After Me Comes the Flood Read online

  I saw Hester standing with her hands on her hips watching the woman. She was less impassive now, biting hard on her bottom lip. I said, ‘I saw them together earlier. The boy wanted to see inside one of the boats on the marshes – maybe Alex took him there?’ Hester took this in on a low breath, then said, ‘Right,’ and gripped my shoulder. She shook her hair back from her forehead. ‘Look, be quiet – she’s coming back.’ Then she called out: ‘Sweetheart?’ It was an endearment she used without discrimination, but now it had changed; it wasn’t mollifying but condescending, as if she could use it to put an opponent in her place. The woman had appeared again from between the rocks; her flash of anger had gone, and she was wringing her hands. ‘He isn’t there, he’s not there…’

  ‘Of course not’ – Hester put an arm across the woman’s shoulders – ‘of course not. We’d’ve seen him, wouldn’t we?’ Turning the woman to face her, she put a hand on either side of her face and said intently, ‘The man he was with is called Alex. Did you speak to him?’

  The woman nodded eagerly – her mistrust of Hester had gone, dissolved by the stronger woman’s gaze, and she was looking at her again with a desperate pleading face: ‘Just a bit, an hour ago I think. Ben wanted someone to play football with and my head ached, and the man was nearby – he was young and he smiled at me… they were there, just over there’ – she flung out her arm – ‘I don’t understand, how could they get so far?’ Her voice ended on a drawn-out wail.

  ‘You mustn’t panic. You won’t find him by crying, now will you?’ Hester bent awkwardly and picked up a half-empty bottle of water. ‘Have some of this.’ The woman winced as she drank and I thought it would be warm and unpleasant by now. I began to feel agitated by what I knew – the boy had probably begged to be taken back to the boat to spy for faces at the windows, and Alex would have taken him, I was sure of it, not seeing anything to threaten the happy day. I stepped forward and put out my hand thinking I’d tell the woman, but the order of the house had established itself here too, and I deferred to Hester, and stepped back again. Hester waited for the other woman to stop sipping at the bottle, then said, ‘You were out on the marshes, earlier in the day?’ She nodded. ‘Do you think your son might have gone back there?’

  ‘Not alone. He’s only five years old – he would never get that far alone, he’d get lost, he would never go by himself…’ Then the realisation of what she’d said struck her – he wasn’t alone and lost, he’d been taken away from her – and she threw down the water bottle. It landed beside Clare, on her knees beside a mandala of cowries. She noticed for the first time the three of us standing there and came over, frowning, looking from me to Hester and back again. She came and stood close by me, smelling of salt. I said, ‘She’s lost her little boy,’ and she grimaced.

  ‘But we’ll find him, John. Won’t we?’ Then she said to the woman, more loudly, ‘We’ll find him for you,’ but the woman wasn’t listening. Without turning to speak to Hester she ran heavily over the sand and I watched her heels sinking into the fine powder. We three looked at each other and followed, Hester moving a little behind me, and Clare running lightly ahead. I remember watching the woman’s bare feet thudding on the concrete of the car park and wincing as if I could feel it too, but she went on running and calling her son’s name, although even if he’d been able to hear her it came out so high and frantic it was like the seagulls crying. Many of the cars were gone by then, as people had tired of being battered by the sun and had gone home to lie in the shade until evening made life bearable. I looked for the boy with his fishing lines but he was gone too, with his white marks like a threat on the tarmac, and the shed selling crabs and cockles had closed its shutters. I remember being surprised that Hester, carrying so much weight on her stomach and thighs, could run so far and so fast. I could hear her breath heaving in and out of her but it didn’t slow her pace, and she reached the edges of the marsh just after us.

