Little Black Lies

by Sharon Bolton

  During my last session, I told her about the Coleridge poem, the one I’d never much liked, but had learned because I’d thought that Catrin, coming from a long line of mariners, would appreciate. As Sapphire’s eyes glazed over, I told her the story of the long, perilous voyage south, about the albatross, something akin to a pet or surrogate child to the sailors, being shot dead by the titular Mariner.

  The Mariner’s remorse haunts him for the remainder of the story, and, either literally or metaphorically (I was never quite sure), he carries the dead bird, an outward symbol of his spiritual burden, around his neck.

  I feel like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, I told Sapphire. I did a stupid, thoughtless thing and now its consequences are impacting upon everyone around me. I feel as though I’ve cursed everyone I care about. I feel as though the people of these islands have hung the albatross around my neck, I told her. I feel as though everywhere I go, I carry the stench of a rotting creature with me, that everyone who looks at me sees the blood that still drips. Will always drip. What I didn’t tell her was that it is only towards the end of the poem, when the Mariner finally learns to pray, that the albatross falls away.

  It’s going to take a lot more than a couple of minutes in church to cut the rotting carcass from around my neck.

  Sapphire, on the grey gelding that matches her hair and clothes, and I on my mahogany-coated devil, make our way over to the small group to find a man holding up a piece of red fabric. We have already been told that Archie was wearing red.

  ‘May I see it?’ I press Bee forward. Sapphire keeps up with me and we approach together.

  He gives it up reluctantly. Red check. A large print. A piece of brushed cotton about ten inches by eight, ripped from the bottom of a shirt, with the washing instructions still attached.

  ‘No.’ Sapphire shakes her head. ‘I know this label. It’s a clothing range sold in Stanley. Nothing to do with the little boy.’

  People look at me for confirmation. We are the only two women and must naturally be experts on all matters of clothing.

  ‘I recognize the label too. I think this belonged to someone who lives here. And the pattern looks quite faded. I’ll keep it though, in case.’

  I tuck the fabric into my saddlebag before Dad can get hold of it, because I can see his fingers itching. He suggests we re-form the line and we move on.

  ‘We need to find him soon.’ I glance round to see Sapphire is keeping up with me. ‘Even if he’s dead – and I pray to God he’s not – but one way or another we need to find him. Nothing stirs up panic in a community like missing children.’

  I think, but don’t say, that few communities are fond of dead ones.

  ‘It’s our worst, most primeval fear.’ I can hear her breathing. She’s working hard to keep up with my bigger, fitter horse. ‘The possibility that someone could be taking our children. Your father wrote an excellent piece about it about a year ago. Did you see it?’

  Not only had I seen the piece in question – a consideration of how communities react to missing children by incorporating their tales into folklore – I’d written it. Dad had argued, probably correctly, that no one wanted to read a piece by me about mishaps to children and so he’d put it in the paper under his own byline. I think in the time since, he’s actually convinced himself he wrote it in the first place.

  ‘The little boy was playing,’ I say. ‘I’m sure he just got lost.’

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right. But fear changes a community.’

  ‘Watch Bee.’ I pull ahead. ‘He kicks. He’s a nasty piece of work.’

  ‘Look who’s talking,’ snorts my horse.

  * * *

  We see no sign of the child that afternoon, even though we stay out until the sun sinks below the mountains and the sky around us turns violet. As we near the farm, I edge closer to Tom Barrell, the farmer’s youngest son, who is riding on my left. He is talking to Sapphire, who is on his other side.

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve seen your dad around,’ she is saying to him.

  ‘He went out early this afternoon. He doesn’t even know.’

  ‘Do you think the little boy fell in the river?’

  Tom’s face creases, he has a young child himself. Of course, nobody wants to think that the child may have drowned, but given how close we are to water, it has to be a possibility. In spring, after the winter rains and snow, the rivers can be deep and fast.

  ‘Starting to look that way,’ he says. ‘Tide will probably wash him up overnight or tomorrow.’

