Page 8 of All Our Missing Pieces

I can go months, perhaps even years, without dreaming it. Sometimes I imagine I’m free of it at last, and then it comes for me again, the same as ever, only the details changing. Always, in the dream, I see her somewhere – sometimes in a familiar place, such as my kitchen; sometimes in a random location like a street I walked down long ago and believed I’d forgotten. Sometimes in a place that must exist only in my imagination.

Last night, it was in Spitalfields Market. Its vibrancy and clutter – the teetering racks of clothes; the shouts of the stallholders; the teeming tourists wielding cameras and students hunting for bargains; the smells of mothballs, incense, spicy food and stale sweat – were intensified in my sleeping mind into a frightening chaos, a dense thicket of sensation.

Then I saw her, just the back of her, same as always. I recognised her instantly even among the crowd, the shoulders of her coat and her flying dark hair as familiar as my own reflection in a mirror. That glimpse sent me hurrying after her, calling her name, desperate to catch her up this time, even though I never have before.

I shouldered desperately through the throng, my breath coming in gasps. I came close to her, then lost her again. The heel came off my shoe but I staggered on, her name rasping again and again in my throat.

I’m never in any doubt that it is her. I am always so sure that I would recognise her anywhere. And every time, I lose her. She slips away, lost to me in my dream just as she is in reality.

Every time, I wake feeling like this: achingly sad yet somehow purged, relieved that – at least until next time – it is over.

I can’t write any more today. I could fill three thousand pages, never mind three, without being able to describe this sense of loss, but at the same time I have no more words.

I will get up and feed the cat. I have decided to name her Maud, because I love the pilgrim soul in her.

EIGHT

I didn’t go to see the house with Orla that day. In fact, I didn’t see it at all until two weeks later. I left her outside the newsagent, taking her number and the address on Damask Square, thanking her and saying that I’d give her a call.

But somehow I couldn’t persuade myself to do that. Part of me – the sensible part, I suppose – told me that she could be crazy, she could be a fantasist, she could be a people trafficker and the next thing I knew I’d be imprisoned in some Soho walk-up servicing twenty men a day, guarded by a Maltese thug with a firearm, my passport hidden in a safe somewhere amid bundles of cash and cocaine.

But there was another part of me that felt differently – a bolder, more adventurous part that told me I was worth more than slinking around people who’d treated me badly, that if I flounced out leaving my deposit to cover one month of my remaining rental contract and Samantha to cover the other, it was no less than she deserved.

So, for two weeks I dithered. For the first week, I kept my head down, went to work, ate my meals in silence at the kitchen table, and went out with colleagues whenever anyone suggested a pint after work. I spent one Saturday night at Emily’s, sharing her double bed after an evening of wine, box sets and pick and mix.

It was only the next morning, over boiled eggs and soldiers – Emily’s hangover cure of choice – that I told her about Orla and the house on Damask Square.

‘Oh my God, you should totally live there!’ she said. ‘It would be amazing! It would be an adventure. It would be so cheap.’

I explained my fears about the Soho walk-up and the sex slavery.

‘What?’ she laughed incredulously. ‘Who are you and what have you done with my rational friend Livvie?’

‘That’s the whole point,’ I countered. ‘It’s not rational. Staying where I am is the rational thing to do.’

‘No, it’s not. Sometimes the rational thing to do is to take a leap of faith. What’s the worst that could happen? It doesn’t work out and you move in here with me once Carl and Hannah have headed off to Thailand.’

The following Sunday morning, I got dressed and headed downstairs, hearing Samantha, Amanda and Gary’s chatter and the clink of spoons on coffee mugs immediately silence when they heard my feet on the stairs. Their three pairs of eyes watched me with cold suspicion as I put on my coat, said a cheery goodbye and let myself out.

As the door was closing, I heard Gary say something and all of them giggle.

Feeling suddenly lighter, as if I was breathing different air from that inside the house, I walked to the end of the street and waited for a bus. I could have walked, as I had before, but this felt more appropriate, somehow – more normal. Less desperate.

Twenty minutes later, I stepped off at the intersection where the two corner shops stood opposite each other. My A–Z was open in my hand, as it had been throughout my journey, although I’d already memorised the route to Damask Square. I turned off the main road into a side street lined with 1960s red-brick terraced houses, two newer grey concrete tower blocks looming above them. Then I turned again, following a path through a small park where children played on swings and slides in the spring sunshine and a group of teenage boys kicked a football over the muddy grass.

Another turn, and the square opened up in front of me. A graffiti-covered street sign confirmed that I’d reached my destination: Damask Square.

I could see how beautiful it must once have been. There were perhaps a dozen tall houses arranged on two of its sides, the third open to the park and the fourth taken up by yet another newer low-rise building. In the centre was a garden bordered by black iron railings, a plane tree laden with acid-green spring foliage shading the grass where daffodils and crocuses bloomed. It must once have been a full square, I realised – probably German bombs had destroyed the rest.

The older houses were tall and elegant, four or five storeys high, taller than the block of flats. Their roofs were grey slate, their fronts white stucco, mostly worn and flaking. Pillared porticos sheltered their front doors and sash windows overlooked the garden – or they would have done, except most of them were shaded with blinds, shutters or in one case sheets of curling newspaper.

Slowly, I made my way around the square, the garden proving inaccessible owing to a padlocked gate. Number five was identifiable only because it was between number four and number six – it was only when I reached it that I could see the faint ghost of less-faded red paint on its door where the brass numeral must once have been fixed.

The door knocker was long gone, too, and the letterbox was an empty gap in the wood, disconcerting as a toothless mouth.

I raised my hand and knocked, the wood hard and heavy enough to bruise my knuckles before they made any significant sound.

Then I waited, feeling the sunshine warm on my back. Behind me, somewhere up in the branches of the plane tree, I could hear a magpie’s cackling call; the voices of the children playing were distant now and the hum of traffic on the main road almost inaudible.