The Disappeared Read online

It was after Christmas that Sharon became a problem for Stephen. He had spent the holidays at his mother’s house in North London, looking up old friends, reading, and making occasional stabs at a down-and-out novel. Returning to the flat in Whinmoore, he observed the sparsely furnished interior, with his few books and possessions serving only to emphasize its unoccupied appearance. He felt a pang of futility and loneliness. The life into which he had fallen was not the life he had planned. On the desk, however, was the essay that Sharon had shyly pressed on him in the last week of the autumn term, saying ‘please, sir, I done an essay,’ speaking without grammar as they all did, since grammar marked you out as a freak.

  He had read it that evening with astonishment. It was a slow, patient account of the love between Catherine and Heathcliff, of the mistake that Catherine made in despising the uncouth man who truly loved her and whom she truly loved. It described the moors, the isolation of the characters, and the absurdity of class distinctions in a place where wind and weather set the tempo and the goal of all events. One phrase in particular struck him: ‘Heathcliff,’ Sharon wrote, ‘was a shrine, in which Catherine had placed the joys of childhood, hoping they would not spoil; one day she would return to them, and it would be too late, for the shrine was her tomb.’ How could a child from Angel Towers write a sentence like that, with phrases from books and a semi-colon in the heart of it? In what corner of a council flat, with the TV blaring and flickering, her half-brothers fighting and swearing, and no doubt a mother resentful of her presence, had Sharon gathered those thoughts? And of course it flattered him that she had come with them to Stephen, hoping – no, knowing – that he would be moved. He picked the essay up and read it for the fourth time. Whatever happens, he said to himself, I will rescue this child.

  There was no sixth-form English class on the first day of term. He looked out for her in the corridor. He peered into the lecture theatre at lunchtime, since she sometimes hid there. He walked for a while in the garden that had been laid out behind the Gothic heart of the school, where he had once seen her sitting on a bench, but which was now bleak, frozen and deserted. He left school late: there had been trouble with an Afghan father, who had arrived shaking with rage during the morning break, demanding to see his daughter. Eventually the man had made himself understood: his daughter was not to attend lessons in health education – the imam had personally forbidden it, and moreover the imam had explained what it meant. The man had refused to leave until he had his tearful daughter in tow. There had been a solemn confabulation in the staff-room after school, but it ended without agreement. Health education was on the national curriculum, and condoms were a part of it.

  A girl was waiting for him in the lane that led to his flat. In the January dusk he could not make out her features, but the tenderness he felt, at the sight of a pale hand on the strap of a satchel, was proof that it was Sharon.

  As he came up beside her he spoke her name. ‘Fancy it being you.’

  He regretted the words. They seemed to suggest he was hoping for someone else and that he was talking down to her, as someone who could be easily discarded.

  ‘Had to see you, sir, din’ I?’

  She did not look at him, but fitted her pace to his in a way that sent a slight thrill through his body.

  ‘You mean about the essay? I looked for you, to give it back. It’s brilliant. I’ve got it here.’

  ‘Oh, sir. You really like it?’

  He had stopped to take the essay from his briefcase. She had turned to face him, with an astonished expression that showed the scar to her mouth.

  ‘I looked for you at school,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t find you.’

  ‘I wanna there, wan I? Shouldna tell you that though.’

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ve written a few comments at the end. There’s some beautiful writing in it. And why weren’t you at school?’

  She looked at him with wide unblinking eyes. The astonished expression faded, giving way to an anxious tremor of the lips. Quite suddenly she took the essay and pushed it into her satchel, turning away and beginning to walk in the direction of his flat.

  ‘This where you live, innit, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know cause I watched you. Once I went past an’ you was in the winder.’

  ‘So why weren’t you at school today, Sharon?’

  ‘Mum stopped me, dinna she? Here.’

  She stood, lowered her satchel and reached into it. They were outside the block of flats. It would be natural to invite her in. She straightened and held a sheaf of papers out to him.

