I Do Not Sleep

by Judy Finnigan

  Chapter Four

  I tried with all my being, all my soul, not to dream that first night at the cottage. I prayed that hideous thoughts would stay away; and for once someone listened. I had refused to believe in any kind of God since my son disappeared. There were no answers from Him in the desperate weeks and months before we gave up hope, not of finding him alive but at least of retrieving his body, something of Joey to wrap warmly in cashmere and lay gently inside a casket; a casket in which to place his favourite old cuddly toys, a casket to lie before the altar in Talland church, a tangible body to pray for and weep over. ‘Hand it over to God,’ said a well-meaning vicar friend when my grief became too much to bear. And I’d tried, but nothing came of it. Just silence. No news. Only the sympathetic words of the Coroner who told us that bodies often disappeared at sea and they were not always, as I had supposed, washed up ashore, even as close to land as Joey’s empty boat had been found.

  He didn’t elaborate, but the dark voice inside my head found its own narrative. Yes, it intoned bitterly. Nothing left, of course. He’ll have been eaten; he’ll have been devoured by marine life. The monsters of the deep.

  Adam and I didn’t discuss it. Our thoughts about what was left of Joey remained for each of us our secret. Horrible images. Private nightmares, not to be discussed in daylight, for fear we should go mad.

  So I had no faith in prayer, and yet that first night at Coombe the entity that guides our dreams thankfully spared me.

  The first few days of our summer holiday passed pleasantly enough. I still couldn’t face Polperro, but there were lots of other pretty coves to take Edie to. My favourite was Talland beach, small and unthreatening, with its cosy little café, softly lapping waves and hordes of tiny children digging in the sand, building lopsided towers out of pebbles and bits of shale. Yes, I had to look at the sea, and it was the same sea that had claimed Joey, but here during these soft summer days the water looked so gentle that I couldn’t equate it with the tempestuous tides that capsized Joey in a sudden April squall more than five years before. Apparently it had blown in out of nowhere, Joey’s friend Ben had told me. It wasn’t that my son, skilled sailor that he was, had taken a foolish risk and set sail in bad weather. The sea was calm as a millpond when Joey left the harbour. Half an hour later the wind whipped up and the waves grew fierce and choppy.

  And yet… it wasn’t a violent storm, Ben said, just a bit of a blow. He hadn’t been worried about Joey at all until he didn’t return in time for the pub lunch they were supposed to meet up for at the Blue Peter. He confided his concern to a fisherman he met in the pub. The fisherman took Ben at once to find the harbourmaster, who immediately ordered a search. Late in the afternoon Joey’s boat was spotted, wrecked on rocks down the coast near Looe. Joey, of course, was not on board. Joey was nowhere to be found.

  As I played on Talland beach with Edie, who was valiantly trying to fill her little seaside bucket with pebbles, I tried not to think of that dreadful day at the start of the Easter holidays, when Ben had called me as I sipped wine in the garden at home in Manchester. Oh, foolish, stupid woman. Just to think of myself sitting there without a care in the world, waiting for Adam to get home, planning a barbecue, made me feel sick.

  Ben had stayed on in Polperro while we rushed down in a panic that night. We moved into the same cottage he and Joey were renting. As day after day passed with no news, I took to sleeping in Joey’s bed, his sweater on my pillow, his red scarf wrapped around my shoulders. The local doctor gave me pills, but it was Joey’s scent that enveloped and calmed me on the rare occasions when I managed to drift off. On those nights, inhaling his robust young man’s smell, I felt he was joining me in my dreams. I could hear his voice calling to me, urgent, pitiful, above the sound of crashing surf and howling wind. Oh, how desolate it made me feel.

  Now, years later, sitting on the rocks with Edie and Adam, as Danny and Lola, child-free for a few blessed minutes, strolled arm in arm along the beach, I made a decision. I needed to see Ben. Yes, we’d talked about that day many times but I wanted him here with me in Cornwall. I felt a desperate need to go through it all again.

