The Missing Link

(unpublished)

The link was not missing.

John stared coldly at the gold necklace – whether gold or gold-coloured he wasn’t sure, then or now. 

He knew, however, that it had a missing link yesterday when – as part of his regular duty of care regarding his late parents’ property – he examined the necklace’s glittery existence.  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.  The necklace had always possessed a missing link within John’s living memory.  Thirty three circles of interlocking gold links – when there should have been thirty four.  His Mum once told him that it should have thirty four because her late husband (John’s Dad) had bought it for her 34th birthday. 

One day, not long after that birthday, a link snapped and her 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 thirty three links, thus discarding the unreliable broken link (without mending it).

When John inherited the necklace upon his Mum’s own later death, he had counted the links meticulously so that he could ensure it was 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 little John’s 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’.

There had indeed been thirty-three links.

Today, though, the day after yesterday, he was stunned to count thirty four links.  He counted again, sure he had made a mistake.  No, he was right, definitely thirty four links.

The missing link was missing.  Or, rather, upon further consideration, the missing link was not missing.  He wasn’t sure.  John 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. 

 The strange audit trail took his mind away from the mystery and towards tussling, joyfully, with states of missing and not missing to calm his tangled nerves … giving his worries the ability to go missing, too, as it were, without the need for John’s conscious volition to calm his own nerves about such worries … although this was all quite beyond even John’s twisted logic. 

He needed his late Mum’s placid logic and the comfort of her spoken Nursery Rhymes.  He could even imagine his Dad banging things in the distance from his beloved shed.  He had died longer ago than John felt he was able to remember.  But a comfort nevertheless.

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

The man had a kind soul and John 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.  John somehow remembered, either in fact or by hearsay, 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 bifurcated end of a hammer in a devotionally meticulous slowness – even though the nails were rusty and beyond use. 

His Dad had sworn there were seventy seven planks in the shed – he knew this as he had once made it himself.  But now laid out on the lawn there were only seventy six planks, enough to make John’s Dad cry.

John could now put the necklace over his head – the thirty fourth link just giving sufficient slack which the previous thirty three 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 wore the necklace – for the very first time – with filial pride.  He felt as if his beloved parents were watching him. 

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

That was before the thing round his neck began to tighten with a series of single clicks.  John became the missing link, someone who had never existed at all, the phantom child of childless parents, parents with nobody to leave their goods.  Every life has a catch somewhere.

It was enough to make any good man cry, as he hammered on the door of Heaven.  Then, in frustration, banged nails into it.