The Story of Before (31 page)

They did as she said and I was left standing there. Time was ticking. And still I was the only one who knew Kev was gone.

‘Look, Ruth,’ Mam said, her voice all soft and kind. ‘All this stuff about your father and Liz Lawless. It’s . . . it’s, well, it’s all rubbish, love. None of
it’s true.’

Dad’s face was stern, but not cross, and he sort of half-smiled as he nodded. ‘I’m sorry, love, but your mother’s right. It’s my fault in a way. I should’ve
told you ages ago. You got the wrong end of the stick. I—’

‘Stop, Dad,’ I managed to whisper, tears running down my face. I didn’t care what he was saying. Not now. I wasn’t even sure I understood what he was talking about.

He put his arm around my shoulder. ‘It’s all right. No crying, you hear? Everything’s going to be OK. Don’t be feeling bad. You weren’t to know.’

‘We had a good talk on the way home,’ Mam said. ‘We know you thought you were doing the right thing telling me. And I should’ve said last night I knew it wasn’t
true. But . . . I don’t know . . . just hearing that thing about the woods, it put doubt in my mind.’ She looked at Dad. ‘It shouldn’t have, but when your daughter comes out
with something like that, it . . . well . . . it knocks you for six. And I don’t know why, but I felt I had to get away for a night. I’m sorry, love. Me going off like that probably
made it all a whole lot worse. I’m sure you thought it was the end of the world.’

‘I told your mother about the fight on the green earlier too,’ Dad said. ‘You see now why I wanted you to stay away from that gurrier? God only knows what he’s capable
of. I can only—’

‘Kev’s gone.’

Mam’s chin went back and she looked at me all confused. Then her eyebrows shot up. ‘Now, see here, if this is another one of your . . . your—’

‘We were in the graveyard. I only left him for a minute!’ My head was pounding. I thought I was going to faint.

‘The graveyard? What were you doing there?’ she asked. ‘And what do you mean he’s gone? Gone where? He’s all right, isn’t he?’

‘I . . . I don’t know! I don’t know where he is. I ran home all the way! I tried to get into the churchyard to see if they took him there but the gate was locked and it was too
high to climb over and it was all dark and I—’

‘Hold on. Slow down.’ Dad let his arm fall from my shoulder. ‘You mean . . . someone . . . took him? Someone took Kev? When? When, Ruth?’ He grabbed my arms and shook
me. ‘How long ago?’

‘I don’t know! Just now. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. I’m not sure.’

‘Jesus Christ almighty
! Holy Mother of God!’ Mam covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Jesus, Mick! Call the guards! Jesus
Christ
! What are we going to do?’

Dad had already picked up the phone. ‘Did you see anyone? Was there anyone around? Anyone in the graveyard?’

‘No. No one,’ I said. ‘Just some old man, that’s all.’

‘What old man? What did he look like?’

‘Like . . . like . . . I don’t know! Like some old tramp.’

‘Think, Ruth!’ Mam said through her tears. ‘You have to remember!’ Dad was talking into the
phone now. ‘Tell them, Mick,’ she cried. ‘Tell them she saw someone there. Jesus, Ruth, what was he like? The guards will want to know.’

‘It wasn’t him! He didn’t take him!’

‘How do you know? If there was no one else around he—’

‘No! Someone took Kev when I was watching the man!’

‘Watching
him?
Why
, for God’s
sake? It was more important to spy on some old tramp than keep an eye on your baby brother?’ She collapsed onto the stairs in a heap, her head in her hands. ‘We have to go and look for
him. Mick? Mick? Are the guards coming? Are they on their way?’

‘A couple of minutes. Said they’ll be here as fast as they can.’

‘What’s going on? What’s wrong?’ Mel appeared, with Sandra right behind him.

Dad told them. Mel went white and Sandra burst into tears.

‘This man, start writing down what he looked like,’ Dad said, scrabbling for a pen in the hall table drawer.

‘I don’t need to! I know what he was like. But it wasn’t him!’