  I knew Adam would be unhappy. He saw this break as an opportunity to move on, not to get stuck again in the past. But there was no help for it. He had brought me here, and now I needed to ask more questions. Ben seemed the only person who could possibly answer them. If we went over that Easter day again, now, with the immediate panic of Joey’s disappearance long past, with the questionable benefit of five years’ mourning behind me, maybe Ben would tell me something he might have mentioned before, when I was too distraught to listen properly. The more I thought about what I knew about that day, the more I realised what a blur it had all been.

  I began to feel excited, as Edie chortled over some sandy shells I stopped her trying to eat. There must have been something, I thought. Something Ben might have noticed; maybe Joey had told Ben exactly why he wanted to take the boat out alone that morning. Usually they sailed together. Why had Joey decided he wanted to make this trip on his own? I decided to call Ben at once and ask him to come and stay with us at Coombe.

  Except I couldn’t get a signal at Talland, and even back at the cottage I would have to use the landline. No keeping it secret then. I would have to tell Adam. I braced myself.

  Chapter Five

  Edie began a swift crawl along the beach, evidently heading towards a small boy who was building a sandcastle with his dad. I lunged forward and grabbed her just before she ploughed into his lovingly crafted handiwork. The boy looked at her with annoyance and disdain. Edie, bless her, gave him an enormous grin and held out a grimy shell. He took it and placed it on the turret of his castle. Edie promptly swiped it back, demolishing a large section of the tower into the moat his dad had just finished digging. I smiled apologetically, and shrugged: what can you do? But the dad scowled. Not a nice man, I thought, as I scooped Edie up and took her back to our beach towel. Adam was watching with amusement. ‘What a plonker,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I’ll never understand territorial wankers like that.’ He looked so chilled that I decided now was the moment to broach my idea about Ben.

  ‘Adam,’ I began hesitantly. ‘How would you feel if I asked Ben Thomas down to stay with us for a bit?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Ben?’ he asked. ‘Why on earth…?’

  I looked at him, and at once he understood. ‘No,’ he said immediately. ‘No, no, no, no, no. Not under any circumstances. That would be all wrong, completely wrong for us right now.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be wrong for me,’ I said quietly. ‘In fact, I really need to see him.’

  Adam looked at me carefully. ‘When did this come on?’ he asked.

  ‘Just now,’ I said honestly. ‘But I think it’s been in my subconscious ever since we got here.’

  Adam sighed. ‘I suppose I should have thought of this. I guess it was inevitable.’

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured. ‘Once I came here I was bound to start thinking about it all again. Bound to start asking questions.’

  ‘But, Molly, Ben’s already answered all our questions. He’s told us everything he knows about Joey and… that day.’

  ‘I know. But I was in such a mess I didn’t listen to him properly.’

  Adam looked grim. ‘Well, I did,’ he said. ‘And I can assure you he knows absolutely nothing more about Joey’s last day than we do. Molly, love, it’s all over. I brought you here because I wanted you finally to accept that.’

  ‘Well, what if I can’t?’ I asked sadly. ‘What if getting me here just stirred it all up again? You must have known it was a risk.’

  ‘I thought that Edie… I thought your focus would be on her.’

  ‘Adam, I love Edie with all my heart, but she’s not going to make me forget about Joey.’

  ‘No, of course not. I just hoped we could have a new start.’

  I looked at my husband, my heart swelling with sadness and despair. ‘You don’t understand. There can’t be a new start
for me until I know what happened to Joey. I know you meant well, but did you really think you could bring me back to Cornwall with Danny and Edie and somehow I would waltz into a new future? How can I possibly come down here, sit on a few beaches with the baby, and somehow forget my son vanished here? Or worse?’

  Adam shook his head and looked down at the sand. ‘I thought you were ready for this. I’m sorry.’

  I took a deep breath, steadied my voice and said, ‘Look, Adam, I don’t want us to quarrel. I know you meant this holiday for the best. And you were right, certainly for Danny, who means the world to me. And maybe it still could be the right thing for all of us; help to lay things to rest. But I’m not ready yet. There are still questions I need to ask. I won’t ever have any peace until I’m sure.’

