Out on a Limb

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  No, it’s not odd, I think. He’s just sleeping off a hangover or something. Or is still…well…well, ensconced. With whatever her name is… No, Abbie. Don’t think about that. ‘What about this girl he was with?’ I ask Jonathan. ‘Did these two girls know each other?’

  ‘Yeah, they do. Well, sort of. They’re all with different firms. But –’

  ‘Firms?’

  ‘You know, camping firms.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You mean they work there. Well, doesn’t she know anything? Doesn’t she know where this other girl might be?’

  ‘Yeah, course she does. We went round to her tent this morning. But she hasn’t seen him either.’

  ‘So he didn’t go off with her, then.’ Oh no. Sex I can cope with. Sex I can manage. But that’s not what happened, clearly. Unless he met someone else. God, what has my son been getting up to, exactly? Is he on some sort of pan Europe seed-spreading mission? This is getting less and less palatable by the second.

  ‘No. Well, he did,’ says Jonathan. ‘Well, sort of. There was a whole bunch of them. They were going to go down to the beach and –’

  ‘So what happened? What did she say?’

  ‘Nothing. She said he told her he wasn’t feeling too great, and he was going to head back to the campsite and get the tent sorted –’

  ‘Except he never got there.’

  ‘Not as far as I can tell.’

  ‘So where did you sleep?’

  ‘Um…’

  You d ozy mare, Abbie. Where d’you think he slept? ‘No matter, no matter, no matter,’ I say quickly. ‘But you’re sure he’s not on the site anywhere, are you?’

  ‘Definitely. We’ve been all over trying to find him. I’m getting a bit worried.’

  He’s getting worried. ‘And you’ve kept trying his phone.’

  ‘Yeah, all morning.’

  Okay, okay. Think Abbie. Think. ‘Right,’ I say, having thought. ‘I’m going to hang up now in case he’s trying to get through to you. And I’ll keep trying him too. What’s the name of this place you’re at again?’

  ‘Cervia.’

  ‘Okay. Is that with a ‘C’?’ He says yes. I write it down. ‘And do they have a police station or anything?’

  ‘Um, I guess so. Fulvia, er… carabinieri?’ I hear a girl’s voice. Then Jonathan’s again. ‘Yeah, they do.’

  ‘Right. I want you to head straight there, okay? See if they know anything. I’ll keep on trying him in the meantime. Yes, that’s best. You find the police station and see if you can find anything out. Ring me the minute you hear anything, okay? I’ll do likewise.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Calm, Abbie. Keep calm. ‘And Jonathan?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t panic. Don’t worry. It’ll be something and nothing, I’m sure.’

  I wish I thought it was. Oh my God. My son is a missing person. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.

  I drive home with all the due care and attention I can muster – which still probably leaves it hovering at around a barely legal level – then spend about five minutes in a wall to wall button-pushing frenzy. Contacts list – S – Sebastian – Call Contact? – Nothing – Retry? – Retry – Nothing – Retry? – Retry – Nothing – Retry?

  I stop retrying then, as it is patently pointless. So, all out of options, I burst into tears.

  Bursting into tears is, of course, equally pointless. Bursting into tears will achieve nothing whatsoever, but is the main unavoidable side-effect of thinking all the things a mother simply cannot help but think at times like these. He is lying in a ditch somewhere, of course. Sick, mugged, damaged, unconscious, having been divested of both his rucksack and tent, and the phone with which I am trying to make a connection is lying in a ditch with him, silenced and discarded, while its Sim card has been purloined, and – even as I think it – is now safely installed in the phone of some teenage Mafioso gangster, who is running up Seb’s Vodafone bill making calls to other gangsters, who are engaged in putting contracts on people or gun-running or extortion, or smuggling eastern bloc young peasant girls into the west for a life of prostitution and drugs.

  I carry on in this vein, with commendable focus, until, some fifteen minutes later, my phone rings again.

  ‘It’s me again.’ Jonathan.

  ‘Jonathan! Any news?’

  ‘’Fraid not. Look, I’m just calling to say my battery’s going and I’m going to have to charge it, so if Seb gets in touch with you, can you tell him I’m heading back to the campsite to wait for him there?’

