The Lost Child

A Mother's Story

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

FLATLINE

Chapter 2

CYCLONE

Chapter 3

SMASHED AND TORN

Chapter 4

SOS (SAME OLD SHIT)

Chapter 5

UNTITLED

Chapter 6

CARELESS

Chapter 7

SPIRITS

Chapter 8

ROMANCE

Chapter 9

AFTERWORD

AN END

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

FOREWORD

THROUGHOUT THE TIME I spent discovering Mary Yelloly and then researching and writing this book, something painful was happening at home. Our eldest child - previously bright and sweet and happy - was drifting further and further away from us. We seemed to be losing him.

Some days it was almost impossible to concentrate on looking for Mary Yelloly. Other days, when I seemed at last to be getting close to her, I found myself too distracted and distressed by what was happening with our boy to be able to write about her far too short life. However much I didn't want it to be so, loss was all around me, in all its forms. Loss of children, loss of hope, loss of life. This book was always supposed to be about Mary Yelloly and Mary alone, and at first I tried hard to keep our boy out of it. But in the end almost paralysed by the effort of doing so - I gave in and let the two strands weave together on the page, just as they seemed to in life.

Then, months after I'd finished writing the book, I was sorting through an old box of our boy's stuff - abandoned school exercise books, paperback novels whose comers had been ripped to make spliffs - and I found a collection of twenty-one poems,
Works From a Former Life,
all of which he had written during that time. I wept as I read them.

And later, when he'd read this book and been more generous about it than I could ever have hoped, I asked if he'd let me put some of the poems in it. He hesitated, then said yes. Nine of them are included here.

1

SUFFOLK, JUNE 1838. A day so hot the air is glass. Splash of poppies in the hedgerows. Cow parsley high as your shoulder. Above it all, the soaring summer sky.

Looking down. A pattern of fields, dark smudge of woodland, the sly grey spire of a church. England spread out on a perfect midsummer's day. Look again. A dot on the dark dirt road, the smallest dot, wobbling along towards that church. Go a little closer. Zoom right in. It's a carriage - primrose yellow, streaked with dust, a family crest on the side. A shield and helmet, curling ribbon.
Spes Mea Christus.
Christ is my hope.

The carriage is pulled by two drenched old horses that have seen better days, whipped by a tired fat man in a scratchy woollen coat - a man who should not have had ale before he set out from Ipswich - windy, sweaty, drink-stained, trying without success to swallow his burps. The wheels squeak and bump, slamming hard over dirt and shale. It'll be another hundred years before this road smooths out to a hard ribbon of grey. Now on this summer's day it's tedious, uneven, cracked with heat, littered with stones, dried animal dung, the sparse yellow heads of dandelions.

The road to Woodton.

The carriage curtains are drawn tight, no chink open to let sun in. Inside, a young woman sits alone in the airless dark, everything about her black except for the pale shock of her face. A lovely face, normally flushed and teasing - empty now, voided by grief She's done all the crying she can do. Those eyes - two pinpricks on this earth's dark surface - are dry and hard.

Sarah Yelloly, thirty-one years old. And above her unbrushed, unbonneted head, strapped to the carriage roof in a rough pine coffin, there you are. Her little sister Mary, twenty-one.

All Saints, Woodton turns out to be hard to find - standing some way out of the village and on high, windy ground, away from the main road.
Beautifully positioned,
says a guidebook. Lonely, it seems to me. Plague, someone mutters to me later, as if that one dark syllable explains everything.

At first, driving through the eerie quiet of Bungay and reaching Woodton at four, hurrying to beat the dusk coming down all around me, I start to wish I'd come earlier. All day it's been so dark, the sky one single, crushing slab of grey. I should have come this morning. The antique shops in Bungay might have been open.

But as I reach the church, half thinking of you and half listening to the end of a programme on the radio, the clouds shift and light spills over the Norfolk countryside and everything suddenly drowns in colour. Furious greens and yellows, blinding gold. Dazzled, I pull in by the old wall and turn off the radio. No sound except for some lone bird cawing, and the dog's eager breath in the back.

I bite the woollen finger of my glove. It smells of home. My heart tightens.

I'm approaching the place where your bones must lie.

