Burnt Paper Sky (21 page)

‘Am I Alice or Katy?’ I asked.

‘Katy.’ It was a whisper and Nicky’s face contorted tearfully around it, mirroring mine.

In the photo, my parents’ expressions were impossible to read. They were both smiling for the camera and I tried in vain to imagine what was actually going through their minds. I looked at my brother. He sat in the centre, cocooned by their bodies: a terminally ill little boy who was never going to get to live a proper life. I wondered whether they’d had the diagnosis before this photograph was taken, or were they just worried about his eyesight at this stage, thinking that was bad enough and having no idea what horrors lay just around the corner for their little boy. A boy who looked just like Ben.

I said to Clemo, ‘Why are you telling me this now?’

He addressed Nicky. ‘We spoke to your sister’s ex-husband this morning.’

She looked at him warily and raised her chin slightly, with a touch of defiance. She let go of my hand. The light in the room fluctuated, growing darker and more riddled with shadows as the clouds lowered outside.

‘I know what you’re going to say, and it’s bullshit,’ she said.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I know what you’re trying to do, but you’re wrong.’

‘What am I trying to do?’

‘I don’t have to listen to this.’

‘I think we both know that you do.’

She crossed her arms, stared down at the table.

I sat in a state of pure, simple shock. I knew well enough by now that you could lose your child in just a few minutes, but I was shocked into silence by the new knowledge that in a similar space of time you could also gain and lose a brother who was the image of that child, and parents who were more imperfect than any version of them that I’d ever imagined.

Clemo spoke to Nicky: ‘John Finch told us that when Ben was born, he was concerned that you might have what could be described as an unhealthy interest in Ben. Would you like to comment on that?’

‘You revolting man,’ said my sister. ‘You haven’t got a clue who’s got Ben so you’ve decided to pick on me. Easier to get to someone close to home, is it? Stops you having to do so much work?’

Clemo’s gaze never left her face. ‘Would you care to comment?’ he asked her. ‘I’d be very interested to hear what your response might be.’

‘I’m sure you would,’ she replied.

‘I expect your sister would as well,’ he said.

Nicky looked at me. ‘I’ve tried so hard, and for so long, to protect you. I just wanted you to have a life where you didn’t feel rejected. I wanted it to be straightforward for you. But you were so…⁠’ She searched for a word, frustrated.

‘What?’

‘Difficult, and ungrateful.’

‘For what? Ungrateful for what?’

‘And irresponsible! You never understood anything. You just took it all for granted. You did what you wanted to do, when you wanted to do it. You had no burden. You had no loss to bear.’

‘I had the loss of my parents to bear.’ I said this quietly, because I understood that she’d had more to cope with, but she was angry now, and so was I.

‘You were clueless! Totally clueless!’

‘How could I have been any other way, if you didn’t tell me anything? That’s not my fault.’

She didn’t respond to that, she had more to get off her chest. ‘You never thanked me.’

‘For what?’

‘For protecting you.’

‘How could I have known?’

‘They never thanked me either.’

Suddenly she lost her momentum, as if that statement summed up the hopelessness of it all.

Clemo leaned in towards her. ‘Who never thanked you?’

‘Mum and Dad.’

‘What did they never thank you for?’ he asked.

‘For loving Charlie, for watching him when they’d had enough, for making him smile when they were too tired, when they couldn’t cope any longer.’

Her eyes were glassy with loss. His were intent.

‘Nicky. Were you jealous when Rachel had Ben?’

She snapped an answer at him as if he were running through a questionnaire.

‘Yes, I was jealous, yes.’

‘But you had the girls,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand,’ she said.

‘Why were you jealous?’ said Clemo.

‘Because he looked like Charlie, right from the start. All I could see when I looked at him was Charlie.’

‘Did you feel that Rachel might not be able to care for Ben properly?’ said Clemo.

‘I was worried,’ she said simply, and she turned to face me. ‘You were so feckless, you know, so young?’

My sister spoke as if she’d rehearsed these words for years. Her speech gathered pace, as if she were confessing something.

‘You messed about for years, you never bothered with schoolwork although they said you could have done brilliantly if you’d tried. You never cared about anything, and then all of a sudden you got John. God knows how, because you were pissing your life away, partying all the time, and suddenly everything was so perfect and what had you done to deserve it? Nothing.’

‘We fell in love,’ I said, but she took no notice. She couldn’t seem to stop herself now.

‘I knew you’d have a boy the minute you told me you were pregnant. And when he was born and I went to see him and I held him, I saw Charlie in him. It was as if he was Charlie, reborn. He was so precious, and I wasn’t sure you’d be able to look after him.’

‘So you called John Finch,’ said Clemo.

‘Just to check that she was coping, that she was doing the right thing.’

‘Mr Finch says that you were rather insistent with your phone calls.’

‘Well he wouldn’t give me any information!’

I interrupted them. ‘John never said anything to me.’

They ignored me, their eyes were locked, Nicky’s gaze furious, his eyes hard like ice; their terrible dialogue unpicking yet more of the stitches that had held my life together. I was relegated to the role of spectator.

‘Nicky,’ he said, ‘did you want to have Ben for yourself? So you could look after him properly?’

‘That’s the thing,’ she said, ‘I didn’t. I didn’t want her to have him, but I didn’t want him either. He would just have reminded me every day what I’d lost, and that’s why you’re wrong.’

‘Wrong about what?’

‘For pity’s sake!’ She laughed. It was a shrill, upsetting sound. ‘Stop playing games with me! What would I do with him? Where do you think I would keep him?’