  By then the tide was coming in fast: fingers of water crept across the cracked mud, and though the woman called and called, and Hester’s breath behind me hissed on the back of my neck, I thought I could hear it trickling up from underneath. Then suddenly I couldn’t hear anything because the woman stopped in her tracks and put her hands up to her head and screamed, not a high woman’s noise but deep and rasping and terrible, and it silenced everything else. I’d never heard anything like it and hope never to again – it dried my tongue and my stomach fell through me. I’d stopped running when I heard it, and Hester ran into me and knocked the breath out of me: I bent double and when I straightened up the woman was silent, which was worse than the screaming, because everything else was silent too, and there was a long empty moment when the water stopped creeping towards us over the mud, and we tried to see what she’d seen. She stood pinned to the ground, her hands still raised to her head, and I thought stupidly that if the wind blew she’d fall where she stood like a toppled statue.

  When we moved either side of her on the narrow path and saw what was coming, Hester gasped and I heard a groan that can’t have been from Clare, so I suppose it must have come from me. Coming slowly towards us and with his head bowed and loose so that it swayed a little as he walked was Alex, and he was carrying the child. The bright green T-shirt was muddy and dragged up over his chest. His body sagged between Alex’s arms, and one of his trainers was missing. Alex must have been able to see us on the path but he didn’t lift up his head or call out, only went on walking, and the boy’s dangling limbs swung as he walked.

  I marvelled at how slowly and painfully the blood thudded against my ears, and then the woman drew her breath in a gulp and screamed her son’s name. She dashed forward, pushing Hester into the rough grass, and snatching the boy lowered him on to the path. By the time we reached her the child was trying to sit up, and seemed not frightened but dazed. Where the T-shirt was pulled up over his thin torso he had a long fresh graze, and before his mother wrapped him in the cardigan she’d been wearing I saw a few dark splinters in the skin. The woman had become very calm, no more distressed than if her child had caught a cold – she stroked his hair and murmured, ‘We’d better get you in the warm, hadn’t we,’ although the sun was still trying to scald the water on the marshes. There was a bruise on the child’s forehead so recent it was still swelling as I watched, and when I saw it I became aware that Alex was standing a few paces away, wringing his hands and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry’, over and over. His T-shirt, white when we’d left the house that morning, was covered in patches of mud that were like inkblots, making a pattern like the drab wings of a giant moth. He too was grazed, down the length of his right arm.

  Clare stood behind me and touched my arm briefly and uncertainly every few moments, as if she wanted to ask me something but couldn’t think what it was. I felt we were all ranged against Alex, that battle lines had been scored in the mud on the path: I wanted to place myself exactly halfway between the mother and the man who’d taken her son away, but couldn’t move, and as I write it now I feel it was cowardice that made me just stand by. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he kept on saying, and I wanted to shout that he should either say nothing at all, or tell us what had happened – what use was ‘sorry’ if he’d done nothing wrong?

  The boy was sitting up by then – the cut on his forehead hadn’t after all gone deeper than the skin, and there was colour in his cheeks. He looked around, seeming unsurprised, not registering Alex’s face as any different from all the others that leaned over him. He recognised me. ‘We heard that funny bird again,’ he said brightly, and then began to cry. It seemed to me such a simple sound, so straightforward and easily remedied in all the muddle I’d been living through, that it calmed my anxiety, but the effect on the crouching woman was terrible. She stood up, and left unsupported the child almost toppled backwards. Clare, with her unselfconscious helpfulness, knelt next to him and patted his back with the same rough uneven strokes she used on her cat. The woman stepped forward towards Alex, who put out his hands an
d spread them in a gesture of fear, I think, and also of apology. It would be easy to look at the wringing hands and call it guilt, but that wasn’t what I saw then, and I don’t see it now, in my memory or as I write it out. He said again, ‘I’m sorry!’, this time making the words firmer, as if it might forestall the woman who was still coming towards him.

  When she reached him, she put out her hand either to strike him or grip his arm, then pulled it back as if the idea of touching him disgusted her, and hissing between clenched teeth she said, ‘What did you do? Did you hurt my son? What have you done?’ Alex tried to speak but it came too slowly, and while he still formed the words on a stammer I’d never heard before, the woman said again, with controlled malice: ‘Well? Talk, can’t you? What’s wrong with you – cat got your tongue, is it? Say something, tell me what you did!’ She was moving towards him still, a small step with every word, and Alex backed away imperceptibly, holding out his hands to ward off the words and not finding any of his own. His silence infuriated the woman and with angry tears she said: ‘What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?’

