I Do Not Sleep

by Judy Finnigan

  And so by the time the boys started their second year at university, Ben was not only clean but flying high. He was full of plans for the future, charming, healthier and happier than I’d ever seen him.

  Autumn Term began in October 2008. The following April, when Ben and Joey were just twenty, they went on holiday together. An Easter break, boys only, in Polperro. Where they could both indulge in the hobby they loved most. Sailing. The hobby that took my son away from me, seemingly for ever.

  Yes, I lost Joey that day, and I had failed to keep in contact with his best friend. I simply couldn’t bear to talk to Ben afterwards. The thought that he had seen Joey, been with him for those last days when I was going about my normal existence in Manchester, happy, totally unprepared for the cataclysmic shock about to devastate my life, meant that my throat closed up in horror when I thought about calling him. In some irrational way, I blamed Ben for being with my son when I was not. As if I might have prevented his disappearance. I knew I was being unfair, but there it was. Now, five years later, back at the scene of so many happy family holidays, I thought maybe it was time to change that.

  Chapter Seven

  Present Day

  We got back to Coombe in the late afternoon. Edie was sleepy and went down for a nap in her cot straightaway. I could have done with a lie-down myself, but I was still wrestling with my plan to call Ben. Because of Adam’s reluctance, I decided to put it off for a while. Besides, if I seriously intended to ask Ben to stay here with us on our holiday, I had to talk to Danny and Lola. I knew my elder son thought everything was going fine. He was loving Cornwall with his wife and their gorgeous little girl, and he thought I was too. Danny was congratulating himself; his coup to get me down here, his appeal to Adam, had worked. Here we all were, having a lovely time. The future lay hazy, rosy and bright on the horizon. And–guess what? Mum seemed to be having a ball down here, on the beach with her grandchild.

  I could imagine Danny whispering to Lola, when they were in bed at night, that it had all been a great success. ‘I knew this would be OK,’ he would say to his wife. ‘I knew I just had to get Mum down here with Edie and she would fall in love with the place again.’ He would smile as he said it and settle down to sleep. Lola would stroke his cheek and murmur soft agreement. But Lola was not deceived. She was, after all, a mother. She knew, more than Danny, more even than Adam, what was going on in my head. She had no illusions that this holiday was for me just a ritual of acceptance. How could it be? It involved remembering the disappearance of my child.

  Lola knew that. And she had loved Joey. I thought my daughter-in-law might be my ally.

  After supper that night, we watched some television. I was restless, and knew I wouldn’t sleep. Danny and Lola went up to bed early, knowing they’d be woken by Edie before the night was through. Adam went upstairs to read; I told him I wouldn’t be long. I wanted a walk around the garden before I came to bed.

  And so, holding a gin and tonic, I stepped outside into the moonlight. The grass was silver, the leaves on the soft-lit trees glittered like diamonds. It was so quiet. The gentle breath of a breeze sighed around me, swaying, holding me steady. And as the clouds drifted softly over the garden the night revealed herself in a sensuous dance. Slowly, minute by minute, she tantalisingly showed me the darkness, as if I watched a curtain pulled teasingly apart by ghostly fingers, quietly, gradually, so as not to alarm me. But as each drape was drawn tenderly aside, I saw more. One by one, tiny glinting fragments opened up the magic moonscape, and there it was, the whole fantastical landscape, stamped on my heart like an impossible fairytale postcard.

  And Cornwall suddenly burst upon me.

  For all the jolly days we’d had on the beach since we’d arrived, the spirit of this magic place had not yet touched me. I had been out of its reach for years.

  Now in the silver, shadowed garden, the essence of Cornwall at last stretched out its arms, its limbs, wrapping itself around me so tightly I could barely breathe. Tendrils of sea mist seeped into my head, swirled around my brain. I was back, claimed once more by the strange, mythical home which had sung seductively in my soul until the day I lost my son.

  I’d re-entered this mystic realm, I’d returned, and now all things were possible. I felt I could touch Joey. He was here, next to me. I could feel him, smell him, almost see him. I could certainly hear him.

