Burnt Paper Sky

by Gilly MacMillan

  I was watching Clemo and Zhang. He was waiting for Nicky to finish. Zhang looked at her notebook, which she’d laid neatly on the table in front of her, then glanced sideways at Clemo. Whatever they were here to say, he was going to be the one to say it, and I was becoming certain that it wasn’t to discuss Nicky’s wish list.

  ‘Coffee, please,’ he said. Zhang wanted some too.

  As Nicky filled a cafetière with boiling water and set it down in front of us, Clemo watched her in a way that made frost settle on my skin.

  ‘From our point of view,’ she said, ‘this is so valuable. I’ve been doing some research, as you can see –’ she smiled at them – ‘and everywhere it says that there’s a much higher chance of success in finding the child if there’s a close relationship between law enforcement and the family. So – thank you. So much. Help yourselves to milk and sugar.’ She set down a sugar bowl and a small china jug. Steam rose from its contents. She’d warmed the milk.

  DI Clemo opened his notebook and had a quick look inside it. He closed it again. Nicky finally heard the silence.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m gabbling, aren’t I? Sorry.’ She pulled out a chair, sat down and looked attentively at Clemo and Zhang.

  Clemo cleared his throat before he spoke. ‘Do either of you know of a couple called Andrew and Naomi Bowness?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘Nicky?’ he asked my sister.

  Her face had emptied of colour, instantly. It was extraordinary.

  ‘Oh God no,’ she said, and the tendons on her neck appeared stretched and odd as she looked first at me and then back at Clemo, searching our faces for something. She stood up abruptly but didn’t seem to know what to do then.

  ‘This will be easier if you can sit down and talk it through with us,’ said Clemo.

  ‘No,’ said Nicky. ‘Don’t do this.’ Her hands were clasped together, the edges of her fingers white from the pressure of her grasp.

  ‘Please sit,’ Clemo insisted.

  She didn’t sit; she crumpled back into her chair, as if he’d sunk his fist into her stomach.

  ‘What about their son, Charlie Bowness?’ asked Clemo in a tone that seemed carefully controlled to sound light. He adjusted his chair, moving it just a little closer to Nicky. She wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘Nicky?’ he asked. ‘You know who they are, don’t you?’

  ‘You know I do,’ she whispered.

  ‘And you?’ he asked me. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I said.

  I was transfixed at the sight of my sister so vulnerable and defenceless. I was aware that I should probably move, and go to her, but there was a ghastly momentum in the room now, and it felt unstoppable.

  ‘She doesn’t know,’ said my sister. ‘She hasn’t got a clue and that’s the way it should be.’ Hatred had crept into her voice, and it was directed at Clemo.

  He persisted. ‘And what about Alice and Katy Bowness? Do you know who they are?’

  Nicky began to shake her head violently.

  ‘Alice and Katy Bowness,’ he repeated. ‘Do you know who they are?’ He spoke slowly, giving each word space and a weight, as if it were a rock being dropped into water.

  She looked right at him, and it seemed to cost her an enormous effort to do that. Defiance and defeat waged war in her expression. She spoke her next words quietly. ‘I know who they are.’

  ‘Have you heard of them?’ he asked me.

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘Who the hell are they? Have they got Ben?’

  ‘Are you sure you haven’t heard of them?’

  ‘No! She hasn’t! She’s telling the truth,’ said my sister.

  Clemo remained impassive. He contemplated me, and then my sister, in turn. I felt my chest tighten.

  ‘Will you tell her, or will I?’ he said to Nicky.

  ‘You bastard.’

  Zhang started to speak but Clemo held a hand up to silence her.

  ‘Careful,’ he said to Nicky.

  ‘You’re frightening me,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Nicky turned towards me. I was sitting at right angles to her, at the head of the table. She wanted to take my hand and I let her.

  ‘Who are these people?’ I said.

