The Winter's Child

by Cassandra Parkin

  He looks so sad, so vulnerable and ashamed, and at the same time his hand against my leg is so dry and hot with longing, that there’s nothing else I can do but kiss him, and all the things that come after kissing him, the touching and the stroking and the squeezing and the long slow unravelling. How long is it since I had sex twice in a couple of hours? Decades. How long for him? I’ll never know.

  Afterwards, he stands by the bed and stretches. This means our time is coming to an end. It’s almost a relief. Such companionship, after such loneliness, has me stretched tight and painful, gorged to the point of sickness.

  “Can I use your bathroom?”

  “Of course. Just out on the landing.”

  I lie beneath the covers and savour the small sounds of his presence. The floorboards yielding to footsteps that aren’t mine, the click of the light switch that I haven’t touched, the running of the tap that I haven’t turned. His sudden reappearance in the doorway of the bedroom makes my heart leap.

  “Can you remember where I left my clothes?”

  “They’re somewhere in the hall. I think.”

  I hear the stairs creak, and the small sounds of clothes being gathered. “Fine copper I am. Can’t even remember where I left my kit…” He dresses quickly, shyly, as if he’s suddenly embarrassed about me seeing him. Should I offer him coffee? A sandwich? In his pocket, his mobile phone buzzes.

  “Sorry,” he mutters as he fumbles it out. I try to glimpse the name on the screen. Is it Bella, asserting her superior claim? Has she guessed his betrayal? Nick swipes the screen, raises his eyebrows in apology, and takes the call out onto the landing, a poor disguise since I can hear every word he says. Hiya, mate, what’s up? No problem. What? When? So where is it? And who was it found it? God, who’d have a dog, eh? And was it hidden, or… okay, yeah, got it. No, I know, they can’t help themselves, it’s just instinct, isn’t it? Has it done much damage to the… Okay, well, let’s hope. So who’s attending from… okay, understood. Yeah, definitely the best. No, no problem, mate, I want to be there. Right. Got it. No. Yep. No. No, I agree, absolutely not, not until we’ve had someone take a look and confirm if it’s a good match. Right. I’m on my way now, mate, see you there. Yeah, I know. Right, bye.

  Even if I was too stupid to understand what I’ve just overheard, I would be able to read it in Nick’s expression when he comes back into the bedroom to kiss me goodbye. His face is closed and intent, his mind already elsewhere. This must be how soldiers look before they go to war, how hunters look before setting out across the plains.

  “Is everything all right?”

  He kisses me, hard and triumphant. “That was work. I have to go.”

  “You’ve found a body?”

  “Yeah.” He can’t hide the excitement in his eyes. “Based on the description, it sounds like it could be a teenage boy.”

  My heart turns over in my chest. “Is it… it’s not—”

  “Oh my God, Susannah, sweetheart, no. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. No, it’s not, it’s not him, okay? I don’t know for sure who it is but I promise, this is not Joel.” He strokes the top of my head, then kisses me there, comforting and paternal. I can tell he’s not sure, just as I am not sure, if the body not being Joel is good news or bad. “I have to go now, okay? Will you be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t like leaving you on your own. I’ll call your sister, shall I? Get her to come round?”

  “No. We’re not really speaking at the moment. Nothing serious,” I add hastily. “It’ll sort itself out. But just, no, don’t call her.”

  “You’ll be careful?”

  “Yes.”

  “And call me if you need anything?”

  How can I call him when I know the terrible work he’s about to embark upon? “Yes, I’ll call.” Still he hesitates. “What? What is it?”

  “Can I ask you to do something for me?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Lock the door when I’ve gone,” he says. “And don’t call Jackie.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Friday 7th December 2012

  When I leave the police station, I’m shivering as if I have a fever. The streets feel alien and oppressive and the trees stand watch like sentinels. The sensation is one of escape, but I know it’s only an illusion. If the police want me back, all they have to do is to stretch out their hand and hook me back inside again. Perhaps they’re only letting me go now so they can watch what I do when I think I’m not being watched. Is there someone discreetly trailing me? I look behind me a few times, but no one looks back at me with furtive innocence, and no one flinches back between parked cars or crams themselves into doorways, and no one’s face grows gradually familiar. Is this because the person following me is too clever to be caught? Or is it because there’s no one there at all?

  I should wait at the station for John, but I can’t bear to sit in that shiny-floored reception and watch the slow flow of people in and out. Instead I stand at the bus stop and let the shadows gather around me. The sky is heavy with rain that’s only a few minutes away from becoming snow; another downward twitch of the thermometer and we’ll be there, drowning in tumbling white. I wonder if it’s obvious where I’ve been, if people recognise my face from the newspaper and television appeals. I hope not. I want it to be Joel’s face that they remember. But even if that photograph of his tousled blond hair and anxious eyes has burned its way into their brain, what good will it do? A photo freezes us in time, and time has moved on. Even if they pass Joel on the street, see him getting on or off a bus or a train, entering or leaving a building, how will they ever connect the young grubby man with the rucksack on his back with the face of my lost boy? If he’s still in the city, he’ll be in the places where most people don’t want to go, among the people we choose to look away from. The cold white light of the bus’s interior drown out the anaemic watercolours of the winter sunset, and the bus driver has hung a boa of tinsel around his fat neck. I climb on board and take my seat among the silent crowd, staring blindly out at the Christmas lights that have begun to appear in the windows and on the walls of the houses we pass, each of us locked away in a bubble of solitude. How can it be so close to Christmas already, and Joel still not found?

