Fathers and Sons (20 page)

I looked wildly around me. We’d warned our children time without number not to go off with strangers, but it happens. A couple of years before Jack had been on his bike in Old Broadway and had ridden straight into a car cruising slowly down the street. He wasn’t hurt and we were in the house, oblivious. A few minutes later he ran in to tell us what had happened and finished with the words, ‘But I did cry a bit and the lady sitting next to the man driving put me on her knee and cuddled me. She was very kind, Mummy.’

I’d had visions of a latter-day Hindley and Brady on the prowl and exploded. ‘You never,
ever
get into a strange car. Not
ever
!’

Now it looked like he had, and this time the Big Bad Wolf really was behind the wheel. I had a sudden, vivid image of my son panicking in some paedophile’s car, now miles away somewhere on the North Circular. I pushed it away.

‘Hang on. Let’s think. Is there anywhere he could have gone? What about Ronnie and Jan?’

They used to live in our house. They had only moved a few hundred yards up the road, and had sons around Jack’s age.

They’d become friends. Jack always asked us if he wanted to call on them but perhaps, in all the excitement of Christmas Day, he’d forgotten. I grabbed my mobile phone and punched in their number. Jan answered.

‘Oh hi, Richard–Merry Christmas!’

I could hear party noises in the background, and the squeal of children’s voices.

‘Jan, is Jack there?’

My voice had cracked slightly, and she sounded startled as she said quickly, ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

‘Is he there?’

‘I don’t think so. But the house is full of kids. Hold on, I’ll check.’

She left the receiver swaying on the end of its flex and I heard it bumping lazily against the wall. Time seemed to slow and settle along with the swinging phone. Then it snapped back into gear as the receiver rattled. Jan was back on the line.

‘No, he’s definitely not here–he hasn’t been round for a couple of days. Is everything OK?’

That was that, then. The last door behind which our son might have been standing had slammed shut. Game over. Try again.

I stared at my wife. ‘I’m calling the police.’

She nodded hopelessly and sagged against the doorframe.

Dialling 999 seemed like the end of all hope; an abject admission that we’d failed to keep our child safe; surrendered him to the beasts of the forest. As I pressed the second nine I could see Tom and Dan darting about in the dusk on the heath, looking into bushes and ditches.

Every parent’s worst nightmare was taking solid form in front of us.

As I was about to complete the triple sequence, I suddenly remembered one last door we hadn’t tried. Our neighbours, an American couple, had a dog, a big grey Weimaraner called Sophie. Sometimes Jack went round to play with her. He always checked with us first, but…

I walked up their front path, praying fiercely. ‘God, let him be here. If you don’t, we’ve lost him. Make him be here. If you don’t, we’ve lost him. Let him be here.’

A couple passing by on the pavement heard me muttering to myself and stared for a moment before hurrying on.

I pressed the doorbell but couldn’t hear anything. It didn’t seem to be working, so I hammered on the door with my fist.

‘Is he there?’ Judy called from our front step.

‘Hold on.’ I banged on the door again, but there was no answer. Fuck, fuck, fuck, they were out. I turned away in despair, reaching for my phone again, but suddenly heard the faint sound of voices as a distant door opened. The family were at the back of the house, in their big kitchen. Footsteps approached and a lock and chain rattled.

The front door swung open and a blast of warmth and smell of cooking hit me. Our neighbour, Sandy, cracker hat askew and glass of wine in hand, swayed slightly before me. ‘Hey, Richard! Merry Christmas!’

‘Is Jack here?’

She blinked in surprise. Oh, God…

‘Sure, didn’t you know? He’s out back with Sophie getting
her to chase his new truck. We were just going to…’ She stared at me. ‘Richard…are you OK?’

My legs had given way and I was breathing oddly.

‘We’ve been…we couldn’t find him, Sandy. He was on the heath and then…he wasn’t. We looked everywhere. We thought he’d been…’

Her eyes widened.

‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry, we thought you knew he was here…I’m so sorry.’

Sophie came rushing out barking furiously, Jack on her heels.

