His Other Life. Beth Thomas
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a jolt I remember the answer phone. ‘Oh, yes, there is one thing. I completely forgot about this. A man left a message on the answer phone today. A Leon.’ I get up and walk over to the phone, then press play on the machine.
‘Hello Adam, it’s Leon.’ That horrible, deep, gravelly voice seeps out of the speaker into my life again. ‘Long time no see. Betcha didn’t expect to hear from me again, did you? Come as a bit of a shock, has it? Ha, I bet it has. Just thought I’d give you a call, let you know I’m in the area – nearby actually. Very nearby. Would only take me two minutes to get to your place from here. Piece of cake. I’m gonna try to catch up with you very soon. Don’t worry about calling me back, I’ll be in touch.’
The officer listens raptly as the message plays. When it finishes she asks me to play it again and furiously scribbles in her notebook the entire time. Then she asks me if I can give her the tape. I blink and wonder how old she is.
‘It’s a digital machine.’
She stares at me, as if she doesn’t understand what that means.
‘There’s no tape,’ I elaborate.
‘Oh, God, silly me,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘I’ll need to take the whole machine then, please.’
I unplug it and put it in a bag for her and then Ginger and the male officer come back downstairs.
‘Anything?’ I ask them both as they arrive in the room. Ginger shakes her head but the male officer is looking expectantly at the carrier bag containing the answer phone.
‘Something interesting?’ he asks her.
‘Could be,’ she nods. ‘Message on the answer phone, left this evening, just before Mr Littleton left the house.’
‘Uh huh, uh huh.’ He’s nodding approvingly, looking knowledgeable, but I’m sure the answer phone message won’t give them anything other than the overt words in it that we’ve all heard. Someone called Leon phoned and left a message. That’s it, nothing more. Big dumb policeman is probably just showing off since there’s really little point in taking the machine with them. No matter how many times they listen to it, that message won’t tell them anything.
‘We’ll have a look into your line records,’ PC Burly says suddenly, interrupting my train of thought. ‘See if we can find out where that call came from.’
Of course. I didn’t think of that.
‘Has the phone rung or been used at all since that message arrived?’
‘Um, no, I don’t think so.’
‘Well that’s something anyway.’
‘Right.’
‘Last thing, Mrs Littleton. Do you know where your husband keeps his passport?’
‘Why?’
He tries to smile reassuringly but it doesn’t go very well. ‘Let’s just see if it’s still there.’
‘Yes, sure, it’s in the same place as mine.’
I take them all back upstairs into the spare room and pull open the drawer in the bureau where the passports are kept and we all stand motionless as we stare silently down into it. Lying there amongst the travel insurance documents and the suitcase tags and some old pens and batteries and foreign plug adaptors is one single solitary passport, abandoned amongst the detritus, ungrabbed, unincluded, unwanted.
‘That lying little shit,’ Ginger spits venomously behind me, neatly summing up my thoughts exactly.
THREE
When I was fifteen, I had a friend at school called Kate. She joined our school in Year Ten because her mum found condoms in her dad’s jacket. Kate was pretty unhappy about the whole thing – moving house, changing schools, arguing parents – and made very little effort to make new friends, but she was clever and pretty so inevitably she became popular anyway. She didn’t pay much attention to me of course. I was good at French and English and she was good at tennis; I was friends with Ginger Blake and Maria Stavronopoulous, she was friends with Ryan Mitchell and Daniel Williams. But one day when Maria was away visiting family and Ginger was off sick, Kate came and sat next to me in Sex Ed. It was like Kate Middleton calmly sitting down next to you in the Asda café. She said ‘Hi’ to me so naturally it was like we were already close. So we started chatting and I found out that she was actually a really nice girl and we became good friends and stayed that way until we finished school.
Ha ha. That’s my sarcasm again. Kate, I think, was quite happy to be friends with me now and then, so we would get together at weekends and go out in the evenings and paint each other’s nails. But when I really needed her, when Ajeet Johar snogged Stephie Morrison in the geography room, or when I was off school for six weeks with glandular fever, she was nowhere to be seen. By me, anyway. By all accounts Stephie and Ajeet saw plenty of her during those two six-week periods of black misery – known in our family history as The Dark Ages and The Dark Ages Two: The Return.
I wasn’t really surprised and didn’t even feel particularly let down. Her being friends with me was extraordinary, remember. I was so grateful that she had chosen me at all, even on a superficial level, that I was happy with what I had. Ginger and Maria came and sat by my bed and brought me magazines and chocolate and DVDs for both of my teenage crises, and that was fine.
Marriage, on the other hand, is a different story. By definition, it can’t be superficial. I Googled the definition, months ago, so I know. Two people, choosing each other above all other human beings on the planet, to go through the rest of their lives with, to support, confide in, listen to, help. Or, you know, something like that. I’m no expert but that sounds like the opposite of superficial to me. I heard once that marriage is a gift through which husband and wife may grow together in love and trust, united in heart, body and mind, but I don’t know if I believed it then, and I’m pretty sure I don’t believe it now.
The funny thing about someone in your life walking out of it without telling you they’re going is that you don’t know how to feel. Or rather, you feel so many different things, they all get blended up together so nothing is distinguishable. You end up with a kind of brown plasticine of emotion. A sludge of feeling. I’m upset, of course, and hurt. But also empty, lost, scared – for him and for me – mystified, curious and angry. Furious actually. Curious and furious. I swing from screaming ‘I HOPE THAT FUCKING SECRETIVE LITTLE TOSSER NEVER COMES BACK!’ to thoughtfully pondering ‘I wonder what on earth has happened to him.’ I hate him with a pure, scalding stream of loathing; I love him like I never did before. I hope he stays away forever; I yearn for his return with every single molecule of myself.
I spend stupid amounts of time Googling ‘missing husband’. Mostly there are news articles from around the world talking about murdered wives or bodies being found. One actually makes my toes curl as it describes a poor woman collapsing after finding her missing husband in the local hospital morgue.
A sound comes out of me and I’m not sure if it’s a sob or a laugh. But then the air gets stuck in my lungs and my face crumples and I have to blink very quickly for several seconds to stop myself from believing that have anything to cry about.
For the first three days I don’t sleep, I don’t eat, I don’t go to work, I barely see anyone. I feel like I’m in suspended animation, like sitting motionless in HG Wells’ time machine, watching the world spin by faster and faster, plants growing, dust collecting, things getting older and everything moving on and changing except me. It’s like breathing in and not breathing out again. I’m tense with a feeling of imminent onrushing change, my adrenalin levels dialled up to maximum, my fight or flight reflexes poised and waiting for whatever is coming, to come.
But it doesn’t. The only thing that comes is the police. A bland, quiet officer called Linda Patterson who says she’s my family liaison person while the investigation is underway.
‘If