“Last time you said ‘doctor.’”
The senior nursing sister came out of the hospital to say “dead on arrival” and Mum collapsed inside the Land Rover, fell to her knees on the floor of the ambulance, though maybe it was a police van. She remembers the noise she made.
“A form had to be filled in. I remember that.”
The request sounds unbelievable, unbearable, but an official printed form marks the end of the beginning: the dotted lines and tickable boxes are the first dose of the documentary anesthetic to come—the death certificate, the coroner’s report, the dutiful letters of acknowledgment to the many letters of condolence. The paperwork is a reminder that this has happened before and will happen again, and that the NHS has a form ready for the inevitable day when tragedy strikes. Follow the procedure. Honestly, this is something you can do.
What else is going to help? Even years later I use my various documents—the school reports and RNLI statistics—as a barrier against the great abyss. Reading and writing diverts the emotional shock, until much later reading and writing may help to bring it back.
“They wanted to know buried or cremated straight away,” Mum says, “within hours of his death. The police brought us back to Port Isaac. They were very young.”
Everyone remembers the police. I do, and so do Tim and Jem, because a police car meant that whatever had happened must be unforgettably serious. Back at The Mill, when Mum and Dad came back, we had a group hug in the lane beside the gate. By that time it was late afternoon, early evening. Summertime. T-shirts and shorts and plenty of light. Birds and bees. Electricity in the wires between the pylons.
“The five of you were outside,” Mum says, “waiting to hear the news.”
Maybe we heard tires in the lane—by the time Mum climbed out of the police car we were assembled.
“I caught Gran’s eye, shook my head. That was enough.”
Mum shakes her head. In the lane everyone cries. No, I can’t say for sure that’s true. I assume everyone cried. I invent some tears for us all. Gran goes inside to make the tea.
When I visited Bertie and Jim at The Mill I thought the space outside the gate at the back of the house seemed narrow for Mum’s set-piece drama. But I make this the congested stage for that silent negative shake of the head. The family learns that Nicky is dead, and this is where and when we knew for sure.
Jem’s second physical memory, after hiding behind a rock on Tregardock Beach, is of an event Mum has told him never happened. The memory remains physical nonetheless, of the type that refuses to fade.
“We were in the holiday house,” Jem says. “I was woken up, led down the wooden stairs, and given a glass of sherry. It was night-time. This is a very vivid memory, even though it seems odd.”
“Is that your sense of when you realized what had happened?”
I mean to say when he accepted or understood, at the age of six, that his nine-year-old brother was dead.
“Yes.”
Tim is also at The Mill that afternoon, waiting for Mum and Dad to bring news from the hospital. He has no memory of leaving Tregardock, but back at the house he prays for Nicky to be safe. He prays, and he prays. Until Mum and Dad arrive to tell us otherwise, Tim keeps his hopes alive.
“Then the police car arrived with Gran inside,” he says.
It can’t have been Gran, though I don’t correct him. I could ease off, accept the possibility of a story with two police cars. I want everybody always to be right, if these are the memories that console. Really, what difference does it make now? All of our versions exist, and for the same reason: we remember as much as we can bear.
The police car. That’s when Tim recognized a terrible day for what it was, with a white-and-orange patrol car tucked in efficiently at the side of the lane, to avoid causing an obstruction. We may not remember the helicopter, but at that age we’re alive to the glamour of the police. They hadn’t parked up for show, because at some point I was summoned to the car: this is something I know, a reality equivalent to Jem’s physical memories.
The police had established that I was the last person to see Nicky alive, and they sat me in the back of the patrol car. I remember the plastic blackness of the interior trim. Too new, too clean, I thought, as if the police car were underused, a vehicle from an alien world where no one scuffed the seats. Our Vauxhall Viva was filthy with mud and crumbs, sports equipment blocked the footwells, and prints from fidgeting shoes patterned the dash and the seat-backs. The wipe-clean hygiene of the police car was unsettling, as if the tolerances of family life no longer applied.
