Little Black Lies (3 page)

They are hiding.

I wish they wouldn’t, but hide-and-seek was one of their favourite games when they were alive and sometimes they play it with me still. I start to search the house again, this time looking properly, and all the time, the storm cloud in my head is getting thicker. I’m pulling open wardrobe doors, tugging back shower curtains, peering under the spare-room bed. If I’m honest, this game has always unnerved me, even when I knew I’d find two warm, strong bodies at the end of the search.

I’m downstairs again. They can only be outside. I open the back door and the wind races in as though it’s been waiting to pounce.

They’re not out here. I can feel them slipping away. Two sounds cut through the rushing of the wind, both moans of abject misery. One from Queenie, the other from me.

‘Ned! Kit!’

They’re gone. Just as I was certain of their presence earlier, I’m sure of their absence now.

There is very little light left in my head. I’m upstairs again, in the small extension to my bedroom that I use as a study. I’m kneeling by my desk, fumbling at the pull-out drawer I always keep locked. I find what I’m looking for. I keep it sharp.

Downstairs, Queenie starts to howl.

*   *   *

Some time later, the fog lifts. I drag myself up off the carpet and into the desk chair. My left hand is bleeding. I put the harpoon head back in its drawer. The photograph of Rachel at my feet has been cut and stabbed to a torn, ribbony mess.

Bending, I drop the pieces in the bin. I have other copies of the same photograph. For next time.

I’m so tired I can hardly think. I need to shower and sleep, but something keeps me here, nursing my injured hand, staring at the walls around me. I keep the rest of my house much as it was when the boys were alive and Ben lived here, but over the last three years this small study space has become my indulgence room.

There are photographs of Ned and Kit all over the walls, some of them framed, most simply stuck on to the paintwork with Blu Tack. Their artwork from school is here too, little certificates they won in class, even some baby clothes I kept, all hanging from the wall in a grim, memorial montage.

‘Christ, Catrin,’ Ben said, when he called back to collect something from the loft. ‘This isn’t a study, it’s a shrine.’

On the wall behind me, though, is something different. Here are photographs of two other little boys; two dark-haired, dark-eyed boys who vanished – suddenly, mysteriously. The first, Fred Harper, went missing during the sports day on West Falkland, a little over two years ago, when my grief was still raw, weeping like a fresh sore. He was five years old.

I’d heard the news of his disappearance, of course. The radio had been full of it for days and Ben, who’d been on the island as part of the emergency medical team, had taken part in the search. When I saw the story in the
Penguin News,
accompanied by a large portrait photograph, my heart leapt. Fred looked so much like Kit. I’d cut it out instinctively, hiding it away, eventually pinning it to the wall along with everything else about him that appeared in the paper over the coming weeks.

Maybe I kept the coverage as a sort of test of my humanity. If Fred was found, and I was glad, it would be a sign that there was still hope for me. And then, about a year and a half ago, the islands lost a second little boy. Seven-year-old Jimmy Brown was last seen at Surf Bay where Rachel lives. I knew the Brown family reasonably well. I was friends with the mother, Gemma, whose daughter, Jimmy’s little sister, was in Kit’s class at school. Ben knew the father, who worked up at the hospital as a technician.

When Jimmy disappeared, when the whole town spent days and nights searching, as his family sunk deeper into a sort of frantic despair, more than one person told me that at least I had closure. I knew what had happened to my sons, I’d been able to bury them, grieve properly, a privilege denied to the families of the missing.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said to one woman. ‘I do appreciate how lucky I am.’

She hasn’t spoken to me since.

Below the pictures of Fred and Jimmy is another cutting, not directly related to the boys but one that touched me, at the time. A couple of months after Jimmy vanished, when the searches were still taking place, albeit more contained and without any real hope, the
Penguin News
’ editor-in-chief wrote about the impact of missing children upon a community, especially a small one. He talked about a collective sense of shame, about the belief that children are a shared responsibility and that harm coming to any one of them reflects upon us all.

The piece hadn’t been written with my sons in mind, but I’d found some comfort in it all the same. It had made me realize that Ben and I, and our immediate circle, weren’t alone in feeling the impact of the boys’ deaths. That, in some small way, our pain was shared.

