‘Why?’ asked Robbie.
‘Because if someone knows where Daddy is but hasn’t said anything yet, then they’ll see us on the TV and realise how much we’re missing him and they might tell us where to find him. But we all have to pretend to look sad when they start filming us.’
‘But we don’t have to pretend,’ replied a puzzled James. ‘We are sad.’
Of course they were. I paused to ask myself if I was exploiting their pain to prove something to myself or to help our family as a whole. Would parading them publicly heap more psychological damage on what they’d already suffered? Or did the end justify the means?
I didn’t see I had much of a choice, so I shoved them into the living room wearing long faces. I was a terrible mother. But, fired up by a breath of fresh interest in us, I blanketed surrounding villages, bus and train stations, hospitals, libraries and community centres with posters I’d had printed with my husband’s photograph and description.
I delivered them to each place by hand so they’d be less inclined to throw them away, having seen my worried and desperate face in person. And I wrote three dozen letters and sent his photo to homeless shelters and Salvation Army centres around the country, in case he’d turned up confused. Being proactive gave me a lift I’d not felt in a while. I was optimistic and in control. When I’d completed every bit of outreach I could think of, I told myself that all I had to do was wait.
The police received thirty or so calls after the TV appeal, but none of the leads came to anything. I drew a blank with the Salvation Army, and only one shelter in London recalled seeing someone with a vague similarity to Simon. But that person had left months ago.
By the end of September, I was back to square one.
It’s funny what the mind can do when it’s grasping at straws and only touching nettles. Down to either wine or desperation, I began coming up with ludicrous theories to explain his absence. If it offered a faint glimmer of hope, I latched on to it.
I scanned through newspapers on the library’s microfiche to see if there were any serial killers on the loose he might have fallen victim to. I asked Roger if there was any possibility he could’ve been forced into a police witness protection programme. I spoke to a very sympathetic woman at MI6 to ask if he’d been leading a double life for years as a spy, and was now on a mission somewhere in the world. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, confirm or deny it.
I spent a day reading interviews with people who claimed they’d been abducted by aliens and experimented on. Simon hated his doctor prodding and poking him, so in a rare moment of self-amusement, I pictured his face as E.T. tried to stick a long finger up his backside.
I even visited a friend of Paula’s mother, a psychic who frowned when she held Simon’s comb in one hand and photo in the other. She closed her eyes and hummed.
‘Well, he’s not passed to the other side yet, dear,’ she began, to my relief. ‘I’m sensing that he’s safe and well, but far away. Somewhere sandy. I’m getting mountains and people speaking in funny accents. He’s smiling a lot. He seems very happy.’
I stormed out before she finished, cursing myself for throwing money at a fraud.
Back home, I walked through our front door, slumped across the kitchen table and, without taking my coat off, finished off a glass of wine I’d left earlier.
Four months had passed since Simon had vanished, and I was back to the morning of June the fourth – without him, and none the wiser as to why.
7 October
I went to bed early and turned off the lights, hoping the wine would knock me out quickly. It didn’t. My stomach rumbled but I couldn’t be bothered even to make myself a sandwich.
I’d long ceased closing the curtains, so that I could stare out of the window during my frequent bouts of insomnia. The moon was brighter than I’d ever seen it, as were the stars. I stared at clusters of them and tried to fit them together to form Simon’s face.
It wasn’t anything in particular that set me off, but I’d spent most of the day at a new low. It doesn’t matter if you’re holding the hand of a loved one as the death rattle slowly dissolves into a rasp, or if the police turn up on your doorstep to tell you there’s been an accident. No matter how death happens, the pain is hideous.
Some people build barriers to hide from themselves or those who share their pain. Some shut down completely, and others dedicate the rest of their lives to mourning. The brave ones simply get on with it.
I couldn’t do any of that. Because when someone simply disappears into thin air with no reason, no explanation and no closure, all you’re left with is an interminable void. A gaping, aching chasm that can’t be filled with the love, sympathy or strength of others.
Nobody knew my heart was now a black hole, swirling with the debris of unanswerable questions. Until physical proof of Simon’s death came along, I would never, ever, truly be able to let him go.
I had no funeral to arrange; no body to bury; no one to blame; no autopsy to offer a medical answer or suicide note to explain a reason; no nothing. Just months of absolute nothingness.
And as everyone else’s lives carried on beyond our garden gate, I was stuck in purgatory and feeling so very, very alone.
SIMON
Saint-Jean-de-Luz, twenty-five years earlier
14 July
There was an emptiness in my belly that needed to be filled. My imagination was hungry and I craved a project to sink my teeth into. Even as a boy I’d had an urge to construct. Birdhouses, dens, rabbit hutches, dams in streams – it didn’t matter so long as it was a tangible object I could build from scratch and be proud of.
My life in France was content and free of stress. But while I’d shaken most of the trappings of my past, living in a hostel that was once so splendid and now cried out for help made my desire to design and actualize impossible to ignore. It was what I did. I made things. I created things. I restored things.
And the more time I spent under its roof, the more familiar I’d become with its personality. I knew which floorboards creaked and which had barely enough strength to support my weight. I knew the windows to keep closed, or risk the rotting frames disintegrating. I knew on which side of the attic the mice preferred to nest. I knew the rooms to avoid in a heavy downpour and the places to find maximum sunlight for Bradley’s indoor garden of cannabis plants to thrive.