The Lost Child (9 page)
And it's a sunny day and outside in the garden the dog's probably barking a little bit too much and his brother and sister are shouting and laughing and our boy is about to lay the table, and yes, he will wash his hands, but first he pauses for one quick moment in that doorway so that someone - is it Granny who has come to lunch? - can take the snap.
Our boy after cricket practice on a Sunday.
The other day when we were round there for some reason or other and, for a moment or two, no one else was in the room, I found my self reaching out for this photo, picking it up and staring and staring at it, my face close to the glass, greedy for whatever it could give me. A clue? A jolt of pain? A taste of what we'd lost?
* * *
You don't know this, but your eldest sister Sarah, the one who brings you back home to Woodton from Ipswich after you die, has a late marriage. She is fifty-seven when, in 1864, she marries a widower called Samuel Severne and goes to live with him at Poslingford House near Clare, not far from Cavendish, in Suffolk.
It's a summer wedding and Sarah and her new husband give a generous supper for all the villagers in celebration of their marriage. It's even reported in the
Bury
&
Norwich Post:
On Tuesday night the populace of Poslingford were regaled by Mr and Mrs Seveme to a most plentiful supper, all labourers' wives and children above the age of 12 years assembled in the most capacious bam which was decorated with flowers and evergreens. Hot joints of beef and mutton-plum pudding and vegetables were liberally supplied to the company by the many helpers of young people from farming families. A band from Clare added to the cheerfulness and the evening passed pleasantly and the large assemble of near 200 separated in good order.
Their happiness is short-lived, though. What Sarah and her new husband don't know, as they celebrate their union in that capacious bam with the villagers, is that he has only seven months left to live. He dies the following spring and your sister lives out her remaining thirty-two years as a widow.
On Friday, 24 October 1896, in her ninetieth year, Sarah dies in her chair. In her
Last Will
&
Testament,
written in an elegant, sloping hand, she asks to be buried
in a coffin similar to those which my brothers and sisters had and not in a leaden one, and I direct my executors to erect a neat tablet in Woodton Church (the last resting place of many of my dear family) to my memory and that of my late brother Samuel and my late sister Ellen Tyssen, the expense of the tablet and the erection thereof not to exceed the sum of Twenty pounds (exclusive of a proper fee which I wish to be paid to the Rector of Woodton on the occasion).
Just like her sister Anna, Sarah leaves a huge quantity of possessions and ornaments, but unlike Anna she seems to have a much longer list of friends and relatives to leave them to. She makes careful provision for her servants too - making sure they have money to buy mourning clothes as well as something to spend on themselves.
Even the lad who works in the garden is told he may help himself to
any loose numbers
if
British Workmen, Animal World and The Vet.
We had our babies too fast, too easily. I didn't think it at the time but it's what I think now. I think we were having much too good a time of it, taking for granted how easy it all was, jumping in there without much thought or fear.
We were so young. We thought we were perfect. We didn't know that bad things could happen. As soon as we tried for a baby, a baby came, just like that, boy, girl, boy. And we were so absolutely caught up in the rhythm of it - the nappies, the night-time feeds, the exhaustion and exhilaration of holding one new person after another in our arms - that we just kept on going. We didn't look down.
But I'm looking down now - from the dark, churning centre of my middle-aged anxiety - and certain moments make my heart stop. The time I let an inexperienced friend hold our baby girl on his knee over our stone-flagged kitchen floor and when, as he took one hand off her to reach in his pocket for something, I saw her wobble for a quick second, some kind of crazed politeness stopped me diving forwards and snatching her away. The time I raced back from work in my lunch hour to check on our nine-month-old, our boy, who was being looked after by a temp from an agency. And found her smoking and chatting on the phone while he lay in his cot crying so furiously his face had turned a whole new colour I'd never seen before.
