by Jane Shemilt
‘She went in that way,’ he says. ‘I saw her unlock it with a key from her bag, but she was carrying something so maybe she forgot to lock it up again.’ He smiles. ‘It might be worth taking a look.’
‘A look? Are you mad, Bogosi? Even if the gate is unlocked, there could be people in the garden or dogs. I’ll be seen straight away.’
‘The front door is further round,’ he continues, as though I haven’t spoken. ‘I’ll go and knock, then whoever comes, I’ll keep them talking while you check out the garden.’ He is playing a part culled from a film: I’m to case the joint while he provides the distraction.
‘What will you talk about that could possibly be convincing?’
‘My new door-to-door taxi service.’ He waves a hand nonchalantly. ‘Cheap rates for special customers. I’ve done doorstep advertising before. People like it.’
‘In Gaborone, perhaps, not in a tiny settlement in the countryside, miles from anywhere,’ I hiss. ‘We ought to phone the police. They’ll deal with it.’
‘Trust me,’ he says, with a grin, getting out of the car quickly. Before I can stop him, he’s walked towards the corner of the wall, swaggering a little. Just before he disappears he turns and points exaggeratedly at the gate. Quick, the gesture says, I’m buying you time.
A distant bell rings, answered by the deep bark of dogs. I was right. In an isolated place like this, people have dogs. Fifteen months ago, I thought I’d known better than to follow Kabo’s advice. Regret washes over me, receding slowly.
Voices drift towards me in the still air: Bogosi is talking to a woman; another voice joins in, lower-pitched. Bogosi doesn’t reappear. Perhaps he’s charmed his way in after all. A minute ticks by. Another. My scalp crawls with tension. The dogs went to the bell: it might be safe to chance the gate. I could take photos for the police. Slipping on my sandals again, phone in hand, I run to the gate before I can change my mind. The handle turns smoothly. Bogosi guessed right, the gate is unlocked.
Another world opens up. A striped square lawn, shockingly green after the dull browns of the bush; red flowers in a stone urn, a couple of teak sun-loungers, angled parasols. The still water of an oval pool shines in the sun but the house is forbidding: all the windows are closed and barred. There are large empty kennels at either side of the back door.
Inside the gate, and keeping close to the wall, I photograph everything I can see. The house, the windows, the lawn. A door slams somewhere inside the house. Turning to go, I catch sight of four cots with their sides up, pushed into the shade near a little path running along the side of the house. Is this, after all, simply an orphanage? If so, where are all the children? Orphanages should be noisy places full of children and toys. Unease prickles. There are only moments left.
In the first cot there is a sleeping baby of a very few months, lying on his side, the dark skin of his cheeks flawless against the white sheet. The baby in the second is awake, the brown eyes watching the pattern of light and shade above him, his open palm pink as a shell. The child in the third cot is a little girl, older than the boys. There are pink ribbons in her hair and her lashes curl against her cheeks as she sleeps, a tiny thumb in her mouth. I photograph them all. Fighting the urge to leave, I risk a glimpse into the fourth cot.
My heart jolts. The boy in this cot is white, sleeping face down. For a second I can’t breathe, but in another I see it can’t be Sam: this child is too old, too big, so tall his legs are bent, feet jammed against the end of the cot. Does this orphanage take white children, then? I take a photo but the click disturbs him: he is turning his head, rolling on to his back.
The world stops turning. Colours fade. A dull beating sets up in the pit of my stomach, rising to my chest, thumping so strongly it could knock me to the ground. My vison narrows and the only thing I see is the birthmark: it covers most of his right cheek; the edges are crenellated like the edges of a map.
Even as I’m reaching in and carefully, quickly, lifting him out, I can tell he is perfect, both exactly the same and different. I settle him against me and instantly I am complete. I press my cheek lightly against his hair, gold still but darker, thicker. The shape of his head is exactly the same. My arms are full of him. He has grown more than I would have thought possible. He’s a boy of fifteen months, not a four-month-old baby. I knew that, of course, but I hadn’t felt it. He’d stayed unchanged in my heart.
