The Child Inside

by Suzanne Bugler

  She makes toast and tea in my kitchen. She dozes in my chair, and uses my bathroom. She is all that separates me from total aloneness.

  I talk to her.

  I jabber away on hyperdrive, telling her one hundred and one things about Jono; about that dog on wheels that he had when he was little, and dragged about with him everywhere; about how he used to play for hours on end in the garden in summer, stark naked, running in and out of the sprinkler, which he’d put on rotate, dodging the spray; about how proud we were when he passed the exam for Hensham Boys’.

  About how much I love him.

  I tell her about every place we have been, ever, with Jono in his life. I tell her over and over, while she makes notes, while she probes for more.

  ‘Jono loves the zoo,’ I say, and I picture him, his solemn face staring at all those creatures in their cages. ‘We park by Regent’s Park and walk through. We go every summer.’

  But Andrew cannot have taken him to the zoo now. It is nearly half-past two in the morning.

  I tell her about the baby that Andrew and I lost.

  I tell her how the grief ate away at our marriage, driving us apart. That the joy was taken from our lives, and in its place was left isolation, and fear.

  ‘Is it so surprising that I was drawn to someone else?’ I cry, sobbing out my guilt while Karen pats my arm and hands me tissues. ‘Is it?’

  And then I am silent.

  We sit opposite each other: me on the sofa, she in the chair.

  ‘All the patrol cars have their description,’ she assures me, yet again. ‘There are a lot of people looking out for your husband’s car.’ I stare at her; I hang on her words. ‘They’ll stop for food eventually. At a motorway stop. We’ll pick them up then.’

  Outside I hear the rattle and clink of the milk float, trundling its slow way down the road. I hear the birds, starting up their morning call. I stare at Karen, and Karen stares at me.

  And I am thinking, Surely they would have needed food before now.

  The phone rings and I jump, and drop it in my panic to answer. Like a cat, Karen springs to her feet, ready to intervene.

  But it’s Janice.

  ‘Have you heard anything?’ she demands.

  And I say, ‘No. I would have called you if I had.’

  I want her to tell me it will be okay. I want her to say, Don’t worry, they’ll be home any minute. Andrew would never harm Jono, never. Andrew would never hurt a fly.

  But she says, ‘He was so upset, Rachel. He can’t be thinking straight. Surely you have some idea where he might go? They can’t just disappear.’

  I don’t want to hear this. I cannot hear this. I cannot cope with anyone else’s fear.

  ‘The police need to find them,’ she tells me. ‘They need to be out there, looking.’

  Her words swim in my head. A rush of nausea tightens my throat. ‘Janice,’ I manage to say, ‘I don’t want to block the line.’

  Somebody else is trying to get through; the red light on the phone monitor beeps once, twice. I hang up on Janice, and I hear Jono say, ‘Mum?’

  ‘Jono!’ I stand up, too fast; the blood smashes into my head and recedes again.

  The phone is on loudspeaker and Jono’s voice, so young, so tender, fills the room. ‘Mum, I’m scared,’ he says, and my whole body is jelly; boneless, weak.

  Karen kicks into action. She’s doing something to the recorder; she’s on her radio. She gestures me to sit back down. Keep calm, she mouths. Keep calm.

  I swallow hard. ‘Jono, where are you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, sounding so small, and frightened. Then, ‘I’m worried about Dad.’

  ‘Where is Dad?’ I ask, keeping my voice as steady as I can.

  ‘He’s . . . just over there. He won’t stop crying.’

  ‘Jono, where are you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jono says. ‘It’s dark. I’m cold.’

  Panic buzzes in my hands and my head, and I stare at Karen. Keep him talking, she whispers. We’re tracking the call.

  ‘Does Dad know you’re phoning me?’

  ‘No. I don’t know.’

  ‘Let me speak to him,’ I say, but Karen shakes her head. No, she mouths, slicing, slicing the air in front of me with her hand. No. So quickly I say, ‘Jono, wait. Keep talking to me.’

