Found Missing

Dull amber lights cast over an empty room, tattered, sticky stools stacked on sticky tables around a sticky strip stage in front of an equally sticky bar where Heather Blake stands, cleaning a sticky pint glass with a dirty flannel. She doesn't look up when she hears the metal door close behind us, nor when our shoes scuff over the sticky floor. "We're clearly not open yet." She says, adding fingerprints to the glass. "If you're looking for a fuck then the girls get here later on."

"Heather..."

Her grey eyes flick up when she hears my voice, and she smiles, halfheartedly, and drops the flannel against the wooden bar. "Elfaine, I was wondering when I'd be seeing you again." She crosses her arms around her tiny chest. "You got my wallet?"

I nod quickly, pushing Gerard in his back. He scuffles forward reluctantly, scowling at me and wrinkling his nose before holding Heather's wallet up in front of her. "Here."

"Thanks," She says, "I didn't think I was gonna' get that back."
"You can have it back after you've explained how you came to leave it in the coffee shop to begin with. Elfie said that you know Vince and what happened to Martha, and don't you dare tell us we came looking out here for nothing." Gerard says, stuffing the wallet back in his pocket. "It's not exactly like you'd be missing much worth without this piece of tack anyway."

I've almost forgotten how spiteful that tongue of his can be.

Heather sighs and walks to the front of the bar. "Gerard, don't be like that-"
"How do you know my name?"
"I've read about you."
"Where?"
"Your girlfriend wrote about you, and believe me, she made you out to be a whole lot sweeter-"
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Martha, she..." Heather bites her lip, pushing her hand through her fire hair, fingers catching in the unkempt curls. "I really didn't want to have to do this." She mutters, "I don't know how to even..." She sighs again, eyes fixing on me as I step to Gerard's side, clutching his hand with my own.

"Alright." She swallows. "Alright, I'll tell you everything, but I think you should both come and sit down."

*

Have you ever heard something, been told something, and everything that had been mere fragments before connect together to suddenly make sense?

"I'm falling." Martha said this to me a few days before Halloween last year.

"You're falling? Why are you falling?"
"I don't know... I feel like I'm falling through space, like I'm not really here anymore." She sighed, "Do you ever feel that, Elfie?"

I had laughed with a chest filled with angst, if anything. "I think I've been falling for so long that gravity has finally slowed me down, Martha."

"I've been falling faster and faster, so fast gravity hasn't had time to stop me." She smiled, contrary to her nonsense that meant nothing until today. "For a while I've been feeling nothing, but soon I'm going to burst into flames... and the angels won't help me, because they've all gone away."

I didn't understand a word that melted from her quiet mouth. I thought she'd been high, popping Gerard's pills perhaps, so, at the dinner table I watched her pick at the wicker from her mothers bread baskets, Anne's attention too focused on her cook book to give notice to Martha's drivel tongue.

I watched her and I thought about how much I loved her. I loved her yellow hair and her nonsense words, and I wondered what it felt like to be her, to be so enchanting, so fascinating, so perfect. Now I wonder how I could have been so blind.

"She was a prostitute."

Heather ignores our fallen faces, her eyes are stuck to the envelope in her hands. "She worked here, as a dancer, for, I dunno', around a year?"

We've been sat at this sticky table for no more than ten minutes, but somehow Heather has managed to pick a hole in the corner of the envelope so that whatever has been sealed inside is beginning to show through.

"And after a year she moved on to prostitution."

The air is so thick with our shock I swear we could cut it with a knife. I want to say something, do something, anything to turn this mental gob-smack around. I want Heather to smile, I want her to burst into laughter and tell us that she's only joking. I want her to tell us that Martha wasn't a whore, she wasn't tainted, at least not any more tainted than we'd already discovered, but she doesn't. The most sickening part is that I know the worse is yet to come.

Gerard's mouth is parted, his eyes are wide and his brow is creased, like the confused expression he had held at Martha's wake, but I don't recognize this expression. His owl eyes don't show any confusion, if anything they look like they finally understand everything that's been missing.

