confused, I see now, though how I got here I don’t know. I’ll never find my way with the roads in a jumble like this. And I’m exhausted. I can’t have walked very far, but my legs are heavy and my back’s sore. I feel like an old woman. I work another Polo from its wrapper and throw this one on to the pavement behind me. It shines white, bright on the dark stones. At least I’ll know if I’m going round in circles. A car stops at the end of the road and a man gets out. He wanders towards me, his hands hooked in his belt, his shadow reaching out from the car lights. I begin to back away.

“Where are you going, love?” he says. He’s looking right at me. I can tell even though his face is just a silhouette.

“Home,” I call as I turn away, trying to force my legs to go faster. “My mother’s waiting up.”

The man makes a noise, a sort of snort. “Is she?” he says. “And where’s home?”

I don’t know. For a second I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, I say to myself, I wouldn’t tell him anyway. I wouldn’t tell him anyway and I’ll remember in a minute. When I get on the right path, I’ll remember. Soon the man is a good way behind me, still standing by his car. I turn down a street, then another, walking without seeing. On a pavement I find a Polo mint, white and shining in the night. I bend to pick it up and see a big turreted house in the distance. Perhaps I’ll recognize something when I reach it. I look into the front garden as I get near, but it’s just a dark space.

“Thought home was the other way?”

A man leans against a car. The lights glint off his fair hair, and that makes me think of Frank. He’s waiting for me. But he should be waiting for Sukey. “What are you doing here?” I say.

“Taking you to the station. Car’s waiting.”

“Station?” I ask as I get in. There’s a mint in my hand and I pop it into my mouth. “Are we getting a train?”

The man doesn’t answer me but asks if I want the window up or down.

“Down,” I say, putting my hand on the inside of the door. I want to leave something behind me, something to tell people I was here. The mint slides against my tongue and I spit it out as far as I can into the night. The man laughs and I laugh with him. “Frank,” I say. “Frank.”

I walked right into him one day after school. He was standing by Mrs. Winners’s hedge, looking towards our house, and he turned round as we collided, putting out his hands.

“Maud,” he said. “I was just thinking about paying you lot a visit.” There was a deep dent in the hedge where he had been leaning into it and I thought he must have been waiting there for a long time.

“How are your parents?” he asked, and I opened my mouth but found I was unable to make any sort of expression, and I wondered if I was imagining him.

“They haven’t heard from Sukey, then?”

I shook my head and studied his face. I suppose I wanted to see if he looked guilty. But he only looked shabby. There was stubble on his chin and his hair was a bit longer, his clothes were crumpled and grubby. I was shocked at the change. Where were the perfect creases down the front of his trousers, the starched collars, the shined shoes?

“Can’t understand it,” he said, leaning over me, his hands on my shoulders. “I mean, if she was going off somewhere you’d think she’d tell her husband, wouldn’t you?”

The words gave me a little flutter of hope. I thought of Sukey hiding from Frank. Hiding away somewhere safe. Of course she wouldn’t contact anyone if she was hiding.

“But I s’pose she might tell her sister, mightn’t she?” Frank looked down at me with his usual smile, eyebrows raised, a kind of forced gleam in his eye. It looked wrong on this new, scruffy face. His hands pressed down heavily on my shoulders and I realized he was studying me, too. “Did she tell you things, Maudie? Things about going away? About me? About anyone else?”