It's Not Bex

I see her, two or three fleeting times a day – I see her in the thrust of the dawn, in the polished mirror of the now silent dinner table, in the moon silver pitch of the endless night, except it’s not Bex, not even once. Yesterday she was in Tesco’s, she was queuing at one of those self service tills with a bottle of wine and what looked like a bunch of Irises. It was her, as big and bold as you like, the movement of her hair - mousey and bouncy we’d christened her when she was twelve - the way those natural curls of hers mirrored the spring in her steps. Except it wasn’t Bex. To keep looking for something and never finding it – hard is not even the skin of it. Make that looking for someone and well – it’s not Bex and that’s curse enough. Look at me, truncated between nearly and really. I think therefore I am, who was it said that? Socrates? Descartes? Well whoever it was, I got news for them – I think therefore I am not, nor can I ever be. Because it’s not Bex.
On the bus is a favourite. Head resting against the vibrating glass - thrummed and numbed. Maybe it’s raining, little drip spatter slides streaking down the glass and maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s sunny and bright, folks beyond the glass in tight t-tops and girls with their midriff taut and bejewelled; tattoo of a snake sliding down to her hips, that was Bex. Except it never is. The tattoo is a Celtic knot or a trick of the light, her hair doesn’t bounce right or it is, really-nearly her, then the bus passes by and the face is...wrong. Just another girl in whose features my daughters static sits for long enough to raise the pulse, but never long enough to overtake the past.
Her room, it’s not as you might think. It’s no memorial shrine – why should it be, Bex is not dead, just elsewhere. Her jewellery sits on the dresser in little sparkling sloughs whose lustre is dimmed by an accrual of dust. I dare not clean it - that would break the cycle and everything’s cyclical. Her scent still lingers amid the sheets and the corner curl posters – though only I can still smell it, even her father has lost the olfactory gift needed to pick out the sublimely painful tones of our gone girl. Her room is my physicality. A spacial mirror of my own human condition. We are after all, both waiting. But it’s never Bex.
Coming home from a night on the town, that is what she was doing – still doing. A twenty-minute walk stretched out over eleven years as if it were memorial toffee. How many times do you think I have re-enacted that journey? What if I told you that I am as lost on that path as she is. What then?
It starts in town at O’Hanlon’s bar. Kids joint, all electro backbeats and multi-coloured Alcopops. You know the thing – the sort of place were the whole strut bonding magic of youth takes place – coping off as Bex called it. Not in a sordid way you understand, but with a young girls hand-clasped-to-mouth sman. That was Bex also, a laugh fit to burst. She went most Saturday nights, Bex and her college mates walking the magnesium strobe of young adult-hood. At the core of her circle of friends, there was an inseparable triumvirate –Hannah, Sophie and Bex. As good as conjoined – until that night.
I’ve heard it back so many times, it’s like a play I rehearsed the script for until I knew every inflexion, every nuance of the text – Thing is, I can never get past Act 1. And now I’m imprisoned in the meter of the lines.
Inside endless arguments – the harvest of our sorrow, my husband and I, ensepulchered in a tomb of not knowing, cloying like fingers at your throat.
Maddening silence born out of ever decreasing circles. Depression. Desperation. Delusion, it’s all the same bag of bones anyway. And whilst he whiles away the insanity playing golf at the weekend and burying himself in the minutiae of his job, I just drift along like a tide tossed jellyfish, seeing Bex in every face and backwards glance and half-smirched flick of a head, I see her but it’s not Bex. And so we collide, my husband and I, as if we are imperial asteroids bent on implosive obliteration. Collide over what’s left of Sunday dinner, over the channel changer, over how best to breathe life into arid days and most of all over Bex, over the lack of her and the need for her to be something other than....gone. Please be something other than gone.
Now I live by ritual endeavours, telling myself that if I brush my teeth the same number of times at the same time every time – that somehow, she will be called home to me. That by checking the door handle four times whenever I leave the house it will mean that one day, when I return home Bex will be sat there in the rocking chair by the window, just like she used to be most evenings, her eyes ocean deep, reading a book or watching TV, legs drawn up under her like a lithe limbed cat. But it’s not Bex, no matter how much I want it to be. And there is an anger in me I simply cannot articulate, not just pain, but a simmering anger at the loss of days and years and more and sometimes – dare I say this? Sometimes I wish she was dead and buried and then I could be free. I would still hurt - always, but at least I’d be free.