  I close my eyes, take deep breaths. Ned and Kit didn’t drown, their post-mortems made that perfectly clear, but so many times I’ve taken that sickening plunge with them. Every bad dream, every waking nightmare is the same. So, I know what it’s like to feel water all around me, to see nothing but water, feel it hitting my face, forcing its way into my throat. I know what it’s like to be lost, in a world of water, not knowing whether I will ever get out. Ned and Kit didn’t suffer that, but I do, on a daily basis.

  Water, water, everywhere.

  No one should have to die in water, especially not a three-year-old child.

  We’re back. Bee sees his hay net and starts capering. He skitters over towards it, nearly sending Constable Skye flying.

  ‘Tom, I wanted to ask you something,’ she calls up to him. Bee reaches the hay and starts eating before I’ve even jumped down.

  ‘One of Archie’s brothers says he saw another silver Land Rover parked down the road earlier.’ Skye is jumping about like a nervous colt, scared of being stood on by one of the horses. ‘Did any of you over at the farm notice anything?’

  Tom thinks and shakes his head. ‘We can’t see that spot too well from the house, to be honest. But we do get a lot of people parking there in the summer. Sometimes a dozen cars a week. It’s possible.’

  ‘And this second Land Rover wasn’t part of the group?’ My father has crept up. He invariably has to be at the centre of things.

  ‘Archie’s family and friends came in two hire cars,’ Skye explains. ‘The Land Rover and a red Ford Mondeo. There was another group here when they arrived, in a blue Vauxhall estate, and those people are still here, helping with the search. So, three cars. Now we have the possibility of a fourth.’

  Every second vehicle here is a grey or silver Land Rover, I think. The child could be confused.

  ‘We really need to talk to your dad,’ Skye tells Tom. ‘He could have seen the unaccounted-for vehicle. He could even have seen the child. What time did he go, did you say?’

  Leaving them to it, I lead Bee into the trailer, fasten his head collar and step back out to collect his tack. At the bottom of the ramp, I turn and almost bump into a man I know. Medium height, slim build, dark eyes that blink frequently and heavily. Sallow skin. His once dark hair is now sprinkled with silver.

  Ben Quinn. Whose sons died at my hands. While we’ve been out searching, an ambulance has arrived and I guess he came with the medical team.

  ‘Oh. Hello.’ He seems as surprised as I am. He can’t have recognized my trailer.

  There is a moment when neither of us knows what to do. So we simply stare at each other. I must be the last person he wants to be anywhere near, and yet the rules of civilized society demand that, at the very least, he offer a token social pleasantry.

  ‘You OK?’ he asks, blinking hard, as though trying to break whatever spell is keeping him within reach of the woman he has probably fantasized about choking to death.

  ‘Good. You?’

  What next? Ask him about his family? His seven-month-old baby? I don’t get a chance to do anything so stupid, thank God, because he turns away first, half stumbling over a clod of earth. Forgetting the tack, I head back into the trailer. I go in as far as I can and lean, trembling, against my horse’s solid front quarter.

  Bee shifts, uncomfortably. ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Shush, give me a minute.’ I let my head fall. Bee’s coat is warm and damp with sweat. I can feel his heart b
eating.

  ‘You are pathetic, you know that?’ He tosses his head.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  Dust makes me want to sneeze, but still I don’t move. I stay cuddling my horse, telling myself I need a minute, just a minute, and all the time knowing that a thousand minutes, a million, would never be enough.

  * * *

  Being in the same school year, Catrin and I went to England together, although not to the same university. She was studying marine biology at Plymouth, I’d chosen English and drama at Bristol.

  I don’t think I’ll ever forget the excitement of that first trip. There were five of us heading to academia on the RAF TriStar, including Ben, in his third year at medical school. The older ones slept but Catrin and I stayed awake all night, watching the light fade and reappear unnaturally quickly as we crossed time zones.

