Elizabeth Is Missing (27 page)

“And these are your details,” she says, taking the note. “Thank you. I’ll keep them there. See, I’ve written them in already. Okay, and is Elizabeth microchipped?”

I don’t recognize the word. I shrug.

“We’ll leave that out, then. Never mind. Hmmmn. It’s not very detailed so far, and it seems funny to put her name in when there’s no collar. I mean, she’s hardly going to identify herself, is she?”

“No,” I say, laughing, but I don’t quite understand the joke.

“Well, have a read over what we’ve got.”

I look at the sheet. It’s a strange jumble of words and lines and I’m not even sure which bit I’m supposed to read. But there is a title: “Missing Cat.”

“I don’t want this,” I say. “I don’t want this word.” I put my finger over it, trying to lift it off the page.

She waits for me to move my finger before she reads it. “‘Cat’? But I really would advise . . . You see, we don’t mention it anywhere else.”

“Don’t we? All the same, I don’t think ‘cat’ is right.”

She crosses the word through. “Up to you,” she says.

“I’d like her last name, too. Markham. Elizabeth Markham.”

The woman makes a face, one fat cheek bunching, but she writes the name down anyway. “Part of the family, is she? Wait.” She stops suddenly and covers the paper with both hands. “We are looking for a cat, aren’t we?”

“Cat.” I can’t think what it means. “I don’t think that’s the right word. Cat. No, I don’t think so.”

“Oh, sorry, love. Elizabeth Markham. It’s a person, isn’t it? You must have thought I was off my rocker. Right. Let’s begin again.”

She pulls out a new sheet of paper and writes something down. I show her my phone number.

“I’ve kept it simple,” she says. “I’m assuming it’s an old friend? Yes? At the moment it would cost seven pounds twenty-two, but if we put it in a box with the phone number up large, it’ll only be four pounds fourteen, don’t ask me why. Something about price brackets. I just do what the computer tells me. That suit?”

I feel a bit stunned. The numbers roll around in my head. I get my purse ready, but I can’t work out what she’s asking for, or what I have.

“All right if I have a look?” She takes the purse and counts some coins on to the desk. “There. Four fourteen, okay? It’ll be in this weekend.”

And somehow I’m out on the pavement. Rain is coming down, slanting over the road, and drops hit my face like pinpricks. A lorry roars by and the noise of it makes me shudder. I look along the street after it, not sure where I am. All the buildings seem to be made of glass, reflecting the traffic back at me. Drizzly, wavering traffic. There’s something hanging from my wrist, heavy and swinging. I can’t think with it swinging there. I try to shake it loose, but it won’t come off.

A car swerves round me, beeping, screeching, as I start to cross the street and I stumble on to the curb, clutching at my cardigan. It’s soaking, and so are my trousers. I feel up and down my body, squeezing the fabric of my clothes. I’m wet through; there are drips running from my hair and my toes squelch when I move. The rain seems to send the smell of petrol up into the air, and I stand, shivering, looking out at the wet road, where rainbows of oil shimmer. I was on a curb like this when the mad woman chased me. Hitting and shouting at me. The thought makes me hunch in anticipation. I start to take off my wet things, pulling my sleeves over my hands, and an umbrella slips off my wrist. It rolls on to the road and a car whizzes past, sending it hurtling into the middle. I’m too frightened to go after it but look at the umbrella where it lies and think about the shock of the bang! on my shoulder and the way the mad woman shouted.

I thought at the time I couldn’t hear her words, but now I find I can remember them clearly. “Saw you,” she said. “In the car with Frank. Playing at being her. Wearing her lipstick.” I rub at my mouth now: the sleeve is wet, but so is my face. “You can’t replace her. You can’t ever replace her.” And then I ran into the kitchen and Ma went out to tell her off, to tell her I was too young to be knocked down by a bus. And Sukey said, “Thank you, Mopps,” and kissed me on the head.

No, that’s a jumble, but I can’t work out where I’ve gone wrong. There’s a ribbon by my feet. A green, checked ribbon. It could be Sukey’s. The ends are frayed and the silk is stained and grubby, but I wind it carefully round my finger as I walk along. My pocket’s full of something. Seeds of some kind. I must have brought them for a snack. I pop one in my mouth, but it doesn’t taste quite right and I spit it out.