So I imagine her, in the conflagration of 9/11, I see her, a jumper howling downwards to the salvation of a sudden stop. I dream that she is the victim of the latest murder - that the body in the bedsit is hers, or the festering remains discovered by the elderly couple walking the dog are hers - can you fathom that, a mother dreaming that her daughter has been killed – but when you’ve lived for a decade in the arms of mistress absence, there is not a lot else left to pray for – except an end. Please just make it end. I don’t want to...no...I can’t wait any more. Please let me see her, in one of those grainy CCTV shots taken from some hotel balcony as the Tsunami hit. See her final image racing those tumultuous waves, me praying that this time, it really is her - as the waves take her and smash her like boxwood, leaving behind a bracelet, a trinket, a thing to tie her to a place and a time. To tie her to death. But it’s not Bex. Death would be an answer. What I have is like an un-tuned TV set, a static swirl, a paternation that speaks only of absence.
Lately, I have taken to visualising imagined future events – it’s a new hobby of mine. Projecting forwards in my head as a means of defeating the clock – tick-tock, every flick of the second hand is like a finger tapping on your skull. Tick-tock – she’s gone. Tick-tock – she’s gone. So I have taken to raising her image in my mind, phoenix like and transported forwards to weddings, births, parties, graduations, and just popping round to see her mum, dad, brother please – if I can’t see her dead then she must be alive. But it’s not Bex.
Maybe she doesn’t want to come home. There, I’ve said it. That’s what sits at the back of my mind, what clouds my eyes like bitter cataracts, maybe she ran away. My little Bex, maybe she ran away from...me. Maybe she’s out there, re-invented, living a happy life with people around her who are not me. So I rake over the ashes of every single word we ever spoke and I challenge my husband to do likewise, though he shakes his head more often than not, as if I am some sort of deluded child – perhaps, I sometimes think, usually in the void of the night, in the fist of the night, it is he who has somehow caused her to leave – that his silence on the matter is a reflection of his guilt. Do you know what it’s like to pick over the past like some sort of insane vulture – madness is all I have left. Madness and emptiness and most of all – nothing. I have nothing because it’s not Bex.
This Saturday it will be exactly eleven years since last I saw her, as in really saw her. Those first few days when she went missing were a hail of activity, so much so, so occupied were they that they almost held the truth in abeyance. Police, press, neighbours with troubled faces and offers of help. And the whole circus of it. No time to stare reality in the face, Bex was gone. Just gone. She had walked home from O’Hanlon’s and one by one Hannah and Sophie had returned to the sanctuary of their homes and because Bex lived where she did, she walked the last ten minutes alone – she’s still walking it now. A ghost of unknown values lost like a vaporous tendril of fog, leaching away to nothing in the glare of the sun.
I tried to write a poem, to enunciate the unspeakable. The idea came from the support group I attended just after Bex vanished and it’s taken me until now to try to do it, the idea clinging on to me like tenacious lichen on some storm pounded pock-shot cliff. Called it nothing and it has no words. Blank. Both it and I. I showed it to my husband and he didn’t understand. I showed it to the mirror, held it out as if it was a prophecy - and I don’t understand either. Show me how to move. I am besieged and no one cares, not the way I do. Because for everyone except me, time has moved on. My time can’t. It’s still the first of forever. The first night. The first week. The first TV appeal. The first birthday-Christmas-Easter-Holiday. Every day. It’s the first of everything every day.
I should forget my daughter and remember my son. That’s what they tell me. The Doctors, the soothsayers, my husband, the women at the institute, forget your daughter and remember your son. None of them can tell me how to do that. Just that I should – must. Thing is I can’t even figure out why I should breath, much less put down the past and step into the glare of a world without her. A world where I no longer pretend that one day she will appear, as if by magic. Remember that children’s cartoon from way back – Mr Benn I think it was called. It was some moral skit about a man who would go into a costume shop and try on some outfit or other, and when he stepped into the changing room, he would be transported to a world themed around whatever costume he had picked. He would live out a grand adventure before being sucked back again – complete with a memento to remember it by. Anyway, whenever Mr Benn set foot in that myth weaving emporium, the shop keeper would just appear in a puff of smoke like some incanted spell - like a magic spell. And that’s what I tell myself that Bex will do. Just appear. Please just appear.