  We told each other this was simply a new phase in our friendship. We planned to buy travel mats and sleeping bags so that we could sleep on each other’s floor at weekends. Catrin’s new friends (she’d be selective and particular, she had high standards when it came to the people she allowed into her life) would be my new friends too, and mine (I was planning to spread my net as widely as possible, dip my toe into every river, lake and puddle – because how else will I know who I really like, Catrin?) would be hers. In the last months before we left, I seem to remember talking endlessly about the nature of true friendship, of the synergy of two souls growing closer as each individual part gets stronger. Catrin checked railway timetables and worked out how much of our annual grants needed to be set aside for train fares.

  ‘I’d love to see Scotland,’ I said, as the plane took off again from its refuelling stop at Ascension Island. I’d been reading Sir Walter Scott and having Rob Roy fantasies about tumble-down castles, tartan-clad warriors and heather-strewn mountains.

  ‘The drama society at Bristol usually takes a couple of shows to the Edinburgh Festival,’ I tried again, when she didn’t respond.

  ‘Isn’t the festival in summer?’

  As first years we were expected to fly home for the long summer vacation.

  She twisted round in her seat. ‘Ben, when’s the Edinburgh Festival?’

  He was sitting three rows back, with Josh Savidge, who was in his final year studying law at Bath. Ben invariably looked as though he’d just woken up in those days. Maybe it was his heavily lidded eyes, or his habit of blinking rather quickly and forcefully. Maybe he didn’t sleep enough.

  ‘August.’ He flicked hair from his eyes. The silver that was to claim it hadn’t yet staked its hold. It was still black as a Spaniard’s. ‘Why? You thinking of coming up?’

  ‘Rachel is.’

  ‘Come for Hogmanay. It’s mental. We usually have floor space.’

  We did go for Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year. Our sleeper train arrived at six thirty on a Tuesday morning and Ben was at the station to meet us. There then followed five days in a city that seemed to be carved from black ice. We were dazzled by Edinburgh, as imposing and as permanent as the mountains around it. Coming from settlements where, if you want your house to stand the test of time, you give it a stronger tin roof, we were in awe of the castle and its surrounding mansions, towers and churches, of the wide colonnades and sweeping steps, the cobbled roads and subterranean bars, of skies that were so like home, above a city that could not have been more different to anything we’d known in the past.

  The New Year cold sucked the air from our lungs and tore the skin from our fingertips, but the amber liquor we drank burned all the way to our toes. For five days, we barely stopped to rest. I don’t think we spent an hour sober. We didn’t both sleep on the floor, though, not after the first night. That was the trip when Ben and Catrin got together.

  Leaving my snorting, stamping horse I creep to the rear of the trailer and look out. Ben is over by the ambulance, talking to the paramedic who drove it here.

  The people we love fall into two distinct camps, it seems to me. First, those whom we are obliged to care for, connected to us through ties of blood and, occasionally, other people’s marriages. Then there are those few souls who suit us so perfectly that we cannot help but love them. Those whose very presence seems to lift our spirits, soothe our ruffled feathers, tilt the disturbed world so that its axis is true again.

  In all my life, there have been only two people I’ve loved in that way. Two people whom I simply couldn’t help but love. My best friend and soulmate, Catrin, of course.

  And the man she married.

  28

  The five days in Edinburgh became five nights of physical and emotional torture. Alone in my sleeping bag on a greasy living-room carpet, I dreamed of Ben’s hands on me, of the warmth when our skin touched, of the soft tracing of his fingers, just as Catrin was experiencing those things for real only a few yards away. I told myself it wouldn’t last, that one day he’d be free again and next time he’d choose more wisely, but it did last. It lasted all the way through the three years of university, and by the final term she was wearing his diamond.

  When she went home to work for the Conservation and plan her wedding, I simply couldn’t follow. I didn’t go back until the big event, over a year later, when I cried the whole day. Luckily, everyone assumed it was sentiment. I’ve always cried easily. After that, I decided I might as well stay. It wasn’t as though things could get any worse.

  Besides, there was a new young man on the islands, a Dutchman called Sander who’d come over to work in the Secretariat. He obviously had a thing for girls with damp blue eyes because he barely left my side the day of the wedding. I’ve wondered, occasionally, if he knew that those were real tears and that, beneath the pale gold satin, my heart was shredded. If he did, he’s never once let on.