  ‘Oh, Molly. How can you NOT be sure? It’s five years now. He’s gone, love. You know that.’

  I sank down onto the sand to cuddle Edie, who was looking anxious at this unaccustomed tension between her grandparents. ‘I know he’s gone. I just need to know where.’

  And as Edie began to wail, I held her and looked out to sea, the sea that took my boy. I want him back; and while I’m here I’ll do everything in my power, move heaven and earth, to find him.

  Chapter Six

  2004–2009

  ‘Mum, can I talk to you?’

  Joey was uneasy, and I was busy. It was September 2004. The school year had just begun, and my life was engulfed in study plans and meetings. We had a new Head. I liked her but she had different ideas, naturally, from her predecessor. We, her teaching staff, had to absorb the new atmosphere as well as dealing with the normal chaos of starting school up again after the long summer holidays. Adam, who taught at the city’s prestigious boys’ grammar school–an enormously influential establishment which, like my own girls’ high school, was held in huge respect by the most prominent and powerful people in Manchester and by educationalists throughout the country–was equally preoccupied. Our sons both went to Adam’s school, and so the whole family was deeply entrenched in education; possibly not always to the boys’ advantage. We were, I suspect, a tiny bit neurotic about their academic progress. We expected them to do well, as if it were our right. Fortunately, they were both bright and did OK. They weren’t geniuses, but kept their heads above water and were expected to get good A-levels and go to university. And they were well behaved. Thank the Lord, they didn’t shame us before our colleagues.

  I like to think we didn’t put too much pressure on them. I like to think we were a happy family, normal, with lots of interests outside school, emphasising that achievement and good grades weren’t everything. But who knows? Certainly the question Joey asked me that golden September afternoon threw me completely.

  ‘Can Ben come and live with us?’ Joey asked without preamble. I must have looked shocked, because he suddenly became nervous. ‘Please, Mum? I wouldn’t ask except he really needs a proper home.’

  I gulped. ‘What do you mean, Joey? Live with us, here? What about his mum? What’s happened?’ But I knew, of course. This had been brewing for a long while.

  Oh, Ben. Such a lovely little boy, and yet his early promise had seemed to wither on the vine. Every time Joey told me about his friend’s unhappy home-life, I wondered how we could help him. And yet it was never simple. By the time Joey asked his anxious question Ben was sixteen, living with his neurotic, divorced mother. It was already too late to assimilate this troublesome child into an ordinary home. He was, even then, beyond the pale. He was into drugs. Brilliantly clever, exceptionally intellectually gifted; but frankly not someone you could introduce into a normal household without causing domestic waves as threatening as a tsunami. So what could I say to Joey?

  ‘What about his mum?’ I repeated.

  Joey looked impatient. ‘She’s chucking him out. Says she can’t manage him any more. And his dad won’t have him either. He’s remarried, and his new wife can’t stand Ben. Mind you, it’s mutual.’ Now my son was upset. When he looked at me I saw his eyes were glistening. ‘But, Mum, he’s only my age. I don’t see how he can live on his own in some crummy little flat.’

  Neither did I. I told Joey I’d talk to Adam when he got home. Of course I knew exactly what he’d say. And he didn’t surprise me.

  ‘Molly, are you out of your mind? Of course Ben can’t live here. I’m hugely fond of him, and he has enormous potential, but he’s a mess.’

  ‘I know, but that’s his parents’ fault, not his. And we’ve known him since he was four.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m more than willing to keep a close eye on him at school, although he’s not in any of my classes. I do watch out for him, always have. But I won’t have him living in this house. He has massive problems, Molly. If he moved in here we’d be asking for trouble. And it’s not fair on Danny and Joe.’

  I didn’t put up much of a fight. Adam was right. Poor Ben. As it turned out, he seemed to manage in the little flat his parents found for him. He saw his dad sometimes, hardly ever his mother, who had been diagnosed as bipolar and said she simply couldn’t cope with him. Outwardly, Ben didn’t seem to care.

