Two months after Alice disappeared in June 1968, Kathleen had been sure she would find it impossible to survive in a world without her. There were no floors or supporting walls. With no meal times or baths to run, no clothes to wash and iron, no school bag to pack or spelling tests to take, daily life had collapsed. She could not carry on without gravity, with the clocks stilled as time slipped stealthily past uncleaned windows, leaving only dust as proof of progress.
Kathleen did not see Alice all the time. She did not follow every child who might be Alice. For example, she no longer hung around outside the school or sat in the spectators’ gallery at the local swimming pool where there were plenty of young girls laughing and shouting. Alice didn’t like swimming. She loved school, but Kathleen knew the staff would ring if she came back. They had rung Kathleen at the surgery when Alice broke her arm. Teachers could tell when children weren’t right even when the children themselves made no fuss. She trusted them with her child. Alice had not cried with her green stick fracture; not wanting to miss maths, she had sat for two hours white with the pain. As a girl, Kathleen would have welcomed any excuse to miss maths. She had admired her daughter’s stoic efficiency, her easy intelligence and had stood helpless listening as Alice instructed her teacher how much food to give the fish – relinquishing her post of Pet Monitor – her face pinched and white as she clasped her limp arm. In that moment Kathleen had seen the woman Alice would one day be: a cleverer, calmer, more competent adult than herself. It was an exciting, yet disturbing, vision and Kathleen had been deliriously happy when Alice burst into tears that evening and asked for hot chocolate Nesquik. As she watched Alice take sniffing sips she had secretly welcomed her small daughter back.
It was that little girl Kathleen was determined to find. Somewhere, in a competent adult living out her life, the little girl who was Alice must exist.
Alice would have been forty on the 25th of March. Seventy-five days ago, Kathleen knew exactly, she didn’t delude herself.
Over three decades on and Kathleen had refined her search. She now looked for an essence with edges polished smooth by time and embellished with wistful properties, like generosity and limitless kindness. Kathleen knew the girls she was trailing would not be Alice. She had seen their faces, heard their voices, yet the way a girl would skip along beside her Mummy or put her arms out against the wind could be enough to bring Alice back. Then Alice’s soul would gain clarity and Kathleen would feel the back of her neck tingle and be convinced she was near. Once she had gone to the bottom of the stairs and called up to Alice in the empty cottage:
‘Can’t you give me a sign?’ The lights fused. She had been unafraid of the darkness, she was no longer alone. If he had been alive, Steve would have questioned why a soul would signal its presence through the electricity circuit just as once he had refused to apply for a transfer on the basis that she was convinced someone had died in the cottage. But perhaps her deep feeling of unease had been the premonition of a terrible event just around the corner, not divining of the past.
The quality of ‘missing’ had altered; Alice’s presence in the cottage had become another prop for alleviating the pain of her absence. It managed Kathleen’s grief and fought her conscious desire to die.
Kathleen Howland’s life had changed again the day, eight years earlier, when she collapsed in Boots in Canterbury, falling against a life-size cut-out of a woman gaily brandishing a deodorant. As she went down Kathleen’s eyes conveyed apology to the brightly smiling image. Her chest refused to breathe. Later she tried to explain it was less a blacking out, more of a greying, a steady diminishment of sight and sound. She had been rushed to hospital. After many white-coated questions they told her what she already knew because she had seen the same symptoms in her mother. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. She confessed that the tremor in her hand had been going on for over a year. As she lay on a trolley bed while they tapped her arm for blood, Steve’s sheet white face appeared like the moon between hospital curtains glaring accusingly at her. This too was her fault.
That day, Alice had got away.
After that, Kathleen had been forced to recognise her limits and adapt her methods. For some time there had been plenty of time between tablets, when she was almost herself, but had to be mindful of her energy. Too much excitement and she trembled visibly, jerking involuntarily and attracting attention. Then she developed low blood pressure in the mornings, and had to lie still, her feet propped on pillows until she could rise without feeling faint. They gave her steroids, but these drained her of potassium and she had an angina attack. This time no one turned up in Accident and Emergency to claim her. She told them there was no ‘Next of Kin’. After they cut back on the steroids, Kathleen’s symptoms got worse, and she couldn’t go until the mid-morning. She was informed that her Parkinson’s was advancing fast.
One night five years earlier, as Kathleen was writing up her activities for that day, she had flipped back through her notebook and was upset to see how her handwriting had changed: it was tighter, smaller and crabbed, only just decipherable. Like an old woman’s. Except that she was not yet out of her fifties.
Time was not on her side.
In the first months after he died in the summer of 1992, Kathleen would see Steve in the street too. She didn’t try to follow him, knowing how much it would annoy him. Steve was a private man whose feelings were his own business. She kept in the shadow of an awning as he stared in at the window of a hardware shop or strolled out towards the fields to merge with the sky. Although she had let Steve go, she missed him. She had howled like a wounded dog with its stomach ripped wide open to reveal a mash of ribs and spleen. She was scared of the noise, a giving birth sound that was death. Nothing could stop it as it rose up, rushing out of her, to roar about her ears like a typhoon. Steve had left without saying goodbye or leaving a note. His dying had been a subtle creeping away, a sick animal first curled irritably in a corner, then one day the corner was empty.
With Steve dead, Kathleen was alone with the loss of Alice. She was by herself with the knowledge of what it was to have a way of life wiped out, one sunny afternoon. The police had informed her that her precious little child was missing and all they could offer her in return was a nice warming cup of tea with extra sugar in.
The isolation was her choice: she had resisted joining groups or answering sympathy letters. She had passed up the chance of conversations with other bereaved parents or with a counsellor that might have sanitised her state. To utter barely formed fears and possibilities gave them the credibility of fact. Kathleen preferred the fluidity of fiction.
In June 1968 there had been Steve. Without speaking, they had clung to each other, sheltering in a shared language. Then, as hours and days slipped by unacknowledged, they had let go finger by finger until they were awkward strangers sharing a kitchen, hovering with polite reticence to use the bathroom. Then Steve left Kathleen by herself to hold the creaking, ticking quiet of the cottage in hands clumsy with tremor. Gradually as the palpability of his absence waned, Kathleen gave herself up to an undertow of relief: it was easier to look for Alice alone.
When Alice went missing, they had been besieged by reporters. Kathleen had welcomed them, grateful for their interest, confident they could help. Her numb disbelief was awakened by the flow of words; the flickering phantoms of her home and her daughter on the new Radio Rentals television were an impression of life. She had grasped at every opportunity to talk and keep talking.