The Lost Child

by Caryl Phillips

  * * *

  On the first Saturday morning of each month, Julius travelled by tube and then bus to an unsightly part of South London. Moving to the city had made this ghastly journey far easier in practical terms, but for some time now the ordeal of fulfilling his parental obligation to the child from his first marriage had been taxing his dwindling reserves of goodwill and optimism. The eight-year-old girl had been born shortly after he’d arrived in England and made her first appearance during a blizzard-ravaged winter that people seemed keen to continually inform him was “unusual.” The girl was slow, and he feared she might have been affected by English weather, but whenever he raised these concerns with the girl’s mother, she looked angrily at him, which served only to stoke his resentment towards the woman. Until the girl was three, he commuted to university from their South London council flat, but when he finally packed his bags and resolved to leave London and scout for his own place in Oxford, a part of him wanted to miss his daughter. Five years later, however, he still feels uneasy that he has never, not once, been touched by any sense of guilt or loss.

  The child is always neatly presented, as though ready for church, but some kind of skin condition causes her to constantly twitch and scratch, and her glum disposition merely confirms his suspicion that she is in perpetual discomfort. What worries him most, though, is that when she deigns to smile, she does so with an openness that he feels sure some man will exploit before she is too far into her teenage years. For the first hour of each visit the girl’s mother retreats to her bedroom and closes in the door behind her in order to give father and daughter time together. This suits him, for somewhere beneath her swollen face and bloated waistline he can still detect the woman he married, and he has no desire to look at her. Back home he rescued this woman from a life working as a shop assistant in a haberdashery on Liverpool Row that was run by the Lebanese Sahaley brothers. He offered her the choice of forty more years serving customers, with the fresh sea breeze cooling her through the open jalousies, or marriage and a trip to England and a new and exciting beginning. She had waited dutifully for him during the three long years he had dedicated himself to his coursework and earned a Bachelor of Arts at the University College on the larger island to the north, and when he returned, it was to claim the island scholarship and sweep her off her feet and onto a ship bound for England. But she had country values, and whereas most women would have considered the possibility of a life in England to be a lavish reward for simply waiting faithfully for a fiancé, he soon discovered that their arrival in England served only to stimulate the woman’s materialistic cravings, about which he had hitherto been ignorant. After he had rejected her and found a basement flat in Oxford where he felt he could live and work for the four remaining years of his scholarship, she hired a lawyer and began to harass him. Mercifully, and with help and advice from the University Overseas Office, he was able to quickly secure a divorce and put this marriage behind him. He speculated that perhaps some years hence, when she had finally grown up a little, she might well make some man a loyal and decent spouse, but this would be in the future and would be none of his business.

  As his former wife emerged from the bedroom, he looked from mother to daughter, and again he wondered how he could have miscalculated so disastrously. The place contained not a single book, and as the woman began to speak, he was once again reminded that her conversation never ascended above the banal: their daughter’s life at school, her new job as a cleaner at a local hospital, her friend the nurse who minded the girl when she worked the night shift. He had read about such people, but it didn’t seem fair that he should be connected to them. His former wife had, as always, prepared rice and peas and chicken for him, and he watched as she carefully spooned out his food onto a plate, and then she and the girl sat and stared as he ate, and he knew that this charade would end only when he handed over the slim brown envelope of money that they were expecting. Until then he forced himself to appear amicable, all the while stealing glances at the girl, who, when she opened her mouth, exposed teeth that had already been attacked by sugar.

  Sometime later he sat on the tube and stared at his reflection in the smudged mirror that was the glass, and he knew it was essential that he empty his mind of the events of the day. He had made a mistake and he was paying for it and that was all there was to it. Once he got off the tube, instead of going straight home, he made his way into a noisy pub next to the underground station and stood by the bar and began to order drinks. Once the landlord called time, and the pub began to let out, he wandered into a small park and sat alone on a damp bench with a slat missing. Monica needed help, he knew this, and in fact he had begun to worry about her before they had even moved to the south coast. It was not just the blank stare that perturbed him, for the truth was she had always displayed a tendency to lapse into these trances; what alarmed him the most was her ability to withdraw completely from him yet continue to function as though nothing were happening. It was clear that at such moments she wasn’t listening to him, and when she finally came back to herself, she seemed to have no understanding that she might have been behaving oddly. He knew that Monica couldn’t be happy, but how was he supposed to know what to do about it if she wasn’t prepared to talk to him? He sighed. Really, when all was said and done, this wasn’t the ideal moment for him to be dealing with this. Not now.

  By the time he was ready to stumble home he had no clue how late it was and no idea how his life could have taken such a depressing turn. He quietly pushed the key into the door of the bed-sitting-room, hoping that Monica would now be asleep. He eased the whining door shut until he heard the reassuring click of the Yale lock, and then he stepped on the back of first one shoe and then the other and silently slipped out of his jacket and trousers, leaving them pooled on the floor. He watched as his increasingly mutinous wife extended a thin arm out over the side of the bed. He stood half undressed in the doorway and continued to look across the bed-sitting-room at Monica, who stirred and then, with her exposed arm, lifted the blankets over herself and turned away from him and onto her side.

