Twenty-one

It was almost three o’clock. I walked across to Lyneham shops, thinking to buy a treat from the bakery for afternoon tea, and meet Peter at the school.

There were a number of small rituals associated with picking children up from school, which, as a new parent five years ago, I’d quickly learnt. Parents of the younger children waited in a straggle around the playground equipment. In high summer they stood in the scant shade offered by school buildings, in winter hugged uninviting bricks for warmth and shelter against the rain that slanted off the Brindabellas.

Parents who waited at the senior entrance did so less obviously than those at the junior section. Many had driven, and remained in their cars. Those on foot stood a little way back from the doors and seldom looked at them. They chatted to each other, or stared into space.

It was blowy and warm. Sun bit through the new prunus leaves that lined the walkway to the school’s main entrance. I always knew when the bell was about to ring, but still it was a shock. Momentarily deafened parents watched their kids pour out the doors, a mass of blue shorts and yellow T-shirts.

The second wave pushed through the doors, the third, and finally the stragglers. I turned around thinking I must have missed Peter. But surely he would have seen me.

I went right up to the doors and stared through them, unable to see much more than my own reflection. Maybe Peter’s teacher had kept him in. With another backward glance, I pushed past a group of laughing girls and hurried along the corridor to Peter’s classroom.

It was empty apart from his teacher, who was standing at her desk piling folders on top of one another.

‘Mrs Hyles? Have you seen Peter? He wasn’t at the front.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I think he left with the others.’

‘Did you see which way he went?’

She was sorry but she hadn’t noticed. ‘Let’s check to see if his bag’s still there.’

The rack was empty except for a single yellow sweatshirt.

‘He probably went out the back doors. You know what kids are like.’

There were four, if you counted the toilets five, doors Peter could have used. I’d only been a couple of minutes in his classroom, but by the time I got to the back of the school, the yard was practically deserted.

Four boys were dribbling a basketball. Some girls sat in a huddle on the steps, poring over a piece of paper. I demanded to know if they’d seen Peter.

They looked up at me with the dull contempt of children used to adults asking stupid questions. One said, ‘Who’s he?’

I realised they were year six and that my son was beneath their notice.

I didn’t stop to explain, but rushed up to the boys, who shook their heads. Next I overtook a couple of girls who lived around the corner, one a tall blonde with the shy, superior air of girls who develop early. She thought for a moment then said no. I was almost at the high school now. I spotted a yellow T-shirt in the distance, heading for Mouat Street. I chased it for twenty metres before admitting to myself what should have been obvious.

I ran to where I had a clear view of my front garden. Peter would be waiting there, school bag tossed up on the porch. He would be round the back.

I pulled at the latch and shoved the back gate open, calling out his name. I ran round the side of the house. The backyard was empty.

‘Fred?’ I called out. ‘Fred!’

Could he be sick or hurt? I checked the kennel, then walked around the yard looking in all the places he liked to lie, up by the back fence next to the rose bushes, underneath the fig tree. I pushed aside branches, stamped in the long grass. Fred was gone. Peter was missing and he’d taken his dog with him.

I choked on my breath. The air was impossibly dry and full of grit. I checked the nail on the wall of the garden shed where Peter kept Fred’s lead. It wasn’t there. Why hadn’t I noticed earlier that Fred was gone?

After school, Peter generally preferred his dog’s company, or his own. Sam was the leader of the group he ate his lunch with. If Sam had invited him over, Peter might have been so keen to impress that he’d rushed out of school the back way, collected Fred, and left again without waiting to speak to me.

I rang Sam, congratulating myself that I’d had the foresight to copy his number into my address book. This piece of clear thinking raised my spirits and I expected to find Peter at the other end, with some laughably simple explanation of why he’d taken Fred with him to Sam’s.

Sam answered the phone himself. No, Peter wasn’t there. Sam thought he’d left the classroom with everybody else. He gave me the number of another boy. When I rang it, a woman answered and said her son was at basketball practice. It didn’t sound as if she knew who Peter was.

I clicked on the answering machine, then ran next door and knocked, praying that my neighbour, Sylvia, had seen Peter go off with Fred.

Sylvia was often at home during the day. She came to the door after my second knock, dressed ready to go out. She’d been talking to her sister on the phone at three, she told me, rather a long call because her sister’s husband had just had an operation. She was going over to the hospital now. She was afraid she hadn’t seen Peter come home.

Most of the houses in our street were empty, their owners still at work. I ran from one to the next. Of the few people who did come to their doors, none had seen Peter or Fred.

I scanned the small horizons that bounded all the good safe places. I called Peter’s name until the two sweet syllables crumbled to a bit of old dry wood.

I headed towards Southwell Park. Would Fred have willingly got into a car with a stranger? If the stranger had offered him food, I was afraid the answer was yes.

I stumbled over a tree root and looked down. The root was immense, growing with the slow confidence that finds its way through stone. Each blade of grass around it was singular and lovely, the brown pine needles that had come to rest between them, the light shining through the branches of the trees, oblique afternoon light that I’d always found restful, walking outside just to stand in it.

The road and traffic gave way to scrubby eucalypts and casuarinas. This was the way we’d always come, first when Peter was very small, then with Fred to show him fresh rabbit droppings, the best spots to dig. It didn’t seem to matter to Peter that Fred took no notice of these treats, but simply ran from one garbage bin to the next, and when there were no more, when the playing fields ended and the overgrown bit around the creek began, turned round as if to say, there’s no point going on. No one will have dropped a sandwich here.

