Oli
Oli picks up his skateboard. “Are you going out?” his dad asks.
“Might as well, nothing else to do.” Oli sounds bored by the fact because appearing bored is habitual. Showing enthusiasm or having something particular to do, admitting that anything amuses or interests him, is not dope. Oli is not bored. How could he be bored right now? But he has worked out that it is best if he acts bored in front of his dad, because that is what’s expected of him. And any emotion bigger than boredom might trigger his dad. His dad is acting crazy. Storming about in and out of the house, so moody. He’s like a faulty firework—you just don’t know when he is going to catch or where he is going to blast and burn. Like when Oli showed him that meme and he went off it. He was only trying to lighten the mood. Okay, in retrospect, suggesting they watch Baptiste was a bit off, but all his mates had seen it, and he didn’t know it was a spin-off from a show The Missing.
Or maybe he did know. But what the hell.
When Oli made the mistake of saying he was pleased that exams have been canceled, his dad yelled, “How can you be thinking about that right now?” Pretending to be bored is safe. He just wants to help keep things calm, on track. Oli is worried about his dad. He’s worried about everything.
“Where are you going?” his dad demands now.
“The skate park.”
“Which one?”
“Does it matter?” Oli doesn’t know why he said that. He should just tell his dad he is going to Regent’s Park. He isn’t, but that’s not the point. It’s not a good idea to rock the boat and draw attention to himself. All his dad wants is an answer. It’s stupid not to give him one—it will just lead to a scene. But sometimes Oli does stupid things. Like preening too much before a house party, or saying stuff about a girl that he doesn’t mean, or not saying stuff he does, other things. His head decides one thing, but he goes and does something completely different anyway. Leigh would usually excuse it. “He’s just a kid, he’s just finding himself.” She was generally the easygoing parent, the good cop, so to speak.
Until she wasn’t. Bitch.
The pain of the betrayal sears through his body again. Scalds him from the inside. That has happened a few times this week. He is ashamed that he feels this way. That he misses her. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t miss her, not really. How could she? How could she? His own mother. What a total bitch.
“Wear your helmet,” says his dad but he doesn’t push for the answer to his question about where Oli is planning on skating. It’s not usual. Nothing is usual.
Just as he is about to leave, the house phone rings. His dad leaps up out of his chair like he is some villain in the Bond car, ejected from the passenger seat. Oli waits to see if it is the police with news.
He hears his dad say, “Oh, hi, Fiona.” Oli decides to linger a little longer. Fiona left their house only about half an hour ago; he can’t think what she’s calling about already but he is okay with the fact that she is always calling or hanging around. She seems to cheer up his dad and Dad deserves that, yeah? After everything. Because it has turned out to be worse than he could have imagined. Not an affair. A whole other world. He hears his dad tell Fiona that Seb is upstairs in his room and Oli is going skateboarding. His dad calls to him, “Fiona says if you are going on the tube take some hand sanitizer.”
Oli shrugs. “We don’t have any.”
“He says we don’t have any,” his father repeats into the phone. He sounds exhausted. He nods and then looks up at Oli. “She says she bought some yesterday—it’s near the bowl on the table where I put my car keys.” Oli isn’t going to use it. But it is sort of cool of Fiona to look out for him. At least she is keeping her shit together, so he goes into the kitchen, finds the sanitizer and puts it in his pocket. His fingers graze the card the policewoman left him, the corner accidently scrapes underneath his nail. He flinches like he does when he is woken by an alarm. She gave it to him in case he ever wanted to talk to her. “If you think of anything, anything at all that might be relevant. Anything that might give us an insight into your mum’s state of mind.”
He hasn’t called, even though the cop had said “anything” three times. Probably because of that. That desperate urgency she was trying to convey felt like a lot.
He has been wearing the same cargo pants for days now. No one nags him to put clothes in the wash basket. Leigh made a big deal about that. She was pretty chill most of the time, but washing was the thing that she could go a bit obsessive about. Nothing would be washed unless it was in the basket. She would basically conduct a stand-off until he complied. She’d watch him go around the room picking up T-shirts and stuff, like some sort of washing Nazi. Fiona cooked an awesome burger and chips supper the other night so it’s not as though he’s being neglected—he’s just not nagged. Fiona says she likes to keep busy and to have something to do. She put a wash on. He noticed because not only did she pick up his clothes from off the floor, but she changed his sheets too. Bit weird that, TBH. Leigh left him to strip his own bed because it’s a privacy thing, sheets and stuff. But Fiona means well. Probably Leigh just didn’t care so much and what looked like consideration at the time was in fact disinterest. Right?
He doesn’t know—it’s possible.
He doesn’t know Leigh. None of them do.
His head aches with thinking about it. He has to get out of the house.
He walks out of the front door, letting it slam loudly behind him. He doesn’t want to turn around or glance up as he expects his brother’s face will be stuck to his bedroom window, like it has been since Thursday morning. Eyes alert, scanning the street—left, right, as though he’s watching a pro-level tennis match—looking for his mother. Sad. Hopeless. His brother is taking this pretty badly. The front door slams again, which makes Oli turn around. Seb is not in his room—he is standing awkwardly on the step.
“You’re not coming with me,” Oli says, automatically.
“I didn’t ask to.”
“No, but you were going to.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“What have you got in your backpack?”
“Nothing.”
“Clearly you have something.” Seb is wearing his school backpack. It looks almost as bulky as when he is going to school and it’s full of a day’s textbooks.
“I’m going to my friend’s for a sleepover.”
“Which friend?”
