Burnt Paper Sky (23 page)

‘What is this one?’ he asked us. In the centre of the painting was a white figure, mounted on a rearing white horse and holding aloft a long stick with a green flag at the top of it, which looked to be fluttering in a hot breeze. Behind the figure were two boats, barely emerging from the thickly painted background, with its suggestions of land, sea, clouds and sky in dusty shades of brown and blue.

‘It’s a bit messy,’ said Ben.

‘The artist has done that on purpose,’ Ruth told him. ‘He wants to suggest a dream to you, a world where stories take place and where you can use your imagination.’

‘What is the story?’

‘Like your mummy said about the other painting, the story is anything you want it to be. It’s everything or nothing.’

‘I would like to have a green flag,’ said Ben.

‘Then you could be an adventurer too, like the person in this painting. Would you like a white horse?’

Ben nodded.

‘And what about a boat?’ Ruth asked him.

‘No thank you,’ he said, and I knew he would say that, because Ben had a fear of the sea.

‘Do you know what I see in this painting?’ Ruth asked him.

He looked up at her.

‘I see a brave person riding a magnificent horse and I wonder where that person is going and where they’ve been,’ she told him. ‘And I also see music.’

‘Where is the music?’ he asked.

‘It’s in there. It’s in the paint, and the sea and the sky and in the story of the person and their horse and the ships,’ said Ruth. ‘All those things give me the idea of music, and then I can hear it in my head.’

‘And for me too,’ he said. He smiled at her, his face lit up. ‘It’s lots of fast notes, like an adventure.’

‘And slow ones too,’ said Ruth. ‘Do you see here – that thick bit of paint, where you can see how the painter smeared it on with his brush? That’s a slow note for me.’

Ben considered that. ‘Can you hear it, Mummy?’

‘Definitely,’ I told him, and in that moment just the sound of his voice, the innocence ringing in it, the eagerness to listen, was music enough. On that day, my son was seven years old, and I suspected already that he might not be the kind of child who could win a running race, or triumph on a rugby pitch, so to see him respond in this way to the paintings was a joy. It gave me so much hope for his future, that sensitivity he had, the way that he might be able to respond so positively to beauty and to ideas. I felt it would enable him to create reserves that he could draw on when he needed to, and I knew I could guide him through that, or at least set him off on his way.

What I hadn’t realised on that day, as Ruth and I took him downstairs to find tea and cake, was that he might need to draw on his reserves so soon. Before he would be ready. Or that he might never get a chance to build them up before they were shattered for ever.

‘Do you want to borrow the book?’ Ruth asked. I was lost on the page, in the image, and her voice pulled me back to now. ‘Ben might like to see it.’

What to answer? How to disguise my emotions? I managed only to say, ‘He would. Thank you.’

‘Bring him to see me next week. Promise you will.’

I was struggling to hold myself together. I went to stand at the window, keeping my face turned away from her, looking out at the beds of pruned roses in the garden below, at the sweeping, gracious branches of a mature cedar tree. But Ruth was no fool, dementia notwithstanding.

‘What is it, dear?’ she said.

‘I’m fine.’

‘I don’t like to see you like this, my darling. Come, sit with me, talk to me.’

I wanted to, I so wanted to. But the thing is that if I’d told her, it would have destroyed her. So I didn’t.

‘I’ve got to go now,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you next week.’

I put my face to hers, said goodbye, kissed her. She clasped my head to hers and for a moment the sides of our faces rested together. Her skin felt as smooth as gossamer, her cheek bony and delicate, barely there.

‘Bye bye, darling,’ she said. ‘Be strong. Remember: you are a mother. You must be strong.’

I got one of the DCs to pick up John Finch and bring him in. He was with us within the hour. He looked thinner than he had at the beginning of the week. I put the letter down in front of him.

‘Don’t take it out of the bag.’

He picked the bag up. Fingernails bitten to the quick. Shaking hands. He read out loud:

I watched him closely. He looked as if I’d swung a cudgel at his head, and made contact.

‘Who sent this? What is this?’

‘It arrived this morning. We don’t know who sent it. We’re hoping you can help us find out.’

