Page 57 of Just Another Missing Person

You never scanned things sideways, but you did regularly forget to attach anything at all: emails from you usually came in pairs. And you did use lol as punctuation. You said it used to be uncool, and then people started to use it ironically, and then it just became cool again. “Does it still mean laugh out loud?” I once asked you, and you said, “Not really,” while lolling away.

The landlord emails back later, while Yolanda is cooking and I’m sitting at the kitchen island, fidgeting, or so she says. I’m not looking at the screen, not really. I’m looking at your mother’s profile, side on, thinking that I know she would stop me. That this would take back from what has been so hard won: our reality, on Mars. But I am thinking, too, that one day, maybe she will thank me.

The landlord says Olivia can move in the next day.

“Need anything from the shops?” I say, standing with a start.

“Huh?” Yolanda says. “You’re going now? Why?” Her eyes stray to the clock: after ten.

“Just fancy it. The walk, the peace,” I say, and she doesn’t question me any more. The thing is, since you left, even though it’s been a year, we both still behave weirdly at times, erratically. It’s not unusual for one or the other to excuse ourselves in the middle of a main meal in a restaurant, return embarrassingly late, with red eyes.

Tesco is not where criminal masterminds go, I know. I drive there too fast, then walk across the car park, still so cold, even right at the end of April. It’s a supermarket within a mall, has an airport feel to it, or maybe that’s just the time of day. Opposite is a Costa Coffee, populated by shift workers and those who need strange things at strange times, like me.

The Tesco Mobile place is open. Like something preserved from 2004. Little toy model phones tied to the desk with string. I take a box, just a cheap one, with full encryption. Am I really doing this? I wonder. But, yes, I am. For you. For justice, for you. And for future yous, too. Who will be swept away by men like Andrew.

I queue at the self-service checkout behind a woman buying gripe water.It’s just nice to be out, and away from it, tbhshe texts. I can clearly read it, though I pretend not to. The lives we lead online. The footprints we leave behind. Imagine if you were only those electronic footprints, and nothing more: would the world believe you were real? Could they?

The woman in front of her is buying flipflops and a bikini. And I am buying a phone for a fake person. I won’t be able to populate this phone with your history, sadly. But what can you do? It’ll have to be another hole in the plan.Just get him arrested, just get him arrested, just get him arrested.

I get outside, into the massive car park, dome of black skyabove me. It feels like it’s just me in the world. Nobody to watch me. The anonymity of towns and cities. A gritter moves slowly along the street beyond the car park and a cold mist swirls around me like pollution. Somewhere in the very back of my mind is Yolanda. She is saying:Lewis, this is crazy. You’d agree, too, I’m sure. But I don’t care, can’t seem to. Imagine if he was arrested, properly this time: searched, cautioned, lawyers, the lot. Imagine if... no, I can’t allow my mind to go there, that bright star of a place where you are found, alive.

I open the box and tip the phone out into my palm. It’s a smartphone. No young person would have a flip phone—Jesus, you wouldn’t countenance that; can you imagine the uproar if you couldn’t access Instagram twenty-four seven? It’s cold as it sits there like a pebble. Olivia’s new phone.

It’s so strange to me that I had it all there. The Facebook account set up a year ago to talk to Andrew. I’d followed him on Instagram. Found blurred selfies of models online that resembled Olivia’s passport.

And then the strangest thing happened: even though I’d given up on bringing him to justice, I continued to maintain the account. Shots of artisan coffee shops, of peonies, of window seats you’d like to sit in. Things that made it seem to me like you were still alive. I’d check it, sometimes, and laugh at things I’d written in your voice. If I scrolled enough, it was almost like you were still here. A way of keeping you with me, I suppose. As though, if an avatar of you is out there on Instagram, your light hasn’t yet gone out, not yet, not yet, not yet.

Olivia uses your phrases, as best as I remember, and she looks like you. Everything you liked, everything you said. Even that you’d left a job. All invented. Your funny phrases, your wit, your energy. My eulogy to you. Forever, Sadie.

The way you’d sit at the beach and watch HIIT workouts while eating churros. The way you always said you got a boner when you went shopping. All the things you did, the little things, the big things. All the funny things you thought and said. It was all there. Andrew didn’t notice—men, eh? He probably thought everyone was just like you, just as funny and scintillating and sparkly as you.

It was easy, really. After all, what is an identity? I had loads of them. That box of dud passports that failed to print. I chose the one with the most anodyne name, Olivia Johnson, and the one that reminded me of you, Sadie, and that lovely face you used to pull as a baby, Little O.

And then I set up your profile, initially to catfish Andrew, later to pay homage to you.

Text me, I send to Andrew, now Matthew, giving the number of the new phone.

8pm day after tomorrow—here?he sends, adding a pin to a café you’d like.It’s dead near mine :)I agree to it. We won’t meet, of course. But, you know.

In the car, I set up five Facebook accounts, all pending ID, which I’ll get from the box at home. I then message them from her, telling them the new number. I comment on a few of her updates, accidentally write on an older one as someone called Doug Adams. I email somebody called Amy De Shaun from Olivia, and then email back from Amy’s account to Olivia’s. I find somebody on Facebook who I can say is Olivia’s boyfriend, if they don’t find the messages with Matthew and believe he is dating Olivia. If the heat starts to turn to me, or it starts to look like they doubt Olivia’s existence, I can say I am the boyfriend, this stranger, and that my alibi is that I was out of the country.

It’s so easy, Sadie. It’s so easy to make someone exist, Ialmost wonder if I can magic you back. It’s official: Olivia Johnson is about to go missing, even though she doesn’t exist.

***

Early morning, next day, and I have a list of what makes a person seem like they exist. A house, a job, an email account, Instagram... and a wardrobe.

In the charity shop. It’s musty in that way places only are on a rainy spring day, when the damp rises off clothes and hangs about in the air. An elderly woman behind the till, counting coins out into piles.

I begin to sweat. I’m meeting Matthew tomorrow. A self-imposed deadline, but a deadline nevertheless. Olivia has to be set up by then, by me, with no help from anybody.

I grab at this and that. Designer, off cuts, whatever the Oxfam shop has. A green jumper. A white top. Random jewelry. I clutch at them, then take them to the till, not looking at the prices.

I take the clothes to her new house, but as I idle outside, I see there’s no way I can sneak in now. It’ll have to be later, in the quiet, under cover of darkness. I can’t risk being seen.

I go home, and write reams and reams of things I should do, setting her up so she seems rounded, a real person. I buy three burner phones to associate with fake Facebook accounts from a stall at an indoor market. I add them as Olivia’s contacts. I fabricate the boyfriend and buy a phone to pretend to be him, too. Olivia can message these people and they will message her back. And, when the police call any of them: they will be me, because they are men. Doug, who temped with her years ago. A uni friend called Darren.And her father. An elusive type, hard to get hold of, often has bad signal, otherwise the police might recognize him as me.

I email boohoo and pretend I have a return. I comment on a few more of Olivia’s status updates. I clean up the posts, check them over, make sure they’re authentic. Yolanda comes home, goes to bed, and then it’s time.

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