The Day That Went Missing

by Richard Beard

  “Where was Dad on the beach in the time before Nicky died?”

  “I don’t know where your dad was.”

  There it is again—“your dad,” as if since his death she can’t be held responsible. I don’t know how far to trust her answers. I still worry that we haven’t spoken about Nicky in all these years for some very good reason. We’ve acted for decades as if we had something to hide.

  “Never mind about Dad,” I say, changing my angle of approach. Now that I’ve confirmed some factual parameters of the day itself, I have reference points against which I can test Mum’s reliability. I’m feeling confident about how much more I know since asking that first basic question. “We have the date definitely as the eighteenth. Can you remember the day of the week?”

  My brother died on Friday, 18th August 1978. Anyone can look up a day from a date, it’s easy. I looked it up and the day is a Friday, another solid fact that makes Nicky and his death more real. By insisting on the details, I feel like I’m protecting his existence in the universe.

  “I think it was a Saturday,” Mum says. “We couldn’t arrange anything over the weekend, like moving the body. That’s why I think Saturday.”

  I don’t correct her straightaway, because time and denial have a distorting effect on the past. Memories look plausible from a distance, but up close the fractures and patches become visible.

  “Why did you say Nicky was bad at sport? I’ve read his school reports, and the condolence letters. Other people think he could do almost anything.”

  “I don’t know,” Mum says. “Maybe he wasn’t good when I was watching.”

  “Did we actually get on, Mum? Me and Nicky. I once punched him in the face, but I don’t suppose you knew about that. Do you remember any nasty rivalry between us?”

  She doesn’t. “You were always fighting, but boys did. You’d go off and someone would break someone else’s Lego, and World War Three would break out. You were very different. I don’t remember in detail, there was so much going on. You did things together, but you also did things on your own.”

  “Tell me about the beach,” I say. I will not let go. “What are your memories of the actual day?”

  On Friday, 18th August 1978 Mum was sitting on the beach checking off her children. Not enough heads, this is how Mum remembers the crucial passage of time. Not enough heads at base camp, so one of her boys must be missing and she looks for Jem, the youngest and most vulnerable. Jem is squashing sandcastles with a spade.

  “Nicky wasn’t there. I looked for him, but he was gone.”

  “That can’t be right, can it, Mum?”

  “Can’t it?”

  “You count the heads, and Nicky is missing. But I wasn’t there either, because I was with him. If that’s the way it happened, at least two of us were missing. Maybe Tim was as well, if he was playing with Guy Hake.”

  “No,” she says. “Yes.”

  She doesn’t dispute my absence from her scenario, but seems genuinely surprised. The passing of time has eroded the truth, and over the years Mum has lifted me from the water and placed me safely in her care on the beach, all of her precious boys present and correct except Nicky. She doesn’t mention Dad. Wherever he was in reality, he’s absent from the fiction.

  Mum looks confused, as if trying to remember her reason for misremembering. What a muddle. She’s lost, distressed, but while Mum doubts her memory, I’m free to question my motivation. I wonder if my harshness is to exact some kind of revenge, for the years of silence, for my cold educated heart.

  In Mum’s revised version Nicky wandered off, alone. He found himself in the water and was swept away. She hasn’t admitted that two of her sons could have drowned at the same time, on the same day. I know this is true from being in the water, but over the years I’ve forgotten that in the pain and disorder so many details of the events were lost. Mum doesn’t seem to realize I was involved; but then from her side she probably thought I’d remember the date. Our differing perspectives have grown apart unchecked.

  “Mum, I wasn’t on the beach building sandcastles.” I try to sound kinder. “Can you go back a bit earlier?”

  “I was packing up the lunch and Nicky said: ‘Can we have one last swim?’”

  Nicky says “we,” not “I.” In her first reconstruction Mum chose to forget I was gone, and had me sitting beside her obediently, like a good little boy. Wrong, Mum. Nicky is asking permission for us both. “Can we have one last swim?” Or maybe I asked the question. Mum’s memory is unreliable.

