The Day That Went Missing

by Richard Beard

  How could this cousin have formed an opinion? Nicholas was nine, and even those of us closest to him had barely known Nicky long enough to judge him as a person. For all my cousin knew, Nicky was a chump, or only intermittently a goodish kind of guy; any assessment of his character had to be provisional.

  At Gran’s funeral I didn’t closely examine my anger, either with my immediate family or my cousin. I didn’t question why it was preferable to move along, down the path to the Liddington Village Hall with the distant relatives and friends. I spurned Mum’s impromptu family vigil, and missed another opportunity to study the wording on the gravestone. I told myself I wasn’t interested, but in fact I wasn’t ready. Now I feel I am.

  Before setting out for Cornwall I’d reminded Mum of the red suitcase, the one she’d mentioned was in the attic, full of Nicky’s stuff. The objects he’d left behind would help in getting to know him, at bridging all this distance—they were part of what had survived. I drove to Swindon and spent time looking for the hook to pull down the trapdoor to the attic. Found the hook, pulled down the trapdoor and then the ladder. I climbed into the loft space, and was transported back to the old family house.

  When my parents moved—about 300 meters across Swindon as the crow flies—the attic moved with them. They resisted a clear-out at the time, and from one loft space to another the removal men shifted dismantled bedsteads, trunks and travel cots, boxes of cassette tapes, and many dented lampshades. Yes to all of those, here was the attic as it always had been, and yes to a cardboard box of Balinese shadow puppets, a Cookbook for Boys (1975), and Mum’s scrapbooks of her wedding. Handmade clothes, it seems, are hard to throw away after the effort that goes into making them, and our enormous blue cloche for cheese may one day raise eyebrows on Antiques Roadshow. I find a newspaper cutting about a Swindon builder who went to work on his 100th birthday. I feel sorry for him, my own great-grandfather, and for the single-minded genes I may have inherited. Keep busy! Don’t stop! One More Step Is Always Possible!

  I fall briefly in love with a 1920s studio photograph of a beautiful, soft-faced woman called Madge. I don’t know who she is. The attic is full of objects kept but not kept, that had value once when life was different and may again, if life ever changes.

  No red suitcase.

  “I’m sure it’s there,” Mum calls up. “Shiny, and square. It’s red. You must have missed it.”

  “How big is it? What’s inside it?”

  “His letters, his schoolbooks. His blue cricket hat is in it.”

  “What blue cricket hat?” I poke my head through the trapdoor and look Mum in the eye upside down.

  “You know. His blue cricket hat. The one he wore all the time.”

  I don’t always recognize Mum’s parallel version of the past. I want documents, evidence, objects, but I climb down the ladder because there’s no red suitcase.

  Mum is apologetic. “We’d have to turn out the whole attic to be sure.”

  “Let’s turn out the attic.”

  Mum is tired of the energy I’m devoting to the cause. I make another run through the attic, and in boxes and trunks find loose letters and a few photographs. Also, a blue school blazer (with his name tape in the back of the neck, N. P. BEARD, below a worn silk loop for hanging miniature blazers on low school pegs). The embroidered badge on the pocket says K, for Kingsbury Hill, his school before he moved to Pinewood. The pockets are empty.

  Encouraged, I search behind the bedsteads, and between the folded handmade clothes. I don’t find a carefully tended shrine of mementos, but nor has Nicky been systematically erased. He turns out to be in between, slipped to the bottom of cardboard boxes and in the linings of trunks, in the spaces behind old music systems and at the bottom of baskets of audio cassettes. He is forgotten, but not completely.

  There is, however, no red suitcase. Nicky is fragmented, the scraps of his life scattered in pieces that until now no one has thought to gather together. We erased the accident at the beach, and along with the pain we effectively deleted Nicholas Paul Beard the person. We may not have meant to but we did, though not entirely.

  In the attic I keep finding pieces of him. His birth certificate, and six Premium Bonds in his name, dated 3 June 1969. I’m amazed that before now no one has gone through these remnants looking for what’s left of him, but no one ever has. The family has shared a desire to postpone, and possibly delay forever, the acknowledgment of Nicky’s existence. And therefore also his nonexistence.

