Syl was draining water off the tray when Geo called. Her coffee had been poured.
‘Anything?’ he asked, looking down on to the deck.
She shook her head. ‘What’s that? Underneath the chair.’
Her father’s ledger. It was soaked, the pages corrugated by the damp, the ink reduced to winter pinks and blues. Peach blue, like Chinese porcelain.
‘His day book.’ That was unlike her father, to let a book get wet, particularly this one.
‘What was the last date he filled in?’ asked Geo. The architect was brighter than he looked.
She tried to turn the pages but they tore like cotton wool. ‘It’s far too wet to read.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll put it in the airing room to dry.’
‘No, what will you do. you know, to find out where they’ve gone?’
‘I’ve no idea. What should I do? I’m not the police. What would you do?’ She thought her tone of voice made it clear that he should not reply.
‘You’ll have to ask the neighbours what they know. That’s first. Call up your relatives. Have you got any brothers or sisters?’
‘No. I’ve only got an uncle left. And about a hundred second cousins. Look, let me work it out. ’
‘Phone the uncle. He might have heard from them.’
‘He’s in New York. I haven’t seen him since I was about six. He and my father haven’t talked for years. Any other inspirations?’
‘Well, phone their friends.’
Syl shrugged. She couldn’t put a name to any of their friends. She lived her life, not theirs.
‘You’ll have to check the hospitals, then. I’m sorry, but the city morgue as well. And go down to the police. Ask them to look out for the missing car. What’s wrong?’
Syl made a face at him. She hated lists. She hated Things to Do. How many days of visits would that be? How much in pirate taxi fares?
‘I’ll need a taxi, then, for all your bright ideas,’ she said.
‘There’s one outside.’
‘I’m broke.’
‘OK. I don’t always have to charge. Not friends. It’s Saturday tomorrow. I’m free to please myself.’ He concentrated on his coffee-cup. He did not want to catch her eye, although he was content to stand out of the rain and watch the water spread across her shaved head and plaster her shirt across her breasts.
‘That’s good, my ferryman, my pheromone,’ she said. She’d let him stay. He was the interfering sort who’d do exactly what he was told. Here, in another life, would be a fantasy come true, a chauffeur on command, a menial, a parlourman.
‘How free are you to stay the night with me? I hate this house.’
They spent the night in her own bedroom — or, at least, the room that once was hers — forced together by the narrow mattress and the single sheets. Her parents had decorated since she’d left and had taken down the galaxies of luminous stars that she had stuck on the once blue ceiling. Now the Sky at Night was white and bare. The drawers and cupboards, the novel-heavy shelves of her girlhood, were empty and disinfected, like in the cheap rooms of a boarding house.
She could not sleep. Too tired and too uncomfortable. In her own apartment, she would have had some wine to help her cope with her disquiets, but her parents were not drinkers. All they had was an old and sticky bottle of honey ‘rum’. No alcohol. Sober as she was, however, Syl had not needed to fake any sexual ardour with her driver. Stress and agitation, as she’d discovered on many occasions, were unexpected aphrodisiacs. So were acquiescent and dull men. She must have shocked and baffled him twenty times — and not only when she called him Charon. She brushed his penis with the stubble of her hair. She made good use of the stiff tuft below his underlip. She made his wrist and fingers ache. She made him wait. She took the opportunity to flood her parents’ house with noise. But afterwards, when he was sleeping, it seemed that making love had changed and calmed her. The urgency had gone out of the search for her parents. The shadows were no longer Stygian. Death had no mystery. Anxiety had been unsexed. Now she was simply annoyed to be at home. This was a failure at her age, surely, to end up in the room were she had been a child.
In the tranquillizing darkness of the house, with sticky Geo wrapped around her back in her too narrow bed, the panic of her journey to the coast, the hasty ripping up of her own life and job, seemed idiotic and premature. She’d come more than six hundred kilometres, back to a town she hated, simply because her father’s secretary had whistled. Her ‘doctors’, after ‘a couple of days’ fieldwork’ — she didn’t know ‘exactly where’ — had not turned up for work. So what? Hoorah, in fact. At last, a sign of mischief! Syl had always thought her parents loved work too much. They’d broken free for once.
Celice and Joseph had been thoughtless, possibly. But this can’t have been the first time they’d gone away and not informed her or their colleagues. They’d driven somewhere in the car, a little holiday, perhaps, and overstayed. No mystery in that. There was a simple explanation for all this derangement. Her parents were too middle-aged and dull to suffer accidents or die before their time, like mountaineers or poets.
At any moment she expected to hear their old car in the street, their headlights flaring on her starless ceiling, and then the tumbling of the front-door locks as they came in and up the stairs to catch their daughter with a naked taxi driver in her bed. Here would be the slapstick answer to her father’s vexing question, ‘When will we get to see you in the flesh again?’
Syl was both tranquil and unnerved. She left her sleeping driver in her bed and went into her mother’s room, where she would be more comfortable and might sleep. She put on her mother’s nightdress and lay down on the near side of the bed where the sheets and the coverlet were dry. This would be a better welcome if they returned: they’d find their modest daughter, sleeping, and death ten thousand days away.
‘To what do we owe this honour?’ they’d say, sarcastic and delighted, too shy to hug. ‘What brings you home?’ Hardly anything, Syl would have to answer. That was the truth. Why had Syl come? To close the bedroom window, dry the tray and rescue Father’s ledger from the rain, to make piles at the bottom of the stairs of the junk and bills from their dull and geometric lives.
16
Her driver woke her, shook her arm, earlier than necessary the next morning and in a bleating mood. He’d woken in the middle of the night to discover she’d abandoned him.
‘Why did you go?’ He was standing at the foot of Celice’s bed, as peeved and naked as a child. ‘I thought you’d run away.’ Syl laughed. ‘I’ve only got your word for all of this,’ he said. ‘Some joke.’
‘That’s right, I made it up. This isn’t my parents’ house at all. They haven’t disappeared. It’s just to get you into bed and save on taxi fares. You’re such a catch.’ She reached across and switched on the radio, the news channel, and waved the ferryman away. He’d already tried to lift the bedclothes and when she’d pulled them back in place, had gripped her wrist. ‘No, there’s not room in here for you. OK? Have you had breakfast yet? See what there is. Go on.’
When he had gone — he almost slammed the bedroom door — she listened for radio reports of local accidents and deaths. There were a few — a lorry spill, three students in a car, a garage worker crushed — but none that matched. No doctors of zoology. No unattractive people of her parents’ age and learning.
Syl dressed and crept downstairs. She knew which two steps to avoid, which banister would squeak. She could see Geo kneeling in the kitchen, searching the cupboards for any edible bread. She went out in the drizzle in her father’s waterproof to call on the two neighbouring houses. There was no reply at the first, except from a dog. But at the second an elderly woman she did not recognize reported, ‘It’s been four or five days, at least, since I’ve seen your mother. Or your father. Last Sunday, I think. They’ve not been in the yard. Their bedroom window’s been hanging open. It was banging in the wind the other night. You’ve closed it now.’ How long had her parents’ car been gone? The woman didn’t know. ‘I wouldn’t recognize their car,’ she said. ‘What colour is it?’