  And what I heard was a long, soughing sigh. What I heard, or thought I heard, was one word:

  ‘Mother.’

  Could this be happening? I listened with every nerve I had, every sensory receptor in my body trembling with fear and pain. Was he trying to reach me? Please God, make it be so.

  And his voice came again. Plaintive, pleading, dying, sighing on the breeze. ‘Find me. Find me.’

  He sounded so sad. I cried out: ‘Joey. Where are you? Tell me. Help me. Please, Joey. I’m coming, darling. I’ll find you. Wait for me.’

  I sank down onto a white stone bench. I sobbed, but I felt happier and more alive than I had in years. He had found me, my boy, at last. As I had prayed he would. He was here. Close, in Cornwall. I would find him even if it killed me.

  And I knew this strange, haunted county had stirred again, as it does when the need is great. Cornwall had waited a long time, but until now I couldn’t hear her. The remote landscape of the far West Country had failed to reach me while I mourned my loss in Manchester, the northern town where Joey was born. I had to come back here, to the place he went missing, to be wrapped tightly in its flowing spirit-haunted cloak. Who knew what was real in this land of legends?

  That night, wrapped in Faerie, I dreamed about an island. I was puzzled. In my dream I knew where it was. I had been there, surely, in the past? What enchantment had guided me? Something had taken me there, had held me in its spell for many days. So why was the place so mysterious to me? The image of the island cocooned me in enormous grief. Where was it, and when had I seen it? I had to tune in to this new sensibility, the wave of thought that had suddenly presented itself. If I could, I would know the answer to Joey’s fate. If I didn’t, he would be forever lost to me. I had no choice. I had to listen to Cornwall’s beckoning song. I had to let myself be haunted.

  Chapter Eight

  None of this made any sense in the morning. I had gone to bed, snuggled up to Adam and found comfort in the warmth of his body. But when I woke up I felt bereft, my stomach nauseated with what felt like a hangover. I knew this had nothing to do with alcohol. My brain was sick, scoured, scavenged. As Edie ate her breakfast porridge, I tried fiercely to concentrate on her, this gorgeously predictable little child pulling her usual wake-up faces, making her lovely tiny noises, communicating as always with the adults she knew would never disappoint her. The parents and grandparents who formed the boundaries of her happy baby life, the small circle of security she knew would never fail her.

  But, much as I loved her, my mind was elsewhere, pinging off walls of doubt and uncertainty. What had happened in the garden last night? Somehow I had found Joey, I thought. Surely I had spoken to him? But I couldn’t remember how, or what he’d said.

  I had to get away from everyone. Danny and Lola were taking Edie to Polperro. Thank God they understood this was still a bridge too far for me. Adam was keen to see a vintage classic car rally at the Talland Bay Hotel. Lunch was included in the ticket price, and he evinced no surprise when I said I didn’t want to go. Cars and me don’t mix, and I think he was relieved that he wouldn’t have to put up with my boredom as he swapped motoring tales with other enthusiasts.

  As for me, to my astonishment I realised I had decided to visit Jamaica Inn, the old house on Bodmin Moor made famous by Daphne du Maurier’s novel. I had no idea why. I had been to this over-populated tourist trap many years ago, and vowed never to go back. But when Adam asked me what I was going to do with myself, I found myself blurting my destination before the words even reached my brain. Adam was quizzical. ‘Why on earth do you want to go there?’ he asked. ‘At this time
of year it’ll be heaving with coach parties. You’ll hate it, Moll.’

  He was right, but I knew I had to go anyway. It was as if, in the night, I’d received a voiceless command I couldn’t ignore.

  Danny said he’d drop Adam off at Talland Bay on the way to Polperro, leaving me the Volvo to drive to Bodmin. I sat behind the wheel, disconsolate at the thought of turning up at Jamaica Inn at the height of the tourist season. I didn’t even like the place. But the insistent demand in my head told me that was where I had to go. Resentfully, visualising crowds of day-trippers, I set off.

