The Boy Under the Table (6 page)

Summer had ended but Tina knew that she would at least be warm in the cold squat when she slept. It wasn’t a real home, but it was a place to come back to. The one thing she really missed was a bathroom. The one thing among the many, many other things.

The building had no water although it did, for some reason, still have electricity. She would have loved a heater but there was no way anyone wanted to draw attention to the building. They used the lights occasionally but a heater would probably give someone down at the electricity company the heads-up that they were using the space. They knew, everyone knew, but there was no need to throw a party and invite the council.

Tina took off her shoes and zipped herself into the sleeping bag. In the morning she would go to the gym for a shower. The gym membership was the most important thing she owned. It still had three months to go and Tina would savour every one of them. It was a parting gift from Ruby. At least that’s how Tina liked to think of it.

Tina looked around the room in the dark while her eyes adjusted. She had been too tired to check her stuff tonight but she usually checked it every time she came in from being out on the streets. Three broken plastic boxes weighted down with bricks contained her clothes and her books. She made sure she never got attached to anything. If something meant enough to her, it went in the backpack that never left her side. Even now it was shoved in the sleeping bag with her.

Tina’s body felt heavy and warm but sleep darted away each time she tried to catch it. The boy under the table didn’t even have a blanket. He didn’t have a pillow or some ragged old toy that he had been dragging around since he was a baby.

‘He’s not Tim,’ Tina said aloud in the dark room.

Tim had carried a ratty old teddy bear everywhere when he was little. He named it Mr Lulu and insisted it was a boy. Even when he got too big for the toy it had still been on his bed. Then he got sick and Mr Lulu helped him get through the treatments and the long nights of pain. The thing had been vomited on more times than anyone could count but it survived every cycle in the washing machine.

Kids needed something to drag around with them. Some nights, when things looked completely dark, Tina longed for her old stuffed puppy dog. Of course she longed for a lot of things.

What did the kid under the table long for? Freedom? Death? Tim had longed for death at the end.

I’m so tired Tina, please just let me sleep okay?
He didn’t know what he meant, of course. He thought if he could just get enough rest he would be able to wake up again and get out of the special bed that went up and down with the touch of a button. Tina thought he should know, thought he would want to know, but her mother was adamant. They kept telling him he was going to get better.

God is the greatest healer, Christina
, her mother said. Tina had looked at her and realised she had no clue who her mother was anymore.

Tim longed for sleep. He longed to rest his body. The boy under the table would not be able to rest if he was freezing. You could not rest if your body had to keep moving to stay warm.

Tina turned over in her sleeping bag and willed herself to close her eyes but the boy was the only picture she could see.

She grabbed a torch out of her backpack and switched it on, choosing one of the books she had read before. She would comfort herself with familiar words and wait for dawn and hopefully then she could sleep. Hopefully.

Sarah

On the day, on
that
day, the day they lost him, he had refused the breakfast at the restaurant.

The eggs weren’t cooked properly. He liked his scrambled eggs dry and separated. The eggs on the plate in front of him oozed and clumped together. He had folded his arms and stared in horror.

Sarah had tried a minute of bargaining, offering Lockie a lamington as a treat if he ate his eggs before she heard Doug’s irritated hiss of breath.

‘He’ll eat what’s there or he can leave it. Eat your food, Sarah.’ Doug wasn’t one to send food back in a restaurant. He was out of his element and it showed. Sarah had listened, biting her lip—keeping the words inside. She hadn’t wanted to make a scene. She hated to stand out for the wrong reasons.

As it was she could feel the stares. The country dust stuck to her no matter where she went now. Doug never looked like anything but what he was. Everyone in the restaurant could tell they were in the city for the Show. She could not remember the casual Sarah who needed her morning latte before she did anything else. She had willingly given that Sarah up, it was true, but when she was back in the city she yearned for the ease with which she used to walk in and out of coffee shops and giant shopping centres.

The irony of her situation was not lost on her now. The whole of Australia knew her name for some very wrong reasons.

Lockie had eaten toast with peanut butter instead and Doug had said, ‘Leave him be, Sarah. We’ll be eating all day at the Show.’ Sarah had known that Doug was probably right. The excitement of the show would make the hours fly past and lunch would come soon enough. Lockie’s choice of a corndog was already set firmly in his mind.

But Lockie was lost before lunch and he didn’t get to have his corndog or his lamington.

The promised cake had occupied her mind completely at first. She should have given it to him before lunch. What difference would it have made? She spent so much time keeping to routine and saying no. Children needed routine. That’s what all the books said. That’s how her mother had done it; or, rather, how the nanny had done it. Routine and discipline made children feel secure.

What difference would the lamington have made? Perhaps the sweet chocolate taste would have been something for him to cling to wherever he was now. She imagined how he would have crammed the cake in his mouth, not pausing for breath or to chew properly. She saw the streaks of chocolate on his cheek. She saw his smile.

Sarah wondered what they—the ‘they’ who had taken her child; the ‘they’ or the ‘him’ or the ‘her’—were feeding him.

Sometimes a fear dug at her until she acknowledged it: maybe they weren’t feeding him at all.

