I have no personal, no family reason, to be there, yet I find myself looking at the missing.ie website again. The names, the dates, the last sightings. The first startled moment when I spot a familiar face! Then I realise that I recognise them only because I’ve seen their picture in an appeal on the news, or on a poster, not because I actually know them. And then – even worse, in one way because these seem somehow unappealed for – are the unfamiliar faces. Yet they too are still out there, even as they are still not out there.
So many of the photos are casual, family photos (well they must be, as the Jensen siblings in The Heart of Everything discover; for who of us has a formal shot ready for such a situation?) and there is often another person – or part of one – in the photo. I imagine what that individual must think, must feel, every time he or she sees the picture. Photos taken in pubs, in gardens, at parties, for ID cards. Photos taken in order to capture a happy moment are used to ask strangers to try and recall a face: they take on another, frightening significance.
I’m not mawkish. I don’t read about missing people with a shiver of prurience. But I am preoccupied by them. By the men and women lost to tragedy, accident or despair; to a collapse in mental health; or maybe to the desire to start again, to begin a new life somewhere fresh and uncharted. There have been a number of well-publicised cases over the last few years where someone with some form of dementia goes missing, and I’m sure the horror for the family is complicated by the worry that the person may not be able to make themselves found.
All three Jensen siblings are made share my concerns, though it is Anita – the eldest of the three, a woman mired in grief and anger – who carries these thoughts for the early part of the book: “She’s seen the photographs of the women who set off early to work and never return, the young men who don’t make it home from a night out, the sleep-heavy children stolen from their tiny beds. She’s watched their families, punch-drunk and crying on the televised appeals, then the reminder at one year on, the dull-eyed teddy bear, the memorial tree planted to mark a decade, the age-progressed images. And she’d be looking at the news and thinking, How shocking, there hadn’t ever been a trace of that little girl in all these years or whatever, before flicking over to another channel. The photos grow more poignant, more fragile, every year. All these people, lost to their own families, lost to themselves. Trapped while the spinning world relentlessly pushes the rest of us into the future.”
Her brother Raymond has a more practical approach: Mags is not here, therefore she is somewhere else. Find the somewhere else, we find her. Job done, and straight back home to Cork, and his girlfriend, and his unwritten screenplay, and his pints. Elin, youngest of the siblings by almost a decade, struggles with the practical side of the search. She removed herself from the family’s life seven years earlier. She now works as a children’s book writer/illustrator in Scotland. She doesn’t want to be in Dublin, looking for her mother, and she hates herself for feeling this way. In some ways both Elin and Anita’s son Jack are already “missing people” within their family.
Disappearance can be foisted upon people too: ageing brings about a sort of invisibility within society; a slow, enforced “missingness” in which an older person’s status can be withdrawn, respect tip-toeing out of the room. Because of that I decided to explore what could happen when the person who disappears is an older woman. Add to that the complication of dementia, and the picture gets even more blurred.
Anita, Raymond and Elin have to consider both the worry of her disappearance with the worry of what her life will be when she is found. How are they to cope when dementia takes its acid hold on her life and by extension, theirs? She is not going to be the same person. It is thinking about this “same person” that forces them all to realise that they didn’t really know who she was to begin with, they each had a version of “mother” that they played to, without ever considering whether or not it was accurate. They have shades of John Dashwood and his wife Fanny in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility: when they unequivocally determine to care for their mother their resolutions crack immediately, proven to be made of glass.
Yet isn’t this how our lives work; a constant cycle of promises made and remade? The days I’ve begun with promises to myself to be fitter, kinder, soberer, harder-working… that my intentions may slip away unheeded during the course of the day doesn’t make them any the less real or heartfelt at the time.
Mags is clever and quick-witted and curious about the world. She also spends a lot of time alone, which makes her reflect on the contradiction of living in a city and how it always forces us to be in the company of strangers. When she decides to stop answering the question, “how are you” with an automatic “I’m grand, thanks”, and instead tell the truth, she proves to herself that we are all constantly thrown up against other people in a series of superficial and largely meaningless connections.
She is echoing what I felt when I've done Canadian artist Janet Cardiff's The Missing Voice audio walk from Whitechapel Library (it's now part of the Gallery) in the east end of London to Liverpool Street Station. Ostensibly a trail that follows a (fictional) woman who is always just out of sight, who may even wish to be lost, The Missing Voice winds its way through the streets of Spitalfields and ends abruptly, abandoning the listener alone in the public concourse of Liverpool Street Station.
Its sound effects have always bizarrely fitted in with the live street sounds, making it exhilarating and disorientating all at once: you are trusting yourself to this stranger’s voice, to this search. The walk forces you to become a stalker, albeit a benign one. I’ve done this walk four, maybe five times, and each time the return journey to the library without the companionship of the voice was empty and noisy and lonely. I wanted to capture that feeling in The Heart of Everything, that sense of never quite knowing what’s at play. Of always being sure that the solution has to be around the next corner. Of there always being a next corner.
