Writing Magazine Grand Prize 2021 - Runner Up

“Look what the cat dragged in.”
Dead mice. An old sock. Missing daughters. They’ve never had a cat, but it’s what he always said.
The click of the door, her shadow through the frosted glass, and the soft clash of her dropped rucksack conspire to cause this verbal chain reaction. Sixteen years overlapped by an invisible seam.
There is no soap opera collapse to the floor no blubbering thank god thank God Wendy I knew you weren’t dead. Just the same old response, before his mouth hangs open, his flesh catching on before his mind.
“Mum at work?” she says, her head around the door. Her voice is full of grit and history.
“Dead. Cancer.”
She nods from the doorway. “I’m going upstairs.”  
He folds his newspaper and stands up. He sits back down, stands back up. He finds himself at the door, staring at the bare patch on the carpet. Was it there when he reported her missing? He thinks of the telephone. He should call the police, or at least peel some potatoes for tea.
“Mr Corling. Howard, can I call you Howard?” The other officer had been silent, hands tucked in his vest, his face turned to the window.  
Howard heard words like probably, likelihood and missing persons. Nothing much else to hear.
He had tried to rub life back into his wife’s limp hand.

 “Where’ve you been?” he calls up into the silence of the staircase. His voice is a rusted motor around the words. He claps a hand to his mouth before young lady tries to skip out. No counting on fingers to know she is forty-two. He resists but can’t help it. “Tea will be ready in a bit,” he blurts.
Oh, just with Cath would have been the answer, once. He remembers Hazel in the kitchen stretching her mouth around her suspicions, mouthing “boyfriend!” at him. He had whispered, “How do you know?” She had touched the side of her nose in answer.
Of course.
Hazel had been a thorough housekeeper. As such, no nook, corner or under-bed area was private. This right was inalienable and extended to anything that lurked hidden within. Such as diaries. An angry disappointment had clutched at him. He had said, “Shouldn’t we just talk to her?” Hazel had huffed like a pony and gone back to scraping carrots.
Outside her bedroom door, he coughs. “Wendy, where have you been?”
“Away.” She tuts. “What’s for tea.”
“Chips,” he says, pulling at his cuffs. “We worried. There’s a headstone.” Water is threatening to rush up and out of the dry pipe of his throat. Should he fall to the floor now?
“She wouldn’t run off,” he’d told them. “She wouldn’t let us worry.”
But Hazel had shown them the diary, wordlessly, her lips a paper cut in her face. They had nodded. A new man, a more exciting life. It happens.
Howard had protested. “No. Not my Wendy.”
“But without a body, sir, or signs of a struggle…”
After the police had gone Hazel slept, grey as three-day old fish. Howard washed dishes and waited.
He waited seven years and would have waited longer. But Hazel came back from the dead, straightened her back and said, “It’s time.” It was her clock, not Howard’s it seemed.
“Alright Hazel,” he’d said. “Alright.”
It was declared. First the court, then the papers. Hazel declared it to neighbours and relatives and the bridge club. She declared it to the clothes she bagged, the posters and dusty lipsticks she binned, the wallpaper she stripped.  Howard found it all when he emptied the caddy.  Her things, macerating in gravy, splattered with teabags, peelings, eggshells. Maybe she wasn’t coming back then.
His knuckles have split from hammering the door. “Selfish girl! How could you do this?” He bashes and gasps. “There’s a headstone!” He stops, panting. The door opens smoothly. The room behind her is vapid in tones of magnolia, mushroom, mist. “Where have you been?” A frantic search of her face reveals something like smooth rock, unaffected by breezes. He looks again. There are lines, and a patch of her eyebrow missing, where scar tissue has formed. She is grey at her temples. He grabs her hands and turns them over in his, examining the grimy palms, the penny sized circular scars. Burns. He rushes them to his lips and weeps.
When he looks again, her teeth are showing. The ones that are left.