  Like Seb, Jonathan has a wind up phone charger, for those occasions where they can’t get to power points. Which I presume he can’t now, what with being on the road to some campsite in the middle of nowhere. So now he’ll have to spend thirty minutes winding the bloody thing, during which time anything could happen. Oh, God. But then I have a thought. And my heart leaps to grab it. That’s it! That must be it! Seb’s battery is flat too! ‘There’s a thought!’ I say to Jonathan, and suggest it.

  ‘Then he would have used a payphone to call me instead, wouldn’t he? If he was in a position to, that is.’

  In-a- position -to. Ah, but what would constitute not being in a position to? No payphone? No money? No digits ? Aaarrrgh. ‘And what did the police say?’

  ‘Not a lot. He didn’t speak much English. But he’s taken my number. And I gave him yours too.’

  ‘And have you got one for the station?’

  He tells me it. I note it down. I reassure him again. I ring off. I wait. And I wait. And I wait. And I wait. I really don’t know what else to do.

  I’m still waiting when Jake appears. He’s back in school on Monday, so has been eking out his last hours of freedom with his friends at the skate park, doing twiddles and twirls on his skateboard. At least, twiddles and twirls is how I like to think of them. Potentially neck-breaking, skull-splitting stunts doesn’t have quite the same ring to a mother. But to think the very pinnacle of my maternal worries once was that one of my offspring would fracture a small bone.

  ‘Something up, Mum?’ he asks. He’s drinking from a two-litre bottle of Sprite, which is how he gets most of his nutrition at such times, augmenting with occasional Mars Bars.

  My phone rings again, just as I’m filling him in. And this time – hurrah! – at long last, the display says – ‘Incoming call. Seb.’

  ‘Oh, thank the Lord. Thank the Lord !’ is what I’m already saying as I flip it open and put it to my ear.

  What comes out of the earpiece isn’t the voice of my missing first born, however, but an incomprehensible stream of something indecipherable and foreign – and I hazard a guess at Italian. Yes, definitely Italian, I decide. It has that pizza restaurant menu kind of ring.

  What I also establish, because I have been spending most of the afternoon engaged in the business of terrified conjecture, is that the man speaking to me now (for it is a man, and a mature one) is – thank heavens – probably not a member of the Corleone family. Because it takes mere nanoseconds to compute that no criminal, having stolen a mobile phone Sim card, is likely to make his number one priority to scroll through the victim’s address book and phone up a contact marked ‘mum’. I exhale shortly after. He’s still gabbling at me.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t speak Italian,’ I say slowly. ‘Do you speak Any English? Er, Inglese?’

  ‘Inglese,’ he says back. Or something quite like it. Then. ‘’Ello. But no.’

  Ello, but damn. Damn. ‘Se- bas ti an ?’

  This elic its a ‘Si’, which is certainly encouraging. But then he’s back to being incomprehensible again.

  Jake’s jiggling my forearm, slopping Sprite on the carpet. ‘Mum! What they saying ?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I hiss. ‘Signor?’ Is signor the right parlance? Signor e ? ‘Seg-nor-e,’ I plump for. ‘Me non-com-prend-ez vous!’

  ‘That’s French, Mum,’ says Jake. ‘That’s no good.’ And he’s qui
te right. It isn’t. ‘Ask if there’s anyone else there who speaks English.’ I do. Seems there’s not. Though I wouldn’t know either way, would I? I make an executive decision.

  ‘Signor,’ I say firmly. ‘I speak no Italian. Have you, um, a telephono in, er, casa that I can call you back on? A Land Line?’ I’m beginning to feel Like Julie Walters in that Victoria Wood sketch. Speak Very Slowly And Loudly to Foreigners and With Any Luck You Will Be Understood.

  And, by God, I am! ‘Si,’ he says. ‘Telephono. Si si. Nombre. Si.’ He reels it off to me, and I carefully note it down. I write it out in words, phonetically, just to be on the safe side. Though I’m not altogether sure about ‘settee’.

  ‘I will ring you back in ten minutes,’ I tell him. ‘Er. Grazi.’

  ‘Si, Senhora. Ciao,’ he says, enunciating similarly carefully. He has obviously seen Wood and Walters as well.

  ‘Right,’ I say to Jake as I end the call. ‘We’ve got a number. Which means we’ve got something, at least. Go and find the Italian phrase book, will you? If we can cobble together a few sentences, we might be able to make some progress.’

