The Fahrenheit Twins Read Free

away before
but never for this long. At Christmas 2003, a girl claiming to be a friend of Cathy’s rang Cathy’s auntie
in Dessborough, Northants, asking if Cathy could
come to visit. This visit never happened.
Cathy’s mother wants her to know that Cathy’s
stepfather is gone now and that her room is
back the way it was. ‘I have never stopped
loving you,’ she says. ‘Snoopy and Paddington are
next to your pillow, waiting for you to come home.’
Cathy suffers from epilepsy and may need medicine.
If you have seen her, please call the
Missing Persons Helpline.
    Cathy snoozes on, a stray lock of her blond hair fluttering in the updraft from her breath.
    I lean back in my chair and sip at my mug of soup. I taste nothing much, but the porridgy liquid is satisfying in my stomach, filling a vacuum there. I wonder what I will have to do in order to be allowed to stay in the Safehouse, and who I can ask about this. As a conversationalist I have to admit I’m pretty rusty. Apart from asking passers-by for spare change, I haven’t struck up a conversation with anyone for a very long time. How does it work? Do you make some comment about the weather? I glance up at the windows, which are opaque and high above the ground. There is a faint pearlescent glow coming through them, but I can’t tell if it’s still raining out there or shining fit to burst.
    The old woman who escorted me here hasn’t returned to tell me what I’m supposed to do next. Maybe she’ll escort somebody else into the hall at some stage, and I can ask her then. But the canteen ladies are cleaning up, putting the food away. They seem to have reason to believe I’m the last new arrival for the afternoon.
    I cradle my soup mug in both my hands, hiding my mouth behind it while I survey the dining hall some more. There is a susurrus of talk but remarkably little for such a large gathering of people. Most just sit, staring blindly ahead of them, mute and listless inside their black-and-white texts. I try to eavesdrop on the ones who are talking, but I barely catch a word: I’m too far away, they have no teeth or are from Newcastle, Cathy Stockton has started snoring.
    After about twenty minutes, a grizzled bald man walks over to me and parks himself on the chair nearest mine. He extends a hand across the faux -marble patio table for me to shake. There is no need for introductions. He is Eric James Sween, a former builder whose business had been in financial difficulties before he disappeared from his home in Broxburn, West Lothian, in January 1994.
    I wonder, as I shake his surprisingly weak hand, how long ago his wife said she would give anything just to know he was safe. Would she give as much today? The baby daughter she desperately wanted to show him may be experimenting with cigarettes by now.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘It’s a doddle.’
    ‘What is?’ I ask him.
    ‘What you have to do here.’
    ‘What do you have to do?’
    ‘A bit of manual labour. Not today: it’s raining too hard. But most days. A cinch.’
    The old women seem to have melted away from the canteen, leaving me alone in the dining hall with all these strangers.
    ‘Who runs this place?’ I ask Eric James Sween.
    ‘Some sort of society,’ he replies, as if sharing information unearthed after years of painstaking research.
    ‘Religious?’
    ‘Could be, could be.’ He grins. One of his long teeth is brown as a pecan nut. I suspect that if I could read the lower lines of his T-shirt, obscured by the table, there would be a hint of bigger problems than the failure of a business.
    Which reminds me:
    ‘No one must know what’s become of me.’
    Eric James Sween squints, still smiling, vaguely puzzled. I struggle to make myself absolutely clear.
    ‘The people who run this place … If they’re going to try to … make contact, you know … with …’ I leave it there, hoping he’ll understand without me having to name names – although of course one of the names is