Not only that, but he had on two woollen cardigans buttoned up to the chin and, when I touched him, felt like he was running a fever. And what did I do? I unbuttoned and soothed him, asked her steadily and politely if she could take him out in his pram, before heading straight back to work, anxious not to be missed. Why? Was I completely insane? Why didn't I just stop right there, fire the nanny, and lose my job if necessary? What job is more important than the welfare of your child?
In the bleak middle of the night, I punish myself with these questions. In the bleak middle of the night, I remember that, when our boy was about thirteen, his father and I went through a difficult patch. And I think now that I was very much to blame for the atmosphere that this generated. Temporary, but potent, and all my fault.
And even though I thought - we thought - that we were still being genuinely good parents, loving and caring for our children, I think for a while we were very centred on ourselves. It took us a year or so to sort out our problems. A year of self-centredness. And because we managed it, because we came through, I automatically assumed the family would be OK too. But is that when he started smoking?
There was the day we were looking for something in his room and we stumbled on a DVD case labelled
Hands Off.
Straight away we opened it and found a little bag of weed. Not that worrying, really, not that surprising. We'd always known our kids would come across drugs, would probably try cannabis, maybe Ecstasy, hopefully nothing much else. And we prided ourselves on not being so naive as to think these substances any more dangerous than alcohol, for instance. We really hoped they would never take up smoking tobacco, but a little bit of cannabis? Where was the harm in that?
So on that day, after a quick discussion - and faint guilt that we'd invaded his privacy in the first place - we put it back exactly where it was and agreed to say nothing. Our boy was bright, happy, energetic, easy-going. He was working very hard at school. So what if he occasionally smoked with his friends? Was it even any of our business?
We go over that scene again and again. So many times we replay it, question our actions. And again and again, we do the same thing. We put the cannabis back, close the case, leave the room, say nothing. I can see us doing it right now. Closing the case, leaving the room. Leaving his things as they were, walking out quite carefully, with respect for his privacy, pulling the door behind us. Closing the door, smiling and shaking our heads - leaving our child to his fate.
The moment haunts me. How did we miss the signs? And would it really have made any difference if we hadn't?
An old schoolfriend who lives in Canada emailed me recently to say that her youngest child - her late baby, her joy, the apple of her eye, the one who'd never caused them any problems - had developed eating and self-harming issues. We certainly didn't see that one coming, she wrote.
I hadn't seen her for years and could only really remember this child as a baby - dark-eyed and plump-cheeked. And that sentence - so lightly written, without anger or self-pity, yet somehow loaded with parental responsibility and remorse made me want to weep.
The boy's father sometimes says that a bomb went off in our family. That it went off without any warning and left destruction in its wake. And there was nothing we could possibly do except sort through the wreckage, salvage what we could. That's how he looks at it.
But I don't really see it like that. For me it's not a bomb, but a tidal wave. There we all are, a little family group standing on a beach with our backs to the sea. Holding hands. Happy. Stupidly happy, because just behind us - towering and terrifying - the wave is approaching. A vast dark curve of water just waiting to knock us off our feet.
I come home one night after doing a late-night TV programme to find our boy sitting alone at the kitchen table, head in hands, face raw with tears. Arranged in front of him, eight or nine pieces of sodden and scrunched-up kitchen paper. And three kitchen knives.
Hey. I touch his shoulder with my hand. What's going on here?
He says nothing.
I get a glass of water and sit down at the table next to him, kick off my shoes.
What are these doing here?
He picks one up, gently rests the tip on the pine table, lets it drop. He looks at me with pinprick eyes.
Dad threw them there.
Why?
He says nothing.
I stand up again, my bare feet sticking to the kitchen floor.
Why would he do that? I say.
No reply.
I gather up the knives - which have only recently been allowed back into the drawer from their hiding place in the cupboard under the stairs - and carry them back over to the drawer where I lay them carefully, blades pointing down. I make a mental note that they might have to go back into hiding tomorrow. These kinds of precautionary measures have now become a normal part of our daily lives and no longer strike me as strange or tragic, the way they did at the start.
