Caryl Phillips - The Lost Child

“You ought to be more like your big brother and think on about joining the Cubs or maybe a church group.”

“I don’t want to join anything.”

“I don’t want to join anything.” She mimics Tommy, and smiles at Ben, who chuckles approvingly. “Young man, you need to get your ideas straight. You’ll soon learn that the secret to life is getting to grips with the fact that you can’t always have what you want.”

Tommy looks down at his plate and carefully cuts the last piece of toast into two, and then pushes some beans onto each bit. He’s still confused and a little bit upset: Why would Ben tell Simon Longbottom that he didn’t have a brother?

“You do know that when we go nesting, we don’t keep the eggs.” Ben carefully places his knife and fork together, and then looks up again at Mrs. Swinson. “We just like to count them, and then we put them right back in the nests.”

“But you shouldn’t even be touching the eggs. The mother bird’s got them all nice and warm, and then you lot come along with your mucky hands and it’s all back to square one.”

“But is it alright to just look?”

Mrs. Swinson sighs deeply, and then once again gestures with the unlit cigarette.

“Your best bet is to just leave nature be, that’s what I think.”

It is now Tommy’s turn to put his knife and fork together at attention and push the plate slightly away from himself.

“Well, what do you say?”

They both chorus, “Thank you, Mrs. Swinson.”

“That’s right. I hope I’ll not have to ask in future. Now then, we’ve heard all about Ben’s day at school, what about you? Before you go down to the basement to watch telly, I’d like to know what you’ve both been up to.”

“Tell her about the watch.”

He glares at Ben, who smiles weakly and then turns away and won’t meet his eyes. Mrs. Swinson pauses before striking a match on the box.

“Well, what watch is this?”

“Tommy was telling me about a watch, but I reckon I must have heard wrong.”

He suddenly feels angry, but he keeps his focus on the now-empty plate as Ben begins to stammer.

“I don’t think I can have heard him right.”

His brother is making it worse. Mrs. Swinson slips the cigarette back into the box, and then leans to one side so that she can place the saucer that she was using as an ashtray on top of the Aga.

“Well, Ben, either there is a watch or there’s not a watch. Which is it?”

“I don’t know,” mutters his brother, which is the daftest thing he could have said, for now Mrs. Swinson has the bit between her teeth.

“Have you seen the watch, Ben?”

“Yes, Mrs. Swinson.”

“Then you’ve told a lie, for you know full well there’s a watch. Telling lies is a sin, but, as the vicar will tell you when he hears about this, we’ll not be the ones judging you. We’re all of us accountable to higher powers.” She pauses. “Well? I, for one, would like to see the watch.”

His brother’s world is collapsing. The club on Thursday. Nesting. Simon Longbottom’s dad and the army. Clearly nothing matters anymore because Mrs. Swinson now thinks his brother is a liar. He stares at Ben and wonders why on earth he decided to squeal.

Tommy puts his hand in his pocket and passes the watch to Mrs. Swinson, who is clearly surprised by this elaborate underwater model with an adjustable dial on the front.

“Now then, Sonny Jim, I want you to reason carefully before you answer me. Where did you get it, and don’t be like your brother and think you’re going to get away with any yarns, for I’m not fresh off the boat.”

Tommy wishes that he’d just left it where he saw it and hurried out of the changing rooms, for Ben now looks as if he’s ready to burst into tears.

“Well, I’m waiting. Come on, I don’t have all day to be sopping up your dumb insolence.”

“I found it, Mrs. Swinson.”

“So, you’re sticking to that cack-handed story, are you?”

“It’s the truth. I found it in the changing rooms.”

Ben coughs and puts his hand to his mouth to stifle the sound. “It’s true.” His brother has a scratchy throat, so he coughs again. “Tommy found it at dinnertime, and he was going to report it to his teacher.”

“And how exactly do you know this? Were you in the changing room with him?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Swinson laughs scornfully. “And if I ask you again, are you going to continue to try and bamboozle me with more of your lies? Always the brightest kid in the year, your mother said, but you don’t seem that clever to me.”

Ben lowers his eyes, and the room gives way to a devastating silence, made all the more painful by the triumphant smile on Mrs. Swinson’s face.

“You know, for a moment there I thought I might have got you two wrong, or at least one of you.” Her eyes bore directly into Ben. “But you, Mr. So-called Brainbox, you’re nothing more than a barefaced liar.” She looks now at Tommy. “And you’re a thief. In a fix, aren’t we?”

Tommy watches Ben wipe away his silent tears with the sleeve of his pullover, and he feels nothing but intense hatred for this miserable woman, who is not their mother and never will be.

“Away to bed with the both of you. Tomorrow morning we’ll return the watch to its rightful owner, by which time I expect to hear the whole truth. Am I making myself clear?”

Tommy can hear her downstairs locking up the house. When they came upstairs, Ben wouldn’t talk to him, and he simply got into bed and turned his back. He knows that Ben has nicked a lot of stuff: sweets from corner shops, packets of biscuits from the new supermarket, stacks of comics and records. Ben has even taken money from the pockets of clothes hanging up in the cubicles at the swimming baths. (Ben told him that the teacher lined them all up and gave them a piece of paper and asked everyone to write down who they thought did it, and they all wrote down his name, while Ben wrote down “Colin Green.”) But unlike his brother, Tommy has never nicked anything in his life, and he didn’t nick this watch, he found it, and no matter what Mrs. Swinson says, he’s not going to say anything different in the morning. He hears her plodding slowly up the stairs, and he looks again at his sleeping brother. He and Ben used to talk about everything, but all that seems to have changed. Mrs. Swinson opens the door to their bedroom and pokes her head in. He keeps his eyes squeezed shut until he hears her pull the door to, and then he listens for the snap of the switch as she turns off the lights in the hallway. Maybe things will be different tomorrow, but if they’re not, he’s still not going to change his story. She can call him whatever she wants to, but he didn’t nick the watch.

They stand together by the front door and wait for Mrs. Swinson. It’s obvious that Ben has been crying, for his eyes are all bloodshot, but Tommy doesn’t say anything to him. Today his brother’s school uniform hangs sloppily, and Ben looks as though he needs more sleep. Mrs. Swinson, however, has put on her powdered face as she tries to look bright and breezy, but as far as Tommy is concerned, she resembles a clown, and she smells of dog. She retrieves the black umbrella that’s leaning up to the side of the door and looks daggers at them both.

“Well, have you anything to say before we set off?”

Tommy defiantly gives her the eye and watches her crabby face curdle into contempt.

“I didn’t think so.”

It has rained overnight, and as they attempt to match Mrs. Swinson’s brisk pace, they keep an eye out for the slack water in the gutter, which sprays up every time a car or bus races by. When they reach the school, Tommy sees two older boys in the playground who stand together, bags abandoned on the rain-drenched ground between them, quietly arguing as though their lives depended upon whatever point they were trying to make. As Tommy passes by the boys, he catches sight of their prefect badges, and he assumes they have to get to school early to carry out some duty or other to which they’ve been assigned. To the side of the gymnasium, a mopey boy of about his own age is kicking a football up against the wall with a hypnotically monotonous rhythm, and Tommy notices that the boy’s school shoes have already been scratched so badly that no amount of polishing is going to help. Only a few vehicles are parked in the staff car park, and being a new boy, he’s not sure which car belongs to which teacher. Mrs. Swinson leads them inside the main school doors and pads her way down the long corridor and knocks loudly on the staff room door.