Mapping the Edge
Contents
For Georgia and Zoe
Mapping the Edge
People go missing every day. They walk out of their front doors and out of their lives into the silence of cold statistics. For those left behind it is the cruelest of the long good-byes, because for them there is only pain and doubt. Did that person whom you loved so muchâand thought you knew so wellâdid they simply choose to go and not come back? Or was it darker than that, and did someone do the choosing for them?
Missing rubs the soul raw. In place of answers all you have is your imagination. In place of reality, only fantasy. And the more you think about it, the more elaborate and the more consuming those fantasies become.
Stories from the edge.
Like this one.
Anna is leaving home. Bye-bye.
Part One
TransitâMonday
P.M.
D
EPARTURE LOUNGE
, S
OUTH
Terminal, Gatwick Airport. A shopper's paradise: two floors of superior retail space connected by gliding glass lifts and peopled by an endless stream of travelers, processed to have time on their hands and a permanent discount at the wave of a boarding card. If you are smart you come here with an empty case and do your packing as you walk: cosmetics, toiletries, clothes, shoes, books, perfumes, booze, cameras, films. For many the holiday starts here. You can see it in their faces. People shop differently, none of that suburban mall madness. Instead they stroll and browse, couples with their arms around each other, the beach saunter already in their stride, children dancing behind their parents in the hermetic safety of a controlled environment. When did you last read a horror story about a child abducted in a departure lounge?
Second floor, a cappuccino bar with tables out on the concourse, next to the Body Shop and Accessorize. A woman is sitting alone at a table, a small holdall by her side, her boarding card lying near to a plastic cup in front of her. She has no carrier bags, no duty free. She is not interested in shopping. Instead she is watching others and thinking about how it was twenty years before when she came to this airport as a teenager, on her first solo flight to Europe. None of this existed then. Before the invention of niche marketing, air travel had been a serious, more reverent affair. People wore their best clothes for flying then, and duty free meant two hundred Rothmans and a bottle of Elizabeth Arden perfume. It seems as far away as black-and-white photography. At that time her flight had been delayed for three hours. Too young for cheap booze and too poor for perfume, she had sat in a row of red bucket chairs nailed to the ground and read her guidebooks, mapping a city she had only ever visited in her mind, trying to quieten the tumbling adrenaline inside her. The rest of her life had been waiting on the other side of Gate 3 and she had been aching to walk into it.
It is not the same now. Now, though there is adrenaline it has no playfulness within it. Instead it burns the insides of her stomach, feeding off apprehension and caffeine. There are moments when she wishes she hadn't come. Or that she had brought Lily with her. Lily would have loved the circus of it all; her chatter would have filled up the silence, her curiosity would have nudged the cynicism toward wonder. But this is not Lily's journey. Her absence is part of the point.
She pushes the coffee cup away from her and slips the boarding card back into her pocket. When she last looked at the monitor the Pisa flight was still waiting to board. Now it is flashing last call. Gate 37. She gets up and walks toward the glass lift.
Twenty years ago as she made this last walk there had been a Beatles track playing in her head. “She's Leaving Home.” It was dated by then, already ironic. It had made her smile. Maybe that was her problem. She was no longer comforted by irony.
AmsterdamâFriday
P.M.
O
N
F
RIDAY EVENINGS
I like to take drugs. I suppose you could call it a habit, though hardly a serious one. I see it, rather, as a way to relax; the end of work, the need to let go, welcome the weekend, that kind of thing. Sometimes it's dope, sometimes it's alcohol. Like most things in my life it has a routine. I come in, turn on the radio, roll a spliff, sit at the kitchen table, and wait for the world to uncurl. I like the way life becomes when I'm stoned: more malleable, softer at the edges. It feels familiar to me. Reassuring. I've been doing it a long time. I started smoking when I was in my teens. I got my first stash from the boyfriend of a friend: an early example of adolescent free enterprise. The first time I smoked there were other people around, but it didn't take me long to discover solitude. I used to sit upstairs and blow the smoke out of my bedroom window. If my father knew (and it seems impossible to me now that he didn't) he was smart enough not to call me on it. I was never into rebellion, only into solitude. And being stoned. And so it has continued throughout my life. Though you probably wouldn't know it from meeting me. I don't look the type, you see. It has always been one of my greatest talents, that in the nine-to-five game I come over as the professional to my fingertips, brain like my clothes: sharp lines and no frills. Straight, in other words. One of life's good girls. The kind you can depend on. But everyone has to slip off their shoulder pads sometimes.
Other Fridays I vary the mood and go for alcohol instead. This has nothing to do with any queasiness about legality. Among its many splendors this adopted city of mine boasts a remarkable tolerance for dope and a system of distribution that suits even the most discreet members of the community. No. It's only that there are some Fridays when my brain yearns for another form of unzipping. On these occasions I indulge my appetite for frozen vodka. There is a singular pleasure to the way in which it flows out of the bottle, like heavy water, a thick viscous river of pure alcohol glugging its way over little chunks of ice. I keep a special glass for it; small, shot-sized, heavyâlike the liquid. The sides go steamy with the cold as you pour, and when you drink, your fingers leave little wet prints on the glass.
