The Final Child

by Fran Dorricott

  “Oh?” Yes. Not only had she asked me to stay but she wanted to talk. And that phrase. Taken from me… I tried to keep my face sympathetic but vaguely disinterested. “I’m sorry…?”

  “My boys. We thought they ran away…”

  “And – you don’t think that now?”

  Jenny shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I think. I’m an angry old woman.” She turned to me and reached out; her arthritic fingers latched onto my arm with surprising strength. “You should never get old. It sucks the hope out of you.”

  “What happened to them?” I asked. “If you don’t mind me asking…”

  “I lost them. They were there, one minute. Arguing before bed – playfully, like brothers do. And I put them to bed like I always did. And in the morning they were gone.”

  “You don’t think they ran away in the night?”

  “I expect they did. But I don’t think they meant to stay gone. They were good boys, both of them. I think they were… testing boundaries, but something happened.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. And I truly meant it.

  Jenny smiled. “You seem like the kind of girl I’d have liked for a daughter. Friendly. You know you shouldn’t trust strangers?”

  I almost laughed. “I know. I don’t normally. This was sort of unavoidable.”

  “It’s always unavoidable.” She sighed. “Always. I said that was unavoidable. Except of course it wasn’t at all. If we’d only known…”

  “What could you have done?”

  “Something,” Jenny said simply. “Everything. I would have done anything if I’d known somebody would take them from me.”

  “Do you think… they were taken by somebody they knew?” I asked tentatively.

  Jenny looked at me with the first hints of suspicion but didn’t hesitate when she answered.

  “Could have been. Always can be, can’t it?”

  Jenny was lonely. I could tell, despite the photographs, that she was on her own a lot of the time. The place was clean, but empty. She was desperate to talk, to tell her story, but probably didn’t want the pressure of explaining herself like she would have to with a journalist.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It’s a scary thought, but it’s true.”

  “Do you have any siblings?” Jenny asked suddenly.

  I flinched.

  “I… I did. I do.” I didn’t know what else to say. But Jenny clearly wasn’t done.

  “Siblings,” Jenny Bowles said again. “They protect each other. They should.”

  I felt my heart in my throat. Jenny had spoken with such force, such raw honesty, but her meaning was masked.

  “What?” I asked stupidly.

  That seemed to bring Jenny back to the cheerful old woman I’d met when I first arrived. She withdrew her hand from my arm with surprising speed and fixed her smile again.

  “I suppose you’d better go,” she said firmly. No mention of my car. Of the AA that was meant to be coming to fix me up. I felt a slither of guilt worm up inside me.

  “Yes. Look, I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t apologise, duck. These things can’t be helped.”

  I left the way I came, only now the hallway felt darker. I found myself checking the shadows. I started to feel my skin crawl, like it used to when I was nervous as a child. I scratched at my arm, feeling it prickle like there were little needles underneath, the skin getting red and sore. I’d fought so hard to overcome this habit, the scratching, the raw skin, the nervous desire to run nails over flesh when it felt like there were a thousand bugs underneath. I clenched my fist and forced my hand away.

  By the time I made it to my car my heart was hammering in my chest and my palms were sweaty.

  It felt like drowning, like a whole lake full of water sitting on top of my head, panic holding me down. I realised that Harriet was right. All of the thoughts I’d been ignoring since she told me about the boys just crashed over me like a wave, all of them at once. If Oscar and Isaac were taken by the Father, did that mean the police might have new leads? Would it even matter?

  Siblings should protect each other. I wondered what Jenny meant. I’d failed Alex, but how did she know that? Was she talking about her boys, or somebody else?

  I couldn’t remember where I’d put my phone. It took me several long minutes to remember that I’d stashed it in the glove compartment. When I found it, I saw I’d a missed call and a text. Both from a number I didn’t recognise – until I saw it was the same number I’d called to reach Harriet.

