Lullaby (12 page)

‘All right, sis. Beautiful as ever,’ he said indulgently, dragging on his scraggy roll-up which tumbled ash onto the terracotta tiles. He got up to hug me. ‘You’ve done all right for yourself, I must say. Congratulations.’

I fell into his embrace, absorbing him for a long and quiet minute. Then I pushed him off, although the bigger part of me wanted to keep holding tight.

‘Sis?’ I said, incredulous. ‘You’re not in Albert Square, you know. It’s not flipping
EastEnders
, Robbie.’ I went to the fridge to pour us both a drink, playing for time. My heart was beating very fast. I was shocked, confused, overjoyed, in fact, I thought—but above all else, I was cross. Five years of pent-up hurt throbbed through my brain.

‘You said you weren’t in the country when you rang. You said you saw the news on satellite.’ I poured the juice very carefully, sliding my eyes towards him. I’d spent so long dealing with his disappearance I didn’t know how to cope with the real Robbie now. He looked apologetic at least, smiling his charming little smile. The fact he was missing a front tooth rather ruined the effect.

‘Yeah, well, you never know who might be listening, do you?’

‘Don’t you? Blimey, Rob. This is the real world, not Tarantino.’

‘Taran— who?’

‘You know.
Pulp Fiction
?’

‘Oh, right. The real world, is it? God, Jess, your
life’s more dramatic than mine’s ever been right now.’

‘Maybe. But not through choice.’ I gulped the cool liquid, my throat still sore from having my stomach pumped. There were so many things I wanted to ask him; so many things rattling through my aching head I didn’t know which to choose. I selected a real winner.

‘I mean, where’ve you bloody been for the last five years, Rob, you bastard?’

He shrugged, sitting down again, grinding out his fag-butt in a saucer.

Shirl came in and screamed.

‘Lord, Robbie, what have you been doing with yourself, man?’ She sucked her teeth. ‘You look like you could do with a good bath.’ She sniffed the air. ‘Smell like it too. Have you been smoking in here?’

I grinned. She was nothing if not maternal, my best mate Shirl.

‘Char, what about your sister’s asthma? Have you no thought, man? You’re as bad as that husband of hers. Always doing jus’ what you want.’

I let that go.

‘Nice to see you too, Shirl.’ He raised his arms in mock submission. ‘Sorry. Won’t do it again, I swear.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘I won’t do—’

Shirl quelled him with a look. I turned back to my little brother, attempting to harden my heart. Where Robbie went, invariably trouble came too.

‘So, like I said, what
do
you want?’ I sat next to him at the table; I couldn’t stop staring at him. ‘Leigh’s going to do her pieces, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Aw, Jess, don’t be like that, darling.’ He tried his puppy-dog eyes on me and I couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’ve missed you. And Leigh.’

I’d missed him too, quite desperately at times, but he really didn’t deserve to hear that straight away. It was what he traded on, Robbie. Old good feeling for the good old days. Then he spoilt it all. ‘I’m worried about my nephew.’

‘Rob, you’ve never even seen your nephew. I doubt very much you even knew you had one until you saw the news. Did you?’

He had the good grace not to lie. He twisted one of his earrings through its hole and back again. ‘I knew you were married, though.’

‘Really? How?’

‘Mum must have told me.’

‘When did you ever speak to Mum? She never told me.’

I stared at him; he looked a little sheepish.

‘Only the once. She must have forgotten to tell you.’

‘Forgotten to tell me?’ I looked at him; I didn’t know who to blame. In the end, I let that go too—for now. ‘So,’ I prompted, ‘why are you really here?’

‘I’ve come to help.’

I grimaced. Robbie had helped no one but himself in years. He’d been the kind of kid who didn’t pull the wings off daddy-long-legs himself, but stood and watched while others did. I sighed wearily. ‘I appreciate the offer, but I don’t really need your kind of help, Rob, I don’t think. I just need to find my son.’

‘Yeah, well, I can help you look, can’t I?’

‘Robbie, half the Met are looking. Where are
you
going to start?’

He shrugged, running nicotined fingers through greasy hair. I thought I could see his hands shaking a bit. He had a name tattooed across the left one—
Jinny
, I thought it said. He slumped against the dresser, his shadow wavy down the dusky hall.

‘I’ll look anywhere I need to. Christ, Jessie, I’m your family. We’ve got to stick together at a time like this.’

