Her (8 page)

When I reach the road I stand there for a moment, looking up and down, my chest rising and falling, the air scouring my dry throat. The road’s quiet as dusk begins to settle, the jolly lollipop flash of the Belisha beacon starting to assert itself in the fading light. I realise a Fiat Punto has halted to let me cross. I wave it on. ‘Christopher?’ I shout, into the trees, and it’s a pathetic sound, weak and insubstantial, nothing like it feels.

This isn’t happening.

I need to call the police?

‘There she is.’ A voice behind me. I turn around, electrified by hope. The two women from the pond are hurrying along the path towards me, and a park attendant is with them, a man with a radio, but no child in a green anorak. The park attendant sees the expression on my face and puts the radio to his mouth.

It has only been five or ten minutes, I realise. It doesn’t sound like much. Anything could happen in five or ten minutes.

No.

I describe Christopher to the park keeper, who bends his head into the crackle, passing on the information to the police: Christopher Nash, nearly three (‘No, it’s Christopher, not Chris,’ and I nod dumbly, confirming this again, horrified by the contrast with the normal circumstances in which an explanation is required:
We always expected we’d abbreviate it, but he doesn’t look like a Chris. He just looks like a Christopher)
. Blond hair, blue eyes. Green quilted jacket, yellow-and-black bobble hat, navy trousers and wellingtons painted with beetles. Purple micro scooter.

This high
, I say, showing him, not sure how to quantify it.

Someone says my name, and it’s Fran from Monkey Music, with Ruby on her balance bike, heading for the gates and home. I see Fran’s face change as she comes closer and sees the look on mine. I start to cry then, and the park keeper, whose name is Gareth or Gary, says, ‘The police will be here any minute,’ and moves away, letting Fran get closer. As she hugs me, Ruby looking up at me with huge curious eyes, I see that Cecily has nodded off in the buggy. Part of me is still stuck in that old, safe life, because for a moment I feel the echo of that tinpot panic:
too late for a nap, she won’t go down easily at seven.
Then, contemptuously, I let the thought go, because it means nothing.

The dark is racing across the park now. The two ladies who have been standing around talking in low voices shuffle off apologetically, muttering reassurances. Then we hear the siren. A moment later I’m being helped into a police car while Fran takes the buggy. ‘Thank you, I’ll call you,’ I mouth as the car pulls off, and I see her face as I go, strobing in the light.

They’ve switched off the siren, I don’t know why.

There are two youngish police officers in the car, they tell me their first names, John and Lauren, and they do their best: they seem organised, reassuringly invoking protocols, but I can sense the undercurrent beneath what they say. ‘We’ve got another car out locally and two foot patrols doing the park,’ Lauren tells me, leaning back so I can hear what she says as John takes a right towards the cemetery, ‘And the chances are, he has just wandered off, got lost somewhere. We’ll just drive around the neighbourhood and see if we can spot him anywhere. Chances are, he hasn’t gone very far.’ She asks if I wouldn’t mind buckling up.

The radio hisses and whistles, another unit reporting from higher up the hill. My heart soars and then plummets. ‘Just keep your eyes peeled,’ John says. ‘We’ll go nice and slow, so we don’t miss anything.’

We’re driving along the edge of the estate, the white stepped terraces chalky under the sodium lights. Behind the little balconies, windows are lighting up. The aquarium flicker of TVs, the snub as people pull curtains.

By the wheelie bins, six or seven kids kick a football against a wall. They scatter when the police car slows to a halt alongside, but John rolls down his window and calls, ‘We’re looking for a lost toddler,’ and the boys come closer, interested, possibly even concerned, despite themselves. They haven’t seen anything.
Thanks. If you do
. . . Window up, drive on.

This is it, this is really happening
.

A bus sails by, full of light, people inside reading books, checking their phones, looking bored.

‘Is there anyone you need to call?’ Lauren asks, and I say no, though I know I must ring Ben. But I’m trying to put that off for as long as I can. Telling him, like telling Fran, requires a vocabulary that I don’t possess. I keep my eyes on the pavements, the deep dark patches of shadow at the edges of things: buildings, bushes, stairwells.

We turn left at the library and slowly work back towards the hospital, which rises up in front of us, huge and illuminated, like an ocean liner. As we drive past the entrance, I see the shuttered florist’s kiosk, the empty escalators endlessly rolling up and down. Three smokers in wheelchairs are spaced out in the concrete plaza, one trailing an IV stand.