  The text simply said I’m sorry about last night. Call me? I can make it up to you – again.

  I ignored it until my hands were steadier. I dialled Monica’s number instead, needing to funnel some of my nerves into something that wasn’t – whatever this was.

  She picked up on the third ring, as though she may have been holding her phone. I don’t know why I rang her, except that I wanted to hear a familiar voice, even an angry one.

  “Mon, hi.”

  “Erin, I can’t talk to you.”

  “Why not? I know I was a bit shit but there’s a lot going on. I’ve got… some personal stuff—”

  “What, and I don’t? Look, it’s freaking me out, okay. You need to get this to stop. I understand. But the least you could do was talk to me if you’re seeing somebody else, Erin. I don’t care what you’ve got going on but leaving gifts at my house is fucking weird.”

  “Hang on—”

  “No, Erin. It’s not cool, okay? I get the picture. You’re not available. Stop calling me.”

  The call disconnected.

  BEFORE

  Mouse

  THE DOCTOR LET THEM go home but he didn’t feel better. Mother herded them into the car and Chris started to complain immediately. I’m tired, I’m cold, I’m hungry – it was never-ending. Why couldn’t he just shut up and deal with it like the rest of them had to?

  By the time they got home Mouse was feeling even worse and Chris was doing his head in.

  “Little Bear, your brother is poorly, we’ve got to try to be quiet.” Mother was doing her usual simpering thing, her immaculate hair pulled back in a neat bun and her smile mechanical. She must have learned it when she was an actress. That was a lifetime ago, now. Before she got married and had children.

  She cocked her head to the side and made her eyes all wide and for a second it always seemed real – really real. Like she actually cared. But it had been an act since Father left. Mother told them at first he was in the basement, and then that he was working, and then that he was living in the grounds of the big house. Mouse didn’t know what to believe.

  Chris didn’t shut up until they fed him. Cheese sandwiches cut into triangles without the crust and cake for dessert. Chris ate it all but Mouse couldn’t keep anything down. He hadn’t been able to since dinner last night. Mother said it would be better if he ate something he could throw up easily and the doctor said the feeling would pass, but so far it hadn’t even gone away a little bit.

  It had been this way since they’d moved in, though. Since Father had stopped tucking him in at night. There were random evenings where he sat down to dinner feeling fine and by the time he went to bed he was ready to puke up his guts. Spores. Mould. The damp. Milk allergy. Maybe it’s the bread. Mother rolled her eyes and waved her hands and petted his head like he was a dog while he underwent test after test after test.

  “There, there, Mouse,” she always said. She held him tight and he smelled foreign worlds on her work uniform. He knew she worked in lots of places, with lots of different people, and sometimes she liked to just drive and sit in her car for hours before picking him up from the childminder. She stared at the people on the street outside the houses where she visited people who needed to be cared for, tears striping her cheeks. She’d done it once while he was in the car – she’d forgotten he was there.

  “Mother’s here,” she always said when he was sick.

  But she wasn’t. Not really. She was on another planet half the time,
her thoughts stuck in some loop of Back Then. Once or twice he’d caught her watching tapes of her old performances on video. She got dressed up for it, eyeliner and eyebrows and face powder. She wore heels and a dress even though she never left the bedroom and she always sighed dramatically when she saw her own face on screen.

  The woman on TV was different. Not really Mother. It was so different to how she was now that he couldn’t believe they were the same person. It wasn’t just that she was younger or that she looked kinder. It was everything; the way she spoke, the way she moved, the willowy strength that had faded to dumpy force over the years.

  If he challenged her about how much she’d changed, she got angry. Once she had hit him. She might be distant when she was alone with him but in public her act fooled everybody. All she had to do was channel the way she treated Chris all the time. The doctor always said that he’d never seen a more devoted mother, even if the boy didn’t appreciate it.

  He didn’t want to appreciate it. He hated her. She was plastic, merely a stand-in for the mother he remembered. As though she had forgotten that he was as much her son as Chris was.

