Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

When we were done, Nicky said, ‘John, Katrina, do you mind if I ask, can either of you think of anybody who might have done this? Anybody at all?’

John’s reply was curt. ‘I’ve told the police everything I can think of.’

‘Are you sure you can’t think of anything odd at all, people behaving strangely around him, anything like that?’

Katrina said, ‘We’ve gone round and round in circles talking about this, haven’t we, John?’

He had his elbows on the table, his hands flat on its surface. It was almost a position of surrender. He nodded at her. ‘We have,’ he said. ‘And I can’t think of anything.’ His eyes were so bloodshot they looked painful.

‘It’s the teaching assistant I wonder about,’ said Katrina.

‘He only started this term,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about him.’

‘Exactly,’ said Katrina. ‘That’s what bugs me. We don’t know who he is. He’s an unknown quantity.’

‘Have you spoken to him?’ I asked John.

‘No. You?’

‘Not once, he’s never out in the playground.’

John shrugged. ‘The police will be talking to everybody,’ he said. ‘They’ve assured me of that. I don’t see what we can do.’

‘Anybody else you’ve thought of?’ Nicky asked.

John had had enough. ‘Don’t you think I haven’t spent every second of every day going through this in my mind? I can’t think of anything else that would help. God knows I wish I could!’

He slammed the flat of his hand down on the table and it juddered.

‘Of course,’ Nicky said. ‘I’m sorry.’

In the silence that followed, Katrina stood up and began tidying up mugs. My eyes roved round, taking in John’s new home. Their kitchen was white and shiny, the granite surfaces immaculate. The only sign of disorder in the room was a large pin board, covered with stuff. I stood up and went to look at it, lured over there by one image in particular. It was a drawing, made by Ben.

The drawing was of three adults and a child. Each person was named underneath: Mummy, John, Katrina and Ben. We all stood equidistant from each other. Ben stood between John and me. ‘My family’ he’d written above it and on each of our faces was a smile.

And in that moment I realised that Ben had managed to do what I hadn’t done, couldn’t do: he’d moved on. I began to cry.

I felt an arm around my shoulders. It was Katrina, and what she said next made me realise for the first time that she had a heart, and feelings of her own.

‘Would you like to see his room?’ she asked me.

‘Yes.’

She took me upstairs. On the landing, the first door we came to had three colourful wooden letters on it that spelled out: ‘BEN’. She opened it and I stepped inside. ‘Take as long as you like,’ she said. She went back downstairs.

The room had been beautifully decorated. It was light, and fresh, with pale walls and striped bedlinen. The bed was made up with care. The duvet had been smoothed and tucked in and somebody had carefully arranged three or four soft toys against the pillows, which were plumped up and welcoming.

The walls were hung with two framed pictures of Tintin book covers, Ben’s favourite ones, and a Minecraft poster. There was a child’s desk in the corner, and on it a stack of scrap paper, a container full of colouring pens and pencils and a lamp, bright red, in the shape of an elephant. A half-finished drawing lay waiting to be completed beside the iPad that John had given me the day before he left us, but which had ended up belonging to Ben. It had felt impossible for me to deny him that, in the absence of his father, and he often left it at John and Katrina’s house so that he didn’t have to negotiate with them over computer use, because there was only one in the house.

A large rug covered the floor and there was an electric railway set assembled on it, a train with carriages attached, ready to depart. A light shade, patterned like the moon, hung in the centre of the room, and from it, carefully suspended on a thread, one above the other, hung three home-made paper aeroplanes.

I sat on the bed for a long time, until John appeared in the doorway.

‘This room is lovely.’ I wanted him to know that.

‘Katrina planned everything with Ben and she painted it herself.’

There was no reproach in his voice, which he might have been entitled to, just a dreadful sadness.

I could see that an extraordinary amount of care and attention had gone into the creation of the room. It was painful to me to hear that Katrina had done the work, but not nearly as painful as the fact that Ben had never once described it to me.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said and I saw suddenly how I’d taken everything Ben told me about his life at his dad’s and twisted it into a sordid, unhappy shape.

No skidding on the floor had meant that Ben wasn’t allowed to play, and that wasn’t the end of it. Every time Ben had come here I’d festered at home, and questioned him afterwards, mining him for information that I could use to paint their marriage, and especially Katrina, in a negative light. I’d never allowed for the fact that Ben might have been happy here, that John and Katrina might have made an effort to make things nice for him, that she had, in fact, welcomed him with open arms.

Everything my son had told me, I’d taken and made into something unpleasant or sad, until he’d simply stopped telling me things. He was a sensitive child. He knew what upset me.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to John, and he said, ‘I am too.’

I heard in his voice the self-blame that was my companion too.

‘I keep thinking about how scared he must be, without us,’ I said.

‘He misses you even when he’s here, so God knows how he’s feeling.’

‘Do you think he knows we’re looking for him?’

‘I’m sure he does.’

They were words of reassurance, but John’s eyes told a different story. I read in them a quality and depth of despair that matched my own, and that frightened me even more.

When we got home, Nicky and I decided to park the car a few streets away and see if we could approach the house via the alleyway that ran along the back, avoiding the press pack. It was a narrow passage, not wide enough for a car, and occupied mostly by rubbish bins and foxes. It separated the ends of our gardens from the allotments behind. From it, you could directly access my garden studio, where I did my photography. Once in the studio, it was only a few metres across the garden into the house. Our garden wasn’t big. There was just enough room for a small football net and a Swingball set.

Our gamble paid off because the journalists hadn’t bothered to camp out there. As we squelched along, avoiding puddles, we saw it at the same time. On the fence panel facing my studio door somebody had been busy with a can of spray paint. In scorching orange letters, neon bright against the dull grey slats of wood, dripping in places because it was so fresh, two words had been sprayed: ‘BAD MOTHER’.

When I sank on to the sodden, stony ground in front of the panel of defaced fencing, grit digging into my hands and my knees, Nicky knelt down beside me and coaxed me up. She took me indoors and phoned Zhang.

‘Who would do such a thing?’ I asked Nicky, but she just shook her head, and lifted her hands in a gesture of Who knows?

It boiled over: the fear, and the anger, the frustration and the terrible impotence I felt too. I was being persecuted. It was personal, and that was terrifying. And it wasn’t just in cyberspace; it had come to visit me at home.

Some of my anger was directed at myself, because of Katrina, because I’d got it so wrong about her and John, because I’d been so bitter and so stupid that I’d forced Ben to lie to me. At eight years old, he’d felt he had to protect me from the fact that they had a nice life together, that they cared for him.