M.R. Hall: The Disappeared

'Who vanishes?'

'The girls in the middle.'

Dr Allen wrote in his notebook. 'Where do they go?'

'Where? I don't... I don't know . . . It's just nothingness.''

'And the girls left behind?'

'They don't seem to notice.'

'And that's it?'

'Yes.' Jenny sucked in a breath, the tide of fear slowly washing out, leaving her beached and numb. She stared out of the window at the sodium light catching the rain falling on the barren patch of garden.

'How old were you when you had this dream?'

'I was at university ... It kept coming. I remember it lingering on throughout days that should have been carefree.'

'What does it represent to you?'

She shook her head, pretending to herself that she didn't know, but words were forming by themselves and spilled out almost against her conscious will. 'For every something there is a nothing. For every object an absence . . . It's not death I'm afraid of, it's emptiness.'

'You fear being disappeared?'

'No . . .' She struggled to put her mental state into words. 'It's of being where there is nothing . . . and of not being where there is everything.'

Dr Allen's face registered his struggle to understand. 'Like being trapped on the wrong side of the looking glass? Out of time, out of place, out of context.'

'I suppose.'

There was silence as the doctor scanned his notes, then rubbed his eyes, straining with a thought his expression said he found troublesome but necessary to express. He looked up and studied her face for a moment before deciding to voice it. 'Are you a woman of faith, Mrs Cooper?' His use of her surname confirmed his unease.

'Why do you ask?'

'The trinity is a powerful Christian symbol. Father, Son and Holy Ghost. . .'

'Lots of things come in threes: mother, father, child. Good, bad, indifferent. Heaven, earth, hell.'

'An apt example. You were brought up in faith, as I remember. The concepts are vivid to you.'

'We were sort of Anglican, I suppose. And there was Sunday school.'

Dr Allen looked thoughtful. 'You know, I think you're right. There is a piece missing - the girl, the space beyond the room. Whether it is emotional, or physical, or spiritual I couldn't yet say. But sometimes what we fear most is what we need. The most powerful stories are often those about strange saviours, demons who become an inspiration . . . like St Paul, or —’

'Darth Vader?'

He smiled. 'Why not?'

'This is sounding like a good old-fashioned diagnosis of suppression. Believe me, I've tried letting it all hang out; it wasn't a happy experience.'

'Would you do one thing for me?' He was suddenly earnest. 'I really would like to have one big push to crack this open.'

'Fire away.'

'For the next fortnight, keep a journal. Write down your feelings, your impulses, your extremes, no matter how bizarre or irrational.'

'In the hope of finding what, exactly?'

'We'll know when we see it.'

'You can be honest. Is this a last throw of the dice?'

He shook his head and smiled gently. 'I wouldn't still be here if I didn't think I could help you.'

Jenny pretended to be comforted, but couldn't help feeling that psychiatry was a slow road to nowhere. She had a small grain of faith that somehow, some day she would look up into a clear sky and feel nothing but undiluted happiness, but how that would come to pass was something she couldn't yet begin to answer. Perhaps her discussions with Dr Allen were worthwhile; at the very least he stirred her up from time to time, made her look into the corners she would otherwise avoid.

Later, as she drove home through the starless night, a single phrase of his kept repeating itself: strange saviours. It was a new idea to her. She liked it.

Chapter 2

Jenny had become used to living with the noise of a sixteen-year-old in the house, and part of her missed it when Ross spent the weekend with his father in Bristol. She would have phoned Steve, the infuriatingly free spirit she described as her 'occasional boyfriend', but he hadn't called her for nearly a fortnight, even though he had been forced to acquire a phone; the architects' practice he was articled to during his final year of study had insisted on it. She had encouraged him to break out from his self-imposed exile on the small farm above Tintern, where, for ten years, he had tried to live out a self-sufficient fantasy. Now that he went to work in the city and spent his nights at a draughtsman's desk they scarcely saw each other.

She didn't like to admit to loneliness - escaping from a suffocating marriage to live in the country was meant to be a liberation - but driving south along the twisting Wye valley early on Monday morning through the dense, leafless woods, she was glad that she'd shortly be relieved of her own company. A workaday week awaited: hospital and road deaths, industrial accidents and suicides. She drew a certain comfort from dealing with others' unimaginable traumas with professional detachment. Being a coroner had given her an illusion of control and immortality. While Jenny Cooper the forty-two-year-old woman was still struggling to stay sane and sober, Jenny Cooper the coroner had come to enjoy her job.

With a take-out coffee in one hand and her briefcase in the other, Jenny shouldered open the door to her two-room office suite on the ground floor of the eighteenth-century terrace off Whiteladies Road. While her small domain had been made over, the common parts of the building remained tatty and the boards in the hallway still creaked under the threadbare carpet. The landlord's refusal to pay for so much as a coat of paint irked her each time she crossed the threshold. Alison, her officer, was pleased with the compromise, however. Having spent most of her adult life in the police force, she was comfortable in down-to-earth surroundings and suspicious of outward show. She liked things simple and homely. The stylish kidney-shaped desk at which she now sat, sorting through the pile of documents that had arrived in the overnight DX, was home to a selection of pot plants, and her state-of-the-art computer monitor was decorated with inspirational message cards bought at the church bookshop: Shine as a Light in the World, encircled with childlike angels.

'Hi, Alison.'

'Good morning, Mrs Cooper. Fifteen death reports over the weekend, I'm afraid.' She pushed a heap of papers across the desk. 'And there's a lady coming in to see you in about five minutes. I told her she'd have to make an appointment, but-'

'Who?' Jenny interrupted, running through a mental list of the several persistent obsessives she'd had to fend off lately.

Alison checked her message pad. 'Mrs Amira Jamal.'

'Never heard of her.' Jenny reached for a spiral-bound folder of police photographs sitting in her mail tray and flicked through several pictures of the frozen corpses in the supermarket lorry. 'What did she want?'

'I couldn't quite make it out - she was gabbling.'

'Great.' Scooping up the reports, Jenny noticed that Alison was wearing a gold cross outside her chunky polo neck. Not yet fifty-five, she wasn't unattractive - she had curves and kept her thick bob of hair dyed a natural shade of blonde - but a hint of staidness had recently crept into her appearance. Ever since she'd become involved with an evangelical church.

'It was a baptism present,' Alison said, a challenging edge to her voice as she scrolled through her emails.

'Right. . .' Jenny wasn't sure how to respond. 'Was this a recent event?'

'Yesterday.'

'Oh. Congratulations.'

'You don't have a problem with me wearing it at work?' Alison said.

'Feel free.' Jenny gave a neutral smile and pushed through the heavy oak door into her office, wondering if she'd go the same way at Alison's age. Organized religion and late-onset lesbianism seemed to be what hit most frequently. She couldn't decide which she'd opt for given the choice. Maybe she'd try both.