The Missing (15 page)

I don’t think I lost consciousness, but I was quite a long way from alert in the minutes after he struck me. I was floating, lost in a sea of agony, too shocked to put anything like a coherent thought together, and when hands grabbed
me
under the arms and hauled me to my feet, I didn’t try to resist. I lolled against the warm bulk behind me, as limp as a rag doll. My left arm hung down by my side, useless, and I couldn’t feel it. With strange detachment I wondered why that might be, while at the same time I knew that there was something much more important to worry about. Slowly, painfully, the distant alarm bells I could hear came closer and louder, until they were jangling in my mind, drowning everything else out.
I’m in danger
, I thought.
I should do something about that
.

While the bit of my mind that was still functioning properly tried to raise some sort of response from the rest of me, I was dimly aware that my attacker was moving. He – and I knew it was a man from his strength and his smell, a mixture of cigarettes and engine oil and hot, acrid excitement – dragged me into the shelter of the bushes, out of sight of anyone who might be passing. Panic flared then and I opened my mouth to scream, but he pounced like a cat, one fist jammed into my throat, pressing on my larynx. I couldn’t cry out. I couldn’t even breathe. White lights whirled and exploded behind my eyelids and I felt my knees start to buckle. If he hadn’t been holding me up, I would certainly have fallen.

After what seemed like centuries the pressure on my throat slackened and his hand dropped away. I pulled air into my lungs in huge, ragged gasps. When I could speak again, I croaked, ‘What … do you … want?’

I wasn’t really expecting an answer, and I didn’t get one. I felt rather than heard him laugh, hot breath against the side of my face, ruffling my hair. He ran a fingertip down
my
cheek and the stitching on his glove scraped against my skin. He held me by the jaw, forcing my head back so the tendons in my neck strained as he slid his other hand up my torso, to my chest, and cupped my left breast, squeezing gently at first, then hard enough to force a small noise from me that was half pain, half fear. I felt him start, surprised; he must have discovered that I was wearing nothing under my flimsy top. His hand went to his face and he dragged off his glove with his teeth; I barely had time to register it before he ran his hand under my top and began to fondle me again, his fingers damp on my skin. Tears sprang into my eyes. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me, in my own driveway, not six feet from the front door. I could try to fight back, but at that moment, I couldn’t see how. If I had been facing him … if my left arm wasn’t incapacitated … if I wasn’t trying to tackle someone far heavier and stronger than me … I might have had a chance.

‘Please,’ I said, and couldn’t think what to say next.
Please don’t kill me. Please don’t rape me. Please don’t hurt me
. He would if he wanted to. It was as simple as that.

With a tiny sigh, he slackened his grip on me. For a moment, I thought he was going to turn me around to face him as he put his hands on my shoulders. Then he was forcing me down, pushing me onto my knees. The weight on my right knee was agony and I was almost glad when he shoved me hard between the shoulder blades so that I fell onto my hands, my face inches from the earth. He stepped forwards and put his hand on the back of my head, pressing me into the ground. I inhaled tiny crumbs
of
soil and gagged, struggling upwards, beginning to panic again, but he forced my head back down.

‘Stay,’ came from behind me, as if I were a dog. His voice was no more than a whisper, unidentifiable, terrifying. I had no plan to disobey. I felt rather than heard him move away, with just a small scuffing sound as he paused to pick something up. My watch ticked under my cheek: ten seconds, twenty, a full minute, and I couldn’t hear him any more. I stayed where I was, shivering, until I was as sure as I could be that he was gone, but pushing myself up and looking around me was still the bravest thing I’d ever done. Relief coursed through me, followed almost immediately by the sharp thud of dismay: my attacker had gone, but so had my bag.

It seemed stupid to worry about a handbag when I had been afraid for my life only minutes before, but the discovery that it was gone made me angry – beyond angry: furious. My whole life was in that bag, not just replaceable things like bankcards and credit cards. There were photographs of my parents and my brother, my little diary and a notebook that I scribbled lists in. It had been stuffed with business cards, scraps of paper with phone numbers and addresses and other useful information that was now gone for good. Keys for both house and car: gone. There wasn’t even anything especially valuable in my bag; my phone was ancient and battered and essentially worthless. I could have told him if he’d asked. I would have given him the cash and the cards and wished him well. There had been no need for violence, none at all. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that he had enjoyed touching
me
– hurting me – and that the bag had been something of an afterthought. My face burned with shame at the memory of his hands on me; I felt filthy.