Here the streets are a little busier, people coming home from the tube or changing buses. Pizza-delivery signs, the cold white of cyclists’ LEDs. Up the hill, a snaking impatient chain of ember-red brake lights.

It has been several years since I’ve been out alone at this time of day, able to notice such things. These are sights I seldom see.

The radio crackles now and again, officers checking in, nothing to report.

‘You’re in Carmody Street, aren’t you,’ says Lauren, consulting her notes. ‘So we could just head down there, just to make sure.’

My face is wet with tears, and the sensation makes other tears come faster.
He’s not quite three. Last week, I forgot the bananas in Sainsbury’s, so I left him in the checkout queue with the basket, I said I’d only be a minute, but he came to find me. ‘I was scared,’ he said, ‘I was scared you wouldn’t come back,’ and even as I picked him up and hugged him, I felt a rush of irritation. Just thirty seconds, is that too much to ask?
I squeeze my eyes shut; and then, quickly, I open them again, because I might miss something, and I mustn’t miss anything.

Bus stop. Railings. Postbox. All the familiar things.

The tick of indicators as the police car pulls out, crossing the main road and taking the first right down Carmody Street. Sunil Faradosa lifts his bike through the front door, Kay Callaghan is hauling Morrison’s bags out of the boot. ‘Nothing,’ I say, as the front step of our house comes into view. ‘Can we go back to the park?’

‘I think we should probably go down to the station,’ Lauren says, and I close my eyes, just for a second, unable to bear the implications, assailed by an overwhelming sense of him – the softness of his skin, his hand sticky in mine, the way he smells when he is asleep, Blue Bunny tucked under his cheek – and I think I’m going to be sick. I open my window and inhale.
In, out. In, out.
I see John stretching up to check me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Just hold on,’ he says, switching on the siren.

The radio crackles again, and a man’s voice says something very quickly, I can’t quite understand what, but Lauren has picked up and says, ‘Ten-four, that’s good news,’ and I can hardly accept it, not at first, it feels like the sort of luck I’m not in any way entitled to; but when she leans back towards me, the handset still held close to her mouth, I see the expression on her face.

They keep the siren on so we get to the police station in maybe four or five minutes. But I won’t believe it. I won’t believe it when we’re pulling up in the car park, and I won’t believe it when Lauren stands back so I can run on ahead, into the bleak illumination of the reception area, where Christopher is sitting with a woman in uniform who is placing a little plastic cup of hot chocolate on the table in front of him. He glances up eagerly when I call his name, and he looks fine: exactly the same, as if nothing has happened. Behind him, the clock on the wall says it’s not quite six. He has been missing for just under an hour. Fifty minutes, maybe.

I kneel down in front of him and wrap him in my arms, and he lets me, for a moment, and then he starts to struggle, and he says, ‘Look, hot chocolate,’ and I allow him to wriggle away from me, just for a moment, so he can take a sip, and then he looks up, distressed,
It’s too hot
, and Lauren laughs and says she’ll go and top it up with some milk from the fridge. So I sit down and pull him onto my knee and press my head against him while he eats another biscuit, and I can feel the detonations as he crunches through the Bourbon Cream.

When she comes back with the cup, Lauren tells me he was found just outside the park at the top of the hill, about ten or fifteen minutes ago. He was on the street, sitting on someone’s front step, playing with their cat. Lady was on her way out, so she called the station and dropped him off on the way.

‘These things happen,’ Lauren says.

I guess so, I say. Thank God.

‘Where did you go?’ I ask him some time later. I’ve read the story (
Goodnight room and the red balloon, Goodnight kittens, goodnight mittens
), and I’m lying next to him on his low bed. He’s in his flannel sheep pyjamas, his hair still a little damp, the emerald-green towel hanging on the doorknob, a beaker of water on his bedside table next to his Moomin collection and the Playmobil guinea pig pen. Fran has dropped Cecily back, I’ve fed her, and now Ben is putting her down in our room.

‘Where did you go? You know, you mustn’t wander off like that, darling. I missed you.’

He picks up Blue Bunny, presses one long velvety ear to his top lip: something he does when ready for sleep. ‘Don’t go away again,’ he says.