"Gerard..." I finally squeak. "Gerard, tell her this isn't true, tell her it can't be-"
"Let her finish, Elfie." He says, hushing me like a child. I press my lips shut and Heather continues.

"I didn't know Martha had died until last week. I was unpacking a box of delivered shot glasses, they were wrapped in old newspaper and I saw her face, the ink was smudged, but it was her. So I read the article - it said that her body had been found washed up on some beach somewhere. The article made no sense to me because the girl in the photo was the same girl who had worked for me; blonde, skinny, pretty... only I'd never known her as Martha Lomax."

"Who did you know her as?"

"Laura." She says. "Just Laura. You don't need to be anyone in particular to work here, so I didn't ask her too many questions."

"So, she lied..." Gerard whispers, echoing my thoughts. "She lied about her name, she wanted to be kept a secret."

I press my clammy hands to my forehead, hating the way my skin feels stone cold against my palms. "I feel sick."

I flinch when Gerard lays his hand on my leg, his thumb moving in careful circles over my dungarees, just like he had done on his mothers sofa. Only then he had sent me into his calming waves, right now he isn't helping, I don't think anything in the world will.

"Okay..." He lets out a shaky breath."Okay, but, Heather, this still doesn't explain what happened to her..." He chews the skin on his lip. "Or Vince-"
"Vince is dead."
"Dead?"
"Dead. He was just a customer to me, couldn't have been too much older than you, Gerard." Heather says. "The only thing I knew about him was that he had a thing going for Laura-I mean Martha."

I can feel Gerard's clutch on my knee tighten.

"Apart from that he kept himself to himself. I didn't even know his name until it was too late..."

"Too late?"

Heather looks back down at the envelope. "I found this."

She hesitates, squeezing the brown paper between her fingertips. "Martha stopped coming into work around Halloween last year, I just thought she'd finally seen sense, I wouldn't have blamed her for jacking this kinda' job in. It was around the same time that this Vince guy stopped coming in..."

Heather slips a folded piece of notepaper from the envelope. "Reading that article spooked me - this girl had made up another life for herself, and from what the newspaper said she had no good reason to. This girl had a family who loved her, and she was just throwing it all away in some strip joint miles away from her home... and then it turns out she's dead. I just had this feeling, I had this feeling that she would have left something behind, y'know? Something that could explain what was going on with her. I felt like I was fucking losing it, and then I found this."

At last, Heather pushes the notepaper across the table. "It was hidden behind one of the ladies toilets in a plastic file pocket, the same cubicle where she snorted her coke." Through my tear stained eyes I can just make out Martha's handwriting, but I don't want to read what her final words had to say. I've already guessed what they are.

"Just, don't touch it, okay?" Heather sighs, voice full with regret, for us, for Martha, for herself, I'm not even sure. "Apart from mine, I reckon it's only got her fingerprints on it. We don't want any confusion when you call the cops to come, do we."

I look up at Gerard as he reads Martha's note. His hand is still clasped over my knee, firmer by the second as those black lashes collect water around his eyes. "I knew it..." I hear him say, quietly, slowly. "She wanted to die."

I've never heard Gerard sound so small, so softly distraught. Even on top of the parking lot, in the pouring rain with his vodka thoughts and heavy heart, even when he had felt the truth all along, I've never seen him so fragile. His pale lips tremble, his hazels darker than ever, hands quickly moving from my knee to grip at the sleeves of my shirt.

I can feel my eyes begin to run, but I can't find the energy to cry. I want to fall into him, I want to cup his colourless face and I want to make him okay, but I can't lie, and I'm afraid that if I touch him he may just break.

"She wanted to die, and she wanted to die with him. So that's exactly what she did."

"Gerard..." I begin. "Gerard, I..." I don't know what to say.
"Gerard, I don't know what to say."

Notes

The was such a difficult one to write...