  He was a frequent visitor to our house, and both Joey and Danny were enormously fond of him. Did I think his druggie lifestyle affected our two boys? Naturally I worried about it, and so did Adam. But whatever our sons got up to, they never caused us serious concern. Obviously we were on the lookout for problems, but they seemed to have a charmed life. Their schoolwork thrived, they were happy and steady at home. I was constantly wary of Ben and his chaotic life, of course I was, but Danny and Joey seemed impregnable; sturdy high achievers, our boys were, set well on course for university and a prosperous life.

  Adam and I both felt for Ben. We wanted to help him, opened up our house and our lives to him within reason. A couple of years passed without incident, and we were happy and relieved when first Danny and then Joey passed their A-levels with distinction. Mind you, so, against all the odds, did Ben.

  He had been Joey’s best friend since they met at nursery in Manchester. Together they had spent their primary years at Beaver Road school in Didsbury, gathering cohorts of other little lads around them, all of whom often came back to our house to play. We lived in an Edwardian cul-de-sac with a park at the end of the street, and I used to love those days after school when they all descended for Ribena and biscuits. Being a teacher myself, it was relatively easy for me to be home early for them a couple of days a week, if I traded time with my colleagues. Danny, too, went to Beaver Road, and when he and his friends also flocked to our place after school, it was bedlam, but gloriously so. Our beautiful road, Old Broadway, was built by a White Russian émigré at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Each house was different, some detached, others, like ours, semis, but they were all spacious and full of character.

  And Ben? The flat his businessman father bought him made him very popular. His friends–including Joey, as he later confessed–spent many hours there with him, probably smoking weed. Ben’s parents gave him money instead of love, but despite that he did well at school–very well. He got into Manchester University to read English and Drama. So did Joey. I had expected my son to want to move away from home for Uni, like Danny who was studying Psychology at Leeds. But Joey was a home-bird. He loved Manchester, although he moved into a Hall of Residence in his first year rather than stay at home. That was fine by me since his digs were only a mile or so away from us, which meant, as a mum, I had the best of both worlds. An independent son who did his own laundry in Hall, but who still came home regular as clockwork to see his old mum and dad and, however hungover, usually turned up for Sunday lunch each week.

  And a lot of the time Ben came with him. They were fast friends. Ben seemed somehow to have sorted himself out; he looked well and happy and was always good company. As for Joey, I couldn’t wish for a better son. He was healthy, good-looking, full of verve and high spirits. Adam and I would grin at each other when the boys left us after a convivial meal, and ra
ise a glass.

  ‘Hey, Moll. Here’s to us. We must have done something right.’ And we would clink glasses and thank God for our lovely, happy family.

  At the end of his first year at university, Joey and I had a heart to heart. My son told me Ben’s drug days were over. ‘I mean, Mum, you know, he does a bit of weed every now and then. But so does everyone else.’

  I tried to look unconcerned. ‘Everyone?’ I asked. ‘Including you?’

  He grinned. ‘Well, yeah, but don’t worry, Mum. I’m not a druggie and neither’s Danny. I think we imbibed responsible behaviour with our mothers’ milk.’

  ‘That would be me you’re talking about,’ I said smiling. ‘And I’m glad to hear it. But hasn’t it been difficult for you while Ben was so wild?’

  ‘No, not really. I mean,’ he said, a little embarrassed, ‘like I said, we have experimented a bit, Danny and me, at parties, that sort of thing. Everyone does. But we were never really tempted to go on with it. I mean, Ben used to go too far. Class A stuff, cocaine, what have you. We saw he was on a knife-edge and it scared us. He could have destroyed himself. He didn’t have the right parents. We did. And anyway, Ben’s so bright. He’s got big ambitions. He wants to be a film director. He’s really talented. You should see the stuff he makes at Uni. The film department think he’s amazing. He gets a lot of positive support, which means he’s finally found the strength to sober up.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘He’s stopped using, for good?’

  ‘Yes, Mum. I promise. He really has.’