  * * *

  When Monica understood that she was pregnant, she began to visit the local library and borrow poetry books and novels; apart from trips out to the shops, or to the odd matinee at the local cinema, these were about the only times she ever left the room. She spent long mornings and afternoons folded up on the settee, reading as she had done throughout her first perplexing year at university, when she had found everything vexing to cope with, be it making friends or simply handling the heavy silver knives and forks in the college dining hall. Now that she was expecting, however, she realized that reading aside, she seemed to be investing countless hours trying to anticipate the sensations that she suspected would soon be overpowering her. She had been alarmed by a few early-morning episodes of vomiting and nausea, and she continued to suffer from an ongoing inability to find a truly comfortable position in which to sleep at night, but beyond these inconveniences she soon came to the conclusion that, far from confounding her, the experience of being pregnant was fairly boring. As she began to show, Londoners nodded and made eye contact when they passed her in the street, and passengers on the bus actually stood up and offered her their seats. All of a sudden she was visible, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about this. With the onset of winter the weather turned bitter, but it annoyed her that she could still feel herself blooming, a peculiar northern flower in an ominously arid southern landscape.

  “You know,” she said, looking up from the settee, “unlike other mammals, our babies spend far too little time in the womb. They come out helpless and unable to run from predators, and that’s just not right.”

  Julius set down the cup of coffee that he was cradling in both hands.

  “Really, I don’t know what you are reading, but these days your mind is full of all sorts of craziness.”

  “I’m feeling fine, Julius.” She patted her stomach somewhat forcefully. “And I wouldn’t say no to an ext
ra three or four months of this if it meant the kid might stand a chance of coming out walking.”

  They called their son Ben, a name that she convinced Julius suggested some substance. He quickly agreed, but they both knew that he did so in order to avoid causing a scene of any kind. As far as Monica was concerned, their one room was now impossibly small, and a basket of unwashed laundry seemed to be permanently calling out to her from its hiding place underneath the table. And then there were the exquisitely fusty smells that, to her husband’s bemusement, spurred Monica to start walking around the room with a white handkerchief tied over her mouth and nose. However, when spring finally arrived, she was able to crack the window and release the accumulation of sour mustiness into the street, where the clattering noises from the café, like the bells of a village church, heralded the start and close of each day. Eventually her husband learned to touch her again, at first tentatively, and then with more confidence as he tried to reintroduce an intimate routine to their lives, but Monica was forced to acknowledge that, at some point during the late winter or early spring, they both appeared to have abandoned the ability, or desire, to converse with each other on any topic beyond the minutiae of daily coexistence, which, these days, generally related to the needs of their son.

  Monica soon ran out of books that she wished to take out of the local library. She had methodically worked her way through the small poetry section, and she had also read most of the contemporary novels that she thought might interest her, but having moved on to short stories, which was a form she particularly loved, she had to admit that none of the collections aroused any elation in her, and more often than not, the volumes were returned unread. Monica knew what the problem was—discussion, somebody to talk with about the books—and once she had accepted that such exchanges were unlikely to occur she fell into the habit of going out into the world without her borrowing card. Sitting by the Serpentine watching the ducks seemed to amuse her young son, until she realized that it mattered little to the child whether he was looking at a duck or a double-decker bus, for all he saw was movement. She had discovered the free museums and tourist attractions of central London, but the hardship of navigating such a vast city with a child, and with precious little money, did nothing to increase her affection for the capital, whose thunderous indifference to her, now that she no longer looked like an expectant mother, was matched only by her progressively detached husband, who, with each passing month, seemed to be investing greater amounts of time attending to his efforts on behalf of Dr. Lloyd Samuels.

  One afternoon, while sitting on a crowded Metropolitan Line train with her sleeping son in her arms, she abruptly opened her eyes and was shocked to discover that she had missed her stop. She quickly gathered her belongings, but when she tried to stand up in order to get off at the next station, she felt as though two hands were pushing down on her shoulders and pinning her and the child to the seat. She closed her eyes and counted slowly to five, then opened them, and as soon as she heard the unoiled grating of the doors, she shoved her way off the train and up the escalator and out into the daylight. The sun was blazing hot, but the thought of reentering the underground or getting on a bus made her head spin. She threaded her slow way through the seemingly endless maze of pedestrians, but the torment of drumming in her head receded only when she came to a junction and could momentarily feel space around her. The child began to cry with an initial whimper that soon grew into a wail, and by the time she turned into her street Ben’s arms and legs were thrashing, which suggested he was in the throes of a fully fledged panic attack. Her eyes began to brim with frustration, and although she could clearly see the scruffy house that held the room in which they lived, with every step she took the building seemed to be receding farther.

  The sweet-smelling man guided her gently into one of the café’s metal chairs and placed a glass of water before her. She relinquished the squirmy child without protest and watched as her son looked into the foreigner’s face and stopped kicking.