I don't know his address, I don't know his phone number, though that's only because we stopped his phone after the monthly bill topped £200. We had to think very hard about that one.

Last time I saw him (two or is it three weeks ago?), I bought him dinner at the Italian down the road. I had wine, he had a beer. We shared bruschetta, talked about this and that. We managed to make ourselves chat - we're both good at that.

He'd come round earlier to collect some stuff We'd hoped to talk him reasonably into swapping his phone contract (paid for by us) for pay-as-you-go (paid for by him). But he said he had no money. That's because you spend it all on drugs, we said.

He got angry then, refusing to hand over his SIM card: Make me, then, go on, try it.

And his father - tense with fury and sadness - suddenly lunged at him. For a moment or two, they grappled on the floor. The two of them, on the floor. No one hurt, but a moment of such despair. The kind of moment you would undo if you could.

Our son's face was greenish-white as he went from our house. He still had his SIM card.

Afterwards, because there was no doubt that he had started it, that he had gone at his son with such anger, his father wept with shame. He lay on the sofa and he wept.

We've lost him, he told me. That's it. We won't see him for years now. We've lost our boy and that's how it ended. My own stupid fucking fault.

We both cried. He cried because of what he'd done and I cried because I knew why he'd done it. Because it could so easily have been me. For two years, our boy has lied to us, stolen from us, even hit us. For two years he's done everything he can to undermine and destroy our family life, not to mention his siblings' happiness and security. For two years, we've wanted this to be over, we've wanted him gone. Is there a worse thing you can feel about your child?

Our boy slammed out of the house. But he didn't go. Two hours later we found him in the churchyard next door, playing the guitar. We went out to him.

His father said: I never meant that to happen. It was completely wrong, I'm very sorry. Please forgive me.

We love you so much, I told him.

We miss you, his father said.

He just shrugged. But then his father leaned across to touch his arm and make a little joke, and our boy looked at the ground and smiled his old heartbreaking smile, the one he's had since he was two years old.

Am I forgiven? his father said.

The boy said nothing. His father said he had to go to a meeting,just for an hour or so, something he couldn't get out of

Come on, I said, you must be starving. I'll buy you some dinner.

My boy looked at me.

Are you hungry? I said.

Yes, but I can't stay long. I have to be somewhere at ten.

I really hoped he'd eat. That was all I could think of now - feeding him. But even though he'd ordered extra goat's cheese on his pizza, he only managed half Said his stomach had shrunk from going without food. He sipped his beer. Panic shot through my heart.

You mustn't go without food. You have to eat.

How can I eat? I have no money.

Come and eat at home. I can't bear to think of you being hungry. You'll get ill if you don't eat. You know I'll always feed you.

He swallowed a smile.

Yeah, well.

I offered him pudding, but he told me he hadn't time - he had to be somewhere else. I didn't say anything. This is what he does, always. This is how he takes back the power. I don't know where Somewhere Else is, but when I try to picture it, all I see is the corner of a dark wet street and him all alone, cupping his hand to light a roll-up, ripped jeans dragging in the gutter, lower lip jutting. My stomach falling.

I left him at the bus stop, standing there with his guitar. I touched his head. I'm pretty sure I gave him a kiss. When I glanced back, he looked like a lonely person, a stranger, shoulders hunched, collar up. It took every ounce of energy I had not to run back and beg him to come home.

It's an album of detailed watercolours begun by a little girl in 1824 when she was eight years old and finished when she was twelve. It's survived intact all these years.

But who was she? (Straight away, I like the name, the red and yellow of it. The first time it pops into my email inbox, I feel my heart tighten.)

Mary Yelloly? We don't know much about her. But you ought to see the album. It's quite extraordinary.

Two days later, in a sunlit room, I'm left alone to turn the pages of the
Picture History
- a title that doesn't begin to describe what you made, what you did. Over two hundred small paintings of what appears to be a made-up family - the Grenvilles. You've written out their full names and ages, you've told us how they spent their days. Reading, doing lessons, dancing, painting, watering flowers, visiting the sick and the poor.

