She’s imagining his voice, of course she is, but she’s using old conversations between them, his words and phrases just rejigged to fit.
She remembers how when he was born he simply took up a different place inside her, everyone and everything else making room for him, shifting around him, so that he is always with her, even when he’s physically not here.
Inside the glass doorways of the leisure-centre foyer a group of parents have phones open showing messages from their children, evacuated from New School.
‘In the coach, they were sitting on each other’s laps.’
‘On the floor in the minibuses.’
‘Ten of them were squashed into Mrs Fenwright’s car.’
‘Maddie was in Mr Johnson’s boot, and it’s just a regular boot.’
And the parents who know for sure their child is safe start talking about Matthew Marr, able to feel the horror of it, but she can’t, not yet.
At the far end of the foyer there’s a police officer with a clipboard, a shifting, pressing group of parents around him. Rumours hum through the parents – his clipboard has a list of names that’s been scanned across; if your child has been evacuated, their name is on the list, in their own writing, you can then go and wait for your child to be brought to the basketball court. If your child hasn’t written their name, you go to the cafeteria.
People are shoving to get to the list and Beth is trying too, but is pushed back. Parents who have seen the list are either hurrying through to the basketball court, their footsteps fast and light, their breathing changed, like a long exhalation, or to the cafeteria, not breathing, or breathing very slowly, as if holding your breath could change the reality you’re inhabiting, their footsteps slow and heavy, carrying an unaccustomed weight.
‘Where’s the CDT room?’ she asks a woman in front of her. ‘My son was going to the CDT room.’ But the woman doesn’t turn. She spots a woman she recognizes, a mother who knows everything, chairs the charity committee and is a parent-governor. ‘Do you know where the CDT room is?’ But the woman just shrugs, as if she doesn’t know anything any more. A father in a Mumford & Sons sweatshirt turns to her.
‘The CDT room is in New School,’ he says.
New School has been evacuated. Jamie crouched in a boot or squashed up ten to a car and got out. And soon she will read his name, in his own writing, and she will remember helping him to do cursive writing, the hours and hours they spent on it together, and so she will see ‘Jamie’ with the ‘e’ at the end remaining a little lopsided, a difficult join, and she’ll run through the swing doors to the basketball court and wait for him.
Fear leaves her body, muscles relaxing but skin prickling as if the tension lingers there on the outside of her body before dissipating into the warm air in the foyer.
Told you, Mum, you worry too much.
You’re right.
Do I still have my get-out-of-jail-free card for A levels and university?
Absolutely.
* * *
In the theatre, Daphne gets up on to the stage and claps her hands. She’s tried not to think about Neil’s WhatsApp message, to concentrate only on the kids; not possible, so she’s been hiding her feelings and wondering how good an actress she really is.
‘Right! Two minutes, everyone! Zac and Luisa, get ready for thunder and lightning; Benny, projection. My three lovely witches, positions, please.’
And for a moment a buzz goes through them all, a moment when ‘two minutes’ to curtain-up generates adrenaline.
The kids’ faces are still in camouflage make-up in case gunmen storm the theatre and they have to hide. Sally-Anne is standing sentinel at the locked security doors that lead to the glass corridor, one hand holding her phone, the other the nail gun, with the forlorn hope that the kids and teachers can still reach them, as if something will change.
She sees Tim, who plays Macbeth, sitting in the wings, dragging on a cigarette, quick deep drags like he can find some magic potion hidden at the bottom. She goes over to him.
‘How’s our leading man?’ she asks.
‘Thing is, shouldn’t be me doing the part,’ Tim says. ‘I knew that but my parents, they’re so proud. Didn’t even tell them about Victor, that he was first choice, and much better than me.’
Tim is worried about his acting! How marvellous is that? She loves these kids. Absolutely adores them.
‘He’s brilliant, isn’t he?’ Tim says, looking at her.
‘He’s very talented,’ she replies.
