Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  “It’ll be fine, Mum, really. Besides, my outfit goes with the shoes.” She stuck out her suntanned bare legs, and the jewels in her sandals glinted in the morning summer sunshine.

  “I just think you should be a little more …”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said and teased me about bumsters. Then you came into the kitchen, singing “Happy Birthday” loudly and out of key. Really loudly. And Adam laughed. You said we’d do something special that evening.

  Adam’s voice was quiet. “I hate going to school on my birthday.”

  “But your friends will be there,” you said. “And it’s sports day, isn’t it? So not all work today.”

  “I’d rather have work.”

  A flash of annoyance on your face—or was it sadness?—covered because it was his birthday. You turned to Jenny. “Don’t kill anyone, Nurse Jen,” you said.

  “Being school nurse is a serious thing, not something to joke about,” I said, snappish.

  “It’s just for the afternoon, Mum.”

  But what if there’s a head injury? I’d thought. And she doesn’t know to watch out for sleepiness and sickness when a child has an internal bleed in the brain. Aloud, I said, “Seventeen is just too young to have that much responsibility.”

  “It’s a primary school sports day, Mum, not a motorway crash.”

  She was teasing me, but I didn’t catch the ball she threw me.

  “Children can be severely injured if they fall wrong. All sorts of unforeseen accidents can happen.”

  “Then I’ll dial 999 and call in the pros, OK?”

  I didn’t argue with her anymore. There was no point. Because I’d be there at sports day, with the watertight alibi of cheering Adam on, to keep an eye on things—any signs of sleepiness in injured children and I’d be on it.

  She doled out the pain au chocolat hot from the oven, bought from Waitrose two weeks ago and waiting in the freezer for this morning.

  “I have done a St. John Ambulance training, Mum,” she said to me. “I’m not totally incompetent?”

  A rise at the end of her sentence, like all teenage girls, as if life is one long question.

  You took a pain au chocolat, juggling it from hand to hand to cool it, going to the door.

  “Run superfast,” you said to Adam. “And I’ll see you tonight.” Turning to me: “Bye. Have fun.”

  I don’t think we kissed good-bye. Not in a pointed way, but in a kiss-taken-as-read way. We thought we had a never-ending supply of kisses and had become careless with the ones we didn’t use.

  And did your mum make you a cake?” DI Baker asks Adam.

  Silence.

  “Adam?”

  But he doesn’t move or speak.

  “It was a brilliant cake,” Jenny says to me. She puts her arm around me. “They’ll find out it’s a mistake.”

  I remember Jenny and Adam searching the house for Adam’s tiny Lego skeleton man to put on the cake’s no-man’s-land and me saying I thought this was going a little far, but secretly being glad that he was doing something boyish.

  I remember counting out eight blue candles (three would go into the artillery guns) and thinking it hadn’t felt long since I’d had to take just two candles out of the full packet, and it had felt extravagant and touching. How could he need a whole fistful of them? The cake bristling like some pastel blue foreboding of stubble.

  “Right, let’s move on then,” DI Baker says to Adam. “Did you take your cake to school?”

  Adam doesn’t reply. Can’t reply.

  “I spoke to your form teacher, Miss Madden,” DI Baker says, and it seems strange that he’s talked to the insipid and mean Miss Madden. “She told me that children always bring a cake in on their birthdays?”

  I remember putting the cake tin into the jute bag with the square base, which is perfect for cake tins as they don’t fall on their sides. And then—

  “Oh God.”

  “Mum?” Jenny asks, but DI Baker is talking again.

  “She told me that parents supply the candles and also the matches.”

  A slight stress on “matches,” but Sarah reacts as if scalded.

  “Your headmistress has corroborated this,” DI Baker continues.

  I plead with Sarah to stop this Sherman tank of an interview before it reaches its destination. But she can’t hear me.

