by Carmen Reid
The car turned from the main road and began to twist along the narrower country road towards the villa. Darkness was falling quickly and already the sky was an inky blue with just a strip of gold low down on the horizon. As they rounded a corner, the headlights Mr B had just switched on swept over a field.
Annie's attention was immediately caught by a tall, thin woman in white shorts and a bikini top running across the field. The woman seemed to be shouting and waving her arms, and even at this distance Annie could see she was very upset. A moment later Annie registered who she was looking at. She lurched forward and shrieked at Mr B, 'Stop the car! Stop! That's my sister!'
Quickly he applied the brakes and the car came to a standstill.
Annie flung open the door and hurried towards the field, calling out to Dinah. Mr B got out as well but stood by the car, trying to work out what on earth was going on.
'Dinah!' Annie called, 'Dinah, it's me! What's wrong?'
Now that Annie was in the field and her eyes had adjusted to the dim evening light, she could see that Connor was there as well. He was about 200 metres or so behind Dinah, carrying a long stick, which he was using to swish at the grass.
'We've lost the children!' Dinah screamed back at her.
'What?' Annie screamed back, unable to take in what this meant.
'Billie and Owen! We can't find them!' came Dinah's terrified reply, her hands falling helplessly to her sides.
As Annie ran towards her sister, her mind briefly registered that Dinah was the colour of an overripe strawberry before filing it away as unimportant information.
OK . . . Annie was trying to think as clearly as she could.
'Where are Lana and Ed?' she asked, but before Dinah could reply, Annie went on: 'what were Billie and Owen doing?' She still didn't feel as if she'd taken this news in. She was too buffered by surprise and pro-secco even to feel properly frightened yet.
'Lana's looking all around the garden and staying near the house, in case they come back, Ed's doing the field behind the house. Annie,' Dinah couldn't help asking hopelessly, 'where are they?'
'What were they doing? Were they playing?' Annie asked. She was almost beside Dinah now, hadn't noticed Mr B striding through the field behind her.
'Ed let them walk back. A ten-minute walk. He last saw them at four o'clock,' Dinah was shaking, her voice flying up and down, totally uncontrollable.
Annie put both arms round Dinah and held her tightly, 'We'll find them,' she said, as steadily as she could.
'Owen!' Connor boomed out into the field.
'The children are lost?' Mr B was catching on.
Then Connor called Dinah over, and both Annie and Mr B followed. There wasn't much time for formal introductions, because when they reached Connor, they could see he was holding out a small pair of pink pants.
'Annie? Are these Billie's?' he asked hopefully, as if this could be a good sign.
Dinah started to scream and wail.
'Dinah, hang on in there,' Connor told her, calmly.
'We'll find them, babes,' Annie tried to reassure her, holding her tightly across the shoulders, but a very anxious feeling was taking hold of her heart now.
'Didn't Ed say Billie needed the toilet?' Connor reminded them. 'Well, maybe that's why pants were hanging on this branch. To dry off . . .' He pointed to the tree from which he'd unhooked the knickers.
Dinah's shallow breathing seemed to calm just slightly as she hoped that this explanation could be the right one.
'Maybe Billie did a wee and then they went off to play,' Connor continued. 'I'm sure they're fine, just a bit disorientated.'
'They've been here,' Annie said and squeezed Dinah. 'We're looking in the right place. We just need to spread out and make lots of noise. I'm going to go down there. Maybe I can climb that big tree and get a view from the top.'
'I'll go this way, Connor can go over there . . . Ed's phoned the police,' Dinah told her. 'They're going to be here soon.'
Annie began to march purposefully down the side of the hill in the direction of the big tree. When she was halfway down, she stopped, took a deep, deep breath, put her hands up to her mouth and roared 'O-WEN!' at the top of her powerful voice.
She listened, straining her ears, hearing only crickets, the rumble of a car passing miles away, and the breeze stirring the grass all around her. But there, so very, very faintly she could hardly even be sure of it, was something else, a ghost of a cry . . . She began to run towards it. She thought she had heard just the slightest trace of her son shouting back, 'Muuuuuum!'
'Over here! ' Annie bellowed at the top of her voice again, this time hoping to attract Dinah, Connor and Mr B as well.
'Over here! ' she shrieked again.
Now, as best she could in her fake snake Italian heels, Annie was racing, stumbling and tripping towards the bottom of the hill.
'O-wen! ' she paused to yell at the top of her voice again, desperate to hear something back, so she could reassure herself that it really was him.
