Down below in Skyler Square the trouble was passing quickly from door to door, mothers telling mothers, not speaking aloud but somehow saying: baby gone, bad man, wild animal.
The night the child went missing, Carmel sat a few miles away in the window of a cafe in Brockley. She was breathing hard, cloud on the glass. Passing by, a man glanced in to check her prettiness and was struck by the intensity of her face behind the patch of steam which partially obscured it. She ignored the gentle rattle of plates and hiss of chips which went on behind her, hearing nothing. When she let herself pore over memories, she was hawkish. Filled with greed for one of the only pleasures remaining to her, raking through lost evenings and moments. It was rare that she did allow herself this. It had been so long that she knew there could only be a handful more times. It would not always be possible to summon precisely the fast-fading textures and tastes.
When the child was missing, while the courtyard was lighting up with drama and anguish, Carmel was thinking about sex. She tried to mete out the different encounters they had shared together and not think of them all at once as a conflated interaction, not to waste her thoughts in an incoherent wave. Rather she had separated them out years ago and given them titles and would think of them only with great care. Often, because her and Derek’s affair had taken place almost exclusively in the privacy of his apartment, they were called after things they had consumed together, and which she could then recall the taste of in his mouth.
Particular drinks (White Russian Night), plain meals he had cooked with sweet incompetence (Spaghetti Bolognese Night), takeaway pizza with a faint cardboard flavour (Gino’s Night). Most often what she tasted was the familiar paternal smell of beer and cigarettes on his moustache, a beautiful acrid dream sense which haunted her. Other nights were named after a book he had been reading at the time (Of Human Bondage Night), or a chapter she had been studying (‘Home Rule’ Night). She could see with perfect clarity the books being laid aside when they became too impatient.
The clothes she had worn were another method, to think of him undoing the side clasp of a kilt, or pulling up the snug wool jumper she had stolen from her brother after he had shrunk it in the wash. There were ways to do it, ways to differentiate. Despite what had resulted, and what they had meant for the rest of her life, their nights together had not been so many. They weren’t enough that the ways he touched or looked at her were easily muddled together.
These too were divisible, the disbelieving ecstasy on his face when she first parted her legs and let him see her with light, without shame. The confusing joy of him slipping a finger inside her mouth, gently probing so that she felt evaluated like a body, like an animal, but happily. And now, in her window haze, she let herself murmur his name to herself as she almost never did and felt for a moment the fervent rise of devotion which used to be so constant. The feeling, which she knew was also a lie, that she would do anything for him, anything to have him again for a minute. To confirm that his sweat smelled that way it did in her mind, so green and pleasant. If it had been true, if she would have done anything to get him back, then she would have done it at the time. She would have done the one thing guaranteed to summon him when he left.
She was allowing herself the indulgence of memory because her second remaining pleasure, that of sleep, had been torn from her that morning. It was strange that sleep had come to mean so much. She resisted it for most of her life. As a young person she found it a darkly boring prospect, all that waste of fun and thought, and as an adult was fearful that its oblivion was too close to death, too tempting to trust as an indulgence. Later she accepted its blankness as positive, when she stopped believing in the chance of positive movement and embraced distraction as the only possible relief.
There were two nights, soon after her mother had died, when she left the flat.
I’ll be gone for two days, she told her father and brother, You can look after Lucy for two days?
Her father wanted to ask what she was doing but didn’t. Her brother nodded. The child would be taken care of. She used money she had saved to book two nights in a hotel in Little Venice, somewhere a woman who worked in the shop had gone for her anniversary. She wasn’t sure what she was doing exactly but felt that if there was any time to lose herself in new sex it was now, in the mud of grief. She packed a bag with her least-frayed underwear and her best dresses and walked the few hours to the hotel. After throwing her bag in the room, surprisingly shabby and insect-ridden, she showered and did herself up and went down to the bar. She assumed something happened in hotel bars, that was the received wisdom.
After two drinks, and one unappealing pissed businessman, she ventured out. She had three more drinks at three different pubs, hoping for something. It seemed impossible that it wouldn’t take place. Some of them looked at her, but nobody approached, nobody even nodded hello in a promising way. Back in her room she found a long foreign hair in the sheets, and more insects in the bath. She stamped her foot in disappointed rage, shouted oh fuck you at a broken window latch which wouldn’t allow any air in. She checked the rest of the bed for stray foreign bodies, found one more hair which was different to the first, and started laughing. She got into the bed with it, drunk, resigned to disgust and disappointment. She thought about how she would sometimes find Derek’s hairs inside her own underwear the next day and how unspeakably thrilling it was. She would press them against her lower belly as though they could put him back inside of her, that pure agony, how deep the ache in her lowest body was, pain that could only be resolved by the return of its cause.
