‘I forgot,’ Edie said.
Tess’s face turned sullen.
‘Look, I’ve something to show you,’ Edie said. She pulled Tess over to the table. ‘Valentina made it for us.’
She opened the cake tin. Tess peered into it. Inside was a chocolate sponge with chocolate icing, a ring of violet sugar flowers and in matching lettering, the words ‘HAPPY 10th BIRTHDAY EDIE AND TESS’ had been piped across the top.
‘Wow,’ Tess said. Her face lit up, the fall forgotten.
Edie picked off one of the flowers.
‘Edie, don’t,’ Tess said. ‘It’s for afters and it doesn’t look right now. Look, there’s a gap.’
‘Open up.’
‘Edie, you shouldn’t.’
Edie winked at her. Tess opened her mouth. Edie placed the flower on her tongue. She took another and put it in her own mouth, closed her eyes and tilted her head to the sun, so that all she could see was red. The sugar flower’s sweetness spread across her tongue. She opened her mouth and laughed. This was going to be the best birthday ever.
Tess: June 2018
The last time I saw Edie she was slipping through a gap in the hedge at the back of our school. One moment she was there, the next she was gone, like Alice Through the Looking Glass. And like Alice, I thought one day she’d return.
My train is sitting at a red signal, a fire on the line outside Coventry is causing delays and we’re already forty minutes late. People tut and glare at their phones. I’m the only one hoping the signal stays red.
We’ve received calls before to say a body’s been found. Only to be told later that it’s too old, too young, the wrong height. This will be another mistake. So why is my heart thudding against my chest, why is Dad so certain it’s her this time, when he’s been through so many scares before, why do I dread the train ever reaching its destination?
The gap in the hedge led to a route home via the canal. The police searched its towpath repeatedly in the week after Edie’s disappearance. Only her leather school bag was found, flung in the water, its strap caught on the bars of a discarded shopping trolley. In it were her schoolbooks, comb, Discman and a purse holding four pounds twenty-two pence in change. She even left one of her records, a Northern soul track Ray had given her.
The police brought the bag to me.
‘Do you recognise everything, is anything missing?’ a policewoman asked.
‘The photograph,’ I said.
‘What photograph?’
‘Edie keeps a photograph of us. She always carries it with her.’
It was the sole copy of a family portrait, the negatives lost long ago. In it we’re about three or four years old. Edie is sitting on Mum’s lap, looking up into her face. Mum gazes back, smiling. Dad’s turned towards them, proud and protective. I’m on Dad’s knee, swivelled away from the rest of the family, pointing to something out of shot.
There aren’t many snaps of Mum; we didn’t own a camera. Uncle Ray took them. I have the one of Mum at nineteen, just before she married Dad. She looks so like Edie, tall, slender, graceful. Her expression is difficult to read, a half-smile flickers round her lips, her eyes slightly turned from the camera, as if a full gaze would be giving too much of herself away. And there are pictures of birthdays and Christmases. But Edie loved that one of us all together, when we were very young.
‘Are you certain she had it? When was the last time you saw it?’ the policewoman asked.
‘I’m not sure, but she’d never leave it. She must have taken it with her.’
‘She may have removed it from her purse or lost it months ago.’
‘She wouldn’t remove it or lose it,’ I said. ‘She took it with her.’
The policewoman smiled, made a note and started asking me if Edie had been in any trouble recently.
Over the years I repeated to Dad, Uncle Ray and Auntie Becca about the photograph, that Edie would never leave it behind, she took it from her bag, which means she must be alive. None of them listen. Perhaps Edie knew that too, that only I would realise its significance. A message to me alone.
So I never believed she was dead, never gave up hope, but my heart still thuds as the train lurches forwards for the final stretch of the journey. Is it Edie?
Edie: August 1993
‘This one’s called “The Snake”.’
Even though Edie had heard it a hundred times before, Uncle Ray always announced the songs. It was part of the ritual. And this time it was her record player, the one Uncle Ray and Auntie Becca had got her for her birthday. Tess had got a portable CD player. But Edie knew she had the best present. All Uncle Ray’s Northern soul tracks were on vinyl and that first crackle before the song came on, then the drum roll, gave Edie goosebumps.
As the trumpets came in, Uncle Ray swung his leg sideways before stepping left then right. He didn’t sing along like Edie, his arms and legs slid into patterns and his eyes focused on the middle distance.
‘Spin,’ Edie shouted.
He kicked one leg high then brought it down with a snap, sending him swirling so fast the stripes on his T-shirt blurred. Then he was back into his diamond pattern steps.
‘Your turn,’ he called to Edie.
She’d been practising. Uncle Ray had made her a cassette of some of the top tunes, as he called them, though a few of her favourites were missing. She couldn’t play it on the stereo in the lounge if Dad was watching TV, which was most of the time. So she practised upstairs, which she preferred anyway, because Tess wouldn’t try and join in. With her clumsy hopping about, she looked like a puppet with half of its strings cut. At Christmas, Uncle Ray had bought them their own cassette player for their bedroom, which Edie loved. But Tess said she felt bad because Dad had wanted to buy it for them and couldn’t afford it. Edie thought if he wanted to buy them stuff that much, he’d get a job.
Auntie Becca came in and leaned on the kitchen door frame.
‘You should be outside on a day like this, Edie. It’s your birthday; everyone else is in the garden. It won’t be summer forever.’
Edie ignored her and kept swinging her hips from side to side before copying Uncle Ray by kicking her leg up by her head, then pulling it down to put her into a spin.
Auntie Becca shook her head.
‘I’m not sure you should be teaching her that, Ray,’ she said. ‘She should at least be wearing trousers.’
Edie didn’t listen. She was watching Uncle Ray’s next move. He lunged to the side with his right leg and dragged his left foot along the floor behind him. Edie followed. They stepped left together. Edie squealed and hissed the ‘s’ of snake in the chorus.
‘Ray,’ Auntie Becca said.
‘Give it a rest, Becs,’ he said. ‘We’re just having a bit of fun.’
Auntie Becca shook her head again and left.
Why didn’t Auntie Becca ever want anyone to have fun? Edie thought. It didn’t matter, she was gone now and Edie was going to dance how she liked.
‘What