Elizabeth Is Missing (33 page)

“It was digging in the garden that got her in this state,” the man says. “Do you hear me?”

He leans over, his raw throat stretched taut. Elizabeth is asleep half sitting up; she lists to one side and her mouth does, too, and it makes me feel as though we’re rocking, as if we’re on a ship. I hold on to the side of the bed to keep myself steady.

“You were digging, in the garden. Do you remember?”

I imagine my eye as a tiny point on the side of my head, and I turn as far from him as I can. “I don’t know,” I say. “Where was I?”

“In my mother’s garden.”

“No, I don’t know where that is.”

“In Elizabeth’s garden,” Helen says. “Peter, can I have a word outside?”

“No,” I say. “I wouldn’t dig there. You never know what’s buried under the ground by those new houses. Douglas said there could be anything.”

“Is that another accusation?”

“No,” Helen says. “It’s not.”

She asks Peter again if they can talk outside and he whips the curtain open and shut, making a sound like a saw. I swish it about myself, trying to create the same effect, until I find the material tugged from my grasp. The room seems small now that it’s just me, and the walls don’t look quite right; they move with the breeze and I have a feeling of being on a boat. A tissue sticks up from its box like a sail and I pull it out before slowly tearing it to bits, listening to the voices outside. A woman sometimes, a man mostly.

“It was the shock of the fall that caused the stroke,” he says. “And I’ve been asking myself what the bloody hell she thought she was looking for. I know for a fact she found something and didn’t tell my mother what it was. If it’s anything valuable we want it back. It’s ours by right.”

A carton of juice sits next to the tissues and a little white plastic comb next to that. I drop the bits of tissue on the floor and start to brush Elizabeth’s hair with the comb. Gently, gently. Her hair is all white now, no streaks of grey left, and the comb looks dirty in comparison. It makes me angry: this isn’t good enough for Elizabeth, she should have something better. I go through my handbag again and find I have a tortoiseshell comb, but it’s curved and carved and for keeping your hair in place, not brushing it.

There’s a laugh from beyond the curtain, nasty and sharp. The man again: “But then gardening’s in the family, isn’t it?” he says. “I suppose ruining people’s lawns is some sort of big joke for you lot. And don’t think I’ve been kept in the dark about your sneaking in to see my mother before.”

I wonder what it’s all about, but I only wonder for a second, because, finally, Elizabeth is opening her eyes. She makes a croaky sound, and I know she’s speaking, but I can’t understand her. The words are too soft, too wet and runny. Her hands push a little way inside the opposite sleeves, but I can still see the flesh of her wrists. They look unnaturally soft, boneless and puffy, and the skin is smooth, as if she has been filled with air. Her lips are cracked, but she pulls them into a smile, she pulls one half into a smile, and tries again to speak. I feel as though I’m failing to catch something precious. The words tumble out and hit the floor and are lost.

None of us went to bed the night the mad woman died; instead we kept a kind of vigil, Ma and Douglas and I, and the insects that plastered themselves against the windows. What we were watching for, waiting for, I don’t know. For some sense to come of it all, I suppose.

When the light of dawn worked its way into the air outside I went to stand in the garden and breathe it in. But my limbs were heavy and my eyes stung as I left the house. I walked blindly into the thick bramble hedge as I made my way up the path, and the hiss and sway of it made me jump in fright before I remembered that the mad woman would never again appear between the leaves of any hedge, would never shout or point or raise her dress to a bus, would never again chase me with her umbrella. And I regretted the relief I felt at the thought.

Dad went off to work while I was in the garden, stopping to pick a couple of blackberries from the mass that hung along the wall. He did it furtively, as he didn’t want anyone to know he could still see the fruit, or enjoy the taste of it. But I copied him as I watched him go, popping the berries into my mouth. It seemed the right thing to do, fitting somehow, and anyway, it masked the stale morning taste on my tongue. I ate a few more, the sour ones making me search harder for the truly ripe and sweet, and then began to collect them in earnest, filling an old watering can which had been left in the grass.

