hostilities were last at their worst. We took a spontaneous trip to the Cotswolds, driving with the roof down and my skirt up, his hand manoeuvring between my legs and the gearstick, before pulling over at the first B&B with a vacancy sign. I remember laughing and making love in front of an open fire, eating bad pizza and drinking a bottle of good port. I loved how desperate he was to touch me, hold me, fuck me back then. But all my talk of having children changed that. He did love me. He just didn’t want to share.
I miss that version of us.
Then I remember finding another woman’s lipstick beneath our bed.
‘I appreciate what a distressing time this is . . . ’ says Croft, bringing me back to the present. She leans in a little further and slots the key into the ignition. The dashboard lights up and the radio softly serenades us with a popular song about love and lies. Then Croft walks around to the passenger side of the car and opens the glove compartment. I only realise I’ve been holding my breath when I can see for myself that it is empty. She feels under the seats but doesn’t appear to find anything. ‘A loved one going missing is always hardest on the spouse,’ she says, looking at me. Then she closes the door and moves to the rear of the car, staring down at the boot. I find myself staring at it too. We all are. ‘You must be worried now,’ she says, then opens it. All three of us peer inside.
It’s empty.
I remember how to breathe again. I’m not exactly sure what I thought she might find in there, but I’m glad that it’s nothing. My shoulders loosen and I start to relax a little.
‘I think I must be missing something,’ she says, closing the boot. Her words intrude on my relief. She returns to the front of the car and retrieves the key. The music from the radio stops, and the silence feels as if it might swallow me. I watch as she removes the gloves from her tiny hands, then I try to speak, but my mouth can’t seem to form the right words. I feel like I’m stuck inside my own bespoke nightmare.
‘What do you think you are missing?’ I ask, eventually.
‘Well, it’s just that if the last place your husband went before he disappeared was the petrol station, then doesn’t it seem a little strange to you that the tank is almost empty?’
Essex, 1987
I’m stuck halfway up the longest staircase in the world and I’m crying, because I think my daddy is dead. I don’t know why else a strange man in a strange place would say he was my new dad. He keeps talking, but I can’t hear him any more, I’m crying too loud. He doesn’t sound Irish like Maggie and me, his voice sounds strange and I don’t like it at all.
‘Get out of the way, John, give the child some space,’ she says, when we reach the top of the stairs. I can see four wooden doors. None of them are painted and all of them are closed. Maggie takes my hand and pulls me towards the door that is furthest away. I’m scared to see what is behind it, so I close my eyes, but this makes me trip and stumble a little. Maggie holds on to my hand so tight that my feet just have to catch up.
When I open my eyes again, I can see that I am in a little girl’s bedroom. It isn’t like my bedroom at home, with the patchy brown carpet and grey curtains that used to be white. This room is like something I’ve only seen on TV. The bed, table and wardrobe are all painted white. The carpet is pink, and the curtains, wallpaper and bedspread are all covered in pictures of a little red-haired girl and rainbows.
‘This is your new room. Do you like it?’ Maggie asks.
I do like it, so I’m not sure why I wet myself.
I haven’t had an accident in my pants for a really long time. I think maybe the walls made of corks, the tall stairs, and the man with the gold tooth might have frightened the pee right out of me. I feel a hot trickle of it run down the inside of my leg, and I can’t seem to make it stop. I hope Maggie won’t notice, but when I look at the pink carpet, there is a dark patch between my shoes. She sees it then, and her smiley round face changes into something cross and pointy.
‘Only babies wet themselves.’ She hits me hard across the face. I’ve seen Daddy hit my brother like that, but nobody has ever done it to me before. My cheek hurts and I start to cry, again. ‘Grow up, it was just a slap.’ Maggie picks me up, holding me as far away from her as she can with straight arms. She marches back out into the hall and through the door nearest the top of the stairs. It’s a small kitchen. The floor is covered in lines of strange, squishy green carpet, with words written on it, and the cupboards are all different shapes and sizes and made from different-coloured wood. Another door at the end of the kitchen leads to a bathroom. Everything in it is green: the toilet, the sink, the bath, the carpet and the tiles on the wall. I think Maggie must really like the colour. She puts me down inside the bath and leaves the room, then comes straight back, with a big black bin bag. I worry that she wants to throw me away with the rubbish.
‘Take your clothes off,’ she says.
I don’t want to.
‘I said, take your clothes off!’
I still don’t move.
‘Now.’ It sounds as if the word got stuck behind her teeth. She seems awful cross, so I do as she says.
When all my clothes, including my wet pants, are in the bin bag, she picks up a little white plastic hose that is attached to the tap in the bath. ‘The boiler is on the blink, so you’ll have to make do.’ She hoses me down. The water is freezing and it makes me gasp for my breath, like when I fell out of the fishing boat once at home, and the cold black sea tried to swallow me. Maggie squirts shampoo on my head and roughly rubs it into my hair. The yellow bottle says No More Tears, but I’m crying. When I am covered in soap from my head to my feet, she sprays me all over with cold water again. I try to keep still the way she tells me to, but my body shivers and my teeth chatter like they do in winter.
When she is finished, she dries me with a stiff green towel, then she marches me back to my new bedroom and sits me down on the bed covered in rainbows. I don’t have any clothes and I’m cold. She leaves the room for a moment, and I hear her talking to the man who said he was my new dad, even though I’ve never seen him before.
‘She looks just like her,’ he says, before Maggie comes back in with a glass of milk.
‘Drink it.’
I hold the glass in both hands and take a couple of sips. It tastes chalky and strange, just like the milk she gave me in the house that was for holidays.
‘All of it,’ she says.
When the glass is empty I see that she is wearing her smiley round face again, and I am glad. I don’t like her other one, it scares me. She opens a drawer and pulls out a pair of pink pyjamas. She helps me to put them on, then makes me stand in front of the mirror.
The first thing I notice is my hair. It’s much shorter than it was the last time I saw myself and stops at my chin.
‘Where has my hair gone?’ I start to cry but Maggie raises her hand so I stop.
‘It was too long and needed cutting. It will grow back.’
I stare at the little girl in the mirror. Her pink pyjama top has a word written on it made of five letters: AIMEE. I don’t know what it means.
‘Do you want a bedtime story?’
I nod that I would.
‘Has the cat got your tongue?’
I haven’t seen a cat and I think my tongue is still inside my mouth. I wiggle it behind my lips to be sure. She walks over to a shelf stacked with colourful magazines and takes the top one off the pile. ‘Can you read?’
‘Yes.’ I stick my chin out a little without knowing why. ‘My brother taught me.’
‘Well, wasn’t that nice of