Shirl laughed quietly. ‘That’s a good one. Like you’ve always stuck by Jess, you mean?’

Robbie’s mobile phone rang. He looked down at the number and scowled, shoved it back into his pocket.

‘Don’t you need to get that?’

‘No.’

The ringing stopped. Then it began again.

‘Someone’s persistent,’ I said. ‘They must really want you.’

He snatched up the phone. ‘What?’ he growled. Then he darted outside the back door, phone clamped between multi-pierced ear and leather jacket, rolling yet another fag. ‘Yeah, yeah, all right. I’m there now,’ I heard him say. I wondered who knew he was here.

Deb had melted discreetly away when Robbie had arrived. Now the doorbell went again, voices muttered in the hall, then Leigh walked in. She saw Robbie outside on the back steps; she stopped dead in her tracks. And I was right. She completely did her pieces.

Later, when Robbie had gone, limp in the wake of Leigh’s wrath, leaving a mobile number that I didn’t
expect to work and another hug that, despite all my mixed emotions, I was overwhelmed to relax into for a second—was glad to get, in truth—the hospital rang again. They’d worked out that I’d scarpered without ever seeing the shrink; they asked me to go back tomorrow for a ‘quick chat’. Then Deb came in and said that they’d got a few leads on the calls they’d had, and I tried to feel some optimism, I really did. She said that they wanted me to appeal again tomorrow, and that it wouldn’t be long now before Louis was back.

I knew I should go back to see Mickey now, but the thought made me feel rather sick. When I spoke to the nurse on duty she said he was asleep, and so I sat down with Shirl and a bottle of wine but the drink just made me feel ill. I switched on the computer and started to surf the net. I was looking for something reassuring about how much time could go by and stolen babies would still be found safe and sound, but the only statistics I came across were sparse and scary. Eighty per cent of babies were found within three days, and if they weren’t—well. Over and over again I read how crucial the first forty-eight hours were in the investigation-the most crucial. It was another slap in the face. Fear mounted in my chest until I had to log off.

I was knackered but I knew I wouldn’t sleep, so I tried to watch some silly soap that Shirl had on. I couldn’t concentrate. The 100,000 British kids who went missing every year whirled round my mind like fairground waltzers. Where were all those poor lost children? Hidden in cupboards, stashed in cellars, bedsits,
existing under the arches in Waterloo and Vauxhall, round Liverpool’s cathedrals and Birmingham’s Rag Market? Images of the Austrian teenager locked in a stranger’s cellar for her entire childhood, the American boys absorbed into a new family not far from their real homes floated back to me. The horrifying fact that these poor stolen kids had seemed to almost love their captors. I flicked channels dispiritedly, looking for something to distract me.

‘Shall I see if I can find one of those travel shows you like?’ Shirl prised the remote control from my hand.

‘No, don’t worry about it. Sorry. Am I annoying you?’

Mickey was so scathing about television—it was so trite and vacuous, he’d scoff, for the entirely brain-dead, that I rarely watched it any more.

The soap was back. I stared blankly at the screen as some blowsy blonde ran off with her stepfather, leaving her kids behind. Heartless cow. I bit the skin around my thumb—and then I had a thought.

‘I’m going to make some posters of Louis. Some missing posters.’ The word ‘missing’ bounced painfully round my brain like the pinball in a pub machine. I jumped up, trying to slam it away.

‘You mean like people put up for their cats on lampposts?’ Shirl looked bemused. ‘Surely the police are doing all that kind of thing, aren’t they, babe?’

‘Louis is hardly a cat, Shirl.’ I rushed over to the chest where we kept our photo albums, and dragged the doors wide open.

‘I didn’t mean that, silly. I’ll give you a hand, shall I? I’ll find a pen.’

An expensive blue album fell onto the floor,
‘BOY
’ emblazoned across the front in gold. I’d bought it just after my second scan, when they told me and Mickey I was expecting a boy. I’d watched my baby’s foot flying through the unearthly air on that ultrasound machine and I’d felt the first flickers of the most profound love. I’d said goodbye to Mickey, who’d gone back to work, and then I’d wandered round the shops in a haze. I’d spent a fortune on tiny babygros and jumpers and clothes, and then I’d hidden them all away, waiting with growing excitement for the birth of my son: before the cosh of postnatal hormones whacked me over the head and left me reeling.