The berries broke from their buds with satisfying ease and I wove my arms further into the brambles to reach the ripest. Douglas said nothing when he came to find me, but he, too, began to eat and collect and carefully pull away the branches so that he could get deeper into the fruit’s nest. I watched him for a moment, and there was a resemblance between him and the mad woman that was obvious when you knew about it, but I thought perhaps that was partly the situation: his arms buried in the foliage. And soon my own mother was out with baskets and bowls and her own share of the harvest.

We stripped the branches, greedy and quick, the berries collapsing between our fingers. As we picked we filled our mouths, silently, intense, and certain. I kept going until I could hardly lift my arms and the skin of my fingers was flecked with tiny cuts from the blackberry thorns. It was then that Frank appeared. We heard his step on the path and turned together.

“Christ!” he said. “You all turned cannibal?”

I looked at Ma and Douglas and saw how their faces and hands were bloodied with the fruit as if they’d been devouring some animal alive. I could feel the juice clinging to my own mouth. We none of us laughed, but gazed at each other as if we’d just woken from a dream, our clothes stained, our skin pale, our eyes watering.

Frank had brought sugar and Ma wiped her hands and face on her apron to marvel at it, feeling the packages as if they were Christmas presents. “We could make jam,” she said. “We’ve got the fruit for it.”

“So I see,” Frank said, and he laughed, but still he eyed us, side on, uneasy, and he lit a cigarette with nervous hands, one cuff flapping at his wrist like a greedy seagull.

Ma went inside, carrying our crop, and Douglas went on eating berries, but I’d lost my appetite for them. My skin itched where the juice had dried and I felt irritated. I wished Frank wasn’t there; I wished we could have gone on picking blackberries all day, not talking, just gathering, doing something that I didn’t have to make sense of.

I’d put off seeing Frank for days, walking the long way home when I saw him waiting at the end of our street, crossing the road when I was too near the Fiveways, or any other pub I thought he might frequent. I didn’t know what to say to him. I couldn’t tell him that Douglas was waiting at the Pavilion Ballrooms every night, in the hope that Sukey would arrive.

“Looks like you’ve got smudged lipstick,” Frank said. “Like you’ve been kissing someone.” His hands had stopped shaking and he put a thumb up to my mouth, letting it hover a fraction of an inch from my lips.

“I don’t wear lipstick,” I said, the effort of not moving towards his touch making my words stiff. There was a scuffing sound as Douglas kicked at the wall behind me. Frank didn’t look at him, but stroked his thumb lightly over the last of the wet blackberry juice on my top lip and then smeared it on to his own.

“What d’you think?” he said. “P’raps
I
should start wearing it.”

The absurdity of the action, the remark, made me giddy. “Now
you
look like you’ve been kissing someone,” I said, as Ma called us in.

“I was going to tell Frank,” she said, when we got through the door. “About the accident.”

I saw Frank start at the word. “What accident?”

“Douglas’s mother. She was killed by a car.”

Ma was washing the fruit and turning it out into a pan to soften over the stove, and there was a moment of quiet before Frank spoke. When he did his voice was watery.

“What a terrible thing,” he said. And, unbelievably, he seemed close to tears. “When was it? Were you there? God, it’s terrible.” He let out a sob which made the rest of us jump, as if he’d smashed a plate.

“You might not think it’s so terrible when you hear who she was,” Douglas said. His voice was angry, but his face, violently stained, was serene.

“Never mind about that,” Ma said, wiping at the blackberry juice on his chin and silencing him.

“I remember the first time I saw her,” Frank said, and there was a pause, during which I think we must all have been wondering what he would say next.

But he didn’t finish; he shook himself and went and stood close to Ma and helped her to force the heated, softened berries through muslin bags, dark pulp clinging to his fingers and slipping over his wrists. I boiled the fruit with the black-market sugar, and Ma cooled it and poured it into jars and sealed them with wax. The jam came out clear and rosy and delicious. And all the time there was Frank, again and again on the verge of tears because Douglas’s mother had died in an accident.

“God, that bloody man,” Helen says, hitting her hand on the steering wheel. “Blaming you for everything. Blaming me! As if how I make my living has anything to do with it. Well, it’s Elizabeth I feel sorry for, with a son like that.”

“Elizabeth is missing.”

“Mum, we’ve just been to see her.”

“She’s missing and it’s my fault.”

“No, don’t listen to that idiot. He shouldn’t have left her alone in the garden when she was so unsteady on her feet. It’s not your fault.”

