It was cold in the kitchen; the small hours of the night, long before the first fingers of morning sun would take the edge off. Before the central heating would rattle and gurgle to life, bringing civilisation, bringing control. It was that time when fear and indecision show their true selves in the darkness, and where understanding can break through with such clarity that, for a moment, the path stretches clear and sharp, only to haze in the light of day, for visibility to reduce back down. For understanding to slip through fingers like the stuff of dreams.
4:30 in the morning: the suicide hour.
No, the suicide hour was 4:48. Maggie frowned; where had she heard that? It was a very specific time to come so certainly to the fore of her mind and yet, despite the certainty, she was also certain that it wasn’t true. But then where had she heard the counter-argument if she could not even remember the argument?
Did it matter?
Standing in the cold kitchen as the green illuminated numbers on the oven clock ticked over to 4:31, it felt right. That was what was important, wasn’t it? That was the point. Not what was right, but how it felt.
That was the whole point.
4:48: the suicide hour. It felt right.
The orange glow of streetlights seeped into the un-curtained room and reflected, as though the cream tiles emitted their own, colour-muting phosphorescence. It pooled like tainted mercury on the black-marble-effect countertop, it gleamed dully on the corner of the silver-metal toaster, and it stripped the colour from the framed photograph of a smiling girl on the shelf near the door. The photograph was separated by a gap on each side from the cookbooks and the junk of day to day that had accumulated around it, separated to make it stand out, to make it a shrine, to save the day to day junk from being infected by it. Too late. Everything was infected by it.
Cathy.
Maggie’s brother, Chris, had pointed out that in all the pictures of Cathy, she was smiling. Always smiling, he had said, bitterly, accusingly, so how was anyone supposed to know there was anything wrong?
The photograph on the shelf had been taken only a week before Cathy had gone. Her best friend had just turned 14 and Cathy had been the one chosen to go with the family on a birthday trip to a theme park. They’d had a great time, though it had been cold, particularly after they’d got soaked on the log flume, and Cathy had smiled and laughed and seemed happy all day.
How was anyone supposed to know there was anything wrong?
It was the last photograph there was of Cathy. It was the one the police had used in their appeals, the one that had been on the posters pasted to lampposts that Cathy would never pass, on the leaflets they gave to people who Cathy would never see. It had pride of place on the shelf because it was more than a memory, it was a reminder. It surprised Maggie that sometimes she needed reminding, that sometimes life threw up so much fog that Cathy drifted out of sight. When that happened, and she remembered all over again, the anaesthetic of time would take a while to kick back in and before it did she would feel everything she had felt then and the pain of her loss would roar.
Maggie’s head cocked to one side as she studied the ever-young, colour-bleached image. Maggie had the same smile in photos: welcoming, happy. She peered a little closer, not for the first time looking for goosebumps or clenched teeth or any sign of how cold the two girls had been.
There was no sign.
She padded softly across the lino, taking a mug from the cupboard and pouring herself a drink of milk. For a moment, as the fridge door stood open, she was spotlit in harsh white: middle-aged, greying hair, lined face, a tired and aged reflection of the girl in the photo. She grabbed a chocolate biscuit as well and stood over the sink to eat it so that she could look out on the sleep-silent street beyond, and let her mind fall as empty as the orange-glow night.
The clock on the oven ticked over: 4:39.
A new thought floated into the emptiness and she found herself following it without even realising what it was. It was a spreadsheet she was developing at work; if she added another column to break the sundries out separately it would be easier to assess the difference between the costs and the percentage fee. She blinked. She didn’t want to be thinking about work. But work had a nasty habit of creeping into her mind and taking over when she wasn’t paying attention. It filled up too much of her head, it stopped her thinking properly. Religion was not the opiate of the people, the office was. Or factories or shops, 9 to 5 or shift work or weekends with a day off midweek in lieu. The mundanity and complete irrelevance of a million self-perpetuating tasks took up so much space in everybody’s heads that there was no room for anything else. Evenings were only a few hours to eat and watch TV before tiredness drove her to bed. Weekends filled up with the chores she was too tired to do in the week and just as real thought, free-wheeling, interesting thoughts of possibility started to break through it was already Sunday evening and by mid-morning on Monday that brief spark was forgotten again. So the brief spark could only ask the same unanswered question: why do I do this? Maggie had once put it to Chris, at the end of a bank holiday weekend where there had been time for the Sunday thoughts to condense, to gain a little weight, to stay for long enough to find a voice. ‘I’m tired of it,’ she had told him. ‘I’m tired of everything. No, it’s not even that, I’m bored.’
‘Everybody is,’ he had replied, tetchy. ‘Nobody likes going to work you know, but it’s not an optional thing. Everybody has to do it.’
‘But why should they?’ she had tried to explain. ‘I don’t want to do it anymore.’
