Where the Memories Lie
By: Sibel Hodge
She didn’t seem able to hide her grief about splitting up with Chris, though. They’d been together for nine months, and although she never told me she was in love with him, I guessed she was.
It seemed obvious to me by how she acted around him. Whenever she looked at Chris she softened around the edges. Her face lit up. She was happier, freer, lighter somehow. He had loved her, too, but it just wasn’t meant to be. When he’d finished with her, she was devastated. She’d refused to come out anywhere with me, preferring to cry and mope around at home, which I’d never seen her do before. Katie was usually strong, resilient and independent ? she had to be. She always had a strength that I envied ? although I’m sure some people would call her hard, bitchy and selfish. The thing is, you can never understand someone until you’ve walked in their shoes, and even then it’s probably impossible. No one’s perfect, are they? So maybe she had a reputation, for a lot of things, but maybe it wasn’t her fault. Anyway, she was my friend, and I was nothing if not loyal. I tried to get her out of the house when she split up with Chris. Tried to get her to do things with me again, take her mind off the break-up, but she wasn’t interested. The last time I saw her, after weeks of being heartbroken, she’d looked like her old self again, like there was a kind of determination about her. A new resolve. I’d thought it was just that she’d made a decision to herself to go out and get on with her life again, but it wasn’t that at all. She’d decided she was leaving the village. Running away from Rose and Jack and her broken heart.
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Sibel Hodge
I studied the freshly made pizzas under their shiny cellophane wrapper. Ham and cheese or roasted veg?
Who cared? Who cared what pizza I bought if what Tom had told me was true?
But, of course, it wasn’t true. Couldn’t be.
So why hasn’t anyone ever heard from Katie again? In twenty-five years, why hasn’t she contacted you?
Because you were a bad friend. A friend who obviously ignored her when she was in need and she felt the only thing to do was run away. A friend who was too busy with her nursing diploma and her fabulous boyfriend to notice how much she was hurting. Yes, a selfish friend who never stopped to think what was really going on in Katie’s life.
I chewed on my lip and put both pizzas in the trolley.
But plenty of people ran away and were never heard from again. I googled it once, a long time ago. Of course, there was no Internet when Katie went missing, but one day, oh, probably about six years ago now, I thought about her out of the blue and actually looked up how many people go missing a year. I was shocked. It was thousands. About 300,000, if I remember rightly.
And Katie had been eighteen. An adult. The police said at the time that they couldn’t do anything. It was her choice. And, of course, there’d been the letter she’d left, addressed to her mum and dad. The village policeman had been satisfied that Katie had just run away and she’d probably turn up again.
I picked up a packet of minced beef and flung that in the trolley.
So, really, it was Katie’s choice not to get in touch with anyone and tell them where she was. She’d left for reasons that none of us ever really knew for certain. But Tom couldn’t possibly have killed her because of the letter.
There. That letter was complete proof that Tom’s memories were just distorted with Alzheimer’s.
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