  Bodmin Moor is a forbidding place. Even on a sunny July day, the deeper you travel, the higher you climb, the more hostile the landscape becomes. There’s a sense of utter timelessness up there among the craggy tors; mist creeping around the inky rock pools, the black silent rivers which for thousands of years have wound their way from their moorland genesis, through dark wooded banks until they find their release, joining the pounding seas thrashing the coastline. The purple heather, sorrel, ivy and the golden glint of celandine have been trodden underfoot for millennia. If you walk on the moors, you feel besieged by ancient spirits. How could you not?

  I shivered as I continued my impetuous journey to Jamaica Inn. Why was I doing this? I only knew I felt compelled to get to this old hostelry, high up at Bolventor, a house of legend so chillingly remote that even the thought of travelling there at night makes your skin crawl.

  But it was broad daylight, even though the sun had retreated, hiding shyly behind a looming cloud-bank. Within minutes the sky was grey, the ever-present mist gathering dankly, swirling round the trees, mobile and ominous as ghosts in a horror film.

  I shook myself, stopped the car. I would go back to Coombe, I thought. I would light the fire, put on some music, read a good book. I would have a lunchtime glass of wine and banish all thoughts of spirits, spooks and supernatural encounters. I might even drive over to the Talland Bay Hotel and join Adam for lunch, braving the inevitable stories of heroic trips in classic cars. Anything to shake off the increasingly morbid thoughts that were beginning to immobilise me on my reluctant jaunt to Jamaica Inn.

  But I was almost there. And, despite the predictable number of coaches in the car park, I drove the Volvo in and parked as far away from the tour buses as I could get. I stood beside the car, restlessly putting the keys into my handbag and wondering what on earth to do next. My inner voice seemed to have deserted me. The Inn forecourt was swarming with families, all heading into the pub in search of lunch. I wasn’t at all hungry, and wandered aimlessly towards a small meadow to the side of the hotel. This was deserted, unsurprisingly, since the smutty grey cloud already threatened rain, and the untidy patch of ground I’d stepped onto held no attractions for children. I remembered there was a proper kids’ playground with swings and slides behind the Inn, and felt grateful that, for the moment, I had this squelchy, slightly slovenly spot to myself.

  Except I wasn’t alone.

  Chapter Nine

  Jamaica Inn

  Lore and legend surrounded Jamaica Inn, enveloping it in a miasmic cloak of mystery, full of ghoulish ghosts and murders, all of which meant the place did a roaring trade. I was sceptical of course; well, wouldn’t any educated person think it was a load of old nonsense? A good tale to scare children with, and rope the punters in, but really just a spooky old Cornish yarn, the kind of stuff tourists loved to tell each other sitting next to a roaring fire in an ancient pub, holding a pint or a large glass of Merlot.

  So what was I doing here, feeling idiotically ‘drawn’ to a place I knew, rationally, was a nest of fraudulent but profitable legends? The field I’d wandered into was no atmospheric Scaddick Hill Meadow. No haunting presence hovered over this unlovely spot.

  In fact, there was nothing much to see in the grey light. Mud; scuffed grass. The churned-up holes and messy mounds that meant badgers dwelled here. My gaze swept restlessly over a prosaic vista that looked utterly unrewarding. Nothing mystical, nothing at all noteworthy here, certainly nothing to suggest why the insistent voice in my head had told me to come. There was a scruffy fence at the bottom of the meadow, neglected for years, its struts rotten and broken, a rickety property marker that would these days deter neither man nor beast from invading the deeply unattractive little plot it guarded.

  I sighed. What a waste of time, I thought. How utterly stupid of me to listen to the nonsense in my head. I’d had some kind of nightmare, not the revelation or discovery I longed for, and I’d let it take me over, bring me to this desolate spot where I had hoped to find salvation, only to find all that awaited me was boredom and crushing disappointment.

  Feeling foolish, I turned back towards the car park. And then I stopped in my tracks. I was an English teacher. Lines from classic plays and poems were never far from my head. And suddenly what leapt into my mind was one of the scariest passages I had ever taught to a breathless sixth form. It was Coleridge. From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

  Like one, that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows, a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread…

  As the words reeled in my head, I knew there was something behind me. Something that made my nerves quiver, my skin shrink and the hairs on the back of my neck stiffen with fright.

