Safe and sound, p.24
Safe and Sound, page 24
I take the back street off Brixton Hill, the one that leads straight to the school. When I make it to the playground, one minute to four, there is no sign of Charlie, but then of course, they wouldn’t be waiting outside. It’s too cold for that. I push at the front doors of the school to head inside. I know where Charlie’s classroom is, it’s one of the first off the main corridor. I know exactly where he will be.
But the outer doors jolt against my hand. Locked. I can’t get in.
I try again, shaking the handle, but it really is locked, the school is closed. Now I can tell – there are no lights on inside. And there is no sign anywhere of Charlie.
Home then. Alastair must have taken him home. He must have arrived early, before four, and why would a teacher wait past then? I turn to head to our flat and, as I do, in the staff car park I see a little blue car, just leaving. It stops when the driver sees me and the woman inside – I recognize her now as Charlie’s teacher – rolls down the window.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘I couldn’t … my train … and then my phone …’ I stop and take a breath. ‘Has Charlie gone home?’
Ms Simmons smiles at me. ‘You didn’t get my text? Your friend came … Alastair. Charlie was fine and went with him.’
‘All right, thank you. I’ll head straight there. Thank you, I promise, it won’t happen again.’
I stumble-run up the road, my legs shaky beneath me. Ms Simmons shouts after me. When I look back, she’s pointing – they went that way! – but that doesn’t make any sense. Every second feels too long, but I am nearly there, I am nearly with him. Here is my flat, and I already have my key in my hand as I run up the steps. I shove open the door, half falling inside, calling out for them. ‘I’m here!’
But there is no answer. The flat is warm, but the flat is empty. There is nobody inside.
I check all the rooms. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Alastair has taken Charlie. Pins and needles of terror shoot up and down my arms. There was no sign of them at the school, there is no sign of them at home. I have to bend over, the pain in my throat and tightness in my chest is so excruciating. The words rush through my head, Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
What do I really know about this man? Alastair, who I first met barely two weeks ago. Alastair who works with children, who sat across from me at a café and told me things about his life. I trusted him because he seemed to like me, because he said I was kind and thoughtful, because he made out he had anxiety too, because he gave my son Silly Putty.
Really? I inwardly scream at myself. Really? When Marianne told you he had outright lied?
I force myself to stand back upright, muscles wrenching in my chest. Think. Think!
They went that way. I can see it in my mind: Ms Simmons’s pointing finger. That way …? Towards the park?
I hitch my stupid bag back onto my shoulder and slam the door of the flat behind me. I’m really running now, zigzagging through the streets. I’ve been this way a million times with Charlie, I could walk it in my sleep and now I cannot bear to think what I will do if they are not there. I shove my way through the entrance gate to the park, catching my fingers in the cold iron. I run towards the swings, the place I go to with Charlie all the time.
If they’re not here, the words, the blood pounds in my head. If they’re not here – and I can’t even finish the thought.
Because they are there.
Two figures, spinning slowly on the roundabout. From here, they could be father and son. Alastair waves at me as he sees me coming, and Charlie jumps off the roundabout, stumbling as he lands, his face split by a smile.
I should want to hug my son. I should say thank you to Alastair. But instead fear has hijacked every cell of my mind. Somewhere, there’s a part of me looking down from above, wise and rational and quite in control. But down here, running across the cold ground, I’m like a wild animal, all teeth and claws, fight and flight all scrambled up inside me, so that when Alastair comes up to me, Charlie following just a half-step behind, I swing my bag at him as if it’s a weapon. Alastair raises his arms to protect himself, but I can’t seem to control myself, I can’t seem to stop.
You’re having a breakdown, that wise person above me says. A total breakdown. I can see it happening to myself, quite clearly.
I keep hitting Alastair, again and again. All the confusion and horror of these last few weeks has come bulging out of me. I have become violent, enraged, hysterical, helpless.
