Another Place

by Matthew Crow

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A small town. A missing schoolgirl. A terrible secret. And one girl's fight to survive. Sixteen-year-old Claudette Flint is coming home from hospital after an escalating depression left her unable to cope. She may seem unchanged on the outside; but everything's different. The same could be said about her seaside hometown. A local teenager, Sarah, has disappeared. Sarah had a bad reputation round town; but now she's vanished the close-knit community seems to be unspooling. As the police investigate and the press digs around for dirt, small town scandals start to surface. What nobody knows yet is that Claudette and Sarah had a secret friendship. And that the last secret Sarah shared may be the key to the truth. After weeks of focusing solely on herself, Claudette realizes she is not the only part of the world that needs fixing - and that if she can piece together the fragments of Sarah's story, then maybe she can piece herself back together too. Another Place is a novel about lost girls, recovered life - and the meaning of home.

Release date: August 3, 2017

Publisher: Atom

Print pages: 304

Sample

I got out of hospital the summer they were looking for Sarah.

The summer I got better, then worse, then better again.

The never-ending summer.

The blink and you’ll miss it summer.

 

They showed where I lived on television.

It was the day that they found the hairclip in the wastepipe leading to Hook’s Scar. A helicopter caught a glimpse of our chimney as it sliced through Shetland Avenue and across the promenade towards the beach.

‘I live there,’ I said in the common room. It was fifteen minutes until the start of my last group, and there were only three of us on the sofas.

Lou said that she had lost her virginity between some bins behind Jumping Jacks nightclub. Samantha said it looked rubbish. Ginny asked whether Sarah was at my school. When I told her she was in my year she asked me if I knew who’d taken her. I said I didn’t know and that she could have just run away for all anybody knew. Samantha said it wouldn’t be on the news if she wasn’t dead already and then Ginny started crying and left the room.

In truth I knew it would be bad.

Sarah had the kind of beauty that forced you to look, but a manner that caused you to turn away fast. She didn’t seem like the type of girl who simply wandered off and got lost. She seemed like the type of girl that was taken.

I had known her in secret, which was the way she seemed to form all of her acquaintances; and in fragments, the only way she would give of herself – sharp pieces picked from the whole, doled out necessarily and sparingly to those who cared enough to make an effort.

‘We’re the same, you and me,’ she’d said quietly on one of our last nights together on the beach. ‘I mean we’re different, and all that. But deep down we’re the same.’ She had mused, sat there draining the last of her vodka as the tide pulled in. ‘We’re just two different types of fucked,’ she concluded.

I began to think about her more and more during those last days on the unit. In a strange way it was nice, after weeks of focusing solely on myself, to be reminded that I was not the only part of the world that needed fixing. The longer she was missing, the further away she seemed to get, the less I was able to focus on anything else, to the point that her recovery became my mission. As if by solving the mystery of Sarah I could solve the mystery of myself.

In the run up to my release I had been given a notebook to fill out.

‘Baby steps, Claudette,’ Doctor Warren had informed me, handing the notepad across to me with a plastic biro. ‘Set small goals that you can easily achieve, and a large goal to work towards.’

‘Do I have to show this to anybody?’ I had asked, and he smiled as he shook his head.

‘It is for you and you only,’ he said. ‘It may seem silly, but try it. You’d be amazed at how much you are able to achieve once you set your mind to it.’

That night I had done as instructed. I picked easy tasks to adhere to on a day by day basis, and weekly goals that didn’t seem entirely unachievable.

Towards the back of the small notepad was a page headlined in an insistent font: A LONG TERM GOAL I WILL WORK TOWARDS, it said in block letters, underlined and exclaimed.

It was here that I wrote my goal for the summer. A goal I would only share with those whose involvement helped my mission. The last secret between me and the friend I had known only at night.

That summer I would find Sarah Banks.

 

Jimmy was the nurse on guard that day. He looked up from his crossword and squinted over the rim of his glasses at the television, where a camera now panned over the main stretch of the beach.

‘The first place we ever took our Sonny for a walk after he was born, along that promenade,’ he said. ‘We found a fiver in the shingles that day and bought some chips. Good day.’ He smiled and returned to his puzzles.

I stared at the footage on screen. Across the sand, dark patches wound in and out of one another from where the search party had combed the stretch from the lighthouse, past the pier, all the way towards the power station. The camera showed all of the places I knew; the ice-cream shop and the amusement arcade, and the other ice-cream shop and the other amusement arcade.

Leaflets showing Sarah’s face lined the faded boards that surrounded the Mariners’ development.