I’m in the police car. Now what? I’ve started so I want more, always more information. I go back to the well, to ask Mum, which is the purpose and comfort of mothers. Can I have some more, please? Of course you can—the mums of the world supply whatever is the opposite of the workhouse and the orphanage. Oliver Twist can ask his question without fear of reproach—can I have some more?—as long as he asks it of his mum.
“Please, Mum, tell me. Everything you remember.”
Mum says: “The police wanted to talk to you, especially.”
“To me?”
“Especially to you. They were very kind. They took you aside and made a point of telling you it wasn’t your fault.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“They said it again and again. They wanted you to know you shouldn’t blame yourself for Nicky drowning in the sea.”
I’m eleven years old. I watch Starsky & Hutch on television, when I’m allowed. The police isolate witnesses when they have their suspicions.
For hours I’d feigned ignorance or, like Tim, allowed myself to hope. Unlike him, I knew at first hand that hope was unlikely to help. In fact he and the others allowed themselves a measure of optimism because the last person to see Nicky alive, namely me, hadn’t cautioned them against it. I must have acted the innocent throughout that afternoon as we waited to hear dead or alive from the hospital. I imagine, as my mum stepped out of the police car, as she shook her head, that I felt some kind of relief. Finally, everyone knew as much as I did.
I can’t imagine I felt free of guilt. For several years the lively N. P. Beard had been catching me up, as noted in his school reports. I punched him in the face, but failed to slow him down. I hit him because that’s how frightened he made me feel, just by standing in front of me. I despised him for posing in photographs as a railway engineer. Some part of me wanted him dead. He died, and no one else was in the water but me, so no wonder the police decided to take me aside.
Two summers earlier, Nicky set up an obstacle course around the garden in Swindon. He ran and jumped for hours, competing in every track-and-field event from the 1976 Olympics, always winning gold. He was a talented athlete but only a moderate swimmer, a valiant fourth in Junior Breaststroke in the Summer Term 1978 school magazine.
Come face the waves, I may have said, let’s see you run your way out of this one. Come on in, Nicky, if you dare.
Two brothers leave a place of safety, a camp with food and water, with travel rugs arranged by a loving mother on a flat patch of sand. All potential dangers are visible from afar in every direction, but behind some awkward rocks the older boy knows of an untouched section of beach, one that no one can see. I’d scouted the area earlier in the day, somewhere new and hidden, therefore exciting and better.
Are there any adults—any grown-ups with you?
Lord of the Flies was permanently in stock at the school bookshop. I’d read the novel too, and I’d had more years to understand it: we are a vicious species, especially the children. Only the strong will survive. Come and vault the waves, Nicky. Feel how the sea lifts us up, as if our bodies have no weight, as if we are nothing but air. Who was more likely to have taken the lead?
I didn’t much like him. It’s plain to see in photographs how he infuriates me, and physically I assaulted him without provocation. I didn’t like him, but round a table the day after his death I hid my feelings from Dad’s a
mbush diary.
Nicky himself was in the habit of being more honest: Fat well you can’t say that. He tries out the unsayable, recording his awkward truths in the back of schoolbooks. Instead of smiling at the camera like a feeble conformist, he experiments: he’s a bicycle mechanic, he’s a welder of metal on a bridge in Wales. Nicky is whoever he wants to be. He shows off in the sea when he knows the lens is on him. He does as he pleases, and gets away with it. He is everything I want to be.
And he’s nine. He is nine years old, and I’m eleven. He’s catching up. The match reports in the school magazine, the Blue and Grey, have Nicky as a bowler while I’m a batsman, but from the pictures I see he’s a batsman too. He’s an all-rounder, while I bowl as terribly as Dad. In the cricket photo at the beach on 18th August Nicky is batting. I’m a fielder at square leg, but Nicky at the crease is at the center of the game—we can’t get him out. He’s the batsman my grandfather chooses to photograph. However I look at the image, Nicky is the one, the object of attention.