Scene after scene of grand country houses and smooth, dappled English landscapes. Some lonely and wild and vast, but many dotted with tiny extravagant figures: bonneted children, bouncing dogs, now and then a baby, a stiffgoverness, a white-pinnied nurse. Bonnets and shawls, stripes and frills - kittens frolicking, dark, gleaming wood furniture, china, silver, curls and bows.

Bright sun falls into the room. I swivel my chair into the shadows so I can see your work better.

The shades are mostly subdued, muddied and mixed, but now and then a colour jumps out - a stroke so bright and zany it could have been painted yesterday. A fuchsia swag of curtain, a lurid green parasol, a gown with the waxy hue of a daffodil. Or, the bright spines of brand-new books, a purple overcast sky, the hot crimson of a potted geranium. In the distance, always, the greeny-grey Suffolk-Norfolk landscape: hills and fields and scudding clouds.

You've written some captions yourself in ink - doing them carefully in pencil first then tracing over them with your nib. A sloping and slightly wobbly hand. Dipping the pen, concentrating, tongue wet against your lip:

Mr Weston's Mill at Burnside near Woodlands. And Mr and Mrs Grenville being driven in a pale yellow carriage with red wheels and bearing the family crest.

Sometimes you do get the proportions slightly wrong. A mammoth chest of drawers towers above a small person with spindle limbs. Kittens big as dogs. Energetic bowls of fruit that seem to crouch ready to bound off the page. But this occasional schoolroom clumsiness only draws me closer to you. You really were here, touching these pages, your frowning breath held over this album, exactly the way mine is held now.

Sometimes a figure has clearly been cut out like a paper doll and pasted in over whatever was there before. Covering up what - a mistake, perhaps? And the pictures themselves are stuck into the album at the comers and one or two are coming loose, and I can see a trace of pencil-writing on the back. I test a corner, seeing if I can prise it further, but have to stop. I know the dealer paid a five-figure sum for this album, your album.

And then, at the end, something else. A pencilled note in a different hand. It tells me that Mary Yelloly died in 1838. She was twenty-one.

My heart turns over. She died. You died.

And I flick back through. A little girl is cutting cloth. Bonneted figures carry baskets of flowers, the trees behind them nudged by wind. It's a breezy day. A pale front door beckons. You swished your paintbrush in the water, backwards and forwards. The water turns pink. Or blue. Or muddy with colour.

And you died.

Here in this century, it's almost lunchtime. All around me, in London and the world, people still alive. Outside in the street, a beep-beep-beep, as some kind of articulated lorry backs or turns.

What was it that took us to the edge, the place no parent can ever imagine reaching? What happened to make us ask him to leave?

You look him in the eye, the baby you once held against your heart in a warm blanket, his soft hair tickling your cheek, his breath on your face. You look at the baby you loved so much it hurt, the child whose open face still makes your heart turn over and - what? - you tell him to go.

How did we ever get to this?

No parent asks a child to leave except as a last, terrible resort. No parent asks a child to go unless they've tried every other possible option. Tried it a hundred times and then tried it just once more - a sliver of hope in their heart. Because because this time, after all, it's just possible -No parent asks a child to leave without feeling that they themselves have reached rock bottom - down there, laid out, flat and dead in the darkness. No parent rejects a child in this way without feeling they've failed in the very darkest way possible.

But we reach a point where it's him or us. Him or this family. may be If we had just the one child, we tell each other, If we had just him, we could let this happen. Let him undo us. We could shrug it off, that kind of obliteration. If we had just one child, If he were the only one living at home, we'd surely try and stick this out, we'd tough it out?

Whatever happened. Losing ourselves. But holding on to him.

But we don't have just one, we have two others. Two children who are slipping down too. They think they're OK, but they're not. Actually, may be they don't even think they're OK.

And each day they need us more - they're crying out for us to do something - and most days we're just not there. Because every day is given over to dealing with the wreckage. All the joy and pleasure of normal family life has been replaced with dull-eyed damage control.

So how did we get to that place? I don't know. I do know. I know but I don't want to say.

There came a point where it felt like he was pulling the whole family over the edge and I had an option: let everyone fall, or cut the rope.

And when the moment came, I was surprisingly ruthless. I knew I couldn't let myself think about it for very long. I just did it. I cut the rope.