  “Miss Madden told us that she keeps the cake, with the candles and matches, in a cupboard next to her desk. Usually she would get it out at the end of the day, just before the children go home. But yesterday was sports day, wasn’t it?”

  Adam is silent and still.

  “She said that if it’s sports day, the birthday child can take it out to the playing field to have at the end?”

  Adam is motionless.

  I remember how anxious he’d been that his birthday cake would be forgotten and he’d miss that once-a-year singing to him, all the children clustering around him.

  “She told us that you went to get your cake from your classroom?”

  He dashed up to me, his face one big smile. He was going to get his cake right now!

  “So you went to your classroom, which was empty?” DI Baker asks, not waiting for a reply anymore. “And then did you take the matches to the art room?”

  Adam is mute.

  “Did you use your birthday cake matches to start a fire, Adam?”

  The silence in the room is so loud that I think my eardrums will burst with the force of it.

  “You just have to say yes or no, lad.”

  But he’s stock-still, frozen.

  He’s standing by the statue of the bronze child, watching me running into the burning school, smoke pouring out and I’m shouting and screaming for Jenny.

  “We don’t think you meant to hurt anyone, Adam,” DI Baker says.

  But how can Addie speak with the noise of sirens and shouting and his own screams? How can he make himself heard above that din?

  “How about if you just nod or shake your head?”

  He doesn’t hear Adam screaming. Just as he can’t hear me as I yell at him to leave my child alone.

  “Adam?”

  But Addie is staring at the school, waiting for me and Jenny. The smoke and the sirens and the waiting. A child turned to stone.

  “I am giving you a caution, Adam,” he says to him. “Which is a serious thing. If you ever do anything like this again, we will not be so lenient. Do you understand?”

  But Adam is watching us being carried out by firefighters. He thinks we are dead. He sees Jenny’s charred hair, her sandals. He sees a firefighter shaking.

  Sarah’s arms are locked around Addie. “That’s the evidence? That he brought in matches? And that someone saw him?”

  “Sarah—”

  She interrupts him, coldly furious. “Someone’s made him the perfect patsy.”

  13

  Adam comes out of the office, looking dazed.

  In the corridor, he retches and then he runs, trying to find a loo, but he can’t find one and he’s sick on the floor. I hold him but he can’t feel me.

  Mum is coming down the corridor. As she sees Addie she magicks that smile onto her face.

  “Poor old you,” she says, giving him a hug.

  Sarah has come out of the office now. She wipes his face with a Kleenex from her pocket, then bends down so that her face is level with his.

  “I’m really sorry the policeman said those things to you. Someone has lied to him, and we are going to find out who, I promise. And then I expect he’ll want to come and apologize to you in person. I would, in his shoes. I’m going to talk to him right now.”

  Mum takes Adam’s hand. “Let’s go outside and get some fresh air, shall we?”

  She takes him towards the exit of the hospital and Jenny goes with them.

  As I watch them leave I remember watching a history series with Addie while you were away. (Neolithic man; we’d search for flint arrowheads next time we visited Mum.) During the ad breaks, they show
ed a trailer for a crime show. It gave Addie a nightmare, so afterwards Jenny or I would grab the remote to change the channel until it was finished. It’s a little bit mad, I know, but I feel as if our old safe life is on the other channel, and we’ve been sucked into a violent and frightening one that we can’t escape.

  I go with Sarah back into that stifling, vile office.

  DI Baker looks up from writing on a form; a done-and-dusted form, I imagine, naming Adam and a caution and a job finished.

  “I need to know who said they saw Adam,” she says.

  “No. You don’t. You’re not a part of this investigation.”

  “Whoever told you was lying.”

  “I think I’m the best judge of that. Believe me, it gives me no pleasure to have to caution a child, let alone a police officer’s nephew.”

  “You said that on sports day the birthday child takes his or her cake, with matches, out to the playing field?”

  DI Baker leans forward over his form; his shirt is untucked, and a droplet of sweat on his back glistens.

