She was alive. She had a phone number. She had left a melody on her voicemail that only someone who knew her would recognise. She had built a door into her disappearance and left it unlocked for the people who knew which melody was the key.
The car was very cold. The fogging on the windscreen was thickening. The cranes stood in the dark. And I sat in the car with the knowledge that the melody I had just heard was the sound of my sister saying:I am here. Come find me.
CHAPTER 18
The Price of Knowing
MORVEN
He comes to me at seven in the morning, which is unusual. I am still in my dressing gown. He sits on my bedroom floor as though he has sat on floors before, and he shows me his phone.
The bedroom is cold. The fire has not been lit. The morning light is grey through the curtains and the room smells of sleep and cold stone and the faint smoke that drifts through Crag Manor’s walls from the study chimney below. Ewan is sitting cross-legged on the carpet beside my bed, his back against the wardrobe, his phone in his hand. He is wearing yesterday’s clothes. He has not shaved. His face is stripped of everything – the charm, the wit, the Fixer’s performance – and what remains is a man who found his sister’s voicemail at a hospice car park and drove home in the dark and did not sleep and came to my room at seven because I am the person he comes to first.
“Listen,” he said.
I took the phone. I pressed play. The voicemail was four bars of a melody I did not recognise – thin, piano, the sound of someone recording on a phone in a room that was not designed for music. It lasted perhaps eight seconds. Then silence. Then the automated voice asking to leave a message.
I looked at him.
“Cat used to hum it,” he said. “Every morning. In the kitchen, in the car, at the barre. She heard it once in a film she couldn’t remember and it stayed.”
“This is her voicemail.”
“This is her voicemail.”
I played it again. Eight seconds. The melody was simple – four notes ascending, a held fifth, two notes descending, a rest. The kind of melody a child learns and carries into adulthood because the carrying becomes the memory and the memory becomes the person.
“What do you need from me right now?” I said.
He looked at me. His face was doing the thing that Ewan’s face did when all the mechanisms were turned off and the man underneath was visible – a brother who had spent six years building a structure of grief and purpose around a sister’s absence and had just heard that absence sing.
“I need to not do anything stupid,” he said.
“Then we’ll wait.”
“I want to call back. I want to leave a message. I want to go to every address on that board and knock on every door until–”
“Then we’ll wait,” I said again.
He stopped. He breathed. The floor was cold and the carpet was thin and neither of us moved.
“She left the melody on purpose,” he said. “She knew I’d hear it. She knew I’d know. She left a door.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m supposed to – what. Walk through it? Stand outside it?”
“You’re supposed to wait until you know which one she wants.”
He looked at the phone in my hand. He looked at the ceiling. He breathed.
I made him breakfast.
This was the anchoring. The domestic act that said:you are in a kitchen and the kettle is boiling and the eggs are in the pan and the world has not ended, it has changed, and changed things need feeding.I made toast and eggs and tea and I put them on the table and I sat across from him and I watched him eat with the slow, mechanical effort of a man who was eating because someone he loved had asked him to, not because he was hungry.
The kitchen was warm. The AGA was running. The morning light was strengthening through the window and the Clyde was visible and the dock cranes stood in their rows and the day was beginning its ordinary business and in the middle of the ordinary business, a man was eating eggs at a kitchen table because his sister had left a melody on a voicemail and the melody meantI am alive.
He ate slowly. He drank the tea. He held the mug in both hands and the steam rose between us and I watched him do the ordinary things – chew, swallow, sip – with the concentration of a man who was using the ordinary things to anchor himself in a world that had shifted beneath his feet overnight.
