Then You Were Gone. Claire Moss
even though he’d kept saying she shouldn’t bring too much stuff. ‘We don’t know how long we might have to be away,’ he had said. She had thought he was mental. Well, obviously she had thought he was mental anyway; what other explanation could there be for what he was doing? But she still had nine weeks to go before her due date. He really was crazy if he thought she would still be in this shack in the woods with him by then.
But now days had passed – maybe a week? She couldn’t tell. All those grey misty mornings that never materialised into a real day, those long, black, wakeful nights wheezing and coughing and trying to get comfortable. All those hours had passed and she was still here.
She could hear sounds now. He was starting to move around in the other room, coughing and shuffling and being conspicuously quiet, as though if he tried not to disturb her in the mornings then that would make up for everything else. For it must be morning, if he was up. Another day, more long hours where nothing happened and still she could not go home. Jessica pulled the baby’s blanket tighter around her shoulders, lay back down and closed her eyes.
‘You know,’ Petra said, ‘there’s one question you haven’t asked.’
Jazzy looked at her and did one long, slow blink. It was already nearly midnight and they had been sitting at the kitchen table having this conversation for four hours. In five and a half hours’ time either the alarm or Rory would wake them up – if they ever got to sleep in the first place. ‘Go on,’ he said. He genuinely hoped that Petra would provide some insight that had thus far escaped him. If anyone could, she could.
‘Well… I hesitate to say it, but how well do you really know this guy? How well do any of you know him, even Simone?’
At first Jazzy thought she must be talking about Keith; he could not shake his suspicion that Keith must be at the root of this somehow, and he had spent a large part of this evening telling Petra so. She could not mean Mack. Because he knew Mack like a brother; he knew everything about him that you could know about another person. They had lived together in Japan for two years, eaten together every evening, slept every night separated only by a wall of paper, ventured out together to karaoke and sushi bars and sento bath houses at weekends. There was nobody in the world who knew Jazzy better than Mack.
‘I mean,’ Petra continued, ‘what do you really know, other than what Mack’s told you? Like, do you even know which school he went to? Have you ever met any of his friends from school? Have you ever met his dad? Do you know what he was doing in between leaving uni and going to Japan?’
‘Of course I know all that,’ Jazzy said dismissively. But he felt a heavy weight settle at the bottom of his stomach. Because Petra had hit on something there. He had never met any of Mack’s school friends, nor even any of his mates from university, though he had at least heard him talk about them – mostly some guy called Dan who had been something of a sidekick by the sounds of him. He did know that Simone had gone with Mack to a university reunion a month or two ago but, reading between the lines he gathered that the two of them had spent most of the weekend in their hotel room shagging.
And it was also true that Jazzy did not know which school exactly Mack had been too. Because of course he had never asked; after all, there must surely be hundreds of Catholic comprehensives in south London. It was not like the world Jazzy had come from, where you mentioned which school you had been to and everyone had either heard of it or had a cousin who had boarded there at the same time as you. He had never asked about Mack’s school because he knew he would never have heard of it anyway. And, a small, embarrassed part of him conceded, because he had never really deemed it something worth knowing.
Nor had he ever met Mack’s dad – and nor had Simone, at least as far as Jazzy knew. Actually, now that he thought about it, Jazzy wasn’t sure that Mack’s father had ever been on the scene. Mack had certainly never mentioned him. Jazzy had met Mack’s mum on a few brief occasions but had done little more than pass the time of day with her, and Jazzy knew that Simone had met the woman only once.
So when it boiled down to it, what he knew about Mack was, essentially, what Mack had chosen to let him know. That he had been born and brought up in New Cross, the only child of a single mother and an absent father, who had buggered off before Mack was old enough to remember. To hear Mack tell the story, he had taken his parents’ separation very much in his stride, just as, he would insist, the Catholic education to which his mother had insisted he be subjected had been something he breezed through, untroubled by the guilt and introspection such an experience was supposed to produce in young people. Jazzy knew that Mack’s mum had never remarried and that Mack had lived with his mum until he finished school, and then… Well, Jazzy was not sure exactly what had happened. It was one of the areas of his life that, now Jazzy came to think about it, Mack could in fact be pretty vague about. He knew that after school Mack went to read English at Glasgow, then apparently came back to London and dossed around in temporary jobs for a couple of years before applying for the JET scheme for the want of anything better to do. And that was where Jazzy came in.
There were a lot of gaps there, Jazzy was forced to admit. But then really were there any more than in the background of anyone you had got to know in adulthood? Was it normal to know the name of your friend’s old school? Was it essential to have met a friend’s father or his old university flatmate or his childhood pet before you could say you really knew him? Did the fact that he could not account for all of his friend’s movements in the preceding decade mean something sinister? Jazzy could not believe so. Mack was so normal. That was why Jazzy loved him. Being normal, getting on with your life, rubbing along, fitting in, not overreacting or falling out or having strange, furtive pastimes was, in Jazzy’s experience, a rare and underrated quality. How could anybody as normal as Mack have a hidden life?
‘All I’m saying,’ Petra said, apparently aware that Jazzy was about to shut down communication, ‘is that you have to start from the assumption that Mack has been hiding something from you – at least for a couple of weeks, but possibly for – well, for as long as you’ve known each other. And you need to work out all the things that you don’t know about him, and work out if any of them might be the key to it. Honey?’ Her voice had taken on that hockey captain tone it sometimes did when she suspected she did not have his full attention. ‘Do you see what I’m saying?’
Jazzy was quiet a moment. He could not summon the energy to think, let alone articulate those thoughts. ‘I don’t know.’
Petra sighed, but in a fond, loving way, and Jazzy avoided making eye contact. Normally he enjoyed her fussing over him, but tonight it was starting to wear a little thin. ‘I think Mack’s keeping a secret from you – from all of us. And if you insist on finding out what’s happened to him, even when he’s asked you not to…’
‘How can I not look for him?’ Jazzy put in, almost incoherent with frustration and fatigue. ‘He’s my best friend, and my work colleague, and Rory’s godfather, not to mention Simone’s – whatever he is to Simone. I can’t just think, oh well, that was fun while it lasted, he’s obviously had enough of this life so we’ll all have to move on too. He could be in real trouble! If I don’t help him, then who’s going to?’
‘I know,’ she nodded. ‘I’m sorry. Look, let’s go to bed. But I just think, if you’re going to find him, you need to at least decide where to start.’
Jazzy did not have the least idea where to start, so in the morning he got up and went to work as normal. He arrived in the office slightly earlier than usual again, before Keith was likely to show up – before even Ayanna – desperate to buy himself some quiet time in which to hatch a plan to get information out of Keith. It was the only thing he could think of to do. He went into the office, switched on all the lights and the coffee machine, then went and sat down behind Mack’s computer again. He knew that he had switched it on, and he must have entered the correct password, because when he jerked awake nearly two hours later, the machine was humming away happily, Mack’s screensaver photo of Mount Fuji in spring only serving to disorientate Jazzy