  ‘Durr, Mum. We don’t have an Italian phrase book. Not any more. Seb took it with him, didn’t he?’

  Rats. Of course. But then I have a better idea anyway. ‘Go and switch the computer on, then. We can use Google or something. Or BBC education, or whatever. I’m sure there’s some website where you can translate stuff online. God, Jake,’ I say, as we troop through the hall. ‘What on earth is going on ?’

  We decamp to the dining room in which we don’t do any dining and boot up the computer without delay.

  ‘Right,’ says Jake, who has found a likely looking website. ‘What shall I type in, then?’

  ‘Erm… how about “can you tell me what has happened to my son, please”. Yes?’

  He types it in. ‘Er…here we are,’ he says. ‘Um… “ Puoi dirmi che ha succedere verso mio figlio, pregare ?”.’

  ‘Okay. Hang on. Let me get that written down. Puoi… how on earth do you pronounce that when it’s at home?’

  ‘Pooh-oy, I guess.’

  ‘Okay. Pooh-oy derr me chey (chee? Cheh?) has suss ay deary verso me-oh fig-leo, pre-gare (or pre-gar-ray? Pre-gar-ee?).’ I read it back. ‘That sounds okay. You think that sounds okay?’

  ‘I s’pose so. Go on, then. What next?’

  I suggest ‘do you know where he is now?’, which produces another bunch of words. But six or so carefully annotated utterances down the line, and I am fast beginning to realise that we’re on a twenty-four carat hiding to nothing. ‘God, this is hopeless, Jake,’ I say, putting my pen down in despair. ‘Because we’ve forgotten one crucial thing.’

  He glances across at me. ‘What?’

  ‘That if I can barely read this lot back in the first place, then how am I going to have the first clue what he might be saying back to me? Damn, but I wish I spoke Italian!’

  And in saying so something wonderful suddenly occurs to me.

  ‘Yes!’ I say. ‘ Yes ! Jake, I’ve just had a thought. I know someone who can speak Italian!’

  ‘Who, Mum?’

  ‘Well, at least I presume he can, anyway. Some at least. He must do. He lived there, didn’t he?’

  ‘Who, Mum?’

  ‘Gabriel Ash!’

  ‘What, that weather guy who came here? Hugo’s son?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  Gabriel Ash is doing the tea-time weather forecast. Live. On air. On TV. Right at that very moment. Wearing a pink and purple tie. Which is why I can’t reach him on his mobile, I presume. I leave a message on his voicemail and a text message too, and try to desist from making any more random conjectures about why an old Italian man might have my missing son’s phone. But they come at me anyway, like runaway scuds. He’s caught Seb with his daughter. He’s locked him in a cowshed… no, no. It can’t be. He left the girl didn’t he? Another girl then… No! Why a girl, anyway? Perhaps he ran him down? Or perhaps he was out cruising for vulnerable young men… Perhaps… Oh, God. Too many perhapses for a mother.

  ‘And for all those of you hoping to make the most of the weekend,’ Gabriel Ash is saying brightly, ‘Make your plans for the Saturday if you can, because this current round of weather is likely to break by early Sunday, when this low pressure system –’ he wafts a hand towards his map ‘– will see rain in most areas by noon.’

  Yes, yes, yes. I think. Get on with it! Ring me!

  Exactly ten minutes after Wales Tonight has started, he does.

  Which is impressive. ‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ he says politely. ‘Is there something I can do for you, Abbie?’

  ‘O h, thanks so much for calling back, Gabriel! Um, yes. At least, I hope you can. I was wondering how your Italian was?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your Italian. As in the language. As in speaking it, I mean. Do you speak it? Only I presumed you probably did, and I was wondering if I could ask you a really big favour. There’s this Italian man, and I need to be able to understand what he’s saying, and it’s really important, and…’

  I have to pause here, for oxygen. ‘What man?’ he asks, taking advantage of the gap. ‘Where?’

  ‘In Italy. Only he’s got my son’s phone, and my son’s gone missing, and he obviously knows all about it – well, at least, I hope he does – he could have just found the phone, of course, and be trying to trace its owner, but…’

  ‘Your son is missing ?’