Howard is drying plates very slowly. His daughter is sleeping. He had watched her that morning, after quietly setting down her breakfast tray. He had watched for the boyfriend from the plundered diary, for signs of love and fulfilment. Perhaps he had died and left a hole.
The headstone had been installed immediately. No need for the ground to settle when there is no decaying body beneath. Hazel went the year after. It took her quickly, deliberately. I’m having you, death said. One day clicking her tongue and sighing at water marks on spoons and illegal immigrants, the next a bag of bones in a hospice. A day later still and she was in the ground. She went in with Wendy. Where they pretended she was.  Howard grieved in bursts of Christmas cards from those who hadn’t heard, of tights found behind the radiator. A song on the radio would fold him inwards. Wife and daughter dead, and at his age. He had kept house.
He is clutching the newspaper too hard; it rips at the edge. She shambles downstairs, past the open door down the hall into the kitchen. He hears cupboards banging open.
“How about I do you an egg?” he suggests from the door, attempting cheerfulness.
“No,” she replies.
“I think you need a doctor,” he says.
“I don’t think so,” she says.
He steps over the threshold. “I could ring them in the morning?”
 “I’m busy.”
 He nods and says, “What about a drive out in the car? The bluebells are out. You remember the bluebells?”
She shrugs. “I’m going back to bed.”
Guilt he thinks as she leaves. She is ashamed of herself. Something terrible happened. The boy. He thinks of the cigarette burns. “Amnesia,” he whispers to himself.
He shouts from the bottom of the stairs. “It’s okay if you can’t remember. We can remember together.”
He digs in the cupboard, whistling. The album is yellow leather. He dislikes how the cellophane sticks to the card. The static of memory. Wendy in a sunhat on her mother’s knee; the round apple of her cheek, peachy from the sun. Brighton, nineteen eighty-three. Fourteen years old, report card tucked in the back of a school photograph. Wendy is an amenable student but often in a dream world. He looks at the photo. A sprinkle of angry spots across her forehead. Her eyes cannot be emotionless, he would have noticed that before, surely. The day is strange, and he is a lonely and stupid old man. He leaves it open on the coffee table. Perhaps it will help her come back to him.
She coughs. All night.
She doesn’t change her clothes. He has given up asking for her washing. The stairs are hard on his legs, and he is tired of how the banister feels under his hand.
On and on she coughs.
“You should see a doctor,” through the crack of her door. She turns away to face the wall.
“Shall I bring your tea up?” He calls into the void. He can hear his old heart in his ears.  Words are not working. Sixteen years’ worth of saved up love is not working.
He writes her a letter.
All the things he could not say, because she was dead. All the things he wished he’d said, before she was gone. The more he writes, the more there is. We loved you. Your mother did her best, for all her nagging. You were our best girl, our little flower. I didn’t tell you enough and then it was too late. Remember the dog? He didn’t run away; he was run over. I should never have let you think it. We thought we were sparing you. He pauses, tapping his pen gently on his teeth. Terrible, when a loved thing is gone without a chance to say goodbye, and no way to understand. What did we do to deserve that? His fingers are white where they grip the pen. How could you let us think you were dead? How could you let us worry like that? How can you be so silent? Why did you bother to come back? How…. He stops. A moan escapes and becomes a rising cry. He screws the paper in his fists.
He watches sitcoms without laughing while she coughs upstairs. He wades through days and weeks. He loses count. His wedding photograph framed and perched on the window ledge seems to be fading. Tea is bread and butter most nights. The newspapers pile up and the crosswords are empty paper skeletons. He doesn’t care what the answers are.
The front door slams, he shuffles to the window. She is shambling down the path. He opens his mouth to call and closes it again.
Upstairs, he looks under the bed. The slippers he bought her still have their tags. The wardrobe is empty, but the ashtray is full. He slides open the bedside drawer. A diamond ring. A watch. A bank card. Mrs. Elizabeth Moxon. He picks these things up, a piece at a time, turning them over. The watch is masculine. The ring is too small to belong to his daughter. He knows he will not ask her how she came by these things. “I don’t think she’s a very nice girl after all,” he says to the open drawer. It gapes back at him sadly.
There is no Elizabeth Moxon in the phone book that he can see. From somewhere else then, some other time. He wonders if Elizabeth Moxon cried when she handed it over, or if she tried to fight her off. He hopes so. He hopes she has healed. He considers the police, but there is something bitter and nasty in his throat at the thought of them. It’s too late in the day for that, but he feels wide awake.  
Tea is potatoes and vegetables done the way he likes them, a little melting butter, a sprinkle of white pepper. A pie, or a ham salad. He leaves her silent sandwiches outside her door, knocks politely, doesn’t speak. Pauses on the stairs when the door opens but doesn’t turn.
He fills in the answers, absorbed in cryptic clues. He can feel his bones again, he makes friends with the banister, turns the pages in the photo albums, traces palsied fingers across the spines of the romances Hazel left behind. His pushy, fussy Hazel who would sooner unravel a worn jumper for spare wool than give it to charity, but who left grapes on saucers for blackbirds. The comfort of what had been real pulls strength back into him.
He waits for the coughing to stop, for a sign of rallying health. Howard’s heart has righted itself, but he would no sooner throw out an ailing woman than kick an injured dog. Into the mellow air of his sitting room, cheered on by muted applause from his television set, he stands, wheezing.  He finds the stairs less steep than before.
He knocks and enters when there is no answer.
Of course, she is dead. Of course.
Howards sighs, but doesn’t weep. He has been here once before, he hasn’t the energy to do it again. He doesn’t have another sixteen years. Hazel scolds him from a corner of his mind. Well now look. You should have done this in the first place Howard. You’d better call an ambulance she insists.
“I will,” he says.
Too soft, that’s your problem.
“Probably,” he says and reaches to gently stroke his daughter’s sunken cheek.