The Other People: A Novel

Blood may be thicker than water but it’s a pretty useless substance for sticking anything together.

Families were just strangers, bonded to each other by accidents of birth and misplaced duty.

Katie picked up her mug of tea and took a sip. Predictably, it had gone cold. Sometimes, it seemed like her entire life was measured out in undrunk mugs of tea.

Families were just strangers, bonded to each other by accidents of birth and misplaced duty.

couldn’t choose your family. You couldn’t even choose whether to love them or not. You just sort of had to. Whatever they put you through.

Anyone who has ever lost someone hates Christmas. Christmas takes your pain and turns it up to eleven. It taunts your loss with every glistening treetop and “First Noel.” It reminds you that there is no respite, no let-up. Your grief is unrelenting and even if you manage to put it away, like a box of decorations, it will always come back. Reappearing every year, as familiar as Jacob Marley’s rotting ghost.

love you have for a child. From the minute you cradled that soft, sticky head in your arms, everything changed. You lived in a state of perpetual wonder and terror: wonder that you could have produced something so incredible, terror that at any moment they might be taken from you. Life had never seemed so fragile or so full of menace before.

Missing is different to being dead. In a way, it’s worse. Death offers finality. Death gives you permission to grieve. To hold memorials, to light candles and lay flowers. To let go.

Missing is limbo. You’re stranded; in a strange, bleak place where hope glimmers faintly at the horizon and misery and despair circle like vultures.

We live our lives in a state of denial. A blinkered belief that we are different, special. Protected by a mystical force field that deflects all the bad stuff.

Terrible things happen, of course, but they happen to other people; the ones you read about in newspapers. The haggard, tear-ravaged faces you see on the television.

We sympathize. We shed tears. Maybe we even light candles, leave flowers, create hashtags. And then we get on with our lives. Our special, safe, protected lives.

Until one day, one phone call, one sentence.

It’s about your wife…and your daughter.

And you realize it’s all an illusion. You’re not special. You’re just like everyone else, skipping across a minefield, trying to pretend that your whole world can’t, at any moment, be blown apart.

You never consider how that will feel. Not really. Because you have spent a lifetime not imagining it, as if to do so might tempt Fate to turn his ravaged face your way and see something he likes.

On the motorway, in the service stations, normal life was suspended. Everyone was on their way somewhere, at a point in between. In neither one place nor another. A little like Purgatory.