  Hester, still standing close to Alex, moved forward a little, and I remember then being puzzled at her face, which briefly showed open hostility to a woman who had every cause for anger. If she was going to say something, to defend Alex, to placate her perhaps, we never heard it, because a thought occurred suddenly to the woman and she stopped, gasped and said, not shouting any more but falteringly, testing the thought: ‘Did you – did you touch him?’

  Seeing the word now, written plainly and without the awful inflection she gave it, it’s impossible to think how we all saw at once how to touch could be worse than to hurt. But it hung in the air like a foul smell; Hester paused in her movement and I felt bile rising in my throat. Alex went white and his eyes widened, and the movement of his hands became frantic as if he felt the accusation against his face and wanted to bat it away.

  Only Clare seemed not to have noticed: she and the boy had found something by the path and were parting the grasses to get a better look and I wondered if it was the toad who’d passed me earlier that day. I wanted Alex to shout ‘No!’, to shout it clearly and strongly to break through the hysteria I could see darkening the woman’s face, but he didn’t, only mumbled, ‘Sorry, I’m sorry, it isn’t in there, I can’t remember,’ beating his own forehead with a bunched fist, then sagging slightly against Hester’s shoulder. It must have looked like a confession, because the woman rushed at him and struck out, not with the comic flailing I see sometimes on my way home late from work, but with violent precision. She wore a ring with a cheap stone on her right hand and it flashed as her arm swung back; Alex flinched and put up his arm, but she was quick and the blow landed and I heard it loud as a knock on a door. He didn’t make any sound, and I remember being proud of him for that. The woman’s anger exhausted itself quickly, perhaps because when Alex raised his head again he was bleeding from a split lip. The woman ran to her son, who looked now like any child might who’d been playing in the mud somewhere and fallen. He and Clare had picked long broad blades of grass and were trying to blow them like reeds, but they were the wrong kind and made no sound. The woman bent and yanked the boy’s arm to make him stand, and he looked up, baffled at first, then remembered where he’d been, and that his head hurt, and started sniffling.

  Standing there holding his hand, she turned to face us. By then I’d crossed the battle line and stood with Alex and Hester, feeling the force of her rage pulling me in with them. She said: ‘I’m calling the police. I’m going to go and get my phone and call the police – you took my son and hurt him, and everyone will know.’ The child stopped sniffling and rubbed his eyes and nose on his bare arm. Tears and snot made a path through the mud drying on his skin. ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ he said weakly, and I heard Alex make a small grateful noise, but the woman didn’t hear her son, or didn’t listen. She turned away from us and began walking back along the path, and I felt Hester move convulsively next to me and draw in her breath to call her back.

  But a few paces away the woman stopped. It must have been only a second or two that she stood unsteady on the path, but I felt the moment stretch out in front of us, giving me time to wonder what had happened or might have happened, what would happen to them all now, what it meant for them and me. Then she spun round and said, in a voice she must’ve taken great efforts to make chilled and controlled: ‘I want your names. All of them. And your phone number.’ She said it again, only tried to make it sound professional as if she could intimidate us, but the words weren’t quite right and I almost smiled, because I was ashamed of everyone and frightened for them all: ‘I require your contact details immediately please, so this matter can be resolved.’ I think she must have seen my smile because her eyes narrowed and the chill left her voice and I saw the flush of anger or embarrassment creep back into her cheeks.

  The woman had found a pen and a scrap of card in her bag, and thrust it at me with shaking hands. Thinking all the while how absurd this was, I wrote out my name in clear capitals, as if I were humouring an inquisitive child. I wanted to say, ‘You’re mistaken; you must be – I never knew anyone less capable of harming a child.’ But every time I took a breath to speak I remembered my own guilt in deceiving them all, and the old stammer came back, and I couldn’t make the words come. I passed the card to Hester, thinking that surely she would speak in his defence, but instead she paused and looked at me with what I think was gratitude, then wrote Alex’s name underneath. She made it complete – ALEXANDER – as if this could distance it from the boy she’d sent to bed the night before with a glass of water for the hot night. Then she wrote her own name, and underneath that her telephone number, folded the card, and walked towards the waiting woman, who held out her hand.