I sit down again. I'm starving. I pick up a banana, start to peel it.
Did you have a fight? I say.
Believe what you want, he says. I don't care.
Did you have a fight? I say again, my mouth full of banana.
Why don't you go and ask him? He's the one being a fucking insane idiot.
We sit together for a few more moments. He doesn't say anything else. He doesn't need to. I know how the evening will have gone. He will have threatened and his father will have stayed calm. Then he will have threatened again, he will have done one more destructive and outlandish thing may be looked around for money, maybe tried to kick a door down - and his father will have cracked. Or maybe he won't have done anything else. may be he didn't have to. Maybe his father will have cracked anyway. Sometimes the threats are enough: one moment you're trying to be a calm and loving parent. The next, you're shouting, screaming, weeping.
Recently, we've returned to the old, depressing dialogue. We can't live like this. We really do mean it this time - behave or go.
If we don't do as he wants, If we don't give him the things he wants, he punishes us. He plays guitar, turning the amp up so loud the house shakes. He shouts and he throws things. He broke my vintage phone - a present bought on eBay by his father - by slamming it against the wall because he couldn't get through to someone. If! refuse to give him money, he sits on my study floor, his whole body blocking the door, his eyes on my face, smiling because he knows I won't be able to write a word.
This last kind of menace - not violent exactly, but making full and calculated use of his physical bulk - is the worst. At times like these I'm shocked to find myself feeling little love for him. It's all been squashed out of me, squeezed out through the smallest hole. Is this what abuse is? Is this a definition?
One time, when he's followed me all around the house for an hour demanding cash, I lock my study and, grabbing the car keys before he can stop me, rush out to the car and drive away. Just around the corner, I pull in and sit in a side road, shaking and crying, till I think he'll have given up and it's safe to come home.
Another time, I walk right out of the house without a coat or bag and have to stand in Superdrug, pretending to look at the nail polishes, swallowing tears of loneliness and frustration. The security guard eyes me. He knows something's up, he just doesn't know what. I'm tempted to beg him to come home with me.
And then another time - the time he picks up a little set of espresso cups that he and his sister jointly gave me for Christmas, and walks outside and proceeds to drop them, one by one, on the pavement.
I remind him that I actually gave him the money to buy me that Christmas present as he'd spent all of his. He grins. I then plead with him not to do this terrible and destructive thing, because didn't his sister pay for half the set with her own money?
He looks at me.
You're right, he says. I didn't think of that. And he smashes exactly half of the cups, leaving the rest on the kitchen counter.
You shouldn't have watched him do it, his father tells me later. He was only able to do it because you gave him the satisfaction of watching.
And I know he's right. Of course he's right. But the instinct to beg him to stop, the instinct to prevent damage if you can, is strong. Still, I think I'm tougher now. Replay that situation today and just watch me walk away.
He's almost eighteen, people remind us, he's almost a man.
What they mean - and they mean it kindly - is don't feel responsible. Let him go if you have to. And intellectually I know this, Of course I do, but it's not what I feel. What I feel is a great big burning grief And deep, deep responsibility. And shame, that I no longer know how to comfort him.
And now, tonight, at 1.30 a.m., this. Knives and tears.
His cat jumps on the table and pushes herself on to his lap. I see that he's crying. He doesn't of ten cry these days, except just occasionally in rage. He doesn't cry, even though he's made all of us cry, often. A small cold part of me decides that may be this is a good sign. At least he's feeling something.
Tell me what you're thinking, I say gently.
He says nothing. His cat pushes her head into his hand, purring.
He makes a noise, sucking in tears.
If I have to go from here, he says, then what the fuck am I going to do with Kitty?
Much later, when he's in bed and so am I, it's that small practical question that reduces me to tears as well. If! have to go from here. Again. If! have to go again. If! have to go from here, from my home - then what provision do I make for my cat, this cat I've had all my life since I was six years old?