Ready or Not

by Thomas, Rachel

  Kate turned the card in her hands. The castle, the moat, the snow: it was a replica of the scene she too had been haunted by all those years.

  ‘How easy was it for you to find me?’ she asked quietly, not looking up from the card. She was too ashamed to make eye contact: embarrassed that this man had succeeded where she had failed. Had she managed to find Daniel, would she have been able to stop everything that had followed?

  This was her fault; her doing.

  Andrew seemed to sense her thoughts. ‘It was easy for me,’ he said. ‘The internet has made a whole load of things very easy. A castle…a missing boy named Daniel…he didn’t need me to find out who he was. But he needed me to find you.’

  The photograph was in Kate’s lap now. She fought back tears and continued to keep her head lowered, afraid to show weakness in front of this man who knew more about her family and her past than she did.

  ‘This is my fault,’ she said softly.

  Andrew leaned forward. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘None of this is your fault.’ He sat back and sighed. ‘It’s your father’s.’

  Kate ran the back of her hand hastily across her eyes. ‘What?’

  It was his turn to avoid eye contact. She watched as he moved files to the floor and sifted through those remaining on the desk. ‘Julie Davies,’ he said, finding the file he’d been looking for. He moved another photograph across the table; an old, speckled, poor-quality picture of a greying woman in her late-forties, deep creases lining her sun-tightened skin. She smiled at the camera, a forced smile that showed too many teeth and exaggerated the crow’s feet that pinched at the corners of her eyes.

  ‘This is the woman who took Daniel from the castle grounds. Her name was Julie Davies. As you can imagine, a nightmare to find with a name that common. Anyway, I didn’t find her – not exactly. She died in 1983. Cancer.’

  Kate’s head was throbbing with names, dates, and words that made no sense to her. She looked away from the photo, sat back and pressed her head into the cushioned chair.

  ‘You said it’s my father’s fault,’ Kate said quietly. ‘How was it my father’s fault?’

  ‘Julie Davies was told at a young age that she wouldn’t be able to have children then at forty-three she finds herself pregnant, against all the odds. She had a boy, a little blond haired son…’

  ‘This is all very lovely,’ Kate said, standing quickly, ‘but what the hell does this have to do with my father?!’

  Andrew Langley was taken aback by Kate’s uncharacteristic abruptness. He raised his eyebrows and gestured to Kate’s chair without speaking. She sat down obediently, ashamed at her behaviour and her outburst.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.

  ‘It’s understandable. I just feel that if we go through this – all of it – in order then all your questions will be answered.’

  Kate doubted that was true but said nothing. This man had been through enough because of her family; it wasn’t for her to give him any more unnecessary grief.

  ‘Julie’s child was knocked off his bike by a car. It was ten past four in the afternoon and the driver was drunk. The boy survived three days and then died.’

  ‘Am I supposed to feel sorry for her?’ Kate asked, and even she was surprised by the harsh edge to her tone; her voice, her words, sounding so callous, so cold, and so unlike hers. ‘She lost a child and that’s terrible, awful. But does that give her the right to put another family through the same thing? Does that give her the right to steal someone else’s child?’

  ‘She didn’t,’ Andrew said bluntly. ‘Your father gave him to her.’

  Kate laughed. The sound was sudden, loud and harsh and seemed to echo around the small office. She raised a hand and pushed her hair from her face. ‘Right,’ she said through a forced smile. ‘So, my father gives his son to some woman who’s lost hers. How charitable of him.’

  She turned to the window and looked out at the street below. She hated herself when she was like this: blunt, cruel and sarcastic. They were the characteristics Chris hated the most, but she’d never confessed to him that she loathed them just as he did.

  Kate put a hand to the soft, barely-there swell of her stomach and breathed deeply, willing herself to stay calm. Her baby – Chris’ baby – had been conceived just weeks earlier and they’d decided not to tell anyone yet. It had been completely unexpected and Sophie and Ben weren’t ready for that sort of news yet. Let them try to return to some kind of normality first.

