The Girls Beneath. Ross Armstrong

to ask if anyone has any information about the missing girl?’

      Silence.

      A shuffle of feet.

      I sense Miss Nixon’s stony visage in my periphery.

      More silence.

      I scan their stunned faces. Maybe Bartu’s right, maybe I am pretty blunt these days. I make a judgement. I think they had no idea that one of their number was missing, until now. That’s what it looks like. I check just to make sure.

      ‘Anyone at all? Know anything?’

      Emre Bartu’s open mouth comes into focus, making a small dark ‘o’. His eyes are like snooker balls, bare and marmoreal.

      I wait a few seconds. One, two, three. Then someone speaks. But unfortunately it’s only Emre Bartu.

      ‘No? That’s fine. Thank you. Dismissed!’

      They detonate into a flurry of chatter, standing and jostling each other as they start to flow out. Nixon comes towards me and speaks out of the corner of her mouth.

      ‘PC Stevens agreed we shouldn’t tell them about this yet,’ she says.

      ‘Sorry, miscommunication. It’s standard practice to… throw it out there early, you know.’

      Emre is at the back. Trapped as he sees me talking to Miss Nixon.

      ‘I wish you would have told me you were going to do that.’

      ‘Apologies again. He shouldn’t have told you it was possible to keep it under wraps. I can only apologise… on his behalf.’

      ‘So what do we do now?’ She says.

      Emre hears none of this. He can only see our mouths move as he swims through the crowd, smiling, trying to seem in control. He turns for a second and mouths a few words to a couple of them. This allows me to do what I do next.

      ‘Here you are,’ I say, palming her my number.

      I decided to make a few cards and keep them in my right pocket. You have to be prepared.

      If you want to dive in face first.

      If you want to crawl against the current.

      If you want to make your own tide.

      ‘Let’s see what happens. You might get a knock on your office door. If you do, let me know about it.’

      I’m pleased with the clarity of my sentiment.

      ‘Putting an idea in the water always tends to dig up something,’ I say, mixing metaphors like a real pro.

      I do all this while scratching my head as if talking about the weather, keeping it casual for the eyes of Bartu, the mirage of small talk when it scarcely gets much larger.

      But he suspects by now. He’s not smiling anymore, no matter how hard he tries.

      I beat him.

      I won.

      I got to ask my questions.

      He puts his hand up, drowning in a sea of boys and girls. He’s too far away.

      He’s paralysed to stop what comes next.

8

       ‘Can’t, Dah dah dah dee dah, out of, my head…’

      The girl’s home smells of orange. Not of oranges. Not citrus. It smells of the colour orange. I’d learnt to associate smells with colours, a new trick, and not one of my willing. Another brain adaptation, an aroma-based synaesthesia. You can, in effect, see scents.

      It’s got stronger every day since the bullet. A purple fog appearing in the school as I smelt the cleaning fluid, a waterfall of light green trickling from the ceiling of Dr Ryans’ office made by his herbaceous smoke remnants.

      But orange grips me hard here as her mother lets us into the house. If it were a musical note it would be an ‘A’. I picture an orange letter ‘A’. It’s my mind’s automatic reflex.

      Then a pink smell intrudes. I can’t hear it’s note yet, but I see it snakes through the orange mist.

      As I watch the colours move, I decide to wow them with a deduction I’ve made.

      ‘It was good of you to get Tanya that cat she wanted so much, what with your allergy,’ I say.

      ‘I’m sorry, what?’ Ms Fraser says.

      Our stilted conversation hadn’t turned to cats or allergies on the way here, so Bartu is left pondering how we move on from this non-sequitur.

      ‘It’s just that there are two single hairs from a Siberian on the settee, just enough to suggest that someone who’s usually here, probably Tanya, grooms her meticulously and that on the odd occasion the cat does make it into this room she’s quickly removed, leaving little behind her. People get Siberians because they’re supposed to be better for allergies, but I question the science on that. Your eyes aren’t reddened and you’re not wheezing, which tells me the air filter on the floor is doing its job. I’d also advise you to keep the window open but I imagine you did until it turned too cold for that. And then there’s the pink smell of Neem Oil, found in cat but not human shampoo. Smells like Tanya promised to wash her, twice a week I’d say, as another way of persuading you it’d help manage the dander that causes allergies.’

      Bartu shakes his head and gives Ms Fraser an apologetic look. ‘I can’t smell anything.’

      ‘You wouldn’t. My sense of smell is… a little keener than most, and you can’t sense habitual smells in your own home, due to what’s called olfactory adaptation, giving you no chance at all, Ms Fraser. Also, your cat has diabetes.’

      She stares at me. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have a diabetic cat.’

      ‘Well, the kitchen roll Tanya seems to have stashed in various places about the house, just in case of emergencies, suggests otherwise. I’m guessing her toilet habits have recently become more unpredictable, plus there’s a subtle scent of sweetness in the air, the odour of which would be consistent with diabetic cat urine. Not that your home smells of cat urine. You’ve hidden it well and you’re a kind mother. Again, I just have a keener sense than most.’

      She gives me a look that suggests two things. Either this woman is dumbfounded by the diagnosis. Or she doesn’t have a cat. Either way, it’s probably best to move on from this.

      ‘Could you show us her room?’ I ask.

      I also picture numbers as distinctly coloured.

      The number one is purple.

      Two yellow.

      Three blue.

      And I picture them circling my head whenever they come to mind.

      1 is at a ten-degree angle to my forehead.

      2 is at about twenty-five.

      Then the rest disperse themselves in fifteen-degree intervals around me. This side effect doesn’t seem of much practical use but the brain isn’t always trying to help, sometimes it’s merely trying to exist the only way it can.

      The walls appear to me vaguely orange, the carpet on the stairs is orange, the pictures in the hallway are all various shades of orange, the scent of cinnamon and pine, I imagine, subtle notes of a recent Christmas that only I can smell. The girl’s bedroom door is the same colour.

      Bartu looks at me, barely disguising his discomfort at being here. Exactly where he didn’t want us to end up. But when Miss Nixon revealed that the missing girl’s mother was coming in to speak to her, I couldn’t resist asking if I could have a word, too. Nixon had agreed to do the introductions by the time Bartu caught up with us heading to her office.

      When I suggested to Ms Fraser that