The writer, Rachel’s father of all people, had gone on to talk about how cultures deal with children who vanish. He wrote about how the vanishings quickly slip into local folklore, appearing first of all as ghostly sightings and then later in the oral tradition of storytelling. Missing children, he argued, are behind all the tales of children stolen by fairies, or eaten by trolls and witches. We deal with our shame by externalizing it. By blaming supernatural forces.

He’d unearthed old legends about children coming to grief here on the islands, and linked them to real-life cases of unexplained deaths and disappearances. In fifty years’ time, he claimed, Jimmy and Fred would have found their way into Falkland mythology.

Ned, Kit, Fred and Jimmy. My own little collection of dead boys. Was there to be a fifth now, was our collective shame to grow ever greater?

I lean across my desk and switch on the radio. The locally run radio station is broadcasting later than it would normally. The missing child is called Archie West, I learn. He is three years and two months old. A little older than Rachel’s youngest.

No, don’t think about Rachel, not now.

‘Just a reminder then,’ says the anchorman, aka Bill from the fishmonger’s, ‘Archie has blond curls, brown eyes and is of a stocky build. He was last seen wearing an Arsenal football strip, red shirt with white sleeves, white shorts and red socks. If you think you’ve seen anything of him, get in touch with the police immediately. OK, this is Falkland Islands Broadcasting Service, Bill Krill with you for the next couple of hours, the time is one forty-three in the morning and, don’t forget, tomorrow morning – or should I say later on
this
morning – we have Ray Green from the Astronomy Society coming in to tell us all about Thursday’s solar eclipse: where best to see it, how to avoid eye damage and just how dark we can expect the islands to become.’

I turn out the lights, go to the window and look west. The solar eclipse on Thursday will occur at almost the exact time my plan goes into effect. This far south we’ll only see a partial eclipse, but nevertheless, some time between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, our tiny corner of the world will go dark.

In more ways than one.

‘With me here in the studio is Sally Hoskins,’ says Bill, ‘a friend of the family, who’s been telling us that Archie is a lively, inquisitive child. Is that right, Sally?’

I haven’t a hope of seeing the search party, of course. They are nearly twenty miles distant and there are mountains in the way.

‘Yes, Bill, that’s right. Archie’s a lovely boy. Full of fun, full of mischief. He loves playing hide-and-seek.’

There are fewer lights down at the harbour. Skye must have persuaded the passengers to return to the cruise ship after all.

‘And that’s why the family didn’t worry at first?’

‘That’s right. We assumed he was hiding. He can keep it up for hours.’

I can barely make out Mount Tumbledown. The search will be taking place beyond it.

‘We all searched for over two hours before calling the police.’ Sally’s voice over the airwaves keeps breaking. ‘Archie’s parents want me to thank everyone for their support tonight. People have been so brilliant. Joining the search, checking their properties. I just want to say please keep looking. And if you know where he is, please do the right thing. Please let him come back to his family.’

‘Sally, why don’t you tell us a bit more about Archie?’ Bill jumps in quickly. ‘We know he likes hide-and-seek. What else does he enjoy?’

‘Oh, you know, Bill, he’s a mad keen Arsenal fan. Like all his family really. He’s going through a phase where he won’t wear anything but the Arsenal strip and his poor mum has to wash it overnight so he can wear it again the next day. He knows all the club songs, some of them not really appropriate for a three-year-old, but what can you do?’

I’m only half listening as Sally goes on to tell us about Archie’s love of pop music. Apparently, he can’t sit still when the radio plays ‘Here Comes the Hotstepper’. And about how he won’t miss an episode of
Power Rangers.

‘And if anyone has Archie, please don’t hurt him or frighten him in any way,’ she’s saying now. ‘If anyone has taken Archie, all we want is to get him back. Please, tell us where to find him. Please don’t hurt him.’

