FIVE

When I got home, I put the news on. There had been a massacre somewhere, the same clips reeling over and over: white sheets, bloodstains, children crying, lights flashing. I sat there and watched the images until I might as well have been staring at a screensaver. In a way it was soothing, all that chaos and violence: it was not mine. What I didn’t notice at the time was how little guilt I felt at my own reaction to the tragedy. It was sad, but I didn’t dwell on the effect it had on me, or rather the lack of effect. Something terrible had happened in the world, but it wasn’t my fault, and for the first time I realised that I did not deserve to carry the weight of it to be valid. It wasn’t that I didn’t care; it was more that my caring was less selfish now. Removing myself from what I saw on the television, I was able to feel empathy and sorrow without worrying if my reaction was adequate.

With Owen I had always felt that I was performing what it was I wanted him to see, but now I realised that my preoccupation with his perception of me was – in part – what had obstructed the connection I thought we were supposed to have. We had eaten dinner while hurricanes raged across the ocean, we had read breaking news alerts of terrorist attacks in countries we had never heard of. But instead of opening myself up to emotion and education, I had focused solely on how other people perceived me.

The flat felt lacking without Owen in it, as if the nature of his body had made the atmosphere breathable. I felt that he was present, but his presence wasn’t physical. It was louder without him there to soak up the dead air. I turned the television off, and because I didn’t know what else to do, I just stood in the middle of the room for a while.

A sharp pain squealed into my head. The sound was like that of the handbrake turns Owen would do when he took me out to practise driving. I never did pass my test. I took a second to realise that the squealing sound was the phone, and a second more to remember where it was; no one had rung the landline for years. I found it under a blanket and picked up the smooth, cold Bakelite receiver. I was only wearing one shoe. I didn’t know why or when I had taken the other one off. It was nowhere to be seen.

‘Hello?’ I answered, but there was no voice at the other end, just the buzzing insect of the dial tone. I wondered if the phone had really rung, but I could still feel the shrill echo ricocheting through my skull. The rain on the windows and door sounded like a thousand tiny fists knocking to come in. My skin was heavy, as if it was about to slide off my skeleton. I could feel Owen all over me, dragging me down like quicksand. The light fitting was swinging gently. There was a breeze. The window was open, and I was certain I hadn’t opened it. Owen would always open the windows at night when our legs were glued together with sweat. But I liked it, the gluing, and I kept the window closed when I could. I pulled it shut and pushed myself towards the ceiling with my toes. My fingertips grazed the paper lampshade. The air was cold and thick like ice cream, and I sliced it with the arcs of my arms as I lowered them to my sides.

I heard a noise from somewhere, but it was either too quiet or too short to decipher. A pair of Owen’s trainers, not the ones he had been wearing the other night, were lying just inside the bedroom. Had they been there before I went to work? He sometimes left them there when he came home drunk, but he would always put them away in the morning. He was weird about his shoes. One time, he had lined them up in order of colour by the front door, and since then, he had always put each pair back in the exact slot from which he had taken it. I turned from the stairs to the door. There were two gaps in the shoe line. One of the missing pairs was his favourite, the pair he had worn on New Year’s Eve. He had bought them a few weeks earlier, and I had called them ugly and pretentious. I knew exactly where they were now. I had shoved them into his backpack when I left the hotel, and the backpack was now stuffed underneath our bed, out of sight. But the other pair, the pair at the bottom of the stairs, those were his everyday trainers.

I took off around the flat, picking up as much speed as the cramped layout allowed. I burst into the bathroom, the office, the airing cupboard. Each time I flung a door open, I expected to see him there, eyes wide and questioning, wondering why I was acting crazy. But I was alone, running around my flat and slamming doors like a person possessed.

I trudged back to the bedroom, picked up the trainers, and threw them back into the wrong slot. I thought that pissing him off might somehow bring him out of me, but my thoughts were incoherent. I was upset and angry, but I didn’t know if the anger I felt was mine or his.

The phone rang again, and I glared at it. Was it really ringing this time? I picked it up and waited, not saying anything. But there was someone there. The call went something like this:

‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice at the other end. ‘Owen, are you there?’

‘Hi, Phillipa.’ I wasn’t sure if I would have preferred another frightening hoax call over Owen’s mother. ‘Owen’s… not here.’ I didn’t know what else I could say, but I somehow expected her to understand.

‘Oh, I just wanted to wish you both a late happy New Year! Did you go out in the end?’ It wasn’t uncommon for Phillipa to call late with her regards.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Lovely, did you do anything nice?’

‘Just a party.’

‘Lovely,’ repeated Phillipa.

‘Owen’s gone!’ I spat the words out and winced. I was so sure of what had happened but had been desperately hoping I was wrong. A part of me expected that Owen was out there somewhere, not deep inside me. He had been ‘gone’ for almost a week, and I had just discovered another place that he certainly was not. He hadn’t gone back to his mother. Where else could he have gone? It was becoming more and more difficult to convince myself – in the times I most needed comfort – that I had not absorbed him.

‘Oh, don’t worry dear,’ Phillipa said, ‘I just wanted to check on you both, you see—’

‘No, he’s gone,’ I whined, more insistent now, ‘I don’t know where he is. You haven’t heard from him?’