  I’m old enough (at last) to appreciate more positive ways to cope with sudden death. Fear, I imagine, is one of the reasons we have distanced Nicky, but I did not shatter at the churchyard when I read the words on his gravestone, or when Mum revealed the date. We didn’t need to be so frightened—the finds from the attic haven’t overwhelmed me.

  In fact, I feel rewarded by every object that connects to Nicky: he was real, he occupied a particular space of his own in the material world. Up in the attic I feel energized and useful. I pick out anything that might be relevant, and whenever I’m convinced I’ve salvaged all there is, I find something more. Certificates, schoolbooks, photographs I’ve never seen. In one of these photos I recognize his cricket bat, a polyarmored size-three Slazenger, and I go to the shed and there it is in the bucket of rotting sports equipment. The Slazenger has my younger brother Jem’s initials painted on the back in red Airfix paint, but this is Nicky’s bat. The rubber grip has perished, but I play a forward defensive and remember, from nowhere, that England’s unshiftable opening batsman Geoffrey Boycott was Nicky’s cricketing hero. Stubborn bastard, hard to dislodge.

  Eventually, mired in dust and grime, back and knees aching, I have to accept I’ve covered every inch of the attic for surprise relics from Nicky’s short life. At some point there are no further items to find, and my haul includes most of the objects Mum claimed for the elusive red suitcase. His blue cricket hat, for example, and his schoolbooks.

  “We once had a recording of his voice,” Mum says. “We knew it wouldn’t last, the way you were then. We organized a quiz with the same format as Mastermind, and recorded everyone’s turn to answer the questions. Recording took more preparation then than it does now, but we lost the cassette. Look, you found another hat.”

  The floppy camouflage hat is covered in cloth patches, badges of survival from family tours of duty: Corfe Castle, The Royal Tournament, the Talyllyn Railway.

  “That’s my hat,” I say. “I just saw it, so I picked it up.”

  “That’s Nicky’s hat. I recognize the patches.”

  “It’s mine.”

  We squabble for our conflicting narratives of the past, but the more evidence we unearth, I think, the less cause we’ll have to squabble. The facts will speak for themselves. In the meantime our different memories betray the distance between us. “Did you chuck his other belongings out in one go, or gradually?”

  “I don’t know,” Mum says. “I don’t understand the question.”

  The attic pile of objects is not very big, despite Nicky’s nine years of life. In my own home I’ve had nine-year-old boys and could hardly move in their bedrooms for the stuff they have.

  “You didn’t have a solemn ritual sometime after he died? Maybe an afternoon you put aside to dismantle his bedroom, to decide what was worth keeping?”

  An absence surrounds the odds and ends I’ve collected together. Nicky’s casual clothes are missing, as is his toothbrush, his football boots, his light reading and comics. Where are his biodegradables, and his disposable everyday life?

  “Did you have a tight-lipped clear-out, dumping his comb and pencil case without even looking? Maybe you got someone in, to do it as a favor, or you paid someone. Take the emotion out of it.”

  I stop before I upset Mum more than I already have. I can hear myself making up stories on her behalf, and that’s not the idea. Stick to the facts, now that I know from the graveyard and the death certificate that facts in themselves will not destroy us. The emotion they’v
e so far failed to evoke feels like an outlet silted up and blocked through deliberate neglect. I look again at my Nicky pile, and I’m not disappointed, considering I climbed into the attic with few expectations beyond a single red suitcase. No suitcase, so this pile is all we have, and no more. On reflection, the pile amounts to almost nothing. I feel I’m reaching out for Nicky, but there’s never enough of him there.

  I concentrate on what I have, the boy in pieces.

  Three baby shoes, a pair in white and one solitary blue shoe.

  A blue tracksuit top (with a J. I. BEARD name tape, but I’m sure I remember this as the top Nicky wore in Cornwall)—it has a distinctive hexagonal patch saying GO, in green, sewn onto the left breast.

