The Missing One (2 page)

A memory surfaces even though I don't want it in my head. It was a very long time ago and we were standing on Brighton beach, just the two of us, watching a swarm of starlings seethe through the sky, switching direction this way and that, before vanishing through the ribs of the ruined pier like a cloud of smoke sucked into a vortex.

‘Why don't they crash?' I asked.

She looked down at me. ‘They do it by intuition,' she said, ‘and trust.' Then she knelt at my level and grabbed the tops of my arms. ‘Kali, I need … ' She was breathing fast, as if she'd run somewhere. For a moment I felt as if she were really seeing me – just me – and I swelled into something important. But then the familiar cloud drew across her eyes and that good feeling crumbled as she dropped my arms. ‘No. It doesn't matter.' She turned away and then she just walked off up the beach, calling sharply over her shoulder for me to hurry or we'd be late to pick up Alice from ballet. I ran after her, up the steep bank, but the stones slipped
under my boots and it was like one of those dreams where you can't go any faster even though your life depends on it.

I flick through her other paintings, almost all abstract oils of the Seven Sisters, sailing boats at Seaford, pebbles at Beachy Head. All she ever painted was the sea – almost forty years of waves and boats and shingle and gulls, even though our village is fifteen miles from the coast, rooted in Wealden clay, with oak trees, bluebell woods, cow parsley, hawthorn hedges and the line of the Downs changing with the light and the seasons. All perfect subjects for a landscape artist; all stubbornly ignored by my mother.

Her easel sits in one corner and there are boxes of charcoals and paintbrushes everywhere. Tubes of paint overflow from a wooden crate. Her worn black boots sit in one corner – but I can't look at those – and her green silk scarf is on the back of the door. It is the same shade as her eyes. I always wished I'd inherited her eyes, rather than my own, a sort of navy blue that Doug generously calls ‘violet'.

But I can't think about Doug. Not now. I just can't. Not while I am doing this. Since I found his phone and everything torpedoed, I have been unable to think about Doug at all. Even if I try to think about what it means, my mind shuts down as if a blanket has been thrown over that part of my brain.

When I heard his voice earlier that day the fury was so intense that my words came out strangled: ‘I have to stay down here, and help with the funeral.'

‘But I'll drive down – I should be there … you shouldn't do this alone. You can't.' I heard the guilt in his voice.

‘No!' I barked. ‘I don't want you to come.'

There was a second of silence. And then I hung up.

All I wanted was to run – to go far away where none of this could touch me. He would have put my inability to speak to him down to shock or grief, initially. Maybe he'd even have been relieved, on some level, that I was staying in Sussex with Finn. With us away, he could work longer at whatever vital meeting or conference or lecture he had scheduled and he wouldn't have to stress about being back for bathtime or feel guilty that I was doing everything again. Or perhaps he would take off, to be with her.

But I can't think this sort of thought. Not now. The timing of all this is horrendous. I try to breathe. All I want to do is flee. Every single part of me is saying, ‘Run'. I want to be anywhere but here; I want to be gone, far away.

I have to focus and get this done. There is nowhere to run to. It's so late, my eyes hurt, as if they're shrivelling inside my head. I just have to find her birth certificate and get out of this room.

Then, as if my thoughts have made it all the way to Oxford, the phone buzzes in my jeans pocket. I tug it out and jab ‘ignore'. He has been trying to call all night, but I can't hear his voice, his excuses or, worse still, his confessions. I can't face either the truth or lies. I drop the phone on the ground and kneel in front of the filing cabinet, wrench it open. The phone rings again and I kick it under the desk. It bleeps and goes silent.

I am here to find my mother's birth certificate. When I've found it I will go and sleep next to Finn, and I will wake up
in less than five hours with my baby laughing and singing and bashing his fists on the side of the cot, calling, ‘Mama! Mama? Mam-A!' And I will keep going; I'll keep moving through the next day and the next because whatever else I have lost, I still have Finn.

*

The hanging files are surprisingly organized. There are health folders containing her NHS card, some information about iron deficiency and an ironic all-clear from a mammogram three years ago. There must be a stack of hospital paperwork somewhere. I hope I don't find that.

I flick through the files – bank statements, random receipts. But no birth certificate. I pull out a file marked ‘Personal' and tip the contents onto the carpet. There is a Mother's Day card with a love heart that I made from stuck-on sequins when I was little, and hopelessly trying to win her over – or make her feel better. There is a painting of the apple tree by Alice, aged ten, far more accomplished than any of my efforts, and some more Mother's Day cards – mostly from Alice. Then there is an old blue airmail envelope with my mother's name on it, and an address in California. I recognize my father's handwriting. It is careful and controlled, with each letter perfectly formed.