  Thinking of Sander has calmed me somewhat. It usually does. I don’t love him – I’m not sure I ever did – but I’m a better, stronger person when he’s around.

  I gather up the rest of the tack, listen to a half-formed plan to meet in the morning – if we have to – and then we all head back towards Stanley. Desperate not to see Ben again, I’m the last to leave apart from the police cars and the family’s vehicles.

  A few yards before the road crosses the stone run I spot an old green Range Rover coming in the other direction. It pulls over to let me pass. I raise my hand in thanks and George Barrell, back from his errand, raises his in return.

  By this time, I seem to be alone on the road and realize it’s getting quite close to Peter’s bedtime.

  Something has been digging into my bum and I remember I still have the anonymous note in my pocket. A note that I know I should report to someone, if only to Sander. And yet, I cannot tell anyone about it without admitting that, for large chunks of the day, I do leave my youngest son alone. He goes for a nap, and I head for my rock above the beach, or take one of the pills my GP prescribes for when I’m having a rough time sleeping. Often, he wakes before I do, or before I get back from the beach, but he can’t climb out of his cot. He’s perfectly safe.

  I’m nearing the point where the road out of Stanley forks, the left arm heading towards Darwin, Goose Green and the airport, and the right (the one I’m driving back along now) towards Estancia. Another vehicle is heading for me from the west, travelling faster than I am, as though determined to reach the fork first. I brake, let the pale-coloured Land Rover get ahead, but not before I catch the final three registration letters, SNR, which makes me think of the stone run.

  * * *

  Halloween is in full swing as I drive through Stanley. I pass groups of tiny witches, miniature devils and half-pint skeletons, all carefully supervised by attending parents. Older, bigger children are out too, their masks altogether darker, more threatening. A zombie lurches across the road in front of my car, forcing me to stall.

  Before I can restart the engine, I see that some of the adults are getting into the spirit as well. Mel, the chef from the Globe, struts down the street in the costume of a pantomime dame. He sees me
and stops, one hand on his purple-silk-clad hip, the other pushing a Carmen Miranda hat more firmly on to his head. ‘How do I look, darling?’

  Mel is one of the few people on the islands who is genuinely nice to me. So I look him up and down and try to smile. ‘There is nothing like a dame,’ I tell him.

  He pretends to rearrange his crotch. ‘And I’m nothing like a dame.’ He winks before tottering off along the street.

  I find the boys at home, up and playing with their grandmother, even though it’s long past the youngest’s bedtime. She’s found some old cardboard boxes and built a series of tunnels and caves in the living room. There is no sign of any of them as I walk quietly in through the back door, but I can see boxes shaking and hear the scuffling sounds of small people scurrying along inside.

  ‘Mwa, ha, ha, ha!’ Grandma sounds even more like a goblin than usual. She emerges from one end of the cardboard city and looks abashed when she sees me in the doorway. Crawling out, she gets awkwardly to her feet.

  ‘Is your father with you?’ She brushes the cardboard dust off her clothes.

  ‘I think he went straight to the newsroom. They’re planning to stay on air for longer tonight.’ All scuffling has stopped. Chris appears to grin at me, then Michael. Finally the little one stands up. He ignores me. ‘Ganny chase us!’

  All three boys are in their pyjamas. I can smell shampoo and biscuits.

  ‘Any luck?’ my mother mouths at me. I shake my head.

  ‘Did you find him?’ Chris misses nothing. Michael comes over and wraps his arms around my waist. He has always been a very cuddly child. Peter sees my arms around his older brother and, predictably, gets jealous. He runs over, holding up both hands to be lifted. He’s looking at Michael, not me, but I pick him up.

  ‘How about some hot chocolate?’ Grandma suggests.

  In the kitchen, dishes are washed and away in cupboards. The table is clear of clutter. The worktops shine. I try to see it as it was meant, as a kindness, but the very sparkle on the taps seems to be telling me I’m a failure.