The Missing (16 page)

The woman on the checkout smiles a hello without really seeing us and starts to drag our
things
over the scanner, pushing them to the end where the plastic bags are hanging. Mum jabs me in the back. ‘Go and pack.’

I would prefer to unload the shopping trolley. I like to arrange the things on the conveyor belt in groups, fitting everything in so that there are no gaps. Mum is throwing the food we’ve chosen onto the belt carelessly. The bananas hang over the edge and the jars roll around noisily every time it lurches forward. I pull a plastic bag off the stand and start to fill it. I hate Mum, I really do. Packing is no fun. I deliberately put heavy tins in on top of the fresh fruit and squash too many things into the fragile plastic bag so that it stretches and tears a little. When I look up, Mum has gone, leaving the empty trolley at an angle at the top of the conveyor belt. For a moment I feel pure terror.

The checkout lady swipes another jar across the scanner with a beep. ‘Don’t worry. She’s just gone to get something else.’ She eyes the bag I am holding and reaches up to the stand. ‘Want a new one?’

I nod then watch, disgusted, as she licks her fingers and rubs the top of the bag to open it. I don’t want to touch it as her spit is all over it, but I can’t think of a way to get out of using it. I fill it up, and another one, and still Mum doesn’t come back. The checkout lady is looking at me now, frowning a little. My cheeks are
burning
. If Mum doesn’t come back, I can’t pay for the shopping. I can’t carry it home.

All at once she is there, her arms full of bottles. She stands them up at the end of the conveyor belt: three glass bottles filled with clear liquid, each with a silver cap and a blue label that is turned away from me. The woman scans them quickly and Mum puts them into a bag herself, pushing me out of the way. She pays, handing over her card. When the checkout lady reads the name, she looks up, her mouth a little O of surprise. I look straight back, daring her to say anything, while Mum waits to sign the receipt.

We march out of the supermarket and I help to pack the car. Mum drives home in silence. When we get back, she goes to the boot and takes out a single bag. It clinks musically. Bottles.

‘I’ll help to carry the bags in.’

‘Just go into the house, please.’

She unlocks the door and pushes me inside, in front of her. She goes straight through to the kitchen and gets a glass from the cupboard. I watch from the doorway as she sits down at the table and breaks the seal on the first bottle out of the bag. It looks like water as she tilts it into the glass. She drinks it in one long swallow, then sits with her eyes closed and her face scrunched up for a second. Then she pours another glass and does the same. And again.

The rest of the shopping stays in the boot, and I stay in the doorway. I watch and I wait as for the first time ever my mother drinks in front of me, and drinks, and drinks, as if there’s no one watching, as if I’m not even there.

I TRIED VERY
, very hard to clear my mind when I turned out the light and settled down to sleep, but along with the darkness came the memories, splintered images from the past few days. A dead branch on the forest floor, a pale hand in the grass beside it. A curling poster of a green canal. Blake lying on the grass, eyes closed. Glass splintered on tarmac. A man reaching out of the shadows, violence on his mind. I stuck on the last one, unable to shake it. I had no face to put to him, no idea at all who had attacked me. I should just forget about it. But I couldn’t.

I couldn’t help thinking about what I had noticed, trying, in spite of myself, to work out if I’d known him, or would know him again. He was taller than me, like most men. The best I could do was to put him between five foot six and six foot. He had a slim build, but he was strong. Dark shoes – probably trainers; he had been almost silent as he moved away. Dark trousers. A jacket that was made of some sort of rainproof material. Leather gloves. Nothing specific, nothing that would make him stand out. I could walk past him in the street and I’d never recognise him.

The only other distinctive feature I could remember was the combination of smells: cigarettes and engine oil. Not exactly unique to one individual. He could have picked up
the
engine oil anywhere; it was easy enough to find a greasy patch on the road where a car had been parked. If he had walked through one of those, the smell could have lingered quite strongly. I had done it myself.

The feeling that tormented me above all others was not fear, but irritation with myself that I hadn’t been paying attention, that I had dropped my guard. If he had wanted to rape or murder me, what would have stopped him? Not me; I hadn’t even been able to struggle. Maybe if I had seen him, I could have run away, or screamed loudly enough to wake the neighbours. It was futile to dwell on the ifs and the maybes, but I did it anyway, my arm throbbing sullenly all the while. The luminous hands inched around the face of my bedside clock and methodically, monotonously, I plodded again and again through the who and the why of what had happened and got no nearer to an answer.