‘Do you think I do?’ he snapped. ‘Do you know how many hours I put in last week? That’s just the way it is. That’s life.’
She had never been good at arguing with him, not in the haze of day when visibility was poor. And she knew there was no point when he was in a waspish mood, when he blamed her for everything with a subconscious sideways look. And she knew he had snapped at her because he felt it too. Everybody felt it. But it was only in the sharp clarity of these small hours that anyone could explain. The thing he was talking about was only existing, it was not life. It was Stockholm Syndrome; the whole of the Western world complicit in its own comfortable slavery, in its own carefully constructed cage of conformity. Because conformity was predictable and predictable was safe. Cathy had known that; she had seen it coming, seen it laid out for her and seen through the promised lies of what her future would hold. She had seen a future of merely existing, interrupted by, endured for, occasional brief sparks of actually living.
Police are making a fresh appeal for information to help trace a missing girl. Catherine Margaret Driver is 14 years old and was last seen at her home on West Street on the evening of Tuesday 3rd March. Catherine, also known as Cathy, is approximately 5ft 3ins tall with long brown hair and brown eyes. She is thought to have been wearing dark blue jeans and a navy quilted jacket.
Since her disappearance police have been carrying out extensive enquiries in order to trace her whereabouts and continue to urge anyone with information to contact them.
The milk was cold as it flowed down Maggie’s throat and through her chest. She finished it and set the cup down next to the sink. Above her head a creak rose and fell, rose and fell: Karl turning over in his sleep. He wouldn’t wake to notice the empty space beside him, sheets growing cold where the duvet had been thrown back. He only ever knew she had been awake in the night by the empty cup next to the sink in the morning. He had long since stopped mentioning it.
There were so many reasons why people ran away from home, and of them so many that were deemed understandable, acceptable. They changed over the years, the hierarchy shifting with fashion: violence, abuse, neglect, running away to the circus, running away to the lure of the bright lights, like the one Paul McCartney wrote a sad song about. And among them, always among them, yet never acknowledged because it was not understood and it was not acceptable, was boredom. But Maggie understood it – that was the legacy of Cathy’s departure.
The oven clock stood at 4:48.
The police had picked Cathy up nearly ten months after she went. They had found her in a squat in Brighton. A series of unpredictable, minor coincidences had led to her identification, as though the world, not trusting to the deductive powers of a largely disinterested police force, had chosen to intervene and put things back the way they were supposed to have been. The thing that had kept her hidden for so long was that she had simply stopped using her first name and taken her middle name instead. The squat had been filthy and infested with lice. She was malnourished and had a nasty chest infection from a few months of sleeping on the street. She had taken up smoking, but, try as everyone did to validate their terrible predictions of what happened to those who stepped out of society, that seemed to be the worst that had befallen her. She hadn’t wanted to go back, she had kicked and screamed and tried to cling to the doorframe by her fingers as the few others who had been at the squat when they came pelted the police with anything they could throw and shouted and punched, and were punched and kicked and beaten in response, until still screaming she was finally torn back into the world.
Re-born.
Re-programmed.
She had got some exams and a decent job. 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. She had found the occasional, brief sparks of actually living: she had fallen in love a few times, she had married the last one; she had been besotted with her brother’s children; she had had a dog; she had taken holidays in foreign countries and stood in awe of majestic landscapes; she had grieved the loss of her parents; she had savoured the feel of the sun on her face in spring.
Occasional, brief sparks.
And the rest of the time the mundane irrelevance of existing filled all the space in her head and left no room for anything else. But she had kept reminders, even though when she needed them the anaesthetic of time would take a while to kick back in and the pain of her loss at being brought back would roar. She had kept the photograph, the one that Chris hated because for him it symbolised days and weeks and months of uncertainty. For her, it was the day she had understood. And she had kept the name, Margaret, because Cathy had never come back.
4:48: the suicide hour.
Where had she got that from? It might not be right, but it felt right, and that was the point.
The oven clock ticked over: 4:49.
And what felt right was not dying.
That was the whole point.
She padded out into the hall and quietly opened the cupboard under the stairs where her rucksack had been packed and waiting next to her walking boots for days. Karl had been in that cupboard numerous times but never noticed it. The first time, her packed bag had stood in the corner of her room for a week, and nobody had noticed it. She took a note out of the front pocket and left it propped up against the kettle. It didn’t apologise and it didn’t try to explain. Silently, she slipped into her coat and crept out of the front door, only pulling on her boots and hoiking the rucksack over her shoulders when she stood on the doorstep on the other side.
It was cold outside; the small hours of the morning before the first fingers of sun would take the edge off. Orange streetlights leached the colour out of motionless cars lining the road. She needed to move, to get some blood flowing, generate some heat from the inside so that she could finally begin to feel warm again. She smiled, like a smile for a photograph, and started to walk.
(Shortlisted and Highly Commended in the Frome Festival Short Story Competition 2017)