Then You Were Gone (30 page)

There was a pained concern in Geri’s eyes as she spoke. ‘I know, I’m sorry. I know that you’re not ready for someone else – Jesus, how could you be? And I know that you’re still grieving for your mum and dad, I just – just be careful, that’s all.’

I almost laughed. This guy had not seemed like somebody I felt I needed to be careful of. He had been so interesting and kind and – well, calm. And he had been the first person I had talked to in nearly two months who didn’t know about Mum and Dad, didn’t know about Stephen or Tim, who seemed interested in me – the old me – rather than ghoulishly fascinated by what a fantastic mess my life was. I just wanted to sit in a room with him for a couple of hours and talk and listen and pretend to be normal. I just wanted a friend. A handsome, charming friend.

*

He was waiting for me at the bottom of the library steps on the Friday night. Several of the other staff were leaving at the same time as me, heads down as they pulled their phones from their handbags or buttoned up their jackets, but some of them saw me greet him and walk off with him. I felt a warm glow that they might think this man was my boyfriend or my husband, that they might assume that my life was filled with the simple pleasures of a walk home on a chilly spring night with a tall, warm man.

‘So what’s your name, mystery man?’ I asked him. He was walking close beside me, his arms swinging loosely by his sides. I could have reached out and grabbed his hand if I’d wanted to. I wrapped my arms around myself, keeping my own hands safely out of reach.

‘Ed,’ he said, smiling and meeting my eyes.

It was quite something, that smile: broad and intimate and knowing and fond. The smile of an old friend you never expected to see again, who greets you by telling you that you haven’t changed a bit. It would warm the coldest of hearts, I felt sure, but of course all that was academic because my heart wasn’t simply cold but dead. The body, however, is something else altogether, and I began to feel a long-forgotten sizzle in my gut when his eyes started to twinkle. I looked away, worried that I was beginning to blush.

‘Have I ruined the mystique now?’ he asked.

‘A bit,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you ruin it a bit more and tell me where we’re going?’ We were heading away from the town centre, up South Parade. ‘I didn’t know there was anywhere up here.’

‘Neither did I until the other day. My sister took me.’ He steered me into a white building with a grey painted sign above it saying ‘Dove’. Inside was all smooth wood and dim light and art on the walls. Proper art as well, stuff that looked as if a real artist had painted it – well, either an artist or a school child using their non-dominant hand. There were a few other people sitting at tables nursing wine and real ale and Ed took a seat by the window.

‘I didn’t know places like this existed in Doncaster,’ I said lightly.

He didn’t smile. ‘It’s not all flat caps and slag heaps up here any more, you know.’

‘I know. I’m – ’ ‘I’m one of you’, I wanted to say. ‘Do you think I’m from somewhere else?’ I said instead.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No, I’m from here, from Donny.’

He didn’t look surprised so much as disbelieving. ‘Right. Sorry, I just assumed – I mean, you don’t have the accent or –’ he waved a hand up and down at me. ‘What I mean is, your clothes, your hair, it’s all – you do look very London.’

‘No!’ I was genuinely wounded. ‘I’m not London, not at all. Well, OK, you’re right, I do live in London – did live there – but I haven’t turned traitor. I’m still a Yorkshire lass really.’

He smiled. If it wasn’t too familiar-sounding I would say he was looking at me fondly. The fizzing started up again and I quickly dropped my gaze. ‘If you say so,’ he said. ‘Don’t remember meeting many like you when I was growing up though.’

‘See? I wouldn’t have guessed you were a native either. You don’t look like a typical Donny bloke to me.’

‘What do I look like?’

Like an overgrown student circa 1994, I wanted to say. And also a bit like Robert Redford. ‘Like a man of the world,’ I said instead.

That indulgent smile again. ‘I’d say you were a pretty good judge of character.’

‘Hmm.’ I made a non-committal noise. Judgement of character was not something I generally performed well at, as my track record would indicate.

We ordered drinks and I pulled an envelope from my bag. ‘This is what I’ve managed to find on your Peter Milton.’ I passed a few copies of newspaper articles across to him. ‘It’s not much, I’m afraid, just a few profile pieces done after he disappeared, which you’ve probably seen already. The only thing I found from before was him doing a sound bite from the picket line – there, you see?’ I pointed at the smallest cutting.

