After work, Chloe leaves the office and heads for the shopping centre. She walks against the tide of shoppers, scanning the crowd as she does for a navy parka, white hair and a wobbly gait she would instantly recognize. A group of teenage schoolgirls, skirts rolled up above their knees, pass her going in the opposite direction. Chloe stares at the tight circle they make. One bumps Chloe with her bag. They walk on chattering.
Chloe finds the department store and heads towards the electricals. Inside, she browses different models of kettles, walking alongside rows and rows of them. She watches the people around her, the couples taking time to choose; some pick up one kettle to test how it feels in their hand, how it feels to pour. Chloe copies them, testing kettles well out of her price range, before choosing one exactly the same as Nan’s last.
Nan’s house is a museum of her life. It makes Chloe feel safe that Nan’s world moves more slowly than the outside one, the things and people take longer to change. Chloe can relax in there. Outside the doors, the world is less reliable. The people are too.
When she was a child, she had a favourite teacher in year three. Her name was Miss Moore. Chloe had a book then, about a little girl who loved her teacher too, and when she read it she always thought of herself and Miss Moore. She once saw Miss Moore trimming a hedge outside her house. She often wished she could go into that house, that she could look behind her red front door. The teacher in the book left the school, and Chloe felt sure that Miss Moore would never do that to her. Then one morning she arrived at school and there was no Miss Moore in front of the blackboard. There was Mr Chadwick. The next time she walked past Miss Moore’s house she reached over the fence and pulled all the heads off her pink roses. It had made her feel better but only for a while. She feels safe with Nan, and she knows Nan feels safe with her, and that’s more than you can ask from a lot of people. In the electrical department, she feels wet tears on her cheeks. When will Nan be home?
She looks up and sees someone watching her. She dries her eyes. Hollie is right: the first thing Nan will want when she comes home is a cup of tea. And she will come home. She has to.
Chloe takes the kettle to the till. She waits in line to pay, gripping the box. A man and his daughter stand not far from her. The girl is about four, her hair in a plait, a navy pinafore peering from under her cerise woollen coat. She thinks of the missing girl in the news cuttings. Chloe watches her as she plays, balancing her shiny T-bar shoes on her dad’s giant ones and giggling as he walks her round in circles in his great big footsteps.
‘Excuse me? Madam?’
Chloe spins round. She hadn’t noticed the cashier calling her forward.
‘Sorry,’ she says, smiling back at the little girl and her dad and placing the kettle on the counter.
‘They’re lovely at that age, aren’t they?’ the cashier says.
At that moment, the father looks across to the tills and the cashier waves at the little girl. The man smiles back.
‘Oh, yes,’ Chloe says, fishing inside her purse.
The cashier rings up the kettle on the till.
‘Right, that’ll be twenty-five pounds, please,’ she says.
Chloe pays as the man and the little girl start to head for the exit.
The cashier presses her receipt into her hand.
‘Hold on to these moments,’ she says. ‘They grow up so fast.’
And it’s only then that Chloe realizes what the cashier is seeing. She pauses before she takes the receipt and follows the man and his daughter out of the shop, imagining the cashier’s eyes on them, their perfect threesome. How easy it is to belong in another’s eyes. It’s only when she’s out of sight of the till that she turns back on herself, taking the escalator up to the first floor, watching the man and the little girl skipping at his side until they disappear from view.
Chloe is soon outside again, the cold biting against her cheeks. She pushes her chin into her scarf, and her footsteps quicken towards home. She walks past the glow of shop windows until they become those of cosy front rooms. She can’t bear to look inside tonight at neat family scenes. All she can think about is getting home. She pictures turning into Nan’s street, seeing the house lit up from the inside, as if it has all been a bad dream. Cars filled with families pass her as she follows the path out of the city centre; small kids stare out at her from steamy back windows that they draw on while mum and dad ride up front. She stops for one at a junction, and when it turns right, she’s about to step out into the road when a faint orange glow from a street light illuminates the sign: Chestnut Avenue. This is the street mentioned in the cuttings, the one where the missing girl had lived – where her parents continue living, still waiting for her to come home.