‘How could you?’ I’m shouting at him. ‘How could you? How dare you take him off somewhere like that, my son! You had no right, you had no right!’
‘I’m sorry!’ Alastair is trying to say. ‘I sent you a text! Charlie couldn’t find his key. We came here to keep warm. Charlie said he comes to this park all the time. We knew you were coming, and I sent you a text!’
He’s repeating himself, in the face of my madness.
‘I thought we were friends,’ Alastair is saying. ‘I thought we trusted each other. I was glad that you asked for my help!’
My arm is too weak to keep fighting and swinging. My bag drops like a leaden weight to my side. There’s the tiniest, tiniest moment where it can all be so different. If Alastair would only step forwards right then, wrap his arms around me, hold me tight until I know that I’m safe. But I have scared him too much, how can he approach me? So instead I grab Charlie’s arm and then we are running, me and Charlie, away from this man that I’ve become so terrified of, and my head feels as though it can’t contain what’s inside it any more; so many questions and falsehoods and mirages, each one of them shredding another part of me into nothing. We run across the cold, muddy grass, out of the play park, Charlie stumbling and crying beside me, and I can feel myself leaving that wise version behind me, floating loose above me, and I think to myself, if you run out of these gates like this right now, there might be no way you will ever get her back.
When we get home, I give Charlie Calpol again. He cries and shouts at me – he doesn’t want it, he hates it – until in the end I have to half-force it through his lips, hand over his mouth to make sure he swallows. I don’t know how else to manage him or myself.
I put him to bed, weak with relief when he falls asleep. I plug my phone in to charge and drag open my laptop. I type everything I can think of into the Internet search bar. What happened to Sarah’s loving parents? If they are dead, then how did they die? It feels as if this piece is the answer to everything. The thing that will bring my sanity back. The woman at the local authority, the coroner, they never told me this. Maybe they didn’t even know.
I type in Sarah’s name, her surname, her date of birth. I keep going and going, trying to find something to piece reality back together. Everything about Sarah was false; her whole world was constructed upon lies and pretence. And at the centre of those lies was the fantasy about her parents. Seemingly the root of it all. The person who sent that terrible text: is this the secret they didn’t want me to know?
I don’t know how I manage, but I find them.
The newspaper reports, from eighteen, twenty years ago.
I know as soon as I see them, this is it.
Sarah’s mother died in 2001.
Sarah’s father died in 2003. In prison.
The dates are connected, not a coincidence. It is one final horror on top of all the others.
As the pieces come together, I feel the last thread of my mind stretch to breaking point.
Sarah’s dad was in prison for murdering Sarah’s mum.
Chapter 33
BACK THEN
There are lots more visitors to Prin’s house now. All kinds of people traipsing in and out.
Jane has gone again. Not back home. For some reason (as Prin is starting to pick up now), she can’t go back to her own house or her own mummy and daddy. Something happened there. A very bad thing. So now that she’s been allowed to come out of the hospital, Jane has gone to another house, to stay with another family for a while. Just until all of this mess can be sorted out, Daddy says.
Meanwhile a psychologist wants to talk to Prin.
They actually have to go to her office for the talk, to a big building forty minutes’ drive away. Prin and Mum and Daddy. The building is grey and the lady’s office itself has toys in it, plus loads of paper and felt-tip pens. Prin supposes this is because this lady talks to lots of families, and the toys and pens are to keep the children busy.
The lady says she first wants to talk with all of them together. Mum and Daddy and Prin. Then she will talk to Prin on her own. She asks whether Prin would like to play with anything. Prin asks for the paper and pens.
To begin with, Prin just lets Daddy talk. He’s the best at talking in their family.
‘No,’ he tells the lady, ‘we didn’t tell her what happened. We thought it best not to tell her any of it. Prin – she … our daughter would have just thought her cousin was coming to stay for the summer. We didn’t tell her any more than that. I mean, would you?’
