The Other Hand (30 page)

And I said,
Oh
.

I stood there for a minute, shocked, and then I just had to smile.

The sun was lovely. I closed my eyes and let the breeze airbrush away the traces of the last few years. One phone call: I realised it was as simple as that. People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.

I was already thinking about how I might carry on with Andrew’s book. The trick, of course, would be to keep it impersonal. I wondered if that had been a problem for Andrew. The first thing they teach us in journalism school is, don’t put yourself in the story.

But what if the story is that we are in the story? I started to understand how Andrew must have agonised over it. I wondered if that was why he had kept so quiet.

Dear Andrew, I thought. How is it that I feel closer to you now than I did on the day we were married? I just told Little Bee I didn’t want to hear what she had to say because I know I need to stick with Lawrence, but at the same time here I am talking to you in my head. This is the forked tongue of grief again, Andrew. It whispers in one ear:
return to what you once loved best
, and in the other ear it whispers,
move on
.

My phone went, and my eyes snapped open. It was Clarissa.

“Sarah? They told me you resigned. Are you
crazy?
”

“I told you I was thinking about it.”

“Sarah, I spend a lot of time
thinking
about bedding Premiership footballers.”

“Maybe you should try it.”

“Or maybe you should come in to the office, right now, and tell the publishers you’re very sorry, and that you’re going through a bereavement at the moment, and please—pretty please—could you have your nice job back.”

“But I don’t want that job. I want to be a journalist again. I want to make a difference in the world.”

“Everyone wants to make a difference, Sarah, but there’s a time and place. Do you know what you’re doing, honestly, if you throw your toys out of the pram like this? You’re just having a mid-life crisis. You’re no different from the middle-aged man who buys a red car and shags the babysitter.”

I thought about it. The breeze seemed colder now. There were goosebumps on my arms.

—“Sarah?”

“Oh, Clarissa, you’re right, I’m confused. Do you think I’ve just chucked my life away?”

“I just want
you
to think about it. Will you, Sarah?”

“All right.”

“And call me?”

“I will. Clarissa?”

“Darling?”

“Thank you.”

I hung up and walked slowly back along the path. Behind me the wild grasses rose to a stand of oaks, feral and lightning blasted, and in front of me the Isabella Plantation stood within its wrought-iron palisades, docile, lush and circumscribed. It is hard, when it conies right down to the actual choice, to know what you want out of life.

It seemed like a long walk. When I saw Lawrence and Little Bee, I rushed to be with them. They looked so forlorn, standing there, looking away from each other, not speaking. I thought, Oh gosh, how foolish I’ve been. I have always struck myself as a very practical woman, capable of adaptation. I immediately thought, If I turn around now, and walk back to where I can get a signal, I can phone the publisher and tell him I made a mistake. And not just a little mistake but a great, elemental, whole-life mistake. During one whole week of grace I utterly forgot, you see, that I was a sensible girl from Surrey. It was something about Little Bee’s smile, and her energy, that made me sort of fall in love with her. And thus love makes fools of us all. For a whole week I actually thought I was a better person, someone who could make a difference. It completely slipped my mind that I was a quiet, practical, bereaved woman who focused very hard on her job. I unaccountably forgot that nobody is a hero, that everyone is so bloody
tainted
. Isn’t that odd? And now might I please have my old life back?

From further along the grass lawn, carried up by the breeze, came the sound of barking dogs. Little Bee looked across and saw me. I went right up to her and Lawrence.

I held out my hands to both of them, but then I noticed that Charlie was no longer with them.

“Um, where’s Charlie?”

It is painful to think about this, even now. I looked all around, of course I did. I ran up and down. I began screaming Charlie’s name. I raced around the perimeter of the lawn, looking into the gloom under the edge of the rhododendrons, scanning the reed beds at the side of the lake. I shouted myself hoarse. My son was nowhere. An aching panic took me over. The sophisticated parts of my mind shut down, the parts that might be capable of thought. I suppose the blood supply to them had been summarily turned off, and diverted to the eyes, the legs, the lungs. I looked, I ran, I screamed. And all the time in my heart it was growing: the unspeakable certainty that someone had taken Charlie.