  Hester put the card into her open palm and folded the other woman’s fingers over it, and I heard her say: ‘I am so sorry your child was hurt. And I am sorry your day is spoilt. But it was an accident, no-one touched him. You’re making a terrible mistake – and I understand, I do, the world these days is dangerous for children. But it is a mistake. Look at Alexander, look – can’t you see he’s hurt most of all, that this will take longer to heal than bruises? Call us, call the police, talk to the boy: we’re not afraid. We’ll talk to you, to anyone. But take him home. Talk to him: he’ll tell you.’

  We watched and waited for an angry response but none came. Hester’s strength of will gives her words weight: there’s something in her face, although it’s ugly – or even perhaps because it’s ugly – that seems incompatible with deceit or half-truths. The other woman briefly touched her son’s forehead, then nodded at Hester, and walked away from us. Clare stood by her brother plaiting blades of grass. She’d realised by then what had happened, I think, and was leaning against him slightly, biting down on her lip in concentration or perhaps because she didn’t want to cry. Hester came back to us. She put out her hand and touched each of us lightly on the shoulder. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time to go home.’

  Not much was said or done that night. There were phone calls I only partly overheard, Hester saying little and Alex nothing at all. I was there when Hester told Eve and Walker what had happened, and saw Eve storm at Hester as if it had been her fault: ‘The woman’s an idiot. Who leaves a little child alone on a beach? She should be glad. She should be glad it was Alex who found him, who looked after him. She deserves to have him taken away. I hope she calls the police. I hope she does…’ Walker put his hand on the back of her neck with a possessive gesture I hated; she flung it off, and shut herself in the music room. She didn’t play the melodies I was hoping for but scales, painfully slow and even, and after a while it was like the noise of the crickets in the garden and we couldn’t hear it any more.

  I found Elijah in the dining room, dozing in the high-backed chair with its wooden candlesticks, where I’d seen him the night I arrived. His grave quiet presence was a relief to me, and we played chess until Hester came i
n to draw the curtains against the moths drawn to the light. When I told him what had happened he listened without anger or surprise – either the thought of Alex doing harm was so absurd it deflected off him without sinking in, or he could accommodate the idea of wrongdoing more calmly than we, as being just another consequence of being human. When I finished the miserable tale he shook his head and picked up a white bishop. ‘I’m afraid I never was any good at chess. You’ve won again, haven’t you?’

  Just before I came upstairs to bed I went into the kitchen. Hester was there, unpacking the plastic cups and plates we’d taken to the beach. Clare was there too, knocking the sand from her shoes on to the kitchen floor and being scolded for it; and I didn’t notice for a long time that Alex was sitting in one of the kitchen’s dark recesses with his legs crossed, inspecting his hands and looking up sometimes when he heard his name.

  ‘She called, of course,’ Hester told me. She pulled a foil-wrapped parcel from one of the bags. ‘That’s the fruitcake I made, and we never got to eat it,’ she said, turning it in her hands. It gave off a sickly scent of spice and honey. ‘Yes – she called, firstly to ask lots of questions. She took the boy to hospital – he’d been knocked out but not for long, though they’re keeping him in until tomorrow. Alex spoke to her. She wanted to know if Alex would tell her what the boy had told her. Whether it all added up.’

  ‘And it did,’ Clare told me.

  ‘Well, of course it did. The boy had lied to Alex. He told him his mother had gone to the marshes to look at the boats, and he was scared to go out and meet her on his own, and would Alex take him. There’s no-one on earth can lie as well as a child, because they believe themselves, so it comes out like the truth.’ She gave me another of her searching looks and I wondered what Elijah had told her. But she shrugged and said, ‘They went out to the marsh and she wasn’t there, of course. No-one was. And the boy ran off to look at some abandoned boat. He slipped and fell, and if Alex hadn’t been there he’d’ve lain out there on the mud while the tide came in.’