  ‘He won’t stop crying,’ Jono says, and he starts crying too now, in short, frightened sobs. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  Karen cuts in. ‘Hello, Jono,’ she says gently. ‘My name’s Karen. I’m here with your mum. You’re being ever so brave,’ she says, ‘you’re doing ever so well. Now, we just need to work out where you are and we’ll have you home in no time.’ And she starts to question him softly: are there any buildings nearby, are they near a road, can he hear cars, are there any lights; street lights, lights from buildings? How long have they been where they are? For how long did they drive?

  I stand beside her, helpless, powerless, as Jono gives vague, pitiful reply after vague, pitiful reply. ‘It’s dark,’ he says over and over. ‘I’m frightened.’

  Another police car arrives at the house, and Karen and I move to open the front door together, taking the phone with us. I am clutching Karen’s arm; I will not let it go. A policeman walks into my living room, but we take no notice of him. On the phone Jono is saying, ‘We drove up a hill. There was a cafe, but it was shut. Dad said we might see badgers.’

  Every hair on my body is standing on end, yanked tight and fizzing. My heart is slamming against my ribcage.

  ‘That’s Box Hill,’ I say.

  It all moves so fast.

  They won’t let me go with them, but I insist; I am screaming, yanking their hands away from my front door.

  ‘I am not a fucking prisoner!’

  ‘There’s a patrol car already on its way,’ Karen says, her hands interlacing with mine, dodging my slaps. ‘They’ll be with them, any moment.’

  ‘I want to be there,’ I say. ‘I want to be with my son.’

  ‘Mrs Morgan,’ the policeman says, ‘please, calm down.’

  I stare at him. He is not even thirty. I think of his mother, and how proud she must be. I think of Andrew’s mother, with her photos of Jono crowded onto her mantelpiece; every single photo from every single year of Jono’s school life, from gap-toothed reception to pensive, woeful Year Eight.

  ‘He’s my fucking son,’ I scream.

  The streets are deserted and we drive fast; a journey that on a summer’s Sunday afternoon can take almost an hour takes less than twenty minutes. The miles speed by and I sit upright in the back of the police car, tense, leaning forward, watching through the gap between the heads of Karen and this unnamed male. They are in constant radio contact; in code-talk, in crackle and over-and-out.

  The roads around Box Hill are dark, not lit at all but for the cat’s eyes, winking up from the asphalt. The roads as we turn and climb higher do not even have cat’s eyes, and we creep up into a darkness rendered darker by the ghostly tunnel of the car’s full beam.

  We used to come here, sometimes, but we’d park at the bottom and walk up. We’d come at the end of summer, collecting blackberries, and when we got to the top we’d walk across to the cafe selling ice creams. It was always packed around the cafe, with cyclists and bikers and people out for a walk. And there was a road, leading off the opposite side from us; that was where all these people had come up from. There’s a pub down there, Andrew said. I used to come out here sometimes with my mate Roger. On a summer’s night you could sit in the garden and watch the badgers coming out of their holes.

  The car follows the road, winding up and up.

  And then the lights are cut out, and we barely crawl, barely purr, into the blackness. Up and round and up.

  I stare ahead. The last time we climbed up Box Hill Jono skulked behind, dragging his feet. It’s too far, he complained. I don’t want to go. We’d just taken him away from his friends in Surbiton and stuck him in Hensham Boys’.


  I see the blue light first, flashing in the dark. I see it against the sky whole, long seconds before we are there. I see it like a film set; like some phoney nightmare into which I must run yelling scripted, clichéd banalities. The blue light whirls and flashes, fairground-bright, a hideous spotlight, blinding into my eyes.

  ‘Turn it off,’ I yell, dazzled by the brightness. ‘Turn off the fucking light!’

  And then I see him: Jono. Standing beside a policeman; his face illuminated, white and tear-stained. His arms are hanging by his sides, just dangling there, as if they have no life. My hands fumble with the seatbelt, with the door; before the car has even properly stopped I am tumbling out and scrambling across the uneven ground, tripping, falling over myself.

  ‘Jono!’ I shout, and he turns towards me and his face crumples, collapsing in on itself, and then he’s in my arms, his body pliant and weak. He bends in my arms; he wilts against me. ‘Jono,’ I say, kissing his head, over and over; the top of his head, his soft, honey-sweet hair.

