I listened at the front door for her footsteps, reluctant to open it until I knew she was there. A peek from my bedroom window had told me that overnight the numbers of journalists had dwindled to just two or three, but I didn’t want to give them a photo opportunity.
When I heard her footsteps, and I heard the journalists call out to her, I began to undo the latch, but the expected ring on the bell didn’t come. Instead I heard her curse. I opened the door a crack.
My doorstep was awash with milk. It covered the front door and dripped down onto the doormat at my feet. It pooled onto the short front path and it was littered with broken plastic. A pair of two-pint bottles, my twice-weekly delivery from the milkman: full fat for Ben and his growing bones, semiskimmed for me. Smashed to pieces.
I pictured hands throwing them, feet kicking them, the impact, the explosion of white liquid, the dirty, messy aftermath, and I knew I was meant to understand it as a rebuke, that it labeled me as a woman with a filthy doorstep: such an old-fashioned taint that marks you out as the worst, sluttish kind of woman. I read it as snide vigilante justice, the domestic equivalent of a white feather through the door.
You can see how my mind was rampaging, now that I was cornered, and alone.
“Rachel, go back in,” Zhang snapped. “I’ll deal with this. You go in.”
I did as I was told. She borrowed a mop and a plastic bag to gather the debris, and when she came in after cleaning up I said, “Do you think somebody did it on purpose?”
“I can’t say that for sure. It might have been an accident.”
“You know it wasn’t.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Did they see who did it?” I gestured toward the journalists.
“They say they didn’t. They say it was like that when they arrived this morning.”
“They’re liars.”
“Rachel, it’s nothing. It could have been an accident. Don’t let it get under your skin.”
But it was too late for that.
We went down to my studio, taking the dog. I couldn’t bear to be near the front door, with its smeary residue of vandalized milk that shamed and frightened me.
In the studio I put the heater on this time, embarrassed in front of Zhang to indulge in the predawn masochism that had compelled me to sit in the cold while I looked online.
Zhang told me about the letter then, and about the dawn raid that had turned up a dying hoaxer.
“He was a broken person,” she said. “His child died during surgery, when Mr. Finch was operating.”
“Was it John’s fault?”
“No. It was a very risky operation. The father had been informed of that, and the child would have died without it. John wasn’t at fault. Nobody was.”
“Was it a boy or a girl, the child?”
“I don’t know. Apparently the death drove the father mad. He’d been bringing the child up alone anyway because the mother had died. Also to cancer. He wrote a series of letters to the hospital threatening legal action, but he had no case against them, so it was hopeless. And now he has terminal cancer himself. The whole family, wiped out by that disease.”
“How did he know about Ben?”
“He saw it on the telly, recognized John, and he thought it was a chance to get back at him. That’s all it was, a spiteful act. I’m sorry. We’re not back at square one though. We’ve got other avenues to pursue.”
Her words were reassuring in themselves, but I could see that it cost her an effort to arrange her features into an expression of optimism.
As she stood up to leave, my photographs caught her eye.
On the wall above my desk was a collage of pictures I’d taken over the years, and almost without exception they were portraits of Ben. They were my best work.
They were mostly in black and white, and mostly taken on old-fashioned film and developed and printed by me, in a darkroom I’d rigged up in the garage of our family home. John had been happy to hand the garage space over to me. He wasn’t a DIY man.
My camera of choice had been a Leica M20, given to me by Ruth and Nicholas. I processed the films myself, and spent hours poring over the negatives, deciding which ones to print.
The printing process was a joy: the murky red light in which images of Ben emerged from the chemical soup, a kind of alchemy, painting with light, bringing something from nothing. It was a wobbly, unreliable, unpredictable process, yet it yielded images of such beauty and power, and I never tired of it.
The photographs I took weren’t the brightly lit studio prints that are ubiquitous now, where families are pictured against glaring white backgrounds, mouths agape, dental work on show, in poses they’ve never before adopted. Artifice, all of it.
I preferred to work with light and form, with what was there already. I started with the idea that I would be lucky to capture just a scrap of the beauty of my child.