  An invitation card with Nicholas written in italic red to my great-grandfather’s 100th birthday celebration. The date of my great-grandfather’s birth is misprinted and overwritten in blue biro (presumably on every invitation): 18 April 1878. As a family, it looks like we’re weak on dates.

  A framed certificate from Devizes Junior Eisteddfod 1976, Piano Solo, Under 9,80—Merit.

  School bills.

  A small transparent plastic bag: Cash’s 72 Name Tapes. By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen Manufacturers of Woven Name Tapes. In blue—N. P. BEARD. Unopened.

  The Empire “Cumulative” Cricket Scoring Book, for invented cricket matches. Nicky has filled in dates for the new season—1978–79—but of the book’s possible 100 innings, only two games have started.

  A selection of letters to and from.

  Photographs, many single photographs, mostly dog-eared or creased. Others in a cardboard scrapbook, the prints glued or Sellotaped at the corners, the Sellotape as brown as the glue.

  A pocket-sized Letts Schoolboys’ Diary 1978, bound in red plastic.

  The blue floppy sun hat Mum called his cricket hat, but I’m not sure it is. It fits on my head. The label inside says Harrods, so the hat was school uniform, bought on our yearly trip to London. We didn’t go to London, as such. We drove up the M4 and parked at the Knightsbridge NCP, walked round to Harrods, bought school uniforms, and ate a roast-beef lunch in the Georgian carvery. Harrods was London, just as Cornwall was holiday England.

  Two newspaper cuttings: Surf Boy is Fourth Victim is one headline. The other is Holiday Boy, 9, swept to death.

  A blue-peaked gray school cap, name-taped, from Gorringes of Victoria, School and College Outfitters, Phone Vic. 6666, London, SW1, which looks antique even to me, and I’d have worn something similar. Size 6¾, with oil from Nicky’s hair shiny in the rust-black lining.

  A folder marked Nicholas Beard, Termly Reports. Another reason not to die young: what will survive of us is our school reports.

  The morning after failing to find Tregardock Beach by car, I leave the Mazda at Port Gaverne and decide to walk. The South West Coast Path follows the cliffs north across National Trust land, and I’m persuaded by the idea of approaching the beach on foot. I won’t have to talk to anyone. Also, if I take every track that turns left between here and Tintagel, I can’t help but find my beach. Though it won’t be straightaway—I estimate I have three or four miles of tough up-and-down hiking, the grass knee-high with bluebells and red campion, and on the higher sections complicated with brambles, a plant with a liking for Britain’s climate.

  In the absence of a map I’m relying on memory, and from up on the coastal path I have a panoramic view of every cove and inlet. The blue-white sea smashes into Cornish rock. I may have misremembered the broad sand beach, elaborating a haven where the rest of the family was out of danger, but I decide I can’t afford not to trust my memory. If I’m wrong about what I remember, what else might I always be wrong about?

  Originally, I’d assumed the sea and the beach were within walking distance of the rented holiday house, but in the attic I’d found a map hand-drawn by Dad. He’d written out clear directions from Swindon to The Mill, denoting the house with a rectangle to the south side of Port Isaac. Tregardock, on 18th August 1978, must have been a special outing by car to a beach worth the journey. I’m therefore not expecting to see the house, not today.

  From high on the path I dismiss one cove after another; I feel physically sick. I’m anxious I’ll never find the place that I settled in my memory. Or that I will. Reality feels like an enemy, a toxin identifiable at a distance, like a bad smell. My body prepares to reject the past, and I experience a sense of physical blockage in my heart, in my throat. As I walk along I clutch my chest and cough. Rain starts to fall.

  Danger

  Cliff Liable to Subsidence

  The fence is on the wrong side of the coastal path, protecting the sheep in the fields, which means no protection for walkers between the path itself and a drop to the fizzing ocean below, one misjudged step away. One more step is always possible. I could throw myself into the sea and drown. I could get blown off the cliff and drown. I’m assaulted by fear, by which I mean imagined stories that end badly, in particular for me.