  ‘Andrew and Naomi Bowness…⁠’ said Nicky. It was hard for her to go on. A sob escaped her. ‘I’m sorry, Rachel,’ she said. Her gaze flicked back to Clemo and he nodded at her, willing her to continue. She placed one trembling hand upon the other, so that my hand was buried beneath both of hers. I saw in her eyes that some kind of battle was lost.

  ‘Rachel,’ she said, ‘Andrew and Naomi Bowness are our parents. Our mum and dad.’

  ‘What do you mean? No they’re not. That’s not what our parents are called.’ I tried to pull my hand away but Nicky was gripping it now.

  ‘It is. Those are the real names of our parents,’ my sister said. Her eyes were begging me to understand but I didn’t, not really, not yet.

  ‘And Charlie Bowness?’ I said.

  ‘He…⁠’ She was welling up again, but she got herself under control. ‘He was our brother.’

  ‘Brother?’ I’d never had a brother. ‘And the others? I suppose they’re our sisters are they?’

  ‘Tell her everything,’ said Clemo.

  He’d broken Nicky, drained the fight out of her. In her expression I saw terrible suffering, terrible vulnerability and, most frightening of all, what looked like a plea for forgiveness.

  ‘Alice and Katy Bowness are us. Those were our names before they were changed. We were, we are, Alice and Katy Bowness.’

  Clemo briskly pulled something from between the pages of his notebook. It was a newspaper cutting.

  If he hadn’t showed it to me there and then I’m not sure that I’d have believed any of them. I’d always been told that my parents died in a car accident. You could tell the story in an instant and I’d been doing that for years: our parents died in a head-on collision with a lorry. It had been nobody’s fault, just a tragic accident. The steering on the lorry was proved to be faulty. My parents were cremated and their ashes scattered. There was no headstone. End of story.

  Except that apparently it wasn’t.

  I wasn’t who I thought I was, and nor was Nicky.

  Clemo handed me a photocopy of a newspaper article from 30 March 1982, thirty years ago. There was a photograph of a couple that I recognised as my parents. My Aunt Esther had had one photograph of them on her mantelpiece and this grainy image showed the same two people. The difference was that in this image they were with three children.

  I recognised my sister. She stood beside our mother. I could see a baby, a chubby little thing of about one year old in a smocked dress, and I supposed that she could be me. I didn’t recognise the boy who sat in the middle of the picture. Around four years old, he was so like Ben it took my breath away. He had the same messy hair and balanced features, the same posture and the same grin, the one that could light up your day, and the same smattering of freckles across his nose. He was nestled between my parents. It was a lovely image, a perfect family.

  The headline beside it told another story:

  BATTEN DISEASE FAMILY IN FATAL DEATH LEAP

  I scanned the article, snippets of it jumping out at me: ‘Local couple Andrew and Naomi Bowness leaped to their deaths… driven to the act by lack of support for their terminally ill son… no grandparents surviving… friends and neighbours expressed surprise… had coped so well… feel sorry for their two surviving daughters… wanted to end his suffering.’

  I looked at Nicky who was watching me, stricken.

  ‘They killed themselves?’

  ‘And Charlie.’

  The way she said his name, the tenderness in those two words, the loss, told me that it was Charlie who she mourned above all.

  ‘But what about us?’

  Nicky looked away.

  ‘Why did they leave us?’

  ‘Don�
��t you think I’ve been asking myself that all my life?’

  ‘And why didn’t you tell me?’

  She didn’t answer.

  I looked at the article again, and stared at the photograph.

  Clemo cleared his throat. ‘There was a report from the coroner. Would you like to know what it said?’

  ‘I’ve read it,’ said Nicky.

  ‘I want to know,’ I said.

  He took another sheet of paper from his notebook, ran his eyes down it.

  ‘It says that your brother Charlie was diagnosed with Batten disease at the age of five and that his condition began to deteriorate rapidly after that. His diagnosis came about a year after you were born, Rachel, at around the time that this picture was taken, but he was already experiencing some of the symptoms.’