He’s heavy too. Hot and heavy with sleep. I’ve dreamt this often but he was tiny in my dreams, a pale, cold baby, lifeless in my arms, as I called for help, running up and down empty corridors. Never this beautiful child, this breathing boy, flushed with sleep, a dried line of mucus on his chin. My heart is banging strangely. I mustn’t die, not now. People don’t die of joy, of thankfulness.
I hold him closer, the soft pad of a nappy crinkling under my hand. Halfway to the gate, a door opens behind me. The girl from the bus steps out of the house. She is still wearing the red and green print dress but the dark glasses, the hat and the wig have gone. Her face is a little fatter, but her eyes are the same, the same nose, the same mouth. Dark hair neatly braided around her head. Teko. Though I tracked her down, I’m frozen with surprise.
Sam makes a sleepy protest as my arms tighten. Teko sees me and stops dead. We stare at each other, waiting. Will she scream for help? Summon the dogs? There is a whimper: one of the babies in the cot wakes. The noise widens into a cry. Teko gives an almost imperceptible nod; her left hand moves a fraction. She is telling me to leave. Now.
I take a step backwards, turn, and run the last yards of garden and through the gate, kicking off my sandals as I go.
The taxi isn’t there. My hands clench around Sam as I search the track. Has Bogosi lost his nerve and absconded?
Then red metal glints from overhanging shade further along: the car has been moved and is tucked close to the wall. Bogosi is inside, hunched over the wheel. I stumble towards him, gasping for breath. He is out and round to the side, opening the door.
‘I moved the car … Less obvious … Cooler … Sorry,’ he says breathlessly.
He pushes me inside; Sam is jogged against my shoulder and makes a small noise. Bogosi, back in the driver’s seat, turns the key in the ignition.
As the wheels spin on the rutted track, two great dogs bound from the gate, barking and springing at the car, their muzzles hitting the window; saliva dribbles down the glass in a thick bubbling trail. As the car jerks forwards they fall back, and a burly figure emerges from the front of the house: a Motswana man in a cowboy hat. He catches one of the dogs by the collar. He has something in this hand – a stick, a gun?
A woman comes to join him. Her arms flash white as she grabs the other dog in a practised movement. She is talking and looks half amused, half irritated, blonde hair tumbling around her broad face.
Recognition hits, like a smashing punch to my mouth.
Claire.
How can it be Claire? Her orphanage is in Gaborone. The impossibility clashes against the reality: the blonde hair, the thick arms, the wide face. She hasn’t noticed me, so focused on the dogs she’s scarcely looked at the car, let alone who is inside. She has no idea I’ve taken back my son.
We are moving faster all the time. Disbelief coalesces into white hot anger, scalding my face and arms. Claire is the criminal we have all been hunting. The truth flashes like fire along every nerve and into my brain. I want to stop. I need to get out, take her by the shoulders, scream my questions into her face.
Why? Why choose Sam? Why choose us? Why drag us all to the brink of hell for a year?
Even as I am leaning forward to ask Bogosi to brake, we are already round the corner and Claire has vanished from sight.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Botswana, March 2015
The car settles on the road, gathering speed.
‘You have your son,’ Bogosi announces, his voice breaking a little.
Yes, I have my son. He is saved, I am, we all are. Anger must be trodden down, every secon
d savoured. I lower Sam carefully to the seat, where I can look at him and he can sleep stretched out comfortably.
His eyelashes are longer – they sweep in a curve to his cheek, silky as a girl’s. His skin is translucent. The birthmark, I touch it with my lips, feels the same.
‘… worried for a second there …’ Bogosi is saying. ‘I thought something might have happened to you.’
Something has happened to me. Life has started again: I feel as though I’m drawing breath for the first time in a year. I cup my hand over Sam’s foot; in sleep, he pushes strongly against my palm. He could be walking now. I hadn’t thought of that.
‘The dogs got out through the gate at the back but those guys came from the front. They had no idea he’d been taken. Did you see the gun?’ There is awe in his voice. ‘They would have shot us, if they’d known.’