I slipped into a heavy, dreamless sleep near dawn, and woke up long after my usual getting-up time with gritty eyes, a sore throat and a face that felt as if it had been snipped off with pinking shears and stapled back on in a fairly approximate way. I had, I discovered as I walked to the bathroom, a limp. My knee was stiff and protested when I bent it. It was pulpy with swelling and bruised, but wasn’t as extravagantly lurid as my shoulder. I still couldn’t lift my arm above my shoulder and both were vibrant with colour, shading from purple to bluey-black at the most tender point. The bruising extended down my arm to about halfway between my shoulder and elbow, like a longshoreman’s tattoo, and it was exquisitely painful.
My
face in the mirror was grim. I felt exhausted; I was too shattered to think of going to school.

I padded unevenly downstairs to the phone and called the school office, expecting Janet, and got Elaine. I had to stumble through my excuse, hoping that it didn’t sound too much like a lie, knowing that Elaine was a tough audience and wouldn’t believe it in any event. I sold the
terrible, blinding headache, I really don’t think I can make it in today
line like my life depended on it. She harrumphed. Something told me that I wasn’t the only one calling in sick. I upped the pathetic quaver in my voice as I elaborated on the nausea I had also been experiencing, and got a grudging assent out of her.

‘But I will need you to come to St Michael’s tonight. There’s going to be a prayer service in memory of Jenny Shepherd, and I want all the teachers to attend.’

‘What time does it start?’

‘Six o’clock. I do hope that your headache will have gone by then.’

Choosing to ignore the sarcasm in her voice, I promised to be there and hung up, wondering how on earth I was going to make myself presentable in a mere ten hours. More sleep seemed like the best option. I wrote a note for Mum, explaining that I hadn’t had to go to work and could I not be disturbed, please, and tiptoed into the living room. She was still there, curled up on the sofa, and didn’t stir. The room was sour with night-breath and alcohol, dark and hot. I left the note in a prominent place and slid out again.

The stairs seemed longer and steeper than usual and
I
dragged myself up, holding on to the banister. My limbs ached and every joint complained. I felt as if I had acquired a bad case of the flu along with my bruises, and the only thing that gave me the strength to get back to my bedroom was the prospect of peace, cool sheets and solitude for the next few hours. I clambered back into bed. Falling asleep was as easy – and as sudden – as falling off a cliff.

It was the rain that woke me in the end. The weather broke mid-afternoon, the first fragile warmth of summer subdued by a soggy low pressure that swept in from the Atlantic, pushing a clutch of heavy showers before it. I had left my window ajar and opened my eyes to dark spots on the pink carpet and a dappling of water across my desk from fat raindrops that had landed on the windowsill and exploded like tiny grenades. I got up, fuzzy-headed from sleep, and reached out with my left hand to shut the window. My arm thrilled with electric pain and I gasped, wondering how I could have forgotten. I switched hands and drew the window down, leaving an inch-wide gap so the pure, rain-washed air could flow in. The rain rattled like drumbeats on the roof and hung in an almost solid sheet in front of the houses across the road, turning them into faded, softened approximations of themselves, watercolours painted with dirty water. I watched idly for a few minutes as the rainwater leaped off the road surface and ran in rivers down the pavement. There was something fascinating about the heavy rain, hypnotic. Especially if you didn’t have to go out in it.

It came as something of a shock to remember that I
did
have to go out, and moreover that I had to walk. I was far too frightened of Elaine to be a no-show at the prayer service. I checked my watch, wincing at the discovery that it was half past four. My only hope was to ring Jules. I had her telephone number; it was in last year’s diary. She had written it herself, with big looping writing that took up two lines at a time. I hopped back downstairs to the phone, hoping grimly that the guy who had nicked my bag was enjoying the use of my Nokia. It would have been so much more convenient if he’d left me my phone. And my keys. And my wallet. But then it wouldn’t have been much of a mugging.

‘Hello?’

‘Jules, it’s me, Sarah.’