  ‘I couldn’t leave him,’ Jono cries, and his body trembles in my arms like a frightened animal’s. ‘I couldn’t leave my dad.’

  He pulls away from me and I turn with him, and I see Andrew, flanked on either side by two policemen, his hands cuffed together in front of him like a convict. He is wearing just a shirt over his trousers and there is a muddy streak all down one side of his body, as if he has been struggling in the dirt. His hair is dishevelled, and his face is twisted in a grotesque mask of horror; as if his skin is made of wax, and someone has put their hand into the wax, and pulled.

  ‘I want to be with my son,’ he pleads as they lead him towards the car. His skin is an unearthly blue in the reflection of the light. His eyes are on mine, red-rimmed, naked in their pain. ‘I just want to be with my son.’

  A policeman puts his hand on Andrew’s head and presses him down into the car. Andrew strains against the pressure. He twists around and he stares at me. ‘Don’t do this to me, Rachel,’ he says. ‘Please. Don’t take Jono away from me.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Andrew wouldn’t hurt Jono. I know this.

  But the law assumed that he would, and slapped a prohibiting order on him anyway. It was the law that took Jono away from Andrew, not me. And now he has to earn his rights again as a father, month by month, hour by hour.

  For this I am truly sorry.

  Andrew stays with my sister a while longer, sleeping on her sofa; my sister who can barely bring herself to speak to me. Then he stays with his mother, and I need not mention the fact that she will definitely never speak to me again. He is given time off work, as long as he needs, to recover. His position is kept open for him. It would seem that his employer values him more than his wife did.

  And then he finds a ground-floor flat, with a garden, in a large old house in a quiet street in Guildford. The garden is big enough for Jono to kick a ball in, and although the flat only has one bedroom, Andrew is keeping that bedroom for Jono, for when he is allowed to stay. Already some of Jono’s things are there, and new things bought specially: the new bed and wardrobe, the signed poster of Southampton football team, the magnetic dartboard, hanging on the wall.

  Andrew sleeps on the sofa bed in the living room. Jono’s new room is kept waiting for him, like a shrine.

  Our house is put on the market. None of us can live here any more. Our family is sliced apart.

  When I am clearing the last of my stuff from the house I come across Vanessa’s jacket, tucked away inside that box. I cannot throw it away, nor do I want to keep it. It is not mine; it never was. It lies on a pile of other stuff in the spare room, a reminder of unfinished business.

  Carefully, I wrap it up in some new tissue paper, put it in my car and drive to Kew. And as I drive through those streets again my stomach automatically knots itself up with nerves. It is like a reflex reaction. I have to park some distance from Mrs Reiber’s house, and so I have quite a walk, and I make the walk longer by taking a detour and following the road around in a loop, so that I approach her house from the other side. And I know, with every step that I take, that I will never, ever come to Kew again. I walk slowly. I look at the houses. With scorn for myself, I think of how I longed to belong in a place like this. I longed to fit in here. I am more the outsider now than I ever was.

  And yet.

  It is cool for June and I am wearing a cotton trench coat, open, over a long, loose shirt. According to the doctor I have been pregnant for over four months, and now that the sickness has passed I am starting to show. I am swelling in the middle. Like a plant rising up through the ashes, my baby is starting to grow.

  Not that Mrs Reiber would notice anyway. She probably will not even remember who I am, but still . . .

  My heart beats a little faster as I walk up her path. I am half-expecting her to close the door in my face, but I am ready for that; I have my words prepared. I do not even consider the fact that she may not be in. I hold Vanessa’s jacket in my arms like a newborn child, and I wait.

  I hear her footsteps the other side of the door; I hear her fiddling with the lock. The door slowly opens, and at first she stares at me blankly, and then recognition, unwelcome, shadows her eyes. Her face puckers in displeasure, but before she can speak or shut the door in my face I say, ‘Mrs Reiber, I have something for you.’

  ‘I’m quite sure you have nothing that I want,’ she says, dismissing me as if I was nothing but a salesperson, come knocking uninvited.

