Local Gone Missing by Fiona Barton

Author:Fiona Barton [Barton, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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Later, I hear sirens as I’m sitting on the front step. And I startle—then remember the police are already here inside, going through Cal’s Minecraft collection at the moment. The wail fades away. Someone else in trouble. I can hear the officers in the bedroom above me.

I’d like to bundle Cal in the car and leave. And in my head, I’m going to. But I can’t. People will notice. Ask questions. And I can’t have that.

“Stay and face things,” my social worker used to say each time they brought me back to my foster home in Wales. “You’re only making things worse by running away.”

So I stay and watch the washing flapping in the breeze until the police officers nearly knock me off the step as they leave.

“We’re done here,” one calls over her shoulder. They can’t have found anything. And they’re gone.

I get up and go into my house, following their trail. They’ve made an attempt to put things back but I can see they’ve been everywhere. I close cupboard doors and push chairs back into place. Then walk slowly upstairs and stop at our bedroom door. The bed’s been stripped, so I make it again, folding the duvet to air the bottom sheet and plumping up the pillows as if everything’s normal.

I suddenly feel so tired, I sit where I am, on the carpet, and try to make sense of the last few weeks. How my world has fallen apart since my brother died. I’d managed to keep ahead of the past for so long but it’s catching up, nipping at my heels, tearing at my skin, exposing me.

I learned to tell lies as a child—I had to to survive—but I’m getting too old to be doing it now. I’m suffocating in them.

I told Doll there was no way Liam could be involved but I know he probably was.

He did some drugs when he was younger. Well, quite a lot, but he never touched any of the nasty stuff. I’d have known. I’d had practice with Mum.

I was living in Brighton by the time we met. I’d been in foster care in Wales until I was seventeen and I couldn’t wait to leave but I didn’t want to go back to London. I’d always wanted to come back to Ebbing. It was such a brilliant place—I was only little but we were outside all the time. Out of Mum’s hair.

We were outside all the time in London too, but there was trouble round every corner. Street kids don’t play nice. They’re always out for what they can get. What they can get you to do. I was too young to matter to them but Phil was older. More visible.

But Ebbing is small and I thought someone might remember Mum. Might imagine I was like her. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” my foster mum used to say. So I went to Brighton, where I could be someone else but still feed seagulls. Liam thinks I’m mad—he hates them.

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