I recognized my sister. She stood beside our mother. I could see a baby, a chubby little thing of about one year old in a smocked dress, and I supposed that she could be me. I didn’t recognize the boy who sat in the middle of the picture. Around four years old, he was so like Ben it took my breath away. He had the same messy hair and balanced features, the same posture and the same grin, the one that could light up your day, and the same smattering of freckles across his nose. He was nestled between my parents. It was a lovely image, a perfect family.
The headline beside it told another story:
BATTEN DISEASE FAMILY IN FATAL DEATH LEAP
I scanned the article, snippets of it jumping out at me: “Local couple Andrew and Naomi Bowness leaped to their deaths… driven to the act by lack of support for their terminally ill son… no grandparents surviving… friends and neighbors expressed surprise… had coped so well… feel sorry for their two surviving daughters… wanted to end his suffering.”
I looked at Nicky, who was watching me, stricken.
“They killed themselves?”
“And Charlie.”
The way she said his name, the tenderness in those two words, the loss, told me that it was Charlie who she mourned above all.
“But what about us?”
Nicky looked away.
“Why did they leave us?”
“Don’t you think I’ve been asking myself that all my life?”
“And why didn’t you tell me?”
She didn’t answer.
I looked at the article again, and stared at the photograph.
Clemo cleared his throat. “There was a report from the coroner. Would you like to know what it said?”
“I’ve read it,” said Nicky.
“I want to know,” I said.
He took another sheet of paper from his notebook, ran his eyes down it.
“It says that your brother, Charlie, was diagnosed with Batten disease at the age of five and that his condition began to deteriorate rapidly after that. His diagnosis came about a year after you were born, Rachel, at around the time that this picture was taken, but he was already experiencing some of the symptoms.”
“He looks OK in the photo,” I said. He did. He was lovely: sunny-looking, vibrant, snug in his family’s embrace.
“He’s not,” said Nicky. “He was beginning to lose his sight. Look at the photo. You’ll see that he’s not looking at the camera properly. He’s looking above it. It’s because he only had peripheral vision when that was taken. He had to look out of the bottom of his eye to see anything.”
She was right. The little boy was staring at a point that was above the camera.
“He was totally blind soon after that,” Nicky said. “And then he stopped being able to walk and stopped being able to talk, and he had to be fed with a tube because he couldn’t swallow and he had epileptic fits. The disease took him away from us piece by piece.”
“You loved him.”
“I worshipped him.”
Her words seemed to hang for a moment between us, and when she spoke again it was hushed.
“He didn’t deserve it. I would’ve helped them. I would’ve helped them to look after him until the end, but they couldn’t stand his suffering. Mum blamed herself.”
“Why?”
“It’s an inherited condition.”
“But we don’t have it.” I was struggling to understand.
“Not every child gets it. It’s a matter of luck.”
“So they jumped off a cliff with him? That’s so extreme.”
Nicky simply nodded. She’d turned her head away now, and I could only see her profile, as she looked fixedly toward the dim winter light that filtered through the kitchen window, washing her features with gray.
“But why would you do that if you had two other children?” I asked.
Clemo replied, “The coroner’s report does shed a bit of light on that. Apparently, because the condition was inheritable, they had had you tested. They were waiting for the results when they took their lives.”
“But I’m fine,” I said. “Why didn’t they wait for the results?”
“Your mother had convinced herself, and your father, that you would not be fine. By then she was, as far as we can gather, extremely depressed and unstable. She told her sister, your aunt Esther, that she would not be able to cope any longer if you were also diagnosed with Batten disease, and your father had never coped well. The report mentions that she spoke of feeling very isolated. There was a stigma to mental and physical disability in those days and your mother was not very strong emotionally. The coroner concluded that the strain of caring for Charlie had affected your parents profoundly. They felt that they had no option.”
“It makes no sense.”
“Things don’t always make sense,” said Clemo, “especially when people are under duress. We see things you wouldn’t believe.”
