Everything Under

It would be – she thought – a sort of memorial, a way of apologising. She reached down and pressed her hands into the damp earth. She felt Margot leaving. Stopped dumb-struck on the path, bent double. Felt a sudden, great sorrow at what was gone, what was left behind, what would never be spoken of again.
His name was Marcus. He did not remember his parents. He was walking along the canal. He had met and spoken to no one. He liked to run, to fish, to listen to riddles. He walked the way a boy walked, stopped and listened the way a boy would, spoke the way a boy would.

Inside I’d packed my bag, found the keys, ran as far as the car before I realised I still did not know where you were. Even you, it seemed, did not know that. I went to the shed and knocked both fists against the door, shouted and shouted until it was flung open. Even then I shouted for a moment longer, arms raised, head back. When I opened my eyes and saw her I realised that she was frightened of me. Good, I thought, I’m glad you are, I’m glad you’re scared.

Then there was silence for so long I thought Jennifer must have made a mistake, turned the machine off or moved the earpiece away. I opened my mouth to say her name and then your voice spoke into my ear.
Gretel, you said. Gretel. I’m lost.

She was sixteen and not the person she’d been before. She was sixteen and she needed a new name.

Fiona had looked – he said – worse than any of the times before. At moments she would catch his eye but mostly she looked over his shoulder or up at the ceiling. She was too thin, and when she ran a distracted hand through her hair it came out in clumps. There had been a moment – he admitted it – when he’d considered swinging the bottle down. Except then she would never tell them where Margot had gone.

A few times Roger went to meetings for people whose children had died, but it was not the same and he’d known it. He was a fraud there. His child had not wanted to stay with them. His child had never really even belonged to them.

Laura pushed her hands beneath the mattress, upended it, knocked the books onto the floor and shook them out, went through the clothes in the wardrobe. They had spent all morning trying to force Fiona to tell them what she had told Margot but she’d refused and now there was nothing there in her bedroom either. There was nothing there that meant anything. Laura put everything into bags, left them out by the kerb. In the morning Fiona was gone.

She had known something and she had told Margot.
What? Laura said, what did you tell her?
Fiona closed her eyes. She was, Roger saw, crying, and he was so frightened he could barely speak. I told her she had to leave, Fiona said. I told her to go.

I remember, out of nowhere, being accosted at a train station by a man in a bright purple T-shirt with a piece of paper where he wanted me to write my details. He had dropped a large orange into my open hand and told me that was how much brain a person lost when they had Alzheimer’s. I thought about that. The size of an orange cored right out of you.

You are nowhere. I go up and down. I have lost you again. Was this why you wanted to come out? You melt away so easily. I can feel, already, a heavy mourning in my belly. You had told me so little, explained so little. I will never understand what happened. I realise – a sharp pain – that I would miss you if you went, that it would be harder this time around.