Bristol Standard reporter Steve James spoke to a neighbour who watched the appeal on the television. ‘We’ve never had any run-ins with the Wilkinsons. They seem like a perfectly normal family but you have to wonder whether someone knows more about Billy’s disappearance than they’re letting on.’
‘Claire!’ Liz snatches the newspaper from my hands before I can read another word. ‘It’s all crap. They make stuff up to sell copies. No one believes that shit.’
She reaches an arm around my shoulders but I twist away from her, knocking her against the basin in my desperation to get out of the bathroom. It’s unbearably hot and I can’t breathe.
I take the steps down to the hallway two at a time and wrench open the front door. The second I step outside I run.
Chapter 8
I stand at the end of the bed with my feet pressed together and my arms outstretched and I tip backwards. The bedspread makes a delicious floop sound as I hit it and the bed springs squeak in protest. I can’t remember the last time I felt this happy.
‘No!’
I look to the right, in the direction of the voice, but there’s no one beside me on the bed. I’m alone in the room. There must be someone in the corridor. A woman arguing with her husband perhaps, although I can’t hear the low rumble of a male voice.
‘No!’
The voice again, quieter this time but closer, as though someone has spoken the word directly into my ear. I sit up in bed and pull my knees in to my chest.
‘NO!’
I clamp my hands to my ears but there’s no blocking out the woman’s voice as she shouts the word, machine-gun fast – NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.
It’s inside my head. The voice is coming from inside my head.
‘CLAIRE!’ it shouts. ‘I AM CLAIRE. I AM CLAIRE.’
Claire? Who is Claire? I recognize the name but I don’t want to. I don’t want to know who Claire is. I just want to get back to the seafront. Back to the sunshine and wind and the café on the edge of the pier.
‘I AM CLAIRE! I AM CLAIRE!’
The voice fills my brain, screaming and buzzing, and my head is vibrating and the light, happy feeling inside me is fading.
Dark. Light. Dark. Light.
My thoughts are dark and foggy, then brighter, clearer and then, just for a second – a split second – I know who Claire is, then the darkness returns and with it a confusion so disorientating my hands instinctively clench as I try to anchor myself to something, anything solid. There is something smooth and slippery soft under my fingers. Bed linen. I am sitting on a bed. But this is not my bed, this is not my room. There is a framed art print on the wall to my right: a faded Lowry, stick people milling around a town. There is a lone boy in the centre of the scene. He has his back to me. He’s looking at the crowd of people spilling out of one of the buildings. Who is he looking for? Who has he lost?
A shrill sound makes me jump. A small black mobile phone jiggles back and forth on the orangey pine bedside table to my right. A name flashes onto the screen. A name I don’t recognize. But the noise hurts my head and I need it to stop.
I reach for the phone and press it to my ear.
‘Mum?’ says the voice on the other end of the line.
I want to reply but I can’t talk. I can’t think. I can’t … it’s as though my mind has shattered. I can’t focus … I can’t form coherent … what’s happening to me?
‘Mum?’
‘Claire.’ I say the word out loud. It sounds strange. Like a noise, a sound, an outward breath. ‘Cl-airrrrr.’
‘Mum? Why are you saying your name?’
My name?
‘Cl-airrrrrr.’
‘Mum, you’re freaking me out. Stop doing that.‘
‘Claire.’ The word crystallizes inside my mouth. It tastes familiar. As though I’ve known it for a long time. Like buttered toast. Like toothpaste. ‘Claire. Claire Wilkinson.’
‘Oh Jesus Christ. Dad, I think she’s having a stroke or something.’
My head … my head … my brain hurts … no, aches … but not a headache … foggy … and then a thought, breaking through the darkness and I grip hold of it as though it is a rock to tether my sanity to.
‘Is my name Claire Wilkinson?’
‘Yes, yes, it is. Jesus, Mum. We’ve been trying to ring you for hours. Where are you?’
Mum. I am a mum? The man on the phone sounds scared. Is he scared for me? Or of me? I don’t know. Nothing makes any sense.
‘Where are you?’ says the voice on the phone.
‘I’m … I’m …’ There are gingham curtains at the far end of the room and a full-length mirror, smeared with fingerprints. Beneath me is a bedspread. Pink, satiny, puffy. I dig my nails into it and cling to it, rigid with fear. ‘I don’t know. I don’t recognize this room.’