I walked close to the trees that lined the creek, but even there it would have been hard for anyone to hide. The only place Peter could be, if he was for some reason hiding from me, was an overgrown copse that bordered the golf course on one side and the creek on the other.

I saw yellow everywhere. A leaf catching the sun was the corner of his T-shirt. I heard a dog bark and my legs gave way underneath me. A fluffy, impossibly happy golden retriever ran out of the trees on the other side of the creek. I could have shot it and its owner just for being there.

Under the thick trees, in the undergrowth, the air was cool and damp. I stood still, waiting for my eyes to adjust. There was the tree Peter liked to climb, while Fred stood at the bottom barking as though his master was some large, ungainly cat. There was the glen—funny unAustralian word, not appropriate at all, but it was what we called it—where we’d brought a picnic once during the school holidays. Fred had to be tied up so we could spread our food out on a blue and white cloth. The grass looked flattened as I walked across it, ducking my head to avoid low branches. Could Fred and Peter have been here, rested here?

The ground was soft. I looked around for open bits where footprints might show, but though a little way further on there were plenty of these, both human and dog, they were too big or too small, the wrong shape, not my son’s or his dog’s. My insides turned over as though all was pulpy there, and no outline could hold.

I called Peter’s name, and Fred’s, thinking there might be a chance that, if Fred wasn’t on the lead, he would come when he heard me. But all that came back in response to my voice were the ducks on the golf course pond, and small birds rustling in the holly bushes that formed a barrier between the golf course and the copse. I had no sense of anybody hiding, watching me. Still I stumbled on, looking up into the trees, though how Peter would have kept Fred quiet while he climbed one, I couldn’t guess. My feet were muddy, my legs wet from the long grass. I stopped again and for a few seconds there was complete, pure silence, and then my legs, which kept threatening to fail me, did, and I crumpled down by the trunk of a casuarina and began to cry.

. . .

I rang Ivan, and left urgent messages for Brook and Derek, who was out of Canberra at a conference. I looked through my kitchen window without being able to make a connection between myself and what was out there.

Ivan walked in holding Katya, his face hard as an early Cubist painting. I wanted to grab my daughter from him, take my remaining child and run.

I switched on my computer. There was another email from Sorley Fallon.

Overcoming time and distance was an image of a castle and a cliff beneath it, cruel rocks, a boy who, in spite of his twisted posture, might possibly be sleeping. But instead of long pale hair, a black shirt, the figure lying on the rocks was a true boy, no more than ten years old, dressed in blue shorts and a Lyneham T-shirt.

I must have cried out, screamed.

Ivan was beside me with Katya in his arms. A footfall in the corridor had me running to the door. It was Brook, who used my phone to ring his station commander. A couple of Belfast-based officers could be at Fallon’s shop within three hours.

In spite of following through the hospital inquiries in his own way, stubbornly, methodically, Brook had never let go his suspicion of Fallon, or of what, in his mind, Fallon represented.

He examined Fred’s kennel. I showed him the hook on the shed wall.

‘Is anything else missing?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Would Fred let a stranger into the backyard?’

‘If he was offered food,’ I said, thinking that I should have asked Sylvia whether she had heard him barking.

Brook left then, to put together a media release. He took a recent photograph and a full description of what Peter had been wearing.

‘We’ll start broadcasting at seven if he isn’t found by then.’

. . .

Ivan fed Katya. His body bent over her highchair looked ridiculously big, her favourite small gold spoon all but invisible in his hand. When she’d had enough, he made sandwiches, offering me one. I shook my head, but decided I would wash the dishes.

The sink seemed filled with the discarded paraphernalia of illness—syringes, used gauze bandages, empty bottles and pink cotton wool. A slow leaching down through all these layers was no more, at that moment, than the pastel layers of hope, fading as I watched them. I shook my head to clear away the vision, but my eyes continued to betray me.

We watched Brook interviewed on television. Whoever had taken Peter knew that the one chance he had of making sure he came quietly was to take Fred, and then get word to Peter—during school? A note in his bag? Unless Peter did what he wanted, he would never see his dog again.

I saw this part with perfect clarity. The note. Peter too frightened to tell his teacher—wanting to run home and see if Fred was there, but then dismissing this as too risky. The horrible afternoon, the final bell. Peter working out which door he had to make for. And me waiting like a dumb fool as the minutes ticked by.

How could it be Fallon, or someone acting on Fallon’s instructions? Fallon didn’t even know of Peter’s existence, let alone Fred’s. He hadn’t asked me anything about my life in Australia.

Night bells. Bells tolling the watches of the night, so that one person might say, it’s over now, my shift. Some time, it could have been a few minutes after the news finished, it could have been hours, I let myself out the front door, locking it behind me.

The pine trees on the oval looked the same. I knew them well, where each branch went, the ones that had been amputated to make a cycle path.

I came to the path and turned left along it. The cream-brown wounds of the trees’ lost arms shone under lamps that seemed placed at random, though they weren’t. Weak light cut the darkness. The trees were neutral. The path, pine needles and grass had had their afternoon beauty and would have it again.

Thunder rolled off Black Mountain as I crossed the road back to the house. A sword of lightning cut the sky in half.