The Half Life of Stars (4 page)

It’s gone 3:00 a.m., Daniel still isn’t home, and we’ve run out of logical excuses. No one has called, his mobile remains unanswered, no one has knocked on the door. We’ve tried all the hospitals, woken all his friends, dragged his boss and his colleagues from their beds. Nobody has any more suggestions. Nobody has anything more to say. Kay decides that she’s going to call the police, and the pastry chef seizes on the momentary distraction to make his overdue escape and bolt for the door.

I might be mistaken but I think I see him raise his hands to the sky and offer a silent prayer as he sprints down the path towards his car. What a story to tell his friends. How he got invited back to some crazy woman’s flat for a quickie shag and ended up in the centre of a family crisis. How he was goosed by the semi-drunk mother, seduced by the sexy sister and confronted with the mystery of the missing brother by the immaculately groomed wife. I stand in the porch and watch him drive away (make a mental note to avoid walking home past the Café Vasco for the rest of my life) and head back inside. Another one down. Another vision of awkwardness and embarrassment, drifts away into the night.

Back in the house, Kay is just off the phone and my mother is giving her the third degree.

‘What good is
tomorrow
? Why can’t they send someone now?’

‘It’s too early. They said we’d have to wait…at least until morning.’

‘Well, what are we meant to do? We can’t just sit here. Give me the phone, I’ll call them back.’

Kay shakes her head, she looks pale. The mere act of dialling 999 has visibly dented her.

‘If he was younger, or vulnerable…they could do something now. But a grown man staying out late…we’ll have to sit tight. They said a missing adult usually turns up within twenty-four hours.’

‘Well, that’s good then,’ says Sylvie, weakly. ‘I mean, in a way…he’s probably just…’ She fades out.

‘Did you tell them it wasn’t like him? Did you tell them it’s completely out of character?’

‘Of
course
I did. You just heard me.’

‘Well, what about his phone? Did you say he wasn’t answering his phone?’

My sister-in-law checks herself. I sense her battling to stay calm.

‘They said we should try not to panic. That he’s probably held up somewhere. If he’s not back by tomorrow…we can fill in a missing person’s report.’

Kay lifts her hands to her ears, partly to compose herself, partly to shut out my mother. She’s wondering if the police might be right; if she’s missed something; if there’s some small chance she might be overreacting.

‘They asked if he could be staying at a hotel,’ she says, quietly. ‘They wanted to know if we’d had a fight.’

‘Did you?’

She shakes her head, no.

‘Maybe he crashed out at a friend’s house,’ says Robert. ‘Perhaps he just flaked out after too much wine.’

‘We’ve tried them all, Robert. I’ve tried
everyone
I can think of. I don’t know who else I can call.’

‘Perhaps he’s with someone you don’t know.’ says Robert, trying to be helpful. ‘Could that be possible…do you think?’

‘What are you suggesting?’

Robert shrugs his shoulders. He’s not suggesting anything.

‘Might he have met someone? Could he have run into someone and gone home with them?’

‘A
woman
?’

‘No…God, no. I meant someone from school…an old schoolfriend, something like that.’

We shift uncomfortably in our seats. He didn’t mean to imply it, but this would make some kind of sense. Kay and Daniel have had a row of some kind. He went to spend the night in a hotel. Could he be cheating on her?
Could
he? She picks up on our betrayal immediately, feels us all slipping away.

‘Daniel and I are fine,’ she says, turning to my mother. ‘There’ve been no arguments.
None
.’

My mother stares hard at her drink. Kay sits down next to the phone.

‘They said I should call again later,’ she says, dejectedly. ‘I’m supposed to let them know…if he turns up.’

‘He will,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry, Kay. He will.’

What a stark week it’s been. It snowed yesterday. Great grey clouds of the stuff came swirling through the air, like a ton of duck down shaken from some giant wintry pillow. People were so excited to see a heavy snowfall in central London that they came tearing out of their houses just to watch it. They were laughing. They seemed to like it. They immediately began scooping up frozen clumps from the ground and stuffing it down one another’s jumpers. I gave them a disapproving look as I walked by, like I was an old person or something.

