Her own carelessness is surpassed only by her stupid habit of worrying endlessly then doing nothing to alleviate it. If anything, she makes difficult situations worse with her weak thoughtless behaviour, being slapdash and forgetting to lock doors when a child in the next village has gone missing, possibly, in fact most probably, taken against his will. And on it goes, the vicious circle of fecklessness and fretting that is her life.
Tomorrow, she tells herself, she will not drink. She will make sure the door is locked and she will routinely check all the windows. She will close every curtain, every blind, do what she can to keep the outside world at bay. Her son is her life. He is everything to her. She cannot risk losing him.
She doesn’t miss having a husband and she definitely doesn’t miss Samuel. What she misses is the security another person’s presence provides when things get tough. Aside from that, what Samuel’s absence actually does is keenly remind her of how irritating he was, how final and unyielding he could be as he threw out lists of demands that were impossibly rigid, from making sure she left impossibly straight, perfectly symmetrical lines in the grass every time she mowed the lawn, to never allowing his name to be shortened by anybody, even his own wife.
The memory of trying to tiptoe around the house in the early hours with a newborn baby in her arms so she didn’t disturb his precious sleep still jars. It was a traumatic time made all the more difficult by Samuel coming home and telling her that he no longer wanted to be married, saying that fatherhood and being a husband was no longer for him.
She can’t remember how she reacted. She does, however, recall feeling sick and the room tilting as she struggled to take in his words, to slot everything in place inside her head whilst holding a screaming baby. She recalls watching his mouth move, muffled echoey sounds coming out as he told her things she thought she would never ever have to hear.
But now with hindsight, she can see that he did her a favour. She is not and never will be the austere, clinically minded woman he wanted her to be. She is the sort of woman who falls asleep with a glass of red wine balanced in her hand. She is the sort of woman who leaves the pots piled up in the kitchen sink because she is too tired and lazy to wash them immediately after eating. She is the sort of woman who leaves the front door unlocked when there’s a predatory individual somewhere in the vicinity who has taken it upon themselves to snatch children away from their unsuspecting parents; parents who are trying so damn hard to hold down a job and raise a child in the best way they know how.
Newspaper reports have painted a picture of a less than perfect mother who was late picking up her son on a regular basis. On the day he vanished, she had left work a couple of minutes later than usual and had become caught up in heavy traffic. Reading about it damn near broke Emily’s heart. It resonated with her, striking a chord deep within her, giving her crippling déjà vu.
Joel is collected by a childminder three days a week. The two days that Emily picks him up are fraught with difficulty and tension. She cannot count the number of times she has been late, held up in traffic, trapped in meetings that have run over, cornered by customers needing to speak with her about issues that could easily wait until the following day.
There are days when it feels as if the world is determined to stop her getting to Joel, refusing to allow her two days when she is afforded the pleasure of standing at the school gates along with the other parents who are fortunate enough to not have to work and are able to collect their children in a calm and measured manner, whereas she inevitably arrives late and flustered, wishing that for once, life would go her way.
A pebble-sized lump sticks in her throat, borne out of exhaustion and weariness at a cruel and judgemental world that allows such wicked people to exist, the sort of people who take children and do unspeakable things to them, whilst pointing the finger of blame at the parent who was just trying to make ends meet.
Already, the trolls on social media have made their feelings about the mother of little Leo known. Lazy, thoughtless, feckless. Just a few of the repeatable adjectives being bandied about to describe her. Like none of them have ever had a bad day and turned up late for an appointment. Calls have been made for social services to intervene and question her actions. Little or nothing has been said about the perpetrator. Their actions haven’t been called into question. They are a faceless individual, anonymous and ghostlike. Like a thief in the night, they spirited away a little boy, stole somebody else’s child, somebody’s baby, and yet the press and public are hellbent on blaming the mother. She’s a tangible entity, unlike the offender. She has a name, a face, a home; something they can cling on to, something the baying mob can lodge in their heads and hold fast whereas the person who did this terrible deed has managed to slip away and escape, their reputation unblemished.
Emily swallows and blots out all thoughts of Leo and his mother and the crazy backward world in which they all live. If she is to get a good night’s sleep, clearing her head of toxic news and the endless possibilities of what could fracture her little family is essential otherwise she will lie awake through the wee small hours, raking over the past, present and future until she can no longer think straight. She sighs and rubs at her eyes with her knuckles. She needs sleep and she needs it now if she is to face the world tomorrow with a clear head.
Slipping in between the soft cool sheets, she drifts off almost immediately, all thoughts of Samuel and their short-lived marriage forgotten, all the horrid dark images of little lost Leo and an unidentifiable nameless being, soon relegated to the back of her mind. She replaces them instead with thoughts of Mo and his recent text, imagining his kind warm face and soft voice and soon feels her body become weightless, as light as air.
5
Lynda
‘Jesus Christ. I know it’s a terrible thing to say but I’m so relieved it didn’t happen here.’ Isaac dunks a biscuit in his tea and shoves it into his mouth with a savage like intensity that both fascinates and repels Lynda in equal measure. He resembles a man who hasn’t eaten in months.
Registering the disgust on his colleague’s face, he quickly chews and swallows it down. ‘I mean, imagine how fucking terrible it must be for the staff at that school. They must be getting some stick over their methods. I’ll bet they’re having a safeguarding meeting as we speak. They’ll have the bigwigs in from the local authority, maybe even Ofsted, who will crawl all over the place looking for cracks in their policies, searching for somebody to take the rap.’
Lynda rolls her eyes, trying to turn away from him, the top half of her body twisted at an unnatural angle so she can’t hear his words or see the line of spittle that has formed at the corner of his mouth. Retirement can’t come soon enough. She no longer understands this place or these people. Her young colleagues are on a different wavelength to her. She sees no humour in their jokes, has no clue as to what makes them tick. She is a stranger in this place, the building in which she has worked for the past forty years. Things have changed, morphed into a system, a regimented organisation that she no longer recognises.
Teaching at Priory Place Secondary School used to be easy, effortless. For sure, there were badly behaved pupils, errant youngsters who didn’t want to learn, certain that they knew everything there was to know, and that she could deal with, but it now feels as if the odds are stacked against the staff. They are bound by bureaucracy and endless lists of recently implemented policies, targets and government requirements that are impossible to keep up with and meet.