  At the interchange, the trains call to me as they always do, with their paradoxical promise of both order and adventure, the wildness of elsewhere corralled into a timetable, each journey into the unknown bound with iron rails. Did Joel hear them calling to him that afternoon? If I stand beneath the screen and stare for long enough, will I recognise the place he chose? Perhaps there will be a signal, a feeling, some jolt or twitch on the secret invisible connection that unites my heart with his. How will I tell the police that I know where he went? I’ll have to invent some plausible-sounding lie. A conversation newly recalled, perhaps. I just remembered that Joel told me once that if he was going to run away, he’d run to Nottingham/Penzance/Aberystwyth… I’d like to think this will be enough to make them drop everything and tear off with sirens screaming but I know now it doesn’t work like that. Instead they’ll want to know when and where, what I said in reply, how long ago, and where did I say again? And why do I think he picked that place? I’ll have to work out all the details first, and then maybe even take John into my confidence, to ensure my memorable day trips or family holidays don’t take him by surprise.

  I’ll do this another day, another day when I have exhausted the possibilities of my own city. There are still places here I need to visit and re-visit, searching for the signal that I know is out there if only I can find it. Somewhere, if I look hard enough and often enough, there is something that will lead my back to my son. Go home and try to rest, they told me at the station, the way they always do, but I don’t have time to rest. I have too much work to do. Four weeks gone, and I’ve begun to accept that Joel may not come back to me of his own free will, that it will take some special effort to wrench the universe into a shape that gives him back. I’ve not yet begun
to accept that he may not come back at all.

  In the time I spent in the police station, the world’s grown darker. It takes me a long time to get home. It’s much quicker by car, and I wonder if John might have beaten me home, but the house is like a tomb and the garage is empty. My feet hurt and I’m tired, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I have to keep going. If I try hard enough, make enough sacrifices, the universe will relent and give me back my child. Before I leave the house, I scribble a note for John, just a few words so he knows I’ve been home and I’m not dead.

  Gone out to look for Joel – S.

  How often do people write notes for each other these days? So much simpler and more efficient to send a text. Why would you leave me a note in a building I’m not even in yet, when you can just send me a text that I can read right where I am? John asked me once, and for once John and Joel laughed together, and Joel hugged me and told me not to worry, I was still the best mum in the world and then later John kissed me and told me he loved me exactly as I was, old-fashioned notes and all. Will I ever have a moment like that again? (The answer is no, but I don’t know that yet.) But there must still be a place for handwritten messages. If you were walking out on your marriage, perhaps. If you were running away. Oh God, why didn’t Joel leave us a note? Does this mean he must be…?

  I can only escape this thought with action. I leave the house with the ordered frenzy of an overwound clockwork toy: hat, gloves, keys, phone, check the door and out of the front gate before my thoughts can catch up with me. The street is deserted, but nonetheless I feel breathless watchers staring out at me from the looming houses. I dart my eyes around trying to catch them, but find only my next-door neighbour standing tall and bent in his front bedroom window. When he sees me looking, he slowly raises one hand in greeting.

  My need for movement takes me on the route Joel walked to school, on the days when he missed his bus or simply couldn’t face the tight-packed proximity of his tormentors; a winding walk past houses and shops, and then a forbidden left-hand detour across the undulating folds of the common where travellers’ horses raise their foals amid intermittent floods and hedges made alternately sweet and sharp with blackthorn. Today the hedgerows are bare and sullen, and the horses stand like passengers at a deserted railway station, staring out across over-grazed turf for a rescue that will not come. I stop to pet the soft pink nose of one benign-looking giant, only to jump back in shock when it lunges at me, all yellowy teeth and snapping jaws. Did Joel pass this way on the morning he disappeared? When I emerge on the other side of the common, the school looks just as it always has, grey and squat and stained with weather, its silence and emptiness rendering it threatening. A half-frozen rain has begun to fall, stinging my cheeks. I’d forgotten it was the weekend.

  I can’t bear to turn back, I have to keep going. So I walk past the school and take the path beside the wide dual carriageway instead, the heavy traffic muted by the broad avenues of trees that grow beside and in the centre. Growing up I took it for granted that our city, so endlessly reviled for its brutalist post-war concrete and bleak town centre, was nonetheless crossed and partitioned by these wide Parisian boulevards that each spring frothed with blossom and tender green leaves. It was John who first told me that the main roads into the city were built extra wide to accommodate tramlines, and the green oases I loved so much were the grassed-over graves of a long-gone public transport network. So what about the big wide verges at the side, then, why didn’t they build houses there instead? I demanded, and he laughed and said he didn’t know, maybe someone in the Town Planning department just really loved trees.