For a second or two, she remembers her swell of pride in Victor, a raw natural talent like nothing she’d ever seen in all her years teaching. First term in her class she’d give him notes – a bit of vulnerability here, more nuance there – and he’d just do it, perfectly, first time. But he’d had to leave when his parents couldn’t pay the fees.
‘You’re very talented too,’ she says to Tim. ‘You’ll storm it.’
‘Really?’
‘I have absolute and total faith in you. Go knock ’em out.’
‘Thanks, Daphne.’
Miranda, playing Lady Macbeth, sashays over to him, still doing her sex-kittenish act, even though it’s never tempted Tim away from his girlfriend, let alone that the school is under attack. She thinks Miranda spectacular right at this moment. Miranda slides herself down next to Tim.
Daphne’s mobile buzzes with a WhatsApp from Sally-Anne in the foyer, who’s just received an update about the people in New School and a message from a junior school teacher. She leaps to her feet and claps her hands, soles of her feet and palms stinging with adrenaline.
‘Listen up, everyone! I’ve had some good news. Everyone in New School has been evacuated and junior school are safely on Fulmar beach, waiting for boats to pick them up. Rafi got them out.’
A cheer goes up, the kids momentarily elated. Jamie Alton went to New School to get his cauldron, so he’s definitely evacuated too, blessed, blessed cauldron. Anna and Davy, her little Macduffs, were also in New School, so are also safe, and all the other junior school children are safe too, because of Rafi; a huge hoorah for Rafi, wonderful boy.
‘So Anna and Young Fry are all right?’ Josh asks.
‘Yes.’
‘What’ll we do without them when we get to Act Four, Scene Two?’ Joanna asks.
‘We’ll think of something.’
But even if the young children were here – thank you, Lord Jesus, that they’re not – she would have stopped the rehearsal before this scene. The other murders in this play aren’t so terrible, committed off stage and adult to adult, but the murder of Macduff’s son is on stage, right in front of you, the murderer stabbing the little boy as he holds him on his lap. Then, in their production, the little girl runs but is caught by a murderer in the wings, because Macduff had all his babes savagely slaughtered. She’d faff about this play’s themes and various interpretations and then she’d get here, to its terrible black heart, and know it was a play about raw evil.
My children too? … My wife kill’d too … all my pretty ones? Did you say all?
* * *
In the woods, Rafi Bukhari has stopped running to check his messages but his thumb has got too cold to be recognized on the touch ID so he has to key in his passcode and he’s wasting time, wasting time. He skips hurriedly through voicemails from friends and teachers, still nothing from Hannah. But she doesn’t ever leave voicemails, only talks on the phone when there’s a voice talking back to her. She’d told him that the night they’d first properly spoken to each other at a party. Before that, they’d hung out with different people, were doing different subjects, and he’d been shy of approaching her.
He’s running again, flat out, towards Old School.
At the party, she’d been sitting on a sofa, and he’d sat next to her and she’d jumped. And then he didn’t know what to say to her, didn’t have a clue. Idiot.
‘Do you think we wake up every day the same old self?’ she said. ‘Or do we have a choice but we don�
�t realize that? It might be just habit that makes us the same self as yesterday even if that’s not who we want to be at all?’
He just stared.
‘Oh shit, you think I’m totally weird.’
This girl.
‘I think that’s what mental illness is,’ he said. ‘I think it takes away the choice. You’re stuck being someone who isn’t even really you. And you should know that the not-really-me has PTSD and I’m genuinely weird in a psychotic way. You’re beautiful.’
She glanced away from him, deflecting what he’d told her as untrue, and it was a week before she explained she was turning away from him calling her beautiful, dismissing that, not his PTSD.
‘Jesus, Rafi, what kind of horrible person did you think I am?’
‘Yeah, but I still wanted to kiss you.’
‘So, it was always a totally superficial physical thing for you?’
‘Totally.’