 

Missing

Have You Seen This Girl?

Call This Number

Her image was multiplied, over and over again, like a morbid Warhol painting on the development that never really was.

The Mariners had started life as a dance hall. Then, after various and fleeting stints as a disco, a roller-rink and an indoor market respectively, it was shut down, boarded up and eventually bought by a developer to be turned into: ‘Quality One Two and Three Bedroom Apartments: City Style, Coastal Views.’

The company responsible had made a big deal of holding town meetings with a view to getting everybody on board. They promised to employ local tradesman. They swore to retain the character of the building. ‘Maintain the best and strengthen the rest’, said the flyers that came through the door, before planning permission had been granted.

The development had made its way as far as the scaffolding stages before money ran dry and the Mariners was abandoned to rats and squatters.

Mostly the closed-down shops up there on television just looked embarrassed. When I was a little girl the promenade was the brightest, busiest thing in the world. There were people. There were sounds and open signs and coloured lights in the dark.

Dad was on the Street Wise team then: a group of locals who met up after work in hi-vis jackets, armed with bin liners and litter pickers, to clear the beach.

Sometimes he’d take me when after-school club had been cancelled.

‘Come on,’ he’d say, putting his jacket on me. ‘We’re going on a treasure hunt. Biggest bag wins.’

We never did find any treasure. I’d get to the end of the beach, all clean and shiny again, and look forlorn at our notable lack of jewels and coins.

‘Well, there’s always next time,’ Dad would say, handing me fifty pence and a wink for my efforts.

Once the rot set in there was no stopping it. Each day another shop was boarded up. Weeds grew from cracked windows and the crowds grew less and less. It was the same with me. Sometimes I’d look back at old photographs and try to pinpoint the exact moment I broke; when the world changed colour and suddenly I was different. There was no single moment. It was a gradual change, like a cloud moving across a picnic. If you lined up the photographs of Dad and me, from baby to adolescent, you could see it happening. Beside him stood a girl whose eyes grew sadder and more terrified with each extra inch she grew, as though the more she saw the more she realised there was to be utterly frightened of. More to be bemused by. More not to understand.

‘Ever get the feeling you’re on a sinking ship?’ Dad once chuckled sadly as we walked home from the bus stop one evening to find that his second favourite sandwich shop – Goodfillers, with the logo of the French stick wearing a tuxedo – had been boarded up. He still hadn’t fully recovered from the loss of Pita Pan, and would struggle to find solace in the substitute offerings of Lord of the Fries.

I didn’t say anything and I suppose I didn’t have to, because Dad just put his arm around me and held me tight as we walked the rest of the way home.

 

The day Sarah disappeared I had been in the hospital three weeks and four days. It would be another three days before Dad came to pick me up.

I was unsticking the photographs from above my bed when Violet came in to check on my packing progress. I’d arrived at hospital in the same torn school uniform that they’d found me in. The rest of my clothes had appeared during the first few days, when I slept right through the chemical fog administered by kindly nurses. Occasionally I’d lift my arm as a tourniquet was tightened and blood samples were taken to check that my cocktail of narcotics weren’t doing more harm than good. But mostly I slept.

Dad had driven up every day, or so I was told. He had left clothes, which were folded and put into drawers for me, and photographs which I had to stick to the walls with chewing gum. Safety pins were a no-no. I suppose even Blu Tack could be lethal if you ingested enough.

Violet was tall and oblong with a hairdo that looked as though it had been built from Lego. She wore hiking boots and wax jackets everywhere she went, summer or winter, as if she thought she might be required to conquer a sudden precipice in the middle of Tesco. Violet was not a doctor or a nurse or anything that seemed to grant you letters after your name. She called herself a counsellor and mostly chatted about your day, before scurrying off to make notes and show them to the doctors in charge. If the hospital were a prison, Violet would have been shivved for snitching long before now.

Fortunately it wasn’t a prison. Despite the bars on the windows and the skeleton keys and the occasional forcible restraints. And Violet was sweet and kind and often brought distracting chocolates, so nobody ever thought to attack her for her treachery.

‘How you feeling?’ she asked, walking straight into my room.

‘I don’t really know,’ I said as I scrunched the last of my underwear into a bag. ‘Good, I suppose. Positive.’

Violet turned to check that we were alone for a moment then lowered her voice.

‘It’s me you’re speaking to now, Claudette. Don’t feel the need to use therapy talk. You can feel however you feel, in whatever words you like. I don’t mind. You’ve done well. You’ve earned your right to simply not know at times.’ She leaned over the bed, holding out an open bag of sweets.