  “I was busy,” she says. “I was packing up the lunch. I said: all right then, you can go. One last swim.”

  For the sake of a bit of social diversity, I wouldn’t have chosen for Ted Childs of Port Isaac RNLI to be a retired prep-school headmaster from the south of England, but that’s what he is. I’d prefer to have met the Port Isaac butcher, like the helmsman that day, Mark Provis, but Mark died from a brain tumor in his thirties. The third member of the lifeboat crew on 18th August 1978, Eddie Fletcher, newsagent and taxi driver, moved away from the village some years ago.

  Ted it is. Ted Childs is a big man dressed in blue, with a round-necked navy sweater hiding half the knot of his RNLI-crested tie—a half-visible statement that binds him into the noble tradition of volunteer lifeboats. Ted and I sit side by side on a plastic upholstered bench in a corner of the operations room. To guess at his age, I make a calculation (like so many others) starting from the base of 1978. If Ted was then in his thirties—the maximum age for an active lifeboatman is forty-five—he must now be well into his seventies. In an archived photo album Chris finds a picture of the station crew in ’78, or thereabouts. Ted is bald already, but the younger lads are relishing that twentieth-century moment when no one expected to see ears.

  Ted has pale eyelashes and washed-out blue eyes and huge, unashamed ears. His nose is flat, honest, his lips fleshy and full. I will later have my reasons for looking at these lips more intently, but for now his appearance seems significant because he was the next person, after me, to be physically close to Nicky. He touched Nicky’s skin with his bulky liver-spotted fingers.

  “I remember that shout,” Ted says. “Of course I do. It was about two-thirty, early afternoon, after lunch. The maroons were fired, and at that time there was a coastguard station at the top of the hill. The first flare went up in response to a 999 call.”

  The first coast-guard flare didn’t always lead to the launch of the lifeboat, but Ted usually started out the door in any case. The quicker the crew reached the station, the more likely they were to make a rescue.

  “The first maroon went up with a great whoosh. It was a rocket. You’d hear it and could be running by the time it exploded.”

  The whoosh, a raucous scattering of gulls, the bang of the maroon rocket 800 feet up in the Cornish summer sky. A shout for the lifeboat was a major Port Isaac event—first flare to summon the coast-guard team, then two more from outside the RNLI station for a full-scale launch. On an emergency call like this one the rockets would be sent up one, then two, three, with barely a gap in between.

  Ted was in the street by the time the second flare banged high above the village, and the system then as now was first three crew to the station launched the boat. Ted lives a two-minute walk from the slipway; he was there in under a minute. As he and the butcher and the taxi driver zipped and buckled their immersion suits, they learned the type of incident from the operations manager—a swimmer in the water. In the language of the rescue services, Nicky was a “swimmer in the water” until proved otherwise, though according to Ted they never took too much notice in advance.

  “You go,” Ted says, and in those days they responded to about thirty shouts a year, “and you see what you see when you get there.”

  I’m not yet ready to see Nicky from the perspective of the Port Isaac lifeboat. Not yet. I look away, anywhere else but at Nicky facedown in the sea, at Ted Childs as he is today, the retired headmaster of a private prep school in Kent. Back
at Ted Childs as he was in 1978, qualified to serve as lifeboat crew because he spent the long school holidays at his cottage in the heart of the village. I latch on to his hard-earned pride in a lifetime’s loyalty to the RNLI, offset by the sadness of this particular day.

  “It wasn’t even very rough,” Ted says, “and the body wasn’t far out.”

  In his eleven years on lifeboat duty Ted Childs hauled in three dead bodies. Two of these were grown men, recovery operations. The crew knew in advance what to expect, and the bodies had been in the water for some time. With Nicky, it was different.

  Go back, to the instants before his death. Nicky made so many schoolboy errors. He had a somewhat arrogant manner, as regretted in his school report for Summer 1977. He was a little overconfident at present in Maths and Art, but there was no reason his confidence should stop there: a year later he was in the Colts Cricket XI, taking unbelievable catches. He beat boys his age at anything, so it was no wonder his head was bigger than his boots.

