That afternoon Ben exuded happiness in that uncomplicated way children can. It made me feel happy too. It had been a hard ten months since John left us, and although I still thought about him and Katrina more than I probably should have, I was also experiencing moments of all-rightness, times when it felt OK that it was just Ben and me. They were rare, if I’m honest, but they were there all the same, and that afternoon in the woods was one of those moments.
By half past four, the cold was beginning to bite and I knew we should start to make our way home. Ben didn’t agree.
“Can I have a go on the rope swing? Please?”
“Yes,” I said. I reckoned we could still be back at the car before it got dark.
“Can I run ahead?”
I often think back to that moment, and before you judge me for the reply I gave him, I want to ask you a question. What do you do when you have to be both a mother and a father to your child? I was a single parent. My maternal instincts were clear: protect your child, from everything. My maternal voice was saying, No you can’t, you’re too young, I want to take you to the swing, and I want to watch you every step of the way. But in the absence of Ben’s dad I thought it was also my responsibility to make room in my head for another voice, a paternal one. I imagined that this voice would encourage Ben to be independent, to take risks, to discover life himself. I imagined it saying, Of course you can! Do it!
So here’s how the conversation actually went:
“Can I run ahead?”
“Oh, Ben, I’m not sure.”
“Please, Mum.” The vowels were strung out, wheedling.
“Do you know the way?”
“Yes!”
“Are you sure?”
“We do it every time.”
He was right, we did.
“OK, but if you don’t know where to find the track, just stop and wait for me on the main path.”
“OK,” and he was off, careering down the path ahead of me, Skittle racing with him.
“Ben!” I shouted. “Are you sure you know the way?”
“Yes!” he shouted, with the assurance of a kid who almost certainly hasn’t bothered to listen to what you said, because he has something more exciting to be getting on with. He didn’t stop, or look back at me.
And that was the last I saw of him.
As I walked the path behind Ben I listened to a voicemail on my phone. It was from my sister. She’d left it at lunchtime.
“Hi, it’s me. Can you give me a ring about the Christmas photo shoot for the blog? I’m at the Cotswold Food Festival and I’ve got loads and loads of ideas that I want to chat to you about, so I just want to confirm that you’re still coming up next weekend. I know we said you should come and stay at home, but I thought we could do something better at the cottage, dress it up with holly and stuff, so why don’t you come there instead. The girls will stay with Simon as they’ve all got things to do, so it’ll be just us. And by the way I’m staying there tonight so try me there if you can’t get through on my mobile. Love to Ben. Bye.”
My sister had a very successful food blog. It was called “Ketchup and Custard,” named after her daughters’ favorite foods. She had four girls, each one the image of their father with deep brown eyes and hair that was so dark it was nearly black, and stubborn, willful temperaments. My sister often joked that if she hadn’t given birth to them herself she’d have questioned whether they belonged to her at all. And I admit I sometimes wondered if my sister ever truly got the measure of her girls: they seemed such an impenetrable bunch, even to their mother.
Close in age—all of them older than Ben—they formed a little tribe that Ben never quite managed to infiltrate, and in fact he regarded them with some wariness, mostly because they treated him a bit like a toy.
Nicky proved a match for them more often than not, though, scheduling and organizing them down to the last minute, dominating them by keeping them busy. Their lives ran to such a strict routine that I sometimes wondered if these raven-haired girls wouldn’t implode once they entered the real world, beyond their mother’s control.
On her blog Nicky posted recipes that she claimed would make even the fussiest families eat healthfully and eat together. When she started the blog I thought it was tacky and silly, but to my surprise it had taken off and she was often mentioned when newspapers published Top Ten lists of good food or family blogs.
My sister was a brilliant cook and she combined recipes with good-humored writing about the trials of raising a big family. It wasn’t my cup of tea—too contrived and twee by far—but it was impressive and it seemed to strike a chord with lots of women who bought into the domestic heroine ideal.
I called her back, left a message in return. “Yes, we’re planning to come up on Saturday morning and leave after lunch on Sunday. Do you want me to bring anything?”
