House. Tree. Person.

by Catriona McPherson

  “The bus is late,” I said.

  “The bus has been and gone,” said Marco. “He wasn’t on it.”

  I flew down the rest of the stairs and straight out, blew through the gate, and stood looking both ways into the sinking light. The rain had stopped but the day was beyond hope, chilled and damp and murky. The police and reporters had gone. There wasn’t a soul to be seen in either direction and not a sound to be heard except the dripping of the trees and the distant downshift of the school bus’s diesel engine as it rounded some corner out of sight.

  I heard the door shut behind me and Marco was advancing with a coat for me and his own hooked on his head by the hood.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ll go looking.”

  “One of us should stay here,” I said. “In case he comes back.”

  “Serve him right to come back to an empty house,” Marco said. “I’m not leaving you on your own to work yourself up. And no way I’m letting you drive.”

  “Trouble?” said a voice. The neighbour. Of course.

  I rounded on him. “You should know. You made it.”

  He stood his ground, turning his head to one side to look at me like a bird watching grubs. “Me?” And he did look harmless, standing there in his shirt collar and zip-up cardigan, slippers on his feet and his Sta-Press trousers bagging at the knees.

  “Why did you tell the news that kids meet over there?” I demanded.

  Marco had laid a hand on my arm and was pulling me gently away. “Let’s get going, Als. Sooner the better, eh?”

  “Me?” said the neighbour again. “I never said a word.”

  “What did you tell the cops?” I said, shaking off Marco’s hand and taking a step forward.

  “I’ll tell them about that!” he said, pointing a wavering finger. I thought he was showing me something behind my head and I turned. That’s when I saw my own arm, fist clenched, raised above my head.

  “Ali!” Marco called. He was over by the car with the passenger door open.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the neighbour. “I don’t know what came over me. Our son is missing.”

  “That’s none of my doing,” the old man said. “We brought up three of our own and never had any of this.”

  “Ali!” Marco shouted again. “Come on!”

  “He’ll have missed the bus and set off walking. That’s all it’ll be,” Marco said. He turned the car and set off in the direction of the school, back the way I had come.

  He couldn’t have made it this far already, ten miles on a twisting road, but still I wound down the windows and scoured the darkness at the edge of the lane, already black in the dying light. We passed the checkpoint gate at the turn to Howell Hall, the soldier’s head just visible over the messy windowsills. From there on, the trees met above our heads, still dripping, swallowing the last of the daylight. Marco flicked the lights to full beam.

  “What’s he wearing?” I said.

  “In case you don’t recognise him in the crowd?”

  “In case he’s walking up the wrong side of the road.”

  “You look out your side and I’ll look out my side,” Marco said.

  Why couldn’t I remember what he was wearing? I had seen him that morning. Black, probably. Black hoodie, black trousers, black shoes. And a black jacket on top. He didn’t have to wear reflectors catching the bus from home to the school door. I imagined him jumping into the verge as a lorry came up behind him. He wasn’t a country boy. He didn’t know to walk into the traffic so you could see what was coming. And he probably had his earbuds in too.

  But there weren’t lorries on this road. Cars and the odd small delivery van, maybe. I trained my eyes into the trees at my side of the car, starting to feel my head spin as they whipped past, and past, and past.

  “Slow down,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to find him as soon as we can?”

  I said no more, just kept watching.

  We traced the bus route all the way into town, past the trim bungalows and into the quiet streets of stone terraces, right to the school gates, and parked there.

  “I’ll go in,” I said, unbuckling my seatbelt.

  “Ali, he’s already been hauled out of school by the cops today,” Marco said. “He doesn’t need another red face. He’s probably just gone to a pal’s house. He probably phoned us when he got there and we missed the call because we’re sitting here.”

  “He’d call one of the mobiles,” I said. A couple of teachers’ cars came out of the school gateway. If I didn’t go in soon they’d all be gone.

  “No way!” said Marco. “If he’s gone somewhere without asking he’ll be pleased as punch we didn’t pick up. Come on, eh?”

  I managed to give half a smile. He was right. It was a teenage art form, getting voicemail instead of your actual parent.

  “Let’s go back home, eh?”

  I looked at every shadow on the way, once asking Marco to reverse because I thought I saw someone at the bus shelter by the Mutehill turn. But it was just a patch of denser shade and the poster of bus times at head height looking like someone’s pale face.

  “Bet he’s back,” Marco said and, when we rounded the last corner and saw the row of lights shining out from the cottages, I believed him. But the small window to the left of our front door, Angelo’s room, was in darkness. And he hadn’t turned off a light since he could first reach the switches. I felt my breath quicken.

  “Okay, okay,” Marco said. “If he’s not there—”

  “He’s not there!”

  “If he’s not there, I’ll start phoning round.” I opened my mouth to protest. “I’ve got most of them,” he said. “And the ones I haven’t got, I’ll get.”