Dad feeds him easy runs, lobbing his inviting off-breaks. Nicky is a daddy’s boy. In the letters he’s Nicky to Mum, but to Dad he’s Nick-Nack, and in earlier photos at a school sports day he’s sitting at Dad’s feet. Nicky is proud in the picture beside Dad and the statement Daimler. That’s a serious car, but in the second half of the twentieth century the UK building trade just keeps on giving. Dad’s favorite car and his favorite son, snapped for posterity.
“He was like your dad,” Mum says. Did she say that? She told me Nicky was going to be a banker or a murderer. He was destined for an extraordinary life, beyond our Swindon limitations.
Up until 1978, I had been the chosen one. The last uncluttered editions of the school magazine, before Nicky pushes in, make frequent reference to the developing talents of R. J. Beard, or Beard mi. He is third in Cricket Ball, second in High Jump, first in Sprints. Three, two, one, winner. I can be the best. Every term I was desperate to feature in the magazine, and usually I’m in it. There I am by name, even if incorrectly transcribed: Colts XV Rugger P. J. Beard (capt). That’s me. I’m the captain already. I’m somebody.
But by Summer 1978 Nicky is somebody, too. He’s second in Long Jump and third in High Jump and fourth in Junior Breaststroke. He has the cheek to feature in the swimming events, which I never do, though junior breast-stroke won’t save anyone’s life. When it counts, the winner will be a savage, untaught, all-in frenzied crawl. Not that either of us yet knows this.
I’m busy looking over my shoulder, hating him for catching up because I’m one of the big boys. Eleven years of photographs, leading up to 1978, confirm that this is so. In June 1968 on a beach in Devon, at a place noted as Georgeham, I’m wearing the same dungarees and stripy T-shirt as Tim. We have no need of a younger brother and are never photographed separately, a pair of happy, fat boys gurgling with spades in hand.
In that scrapbook the village of Georgeham takes up several pages. A Premium Savings Bond is glued inside the front cover, postmarked Georgeham 24 June 1968, followed by Sellotaped postcards of Georgeham’s church, manor, and beach alongside wine labels peeled from a bottle of Liebfraumilch and one of Riesling (Produce of Yugoslavia). These scrapbook fragments have a message for me. Look, look.
I do the sums, find the story: I’m seeing mementos of Nicky’s conception. I turn again to the images of me and Tim in our matching dungarees and stripy toweling T-shirts. I study the beach, the buckets, a metal spade with a wooden handle, the tipper trucks, a plastic ball. This is my last unrivaled summer, in photographs.
A year later we’re on some other English beach, held back by a new baby with nine years to live. The coastline of England is where he started and where he will end, with Nicky forever little and never one of the big boys. The distinction is important, as it is in Lord of the Flies, where on the deserted island the boys first sort themselves out: biguns at one end and littluns at the other. Boys like to know their place; they feel safer that way.
At Tregardock Beach in 1978, Tim, my reliable big-boy companion, is chasing through the shallows with Guy Hake. Hake is captain of the school cricket team, of course he is, but what about me? If Tim is horsing around with Guy, then I have to play with Nicky, a littlun, but I know a hidden cove where the waves are fantastically huge. Come on, let me show you how brave the big boys can be.
We all remember Nicholas at the Barbecue as a bright handsome boy with a lovely sense of humor.
He was close to perfect—he didn’t even tell tales, because if Mum had known about the punch, I’d have been memorably punished, and I don’t remember any punishment.
Everything Nicky did he did well, be it sport, work, his music, or just kindness and good manners.
He’d been kind enough to say nothing, and now I was in his debt. He could betray my vicious jealousy at any time. He knew, and he knew I knew. Our relationship was changing.
Nicholas reads exceptionally well for his age, and has made a good beginning with all composition work.
That’s my thing. I’d read Lord of the Flies, but I’ve never read Treasure Island. He was ahead of me in his reading. He has become more sure of himself in his creative writing. Reading and writing, he simply will not leave me be. He had a Snoopy pendant, and Snoopy on the roof of his kennel is a writer: It was a dark and stormy night. He reads widely and has the necessary imagination—he pretends he’s an engineer. He’s curious and tenacious. He’s already judging his family on sheets of Basildon Bond. Not a banker, then, and not a murderer—Mum missed another possible option. Nicky was shaping up as a writer.