I picked up the album. I hadn’t stuck a single photo of Louis in yet—I never seemed to have a spare second any more. Piles of pictures of the baby were stacked haphazardly on the shelves, and I felt another surge of guilt. For not bothering to officially record my son’s short life. For failing him as a mother, yet again. I gritted my teeth and picked a recent photo; I drank in his serious little stare; the next one where he’d begun to blow a raspberry with excitement at the camera—a trick he was so proud of.

And then Maxine arrived home. Her swarthy new boyfriend dropped her on the doorstep and they had the gall to have a long smooch right there, not minding who could see, and then I watched him saunter down the path to his car. A foreign flag I didn’t recognise fluttered from the back window. Anger flooded my
veins. I hadn’t seen Maxine since I’d found the photos of Louis in her grubby little room.

I shot into the hall as she opened the front door. Key in hand, Maxine stared at me as if I was some odd animal she’d never seen before. Was I imagining it or did she actually seem nervous now?

‘Why did you take those photos, Maxine?’ I demanded.

‘Photos? What photos?’ she shrugged.

‘The passport photos of Louis. The ones that were hidden in your room. What have you done with him?’ And I began to shout. I shouted incoherently, shouted for all the times she’d made me feel inadequate, for every time she’d taken the baby from me and he’d stopped crying and smiled happily up at her, for every deliberate flash of her long legs in front of my husband. I shouted for all the guilt and all the pain and all the times I’d not known what to do with Louis—and she, she just kept looking at me now like I was mad. And finally I ran out of steam, ground to a halt, and she said, quite calmly, ‘I don’t know what you talk about. Why should I not take photographs? We go shopping; I see the photograph place. I want a picture of me and
le bebe.
It’s just something for me. You know, because I love him.’

And I stared at Maxine, just like she had stared at me when she’d come in, and I knew that it was true. She did love him; I’d seen it and I’d smarted with jealousy and fear, but it was why I’d let her stay, why I hadn’t fought Mickey to get rid of her. I’d needed her expertise; her unruffled knowledge. The truth was, I’d
thought Louis had needed her as I recovered from my early depression, recovered both my brain and my courage.

‘I just get the photos for myself. For—how you say—for my wallet?’

I thought of Silver’s words when I’d found them in the first place, and finally I surrendered. ‘Yeah, all right, Maxine.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Sorry.’

She shrugged again. ‘It’s okay. I am sorry for you, really. I will help you if I can.’

‘Thank you.’ I went back into the sitting room and slumped on the sofa holding the photo of Louis that I’d chosen; holding it to my heart, feeling foolish, feeling utterly empty. I kept glancing at the picture of his beaming face.

‘In the morning, I’ll go to Blackheath and get it photocopied,’ I told Shirl carefully, and she smiled and offered me an éclair she’d nicked from my stash in the freezer. Normally I loved them, but the image of Mickey’s chocolate cake in the Tate haunted me and I couldn’t face it now. Shirl put something quiet and ambient on the stereo and offered to give my shoulders a rub, but I didn’t fancy it. I knew I’d never relax. I half-listened as Maxine skulked around the kitchen, then went up to her room with the inevitable can of cold baked beans (her peasant roots were embedded deep, Mickey had always said, whatever her aspirations to climb the social ladder) and a copy of
Hello!
that I’d sneaked past Mickey a while ago.

In the night I woke and couldn’t sleep again, thought longingly of pills, but I’d flushed the remainder down
the loo. I supposed that was for the best. And then, as I finally slid towards the dreams that went some small way to protect me, I remembered something I hadn’t checked. My eyes snapped open as fear sidled back into the room and my heart began to race. I put the bedside light on; forced myself out of bed and half-crawled to the cupboard where I kept my things. I cursed my own stupidity as I slid my hand down beside the shoe-rack, past the plastic folder, to my dad’s old boot-bag where I kept Louis’s precious things. I drew it out and with trembling hands scurried through the contents. The first photos, the wrist-band from the hospital, his birth certificate…and then, thank God, the passport I’d only just received back for him. I flipped it open and studied his tiny little image, barely visible in the half-light. Then I buried the bag back into the cupboard, deeper than before, and carried the passport to bed, slipping it carefully beneath my pillow.

As I finally fell towards sleep again, Mickey’s own passport flickered through my brain. I hadn’t asked him why he’d had it yet…Then darkness overtook me and chucked me back into oblivion.