The first hit is best taken on an empty stomach. I make sure that I lunch early that day so I'm already spacey with hunger by the time I arrive home. That way you can actually register the alcohol flowing into the blood, moving around your veins, making your hands tingle and your stomach burn. You mellow very fast. Then I start to cook. Timing is all here. Wait too long and you can lose the moment, find yourself too hungry to concentrate or too drunk to care. I put on music to focus me, and make something where the smell comes quickly, mingling the juices with the senses. Then I sit and eat in front of a movie previously selected from the video store. I don't watch television. A question not so much of language as of taste. Like the contemporary club scene, Friday TV schedules feel too young for me now, more like a waste of time than a passing of it.
I've become more aware of time passing recently. Not the day-to-dayness of it, but the bigger, structural stuff. Sometimes I have a sense of great chunks of my life floating, like space debris, in slow motion around me: three- or four-year bits that have got detached from the space station and can't be recovered. There goes twenty-two to twenty-six, passing so close I can almost touch it. Then a little further off I see my late twenties/early thirties turning over and over in zero gravity; glimpses of a job and a half-empty flat in a Scottish town where it never stopped raining and where anything decent was always a train ride away. Maybe I should reel it in and work a little revisionism on itâScotland on the cusp of its style triumph. But then I think, Why bother? It's done already, over, all the possibilities hardened into choices, of no interest now except as history. And anyway life seems freer without it. I am, I realize, fortunate in this respect. Unlike others, I find myself growing less burdened with age.
Of course it helps to have been so bad at being young, though I had excuses enough at the time had I chosen to use them. While others were burning comet paths through the skies with their energy and ambition, I was standing underneath brushing their sparks from my clothing, afraid even to look up in case I got their fire in my eyes. In recent years, though, I have found myself passing an increasing amount of debris from the burnout of faster, more colorful lives. Negative equities, second wives or husbands, the beginnings of double chins, the drain of the psychotherapy bills. If they are coming unstuck this fast as they hit forty, imagine the dropout rate in another ten years' time.
But not me. I, against the odds, am doing okay. Maybe because I always asked for less, I have been rewarded with more. It's certainly the nearest I've ever got to contentment. I like this city. It has energy within its calm. Indeed, the whole country feels laid-back. Being underwater for so long seems to have imbued the land with an unholy sense of quiet, but since anyone who is anyone usually ends up in Amsterdam anyway you don't need to worry yourself too much about the waterland outside. I have a life here. I live in an apartment in one of the old merchant houses on the canal (the wealth of nations has been stored here at some time or another; scratch the wooden floors hard enough and you can still smell the spice); I have a job that I like and, most surprisingly of all, a man who likes me but doesn't need to live in my pocket (or my flat). I am satisfied. I couldâand haveâlived with less, and I have no wish for more.
It's usually when I'm in this mood that I know it's time to call Anna, if only to give her the pleasure of teasing me out of my complacency. In my more sentimental moments I think it's our friendship that's kept both of us from the fall. That while the married ones got bored and the single ones got bitter, good friends stayed alert to each other's needs. Of course Lily has helped. But this system of checks and balances was in place before she came along.
Friday is our phone night. Not that we do it every weekâsometimes work or travel gets in the wayâbut as customs go it is an established one. And that particular Friday, I remember, I was looking forward to the call, because recently we had missed a few and I felt the need to catch up. And because, I suppose, yes, I did have an undercurrent of worry about her, a sense that there might be things happening in her life that I wasn't completely up-to-date with. But I was sure I would find out. Because in the end she would tell me. That's how it was with us.
We usually try to time the call for around 10:00
P.M.
We wait till then because Lily is almost certain to be in bed and we can talk more freely. More often than not Paul is there, too, doing something inspiring with chow pak and sesame-seed oil, but he doesn't mind if she eats by the phone. So when the phone rang at 7:50
P.M.
on that Friday night, the pan of finely chopped onions caramelizing on the stove, the second shot of vodka misting up the glass and my mind, I knew it was altogether too early to be her.
“Estella? Is that you?”
“Hello, Paul. How are you?”
“I'm fine. Listen, is Anna there by any chance?”
“Anna? No. Why?”
“Er . . . well, she's been away this week. We thought she might have visited you on her way home.”
Out through the open windows the sky is beginning to bruise into a purple-blue twilight. From below I can hear the chug-chug of the first of the tourist barges starting off on the nightlife tour of the canals. “No. She's not here. Where's away?”
“Italy.”
“Italy? What for?”
“I don't know, exactly. Have you heard from her recently?”
“No. We haven't spoken for a couple of weeks.” I hold him snug to my ear as I carry the portable back to the stove and check the pan. “You sound worried, Paul. Is something wrong?” I ask quietly.
He doesn't answer immediately, as if he knows that the words, once spoken, cannot be taken back.
“Maybe, yes. She was due back yesterday evening. No one has heard anything from her. She seems to have gone missing.”
Anna. Missing. I take another hit of vodka and turn off the flame under the onions. I will not eat dinner here tonight, after all.
