Off Minor

Sixteen

Michael, lighting a cigarette, pushing his shirt down into his trousers, thinking, another six or seven hours, the damned weekend’s good as over. Alarm’ll be going and there I’ll be, fighting for car-park space before seeing the same old faces on the train. The ones who nod and climb behind their Telegraph; those who want nothing more than to talk about their round of golf, their kids, their car; the four who had the cards shuffled and dealt before leaving the station, bridge at a penny a point.

“Michael!”

Thinking: Sheffield, that’d be better. Chesterfield, even. Easier. Worth dicing with the traffic on the M1 for a chance to get home at a decent hour, get back to living a proper life.

“Michael!”

He rested his foot on the board at the foot of the bed, so as to tie the lace. Lorraine and I weren’t forever rushing off in different directions, if we had a bit more time to relax, going to bed wouldn’t be such a rare event. Thank God, at least when they did it was still pretty good. He tied his other lace. Lorraine, she’d never needed a lot to get her going; certainly not back when they’d started.

“Michael!”

“Hello!”

“You’re not still there, are you?”

“No, I’m on my way.”

Emily’s dolls were scattered here and there on the back lawn. Her pushchair was skewed sideways in the gravel passage that ran between the side of the house and their neighbor’s high creosoted fence. Michael couldn’t see the doll’s pram at first, but then there it was, pitched on to its side near the garage door.

“Emily!”

He hurried fifty yards in either direction, finally back to the houses front and rear gardens-“Emily!”-all the while calling her name.

“Michael, whatever’s the matter?” Lorraine in the doorway, sweater and jeans, pink towel in her hand as she rubbed her damp hair.

“Emily, she’s not here.”

“She’s what?”

“Not bloody here.”

Lorraine stepping out, towel to her side. “She’s got to be.”

“Yes? Then show me where she bloody is.”

They searched the house, top to bottom, every room, bumping into themselves in and out of doorways, on the stairs, faces increasingly pale, drained.

“Look.”

“Where?” Michael swiveling anxiously round.

“No, I mean …”

“I thought you’d seen something.”

Lorraine shook her head, came forward and took his hand and he shook her away. “Just for a minute,” she said, “we ought to sit down.”

“I can’t bloody sit down.”

“We need to think.”

“Out there looking for her, that’s what we need to be doing.”

“You said you’d done that already.”

“And I didn’t bloody find her, did I?”

His eyes were wild and his hands were beginning to shake. He surprised Lorraine by letting her lead him into the kitchen, though when she pulled out a stool and sat down, Michael remained, agitated, on his feet.

“We should make a list,” Lorraine said, “places where she might be.”

“What places, for Christ’s sake?”

“Friends. Megan Patterson, for instance.”

“That’s half a mile away.”

“Not if you take the cut-through before the end of the crescent. She could easily have walked there in the time we were upstairs.”

“Screwing,” Michael said.

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Of course, it’s got something to fucking do with it! If we hadn’t been up there, leaving Emily alone, this wouldn’t have happened.” He was leaning forward, glaring at her. “Would it?”

Lorraine got to her feet.

“Where d’you think you’re going now?”

“To phone Megan’s mother.”

Val Patterson hadn’t seen anything of Emily, not since a few days ago, and besides, Megan was off at her riding lesson, her father had dropped her off there over an hour ago. Why didn’t Lorraine try Julie Neason, didn’t Emily and her Kim go to school together sometimes? Lorraine rang the Neasons’, but there was no answer. The front door slammed and she knew that Michael had gone back out to look for Emily again. While Lorraine was looking in the phone book, fingers sliding awkwardly over the pages, she heard the car being backed out of the garage, driving away.

In the ten minutes that followed, Lorraine spoke to every one of the parents in the area that she knew and with whom Emily had any kind of contact. Clara Fisher’s dad had been driving past half an hour ago and seen Emily pushing her pram across the front lawn. No, he couldn’t be positive about the time, not to the minute, but he was sure it had been Emily.

“Did you notice anybody else?” Lorraine asked. “Anyone close by? Another car?”