  The school had not worn Nicky down, not yet, and in the summer of ’78 he remained too self-assured. One danger of self-assurance was underestimating the risks of a final swim as the tide surged in. If Nicky had been less self-confident, I might have been able to discourage him. Unfortunately, in terms of his character traits, he was notably assertive among older children. In the Final Order of Summer Term 1978 his age is given as 9.3 in a class with an average age, usefully provided, of 10.2. Though the smallest in the class his agility and coordination make him always in the fore in both formal and games activities.

  If Nicky is eleven months younger than the average, there are children in his class who are eleven months older than the average; a two-year span across the class as a whole. Nicky is competing on a daily basis with eleven-year-olds, the same age as me. Nicky is always in the fore. He takes the lead, though the smallest in the class. He comes to believe that no feat is beyond him. He asks Mum for one last swim, even though she’s packing up the camp and the tide is rushing in and everyone knows our day at the beach is almost at an end. Nicky has the idea—his idea—to leave the wide-open beach where the others can see us. We are special. We deserve the once-in-a-lifetime patch of sand behind the large rock with the best waves that no one but us has dared to test.

  In Lazarus Is Dead I introduced an element of competition between the brothers. At the time I thought I did this for narrative reasons, because the rivalry between them created a plausible chain of cause and effect. The younger brother, Amos, wants to be first at whatever they do—first to run into the water, first to swim out deeper—but fiction isn’t shaped from thin air. All novelists say this, if pressed. The subconscious must be persuaded to open.

  Nick-nack paddywhack, give the dog a bone.

  Fictions aren’t about creating something from nothing, but something from everything: Nicky was a smaller boy in a class where other children might be two years older. He was constantly having to prove himself.

  Well done, Nick-Nack, well done coming first, but keep trying.

  In his letters Dad stokes Nicky’s ambition, but coming first is only part of the problem. Nicky’s boarding-school education puts the comfort of home out of reach. This means that in his letters Nicky is always looking backward or forward (at half-term I hope I can find my flippers) until his attention is permanently averted from the present (Well dear, see you on Saturday). Does this leave him ill-equipped to appreciate the here and now, or to identify immediate danger? It would help explain why he died.

  Nicky is running into the sea ahead of me, his Snoopy pendant leaping on its chain, rebounding bright splinters of sunlight. His trunks darken as he gallops over fading waves. I may have tried to talk him back in, choosing words he’d learned how to spell—future, sicken, stress, brink, nothing, scald. Get a word wrong and write it out five times until it sticks: Change, change, change, change, change. His spelling book is full of words that at first he couldn’t grasp: scar, scar, scar, scar, scar. Rage he manages without trouble, also Love.

  But I can’t get through to him. His head is buzzing with irrelevant nonsense, scraps from school music books, with Old King Cole was a merry old soul and roving’s been my ru-u-in, with Birds and Their Eggs and Geoffrey Boycott’s first-class batting average, and family birthdays already marked in his Letts Schoolboys’ Diary for November and December 1978, beacons of a projected safe future distracting him from imminent perils as they approach.

  They are here right now. He hurdles white water and throws himself at the pre-break swell of the day’s big waves. We love the heave of weightlessness, the sensation of being lifted up by nature, ungrounded and free. Placed back down, ever so gently. Turn, go again.

  Nicky has read Lord of the Flies, and together with the joy of being nine years old in the high sunshine of Cornwall, he thrills to an adventure without adults.

  – Aren’t there any grown-ups at all?

  – I don’t think so.

  Without grown-ups, this is real exploring, I bet nobody’s been here before. It’s wacco and wizard, and then it is not, and suddenly Lord of the Flies is a novel about two boys fighting to the death on a savage unsupervised beach. Nicky can’t afford to be windy, because only one can be supreme and lead—He is so confident. How different from some! (Autumn 1977, headmaster’s comments.)

  Nicky is out ahead of me in the water. He is first in Geography and first equal in Scripture and also first in English, the subject closest to my heart. I don’t remember him being so clever. He was stubborn, annoying, growing stronger all the time. He has a very good vocabulary. “Distance,” “escape,” “space.” The evidence is there in his spelling books.

