‘I think,’ Marilyn Angus said, taking off her glasses, ‘I am going mad. I think if this goes on for another five minutes, I shall be mad.’
They had tried doing normal things. They should be as normal as possible, if only for Lucy’s sake, though there was nothing normal about Lucy, as she sat as close as she could to one or other of her parents while trying to pretend she was not doing so, and bit the fingernails she had taken such care in growing down to the quick.
They had tried cooking supper and eating it and most of it lay congealing in the bin. They had tried answering emails, and watching television and playing Scrabble and Racing Demon.
‘What are we doing this for? We never do this. We only do this at Christmas.’ Lucy had got up and walked away, leaving the words frozen in mid-game on the board.
They had switched on the television and heard the terrible canned laughter like demonic cackling in their ears and turned it off.
They had poured gin and wine and tea, and the glasses stood about still full. Only the teacups were emptied, over and over again.
‘I’m going to have a bath,’ Marilyn Angus said. ‘Call me if …’
Lucy slid off her chair as her mother left the room and sidled behind her up the stairs. Marilyn Angus went into the bathroom and out of the usual habit closed and locked the door. Lucy sat on the floor outside it, touching the panel with her arm.
The steam billowed up smelling of freesias. Marilyn wished she had not put essence into the water. It seemed wrong. Her bathwater ought to be plain, to smell of nothing, to be penitential. She ran cold into it so that it would not be so hot, seem so luxurious and enjoyable. She must not enjoy anything until …
What could be happening to David, where David might be, who was with him, what they were saying and doing to him, was there, starting out of the traps and racing round the track of the inside of her head over and over again. His face was in front of her and occasionally she saw a bit of his body, his thin, frail-looking wrist, his toes, his ear with the small cauliflower frill at the top. The thought of any part of his body not just being hurt or defiled but even being touched, even being looked at, by someone who meant him harm made her retch with a sickness that sent her to the basin but from which nothing came, though she stared down expecting black bile to be there, swirling round under the running taps, the bile her whole stomach was filled with.
Not knowing. Was it true that not knowing was the worst of this? She needed to ask someone who had been through it. The names of those people, known from newspapers and the television and radio, rang in her head. She needed to talk to one of them, anyone, to ask if not knowing was the worst, or if, when things were known, those things were the greatest horror of all and the not knowing had been nothing, a soothing, tranquil, paradisal state by comparison.
She would ask Kate, the policewoman who had been assigned to them and was now, indeed, living with them, though Marilyn would have preferred her not to be there. She neither liked nor disliked her, she simply did not want or need, or see the need for, her permanent, intrusive presence. She would ask Kate. Kate could get addresses, numbers, couldn’t she, the station would have computers to talk to other computers and send the telephone numbers of those people she needed to speak to across the ether. It did not much matter which parent of what child, what had happened to that boy or girl, how long they had been missing, in what state they had been found. Anyone, anyone at all would do. Just so long as she could talk to them and ask them the questions she could ask no one else. And they might have answers. No one else had answers, but they might.
She saw David as a newborn baby writhing beside her, still attached to the cord, still covered in the white strands of mucus and caul, mouth roaring with fury at being naked under these blue-white lights.
She saw David racing down the wing with the ball at his feet and Ryan Giggs in his head and the shouting schoolboys and parents on the side cheering.
She let out the bellow of a cow that has had its calf taken away, the bellow of pain and rage and bewilderment and distress that sent Lucy backing away from the door on her hands and knees.
Alan, followed by Kate, came running up the stairs.
Lucy’s bedroom door banged shut.
Marilyn sat in the cooling bathwater that smelled too strongly, sickeningly of freesia and heard the appalling noise and was puzzled, unable to tell where it was coming from or why.
The phone was ringing as she returned to the kitchen, dressed again and calmer, Kate behind her, touching her arm.
‘Oh God.’
It could not be news; Kate would receive that first, on her radio, and prepare them for it, good or bad, but the sound of the telephone bell was terrifying now, any intrusion from outside could be something to do with David.
‘Alan Angus …’
Do not answer the telephone, they had said, leave that to us. Leave us to take the enquiries and the well-wishers and the lunatics and the press, let us deal with it all. Alan would have none of that. He was permanently on call, even now, even through all of this … patients came first.
Marilyn sat in the chair by the fire watching as he listened and jotted down a note.
‘What time did they bring her in? How long has she been unconscious? How much bleeding? OK, we need a theatre, I’m on my way.’
She could not bring herself to say anything. He had to go. He could not ignore it. Not even now.
‘Woman cyclist hit by a car.’ He glanced at the policewoman, coming in with yet another tray of tea.
‘I’m going to the hospital. I’ll be in theatre but you can page me.’
