by Max Porter
he lifts his hand and the cool air of the room washes away the water and heat of the mark so he places his other hand down and leaves another print and a Rorschach-couple more appear, heat prints, stress,
then fade,
and he thinks about ants carrying water droplets on their backs, tiny water sacks and he remembers swimming in Greece as a teenager in the weirdly warm sea and the point on the cliff where the locals had told him to dive down, he dived down and met a blast chamber of icy fresh water
a corridor of freezing silence cutting into the hissing lukewarm salt
diving again and again
every time shocking
like a visitor at the wedding of two warring waters
again and again diving down Blythe down again into the water Mr Blythe
I’ll swear on a bible, on my cousin’s life, on every mark I’ve ever made on paper, wood or canvas, that I would never harm that child.
Mr Blythe?
Can you describe for the benefit of the tape what we are looking at?
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Into a van, chloroformed, to Dover, down through France, Spain, across to Morocco, wakes up the plaything of a rich pervert with a pomegranate in his mouth. Good night Lorraine I don’t want to think about it any more. We don’t know.
Well someone knows.
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All day every day. The second hand of the clock barbed-wired and cutting.
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In a word; oblivious. To bullying, to competition, to classroom politics. Off with the fairies. But very sophisticated and intuitive at the same time. He was a joy to teach. Is. Oh dear. Sorry.
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I was thinking How should I behave? I went back out but the search teams were so organised and everyone said Go Home Robert You Rest and I was the most hopeless and fraudulent human being.
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You keep saying that. Stop repeating yourself and concentrate on what we know.
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Julian and Fi’s eldest was going to do his dissertation on Peter Blythe, huge fan he was, so he’ll have to think again now.
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The colour of his eyes, but not how he fist-bumps when he’s enjoyed a meal. The make and shape of his rucksack, but not the little ridge of freckles across his nose and cheeks.
I’ve told them.
I’ve forgotten.
I mentioned it.
I remember.
The colour of his eyes, but not how he sings as he walks. The make and shape of his rucksack, but not the little scar on his knuckle.
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Silence in the room.
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That picture of Pete in the seventies, got up in full-on Moondog garb, I mean, you’d do a CRB check on that bastard would you not?
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She says it again in her velvety-soft professional way: There’s no accepted way of reacting.
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Fame at last: Nan was on the ten o’clock news saying about how Mad Pete was well dodge.
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I am speaking, but I don’t recognise my own voice. My voice and all these other voices and the hammering noise of the fact that he still hasn’t turned up.
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Who is this man in a shiny grey suit with blue plastic bags on his feet, two iPads and a portable chemistry lab sitting on Lanny’s bed?
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They should check Peggy’s woodshed; she’s been stealing babies since the Middle Ages.
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There are fifteen people talking at once, busily translating Lanny into an A4 page of missingness, a speck in the sea of missing people.
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A crucial fixture is a crucial fixture, whatever else might be happening and we will win it for him, for the kid.
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All I will say and you didn’t hear this from me is that some very odd things were found in his home.
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Sleeplessness does the devil’s joinery, son.
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Someone knows where he is, says Sally for the four hundred and fiftieth time and I will kill her, but she’s been a rock. Hasn’t Sally been a rock?
Find. My. Son. Swap my husband for my son, take him, get him out of my sight, get everyone out of my sight. I will close my eyes and draw Lanny on the inside of my eyelids in detail only I am capable of and when I open them I want to see him.
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Imagine, just imagine being that woman, even for ten minutes, Jesus Christ.
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It is one thing and one thing only: negligence.
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That tea-towel with a cheeky raccoon saying ‘Lord grant me patience but please hurry!’ I mean how insensitive?
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Gavin, the Child Abuse Investigation Team (CAIT) Duty Sergeant, says, Talk to Robert. Ask Robert what he’s thinking.
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Think about that, about having no idea where your son is, for whole afternoons, whole chunks of days.
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I was thinking: Let Jolie’s dad off his leash, let him murder Pete and bring home Lanny, let him tuck me up in bed, let him patronise, belittle and infantilise me forever and ever in return for Lanny skipping up the driveway saying, What’s going on, Dad, what are Gran and Gramzo doing here?
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I have to ask. Do you want Pete to have killed Lanny? Do you want that? Do you want a body?