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ the man on the phone says. ‘Just … sorry, hang on a second …’ There’s a muffled sound like a hand being placed over the receiver but I can still make out the low rumble of his voice.
‘Mum?’ His voice is clear again. ‘Is there a door or a window you could open? Tell me what you can see.’
I don’t want to move from the bed. I don’t want to open the pine door to my right or the closed gingham curtains at the far end of the room.
‘Please, Mum. As soon as we know where you are we can come and get you.’
We? Who is we? Who is coming to get me? I’m in danger. I need to run but I can’t move.
‘Dad’s here, Mum. Do you want to speak to him?’
‘No,’ I say and I don’t know why.
‘Are you sure?’ the man says and an image appears in my mind – vivid and sharp in the gloom – of a young man with tousled fair hair, shaved at the sides, and broad shoulders, lying on a bench, pushing weights into the air.
‘Jake?’ I venture.
‘Yes, Mum. It’s Jake. I’m at home with Dad. Liz just came round, wanting to talk to you. That’s when we realized you’d gone missing.’
I search for a memory, something, anything, to still my mind, to stop this terrifying free-fall sensation. Where is my home? Why don’t I remember?
‘Yes, I know, okay. Okay, Dad.’ The man is talking to someone else again. ‘I just asked her that. Mum, can you describe what you can see?’
I look back at the Lowry painting, at the boy standing right of centre staring into the crowd, looking for someone, then I look at the shiny pale pink bedspread, the mirror, the cheap pine table and the white tea tray.
‘I think I’m in a hotel room.’
‘Is there a phone? Can you ring reception to find out which hotel you’re in? Or is there a brochure or room-service menu anywhere?’
I slide across the pink bedspread and press my toes into the worn pile of the beige carpet, then inch my way across the room, keeping one eye on the door, and approach the table near the mirror. There’s a white china teapot on a tray and two cups and saucers. There’s also a dish containing tea, coffee, sugar and tiny cartons of milk. There are no brochures, no menus, no phone. Nothing else in the room at all other than my handbag and boots, with my socks tucked into the top, on the floor by the bed.
I touch the edge of the gingham curtain and tentatively pull it back. Outside is a low railing, a balcony and a stretch of grey-brown sea with a lump of land in the distance, an island shaped like a turtle’s back.
‘Steep Holm,’ I say and the darkness in my mind fades from black to grey at the sight of the familiar lump of rock in the distance. ‘Jake, I’m in Weston-super-Mare.’
As he relays the information I feel a sudden desperate urge to throw open the window and inhale great lungfuls of sea air but when I yank at the sash it only opens a couple of inches at the bottom.
‘Do you know which hotel, Mum?’ Jake asks. ‘If you stay where you are we’ll come and get you.’
It’s a small room: shabby but warm and clean. The floral wallpaper behind the bed is peeling in one corner and when I open the door to the en suite there are no branded toiletries, just a bar of soap in a frilled wrapper and a glass, misted with age, on the shelf above the sink. There is no welcome pack on the table that holds the tea and coffee things, no branded coaster or complimentary notepad.
‘Reception,’ I say. ‘Need to find reception.’ But then I spot a fire-evacuation notice pinned next to the door. It is signed at the bottom by Steve Jenkins, Owner, Day’s Rest B&B.
‘Day’s Rest,’ I say. ‘I’m at Day’s Rest B&B.’
‘The one we used to stay in as kids,’ Jake says and I have to steady myself against the wall as a wave of grief knocks the breath from my lungs.
Billy.
I have two sons. Jake and Billy. Billy is missing. He’s missing.
‘Mum?’ The worry in Jake’s voice bounces off me like a stone skimming the sea.
I snatch up my handbag, my boots and my socks and I reach for the door handle.
‘Mum?’ he says again as I yank open the door.
‘Billy!’ I scream into the empty corridor. ‘Billy, where are you? Where are you, son?’
Friday 22nd August 2014
Jackdaw44: You there?
ICE9: Yep.
Jackdaw44: Liv is a bitch.
ICE9: Who’s Liv?
Jackdaw44: Girl I was seeing.
ICE9: I didn’t know.
Jackdaw44: You wouldn’t. I keep my shit private.
ICE9: OK …
Jackdaw44: But I’m pissed off today. Need to talk to someone. I know you can keep secrets.
