Page 34 of Just Another Missing Person

“Okay, then,” he says hurriedly, “thank you for your time.” He waves the labeled sample bag, goes next door to ring their bell. I’m relieved to see that. That it isn’t just you.

I start unloading the dishwasher even though the plates are still steaming and burn my hands. It’s for something to do, that’s all. So that I can ask you the things I need to ask you with a veneer of housework covering them.

“You all right there?” you say to me. “Laundry. Dishwashers. So productive. You should’ve been in the special services or something.” It sounds friendly, but it isn’t: it’s your own veneer, your own deflection. I’ve known you for twenty years, and you are never breezy. Awkward, often. Funny, very. But never really relaxed. It’s just the way you’re made. You came home from school once, aged sixteen or so, and said you found school so fake, and the people in it worse. We talked about it a lot, standing in your bedroom, you with your rucksack still on. The next day, you pretended the conversation hadn’t happened, were embarrassed, I guess, at the intimacy.

“Are we pretending that didn’t just happen?” I say.

You shrug. You actually shrug, then look directly at me, wounded, the way you sometimes are, my fragile, glass-bauble boy. “I’m helping out.”

“But—”

“Do you remember,” you say, your tone frosted ice, “that a year ago, I was actually exonerated?”

“I do.” I give you a tight smile, but my scalp is prickling in that way it does when you know you’re in the presence of something important, something big, something dangerous.

***

It’s late. We’ve been out to dinner, just the two of us, the way we often do. This is what people don’t tell you about having a child: so quickly, so fast you almost miss it, they become a full, sentient, adult being. And this is when they need the most help, need the sacrifices. Breastfeeding versus formula feeding, crying it out versus co-sleeping, it doesn’t matter then, though the hormones would have you believe otherwise. The time when your baby really, truly needs your emotional heft is now: the teenage years and beyond.

The Uber we’re in smells of mouthwash commingled with the artificial scent of the air freshener, which dances every time we take a bend. You have just said to me that you want to get home and watchDIY SOS, even though that makes you a sad case, and I’ve said that it makes me love you more.

The conversation between us flows easily, but I’m thinking about last year, and what you said earlier:exonerated. That’s the word you used. But, the thing is, you weren’t, were you? Not really. Because your girlfriend disappeared, and you were questioned, and—yes—released. But she was never found. Can we call that exoneration?

I shift slightly away from you in the car. It’s been—in a way—an easy problem for my mind to solve, at leastintellectually. The answer presents itself to me often: the police didn’t go any further with it, so why should I? And that has been the answer I have given myself repeatedly, since last spring. Acting like the protective parent that I am—and Iam—but, internally... well, something else.

Sometimes, when you’re coming in late, or meeting friends I don’t know of, or up pacing in the night, I think the flipside of my own reassurance: but they did question you.

You didn’t ever fully discuss it with me. And it’s been the same since this new woman, Olivia Johnson, went missing: nothing said by you. All over the news, all over social media, and... nothing. You haven’t raised it, not directly, not with me. You gave your swab. That’s all.

Nor have you mentioned how alike they look.

“Those bread rolls,” you say. You puff your cheeks out. “I perhaps didn’t need to eat forty.”

I can’t help but smile.They did release you. You always did like simple food, even as a small child. Potatoes, chips, bread, anything beige. You’re the same even now.

“It’s the butter,” you say. “How do they make it so nice? It’s like—whipped.”

I close my eyes. The women have the same blond hair. Similar circumstances. Similar location... stop thinking about it. Just stop.

“Plus, I think it’s salted,” you say. You glance sideways at me, no idea of the transactions going on in my mind.

“We’ll have to make some,” I say weakly.

We’re pulling up, near to ours, and, just like that, the ambience dies.

That specific post-dinner feeling, blurred city lights, rain, alcohol, joviality: gone. You know why? Because the street is blue. A lit-up, phosphorescent blue.

And I can’t believe it, but the first thought I have is that I haven’t been wrong with my gut feeling.

No! I try to erase the thought the second after I’ve had it. It’s just a misunderstanding. Bum luck.

All of my senses are trained on that blue. We don’t look at each other. Perhaps this is what is most telling of all. We’re not surprised. We’re not even shocked. You are still and soundless next to me. We get out of the car like tin men.

“Ah,” a bald male officer says, striding over to us. “Matthew James,” he addresses you.

“Sorry—what’s the problem?” I ask, sounding authoritative, the me who can balance a profit and loss account on sight, who grew up with nothing, but I don’t feel like that me. I feel like the real me, the me that lurks in every single one of us: someone for whom things fall apart.

“DS Poole,” he says, reaching out. As we shake hands, both of our wrists flash blue, strobed by the light from the car outside our house. “Just a few questions for Matthew, if you don’t mind?” He’s standing there, next to the police car, with a blond woman who introduces herself as DCI Day.

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