I smiled and rummaged in the bag.

‘Scared, a bit,’ I said, swallowing a plastic-y tasting blackcurrant cube. ‘Well, apprehensive more than anything.’

‘You’re bound to be scared. I’m nervous coming back to work after taking a long weekend. Four weeks is a long time, Claudette.’

‘Ever started a long weekend the way I started my stint here?’ I said, and Violet laughed as she shook her head. She had read my notes, I knew. So was aware of the state I’d been left in by the time I was admitted. Depression and I had been on speaking terms for some time by that point. I may not have always understood its rules, but its rhythms I had grown to recognise. And yet the white-hot snap of mania had come at me quickly and without warning. It was as though all of a sudden my body and mind could only recognise extremes; that unless I felt everything then I would feel nothing at all. And so I pushed harder and harder until I guess I just gave out.

‘You’re a good person, Claudette, and a smart girl. You’ve come far and you’ll go farther,’ she said with a knowing nod.

I think in Violet’s head she was the type of figure they’d make a film out of one day. The one person who got through to the seemingly unfixable head-case. The truth was, most of the other girls spent all their time in rec making fun of her. But to me she seemed sweet, in a sad sort of way.

I nodded appreciatively and Violet gave me a special sort of wink.

She placed the half tube of sweets on my bedspread as she left me in peace. ‘For the energy,’ she said. ‘Nice to see your appetite hasn’t dipped.’ She smiled and left me in peace.

The room was stripped of my things. It no longer belonged to me and I no longer belonged to it. I felt my body begin to shake as I picked up my bag. Because for all my bravado, it had suddenly dawned on me just how clueless I was about whatever came next. For as long as I could remember my life had belonged to a condition that had taken me down. But everybody knows how to break. There were films about girls unravelling and boys exploding. Every other song seemed to be about Losing Your Mind or Going Under to a place where there was no light. There was a point of reference for coming apart. I’d been gifted a condition that had its own aesthetic. But putting myself back together? That was something that nobody showed you how to do. There was no framework. No well-trodden footpath.

We break suddenly.

We break spectacularly.

But to rebuild takes time and effort. It is a skill set none of us are born with.

Without realising it we spend half our lives being shown how to come apart. But putting ourselves back together? That was the great unknown.

I felt like a blank page.

And I was terrified.

‘All set then?’

Dad greeted me at the front desk, where he stood with Violet. He had worn his best shirt and was carrying keys to a borrowed car.

‘Just about,’ I said, taking my package from Violet.

‘These will last you the first few weeks,’ she said. ‘And remember you’re not in this on your own. We’re only ever a phone call away. You’ve got your first appointment with the counsellor set up for next week.’

‘Oh yes,’ Dad interjected. ‘We’ve been well drilled.’

‘Then that’s you.’ Violet beamed. ‘Well done, Claudette, you’ve come on leaps and bounds. We’re all very proud of you.’

Dad and I went out to the car.

‘So… how’s your day been?’ he said, with a deadpan look that I couldn’t help but smile at.

‘Well, the hotel wasn’t up to much.’

‘Out of ten?’

‘A low six if anything.’

‘This simply won’t do,’ he said. His tone was light but his voice weak and scratched. I could tell he had been crying. ‘Set spell-check to livid! To TripAdvisor forthwith!’ He opened my door, taking my hand to guide me into the front passenger seat.

‘I’m not glass, Dad,’ I said, shattering the wry jollity somewhat.

‘No…’ he said. ‘No… But precious cargo is precious cargo. You’re my pension, Claudette Flint. I intend to maintain you the way I never could my savings account.’

‘Don’t worry big man, I’ll see you right,’ I said.

Dad chuckled, but after a while he sighed and his eyes softened. For the last month I’d been relearning how to cope on neutral. I wasn’t ready to test myself against extreme emotional duress, especially not with the man I loved the most.

‘I missed you,’ he said with such quiet sincerity that it hit my stomach like a wrecking ball.

I leant out of the car window as he shut the door and squeezed his hand.

‘So did I.’

We drove home in silence, getting used to sharing space.

 

‘Well, I’ll put the kettle on then,’ Dad said as I dragged my bag into my room and shut the door behind me.

The window had been replaced with new glass. Double glazed this time. With a security sticker still stuck to the bottom right hand corner. I unpicked the clear plastic as the radiator clicked and clanked, before omitting a gentle hum of warmth that seeped up towards my wrists.

