The Missing Missing

 He stared coldly at the old photo of the gold necklace – whether gold or gold-coloured he wasn’t sure, then in real life or now in the photo. The photo was in black and white. He knew, however, that the necklace had a missing link when the photo was taken and — as part of his regular duty of care regarding his late parents’ property — he examined the necklace’s glittery existence in the dim light of the photo.  Yes, he had stared it at yesterday, as he stared at it the next day, as maybe he will still stare at it tomorrow. 

The link was missing on all previous occasions of his memory, even before the photo was taken.  The necklace had always possessed a missing link within his living memory.  Twenty one large circles of interlocking gold links – when there should have been twenty two. His Mum once told him that it should have twenty two because her late husband (his Dad) had bought it for her 22nd birthday, when she was still beautiful, she claimed, with a laugh.

One day, not long after that birthday, a link snapped and her now late husband joined the whole necklace back together again in his shed, his wonderfully appointed shed; he had used cutting and welding equipment to create a necklace of twenty one links, thus discarding the unreliable broken link (without mending it).

When their son inherited all his mother’s goods upon her own later death, the whole necklace itself was found to be missing, but he had managed to find the old photo and. counted the links meticulously so that he could remember the same necklace she had always proudly shown him.  He remembered her fetching it from its click-tight box (she never wore it) and placing it in his tiny upraised palms just for a minute or so of reverent silence – of wordless but mouthed counting – then replacing it in tissue paper for its latest in a long line of ‘hibernations’. He was not born till she was twenty-three.

The photo proved there had indeed been only twenty-one links when the photo was taken.

Today, though, the day after yesterday, he was stunned to count twenty-two links in the photo,  He counted again, sure he had made a mistake.  No, he was right, definitely twenty-one links. He had somehow hoped that proof of its earlier existence by means of a photo would help find the necklace itself. He could not rationalise why this should be so. But now he wondered if this was the right necklace. Or even the right photo. But it had the right mansion in the background.

The missing link was missing.  Or, rather, upon further consideration, the missing link was not missing.  He wasn’t sure.  He was never sure, it seemed, in the light of today’s events.  If it were missing, there must be a gap the size of a link.  Then the missing link would be simply missing as opposed to being not missing, but still there. He then examined the photo in more detail. Was this indeed the right photo album. And he began to look through later pages and found several more photos of the same necklace. Too many or too distant to count the links in each one. Why were there so many photographs of the same necklace? All with the same mansion in the background.

 The strange journey through the album took his mind away from the mystery and he started thinking of things going missing … hoping his world-weary worries would go missing, too.

He needed his late Mum’s placid logic and the comfort of her Nursery Rhymes she used to recite to him when he was a child.  He could even imagine his Dad banging things in the distance from his Dad’s beloved shed.  He had died longer ago than his son felt he was able to remember.  But a comfort nevertheless. Each person in his life was now missing. Seemed to calm him down. At least he could not argue with himself. Being alone was some sort of comfort. Best to make the best of things. The best of missing things,

He again recalled his Mum telling him how his Dad had repaired the broken necklace – making an unbroken necklace whole again, if it was not exactly, as a result, the same necklace. 

His Dad had a kind soul and his son hoped he had inherited that, too.  With steady grey-iron eyes and a skill for making things and unmaking things, his Dad had once demolished his shed when it grew too old to be a shed.  He somehow remembered that his Dad had not demolished it with a sledgehammer but meticulously plank by plank – even though the planks were rotted through and quite worthless: extracting each nail with the clawed end of a hammer in a devotionally meticulous slowness – even though the nails were rusty and beyond use. Making each tiny part of the shed go missing till the whole shed would finally give up the ghost.

His Dad had sworn there were fifty planks in the shed – he knew this as he had once made it himself.  But now laid out on the lawn there were only forty nine planks, enough to make his Dad cry. He remembered his Dad taking a photo of the planks spread across the lawn. He remembered the photo had grey grass and a greyer sky, with their mansion in the background. Even the sun was another shade of grey. 

He could remember putting the necklace over his own head as a boy – the twenty-second link just giving sufficient slack to allow it over his head which the previous twenty-one links hadn’t possessed. 

There was no catch. 

It was a necklace that was donned and doffed like this without any mechanism (for breaking its circle then completing it again) once it was around the neck.  He had worn the necklace – for the very first time – with childish pride.  He remembered his beloved parents were watching him. Taking a photo of the end result of the whole event. That photo had since gone missing. 

Well, now he knew that was a false memory. The photo never went missing as it had never existed in the first place.

He tried to think of a link, some clever end that would bring matters back to their beginning, the son’s story of a  life lived – thus making a whole.  The whole felt very untidy.  It couldn’t be a whole because it had actually grown a gap as large as the missing link, leaving his life just hanging there forever at a a loose end.

That was before the thing he imagined around his neck began to tighten with a series of single clicks. He became the missing link, someone who had never existed at all, the phantom child of childless parents, parents with nobody to whom they could leave their goods.  Every life has a catch somewhere. And we all go missing in the end.

Such thoughts were enough to make any good man cry, as he knocked on the door of Heaven.  Then, in frustration, he hung the missing photograph onto one of the door’s planks, one of the nails he used happening to be hammered straight through the blurred grey neck around which the 22 carat gold necklace had once sat. And he then remembered the missing mansion, because, long before any photographs had been taken of it, it had been slowly dismantled into a ground zero, his Dad having counted each brick and each defenestration along the way — a dismantlement beginning with the basement, but leaving, till last, the roof-ridge where the wife and mother sat as if she were waiting to be rescued from floods.