‘I won’t. It’s easy to get lost, isn’t it. It was a bit scary. You need to stay with Mummy.’

‘I want my scooter,’ he says.

‘I wonder where it is,’ I say. ‘Never mind, we’ll get you another one.’

He looks sad. ‘Poor scooter,’ he says, ‘All alone. The lady said to leave it.’

‘What lady?’ I say, but he’s yawning, and I pull the duvet up to his chin. ‘Maybe another child found it,’ I say. ‘A little boy who always wanted a purple scooter, but didn’t get one for Christmas. He’ll look after it.’

He rolls over and I lean across to switch off the lamp. On the chest of drawers his toadstool nightlight glows: the china mice silhouetted in the open doorway, the cosy little golden windows. I remember Christopher’s bitter disappointment when we presented it to him, when he first peered in those windows, and at first I didn’t know what was wrong, and then I realised – some distant echo from my own childhood – that he was expecting to see beds and a little stove in there rather than electrics and a low-voltage bulb. ‘It’s just pretend,’ I explained. ‘It’s to look at. It’s not real.’

‘Mama,’ he murmurs into Blue Bunny, and I kiss him, inhaling his smell, toothpaste and camomile shampoo, feeling the sturdy compact warmth of him, telling myself,
He’s fine. Nothing happened. One of those things. Everything’s fine.

Walking back from the studio, I decide to go the long way home, through the park. The air still feels damp after the quick flurry of rain, but there’s a sense that we’re on the cusp of a new season, that something’s about to change. The sun’s a little higher in the sky than it was this time yesterday. If you half-close your eyes, a promise of green is just starting to declare itself, quite tentatively, on the trees.

I come round the corner, the sun on my back, and see a small boy. He’s on a scooter, coasting along the flat bit of path by the compost bins, one foot casually held out to the side, demonstrating the absolute effortlessness of the activity. A slow graceful loop and a push, and he’s off again, coming towards me, squinting a little in the sun.

I walk along the hedge towards him, thinking about popping into the café for a cup of tea before going home, and then I recognise him, even though he’s wearing a striped knitted cap over his bright hair. There’s a flash of yellow and black as he goes past. I turn to look after him, and then I see her in the playground, a little way off: angled away, bending over the swing, talking to the baby who is bundled up in a pale blue snowsuit – one of her brother’s castoffs. ‘Do you want to go higher?’ I hear Emma say, quite clearly. ‘Do you want to go over the top?’

The hum of the scooter’s wheels as Christopher comes past me again, swooping busily towards the line of yews. I can see the pleasure he takes in his mastery of the movement.

I was going this way, anyway. So it’s not really following. I keep to the route I’d planned, under the trees, heading in the direction of the café. It’s dark here, and the foliage is full of the afternoon’s brief rain shower. He’s a little ahead of me, and then he’s slowing down, turning. But the path is too narrow here, and the scooter runs into the hedge. He steps off it, tugs it round. I know no one can see us. ‘Hello Christopher!’ I say cheerfully, coming closer.

He looks up at me, puzzled, one foot on the scooter board. Those beetle-patterned wellingtons, splashed with mud.

‘Do you remember me?’ I bend down in front of him, smiling. ‘Where’s your mummy? I know your mummy. She’s called Emma, isn’t she? And you’re Christopher.’

One hand rests on the scooter, the other has gone swiftly to his mouth.

‘Have you lost her? Are you lost?’

He won’t say anything. I know I don’t have much time.

‘Oh well, never mind, I’ll help you find her. Come on.’ I hold out my hand and straighten up. ‘Don’t worry. She won’t be far away. We’ll find her.’

I can see he doesn’t really want to come with me, but the pull of convention – the desire to do the right, the expected thing – is strong, even in children this young. No one wants to look the fool. ‘Come on,’ I say, jollily. ‘Let’s find her. I’ll bet she hasn’t gone far.’ And I take his hand, and I tug it, just a little, so he moves off with me, dragging the scooter with him. ‘Oh, let’s leave that,’ I say, because I imagine it’ll be one of the things she’ll tell people to look out for, like the yellow knitted cap. ‘Look, I’ll just put it behind this bush, just here, for safekeeping. No one will see it there. We can come and fetch it once we’ve found her. How about that? And, oh dear, look, your hat, it’s all wet. Let me put it in my bag for now. Pop your hood up. That’s right.