Once, when Ben was about five years old, I came downstairs very early one summer morning to find a dawn light so softly crystalline that it seemed to have an ethereal presence of its own.
I roused Ben gently and before he was fully awake I asked him to sit at the breakfast table. It had been a hot night and he wore just pajama shorts. He sat and gazed at the camera with a frankness that was perfect. In the finished photograph, it’s as if you can see into his soul. His hair is messy, his skin has the texture of velvet, and the contours of his slender arms are perfect. There are no harsh lines in the picture. Blacks fade into grays and into whites, and shadows draw the features of his face and torso. They describe sleepiness and innocence and promise and truth. Only deep in Ben’s eyes is there a glint of something that is of its moment. It’s a flash of light, a white pearl, and although nobody else could tell, I know that the pearl is the reflection of the window, and of me, taking the photograph.
It’s the best photograph I’ve ever taken, and probably the best I ever will take.
Zhang stared at that photograph for a very long time. She held her coffee and stood in front of it and in time steam stopped curling above her hands. Then she looked at the others too, the various manifestations of Ben, of Ben as he was to me.
He was a toddler examining something on a summer lawn, with a lightly furrowed brow just visible under a sun hat; he was a close-up of two chubby baby feet and a study of hands with tiny, fragile fingernails and knuckles that had newborn wrinkles but not yet any solidity; he was his profile, the softness of the skin on his temples, the crisp curls of his eyelashes just visible behind; he was a distant silhouette jumping a rock pool on a spectacular cliff-edged winter beach.
There were so many and Zhang studied each one. Occasionally her radio made a sharp noise, a crackle or static or a voice. She ignored it.
“These are just beautiful,” she said.
I was lost in the pictures myself when she said it, and her sincerity was unexpected, and felt unfiltered.
“You’re the first person outside the family to see them,” I said.
‘Truly? I’m honored. I really am.”
Her voice caught. She had to take a moment to compose herself.
“I tried to learn photography when I was younger,” she said. “My dad bought me a camera, an old-fashioned one. It was a film camera. I was fifteen years old. He set me a project. He told me to go out and take photographs. He drove me to a place called Old Airport Road, in Singapore, where I grew up, because he was in the army, you see. Anyway, on Old Airport Road there’s an old-fashioned food court, so you know what I mean, lots of stalls selling street food of every different kind, a photographer’s dream really. My dad told me to take photographs of the food. I had to ask permission from the stallholders and my dad sat and watched while I spent ages preparing my shots and looking at the different angles and shapes, and after two hours I’d taken my twenty-four photographs. We dropped the film off to be developed and I couldn’t wait to go and collect it the next day, I was so excited. I had one of those ideas you have when you’re young, you know: I’m going to take one roll of film and be a famous photographer. I was that excited. But when I went back the next day and the girl in the shop gave me my packet of photographs, I pulled them out, and every single one of them was black.”
It was the most I’d ever heard her talk. “What happened?” I asked.
“Well, I looked at my dad, I had the same question on my lips, and he said, ‘That will teach you not to leave the lens cap on.’ I was so angry with him for not telling me.”
“Did he know? While you were taking the photos?”
“He did. That’s what he’s like though. He believes you should learn things yourself, do things the hard way.” She smiled wanly. “It worked. I never did it again.”
“That’s what I was trying to do for Ben,” I said. She kept her eyes on the photographs. “In the woods, when I let him run ahead. Because I thought that being independent would let him feel life, be enchanted by it, not fear it, or feel that he has to follow a set of rules to get through it. Because it’s tough.”
She said nothing. She turned away for a moment and the silence was awkward. When she turned back her eyes were red and she put a hand on my arm, and said, “I’m so sorry, Rachel. I really am.”
Once Zhang had gone I went back into the house, driven by the need to be near the landline in case of news. The silence was hard to bear, and I tried to console and calm myself by looking at Ben’s books again. I revisited the page where he’d drawn himself spending the whole day in bed, before I turned over to see what he’d written next.
