Missing Fay Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Adam Thorpe

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A spirited, restless fourteen-year-old, Fay, goes missing from a Lincoln council estate. Is she a runaway, or a victim – another face on a poster gradually fading with time? The story of her last few days before she vanishes is interwoven with the varied lives of six locals – whether aware or unaware of her presence or absence, all touched in life-changing ways.

  David is an eco-campaigner on a family holiday on the bleak Lincolnshire coast; Howard, a retired steel worker with some dodgy friends; Cosmina, a Romanian immigrant struggling as a care-home nurse; Sheena, middle-aged and single, running a kiddies’ clothes shop, is sexually entangled with the peculiar Gavin, while dreaming of Paul, up the lane; Mike, the misanthropic owner of the haunted second-hand bookshop, is secretly in love with Cosmina; and Chris, a TV producer become Trappist monk, can’t quite leave the ordinary world behind. All are involuntary witnesses to the lost girl; paths cross, threads touch, connections are made or lost. Is Fay alive or dead? Or somewhere in between?

  Adam Thorpe has once again created a cast of brilliant eccentrics bound together by the accident of geography, in a novel of effortlessly elegant prose, forensic observation and resonant power.

  About the Author

  Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, appeared in 1992, and he has published two books of stories and six poetry collections and nine further novels, most recently Flight (2012).

  www.adamthorpe.net

  ALSO BY ADAM THORPE

  FICTION

  Ulverton

  Still

  Pieces of Light

  Shifts

  Nineteen Twenty-One

  No Telling

  The Rules of Perspective

  Is This The Way You Said?

  Between Each Breath

  The Standing Pool

  Hodd

  Flight

  POETRY

  Mornings in the Baltic

  Meeting Montaigne

  From the Neanderthal

  Nine Lessons from the Dark

  Birds with a Broken Wing

  Voluntary

  TRANSLATION

  Madame Bovary

  Thérèse Raquin

  NON-FICTION

  On Silbury Hill

  In memory of Ernest Wistrich

  Every angel is terrifying.

  Rainer Maria Rilke,

  The Second Duino Elegy

  1

  DAVID

  15–16 August 2012

  There might be bigger crabs when the tide’s right out, he suggests to the kids. Worms, anemones, brittlestars and the countless small crabs have not grabbed them. Stephie has just done a project on giant crabs at school, and is further up the beach, stooped over with a red bucket and a net. Noah is stabbing at bubbling air holes with a stick.

  ‘Don’t do that, Noah,’ says his father. ‘You might kill whatever’s breathing down there. Those holes are like their nostrils, OK? Little critters that thrive in salty environments. Pretty special.’

  A brief pause, and then his son stabs at them with even more enthusiasm, now they are nostrils. Nostrils of concealed salt-loving monsters.

  ‘I said, Noah. Don’t do that. An intertidal mudflat is an amazingly rich habitat but it’s also … what? Noah. What is it? Remember? Begins with F.’

  Noah mumbles a word that sounds very like fucking.

  David is momentarily speechless. Surely not? Not at six years old? Noah glances up at him with a secret little smile. ‘Fracking,’ he repeats, loud enough to be heard over the sea’s restless wash.

  The father chuckles in relief, to Noah’s delight. ‘OK, OK, I get it. The word is actually fragile. Remember? Fragile. A very important word, Noah.’

  The boy is now pretending to be a burly hard-hatted fracking operative, from the look of it, adding drilling noises. His father turns away, defeated. He was woken at dawn, shivering in the tent, by a cacophony of rooks massing directly overhead, and he feels shit. The damp sand is silky-hard under his feet and surprisingly cool. He presses his toes into it, kneading the grains, not making much headway and releasing a sulphurous odour: the natural decay of organic matter, on which all life depends. His toes’ impressions are black. He is not an imaginative man, but he tries to picture himself as a hominid walking here a million years back, with a very simple life pattern, with straightforward thoughts and feelings and finely tuned sense receptors. Wetness, light, the healthy stench of mud, the cries of his blood progeny, the tribe’s future. It is difficult picturing this, what with a huge bright-blue shipping container in his sight line, dumped for no discernible purpose in front of the concrete seawall, its patched ugliness topped by a metal fence.