‘Hi, Dad. Is our Christmas dinner ready? They’ve nearly finished theirs here…’

When I’d been Jack’s age there was a big fire at the gasworks at the end of Crow Lane. My mates and I watched, thrilled, as the fierce jet of flame thundered from a ruptured pipe directly on to one of the gasometers, blistering the paint and turning the metal beneath it a dull red. We’d managed to sneak through the police cordon and were up nice and close to the action. Then we were spotted, bundled into a squad car and driven home.

My mother’s language, when the officers on the doorstep explained what her son had been up to, was unprecedented.

Thirty years later, on another doorstep, history repeated itself.

Word for word.

I will never forget the animal intensity of my emotions over that thirty minutes on a Christmas Day; the relentless
acceleration of dread and fear, culminating in the absolute certainty that my son had been abducted. Even now my heart trembles at the memory of it, and yet all was well, nothing was wrong; happy endings all round. But what a glimpse into darkness those minutes provided; a very facsimile of hell.

Later, the children in bed, I reached for my Shakespeare and searched for Macduff’s haunting, horrified words when told that his children have been murdered.

‘Did you say all…all? What! All my pretty chickens…?’

I shivered and put the book back.

I said happy endings all round–not quite. The flash of completely unreasonable anger I felt towards my son when I found him at last was almost as fierce as the panic that preceded it, and it took a while to fade. Perhaps, too, there was a faint echo of my father’s propensity to explode with rage. I don’t know. But I assumed at the time this was a one-way passage of emotion; a strictly father-to-son, adult-to-child reaction. But a few years later I discovered this was wrong, and that the channel of relief and recrimination after a great scare flows just as strongly in the reverse direction.

We were celebrating my niece’s eighteenth birthday at a restaurant called the Blue Strawberry. In hindsight its strange name carried a hint of warning.

Our sprawling family party had commandeered a huge table and, as is usual when we all gather together, the conversational volume control was set to eleven. I was having a fierce argument with my sister’s husband about the current television remake of
The Forsyte Saga
. The nation was split over the casting of Gina McKee as Irene, originally played by the fragrant
Nyree Dawn Porter. I was with the half who thought McKee was terrific; my brother-in-law, Peter, was scathing.

He’d just made rather a good point and I intended to counter it. So I swallowed the entire chunk of rare beef I’d just forked into my mouth, wanting to return to the fray without delay.

I opened my mouth, but no words came. The slick piece of meat had wrapped itself snugly across the top of my windpipe, and I couldn’t make a sound. Neither could I breathe.

Choking–proper choking, I mean, not the coughing and spluttering we all make when something goes down the wrong way (if you can cough and splutter you’re OK)–is the most extraordinarily sinister physical experience I have ever had. I must have exhaled just before swallowing so I had very little air in my lungs; no reservoir of oxygen to compress upwards to punch out the obstruction. I sat in complete silence, trying to work out what to do. My brother-in-law thought I’d been silenced by his rapier thrust and turned to talk to someone else.

In the middle of this raucous family gathering, I was instantaneously trapped in my own little world.

I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to squeeze my ribcage in a sort of self-delivered bear hug. No dice. Then I thrust hard backwards into my chair and strained every muscle to try and deliver a cough. Not even the tiniest hack. My chest was locked in paralysis.

By now I’d started to drool slightly and black spots were beginning to appear in front of my eyes. Uh-oh.

Still no one noticed anything was wrong, even though I hadn’t spoken for at least thirty seconds (unheard of). I pushed my chair back with a crash and stood up, bending low over the
table and hammering it as hard as I could with my fists, not to attract attention but in an instinctive attempt to dislodge the blockage. It didn’t work but people now looked across at me curiously.

‘What on earth’s he doing?’

My face was beginning to turn as blue as the proverbial strawberry and Peter suddenly shouted, ‘Christ–he’s choking!’

Uproar. Fists crashing on my back (Judy’s). Bigger fists (Pete’s). Still the fucking thing in my throat wouldn’t budge, and now the dark spots were multiplying into a grey blizzard.

Strangely, the initial panic that had swept through me now faded, and I was able to think perfectly clearly. I remember telling myself: ‘This is a stupid way to die’ and a very high whine began droning in my head, exactly like a mosquito hovering over one’s ear on a hot summer night.

Still the pounding behind me went on, and still my respiratory system was stuck in stubborn lockdown.

