M.R. Hall - The Disappeared

'Cooking? You have a panic attack every time I come in here.'

'You never clean up after yourself.'

'You wanted to live with a teenager. Reality check.' He shrugged, gave a sarcastic smile, and left the room.

Jenny went after him. 'How are you going to get there at this time of night?'

'Walk.'

'It's freezing.'

'So's this place.' He crashed through the door into the hall. 'Steve called.'

'What did he want?'

'Didn't say.'

Slam. He was out of the front door and off into the night.

Jenny let him go. She was feeling too fragile to face another verbal assault. She understood that pushing her away was part of his growing up, but that didn't make it any easier to bear.

She contemplated her options: driving out to find a supermarket or sitting down hungry to clear her backlog of death reports before an early night. Neither appealed. She dropped into an armchair and tried to work out how she could organize her domestic life to keep Ross happy for the remaining eighteen months before he took off to university. She needed a system to replace the ad hoc trips to petrol station convenience stores. She needed to make the cottage more comfortable: it was all wood and stone; Ross preferred his friends' charmless, carpeted, centrally heated homes. She needed to behave like a proper mother.

She had forced herself upstairs to tidy his tip of a bedroom when the doorbell rang. She peered cautiously around the curtain and felt a flood of relief: it wasn't Ross returning to berate her, it was Steve.

She opened the door to find him standing on the doorstep in walking boots and thick coat, carrying a flashlight. Alfie, his sheepdog, was sniffing around the front lawn.

'Haven't seen you in a while,' Jenny said, with an involuntary trace of reproachfulness.

He gave an apologetic smile. 'I thought it was about time.'

'You want to come in?'

'I'm walking Alfie - he's been cooped up all day. Thought you might want to come along. It's a beautiful evening.'

They walked briskly up the steep, narrow lane with its high, enclosing hedges, and turned right onto the dirt track that led into a thousand acres of forest. Alfie skirted ahead of them, nose to ground, making forays into the undergrowth. Jenny stayed close to Steve, their arms brushing together but neither of them willing to reach for the other's hand. Since they'd met the previous June they'd spent no more than half a dozen nights together and had only once discussed their 'relationship'. They had come to no conclusion except that after ten years in the wilderness Steve was ready to go back and take his final exams to qualify as an architect. To make ends meet he'd rented his farmhouse to some weekenders from London and moved into a makeshift one-room apartment he'd cobbled together in the upper storey of the barn. He'd never suggested moving in with her and she'd never invited him to, but she couldn't pretend she hadn't thought about it. Living alone was manageable, but co-existing with a moody teenage son could be painfully lonely. There had been times when she'd longed for a man's solid energy to dissolve the tension.

The frozen mud crunched beneath their feet. A tawny owl hooted and from deep in the trees another screeched in response.

Steve said, 'You know what I love about coming out here at night - you never see a soul. Everyone's stuck in front of the TV not realizing all this is outside their back door.'

It was a point of pride that he didn't own a television and never had. Jenny had once told him that for a dogged anti- materialist he managed to find plenty of things to get competitive about it. He hadn't got the joke.

'Is that your idea of happiness, not seeing other human beings?' she said.

'I like the peace.'

'Being alone frightens the hell out of most people.'

'They must be frightened of themselves.'

'Aren't you ever? I am.'

'No. Never.'

Another thing that changed about him: since he'd quit smoking grass he had a keener edge. He'd give straight answers where once he'd just shrugged or smiled. She liked the new attitude.

'You don't mind being in an office full of people all day?'

'I survive. Most of us have a lot in common.'

'I thought idealists always fell out with each other.'

'Haven't yet.'

Despite her cynicism she liked the idea of Steve and his self-styled 'ecotect' colleagues spending their days trying to make the world a more beautiful and harmonious place. Her work had always been one long fight and it showed no sign of letting up.

'You don't regret renting out the farm?'

'I hate it, but it won't last. Give it a year or two and I'll take it all over again.'

'You might like a change, or to build something from scratch.'

'Who knows?'

His response surprised her. He had always talked about the farm as the one thing that gave meaning and stability to his life. The woods he worked and the vegetables he grew were his reality; everything else was a means of allowing him to remain there immersed in nature. She felt for a moment as if she didn't know him, yet she'd prompted him: on some level she must have suspected.

'You'd really consider moving?'

'I'm open to change.'

'Wow.'

He glanced at her. 'You were the one who started it for me.'

'Maybe I was just the excuse you needed?'

He looked away. 'You never take a compliment.'

They walked on in silence: Steve retreating into private thoughts and Jenny trying to fathom them. She wasn't used to him being touchy. He was always easy-going, taking whatever she said lightly. Her disquiet at his brooding turned to unease. She realized how badly she wanted them to get on, how much she'd like to spend the night with him, to push aside the images of the dead and the missing which were never far from her thoughts.

She slid her arm beneath his, squeezing it close to her body. She felt for his hand and threaded her cold fingers between his. They slowly relaxed. They were warm and softer than she remembered, an architect's hands not an artisan's.

'Sorry it's been so long,' she said quietly. 'It's not that I haven't been thinking about you.'

'It's OK.'

'It's not ... I get caught up in myself. Work, Ross . . .'

Steve hesitated, then said, 'Are you still seeing the psychiatrist?'

'Yes. I'm doing all right.'

'Sure?'

'Why? Do I seem strange?'

'No . . . not at all.' There was a trace of uncertainty in his voice.

'Then what's the matter?' Jenny said. 'You're not yourself.'

'Nothing

She gripped his hand tighter, determined to get it out of him. 'Tell me.'

'Really it's nothing . . .' He sighed. 'It's just that my ex, Sarah-Jane, showed up the other day—'

'Oh.' Jenny felt a knot of jealousy form in her stomach. She had always thought of Sarah-Jane as belonging to the distant past. The few times Steve had mentioned her he had painted her as a monster: artistic, emotional, erratic, and not at all ashamed of having put him through years of hell before taking off to sleep her way around the world.

'Mad as ever . . . said I owed her money. Left screaming when I told her to get lost, then turned up in the middle of the night wanting to share my bed.'

'Did you?'

'What do you think?'

'Sorry.' She wished she hadn't asked. 'I didn't mean —’

'I know.' Steve let go of her hand. God, he was tetchy. 'I don't even know why I'm telling you ... I thought I'd got rid of her. She's like some sort of succubus. You know what it's like - the one person in the world who can cut you down with a single word.'

Jenny had never known him like this, shaken up, absorbed in himself, but she could understand. She'd met women like

Sarah-Jane: emotional parasites who passed off their selfishness and violent moods as creativity. Steve was methodical, a planner and, Jenny had come to realize, quite delicate in many ways. Her instinct was to take him home, comfort him and build him up, but at the same time she was frightened of smothering him and pushing him further away.