When You Disappeared

by John Marrs

‘There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.’ —Franz Kafka ‘Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant.’ —Paulo Coelho

She was puzzled. Nobody called me Kitty except for my father and . . . Her stomach dropped like she’d fallen thirty storeys in a split second.

James was eight, Robbie was five and a half and Emily was approaching four, and they showed no more understanding of our new life than their equally confused mum.

needed their help to keep myself together, so I got my support from a bottle of red wine instead. It understood what I needed more than any friend did.

I had no funeral to arrange; no body to bury; no one to blame; no autopsy to offer a medical answer or suicide note to explain a reason; no nothing. Just months of absolute nothingness. And as everyone else’s lives carried on beyond our garden gate, I was stuck in purgatory and feeling so very, very alone.

And it was that, if you scratch the surface of something perfect, you’ll always find something rotten hidden beneath.

Because the more you trust in someone, the more opportunities you give them to shatter your illusions about them.

I gradually figured out I shouldn’t need another person to validate my life, no matter how much I had loved or now longed for it. It was something I could do myself and it began in our local supermarket, of all places.

You can either learn from your parents’ mistakes, or repeat them and use them as an excuse for your own behaviour.

The day after bidding adieu to Paris, my alter ego Darren Glasper had landed in New York.

She was like a dog with a bone. Much of the time I’d only tolerated her because she was Catherine’s best friend and Roger’s girlfriend. I much preferred Baishali, a passive soul who didn’t like to rock the boat. Why couldn’t it have been her who’d seen me?

I clamped both my hands around her cheeks, forced her backwards off the curb and then pushed her into the road and into the path of oncoming traffic. She didn’t even have time to scream. Neither the crunching of her bones under the van’s wheels nor the screeching of its brakes persuaded me to stop walking and to turn around.

‘You . . . you killed Paula?’ she stuttered slowly. ‘Yes, Catherine, I did,’ came his reply, reticent but showing little remorse. ‘She was pregnant,’ she said quietly. He inhaled deeply. ‘I did not know that.’

An old woman stared at her. In the 175time he’d been in her house, she’d been thirty-three again. Now she was every inch her fifty-eight years.

‘There is no possibility Billy could have been Dougie’s child because he sodomised me.’

Catherine had deserved the truth no matter how much it had hurt her. He’d wanted her to apologise for what she’d done and for her to understand why he’d allowed Billy to die.

Because he had never considered in all that time they were apart that he might have got it wrong. And in the end, he had been savaged by the truth just as much as her.

the undeserved. Finally he accepted it hadn’t been God, Doreen, Kenneth, Billy, Dougie or Catherine who had caused his suffering, but himself.