That night in the hotel her disillusion was so great that she accepted the weight of sleep she had formerly resisted. She slept for twelve hours and rose and ate an early dinner on Formosa Street, a big bowl of spaghetti, then returned immediately to sleep, which had become delicious. When she was roused from it by the cooing of birds at the window she cursed them and went immediately back into it. She had learned there was one more love in her life, this kind of disappearance.
In the cafe in Brockley, pushed out of her sexual reveries by the owner, a kind woman called Sally, closing up, she thought again how deprived she had been that morning. She had been in a perfect sleep, dreaming of an enormous cinema and the feeling of slyly touching hands, when Lucy had run in and screamed that everyone was down in the courtyard playing a game and could she go too.
Yes, yes, Carmel said, go on.
Tom stared at himself in the lift mirror as it trundled down, lit with a brutal glare. He shook his head, loosening the hair and then raking it backwards. He exhaled a long slow sigh and let his lips stay stuck out as it whistled to an end. He held the pout for a moment, squinting, then laughed nervously and stuck his tongue out, making a brief retching sound before readjusting himself back to the mannered, carefully casual stance he maintained while out on a job.
He wore a Fruit of the Loom faded sweatshirt and black Levi’s. His boss Edward had burst out laughing the first time he had seen this outfit on Tom.
Are you doing a little performance as an Everyman, Hargreaves? he said.
Tom had flushed at this even as he laughed along. There was nothing he wanted more than Edward’s approval, he had learned to live for the brief ecstasy of a Good work, lad, or a Knew I could count on you.
Afterwards he felt aggrieved and defensive, bickering with him inside his head. These were the clothes he had worn in Margate before he moved to London and started working for the papers. They were the clothes of normal people, it was only that he’d been playing at being one of the others for long enough that a return to his old home stuff looked comical and perverse.
Peasants, that was what Edward and the others (barring a few hand-wringing employees who were biding their time to make a break for one of the leftie rags) called everyone who was not a journalist or royalty or a celebrity. Peasants were the cheapo hookers who’d had it off with footballers getting paid a few hundred quid for a tell-all, peasants were single mothers with hyperactive children whom they could sell as the NEIGHBOURS FROM HELL. Peasants were small-scale drug dealers who worked in public-facing jobs.
(Tom’s first story in a national was about a school-crossing guard who sold pills to primary school children when he came off his shift. He’d never existed, of course, Anto the lollipop drug lord was Tom’s flatmate Harry with his back to the camera, dressed up in a big beefy tracksuit with a neon vest over it, his shaven head buffed to gleam a little more threateningly.)
Peasants were crooks, bin-men whinging over wages, alcoholics, churchgoing Holy Joes, old people ringing in complaining about telly storylines, slappers, nurses, bouncers on the make, but most importantly, most of all, peasants were the readers.
In the lift mirror he checked himself one more time before exiting to go and have a walk round the square and see what he could gather about the families.
Meeting his own eyes for a moment he had one of the jarring intrusive thoughts which he had, quite often, to suppress lately. Mostly they came when he was trying to sleep, if he had not drunk enough alcohol to make it instantaneous. But they came also during the morning news editorial meetings, particularly when he was being inadequate and panicking about it, failing to light up Edward’s eyes with anything juicy, feeling the ever-present danger of an imminent bollocking. The thoughts got there first, belting out ‘Fucking cunt stupid cunt’ with such an alarming urgency he had to fight the impulse to laugh or cry out. They sometimes had an almost jubilant quality, like a quick burst of circus music being blared at overwhelming volume right inside his skull.
I’m the loneliest man in the world, this one in the lift screamed as he regarded himself, I’m the loneliest man in the world!
Thursday 17 May 1990 TERROR IN NUNHEAD AS BODY OF MISSING INFANT DISCOVERED NEXT TO BINS By Tom Hargreaves
Residents of the Skyler Square housing estate were reeling early this morning after the body of three-year-old Mia Enright was found after a night of agonised searching. Devastated neighbours who discovered Mia reported that she appeared to have bruising around her neck, spurring speculation that she had been deliberately injured.
Charles and Etta Enright, a popular young couple who friends say are a community staple helping to run youth clubs and activities for unemployed adults in the area, were today being comforted by relatives. Mia was last seen in the communal courtyard of her estate playing with her older brother, Elliott, along with other neighbourhood children. She was assumed to have wandered off and become lost, initiating a huge search effort, before tragically being found dead just a few hundred feet from where she had disappeared.
