style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Claire? Oh, thank God.’ He sinks onto the bench beside me, then glances down at my lap, where the contents of my handbag are piled beneath my hands. ‘What’s all this?’
‘I was trying to understand how I got here.’ I shovel everything back into the bag, including the arcade token and the shell, then zip it shut. Worry is etched into every line on Mark’s face.
‘We thought someone had taken you,’ Jake says, leaning heavily on the stick. I gesture for him to sit down but he shakes his head. ‘We spoke to Liz and she said you suddenly got up and ran out of her house like you were on fire. Then when we rang and you didn’t know where you were …’ He breathes heavily. ‘I thought whoever took Billy had taken you too.’
Mark’s lips part and I know he wants to contradict Jake. He wants to say that we have no proof that Billy was taken by anyone. We have no idea what happened that night.
‘I did run out,’ I say before my husband can speak. ‘I remember that much but … after that …’ I shake my head. ‘The next thing I knew I was sitting on a bed in the B&B and then the phone rang.’
‘How did you get here?’ Mark asks. ‘The car was still in the drive.’
‘By train.’
‘So you remember that much?’
I shake my head again. ‘No. I found the ticket in my bag. Mark, I don’t remember getting the train, I don’t remember checking into the hotel. I don’t remember anything other than leaving Liz’s.’
‘Did you hit your head or something?’ He gently moves my hair away from my face with his hand and my heart flutters in my chest. I can’t remember the last time he touched me so tenderly. ‘I can’t see any swellings or contusions.’
I used to joke with the kids about Mark’s ‘medical speak’ after he got a job as a medical sales rep. It was almost as though he’d become a doctor himself with all his talk of angina, stents and angioplasty. Apparently it’s very unusual for someone without a medical background or degree to get a job selling pharmaceuticals to GPs and hospitals but Mark’s never been one to let someone telling him he can’t do something get in his way.
‘We didn’t realize you were missing until tea time,’ Jake says and I have to smile. I don’t imagine they would have. They’d have returned home after work and congregated in the kitchen, sniffing the air and peering into the oven and fridge. ‘Dad said you were probably round at Liz’s, pissed off with us for screwing up Billy’s appeal.’
‘Pissed off with who—’ Mark starts but Jake interrupts.
‘And then Liz came round and told us that you’d rushed out of her house and you weren’t answering your phone. She was really upset. She thought she’d said something to upset you.’
Mark shifts away from me now his ‘examination’ of my head is complete, but his eyes don’t leave my face. ‘What did she say?’ he asks.
I shake my head. If I tell him he’ll only agree. Mark’s told me over and over again that we should assume the worst about Billy. ‘Six months is a long time, Claire.’ It’s become his mantra, his invisible shield against hope whenever I tentatively suggest that maybe, just maybe, Billy could still be alive.
‘It doesn’t matter what she said.’
‘It does if it made you run off to Weston without telling anyone.’
I slip my handbag across my body, then stand up and rub my upper arms. ‘Can we just go home? Please, I just want to go home.’
Mark stands up too. ‘I think we should get you to a doctor first. Don’t you?’
It’s warm in Mum’s living room. Warm and ever so slightly musty. The top of the telly is grey with dust, the magazine rack is groaning under the weight of books and magazines piled on top of it, and there are dead flowers on the windowsill; green sludge in the base of the vase instead of water. Even the spider plant on the bureau, a plant so hardy that it could survive a nuclear attack, is wilted and yellow. Its babies, trailing on the carpet on long tendrils, look as though they’ve parachuted out in an attempt to escape. Mum would declare World War III if I offered to tidy up so I do what I can whenever she leaves the room; wipe a tissue over the surfaces when she goes to the loo or tip my glass of water in the spider plant when the postman comes.
I haven’t had a chance today. She hasn’t left my side since I arrived a little after 9 a.m. I haven’t told her about my blackout yet; she thinks I’m here to talk about Billy’s publicity campaign. Mark refused to go to work until I promised him I’d spend the day with her. He’s terrified I’ll go missing again.
He’s not the only one.
The doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong with me. She ran a series of blood tests yesterday and said I’d have to wait a week for the results. It’s terrifying, not knowing what caused me to black out. What if it’s something serious like a brain tumour? What if it happens again? When I asked Dr Evans if it might she said she didn’t know.
I didn’t want to leave her office. I didn’t want to step outside the doors of the surgery and risk it happening again. Mark had to physically lift me off the chair and guide me back outside to the car.
‘See that?’ Mum slides the laptop from her knees to mine and points at the screen with a bitten-down fingernail. ‘That spike in the graph?’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking at.’
‘They’re the stats for the website. We had a huge peak in page views the day the appeal went out. Over seven thousand people looked at it. Seven thousand, Claire.’
‘And that’s a good thing, is it?’ Dad says, appearing in the doorway to the living room.
‘Derek.’ Mum shoots him a warning look. ‘If you can’t say something good—’
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I say. ‘I know what Dad’s thinking.’
‘Your dad’s not thinking anything.’ Her eyes don’t leave his face. ‘Are you, Derek?’
His gaze shifts towards me and I feel the weight of sadness in his eyes. There’s indecision too, written all over his face. He wants to tell me something but Mum’s warning him not to.
‘What is it, Dad?’
‘Derek!’
‘It’s okay. You can tell me.’
Mum pulls at my hand. ‘It’s nothing you need worry about, Claire. Just a bunch of drunks in the pub speculating. We know no one in the family had anything to do with Billy’s disappearance.’
I ignore her. I can’t tear my eyes away from my dad who looks as though he might burst from the stress of keeping his lip buttoned. ‘Dad?’
He shifts his weight so he’s leaning against the door frame