ICE9: It’s up to you to tell your mum what you saw, not me.
Jackdaw44: And that’s why you’re cool.
ICE9: Ha! I’ve never been called that before. So why is Liv a bitch?
Jackdaw44: She told Jess not to go out with me. She totally slagged me. Said I’ve got a small dick.
ICE9: Have you?
Jackdaw44: Go fuck yourself.
Chapter 9
The man behind the reception desk jumps as I slam up against it.
‘Is he here?’
‘Is who here?’ He’s a tall man, over six foot with balding hair and an auburn moustache. The buttons of his shirt strain over his gut.
‘My son. Billy. He’s fifteen.’ I raise a hand above my head. ‘He’s about this tall.’
‘Did he check in with you?’
I don’t know. The last thing I remember was running out of Liz’s house. How did I get here and why don’t I remember? Am I asleep? Unconscious? Did I trip and hit my head when I was running? But this feels real. The reception area feels solid under my fingertips. I can smell the musty aroma of old furnishings beneath the pungent scent of furniture polish. ‘I’ve got no idea. Could you check to see if he’s booked in? His name’s Billy Wilkinson.’
The man runs a thumb along the length of his gingery moustache. ‘And your name is?’
‘Claire Wilkinson.’
He reaches for a clipboard on his desk. He raises it to eye level, then mutters, ‘I can’t see a thing without my glasses,’ and replaces the clipboard and begins ferreting around in a drawer. I tap the counter as he searches. It’s all I can do not to clamber over the top and snatch up the clipboard.
‘There!’ I point at a pair of glasses on top of a paperback book. ‘Your glasses are there.’
‘Ah, thank you.’ It takes an age for him to clasp his fingers around them, for ever for him to unfold them and then, as he finally places them on his nose, he removes them again and wipes the lenses on the hem of his jumper.
‘If you could hurry. Please. It’s urgent.’
‘All in good time, Mrs Wilkinson, all in good time.’
‘Hmmm.’ He hums through his nose. ‘Room eleven, is that right?’
I hear the sound of footsteps on the stairs but it’s a middle-aged man, not Billy, who steps into the reception area and raises a cheery hand at the man behind the desk. ‘I don’t know what room I’m in. I didn’t look.’
The receptionist gives me a quizzical look, then says, ‘I’ve got a Mrs Wilkinson in room eleven. Queen room. One occupant.’
I press a hand to my forehead but the fog in my brain remains. Somehow I booked myself into a B&B in Weston. I can’t remember doing it, so either I did check in and I don’t remember or … nothing. There’s a black void where my memory should be. ‘Could Billy have checked into one of the other rooms?’
The man’s lips disappear beneath the bushy arc of his moustache. ‘I can’t give out information about other guests. Guesthouse policy.’
A vision plays out in front of my eyes, of me ripping the clipboard out of his hands and smashing him around the head with it – thwack, thwack, thwack – and I have to close them tightly shut to make it disappear. When I open them again he’s still pursing his lips, still staring at me.
‘Billy is my son. He’s missing. You have to tell me if he’s here.’
‘Missing? Goodness. Have you told the police?’
‘Yes. Six months ago. Please! I need to know if he’s here or not.’ I lean over the counter and reach for the clipboard but he snatches it away, flattening it against his chest.
‘I’ve got a flier.’ I duck down and rummage around in my bag. ‘Here!’ I hold the appeal leaflet face out so he’s eye to eye with Billy’s photo.
The man gives the briefest of nods when he’s finished reading and our eyes meet as I lower the leaflet. There. He’s giving me the look. The ‘you poor bloody woman’ look I’ve come to know so well.
‘I wouldn’t normally do this but …’ He presses his glasses slowly onto his nose, lowers the clipboard and dips his head. He trails a bitten-down fingernail along the list and my heart stills when his finger stops.
Has he …
Is it …
He shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry. There’s no Billy Wilkinson on this list.’
‘Maybe he’s using a different name?’
He places the clipboard on the desk and presses down on it with his palms. ‘It’s a small hotel, Mrs Wilkinson, just thirteen rooms. We’ve got a couple in with a teenage girl and half a dozen families with young children. I’d remember your son’s face if I’d booked him in.’
‘Does no one else take the bookings?’
There’s sadness in his eyes now. Sadness and pity. ‘No. I’m really very sorry.’