The lady’s face looks rather serious at these words. Prin lowers her head back down and carries on with what she is doing, which is drawing a picture.
‘Did you think that would be best for her?’ the lady asks. ‘Not to tell her anything at all?’ She is asking Daddy, but both Mum and Daddy answer.
‘No,’ says Mum, just as Daddy says, ‘Yes.’
There’s a pause then, in which all Prin can really hear is the squeak of her felt-tip pen. She puts that pen – a red one – down, and picks up a blue one. Red for the roof and dark blue for the sky. She wonders when it will be her turn to talk.
Daddy puts his hand on Mum’s arm. ‘Yes,’ he says again.
The lady nods. She appears to Prin to be thinking hard. ‘What about with –’ she glances at her notes – ‘Jane? How much did you talk to … Jane about what happened between her parents?’
Another silence.
This time it is Mum who breaks it. ‘Very little,’ she says. ‘We weren’t sure … we thought it best—’
And then Daddy jumps in to explain it all to the lady. He gets her to see how it is, very simply.
‘That’s not how we do things in our house,’ he says.
Now it is Prin’s turn. Mum and Daddy are sent out of the room, though Prin has a feeling they are still watching her from somewhere. Maybe from behind the big mirror in the wall. The lady rests her elbows on her knees and leans down towards Prin. Prin wishes now that she wasn’t sitting on the floor. She pushes the paper with her drawing away. The roof, the sky, the girl, the wings. She isn’t sure why she decided to draw that.
‘Thank you for coming to chat with me today,’ says the lady. She has quite a nice face, Prin supposes. She looks old, but she is smiley. ‘I’m keen to know a little bit about you. You and your family and … your cousin.’
‘Okay …’ says Prin slowly. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Well. How about you tell me how you feel about your cousin. Did you like her? Did the two of you get along?’
Prin wrinkles her nose. These are sort of silly questions. ‘Yes. We shared a room. I let her play with all my toys. We played lots of games together.’
The lady waits as if she’s expecting Prin to say something else then. But Prin doesn’t.
‘Were there any games you liked to play most?’
Prin isn’t sure how best to answer that. She isn’t sure what she’s supposed to say. They would play with dolls, and on the grass under the sprinklers, and jumping games like the one at the beach. Then the hammer game that they got into trouble for. So which was the right answer out of all of that?
‘I have a zoetrope,’ says Prin. ‘Jane especially likes that.’
‘A zoetrope?’
Prin looks up, checking. ‘You must know what that is?’
The lady nods.
‘Oh,’ says Prin. ‘Well, that’s good.’ She shifts her legs. All this kneeling is giving her pins and needles.
‘So you got along, and you liked playing together. But tell me, was your cousin ever sad? Did she cry, for example, or sometimes get frightened?’
Prin wants to laugh. She wants to say, All the time! But she doesn’t want to say mean things about her cousin, plus she remembers what Daddy has always said: No tears in this house! So: ‘No,’ Prin tells the lady. ‘She was always very happy.’
‘Oh … I see. And what about the night on the roof,’ the lady says. ‘Was Jane happy then?’
Prin feels a rush of feeling in her chest, remembering it all again. The breeze and the stars and Jane’s eyes gleaming and the silhouette of her against the sky just before … just before …
Prin sits up straight. ‘I didn’t push her,’ she says. Prin feels it’s important to say that right straight up. She even repeats it. ‘Not on the rock and not on the roof. I didn’t.’
The lady’s face looks so serious that Prin can’t help wanting to laugh.
‘So what did happen?’ the lady says.
Prin opens her mouth, then closes it again. She thought all the words were there, but they seem to have run away from her. It somehow isn’t so clear when she has to explain it aloud.
‘Jane was a bit scared,’ she says, slowly. ‘And the zoetrope wasn’t working. I took her up to the roof. I liked going up there before, by myself.’
The lady nods. ‘Yes?’