“It is my fault because I looked in the wrong places, I collected rubbish from everywhere else, and all the time the real things were lying out there, waiting for me.”

“What are you on about?”

“She was buried in the garden.”

“Who was?”

I can’t think of the name. “The one you were talking about.”

“Elizabeth’s in hospital, Mum. We’ve just been to see her.”

“No, in the garden. Buried for years.”

Helen shifts in her seat, slows the car. “Whose garden? Ours?”

“At the new houses. She disappeared and they built those houses. And Frank brought tons of soil to lay over the gardens and he planted things there. And the summer squash were nearly ruined after someone was in the garden. Digging.”

“New houses. You mean at Elizabeth’s?”

“Elizabeth is missing.”

“No, Mum, we’ve just been to see her.”

“She’s buried—”

“You’ve been through that. But it’s not Elizabeth, is it?”

“Elizabeth is missing.” It’s the wrong name, I know it’s the wrong name, but I can’t think of the right one.

Helen stops the car. “Who do you think is buried in Elizabeth’s garden? Is it Sukey?”

Sukey. That’s the name. Sukey. Sukey. My chest muscles relax slightly.

“Mum?” Helen wrenches the hand brake up with an awful stuttering.

“It’s my fault. I was there, I knew the place because of the pebble wall, and if I’d just gone to dig, too, I’d have found it all out and Ma wouldn’t have died without knowing. I thought it was nothing, just the mad woman doing something to frighten me. But Sukey’s things were in the garden, waiting for me, marking the place. Her compact was there, I found it too late, far too late. Now I’ll never find her, will I? She’ll always be missing and I’ll always be looking for her. I can’t bear it.”

“Neither can I,” Helen says under her breath. “Right, that’s it. Get out of the car. Wait! I’ll help you out.”

She comes and opens my door, and I see we’re the other side of the park, beyond the green-and-yellow house and the hotel and the acacia tree, and while I am stroking my fingers over the pattern of black-and-white pebbles on the wall, Helen is getting something from the boot of the car. The side gate is closed, but she wedges in the point of a shovel and the wood frame explodes into splinters.

“Come into the garden, Mum,” she says, standing by the tapestry of moss and toadflax and holding the gate open for me. “Come on. I’ll dig the whole fucking thing up if that’s what it takes.”

The lawn is brown and scarred, and there is a lot of bare earth where there should be grass or flowers. Helen marches up and down, carrying her tools. She bends to run her hand over the turf as if she’s feeling for something under a rug and then she stamps at various points, her left ear towards the ground. Finally she throws down the shovel and lifts the fork high in the air, letting it fall, sheer, into the earth. The prongs sink deep and silent and she lifts them with a rolling tide of dirt and grass.

“I’ve bloody had it with missing people and with sick people and with dead people. I’ve had it with missing people’s bloody sons, too,” she says as she stabs at the ground. “So we’ll dig to fucking Australia if we have to.”

I don’t understand what she’s doing. “Is it for runner beans?” I say, pointing at the wound she’s making in the scabby lawn. It seems a funny place to plant them. She doesn’t answer me, but talks to herself, swears. I peer into a greenhouse, empty and forlorn-looking. It’s familiar somehow, and I move to stand inside for a minute, trying to place the smell of mildew, of rotten plastic plant pots and woodstain. A robin lands by the pile of earth next to Helen’s trench.

“Fuck off!” she shouts at it, waving her shovel.

The bird flits away to perch on a branch of the apple tree. “Helen?” I say. “Where would be the best place to plant summer squash?”

“For fuck’s sake.” She whips her head round as if she could make the words hit me. “What’s that got to do with . . . ?” But whatever she says next is lost beneath the scrape of metal and stone as she starts digging in another place. “Get a lot of sunlight here,” she says. “Good wall for wind protection . . .”

She’s making an awful mess and I wonder what it’s all for. Perhaps this is how you landscape a garden, but that seems unlikely. So far there are just great ugly holes in the ground. Unless they’re for ponds, I don’t see the point. A white plastic chair rests on a mound of sandy soil and one of its legs sinks as I sit down. I find I am bent forward, studying the infinite amount of life on this little patch, peeping through holes in dock leaves and blowing on the bits of feather fallen from above.