Seb hesitates. He is not used to lying to his older brother. He is quite a straightforward kid but he clearly is about to lie because he has a tell—he juts out his chin when he’s being dishonest. Leigh identified it years ago, when he wasn’t much more than a baby. Everyone in the family knows when Seb is lying. “I’m going to Theo’s.” He sounds like he’s trying the name out. Asking Oli a question. Sort of, “Might I be going to my friend Theo’s house? Does it sound feasible?” Oli wonders if he’s running away. Off to try to find Leigh. It’s the kind of thing Oli himself might have thought about doing if he was twelve and none the wiser.
“Does Dad know?”
“Yes.” Seb turns pink. Pretty clear evidence that not only is he lying but he is ashamed to be doing so. Oli sometimes wonders how his brother survives at school.
“Don’t let me stop you.”
Seb sets off down the street. Oli watches him get smaller. He stops at the corner where their road joins the busier high street. He hangs about the lamppost for a while. Oli can’t see what he’s doing. Might he be waiting for Theo after all? When Seb eventually turns right, Oli sets off after him. He has a lot going on, but he can’t just let his little brother wander off into London on his own. As he approaches the lamppost on the corner where Seb was hanging about, Oli spots it immediately. A poster, one of several. A plea. Oli’s heart contracts and swells. He can actually feel it beating.
HAVE YOU SEEN MY MUM?
The question is, he has to admit, bold and arresting. It will probably get more attention than a simple MISSING. But it is exposing, horrifying, for Seb and somehow for Leigh too. Oli acknowledges that Seb’s computer skills are pretty good. There is a picture of Leigh, a good one. She looks happy and sparkling. Not the sort of woman who would want to go missing at all. Seb took the photo eight days ago just before they all went out for a family meal. It’s the same one the police have. The next line spells it out, in case a passerby didn’t understand. SHE IS MISSING. Oli almost laughs at the innocence, the naivety but the laugh catches in his throat, and sounds suspiciously like a sob.
REWARD FOR RELIABLE INFORMATION
What reward? Seb has about £24 to his name, and it’s only as much as that because he’s saving for the latest FIFA to drop. Seb has also put his own mobile number on the poster. Stupid kid. He’ll have endless weirdos ringing him.
The posters are not laminated. They will tear or the ink will run once it rains, Seb obviously hasn’t thought about the fact that they will become illegible pretty soon. They are attached with zip ties. Oli recognizes them as his own zip ties that he keeps under his bed. Zip ties are useful things to have—you can make key rings or fix binder files with them. Seb has probably rooted about and found them. Oli got them out of his dad’s shed in the first place so he can’t complain that Seb nicked them. Besides, Seb saved a couple of quid by doing so and he needs all his cash for his reward. Oli is being sarcastic because that is how he behaves with his brother, as a matter of routine. Teasing, sort of scrapping, but they are always on the same team really. Even though they are three years apart, they’ve always been close. The posters are killing him. He can’t believe Seb has made these alone and that he feels he needed to lie about what he was up to. But then, everyone has their secrets it seems. Presumably, Seb is not planning on going to Theo’s at all but instead trailing the streets of London putting up these miserable, desperate posters. He could get lost, he could get into trouble. He can’t go about plastering his phone number everywhere. Oli tears at the poster, crumples it up.
Oli follows his brother’s Hansel and Gretel trail from lamppost to lamppost, ripping down the posters, faster than his brother can pin them up. He has to hang back, lurk in shop doorways so as not to be spotted. He watches his brother carefully, laboriously tie the posters to the lampposts. Other people are watching his brother too. Some give him a sympathetic smile; others give him a wide berth. Oli tears the posters into small bits and throws them in rubbish bins. Their work carries on for a couple of hours. It becomes apparent that Seb has run out of posters when he allows himself a rest. He goes into a newsagent’s, comes out with a Coke and a Snickers bar.
Oli is waiting for him.
“Oh.” Seb jumps, blushes. Oli feels bad for him. He’s not the one who should feel guilty. He’s just trying to do a nice thing. He’s just trying to find his mum.
“I thought you were going to Theo’s,” says Oli.
Seb juts out his chin. “Oh, he sent a text to say his mum said no.”
Oli thinks it’s a weird thing listening to someone lie to you but pretending you believe it. It makes you feel powerful but also sad. “I was just thinking of going over to Aunty Paula’s,” he says. His Aunty Paula. Their mum’s sister could be a bit intense, clearly she never got used to the idea of losing her sister, but he sort of gets that. He’s not sure he got over it either and he barely remembers her. Is it possible to get over such a thing? Still, despite her intensity, Oli likes Paula. He knows she always has his back. Neither he nor Seb can do any wrong in her eyes. They practically have papal status. She has called a couple of times since Leigh went missing, but she’s spoken only to his dad. Leigh always denied that there was any beef between her and Aunty Paula, and maybe that was true. But there wasn’t any love between them either. He really needs to see Paula. “Do you want to come? You know she always has like a mountain of treats. We could maybe stay over at hers.”
Seb’s face lights up. “For real? Yeah.”
They head toward the tube together, Oli stuffs his hands deep into his low pockets, hunches to glue his eyes to the pavement. It hurts to look at his brother, who is overly grateful for the offer of company. He hasn’t been a very good brother since Leigh went missing. He should try harder. Seb is clearly a mess. He needs this to be over. He needs some answers. Everyone does.
Oli’s fingers move around the cop’s card and the hand sanitizer. Is it time to make a call? Surely it isn’t necessary. Everyone now knows about Daan Janssen and where he lives, so Oli admitting he’d known about her other life before isn’t going to help—it is most likely only going to get him into trouble. The cop said call if there was anything that might give them an idea about Leigh’s state of mind. And him knowing about her thing for months doesn’t really reveal anything about her state of mind, does it? Although, maybe it reveals something about his. He shivers. That is the last thing he wants to do. But he does want them to look closely at this Daan Janssen. The cops must be doing that, right?