A Private Haunting by Tom McCulloch Page A

one in it but me , searching hedgerow and cool riverside and not even the sound of an animal, just the selfless wind and a world that is ever empty without you and now without her , who was at least gathered up, who was at least carried that blue morning with arm dangling and her father ’s distraught face, a man become suddenly old, old as the dark woods where I still look for you.

Fifteen
    Mary switched on her mobile just after 8 am. The phone immediately started buzzing and vibrating, the screen an insistent blue-blinking of texts and voicemail reminders from her husband.
    As Mary had avoided all thoughts of him since yesterday, so she avoided the messages. But as she laced her Asics she decided she wasn’t avoiding him. Avoiding was too deliberate, you had to make an active choice to avoid something. She had simply forgotten about him.
    Sunday night was poker night. She waited all week for it. Her husband’s best friend Baz started them when he moved into a tiny flat after his divorce. He was frightened, forty-five years old and scared of his own company. So he started a poker night. Get the boys round . Not that they knew much about poker, but American movies told them that’s what men did.
    Her husband always spent the night on Baz’s white leather couch, took his hangover straight to work on Monday. That suited Mary just fine. She’d switch off the phone and have a long bath. Sometimes she’d indulge herself with a little silver toy she called The Bullet and feel a bit melancholy afterwards. Last night she’d thought about Jonas and hadn’t felt sad at all.
    The talent show was the first time she’d seen him since ‘the interview’. Yet she hadn’t been apprehensive about seeing him. Maybe it was because Jonas Mortensen was her boss now, a functional relationship that put the kibosh on anything else. She blushed a bit as she tied her hair back, spending the next few minutes choosing the most suitable soundtrack for the morning’s run. Her iPod playlist was mostly Andrea’s. It pleased her no end that she actually liked some of her daughter’s albums. She settled on Florence and the Machine.
    And ran, eyes moving from road to sky to field. She thought of seasons, which one she’d choose if she could only have one for evermore. Summer seemed an indulgence today, morning pinks edging the tops of the full-leafed hawthorns lining the single-track. Her happiness was immediate but also intangible, a childhood memory that couldn’t quite be placed. Her pace had slackened. She was daydreaming. On another day she would have upped the pace, re-set the discipline of the run. Today she’d chill, maybe even take a little detour.
    Mary knew what she was doing, but you can know and not admit it. This was one of those situations where she was deliberately ignoring something. But she decided it was a freedom in the morning air that led her on a happy-go-lucky wander off the usual route. And if her route was random then she may, of course, just happen to run down Jonas’s street.
    Crossing back over the road bridge, she didn’t really think about the Sky TV van stuck at red. When she saw the BBC outside broadcast van a few vehicles along she wondered about it a bit more. As the vans passed when the lights changed she expected them to take a right at the roundabout, towards town. Instead, they took the second exit, to the village. She caught up with them by the village green that was never this busy, the vans edging into a swarm of people that a policeman in a Day-Glo bib was failing to control. Other outlets were already there, ITV and Channel 4, techno-roadies unravelling cables, a man with a TV camera filming teenage girls tying bouquets of flowers to the railings outside the church.
    A child had disappeared, she knew it, the media descent instantly familiar from TV coverage of other places. These things didn’t happen here , that was the cliché.