I look at it. I shouldn't. But I can't not. I unfold the blue paper into a single, crackling sheet.

It is dated around the time he brought us to England from California. I would have been about ten months old.

The paper crackles as I refold it and stuff it back in the file. I feel as if I have barged into a room that someone forgot to lock. My father would be appalled if he knew that I had read this. Whatever happened between them all those years ago, I have no right to know.

But it's obvious what happened – his guilt is palpable – and it makes total sense. They never talked about California or reminisced about how they met. There is no family story of a romantic proposal and I have never seen a wedding album. My mother always shut me down instantly if I asked about America. Now I know why.

It is hard to imagine my father doing anything so passionate or so morally wrong as to have an affair. But it was California in the seventies, and maybe he was different then; priorities or morals were different then. I have never heard him call himself Gray. He has always been Graham.

I shouldn't have read the letter. The last thing I need is confirmation that all marriages are subject to betrayal, or that even my upright father could cheat.

I wonder if Alice knows about the affair. She might, since she and our mother talked about everything. I'd hear the chatting in the kitchen with Radio 4 in the background, spaghetti sauce bubbling on the hob, Alice's homework
spread across the table, and I'd walk through the door and they'd stop talking and look at me. Then Alice would jump up and make a space, or ask me for help with her maths, trying, almost pathetically, to include me – as if it were her job to make me feel wanted. But at some point, inevitably, my mother and I would lock eyes over her head. It must have been exhausting for my sister to be stuck between us all the time.

But this is old news. I'm not going to do this, not now. It's much too late.

The birth certificate isn't in these files. It isn't here at all. I scoop everything back and scramble to my feet, resting my hands on the desktop. I feel the tightness around my heart, a physical reality, but a numbness, too. Somewhere in my gut the pain is organizing itself for another day.

The desk is rickety, with curlicues of woodworm running across the surface. There are two drawers. I slide one open and peer inside, as if, miraculously, the birth certificate will be lying there, waiting for me. But the drawer is packed with postcards. I prod at them.

There are pictures of pottery vases, a few Native American paintings, mostly cubic-looking fish in bold blacks and reds, square faces, square eyes, thick black outlines and curling designs on their bodies. I notice a painting of a man's face and turn it over. It comes from a chapel in Ecuador. There is a single sentence written on the card:

I turn the others over, one by one, and for a moment I think I have lost my mind: my brain is short-circuiting. Every card says the same thing, in the same cramped hand.

Most of the postcards have Canadian stamps, though one is sent from Taos, New Mexico, another from Seattle and a few from even further afield – Quito, Moscow, Durban. Not all the postmarks are visible, but every one I can read was mailed on the same date: May 6th. The earliest I can make out was posted thirty-seven years ago. My mother's birthday was in June, so these aren't birthday cards.

I notice that most of the later postcards, from the early nineties onwards, come from the Susannah Gillespie Gallery.

I push them all back into the drawer and shut it, then open the second drawer. It contains pencils and rubbers, a paring knife, a packet of Orbit chewing gum, a nail file, Post-its, a stapler, a box of Swan matches, an ancient silver lipstick.

The base of my skull throbs and I feel the fury massing in my chest: who ignores a lump in the breast? Who sits and watches it grow beneath the surface of their skin and does nothing? Tears are coming down my cheeks, and I give in
and lean on the desk, gasping for breath as they roll off my face and into her drawer.

Then I stop, almost as abruptly as I started. I slam the drawer shut, stand up, wipe my nose on my sleeve, swallow, breathe in and out. There is no reason to believe that my mother actually wanted to die. Maybe she just thought that she was invincible. I wipe at my damp face with both wrists. She didn't believe in illness. When we were young, if we ever complained of headaches, shivers, fevers she'd say, ‘If you think about being sick, you'll get sick.'

*

I think of the time before this – the last time I saw her properly. It was August, just after the diagnosis. We were in the garden. Finn was on his haunches by my chair, putting dirt into his mouth then spitting it out. My mother was thinner and bone-pale, as if her skeleton were sucking away at her flesh. Her old jeans were rolled up, feet bare as usual, but her hair was lacklustre, curls looser, scraped back, more silvery. She looked intensely small, with blue flowers towering behind her.

We sat with a pot of tea and a lemon cake that she had baked, but didn't eat. On my one day in the office that week I'd had to interview three women for the new ‘living with breast cancer' section. While they told me their intimate, awful stories, all I could think about was my mother and what she must be going through and how she would never – ever – talk to me like this. Afterwards, one of the women, about my mother's age, clutched my hand and said the website was a ‘life-saver'. When she logged on and watched the
videos of others talking about their similar situations she realized that she wasn't alone.