Then I heard a new noise, not from inside my head but from the rapidly shrinking world in front of me as my peripheral vision shorted out. It was the sound of glasses and bottles being scattered as my sister, on the far side of the room, leaped on to the table and strode across it yelling ‘Get out of the way!’ with all the authority of the teacher that she is.

Elizabeth jumped down behind me and wrapped her arms around my lower chest, making a hard fist just below the sternum. Ah, I thought almost lazily, the old Heimlich manoeuvre. Good for sis.

Doctors say if you find yourself having to administer the Heimlich manoeuvre, you shouldn’t be afraid to break a few
ribs in the process, and my big sister certainly wasn’t. The violent squeeze she delivered made all those thumps on my back feel like kindly pats.

But it didn’t work. Not in the slightest degree. She tried again, and again, but my trachea stubbornly refused to release its grip on the intruder it had decided was trying to infiltrate the lungs beneath.

It’s called the drowning reflex. A sphincter muscle at the top of the windpipe instantly seals the tube shut when water tries to get in. If you’re drowning it’s the body’s way of buying a little extra time for you to get to the surface or be rescued, because the moment you inhale water, you’re pretty much finished. But the trachea can’t tell the difference between drowning and choking, and the conscious brain can’t override the primitive reflex that’s been triggered deep in the cerebral cortex. This evolutionary conundrum was now in the process of efficiently killing me, albeit in a companionable silence. Our little secret, which the way things were going it looked like I was about to carry with me to the grave.

Liz had started to panic. From what seemed like a great distance I heard her screaming, ‘Help! Somebody help me!’ I remembered Jack’s performance in another restaurant a long time ago, and smiled inwardly. I was quite calm now, and resigned. Another final coping reflex, apparently. A little homebrewed morphine to ease the crossing.

I managed to lift my head slightly as the light finally began to fade away altogether, and saw my daughter weeping hysterically on the far side of the table, her face pressed into her hands. I couldn’t see Judy–she was behind me–but Jack was
turned to the wall, beating it with both palms. I felt terribly sorry for all of them, having to see this awful finale; but was perfectly relaxed nevertheless. It was just time to go, that was all.

Perhaps it was my legs finally giving way that did it. As I buckled towards the floor my sister gave another despairing squeeze, the strongest yet, as if to drag me back. Muscle power combined with gravity and the rock in my throat moved for the first time since I’d swallowed it nearly three minutes before. It lifted very slightly, like a hinged lid on a bottle, and I managed to gulp in a tiny gasp of air before my stupid suicidal windpipe jealously grabbed the lump back again.

Liz felt it. ‘I think it’s coming!’ She gave another vicious heave.

Now I had a little air to work with I managed a tiny cough at the same time and up shot the vile–and by now almost liquid–piece of meat, into my mouth. I spat it out with what looked like contempt but was pure relief, and sucked in the biggest lungful of air in my entire life. Sound and vision flickered for a moment, and then snapped back to normal. All systems go.

Laughter. Tears. Cheers. I hugged my sister, I hugged my wife, I hugged my sister again. Chloe was suddenly in my arms too.

‘Oh, Daddy, I thought you were dying…’

‘I can assure you I was, chicken,’ I croaked, ‘but it’s all right now…I’m fine now.’

Then Jack appeared in front of me, cheeks wet with tears, hair wild, face contorted with fury. He pointed a trembling finger right into my face.

‘
Never. Eat. Again
.’

There was a moment’s pause and then everyone except Jack cracked up. He looked round in angry confusion.

‘I mean, never eat
meat
again…I’m serious, Dad. Don’t ever do that again…please…’ And he burst into tears.

He was easily the most affected person in the room. Jack was sixteen when his Pa nearly expired before his very eyes, but even now, in his twenties, he looks up in alarm if I so much as clear my throat while I’m eating. His anger with me that day was an interesting reflection of my own with him the Christmas he went missing. Perhaps men instinctively resent having their deepest emotions disturbed unnecessarily as things turn out; an atavistic sense that their feelings have been toyed with needlessly.

Judy certainly wasn’t angry with Jack when I discovered him next door that Christmas Day. She was just suffused with relief. Meanwhile, within minutes of my sister saving my life, both Elizabeth and Judy were making dry jokes at my expense about what had just happened. Even Chloe started teasing me before we’d even left the restaurant.