Snow makes me a little uneasy, always has. I hate the way everything goes so deathly quiet after a snowstorm. You can’t hear the comforting hiss of the traffic any more and your feet make no reassuring echo when they hit the ground. Everything’s muffled and silent and cloaked, like the world’s been shut up in a freaky padded cell. I want the world to be noisy, vibrant, active and alert. Especially today. Especially now.

‘Where are you? Where the
fuck
are you, Daniel? You bastard, you’d better come home.’

I say this to no one in particular. Stood in the road outside my mother’s house, ankle deep in the snow.

‘This isn’t funny any more, do you
hear
me? You can’t leave me alone with them, we had a pact. Whatever you’ve done, whatever went wrong. No one bloody cares about it.
No
one!’

Daniel never made it home that Friday night. He isn’t home still, he’s disappeared. There’s a manila file sitting on a desk at our local police station with his name written on it in bold black letters. My brother is officially missing. He’s been gone for over a week.

We’ve barely slept since the night he disappeared, we look like ghouls, the lot of us. Every hour we can muster has been spent glued to the phone or out pacing the streets, desperately trying to find some living trace of him. In the past seven days I’ve spoken to relatives I didn’t even know I had: great-aunts, great-uncles, fourth cousins twice removed, people from the phone book that just happen to share the same surname. Between us we’ve probably spoken to everyone Daniel’s had more than a fleeting relationship with in his entire life: long-forgotten friends from college, kids he went on outward-bound courses with when he was a teenager, kids from his junior running club that haven’t heard from him since he was seven years old. And still there’s nothing. No leads, no evidence, no documents, no sight nor sound of him of any kind.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. There is some footage of him leaving his office building last Friday night that was caught on his firm’s security camera. I’ve watched that footage maybe a hundred or so times in the last week and every time I look at it I try to pick out something new. Something in the way that he turns his head or swings his arms; something,
anything
, in the 10 short paces he takes to cross the screen that indicates an intention of some kind. Is he walking too quickly, is he anxious? No, it doesn’t appear so. Does he have his head bowed, is he depressed or forlorn? No, he’s looking straight ahead. Purposefully? It’s hard to tell. It lasts exactly 8.79 seconds this piece of film, just long enough for him to pass through the marble foyer of his building and make his way out onto the forecourt. How does he move? Not determinedly, not casually, not carefully, just, well,
normally
, I suppose. Which is an exceptional thing to say, because after he left the building at 7:00 p.m., no one has the least idea where he went.

And so it went on. The next day and the day after that. Not a call, not a text, not a sighting, not a conclusive piece of information that we could use. He never got into his car, he didn’t visit a cash point, his passport is still safely tucked away in his drawer at home. He didn’t rent a car. He didn’t turn up at any
hospitals or police stations or homeless hostels, he didn’t answer or make a call on his mobile phone. He wasn’t there when I spent ten hours pounding the streets last Tuesday night clutching his picture in my hand. He wasn’t at the soup kitchens or the train stations or the bus shelters, or camped out in the woods near his home. No one has seen him. No one. Which is odd, because somebody clearly must have.

Somebody hears me shouting in the snow. My voice builds fiercely through the static and the gloom, and hits them with a suddenness that makes them start. It’s a woman, weighed down against the cold in her winter armour: a coat and a heavy poncho, and a brightly coloured hat with a fluffy bobble. I take particular exception to that bobble. If I had a pair of scissors on me now, I’d go directly over there and snip it off.

The woman gives me an indecipherable look as she passes by. Does she think I’m crazy? Probably. Does she wish I’d keep my voice down, learn to respect the claustrophobia of this miserable weather? Maybe. More likely it’s because she recognises me. I can tell by the way she turns her head away so fast, even though it’s obvious that she wants to keep on staring. This has happened to me a lot in the last three days–people averting their eyes when I get off the bus; grown adults whispering about me behind my back when I stop off to buy a pack of chewing gum from the local shop. I’m famous now, so I suppose I should expect it. I’m a celebrity. I’ve been on TV.

