Page 7 of Just Another Missing Person

As soon as her phone stops, she feels it. A presence. Or, rather, a lack of absence. A notion that she isn’t alone.

She tells herself she always gets like this when working on missing persons cases, that it is because a young, attractive woman has disappeared, that it’s because it’s late, unseasonably cold, it’s because Art both is and isn’t at home waiting for her.

But then the back of her neck shivers with something more than just anxiety: instead, a deep, limbic part of her brain fires up a warning flare into the night. There is someone in the car. She counts to three, then raises her eyes to the rear-view mirror.

In the back is a man wearing a balaclava. He says only one word: “Drive.”

2

Lewis

I don’t know it yet, but I am about to get the call to say that you are missing.

I am in the back room alone, at work, quite bored, and so very seriously accepting an Oscar, this time for my role in a breakout film whose title I haven’t yet decided. This will pass the forty-five minutes until my morning coffee. “The person I’d like to thank the most,” I am saying as I seal up passport renewals into their designated envelopes, “is my past self.” Hmm. Would even Hollywood think that was perhaps a step too far?

You used to find this hilarious, would join in sometimes if you overheard me. As I prattle on about the incredible special effects team who, really, made all this possible, I start thinking about how much you hated working here with me at the passport office. But I loved us being together: you were the jaded work playmate I had been searching for. You—twenty-one, just graduated, looking for better—couldn’t believe this was how your father spent his days. I still remember you looked at me, blond hair everywhere, a doughnut raised to your lips, and said, “This is the highlight of my day, and it’s not even a good fucking doughnut.”

We’d go home together and bore Mum with talk of our dysfunctional colleagues and their petty moves: name-tagging their staplers, and so on. We messed up a run of passports so badly we couldn’t confess, took them home and hid them under the spare bed, both of us living in fear for several weeks that we’d get found out.

I stop my Oscar speech once the envelopes are done. Before the coffee, I have to check off some passport applications. New photo against existing passport. New photo. Existing passport. One more lot of twenty-five minutes until I can go and boil the kettle...

I’ve never had the kind of brain that can deal with any kind of drudgery. I never ever knew what I wanted to do. Not at ten, not at twenty, not at thirty. I’ve gone on countless after-work courses, locksmithing, social media, mostly to forget about work. I’ve learnt all sorts, over the years, but nothing I really wanted to do.

It’s at this point that my phone rings. A string of digits, not a contact of mine. I have no idea what’s about to happen.

“Hello?” I say. I walk from the back room with its poor signal and into the kitchenette. The door handle is wobbly, has been for years, and I steady it with my fingertips. The public sector: they never fix anything.

It smells of tannin in here. They’re all tea drinkers. I recently suggested once again that we buy a coffee machine, and they acted as if I had said I wanted to take a shit in the kettle.

“Hi,” a female voice says. I can tell, immediately, that something is wrong. “Sorry—sorry,” she says. “It’s—it’s Molly. Er—”

Your housemate. We’ve never spoken. She only knows me because I guaranteed the rent. Why would she be calling me?My entire body goes hot. I try to count to ten, the way your mum says I should. “God, Lewis,” she will say frustratedly. “You always go from nought to one hundred—there is never any happy bloody medium.” Yolanda: the level-headed love of my life.

One, two, three. “Is everything okay?”

“Sorry—sorry,” Molly says.

Murders, accidents, heart attacks, my mind suggests. Don’t some young people suddenly drop down dead?

Four, five, six. “We all have these thoughts, Lewis,” Yolanda sometimes says. “But you have to ignore them.”

But then Molly says it. You are missing. Rather, she doesn’t know where you are. The kitchenette blurs for just a second, the edges of it fading and then coming back technicolor. I try to concentrate on the things I can see to ground myself. A Costco industrial-sized sack of tea bags in the corner. The fridge, covered in magnets that everyone here—for some reason—brings back from their holidays.

I take a breath. “What? Since when?”

“She didn’t come home last night—I... we don’t know where she is. Sorry to call... I—I know we hardly know each other but...”

Images rush through my mind like cards being shuffled while I wait for the universe to reveal its grotesque hand. Twos, threes. The hanged man. The devil.

No, not you, my Little O—when you were a baby, your mouth made a lovely little happy O-shape. When you smile, it turns full Cheshire Cat. The Little O nickname stuck. You grew up, are now in your twenties, but you’re still the same, really. Happy. Optimistic. Funny. Bit of a champagne socialist, but, you know, lovably so.

“Where was she?”

“We don’t know.”

“Tell me everything,” I say, closing the door to the kitchen tightly. Something thunks, somewhere, but I don’t look to see what.

“She didn’t come home last night,” Molly repeats. “I... her phone’s off.”

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