Because I’m back in her room again. Circles in the sand, in the swirl of my mind. In the churn of a ceaseless, endless, unremitting ache. And downstairs I can hear the cacophony of nearly tea-time. The microwave’s electric purr as boil in the bag cod is irradiated in the name of mother sustenance. An age back that would have been a three pan boil and a joint sizzle-cracking in the oven and all those smirched up scents of real food – of food as a social occasion with gravy and mounds of mash – crackling and homemade apple sauce and more – and I did it. Now they just boil up bags and slop them out on plates as cold as we are. My husband and our son, for I can no longer face cooking and all this must rest on them like a living coffin - It’s not their fault yet still I hold them at bay. I can’t do this anymore, I tell her primped and empty bed, I can’t wait for you anymore. And as I hold that thought, pray that it can somehow drag me out of the past and into the waking present moment, I hear raised voices downstairs, “Mum come down now,” shouted as a declarative. “Mum!” But still she holds me in her room, as if Bex senses that maybe this time, when I leave, it might just be the start of me really leaving. What was it Churchill said at the end of the Battle of Britain, something about it not being the end, or even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning. That’s what this is, the end of the beginning. Has to be – we both know that.
All this time. All this time to realise that there is only so much of your life you can live looking backwards. And as I make to leave, I feel as if a small fraction of me, infinitesimal but existing nonetheless, has let go - that from the seeds of that tiny step, a future could grow and I don’t even know why I think this now, or what it is that has forced me, palsied and afraid to take those first tentative steps towards salvation. Maybe the voices down below, those of a husband and a son whom I have imprisoned these many years. Maybe it was just time for the last grain of sand to drop through the hour-glass of my grief – maybe. And so I tiptoe towards the door as if in fear of re-awakening the ghost of her, the inverted memory of her, the thing I made out of her absence, a thing I now know was less than Bex – remembering not her, only the loss of her – the uncertainty of her and all this time, trying to see round the edges of the veil and the madness of it all. The desperate perverse madness of it all.
Goodbye, sleep tight. That’s what I tell her as I gently close the door behind me, peering one last time back in time, through the narrowing slit as the door swings too – seeing the pastel pink paper, the boy band posters the chest of drawers with the swivel mirror, the row of heels lined up like foot soldiers by a wardrobe in which hang clothes that will wait in vain with the rest of her things and as the door closes fully, I tell myself that the best way to forget that which is painful is to hold dear that which is not. So I descend the stairs, lightly and with no little trepidation, ready to tell the rest of my life this revelation, a life that has been encased in ice ever since Bex didn’t come home. Tell them that I am ready to live again, that I am inching down the path towards freedom. Towards a life were Bex has a place, but not the only place.
This is the first of forever after, I say as I fair fling back the kitchen door, the words babbling out and on their tail comes a verbal deluge. Like a confessional that’s been forming for a decade and I’m ranting almost, stumbling over the words, the order random and discordant as I heap together a chorus of sorries, admonishments spun up with promises for future days spent productively, spent together - as in the three of us, as in not Bex and the tears come, big racking sobs, chest hitching up and down like a storm flung ship, and it all just pours out and the words and the tears and the whole kit and caboodle just melds into one long apology. An apology for living in the past, for excluding my husband and our son and for making their lives less than whole, an apology for forsaking them in Bex’s name.
And no one moves and no one says a thing.
I wipe at my eyes to be greeted by expressions blank and staring, slack-mouthed as if I wasn’t actually there, or as if they think me mad and now I know it’s too late – I can feel pinpricks of panic, how could I expect them to just up and forget all that has preceded this moment? To simply forgive me because I have decided it’s time – I turn from them and their mute struck features, ready to flee back upstairs, back to her room, back to the past, back to Bex and that’s when I see it.
At the back door, which is open, there sits a backpack on the mat like an obedient dog. It is old and tatty, the fabric stained and frayed by the passage of days – across its flap, in teenage inky letters are three words – three words that seem to suck me in like a whirlpool might suck in a paper boat. Behind me, I can hear my husband and son breathing and I can hear the blood pumping in my veins, other than that there is silence because everything is shrinking to a singularity. Three words. Hannah, Sophie....
“Mum....”