  ‘Mrs Reiber, I do.’

  I hold out my hands. Vanessa’s jacket lies draped across them like a sacrifice.

  She looks at the jacket and then back at me, confusion, and fear, in her eyes.

  ‘This was Vanessa’s,’ I say.

  And she snaps, ‘No!’ and tries to close the door. I stick my foot out, quick, to stop her. ‘What do you want from me?’ she demands.

  ‘I want to give you this.’ My heart is thumping, but I hold that jacket steady. ‘I borrowed it years ago, when I was sixteen. I never had the chance to give it back.’

  In spite of herself she is staring at the jacket, the muscles on her face working frantically, turning her expression from panic to terror to a longing so desperate, so achingly raw. I watch her with tears needling my eyes. Tentatively she reaches out one shaking hand and touches the jacket with such trepidation, as though it might break, or disappear.

  I swallow hard. ‘Please,’ I say. ‘It’s yours.’

  She snaps her hand back. And she looks up at me with such suspicion. ‘What do you want?’ she asks again, her voice shrill and sore.

  ‘To give you this,’ I say. ‘That’s all. Please.’ I proffer that jacket, and again her hand creeps out. And this time she snatches the jacket from my hands and gasps as she clutches it to her chest, as though afraid I might snatch it back again.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say and step back from the door, which she then ducks behind and slams shut.

  ‘Who are you?’ she calls from the other side.

  ‘No one,’ I say back, though whether she hears me or not I do not know. ‘I was a friend of a friend, that’s all.’

  And I walk away from there, and I try to tell myself that I have done at least something right.

  I try to contact Simon, but the numbers of his flat, and his mobile, are no longer in use. I call his office, and his secretary tells me he has gone on a secondment, but she will not tell me where. So I write him a letter, and I post it to his house in Kingham. And in that letter I tell him that I will be keeping his baby.

  He has a right to know. He has a need to know, surely.

  I do not get a reply.

  I write to him again with my new address, when Jono and I move into our new little house in Guildford, less than two miles from Andrew’s flat, and one mile from Jono’s new school.

  And I write to him in November, when our baby daughter is born healthy and beautiful in the maternity ward at Guildford hospital, with no one but me, and the midwife, to see her into the w
orld. I tell him that I have named her Freya.

  He doesn’t reply.

  How strangely the world turns.

  On a Sunday in December I pull up in my car outside Andrew’s flat to collect Jono, with Freya asleep in her car seat beside me. Andrew and Jono are in the garden; I see them straight away. Andrew’s flat is in a large Victorian house, with a garden that runs all the way around it, and a low fence, barely a yard high. They are racing up and down the side of the house, playing with the dog from the flat next door. Jono is shrieking and laughing; I can hear him even before I open the car door. I see a stick fly in the air. I see a small whirl of grey as the dog jumps up to catch it.

  I get out of the car and I stand there and watch them, my son and the father of my son. And my heart aches as it will always ache. For a long time they do not know that I am there and carry on playing with this dog, free for a while, unburdened. Then Jono spots me, and Andrew looks up, too. I see disappointment and resignation cloud Jono’s face; the oh no look of a boy who knows it is time to go. And in Andrew I see the shutters come down, rendering him closed, and wary.

  I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I whisper, under my breath.

  Jono turns away from me and picks up that stick again, and throws it for the dog, making the most of his last few minutes. And Andrew starts walking towards me.

  ‘How are you?’ he asks guardedly.

  And automatically I say, ‘I’m fine, thanks. How are you?’ He smiles a thin smile, but doesn’t answer. ‘Really,’ I go on, ‘how are you?’

  I really want to know. I want him to know that I care.

  He looks away, back to Jono. ‘Jono seems happy with his school,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say quickly. ‘He’s really settled in. He’s doing really well. And he’s got friends who live just near us.’ I am talking too fast, talking too much now. I clasp my cold hands together and stick my nails into my palm.

  Jono is getting that dog to do tricks. He knows we are watching. He is putting on a show. Jono loves us; he shows it every day in his kindness to his sister, and his father. We’re still your family, I tell him. We still love you. I tell him this over and over: We will always love you.