  But how did we know who Angel was hanging out with? For the last six months he’d been getting off the bus on his own and hadn’t spoken ten words together. When we lived in our real house, he’d arrive with five or six extra and I’d have to make sure their mums knew where they were. Except their mums always knew where they were. They were at ours, with the pool table and the fridge in the playroom.

  But these days he just slunk off the bus and …

  “Oh my God!” I said, leaping out of the car before it had quite stopped moving. “How stupid can we be?”

  I set off down the track to the Abbey, fumbling my phone until the torch app set a tiny yellow cone glowing ahead of me. There was police tape strung up blocking off all the passages through the ruins, and the ground around it was churned into muddy ridges and deep pools, as if it had been ploughed, with sprays of liquid mud splatting out for yards across the grass where the cars had struggled to get moving. I stopped short. The flood was bad enough, but this! The greenkeeper would break his heart. Were there still greenkeepers? Maybe it was just a crew from the council maintenance team who got stuck with it in the rotation and moaned about coming all the way out here with nowhere to buy a coffee.

  “Angel?” I shouted. I lifted the police tape and walked into the belly of the Abbey, feeling the cold and darkness thicken. I could have sworn I heard him. The air was dead in here, but I could have sworn I heard a soft “Mum?”

  “Angel, I’m not angry,” I said. “I don’t care what you’re doing, what you’re smoking or drinking. Dad and me just freaked out a bit. Because you didn’t drop off your bag in the house first. And because of earlier, I suppose. I just want to know you’re okay.” I rounded the corner of a buttress into the ruins of a dining room or a chapel or something; the walls were pocked with little niches that could have been shrines or could have been salt cupboards and bread ovens.

  “Mum?”

  I heard it again. It was coming from behind the back wall and it sounded low down.

  “Angel, have you fallen?” I said, springing forward. I clambered out through what was once a window, before the wall below had collapsed and turned i
t into an awkward kind of door. I shone my light about and finally I saw something.

  The mud was churned up even worse here, with footprints and whole square sections cut out like peats from a bog. And in the middle of it all was a piece of board as big as a door laid flat on the ground.

  “Angel?” I said, dropping to my knees and trying to get my fingers under the edge of it. “What are you doing? Who did this? Are you hurt?”

  But now at last I heard it clearly. It wasn’t him and it wasn’t “mum” I was hearing.

  “Mmmmm,” it cried, on a higher note, now I was near. “Mmmhmmm.”

  “Now, don’t upset your—” Marco began as I threw myself in the front door. “Jesus, Ali. What happened.”

  “I fell,” I said. “It’s muddy. Did you find him?”

  “Don’t panic,” said Marco. “I’m homing in on him. He’s not at Paddy’s, Gorgo’s, or Mark’s, but they’ve given me about half a million new numbers to try. We’ll get there. Why don’t you fire up his laptop and see if he’s on one of the … God knows. Is it still Snapchat?”

  “Yikyak,” I said. “But I’m phoning the school before everyone leaves.”

  “Ali, don’t. You’ll piss him off and it’ll only make it harder next time.”

  “I’m phoning the school and then I’m going back out,” I said. “You can stay here and wait for him if you like, but I need to be doing something or I’ll go mad. And don’t tell me you won’t ‘let’ me. I’m not asking your permission.”

  I saw him struggle and decide not to argue. His breath came out in a long hiss. “If you drop me off at Jimbo’s I’ll borrow his car and we can both look,” he said.

  That made me turn back. It had taken months to get used to only having one car. One of us kept driving off without thinking, leaving the other stranded in the house. But eventually we worked out a system, like me dropping him off in Dalbeattie before my interview.

  “How did you get into T&C to do your paperwork today?” I said. “And how did you get to the school when the cops called you?”

  “They picked me up,” said Marco. “Swung round on the way and then took me back again.”

  “But how—” I began then I glanced at my watch. I had never believed the way teachers talked about their long hours. They were always coming in for four o’clock appointments at Face Value. I needed to get on it if I wanted to catch them.

  The assistant head was cold, firm, and procedural. He said Angelo had left the school grounds and their liability ended there. The private company that ran the coaches didn’t take a register and we had signed a consent at the start of the year.

  “Mr. Munro?” I said. “You’ve got kids in the primary, haven’t you?”

  “This isn’t about me, Mrs. McGovern.”

  “My son has had a rough couple of days,” I said. “You know where we live, don’t you? You must have seen the news. And you know what happened today?”

  “I’m not likely to forget the police showing up.”

  “Well, could you act like a human being then? I’m not going to sue you. I just want to find him.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, then he cleared his throat. “If you would like to come in for a conference at any time, Mrs. McGovern,” he said, “the guidance staff have a lot of useful advice for communication techniques that might avoid this sort of—”

  I put the phone down and listened to Marco in the other room. He was saying goodbye to someone and telling them not to worry.