I ran along one of the paths and came across a picnicking family, installed in a clearing. The mother -long auburn hair with rather frazzled ends—sat cross-legged and barefoot on a tartan rug, surrounded by the peelings and the uneaten segments of satsumas. She was reading
BBC Music Magazine
. She had it spread out on the rug, pinned down with one foot to stop the pages blowing. There was a slender silver ring on her second toe. Beside her on the rug, two flame-haired girls in blue gingham dresses were eating Kraft cheese slices straight from the packet. The husband, blond and stocky, stood a few feet away and talked into his mobile.
Lanzarote’s just a tourist trap these days
, he was saying.
You should go somewhere off the beaten track, like Croatia or Marrakech. Your money goes further there in any case
. I ran deeper into the clearing, looking all around. The mother looked up at me.

“Is everything all right?” she called out.

“I’ve lost my son,” I said.

She looked at me blankly. I smiled idiotically. I didn’t know what to do with my face. My mind and my body were keyed up to fight with paedophiles and wolves. Confronted with these ordinary people, spread out across their picnic rug in this absurdly pleasant tableau, my distress seemed desperate and vulgar. My social conditioning fought against my panic. I felt ashamed. Instinctively, I also knew that I needed to speak to the woman calmly, in her register, if I was to communicate clearly and get across the information I needed without wasting any time. I struggled—maybe I had been struggling all my life—to find the correct point of balance between nicety and hysteria.

“I’m very sorry,” I said, “I’ve lost my son.”

The woman stood up and looked around the clearing. I couldn’t understand why her movements were so slow. It seemed that I was operating in air, while she occupied some more viscous medium.

“He’s about this high,” I said. “He’s dressed as Batman.”

“I’m sorry,” she said in slow motion. “I haven’t seen anything.”

Each word took forever to form. It felt like waiting for the woman to engrave the sentence in stone. I was already halfway out of the clearing before she finished speaking. Behind me I heard the husband saying,
You could always go for the cheapest package tour and just use the flights. Then you can find some nicer accommodation once you’re out there
.

I ran through a labyrinth of small, dark paths between the rhododendrons, shouting Charlie’s name. I crawled through dark tunnels between the branches, utterly at random. My forearms bled from the scratches, but I felt no pain. I don’t know how long I ran for. Perhaps for five minutes, or perhaps for the time it takes for a divine being to create a universe, make humanity in-its image but find no solace in it, and then preside in horror over the slow grey death of the thing, knowing itself to still be utterly alone and unconsoled. Somehow I arrived back at the place where Charlie had built his city of sticks. I tore the structures apart, shouting his name. I looked for my son under piles of sticks as little as six inches high. I scrabbled through drifts of dead leaves. Of course I knew my son wasn’t underneath. I knew, even as I was scrabbling away at anything that protruded. I found an old crisp packet. The broken wheel of a pushchair. My nails bled into a barely submerged history of family days out.

Across the expanse of grass I saw Little Bee and Lawrence, who’d returned after their own searches through the rhododendrons. I ran over to them, but when I was halfway across the grass I remember the last rational thought that went through my mind: He isn’t on the grass, and he isn’t in the bushes, so he must be in the lake. Even as I thought it, I could feel the second stage of my mind shutting down. The panic simply rose up out of my chest to engulf me. I swerved away from Lawrence and Little Bee and I ran down to the edge of the lake. I splashed out into it, knee high, then waist high, staring down into the muddy brown water, screaming Charlie’s name at the waterlilies and the startled mandarin ducks.

I saw something under the water, lying on the muddy sludge of the lake’s bottom. Underwater, glimpsed between lilies and distorted by ripples, it looked like a bone-white face. I reached down and grabbed for it. I lifted it up into the light. It was the cracked half-skull of a rabbit. As I held it up, dripping muddy water, I realised that my phone had been in the hand I held the skull in. My phone was gone, somewhere—my life was gone, somewhere—lost in the bushes or the lake. I stood in the water, holding a skull. I didn’t know what to do now. I heard a whistling sound and I looked down-sharply. I understood that the breeze was whistling through the empty eye socket of the skull, and that is when I truly began to scream.

