After Anna. Alex Lake
she fell asleep, alone in the bedroom, her only company the sound of Brian’s footsteps as he walked from the kitchen table to the booze cabinet, she’d googled ‘missing children’. It was a mistake, just like it was a mistake to google your symptoms. Persistent runny nose? Not a cold – it was brain fluid leaking out of your cranium. Always tired? Not a condition of being a parent – it was a rare virus that would gradually eat away at your muscles until you wasted away to nothing. Constipation? Bowel cancer. The difference was, these were false diagnoses. In the morning, a doctor would tell you not to worry and send you on your way.
When it came to missing children the facts – or the patterns, at least – were pretty clear.
Kids, especially five-year-old kids, were either found in the first few hours, or not at all.
Yes, there were exceptions (and that was where the hope came from) but for the most part (and please let Anna be different, please) five-year-old kids either showed up pretty soon after they went missing – at a friend’s house, or in the care of a concerned adult who had seen them alone – or they didn’t show up at all.
She had read accounts of police investigations; read about the kinds of people who abducted young girls, and the reasons they did so. She read about criminal gangs who kidnapped kids into slavery, or for rich people who couldn’t have kids of their own, she read about lone wolf predators who took kids and hid them for years, until the kids grew up and lost their appeal and were murdered. She read about paedophile gangs, who took kids and passed them around their network, filmed them being raped to order, and then disposed of their broken bodies in landfill sites in the Third World.
She’d run to the bathroom sink and vomited until there was nothing left to come out other than bile and saliva. It was funny how your body reacted to extreme emotion by emptying the stomach. She didn’t know why that would be the case; you’d think it would be better to retain the food so as to have some energy to deal with whatever crisis it was.
Even so, she wasn’t hungry now. The thought of food held no appeal whatsoever; she wasn’t sure it ever would again. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a creak behind her. For a second, instinct took over and Julia thought it was Anna coming down for an early morning cuddle; her spirits rose, the gloom lifted. And then she turned to look and reality reasserted its grip.
It was Brian. His eyes were red, his face unshaven. He was one of those men who grew facial hair very quickly. If they went out in the evening he would have to shave for a second time in the day. She had found it interesting, at first. Charming. Manly. Part of the husband she loved. Now she found it off-putting, and there were plenty of other things about him that had a similar effect: all his physical imperfections, the smells and blotches and sagging muscles, now repelled her.
‘Brian,’ she said.
He ignored her. They had barely spoken since leaving the school. That was part of the reason she’d googled ‘missing children’. She’d been alone and unable to stop herself.
He walked past her to the kitchen; shoulders slumped, and flicked the kettle on. He put a teabag in a mug. When the water boiled he poured it into the mug and added milk. The milk spilled on the countertop. His hand was shaking. He’d drunk a lot when they had got home, enough to pass out around midnight, but not enough, it seemed, to stay passed out.
‘Brian,’ she said. ‘We need to talk.’
He looked at her over his cup of tea. ‘Do we?’ he said. His voice was broken and hoarse.
‘Yes. Our daughter is missing.’
‘Because you weren’t there to pick her up. You didn’t show up and now she’s gone.’
Julia wanted to defend herself, out of habit. It was how things were between them: he criticized her or she criticized him and they argued. Right or wrong didn’t come into it. Not giving in was what mattered. You didn’t give an inch. You stood your ground. Sometimes she felt like Tom Petty singing ‘I Won’t Back Down’.
But not this time. What could she say? It’s not my fault? It was her fault, at least partially, and partially was enough. Maybe she had an excuse. Maybe she’d been unlucky. Maybe she could have been late a thousand times and each time Anna would have been sitting there with Mrs Jameson, eating a biscuit, and telling the teacher about her favourite place to go on the weekend. All those things could be true, but they didn’t alter the only truth that made any difference: if she had been on time, Anna would be asleep in her bed right this minute.
So Brian was right. Cruel to point it out, but right. Perhaps if they’d been happily married, perhaps, even if they’d been unhappily married but planning to stay that way, he would have been the one to support her, to make her feel less wretched, but she had told him she wanted him out of her life, and with that she had given up any right to his support.
She reached for her car keys. Her hands struggled to pick them up. She wiped her eyes clear of tears.
‘I’m going out,’ she said.
He didn’t reply. He just leaned on the kitchen counter and looked out of the window and sipped his scalding tea.
iii.
Reminders of Anna were everywhere.
Her booster seat in the rear-view mirror. A thin summer raincoat in the footwell. Biscuit crumbs on the backseat.
Brian had told her off for letting Anna eat in the car, for making such a mess.
Who cares now? Julia thought. Who cares about crumbs or mess or late bedtimes? We spend so much time worrying about the little things, when they don’t matter. And we let the things that do matter slip.
When she turned the ignition a CD of kids’ songs came on. She sat back and listened.
Do your ears hang low?
Do they waggle to and fro?
Can you tie them in a knot?
Can you tie them in a bow?
Anna had found that song particularly amusing, and had developed a dance in which she rocked from foot to foot and mimed tying her dangly ears in knots and bows.
Julia pulled into the street. There was a light on in the house next door, and she saw the upstairs curtain twitch. Mrs Madigan: a village stalwart in her nineties, who had an opinion on everything, and who expected, by virtue of her age – as though age conferred wisdom – that people would listen to it. She was known to be both ‘formidable’ and ‘quite a character’ and widely surmised to have a heart of gold beneath her tough exterior. People often commented on how it must be ‘interesting’ or ‘fun’ or ‘quite something’ to have her as a neighbour. Julia didn’t tell them what she really thought: it was a pain. Once you got to know her you realized that Mrs Madigan’s public persona of forthright grumpiness did not, in fact, hide a beneficent and kindly old woman; it hid a sour and angry old woman. She didn’t like it when Anna was noisy in the garden and she thought nothing of shouting at her over the fence, or of complaining to Julia or Brian about their hooligan child. She would ask Brian to help when something broke in her house, and then, when he finished whatever DIY task she had assigned him, she would complain that he had done it wrong, and then ostentatiously get a tradesman in to redo the work. Above all, she complained incessantly to Julia about her two children and many more grand- and great-grandchildren, and how they were selfish and lazy and ignored her.
Julia didn’t blame them. She would have ignored her too, had she been able to do so.
The neighbours on the other side – a childless couple in their late-forties – were much better. They didn’t have much to do with them, which Julia was becoming convinced was the key to good neighbourly relations. Good fences make good neighbours, the saying went, and it was true.
Julia wasn’t sure where she was going, but she found herself heading for the local playground. It was a pretty unprepossessing place: just a set of swings, a slide,