I resented the way he was trying to reassure me, as if he hadn’t just turned my world upside down, and I didn’t want his words to distract me, because there was something else I needed to ask.
“Why did our names get changed?”
Nicky said, “Aunt Esther thought it would be better. She didn’t want it to be hanging over us, or herself either. She thought people would judge us, that they’d say it was a shameful thing. Luckily, for us anyway, the Falklands War started four days later, so that article was all the press attention our little family story got. The papers were full of battleships and submarines after that. Better to be safe than sorry, though, Esther said, and social services approved the idea of having new names. I chose them, you know! I renamed us!”
She forced a sarcastic enthusiasm into her voice but there was nothing in her expression to suggest that this fact actually gave her any pleasure.
I picked up the article and studied the photograph. I’d never seen an image of myself as a baby before. I was chubby-faced with a curl in my hair that I never knew I’d had. I was balanced on my father’s knee, with fat little arms protruding from my dress. My hands were blurry, as though I might have been clapping. My sister stood beside my mother in the photograph. She wore shorts and a T-shirt and her hand rested casually on my mother’s shoulder. Her feet were bare and she had the skinny coltish legs of a prepubescent child. She was smiling widely. When I studied the faces of my parents I felt a new emotion: a stab of betrayal. They’d been willing to leave me. Whether I was healthy or ill, they’d relinquished care of me at just one year old. They weren’t taken from me by chance. They’d abandoned me and they’d abandoned Nicky too, in the most final way possible.
I swallowed and just that small physical reflex felt like an effort. I felt as if the blood had drained from me, just as it had from my sister minutes earlier, and with it any strength that I might have had left, any fight. I was a husk, robbed of all the things that had made me who I am, all the things that had made me vital.
“Am I Alice or Katy?” I asked.
“Katy.” It was a whisper, and Nicky’s face contorted tearfully around it, mirroring mine.
In the photo, my parents’ expressions were impossible to read. They were both smiling for the camera and I tried in vain to imagine what was actually going through their minds. I looked at my brother. He sat in the center, cocooned by their bodies: a terminally ill little boy who was never going to get to live a proper life. I wondered whether they’d had the diagnosis before this photograph was taken, or were they just worried about his eyesight at this stage, thinking that was bad enough and having no idea what horrors lay just around the corner for their little boy. A boy who looked just like Ben.
I said to Clemo, “Why are you telling me this now?”
He addressed Nicky. “We spoke to your sister’s ex-husband this morning.”
She looked at him warily and raised her chin slightly, with a touch of defiance. She let go of my hand. The light in the room fluctuated, growing darker and more riddled with shadows as the clouds lowered outside.
“I know what you’re going to say, and it’s bullshit,” she said.
“What makes you say that?”
“I know what you’re trying to do, but you’re wrong.”
“What am I trying to do?”
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
“I think we both know that you do.”
She crossed her arms, stared down at the table.
I sat in a state of pure, simple shock. I knew well enough by now that you could lose your child in just a few minutes, but I was shocked into silence by the new knowledge that in a similar space of time you could also gain and lose a brother who was the image of that child, and parents who were more imperfect than any version of them that I’d ever imagined.
Clemo spoke to Nicky: “John Finch told us that when Ben was born, he was concerned that you might have what could be described as an unhealthy interest in Ben. Would you like to comment on that?”
“You revolting man,” said my sister. “You haven’t got a clue who’s got Ben so you’ve decided to pick on me. Easier to get to someone close to home, is it? Stops you having to do so much work?”
Clemo’s gaze never left her face. “Would you care to comment?” he asked her. “I’d be very interested to hear what your response might be.”
“I’m sure you would,” she replied.
“I expect your sister would as well,” he said.
Nicky looked at me. “I’ve tried so hard, and for so long, to protect you. I just wanted you to have a life where you didn’t feel rejected. I wanted it to be straightforward for you. But you were so…” She searched for a word, frustrated.
“What?”