‘She wanted to fly,’ says Prin. ‘We had done it before. Flying. At the beach. She loved it. It made her happy. And she saw her parents up in the sky. She said, I’m imagining it, I’m imagining it. Things can come real, you know, like that.’
‘Become real?’ Now the lady is frowning.
‘Like the onion,’ says Prin. ‘You can say something, and you can imagine it, or wish it, or picture it happening, and then it goes that way. It’s just true.’
The lady makes a careful note on her page. ‘And so … on the roof?’
Prin goes still. She looks up at this lady, right into her eyes. She feels something cold and soft move on the bottom of her stomach. When she looks at the papers the lady has laid out on the table in front of her, she sees the names in there.
She sees Sarah Jane Jones.
And she sees her own name too. Her real name.
‘It was Make-Believe,’ she whispers. ‘And Make-Believe is just real.’ She doesn’t know why this lady can’t understand that. She thought this was a grown-up game. She thought this was a grown-up rule.
‘So was it real to you?’ the lady asks. ‘What you were doing up there on the roof?’
Now Prin feels a stubbornness well up inside her. ‘Of course it was!’ she says. ‘She held her arms out, she made the wings, she only had to jump and she’d do it. We were both imagining. Imagining really hard!’
‘So what was it you imagined? That she would fly?’
‘Yes! I imagined that because it’s what she wanted, because I really, really wanted her to stop crying and because her mummy and daddy were up there waiting!’
The lady looks at her for a long time, very still. And very serious. ‘But you know the difference, really, don’t you? Between what’s real and what’s imaginary? What’s true and what’s … Make-Believe?’
Prin shakes her head. ‘I didn’t push her,’ she repeats. ‘She jumped and she flew.’
‘But –’ the lady leans right down close – ‘but do you see that it wasn’t real? No matter how hard the two of you imagined, it was only ever pretend?’
Prin looks up again. Her stomach clenches. She realizes it then, like a cold douse of water. This lady knows things. She is a psychologist. She knows better than Mum, she knows more even than Daddy. This lady is clever.
And this lady is right.
A few weeks later, everything seems to be back to normal. Prin is back at school and Mum’s fine and Daddy’s back at work.
Sarah Jane isn’t living with them any more.
The zoetrope never did get mended. The dent was too bad: it doesn’t spin any more. So Prin decides to cut it up. She can use the little pictures for something else. She goes through into Daddy’s office. She knows he keeps a sharp pair of scissors in there.
When she opens his desk drawer and lifts out the scissors, underneath she finds a piece of paper. With her name on it.
Prin sets the scissors down on the desk. She pulls out the piece of paper. It is stapled to three, four more sheets. Prin’s name appears on them all. Sarah Jane’s name appears on it too.
Prin can read the words in the report, even if she can’t understand what they all mean. But there is one phrase she can make out quite clearly.
… potentially in great danger, if she should go on living with this child.
Very carefully and slowly, Prin slides the report back into the drawer. Feeling very cold and very hollow, she takes the scissors back to her room and sits on her bed, hands clasped very tightly.
She thinks for a long time about what she’s read in those pages. What it says about her. She sits there until the sun moves round and her room grows dim, the blades of the scissors digging deep runnels into her palms. And she promises never to do it again.
Chapter 34
It’s only a few hours later that it happens. A bang against the front door of our flat. The squeak of the letterbox opening. And a sound like an avalanche, something falling like slurry into our hallway.
I wasn’t asleep; I never seem to sleep. I’m wide awake when I hear the sounds and feel my blood turn absolutely cold. Before anything else, I go through into Charlie’s room. He’s awake as well, sitting up in bed, woken by the noise. I crouch down next to his bed and turn on the lamp, covering us with bright, white light. I stare at my son in the harsh light and he stares back at me. My fingers are raising red marks on his arms where I am gripping him so hard.
I have no idea what this is.