  I haven’t planned ahead, I don’t have a decent map, but it helps that no one gets lost on a coastal path. Now I’m here, I do sincerely want to find Tregardock Beach, and the smaller cove beyond it. I want to stop guessing, or imagining, but if I found that easy I’d have made careful preparations and brought an Ordnance Survey map. I’d have gone directly to the place I want to reach.

  Over every new headland my heart lurches, but with each fresh vista of inlets I don’t see sand and I’m thinking: the beach can’t be that big, because these coves are tiny. The rain eases but the wind is up, skimming foam off the waves before they shatter into cliffs. The path dips and a track to the left feels familiar. I walk along it, heart thudding. No beach at the end, a false trail.

  Wherever this beach is, we had a decent walk to get there. Every disappointing inlet means the next is more likely to be the one true place. I start shouting “Fuck! Fuck!” as if from sudden-onset Tourette’s. Maybe my dad wrote his letter of observations about the wrong beach. Of course this is possible, because at the moment of the drowning he wasn’t there. He doesn’t feature in any memory of what I know. Fuck! Fuck!

  I did not imagine I would react like this.

  By now I’m walking so slowly I laugh at myself, which turns to coughing and doubling up and I think I’m going to choke. I can barely haul myself over the stiles. I’m terrified of moving forward, closer to the past. Such a muddle, such chaos. I want to keep the grief at a distance, if grief it is, so I sit down out of the wind to write some notes, and the written word gives me an excuse for not walking further. Then I put my writing away and I do trudge further, but dragging my heavy heart onward, as far as a weathered 2 × 4 pounded stoutly into the coastal turf. TREGARDOCK, 1 MILE. The letters are burned into the wood vertically. There can be no doubt.

  The beach is beyond the next promontory. I hope so much to find it disappointing, and that coming back will be no big deal. It’s no big deal at all, really. Everything’s all right, as we’ve been convincing ourselves for years. Don’t feel bad, just as Mum told me when I didn’t need to be told. That’s how I’ve chosen to remember my initial response. On the night Nicky drowned I was sleeping like a baby, then I woke up. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t upset, or a mess of loss and grief and despair. Not me. I wanted the toilet. Mum, honestly I’m fine.

  Tregardock Beach will be a massive disappointment. I will feel nothing, again, and I can cope with that because disappointment is within my emotional range. I have the experience.

  School reports offer half-truths at best, but I’m grateful for any source that can tell me more about Nicholas Beard. The reports take in two schools from Spring ’74 through Summer ’78, and I read these assessments of Nicky’s character in chronological order, hoping to see a person developing from the child. The early days are of limited interest, not much to see except a cosset of headmaster’s platitudes—he settled into school life quickly and easily, a promising pupil.

  Then, within a year of starting school, Mum’s “
difficult child,” doomed to a life of banking or homicide, is a delightful and able boy, and from 1975 the reports have a category, almost too good to be true, marked Emotional Development. He is Well Controlled. No problems, and the next term No problems at all. He is a sound, controlled child, so not, at this age, the character type to run alone and reckless into a dangerous and raging sea. The future, with hindsight, can lure headmasters into unwitting moments of pathos—he continues to do well, and his future looks bright, a comment that in the drought summer of 1976 is surpassed by Nicky’s form teacher: He has made a courageous effort to swim and can manage half a width (under water!).

  Funny, Mrs. Huxley. Bet you regret that now.

  In 1977 Nicky starts boarding at Pinewood School, aged eight and a bit, and in Form 1 is a little overconfident. The decisive Final Order, however, at the end of the year, sees him rise to second in a class of ten. He is a natural cricketer (a bowler), above average.

  Mum has it all wrong, mourning a boy who never was. A banker? He was a caring and very helpful young pupil. A murderer? He was a lively, cheerful boy.

  We forget. Nicholas is a brainbox with a talent for sport. Anyone at school with him, like me, could on reflection have told Mum that this was so, only we never took time to reflect. I’m glad that the school reports bear witness, because Nicky is otherwise ghostly in his absence.