by Chris Cleave
“Is everything all right?” she called out.
“I’ve lost my son,” I said.
She looked at me blankly. I smiled idiotically. I didn’t know what to do with my face. My mind and my body were keyed up to fight with paedophiles and wolves. Confronted with these ordinary people, spread out across their picnic rug in this absurdly pleasant tableau, my distress seemed desperate and vulgar. My social conditioning fought against my panic. I felt ashamed. Instinctively, I also knew that I needed to speak to the woman calmly, in her register, if I was to communicate clearly and get across the information I needed without wasting any time. I struggled—maybe I had been struggling all my life—to find the correct point of balance between nicety and hysteria.
“I’m very sorry,” I said, “I’ve lost my son.”
The woman stood up and looked around the clearing. I couldn’t understand why her movements were so slow. It seemed that I was operating in air, while she occupied some more viscous medium.
“He’s about this high,” I said. “He’s dressed as Batman.”
“I’m sorry,” she said in slow motion. “I haven’t seen anything.”
Each word took forever to form. It felt like waiting for the woman to engrave the sentence in stone. I was already halfway out of the clearing before she finished speaking. Behind me I heard the husband saying, You could always go for the cheapest package tour and just use the flights. Then you can find some nicer accommodation once you’re out there.
I ran through a labyrinth of small, dark paths between the rhododendrons, shouting Charlie’s name. I crawled through dark tunnels between the branches, utterly at random. My forearms bled from the scratches, but I felt no pain. I don’t know how long I ran for. Perhaps for five minutes, or perhaps for the time it takes for a divine being to create a universe, make humanity in- its image but find no solace in it, and then preside in horror over the slow grey death of the thing, knowing itself to still be utterly alone and unconsoled. Somehow I arrived back at the place where Charlie had built his city of sticks. I tore the structures apart, shouting his name. I looked for my son under piles of sticks as little as six inches high. I scrabbled through drifts of dead leaves. Of course I knew my son wasn’t underneath. I knew, even as I was scrabbling away at anything that protruded. I found an old crisp packet. The broken wheel of a pushchair. My nails bled into a barely submerged history of family days out.
Across the expanse of grass I saw Little Bee and Lawrence, who’d returned after their own searches through the rhododendrons. I ran over to them, but when I was halfway across the grass I remember the last rational thought that went through my mind: He isn’t on the grass, and he isn’t in the bushes, so he must be in the lake. Even as I thought it, I could feel the second stage of my mind shutting down. The panic simply rose up out of my chest to engulf me. I swerved away from Lawrence and Little Bee and I ran down to the edge of the lake. I splashed out into it, knee high, then waist high, staring down into the muddy brown water, screaming Charlie’s name at the waterlilies and the startled mandarin ducks.
I saw something under the water, lying on the muddy sludge of the lake’s bottom. Underwater, glimpsed between lilies and distorted by ripples, it looked like a bone-white face. I reached down and grabbed for it. I lifted it up into the light. It was the cracked half-skull of a rabbit. As I held it up, dripping muddy water, I realised that my phone had been in the hand I held the skull in. My phone was gone, somewhere—my life was gone, somewhere—lost in the bushes or the lake. I stood in the water, holding a skull. I didn’t know what to do now. I heard a whistling sound and I looked down-sharply. I understood that the breeze was whistling through the empty eye socket of the skull, and that is when I truly began to scream.
Charlie O’Rourke. Four years old. Batman. What went through my mind? His perfect little white teeth. His look of fierce concentration when he was dispatching baddies. The way he hugged me, once, when I was sad. The way, since Africa, that I had been running between worlds—between Andrew and Lawrence, between Little Bee and my job—running everywhere except to the world where I belonged. Why had I never run to Charlie? I screamed at myself. My son, my beautiful boy. Gone, gone. He had disappeared as he had lived, while I was looking the other way. Towards all my own selfish futures. I looked at the empty days before me, and there was no end to them.
Then I felt hands on my shoulders. It was Lawrence. He led me out of the lake and stood me on the bank. I was shivering in the breeze.
“We need to be systematic about this now,” he said. “Sarah, you stay here and keep calling- for him, so he knows where to come back to if he’s wandering. I’ll go and ask everyone inside the plantation to start looking, and I’ll keep looking myself. And Bee, you take my phone and you go to where you can get reception and you call the police. Then you wait at the plantation gate for the police, so you can show them where we are when they arrive.”
Lawrence handed his phone to Little Bee, and turned back to me.
“I know it sounds extreme,” he said, “but the police are good at this. I’m sure we’ll find Charlie before they get here, but just on the off-chance that we don’t, it makes sense for us to bring them in sooner rather than later.”
“Okay, do it,” I said. “Do it now.”
Little Bee was still standing there, holding Lawrence’s phone in her hand, staring at Lawrence and me with large and frightened eyes. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t already running.
“Go!” I said.
She still stared at me. “The police…” she said.
Understanding buzzed dully in my mind. The number. Of course! She didn’t know the emergency number.
“The number is 999,” I said.
She just stood there. I couldn’t work out what the problem was.