  “I think it is too hot to be carrying a child.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She tried to guess the man’s accent, but she immediately gave up. No doubt he hailed from some exotic location, but having never travelled abroad she couldn’t pretend to know more than this. He was staring directly at her with an overly kind smile that she knew was meant to reassure her that there was no need to say anything further. She imagined that perhaps the man already understood that she was pregnant again. If so, maybe he wanted her to come and live with him in his country, and if he did, why didn’t he just ask her?

  Monica was lying full length on the settee, and letting the hot air and noises of London wash over her through the open window, when Julius ambled through the door. He had long ago given up insisting that she listen to his boring talks about the future of his nonsensical stupid country, but as he sat down, she found herself once again dismayed by the gaudy African shirt and leather sandals he had taken to wearing. Why on earth had he not sought her advice before adopting this costume? His once trim and neat hair was now wide and ludicrous, and when it first began to assume this unshapely form, he had quizzed her as to whether she thought it suited him. Not really believing that he could be asking this of her, she simply laughed and then asked him why he had started to wear sunglasses when there was no sun in the sky? In fact, why did he sometimes wear them inside of the house?

  As Julius slipped his feet out of his sandals, she understood that her husband didn’t actually care what she thought of his hair, or his attire, or anything, for it was all part of a larger transformation that was taking place that neither required nor depended on her approval. Julius appeared to be casting aside his studious aspect and making some clownish attempt to entertain worldliness. Last week she had found some rumpled notepaper in the wastepaper basket and could see he had been trying out a new name. The evidence pointed to two preferred options: Dr. J. Livingstone T. Wilson or Dr. Julius L. Terrance Wilson. Of course, she didn’t know either man. She watched him bend over and begin to ransack the canvas bag that he had deposited on the floor. He finally discovered what he was searching for and plucked an LP out of the bag, which he then nudged unceremoniously out of his path with the outside of one foot. He took two short steps to the record player and, as he slipped the disc out of its inner sleeve, handed her the LP cover and urged her to read the notes on the back. His laughter seemed to bubble up from deep inside, and it was punctuated with his constant repetition of “Oh, man, you’ve got to hear this.” Jazz was a new passion of Julius’s, although he had balked when she called it a passion.

  “Monica, jazz is the only category of music that you can really study. It has a theoretical intent.”

  She had looked at him but didn’t want to argue. Perhaps he had forgotten, but once upon a time she had been regarded as musically proficient. However, as her father’s pride in her achievements increased, her interest in playing the piano had fallen away to the point where it had now been many years since she had perched herself on a piano stool.

  “Anyhow, just because you can theorize about the music doesn’t mean that you can’t also be passionate about it.”

  “And miss seventy-five per cent of what’s going on?”

  Julius had looked at her with palpable contempt, and Monica couldn’t help herself as she began to laugh. These days the ponderous weight of self-regard seemed to infuse Julius’s whole body; it affected how he stood, how he walked, and how he held himself when he was getting ready to make an announcement.

  He took the LP cover from Monica without giving her a chance to read the notes, and then he closed his eyes as the shrill saxophone opening began to blare out. “Oh, man.” Monica stood up and went to the fridge for a bottle of beer, which she handed to him, hoping he might understand that small gestures like this were about all she had left to offer in the way of a deposit on some kind of continued future together. But it was beginning to feel futile. As he took the beer, she picked his bag up off the floor a
nd stared at her ridiculous husband. She had been waiting a long time for them to perhaps turn a corner in their relationship, but she now realized that they both were navigating a long, hopelessly unforgiving bend, and she was tired.

  “I bought this LP at a new secondhand place on Baker Street.”

  “Can I have some too?”

  He looked puzzled, and so she pointed at the bottle of beer, which he then handed to her.

  “Well, do you like it?” he asked. “Are you digging it?”

  “Julius, please give Ben a kiss.”

  “Jesus, you act as if I’ve forgotten my own son.” He looked at her as though she disgusted him. “Just let me finish listening to the music, okay?”

  “And could you please turn it down? You’ll wake him up.”

  * * *

  One early winter’s afternoon they both returned in silence from their unscheduled visit to the doctor’s surgery. The man confirmed that despite Monica’s slipping on a patch of black ice outside the tube station, everything seemed to be alright with the baby that she was carrying, and he dismissed them without making any further comment. While Monica implored Ben to take an afternoon nap in the cot to the side of their bed, Julius poured a tumbler of whisky and slumped onto the settee in a manner that let her know he would not be going out and speaking at a meeting tonight. Ben appeared to be settled now, so she edged her way to the sink and started to fill the kettle with water while making as little noise as possible. Having turned on the stove, she looked down at Julius.

  “Don’t you sometimes think a television set would be nice?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Of course, a friend would be a better alternative to a television set, and a part-time job would be a godsend, but she knew that with this erratic man she should tread carefully around the word “lonely.” She would find some other time to raise the idea of her perhaps going back to university, for clearly this was not going to be an easy conversation.