What You Wish For (9 page)

‘Would you be a good lad,’ Kate said, ‘and get me a cup of tea? There’s a vending machine just down the corridor.’

‘OK.’ I stood up and made my way to the machine. I bought a tea for her and black coffee for myself.

‘Thank you.’ She sat up as straight as she could. ‘Why are you in here?’ I asked, feeling awkward.

‘You mean to say Marie hasn’t told you? That girl . . .’ She looked me in the eye. ‘I’ve just had a mastectomy.’

‘Oh . . .’ I squirmed. ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea.’

‘Obviously not. Marie probably didn’t think it was worth
mentioning
.’

‘She knew?’

‘Oh yes.’ Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘Where did I go wrong?’

I couldn’t believe this. I hadn’t even known that Marie had been to visit her mother. I tried to work it out: it must have been just after Andrew’s funeral. Why on earth hadn’t she told me?

‘Did she tell you about her friend Andrew?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘Yes she did. She was quite upset, although she didn’t really want to talk about it. We talked about me, mostly. The cancer.’

‘Is it . . . are you going to be all right?’

She tried to smile. ‘Oh yes. I’ll be fine. Tough old bird, I am. Tough as . . .’

She trailed off and silence fell over us. I could hear birds outside the window, the distant quacking of the ducks that lived on the hospital grounds.

My mind raced. Marie knew her mother had cancer. Whatever the problems between them, surely she wouldn’t vanish deliberately, leaving her mother alone? It made me shudder. It pushed me into thinking that Marie hadn’t chosen to vanish. Something had happened to her. But was it an external force, or an internal one? Had the news about her mother, coming so soon after Andrew’s death, torn her sanity from its hinges, pushed her over the edge?

‘When she came to see you,’ I asked, ‘did she say anything at all to suggest whether she was planning something? Like going away?’

She touched her forehead with thin fingers and thought. Eventually, she shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a thing.’ A look of desperation replaced the one of bravado. She clutched my hand, squeezing my fingers until they hurt. She started to cry, her body shaking with the attempt to hold back the tears.

‘I need to see her,’ she said. ‘She’s all I’ve got left. You’ve got to tell her to come and see me.’

‘But I don’t—’

She squeezed my fingers even harder. Her grip was shockingly strong. I thought my bones were going to crack.

‘You have to find her and tell her to visit me. I need you to promise.’

‘OK.’ I tried to extricate my hands from her grip. ‘Yes, yes of course.’

‘Say it. Say you promise. You won’t give up. People always give up, they always let you down.’

A nurse appeared and stared at me disapprovingly. Kate’s body shook with fresh sobs.

‘I promise,’ I said. ‘I’ll find her.’

On the way home I listened to the news on the radio. I kept expecting them to say that the body of a young woman had been found on wasteland somewhere, or discovered by a dog walker. But the world didn’t know, let alone care, that Marie was missing.

Approaching my house, I noticed that the front gate was open. As a habit, I always shut the front gate when I go out – a trait that was drilled into me by my dad when I lived at home. To him, leaving the gate open was like inviting burglars into your house. I paused. Had I left it open in my rush to visit Marie’s mum? Or . . .

I rushed up to the house, scrabbled for my keys and thrust the door open, shouting Marie’s name as I went in. I heard a movement and for a second I felt a pulse of joy, like that moment when you wake from a nightmare.

But it was only Calico, who had jumped down from his spot on the windowsill. I ran from room to room but, of course, she wasn’t there.

So who had left the gate open?

It was probably me. Or someone delivering leaflets, or a pack of Jehovah’s Witnesses. But there were no leaflets on the doormat and the Jehovahs usually came in the morning. Feeling spooked, I went out into the front garden. It was fully dark now, the stars bright in a clear black sky.

There was a window box on the sill beside the door. Marie had put it there, one of the things she’d done when she moved in, to add a splash of colour and character to the house. I made a mental note that I needed to remember to water it. But as I was about to go back inside, I noticed that the heads of a few of the flowers were broken, hanging as if in shame towards the window. There was dirt on the floor too, just visible in the poor light. It looked like someone had knocked the window box off the sill before putting it back again. Carefully, I lifted it down so I could get a better look.

This window, which looked into the living room, was one of the original features of my Victorian house: a sash window that rattled when it was windy, that let in drafts and noise. It was painted white, and a few weeks before, after Marie had pointed out how shabby it looked, I had given it a fresh coat.

There were dirty fingermarks on the paintwork now. Like someone, having knocked over the window box, had tested the window with muddy fingers to try, unsuccessfully, to open it.

Marie? But she had a key, and knew the window was always locked.

I went round to the back of the house, checking for footprints or other signs that someone had tried to break in. I spotted one immediately: the ladder, which I kept in the garden shed, was poking out of the door.

It seemed pretty clear what had happened: someone had started to pull the ladder out, but had been disturbed or frightened off, quickly making an exit.

Maybe they had been scared off by the sound of my car pulling up out front. They were probably in the back garden when I got home.

I quickly ran to each side of the garden fence, peering over. A dog two gardens away began to bark. Whoever had been here was long gone.