At the end of the road I find a mass of people huddled beneath a glass ceiling which stretches over part of the street. They are holding shopping bags and looking up at the sky. The rain patters above them, the sound mixing with their chatter. I think I hear someone call “Grandma.” I walk under the edge of the shelter and hear it again.

“Grandma! Grandma!”

Katy is tugging at my cardigan, her eyes big. “What big eyes you have,” I say. But it’s the wrong way round: she should be telling me.

“You’re soaked,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, Katy,” I say, clutching at her hand, limp with relief. “I don’t know where I am. I’m so glad you’re here, because I’m lost, and Katy, I don’t know where I live. I can’t remember. It’s really terrible.”

A couple of other teenagers are sitting on the back of a bench, their feet on the seat. One has a bright streak in her hair.

“I’ve got to take her home,” Katy calls to them. “Come on, Grandma.”

She takes her jacket off and puts it round my shoulders, rubbing my arms. I start to feel wobbly. I’m tired and want a sit-down.

“Shall we get something to drink?” she says, pointing out a café.

It’s one of those dimly lit coffee shops where sleek-haired women sit at tables in the window and a man with suede shoes lounges on a leather sofa. Katy opens the door for me and waits, her head on one side.

“Aren’t you coming?” she says when I pause.

I peer in through the window again and scrabble in my bag for something, anything. There’s a bit of seed in my pocket and I arrange it carefully on one of the tables outside. No one is sitting there, with it being so wet. Inside, it’s very noisy and smells of damp clothes and hot milk. The people behind the counter seem to be doing a sort of dance and the customers shout instructions for it. I would be too shy to come to a place like this usually. But Katy seems to belong here with her piercings and bright clothes. She is even wearing suede shoes.

“What would you like?” Katy says, already in a queue.

“Tea.”

“Oh, Grandma, the tea won’t be very good here,” she says. “How about a latte or something?”

I say, “All right, I’ll have that,” and go to sit in a big armchair, watching her order and pay and come towards me. If I look away will I forget who she is?

“Here we are then.” She puts the cups down.

My drink has a sort of foam on top. I’ve seen her drinking something similar. “Milkshake or something, is it?” I say.

“No, latte. Milky coffee.”

So that’s what she meant. It’s quite a relief. I never did like milkshakes. There was a place that did them on the pier when I was young. It was like an American diner, only it served tea and fish and chips as well. We used to go there after the pictures.

Katy pats a wodge of paper napkins over my head. For a moment I’m taken aback, outraged.

“Dry you off a bit,” she says.

Am I wet then? I look out of the window. It’s raining. And now I can see that this is the street where the ABC Cinema was. “Tub Street,” I say, nodding at it.

Katy stops her patting. “No, Grandma. Bath Road.”

I smile to myself. Tub Street, that’s what Douglas called it. He went to see some film about gangsters not long after he moved in as our lodger, and he started making up nicknames for the local roads after that. So Blackthorn Road became Tree Street and Heron Court became Bird Street and Portland Avenue became Stone Street. Dad asked him one day why he couldn’t leave the bloody names as they were. He rarely got cross with Douglas, but I suppose as a postman he felt that the names of streets were sacred in some way.

Tub Street’s changed an awful lot. They must have pulled down the cinema to make room for these ugly great buildings. No wonder I didn’t recognize it. The place I knew has been buried. Soil upon soil.

“It’s such a shame, Katy,” I say.

“I know, Grandma, I know.”

She’s humouring me. A wet lump of tissues folds into itself on the table. It looks like that modelling-clay stuff the children used to play with.

“I can’t get hold of Mum,” Katy says, holding something to the side of her face. “She’s probably on the phone to the police or something.”

“What’s that you’ve got against your ear? A shell? Who is it you’re listening to?” I say. Douglas had a shell, I remember. I watched him discover it in Sukey’s case: he felt all around the edges and found it in the lining. And then he held it to his ear and her voice came out and she told him how she’d met the man she was going to marry.

“Handy,” Katy says. “But this is just a phone, I’m afraid. And at the moment I’m listening to a woman telling me the number I have dialled is busy. Never mind. We’ll go home in a minute. After we’ve drunk our coffee.”

“Coffee is good for the memory,” I say.

