Someone Must Know Something

FLEA GETS TO bed at two but doesn’t sleep until four. She leaves the TV on for company, playing silently in the corner. It’s a bad night; she turns and fidgets and cannot get comfortable. From time to time she half wakes – thinking someone has walked into the room. Sometimes it’s her parents, sometimes it’s Jack Caffery. Once she sits up straight and sees, reflected in the TV screen, a skull – half woman, half horse, the teeth long in the front, gums drawn up. Her hair is blonde and her eye sockets are empty.

Misty? she says.

Yeah, hi, what? she says. Have you got a couple of wraps for me, or is that too much to ask? And why did you put me there? They’ll find me – he’ll find me if you don’t do it for him.

Flea reaches out her hand, but the face dissolves and she’s lying on her bed, her heart carumph-carumphing along in her chest. She stares at the TV, still working away in silence. Fake tans and strutting, angry women in big heels. A woman appears, perched, solemn-faced, on a blue sofa. Short skirt, tanned knees together, turned demurely to face the presenter, who has adopted a serious, sympathetic expression. Flea fumbles for the remote. Turns the volume up.

‘. . . someone must know something,’ says Jacqui Kitson. ‘Someone must know where she is . . .’

Flea hits the off button. The TV whines and dies. She rests her elbows on her knees, uses her thumbs to massage her temples. Did last night really happen? Really and truly? Jack says he saw her at the quarry. It has to be true. There’s no other way he could have known.

Outside the window the breaking sun creeps up the long scrape of the valley. The lights of the city of Bath wink out one by one. The city is slowly raising itself out of the monochrome mist. She drags herself out of bed, pads to the bathroom, along the corridor with its wonky floors. On the left is the room where she stores the cardboard boxes that have been taped down. This straggly old house is home – the place she grew up. Mum and Dad are dead – a scuba-diving accident years ago – and the house is so empty without them. A shell. Recently she’s finally got round to packing away their belongings. All part of her healing process – a kind of fartlekking for the spirit. The way she can go on flying.

She cleans her teeth, splashes her face and gets straight into her running gear, sitting on the edge of the bath to lace the trainers. She can’t do what Caffery wants – because it means opening boxed thoughts that have been packed away as neatly as the crates in the other room – stored in the dark edges of her memory. She’s got to keep herself together. If she thinks about it, or lets it in, it’s going to cut her down at the knees. Reduce her to nothing. And that will do no one any good. Not her, not Caffery. Not Jacqui Kitson.

She jumps up, trots fiercely down the stairs.

You can put things back in a box. Yes, from time to time they might pop out and wriggle, but you can make them go back if you try hard enough. The idea is to keep moving. Don’t look down. She gets her running jacket and her keys from the hook. Opens the door to the freezing mist.