Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner Read Free Book Online Page B

snapped and criticised (‘Ever done this before, dearie?’), but Harriet persisted. Nightgowns removed how? What if the soup was unfinished? And if you wet the bed?
    Gradually it emerged that Elsie believed her forgetfulness merited the odd slap. Her shaking hands drove them mad, you see. She couldn’t dress any more – well, that’s bound to get their backs up. Who’d want to dress a scrawny old bird like me?
    Harriet said to leave it there just for now, and she fled the room. When Manon next saw her, she was leaning against a panda car, smoking a cigarette, looking furious and tearful at the same time. This is what Manon likes most about Harriet – no, not likes, understands: she isn’t on an even keel. She feels the work in every fibre and it hurts her.
    ‘I’m going to shut that fucking place down,’ she said, the cigarette tight between her fingers. ‘And that manager’s going to prison.’
    Harriet got Elsie out of there by nightfall, much as she protested. The care home was taken over by new owners and the manager received a year’s sentence for wilful neglect, which was suspended ‘for previous good character’, so she walked free, confirming all Harriet’s suspicions that the courts are ‘a fucking joke’.
    Manon knows that Harriet, and most of their colleagues, cleave to the view that criminals either get off or get off lightly; that the system is stacked against the police. She’s aware that if police officers were allowed to draw up the legislation, it would probably contain the words ‘
and throw away the key
’. What worries Manon is she’s joining their ranks. It can often feel as if they’re fighting a tide of filth and losing; you only needed to do a week in child protection to lose any liberal tendencies you ever had.
    Harriet became Elsie’s visiting daughter, because Elsie had no children of her own – she was twenty-five when the war took the boy she loved at Arras in 1940. His name was Teddy and she kept a photo of him by her bed, but Manon thought he was more an emblem of what had gone wrong. Elsie had had an abruption in her life. Grief had held her up, during which time she worked in a munitions factory and discovered how much she liked to work, when it had never really been an option before. When she emerged from mourning after the war, she found herself looking at a timer where the sand was running low.
    ‘There were no men left,’ she told Harriet, laughing. ‘None who wanted an old spinster in her thirties like me, at any rate. It just never happened for me, the family thing.’
    Harriet called on Elsie every week and Manon occasionally went with her, witnessing between them a conspiratorial warmth. Elsie looked at Harriet with mischievous eyes, saying, ‘Thrash you this time.’ They played cribbage, or bridge when they could make a four with other stooped residents in the care home, though death often intervened (‘Wilf not here?’ ‘Not any more, no.’). Blackjack, beggar-my-neighbour, sudoku, and crosswords. Then, as Elsie became more vague – the shaking and the vagueness accompanying one another as if staying fixed in thought and deed was ungraspable – the games became more infantile: Guess Who?, Connect Four, puzzles, and pairs.
    Elsie humanised Harriet, who had a tendency to be hard. She was the obligation that made her feel stretched and needed. Her joyful complaint. That drunken night when Harriet had confided in Manon (her kindred spirit in singleness and childlessness), she said, ‘When you don’t have kids, everyone assumes you’re some fucking ball-breaking career freak, but it’s not like that. It’s more, y’know, a cock-up. It’s something that happened
to
me. Elsie gets that. Plus, I really fucking hope someone will visit me when I’m pissing my pants in a care home.’
     
    Davyand Manon drive out of HQ car park in an unmarked car that wears its snow like a jaunty hat, but as soon as they turn out of the gates, they slow to a halt.