The tension that’s been holding me upright for the length of the conversation vanishes and I slump against the desk, eviscerated. It’s all I can do not to lay the side of my face on the cool wood and close my eyes.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he says again.
I look up. ‘Did you check me in?’
He nods. ‘Yes. One night, paid upfront. Don’t you remember?’
‘No. I don’t remember walking in, or even how I got to Weston. One minute I was talking to a friend in Bristol and the next …’ I can’t explain what happened because I don’t understand it myself. I came to but not in the way you do when you wake up after a nap or a long sleep. And it wasn’t like the hazy slip into consciousness after a general anaesthetic either. I was awake but my mind was muddled, tangled in a jumble of sounds, images and thoughts that gradually faded away. And then everything was sharp, in focus, as I became aware of my surroundings. And it was terrifying. Utterly terrifying.
‘Boozy lunch, was it?’ the man asks, the sympathy in his eyes dulling.
‘No,’ I say. ‘We were drinking tea.’
‘Sounds like you should get yourself to a doctor.’
‘I will. Just as soon as I get home.’ I crouch down and pull on my boots and socks. A drop of sweat rolls down my lower back as I haul the strap of my handbag over my shoulder.
‘Thank you,’ I say as I head for the door.
‘No problem.’
I wrench the door open and then, as the sea air hits me, I turn back. The receptionist looks up, Billy’s flier still in his hands.
‘Can I just ask one more thing? Was I alone when I checked in?’
‘You were, yes.’
‘And did I seem frightened? Scared? Confused?’
‘No. You seemed …’ He searches for the right word. ‘Normal.’
Chapter 10
The wind whips my hair across my face as I pull my handbag onto my knee and unzip it. There are five messages on my phone from Jake, each one more frantic than the last.
‘Mum. Stay where you are. We’re coming to get you.’
‘We’re half an hour away. I just tried to ring you. Could you pick up, please?’
‘Mum, where are you?’
‘Mum? We’re in Weston. WHERE ARE YOU?’
‘MUM, PICK UP OR WE’RE CALLING THE POLICE!’
I press the button to call him. Jake answers on the first ring.
‘Mum?’ I can hear the relief in his voice. ‘Where the hell are you?’
‘I’m on the seafront. On a bench just to the right of the pier.’
‘Okay. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right there.’ He stops talking and I wait for him to hang up, but then he speaks again. ‘Promise me you won’t go anywhere.’
‘I’m not going anywhere, Jake. I promise.’
‘Good. She’s on a bench, on the right of the pier …’ I listen as he relays my whereabouts to Mark and then the line goes dead.
It’s the middle of summer but the wind cuts through the thin material of my top and I wrap my arms around my body, tucking my hands under my armpits. We used to sit on this bench with the boys when they were little. They’d eat ice creams and Mark and I would drink scalding-hot tea from thin paper cups. Both boys loved our visits to Weston-super-Mare. They adored the bright flashing lights and the bleep-bleep-bleep, ching-ching-ching of the amusement arcade; Mark standing beside them, pressing two-pence pieces into their reaching palms. I’d slip outside, ears ringing, and stand on the pier, breathing in deep lungfuls of sea air, relishing the sense of freedom and space that opened within me as I looked out at the horizon.
I was eighteen when I met Mark, nineteen when we got married, twenty-one when I had Jake, twenty-five when I had Billy. I slipped effortlessly from the family I grew up in, to the one I created with Mark. I never regretted that decision, not once, but there were moments when I envied my single friends. Especially when Mark was away on a training course and whatever activity I’d dreamed up to try and entertain the boys had descended into chaos, fights and tears, and I couldn’t even escape to the toilet without small fists pounding on the door, voices begging to be let in. What would it feel like to read a book without interruption, to nurse a hangover on the sofa with a film and a mountain of chocolate, or book a holiday and just go? What would it be like to have a career where people respected you instead of taking you for granted and to have a bedroom, all of your own, where you could retreat when you’d had enough of the world? Those thoughts were always fleeting and I would dismiss them guiltily, tucking them away deep in my mind where they wouldn’t bother me. I knew how lucky I was to have a husband who loved me and two healthy children.