‘Do it
!
’
he shouted. ‘Just do what you’re told! Don’t cause any more trouble than you already have!’

I grabbed the pen from his fingers and flung it on the floor. ‘I don’t need to write it down, OK?’ I screamed. ‘If you really want to know, I’ll show
you!’

I ran into the kitchen and shoved the table away from the wall. They all followed me in and watched as I reached down and found the edge of the wallpaper, scraping at it with my nails till I had
a grip on one corner. Then I pulled it up and away from the wall in one long, narrow strip. Then another. And another. Each one revealing a part of the man. His boots, his legs, his body.

No one said a word.

I found the blackbird with his yellow eye and the notes coming out of his beak. Then the tree trunk, the leaves, the branches.

Then I finally found the man’s face, and even though I hadn’t looked at it that day in the park, it was exactly the face of the man in the graveyard.

‘There,’ I said, crying. ‘That’s him.’

‘That’s
crazy
,’ Mel said. ‘
How
? You did that when Mam was in the hospital! That was ages ago! How could it be him? You mean you’ve seen him
before?’

‘I . . . I think so. But . . . maybe I imagined him. I don’t know! But I know he didn’t do it. Maybe it was some sort of warning or something. Maybe he—’

‘Shut up, Ruth!’ Mam roared at me. ‘
Shut up, shut up, shut up
!’ She slapped me across the face, then started thumping me with her fists, screaming and wailing.
‘Warning you?
About what, for God’s sake
?
About what
?
’

Then Dad ran to answer the door. The guards had arrived.

They took one look at Mam and told Dad to phone for Dr Crawley. He didn’t want to but they insisted. They said it was for the best. The situation ‘called for
calm’, and the most important thing was getting all the facts together. It couldn’t be done properly with Mam ‘in that state’. Dr Crawley came in minutes and gave her
something that made her all drowsy and quiet and Dad helped her upstairs to bed.

There were two guards – big, tall men with country accents and unhurried movements – and they tried to make us feel that we weren’t really in the middle of a disaster, that
everything was going to be all right if we simply let them do their job. It kind of worked in a way. While they were speaking to me, asking me the same questions over and over, Dad lit a cigarette,
Sandra put the kettle on and made sandwiches without being asked, and Mel even went back to watching telly. I suppose it helped to do normal things; it wouldn’t have done any good if
we’d all been tearing around screaming our heads off like Mam. I couldn’t get the image of her mad face out of my mind. I’d managed to avoid most of her thumps by holding my arms
over my head, but my cheek was stinging from where she’d slapped me.

One of the guards asked Dad about the bruise on his nose and Dad said it was nothing, just the result of some ‘horseplay’. They both nodded silently and there was an awkward kind of
pause, then one of them wrote something down in his notebook. Dad puffed nervously on his cigarette and asked if he shouldn’t be out searching for Kev, but the guards said they already had
that under control and it was more important for him to stay with his family.

It wasn’t long before Bridie came to the door. The guards wouldn’t let her in but she managed to extract enough information to understand roughly what had happened. Then Mel came
into the kitchen to tell us a large crowd had gathered on the green.

When I showed the guards the man on the wall, they rubbed their chins and nodded again, asking if I was positive this was an ‘accurate representation’, but making no remark about the
fact that his picture was on our wall or about all the bits of stripped wallpaper on the floor. No matter how many times I told them I was sure he wasn’t the one who took Kev, they just
ignored me. They quizzed me again and again about the ‘suspicious individual’, making me repeat everything I’d already told them. They spoke to me as if I was a little kid, and
far too young to understand the way they had it all figured out.

When they said they were finished with me for the time being, they spoke quietly to Dad while I sat at the table, biting the inside of my cheek and shaking my head at the ham sandwich Sandra was
pushing towards me.

Dad tried to light another cigarette, striking match after match that fizzled out or snapped in half. He growled in the back of his throat, crushing the cigarette in his fingers and flinging the
matchbox across the room. The guards made him sit down, telling Sandra and me to go and watch telly with Mel. I was about to protest but Dad gave me such a look I knew it wouldn’t be a good
idea, so I kept my mouth shut and slid down off my chair.