‘Sarah! I didn’t recognise the number. God, I nearly didn’t bother to answer it. How are you?’

‘I’m OK,’ I said quickly. ‘Listen, I’m having car trouble. Could you possibly pick me up on your way to St Michael’s for the prayer service?’

‘The what?’ Jules sounded vague. ‘Oh, that. Sorry, sweetie, I’m not going.’

‘I thought we had to go.’

‘Not my kind of thing. I told Elaine I had a family commitment that I couldn’t get out of.’

‘Right,’ I said, wishing I’d thought of something similar. ‘Good for you.’

‘Elaine was fee-urious. Not that I care. She can’t fire me for not being there. I’m really sorry, though. Are you going to be able to manage?’

It wasn’t far, really – just a couple of miles. Without the
bruised
knee, I wouldn’t have thought twice about walking. I laughed. ‘Of course. I was being lazy because of the rain.’

‘I’ve just had my hair done,’ Jules said in a small voice. ‘By the time I get to the pub, it’s going to be totally ruined.’

‘Is that where the family commitment is, then?’ I asked, grinning as Jules said something extremely rude in return before hanging up.

As I put the phone down, my smile faded. It was all very well laughing, but there was no one else I could ask. If I wanted to get there, I’d have to walk, and in my present state I wasn’t altogether sure I would make it.

By a miracle, I got there on time, and as it turned out I was quite grateful for the bad weather. There were cameras massed on the far side of the road from the church, filming people as they filed in, but under my umbrella I was safely anonymous. The umbrella shielded my face from anyone who might just spot the bruising high on my cheekbone, even though I had coated it in layers of foundation.

Leaving my umbrella to drip in a stand in the porch along with a forest of others, I crept into the church and looked around. I hadn’t been inside it for a long time. The foundations of St Michael’s went back hundreds of years, but the church wore its history lightly. Along the walls, antique brasses and monuments to long-forgotten parishioners fought for space with posters about Christian charity and poverty in the developing world. A lurid stained-glass window had been added some time in the seventies, incongruous against the old grey stone that
surrounded
it. Part of the left side-aisle had been glassed in at some point to corral noisy children and their suffering parents during services. But the old box pews were satisfyingly unaltered and my footsteps sounded muffled on the worn stone floor, polished over the centuries by the feet of the faithful, as I limped into the side-aisle on the right in search of an unobtrusive place to sit. It wasn’t going to be easy. There was still a quarter of an hour to go before the service was due to start, but the pews were almost full.

I recognised parents from the school and Jenny’s classmates in the congregation, but scuttled past before they noticed me, quick in spite of my new hop-and-step style of walking. I had prepared a story in case anyone asked why I was limping, but I didn’t want to expose it or myself to too much scrutiny. The rain had dulled the light outside to the point that it seemed more like a winter evening than early summer, and the church wasn’t well lit. It was a gift. I slipped into a pew near the front, beside a pair of old ladies who were deep in conversation. They shuffled along to make room for me, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge my presence at all. Perfect.

Looking around, I saw a little group of my colleagues sitting together in the middle of the nave, talking among themselves. They looked tired and unhappy, more because they were there on duty than because they were grief-stricken, I felt. From where I sat, I could see them looking at their watches, foreheads wrinkled with indignation.

Elaine herself was sitting in the front row of the church beside the deputy head, who had dug out a tie for the
occasion
. Elaine had had her hair done and was wearing lipstick; she was definitely thinking of this as an opportunity to impress. The little old lady next to me was holding an order of service, a single piece of A4 paper; I had missed out on picking one up on my way into the church. I wondered if poor Janet had had to do all of the copying and folding herself. By dint of squinting, I could just about read it. Elaine was doing a reading and the school choir was performing.

On the way into the church I had seen a polite notice asking the media to respect the community’s privacy, discouraging them from attending the service. At least one of them had ignored the notice, although I had to acknowledge that she had the excuse of being part of the community too. Carol Shapley was sitting two rows from the front of the church, right behind the pew that had been reserved for the Shepherds themselves. She had her arms around two teenage children, presumably her own, and looked totally harmless, but I could see that she was taking in every detail of the church and congregation. Her head swivelled on her neck like an owl’s. She would miss nothing, that woman, and the local paper would get an exclusive.