The Lost Child

by Julie Myerson

  My son just had a birthday party, she explains.

  Must have been some party, running around this place, I say, and she laughs.

  Do you have kids? she asks me.

  I make a face. Horrible teenagers, I say.

  Bet they're a handful, says David, and I don't answer as we walk into a room that's in darkness. Joanne goes across and flings open the shutters.

  The billiard room. There used to be a conservatory joined on, built in Victorian times, but it's gone now.

  And there was a little stage in here once, adds David.

  I didn't know that, says Joanne, visibly surprised.

  Oh yes. I don't know what it was for, but there definitely was, just here.

  I look at David as he gestures with his arms. It's hard to decide who has a greater claim to this place. The new owner, whose party balloons cling to the ceiling. Or the boy, the servants' child, who spent whole summers haunting its vast spaces.

  A very long corridor takes us down to the old kitchens where Joanne shows me the cold store - a room with marble surfaces, stone-flagged floor, fly screens on the window.

  So useful, she says, running her finger along the marble. Things really stay cold in here.

  Then she takes us through into a dining room with an enormous stone-and-marble fireplace, but no table.

  We haven't really decided how to use this room, she says, but you can imagine the grand dinners they'd have had in here.

  We go back into the grand dark hall and up the stairs. The broad stone staircase sweeps grandly upwards, the effect somehow enhanced by the fact that every single step has a soft toy sitting on it.

  My kids! laughs Joanne.

  David tells us that as a boy he used to slide down these banisters regularly with no hands.

  Joanne shakes her head.

  I wouldn't let my children do that.

  Oh come on, goes David.

  They'd crack their heads open, she says.

  She's right, I say, partly because it's the truth and partly because it seems only polite to be on her side. This floor would be lethal.

  We go up and David follows. At the top I glance back. It's a long way down. It must have been the biggest thrill, whizzing down with no one around to stop you, and I doubt that David was the first child to do it.

  Upstairs, seemingly endless bedrooms open out on to one another - intricate panelling, tall sash windows giving breathtaking views of the distant grey lawns and trees, the acres of parkland, the fast-moving clouds.

  I stand for a moment at one of these windows and am so effortlessly zoomed back to your grandfather's time that it's actually the plastic paraphernalia of a twenty-first-century female childhood - bright toothbrushes, pink-and-blond sparkly toys and the lurid splash of a duvet cover - that seem out of place.

  OK, that's nearly it, Joanne says. But before we finish, I'll show you one more thing.

  On the landing she opens a small wooden door, a door so low you have to bend your head to go inside, and we climb a winding wooden staircase just like in a fairy tale. Dust and cobwebs and a strangely familiar smell, neither musty nor old.

  We're standing in a long, low attic - or series of attics really. Dark, tattered remnants of ancient wallpaper on some of the walls. Ceilings that slope so you can only stand up in certain places. The remains of a white candle collapsed and spattered on the floor. You down there on hands and knees, skirts grey with dust. The swing of your hair.

  The oldest bit of the house, says Joanne as we all three stand looking around.

  A moment of silence. I can hear the wind moaning in the eaves.

  How old?

  Oh, sixteenth century at least. I know it was used as a hospital in the First World War, this room up here, wasn't it, David?

  He says it was. And we all gaze at the stained walls, the peeling plaster, the greyish light.

  I feel myself shiver.

  Did you come up here? Did you and your cousins know about this space?

  Hey, come out on the roof, says Joanne - and, after crouching down through a little doorway, suddenly we're out there on a small parapet in the bright March wind. An intricately red-tiled rooftop - right on top of Narborough Hall.

  You can see right over Norfolk from here, says David.

  Hey, I say, holding my hair out of my eyes, it's amazing.

  Isn't it? says Joanne.

  And the wind lifts David's hair. David the man who was David the boy. Who says exactly what I know he'll say next.

  We played up here as kids.

  Did you? What an amazing place!

  It was pretty good, yes.

  Before I leave, David takes me for a walk around the Iron Age fort, while Joanne resumes her gardening.

  We walk through the garden, across a lawn, past rows and rows of daffodils, to the lake. Passing an eccentric-looking wooden landing stage designed to look like a dragon - built in Victorian times, David says - and, skirting round the edge of the lake, we walk up into the earthworks. The mad white puppy, who has decided to join us, rushes backwards and forwards, catching the twirling leaves in her mouth.

  It's a place full of gnarled trees and thick, low-lying branches. Perfect for climbing. Piles of leaves and sudden dips in the earth, an ideal place for a warrior to hide. It's easy to imagine boys and girls shouting and running here. John and Charles, Sophy, Sam, you and Ellen. Dirty nails, flying hair, stout boots coming unlaced, pinafores buttoned high up your backs.

  Daffodils and narcissi bend in the wind.

  So did you play here all on your own? I ask David.

  He considers.

  Well, sometimes I'd have friends over. There were plenty of kids in the village. But yes, I suppose I was often alone. I didn't really mind. They were good times. I lived for those summers.