  Tonight it was one of those nights where she didn’t leave him alone. It was always this way when he got unwell. She stayed with him all night, only relinquishing her bedside vigil when Chris had a night terror and started to cry. She rushed to Bear’s aid and the room was quiet and dark after she left. Peaceful. He liked it better when she was gone, none of that fake sympathy.

  He lay in bed and thought of Father. Of what he would do when he found out how Mother was acting. He imagined that he would get very, very angry.

  That was something he could appreciate.

  EXCERPT

  Morgan & Paul Bailey

  Abducted: Chesterfield, 5 July 1996

  When Morgan (9) and Paul (5) were abducted from their ground-floor bedroom in the bungalow where they lived, the family hadn’t been planning to live there much longer. The house had been too small for a growing family.

  “I was pregnant with Sarah then. We were looking at houses,” Vera Bailey explained, “but we hadn’t found anywhere yet. In the end we moved for a different reason. A fresh start, you know.”

  Vera’s youngest daughter was born in October 1996, just three months after Morgan and Paul were abducted. When I visited Vera’s house – a spacious cottage in Calow – she was alone, but her house was filled with photographs of her children.

  “We like to have them with us. It was so important for Sarah growing up, to know about her brother and sister. We didn’t want her to feel like she was eclipsed by them, obviously. It’s not like that. It’s – God, it’s hard to explain, isn’t it?”

  We took a short break while Vera made tea. When she was ready to talk again she told me a little more about Morgan and Paul. “Morgan was the typical older sibling. She loved to boss Paul around. Not in a mean way, she just liked to be in charge. She was very bookish, loved to read, she was quite girly too. Barbies and, what were those little things? Polly Pockets? She had loads of them.

  “Paul loved playing with Morgan so much – loved everything they did together. Barbies were actually his favourite kind of toy. Dolls, anything where he could dress them up or do their hair.” Vera smiled at the memory. “They used to take dolls everywhere. Paul’s favourite was this baby doll with a little pink dress, you know the life-sized ones? When you sat her upright her eyes opened, and when you laid her down they closed. He used to rock her and feed her and everything.”

  “Did Sarah like dolls?” I asked.

  “Nope.” Vera laughed. “Sarah would never be caught with dolls. She was all about climbing trees, building stuff, trucks and diggers and cars. Probably – probably better that way, to be honest. She’s a mechanic now.”

  Talking to Vera I could see plainly the spaces in her life that her older children had left behind.

  “I didn’t ever want Sarah to feel like she didn’t know them,” Vera said later. “And that was – that was hard. It was hard because we didn’t mourn them like we wanted to. After all that time we thought Morgan was dead. We thought they both were, because some of the others – died quickly. We thought she was like them. But she wasn’t, was she? And Paul… We were wrong once, what if we were wrong about Paul being dead too?”

  This, then, must have been the hardest burden to bear. For eleven months Vera had mourned her daughter and her son together, only to find out that Morgan had been alive all that time. And they’d never know what happened.

  “Morgan was such a good big sister. She’d have loved Sarah. So would Paul. He’d have wanted to dress her up and comb her hair and everything. We joked he’d either become a hairdresser or an actor when he grew up. Morgan used to punch anybody who told him that dolls were for girls. She’d always say, ‘Yeah, and getting smacked is for bullies.’ I knew we shouldn’t encourage it but it was so damn reassuring, knowing that whatever happened they’d look out for each other.

  “That’s why I thought they’d be – together. It was almost easier, at first. Knowing that Paul and Morgan were together. Even if we never found them. Then when that poor family found Morgan in the park, and she was… Once we buried her, it made it harder to mourn Paul. We couldn’t go to the cemetery and see him. And every time we went it just… it compounded the fact that they weren’t together any more.

  “We just kept thinking, when they found her, over and over, why there, why then?”