At the end of the party, everyone else fuzzy with drunkenness and tiredness, they’d felt sharpened, wide awake, and they talked about calling each other later that night, not wanting their conversation to have an ending, and she told him that she never left a voicemail, because she could only talk to someone if someone was talking back to her. Weeks later, she said it was because she might say something stupid and he could hear over and over again what an idiot she was.
He stops to phone her again, wiping the snow off his screen, keying in the passcode, but again it goes straight through to message.
‘Hey, it’s Hannah …’
She must have run out of charge, that’s all, doesn’t mean anything bad. Can’t mean anything bad.
As he pockets his phone he feels someone behind him; a sensation that makes his back feel exposed, as if he’s missing clothing, and then the wind drops for a few moments and he hears footsteps and breathing.
The man behind him is just a delusion. He has PTSD and is hypervigilant and highly stressed and this man doesn’t exist. And even without PTSD as an excuse, he cannot trust himself to know what is real.
His love for Hannah is a delusion too.
No, that’s not true.
There was an explosion and you didn’t warn her, didn’t help her, didn’t even think about her until you got Basi to the beach.
He’s running again over the snow-covered earth, his feet no longer beating out an iambic pentameter but a criticism over and over, you left her, and the boy holding her hand and the man he was becoming, around the bend in the path, have disappeared.
* * *
In the foyer of The Pines Leisure Centre, Beth Alton’s eyes are playing tricks or she’s in too much of a hurry and reading the list of children’s names too fast because if she slows down surely this time she’ll see Jamie’s name.
And you tell me not to rush things, Mum.
I know. But I meant homework, not—
More haste less speed, you say.
Please don’t tease me right now, Jamie.
Well, someone needs that job, Mum.
She just has to be more logical, not dart about but start at the top and work down, because it’s not like this list is in alphabetical order, any kind of order, just children writing their names down in a biro that’s running out, and then changes to a thick pen, and they didn’t have anything to press on which means it’s all a bit wonky and so easy to miss Jamie’s name.
Her phone keeps buzzing with calls and messages from her parents and sister and Theo at university; but she doesn’t answer. Another text from Mike.
Is he evacuated?
She hesitates but cannot pretend any longer.
No
The police officer holding the list looks at her with kindness. ‘If you go to the cafeteria on the first floor, police officers are updating relatives who still have children in the school.’
She feels weak for clinging on to hope when all the time the police officers in the cafeteria might have important information about Jamie, which conflates in her mind into being something that will help him if only she knows what it is.
The large cafeteria has no windows. Built in the interior of the leisure centre, it looks down over the swimming pool and a children’s play area, emptied now, everyone sent home apart from them. At the twenty or so tables parents have phones pressed to their ears as they talk to their children, others just gripping phones, willing them to ring; the air so tense that Beth thinks she can see wires criss-crossing the room, threading through the parents, winding tighter.
Another text from Mike.
Will ask Mum to drive over and check our answerphone
Their house mobile reception is unreliable so they often have to use the landline to call someone at home and Jamie might think that she’s at home. But surely he’d call her mobile too?
A police officer comes over to her. ‘Can I have your name, please?’
‘Beth Alton. My son Jamie was meant to be in the theatre, but he left to get a cauldron from the CDT room in New School.’ Why’s she telling him about a cauldron? ‘But he wasn’t evacuated. His name isn’t on the list.’
‘Yes,’ the police officer says, ‘I have a record of your son.’
‘You know where he is?’
‘Sorry. I meant that we know he was supposed to be in the CDT room.’
‘Does anyone know where he is?’
‘I have no more information, I’m sorry. I’ll let you know as soon as I do.’
She is made of damp cardboard and is folding in half. She doesn’t know how to keep standing, so she sits at a table of strangers.
You okay, Mum?
Yes, course I am. It’s you that needs to be okay.
Jamie is four years old. She is in bed with flu. She hears his footsteps on the stairs, a chink of the china mug on a plate as it wobbles. He sets the mug in its swimming saucer down on her bedside table. ‘Tea,’ he says and clambers in next to her, his little body pressing close to her.