“Sorry,” Ben Fisher said. “I didn’t notice a thing. But then, you wouldn’t expect to really. You know as well as I do what it’s like round here Sunday afternoons, quiet as the grave.”

Outside, a car drew up, the door slammed and there was Michael, shoulders slumped forward, distraught. “Well?”

Lorraine looked away.

“I’ve been four times, up and down the crescent,” Michael said. “Checked everywhere between Derby Road and the hospital. Stopped anyone who was around and asked.”

“We should look again,” Lorraine said. “Inside the house. I mean, really search. Cupboards, everywhere. She might have been hiding, a game, got too frightened to come out.”

Michael shook his head. “I don’t think she just went wandering off.”

“That’s what I say, she’s somewhere here …”

“She’s gone off with someone,” Michael said. Even though he was standing close to her now, close in the carpeted square of hall, the telephone table they had bought from Hopewell’s to match the little chest Lorraine’s parents had given them as a wedding present, she could scarcely hear what it was he’d said. Not wanting to hear the words.

“She’s gone off with someone,” Michael said again, taking hold of her arm below the elbow.

Lorraine shook her head emphatically. “She wouldn’t do that.”

“There’s nothing else, is there?”

“But she wouldn’t.”

Michael released her arm. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because we’ve told her, time and time again, both of us. It’s been drummed into her ever since she could walk. Don’t talk to people you don’t know, anyone who comes up to you in the park, in the street. Don’t take anything, no matter how nice it looks. Ice cream. Sweets. Michael, she just wouldn’t do that.”

He reached out his hand towards her face, brushing back a few strands of hair. “Someone’s taken her,” he said.

Lorraine’s stomach hollowed out and a first tightened inside her throat.

Michael reached past her.

“What are you going to do?”

He looked at her, surprised. “Phone the police.”

“But if she’s not been missing for an hour?”

“Lorraine, how long does it take?”

He was dialing the number when she started, a little breathlessly, gabbling her words together, to tell him about Diana.

All the years that Michael and Diana had been married, they had lived on Mapperley Top, a three bedroomed end-terrace, all they had chosen to afford at the time, not wanting to sink everything into the deposit and the mortgage. Two holidays a year that had meant, not having to stint on going out; clubs, that’s where they went in those days, Diana liking to let her hair down, have a bit of a dance. Afterwards a curry at the Maharani, the Chand: sometimes, if they were feeling especially flush, the Laguna.

After the trouble, the divorce, Michael had found his studio flat and Diana had stayed on in the house, a For Sale board outside, though not too many people bothered to come looking. Then, when Michael had wanted somewhere with Lorraine, of course, he’d had to insist that Diana leave; if the only way they could get shot of the place was dropping a few thousand, so be it.

Diana had moved outside the city to Kimberley, a small town where once the men had mostly worked in the pits and the women in the hosiery factories, and now they were fortunate to be working anywhere.

Diana’s house was little more than a two-up, two-down, open the front door and you were standing in the middle of the front room, another couple of paces and you were in the back. Michael turned right past the mini-roundabout, left again on to a narrow street running parallel to the main road. Three lads, ten or eleven years old, were chasing their second-rate mountain bikes up and down the curb, practicing wheelies. Michael stood for some moments outside the house, looking up at the lace curtains at all but one of the windows. Back across the street, someone was sharing this week’s Top Twenty with all but the clinically deaf.

Michael walked past the overgrown privet hedge, through the gap where the gate was supposed to be. The bell didn’t appear to be working and there wasn’t a knocker, so he rattled the letter flap instead, hammered the side of a fist against the door.

“She’s gone away,” called a neighbor two houses down, setting her milk bottles on the front step.

“She can’t have.”

“Suit yourself.”

Several doors along there was an arched passageway, leading to the backs of the houses. Michael stepped around the dustbin and peered through the square of kitchen window, what looked like breakfast things stacked alongside the sink, that didn’t prove anything one way or another. He knocked on the back door, leaned his weight against it: bolted and locked.

