Page 28 of From Now On

He reaches for his phone.

Chapter Thirteen

Nina

Nina pushes the knot in her school tie up to her collar. There’s a familiarity in putting on her uniform, stuffing her pencil case into her rucksack, even though she’s getting ready in unfamiliar surroundings. She actually cannot wait to get to school, to see Maeve who has been her best friend since primary. Get out of this place.

Her new bedroom is stark and soulless – a bit like Aunt Violet herself. The walls painted white, she hasn’t been allowed to put any of her posters up. Her cork board, covered in pictures of her and Maeve, Mum and Dad, Billie, rests against the pine wardrobe door and she has to move it every time she wants to pull out something to wear. The room is too small for her things, too small for her emotions.

At least she’s going to the same secondary. Before, she’d approached from the east and it would take twenty minutes to walk there; now she’ll come from a different direction and it will take her thirty-five minutes. Learning that Aunt Violet lives in the west like the Wicked Witch inThe Wizard of Ozhad made her briefly smile but realizing that she lived so close to them all these years and had never repaired her relationship with Mum seems even more tragic now.

This is what is on her mind when her phone begins to ring, Charlie’s name flashing on the screen. She’s tempted to ignore it but they need to talk.

Still, she leaves it until the last second before the answer service will cut in to pick up.

She sits cross-legged on her bed, which is too hard and gives her backache. The one at home – she still thinks of her old house as home – had never been replaced and was too soft. She wonders if she’ll ever find her ‘just right’.

‘You got it then?’ she says before she even says hello.

‘The form N208. Yes. Did—’

‘Me and Duke have one too, in case we want to object. And we do want to object, don’t we, Charlie?’

‘I… I don’t know. What does it all mean?’

‘Missing presumed dead. I think it’s quite explanatory, Charlie.’ She’s being deliberately unkind. She knows it’s a shock for him, at least Violet had explained the process to her and Duke but then she would have told Charlie too if he ever answered his phone. ‘But…’ She tries to recall all the things Aunt Violet had told her. The fragments of fact whirl around her head and she tries to catch hold of them, to pin them down in the right order. ‘It’s the first step. Aunt Violet has put an advert in the paper too. The court has had a copy of her form and there’s going to be a hearing.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then Aunt Violet can apply for a death certificate and then she’ll be able to access Mum and Dad’s bank account, claim their life insurance, that sort of thing.’

‘I saw on TV once that you had to be missing for seven years before you could declare someone dead?’

‘Aunt Violet said there are exceptions if people are missing and there has been some sort of natural event and it’s certain they couldn’t have survived.’

‘It just seems so… final.’

‘It’s horrible.’ Rationally she knows that her parents can’t, that they won’t come back, but she wants to retain that smidgeon of hope. All of the times the words ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’ have tripped from her tongue must add up to hours, days, maybe even weeks, months, years. Now she will never utter their names again and impatiently wait for their reply. For their attention. She doesn’t want to believe it but this form states in black and white the hurtful truth that they are really gone. She can’t accept it. She won’t.

She never said goodbye.

She pushes away the thought which batters her again and again, the way she had dismissed them so readily New Year’s Eve, so focused on her nails.

She never said goodbye.

They can’t be declared dead. Not without bodies. No matter what the experts say, there has to be a chance they are wrong.

Hasto be.

‘You have to stop her, Charlie.’

‘But…’ She hears Charlie breathing, tapping his fingers against something while he thinks. ‘I’ll call you back, Nina.’

‘But I’ve got to go—’ He’s already hung up.

Seconds later her phone rings again; it’s Maeve.

‘So… it’s going to be so weird not calling for you this morning. I hate that you’ve moved.’

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