  It was black as death outside now and cold as an old grave. It had stopped raining. Raindrops would have cheered it up a bit, sparkling in the headlights and pattering on the roof of the car as I drove, but this was like driving through the belly of a beast, the close chill pressing in around me and the sound damped down. I kept the window open and shouted his name out into the night: “Angelo? An-gelo!” I drove the main road and the loops and the dead-end lanes, bumping through farmyards and splashing along in the ruts of tractor tyres. Tors and Balmae, the signs said. Netherlaw and Fagra. Drumgans and Screel and Knockmult, as if I had left the real world behind and fallen into a place of giants and trolls where Angel had been dragged and chained up somewhere.

  Then suddenly the lights of the town. I crept along every street in Kirkcudbright, shining my headlamps into the parks where kids sat scuffing on the swings and hiding their cigarettes. All of them lanky and hooded and scowling, but none of them Angelo. I took the main road back to Dalbeattie, made it in twenty, and then crept around every side street there too, even parked in front of his friends’ houses and sounded my horn. If he was inside, he’d look out, wouldn’t he?

  But all that happened was one of the mums coming to the doorstep with her arms folded tight against the cold. She peered in and motioned for me to wind down my window.

  “I told Marco, Ali. He’s not been here. And Gordon’s not been out either.”

  So I drove away. This time I’d go to the police, I told myself. And if they sent me home to wait until twenty-four hours had passed, I’d take their names and have their badges.

  I slowed down at the house as I passed it, but Angelo’s bedroom was still in darkness and Marco hadn’t called me so I didn’t stop. And when I’d got back up to speed I flew along. I wasn’t checking the hedgerows and shouting this time. I took the corners as fast as I could on the wet road and flashed past farm entries and the checkpoint gate, the kiosk closed and dark now. I was focussed ahead, planning what I’d tell the cops. It was a miracle I noticed it, really.

  It took a minute before my brain made sense of what my eyes had seen. I hit the brakes and reversed until I could back into a field entrance and turn round. Then I crawled back, telling myself it couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, that it was a trick of the light. But when I nosed my headlights in towards the base of the fence just beyond the army checkpoint, there it really was: Angelo’s backpack, red and black but with the silver decals that had flashed as I drove by.

  It couldn’t have been there earlier. Even if I’d been looking the other way when I went past on my own, Marco was watching this side when we came out together. He’d have seen it. Unless it was better hidden in the dusk when the decals didn’t reflect so brightly. Anyway. I got out of the car and went over, dreading what I might see. But it was just the backpack, dumped at the bottom of the fence. I looked up and thought I could trace, in the stretched-out sections of chain link, where he had pushed in to make toeholds as he climbed, and at the top a scrap of black nylon was caught on one of the barbs.

  Why would my son have climbed into an army base? Or was he climbing into a hospital? Did he think I was in there? Or was he fleeing someone out here?

  I made it up about four feet before I admitted it was beyond me. Then, taking a minute to think, I realised there must be another way. You couldn’t have people living behind a gate with no way to open it if the fire brigade or an ambulance needed in. I remembered Lars saying the two acute beds for emergency admissions were such a money-spinner. So I went back to the car for my phone.

  Dr. Ferris herself answered, which surprised me.

  “I think my son is in the grounds,” I said. “I think he climbed over the fence. Can you … Is there any way to let me in?”

  “The gate should be open, Alison,” said Dr. Ferris in that same cool voice as if nothing ever surprised her. “Unless there are night manouevres, the gates open at dusk when the training centre closes. We’re not captives here.” Then I didn’t hear the rest because I was starting the car and skidding as I turned it into the driveway.

  She was right. The gate was closed over but not even latched, never mind locked, and it swung wide as I nosed my bumper against it. I left it hanging and drove on, keening forward in my seat, so much energy coursing through me that I felt as if I was pulling the car along behind me.

  And after the second turn, my lights found a shap
e in the middle of the drive, and I surged forward and there he was. Shaking, white-faced, and soaked to his skin, but standing there and looking back at me. I turned the heat up as high as it would go and flipped all the vents open and then I got out, slowly, as if a wild animal was injured and needed me but might still run away. I put my arms around him and let him sag against me.

  Seven

  “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing.”

  We were back in the car. I was sweating from the hot air pouring out the vents, but Angelo couldn’t stop shuddering, deep spasms that made his voice quake and his legs jump as if someone was hitting him, testing his reflexes. He had put his head back and his eyes were closed but tears leaked out from under his lashes—like Marco’s lashes, long and sweeping.

  “What’s wrong, Angel-boy?” I said. I didn’t think even a fifteen-year-old boy with his mum asking would say “nothing” when he’d been found soaked and sobbing miles from home, but the answer he did give was worse.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  My stomach lurched up into my chest and stuck there as if it was barbed.

  “You can tell me anything,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, I will always love you and I will fight to my last breath for you.”

  He just shook his head. “See? You think I’ve done something. You’ve hanged me already.” He lifted one hand and wiped his nose with the inside of his cuff like he hadn’t done since he was tiny.

  He was right and it shamed me. A girl in tears, you think she’s been hurt. “Or what you know,” I said. “Do you know who took your phone and used it? Are you shielding someone? Just tell me. At least tell me how to help you.”