“Difficult, and ungrateful.”
“For what? Ungrateful for what?”
“And irresponsible! You never understood anything. You just took it all for granted. You did what you wanted to do, when you wanted to do it. You had no burden. You had no loss to bear.”
“I had the loss of my parents to bear.” I said this quietly, because I understood that she’d had more to cope with, but she was angry now, and so was I.
“You were clueless! Totally clueless!”
“How could I have been any other way, if you didn’t tell me anything? That’s not my fault.”
She didn’t respond to that; she had more to get off her chest. “You never thanked me.”
“For what?”
“For protecting you.”
“How could I have known?”
“They never thanked me either.”
Suddenly she lost her momentum, as if that statement summed up the hopelessness of it all.
Clemo leaned in toward her. “Who never thanked you?”
“Mum and Dad.”
“What did they never thank you for?” he asked.
“For loving Charlie, for watching him when they’d had enough, for making him smile when they were too tired, when they couldn’t cope any longer.”
Her eyes were glassy with loss. His were intent.
“Nicky. Were you jealous when Rachel had Ben?”
She snapped an answer at him as if he were running through a questionnaire.
“Yes, I was jealous, yes.”
“But you had the girls,” I said.
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” she said.
“Why were you jealous?” said Clemo.
“Because he looked like Charlie, right from the start. All I could see when I looked at him was Charlie.”
“Did you feel that Rachel might not be able to care for Ben properly?” said Clemo.
“I was worried,” she said simply, and she turned to face me. “You were so feckless, you know, so young?”
My sister spoke as if she’d rehearsed these words for years. Her speech gathered pace, as if she were confessing something.
“You messed about for years, you never bothered with schoolwork although they said you could have done brilliantly if you’d tried. You never cared about anything, and then all of a sudden you got John. God knows how, because you were pissing your life away, partying all the time, and suddenly everything was so perfect and what had you done to deserve it? Nothing.”
“We fell in love,” I said, but she took no notice. She couldn’t seem to stop herself now.
“I knew you’d have a boy the minute you told me you were pregnant. And when he was born and I went to see him and I held him, I saw Charlie in him. It was as if he was Charlie, reborn. He was so precious, and I wasn’t sure you’d be able to look after him.”
“So you called John Finch,” said Clemo.
“Just to check that she was coping, that she was doing the right thing.”
“Mr. Finch says that you were rather insistent with your phone calls.”
“Well, he wouldn’t give me any information!”
I interrupted them. “John never said anything to me.”
They ignored me, their eyes were locked, Nicky’s gaze furious, his eyes hard like ice; their terrible dialogue unpicking yet more of the stitches that had held my life together. I was relegated to the role of spectator.
“Nicky,” he said, “did you want to have Ben for yourself? So you could look after him properly?”
“That’s the thing,” she said, “I didn’t. I didn’t want her to have him, but I didn’t want him either. He would just have reminded me every day of what I’d lost, and that’s why you’re wrong.’
“Wrong about what?”
“For pity’s sake!” She laughed. It was a shrill, upsetting sound. “Stop playing games with me! What would I do with him? Where do you think I would keep him?”
“I think you might like to have him. I think you’ve always wanted him.”
The baldness of this, the slow, calm way he said it, made my sister pause and collect herself before she spoke again, as if she realized she couldn’t combat his accusations with emotion alone.
“Well, you’re not sure, are you? If you’d got any actual evidence you’d have arrested me, so this is a pathetic attempt to get me to confess to something I haven’t done.”
Now she leaned across the table toward him.
“You made me tell my sister about our family. That was low. You’re not getting anything else. I’ve told you that I’ve got nothing to do with Ben’s disappearance and that’s all you need to know. The rest is private. Why don’t you get out there and start looking for him before it’s too late?”
She got up and went into the garden, slamming the kitchen door behind her. Zhang went after her.
I was left sitting at the table with Clemo.
He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to land this on you like this. I hope you understand that we have to follow everything up.”