  Noah has left off fracking and has picked up one half of a sword razor shell: creamy white, almost opalescent. David begins to relate the amazing story of bivalves, tapping the shell in Noah’s small palm. A helicopter, the bright-yellow rescue type, thumps into view some half a mile inland. The chopper’s slapping rotors are loud, considering its distance. Noah points the long shell at the heli and makes a surprisingly effective space-gun noise, followed by an explosion.

  ‘Noah! You’re really pissing me off! What is that heli doing?’

  ‘Blowing up.’

  ‘It is not blowing up, stupid. It is flying off to rescue someone, someone badly injured or drowning or critically ill!’

  Lisa is meditating out of sight in the dunes, with a view down to their van parked in a lay-by on the very straight and very depressing coastal road. Luke is in the van, dreaming whatever toddlers dream. Lisa doesn’t like her husband to swear in front of the kids, breaking into one of his hissy fits, as she calls them. Maybe it’s his red hair, she says. True, he can’t help it. Not that it happens very often, these days. He has better self-control.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ says Noah in a voice that mixes defiance with deep hurt.

  Steph skips up to join them, to the father’s relief, the bottom of her bucket seething with whelks, hermit crabs and various wrigglings yet to be identified. ‘Wow, well done,’ says David. He’d forgotten to check on her. You never know with beaches. Noah crouches down and examines the bucket’s interior without touching, Steph standing over it with crossed arms.

  At least there aren’t that many people on the beaches of Lincolnshire, if you stay clear of places like Skegness or Mablethorpe. The North Sea is off-puttingly cold, even in August. They’ve seen a few folks in the water, still only up to their waists about half a mile out, it looks like. The weather’s supposed to be getting a lot drier and hotter (or less cool) in a couple of days’ time. It is just unfortunate that most of the coastline has a rampart of static caravans and bungalows, which somehow they did not expect, while the coastal towns are basically run-down housing estates with amusements. Looking on the map, he just assumed that the miles and miles of broad sand would be lined by fields and trees beyond the dune grass, as they would be back home, where there are thousands of miles of wild beaches. There are nature reserves here, but they are pretty small and you can’t camp overnight. The one open stretch of grassy shoreline they drove past lifted his hopes until he saw the first bunker. He didn’t want his kids brained by golf balls t
ravelling at 70 mph, especially as the few people on the fairways looked well into the doddery stage.

  A retired couple from Birmingham with what looked like salt-blistered skin told them this morning, while they were rolling up their tents at the inland campsite, that it’s amazing north of Mablethorpe in the Saltfleetby-Theddlethorpe Dunes, but you can’t camp there, it is another nature reserve.

  ‘Could we camp sort of on the edge of it?’

  ‘Well,’ the man said, ‘there’s always Pleasure Island Family Theme Park at Cleethorpes. Or is it Fantasy Island? There’s that lovely site near Skeggy, lots to do for kids, plenty of toilets. Pool tables and whatnot. What’s its name?’ he added, turning to his wife.

  ‘Fantasy Island’s just down by Ingoldmells,’ said his wife sternly. ‘Ten-minute drive from here. You can’t have missed it. Britain’s first-ever theme park.’

  The Milligan parents have so far managed to conceal the big resorts’ attractions from the kids, on the basis that unappeased desire is crueller than ignorance. They thanked the couple anyway, although the man persisted in going on about the campsite near Skegness. ‘Fifteen minutes’ walk and you’re on the esplanade with all the amusements,’ he said. ‘What the heck’s it called? We used it three years running, didn’t we, pet?’

  His wife’s sagging jowls shook. ‘Haven’t a notion which one you mean.’

  ‘Superb pitch sizes,’ he continued as the Milligans bundled their gear into the van, agreeing to spend the day in the dune area with the unpronounceable name. ‘Superb!’