Slowly, painfully, I dragged myself to my feet. The horizon seesawed crazily and I shut my eyes, holding on to branches so that I didn’t pitch forward again. I knew that if I waited, things would improve, but I couldn’t wait. What if he came back? I forced myself to let go of the bushes and make for the wall of the house, and I got there with a sort of drunken stagger. Not elegant, but effective enough. I stood, clinging on to the brickwork, feeling feeble, and wondered if there was any chance at all that Mum was up. The living-room window was beside me, and there was a gap in the curtains; bluish light leaked out, suggesting that the TV was on. I edged along the wall and peered in. Mum was stretched out on the sofa, her face grey-blue in the flickering light from the TV. She was dead to the world. An empty glass stood on the coffee table in front of the sofa. I rapped on the window gently, knowing that she wouldn’t respond, hoping I might be wrong. Not a twitch.

I stood there for a moment, trying to think what to do, then turned very slowly to look behind me. I had been looking for my front-door key, hadn’t I? And I had found it just as I walked in through the gate, just before the shadows had come to malignant life. I crouched down and worked my way along the path, peering at the ground, and was rewarded by a metallic gleam under the bushes, where the front-door key had fallen out of my hand. A foot, mine or his, had trodden it into the dirt, and it was only
the
shiny fob on the keyring that was visible. I brushed the earth off it, feeling, in a small way at least, triumphant. He hadn’t got
that
, whatever else he’d managed to steal from me.

I hauled myself back to the front door and slid the key into the lock. My knee was really hurting now. I almost fell as I limped into the hall and shut the front door behind me, locking and bolting it before I did anything else. From the living room came the shrill music of late-night television; I couldn’t stand to leave it on, no matter how much pain I was in. I hobbled in and switched it off. In the silence that followed, Mum’s breathing sounded harsh. I looked down at her vacant face, her slack mouth and the glint of whitish eyeball where her left eye wasn’t properly closed, and I felt nothing: not hatred, not love, not pity. Nothing. Without affection, because it was there, I pulled a blanket off the back of the sofa and spread it over her. She didn’t stir.

The feeling was starting to come back to my left arm. I flexed my fingers gingerly and touched my hand to my shoulder a couple of times. Nothing was broken, I thought, though I couldn’t lift my arm higher than my shoulder, and it hurt so much that I was reluctant to try it again after the first time. I limped through to the kitchen and gulped down a glass of water. My throat ached. My knee throbbed. I found two dusty ibuprofen tablets in a drawer and swallowed them. It was about as much use as throwing an eggcup of water on a bonfire.

Crisis management next: I rang the card-cancelling services and my mobile phone operator. They made it so
easy
. Everything could be replaced in a couple of days. My phone would be upgraded; they’d send the new one out in the post. All done in about ten minutes, in the middle of the night, via call centres in India. No questions asked. Apart from the personal items I had lost, the only real problem was my car. The spare keys were in Manchester, with Aunt Lucy, kept safe from Mum because twice she’d taken my car in the middle of the night, when she’d been in no condition to drive. I couldn’t take the risk of having another set of keys in the house. I would have to ring Aunt Lucy in the morning and get her to post them to me. In the meantime, my car would have to stay where it was. At least it was legally parked. Getting a sheaf of parking tickets would have been the last straw.

I refilled my glass and sat down gingerly at the kitchen table. As I sipped the tepid water, I considered the following: if I called the police, there would be questions about where I had been, and what I was doing walking through the neighbourhood at that hour of the morning. Blake wouldn’t thank me if it came out that I had been with him. I would be mortally embarrassed to have to explain what I had been doing in the Shepherds’ street. So no police. And besides, they weren’t likely to find whoever had done the mugging. As far as I knew, they never managed to arrest anyone for crimes like that unless they actually caught them in the act.