  ‘What did your parents argue about, Kate? After Daniel went missing?’

  Kate moved her hand to the window glass and rested her forehead against it. ‘The things you’d expect them to argue over,’ she said. ‘Who was to blame. Who should have been there.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Andrew pressed. ‘Anything that seemed odd or unusual?’

  ‘My brother had gone missing,’ Kate spoke against the window. ‘Everything was unusual.’

  She closed her eyes and remembered sitting at the top of her parents’ stairs in her nightdress: one hand clinging to the top bar of the banister; the other to the tattered teddy bear she no longer went to bed without; now, still, though she was fourteen years old. The argument, like all the arguments, had erupted suddenly, as if from nowhere, but they had all known it was on its way, bubbling beneath the supposedly calm exteriors of her mother and father as they had silently eaten dinner at the kitchen table hours earlier.

  She had known it was coming. When her father was annoyed his cheeks coloured, as if all his anger was gathering in his face, ready to burst from his mouth in a colourful chorus of curses and expletives. And her mother had had that look about her all day. That look, like the face of the accused in the dock; knowing his ‘not guilty’ plea is a lie: knowing that his jury is also in on the secret.

  They had hardly waited for Kate to close her bedroom door behind her. She had changed from her clothes and into her nightdress as quickly as she could, avoiding the creaky floorboards so that she could keep an ear on the scene that was unfolding downstairs. Goodnight kisses and cups of sugary tea before bedtime were a thing of the past; a memory that had not been relived since her brother had gone. She was used to being on her own. She was used to listening. And she was now a pro at creeping, unheard, onto the top step of the staircase.

  ‘You’ve been to the station again, haven’t you?’ her father’s voice asked.

  Her mother didn’t reply, or if she did, the girl didn’t hear her.

  ‘What did they say?’ her father said.

  She couldn’t gauge her mother’s response. It wasn’t upset. It wasn’t angry. It was just nothing.

  ‘Nothing,’ she answered quietly. ‘They didn’t say nothing.’

  ‘Liar!’

  Something was thrown. The little girl flinched at the top of the stairs. She didn’t know what had been thrown, or who had thrown it; her mother’s temper could be worse than her father’s, especially if she’d been drinking. She had never drunk before her brother had gone, but since his disappearance she was drunk more and more; her moods becoming darker and more unpredictable by the day. Seven years had passed, but the gap her brother had left was now a bigger void then ever.

  Arguments echoed in the spaces his small body had once filled.

  ‘They’ve finally closed the case, haven’t they?’

  And then there were tears. They had to be her mother’s, but from the top of the stairs Kate couldn’t be sure. She had seen her father’s tears, but only once. They were heavy and loud. Her mother’s were usually weightless and silent; drowned in alcohol. Today they were filled with the piercing sound of uncontrolled grief.

  ‘They can’t.’

  The words were almost unidentifiable, choked between tears. There was a moment’s silence that seemed to Kate to stretch into the night. It was broken when her mother sobbed loudly and violently.

  ‘Why weren’t you watching him?’ she wailed. ‘Why weren’t you watching our son?’

  When she heard her father sp
eak his voice was quieter now. Calm. ‘He wasn’t mine to watch,’ he said.

  ‘You ring the police back tomorrow,’ Kate heard her father tell her mother. ‘Ring them and tell them you’re not going to keep bothering them anymore. It’s been seven years – you have to move on. He’s gone.’

  ‘You bastard,’ her mother spat.

  ‘What more can I do?’ her father asked. ‘I’ve done everything I can. We don’t know what happened and we’re never going to know. No one will ever know. This has to stop now,’ her father continued firmly. ‘Daniel isn’t ever coming back. We’ve got a daughter and she needs us. Both of us.’

  Upstairs, Kate went back to her room and lay in her bed; wide eyes staring up at the ceiling. She hadn’t heard the end of the conversation, or anything past the point at which her father had closed the door on her prying ears. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. All she knew was that Daniel was still alive.