  ‘I done another one. Thanks for saying what you said.’

  He took the essay and she was gone, running across the road and down an alley between two grey stone Edwardian houses, towards the Angel Towers.

  He sat in the scuffed moquette armchair. This was the worst moment of the day, shut in by the flat that refused to welcome him, facing the void of the evening with no companion save the advert-riddled kitsch of ‘Smooth Classics’ on Classic FM. He resolved to buy a car, drive out in the evenings, maybe stay overnight on the moors. He envisaged an old-fashioned inn beside a millstream, with a stone bridge over the water and a copse of battered, wind-swept pines. He looked down at the essay. And as he read his hands began to tremble.

  The Tempest, in Sharon’s view, is a play about love and fear. Miranda is as much bound in chains of enchantment as Caliban, and how is she to know that the spells are good?

  ‘Chains of enchantment,’ Stephen said aloud.

  Sharon described another Miranda, whose island is on the fifteenth floor of a council tenement in Yorkshire. ‘Here the spells are not so good. But there is no undoing them. Nor do you know who cast them. Was it the woman, this Sycorax who claims to be your mother? Was it the Caliban who comes and goes on secret missions, or the boys whom he kicks and cuffs for their greater good? You have your corner, however, and there you can conjure brighter and more beautiful visions. You invent for yourself a Ferdinand, some washed up, barely rescued creature who is as lost and as spellbound as you.’

  With growing astonishment Stephen followed the thread of Sharon’s imagination, followed it into her fear-ridden corner as though he were Prospero, hovering at the window of that high-rise flat to say ‘poor worm, thou art infected’. By the end there could be no doubt about it, and she pressed the point home with simple, all too eloquent words:

  ‘So when you walk and work in front of me, piling up words like Ferdinand stacking logs, I want to take the book from your hands, to say “let’s sit together somewhere”, and to free you from your chains, because I love you.’

  He dropped the essay into his lap and let out a long whistle of amazement. It was, he knew, a catastrophe. He should hand in his notice at once, go far from Whinmoore, take up some other profession, forget that Sharon existed or that she could ever be rescued from the malign enchantment of the Angel Towers. But those things would not happen. She had spread the enchantment over him and he was chained by it.

  ‘Christ,’ he said aloud, ‘maybe she’s not reached sixteen. Not just professional misconduct but a crime.’

  When, looking at the record, he discovered that Sharon had turned sixteen in October he breathed a sigh of relief, as though he had narrowly avoided the trouble to which he was now careering irreversibly. He put her essay in an envelope, and with it a note inviting her to come to his apartment after school. He sealed the envelope and placed it in his briefcase.

  Chapter 3

  You know he has come through the door behind you, that he is moving towards you and will soon put his hands on your face. Why can’t you turn to look at him? Your body is no longer your own. Nothing like this has happened before: even the time when, as a child, you lost your feet in the river Wye on that summer holiday in Monmouth, and the water closed over your head as though to swallow you forever. At last you find your voice.

  ‘Don’t touch me or I’ll scream.’

  There is someone standing in the car
park, looking up at the window of the flat. He is thin, dark, maybe Indian. With sudden resolve you wave to him, raising your arm high above your head, and pushing yourself up from the desk. But your arm is gripped from behind and a cloth is pressed over your mouth and nostrils, filling your lungs with a hospital smell. You struggle, but to no avail. A numbness seizes you, your limbs fold and dissolve, and your eyes grow dim. Soon there is no sensation. You hear a voice saying ‘Done. That’s it.’ Then all is dark.