  ‘Yes. His friend has lost track of him, and this man has his phone, but without being able to understand what he’s saying, I don’t even know where he is, let alone what he has to do with anything, and I thought if you could call him, you could find out for me, and then I could put him in touch with Jonathan and then he could…’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he says, soothingly. ‘First things first. You have a number?’

  ‘I have two. I have my son’s mobile number, and I have a land line number. I thought I ought to get one in case Seb’s battery dies.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ he says. ‘Hang on. Let me grab a pen. Right. Give me both.’ I reel off both numbers, the latter just as I wrote it. Amazingly, all my chink-ways and settees make sense to him. ‘Right, then,’ he says, in a businesslike fashion. ‘Did you manage to get this man’s name?’

  ‘God, I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘No matter,’ he says swiftly. ‘But your son’s called Sebastian, right?’

  ‘Sebastian McFadden.’

  ‘Okay. Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can find out and call you straight back.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m so sorry to bother you.’

  ‘You’re very welcome. Hey. And keep calm.’

  *

  Keep calm. Yes. I know I must keep calm. But it’s so hard. All I can think of are the myriad ways in which trauma and disaster might have visited my son. ‘Oh, God,’ I say to Jake. ‘What can have happened to him?’

  ‘Probably nothing,’ Jake says with his reliable lack of panic. ‘He’s probably just dropped his phone somewhere and this guy has picked it up.’

  ‘But he wasn’t feeling well. Jonathan said he wasn’t feeling well, didn’t he?’

  Jake shrugs. ‘Probably just had too much to drink. Left his phone somewhere. Something like that.’

  Oh, I wish I had your confidence, Jakey.

  The house phone rings less than ten minutes later, but already it feels like ten hours have sped by.

  ‘I’m sorry to have taken so long,’ says Gabriel Ash. ‘I had to make a couple of calls.’ And he says it in such a serious voice that all thoughts of hangovers and phones being mislaid now implode. I’m immediately scared absolutely witless.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Don’t worry. He’s all right.’

  ‘Oh, thank God. Oh thank God.’

  ‘But he’s in hospital.’

  ‘In hospital ? Oh, G
od. Oh, my baby! What’s happened ?’

  ‘Well, by all accounts, he’s had his appendix removed.’

  I gasp at this, floored. ‘His appendix ?’

  ‘His appendix ?’ echoes Jake.

  ‘Yes. His appendix,’ confirms Gabriel Ash. ‘And he’s okay. He’s fine. Look, are you at home?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, we’re here. We’re at home.’

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Stay there. I’m on my way over. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Sit tight,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry. Keep calm.’

  As soon as I see Gabriel Ash’s car pull up, I’m out of the front door, Spike tucked under armpit, Jake close on my heels. He’s still wearing the jacket and tie he did the weather in. He could be someone who’s come round to sell me an ISA.

  In any other circumstance I would find his arrival somewhat amazing. I know full well that Broadcasting House is only a couple of miles away, but even so, it seems to go against the laws of physics that he could be smiling out from the middle of my TV screen at one point, and then walking up my front garden path minutes later. It almost doesn’t seem possible. But he’s here, even so.

  For which I am terrifically grateful. He locks his car and strides across the street to the house. His limp, I notice, is already markedly improved. Is now barely noticeable, in fact.

  ‘Right then,’ he says, finally, sitting down at the kitchen table and unfolding a couple of sheets of A4 paper. There are lots of scribbles on them, some in English and some in Italian. He passes one of them to me. A name and an address. ‘Here’s the man’s details. Thought you’d want to have them. So. I think I’ve pretty much got all the facts. The guy I spoke to –’ He nods towards the paper, ‘– well, he found your son on his way home last night. He was doubled up in the lane, apparently, and when the guy stopped, he thought maybe he’d been hit by a car or something, but when he got out to see if he was okay he couldn’t get any sense out of him, so he got him into his truck and drove him to the hospital – ‘he checks his notes. ‘In a place called Ravenna, where they took him in. He obviously didn’t know anything about him at that point – but he did leave his name with the hospital receptionist. He’d dropped your son’s rucksack off with him, of course, but when he went to use his truck at lunchtime today he realised his jacket was still in his truck, and that it had his phone and wallet in it. And of course he realised the phone was beeping at him, and saw all the missed calls. Which was when he thought he’d better try and return the last six.’ He smiles. ‘The word ‘mum’, I think, is pretty universal, don’t you?’