The Missing One Read Online Free PDF Page B

and curling lines carved on its body. Something squats inside it. I peer at it from a different angle and realize that I’m staring into a leering human face, or almost human, an oversized block-shaped thing with two big eyes and a grimace that shows tiny, square teeth. For a moment I feel as if it’s alive and might bite me. I put it down.
    Then I pry out the notebook. The cover won’t straighten. The paper is the colour of weak tea but her neat high-school cursive is unmistakable. It is the one thing from her American past that she never managed to shake off.
    I am looking at a string of vowels – ‘eeeeoooup’. I turn the page. There is a list of times in one column, starting at 06.00 and going to 18.18. Opposite the times are more vowel-heavy sounds, with notes – ‘pectoral slap’, ‘simultaneous dive’, ‘B breach’. I flick forwards a few pages – some scientific jargon, more odd observations: ‘tail lob’, ‘fluke lift’, ‘still’.
    *
    I haven’t thought about all this in years. It is easy to forget that my mother was once a scientist. I don’t know if I ever even asked her what her abandoned doctorate was about – marine biology, I know; dolphins, I think. But I probably never asked her for specifics because she was always so prickly about her past. As I got older I realized that her abandoned research was a source of deep regret and possibly shame. This, presumably, caused the early bouts of depression. It is a common enough story: an intelligent, energetic woman forced to drop the career she is passionate about and livea life of domestic boredom. No wonder she was depressed. When I was a teenager I decided that since I was the reason she had to give up her PhD, I must be the root cause of her unhappiness. The last thing I wanted to do, after that, was to dredge it up for her.
    Now, of course, I can see that it must have been more complicated than this. There was an undiagnosed postnatal depression for a start. But it’s too late now. I’ll never really know why she was so sad and I’ll never know what interested her about dolphins, or why she gave up her PhD, and never worked again. They have marine biology departments on this side of the Atlantic too, but she would never even take us to the aquarium. I will never know, now, about her childhood, or my grandparents, or why she disliked her father so much that she refused even to talk about him.
    I can’t imagine why she kept this ancient notebook. Why on earth would she want a reminder of a period of her life that she had tried so pathologically to forget? I flick forward and back a few times in case there are revelations or diary entries, but it really is just scientific notes.
    Still, it is odd to hold this proof of her past in my hands. I have always felt as if this first part of her life, the bit before she married my father and brought me to England, when she was American and young and free and a scientist, never really happened. My father behaved as if she wasn’t invented before he brought her to England. And she never seemed particularly American – though traces of an accent always haunted her speech – and there were the peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches that she called PBJ and put in our lunchboxes every day.
    She used to wrap them in acres of cling film. It would take us half the lunch hour just to pry them open. She did this with other packages and envelopes too. She used feet of sellotape wound round and round as if readying the envelope for a war zone rather than the sorting office. You’d actually need tools to get into them: Stanley knives, sharp scissors.
    For a second I sit, reeling. It is as if someone has opened me up, scooped my insides out and left a pulsing hole. I want my mum. I want her back. She cannot have gone. This is just not possible.
    I lay the notebook next to the carved fish thing. The walls