‘“Violence only dilutes our message,”’ Ed read aloud. ‘“If we want to be heard, we have to take ourselves seriously as well.”’ He nodded, his lips pressed together. ‘That’s quite eloquent.’ He sounded surprised, I noted smugly. Maybe I wasn’t the only one with snobbish preconceptions of Yorkshiremen.

I nodded. ‘There was this as well.’ I leafed through to find the print-out I was after. ‘From twenty years after he disappeared – the Free Press did a follow-up story. Turns out his family has never asked for him to be declared dead and no evidence ever turned up to suggest he is – no body’s been found that fits his description, nothing like that – so I suppose, technically, he’s still a missing person. I think they still live locally.’ I looked down at the piece of paper. ‘Bev Milton, it says here – that’s his mother. You should see if she’ll agree to an interview.’

He took the paper from me, barely glancing at it. ‘She’s dead,’ he said absently. ‘At least,’ he added, ‘I think I heard she’d died.’ He scratched his chin, not looking at me. ‘Anything else?’ he asked. ‘Anything that’s, you know, not in the public domain as such.’

‘Everything I can give you is in the public domain,’ I said coldly, ‘otherwise I wouldn’t be able to give it to you.’ I knew what he meant. He meant, did you find anything that I couldn’t have found by myself given an internet connection and twenty minutes with the newspaper archive?

‘There’s these,’ I said, pulling more sheaves of paper, ‘if this is the kind of thing you mean. Personnel files from Oldfield Main.’

He took them from me and squinted, trying to read the poor reproduction in the artfully dim light. I hesitated. Was it worth even giving it to him? I shook the last few papers out of the envelope. ‘There was this as well.’ I handed them to him. ‘It’s a personnel file from a different pit, Edgarsbridge over in Rotherham. It’s another Peter Milton. I’m fairly sure it’s another one anyway, the date of birth’s different. I just thought there was something a bit funny about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly but whoever it is, he only worked there from October 1984 for about six months.’

His eyes widened. ‘During the strike.’

I nodded.

‘A scab?’ He sounded as though he had heard of such people only in legend.

I shrugged. ‘Must have been. Look, like I said, it’s probably nothing to do with your Peter Milton. According to all this stuff he was a good union bloke, always on the picket lines, well thought of. And anyway, he was only twenty, not married, no kids. I mean, I know times were tough for all of them, but if he didn’t have to worry about putting a roof over his family’s head, then –’ I shrugged. ‘Seems as if he would have had a hard time justifying it to himself. Or anyone else.’ Ed was looking at me, his eyes slightly smaller than before, and he looked as though he wished I’d stop rambling on about this nonsense and let him do the detective work. I shrugged again, trying to signal that this line of reasoning was at an end. ‘Plus,’ I said, ‘the date of birth’s different, like I said. Chuck that bit out if you want.’

‘No, no,’ he took it from me. ‘It all helps. This is great, thanks, Tash.’ He was trying to make up for his faux pas earlier, I could tell, so I smiled.

‘Just doing my job.’

A waiter brought our drinks and I took the opportunity to break the tension with a change of subject. ‘So, man of the world, have you lived in Doncaster all your life?’

He smiled. ‘I was born here, lived here ’til I was eighteen, but you were right about the man of the world thing – I’ve lived abroad for the last ten years or so.’

‘Ah, hence the tan.’

He touched his face self-consciously. ‘Hardly a tan. More like all my freckles have finally merged into one.’

‘So, where abroad?’

‘Most recently, Dubai. I worked on an expat paper there.’ He shook his head. ‘A rag, an absolute rag. Full of gossip and so-called profiles of people bragging about how opulent their homes were. The paper’s gone tits up now, along with everything else over there. Seemed like a good time for a visit home. Plus, you know, I had some family stuff to sort out.’

I nodded. I bet it’s a woman, I thought. He’s just split up with someone and he’s nursing a broken heart. And then it occurred to me that this might be no bad thing. He wouldn’t want to get involved with me, which would stop me from getting involved with him.

‘So, what about you?’ Ed said. ‘You said you live in London? Bit of a commute, isn’t it, to Donny Local Studies Library every day?’

I sniffed a laugh. ‘I’ve been in London for fifteen years, I can’t suddenly stop thinking of it as where I live. I’ve come back up here for a while, and the job in Local Studies came up, so…’

‘And what brought you back here then, after all this time?’ He had that journalistic tone, probing but friendly, trying to get past banalities to the heart of the matter.