‘No.’ She paused. ‘I haven’t. When did you last see him?’

‘New Year’s Eve.’

‘Well, what happened?’

‘I just woke up, and he was gone.’

‘Oh Allison, darling, I’m so sorry.’

I couldn’t say anything. Why didn’t Philippa care that her son was missing? But this was textbook Philippa. Literally phoning in her faux concern.

‘Look, I’ll find out where he is and get him to call you, okay?’ she said after a pause.

‘How will you—’

‘Take care of yourself, dear.’

The dial tone.

For the first time I really began to consider the logistics of the problem. When would Owen’s mother start to worry? How much time did I have?

s

I was barely listening when Owen started to tell me about his Aunt Emily. We’d had a couple of pints and he’d been talking about his course or the shop where he worked part-time. It wasn’t that I was uninterested in what he was saying, but I was preoccupied with something too unimportant to recall later.

‘She was basically my mum,’ he said, out of nowhere.

We had been together for perhaps a year and a half. We were living in a house with five other students. We each had our own bedroom; it made the commitment seem less, somehow. I longed to know Owen at the most intimate level, to know everything about him, even though it terrified me. But whenever he told me anything about his past, I felt sick. I was horrified that he had lived before he met me, that he had existed in the world as a person I would never know. There were people, ex-girlfriends, old school friends, who knew him better than I did, and this made me feel so vulnerable that I would start to sweat and shake. I knew that how I felt was unacceptable, so I tried to act normal; I couldn’t afford for him to start withholding things from me. I didn’t think about how unfair that was. I had different rules for each of us.

He told me how he moved in with Aunt Emily after college. She had cancer; he didn’t say which kind, and I thought it was the kind of question you could never ask. Besides, I had never known cancer, and I was not ready to get acquainted. I remember the way his eyes started to fog over. I didn’t know if he was retreating into some darkness inside, or if he was simply on the verge of tears. I hadn’t seen him cry then, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to. I would not see that darkness in him again, until I absorbed him.

He said that Emily needed some help around the house, that he’d spent a lot of time there in his childhood anyway, probably more than at his own home. He never explained why. Every time I met Phillipa, I tried to figure out what was wrong with her, but apart from being a little vague and dopey, I never did. She must have been absent in some way, but I never got the details.

In spite of the darkness in his eyes, he spoke fondly of those years with his aunt. He’d done a couple of design internships and he was grateful he’d had that opportunity. She’d taught him how to play bridge, and he’d spent every Wednesday night sat in the kitchen with her and two of her friends whose names I can’t remember. She really wanted him to make something of himself, he said. She was the only person who had made him feel that he could be someone. I remember how it felt when he said that: a punch in the gut. He smiled. I remember the awareness I felt of my own face, aware that I needed it to look sympathetic, to look like I couldn’t empathise with loss like that, but that I was open to helping him heal. I remember taking a sip of my drink, how it went down wrong, how I convulsed on a gag. Owen looked at me, but he didn’t really see. For a while, he didn’t say anything. It was like he had finished the story, but he couldn’t have. I knew the ending, but I decided he wanted me to ask for it. I realised later that I was right: sometimes it’s better to end your story so that you can begin a new one.

‘So that’s when you applied?’ I asked. ‘For uni?’

Not at first, he said. He waited for a few months, then applied through clearing in the summer. I thought about the unopened boxes I’d seen stacked in his room the first night we’d met. I thought, How much of his dead aunt does he lug around with him? How could I even begin to compete for that place in his heart? It was a horrible thought and I tried to ignore it.

‘The worst thing is…’ he said, and I braced myself, ‘they didn’t even tell me until after the funeral. Apparently, she told Mum not to bother me, to let me ‘settle in’. She wanted me to get good grades, you know? I didn’t even get to tell her that none of it even matters in the first year.’

How could I have told him about my birth parents? He had already seen the woman in whom he’d placed almost everything crumble away. He had experienced his own pain and did not need to be burdened with mine.

s

Another week passed with no sign of Owen’s return. Every day I went to work, came home and lay on the sofa watching the front door, trying to think up a plan. I was torn between trying to get him out, trying to cover up what had happened, accepting the whole thing and trying to move on, or asking for help. But who could help with something like this? And what would I say when people started to ask questions? Owen’s mother hadn’t called back. None of his friends had asked me where he was. But sometime soon, someone was going to want to find him. And I was going to have think of something to say.

s

About two weeks into the new year, I woke up in the middle of the night with the weight of Owen’s arm pressing me into the mattress. I tried to roll over, but I couldn’t move. I was frightened before I even remembered that he was gone. I rolled my eyes around the room, straining them so hard in their sockets that they ached. A figure loomed by the door. I closed my eyes and squeezed them tight, tried to focus, tried to breathe. Out of the darkness behind my closed eyes came Owen’s face, that contorted scream I remembered from New Year’s Eve. I couldn’t shout out; I didn’t even know if I was breathing. It felt like hours that I lay there, staring into his pained eyes, destroying him over and over again, sweating and shaking and unable to move. Finally, I realised that my fists were clenching and unclenching, and then I realised that I could move again. I flung myself onto Owen’s side of the bed. The figure by the door was just our dressing gowns sharing a hook. I lay awake the rest of the night hugging his pillow.