The Disappeared

Mike Stevens glanced briefly at Jenny in such a way that she assumed he had a question of his own, but whether from shyness or family protocol, he kept it to himself and followed the Crosbys out.

As they disappeared from view, Jenny vaguely recalled an item she had heard on the radio about a young woman who had gone missing from her home in Bristol - a trainee at Maybury, the decommissioned nuclear power station that sat three miles east of the Severn Bridge. Maybury and the other three retired stations on the estuary had been much discussed in the local media lately: a new generation of scientists was being recruited to decommission the fifty-year-old reactors and build the new ones that had been given the go-ahead by the government. Listening to the heated phone-in debates, Jenny had felt a stirring of her teenage idealism, evoking memories of weekend trips with fellow students to peace camps outside American airbases. It seemed strange to her that a generation later a young woman would embark on a career in an industry which she had spent her formative years believing represented all that was corrupt and dangerous in the world.

Jenny slipped on a latex glove, pulled the fold of plastic over the Jane Doe's face and pushed the heavy drawer shut.

After five months of the mortuary being staffed exclusively by a string of unreliable locums, a new full-time pathologist was arriving on Monday. Jenny looked forward to prompt post-mortem reports and not having to waste her afternoons with tasks that his staff should have been assigned to. Professional dignity had been hard to maintain in a cash- strapped coroner's office and, though she had now seen many hundreds of corpses in every conceivable state of dismemberment and decay, being close to dead bodies still terrified her.

She disposed of the spent glove and hurried as quickly as she could on her narrow heels out into the sharp air. She had an appointment to keep.

Death, and her uneasy relationship with it, occupied most of the time she had spent with Dr Allen. In the consulting room at Chepstow hospital during their fortnightly early evening meetings progress had been slow and insights limited, but Jenny had managed to keep to the regime of anti-depressants and beta blockers, and had largely respected his injunction forbidding alcohol and tranquillizers. Though by no means cured, her generalized anxiety disorder had, for the previous five months, been chemically contained.

The fresh-faced Dr Allen, as punctilious as ever, reached for the thick black notebook he reserved exclusively for her sessions. He turned to the previous entry and carefully read it through. Jenny waited patiently, prepared with polite replies to the questions about her son, Ross, with which he usually opened. After a short while she began to sense that something was different today. Dr Allen seemed engrossed, distracted.

'Dreams . . .' he said. 'I don't often put a lot of store by them. They're usually just reprocessed garbage from the day, but I confess I've been doing some reading on the subject.' His eyes remained firmly on the book.

'Really?'

'Yes. I dabbled in Jungian analysis when I was at college, but it wasn't really encouraged; something of a cul-de-sac, I remember my professor saying. Never known a patient who'd been cured by understanding the meaning of his dreams.'

'Does this mean I've driven you to despair?'

'Not at all.' He flicked back through his notes, searching for an earlier entry. 'It's just I remember that before the medication you used to have some quite vivid ones. Yes . . .' He found what he was looking for. 'An ominous crack opening in the wall of your childhood bedroom to a dark forbidding space beyond. A terrifying presence lurking in there that you could never see or even fully visualize ... an unspeakable horror of some description.'

Jenny felt the vessels of her heart enlarge, a pulse of heat cross her face, a flutter of anxiety in her solar plexus. She tried to keep her voice steady. Act calm, stay calm, she repeated silently to herself.

'You're right. I used to have those dreams.'

'How old were you when you first had them?' He turned back to a blank page, ready and alert.

'I was in my early thirties, I suppose.'

'A time of stress, juggling work and motherhood?'

'Yes.'

'And how old are you, as the dreamer, in your dream?'

'I'm a child.'

'You're certain about that?'

'I don't ever see myself ... I suppose I just assume.'

'And as a child you feel helpless? Terrified of a threat you have no power to control?'

She nodded. 'And I think I know what you're going to say next.'

'What's that?'

'That it's nothing to do with childhood. That the dream merely reflects my state of fear and paralysis.'

'That's one interpretation.' His face fell slightly at having his theory anticipated so easily.

'I agree. But I still have no memory between the ages of four and five. And don't tell me I've imagined that.' She fixed him with a look that gave him pause.

'There is one school of thought which says that a memory gap is a subconscious defence mechanism,' he said, 'a buffer if you like, a void into which the conscious mind can project a credible reason, a logical explanation for its distress. An intelligent, rational mind like yours - so the theory goes - would head for the answer most likely to satisfy it: hence while the pain persists, your mind has to satisfy itself with the notion that the cause remains undiscovered — '

She interrupted. 'It does.'

'But what if we're looking for the wrong cause? What if the cause is utterly simple and straightforward - mere stress, for example?'

Jenny allowed herself to consider the possibility, though she remained aware that he might merely be attempting to blindside her, to distract her with one novel thought before firing the penetrating question while she was off guard. She waited for his follow-up, but it didn't come.

'So what do you think?' he said, his eyes alight with the ingenious simplicity of his diagnosis.

'You'll be telling me to take a long holiday next, or to change my job.'

A sterner note entered his voice. 'To be fair, you have stubbornly resisted trying either of those tried and tested methods.'

Jenny smoothed out the creases in her skirt as a way of hiding her despondency. 'Is this a polite way of telling me we've exhausted what you can usefully do for me?'

'I'm only trying to rule out the obvious.'

'And having done so?'

'An extended holiday, at least—'

'I'll tell you what happens to me on holidays: everything comes flooding back. The anxiety, the unwanted thoughts, irrational fears, dreams . . .' She paused, her tongue feeling thick in her mouth - a recent addition to her ever-increasing palette of symptoms.

'What, Jenny?'

She saw the tears land in her lap even before she felt them flood her eyes.

'What's making you cry?'

There was no immediate reason, just a vague, familiar sense of dread that was slowly tightening its grip, like vast, suffocating hands around her mind. 'I don't know—'

'The last word you said was dreams.''

Another river of tears and the inchoate fear became sharper; a shudder passed through her body and left her hands trembling as she reached for the ever-ready box of tissues.

'Tell me about your dreams.'

She began to shake her head - the medication had blocked, or saved, her from dreams - but then the image flashed behind her eyes, a single frame that connected with her fear, causing a further tremor, like a dull electric shock, to pass through her.

'You've had a dream?'

'I had one . . . the same one — ' Her words stuttered out between stifled sobs.

'When?'

'Years ago ... I was nineteen, twenty . . .'

'Tell me.'

'It's a garden.' The image held fast in her mind. 'There are lots of children, young girls in skirts and pigtails . . . They're following each other in groups of three, holding each others' hands and skipping, it's joyful. And then . . .' She pressed the soggy Kleenex to her eyes. 'They stop. And in their groups of three two girls hold a skipping rope and the third jumps . . . and as the ropes pass over their heads, they vanish.''