  Driving back to London down the AI2, my mind caught somewhere between you and David and the mad white puppy and that madder attic space, I'm not even going very fast, certainly no more than 50, when it hits me. Pure panic.

  My heart moves into my throat. Cheeks burning, mouth drying. Breath moving up too high in my chest. I'm suddenly aware - catastrophically aware - that there's nowhere to pull in, that I can't stop. I don't need to stop, but if! did need to, I couldn't. I could not stop.

  Macy Gray is singing -loud and laid-back, unconcerned. I turn her off Nowhere to stop. I need to stop. There are lorries in front and behind. Speed is swallowing me up. I need to stop.

  At last there's a metal farm gate slightly back from the road, a dried mud area, deep with tractor-tyre marks. Just enough space to slow down and swerve in.

  I do it. I indicate, pull in, swerving slightly, braking fast. The car shudders to a halt. Relief As I turn off the engine, my limbs melt. I have no idea what has just happened.

  The boy's father starts going to Families Anonymous meetings as the psychiatrist ordered. Every Wednesday, seven o'clock, for an hour.

  Because we don't want to go out together and leave the children alone, we agree we should go on different days of the week, to different meetings. They take place all over London.

  He comes back from his first meeting and doesn't tell me much about it except: that he cried. That most of the people there had children older than our boy. Mostly harder drugs too. That he's not sure yet how helpful it was, but he thinks he'll probably go again.

  We both agree that I must find another meeting, a different venue and on a different night. I make a note in my diary to do it. And do nothing about it.

  He comes back from his second meeting looking upset.

  Are you sure it's helpful? I say. You don't have to go, you know. Should you do it if it makes you feel worse?

  He shakes his head and something about the look in his eyes makes me feel very far away from him. He's been where I haven't been. He tells me he's sure it's the right thing.

  Just listening to the other people's stories, he says. I don't know why but it helps. It's hard to explain what it's like. You really must put aside some t
ime to find a meeting and go.

  I tell him I will, and I do manage to find one up in north London but, when the evening comes around, I decide I have a headache and I mow the lawn instead.

  And we take our boy back.

  I still remember the length of time that he's away from us (not ever actually on the streets but sofa-surfing, sleeping on the various floors of various friends) as a long, bleak period of dark and frightening winter months. But in fact it's only a couple of weeks. All right, maybe three.

  Three frightening weeks. I can't do it.

  All day I pace the house, unable to concentrate. Every night I surprise myself by somehow managing to fall into sleep, his cat hunched against my legs. Every morning there are balled-up tissues all over the floor on my side of the bed.

  Things keep on coming back. Things I haven't thought about in years. Pulling a vest over his fidgety blond head. A white vest with cap sleeves. How it felt to do up the poppers on his Babygro, his wriggling body warm inside, the bulk of his nappy getting in the way. Kissing his three-year-old fingers and toes till he laughed so hard he kicked me in the stomach. Staying up late to make him a Power Rangers cape. Letting him come into bed and watch a film with me because he couldn't sleep. Trying to explain the grown-up plot in six-year-old's language. Snuggling up, the biscuity smell of his hair. Serious, tearful conversations about God and death and bad things happening to animals.

  His father and I make an effort to go on as normal, we try to work. But again and again, drifting around the house, we'll find ourselves grinding to a halt at the same time and in the exact same spot, and then that's it. The day is over. We're lost.

  Long sad hours of talking about him, hours of sitting and going over and over it. What to do, what might be the best way to help him. Why we mustn't ask him back, why we must. What sort of expert help we should seek. Whether or not it's right to tell his grandparents. What exactly to say to his teachers. Which of our close friends it's acceptable to bore with this. Because we know that this is the truth - that we've turned into dull, onetrack people. People who've forgotten how to have a good time. People who just aren't very good company any more.

  The friend in Manhattan who paid for us to talk to the psychiatrist also sent us a box of American books about coping with cannabis addiction. Tough Love. I read them in one quick sad burst and for a few days they did seem to give me a kind of strength. The stories were so depressingly - reassuringly? - similar to ours, the symptoms so clear, the cure so clean and brutal, so obvious.

  The books described a method known as intervention. You get a whole crowd of people, relatives or friends who really care about your child, people who have been a part of his life, to tell him he needs to go to rehab.

  But it has to be a surprise. So the addict is either lured somewhere - a hotel room, somewhere he can't easily get away from - on some false pretext, only to find all these people there waiting for him. Or else may be they burst into his bedroom, wake him up at dawn. And he - blinking and baffied by sleep, presumably? -lies there and listens while they read out letters that they've written. Passionate, upsetting letters that tell him how much they care for him but also tell him the truth: that, unless he goes to rehab, they don't know how to be a part of his life any more. Unless he goes to rehab, they don't want him around them. They won't see him any more.

  If he agrees to go, then great: the car is waiting. The plane ticket. His bag is packed. It's very important he goes immediately, before he can be distracted or change his mind.

  But if he refuses, then that's it. He's out and the door is closed to him. And hopefully, that soon sends him to rock bottom, which is where he has to go, that place of no hope. He has to bottom out. You have to lose your child to that terrible, no-hope place, in order to find him again. Hopefully.