I was making a point by asking that. I knew she wouldn’t want anything from me. She prided herself on being a perfect hostess.
Limiting our stay was also deliberate. When I’d thought we were going to visit Nicky at their family home I’d been determined to stay only one night, because although Nicky was the only family I had, and I felt a duty to see her and to give Ben the chance to get to know his cousins, it was never something I looked forward to especially.
Their big house just outside Salisbury was always perfectly presented, traditional, and loud, and it became claustrophobic after one night. I simply found the whole package a bit overwhelming: superefficient Nicky working domestic miracles left, right, and center; her big, jolly husband, glass of wine in hand, pile of anecdotes at the ready; and the daughters, bickering, flicking V signs at my sister’s back, wrapping their father around their little fingers. It was a world apart from my quiet life with Ben in our small house in Bristol.
Not that the cottage was my ideal destination either, even without Nicky’s family to contend with. Left to both Nicky and me by our aunt Esther, who raised us, it was small and damp and held slightly uncomfortable memories for me. I would have sold it years ago—I could certainly have done with the money—but Nicky remained very attached to it, and she and Simon had long since taken on its maintenance costs entirely, largely out of guilt, I think, that she wouldn’t let me release the capital in it. She encouraged me to make more use of it but somehow time spent there left me feeling odd, as if I somehow had never grown up properly, never shed my teenage self.
I slipped my phone back into my pocket. I’d reached the start of the path that led to the rope swing. Ben wasn’t there so I assumed he’d gone ahead of me. I made my way along in his wake, squelching through mud and batting away brambles. When I came to the clearing where the rope swing was, I was smiling in anticipation of seeing him, and of enjoying his triumph at having got there himself.
Except that he wasn’t there, nor was Skittle. The rope swing was in motion, moving from left to right and back again in a slow rhythm. I pushed forward to give myself a wider view of the clearing. “Ben,” I called. No reply. I felt a flash of panic but told myself to stop it. I’d given him this little bit of independence, and it would be a shame to mar the moment by behaving in an overanxious way. Ben was probably hiding behind a tree with Skittle, and I shouldn’t wreck his game.
I looked around. The clearing was small, no bigger than half a tennis court. Dense woodland wrapped around most of it, darkening the perimeters, although on one side a large crop of medium-sized saplings grew, spindly and brittle, leafless. They dispersed the light around them, lending it a quality of strangeness. In the middle of the clearing stood a mature beech tree, which overhung a small brook. The rope swing was tethered to one of its branches. I reckoned that Ben was hiding behind its thick trunk.
I walked slowly into the clearing, playing along with him.
“Hmm,” I said, throwing my voice in the direction of the tree so that he could hear me. “I wonder where Ben is. I thought he was meeting me here, but I can’t see him anywhere, or that dog of his. It’s a mystery.”
I stopped to listen, to see if he would give himself away, but there was no sound.
“I wonder if Ben has gone home without me,” I continued, dipping a booted toe into the brook. The motion of the swing had ceased now and it hung limply. “Maybe,” I said, drawing the word out, “Ben has started a new life in the woods without me, and I’ll just have to go home and eat honey on toast by myself and watch
Doctor Who
on my own.”
Again, no response, and the flutter of fear returned. This kind of talk was usually enough to make him emerge, triumphant at having tricked me for so long. I told myself to be calm, that he was upping the stakes, making me work hard. I said, “Well, I guess that if Ben is going to live on his own in the woods, then I’ll just have to give away his things so that another boy can have them.”
I sat down on a moss-covered tree stump to wait for his response, trying to play it cool. Then I delivered my trump card: “I just wonder who would like to have Baggy Bear…” Baggy Bear was Ben’s favorite toy, a teddy that his grandparents had given him when he was a baby.
I looked around, expecting him to emerge, half laughing, half cross, but there was absolute silence, as if the woodland was holding its breath. In the quiet, my eyes followed the lines of the surrounding tree trunks upward until I glimpsed the sky above, and I could feel darkness starting to push in as surely as fire creeps across a piece of paper, curling its edges, turning it to ash.
In that moment, I knew that Ben wasn’t there.