  ‘He looks OK in the photo,’ I said. He did. He was lovely: sunny-looking, vibrant, snug in his family’s embrace.

  ‘He’s not,’ said Nicky. ‘He was beginning to lose his sight. Look at the photo. You’ll see that he’s not looking at the camera properly. He’s looking above it. It’s because he only had peripheral vision when that was taken. He had to look out of the bottom of his eye to see anything.’

  She was right. The little boy was staring at a point that was above the camera.

  ‘He was totally blind soon after that,’ Nicky said. ‘And then he stopped being able to walk and stopped being able to talk, and he had to be fed with a tube because he couldn’t swallow and he had epileptic fits. The disease took him away from us piece by piece.’

  ‘You loved him.’

  ‘I worshipped him.’

  Her words seemed to hang for a moment between us, and when she spoke again it was hushed.

  ‘He didn’t deserve it. I would’ve helped them. I would’ve helped them to look after him until the end, but they couldn’t stand his suffering. Mum blamed herself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s an inherited condition.’

  ‘But we don’t have it.’ I was struggling to understand.

  ‘Not every child gets it. It’s a matter of luck.’

  ‘So they jumped off a cliff with him? That’s so extreme.’

  Nicky simply nodded. She’d turned her head away now, and I could only see her profile, as she looked fixedly towards the dim winter light that filtered through the kitchen window, washing her features with grey.

  ‘But why would you do that if you had two other children?’ I asked.

  Clemo replied, ‘The coroner’s report does shed a bit of light on that. Apparently, because the condition was inheritable, they had had you tested. They were waiting for the results when they took their lives.’

  ‘But I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t they wait for the results?’

  ‘Your mother had convinced herself, and your father, that you would not be fine. By then she was, as far as we can gather, extremely depressed and unstable. She told her sister, your aunt Esther, that she would not be able to cope any longer if you were also diagnosed with Batten disease, and your father had never coped well. The report mentions that she spoke of feeling very isolated. There was a stigma to mental and physical disability in those days and your mother was not very emotionally strong. The coroner concluded that the strain of caring for Charlie had affected your parents profoundly. They felt that they had no option.’

  ‘It makes no sense.’

  ‘Things don’t always make sense,’ said Clemo, ‘especially when people are under duress. We see things you wouldn’t believe.’

  I resented the way he was trying to reassure me, as if he hadn’t just turned my world upside down, and I didn’t want his words to distract me, because there was something else I needed to ask.

  ‘Why did our names get changed?’

  Nicky said, ‘Aunt Esther thought it would be better. She didn’t want it to be hanging over us, or herself either. She thought people would judge us, that they’d say it was a shameful thing. Luckily, for us anyway, the Falklands War started four days later, so that article was all the press attention our little family story got. The papers were full of battleships and submarines after that. Better to be safe than sorry, though, Esther said, and social services approved the idea of having new names. I chose them, you know! I renamed us!’

  She forced a sarcastic enthusiasm into her voice but there was nothing in her expression to suggest that this fact actually gave her any pleasure.

  I picked up the article and studied the photograph. I’d never seen an image of myself as a baby before. I was chubby-faced with a curl in my hair that I never knew I’d had. I was balanced on my father’s knee, with fat little arms protruding from my dress. My hands were blurry, as though I might have been clapping. My sister stood beside my mother in the photograph. She wore shorts and a T-shirt and her hand rested casually on my mother’s shoulder. Her feet were bare and she had the skinny coltish legs of a prepubescent child. She was smiling widely. When I studied the faces of my parents I felt a new emotion: a stab of betrayal. They’d been willing to leave me. Whether I was healthy or ill, they’d relinquished care of me at just one year old. They weren’t taken from me by chance. They’d abandoned me and they’d abandoned Nicky too, in the most final way possible.