  * * *

  David is sitting back on his heels apologising to Noah for calling him stupid. They give each other a cuddle, which topples David backwards into the yielding sand, both of them laughing. Noah has the most extraordinary squeal of a laugh, reminiscent of a juvenile kea. David first heard keas on South Island in Kahurangi, and made their mating patterns the subject of his thesis. ‘They’re probably the most intelligent bird species in the world,’ he told Lisa at the time, when she questioned his choice. Really, it was so he could live in the mountains for a while, but he found it lonely: Lisa did not join him for long enough. The kea squeals got on his nerves, were sending him crazy, and now they’re haunting his son. Memory transference maybe. There’s a lot we don’t know.

  The nature discovery exercise is turned into a game in which they get points for spotting something new on the soggy flats, from worms to waders to rusty cans which they can’t touch. The bigger crabs have made a collective decision to stay under, it seems. Size isn’t everything, he tells the kids, not in the natural world. Intelligence counts for a lot. Finding your niche and sticking to it. They don’t seem convinced. They have a little rucksack rattling with shells, including some pretty whelks, but there’s nothing here to equal the beautiful specimens back home, especially the huge patterned volutes. Yesterday he told them about his favourite, the famous blackfoot paua, iridescent with blue, green, purple and silver once you’d spent a long time scraping and scrubbing it, but that just made them more fed up. He took out a couple of slipper limpets and pretended they were his ears. Noah, despite David telling him that they are a product of the plastics industry and choke birds and fish and could even choke Luke because they look like sweets, has started a collection of blue nurdles.

  When the rain starts in earnest, gusting into their faces, the three of them slope back to the van. Lisa is inside, her meditation already relocated to the van itself and disrupted by Luke filling his nappy and wailing. The cramped interior stinks. ‘This is supposed to be my holiday too,’ Lisa groans.

  They find a spot in the simple campsite a mile away, a little close for comfort to a casino and a games arcade, but pleasant enough and only ten minutes’ stroll from the beach proper. There’s a café and a dilapidated mini-golf nearby. They sit in the site’s wooden clubhouse and play cards, before venturing out to Swan Foods, the local store, for supplies. The row of shops includes one selling mobility scooters, which Noah thinks are for kids and the best gadget he’s ever seen. There is a bright flyer for the Cleethorpes theme park pinned to the corkboard near the till. The kids are investigating the vast lolly display, thankfully.

  David joins the queue, bored already. A small handwritten plea to find a home for Fluffy, an eponymous angora rabbit, red-eyed from the flash. A MISSING poster next to it. Did you see Fay? Thin, toothy, pale. Looking straight at him.

  Lisa is nominally in charge of the confectionery department. The kids’ expressions are agonised, unable to choose within the strict parameters allowed by their parents. Sour Ears, Strawberry Clouds and Cobbers do not exist here, but the Brit substitutes are almost as foul and just as enticing, tempting you at every corner, every counter. It’s a kind of comestible porn.

  David’s glance wanders back to the girl called Fay. Hair not as red as his and Stephie’s, not a proper auburn, but the poster looks faded. He doesn’t think the hair’s dyed, although henna red has become fashionable. Fourteen is a bit young to dye your hair, and she looks a very young fourteen. Old beams in the background, real old English cottage beams. Nice middle-class English girl. She’d still be called Ginger or Carrot Top. Copperknob in his case. Trousers pulled down by the Matthews gang when he was fifteen to check his pubes. Howls of laughter.

  Her eyes of course do not look away in embarrassment but are still bolted to his, straight into the camera. They are a clear emerald green and her mouth has a child’s large teeth, her bone structure yet to mature around them. One front tooth is growing crookedly so it looks pointed. She will need a brace. She is amazingly alive, he thinks. Fay Sheenan. Irish roots, probably. He has nothing much else to read, so he scans the words over and over. Last seen in distinctive leopard-patterned trainers with pink laces, orange tights, a fur-lined hooded coat. And with a small mongrel dog. Some maniac with uncontrollable urges. Or maybe she has just run away. Home situation. With an ugly little bitser. Her only friend.

