Her lonely bench, police blue, on a deserted Sunday platform; wondering what’s left in the fridge for tea. The problem of food for one: it symbolises everything. She wants delicious morsels yet cooking for herself is so defeating: a surplus of ingredients, the washing-up unshared, and the sense that it doesn’t matter – the production of it or whether it’s nice. The daily slog of being alone washes over her on the cold latticed bench, the sense of being unassisted in the minutiae: broadband down; washing machine stuck on spin cycle. Oh yes, people spoke of the freedoms – no one to answer to! – but there was such a thing as a surfeit of freedom, a sort of weightless free fall through nothing. She wonders what Alan Prenderghast is like at fixing things, or renewing roadside breakdown assistance. Masterful, if his Ford Focus is anything to go by.
There is a solitary fellow passenger two benches down, and as he turns to look at her, Manon is careful to turn her head away. Never catch their eye.
A songbird trills, curiously rural amid track and all the metal clutter overhead. The man gets up from his bench and starts towards her, carrying a holdall that looks as if it could be laden with half a torso or firearms but probably contains a mildewed towel and some unpleasantly brief Speedos. He reaches the bench next to hers just as the headlamps of their First Capital Connect train hoves in to view, screeching and puffing and crawling up the platform like an elderly sex symbol keeping the fans waiting. The brakes squeal, a gush of air from somewhere.
Manon waits for the man to choose his carriage so she can choose a different one. Never board first, otherwise they can follow you in.
The familiar blue tartan seats, the smell of warm air pumped through metal floor vents, and someone’s fast food.
In Bedford she stops at her car and looks at the orange glow through the drawn curtains of Bryony’s windows, imagining Bryony and Peter cuddled up on the sofa in front of the TV.
Monday
Miriam
A new year and it feels so old, worn out and tin-rusted. 2011, fifteen days missing. Time pants away from her disappearance like a locomotive and the rawness of it dissipates, as if this might be an acceptable new status quo.
‘Right,’ she says to Rollo, gathering her keys from the kitchen table. ‘I’m off to see Jonti.’
Rollo is eating more toast. It’s Herculean, the loaves he can get through. ‘Say hi from me,’ he says through a full mouth.
Miriam’s journey to Jonti’s shop in Kensal Rise is typically vigilant. She searches every face these days, examines every doorway bed, sees Edith everywhere – the spun gold of her hair; her long slender neck; the back of her head, beloved oval, unaware and vulnerable.
Only yesterday, Miriam had hastened across the scratched grass of the Heath to the bench overlooking the ponds, stumbling happily, she was so sure it was Edith, thinking, Ian will be relieved. Edith in an unfamiliar coat, staring at the tall Parliament Hill houses across the water.
‘Oh,’ Miriam said, as the stranger’s face turned up to hers questioningly. She felt furious and frowned at the woman as if it were her fault.
She looks rough sleepers in the eye, where before she scuttled guiltily past them; she seeks out faces in the hot metallic air of the tube as commuters avoid her eye. She has visited soup kitchens in King’s Cross, the other volunteers mistaking her interest for just another dose of middle-class guilt – it being the time of year for it. She has joined a support group for parents of missing children, some of whom disappeared six years, ten years, fifteen years ago, looking at their dogged campaigns and catching herself thinking, Can’t you see they’re dead?
She is working her way through Edith’s childhood friends, for connections, clues, anything. Pointless, really, but she does it for the sense of contact with Edith, the chance to talk about her, and for the feeling of doing something.