C.L. Taylor - The Missing

‘And then Liz came round and told us that you’d rushed out of her house and you weren’t answering your phone. She was really upset. She thought she’d said something to upset you.’

Mark shifts away from me now his ‘examination’ of my head is complete, but his eyes don’t leave my face. ‘What did she say?’ he asks.

I shake my head. If I tell him he’ll only agree. Mark’s told me over and over again that we should assume the worst about Billy. ‘Six months is a long time, Claire.’ It’s become his mantra, his invisible shield against hope whenever I tentatively suggest that maybe, just maybe, Billy could still be alive.

‘It doesn’t matter what she said.’

‘It does if it made you run off to Weston without telling anyone.’

I slip my handbag across my body, then stand up and rub my upper arms. ‘Can we just go home? Please, I just want to go home.’

Mark stands up too. ‘I think we should get you to a doctor first. Don’t you?’

It’s warm in Mum’s living room. Warm and ever so slightly musty. The top of the telly is grey with dust, the magazine rack is groaning under the weight of books and magazines piled on top of it, and there are dead flowers on the windowsill; green sludge in the base of the vase instead of water. Even the spider plant on the bureau, a plant so hardy that it could survive a nuclear attack, is wilted and yellow. Its babies, trailing on the carpet on long tendrils, look as though they’ve parachuted out in an attempt to escape. Mum would declare World War III if I offered to tidy up so I do what I can whenever she leaves the room; wipe a tissue over the surfaces when she goes to the loo or tip my glass of water in the spider plant when the postman comes.

I haven’t had a chance today. She hasn’t left my side since I arrived a little after 9 a.m. I haven’t told her about my blackout yet; she thinks I’m here to talk about Billy’s publicity campaign. Mark refused to go to work until I promised him I’d spend the day with her. He’s terrified I’ll go missing again.

He’s not the only one.

The doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong with me. She ran a series of blood tests yesterday and said I’d have to wait a week for the results. It’s terrifying, not knowing what caused me to black out. What if it’s something serious like a brain tumour? What if it happens again? When I asked Dr Evans if it might she said she didn’t know.

I didn’t want to leave her office. I didn’t want to step outside the doors of the surgery and risk it happening again. Mark had to physically lift me off the chair and guide me back outside to the car.

‘See that?’ Mum slides the laptop from her knees to mine and points at the screen with a bitten-down fingernail. ‘That spike in the graph?’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking at.’

‘They’re the stats for the website. We had a huge peak in page views the day the appeal went out. Over seven thousand people looked at it. Seven thousand, Claire.’

‘And that’s a good thing, is it?’ Dad says, appearing in the doorway to the living room.

‘Derek.’ Mum shoots him a warning look. ‘If you can’t say something good—’

‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I say. ‘I know what Dad’s thinking.’

‘Your dad’s not thinking anything.’ Her eyes don’t leave his face. ‘Are you, Derek?’

His gaze shifts towards me and I feel the weight of sadness in his eyes. There’s indecision too, written all over his face. He wants to tell me something but Mum’s warning him not to.

‘What is it, Dad?’

‘Derek!’

‘It’s okay. You can tell me.’

Mum pulls at my hand. ‘It’s nothing you need worry about, Claire. Just a bunch of drunks in the pub speculating. We know no one in the family had anything to do with Billy’s disappearance.’

I ignore her. I can’t tear my eyes away from my dad who looks as though he might burst from the stress of keeping his lip buttoned. ‘Dad?’

He shifts his weight so he’s leaning against the door frame and bows his head, ever so slightly, finally breaking eye contact with me. ‘They think Jake had something to do with it. I overheard a conversation when I was coming out of the loo in the King and Lion the other night. No smoke without fire and all that.’

‘Absolute rot!’ Mum snaps the laptop lid shut. ‘Everyone will have forgotten all about it by next week and then, when the dust has settled, we’ll ask the Bristol News to run a story about Billy and Jake as kids. If the Standard are going to shaft us we’ll get them onside instead. We’ll dig out some photos of the boys in their primary-school uniforms. The readers will see them when they were young and sweet and they’ll forget about Jake’s little outburst. It’s all about the cute factor. You’ll see.’

‘Cute factor?’

‘It’s a PR trick to gain public sympathy. I read about it in a book I got out of the library, the one by the PR guru who was arrested for sex offences. Dirty bastard but he knew his stuff.’

I can’t help but marvel at the woman sitting in front of me. Six months ago she didn’t really know what PR meant never mind the tricks ‘gurus’ use to gain public sympathy for a client. Whilst I could barely speak for grief she went part-time at the garden centre and asked a friend’s son to create the findbillywilkinson.com website so she could post a few photos of him and include the police contact details. Now there’s a Facebook page and a crowdfunding site. She’s read every book that’s been written by the parents of other missing children and she spends hours on the Internet looking for the contact details of journalists who might be interested in covering Billy’s story.

‘So can you dig some out?’ Mum asks. ‘Some photos?’

I nod my head. ‘Of course.’

‘Are you all right, love?’ Dad says. ‘You look a bit peaky.’

I can’t tell them what happened yesterday. I don’t want to worry them, not until I know what I’m dealing with.

Waiting. My life has become one long wait. I’ve never felt more impotent in my life. Mark and Jake wouldn’t let me help with the search after Billy went missing. They said I needed to stay at home. ‘Someone needs to man the hub,’ Mark said. I don’t think that was the real reason he told me to stay behind. I think he was worried I’d break down if we found anything awful. He would have been right but I can’t continue to sit and wait. I need to find Billy.

‘I’m fine, Dad.’ I force a smile. ‘But I could do with some fresh air. Are those fliers up to date?’ I point at the teetering pile of paper under the windowsill.

‘Yes.’ Mum nods.

‘Could we go somewhere and hand them out? Maybe … the train station?’

Last week I went through Billy’s things. I’ve been through them a hundred times since the police searched his room – the familiarity is comforting – and I found an exercise book at the bottom of a pile on his bookshelf. He’d only written in it twice. On the first page he’d half-heartedly attempted some maths homework and then crossed it out and written underneath, Maths is shit and Mr Banks is a wanker.

That made me smile. It was something I could imagine him saying to Mark when he’d ask how Billy was getting on with his coursework. Billy knew it would push his dad’s buttons but he’d say it anyway because he liked winding him up. I’d tell Billy off for swearing but it was always an effort not to laugh. Poor Mark.

After I’d read what he’d written I found a pen and wrote underneath it, No swearing, Billy . The tightness in my chest eased off, just the tiniest bit. So I kept on writing. I wrote and I wrote until I had cramp in my hand. It was so cathartic, so freeing to be able to cry, alone, without worrying that my grief might upset Jake and Mark.