  There had been something in the field after all. I had barely registered it, so commonplace was the sight in these parts. A decrepit old scarecrow leaned drunkenly against the sagging fence. Little was left of it; just a bent, rotting, half-collapsed effigy, loosely wrapped in tattered remnants of black cloth clinging stubbornly to desiccated twig-thin limbs.

  I looked back nervously at the dilapidated fence. My vision blurred. Was it a scarecrow, or just an old black tarpaulin flapping in the wind?

  I turned away again, my sight diminished by the fog floating now across the meadow, thickening as it drifted. My eyelids fluttered. A small wave of dark light, so suppressed, so charcoal grey that it was hardly visible, flitted across my brain. A swift shadowy impression, so indistinct it almost missed my retina, and yet there it was. A movement throbbing across a ruined useless boundary that may once have served some practical farming purpose, but was now merely an indication, a warning, that something wicked this way comes.

  The scarecrow turned its head.

  My heart almost stopped. I stood still though I wanted to run. Because I knew instantly that this terrifying vision was what had summoned me to the moor. Slowly, although it looked as if it could snap and shatter any moment, it began to move. It knew me. It had eyes: small, glittering, intense. Malevolent. They were fixed on my face.

  Because he knows, a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread…

  This was not what I had been searching for. It was not Joey. Joey was not a fiend, a demon. Whatever scrambled thoughts had curdled my brain, I knew this was not my son. But it was evil. And I had seen it before. Where? When? My mind couldn’t grasp what was happening. And as my sense of horror deepened, I knew that whatever had happened to my son was dreadful beyond belief. I was being warned. My search for Joey would be dark and terrible, and my lovely summer holiday would be shrouded in fear.

  I turned and ran back to the car, fumbling with the keys, my heart racing, desperate to feel Adam’s arms around me.

  Chapter Ten

  As soon as I got off the moor the grey fog lifted and I drove back to Coombe in blazing sunshine. I shook my head as the hedgerows flashed by, dotted with banks of wildflowers, and breathed in the Cornish air through the open windows. With each breath I felt calmer. The mist and the scarecrow receded in my mind, and the impossible beauty of the landscape tranquilised my thoughts. By the time I got back to the old farmhouse, my heart had stopped thudding, and I was beginning to convince myself I had had some kind of hallucination brought on by my strange moonlight vision in
the garden last night.

  I walked in the door, and was confronted by a pathetic little domestic scene.

  Edie had a bad cough, and her small head blazed with heat, her cheeks burning red, a feverish glaze in her eyes. Our chatty little girl was silent, gazing reproachfully at us, the grown-ups who were supposed to protect her from harm. Lola was reasonably calm, but Danny seemed distressed.

  ‘We’re taking her to the doctor’s, Mum. There’s a surgery in Looe.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Many’s the time I’ve been there with you or Joey. Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s just a summer bug.’

  I waved them off from the porch, smiling to myself. New parents. Poor things, consumed with fear because their first-born had a cold. The smile disappeared when I thought of Joey. All those trips we took to see GPs when he was little. All those cough medicines and Calpol, our anxiety when he spat the medicine out. And of course he always got better. Until the day when all the doctors and all the Calpol in the world couldn’t help him. The day he disappeared off the wild Cornish shore.

  Adam came home, having got a taxi to bring him back from Talland Bay. I told him about Edie’s trip to the doctor’s and he chuckled.

  ‘Brings it all back again, eh, Moll? Rushing off to see the doc with a poorly baby? She’ll be fine.’

  I smiled back at him.

  He looked at me closely. ‘Are you OK, love? You look pale. Did spooky old Jamaica Inn give you a fright?’

  He laughed but stopped immediately as he saw the tension in my face. Putting his arms around me, he pulled me close. ‘Molly, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve just got a headache from the drive, and I feel a bit sick. It was very misty up on Bodmin, and before I left it was turning into fog. I couldn’t see more than a couple of yards in front of me,’ I lied.