“The police, Sarah,” she said.
I stared at her. Her eyes were pleading. She looked terrified. And then, very slowly, her face changed. It became firm, resolved. She took a deep breath, and she nodded at me. She turned, slowly at first and then very fast, and she ran off in the direction of the plantation gate. When she was halfway across the grass, Lawrence raised a hand to his mouth.
“Oh shit, the police,” he said.
“What?”
He shook his head.
“Never mind.”
Lawrence ran off into the maze of paths between the rhododendrons. I went to the middle of the grass lawn and began shouting again for Charlie. I called and called, while the ducks paddled cautiously back into their accustomed circuits on the lake, and the breeze left me shivering in my wet jeans. At first I called out Charlie’s name as a sound for him to home in on, but as my voice began to go I realised that another line had been crossed and I was shouting the name just to hear it, to ensure its continuing existence in the world. I realised that the name was all I had. My voice sank to a whisper. I breathed Charlie’s name.
When Charlie came, he came all on his own. He trotted out from beneath the dark tangle of rhododendrons, filthy with dirt, trailing his bat cape behind him. I ran to him, took him into my arms and held him. I pressed my face into his neck and I breathed in his smell, the sharp salt of his sweat and the acid tang of the soil. The tears streamed down my face.
“Charlie,” I whispered. “Oh, my world, my whole world.”
“Get off, Mummy! You’re squashing me!”
“Where were you?”
Charlie held out his hands to the sides, palms upwards, and answered me as if I was simple. “In mine bat cave, of course.”
“Oh, Charlie. Didn’t you hear us all shouting? Didn’t you see us all looking for you?”
Charlie grinned beneath his bat mask.
“I was hiding,” he said.
“Why? Why didn’t you come out? Couldn’t you see how worried we all were?”
My son looked forlornly at the ground. “Lawrence and Bee was all cross and they wasn’t playing with me. So I went into mine bat cave.”
“Oh, Charlie. Mummy’
s been so confused. So terribly silly and selfish. I promise you, Charlie, I’ll never be so silly again. You’re my whole world, you know that? I’ll never forget that again. Do you know how much you mean to me?”
Charlie blinked at me, sensing an opportunity.
“Can I have an ice-cream?” he said.
I hugged my son. I felt his warm, sleepy breath on my neck, and through the thin grey fabric of his costume I felt the gentle, insistent pressure of the bones beneath his skin.
Eleven
The policemen came after fifteen minutes. There were three of them. They came slowly, in a silver car with bright blue and orange stripes along the sides and a long bar of lights on the roof. They drove right along the dirt path to the gate of the Isabella Plantation where I was standing. They got out of the car and they put on their hats. They were wearing white short-sleeved shirts and thick black vests with a black-and-white chequered stripe. The vests had many pockets, and in them there were batons and radios and handcuffs and other things I could not guess the names of. I was thinking, Charlie would like this. These policemen have more gadgets than Batman.
If I was telling this story to the girls from back home, I would have to explain to them that the policemen of the United Kingdom did not carry guns.
—Weh! No pistol?
—No pistol.
—How come they carry all those gadgets but forget the most important thing? How do they shoot the bad men?
—They do not shoot the bad men. When they start shooting they usually get in trouble.
—Weh! That is one topsy-turvy kingdom, where the girls can show their bobbis but the police cannot show their guns.
And I would have to nod and tell them again, Much of my life in that country was lived in such confusion.
The policemen slammed the police car doors behind them: thunk. I shivered. When you are a refugee, you learn to pay attention to doors. When they are open; when they are closed; the particular sound they make; the side of them that you are on.
One of the policemen came close, while the other two stood with their heads leaning over to listen to the radios attached to their vests. The policeman who came, he was not much older than me, I think. He was tall, with orange hair under his hat. I tried to smile at him, but I couldn’t. I was so worried about Charlie, my head was spinning. I was scared that my Queen’s English would fail me. I tried to calm myself.
If this policeman began to suspect me, he could call the immigration people. Then one of them would click a button on their computer and mark a check box on my file and I would be deported. I would be dead, but no one would have fired any bullets. I realised, this is why the police do not carry guns. In a civilised country, they kill you with a click. The killing is done far away, at the heart of the kingdom in a building full of computers and coffee-cups.
I stared at the policeman. He did not have a cruel face. He did not have a kind face either. He was young and he was pale and there were no lines on his face yet. He was nothing. He was innocent, like an egg. This policeman, if he opened the door of the police car and made me get inside, then to him it was only the interior of a car he was showing me. But I would see things he could not see in it. I would see the bright red dust on the seats. I would see the old dried cassava tops that had blown in to the footwells. I would see the white skull on the dashboard and the jungle plants growing through the rusted cracks in the floor and bursting through the broken windscreen. For me, that car door would swing open and I would step out of England and straight back into the troubles of my country. This is what they mean when they say, It is a small world these days.
The policeman looked carefully at me. On his vest, his radio was saying, “CHARLIE BRAVO, PROCEED.”
“He is not called Charlie Bravo,” I said. “His name is Charlie O’Rourke.”
