by LK Fox
Eventually, I was forced to catch a bus. I walked quickly past the accusing faces, with my eyes fixed on the floor, then slouched down on the back seat. My phone had been in my purse. I wished I had it now so I could listen to music – shut my eyes and pretend I was somewhere else, pretend it had never happened.
*
I got back to find the house in darkness. A note in the kitchen explained that Harry had taken Karen to an Italian restaurant in Hampstead for dinner.
I sat in my room and studied myself in my pink bedroom mirror, trying to gauge the extent of the damage. My private parts felt bruised. There was a sore patch on the inside of my thigh, and a tiny blue-grey mark where his thumb had dug in hard.
Was it enough for people to believe me, or did there need to be signs of force? I’d bruised myself more than that when I’d practised putting love-bites on my arm during a boring geography lesson. Could I be marked inside? Could I – my blood ran cold at the thought – have caught a disease?
If I wanted to go to the police, I knew I would have to decide on a story and stay with it, no matter what happened. But I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to do that. And besides, what good would it do?
My local doctor could give me advice, except that I shared him with my father, and I had always found him roaming-hands creepy. I was intelligent enough to know there was a problem I had to deal with, but right then I couldn’t think beyond the next ten minutes.
I threw away my jeans and pants, knotting them in a binbag and putting it in the dustbin outside, Then I put my T-shirt in the wash and ran a bath. Making the water as hot as I dared, I scrubbed at my body until my skin was red and tender.
After drying myself and spraying Karen’s overpowering scent everywhere, I put on the quilted pink dressing gown my mother had bought for me and dug my old teddy bears out from the back of the cupboard. I wished Jean was still alive to help me. I tried to imagine what she would do.
I went online and looked it up. The word sat there at the top of the page, blunt and brutal. Underneath it said: ‘Rape Trauma Syndrome includes physical, emotional and behavioural stress reactions which result from the person being faced with a life-threatening event.’
A life-threatening event – that didn’t sound like what had happened to me at all. I closed the page and deleted my history.
My teddy bears smelled faintly of chocolate and my mother’s perfume, Chanel No. 5. They were my childhood. I arranged them along the pillows, then climbed into bed and took two Temazepams I’d stolen from Karen’s bathroom cabinet. I settled back to wait for sleep with an old Disney movie, Beauty and the Beast, still playing on my computer. I told myself I would never cry again; crying was for the blameless, and I was to blame for everything: for tonight and for what happened to my mother.
As I fell asleep, I tried to avoid thinking about anything bad. Especially the thought that Ryder had used no contraception and had come inside me.
I knew he had because he’d shouted it out and rolled off me seconds later. What hurt most of all wasn’t what had happened, but the look on his face afterwards.
That night, the shadow man reappeared in my bedroom, and there was no one to make him go away. This time, I knew he was here to stay.
Nick
The investigation bothered me. The police and the detectives were detail-obsessed but somehow sloppy and misdirected; it was as if they were thoroughly exploring the wrong avenues.
With the exception of Hannah Colberton, who was genuinely concerned for us, the police were increasingly obstructive and territorial. I figured that a couple of them were antagonistic towards me because of their dealings with my old company, Datachase. I used to handle security intelligence, most of it involving data searches and retrieval for private corporations. We even found a few missing people when we had to, like actual detectives. Bad debtors, serial bankrupts, frauds and scams ‒ small stuff. We never used our own resources because that was illegal. The officers we came up against hated us because we were private sector, not public-service employees. We recommended our own security systems, and that didn’t go down well with some people. I switched careers because the macho culture in my job stressed me out so much that I dreaded going into work. I’ve never been able to handle anxiety.
To be fair, none of these tensions seemed important at the time of Gabriel’s disappearance. Everyone was focussed on finding him. It was only later that I started to look back and ask myself questions.
After the search was exhausted, there could be only one conclusion: my son had been abducted. I even wondered if he’d been picked up by somebody with whom I’d had dealings in my previous line of work . . . but we rarely made personal enemies because we never got that close. It had mostly been a matter of one corporation dealing with another.
After that long first night without any sleep I stood in the garden in the rain – the downpour hadn’t let up during the night – and knew that something truly terrible had happened. Gabriel had been out overnight in appalling weather. I felt that letting the police tell us what to do had been a total disaster.
When any public service steps in, you lose personal control and enter a regimented system you have to trust. It was obvious that Redditch thought Gabriel had run away because of something I’d said or done to him. He kept asking me if the boy had some reason to be angry or afraid of me. He found Ben’s remoteness odd and, true to his word, started questioning us separately. That was when I finally realised that beneath the diversity training was not just a bad-tempered cop but a homophobic son-of-a-bitch waiting to get out. His questions became weirdly inappropriate. He started making the kind of assumptions haters make when they see the words ‘gay’ and ‘child’ next to each other. Of course, I knew it was his job to be suspicious, but I needed him to see us as parents trying to raise a son and not automatically tap into his personal views on society going to hell.
Colberton was different. She took such an interest in the case you’d have thought it was her child who had gone missing. She had a background in paediatrics and really understood the problems we were having. A few days later, she had a furious argument with Redditch and disappeared from the investigation. My questions about her were ignored.