I press my lips together and run my sandpaper tongue against the roof of my mouth. I’m thirsty. God knows when I last had something to drink. There’s a kiosk on the edge of the pier that sells soft drinks and tanniny tea but I can’t risk moving from my bench in case Jake and Mark miss me. I unclip my handbag and rummage around inside. Gum will help with my dry mouth. I sift through papers, tissues, receipts and oddments of make-up. Long gone are the days when I’d find a small car in the base of my handbag or a half-empty packet of wet wipes scrunched up in a pocket, but my bag is still a mess. I clear it out every couple of weeks but, no matter how hard I try to be tidy, random crap still accumulates inside.
I shove a flier for a music event I’ll never attend to one side and something small and yellow catches my eye. It’s a bundle of paper tokens from the arcade, five of them in a row, folded over each other. The machines spit them out when you successfully throw a basketball into a hoop, bash a mole or shoot a target. Billy was obsessed with these tokens. You need to accumulate dozens just to buy a small lollipop but he had his eye on a shiny red remote-control car and he vowed, aged eight, not to trade in a single token until he had enough to buy that car. Mark tried to explain to him that it would take years to collect enough, and cost us more than the price of the car just to play the games, but Billy was resolute. The car would be his. He never did collect enough and a year later, worn down by his dad’s constant assertion that it was ‘all a big con’, he gave up. I bought him a similar car that Christmas but he barely looked at it, declaring that remote-controlled toys were ‘for kids’. I hated that he’d become so disillusioned so young.
For a long time after Billy gave up on his quest I’d find tokens secreted under his bed, in his pockets, in the depths of his bag and squirrelled away in his sock drawer. I kept them in one of the cupboards in the kitchen, just in case Billy had a change of heart but one day, when I was looking for something else, I realized they’d gone. When I asked Mark if he’d seen them he barely looked up from his newspaper.
‘I was looking for something and there was so much crap in that drawer I couldn’t find it. I threw them away.’
That was four or five years ago. We haven’t been to Weston as a family since. Jake and Kira have been a couple of times since they started dating but that doesn’t explain why there are tokens in my bag now. I take a closer look, examining them for a date or time stamp but they’re generic arcade tokens with the words Grand Pier printed in the centre. They’re exactly the same as the ones Billy collected all those years ago. I found some more recently, a few months before he disappeared, stuffed into the pocket of his jeans when I was doing the washing. There was a receipt too, for a room in a hotel. A few days earlier the school had rung me to say he hadn’t turned up for registration and, when I called him on his mobile, he wouldn’t say where he was, just that he was fine and he was hanging out with some mates. It was a lie. He’d obviously skived school to come to Weston with a girl. He wouldn’t say who and we grounded him for two weeks.
So where did I get these from? Could I have won them? In the six hours between leaving Liz’s house and finding myself in a bedroom in Day’s Rest B&B did I visit the arcade and play a game? Why?
I delve back into my handbag, pulling out wodges of paper, tissue packets, empty paracetamol blister packs and several red lipsticks. I remove my phone, my house keys and my make-up compact. In the bottom of the bag is a shell. It is tiny, no bigger than the pad of my thumb, pale pink with darker pigment along its scalloped edges. I went down to the beach then? Another memory comes flooding back, of me walking hand in hand with Jake and Billy along the beach when they were very little – two and six years old. The tide was out and we had our shoes off, our toes squelching into the sludgy sand. Every couple of seconds one of the boys would dip down, dig around in the sand and then jubilantly offer me a shell, stone or bottle top. Anything they spotted would immediately become the most precious of spoils, thrust upon me until my pockets were full.
Now I turn the bag upside down, attracting the attention of strutting seagulls as I litter the ground with crumbs. There is nothing else inside, no clue as to where I have spent the last six hours or what I have done. Unless … I lift my purse from my lap and peer inside: £25 in notes, a little over £3.50 in change, various bank, store and credit cards, and a tiny laminated photo of the boys one Christmas. Nothing unfamiliar, nothing unexpected, apart from a train ticket tucked between my Tesco card and my credit card. It’s dated today, with 13.11 as the time of purchase. Bristol Temple Meads to Weston-super-Mare, an open return.
‘Mum?’ Jake appears beside me, his hair flattened to his forehead, a sheen of sweat along the bridge of his nose. He’s clutching my granddad’s walking stick in his right hand. Mark is beside him. It’s only been a few hours since I last saw him but I’m shocked by how drawn his face is, how dark the circles under his eyes.
