Walking the corridors of a hospital is hardly a recipe for relaxation. Every ward door that’s open offers me a view to another grey-skinned person lying in a bed, much like I had been minutes ago. Still, Elaine – god love her – is doing her very best to soothe me. She keeps talking about football, has assumed that because I said I like the sport that I know as much about it as she does. She’s been rabbiting on for the past couple of minutes, ranting about how much her beloved Manchester United have damaged their reputation ever since Sir Alex Ferguson retired. The amount of statistics she has thrown at me in the past three minutes is, I’m sure, quite impressive. But it all sounds like gobbledygook to me.
She stops talking, then turns to face me.
‘You’re not really that big a fan of football are you?’
It didn’t take her long to realise that. I laugh, my first laugh of the day, then shake my head.
‘Certainly not as much as you are. No, I mean – I might watch the odd game if it’s on tele, but no… maybe I exaggerated a bit. I’m not that big a football fan.’
She giggles.
‘Okay – then what do you like, what can we talk about that will help you relax?’
I shrug both shoulders.
‘Don’t know really.’
‘What hobbies have you got? What do you do when you’re not working?’
‘I don’t work. Not anymore. Got paid off by the company I founded less than a year after Betsy went missing. I understood why. I couldn’t focus. But it was tough. Y’know… I lost my daughter, my wife and my business all in the space of ten months.’
Elaine does that pursed lips thing again, then reaches her left arm around my shoulders as we continue to walk.
‘I’m so sorry, Gordon.’
She doesn’t know what else to say other than apologise for something that isn’t even remotely close to her fault. I wrap my arm around the small of her back and suddenly we are strolling as if we’re a happily married couple. I know it feels a little awkward for both of us, but I’m gonna take the slight intimacy while I can get it. After a few seconds, she relents, takes her arm from around me so that we’re just linking arms again.
‘So what do you do with your spare time?’ she asks.
I don’t have an answer. Not really.
‘I watch some TV and I eh… obsess about Betsy. Y’know… talking about Betsy is probably the only thing that would relax me.’
Elaine makes a slight pop sound with her mouth, then stops walking.
‘Okay, well… tell me all about Betsy.’
I raise my eyebrows, then let out a steady breath as we stand facing each other in the middle of a corridor.
‘She was the cutest little thing, y’know. Brown hair, a splash of freckles across her face. She had the smallest little nose too. Tiny it was.’
I already feel my shoulders relax.
‘I bet you doted on her, huh?’ Elaine says.
‘Yeah,’ I reply smiling. But my smile is disingenuous. I was a shit dad. And I know it. I was just too obsessed with work at the time to care for the little person who was turning our house upside down. Ironically, back then Betsy was second in my thoughts. Now I can’t stop obsessing about her. ‘I’d give anything to go back in time.’
Elaine takes a step closer to me, then places a curled knuckle under my chin and lifts my head slightly.
‘You’re supposed to be relaxing now, okay? Not evoking feelings of guilt. You shouldn’t feel guilt anyway. You are not the one who took her.’
That’s the first time anyone has agreed with me in years; that Betsy was taken… abducted.
‘Y’know the police don’t believe somebody took her. They think somebody knocked her down, killed her, then hid her body. All seems a bit convenient to me, that. It took them seven years to come up with that theory.’
Elaine stares into my eyes, intensely.
‘Gordon—’
‘It’s fine. I’m relaxed talking about her. Honestly.’
‘Okay,’ Elaine says, relenting. She links my arm again and we continue on our mission to walk up and down every corridor of floor three.
‘Y’know they all think I’m mad when I say she was taken. But I’m not mad, Elaine. I’m not crazy. I just have a feeling deep in the pit of my stomach that somebody took her and that she’s still out there… out there somewhere. I just hope wherever she is, she’s happy; that she’s being taken care of.’
Elaine seems to have fallen silent, is either happy to just listen, or perhaps she agrees with the rest of them. That my theory is the one that’s wrong. I place my hand across her, stop her from walking and then stare into her eyes.
‘You don’t think I’m mad, do you, Elaine?’
She squints a smile at me, the tiny lines on the edge of her eyes creasing.
‘I think you’re being a great dad. You’re not giving up on your daughter. I know that if I was Betsy, I’d hope I had a dad like you who would never give up trying to find me.’
I step into Elaine, give her a hug and breathe in her hair. It feels so good to have somebody who’ll listen to me.
‘That’s why I have a private investigator looking for her now,’ I whisper into her ear. ‘I just couldn’t lie there on that bed after being told I may only have five hours left to live and not do anything.’
Elaine nods her head slowly on my shoulder. I know from a personal point of view she agrees with me, but I also know she’s conflicted; from a professional point of view she thinks I’m doing the worst thing I could possibly do given my situation. I hold her off me a little, so that we are facing each other.
‘Don’t answer this question as a nurse,’ I say. ‘Answer it as the beautiful human being you are, okay?’
She nods her head, then squints her eyes at me again.
‘I’m doing the right thing amn’t I?’
Elaine glances down at her feet, then back up at my face.
‘If I was your best friend, not your nurse, I would be giving you this advice, Gordon. Your best chance of finding out what happened to your daughter is by staying alive and giving yourself more time to look for her. Surviving the surgeries is everything to you right now. It’s all you’ve got. I’m sorry to say this, because I know it’s not the answer you want to hear, but… relaxing right now, not obsessing over finding Betsy, is genuinely the best thing for you to do.’
I look up to the ceiling. Then rub my thumb firmly across my forehead, as if I’m erasing what I’ve just heard from my memory.
‘It’s just the detective who looked after the case is currently talking with the private investigator I hired this morning. What if… what if somehow—’
‘Gordon,’ Elaine says, just like a school teacher would say to a student who’s rambling on too much about nothing. ‘It’s been seventeen years. The fact of the matter is, Betsy is not going to be found in the next hour or two. I mean, what more can I say? You have to agree with me on that.’
I look back down at her, stare at her entire face.
‘I do agree – of course I do. It’s just… if I do die today… I wanna give it my all until my last breath. Like you said, if you were Betsy, you wouldn’t want your dad to stop looking for you, would you?’
I can spot a moistness form in her eyes. I’m not the only one close to tears. She removes her old-school pocket watch from the top of her scrubs and sucks at her own lips.
‘You’re going for make or break surgery in the next hour and a half. I’m going to be straight and honest with you. You’re not going to get any information in the next ninety minutes that you couldn’t find in the past seventeen years. I’m sorry if that’s a hard truth for you to take; but I owe it you to be totally honest.’
I thumb the tear that has just fallen out of her eye away from her cheek, then grab her close. The two of us sob in unison in the middle of the corridor; her sobbing with pity for me, me sobbing because I’m being pitied. Again. Surely there can’t be anything more pathetic than strangers pitying you a couple of hours after they’ve just met you for the first time? But everyone pities me. I am the living, breathing definition of a loser. I literally lost everything I ever had.