As if there aren’t enough of us. I was two years and two months Nicky’s senior, a gap that every year became less significant, especially when at school he was specifically commended for competing with older and bigger boys. Nicky didn’t like to lose. Neither do I. I have my own school reports, with assessments of Emotional Development and more. He is never inactive, potentially a positive quality, though less so for a nasty piece of work who is calculating and underhand (Winter Term 1983). I am that kind of boy, or soon will be.
“Nicky’s in the sea,” I said. “I tried to save him.” I have sprinted from the smaller beach, I have smashed the ridiculous sunglasses, I have not looked back.
Calculating, underhand, I did not say: “I encouraged Nicky to run into the water. I was older and it was my idea. I left him out of his depth and drowning and I didn’t try to save him, not really. I was busy saving myself.”
On 18th August 1978 I didn’t tell anyone in the family I’d been in the sea beside him. I wouldn’t tell anyone for years, until I started this book, not even my mum. I entered a locked state of denial: I blacked out my reasons for abandoning him, along with scrutiny of where that idea might have come from.
Consider Port Isaac, of all the fishing ports on the UK coastline. At the age of eleven I was familiar with the biblical story of Isaac and his sons Jacob and Esau—I’d arrived in Cornwall direct from a Christian holiday camp. In any case, this particular story was a private-school favorite, ideal filler for twice-a-day chapel, because in Jacob smoothness and brains prevail over Esau’s hairy honesty. Jacob is one of us.
More relevantly to me, he stole his brother’s birthright, and secured the full inheritance. Brothers are unkind to brothers. One wins, the other loses.
In Port Isaac, Nicky had it coming. My earliest memory is of my face pressed to a window watching Tim leave for school, and Tim started kindergarten just as Nicky was born. We never needed him. The big boys, once upon a time, were just the boys.
He must learn to be able to accept defeat.
I was keen to help Nicky with that particular learning curve.
He always puts maximum effort into the game.
So let’s see how hard he can try.
I close in on myself, and a sharp thrill bolts through me. I am a killer. This would explain why I ration my feelings, because in the past those feelings were spiteful and the cause of mayhem. When I indulge my emotions, someone ends u
p dead.
The boy is dead, the grandparents are dead, the dad is dead. Memories fade.
When I last saw Guy Hake he was a thirteen-year-old superstar. His exploits in the summer term of 1978 shine across the school magazine, where he opens the bowling and has figures of six for nine in a high-season drubbing of St. Hugh’s, all out for fifteen.
In Cornwall on 18th August that year Guy Hake was at Tregardock, and he later lived through whatever happened in the house. As a friend from outside the family, it’s possible he didn’t go into shock or close the memory down. I trace him through my mum, who knows his mum—they occasionally meet at funerals. I invite Guy round to my house, and over the decades he’s aged into someone still two years older than me but who now looks younger. He has a strong-jawed, square, American face, with John Denver hair and quality specs. I’m not sure what I want from him but I ask the questions anyway, as if he may have a version of this story that falsifies my own.
Guy handles his memories of that summer with care, turning them cautiously, not wanting to bruise or break them, often prefacing a recollection with a sensible disclaimer. “I have it in my head that…”
We all have it in our heads, but the details grow dim. That’s why I asked him round. Guy remembers staying in Cornwall with us “for a time,” and that he and Tim “maybe holidayed together” beforehand. I let him do the work, to gauge how far whatever is inside his head will match the facts I’ve assembled. He correctly places the beach in North Cornwall, the north coast, and what was odd, he says, when he remembers that time, is that unlike everyone else he wasn’t really processing Nicky’s death as a bereavement.
“I felt like a witness.”
Over plates of bread and ham I listen to Guy’s eyewitness account of the day. His memories stand up well against events I’ve confirmed from other sources.
“They’re like snapshots,” he says, “moving postcard memories. On the day, in the morning, I was messing about in the shallows with Tim. We’re playing safely and one of your grandparents tells us something has happened. I don’t remember exactly what was said.”
The Day That Went Missing Page 13