Burnt Paper Sky (37 page)

A few weeks ago, somebody asked me if I thought Ben and I could have some closure once the trial was over. I was lost for words, truly; because the fact of it is that we might never have ‘closure’. If only life were that simple. There are some events and uncertainties that you take to the grave and they threaten to tumble you every single step of the way.

If closure is a search for answers, and an attempt to clear away ambiguity, then let me tell you how far we’ve got.

Here’s what I know for sure:

I know that in the woods that Sunday afternoon, my child willingly walked away with Joanna May, his hand in hers. He looked up into her eyes, he trusted her, and he believed what she told him.

She took him to her car, after making him change into clothes that she provided him with. Skittle followed them. Joanna May hadn’t been prepared for that so she kicked the dog, to make him go away, and, in doing so, she broke his leg. Then she drove Ben away. She avoided routes where CCTV cameras lay in wait for her.

Out of everything that happened to him in that week, Ben talks about her treatment of the dog most of all. His mind circles around it, trying to make sense of her cruelty. What bothers him most is that she made him leave Skittle there, in pain, whimpering on the ground. It was the first sign he had that she wasn’t a stable person.

After that, I know very little for sure, except that it was Ben I met on Furry Football one week later. There is a void, a seven-day hole in his life between the two events.

The evidence tells us a little more. The smashed laptop and bruising consistent with finger marks on Ben’s upper arm indicate that her anger at finding him playing the computer game pitched her into a state of mind dangerous enough that she drove him back to the woods and dragged him through the darkness back to the place where she first took him.

She left him there, dressed only in his underwear and with a black bin bag to shield him from the rain. In doing so, she humiliated and frightened him and the exposure almost killed him.

We know that once she’d returned home after that she booked a flight for late the following morning, and packed a suitcase, and placed her passport in a travel wallet, which she put in her bag.

We also know that Lucas Grantham was her downfall, because the police phoned very early that morning to ask her in for an interview about him. She took a gamble, and went to Kenneth Steele House, not wanting to arouse suspicion, knowing she could still make her plane.

Though she wasn’t to know that we would end up in a car together, and that she would make a little verbal slip, which would lead me to steal her keys.

I imagine her standing on that broad pavement outside her home as DI Bennett and I drove away, rifling through her handbag for the keys to the flat, not finding them, and then replaying the moment in the car when her belongings fell to the floor, and most likely putting two and two together, or at least deciding that she couldn’t afford the time to retrieve them, or to track down a spare set. As far as the police could tell, she made absolutely no attempt to enter the flat and gather her stuff before I got there, probably because she had her passport in her bag already. We know that she was in a cab to the airport only twenty minutes after DI Bennett and I dropped her off, so she didn’t dither. I like to think it was the moment when the hunter became hunted, when her breath quickened, and she began to look over her shoulder.

And that is the sum of all I know for sure.

Here’s what I don’t know:

Why she took him, or how she treated him.

Why don’t I know that?

Because Ben won’t speak of it.

Why not?

We don’t know. I guess that aside from the things he’s willing to say, there must be other things he can’t remember, things he’s confused about, or things he might be frightened of talking about.

I think he doesn’t like the way the eyes and attention of everybody around him sharpen when he so much as mentions that room or Miss May. I think that makes him feel uncomfortable, and ashamed. He doesn’t want to be the centre of attention, he would rather it all went away.

So we have to be careful, because we don’t want to make things worse, damage him further, or send him into a shell where he doesn’t communicate at all. That can happen to children in his situation. I’ve read about it.

And though I hate to say it, I do sometimes wonder if he’s trying to protect her with his silence. They did, after all, have a close bond before this happened.

And why can’t we get the rest of what we need to know from Joanna May?

Because she and Ben have something in common, beyond the seven days he spent in her home. What they have in common is that she refuses to speak about it as well. She has done ever since her arrest. Her guilty plea has been her only word on the matter.

Just when we need her to talk, she has decided to remain silent. As is her right.

And so we speculate. We have built a story that seems to fit the scant evidence. And the story goes like this:

In return for Ben’s trust, for the way he slipped his hand in hers so easily, Joanna May led him to a place where she incarcerated him against his will.

I think she did it because she either loved Ben, or she wanted to very much. It was a distorted, selfish love that was the product of a damaged mind, but I think it existed.