  In her heart, she knew it, no matter what her father or anyone else said.

  She had told the policeman about the woman with the strange, summery dress; how she remembered her watching in the distance as she had instructed her brother to close his eyes and count to ten. Even now, after seven years, she could recall the dress: pink and flowery. She couldn’t remember the face; the woman hadn’t seemed important at the time.

  Her mother believed. She had pressed the police to look for the woman, and when someone claimed to have seen Daniel with a middle aged woman on the late night bus in Cardiff the memory of the strange lady seemed to be even more significant. But they had found nothing. They had looked and looked, they said, but there were no traces of him and no further sightings were reported.

  Her brother had disappeared.

  Her mother and father fought constantly. Her mother visited the police station every day for the first year; refusing to be fobbed off with false promises said before. She walked the streets like a lost person, showing endless streams of strangers the blurred photograph of Daniel on his third birthday, all snot and smiles for the camera. Her father went with her, at first, but his patience thinned and after years of searching he gave up. He accused his wife of harassing the police and told her she was losing her mind. He told her so often that she began to believe it herself.

  Kate pressed her head harder against the window, closed her eyes and tried to push her father’s words from her mind. That hadn’t been the first time she had overheard snippets of conversations that weren’t meant for her ears; words that, as a child, she had been unable to make sense of.

  But things were different now. Perhaps things did make sense, even if she still resisted accepting it.

  The police might have given up on Daniel, but Kate and her mother never would. They would find him, somehow, together. They would bring him home.

  Eight days later Kate had found her mother dead in her parents’ bed. The empty vodka bottle had rolled from the quilt and fallen onto the floor and the pill bottle stood on the bedside table, its contents gone. Her mother’s face was peaceful, as though she was sleeping. It hadn’t been a cry for help: the whole bottle had been taken.

  Her mother had meant it.

  Kate had tried to cry for her, but the tears wouldn’t come. By ending her own life she had given up on Daniel’s. She had given up on Kate.

  ‘He wasn’t mine to watch,’ Kate said.

  Even as she spoke the words she felt as though she was betraying her father. Hadn’t he done everything he could? Hadn’t he stayed with his alcoholic wife, though most people would have left her? Hadn’t he always been there for his daughter, though looking at her face – a face that looked so much like her mother’s – had been a constant source of pain to him?

  Kate was tired of defending people. There was nothing to betray but memories and they had already betrayed her enough.

  ‘They were in the kitchen arguing about Daniel,’ Kate told Andrew, turning from the window. ‘She said, ‘why weren’t you watching him?’ And he said, ‘he wasn’t mine to watch’.’ She returned to her chair. ‘Was that what you wanted?’

  ‘You knew?’ Andrew asked, his voice laced with surprise.

  ‘No, I didn’t know,’ Kate said honestly. ‘I was a child. I heard half an argument, not a full story. A word here – a passing snipe there. People say things in an argument that aren’t necessarily true. I didn’t know what to believe.’

  ‘I don’t know who Daniel’s father was,’ Andrew confessed. ‘I did as much as I could, but that one escaped me. Your father probably knew.’

  Kate put her elbows on the desk and her head in her hands. ‘My mother didn’t know though, did she? She didn’t know what my father had done?’

  Andrew shook his head. ‘I met Bernard Davies, Julie’s husband. He’s an old man. He said he’d never been comfortable with any of it, but Julie had been a different woman after their son was killed and it was the only thing that would bring his wife back to him. He claims that as far as he and Julie knew, both your parents wanted them to have Daniel. It was only when the story made the news soon after that they realised differently.’

  ‘And then?’ Kate asked. ‘Why didn’t they take him back to my mother? Why didn’t they tell her, or tell the police, what he’d done?’ Her voice was rising again and she stopped to reign in her anger.