The second day was even more hellish than the first. Ben retreated even further into himself. He wouldn’t talk to me, and we had a really stupid fight in front of Redditch and his team, who stared at the floor, embarrassed, as we tore into each other. Ben blamed me ‒ of course he blamed me. He thought I was lying about waiting until Gabriel had gone inside the school building, that I’d been in a hurry and had taken off while he was still outside on the street.
There was no one to back up my story. There should have been someone who had seen everything. Redditch interviewed them all but, apparently, nobody had anything useful to add. I wasn’t surprised. Whether he knew it or not, he was an intimidating, antagonistic presence. He decided to hold a press conference, and then all of a sudden he changed his mind. If he had a plan, he refused to explain what it was.
There were a couple of CCTV cameras outside the school gates, but they weren’t trained in the right places. The elm trees had been cut back to give them wider access, but they hadn’t been trimmed to allow for wind and rain, so there were some small branches over the lenses, just enough to blur the images at the far edge of the kerb. It was impossible to work out who had been there that rainy Monday morning.
Every time I thought back, I knew there had to be something odd about the chain of events. I dismantled it into separate components and examined each one. I plotted timelines and drew maps, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was a displacement activity to keep me from dwelling on the horrific worst-case scenarios that kept passing before my eyes.
After the fight with Ben, I sat dumbly beside him, filling pages with routes and names. I knew the two of us had to present a united front. What else could we do? Ben said that he would go into his office and hand over his work to other colleagues until furt
her notice, that he was just getting in the way here and not letting the police do their jobs. They told me to stay home and wait for Gabriel, as if he was going to come strolling through the front door any minute, amazed by all the attention he had drawn to himself.
He didn’t come back.
The hours passed. It rained and rained. The TV kept showing water levels rising. Several subway stations were closed because of flooding. Rats were being driven up out of the sewers. I thought of Gabriel drowning and threw up, my stomach in knots.
The police fired the same questions at us again and again. The Child Support Agency questioned us, too. You could hear the suspicion in their voices. There were no direct accusations, but it was obvious they thought we had done something to provoke Gabriel. Maybe it was the fight – perhaps they saw problems between Ben and me that we hadn’t yet seen for ourselves. They were used to dealing with broken families, and maybe that’s what they saw, instead of a loving, supportive unit. I was sorry that we weren’t the perfect couple, that we had our problems just like anybody else – but at that moment I needed us to be perfect in every way.
Then the networks got hold of the story. At first, they were sympathetic, but when that got old they started prying into our private lives: staking out the house, climbing into the garden, going through our trash, interviewing neighbours and asking around at the school. Shirley talked to them, so we stopped talking to her. A pro-gay lobby group decided to issue a statement in our support, which only made Ben more upset ‒ although he was out at work, he never discussed his private life with colleagues. He tried hard to keep his family out of the picture and didn’t want us to become poster-boys for any sociopolitical causes.
Ben’s mother called me in tears because Ben had phoned her to pre-empt any press contact. Hannah Colberton got in touch to say she had lodged a formal complaint about Redditch. I kept thinking, If only everyone had been honest with each other from the outset, if only we’d all been open and truthful . . . but it’s human nature to try to protect the feelings of others. I only cared about one thing: seeing Gabriel alive and well again.
I knew he hadn’t just run off. He was seven years old that day, and excited. He’d taken his dragoon with him and knew it was valuable. They never found it at the school, or anywhere in the surrounding area.
The police didn’t pick up on that because, at first, I didn’t tell them. I needed to hold something back that was Gabriel’s and mine. I thought perhaps it would give me an edge over them. Privately, I ran searches to see if it would surface online on a collectors’ site – it was a rare piece ‒ but it never did. I advertised on eBay for one and got no replies. In desperation, I even advertised for a Chicago Bears sweatshirt, and was so swamped with junk mail I couldn’t follow it all up.
Then our wait came to an end. The next time I saw our son, at 2.05 a.m. on Wednesday, he was lying on a steel dissection table.
Ella
I never expected to be stranded with my father Harry.
Once, I overheard him arguing with my mother about me. He said, ‘All you had to do was give me a son, and you couldn’t even do that,’ like it was the nineteenth century or something. He had always been surrounded by women ‒ my mum, my sister Lesley, my crazy Aunt Charlie. When Jean complained that he wasn’t helping to look after me, he told her, ‘It’s your job. Ella’s one of yours.’
So, you could say I did not get on with my father, although I always told people I did. I wasn’t what he wanted, which is to say I wasn’t a boy, no matter how hard I tried to be. I embarrassed him. He never came to school plays or concerts and had as little to do with me as possible, but that was okay because, while I had my mother, we didn’t need him. But soon she was gone and I was alone.
Even then, I thought maybe we’d manage, just the two of us. It never occurred to me that Harry would rush into another marriage. When I was introduced to Karen I don’t think I did a very good job of hiding my revulsion. She was everything my mother wasn’t: whiny, lazy, complaining . . . but now I knew even she would be able to look down on me, because I’d got a nice bright blue line in the window of my pregnancy kit.