Four days after Daniel failed to return home from work, the police persuaded us to make a TV appeal. We were ushered into a tiny interview room, sat down at a worn trestle table and directed towards a bank of cameras and microphones. The fact that we were even doing it, the singular absurdity of it, seemed to bring it all home to us: how desperate it was, how serious it was, how bleak it was turning out to be. The recording was delayed a few minutes while my mother went to fetch a picture of Julian, Daniel’s baby son; the police thought it would be a good idea for Kay to hold his photo up to the camera while she was talking.

You know what I was thinking while they went to look for that
picture? I was thinking that Julian’s a pretty odd name for a toddler to have. That when you look at him in his cot–all sleepy and angelic or yowling like a cat–he always seems a tad perplexed. Maybe he thinks he ought to have been given a better name. Maybe he’s pissed off that he has a moniker better suited to an estate agent than an eighteen-month-old. Daniel sometimes calls him ‘Stinky Jools’ which I think is cute, but Kay always insists on using his given name.

This is the kind of stupid thing I think about. That this baby–this gorgeous, rosy child–might have to grow up with a mother who doesn’t believe in nicknames. That he might never know the gentleness or the sweet irreverence of his own father. He won’t experience it, so he won’t inherit it. He’ll grow up officious and a little pedantic, like Kay, and I won’t like him quite as much as I would have.

This is the direction my head was going in while I waited to talk to the British public. To ask them, as kindly as I could, if they’d mind keeping an eye out for my older brother. Maybe they’d spotted him already: walking through a shopping centre, hiding out in a cheap hotel, or wandering through the streets like a bewildered amnesiac asking passers-by if they knew the way to Stinky Jools.

I didn’t have to say much of anything, in the end. I just stood there while the police officer who was running the investigation read out a statement and introduced Kay to the world. Sylvie stared at the floor the whole time, while Mum and Robert clung tightly to her hand, and Kay–quite reasonably–cried her eyes out. She tried so hard to get the words out without faltering but you could see exactly how crushed she was to be doing it. It meant we got upgraded from local bulletin to the national news and that her face was splashed all over the next morning’s tabloids. ‘Blonde mother, 36, weeps in anguish over missing husband this Christmas.’ Mystery of the pretty blonde and her vanished love. It made her physically ill. The indignity of it made her throw up.

My picture didn’t appear in the papers but people always recognise me from the TV broadcast. That’s because I spent the whole time staring directly into the camera like I was some kind of a demented person. I was trying my hardest to communicate with my brother. I was trying to tell him that I understood; that if he wanted to escape the flack or had something to confess, it was me that he should come to first. I wouldn’t judge him, I’d cover him. I’d make any kind of arrangements that were necessary. I was letting him know that I was there for him, no matter what. Under any kind of circumstances, whatsoever. All this I was trying to communicate with a single gnawing look. It stayed with people, I suppose; it’s always me that they recognise first.

‘Hey…excuse me. I just wanted to say how sorry I am…about your brother. I hope they find him. I hope he’s OK.’

I nod at the bobble-hat woman and say a muted thanks, and head along the driveway to my mother’s house. Damn this snow; it makes people think they can stop and talk to one another.

My mother is wobbly from alcohol. Her head bobs about on the end of her neck as clumsy and rootless as a helium balloon. I have to be careful of her now. Her skin is as thin as a sheet of clingfilm when she’s in this state and a single misplaced word or ill-judged look is liable to provoke a sudden tear in its surface, releasing a bitter stream of effluent.

‘What kind of a coat is that?’ she says, slurring her words together. ‘A
fur
?’

‘Mum, you know it is. I’ve had it ages.’

‘You don’t care that animals died to keep you warm…you don’t care about the suffering you cause?’