Sam’s fingernails have been neatly cut. I close my hand carefully round his satiny fist. The image of severed hands in the dust fades, then disappears.
He’ll be frightened when he wakes – he’ll have no idea who I am. He won’t know Adam or Alice or Zoë. Two bereavements in one short life, though he’s older now: it will be worse. We’ll have to be very careful, very patient. I lay my hand lightly on his chest, letting it move up and down with his breathing. That’s fine: we have all the time in the world.
We are passing the last houses of Tshabong when three police cars speed by us, heading in the direction we have just come from. In the mirror, Bogosi’s eyes are shining. ‘I phoned them from the garage,’ he says happily. ‘To put them on the alert. I gave them the exact address once I saw the house. I didn’t know you would find your son, but I thought they’d be interested in the woman we followed.’ He glances at his watch. ‘It’s been five minutes. Once they see your son has gone, those guys will know the game’s up. They’ll be packing their car very fast. At the speed the police are going, they’ll catch them before they reach the end of the drive.’
Five minutes. Is that all? But it doesn’t take long for lives to change. It took a moment to conceive him, another to lose him. I put my face next to his, the small rubbery ear is cool against my cheek.
Bogosi, humming, glances back. He wants to carry on talking. ‘So, that woman who opened the door, she wasn’t smiling …’
‘I know her.’
‘You do?’ His voice lifts in surprise.
‘We met by chance. She’s called Claire. We’d just arrived from England and stayed overnight at a hotel.’
But we needn’t have broken our journey at all: we could have carried right on to Kubung. Claire would have taken her group of children home again after their swim and Teko would never have come to our door.
‘She was with a group of orphans by the pool. She was friendly.’ The memory is bitter, like vomit in my mouth. ‘She seemed interested in my husband’s research.’
Though, of course, it was Sam she was after.
‘We didn’t talk long. She left before we did.’
That would have been so she could instruct Teko and begin to lay her plans. She might even have driven Teko to Kubung herself early the next day, leaving her to walk the last mile to wait for us, removing her shoes as she went, fooling us all.
The tiny hairs on Sam’s temples glint, gold dust. His mouth opens and his thumb slides out, puckered with damp. The frilled edges of new teeth gleam.
‘… didn’t say much. She asked who I was so I told her about my taxi services,’ Bogosi is continuing. ‘She was holding the dogs back. Then the man appeared, wanting to know why I picked on them. I said I was visiting all the houses in the area, but he didn’t like it. He started shouting for someone to check the back garden. He thought it was a trick. He was quite right there.’ Bogosi chuckles. ‘When he saw me looking over his shoulder, he shut the door in my face.’ He turns to grin at me. ‘I could hear him swearing inside.’
‘Claire’s South African, I think. Was he?’ They might have friends just over the border. They might still get away.
‘Hard to tell. He didn’t have an accent.’ Rummaging in his shirt pocket, he pulls out a packet of gum, bites a piece off and starts chewing. ‘His English was perfect.’
‘English?’ Surely he would have called out to Teko in Setswana: she doesn’t understand English.’
‘Even better than mine.’ He winks in the mirror.
‘Did you hear a reply?’
‘A girl called back, said she was on her way.’
‘And that was in …?’
‘English. Does it matter?’ He sounds puzzled.
Yes, it matters. It means Alice was telling the truth. Teko spoke English as Alice had told us, though we didn’t believe her. Teko, hovering at the edge of things, head inclined, must have been listening all the time.
The car is moving steadily on through the landscape. It all looks the same but everything has changed. An earthquake has broken open the familiar shapes of the past. What was hidden has been exposed.
Alice didn’t lie. If we’d listened, we could have worked it out. My mind jumps back a year: Teko, understanding English, must have known in advance about Adam’s conference, passed it to Claire and the abduction was planned accordingly.
Sam curls towards the back seat and I slip my hand between his face and the leather. Teko would have let the kidnappers in through the front door but, blocked from escaping by Adam’s return, must have shattered the glass doors, aping a break-in. It would have only taken minutes.