*
Some of the parents are shivering though it’s too warm in here. A teenage member of staff, wearing a Pines Leisure Centre sweatshirt, gives his phone charger to a mother, helps her to plug it in. ‘No problem,’ he says. The mother sits on the floor, holding her phone as it charges.
Beth feels something at her feet. A child’s party balloon is under the table with ‘4’ on it; she must have seen this balloon, not realized she’d seen, attuned only to Jamie so that she’d thought of him bringing her tea. This room is usually used for children’s parties with easy-wipe Formica tables and linoleum on the floor. She’s been here before with Jamie and Theo years ago, for birthday teas, parents all chatting, the children’s hair wet from the swimming party.
A commotion. Three parents are with a young woman police officer who looks outnumbered. The older male officer is coming to her aid.
‘The TV says armed police have arrived.’
‘I can’t comment on that.’
‘The TV bloody well has so why can’t you?’ a suited man says.
‘I’ll find out, sir. Please, calm down, I’ll find out.’
‘But what if the children are hostages?’ a mother asks. ‘What if he starts firing when the armed police go in?’
‘Safety of the children is their absolute priority,’ the woman police officer says.
The suited man steps away from her. ‘Yes. I’m sorry. Of course. I really am sorry.’ As if he needs to get back in her good books, because if he’s in her good books then the police will take better care of his child.
A man in his mid-twenties, too young to be a father, too old to be a brother, barges through the swing doors of the cafeteria on the phone. He looks at the room full of parents. ‘They’re still on Fulmar beach,’ he says. ‘My fiancée just told me. She said boats are on their way but the weather’s really bad and held them up.’
At the far end of the cafeteria, junior school parents’ voices cluster and grow frantic.
‘What if he goes down to the beach? There’s no other way out.’
; ‘But he’s in Old School, in the corridor, he’s nowhere near the beach.’
‘There might be more of them.’
‘What does your fiancée say?’
‘I only spoke to her for a few seconds, there’s a helicopter flying over the beach, you can’t hear to talk.’
‘That’s good though, isn’t it? The helicopter. They’re making sure they’re all right.’
The young man looks too energetic to be in here, toe tapping on the floor, thumbs tapping at his phone, like he could spring away at any moment. The folding-in-half parents have had all their energy leached away by terror, can barely sit upright.
Something presses into Beth’s side; the edge of a laptop. Sitting next to her is a man in pyjamas, who has his laptop open flat on his lap. For a moment, she’s embarrassed to be so close to a man’s pyjama crotch; tiny taboos continuing. On his screen is a news channel, a girl is talking to a presenter, blurred out below her face. She’s asking how long the ambulance will be. The girl’s called Hannah. She gives an uncertain smile directly at the camera and the man in pyjamas puts his fingertip on to the screen, touching her face.
‘They keep showing it,’ he says. ‘She’s in the library.’
‘She’s with friends,’ Beth says. ‘Your daughter, Hannah, she’s not on her own.’
‘No. Your child …?’ Hannah’s father asks.
‘Jamie. No one knows where he is.’
How can that be? How can nobody know?
‘I think he must be hiding.’ And as she says this, the image crystallizes. Jamie is hiding and he can’t phone her because he can’t risk making any noise in case he gives his hiding place away.
* * *
In the theatre, the start of the dress rehearsal has been postponed. Someone, Daphne doesn’t know who, doesn’t matter, switched on their mobile and got a message from a friend in Jacintha’s classroom and now they all know. Their headmaster has been shot and is lying wounded in the library. Matthew, that kind, charismatic, extraordinary man; she still can’t fully take it in.
Jacintha must have shared Neil’s WhatsApp message with her kids; Daphne and Sally-Anne hadn’t shared it with theirs, had wanted to protect them, but perhaps that was wrong of them. Daphne hasn’t told them she already knew, because she doesn’t want them to stop trusting her.
Three Hours : A Novel (2020) Page 8