‘It’s second hand, it’s old. The killing was already done.’

This is not a fair argument, I know it, but I love this coat. My ex-husband bought it for me at a winter market when we took a trip to Moscow a couple of years ago and it’s the warmest thing I’ve ever owned.

‘I don’t want you to wear it to Kay’s lunch, do you hear me?
I don’t want you to upset me on Christmas day. I want you to make an effort, I want you to look decent for a change.’

I had all but forgotten about Christmas; it seems like such an odd thing to care about. Is she really expecting us to keep up with the winter rituals under these circumstances? Is she really expecting that we all go out and buy presents and pull crackers round a tree in two days’ time? My eyes wander off course for a moment and I make the elementary mistake of glancing too long at her hands. And there it is. The steady rip in my mother’s fragile mood. A small but significant puncture.

‘What are you looking at?’ she says, goading me.

‘Nothing.’

‘My drink? You’re looking at my
drink
?’

‘No Mum, forget it. I wasn’t looking at your drink.’

‘Come on, don’t bottle it up. You think your mother’s drinking too much?
Say
so. You think I should feel ashamed because I’m drinking in the afternoon?
Say
it.’

I don’t say it.

‘Daniel could be lying dead in a gutter somewhere. Did you think of that?
Did
you?’

It’s pretty much all I’m thinking about.

‘It helps me sleep. It helps me get through it. I’m sixty years old, what does it matter to you if I have a couple of drinks to help me cope?’

‘It doesn’t, it’s none of my business. But it won’t make you feel any better, it never does.’

‘How do
you
know how I feel?’

‘I don’t…but we all need to be thinking straight. To be there if…
when
Daniel needs us.’

She gives her trademark sniff, but mis-times it ever so slightly, sending a trickle of tonic water spilling down her nose.

‘
This
from the responsible one,’ she says, holding up her glass in triumph. ‘
This
from the girl who threw away her husband and her savings and her home. This from the one who’s never there, who’s always off fucking some filthy boy when her family needs her.’

There it is. There’s the quality invective I was waiting for.

Predictably she’s worn herself out with this tirade and she attempts to make a grand exit from the room. She stumbles to the bathroom–to throw up or compose herself, I’m not sure which, and I sit down opposite Robert.

‘You want one?’ he says, holding up the gin bottle.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Absolutely.’

As he makes the drinks–great boats of gin and tonic with rings of lime floating on the surface like life preservers–it strikes me that I know too much about him for us to hang out comfortably one to one. Among other things, I know that he and my mother have no sex life any more; that they haven’t had one for quite some time. I know that Robert’s prostate is enlarged, that he’s mildly incontinent and that these days he finds it near impossible to maintain an erection.

I know this because my mother told me. And Sylvie, and Daniel and Kay and Stinky Jools, and just about anyone else in the distant recesses of our family that cared to listen. The same way she still tells people that I was busy losing my virginity on the afternoon that my father suffered his fatal heart attack. The same way she sometimes refers to Daniel as her ‘mental son’ when she’s drunk, because of his infamous five-day silence. It’s her lack of respect that’s so fearful. The way she delves into everyone’s wounds like a maggot, irritating the core of the infection instead of allowing it to stiffen and heal. It means people keep her in the dark. No one tells her anything unless they’re forced to.

‘She doesn’t mean it,’ says Robert, handing me my drink and attempting a smile. ‘There have been more crank calls today, it’s wearing her down.’

‘Haven’t you changed the number yet?’

‘She won’t do it, in case he phones.’

Mum comes tottering out of the bathroom and collapses back onto the sofa like someone’s emptied her out of a carrier bag.
She’s all weepy now–and contrite–and she slips her arm gratefully through Robert’s.

‘Did Robert tell you,’ she says, dabbing at her mouth with a tissue. ‘Some woman phoned to tell me Daniel was dead. Said she was a psychic, that she knew where my dead son was buried.’

‘Mum,
please
. Change the number. You can’t put up with that. It’s just cruel.’