Free The Missing One by Lucy Atkins Page A

asleep after rampaging up and down the cabin for the first four hours with me behind him, trying to stop him from grabbing things and bothering people. He is sprawled across my lap now, fingers uncurled, mouth open, but his hair is static and wild, as if it alone refuses to admit defeat.
    I sip some water and shift gently to get my back in a better position, fearful of waking him because I know that he is perfectly capable of staying awake for the whole nine hours, slowly spiralling through excitement and hyper-activity into full-blown hysteria.
    I see my face reflected in the window and for a second I don’t know who it is that I am looking at. I thought I loved my hair but its absence is intensely liberating. I touch myhead and it feels smooth. My fingers expect length and weight, even though I know it’s gone. I can feel my curls in my hands as I twist my hair up off my neck, the same way I can feel Finn’s newborn mouth suctioning onto my nipple, or Doug’s hands cupping my chin. Body memories; lost things.
    The cut was an impulse. As we waited in the drizzle outside the bus station for the Heathrow Express, I found myself staring at a hairdresser’s sign across the road: ‘Walk-Ins Welcome’. We were far too early anyway. There was time to kill.
    While bored hairdressers fussed around Finn, giving him a lollipop and letting him play with the brushes, I shed my hair. The girl kept asking if I was sure, but I could tell she was thrilled to slice off great, satisfying chunks. She held them up like curling bouquets as she snipped. Afterwards Finn looked at me with a sort of respect and tentatively patted my head with both hands. ‘All gone!’
    I could watch a movie. Or read. I pick up the
High Flyers
magazine and flick through it. There is an article about totem poles of the Pacific Northwest. I skim paragraphs about totem meanings – pride, remembrance, bereavement. How the poles, made of rainforest wood, will disintegrate over the years and how they are built in the understanding that they will be reabsorbed into the earth one day. Nothing lasts for ever. We are all part of a bigger cycle, birth and decay. A subheading catches my eye – ‘
Shame Poles
’ –
totems erected by tribes to shame people for their unpaid debts or crimes
. But I can’t concentrate properly on the text. My eyes are sotired. The words won’t quite line up. I stare at the pictures – faces, symbols, black beaks. I close the magazine, shut my eyes.
    I mustn’t think about what I’m doing. I am in flight.
    Another memory surfaces – I must have been nine or ten. I told the teacher to shut up and then ran for my life – out the staff door, down the steps. As I pounded across the playground I glanced back and saw the faces of my classmates pressed against the picture window, thirty mouths hanging open. This is the feeling that I have right now: I am galloping away, but beneath the adrenalin-fuelled outrage is a strong sense that this can’t end well.
    When I got back to Oxford this morning – only this morning – I called Doug.
    â€˜You’re home.’
    â€˜No – I’m going away for a bit. I need to think.’
    â€˜What? What – where are you going? Back to Sussex?’
    â€˜I’m going to take Finn to visit relatives – in Vancouver.’
    â€˜You what? You’re going to Vancouver? Canada? What relatives? You haven’t got any relatives in Vancouver. Kal … Jesus … This is—’
    â€˜I need to get away, Doug.’
    â€˜Is this about the texts you saw on my phone? Look – listen – I know you’re in shock right now. You just lost your mother. It’s not—’
    â€˜Oh my God!’ I cut him off. ‘Are you honestly about to say “it’s not what you think”?’
    â€˜OK. We have to talk about this. Wait there.