Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

‘You don’t like it?’ says Emma.

‘No, it’s fine. It’s nice.’

Emma starts talking fast. She’s brimming with ideas that spill out of her and bounce off in different directions, as if you’d tipped out a basket of tennis balls and suddenly they’re bouncing everywhere at once, their individual trajectories too fast and too random to track.

Her dark eyes flash and dart, and her skin is a soft, dusky brown. Her lips are full. In repose, her face is symmetrical, perfectly proportioned. When she’s animated she looks intelligent, intense and engaging. When she smiles it’s surprisingly mischievous.

As she talks, Emma disentangles the string of her tea bag from the handle of her cup and dances the bag up and down. It releases dark curlicues of flavour that creep through the hot water and mesmerise me. I’m enjoying the moment, loving her company, but my cosy trance is broken abruptly by a silence that’s weighted with suspense, like a breath held, because Emma’s stopped talking, and she’s fixated on the table that’s on the other side of the café, the one that’s reserved.

‘Jim,’ she whispers. ‘He’s right under our noses. Look.’

I turn and I see him too. Benedict Finch is sitting a few feet away from us and I realise that the table was reserved for him. He’s wearing his school uniform, just like in the photo we put out of him. He’s a really beautiful child.

I get up, but my motion is retarded, and I can’t move towards him as quickly as I want to. The air around me is viscous and intolerably heavy. Where my bones should be I feel only weakness, a confusing absence of strength.

While I make only a few paces of progress, Benedict Finch stands up and peels off his school sweatshirt and top, and then his trousers, shoes and socks. He’s wearing swimming trunks. He smiles at me and says, ‘I’m going to take a dip,’ and still I can’t move any faster. I haven’t even covered half the ground between us.

Benedict Finch strolls towards the doors that separate the café from the pool outside, and disappears through the glass, ghost-like. I reach the doors just after him but I’m trapped behind them. I hear Emma say, ‘Jim, we’ve got to get him. I don’t think he can swim.’

Outside Benedict Finch is standing on top of a very high diving board. I don’t know how he got there because I can see that it’s been cordoned off, and the ladders removed. I bang on the doors, I shake the handles and I shout until I’m hoarse, but Benedict Finch, bold as brass, jumps, and it’s then that I realise the worst thing of all, which is that there’s no water in the pool. None at all.

And I can’t look. I pull Emma into my arms.

Of course then I wasn’t dreaming any longer. I was awake, and I’d woken Emma up and I had to say sorry and I told her it was three o’clock in the morning and she should go back to sleep.

She didn’t though. After a while, she said, ‘Jim? Are you awake?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m bothered by Rachel Jenner. There’s something about her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s unstable.’

‘I know.’

‘Even her sister seems to treat her like she’s made of china or something.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘I don’t trust her.’

‘Do you think she’s harmed Ben?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just a feeling right now. But I think she could have done.’

‘Trust your instincts. Talk to Fraser about it, and keep your eyes peeled when you’re with the family. If Rachel Jenner’s done something she might well let it slip.’

‘I am already. I will.’

I reached over and ran my hand up and down her arm, then let it rest on her skin, which was always perfectly soft. I felt myself getting drowsy, but after a while Emma got up. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, and she said, ‘I can’t sleep. I’m going to read for a bit next door. I’m fine. Go back to sleep.’

After she left, I was asleep again in moments, my hand resting on the warm spot on the bed where she’d been.

You and law enforcement are partners in pursuit of a common goal – finding your lost or abducted child – and as partners, you need to establish a relationship that is based on mutual respect, trust, and honesty.

‘When Your Child Is Missing: A Family Survival Guide’, Missing Kids USA Parental Guide, US Department of Justice, OJJDP Report

WEB PAGE – www.whereisbenedictfinch.wordpress.com

WHERE IS BENEDICT FINCH? For the curious…

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Posted at 04.47 by LazyDonkey, on Thursday, 25 October 2012

On Monday, 22 October, police discovered a bag of clothing in Leigh Woods near Bristol.

They belonged to Benedict Finch.

According to his mother, they were the clothes he was wearing when he disappeared.

That’s why police haven’t issued a description of what he’s wearing.

Because they don’t know.

Because they’ve got to take the mother’s word for it.

Would you?

I slept the night in Ben’s bed again, inhaling the perfect smell of him, worrying that it was fading away. I couldn’t think of sleeping anywhere else.

When I woke up my body ached, crying out for proper sustenance, which it hadn’t had for days. I could feel my hip bones protruding where they hadn’t before, my stomach concave.

My eyes drank in what they could in the dim light before dawn.

I could see Ben’s posters, his Dr Who figurines, the silhouette of his piled-up boxes of Lego.

I could just make out the dark stain on his carpet where he’d left a felt tip pen with its lid off and I remembered how cross I’d been with him when he did it.

It had been our first week in the house, one of the first weeks in years when I’d had to wonder how I was going to pay for everything, now that I wasn’t cushioned by John’s salary. I’d shouted at Ben, and he’d cried. Had he thought, I’d raged at him, how many hours somebody would have to work to pay for a carpet like that? Had he? Did he realise what life was like for most people? I’d been so angry.

The memory was a sharp pain. It made me sit up and pull a cushion to myself, hunch over it, and cry with great gulping sobs. It made me detest my previous self-absorption and shallowness. It made me wonder whether I’d been everything I could be to Ben, especially in the past year. Whether I’d let him down terribly, filtering his needs through my own, letting my anger and depression seep between us, where it shouldn’t have been.

I couldn’t forgive myself.

It was a noise from outside that got me out of Ben’s bed to stand at the window. It was the creak of a fence, the thump of a landing. In my back garden was a man; he was standing in the shadows, beside my studio, half concealed by shrubbery, but only half. He wore a dark coat and a beanie hat. A camera obscured his face, its long lens trained on the back windows of my house. Kitchen first then a slow tilt up towards me. He was scavenging, like the fox. I stepped back, snapped Ben’s bedroom curtains shut. From behind the curtain I pounded on the window.

‘Get out!’ I shouted. ‘Go away!’

My sister ran into the room. She moved me aside and peered through the curtains to see the shadow of him disappearing over the fence into my neighbour’s garden. The stairs rumbled as she rushed down and outside to confront him, but he’d gone.

Out the front the rest of the press pack feigned ignorance. As I watched, standing back from the window in my own bedroom, shaking from cold, Nicky went out into the street in her rosebud print nightie, hair greasy and wild, nipples on show, goose bumps on her flesh and told them what she thought of them.