I took a large slug of wine. I could have taken my lead from him and put it all under the generic heading of ‘family stuff’, but I realised I wanted to tell him the truth. I hadn’t had to tell anyone yet, not anyone who hadn’t known me before.

‘I split up with my husband, then three days later both my parents were killed in a car accident.’

He put his drink down and reached over to grasp my hand. It was an instinctive gesture, a reaching out, and I felt absurdly grateful for it. His hand was warm, much warmer than mine. He opened his mouth, but for a second there were no words. Then he said, very quietly. ‘Oh, Jesus. Tash. I’m so sorry. What happened? With your parents I mean, not – not your husband.’

I half-laughed. ‘I’ll tell you that too if you want.’ I’ll tell you it all, then you can really decide if I’m worth it. ‘Mum and Dad were – they’d been over to Lincoln for the morning and on the way back –’ I took a steadying breath. I could tell the story if I just ploughed on, didn’t stop to think about what I was saying. ‘Well, there was some bloke in an Audi and he was on his phone –’ I saw Ed wince. ‘I know, so fucking predictable isn’t it? And anyway, he came round a bend too fast – the police reckon he was doing at least seventy-five – and there was a girl on a horse in front of him. He didn’t have time to slow down so he swerved onto the other side of the road, and that was –’ I swallowed. ‘That was them, coming the other way. The impact sent them skidding into the horse, and it crushed the car. And them.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said again. ‘Oh Jesus. Tash, how do you – how do you carry on?’

It was what everybody wanted to ask but nobody did. I think he had spoken without thinking, had blurted the thing that was at the front of his mind, and his face looked as though he wanted to take it back. I smiled and shrugged, trying to show him that it was OK that he’d asked me. ‘Oh, you know,’ I said, ‘it’s like everyone says: one day at a time.’

I wanted to tell him that I didn’t carry on, not really. That this wasn’t really me, sitting here, drinking wine, chatting. This was just the pieces all moving together in the semblance of a person. ‘If only you’d known me before,’ I wanted to say, and I didn’t just mean before Mum and Dad, I meant before Stephen – before Tim even. If you’d known me back then, then this could really have been something.

He nodded. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said again. It’s what everyone says, and it’s nice that they say it, but I usually assume they mean that they’re sorry that person has died, they’re sorry that they’re gone, and the sorrow is partly for themselves, for them missing them. Ed had never known Mum and Dad, he only knew me, and even then only barely. He meant he was sorry for me, that this had happened to me.

His warm hand was still on mine. I moved mine above his and squeezed it. ‘Thank you. He’s going to prison, the guy who did it. Not the first time he’d done something like this, apparently. First time he’d killed anyone though.’

‘He was OK then?’

I nodded. ‘Broken collar bone, whiplash, cuts and bruises. He was hanging upside down in his seat when the police got there; his phone was still in his hand.’ I paused to steady myself. I could hear my breath becoming shaky. ‘It always makes me think of a vampire bat.’ I laughed and he didn’t.

‘And what about the girl? And the horse?’

‘The horse had to be shot – or whatever they do to knackered horses now. It survived but it was never going to recover. The girl’s OK though. Her name’s Chloe, I went to see her in the hospital. She’s got a broken arm, a broken leg and a broken pelvis, but she didn’t have any head injuries: she got thrown into the verge, away from the horse and the cars. They say she’ll be fine eventually. Well, as fine as a twelve-year-old girl can be who’s seen two people and her horse die.’

He shook his head. ‘So, when was this?’

I hesitated a moment. ‘Three months ago. Three months tomorrow.’ I nodded. ‘Right, three months tomorrow. I’d almost forgotten it was coming up.’ Every day is an anniversary – the fourth day, the fortieth day, the fifth Saturday. Three months shouldn’t have been any worse, but it was. Three months is a quarter of a year.

‘Sorry,’ he said. Apparently he didn’t need me to explain. ‘You know, I’ve lost both my parents too.’ I felt my face brighten, much as I tried to stop it. Another orphan! Maybe he would understand. Maybe he’d tell me what to do, how to get through it. Maybe he’d tell me that it was all OK in the end, that eventually I, and the rest of my life, would go back to normal, to the way things used to be. ‘Not like you did,’ he went on. ‘Not so horrific. My dad had a heart problem nobody knew about. He dropped dead one day at work when I was seven.’