The following page was startlingly colorful by comparison. Greenery filled every corner: trees and plants in strong confident lines, and a dog that was obviously meant to be Skittle. Short straight lines slanted across the page, over the other images, as if somebody had spilled blue sprinkles across it.
“On Sunday Mummy and Skittle and me walked in the woods,” he’d written. “It was raining all the time.”
I turned another page. The next week’s drawing was very similar. Ben had written: “We walked in the woods agen on Sunday. I found a very big stick and brung it home.”
There was a comment in red ink: “Your walks sound lovely, Ben. Excellent drawing.”
Another page. A different drawing: a picture of a bowling ball, a crowd of children. “I went to Jack’s bolling party and Sam B won,” he’d written.
Red ink: “Brilliant!”
Another page: trees and foliage again, a swing hanging from a branch, a child beside it, wearing red. Ben was a good artist for his age; the images were clear.
“In the woods I went on a big swing and mummy went on her phone.”
Red ink: “That sounds like so much fun for you!!”
A thud of understanding in my chest that was so violent it felt as though it was knocking the breath out of my lungs. It turned my lips and mouth dry and made me look again at the book, as if my eyes were attached to it by strings, and rifle the pages backward and forward until I was sure.
“It’s somebody at school,” I said, although there was nobody there to hear me. In response there was just a single thud from Skittle’s tail, an acknowledgment that I’d spoken out loud.
With shaking hands I picked up my phone and I dialed Zhang over and over again, but every time I just got a message telling me to leave her a voicemail.
JIM
A phone call from Emma woke me up. Fraser had sent me home to catch up on a couple of hours’ kip since I’d worked through the whole of the night preparing for the raid. The buzzing of my mobile dragged me up out of a deep sleep, where the disappointment that we’d wasted so much time and budget and were no nearer to finding Ben Finch was feeding me vivid, uncomfortable dreams.
Emma said she wanted to talk, said she would come over, wouldn’t say what it was about.
I was out of the shower and dressed by the time she arrived, about to call Fraser to check I hadn’t missed anything that morning. “I’ll come down,” I said to the intercom. “Do you mind if we talk on the drive in?”
I pounded down the stairs of my building and I took her in a hug when I found her on the pavement outside, but she was somehow awkward and I got only a bit of a dry-lipped peck on the cheek in return. She had a pool car with her, a green Ford Focus that hadn’t been properly cleaned out since a couple of sweaty DCs camped in it for a surveillance job. She handed me the keys. She was old-fashioned like that sometimes. My dad would have loved it.
We set off into the city, and within minutes we’d got locked in a traffic system around Broadmead, where Saturday shoppers and roadwork had brought everything to a standstill.
It was one of those moments where it seems surreal that ordinary lives go on around you, that other people can actually afford to tolerate delays, when all you can focus on is the gigantic ticking clock that’s your head, counting time on somebody else’s life.
We were diverted onto Nelson Street, the city’s so-called open-air street art gallery, where graffiti murals covered every dank, depressing concrete facade available: psychedelic art meets calligraphy meets art deco meets the recesses of the minds of a dozen artists from around the world. A dreamscape all of its own.
I waited for Emma to start talking, but the whole time she sat motionless beside me, coat buttoned, collar pulled up, scarf wrapped high on her neck, just staring out front.
“Em?” I said when the silence started to get to me. “What do you want to talk about?”
Still she said nothing. If anything, her silence seemed to have settled deeper on her, like it meant to bury her. I pulled over into a loading bay.
“What’s going on?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
The ignition was still running and the wipers squealed as they made a pass across the windshield.
There was so much happening in her eyes that I felt my insides wrench.
“Emma?” I said. Whatever the thing was, I was desperate to sort it out, to make it right. I put my hand on hers, but she kept her fingers curled away from mine, pressing her palm flat onto her leg.
“I don’t know how to say it.” Her voice was small, as if she’d swallowed half of it.
“For Chrissakes try.”
She made me wait for an answer until I was fit to burst.