‘I think you might like to have him. I think you’ve always wanted him.’

The baldness of this, the slow, calm way he said it, made my sister pause and collect herself before she spoke again, as if she realised she couldn’t combat his accusations with emotion alone.

‘Well, you’re not sure, are you? If you’d got any actual evidence you’d have arrested me, so this is a pathetic attempt to get me to confess to something I haven’t done.’

Now she leaned across the table towards him.

‘You made me tell my sister about our family. That was low. You’re not getting anything else. I’ve told you that I’ve got nothing to do with Ben’s disappearance and that’s all you need to know. The rest is private. Why don’t you get out there and start looking for him before it’s too late?’

She got up and went into the garden, slamming the kitchen door behind her. Zhang went after her.

I was left sitting at the table with Clemo.

He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry to land this on you like this. I hope you understand that we have to follow everything up.’

I just stared at him, wondering why anybody would ever do a job like his and believing for the first time that he would do anything it took to find Ben.

The immediate aftermath was the first in a series of new body blows.

Nicky swept everything up from the table, all her hard work, gathered it hastily and tried to push it into her bag. Her movements were rough and clumsy.

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Please don’t.’

I felt as though she was falling apart right in front of my eyes. I wondered if that’s what it had been like when she first went to Esther’s, to live in the cottage, right after it happened, when I was a baby, when her grief must have been unbearable.

And I realised that in the future I would wonder about everything.

From now on it would be impossible to unpick every detail of my history, every assumption that had led to me building a sense of my own identity, and of Ben’s identity. My past had been crumpled up and thrown into the fire, and I would have to sort through the ashes, with only Nicky as my guide. Nicky, who had lied to me for a very long time; Nicky, who said that she’d lied to protect me; Nicky, who I needed.

‘I should leave,’ she said. ‘You’re better off without me. You know, I would
never
,
ever
hurt Ben. Can I just say that? I would
never
hurt Ben.’

Her distress pushed her voice to an acute pitch, and I went to comfort her.

‘I know you wouldn’t.’

She let her bag slide down her shoulder and onto the table, and the papers spilled back out of it. Her head fell onto my shoulder and her body shook.

Are you surprised at my reaction to her? At my willingness to accept what I’d heard and offer her comfort?

It wasn’t the end of it. Of course it wasn’t. If I think back to that day I can remember the stages I went through. I suppose it was like the stages of grief, although this was different. This was the processing of what felt like a betrayal, this was the seeping away of trust.

After the door had clicked shut behind an adrenalin-pumped Clemo and a Zhang who couldn’t meet my eye for the first time, that first interaction Nicky and I had was of course a reflex, an urge to keep Nicky by me, to deny that anything had changed. She’d been my rock, always, and I couldn’t contemplate any other existence. It wasn’t in my DNA. Or I’d thought it wasn’t.

After that exchange we separated. Nicky unpacking her bag robotically, calling on those massive reserves of strength to anchor her to my table, to keep her going as she delved deeper and deeper into whatever the web had to offer her.

I went to my safe place, to Ben’s room, and I immersed myself in him, as was my habit. It was the only place I felt secure. His bedroom had become my womb.

This was my second stage.

I sank onto the beanbag on the floor of his room and I felt as if I was cast adrift in a small wooden boat, shrouded by a watery grey mist. And suspended within each of the millions of fine droplets that made up the mist, was the news, the bombshell that I’d just heard. And in this stage it simply surrounded me, existing, but not yet understood. And within it I felt baseless, disorientated and lost.

The third state was the inevitable churning of my mind, the processing of what I’d learned, and of its implications, the moment the droplets of mist began to settle on my skin and permeate it. It was when the knowledge became part of me and it was irreversible. I had to face up to it.

It led swiftly to the fourth state.

That was the erosion of my trust, where the droplets on my skin turned to acid and began to burn, producing a feeling that was intense and painful, a pins and needles of the mind and the body, and it was so creepy and unsettling that I couldn’t remain still any longer.

I got out of Ben’s bed and looked out of the window, and I saw Nicky below in my garden with the dog, petting him, encouraging him to pee. They stood on the soggy, tatty lawn by the abandoned relic of Ben’s football goal, the net broken from the frame in places, the grass in front of it worn from where he’d played. I backed away from the window, not so that the press wouldn’t see me, but so that my sister wouldn’t.

And as dusk fell again, wrapping itself around the edges of the day, I ran back through events, until I thought about how I had started the day: the photographer in my garden, Nicky’s anger with him, her outburst on the street, her loyalty.

And then I thought about the previous day, and how it had started with an internet search, and with a laptop that belonged to Nicky, that needed a password, and how that password was the name of my son.

And each intake of breath felt sharp in my lungs and my mind roved further and I thought of Nicky’s discontent with her daughters, and what Clemo said about her wanting a son. And then I thought of her words: ‘It was as if he was Charlie, reborn.’

I began to cry hot, silent tears, and they had sharp edges just like my breath did, and they ran down my cheeks and soaked into Ben’s nunny which I held tightly to my face.

When I heard Nicky’s footsteps on the stairs I got into Ben’s bed, covered myself up, turned away from the door and tried to breathe slowly so she would think I was asleep.

When she put her head around the door of the room and asked if I wanted any food I didn’t answer her.

When she reappeared some minutes later with a tray of supper I still couldn’t look at her, couldn’t speak to her.

‘I just wanted to protect you,’ she said.

She shut the door quietly behind her, respecting my privacy, and all I could feel was a throbbing. It was the pulse of the time since Ben had been missing. And it felt as if it had begun to beat faster.