Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey Read Free Book Online Page B

sitting on, comfy, bouncy sitting beds, and I long to collapse into one. Finally we come to a high desk.
    “Can you remember who you came with now?” she shouts, as though I’m deaf.
    I tell her I can’t, and my stomach closes in on itself.
    “You need to give me a name so I can page someone.”
    She is still shouting. I can’t think with her shouting. A man in an overall, wheeling a trolley of strange mutilated-looking dolls, stops. “Bloody hell, Grace,” he says, “what are you doing?”
    “We’ve got a vase smashed in Glass, and this lady’s lost and I don’t know who to page to come and get her,” she says, not lowering her voice much.
    We’re standing near a bank of TVs. The flickering screens, like a thousand birds flapping their wings, make me feel dizzy. They make me think of Sukey sliding the comb into her hair, and of the hedge next to our house, and of the woman in the foliage turning to run from Douglas’s gaze.
    “Just page her name and say she’s here,” the man says. He turns to me. “What’s your name, love?”
    For an instant I think I have forgotten that, too. But then it comes to me, and the next moment I hear the woman’s voice pronounce it over the loudspeaker. We wait. I don’t know how long. The woman goes off to talk to someone and I can see those sitting beds in the distance. Surely no one would mind if I went for a rest.
    The first one I come to is a “Prima Sudeley Sofa, large, in mushroom chenille.” It’s lovely, and cosy. I sink into it. It’s such a relief to be sitting that I’m in danger of nodding off.
    A sudden loud announcement wakes me. Something about discounts on bath mats. I lever myself up from the sofa and stand for a minute.
    “Oh, Mum. Where on earth have you been?” Helen says, coming out of a lift. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
    She takes my arm and we go back down in the lift; she will hold my arm but won’t catch my eye in any of the mirrored walls. The brown-tinted glass deepens her frown. She is cross with me. I worried her, wandering off like that, she says. Funny how things are reversed. Helen was always running away when she was a child. I’d find her school satchel half packed with spare sweaters, bruised apples, and favourite shells, or, if I missed that sign, I’d be forced to go looking for her across the heath. When Patrick was back from the Middle East I left him to deal with it, not bothering to unpack the bag or chase off after her. She knew it, too, knew I’d ignored her one repeated act of rebellion. And I paid for that when she was a teenager. Strange now to think that she’s the child who stayed here, and my son, Tom, who hated to spend a night away from home, has made his life in another country.
    We find Katy when the lift doors open, a security guard watching her paint each of her nails with a different-coloured polish from the set of testers on a counter. He looks at me as I walk past and seems about to speak. I feel a sudden jolt of memory, though I can’t quite place it.
    “I think I might have broken something,” I say, as we walk through the doors, into the street.
    “No, Mum, your arm’s just bruised, remember?”

CHAPTER 4
    I went to Elizabeth’s house. See?” I say, holding my notes up for Carla. She doesn’t look. I slap the bits of paper on to a little table and just miss knocking over my morning tea.
    “So? She wasn’t in.”
    “No, but there was no sign of her, either.”
    Carla turns a page of the carers’ folder; she’s got some sort of flowery perfume on today and it clouds up around her with each movement. “Was anyone else there?” she asks, when she’s finished writing. Her eyes widen for a moment and I can tell there’s some awful story coming. “I’ve heard of cases where young crack addicts move in with old people,” she says. “They locked an old man in Boscombe in his room and asked all their crack-addict friends to smash the house up and”—she pauses, waving