  Come on, Nicky, turn around. With my hand I shield my eyes from the sun. Turn around, Nicky, show me your face and let’s talk our way back with your growing stock of words, plundered from Treasure Island and A Hundred Million Francs, the story of a gang of backstreet kids in Paris. I follow him in. Being first in English isn’t much help now.

  Beyond the apparent confidence, and the precocious physical achievements, Mrs. Huxley long ago noted that to thrive in a difficult world Nicky would need more than a facility for mental arithmetic. He has more difficulty in his application of the four basic processes to problems. The problem before us is that the Atlantic Ocean is a beast and we’re out of sight of the grown-ups. Nicky doesn’t understand the problem, he doesn’t devise a plan and is therefore unable to carry out the plan. By the time it comes to the fourth basic procedure, looking back, there is no looking back. He is drowning in the sea.

  Not that he hadn’t been warned: most unpredictable—very different from the other two—shows tremendous ability but oh so careless and untidy. This must improve.

  I wanted him to be different, I remember that much. Essentially to be not as capable, and therefore less likely to carry off whatever rewards were on offer. But in truth I’m also careless and untidy, and to this day I remain unpredictable. I haven’t improved as much as I should.

  For Nicky, it was too late. Careless, unpredictable, overconfident, what could anyone expect? I was lucky he didn’t take me with him.

  I engaged my desperate crawl, found my feet, lost my footing, crawled again, struggled from the sea, accepted the useless bystander’s sunglasses and ran. I ran toward the camp the family always made, for safety. On the way I threw down the sunglasses and they smashed on a rock.

  After that, I don’t know, but Mum does. Denial is not forgetting. The accepted scientific view is that memory is not a photograph, waiting to be discovered. Nor is it a possession that we either have or we don’t. Trauma fragments memory, but I want to believe that the splinters we collect between us can be reassembled. Mum knows more than so far she has chosen to share. It’s this instinct that makes me push at her defenses, and I try her out now with how the day was for me. I give her a version of the boys in the water. We were together, but Nicky found himself in trouble and I floundered out. I sprinted back over the sand, and as I round the rocks in my dis
tress, in my frenzy, Mum’s vision of her three safe children evaporates. She gives in. I am not sitting untouched beside her on the sand.

  “You ran toward us,” she says. “You said: ‘He’s in the sea, he’s in the sea, I tried to save him.’”

  “I said that?”

  “I remember you saying that.”

  We’re peering at our story from a great distance, as if we weren’t involved, but Mum’s most obvious emotion is annoyance. A silence develops; my questions irritate her—if you’re going to doubt the answer, her silence says, don’t ask the question. But I don’t know, Mum, I genuinely don’t know the answers. Back at the camp, alive but distraught, some words must have come out of my mouth. I’ve no idea what they were, and until now no one else has offered to remember them on my behalf. I don’t want to pounce, but given this opening I’m eager to move beyond the three safe sons and the one son missing. So, yes, I do have questions.

  “Your first version was miles out. I wasn’t on the beach, I was in the water with Nicky. Did you know I was in the water?”

  “No,” she says. “Not until now. I didn’t.”

  “What happened next, after I came running and said I tried to save him?”

  Mum offers up her next memory, if chronologically not the next event. She is sitting on the cliff top holding Nicky’s shoe. One shoe only. “I saw him floating in the water. It wasn’t as rough as they said in the paper. He was quite near the rocks.”

  I know, Mum. Ted Childs will tell me exactly that. Trust your memory, sometimes.

  “The shoe was a blue lace-up plimsoll. We’ve probably got it upstairs.”

  “No, we haven’t.”

  If the gym shoe were in the attic I’d have found it. Often, in the middle of conversations like these, we need to take a break. Mum will read the features in the Daily Mail, licking her index finger before turning a page. I’ll fail to get a connection on my phone, and then we’re back in the room, hands free, and there’s little I’m not prepared to ask.