  When I’m grown up I’m going to live inside a willow tree. Joel, seven years old and holding tight to my hand as we walked slowly, slowly, slowly through the trees. We’d gone too far, as we always did. Soon he’d be too tired to go any further, and I’d have to carry him home even though he was years too big for me to manage.

  You mean inside a tree? Like Robin Hood?

  No. I mean under the leaves, like living in a tent. Look, Mummy. Joel parted the shimmering green curtain and led me inside. See? It’s lovely and quiet in here. Joel always loved to be quiet, finding secret spots where he could hide and let the world unfold around him. Once, after a convincing performance for the school nurse won him a phone call home and a few hours’ reprieve from lessons, we spent an afternoon together hidden in the shrubs of a traffic island where five roads meet.

  My heart hammering, I thrust impetuously through golden leaves and half-bare branches.

  There’s no one there.

  But then, there are many willow trees in this city.

  I walk and walk and walk, until my feet are on fire and my throat is parched and my muscles are trembling. I couldn’t even name the streets I walked down, led only by an intuition that is both seductive and faulty, for I’ve found no trace of where my son might have passed through, felt no inexplicable connection with one place over another. Joel’s rucksack was not hidden beneath the trees or in the bushes I stared into, and I saw no glimpse of him slipping away behind a shuttered row of garages or quiet allotment shed. I know no more than when I started and yet the thought of giving up feels like a betrayal. It’s only when I glimpse a row of houses that look faintly familiar, and realise I have walked in a huge circle that has led me close to my own front door, that I allow myself to stop. There’s always tonight, I remind myself. I’ll wait until John’s asleep and then go out in the car and search the city centre.

  John lies in wait behind the front door, opening it for me before I can even raise my key to the lock. I wonder if he’ll be angry with me for leaving the police station without him, if he’ll want to reproach me for the coldness of the note I left for him on the table. Instead he is brandishing a bacon sandwich, the crisp fat and salty meat oozing with brown sauce.

  “No news,” he says. The first words we always say these days.

  No news. The first time I said those words I thought I’d swallowed glass. Now it’s just one more part of our dreadful new routine for living together. “What’s that?”

  “You need to eat,” he tells me. “No, don’t tell me you’re not hungry because I know that’s not true. Come and sit down.”

  Another reminder that our lives have changed irrevocably. It’s my role to lie in wait, ambushing my hungry boys with food the moment they cross the threshold. Is John letting me know that I’m falling down in my duties? Is he expecting me to carry on as if everything’s normal? Is he reproaching me for my relentless focus on Joel? I take the sandwich and follow him to the dining room, where its identical twin waits for John. In the centre of the table, two cooling mugs of tea wait to be consumed.

  “Have you been back long?” I’m wary of John despite how nice he’s being to me. I feel strung up and tense, as if I’m tiptoeing over a thin crust of a volcano. I feel as if I’m being softened up for some terrible unexpected blow.

  “About half an hour.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you got back. I’d have come back sooner if I’d—”

  “It doesn’t matter. I saw your note. I knew you were out looking. I would have taken the car out to come and find you but I thought someone ought to be here, just in case.”

  Is he blaming me for leaving the house empty? Or is he sympathising with me, letting me know he understands my need to do something, even if that something is as pointless and stupid as looking beneath trees for clues? I don’t dare say too much until I know how the land lies. It occurs to me that I’ve begun to be afraid of my husband.

  He reaches out to me and I have to force myself not to flinch, but it’s all right, he’s only trying to take my hand so he can lead me to the chair he’s pulled out for me, pushing me into the table as if I’m very small and young. I don’t want to eat the sandwich but I can’t help myself. My body is starving and exhausted and it needs fuel. My hand reaches out for the sandwich before I can stop myself. I’m scratched and dirty from all the rummaging I’ve done
, but even the grey smudges that come off my skin and stain the pristine whiteness of the bread don’t stop me. Sitting opposite each other, not speaking, not looking at each other, John and I devour our meal in hungry silence, slurping down sweet milky tea like animals at a trough.

  “I needed that,” I admit when my plate is clean. I have to remind myself not to lick at the slick of grease left on my plate.

  “Me too.” John reaches across the table and takes my hand. “I know it seems awful to be eating when Joel’s… when—” his voice cracks and he has to swallow hard several times. “But if we’re going to get through this, we need to look after each other.” His fingers stroke mine. “We need to stick together. Don’t we?”

  My stomach clenches around its hastily swallowed contents. I look down at the table. The meaning of the sandwich, the mug of tea, the solicitude, suddenly becomes clear. It’s a bribe.

  “You were a while with the police,” I say. I want to sound casual, but John knows me far too well for me to get away with it.

  “They think I might have killed him,” he says. John has no time for prevarication. He likes to have everything out in the open, very clean and precise. His touching honesty was one of the first things I loved about him. I think you’re lovely. I’d like to see you again. I think I’m falling in love with you. I love you. I want to marry you.

  “Oh, John, no! No, I’m sure that’s not true, they can’t possibly think—”

  “Of course they do. That’s their job. Assume nothing, believe no one, check everything. That’s how they work. And right now they’re checking whether I killed our son.”