  I swallowed and just that small physical reflex felt like an effort. I felt as if the blood had drained from me, just as it had from my sister minutes earlier, and with it any strength that I might have had left, any fight. I was a husk, robbed of all the things that had made me who I am, all the things that had made me vital.

  ‘Am I Alice or Katy?’ I asked.

  ‘Katy.’ It was a whisper and Nicky’s face contorted tearfully around it, mirroring mine.

  In the photo, my parents’ expressions were impossible to read. They were both smiling for the camera and I tried in vain to imagine what was actually going through their minds. I looked at my brother. He sat in the centre, cocooned by their bodies: a terminally ill little boy who was never going to get to live a proper life. I wondered whether they’d had the diagnosis before this photograph was taken, or were they just worried about his eyesight at this stage, thinking that was bad enough and having no idea what horrors lay just around the corner for their little boy. A boy who looked just like Ben.

  I said to Clemo, ‘Why are you telling me this now?’

  He addressed Nicky. ‘We spoke to your sister’s ex-husband this morning.’

  She looked at him warily and raised her chin slightly, with a touch of defiance. She let go of my hand. The light in the room fluctuated, growing darker and more riddled with shadows as the clouds lowered outside.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say, and it’s bullshit,’ she said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I know what you’re trying to do, but you’re wrong.’

  ‘What am I trying to do?’

  ‘I don’t have to listen to this.’

  ‘I think we both know that you do.’

  She crossed her arms, stared down at the table.

  I sat in a state of pure, simple shock. I knew well enough by now that you could lose your child in just a few minutes, but I was shocked into silence by the new knowledge that in a similar space of time you could also gain and lose a brother who was the image of that child, and parents who were more imperfect than any version of them that I’d ever imagined.

  Clemo spoke to Nicky: ‘John Finch told us that when Ben was born, he was concerned that you might have what could be described as an unhealthy interest in Ben. Would you like to comment on that?’

  ‘You revolting man,’ said my sister. ‘You haven’t got a clue who’s got Ben so you’ve decided to pick on me. Easier to get to someone close to home, is it? Stops you having to do so much work?’

  Clemo’s gaze never left her face. ‘Would you care to comment?’ he asked her. ‘I’d be very interested to hear what your response might be.’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ she replied.

  ‘I expect your sister wo
uld as well,’ he said.

  Nicky looked at me. ‘I’ve tried so hard, and for so long, to protect you. I just wanted you to have a life where you didn’t feel rejected. I wanted it to be straightforward for you. But you were so…⁠’ She searched for a word, frustrated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Difficult, and ungrateful.’

  ‘For what? Ungrateful for what?’

  ‘And irresponsible! You never understood anything. You just took it all for granted. You did what you wanted to do, when you wanted to do it. You had no burden. You had no loss to bear.’

  ‘I had the loss of my parents to bear.’ I said this quietly, because I understood that she’d had more to cope with, but she was angry now, and so was I.

  ‘You were clueless! Totally clueless!’

  ‘How could I have been any other way, if you didn’t tell me anything? That’s not my fault.’

  She didn’t respond to that, she had more to get off her chest. ‘You never thanked me.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For protecting you.’

  ‘How could I have known?’

  ‘They never thanked me either.’

  Suddenly she lost her momentum, as if that statement summed up the hopelessness of it all.

  Clemo leaned in towards her. ‘Who never thanked you?’

  ‘Mum and Dad.’

  ‘What did they never thank you for?’ he asked.

  ‘For loving Charlie, for watching him when they’d had enough, for making him smile when they were too tired, when they couldn’t cope any longer.’

  Her eyes were glassy with loss. His were intent.

  ‘Nicky. Were you jealous when Rachel had Ben?’

  She snapped an answer at him as if he were running through a questionnaire.

  ‘Yes, I was jealous, yes.’

  ‘But you had the girls,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand,’ she said.

  ‘Why were you jealous?’ said Clemo.

  ‘Because he looked like Charlie, right from the start. All I could see when I looked at him was Charlie.’