I went back inside and turned all the lights on, nerves jangling like I’d just watched a horror movie on my own. Someone had tried to get into my house. I knew there had been a number of break-ins in the area recently, and I should probably call the police. But I also knew, from reading the reports in
The Herald
, that the police hadn’t been able to do anything for the people who had actually been burgled. It would be a waste of time.

No one had got in. Nothing was missing. I was lucky.

But I couldn’t help but feel this hadn’t been a burglar.

‘Was it you?’ I whispered. Then I laughed at myself. What was I doing? Talking to Marie like she was a ghost. I needed to do something to shake this spooked sensation. I needed a drink.

Sitting down with my second beer – I had guzzled the first one standing by the fridge, the radio turned up to blast away the creepy atmosphere in the house – I switched on the PC. Earlier, I had held off doing what I was about to do, because it felt like a violation, but now I thought
‘fuck it’
. What other choice did I have? My emotions lurched between anger at her for running off and terror that something awful had happened. Whatever had happened, I felt justified looking at her emails.

She used Gmail, where the password was also ‘chorus’. I knew that she would be able to easily access her email wherever she was, as long as she could get online. Would she know that I would be able to access them, that I had guessed her password? If I were her, I would assume my emails were private and would carry on sending emails freely. Within moments, I might know if she was alive and well, and where she was.

Of course it wasn’t that easy.

There were dozens of unread emails in the inbox, almost all of them junk. I went back a few pages and got a shock.

I had last seen Marie on the sixteenth of October. All of the emails received before that date had been deleted.

Unless Marie habitually deleted all her emails after she read them, which seemed unlikely, this indicated that her disappearance had been planned. That she had been worried that me or somebody else – the police? – would access them. Unless someone else had done it. Someone else who had, what, forced her to give them her log-in details?

I rubbed my eyes, then opened the first of the only three messages that weren’t commercial. The first, dated yesterday, read:

Hey, Cosmic Girl!

Haven’t heard from you for aaaaaages! Whatcha doing with yourself? I’ve just got back from India. Life changed bigtime, babe. Met some Americans in Goa who are going to Roswell next summer. Gonna scale the fence. Asked me to join them. Cool, huh? Mail me and we’ll chat about life, everything, nothing.

Love-vibes

Alpha centaur xx

The email address it had been sent from was [email protected], which wasn’t very helpful. I opened the next email, which had been sent earlier that morning. It was from a Louise Webster:

Hello Marie

I’ve just heard about Andrew. I can’t believe it! He was such an inspiration to me and I can’t believe I missed the funeral :(

Please get in touch. Would be great to meet up.

Seeya soon

Louise xxx

The final email, also received today, read:

Hey Marie – how are you feeling, huh? I’m so bored right now I could scream. Thanks for the advice. It really helped. My head’s been kinda fucked up lately, since my visitation. I keep remembering little snatches of it. Like, I remember the leader standing over me and another visitor attaching this stuff to my – excuse me – balls and making me come.

I feel kinda cheap but privileged too, you know?? It hurts that they didn’t ask me first, they just went ahead and did it. It’s rude, I think . . . Though I don’t mean any disrespect. I’m sure they know best and there’s a reason for the way they do it. Still, it would have been nice to be asked. What are your thoughts on this? Will I see you at the convention on the 19th? I hope so. We can chat then, face to face. That would be a great help.

See you there then,

Buzz

Alpha Centauri. Buzz. Cosmic Girl.

I felt like I’d entered some weird alternative world, a crazy world in which aliens really did visit men in the night and attach stuff to their testicles. Buzz’s email address, again unhelpfully, was [email protected]

‘Will I see you at the convention on the 19th?’

That was the tantalizing line, the only one that gave me any kind of lead.

What convention? Where? Marie often went to conventions, large and small, where she would meet up with like-minded people and talk aliens. She hadn’t been to any since Andrew died. But I vaguely remembered that she had some flyers advertising a convention that was coming up. If I could find out its location, maybe I could find Buzz. He might be able to help me.

Maybe Marie herself would be there.

I pulled open the desk drawers and rifled through. I found wads of internet print-outs, pages about abductions and conspiracies, Area 51 and theories about cosmic breeding programmes. I found bank statements and telephone bills, college notes and photographs of Andrew, Kate, Calico and various people that I didn’t recognise. I sat and flicked through, page by page, looking hard at every piece of paper, every photo, all the train tickets and receipts that she had hoarded. None of them offered any enlightenment. Nothing jumped out at me and grabbed my attention. By the time I had finished hunting through it was growing dark outside. Dusk fell across the country like a veil of lace. It was time to eat, but I wasn’t hungry. I made a pot of black coffee and smoked a cigarette.

I went back to the computer and replied to Buzz, pretending to be Marie. If she looked at her emails from wherever she was, she would see what I’d done. But I didn’t care at that moment. I typed:

Hey Buzz – I think I must be going crazy! ;) What conference are you talking about?

Love Marie

I also googled everything I could think of to try to find the convention, but nothing came up. I went back into Gmail and hit refresh a dozen times, with increasing desperation, hoping Buzz would respond. I was gripped by a kind of mania. I needed to find those flyers.