by John Macken
‘We’re upstairs,’ she said, turning and heading back the way she had come.
Reuben waited a moment, then followed her up. They were in Lucy’s bedroom, the room that Reuben used to call his own. The room where he had once found evidence that Lucy was sleeping with another man. He glanced at the bed, then quickly away. The taking of their son had momentarily brought them closer together, finding solace and support in each other, sticking together while the world went mad around them. Now, Reuben wasn’t so sure. A crisis changes things. But when the crisis is over, what then?
Lucy was in the middle of folding clothes. She had obviously been busy, catching up with household chores that had come to a grinding halt for a week. She no longer looked tired. There was a swiftness about her movements that spoke of freedom and relief. Joshua was standing against the bed, running a pair of plastic cars over the duvet, crashing them repeatedly into each other. He had been quiet since his release from hospital. Not his usual frantic, dizzying self, dashing around full of energy, alive with every new sensation and experience available to him.
Reuben walked over and kissed the top of his head. ‘How are you doing, little fella?’
Joshua didn’t say anything. He was absorbed in his game, quietly getting on with it.
‘They’re amazing,’ Reuben said to Lucy. ‘Children. To see him standing up, playing . . .’ He stopped. He hadn’t fully got over the feeling that his son was dead. Reuben still felt that at any moment he would wake from the surgery on his fingers, come round from the anaesthetic, with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, and be told that his son hadn’t made it. Seeing him face down on the filthy mattress, paralysed by barbiturates, his breathing so shallow Reuben couldn’t feel it, his skin so cold that Reuben had assumed the worst. He needed to compartmentalize it all, store it away out of sight, like he did with all the atrocity and depravity he came across. But he knew it wasn’t going to be so easy this time. Morgan’s shrine to his dead fiancée tracked him down again, tugging at him, infecting him with images that he was struggling to repress.
‘So what did Sarah have to say?’ Lucy asked, cutting into the hours he had spent in that horrific room with its blood-painted walls.
Reuben looked over at her. She was perched on the edge of the bed, a few crumpled clothes on her left, a pile of folded ones on her right. ‘Not much,’ he answered.
‘Come on, she must have said something.’
‘Mild bollocking. Suspended until further notice.’
‘Could have been worse.’
‘I’m surprised it isn’t.’
‘Why the leniency? It’s not like her.’
‘The sad thing is, I think it comes down to PR. I catch the man who has killed five people in the capital, and who has snatched my son. CID don’t want to be seen to publicly sack me.’
‘The hero saves the day.’
‘I’m no hero, Lucy. Most of what I did was wrong.’
‘Well, you are to me. And you are to that little boy there.’
‘Just as long as you never tell him that. I don’t want him ever to know what happened to him.’ Reuben bent down and picked his son up. Joshua continued to crash the plastic cars into each other. To have him moving, alive, fidgeting in his arms was the best feeling he could imagine. ‘And I don’t want him to look up to his dad. I just want him to live his own life.’ Reuben kissed him again, nuzzling himself against his son’s soft and warm skin.
Lucy folded the last item, a tiny red T-shirt with the words I Do My Own Stunts printed on the front. ‘While Joshua was missing I couldn’t bear to wash clothes that smelled of him and might never be worn again.’ She stood up, placed the pile of folded items into a plastic basket and carried it over to Reuben. ‘So what now, Dr Maitland?’
‘I wish I could tell you.’
Lucy stepped past him and opened the top drawer of an Ikea set that Reuben remembered battling to construct two years earlier. She pulled out a thick white A4 envelope, the crest of her law firm embossed in the top right corner. ‘I finally had some divorce papers drawn up.’
She handed the package to him. He juggled Joshua round, took the envelope with his good hand. He didn’t open it, just felt the weight, the mass of paper inside, the gravity of the clauses and subclauses, the implications for his life and for his son’s.
‘You don’t have to read them now,’ Lucy said. ‘But I want you to sign them.’
Reuben felt a kick high in the stomach, like he was winded. He gripped Joshua tight, afraid that if he let him go he would disappear for ever. A Sunday dad, a part-time father, sliding gradually and inexorably out of view. ‘Really?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been thinking all the time Joshua was missing.’
‘And?’
‘I want us to get divorced.’
‘Right.’
Lucy fixed her brown eyes on him. There was light in them, a radiance that had edged further and further back inside her over the last seven days. ‘And then I want us to start again. From scratch. Two individuals, the future ahead of us, nothing in our past that can ever hurt us or keep us.’
Reuben leaned forward and kissed her.
‘Stop interrupting me,’ Lucy said, pulling back. ‘I’m trying to tell you something important.’
Reuben kissed her again, hard on the mouth. Joshua placed a chubby arm around his mother, a car still gripped tight in his hand.
‘And so am I,’ Reuben whispered.