  “There is no point to this conversation.”

  “So the child would have to return to the school to get his or her cake.”

  “Where, exactly, are you going with this?”

  “I think the arsonist wanted to set fire to the school on sports day—maybe because the school would be virtually deserted. He chose the child who had a birthday that day, knowing that the child would go back to school to get their cake and matches—and could be made a scapegoat.”

  “This story you’re cooking up—”

  “No story. The school PTA makes a calendar every year with a photo of the children who have birthdays that month.”

  Adam gave her one for Christmas. All the relatives got one.

  “So this month has a photo of Adam and three other children with July birthdays,” she continues. “Yesterday’s date has ‘Sports Day’ written in large type and ‘Adam Covey is 8’ in small type. It’s on the wall of my kitchen. I saw it last week then forgot about it.”

  DI Baker is tucking his shirt back in, hiding the sweat.

  “Anyone with a calendar would know it was Adam’s birthday on sports day,” Sarah continues. “Including the arsonist. He planned for the blame to fall on him.”

  DI Baker turns, crossly uncomfortable.

  “Let’s suppose, for just one moment, that you’re right. Let’s go with that. So why didn’t Adam deny it? They’re guilty when they’re silent, aren’t they? In your experience?”

  “ ‘They’ are adult criminals, not an eight-year-old child.”

  “All he had to do was shake his head. I even suggested it to him. But he didn’t.”

  “I think he could well be suffering from amnesia.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “It is another recognized symptom of PTSD.”

  “You clearly learned a lot from your volunteer work.”

  “Memories of the trauma, and often a little while before or afterwards, are blanked out by the brain as a means of self-preservation.”

  “So he’s conveniently wiped the whole thing?” he asks, enjoying his sarcasm now.

  “No, the memory is there. But his self-defense mechanisms have blocked access to it.”

  DI Baker goes to the door, his back to her.

  “It explains why he doesn’t respond to your questions,” Sarah continues. “He can’t. Because he simply doesn’t remember. And he’s an honest child, so he wouldn’t deny something he can’t remember. I just hope he doesn’t believe your verdict on him.”

  DI Baker turns.

  “The only time I’ve seen genuine amnesia is when someone is drugged up to the eyeballs or has had a bash on the head. This is claptrap and you know it.”

  “Dissociative amnesia is a recognized psychological condition.”

  “Mumbo jumbo reserved for slippery defense lawyers, not police officers.”

  “It’s called retrograde amnesia following a traumatic event.”

  Being Sarah, she probably knows all this. But she must have brushed up on her knowledge to have the terms at her fingertips. That must be why she was on her BlackBerry as she waited for Adam to arrive. I used to get annoyed at the amount of time she spent on that thing.

  But I don’t think Adam is suffering from amnesia but the opposite. I think he hasn’t forgotten the traumatic event but is locked into it and that’s why he can’t speak.

  I have to find him.

  I leave the office, remembering Mum saying she was going to take him outside for fresh air, her cure for most ailments. “If it was up to you, Georgie,” Dad had teased, “I’d be prescribing half a kilometer of a healthy walk.”

  Jenny is in the large goldfish-bowl atrium at the entrance to the hospital, looking through the glass wall.

  “He’s with Granny G and Aunt Sarah,” she says, and gestures to a municipal patch of grass a little distance away, where I can just see them.

  “I tried to go with them,” she continues. “But it hurts to be outside. Really hurts.”

  I long to go to him, but Jenny has no one with her and I can feel her unhappiness.

  We watch Addie, the glass separating us from him.

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Jenny says, and I think of her at six bringing me tepid tea when I had flu; sweetly, uselessly, trying to make me feel better.

  “You and Dad and me and Aunt Sarah and Granny G, we all know that Adam didn’t do it,” she continues. “If his family believe in him, then—”

  “He’ll have to grow up with this,” I say, interrupting her without meaning to. “He’ll be the boy who tried to kill his sister and mother. School. University. Wherever he goes, it will go first. This dreadful thing that’s being said about him.”