‘Yes, right. Well, thank you, Sally. But I think it’s worth mentioning, just as a reminder, that the police are working on the assumption that young Archie simply wandered off from his family and got lost. That’s what we have to concentrate on now, folks. A little boy has wandered away by himself, and we have to find him. Right, this is Bill Krill, and you’re listening to Falkland Islands Broadcasting Service.’

‘Jesus, what is wrong with you people?’ Sally interrupts the opening chords of the next song. ‘How many children have to go missing before you actually do—’

Sally’s voice cuts out. They’ve switched off her microphone. The music increases in volume: the reggae song that we’ve just heard is Archie’s favourite. I picture Sally being gently, but firmly, removed from the backroom at the local newspaper office from where the radio service is broadcast. Different culture, I tell myself. In England, when a child vanishes, the default setting is to panic about paedophiles. Here, we hope he didn’t wander into a sea-lion colony.

Three lost children in as many years. It’s a lot to blame on sea lions.

I hear a gentle sigh that tells me Queenie has thought it safe to come back. She jumps on to my bed, snuggling into the groove between the pillows. I switch off the radio and turn on the computer. When it’s fired up, I write up notes of my evening and then close the file and click on the only document I ever password-protect.

I never kept a diary before the boys died. I never felt the need, and with a husband, two young children and a job, when would I have found the time? My life before was too full for there to be any question of the need to document it. Now, with an empty heart and a meaningless life, it is as though I need this regular record of my comings and goings, my thought processes and emotional seasons, to remind myself that I still exist.

I start writing. I always detail the events of the day, not because I have any real interest in remembering what I do at work, but because what I do helps to punctuate what I feel. It’s the nearest I can get to therapy, these daily outpourings of misery and rage. Mainly rage, if I’m honest, invariably directed at the woman whose photograph lies shredded at my feet. The woman who used to be my best friend.

*   *   *

I was eight years old when I met Rachel, she a few months younger. I was making my way along a track that was only wide enough for a child to squeeze through, so densely packed were the tussock clumps, when I came across a small, butterfly-emblazoned bottom pointing to the sky. She must have heard me, although I walk very quietly, because without turning, she held up a grubby, nail-bitten hand. It was such an imperious gesture it immediately put my eight-year-old back up.

‘What are you doing?’

She wriggled backwards until I could see a small, round face with big blue eyes, creamy, freckle-free skin and very long hair that was a fraction too dark to be blonde. She had eyebrows that seemed to arch in the centre, as though she was permanently surprised and her ears stuck out from her head like those of an elf.

‘Dragons’ eggs,’ she hissed at me. ‘Don’t say another word.’

Bemused, I dropped to the sand and crawled up alongside her. She was staring at two creamy-yellow shapes, each a perfect oval, about four inches long. The nest of a gentoo penguin.

‘They belong to Ozmajian.’ She seemed determined to communicate in a low-pitched hiss, even though we were the only two people within half a mile. ‘A very powerful dragon. She was born when the thousandth heart was broken, which makes her very old, but dragon memories aren’t like ours.’

At eight years old I knew that gentoo penguins often nested in the tussock, that the mother wouldn’t normally leave her nest for so long and that the two of us were probably keeping her away. I knew I should suggest moving, but I admit I was curious about the dragon.

‘Aren’t they?’ I matched her low-pitched, secretive tone.

She pressed closer, snuggling into my body in the completely unselfconscious way of very young children. ‘No. Dragons can remember everything that came before, is happening in the now and what will ever be hereafter.’

Well, that needed some thinking about. ‘We should probably go,’ I said. ‘She could be back any time.’

‘Oh, she won’t come back. The eggs will stay here until three moons have waxed and waned. Then the black eagles with sapphire eyes will carry them off and guard them until it’s time for them to hatch. That could be tomorrow. It could be in the next millennium.’

At that age, I could identify nearly forty species of Falkland nesting birds, but the black eagle with sapphire eyes was a new one on me. In the meantime, the wind was getting up, bringing with it the tang of salt on the air and I was getting very worried about the mother penguin. If they get too stressed, they can wander off and leave a nest.

‘The next new moon is five nights away.’ I’ve always been aware of exactly what the moon is doing, even as a child. ‘They won’t go till then. I can come back, if you like, to check.’