I left my bag on the floor and lay back on my bed. There was a bare patch on the far wall where the blood must have been particularly stubborn. Memories of the day leading up to the hospital came in dribs and drabs. I felt the glass shatter against my hands; felt the sharp edges slicing cleanly at my skin. I remember walking as though my life depended on it. Dripping blood all the way to school. I remember standing at the gates. I remember a fuss around me and then… nothing.

The thought of Dad hunched on his knees, bleaching my blood from the paintwork, made my stomach tighten and knot.

The thoughts became loud but then settled as my phone alarm buzzed against my leg to remind me to dose up. Fluoxetine made me nauseous if I took it before lunchtime, I had found, but without my morning ritual with the pensioner’s pill divider Dad had bought me, I needed some form of reminder or I’d forget altogether.

I turned off the alarm while I fished a tampon from my bag, securing my gum in its wrapper before washing down three tablets with a flat bottle of Coke that stood guard beside my bed.

Being back home still didn’t feel quite right. Or rather it felt like only half of me had returned. That the rest of me – the part that had been jettisoned to make room for the mania that had taken the steering wheel in those last weeks – was still out there somewhere, lost and homesick. I didn’t feel quite whole. The memories still burned bright behind my sockets, so I scrunched my eyes together tightly and tried an exercise that they taught in one of our group sessions. Whenever you feel bad about your actions during an episode you think to yourself, When I’m In Control I… and then go through the good things that you’ve done for people.

When I’m In Control I… help with the vacuuming. 

When I’m In Control I… leave Dad’s dinner in the oven if he’s on night shift. 

When I’m In Control I… spend time with Dad even though I’d rather be in my room. 

When I’m In Control… 

A gentle knock on the door interrupted my exercise.

‘Yeah, I’ll be through in a second,’ I said, translating the sound of the knock into the question I knew it was.

‘I forgot to get biscuits,’ Dad said through the door. ‘Shall I pop out and get some?’

‘I’ll go,’ I said, opening the door. Dad had one tea towel draped across his shoulder and another pressing inside of a World’s Best Dad mug.

(When I’m In Control… I buy cheap card-shop mugs, because I know that the sentiment implied will mean more than the five ninety nine it cost me.) 

‘I don’t mind,’ he said, trying to stifle his concern with selflessness.

‘Dad, I’ll go. I need some air. That hospital was always too warm. The air was stagnant.’

‘You watch how you go,’ Dad said eventually, quietly resigned to having lost this battle. ‘Do you need any money?’

‘Nah, I’m liquid,’ I yelled, tucking the spare key into my jeans pocket as I slammed the front door behind me.

 

A man I didn’t recognise stood at the counter as a beeping door announced my arrival. He was talking to Mrs Nesbitt, who ran the shop. Their voices dipped as I made my way past sanitary-wear towards the biscuit section of the aisle. Out of eyesight, Mrs Nesbitt said something and the man let out a short, sharp laugh.

‘Not in our day, eh?’ he said as he made his way towards the door which beeped again as it closed behind him.

I took the biscuits to the counter and held them out to be scanned.

‘Claudette, isn’t it?’ Mrs Nesbitt asked. She had lived in the area for longer than most of the architecture and knew everybody’s business. Feigning ignorance over a detail as pivotal as your name was simply one of many power moves in her armoury.

‘That’s me,’ I said, pressing the biscuits towards her.

‘Hmmm,’ she said uncertainly, locking me in her suspicious glare as she carried out the meagre transaction. ‘I’m keeping an eye on you, mind,’ she said as I opened the door to leave, though her tone implied more warning than concern. ‘You just be careful.’

I walked the long way home, across the grass banks that separated the beach from the high street, to avoid a camera crew in the alleyway that I’d normally have cut through.

Sarah seemed only to travel via backstreets. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the town’s veins and arteries, and could take you wherever you wanted to go without being seen. It was a habit that had rubbed off on me to a degree, but out of curiosity more than necessity. The effort Sarah often put into disappearing made me realise that more often than not she was hiding from something. She just never said what, exactly.

Across the beach there were white tents erected where evidence had been found. Metal poles with Do Not Cross tape marked out square sections of sand. And men in overalls placed dug-up treasures into marked plastic bags. Cameras dotted the lower promenade as a dozen or so presenters all found different ways to tell the world that nobody knew anything.

Ross Lions stood on the upper promenade. He was throwing chips towards the mawkish reporters in a bid to make seagulls attack.

‘Got you!’ he yelled, as a gull the size of a shire horse bumbled its way towards the high heel of a presenter, causing her to dance on the spot as it fussed over the soggy chip.

I’d almost passed unnoticed when Ross’s voice snagged behind me.

‘Clau. . .