I ran to the tree. I circled it, once, twice, again, feeling its bark scrape my fingers as I went around. “Ben!” I called. “Ben! Ben! Ben!” No response. I kept calling, on and on, and when I stopped to listen, straining to hear, there was still nothing. A sickening feeling in my gut pinched harder as each second passed.
Then a noise: a wonderful, glorious crashing sound, the sound of someone rushing through undergrowth. It was coming from the glade of saplings. I ran toward it, picking my way through the young trees as quickly as I could, dodging low, whippy branches, feeling one of them slice into my forehead.
“Ben,” I shouted, “I’m here.” No response, but the noise got closer. “I’m coming, love,” I called. Relief surged through me. As I ran, I scanned the dense growth ahead of me to try to catch a glimpse of him. It was hard to tell exactly where the noise was coming from. Sounds were ricocheting among the trees, confusing me. It shocked me when something burst out of the undergrowth beside me.
It was a dog, and it was big and happy to see me. It bounced at my feet, eager to be petted, its mouth wide and dark red, startlingly so, its big fleshy tongue lolling. A few yards behind it a woman emerged from the trees.
“I’m so sorry, dear,” she said. “He won’t hurt you, he’s very friendly.”
“Oh God,” I said. I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Ben!” I shouted, and this time I yelled so loudly that it felt as if the cold air was scorching my throat when I drew breath.
“Have you lost your dog? He’s not that way or I’d have come across him. Oh! Did you know your forehead is bleeding? Are you all right? Hold on a minute.”
She fumbled in her coat pocket and offered me a tissue. She was elderly and wore a waxed hat with a wide brim that was pulled low on her head. Her face was creased with concern and she was short of breath. I ignored the tissue and instead I grasped her, my fingers sinking into her padded jacket until I felt the resistance of her arm beneath. She flinched.
“No,” I said. “It’s my son. I’ve lost my son.”
As I spoke, I felt a bead of blood trickle down my forehead.
And so it began.
We hunted for Ben, the lady and I. We scoured the area around the rope swing and then returned to the path, striking out along it in opposite directions with a plan to converge at the main parking lot.
I wasn’t calm, not a bit. Fear made my insides feel as if they were melting.
As we searched, the woods were transforming. The sky became darker and overcast and in places the overhanging branches were dense enough to form a solid arch, and the path became a dark burrow.
Leaves gusted around me like decomposing confetti as the wind began to build, and great masses of foliage shuddered and bent as it whipped through the canopy above.
I called for Ben over and over again and listened too, straining to decipher the layers of sound the woods produced. A branch cracked. A bird called, a high-pitched sound, like a yelp, and another answered. High overhead was the sound of an airplane.
Loudest of all was me: my breathing, the sound of my boots slapping through the mud. My panic was audible.
Nowhere was the sound of Ben’s voice, or of Skittle.
Nowhere did I see a bright red anorak.
By the time I reached the parking lot I felt hysterical. It was packed with cars and families, because there were teams of boys and their supporters leaving the adjacent soccer field. A fantasy role-play enactment group loitered in one corner, bizarrely costumed, packing weaponry and picnic coolers into their cars. They were a regular sight in the woods on Sunday afternoons.
I focused on the boys. Many of them wore red jerseys. I moved among them looking for him, turning shoulders, staring into faces, wondering if he was there, camouflaged by his anorak. I recognized some faces. I called his name, asked them if they’d seen a boy, asked them if they’d seen Ben Finch. A hand on my arm stopped me in my tracks.
“Rachel!”
It was Peter Armstrong, single dad of Ben’s best friend, Finn. Finn stood behind him in soccer uniform, mud-streaked, sucking on a piece of orange.
“What’s happened?”
Peter listened as I told him.
“We need to phone the police,” he said. “Right now.” He made the call himself, while I stood beside him, shaking, and couldn’t believe what I was hearing because it meant that this was real now, that it was actually happening to us.
Then Peter organized people. He rallied the families in the parking lot and got some to stay behind with the children, others to form a search party.
“Five minutes,” he said to everyone. “Then we leave.”