she and Brian were in love. They were leaning into each other, his arm around her. He was not looking at the camera, but at his wife, his expression protective, caring, concerned. Loving, most of all. It was a photo of a man who adored his wife and the daughter they had made together.
When they’d left the nursery they’d hugged for a long time. It was funny what you remembered; Julia remembered the smell of the suit Brian was wearing. It was musty; odd but not unpleasant. He was starting his new job as a primary teacher, and he was wearing a suit that he’d bought from a charity store, and in the chaos of early parenthood he’d not managed to find time to have it dry-cleaned.
He was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with and, back then, she couldn’t have imagined any future in which she didn’t.
Not any more. Now he was a brooding presence, squatting in the spare bedroom.
She pulled on her dressing gown and crossed the landing to the stairs. The top two creaked and, out of habit, she trod softly on them so as not to wake up Anna, who was a light sleeper. Julia often wondered whether it was because she and Brian had fussed over her sleeping arrangements so much: at nap time and bed time they ensured that she had a dark room at the correct temperature, and then they performed an elaborate routine to get her to sleep, rocking her in a specific pattern and then, when she was nearly asleep, laying her gently in her bed and patting her back until her breathing lengthened and she could be left without fear of her waking up. They would then tiptoe around the house, terrified of waking her up.
And now she was a light sleeper: no wonder. She had only ever had to sleep in perfect conditions. All those adults who complained of insomnia would sleep like a cat on a warm flagstone if they were rocked for half an hour before bed and then given a gentle massage. She and Brian would have done things differently with a second child, Julia knew, they would have been more relaxed, both because they would have known what they were doing and because they would not have had the time to do with another child what they had done with Anna. The second child had not come, though. A miscarriage and then an ectopic pregnancy, which had left Julia unable to have more children, had seen to that. She was barren, as Edna had once put it.
Barren. It was a horrid, vivid word that Julia hated, and it was just the kind of word that Edna would use. She could pretend that it was just what people said when she was young and she didn’t know it would upset her daughter-in-law, but Julia didn’t believe her. Edna knew exactly what she was doing. She always did.
For a time, Julia had grieved for the loss of her fertility, but recently, as she realized she no longer loved Brian, she had come to be relieved. For one thing, divorce would be easier with one child; for another, she had always worried that she would not love the second child as much as the first. How could she? Anna and she were mother and daughter but also best friends. She knew that they wouldn’t be forever – or even much longer – but right now she loved taking her daughter to the movies or shopping or for lunch. They’d gone to see The Nutcracker at Christmas; Anna was open-mouthed. Spellbound. Julia understood the magic of theatre, the way it brought drama to life, in a way she had never done before. Anna asked frequently when Christmas was coming, so she could see it again.
Yes – her love for Anna was all-consuming, so maybe it was best that she have only one child.
One child who was now gone.
And, although she would not admit it to herself, part of Julia was sure Anna was gone. Of course, she still hoped that Anna would show up. She had to. Without that hope she would probably not have been able to carry on. But, however much she tried to ignore it, she was aware that she might never see her daughter again.
Might never meet – and disapprove of – Anna’s first boyfriend. Might never watch her fall in love, graduate, marry. Might never become a grandparent. There was an entire future at stake here, both for her and for her daughter and husband.
Before she fell asleep, alone in the bedroom, her only company the sound of Brian’s footsteps as he walked from the kitchen table to the booze cabinet, she’d googled ‘missing children’. It was a mistake, just like it was a mistake to google your symptoms. Persistent runny nose? Not a cold – it was brain fluid leaking out of your cranium. Always tired? Not a condition of being a parent – it was a rare virus that would gradually eat away at your muscles until you wasted away to nothing. Constipation? Bowel cancer. The difference was, these were false diagnoses. In the morning, a doctor would tell you not to worry and send you on your way.
When it came to missing children the facts – or the patterns, at least – were pretty clear.
Kids, especially five-year-old kids, were either found in the first few hours, or not at all.
Yes, there were exceptions (and that was where the hope came from) but for the most part (and please let Anna be different, please) five-year-old kids either showed up pretty soon after they went missing – at a friend’s house, or in the care of a concerned adult who had seen them alone – or they didn’t show up at all.
She had read accounts of police investigations; read about the kinds of people who abducted young girls, and the reasons they did so. She read about criminal gangs who kidnapped kids into slavery, or for rich people who couldn’t have kids of their own, she read about lone wolf predators who took kids and hid them for years, until the kids grew up and lost their appeal and were murdered. She read about paedophile gangs, who took kids and passed them around their network, filmed them being raped to order, and then disposed of their broken bodies in landfill sites in the Third World.
She’d run to the bathroom sink and vomited until there was nothing left to come out other than bile and saliva. It was funny how your body reacted to extreme emotion by emptying the stomach. She didn’t know why that would be the case; you’d think it would be better to retain the food so as to have some energy to deal with whatever crisis it was.
Even so, she wasn’t hungry now. The thought of food held no appeal whatsoever; she wasn’t sure it ever would again. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a creak behind her. For a second, instinct took over and Julia thought it was Anna coming down for an early morning cuddle; her spirits rose, the gloom lifted. And then she turned to look and reality reasserted its grip.
It was Brian. His eyes were red, his face unshaven. He was one of those men who grew facial hair very quickly. If they went out in the evening he would have to shave for a second time in the day. She had found it interesting, at first. Charming. Manly. Part of the husband she loved. Now she found it off-putting, and there were plenty of other things about him that had a similar effect: all his physical imperfections, the smells and blotches and sagging muscles, now repelled her.
‘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 weren’t there to pick her up. You didn’t show up and now she’s gone.’
Julia
