These photographs are my memories. The rest is a distant bank of fog. Even the dreams are forgotten now. Especially those dreams, and the voice of the person I called Mr Smallface.
I imagine you’ve heard the story. It made the papers, after all, though you and St Oswald’s must have had rather more pressing concerns at the time. Nor would you have remembered the name of the lost boy’s baby sister, even when she re-entered your life as a pupil at your sister school. But who could forget Conrad Price? He was a mystery indeed. A pupil at King Henry’s vanished on his birthday, just before the end of the summer term, never to be seen again; no body ever found. And I was there when it happened, though my account of the day’s events were useless to the investigation. They tried to make me remember, referred me to a psychologist, but the more they tried, the less they found, and finally they concluded that whatever I’d seen was gone for good into the sink hole of my trauma.
The basic facts were simple enough. My brother was supposed to have picked me up from my nursery school that day. I was excited. Conrad was in his School play, and Friday was the closing night. As a result, his birthday treat had been planned for the following day, which meant that, for the first time, I had a party of my own.
But when I came out of school that day, Conrad wasn’t waiting for me. So I did what I usually did. I walked up to King Henry’s, which was only a few hundred yards away. Remember, it was the Seventies, and Malbry is a small town. In those days, children still walked home from school. The teacher was long since used to me joining my brother down the road. I’d made my way into the building via the Middle School entrance, and from there, to the Middle School cloakroom, where Conrad used to hang out with his friends: Milky, who looked like the Milky Bar Kid, Fatty – or sometimes Fattyman – and Mod, who wore a green parka, which explained his nickname. I was used to doing this. Conrad didn’t like being seen at the gates of the nursery school. But, this time, something happened; something years of therapy failed to make me remember, and I had been found, hours later, crammed into one of the lockers like a small animal in hibernation. Of Conrad there had been no sign. When asked where my brother was, all I could do was shake my head – the red curls newly cropped – and say: ‘Mr Smallface took him away. Took him through the green door.’
The authorities had tried very hard to find out what I meant by the green door. The doors at King Henry’s were mostly made of varnished natural wood, and the doors to the utility rooms – the caretaker’s office, the boiler room – were uniformly painted black. The police investigated every green door in the area, without result. The Malbry Examiner pointed out that St Oswald’s doors were painted green, which caused a brief excitement; but St Oswald’s was five miles away, and there was no reason to believe that Conrad or I had been there at all. It was far more likely, they thought, that the boy had been abducted from school – perhaps by an intruder in a green car – and that the trauma of what I had seen had translated into a fantasy.
In any case, Conrad was gone, except in dreams and photographs. And for nearly twenty years after that, my birthdays passed without celebration: my sixteenth, my eighteenth, my twenty-first. That day was forever set aside; an offering to Conrad’s ghost. And from that day, I too was a ghost; moving from room to room in a house in which Conrad’s giant presence grew year by year, while I continued to shrink, until at last, in my parents’ eyes, I had almost disappeared.
On good days, they still talked to me. They went through the motions of living. My father had taken redundancy the year of Conrad’s abduction; he’d been a deputy at the pit, and he had a generous pension. There were the couple’s savings, too; money they had put aside to pay for Conrad’s school fees. They could have gone on holiday, or moved into a nicer house. But my father would never have touched the money put by for Conrad. On good days, he went to the football, or worked on his allotment. On good days, my mother went to church and helped out with coffee mornings. But on bad days, there was no reaching them. My mother went through phases of going to bed for weeks at a time and my father became increasingly obsessed with numbers stations, and the thought that Conrad’s abduction was somehow connected with them. Throughout the early months and years following the abduction, he had played them incessantly, so that the soundtrack of my youth was not a series of pop hits, or television themes, but those haunted station idents – Lincolnshire Poacher or Cherry Ripe, the cheeriness of the little tune robbed of all life by the static – or worse, an unspeakable warbling that seemed to go on forever. And then came the lists of numbers: Zero, two, five, eight, eight. Zero, two, five, eight, eight – always with that little lift in the final delivery, as if the synthetic voice were discharging some jaunty message of hope. Perhaps that’s what my father heard; a signal from beyond the grave. To me, they were the voices of the dead, and I would fall asleep to their relentless cadences, however much cotton wool I stuffed into my ears at bedtime.
I had just one friend at school: a girl called Emily Jackson. I remember her very well – those memories predate the thing my mind refuses to accept – a little blonde girl with a rosy face and a placid, maternal temperament. Her elder sister Teresa had cerebral palsy and Emily had taken on the role of elder sibling, putting Teresa’s needs before hers without any sign of resentment. Her parents were plump and jovial; their house filled with cheery disorder. She and her family moved away in the winter of 1971, but I had never forgotten her, and my friendship with her remained the most loving part of my childhood. Aside from her, I had no one; lost in my imaginary world. Without the Jacksons, I would have been completely friendless and alone.
I’m not trying to gain your sympathy. I’m merely trying to set the scene. My parents’ house, the numbers stations, the shrine to my vanished brother. Oh yes, they had a shrine: a photo of him in school uniform, his Prefect’s badge in his lapel, his hair as blond and shiny-sleek as mine was red and untameable.
Red hair is a sign of bad temper, or so my mother used to say, but, by then, I had already learnt to keep my feelings safely under control. I was a model schoolgirl. I went to church every Sunday. At Mulberry House, I won prizes in Drama and Deportment. Yes, there was that little thing with Johnny Harrington when I was sixteen; but as soon as his name made the papers, I broke it off. I had more sense. The unplanned result – my daughter Emily – was born in summer the following year, and my parents, though shaken, greeted my decision to keep the child with the same helpless bewilderment with which they had faced every event in our lives since Conrad’s disappearance.
But yes, I was a good girl. A quiet girl. An obedient girl. And if sometimes I had nightmares in which something pursued me relentlessly down the deserted corridors of King Henry’s Grammar School, something I could never quite see, but which smelt of burning tinfoil and drains and the sourness of stagnant water – then that was surely not too high a price to pay for the privilege of having outgrown my big brother, who would never live to see fifteen, or kiss a girl, go to college, or give his parents a grandchild.
She should have been a boy, I suppose. Then, they might have loved her, loving me by association. But, cocooned in their grief like a pair of dead moths, my parents seemed hardly to notice their only grandchild, except when I suggested they allow me to convert Conrad’s old room into a nursery, a suggestion they greeted with the same alarm as if I had suggested burning down the house. Perhaps, if she had been a boy, I might have considered giving her up. It had certainly not been my plan to get myself knocked up at sixteen and a half by a boy six months my junior. But the thought of leaving my daughter to the mercy of a patriarchal State – or worse, of flushing her away like a dying goldfish – filled me with a deep disgust. I would not abandon her as I had been abandoned. Nor would I turn to my parents for help, or contact Johnny’s family. And so, as soon as I turned eighteen, I left for a council flat in Pog Hill, and a part-time job as a receptionist at the Meadowbank Care Home. The hours were good, the pay rather less; but between that and the Social Security, we managed to live, if not comfortably, then at least in a way that kept Emily fed, the bills paid, and the social workers off my back.