'Muuuuum!'
There it was, coming back at her, clearer than before. She wasn't imagining it! It was him.
'Thank God! Thank God! Owen . . . Owen,' she heard herself saying under her breath as she hurried on.
'Mum! Watch out! ' Owen called. His voice was close now, close enough for her to be able to see him surely, but she couldn't. She slowed down and looked carefully all around her, then up into the branches of the tree, but there was no sign of him.
'Owen? ' she shouted, frightened again. 'Where are you?'
'In a deep hole,' came his reply.
Slowly she began to walk forward in the direction of the voice.
'Have you got Billie?' Annie asked and realized she was close to tears. The thought of Owen not having Billie was just too scary to even think about.
Before Owen could reply, Annie was parting the tall, dry grass to reveal a gaping black hole in the ground. Crouching down, she leaned over and called, 'Owen?'
About nine or ten feet below she could just about make out her son sitting with his legs spread out in front of him. With a leap of fright, she saw Billie's dress and legs down at the bottom of the hole too . . . Billie's head was on Owen's lap.
'Oh God!' Annie exclaimed, 'Is Billie hurt?'
'No, she just fell asleep,' Owen called up. He sounded incredibly matter-of-fact, considering. 'But I've hurt my ankle, otherwise I'd have tried to climb out.'
Annie leaned in as close as she could to take a look at her lovely boy. They smiled at each other in happy relief.
'Hello, Mum!' Owen said warmly, 'I've been waiting for you. You're always late, but I knew you'd show up eventually.'
'Have you any idea how frightened we've all been?'
'I was pretty frightened at the thought of spending the night in here,' Owen admitted, 'especially with Billie. She screams a lot. I was glad when she fell asleep.'
'It's a shame she didn't keep screaming, we'd have found you a lot sooner.'
Owen was holding something in his hand. Casually, he bit into it.
'Are you eating?' Annie asked with amazement.
'Yeah.'
'What?'
'Some pears . . . we went pear-picking with a friend of mine. We met her on the road and she took us all around . . .'
'Owen, I don't think you should tell Auntie Dinah that . . . not just yet,' Annie advised. 'Shall we just stick with Billie needed a wee, so she went behind the tree and then you fell in this hole.'
Owen nodded in agreement.
'What is this?' Annie asked. 'Why is it here?'
'I think it's an old well,' Owen called up. 'It's a bit soggy at the bottom and the sides are made of brick.'
'Oh Owen!' was all Annie could say as she tried not to think about how unlucky the two children could have been.
Annie wished there was some way of capturing Dinah's happiness as she galloped down the hill towards them, once she'd heard Annie's shouts that she'd found the children.
'Bi
llie, Billie sweetheart!' Dinah kept saying from the top of the old well, 'are you OK?'
But Billie, who'd spent a long, hot afternoon climbing trees, walking through fields and then playing an interminable game of paper, scissors, stone down in the well with Owen, could not be woken.
It was Connor and Mr B whose minds quickly turned to the practicalities of getting the children out.
'So shall I go down and lift them up to you?' Connor volunteered.
'But how we get you out?' asked Mr B, who was now, sleeves rolled up, as deeply involved in this family drama as everyone else.
'No idea,' was Connor's helpful response.
'Just go down!' Dinah, who couldn't even think about relaxing until Billie was in her arms, urged Connor. 'We'll worry about you later.'
'OK . . . deep breaths, Dinah,' he added because Dinah's fright had been so severe that she was now trembling with happiness and relief.
Using the muscles he'd honed so hard in the gym, Connor lowered himself over the edge of the well and, scrambling for toe-and hand-grips, began to climb down.
'Stay out of the way!' Annie warned Owen.
But the well wall wasn't quite as simple as the plastic and rubber artificial climbing wall in the state-of-the-art fitness studio Connor attended. Just as he reached the halfway point, something didn't quite go according to plan. Maybe the wall jutted out roughly there, maybe there was a rogue loose stone or he couldn't find a toe hold. Whatever the reason, there was a loud 'Ow', followed by a thud and a cry of, 'Bloody hell, I've skinned my nose!'
Annie and Dinah found it hard to care, 'Oh dear . . . well, just bring up the children,' Annie encouraged him.
Sleeping Billie was lifted out first. Connor raised her up as high as he could, then Mr B and Dinah leaned in to get hold of her. Next came the carrier bag full of fruit, which Owen didn't want to leave behind, and finally Owen, whose ankle was clearly swollen and causing him some pain.
