Tim Weaver
Chasing the Dead
For Sharlé
‘And the sea became as the blood of a dead man:
and every living soul died in the sea’
PART ONE
1
Sometimes, towards the end, she would wake me by tugging at the cusp of my shirt, her eyes moving like marbles in a jar, her voice begging me to pull her to the surface. I always liked that feeling, despite her suffering, because it meant she’d lasted another day.
Her skin was like canvas in those last months, stretched tight against her bones. She’d lost all her hair as well, except for some bristles around the tops of her ears. But I never cared about that; about any of it. If I’d been given a choice between having Derryn for a day as she was when I’d first met her, or having her for the rest of my life as she was at the end, I would have taken her as she was at the end, without even pausing for thought. Because, in the moments when I thought about a life without her, I could barely even breathe.
She was thirty-two, seven years younger than me, when she first found the lump. Four months later, she collapsed in the supermarket. I’d been a newspaper journalist for eighteen years but, after it happened a second time on the Underground, I resigned, went freelance and refused to travel. It wasn’t a hard decision. I didn’t want to be on the other side of the world when the third call came through telling me this time she’d fallen and died.
On the day I left the paper, Derryn took me to a plot she’d chosen for herself in a cemetery in north London. She looked at her grave, up at me, and then smiled. I remember that clearly. A smile shot through with so much pain and fear I wanted to break something. I wanted to hit out until all I felt was numb. Instead, I took her hand, brought her into me, and tried to treasure every second of whatever time we had left.
When it became clear the chemotherapy wasn’t working, she decided to stop. I cried that day, really cried, probably for the first time since I was a kid. But — looking back — she made the right decision. She still had some dignity. Without hospital visits and the time it took her to recover from them, our lives became more spontaneous, and that was an exciting way to live for a while. She read a lot and she sewed, and I did some work on the house, painting walls and fixing rooms. And a month after she stopped her chemo, I started to plough some money into creating a study. As Derryn reminded me, I’d need a place to work.
Except the work never came. There was a little — sympathy commissions mostly — but my refusal to travel turned me into a last resort. I’d become the type of freelancer I’d always loathed. I didn’t want to be that person, was even conscious of it happening. But at the end of every day Derryn became a little more important to me, and I found that difficult to let go.
Then one day I got home and found a letter on the living-room table. It was from one of Derryn’s friends. She was desperate. Her daughter had disappeared, and the police didn’t seem to be interested. I was the only person she thought could help. The offer she made was huge — more than I’d deserve from what would amount to a few phone calls — but the whole idea left me with a strange feeling. I needed more money, and had sources inside the Met who would have found her daughter in days. But I wasn’t sure I wanted my new life to join up with my old one. I wasn’t sure I wanted any of it back.
So I said no. But, when I took the letter through to the back garden, Derryn was gently rocking in her chair with the tiniest hint of a smile on her face.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘You’re not sure if you should do it.’
‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I shouldn’t do it.’
She nodded.
‘Do you think I should do it?’
‘It’s perfect for you.’
‘What, chasing after missing kids?’
‘It’s perfect for you,’ she said. ‘Take this chance, David.’
And that was how it began.
I pushed the doubt down with the sadness and the anger and found the girl three days later in a bedsit in Walthamstow. Then, more work followed, more missing kids, and I could see the ripples of the career I’d left behind coming back again. Asking questions, making calls, trying to pick up the trail. I’d always liked the investigative parts of journalism, the dirty work, the digging, more than I’d liked the writing. And, after a while, I knew it was the reason I never felt out of my depth working runaways, because the process, the course of the chase, was the same. Most of tracking down missing persons is about caring enough. The police didn’t have time to find every kid that left home — and I think sometimes they failed to understand why kids disappeared in the first place. Most of them didn’t leave just to prove a point. They left because their lives had taken an uncontrollable turn, and the only way to contend with that was to run. What followed, the traps they fell into afterwards, were the reasons they could never go back.
But despite the hundreds of kids that went missing every day of every year, I’m not sure I ever expected to make a living out of trying to find them. It never felt like a job; not in the way journalism had. And yet, after a while, the money really started coming in. Derryn persuaded me to rent some office space down the road from our home, in an effort to get me out, but also — more than that, I think — to convince me I could make a career out of what I was doing. She called it a long-term plan.
Two months later, she died.
2
When I opened the door to my office, it was cold and there were four envelopes on the floor inside. I tossed the mail on to the desk and opened the blinds. Morning light erupted in, revealing photos of Derryn everywhere. In one, my favourite, we were in a deserted coastal town in Florida, sand sloping away to the sea, jellyfish scattered like cellophane across the beach. In the fading light, she looked beautiful. Her eyes flashed blue and green. Freckles were scattered along her nose and under the curve of her cheekbones. Her blonde hair was bleached by the sun, and her skin had browned all the way up her arms.
I sat down at my desk and pulled the picture towards me.
Next to her, my eyes were dark, my hair darker, stubble lining the ridge of my chin and the areas around my mouth. I towered over her at six-two. In the picture, I was pulling her into me, her head resting against the muscles in my arms and chest, her body fitting in against mine.
Physically, I’m the same now. I work out when I can. I take pride in my appearance. I still want to be attractive. But maybe, temporarily, some of the lustre has rubbed away. And, like the parents of the people I trace, some of the spark in my eyes too.
I turned around in my chair and looked up at them. At the people I traced.
Their faces filled an entire corkboard on the wall behind me. Every space. Every corner. There were no pictures of Derryn behind my desk.
Only pictures of the missing.
After I found the first girl, her mother put up a notice; to start with, on the board in the hospital ward where she worked with Derryn, and then in some shop windows, with my name and number and what I did. I think she felt sorry at the thought of me — somewhere along the line — being on my own. Sometimes, even now, people would call me, asking for my help, telling me they’d seen an advert in the hospital. And I guess I liked the idea of it still being there. Somewhere in that labyrinth of corridors, or burnt yellow by the sun in a shop window. There was a symmetry to it. As if Derryn still somehow lived on in what I did.