By clambering on to the narrow, sloping sill outside the back room window, he could see through a gap in the curtains. Scrubbed pine table and assorted chairs, a towel draped over the back of one; dried flowers stood in a wide-bellied vase in front of the tiled fireplace. On shelves in one of the alcoves, paperbacks jostled for space with cassettes and magazines, scrapbooks, photograph albums. On a table in the further alcove stood photographs of Emily, souvenirs, most of them, of her fortnightly visits to her mother. Emily reaching up to stroke a donkey, face uncertain; Emily in her costume beside an indoor pool; Emily and Diana on the steps of Wollaton Hall.

There were no pictures of the three of them together, Michael, Diana and Emily, as they had been then, a family.

“Hey-up! What the heck you doing up there?”

Michael turned and jumped back down; the flush-faced man was standing by the fence of the house that backed on to the alley.

“Seeing if there’s anyone in,” Michael said.

“Aye, well, there’s not.”

“D’you know where she is, Diana?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m … I was her husband.”

“Oh, aye.”

“I need to see her, it’s urgent.”

“Not been here all weekend, far as I know. Most likely off away.”

“You don’t know where?”

The man shook his head and turned back towards his own house. Michael hurried along to the archway, on through to the front of the house. The woman from two doors down was standing to admire her handiwork, step now spotless, rubber kneeling-pad in one hand, brush in the other.

“Diana,” Michael said, trying to control the anxiety in his voice.

“Away for the weekend.”

“Know where?”

“Can’t help, duck”

“You sure she’s not been here at all?”

“Far as I know.”

“And a little girl? You haven’t seen Diana with a little girl, six, reddish hair?”

“That’s Emily. Her daughter. Well, seen her, course I have, many a time, but, like I say, not these past couple of days.”

Michael shook his head, turned away.

“It’s what she does, you know. When the kiddie’s not with her. Take off for Sat’day, Sunday. Sad, if you ask me.”

“How’s that?”

“Bloke she were married to, it’s him as stops her seeing the kid more often. Breaks her heart.”

Michael phoned Lorraine from a call box, fumbling the coin into the slot. “She’s not here. Nobody’s here. You’ve not heard from her?”

“Nothing. Oh, Michael …”

“I’ll call on the police on the way home.”

“Should I come too, meet you there?”

“Someone’s got to be home in case.”

“Michael?”

“Yes?”

“Be as quick as you can.”

He broke the connection and ran to the car. Emily had been missing an hour and a half, maybe a little more. Pulling on to the main road, he had to brake sharply to avoid a builder’s lorry, heading down the hill towards Eastwood, its driver calling him all kinds of bastard through the glass. Slow down, he told himself, get a grip; you’re not going to help anything if you can’t hold yourself together now.

Lorraine sat in the kitchen, gazing out through the front window, hands tight around tea which had long since gone cold. All the while she had been sitting there, the street lights had shone more and more strongly. Each time a car entered the crescent, the adrenaline coursed through her: someone had found Emily and was bringing her home. And each time the headlights of the car swept past. Whenever there were footsteps on the pavement, she craned forward, waiting for figures to turn into the path, the anxious running of feet, fevered knocking at the door.

That little girl, the one who went missing, you remember?

It was something you read about in the paper, saw on the television news, shocking, the faces of those parents, pictures of their child. The pleas for a safe return.

They found her body.

And Michael suddenly staring at her, so sure.

Of course …

As though there were no other possibility, no other end.

What else did you think had happened?

The cup slipped from her fingers on to her lap and shattered on the floor. Lorraine did nothing to pick it up, left the pieces where they lay.

When Michael finally arrived, it was in convoy, a police car in front, white with a blue stripe, an unmarked saloon bringing up the rear. The two uniformed men were out of their vehicle quickly, moving briskly after Michael as he came, half-running, towards the house. A young woman wearing an anorak stepped from the third car and opened the rear door for a bulky man who stood for a moment on the pavement, pulling his raincoat around him.

Lorraine, face close to the window, was aware of this man, whoever he was, looking back at her, hands thrust down into his pockets, bare-headed, there in the broken dark. Then it was Michael with his arms tight round her and long, raking sobs, his mouth pressed against her hair, repeating her name, softly, over and over, Lorraine, Lorraine.