Mr B had to get involved in Connor's undignified scramble to the top of the well, which resulted in both of them getting very dirty.
'Don't they have well covers in Italy?' Annie asked irritably as soon as Owen was safely out. 'Don't they think holes like that should be covered up instead of just sitting there waiting for people to fall into them?'
'We were warned,' Owen, who'd had a lot of thinking time in the well, told her. 'I think the Italian for deep might be profondo.'
Owen hopped on one leg, supported by Annie and Connor, whose face was now bleeding freely. Billie stayed fast asleep in Dinah's arms and Dinah would not be persuaded to let go of her, even when it was obvious she was struggling with the weight as they walked up the hill.
Just as they approached Mr B's car, intending to cram into it for the brief ride up to the villa, they were met with the bright headlights of a shiny police car in one direction and the beam of a lone torch in the other.
'Ed! ' Annie shouted out, as the police car illuminated the figure carrying the torch. 'We're all here. We've got them.'
Somehow in the excitement of finding the children and the complication of fishing them out of the well, Annie had unforgivably forgotten to at least try and phone Ed and Lana, who'd had forty minutes longer to worry than anyone else.
Annie could see Ed's face in the car headlights. A grin was splitting across it and he began to run towards them. He shot Annie a smile, but his eyes were fixed on Owen. As he bounded up to them, he reached out, flung his arms round Owen and lifted him into the air.
'Watch his ankle,' Annie warned.
'Owen!' Ed said over Owen's giggles, 'you . . . you total . . . you idiot!' but like everyone else, he was grinning with relief.
Spotting Dinah and Billie, Ed asked, 'Is Billie OK?' Dinah nodded curtly in response, and Ed suspected he had some major apologizing ahead of him.
Meanwhile a black leather jacketed, capped and armed Italian police officer was climbing out of the police car.
'Would you talk to them?' Annie asked Mr B, who nodded and strode forward, happy to be the group translator.
'Who's that?' Ed asked, now that he was beside Annie, now that he had slung a comforting arm around her waist.
'Mr B from the handbag factory – the one I was telling you about.'
'Oh . . .' There was something of a pause before Ed said, 'Let's get back to the house, we need to tell Lana and Aunty Hilda.'
Aunty Hilda! Annie hadn't thought about her since she'd left the house that morning. She didn't think she'd even mentioned her to Mr B.
It wasn't quite the evening Annie had planned. Once the wine debris from earlier had been swept and mopped from the kitchen floor, everyone congregated round the table on the terrace for whatever could be cobbled together from Ed's afternoon shopping trip.
They were hardly the 'glamorous and gorgeous people from London' that Annie had thought would wow Mr B. They looked just like an ordinary, exhausted and slightly grubby family. And somehow Mr B had ended up in the chair next to Aunty Hilda.
'What was that?!' Annie kept overhearing Aunty Hilda ask him in her deep and penetrating voice.
'You know, she leaves the children with that man of hers all the time. He's not the father, of course, and Owen . . . well . . . a difficult child . . .'
Now Annie had to make a superhuman effort to tune out the old battleaxe.
The two policemen stayed for coffee because they had to file a report anyway. Mr B drank coffee too and ate a plateful of the food on offer. He ignored his mobile, which burst into life every so often. That had to be his irate date, Annie suspected.
Lana, sitting opposite Annie, had looked touchingly pleased when Owen finally made it back to the villa that evening.
'Did I even have you worried?' Owen had wanted to know.
'Just this much,' Lana had told him, holding her thumb and finger just a tiny bit apart, but her smile had been genuine.
'How's Andrei?' Annie leaned in to ask her daughter. 'Have you had a chance to speak to him with all this going on?'
'No . . . I've not got through to him yet, I'll try again later.' A flicker of concern passed across her face.
'Don't worry,' Annie reassured her, 'he's probably trying to keep busy so he doesn't miss you too much.'
Connor would possibly have liked to make some punchy response to this, but he was too preoccupied with the policemen and their leather jackets and truncheons. Not to mentions handcuffs.
Undeterred by everything that had happened to him this afternoon, Owen stuffed bread and tomato into his mouth. His ankle, carefully bandaged by Ed, who'd promised to call a doctor if it looked worse tomorrow, was up on a chair and whenever his mouth was empty, he launched into a new and increasingly lurid description of his time in the well.
There had now been a 'medium-sized' snake down there at the bottom of the well, along with a 'pure white' scorpion and a 'vicious-looking' one-eyed lizard.