Page 33 of Just Another Missing Person

He turns to her and smiles in surprise at the black humor, at the throwback to how they once were. And there it is. That smile. One side, then the other, a row of straight, white teeth, a little syllable of a wry laugh, beating down on her like a sunbeam. Julia stares directly at it, and after a second averts her eyes. It’s painful to stare at the sun.

11

Olivia

Instagram photo:a golden retriever on a beach.

Instagram caption:Be still my heart. A sunny Sunday at Sugar Loaf beach, and, sunshine itself: a golden retriever, king of dogs. Bounding along like a fucking vitamin advert.

Instagram photo:An aisle of B&M bargains.

Instagram caption:Here is the new Zoflora—white linen. Yes, I have a Zoflora boner, but it’s out of shot. I can’t wait to polish the shit out of my table with this.

Tweet:At shops. Eye mask on, hair in messy bun, COLDSORE on my lip. If this were a film, I’d see an ex-bf right about now. If this were a romcom, I’d meet a hot but grumpy small-town guy in a lumberjack shirt who doesn’t want me to be moving in next door to him from the city. As it goes, it’s real life so absolutely f u c k all is happening.

Sent item:

26/04:[email protected]@hotmail.com

All right, I’m on my way to the bar and I can’t get hold of you on phone or WhatsApp, are you going to be there?

Facebook post:Phone call with Dad—he just asked me forty cryptic crossword clues and I got ZERO.

Comment:Actually, you got minus one, because you got me to write an incorrect one in. x

Third Day Missing

12

Emma

“Oh, sure,” you are saying to a man who is standing on our doorstep. You’ve just arrived back, and you wouldn’t say where from, deflected when I asked. The hallway smells of a plug-in spring air freshener and the actual, real, outside, which is nothing like it.

“Sorry, what’s this?” I say. It’s the early evening. I’m eighteen weeks down some celebrity’s time line on Instagram, trying to see when they took their engagement ring off (for what reason? I have no idea), holding a laundry basket in my other hand. I am sure I used to be more interesting than this, though I can’t quite remember in what way.

It’s sunny out, but still freezing. You’re in only a T-shirt, and the hairs on your arms have risen up. I see now that it is a police officer at the door. Plain clothes, but holding up a badge, just like he’s in a TV show. Immediately, my heart speeds up. Back in my own hell, your hell, from last year, when another policeman knocked at our door. Different door, same police force.

“It’s just this,” he is saying to you. He waves a transparent bag containing what looks like a swab. “Wipe that around, er,the inside of your cheek if you could be so kind,” he says cordially, like he’s just asked you to donate money to charity, not your DNA to a police database. “Then pass it back to me.”

“Sorry—why are you...” I say, hurrying forward, reaching an arm out to touch your shoulder.

You glance back at me. “It’s fine,” you say, blue eyes to mine. “It’s just a DNA thing. A voluntary screening—for that missing woman.”

The missing woman. I saw her on the news last night. Blond, slim, early twenties. It was all too familiar. I heard the BBC News bulletin noise, and then the announcement, and I had to consciously remind myself: that was then, this is now. History is not repeating itself.

Still. She went missing in Portishead. I scrolled through the photos on my phone to the night the police say she disappeared, and felt my shoulders drop when I saw you were with me. This is the way it is. When you don’t quite trust somebody any more life is actually much the same on the outside, except, internally, you spend more time thinking, assessing, checking. Going over stuff.

Something unspoken passes between us now. “You sure you don’t mind doing that?” I say levelly, unable to stop myself, wanting to ask a million more questions, starting with,Why the fuck would you help the police out, after everything?And ending with:Do they know?

“Happy to assist.” You say it so easily, taking the swab and running it around your cheek. I watch as you do it. Underconfident, not practiced, at least. You cough slightly, then put it in the specimen bag. Panic begins to burn ferociously inside me. I stare at the back of your head. I have no idea if you’re being tactical, or naive. You hide your emotions so well.

“We appreciate it,” the officer says. “And just to check—doyou know this woman? Ever seen her while out and about?” He holds up a poster. There she is, the woman I googled last night after I said I was so tired my eyes were closing and I needed to go to bed (See? The ways what we say differs from what’s going on internally).MISSINGwritten in red along the bottom.

“Nope,” you say easily.

“Sure?”

“Certain.”

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