  Chapter 4

  Justin Fellowes joined the firm of Copley Solutions PLC immediately after completing a Masters course in environmental management at a Northern university. He was committed to ‘sustainability’ as a cause, a policy and a way of life. And his good fortune in finding a secure place in the most successful green energy company in Yorkshire convinced him that he was fully launched on his path through life. His job was to explore the sites on the edge of the moors where wind turbines could be installed, to find out who owned the land, and to begin the negotiations that would turn unprofitable acres of poor grazing into a lucrative source of clean energy. Copley Solutions received a large subsidy from the government to offset the capital cost of the turbines, and the profits from the sale of electricity were divided between Copley and the farmer. It filled Justin with contentment, that he was making profit for his firm, and a share of it for himself, in ways that helped the planet. For seven years he had been happy in his job, living a bachelor life, indulging his taste for Heavy Metal, and playing bass guitar in a Rock band which had acquired a certain following in the Northern city where he lived and worked. From time to time he nurtured the ambition of forming a Heavy Metal group of his own, and playing to the local metallurgists, as he called them, who formed a small but devoted sect.

  Then he met Muhibbah Shahin and everything changed. Muhibbah was 20, eleven years his junior, and worked in a boutique in the city centre. She was from a migrant Afghan family, which had come to Britain eight years before from Yemen, to which country they had fled from the conflict in Afghanistan. Unlike her parents she had adopted the British way of life, running away from home aged 19 to avoid the marriage that had been arranged with a distant cousin in Waziristan, and sharing a flat in a run-down part of the city with two university students, both of them girls. After she took up her place behind the counter in Amanda’s Fashion Boutique she was spotted by a member of the Afghan community; her father appeared the next day with two accomplices, and seized her. Muhibbah screamed, spat, scratched, gripped, kicked and clung to whatever she could, and soon members of the public – including Justin, who was passing by – intervened. Someone called the police. The three men were arrested, and Justin volunteered to take Muhibbah to her home. She raised her perfect almond eyes in her perfect oval face, swept back her perfect black hair with perfect smooth fingers from her perfect olive features and looked at him. She did not smile. She did not speak. But she gave a condescending nod in his direction, and he received it as a command.

  He called each day at the flat that she shared in order to walk with her to work; he came to the boutique at the end of each afternoon ready to take her home. He went with her to the police station to give evidence against her family. The police were reluctant to act. Ever since the MacPherson Report, which issued a general accusation of ‘institutional racism’ against the British police, they had been confidentially advised to steer clear of all involvement with the immigrant communities. Nevertheless, by dint of persistence, Justin secured a restraining order, a promise of protection and a safe number for Muhibbah to call. He kept watch over her, took her flowers and presents, encouraged her to read and write in English, and tried to pronounce her name in the way she liked, with the full-throated H of the Arabs, though she was not exactly an Arab and her parents often spoke Pashto at home. Muhibbah, she explained, looking at him curiously, comes from Hubb, the verb for love, and he practised the sound again and again until she rewarded him with a smile.

  ‘So what does Muhibba mean?’ he asked.

  ‘It means love, or the thing loving, or the thing loved, depending how you take it.’

  ‘And how do you take it?’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said coldly. ‘It’s other people give you your name. Usually so as to trap you into doing things their way. I do things my way.’

  Doing things her way marked Muhibbah out as a singular person who belonged to no category that Justin had previously encountered. It was not long before he recognised that she was no ordinary intimidated refugee, but an intelligent, wilful and ambitious girl, who would use whatever opportunities came her way for her own advantage. To win her he must be useful to her, and he studied how it might be done.

  At first Muhibbah would not invite him into her retreat. She lived in a long street of terraced Victorian houses with abbreviated front gardens, most of which had been paved over as carports. When he rang the bell for the upstairs flat there would be a drumming of feet on the carpeted staircase before she opened the door with a quick pull on the latch. She did not greet him but began walking immediately, her bust tightly pressed into a turtle-necked jumper, her narrow waist contained by a flimsy skirt over loose Indian trousers. The colours she chose were dark shades of blue and grey and her black hair was drawn back and pulled through a wooden ring at the nape of her neck. It was as though an injunction had been granted against her body, and only the face was allowed.