The policeman looked at me with no expression.
“Are you the lady who made the emergency call?”
I nodded. “I will take you to where we are,” I said.
I started to walk into the plantation.
“Just a few details first, madam,” said the policeman. “What is your relationship to the missing person?”
I stopped and turned round.
“It is not important,” I said.
“It’s procedure, madam.”
“Charlie is missing,” I said. “Please, we cannot waste time. I will tell you everything later.”
“It’s a ring-fenced plantation, madam. If the child is in there, he’s not going anywhere. No harm in getting some basic details.”
The policeman looked up and down at me.
“We’re looking for a Caucasian male child, am I right?”
“Sorry?”
“Caucasian male child. White boy.”
“Yes, that is right. His mother is inside the plantation.”
“And are you the child’s carer?”
“No. No I am not. Please, I do not see why…”
He took a step towards me and I stepped back, I could not help myself.
“You seem unusually nervous of me, madam. Is there something I should know?”
He said this very calmly, looking into my eyes all the time.
I stood up as straight and tall as I could, and I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them again I looked at the policeman very coldly and I spoke with the voice of Queen Elizabeth the Second.
“How dare you?” I said.
The policeman took half a step back, as if I had hit him. He looked down at the ground and he blushed.
“I’m sorry, madam,” he mumbled.
Then he looked back at me. At first he looked embarrassed, but slowly an expression of anger came over his face. I realised I had gone over the top again. I had made him ashamed, and that is one thing I would not need to explain to the girls from my country or the girls from your country: when you make a man ashamed, you make him dangerous. The policeman looked in my eyes for a long time, and I began to feel very afraid. I did not think I could hide it, so I had to look down. That is when the policeman turned to one of the others.
“Keep this one with you and run her details,” he said. “I’ll go in with Paul and locate the mother.”
“Please,” I said. “I need to show you the way.”
The policeman gave me a cold smile. “We’re big boys, we’ll find our way.”
“I do not understand why you need my details.”
“I need your details, madam, because you quite clearly do not want to give me your details. That is generally the point at which I decide I need them. Nothing personal, madam. You’d be amazed how often in missing persons cases, the member of the public who puts in the call is the one who holds the key to the disappearance.”
I watched him walk through the gate of the plantation with the one called Paul. The other policeman came up to me and shrugged.
“Sorry,” he said. “If you could just step this way, madam, we’ll get you comfortable in the patrol car and I’ll just run your personals. It won’t take a minute and then I won’t detain you any longer. Meanwhile my colleagues will locate the child if he’s there to be found, I can assure you.”
He opened the back door of the police car and he made me sit down. He left the door open while he talked into his radio. He was thin, with pale slim wrists and a little pot belly, like the detention officer who was on duty on the morning they released us. The police car smelled of nylon and cigarettes.
“What is your name, madam?” said the policeman after a while.
“Why do you need to know?”
“Look, we do two or three missing persons a week and we always come to the situation cold. We’re here to help, and the situation may be very clear in your mind but for us we don’t know what we’re dealing with until we ask a few questions. Scratch the surface and there’s usually a right old story underneath. Families are the strangest. Often you ask a few questions and you start to get a pretty good idea why the missing person made themselves scarce, if you see wha
t I mean.” He grinned. “It’s all right,” he said, “you’re not a suspect or anything.”
“Of course.”
“All right then, so if we could just start with your name.”
I sighed, and I felt very sad. I knew it was all over for me now. I could not give the policeman my real name, because then they would find out what I was. But I did not have a false name to give him either. Jennifer Smith, Alison Jones—none of these names are real when you have no documents to go with them. Nothing is true unless there is a screen that says it is, somewhere in that building full of computers and coffee-cups, right at the exact centre of the United Kingdom. I sat up very straight in the back seat of the police car, and I took a breath and I looked the policeman straight in the eye.
“My name is Little Bee.”
“Spell that for me please?”
“L-I-T-T-L-E-B-E-E.”
“And is that a first name or a surname, madam?”
“It is my whole name. That is who I am.”
The policeman sighed, then he turned away and spoke into his radio.
“Charlie Bravo to control,” he said. “Send out a unit, will you? I’ve got one to bring in for a mug match and dabs.”
He turned back to me, and he was not smiling any more.
“Please,” I said. “Please let me help to find Charlie.”
He shook his head. “Wait here.”
He closed the car door. I sat for a long time. Without the breeze it was very hot in the back of the police car. I waited there until another set of policemen came and took me away. They put me into a van. I watched the Isabella Plantation disappearing in the back window, through a bare metal grille.
Sarah and Lawrence came to visit me that evening. I was in a holding cell at the police station in Kingston-upon-Thames. The police guard, he banged open the door without knocking and Sarah walked in. Sarah was carrying Charlie. He was asleep in her arms with his head resting on her shoulder. I was so happy to see Charlie safe, I cried. I kissed Charlie on the cheek. He twitched in his sleep, and he sighed. Through the holes in his bat mask, I could see that he was smiling in his sleep. That made me smile too.