  She didn’t have to say the rest but I knew what she was thinking: and what happened to Paul?

  FOURTEEN

  7 NOVEMBER 2016

  Erin

  I CALLED HARRIET.

  “Hey,” she said on the second ring. “Uh. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I had no idea what Monica had been talking about but I didn’t want to think about it right now. I could barely keep it together as it was.

  “How—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  There was the awkwardness between us again. It felt like last night was a year ago, a lifetime ago. When we’d been comfortable, when I’d wanted to talk. And I missed that already, that closeness I hadn’t had with anybody for a long time. I knew I shouldn’t care – Harriet was still essentially a stranger – but I was shaken by the morning, by my cryptic conversation with Jenny Bowles and how it felt like I knew even less now than I’d originally thought. And I wanted somebody to talk to. Somebody who understood.

  “Listen,” I said, before Harriet could say anything else. “I need to get out of here. I need to do something.” I blew a breath out, unsure even as I said it where I was going with this. “I want to remember. I’m tired of being broken.”

  “You’re not—”

  “I am,” I cut her off. “It feels like it sometimes, anyway. And I don’t want to be.”

  The silence felt static between us. I imagined Harriet, sat at home or in a small office, her hair like fire. I imagined her face – thoughtful, like when I’d told her about my candles. Her canines exposed when she smiled, pointed like a wolf.

  Eventually she said, “I’ve got an idea. If you’re serious about me helping you to remember. But you won’t like it.”

  My stomach tumbled but I shook myself. “What did you have in mind?”

  * * *

  Harriet picked me up from my house since we’d both finished work early. We didn’t speak much at first, a tension between us that neither of us was willing to address, but as we drove we settled into a comfortable silence. Forty minutes passed, the trees and road signs tumbling by. I didn’t ask where we were going – despite everything in me saying I should, I didn’t want to know. I wanted to trust Harriet to make this decision for me, to not have to be responsible for once.

  But as we pulled into a car park, the Pay and Display machine the only sign of human life, I began to regret my decision. There were no cars here, no dog-walkers out today. It was the same view that haunted me at night sometimes and I felt my mouth go dry. The sun was low, the sky
tinted lilac-grey.

  “Here?” I said quietly.

  “I told you you wouldn’t like it,” Harriet said. “We don’t have to stay. I just – it might be useful to jog your memory. I thought, after what we were talking about last night…”

  “Do you think this will achieve anything?” I asked. “I mean, really? You think if I show you how I supposedly stumbled out of these woods after nearly three weeks away from home I’ll suddenly remember everything that happened to me while I was gone?”

  “Supposedly?”

  “Supposedly. I don’t remember anything meaningful. Just the darkness, and being terrified. Before I saw that bloody Pay and Display sign, that jogger, it’s all a jumbled mess. They’ve been trying to get me to remember for years, Harriet. The liaison officer, therapy, all sorts of shit. I told them to pack it in because there’s nothing real in there.”

  Harriet was quiet for a moment. The motor was still running, the heaters blasting out too-warm air.

  “Have you been back here since?” Harriet asked.

  “Why would I? It’s not exactly my favourite place.” I scowled as I remembered. “Actually, that’s not true. The police brought me. They wanted me to retrace my steps because the dogs couldn’t track me. The rain was heavy and they couldn’t see, and I think one of the dogs got caught in some kind of trap? I’d run through a – a bit of the river, like across the flood plains where the mud had just… Anyway, it was still raining when I came out of the woods and I couldn’t remember which way… They never figured out where I’d come from – only that there are a few farms and old houses nearby and it could have been any of them. Or none of them. There are a lot of roads, so I might have come from one of them. The only CCTV is near here, I think, and obviously that’s not where I started out. I think they tried to use those number plate recognition things but they never figured out if I came out of a car or a house or what.”

  “But you’ve never been back here on your own?”

  “I’ve only ever come when they made me. I’m not even sure I want to be here now.”