  That's the idea anyway and, while I was reading the books, I thought I could almost imagine finding the strength to do this.

  This really could be the answer! I said, turning, elated, to his father, and I explained what this thing called intervention was, and we discussed which friends and members of the family we might be able to line up: his grandmothers and his grandpa, his uncle and aunt, his lovely old primary-school teacher?

  He'd just tell them all to fuck off, his father pointed out.

  No, that's the point. He wouldn't be allowed to. It would just be too powerful - seeing them all there.

  His father looked at me, unconvinced, but I think I really did believe this for a moment. But then, as soon as I closed the book, all conviction and energy seemed to drop away and all I could think of were the poppers on his Babygro, the way he'd shriek when I kissed his tummy, the tender way he used to talk to his cat.

  I told his father he should read the books anyway, just in case. And he said he would, he promised he would, even though we both knew he wouldn't. And how could I blame him? I'd said I'd go to Families Anonymous and I hadn't. The broken-hearted can't make themselves do anything.

  And then one day we can't do it any longer. We can't be without him. So we do exactly what we said we wouldn't do, what the experts categorically say you should not do. We take him back without negotiation, without having secured any promises about behaviour. We take him back unconditionally. We tell him we love him. We just take him back.

  All right, for a quick few moments, we do pretend to weigh up the pros and cons: What exactly are we doing? Is this really right? We have two other children to protect, remember.

  But then again, they miss him. We know they do. It's just not natural to live without your brother. It's too unnerving, surely, to know that he's out there somewhere, adrift and alone, moving from sofa to sofa?

  And although it's true that we all felt relief when he went, it's been too long now, too painful. It feels right to try and put the family back together. This is what we tell ourselves.

  If we can just draw up a set of conditions, his father says brightly, already excited at the prospect of living with his boy again, If we could just manage to negotiate something that he could try and adhere to -

  I tell him I agree, that would be good. But in fact I'm barely listening. It's too late, I'm gone, I want my boy. Love shoots through my veins. I want the mummy-fix of seeing him fast asleep, safe and warm in his own bed.

  When he comes home, we do at least try to talk to him about the possibility that he needs help.

  Help with what?

  Your addiction to cannabis. We know an awful lot more about it than we did a few months ago. There are people you can talk to - people we can take you to see.

  As usual he laughs loudly.

  You guys. I can't believe it. You're just cracked.

  OK, may be addiction's too strong a word. But we think you're smoking far too much.

  What's too much?

  I take a breath.

  We think you're smoking pretty much all the time.

  He rolls his eyes but he does not look at me.

  Fuck's sake, Mum, I'm smoking when I want to smoke. Now and then I do a bit more than I want to, yes, sure, who doesn't?

  But then I pull back.

  So when did you last smoke a joint?

  None of your fucking business!

  Have you smoked one today?

  I told you, it's none of your business. But I don't have one every day. Last week, for instance, I didn't smoke for three days.

  Three days? I say, looking at his pale, pale face. You think that's a long time?

  He shrugs.

  It means I can stop whenever I want to.

  But darling, three days is nothing. You need to try and stop for three weeks at least - three months may be. Three days proves nothing. In fact, to be honest, it just makes me feel even more certain that you're addicted.

  Now he looks at me with real anger.

  I'm not sure I can live here with you guys if you keep on treating me like some fucking junkie. It's quite insulting, you know.

  I'm sorry, I say, but I'm not always going to be able to say what
you want to hear.

  It would be nice if you could learn to mind your own fucking business.

  I give him a long look.

  Well, let's just see how it goes, shall we? I say.

  When we take him back, we do it because we hope that, with love and patience and understanding, we can get through this.

  You'll get him back, well-meaning friends have told us again and again, you'll see. It'll be all right in the end. We're not just saying it. We know it will.

  But it's not true. They are - just saying that. They don't know. No one knows.

  He returns sometime in March, sometime after my visit to Narborough Hall.

  Soon, he is keeping everyone awake by coming home at 2 a.m., making cheese on toast, watching South Park DVDs, playing the guitar till four or five in the morning. Sometimes, coming home late, high and wired, he fries eggs and leaves the gas ring on. Or else wakes his brother up for a chat.

  Please, darling, I beg you not to wake your brother up on a school night!

  What the fuck're you on about? What's it to you? I swear he doesn't mind.

  He tells you he doesn't mind. But look at him, he's shattered.

  But I needed someone to talk to. Seriously, what else was I supposed to do?

  His brother and sister stagger around, tired and bad-tempered. Both go off to school looking like they've been punched in the eyes.

  Meanwhile he sleeps in. Despite being woken by me and offered breakfast each morning, he hardly ever gets to school on time and sometimes doesn't make it in at all. He skips school and sleeps in, his cat hunched on his shoulder, a satisfied, protective look on her face.

  He starts almost every day with a roll-up, smoked in the garden with his coffee.

  What is it he's smoking, his father asks me as he glances out of the kitchen window. Is it just tobacco?