The shaking in his hands spread to his wrists.

‘Is this my fault? Have I done this?’

‘Let’s not talk about fault. That’s not going to get us anywhere at this point. Do you have any idea who might have sent it? We think it implies that the sender has had contact with you in a professional capacity. I know I’ve asked you before, but I really need you to think about this again now. Do you know of anybody who might have a grudge against you? A former patient?’

John Finch looked like the most beaten person in the world. He looked like a man watching all his worst nightmares come true. His voice was tight with the effort it was costing him to control it. If I’m honest, I found the interview unexpectedly hard, and I think that’s because I recognised myself in him. I knew that if I was him, I would be broken too, and somehow, although it shouldn’t have, that got under my skin. I don’t know if it was my fatigue, or the way he tried so hard to hold on to his dignity, or perhaps both, but there it was, a small feeling of solidarity with him that I shouldn’t have allowed myself.

‘My patients are children, detective. They don’t tend to bear grudges. In fact their view of the world is often beautifully simple, beautifully fair.’

He ran the fingertips of one hand around his eye socket.

‘But they have families, and, sometimes – rarely – you lose a child during surgery, and the families can’t accept it. They blame you. Even when there’s nothing you could have done. Even when the surgery was your only option because without it the child would have died.’

‘Can you think of any families who might have cared more than others?’

‘Cared enough to take my son in revenge? An eye for an eye?’

‘Yes.’

He shook his head. ‘Like I said before, there were one or two who tried to sue the hospital, but even that isn’t very unusual. It’s a risk we take in our profession.’ He passed a hand across his forehead, squeezed his temples. ‘I can’t imagine them doing anything this extreme, I really can’t, but I suppose there is one family that sticks in my mind as being more persistent than the others. I can give you the name of the child, the father’s details will be on the records at the hospital.’

I pushed a piece of paper and a pen across the desk towards him. ‘Write down the name for me,’ I said. ‘The one that springs to mind. And write down the person to contact at the hospital.’

He wrote. He passed the paper to me. ‘Does Rachel know?’ he said.

This time, I made no attempt at conversation as Zhang drove me home.

I stared out of the window and thought about Ruth and Ben, and how much they loved each other’s company. I was transfixed by the sight of schoolchildren walking home with parents, or in messy groups without adults, shouting, laughing, jostling each other, dropping bits of rubbish, which the wind picked up and blew around them.
It was the start of half-term this afternoon, as Ruth had said, and they were in celebratory mood.

‘Can we go to Ben’s school?’

‘We can. Why?’ Zhang said.

‘I want to get his stuff. It’s half-term.’

She only hesitated momentarily. ‘Of course,’ she said. She pulled into the forecourt of a petrol station to turn around and we got stuck behind another car. It was impossible not to see the headlines, murky as they were behind the thick plastic of the forecourt newsstand. The front pages of two newspapers showed a photograph of me at the press conference, beside one of my sister in her nightie, berating the journalists outside my house. This is what I read before Zhang pulled away:

And on another paper, underneath a photograph of my boy:

Zhang still said nothing. I wasn’t sure if she’d seen them or not. I pulled up the hood of my coat and sank down into my seat. I was afraid of somebody recognising me and I was afraid of what they might say if they did.

Ben’s school was almost deserted as we arrived. We had to manoeuvre around some orange traffic cones that had been placed as a loose barricade across the entrance to the teachers’ car park. Only a few cars remained there, most of the spaces were empty. Zhang parked in a spot where we had a view of the playground, a small tarmacked space with football posts painted on one wall and colourful murals on the others. It was a modest little school, with the old Victorian schoolhouse at its heart, and various unprepossessing modern additions tacked on to it over the years.

Right up until the moment when we parked, I thought it was a good idea to visit the school, but as Zhang undid her seat belt and pulled the keys from the ignition, I found myself paralysed by the fact of actually being there.

It was the sight of the playground. It reminded me that this was Ben’s world, his other world, and that the last time I was here was to pick him up the previous Friday afternoon.

As Zhang turned to me, wondering why I wasn’t moving, images flooded my brain.

The playground on Friday: it had been heaving as usual, crowds of parents waiting for children who were disgorged from the building in various states.