Chloe peers down the road as she crosses. The wide avenue curves after the first few homes, thwarting her curiosity. As she walks away she tries desperately to remember which number house they lived at. Was it 48? She can’t be sure. She’d only know from the very oldest cuttings when life was different and people didn’t need to worry about weirdos turning up on their doorstep.
She carries on walking towards Nan’s house. She had no idea the Kyles lived so close by. She pictures their living room, just like the others she had walked past, yet in her mind’s eye theirs is colder, an emptiness that just won’t shift. She knows something of the pain of being stuck like that, although she’s only had twenty-four hours without Nan, not the twenty-five-year hell they have endured.
Chloe opens the front door, hoping to find Nan behind it, standing confused in the kitchen, rummaging through cupboards. She’s even willing to be called Stella if only she is here. But the house is still and cold.
She plugs in the new kettle and watches as it boils, steam rushing into the tiny kitchen. She makes a cup of tea and takes it into the living room. Inside, her eyes wander across the mahogany-stained sideboard and all the paraphernalia Nan has kept on it for years: the cut-glass fruit bowl filled with nothing but dust; the gold carriage clock Granddad got when he retired that ticked for years longer than his own heart. She pauses in front of a framed photograph of him and Stella. She puts down her tea and picks up the frame with both hands. Stella is a little girl, sitting on his lap; she’s wearing knee-high socks and a tartan skirt, her hair cut in a cute little bob that her curls refuse to obey. They are unmistakably father and daughter. How can it be possible to envy intimacy trapped inside a black and white photograph?
She leaves the picture face down, and as she does, catches her own reflection in the leaded glass. Without Nan for context she looks like a stranger in this house.
She kneels down and opens the bottom of the sideboard where she knows the family photo albums are kept. She pulls them out until they lie scattered across the busy patterned carpet. They smell musty, of decades trapped inside. Cross-legged, she sits down among them. She pulls out the giant red one first and hears a soft crackle from the waxy sheets as she turns the pages one by one. There’s Nan and Granddad on their wedding day, Granddad looking so handsome, so fresh from the war he’s still wearing his uniform. Nan, a woman much younger than Chloe is now, her hair cut into a similar bob to Stella’s. She roams through the pages of their lives together, fast-forwarding through their various homes, past baby photos, catching angles of houses and cars she’s sure she recognizes – photographs and memories blurring into one. It doesn’t take much to plant a story inside your head, then water it and watch it grow.
She flicks through and watches as Nan ages. There are photos of her in cone-cupped bikinis sunbathing on the rocks in Ibiza, and others of her as a young mum, a baby on one hip as she poses proudly beside their new VW Beetle.
She flicks through the albums quickly, like a flip book, watching the lines deepen on Nan’s face as first her daughter and then her husband disappear from her side. The photographs stop abruptly then, a few pages short of the end. Instead a large blank fills the space.
Chloe closes the album, and sits with it in her lap in the dim light of the living room. A whole life contained in these albums. But what use are they to Nan now when the memories, the captions for each of those photographs, have already bid her brain farewell?
Chloe puts everything away. She heats up a can of rice pudding for supper, then sits in Nan’s chair, looking out of the living room window. She watches the street, hoping to see a familiar figure appear under the orange glow of the street lamps. Instead it’s just a fox that scuttles by.
Chloe watches TV for a while, skipping channels when she can’t focus on any one programme. She looks outside again. It has now been twenty-eight hours since Nan went missing. Chloe knows her chances of being found are falling with each hour that passes. In a newspaper story a reporter would describe her as clinging to hope. She thinks of the Kyles, how they first feasted on it, until even hope became famine. She settles down in Nan’s chair. The standard lamp in the window a beacon to return Nan home. Its long fringe shade casting shadows across Chloe’s face.