Brian Edwards, Etta’s brother, released a short statement on behalf of the family which read: ‘Mia brought immeasurable joy to our entire family with her infectious laughter and dazzling spirit. She enjoyed every moment of her short time on this earth and it is this we will remember while we try to find the strength to endure the grief we now face. My family ask for privacy at this time.’
Tom heard of the disappearance of Mia Enright before any other hack through pure luck. He was having a drink with a waitress, Ruth, he had picked up a few weeks back near the Millwall football stadium. He had friends in the area and occasionally hung about on volatile match days in case something interesting happened. The waitress suggested they go back to her place. Her mum was away, the place was empty. The mention of a mum gave Tom brief pause, but he scrutinised the faint crow’s feet barely visible beneath the make-up and judged the situation to be tolerable. She was twenty at least and even if she wasn’t quite, he was only twenty-eight himself, it was hardly like he was a dirty old man, ha ha ha.
By the time they’d made their way back to Skyler Square Mia had been missing for several hours and the central courtyard was buzzing with throngs of neighbours, the ones too old or infirm or indifferent to help search. The waitress took his hand and led him right into the heart of the chatter, trying to find out what was going on. Before he even heard what it was that had taken place, he was feeling more relaxed than he had all day.
He bristled in the excitable anxiety, almost smelling it. He knew something fruitful, something potentially magnificent, had fallen into his lap.
I need to use your phone, he said to Ruth, the pretence of dreamy amiability he usually affected with women gone in a moment.
But she hadn’t a phone she told him, her mum didn’t like them, she had nerves and when phones rang they made her panic. Why do you need a phone? she asked him, and he quickly calculated how the next few hours might proceed.
Because, he said, I’ve got an uncle in Camberwell and I want to let him know to spread the word down there in case nobody knows yet.
Her eyes softened a little at this, as intended, and he said to her, I’m going to go and find a phone box, Ruth, and let Uncle Michael know.
Even as he said this he had to restrain himself from exploding with artifice, Uncle Michael, Uncle fucking Michael!
But will you do me a favour? Will you let me come back and stay with you tonight? I don’t mean like that, not now, I just want to be here to help look for Mia and do anything I can.
He cocked his head beseechingly to the side, eyes large and soulful, full of sorrowful determination, and what was amazing was that in the moment there was even some part of him that believed what he was saying, believed that what he was going to do was for Mia. Baby Mia, he thought to himself, Baby Mia will play.
On the phone to Edward he said it might come to nothing but it might be a big one – tiny kid missing, someone had shown him a picture, blonde hair in pigtails, big blue eyes, those slightly heartbreaking pink plastic glasses they do for babies, devastating grin. Her family are saints apparently, every one of the neighbours falling over themselves to say how decent they are, even the really sour-faced old biddies, they’ve sort of turned the estate around, used to be druggies and alkies on the stairwells at night and now it’s all cake sales and corridor-painting parties. Anyway, here’s the important thing – I heard someone just then, she wouldn’t repeat it to me when I asked her to, but I’m sure I heard her say she saw Mia playing with some other kid shortly before she went missing, I’m sure I heard her say ‘that little scumbag’.
Edward gave him an impressed little Ooft noise and said, For the love of God don’t let anyone near it. Find out who they are and claim squatter’s rights if you have to, just don’t let any other fucker near this.
When he returned to Skyler Square Ruth was smoking and crying on a porch and he put his arm around her and asked if anything had happened, and she said no not yet. I’m just sick thinking of a little kid like that all alone at night-time, it’s my worst fear even now. She must be beside herself.
She recovered a little and sniffled unattractively into the sleeve of her jacket, smearing away make-up as she did so.
Oh, he would so love to go home, he would love to be anywhere, he could be in the flat taking a bath or in town having a glass of wine, he could be talking to a woman who had herself together.
He dreaded the banal misery he was sure he was about to encounter but he’d started something now and he would go on with it.
Come on, he said gently, let’s get you upstairs and you can talk to me about it.
Did you get through? she asked.
Yes I told my uncle all about it, he reassured her.
Once Ruth was asleep in her predictably morose quarters, Tom slipped her key into his pocket and went down into the courtyard. It was after midnight now and many of the people who’d gone out to search had arrived back. It was still warm and a few groups were outside chatting, some drinking, he was glad to see. A few of the longer-term residents on the ground floor had decided to make the most of their location and set up permanent garden furniture dining sets and sofas where the upper balconies sheltered them. If he could manage to slip into one of the chats they were facilitating he might get something good.
He was alright at this sort of thing. Despite what Edward seemed to think of him he wasn’t particularly posh. His parents were standard lower-middle-class aspirational Tories. They went on a holiday to France every other year and he didn’t get the jackets he asked for but nor did any . . .
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