I was in the midst of one of those ‘getting chased’ dreams when my phone asserted itself, rattling against the side of my skull too insistently to be incorporated into some subconscious narrative. I woke up, heart racing and still afraid. I knew instantly that it was Aoife calling— she had tried again as I lay on the cusp of sleep the night before. I groped around in the bedding, feeling for the phone, two black rings right in the middle of my vision from the brightness overhead.
‘Aoife?’ My voice was thick and fatigued.
‘Else? Thank god, I’ve been trying you for— ’ Someone yelled out to her and I heard her saying, ‘My sister, she’s in New York.’ This was followed by a muffled discussion. I put the phone on speaker and looked at the screen. I had slept through seven calls. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Look, I’m at Mum’s. Something’s happened.’ Her voice moved away from the phone and I heard her talking to someone else again. ‘Here, can you tell her? I’ve just got to— ’
‘Hi?’ Another voice, light but male, a man of my generation—eater of hot sauce and reader of The Guardian. ‘Elspeth, it’s Drew.’ Drew was my sister’s husband, a man whose entire identity was a list of middle-class aspirations that Aoife would rattle off with apparent disinterest. ‘Drew’s hoping to be made regional manager,’ or ‘Drew wants to upgrade the car.’ I had never met him but my mind offered a social-media supercut— dark brows, slender build, puffer jacket and beanie, hungry-eyed and with a certain weakness around the chin. I had decided long ago that he was the type of man who would fall hard and fast for a well-deployed compliment.
‘Drew, what’s going on? What’s up with Mum?’ Somehow, in this briefest of conversations, I had gone from half lying down to standing up, my chest constricting in anticipation.
‘We don’t know,’ Drew said, his panic replicating my own. ‘Aoife went over this morning, and she wasn’t home, but it was weird, she’d left stuff on and the downstairs had been torn apart . . .’ He trailed off and took an audible breath. ‘We called the police, they’ve just arrived, and we’ve asked the neighbours. No one seems to have seen her in a while so we’re worried. It looks bad.’
‘Looks bad,’ I repeated.
‘Yeah, the cops are saying that . . .’
There were sounds at his end, more talking and then Aoife had the phone again. ‘Elsie? We have to go, but I’ll call you when we know more. All right?’
‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll wait to hear from you.’
I got up then, put on a pot of coffee and made a painstakingly detailed file note of our conversation. I’ve been doing this on and off since I was a teenager. I do it because when I don’t I spend a lot of time, really a lot, replaying conversations in my head, trying to remember what was said and by whom and their tone and intonation. If I don’t make a note of the exchange, I panic later, worried that I might have said something embarrassing or awkward or threatening. The irony, of course, is that I then spend a lot of time worrying that my notes are inaccurate anyway.
Once this was done, I settled in for a very…
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