‘Can’t someone else do it? Can’t the registrar –’
‘Too difficult. I’m needed. Can’t leave it to Michael.’
He got to the front door, then came back. ‘Hadn’t you better check on Lucy?’
Marilyn looked at the teacups. She had thought she knew Alan but she did not. She had thought they were a close couple but they were not. What had happened had separated them as if a knife had sliced their marriage in half. Alan had retreated into work, insisting on being called in for every neurological trauma, doing a full list during the day, taking every clinic. Alan did not talk about David. Alan did not talk to her. ‘Hadn’t you better check on Lucy?’ Alan could not face Lucy himself.
‘Would you like me to go up and talk to her?’ Kate asked.
She was a nice woman, Kate. Pleasant face. Neat hair. Sympathetic. Easy. If you had to have someone living in your house, at your elbow, behind you, beside you, day and night, you could not do better than nice, understanding, shrewd Kate. Marilyn thought she might kill Kate. It was not the police woman’s fault.
‘No. I should.’
‘Everyone has to cope in their own way as best they can. Your husband copes by being at the hospital.’
‘And what do I do? I cope by not coping. I cope by having hysterics in the bath and terrifying my daughter who is already beside herself with fear. I cope. I don’t cope. How can you expect us to?’
‘I know.’
‘No, you don’t know. You have no possible idea.’
‘Actually –’
‘How do you? How can you imagine what it is like?’
‘By … thinking it is my son. Peter. Or – Peter when he was nine.’
The fire which they had lit for comfort as much as for warmth shifted within itself and a little heap of coals which had burned through subsided into glowing ash.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No. Never say that. You can say anything at all to me, you know that, but you absolutely do not have to apologise to me, OK?’
‘You’re very good.’
‘No, I’m doing my job. I wish I didn’t have to, Marilyn. I wish I wasn’t here as much as you wish me away. I wish there were no reason for me to be here.’
‘When they find his body there won’t be any need. He is dead, you know. I’m quite sure of it.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Why?’
Kate shrugged.
‘I’d better go up to Lucy.’
‘Yes.’
‘If he is dead, please God they killed him very quickly.’
She waited then. Waited for the policewoman to say that of course it was not so, that she knew, that she had evidence, that David was alive and well and being brought home now, that it was simply not possible for him to be dead. That no one had hurt a hair of his head, no one had frightened him, no one had spoken a harsh word to him. That David was as he had been the last time she had seen him, when he had leaned in through the window of her car to kiss her goodbye. That her son’s body and mind were quite, quite undamaged. That time had spun backwards and nothing had happened. Nothing.
She waited. Kate got up and started to pull the fire together.
She waited.
Kate did not speak.
In the end, she went, knowing that Kate could not speak, because there was nothing for her to say, went up the stairs as slowly as if she were an old woman carrying an impossibly heavy burden.
She waited for a moment on the landing outside Lucy’s room. There were no sounds at all from inside. She gathered words up inside her head and tried to form them into sentences with meaning, to make shapes of the words which would then come out of her mouth and cross the air and be received by her daughter but the words were scattered about anyhow like spilled toys.
She turned and went on up the second flight of stairs to the small eaves bedroom. No sounds came from inside. Marilyn Angus leaned her head against the door and prayed to hear the little murmuring noise he made while he was doing his homework or the whirr of a small motor on some game. If she heard something, time would have tipped backwards and he would be there and she awake on the floor outside his room after sleepwalking here.
Silence.
She opened the door. ‘Doodlebug,’ she said aloud.
The room smelled of him. She switched on the light. His dressing gown behind the door swayed slightly as she went in. The model football pitch was on the table beside the window. She bent down and riffled through the books. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Dr Dolittle’s Secret. The Chamber of Tutankhamun. The Story of Pompeii. A Guide to the Stars. Stars and Galaxies. Patrick Moore’s Book of the Night Sky. I was there: A Boy of Pompeii.
He was here. She smelled him. She sensed him. If she reached out she would touch him. If he was here he was dead.
She lay down on her son’s bed and pulled out his pyjamas from beneath the pillow. They smelled of his hair, the odd, particular boy’s smell. She cradled them. He was here now. After a while, she fell asleep and David slept beside her, his small, thin body tucked into hers, as close a part of her as it had been before his birth.
In her room on the floor below, Lucy sat at the window, in the dark looking out at the dark, and thinking nothing, forcing her mind to be an empty drum and her feelings to be non-feeling.
Kate sat at the table in the kitchen, alert to the quietness in the rest of the house, a pile of routine police files in front of her. On the hour, she had telephoned in to the station where the activity was relentless and more and more manpower was being drafted in to work on the case but from which there was no news of the missing boy. Nor had they traced the silver Jaguar.