  ‘It was already too late. In Julie’s head the boy was hers. He was Neil. Her boy had never been knocked down, never been killed. So they ran. They went to East Anglia – as far across the country as they could possibly get. Bernard said he knew then that she was losing her mind, but he didn’t want to accept it and didn’t know how to deal with it. He was scared of losing his wife all over again. She deteriorated progressively and two years later she was diagnosed with cancer. She died within two weeks of the diagnosis.’

  ‘So Bernard did what? Just left him at a children’s home?’

  ‘Pretty much. Not his son – not his responsibility.’

  He wasn’t mine to watch, Kate thought. Daniel had been rejected by two fathers by the age of five. Two men who threw him into the unknown; uncaring of what happened to him afterwards. Could it excuse the things he had done as an adult? No, she told herself. It couldn’t even begin to.

  But still she hoped that Bernard Davies was a lonely, miserable old man who died a death as isolated as her father’s had been.

  Andrew stood and left the room when Kate began to cry. She didn’t care anymore and if she tried to hold the tears and anger back she was going to implode.

  ‘Here.’ Andrew stood beside her, offering her a box of tissues. Kate took one and used it to hide her reddened face.

  ‘I’m not crying for him,’ she explained, her shoulders shaking. ‘Not after all the things he’s done.’

  ‘You don’t have to justify it, Kate,’ Andrew said kindly.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she argued. ‘Those poor kids. Jamie Griffiths’ kids, Joseph Ryan’s kids, Michael Morris’ kids. Ben. Sophie.’

  She stopped talking and attempted to clean her face with a second handful of tissues. She couldn’t finish what she had been about to say. She didn’t think anyone else would be able to understand that in fact she could spare tears for him; not Neil, but Daniel; for the child he had once been and the man he had never had a chance to grow into.

  February 1981

  Sixty Four

  The little girl ran quickly to the trees and stood with her back to the widest trunk. She positioned her feet carefully, making sure not to tread on any dead twigs or fallen leaves that would make a noise and draw attention to her hiding place. She squeezed her eyes shut tight as though, if he should see her, the fact that she could not see him would mean she had still not yet been found. She placed the palms of her hands against the rough bark behind her, running them across the tree and tracing the grooves and ridges in its trunk.

  She took a deep breath and waited.

  *

  Her brother stood on the path, his small hands clamped tightly over his closed eyes. He count
ed slowly to ten and when he opened his eyes again the sky had become darker and the wind had picked up, sending the leaves that had fallen from the nearby trees skipping down the concrete path. Daniel looked around the park and at the castle, wondering where his sister might be. The castle grounds suddenly seemed a lot bigger than he had realised and there were too many places for his sister to hide.

  He turned and spotted a high wall at the far end of the path. If he’d been the one doing the hiding it would have been exactly the place he’d have chosen. He ran towards it, lifting his feet high in an attempt to elongate his tiny strides.

  When he got behind the wall Daniel stopped and looked around. There was no one there. The grass behind the wall had been left to grow high and he stepped through it, the last of the melting snow wetting the bottom of his trouser legs. He ran to the end of the wall, checking that his sister was not crouching behind the bushes in the corner. She wasn’t there.

  When Daniel turned to go back up to the path there was a lady standing by the wall. She was oddly dressed for the weather and had on a flowery, summer dress with a black padded jacket thrown haphazardly on top. Her hair was a tangled mess of knotted curls, tied loosely at the back in an elastic band. On her feet she wore brown sandals and white ankle socks.

  Daniel stopped and stared at her.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’ the lady asked, smiling.

  Despite her bizarre appearance and despite the fact that she looked very old to Daniel, the lady looked quite pretty when she smiled. Her cheeks became fatter and the roundness of them made her look more youthful. Her skin glowed warmly, pinched red by the cold. She had good teeth; very white teeth that were a little too big for her face.

  ‘Katy,’ Daniel told her.

  The lady smiled again. Though her mouth smiled, her eyes didn’t. They were glazed, shiny; she stared at Daniel, but stared through him, as if looking at something beyond him. She looked as if she had sacrificed a lot of sleep to vivid dreams and a million worries.