Charlie O’Rourke. Four years old. Batman. What went through my mind? His perfect little white teeth. His look of fierce concentration when he was dispatching baddies. The way he hugged me, once, when I was sad. The way, since Africa, that I had been running between worlds—between Andrew and Lawrence, between Little Bee and my job—running everywhere except to the world where I belonged. Why had I never run to Charlie? I screamed at myself. My son, my beautiful boy. Gone,
gone
. He had disappeared as he had lived, while I was looking the other way. Towards all my own selfish futures. I looked at the empty days before me, and there was no end to them.

Then I felt hands on my shoulders. It was Lawrence. He led me out of the lake and stood me on the bank. I was shivering in the breeze.

“We need to be systematic about this now,” he said. “Sarah, you stay here and keep calling-for him, so he knows where to come back to if he’s wandering. I’ll go and ask everyone inside the plantation to start looking, and I’ll keep looking myself. And Bee, you take my phone and you go to where you can get reception and you call the police. Then you wait at the plantation gate for the police, so you can show them where we are when they arrive.”

Lawrence handed his phone to Little Bee, and turned back to me.

“I know it sounds extreme,” he said, “but the police are good at this. I’m sure we’ll find Charlie before they get here, but just on the off-chance that we don’t, it makes sense for us to bring them in sooner rather than later.”

“Okay, do it,” I said. “Do it now.”

Little Bee was still standing there, holding Lawrence’s phone in her hand, staring at Lawrence and me with large and frightened eyes. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t already running.

“Go!” I said.

She still stared at me. “The police…” she said.

Understanding buzzed dully in my mind.
The number. Of course! She didn’t know the emergency number
.

“The number is 999,” I said.

She just stood there. I couldn’t work out what the problem was.

“The
police
, Sarah,” she said.

I stared at her. Her eyes were pleading. She looked terrified. And then, very slowly, her face changed. It became firm, resolved. She took a deep breath, and she nodded at me. She turned, slowly at first and then very fast, and she ran off in the direction of the plantation gate. When she was halfway across the grass, Lawrence raised a hand to his mouth.

“Oh shit, the
police
,” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head.

“Never mind.”

Lawrence ran off into the maze of paths between the rhododendrons. I went to the middle of the grass lawn and began shouting again for Charlie. I called and called, while the ducks paddled cautiously back into their accustomed circuits on the lake, and the breeze left me shivering in my wet jeans. At first I called out Charlie’s name as a sound for him to home in on, but as my voice began to go I realised that another line had been crossed and I was shouting the name just to hear it, to ensure its continuing existence in the world. I realised that the name was all I had. My voice sank to a whisper. I breathed Charlie’s name.

When Charlie came, he came all on his own. He trotted out from beneath the dark tangle of rhododendrons, filthy with dirt, trailing his bat cape behind him. I ran to him, took him into my arms and held him. I pressed my face into his neck and I breathed in his smell, the sharp salt of his sweat and the acid tang of the soil. The tears streamed down my face.

“Charlie,” I whispered. “Oh, my world, my whole world.”

“Get off, Mummy! You’re squashing me!”

“Where were you?”

Charlie held out his hands to the sides, palms upwards, and answered me as if I was simple. “In mine bat cave, of course.”

“Oh,
Charlie
. Didn’t you hear us all shouting? Didn’t you see us all looking for you?”

Charlie grinned beneath his bat mask.

“I was hiding,” he said.

“Why? Why didn’t you come out? Couldn’t you see how worried we all were?”

My son looked forlornly at the ground. “Lawrence and Bee was all cross and they wasn’t playing with me. So I went into mine bat cave.”

“Oh, Charlie. Mummy’s been so confused. So terribly silly and selfish. I promise you, Charlie, I’ll never be so silly again. You’re my whole world, you know that? I’ll never forget that again. Do you know how much you mean to me?”

Charlie blinked at me, sensing an opportunity.

“Can I have an ice-cream?” he said.