I phoned my father from our local surgery to tell him the news. No point in delaying the inevitable.
Harry waited until he heard the front door open, then summoned me to the front room – this was the grand one with the bay window and the Italian leather seating units that nobody ever sat on unless we had important visitors. When my mother was here, all the vases were filled with fresh-cut flowers. Now they had dried lavender in, or stayed empty.
I had known Harry would explode at the news, but I thought that by talking it through with him I’d reach a better understanding about my own confused feelings. In hindsight, my naivety seems incredible.
The first thing he said to me was, ‘What was it all for?’
He pushed himself up from the couch but couldn’t resist checking it for handprints. He was always very concerned about the furniture. Then he walked over to the window and stayed there. He wouldn’t let me see any emotion in his face, but I noticed he was still vain enough to pat his grey hair back in place. ‘Tell me,’ he asked again, ‘what was it all for?’
‘All what?’ I asked. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The private education, the extra tuition, all the effort your mother and I put in to give you a decent moral grounding in life.’
I thought this was a bit rich coming from a man who once had an affair behind his wife’s back and then asked for a divorce when she announced she was willing to forgive him. Not long after that, Jean got sick for the first time, which at least put that conversation on hold.
Harry turned away from me, and I was forced to stare at his back for five minutes. I knew he couldn’t bring himself to look me in the eye. ‘I thought they gave you sex-education classes to stop this sort of thing from happening,’ he said finally. ‘You’re intelligent. You came top of your class in history.’
‘I go to a convent school,’ I reminded him. ‘The teachers’ idea of sex education is to warn you not to have improper thoughts. They don’t understand. Miss Prudence says that modesty and purity are the guardians of chastity. She confuses morality with hygiene.’
‘So you know better than them now? Don’t get clever with me. You weren’t very clever when you let this happen, were you? What do you know about morality? You’re just a little girl. The only reason your mother and I put you in that school was to ensure you got the right grades for university. Christ, it wasn’t about religion.’
‘But that comes into it.’
‘You didn’t have to pay any attention to that part. All you had to do was concentrate on your studies and be sensible around boys.’
‘Well, it’s not like there were any boys at school anyway.’
‘You went out looking for a boy, did you?’
‘No, of course not. I didn’t want this to happen.’
‘Then you should have listened to your teachers.’
‘You know what they tell us? I can recite it for you if you like. “For the healthy-minded girl there can be no impurity, no premarital sex, no fornication, no adultery. She must remain chaste, repelling lustful desires and temptations, self-abuse, pornography, and indecent entertainment of every description.”’
He paced about angrily, red-faced, clenching his fists, lost for words.
‘That’s not the point. You’re not a complete idiot, Ella,’ he said. ‘You’re supposed to know what to do. I thought Karen talked to you about this. Men are men. It’s simple bloody common sense.’
‘Common sense? But he—’
‘I really don’t think this is the time for sordid details. I don’t understand why you left it so long to tell me about this.’
‘I‒I was scared. But then I saw the nurse and she said she would contact you, so I told her I would speak to you first.’
‘Well, now you have. And for God’s sake stop playing with your hair, you’re not a seven-year-old, you’re me
ant to be a responsible adult.’ Then Harry came out with the kicker. ‘Well, thank God you’re still under fourteen weeks.’
Harry had trained at Dartmouth Naval College and spent eleven years as a naval officer before going into the city. His world was ordered. Now he looked as uncomfortable as any man could when discussing an unintended pregnancy with his wayward daughter. ‘I’ll arrange for you to enter a private clinic, and no one else need know. I can tell the school you’ve got the flu. But before that, you’re going to tell me who he was. You’re not leaving this room until I get his name and address.’ I looked at Harry. He had turned into a character from a Victorian melodrama. The word ‘hypocrite’ sprang to mind.
‘I can’t tell you that,’ I whispered.
‘Why not? I assume you know who he was?’
‘Yes, but he doesn’t know about this. I tried to stop him—’
‘What on earth are you talking about? Did he force himself on you? You’re not telling me you were raped?’
There it was, that razor-sharp word. It made me flinch. I had to reduce its stigma somehow, and the best way, I decided then, was by being as honest as possible. ‘I wanted him to, um, show me some affection,’ I explained, treading carefully, ‘but it got out of hand. He was someone I’d thought about day and night, but then when it was real . . . it was too real. I changed my mind.’
‘Did you tell him this? Did you tell him to stop?’
‘No, not in so many words. I know I should have, but by that time—’
‘God, no more details, please. Were you drunk?’
‘I’d had some drinks. Look, it’s fine. I’ll find him, and I’ll find out if he wants me to keep the baby.’
Harry’s mouth fell open. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Are you out of your mind? I can’t imagine he wants to marry you. He won’t want anything to do with you, otherwise he wouldn’t have done what he did. You think he has any respect for you at all? What, did he think now was a good time to start a family with some silly drunk schoolgirl? You’ve seen those girls over on the estate, the ones who’ve collected a bunch of kids from different fathers by the time they’re twenty so they can get welfare benefits. You’re no better than any of them.’
