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Nobody seemed to know, and, despite attempts to find out over many long years, his whereabouts and newfound circumstances remained a mystery. His parents couldn’t be asked about it. One of them was dead and the other off the scene. The rest of his wider British family, who first arrived in the UK from Lithuania and Poland in the late 1800s, were now globally dispersed, mostly to South Africa. Today that would only be an email away, but in those days it might just as well have been Mars.
Such is the way of many exit ghosts. An estimated 170,000 people go missing every year in Britain. Mercifully few of them are abducted by strangers, even if these are the shocking cases that understandably capture the popular imagination. Rather, according to organisations such as Missing People, they are far more likely to have contrived to abandon their families. In all, according to the latest UK Missing Persons Data Report, 96 per cent will eventually reappear having suffered no physical harm. The same lack of harm, however, doesn’t always apply to the emotional well-being of those they have left.
Some who go missing are escaping the law or bad debts. Some are kids who have run away from home. A number have mental health issues. For the most part, though, according to Francisco Garcia, author of If You Were There: Missing People and the Marks They Leave Behind, these are mostly individuals like my father: people looking to get out of jagged domestic situations they perceive to have become intolerable. And, as Garcia writes of his own disappeared father, who vanished when he was seven, those left behind will more often mentally make do with ‘yoked-together fragments’ of memory to be interpreted with as much generosity as can be mustered.
In the years following my father’s disappearance, my mother, now back in New Zealand, often seemed to forget where she was or even who she was. It was as if what had happened in England made her lose all sense of continuity. She never remarried or, as far as I’m aware, looked twice at another man again.
It seems almost absurd to even be talking about such a subject, let alone considering it as a social epidemic, in a world in which interconnectedness has become the name of the global game. Everything we supposedly need to know is within reach of a computer search engine. Our work histories. The articles we may have produced. Our late-night rants and oh-so-perfect family shots on social media. All of it is now just a mouse-click away. And yet, with apparent ease, tens of thousands of people still manage to disappear.
‘Empires dissolve and peoples disappear,’ the English poet William Watson, whose work my father was rather fond of, reminds us, but ‘the song passes not away.’ Especially not one particular song by a namesake artist.
A few days after Cave’s swirling performance of the Cohen tune, I was surprised to receive the most specific answer of all. At the time of the show, almost to the moment Cave played ‘Avalanche’, Lionel had died in Eastbourne aged 86. A bad heart, according to the messenger, and she should know because she was a half-sister from another domestic arrangement I knew nothing about until that moment. She had been unaware of me until not much earlier. She had been sorting through her — our — father’s effects, in a matter-of-fact way, only to discover a reference to me in his papers. On this occasion, technology was fortunately indeed a help. A couple of hours of online research filled in the gaps for her. It turned out that they had been living one county over in East Sussex for several decades. What does one say about something like that? Not a lot, probably. You just clamber out from beneath the rubble and keep listening to the music.
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