Some looked as if they’d been catapulted out with the sole purpose of expending excess energy, chasing each other around between huddles of mothers, others looked beaten down by the week, bags weighing heavily on their shoulders. Some were sporting stickers proudly on their sweatshirts, one or two burst into tears at the sight of their parent after a long day of pent-up frustration.

I saw all this in vivid little bursts: pushchairs, mothers laden like packhorses, snacks being distributed, tales of injustice or triumph. Children sent back into the building to get forgotten things. A teacher with a cup of tea in hand; the headmaster wearing a novelty tie on a rare outing from his office, a few parents flocking around him. Cut-out figures strung like bunting in the windows of the classroom behind them.

‘Are you having second thoughts?’ asked Zhang.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to do this.’

I made myself focus, take a deep breath. In front of me the playground was empty, except for a green plastic hoop, which had been discarded in the middle of the tarmac, and the remnants of colourful chalk marks on the ground, only partially washed away by the rain. I got out of the car.

‘Be warned that the school’s hired security,’ Zhang said as we crossed the playground to the entrance, ‘because of the press. They caught a journalist snooping in the school office.’

As we walked, my legs felt as though they weren’t working properly, there was faintness in my head and my chest. Everything seemed to take on a cartoon-like quality. I visualised the press as an invasive plant, its roots and tendrils growing implacably into every area of my life and Ben’s, looking for action or information to feed off. I felt distinctly unwell, and I wondered if I should go back to the car and let Zhang go in without me, but we’d arrived at the door by then and to articulate how I felt was impossible.

We were admitted to the building by a burly man, who I’d never seen before. He had a shaved head, an earpiece and a strikingly large beer belly. He checked Zhang’s ID and then let us in.

I led the way to Ben’s classroom. All I wanted was to get Ben’s PE kit from his peg, and anything else he might have left behind. That’s what I would normally have done at half-term. I would have washed his kit, and checked he had everything he needed for the next few weeks in the run-up to Christmas. Not to do that would have felt wrong.

It wasn’t to be that simple though. As we neared the door to Ben’s classroom, I saw a big display of artwork, and in the middle of that display was a picture that I recognised, because Ben had made it. My knees buckled.

After that I have only snatches of memory and sensation: confusion, when I came round, because I was on the floor of the corridor and Zhang was propping me up; eyes refocusing again on the display of artwork, seeing painted leaves and branches in all the shades of brown and orange and green and black that wrapped themselves around Ben and swallowed him up when we were in the woods; seeing Ben’s picture amongst the others and feeling sure that I could see the imprint of his fingers in the smears of paint; feeling an impulse to stand, and put my fingers where his had been, and then an inability to do that.

When they’d got me upright and they were sure I wasn’t going to faint again, they moved me into the classroom and sat me in the teacher’s chair.

Miss May was there, and also the teaching assistant. I heard Zhang’s voice, saying, ‘She wants his things, that’s all, that’s why we’re here.’

I watched Miss May go over to a row of pegs that ran along one wall of the classroom, and take down the only PE bag that remained there, and behind it there was a label. It was a photograph of a dog, black and white like Skittle, and the name ‘Ben F’.

Then Miss May said, ‘Lucas, can you please get…⁠’ and I watched the teaching assistant go into the corridor and carefully take down Ben’s painting from the autumn display and put it into a plastic folder. Noticing his receding chin and very red hair. Noticing the sweat under his arms.

Then Miss May was offering to help me to the car, but I found my voice and said no, because I didn’t want the fuss of it, and Zhang said we could manage just fine.

Outside in the corridor, with her arm linked firmly around mine, we walked past the new headmaster. He said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ but the way he looked at me made me feel like an exhibit so I didn’t reply. I just wanted to be at home.

Miss May ran down the corridor behind us, her shoes tapping fast, and just as we reached the door she caught up with us. She had an armful of Ben’s books, which she passed to me, and she said ‘I thought you might like these, since you didn’t make it to parents’ evening this week. I thought you might like to look through them.’

So I took them and as Zhang helped me into the car I held them to myself as carefully as if they were an actual baby.