Also, it was important not to overreact. So someone had stolen my bag. Big deal. He had probably wanted to sell the contents and buy drugs. Even in the suburbs, that wasn’t unusual. It was a casual crime. Nothing to worry
about
. A one-off. I could read more into it if I liked, but that wouldn’t get me anywhere. OK, so he had been outside my house. But that was just bad luck, wasn’t it? He couldn’t have been waiting for me specifically. I had blundered into his path and he had taken advantage of it. I would not, I decided, allow myself to worry about it. I would pick myself up and get on with it.

With that in mind, it was time to get going. I felt in desperate need of a long shower and a decent night’s sleep. Before I tackled the stairs, I paused in the hall, reluctantly, to inspect the damage. I flicked on the overhead light, which seemed very bright and unnecessarily harsh, and went over to the mirror that hung by the door. Steeling myself, I looked at my reflection for a long, awestruck moment: the dirt in my hair and on my face, the make-up that was streaking my cheeks, the mark on my cheekbone where he had pressed my face into the ground without pity.

Then I switched off the light and went to bed.

I am standing beside Mum, looking at tins of chopped tomatoes. They stretch away into the distance, different brands, different types of tomato. I don’t know which one to choose and neither, it seems, does Mum. She is just standing, looking at the labels. It’s the first time we have been to the supermarket since Charlie disappeared. We had a routine for the supermarket. Charlie pushed the trolley, Mum decided what to buy and I put it in the trolley. Afterwards, we had a bun and a drink in the little café opposite the supermarket. Mum had coffee. I don’t like the taste, but I love the smell, and I loved sitting in the café, watching all the people going into the supermarket and coming out again.

Today, the routine isn’t working. I am putting things in the trolley, then running around to push it, but Mum doesn’t seem to notice. She has walked past things we always buy, and picked up stuff that we wouldn’t usually eat – frozen
pizzas
, pre-cooked chicken in a foil-lined paper bag spotted with dark smears of grease, a net of limes, shrink-wrapped frankfurters that look like sweaty fingers. I’m afraid to say anything. She has been quiet today – sort of dreamy, lost in her own world. I prefer it to the snappish moods that make me scared to speak to her.

I stand beside her and hold on to the fabric of her skirt, just lightly, so that she doesn’t feel it, and I pretend that things are normal. Charlie is just around the corner. He’ll come back soon with boxes of cereal, and Mum will tell him off for getting the kind covered with chocolate, and we’ll go to the café and have drinks and laugh at stupid jokes and watch the people come and go.

A large lady pushes her trolley into the aisle, at the other end. The trolley looks heavy and the lady’s face is red. She stops short when she sees us standing there, stops and stares. I stare back, wondering what she wants. Mum is still gazing at the tins, not aware of the woman’s eyes on her or the look on her face. The lady pulls her trolley back a little, and leans around the corner, saying something that I can’t hear to someone I can’t yet see. There’s a pause, and then another woman appears, small and thin, also with a trolley. She stands beside the fat one, and they look funny, little and large, both
of
them with the exact same expression on their faces. Surprise, curiosity and disapproval. The two of them together are blocking the whole aisle with their trolleys, and I wonder how we are going to get past them. They are whispering to one another, still looking at us. I know that they have recognised us, I hear the words ‘poor little boy’ and ‘their own fault’, and Mum must have heard them too because her head snaps up, just as if she’s woken up. She looks down the aisle at them for a moment, and I glance up at her face. Her lips are tight. She looks angry.

‘Come on,’ she says to me, and grabs hold of the trolley, spinning it around smartly so we can escape the way we came. Her heels stab the floor, tap tap tap, and I hurry after her, into the next aisle where we don’t stop for anything, and the one after that where Mum barely hesitates as she scoops up a jar of instant coffee and drops it into the trolley without looking. I’m glad that we’ve left the women behind, but I can tell that Mum is furious. I trail along after her, running now and then to keep up. The bright colours of the packaging on the shelves are a blur as we hurry up and down the last few aisles, through the cleaning products and cosmetics, ending up slightly out of breath at a checkout.