It had been a week.
A week when nobody spoke above a whisper, apart from Merry, who cried as often and as loudly as she liked, until a neighbour they called Auntie, but wasn’t, came and took her away, ‘Just until Eileen comes home.’
When she’d gone, the quiet house got so quiet that the silence itself was nearly a noise.
Jack and Joy didn’t go to school. It wasn’t as much fun as it sounded. They played cards, or watched cartoons with the sound down, between the silhouettes of policemen who wandered in and out like clumsy ghosts. The head policeman had a moustache as big as a cowboy’s. ‘Call me Ralph,’ he told them, but they called him nothing – just watched him go in and out of the kitchen with papers and pictures, to say secret things to their father.
When they were hungry, they ate cereal straight from the packet. When they were thirsty, they drank from the tap. When they were tired, they leaned against each other on the sofa like penguins in a snowstorm and slept awkward, restless sleeps where they dreamed of hot, dusty tarmac and of nobody stopping.
Nobody getting involved.
Now and then, their father would look up as if he had just remembered them and say, ‘Are you two all right?’ and Jack and Joy would both nod furiously, because he was very busy with the police and with the papers, and because if they said they were not all right, maybe another Auntie they didn’t even know would come and take them away like Merry.
The newspapers came through the door every morning in a series of thuds, like dead birds falling out of the sky and on to the mat.
Every paper, every day.
Their father sat at the kitchen table, obsessively reading and rereading every word anyone knew or had guessed about his wife’s disappearance – bent close to the pages to glean more meaning, his lips moving and his fingers darkening with newsprint. He wouldn’t throw a single paper away in case he’d missed something, and kept every copy in a pile that grew shockingly fast.
Jack and Joy weren’t supposed to read the papers, but they sneaked a peek now and then when their father was upstairs, discovering in random snatches that the search for their mother was still going on and that the police were looking for clues but not finding any.
Uncle Bill came from Ireland, with his ugly wife, Una. She pretended to like children, while he sat in the kitchen and watched their father heave piles of papers from one side of the room to the other, pointing at pages, explaining his theory of what might have happened to his wife.
Theories.
He had several and Jack was sick of hearing them. All were relayed in shaky little word-bursts not at all like his father’s man-voice. And all involved a mistake, a misunderstanding, a miscommunication that would seem obvious once Eileen came home and explained where she’d been all this time, and everything would be all right.
Jack hummed loudly so he didn’t have to hear his father sounding so pathetic.
‘Shut up,’ said Joy.
Jack hummed louder.
They couldn’t go outside because of all the reporters who knocked on the door and stood on the corner near the pub, or sat in cars parked up and down the street.
Waiting.
‘What are they waiting for?’ said Joy, as they played cards on her bedroom carpet.
‘I don’t know,’ said Jack, although he thought he did – and thought she must too.
But she got off the carpet and opened the bedroom window and shouted down at them, ‘What are you waiting for?’
Nobody told her. But the next day her picture was on the front of all the papers that came through the door.
The headline was ‘ABANDONED JOY’.
It tortured Jack.
Maybe his mother really had abandoned them on the hard shoulder. Maybe he was too noisy and Joy was too irritating and Merry was too shitty for her to take any more. Maybe she’d never even called for help from the orange phone. Maybe she’d just got sick of him and Joy bickering in the back, and had pulled over and walked round the bend, and stuck out her thumb and hitched a ride to a whole new life. A richer husband, a better car, and the new baby, who would be getting all the toys and hugs instead of him and Joy and Merry.
If he tried hard enough for long enough, Jack could get angry enough not to care if his mother ever came home.
But even at those times, he secretly wished that she would.