Page 6 of The World Outside My Window

As the realisation hits that she’s still alone, her stomach drops. She needs to get out of bed and do something, try and work out what’s happened to her husband. She swings her legs out of bed and shuffles across the carpet, concentrating on not throwing up. As she switches on the bathroom light she catches sight of herself in the mirror above the sink and groans. Her skin is almost translucent – hardly surprising as it hasn’t seen the sun for more than eighteen months – and the dark circles under her eyes are black, like bruises. She turns away, not wanting to see the reality of what she’s done to herself: her gaunt cheeks, her haunted look. She hovers over the loo for a few minutes to make sure she’s not going to be sick, then pulls on a fresh pair of jeans – they hang off her now, so she loops a belt through them – and an old jumper and heads back down to the kitchen. Through the fug of her hangover she has the idea that she needs to try to formulate some kind of plan to find Jim.

On autopilot, she fills the kettle with water, spoons Nescafé into a mug, then takes the phone off the hook and drags it over to the kitchen table, stretching the coil of plastic until it strains to get back in its base. She grabs the notepad from yesterday, where the number for the local police station is scribbled, and redials it. She knows they’re not going to do anything, but she needs to feel as though she’s doing something.

‘My husband is still missing,’ she blurts as soon as someone answers, even though she has no idea whether it’s the same prepubescent officer she spoke to the previous evening.

‘I’m sorry, madam, can you tell me who’s missing, please?’ says a female voice.

And so Laura repeats her story about Jim not coming home last night, about how she rang and was told he hadn’t been missing for long enough, but that she’s worried about him.

‘I see.’ A silence. ‘And you say he’s been missing for how long?’

She glances at the clock on the cooker whose green digits tell her it’s 8.36 a.m.

‘Fourteen hours, as far as I know. But it could be longer. It’s definitely been more than that since I spoke to him.’

‘I see,’ she says again, and Laura feels fury unfurl in her like a weed, stretching its leaves to the edges of her patience before the officer has even had the chance to dismiss her.

‘You don’t understand,’ Laura yells, her voice cracking as she leaps up, the wooden chair toppling over behind her and clattering to the floor. ‘He’s never late. He’s always home on time, and he would never just not turn up. He—’ Her voice breaks. She was going to say that Jim knows she can’t cope on her own, but she realises before she does how pathetic it sounds, and also how little difference it will make to anything the police do anyway.

‘I totally understand, Mrs—’

‘Parks,’ she supplies.

‘I totally understand what you’re saying, Mrs Parks, and I understand why you might be worried. But the trouble is, you see, that we’re not allowed to investigate missing adults for at least forty-eight hours following their disappearance.’

‘Yes, I know that, but—’

‘The thing is, Mrs Parks, the chances are extremely high that your husband simply stayed out for the night and forgot to let you know. Grown men tend to come home sooner rather than later and we simply don’t have the resources—’

Laura has heard enough and she races across the kitchen and slams the phone down before the officer has even finished her sentence. Well, screw them if they don’t want to help. But she knows her Jim, and she knows he would never abandon her after she’s been on her own for almost four days straight if something terrible hadn’t happened to him.

Her hands shake as she pours her coffee, taking care not to let the water splash across the worktop. The fridge reveals the milk has gone off so she tops it up with cold water and a spoonful of lumpy Coffee Mate, which turns it a weird grey colour. She knows she should probably eat some food to soak up the vodka in her bloodstream, but she feels sick to her stomach and certain anything she eats will curdle instantly. Instead she picks up the fallen chair, sits back down at the kitchen table and studies the stripes of sunlight that have been painted across the tabletop by the morning sun squeezing its way through the gaps in the half-closed blinds.

She clearly needs a better plan than relying on the police. She pulls the notepad towards her, turns to a new page, then picks up a half-chewed pencil from a nearby pot, and jots at the top of the page:

Finding Jim

She stares at the words for a while, the letters bleeding into each other, and tries to think this through logically. It doesn’t matter that sheknowsJim would never just up and leave her on her own. She needs to work out what might have happened to him, and what she’s going to do about it – all without leaving the house.

Work?

She scribbles underneath. Jim works in Leeds for half the week, and has done since long before they were married. He’s some sort of director – she believes, although when she really thinks about it she’s never actually checked, which is odd – of a large international chain of hotels, and shortly after they moved in together he started working up north for half his working week. She didn’t mind, not really, and even though she missed him when he was away, given the intensity of their relationship at first it did at least mean she had time to see other people, do other things. She asked if she could go with him once or twice, but he put her off, assuring her she’d be bored as he worked such long hours. She notes down a couple of names she’s heard him mention and puts a question mark by their names.

Chris and Dev?

Dead/hurt?

She’s aware this could cover any number of things, including someone hurting him and him falling ill, but, as she doesn’t want to think about it too much, she just makes a note to call some of the hospitals in Leeds and London and moves on.

Friends/family?

The trouble with this, she realises instantly, is that she doesn’t really know how to get hold of Jim’s friends and family. He doesn’t have any immediate family, and his friends all seem to be connected to his job, which means she hasn’t met them either. How has she allowed this to happen? She draws a giant question mark next to this section and decides to come back to it later, if need be.

She ponders her list. It doesn’t seem like much, and yet it’s all she has. She’s always known that she’d need to try and overcome her agoraphobia sooner or later, but since the attack Jim has always been there for her, being the frontman in their marriage and blunting the edges of any glaringly obvious gaps in her social abilities. Without him, she’s lost.

4

THEN – OCTOBER 1985

---