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Nice Adam says, They will prioritise DNA testing when evidence pertains to a missing persons case but nevertheless the laboratory is in London and just to be crystal clear Lanny’s DNA is all over this village like magic fairy dust. Just to be clear forensic evidence of Lanny is everywhere. It is all up and down the street, behind the hall, around the pub, in more than a dozen of the houses, into bedrooms and playrooms and garages, into the woods, onto the common, up the bloody trees, excuse my language. No problem Nice Adam carry on please! Well, it’s almost as if Lanny’s scent is the village’s scent and he’s staring us in the face.
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I’ve looked in every wheelie bin and every single time, every lifted lid or bin bag, I have expected to see a dead child and that’s taken its toll and I’m drinking tonight even though it’s a dry day OK?
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Did I or did I not say they was an odd couple, Jolie and Rob, well, not to mention Pete and the lad, y’get me.
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There is no such thing as trust. It’s a pernicious myth.
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I am in the greenhouse. It’s a mess. Ambitious vegetable plans abandoned. There are police boot prints in the beds. There is a smashed pot.
The little white flowers are open on the seed potato plants, so I grab one and lift it up. There in the hole, some clinging to the roots, are a dozen perfect baby spuds. And a plastic bag. I kneel down. I wipe the bag on my shirt.
Somehow I intuit that this is important, so I am furtive. I look back at the house, at the people inside my house. I don’t want them seeing this.
It’s a zip-loc freezer bag. Inside there’s a piece of paper with Lanny’s writing on it.
I am breathing fast and possible scenarios are tumbling off me like soil off a shaken root.
But it’s simpler than that. It’s so typical of Lanny; the sweetness, the desire to please, the forward-thinking charm.
‘HELLO SEED-POTATO HARVESTER HOORAY FOR TODAY IT’S SEED POTATO DAY!’
I lie down on the scrubby floor of the greenhouse, clutching my boy’s letter from one hundred or more days ago, and I weep and grind my knuckles into the ground. I would have found this. I would have called to him. We would have smiled and pulled up the little spuds together, shaking them free.
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You could give her a hug but she’d bite your arm off.
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I was thinking: Would Lanny fight or struggle against someone trying to bundle him into a car? Is Lanny going to be sexually assaulted and murdered? Is Jolie having these thoughts? Can I protect her from these thoughts? I know from TV they have corpse dogs who can pick up the smell of d
ead bodies, these dogs aren’t corpse dogs, they’re looking for a living Lanny, smelling his funny milky smell, his clothes, his unwashed hair. My thoughts were slippery and grim and I was pretending to be busy.
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It is very important that you sleep.
I can’t.
I can help with that.
If you want to help, get everyone you know, everyone you have ever met, and walk every inch of this country until you find my child then bring him back to me.
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The unlikeliness of Lanny. Nobody can remember whether he was good at football. He was fine at football. He sang a lot. Really? He sang a lot, but was good at football? He sang, therefore he was mocked. No, not Lanny, he had a kind of magic, we all accepted he was enigmatic and special. A kind of magic, and what, it worked on adults, kids, everyone? I don’t believe it.
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At any time of day, you will find there are twenty-odd rubber-neckers, tragedy tourists, huddled by the plastic tape. Blows my mind. And Angela Arsehole Larton bringing them tea!
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Someone has sprayed TOOTHWORT TOOK HIM on the bus shelter.
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Walter started acting funny, barking, sniffing around that weird little concrete pill-box thing by the sledging field, and I thought oh shit, here goes, this is it, I’m going to see a dead body, I’m going to have to carry a dead child a mile home, I’m going to be in the paper, but it was just a decomposing badger, maggots pouring out of his eye sockets like a slow-motion leaderless army, charging, retreating, swirling in confusion.
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I dreamed of myself as the Virgin, feeding Lanny, a bracelet-wristed European painted baby on my lapis lazuli robes, the village in the background, Robert tiny in the fields gathering hay, and as Lanny fed Lanny grew, he swelled and stretched into a big long muscled man, carved, released from whatever invisible rock the baby was imprisoned in, draped across my lap, bearded, his big knob falling down towards the earth, still feeding, glugging at me, fast asleep but thirsty, and my tits were made of cabbage leaves, and my son was made of marble, and Robert was in the background, tiny, desperately harvesting, kneeling down pulling at hopeless straws, and in the mirror, half obscured, was Pete, painting us.
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No missing kid is ever annoying or boring are they? ‘We won’t really miss his plain face or his bog-standard school work. He was unremarkable, a bit of a pain actually, and we’re glad he’s gone.’