  ‘David?’

  Lisa is gawking at him. Infuriatingly he blushes. The kids show him their lollies in their paper bags as if they are jewels. How can anyone harm anyone else, let alone a child of fourteen? Steph will be eleven in the autumn. What if his own red-haired daughter was to go missing, her pink laces carefully tied? Fragile, that’s the word. The lollies look sticky and alien to him. That’s how you know you’re abroad: by the unfamiliar confectionery. Among other things. His EcoForce colleagues, for instance, so passive-aggressive, so British. He loves his kids to bits, nurdles and pink laces and all.

  The adjoining shop sells beach and pool toys, including a dolphin ride-on eerily like EcoForce’s logo, blown up and on display. A mere eight pounds. The kids want it. Even Luke points at the window and burbles in the same acquisitive manner as his siblings. David tries to explain that it’s made out of cheap plastic, no doubt in China, and will last about a week, if that, before creating yet more toxic waste for the planet. Also, the sea is really cold. ‘We can use it in the pool, Daddy,’ Steph points out. Lisa is further up the street, looking at a clothes shop. He walks towards her with Luke, who is in the pushchair; the other two cross their arms and stand firm. It is rare for them to show mutual solidarity. This will all lead with horrible inevitability to the need to find a swimming pool, to being squeezed by overweight campers with armpit and nasal issues: a living hell. Lisa points out that he’s left the other two behind.

  David shrugs. ‘Oh, they just want to buy, buy, buy. Ignore it.’

  ‘Your problem to sort out,’ she says. ‘I’m on vacation.’

  Steph runs up, Noah following her a few yards behind. She says in a mournful tone, ‘Daddy, we really love dolphins, just like you do.’

  They wake up to a cold, clinging fog that soaks the outside of the tents. It is forecast to clear by mid-morning. It’s that time of year, the campsite manager tells them. ‘Yeah, we get these sea fogs in Wellington,’ David comments. Lisa grunts, ‘And how’s that supposed to help?’ They are tired after a bad night so decide to stop this upping-
sticks lark and stay the morning in the immediate area, trying to be mindful instead of hopeful. Lisa’s been edgy ever since they hit Lincolnshire, for which she had great hopes. Or maybe it’s just PMT. Or the weather. Someone she respects at the toddlers’ group – a woman called Penny who has published a novel and lives in Muswell Hill – called Lincolnshire ‘authentically mysterious and eerily unknown. Tennyson!’ she added, which Lisa at first thought referred to sports facilities. England is so tiny, how could anything be mysterious and unknown? ‘The land that time forgot,’ Penny added with a giggle, her overactive son banging the bongo drums like a maniac. David had stayed in Lincoln in January, representing EcoForce at a conference on Engaging with the Televisual: New Ways of Visualising the Environment. A complete waste of time full of unpleasant media types, but he could confirm the (relatively) wild emptiness of the area, although he’d only glimpsed it from the conference bus on a wetlands tour. A quick meander through the Wolds on Google Street View sufficed. It was beautiful. And relatively inexpensive to camp in. And a lot nearer than the Outer Hebrides, which was his first choice.

  David would have quite fancied a walk through the Saltfleetby-Theddlethorpe Dunes themselves, spotting birds, but the kids screamed in the negative; yesterday, when they first saw the trees and open meadows full of swirly rye grass from a winding lane, they pronounced the reserve ‘boring’ and Noah claimed car-sickness. They stopped the van and Lisa had to hold him from behind as he imitated violent retching, disturbing the peace of this miraculous parcel of unspoilt countryside. So the attractive walk plan has been delayed until further negotiations come the afternoon.

  David has hardly used his binos. The birdlife is supposed to be fantastic, but so far all they’ve seen, apart from rooks, sparrows and so forth inland, is gulls and a couple of shelducks and the odd wader on toothpick legs in annoying silhouette against the dazzle-wet sands. Today is a no-no for anything outside, but then it clears in around ten minutes and the future looks bright.