Alice didn’t lie.
Sam’s breath is hot on my fingers. He is sleeping as deeply as if he’s been drugged – perhaps he has been. Sedated babies are less trouble. I check his heartbeat and breathing, both normal. He’ll sleep this off. I put my lips against the soft curve of his cheek.
She wasn’t psychotic. The whispers and footsteps that frightened her must have been real: Claire’s men, closing in, leaving fingerprints on the wall. We ignored all Alice’s warnings. When she snapped, we thought she was psychotic; instead she was anxious, alone and afraid. Tears start. Will she ever forgive us? Bogosi’s face in the mirror softens but I am crying for more than he knows: joy that I have my son safely back, and joy that Alice was never psychotic, tears of shame that we thought she was.
Sam’s hair is shining in the sun; it glints in the same way as Zoë’s. His skin is immaculate. They looked after him well but what kind of return were they expecting?
‘There were other babies, Bogosi. African, younger than Sam. What should we do about them?’
He shakes his head. For a moment he looks unhappy. ‘The police are there now. They will know what to do.’ He leans forwards and turns the radio louder.
He doesn’t want to discuss it. His head bobs up and down in time to the music. The unfairness may trouble him: the white baby of rich parents got the world’s attention, but no one spoke for the other babies, or if they did, no one listened. Where was the media when their parents needed a voice? Other explanations hover, dark wings of the monsters we’ve escaped; baby trafficking, witchcraft, possibilities that Bogosi wouldn’t dare name. I cup my hand over Sam’s sleeping head. He is safe.
It’s time to tell Adam. Past time. He picks up immediately and his voice is so loud it hurts my ear.
‘Jesus Christ, Emma. Where the fuck have you been? I’m waiting in a queue in the police station to report you missing.’
‘The police know exactly where I am. They passed us not long ago.’ I start laughing and for a while I can’t seem to stop.
‘What the hell are you talking about? Have you gone fucking nuts? It’s been hours and hours of hell. I’ve been out of my mind with worry –’
‘I’ve got him, Adam. I’ve got Sam.’
Adam says nothing. I can’t even hear him breathing.
‘He’s fine. He’s beautiful. He’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.’
There is silence for so long that I think he must have decided I’ve really gone mad and is wondering what to do. Then a soft gasping sou
nd breaks into the quiet: he has started to cry. I stay on the phone because it feels like I’m holding his hand and I want him there with me when Sam opens his eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
London, January 2016
We’re building a den in the loft for the girls. I went up last week to clear it out before the builders start. I’d expected a mess but I’d forgotten the boxes, shoved in and stacked high. After my father died we emptied his study into tea chests, put them in the loft, closed the hatch and left it all for years.
I walked around them; the air was sour with dust, dead flies crunched under my feet. This was Dad’s stuff: difficult to touch, worse to throw out. I drank tea, turned on the radio then began: the papers at the top were crackling with age. Tidy piles became toppling heaps: old research documents and published papers, committee reports, academic prizes. No letters; the ones from my mother were already in a box in his desk. In the last tea chest there were hundreds of bank statements and insurance documents. Files. The receipt from the sale of his boat. At the bottom my fingers, scraping plywood and tea leaves, closed on his passport. He’d renewed it the year before he died.
He looked unfamiliar. Not sad, not smiling, just different. The light from the casement was too bright but, tilting the page in the half-shadow, I got what it was. I’d seen it before: it was the look Josiah had, the look of an old man who was content. I sat on the edge of a chest. He’d got there, then, without my help; he’d found it on his own. It occurred to me that he might have felt like that for years. When I went downstairs to put the passport in his desk my body felt fluid, as though I was floating, as though a hand had let me go.
I stuffed everything else into bags, haphazard armfuls packed in and trodden down, though, when it came to it, I kept the receipt from the boat sale. It took three trips to the dump – the bags tumbling over the edge of the containers landed with a soft crash. When I drove away, the empty car seemed to swing round the corners more quickly.