She smiles and sits back. I think of telling her that I’ve forgotten why we’re here. But she looks so happy, and I’m worried about how she might react. She curves her hands round her cup and sips. Her nail varnish is chipped. The nails are very short and I wonder if she bites them or if she’s just broken them all. Broken them and left them in a box. Every little nail in a separate little box.

“Your coffee’s going cold,” Katy says.

I have curled my fingers tightly into the palm of my hands, protecting the nails, forcing them against the skin. It’s an effort to uncurl them, but I hook one finger into the tiny handle, which, as it turns out, is not much use. The cup is huge and heavy and I spill quite a lot of coffee on the shiny wooden table.

“Whoa!” Katy says, springing forward to hold the cup steady. Helen would make an irritated noise now, but Katy laughs.

“Bit too big for your hands, isn’t it?” she says, and makes me feel delicate rather than clumsy. “Let me get you something.”

She pushes the lump of Play-Doh into the spill and goes off. Brown seeps into the white like a sugar cube held on the surface of a cup of tea. Katy comes back with a tiny cup.

“It’s for espresso, really,” she says. “But we can just decant a bit at a time.”

She pours some coffee into the little cup and hands it to me, grinning. I sip the warm liquid, feeling like a giant in a fairy tale. I can’t help smiling at her. When I’ve finished my cup she refills it. I wish I could remember why we’re here.

“We’ll go in a bit,” she says. “You’d better go to the loo, hadn’t you?”

I get up to do as she says. The Ladies’ door has a wooden cut-out of a girl on it. Inside, there’s an old woman, hunched into a cardigan. I step aside to let her pass, but she steps aside, too. I step back; so does she. I walk closer. It’s me in a mirror. I put a hand up to rub against the glass where my mouth is reflected, leaving a mark which makes it look as though I’m wearing smudged lipstick. I go hot at the sight, feeling embarrassed and uneasy, and I scrub at my mouth with the back of my hand. It’s awkward getting the cubicle door closed: I seem to have too many layers on, too much padding. Once I’m inside, though, I have the urge to stay. It’s cosy and safe in here, like my mother’s larder. And I remember a moment when the children were small, when I’d had enough, I remember I went and stood in the larder and shut the door.

Tom and Helen clattered about, calling for me, whining at each other, but I stayed very still and made no noise. I don’t know how long I would have stood there, perhaps not for very long, but Patrick came home unexpectedly and found me. “Hiding from our own children?” he said. He was shocked, but I don’t remember him being angry. And years later, when he’d been away working for months, he remembered my hiding place and pulled me into the larder for a kiss while the children were occupied with the gifts he’d brought home. But the two of us together were too noisy, laughing and knocking against the rows of jars, so the kids knew we were there and made yuck noises and told us we were too old to kiss each other.

“Grandma?” A familiar voice comes through the gaps between the door and floor. “Are you all right?”

I pull my layers straight and struggle out. It’s a girl. She looks like Helen, but younger, with blondish curls and a “piercing” in her lip. She smiles and I feel as though it’s a question.

“Shall we go?” she says. “Are you feeling up to it? Bus stop’s only across the road.”

A jacket is held up for me. It’s not mine, but I let her tuck it round my shoulders anyway, not liking to say anything. I hope the owner doesn’t mind me wearing it. Through the door is a coffee shop. I don’t recognize it, but this young Helen leads the way. She walks ahead, and puts a hand out behind her all the time to make sure I can keep up. I follow her to a bus shelter.

“Do you know,” I ask, when I’ve caught my breath, “where is the best place to plant summer squash?”

There’s a grin and a shrug. “I don’t know, you’d have to ask Mum. Though probably you shouldn’t. That question winds her up like crazy. It’s almost better than asking where Elizabeth is.” She gives a squeal of delight at the thought and helps me to sit down for a moment. We don’t have to wait long for the bus, and Helen, or whoever she is, finds my pass quite easily in my bag.

“Where are you taking me?” I say. I say it several times, but I can’t catch the answers. I hope we’re going somewhere with a kettle. This trip has really taken it out of me. I can’t wait for a cup of tea. We get off the bus and walk a few streets. There is rubbish all down the middle of the road. Mostly newspapers. I suppose the bin men have been this morning. Helen leads me up the side of a house. It’s a new house, newly built. I don’t like it. I never liked new houses. You don’t know what’s buried beneath them. Elizabeth has a new house; I never liked that, either.

“Helen, this isn’t right,” I say. “This isn’t my house.”