I think that she formed a bond with him during the first year she taught him, and she began to want him for herself. Her diagnosis of infertility, which has emerged in the public domain now, was simultaneous with my divorce, with me asking her to help us support Ben, and I think that at this very vulnerable time in her life, when her urge to be a mother was strongest, she might have mistaken him for a child who wasn’t loved enough, or cared for enough, and thought that taking him could solve both her longing for a child and Ben’s sadness.

That thought must have grown stronger for months until it was fully fledged, and formed into a careful plan, which she executed flawlessly one year ago on Sunday, 21 October.

Once she’d incarcerated him, I think she began a process of trying to make him believe that his family was bad for him and she was the right person to care for him.

We don’t know what her long-term plans were, but Ben has hinted to us that she might have been planning a trip for them and I suspect she was going to take him away. I don’t know where, or how.

The bedroom she made for him is testament to her desire to make his environment nice, to look after him well, and I actually think she meant to, even though it was in reality no more than a carefully decorated cell.

But I think it went wrong, the reality of having him. I don’t think she anticipated how much he would miss home, or miss me, and his father and his stepmother, or his dog. I don’t think she expected him to be so desperately unhappy without us. She didn’t realise that he was already deeply loved, and that he loved so much in return.

Those are the motives we attribute to her, the timeline we fabricate to explain things. And we continue to try to fill in more gaps.

We speculate that Joanna May underestimated the tech savvy of a young boy. Why else would she have let him have access to a laptop? Was she tired of trying to entertain him down there, had she exhausted all other ideas? Did she think it was safe because it would be impossible for him to log on? How enraged was she when Ben found a WiFi signal down in that basement that didn’t need a password?

Enraged enough to put his life in danger, and I think that was because it made her feel that she’d lost control, that she’d bitten off more than she could chew. Her solution? To take him back to the woods and abandon him there, then to come home and organise her exit.

Is it because she really did love him that she didn’t take that final step and murder him at that point, to silence him for ever? I think so, although the thought makes me recoil.

To confirm our various hypotheses, we’ve all tried to coax more information out of Ben: therapists, doctors, psychiatrists, us. But for the most part he’s chosen silence, perhaps as a way of feeling in control. And we must accept his silence. We must content ourselves with our guesswork.

I wish now that I’d valued more the words that tumbled freely out of him before he was taken. I wish I’d collected them up and kept them safely in packages that I wrapped up carefully, secured with a ribbon, and stored in a safe place for the future. I wish I hadn’t been too distracted to listen to every word he said. I wish I hadn’t let him run ahead of me. There is so much that I wish, and all of it is pointless now. Beyond pointless.

Ben is not the child he used to be. Trust is difficult for him, because he doesn’t understand why John and I didn’t find him earlier, or why the teacher he adored turned out to be somebody bad.

He has pretty good attendance at school, considering, though it’s not uncommon for John or me to get a phone call to say that he’s unable to cope, again, that he’s gripped by a migraine so severe that he can’t open his eyes, again, and then we come to get him.

Emotionally, his daily existence is volatile and unpredictable. He can be fine for days at a time, and then something sets him off balance. Then he can be desperately clingy, or angry, depending on the form his sadness takes. His emotions are powerful and visceral. Very, very occasionally he fights us, kicking and hitting. More often, he cannot last the night without waking and screaming in terror.

When that happens, I run to him and lift him from his bed, and I bring him into bed with me, where we lie, eyes wide, bodies together, and I hold him to me and wait for his teeth to stop chattering, and watch carefully for the sheen of sweat on his brow that signals the fever that sometimes rises after these nightmares.

I bring Skittle to sleep on the bed with us too, because the dog is the object of Ben’s most uncomplicated affections. I get pleasure from watching them play together, Ben’s gentleness with Skittle, and the dog’s adoration of him. When Ben goes to John’s house now, the dog goes with him. Her claws have made scratches all over the parquet floor, but nobody minds.

And even when Ben and I lie together during those long nights, even though our hearts pump fast and in unison, I wonder if sometimes we remain a hundred miles apart, because his mind still crouches in the woods on his own, cold to the core, or perhaps in that basement, flinching as a laptop shatters against a wall, pieces falling around him, sensing the advance of a person who wants to drag him away, even though he’s covered his face with his hands, even though he cowers.

These are my imaginings, for, as I said, Ben won’t speak of it.

His silence torments me, because I want to make him better, but it’s her silence that I truly loathe, for Ben can’t help it, but she is an adult and she knowingly withholds information that could help us to understand better what happened, and therefore to heal him more quickly, and that I cannot forgive her for.