  When they had turned the corner towards the city Muhibbah would engage him in conversation. She had no small talk, and she held her face away from him, as though studying the sky as they walked. Always she spoke correctly and grammatically, without the Yorkshire accent that had been the lingua franca at St Catherine’s Academy, where she had gone to school. She was eager to learn new words, and would practice them as soon as she picked them up. She wanted to know about universities and what you learn in them; about his career and how he got into it; about his kind of music and whether it was hard to play; about how you save money and whether it is wise to invest it. She did not say much about herself, although what she said was intriguing. She was an atheist, a free thinker, a modern person. She counted her escape from family, religion and the ‘stink of the mzrab’ as a necessary first step to becoming herself. He asked what the word meant.

  ‘It’s Arabic,’ she said. ‘Means stream of dirty things.’

  ‘Gutter?’

  ‘Maybe. Gutter. That’s a good word.’

  She laughed suddenly, as she sometimes did at the sound of unfamiliar words. In those moments she seemed to him like a child, delighting in discoveries. But she kept her laughter to herself, and showed no desire to share it with him: she was laughing at him, not with him.

  It was a warm evening in October, two months after their first meeting, when she invited him in. There was something she wanted to show him, about which she needed his advice. A strange trepidation seized him as they entered. In the past, invited home by a girl, he would not hesitate to seize the advantage. With Muhibbah this was inconceivable. He must put on a mask of reserve, and forbid his eyes to stray to anything that might be part of her privacy or proof of her sex. She opened the door to the upstairs flat with a key that she took from her trouser pocket, and went in without a word of invitation, as though into a place of work. They were in a large sitting room with a bow-fronted window overlooking the street. Three doors led from it and she pointed to them one after the other.

  ‘That’s Millie,’ she said, ‘and that’s Angela. And through there is the kitchen, the bathroom and me.’

  He nodded and looked down at his hands, afraid that they might reach out to touch her, without permission from his soul. It was the first time that he pictured himself in those terms, as a creature with a soul. And he wondered at Muhibbah, that she had placed this antique concept in his thoughts.

  ‘Sit down. I’ll make some tea and bring you the things I want to show you.’

  She went quickly into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. Justin sat in a loose-covered armcha
ir in the window. He tried to fix his eyes on the street, but they strayed over the room, looking for traces of Muhibbah. He saw a television in one corner, and a sofa lined up for watching it. There was a glass-topped coffee table between the two, bearing a thumbed issue of Rolling Stone. Above a blocked Victorian fireplace there hung a reproduction of Picasso’s Les Saltimbanques in a frame of brushed steel. A CD player and a telephone stood on a bookcase beside the kitchen door. There were no books in the bookcase, just a few magazines lying flat and two shelves of CDs.

  The space had an institutional air. He assumed that the girls kept to their rooms, and that communal life was minimal. There was no sign that anyone worked in this room: it was neat, clean, transitional. And that was true too of Muhibbah: such was his thought as she came through the door with a folder of papers in one hand and two earthenware mugs in the other. She placed the mugs on the coffee table and came across with the folder.

  ‘Please look at these while I make the tea.’

  The folder contained brochures for courses: one in accountancy, another in law, a third in secretarial skills and information technology. They were aimed at adults with a few school certificates, who were hoping to better themselves in whatever way they could. Muhibbah came through the door with a teapot and he raised his eyes to her with a feeling of tenderness. She met his glance for a moment and then looked away.

  ‘It is mint,’ she said. ‘Na’na’. I hope you like it.’

  ‘So, Muhibbah. You wanted my advice.’

  She poured the tea, and brought one of the mugs to him where he sat. She drank from the other on the sofa. The taste of mint was innocent and clean.

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘there’s no future for me in the boutique. I need a career, a status; I need to be known, part of things, protected. An accountant, for instance. In a respectable job, like you.’

  ‘And living alone?’

  She huddled up, and a shiver went down her spine.