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Dear Jolie and Robert I am thinking of you. I feel terrible I was sometimes mean to Lanny. Most of the time I wasn’t but one time I called him a retard and he might have been upset. I’m really sorry. I think about him and say prayers that he will come home. From James Stead.
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They offered me a hotel. They advised me not to be in the village. But I want to look for Lanny. Don’t provoke people, they said. Feelings run high at times like this. But I want to see Jolie. I want to help my friends. I want to find Lanny. Then a little man who looked like a sleepy vole came and said to me that I would need counselling. He warned me that I might not ever be able to live in the village again. I should see a psychotherapist and take full advantage of the legal, financial and emotional support being offered to me. And I should not talk to newspapers.
Do you believe in God, Mr Blythe?
No, I said.
Just checking, said the sleepy vole. It can come in handy.
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I knew you were insensitive but I hadn’t realised you were hateful.
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RAPE, MURDER AND SADISTIC VIOLENCE: Read scenes from Lanny’s mum’s ‘hotly tipped crime debut’.
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Silence please. At the risk of repeating myself, please do not antagonise the grandpa. Please respect the FLO and the delicate work she now has to do.
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He’s a sex slave in Saudi Arabia, he’s a busker in Fez, he’s in a bag of builder’s rubble on the mossy bottom of Dudley Canal, he’s acid, he’s sewage, he’s concrete, he’s got a new face now.
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Look me in the eye and tell me it’s not exciting, the whole country watching.
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I thought he was a right little knob skipping about like he was a fairy princess, but you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead should you.
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Pete walked a full loop of the village in bright daylight like he gave absolutely no fucks, fair play to him.
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No longer a suspect. Has a water-tight alibi from the moment that boy left school to this very second. A Water. Tight. Alibi. Can we just repeat that for the benefit of Captain Witch-hunt over there on the fruit machine?
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You’ve never seen anything like this kid’s collections. Like Pitt Rivers in his bedroom, fossilised wood and crystals and stones all labelled ‘40 million years old’, ‘Suffolk beach’, ‘Dad’s first fool’s gold’, shark’s teeth, worry dolls, knots, finger bowls, acorns, shells, stalactites, wishbones, everything labelled, everything loved.
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Brave, to come straight back here, look us all in the eye.
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Dear Mr and Mrs Lloyd, We were in the woods playing BB guns and we found Lanny building his camp and we called him a weirdo and kicked the wall and broke a bit and I tripped him up and we all laughed. I’m so sorry, he was a really cool boy and I hope he’s OK and will be home soon. From Dean Dawes. PS I’m sorry.
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Pam has a library of this shit.
What shit.
You know, missing kids.
Eh?
The murder cases, missing kid mysteries, all those books about famous dead children.
That’s fucked up.
Yeah she told me she’s kind of loving this.
That’s fucked up.
Yeah she said being this close to the drama is a dream come true and she sort of hopes it doesn’t end.
That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard, Fat Pam is evil.
Yeah man, but you shouldn’t call her Fat Pam that’s not cool.
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May I remind you, Nick, that on day one, DAY. ONE, Jolie said she did not believe Pete would harm her child. She said that on day one.
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I know you generously did the first 1000 postcards free, but you are the only local business charging for help with the campaign, and you being, you know, Polish and therefore not ‘of’ the community in the traditional sense, I would hate for word to get out that you were profiting from Mr and Mrs Lloyd’s, well, all of our, terrible tragedy.
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Oi, Paedo, you’ve got a cheek. Can’t fool a fooler. Few of us wouldn’t mind a word.
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Dear all,
I met this morning with Caroline, Jolie Lloyd’s editor, and with Martin from the division legal team, and I can confirm that we will pull this novel from the schedule indefinitely. Thank you all for calm heads when the pages were leaked, and for your care and sincerity. I think we can be extremely proud of how we have behaved, as publishers and people, during this terrible time for one of our most promising new writers. With warm wishes,
Susan
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Bunch of tough guys, attacking an old man. Big men. Flinging punches at a weeping pensioner.
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Facts are my bread and butter, Agnieszka. Seven hundred thousand kids run away every year. About seven hundred kids are snatched every year. Let’s allow probability to triumph over blind panic and sinister phantasms shall we?
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Old posh-pants Howarth hasn’t said much, has he? Keeping shtum in case the police find the hundreds of dead prozzies in his garden?
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Peggy kneels and places her ancient hands on the acorn-garland carvings on the chest her great-grandfather carved out of local oak. She whispers, Look after him.
She waits and she runs her fingertips over the wood.
She sighs. Shooting pains in her knees and up her spine.