  She’s silent for a little while, watching Addie.

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you,” she says. “About the hate-mailer. He threw a can of paint at me.”

  My God. He was following her.

  “Did you see who it was?” I ask, trying to sound calm.

  “No. He threw it from behind. I don’t remember anything useful at all. Nothing that will help Addie. I just remember this woman screaming and screaming. It was red gloss, the paint. She thought it was blood. It covered the back of my coat. And all down my hair.”

  Was the paint meant to look like blood? A hideous warning of the violence to come?

  “It was on the tenth of May,” she says.

  That was just a few weeks ago. Just a few weeks. It hadn’t stopped at all. It had gotten worse. Not just posting her vicious letters, but following her and throwing paint at her. Is he still stalking her now? Attacking her for real?

  “If I’d told the police, they might have found him,” she says. “Stopped him in time. And Addie …”

  Guilt crumples her face; she looks more like ten right now than seventeen.

  I put my hand on her, but she shakes me off as if sympathy just makes it all worse.

  “I tried to convince myself it wasn’t the hate-mailer who set fire to the school. But now with Adam being accused, I can’t …”

  She’s admitting this awful possibility out of love for Adam.

  “Why didn’t you tell us, Jen?”

  “I thought it was the right thing to do,” she says quietly.

  Before the fire, I’d have told her that the right thing was to be responsible and tell us and the police. I’d have become my nanny voice and stood on my soapbox and told her this wasn’t about her being “grounded” or “policed” but about keeping her safe, and unless she told us she was putting herself at risk.

  “Who else knows?” I ask.

  “Just Ivo,” she replies. “I made him promise me he wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  You’ll think it’s unfair of me to hate Ivo now, but he should have told us.

  “When’s he coming home?” I ask.

  “Ten days. But he’s bound to find out about this and come back sooner.”

  I nod. But I doubt he’l
l fly back to be at her side. And you think my doubt is unfair on him too.

  As I stare out of the window, a man brushes past me.

  Mr. Hyman.

  I feel jolted by shock. Shivery with it. What is he doing here?

  He’s in shorts and a T-shirt, looking so suntanned in this white place. At school he had to wear a formal jacket and trousers, and I find his bare arms and legs too intimate.

  He’s by some kind of vending machine now, taking a ticket.

  He goes through a door I hadn’t noticed before.

  I follow him.

  “Mum?”

  “I want to know what he’s up to.”

  “I’m sure he’s not up to anything.”

  But she comes with me anyway.

  The door leads onto concrete steps. It closes behind us.

  We follow him down to a basement car park. After the sunshine of the atrium, the basement is oppressively dim. The heat smells of petrol fumes and exhausts. The concrete is stained, the roof too low. I automatically look for exits.

  There’s only us down here and Mr. Hyman.

  “I don’t like this,” I say.

  “It’s just a car park. He was getting a ticket for it.”

  “You’re invisible,” my nanny voice snaps, so much harsher than Jenny. “And probably half dead already. So what can possibly happen to you?”

  Mr. Hyman reaches an old yellow Fiat and sticks the ticket from the vending machine on the windscreen. There are three children’s seats crammed into the car.

  “What’s he doing here?” I say.

  “He’s probably come to have it out with Tara,” Jenny says. “She deserves it.”

  “But how would he know that she hangs around here?”

  “Maybe he’s a good guesser,” Jenny says. “I don’t know. Or he’s just trying to get away from his wife. He used to pretend to run the after-school scrapbook-making club so he could get more time away from her.”

  She smiles as if it’s funny, but I don’t.

  “You can’t blame him, really. She’s horrible to him,” Jenny continues. “Told him he was a loser, and that was when he still had a job. Said she was embarrassed by him. But she won’t get divorced. Says if he leaves her, he’ll never see the kids.”