Mel was slumped on the couch, staring at
Little House on the Prairie
. I felt like kicking the screen in when I saw Pa and Laura trekking off in the wagon with stupid smiles all over their
faces. Sandra went to the window and looked out through the dark at the crowd on the green.

‘Everyone’s out there,’ she said, beginning to cry again. ‘Why aren’t we? We should be looking for Kev.’

‘The guards said they’re already out looking for him,’ I said.

‘But we should be with them! He’s going to be so scared when they find him. He’ll need someone he knows to calm him down.’

‘How do you know they’re even going to find him?’ Mel asked, looking at me. ‘He shouldn’t have gone missing in the first place.’

‘Of course they’ll find him!’ Sandra said, coming away from the window. ‘A little boy can’t just disappear!’

The door opened and one of the guards called me out. Dad was standing at the front door. ‘Get your coat on,’ he said, his voice low and grave. ‘Sergeant Pearce is coming to
take us to the churchyard.’

Mel and Sandra poked their heads round the sitting room door.

‘It’s all right,’ Dad told them. ‘You two stay here with the guards. We have to go down to the . . . the graveyard for a little while, so Ruth can show us where Kev was
when he . . . We’ll be back shortly.’

A car pulled up, driven by a young guard, with the sergeant in the passenger seat. Dad looked straight ahead and swallowed hard before telling me the station had radioed in to say a pushchair
had been found in the churchyard, at the base of the copper beech.

It started to drizzle as we drove alongside the green, and the throng that had gathered huddled together in small groups. Geraldine stared at us as she pulled the hood of her anorak up. Paddy
half raised his arm in a sort of wave. Mona turned away, as if she was afraid we might catch her eye. I glanced over towards her house and saw that the curtains had been opened. Through the window,
I saw David at his piano, practising away in a pool of yellow lamplight, his head bent in concentration. Dad saw him too and we exchanged a look in the back of the car. I knew from his face that I
wasn’t the only one who thought it was strange. A lump rose at the back of my throat and I swallowed it down, remembering the day he’d taken Kev from outside the shops . . .

To get to the churchyard by car, we had to go down the hill towards the village and take the road that went up behind Churchview Park. As we slowed down to turn the corner, we spotted Liz coming
out of The Ramblers with Vic. The path was sort of greasy from the rain and one of her heels skidded on the slippery concrete. She let out a yelp and grabbed onto Vic, yanking him halfway to the
ground. They steadied themselves then started to laugh and plonked down on one of the low windowsills, where Vic kissed her on the cheek and she gave him a playful slap on the arm. I wondered how
she could seem to be so happy with a man who was beating her up. She caught sight of me in the back of the police car and her slitty eyes followed us as we drove on up the road. Dad opened his
mouth to say something but closed it again when Sergeant Pearce turned around and smiled at me, saying, ‘This won’t take long. We’ll have you back home in no time.’

Could I really believe what Mam and Dad had said when they came in from Aunty Cissy’s? That there was nothing going on between Dad and Liz? That I’d ‘got the wrong end of the
stick’? Mam said she knew what I’d said about Dad and Liz wasn’t true, but hearing the stuff about the woods had put doubt in her mind. That was why she’d wanted to get away
for the night, she said. Maybe to put a bit of fear into Dad and let him sweat while she decided whether she believed it or not. So that meant that if I’d said nothing about The Kiss, or the
woods, or anything, just kept my mouth shut, she wouldn’t have gone to Auntie Cissy’s at all.

She’d have been home with us.

We might even have gone out for the day somewhere, for a drive up the mountains maybe. But she’d gone, and Dad had to make the dinner and he’d been exhausted afterwards and had made
me take Kev out on the green and then he’d got into that fight. And Kev was so upset and I couldn’t calm him so I’d taken him out for the walk . . .

If Mam had been there . . . If she’d only been there . . .