Who would do that? Who would willingly starve a child? Who would hurt her baby? Who would take her baby? Who was this person and why were they allowed to exist?

And what would I do to that person if I got the chance?

There were days when she lay on the bed and concocted scenarios in her head. She would see herself finding Lockie. She was never really sure of the place. It would be a dark room in a dark house but the location wasn’t important. She would see herself rescuing her child, folding him in her arms and saying his name. Then she would see the person who had taken him.

There was never a face, just a body with a blank head, but Sarah would see herself grow until she towered over the person and then she would hit and hit and hit until there was nothing left and all the time she would be screaming, ‘How dare you take my child? How dare you take him?’

She had to find him. The desperate need to find him swirled around her body with everything she did. It ate into her soul and sometimes she had to hold on to the kitchen counter to stop herself running out into the road and screaming his name. She wanted to be looking for him all the time. She wanted to leave Sammy and Doug and just keep going until she got to the city and then she wanted to knock on every door across the whole of Sydney until she found her son. But maybe he wasn’t even in Sydney anymore.

Maybe he wasn’t even in Australia.

Where are you, Lockie? Where are you, where are you, where are you?

Each day she slashed through the date on her
Flowers of Australia
calendar with a red pen. One more day had passed and he wasn’t home. Four months had passed and he wasn’t home. Four months; one hundred and twenty-one days; two thousand, nine hundred and four hours and he still wasn’t home.

On the days that she made it out of bed—and those were the bad days, because she was awake, and if she was awake she was thinking—she would clean the house and see him walking through the front door. She would make dinner and see him walking through the front door. She would bathe Sammy and see him walking through the front door.

What if he never walked through the front door again?

How would she go on?

So much time had passed, his return seemed at once impossible and just around the corner.

When he first went missing all she had felt was a slight impatience. For a few minutes it had been all about her triumph and she had wanted to celebrate it. She had wanted to celebrate being Sarah Williams—artist. She had won the blue ribbon and the prize money in the wedding-cake division. The money would be used for Christmas presents but the blue ribbon was a joy Sarah had never imagined for herself. She was in a kind of celebratory shock when she walked off the stage.

But when they couldn’t find Lockie she had to slip back into mother mode. There were days when mother mode pulled her in kicking and screaming. That moment, just for one moment, she had wanted to remain separate. Just herself, whole and untethered.

As the minutes ticked by she felt her mind slowly growing blank. All she wanted was a chance to hold her boy again. Her prize was forgotten, everything drifted away and the only thing she could think was ‘please’. ‘Please, please, please.’

Even now she couldn’t find the blue ribbon, although the money had helped fund the long days in Sydney. Her ribbon had been lost and not missed in those whirling hours she spent rocking and begging the universe.

Being a mother was all-consuming. There were so many mistakes you could make, so many ways to lose a child. The whole world was a threat. In the years after Lockie’s birth she became addicted to those current-affair shows that interviewed parents who had made the one fatal mistake. They had let the blind cord dangle on the ground, they had left the pool gate unlocked, they had put the pot too close to the edge of the stove, they had just ducked into the shopping centre and left the child in the car. They had taken their eyes off the ball and that way lay tragedy and regret.

Sarah watched to see what mistake had been made and each time had been able to congratulate herself on never making any of those mistakes. But then she had made a mistake—one worthy of a current-affairs show.

She had looked away.

Doug had looked away.

They had lost Lockie.

Lockie had been lost.

It was so arbitrary. So cruel.

Everyone looked away at some point, didn’t they? Why had she been the one to pay for so small a transgression?

Whenever she allowed herself to surface she acknowledged that she was being punished. She was being punished for her sin of pride. She had been so proud of the beautiful wedding cake that had taken six long weeks to create. The three tiers had to be covered in smooth white fondant icing before she could even begin to decorate them, and three times she’d had to start over when she’d failed to achieve the surface she needed. She had guiltily turned the damaged cake into lamingtons, aware of the money the fondant cost, aware of the waste—the terrible waste.

The cake was covered in fifty lilac and black fondant roses. Each rose had taken her twenty minutes to make, and each rose had been remade at least twice. The paste for colours and the fondant were only available in the city. Doug had smiled and waved her off on the train when she went up for a couple of days. He had given her the money when she knew there was none. Sarah knew that he was relieved she had found something to curb her restless soul. She knew he watched for signs she would leave for good. On the train she had been ashamed of herself for not telling him more often that she wasn’t going anywhere. She had accepted the money and kept quiet about a truth only she knew, but she had been ashamed. The prize had swept that shame away.

She had returned from the city excited with her supplies and full of ideas for the cake. Doug had watched her work for a few nights, but she found his presence suffocating. She felt she was proving her worth with every flower. Each small tendril was drawn separately and then placed on the cake. The tiniest of details were the most important. Small, glistening drops of sugar lay on some of the petals, inspired by the rain and the smell of renewal that wafted through the house when it began.

She had begun decorating cakes with nothing more than a spatula and an icing bag, but for her birthday Doug had presented her with a collection of everything she could possibly use to create her cakes. Another wife would have seen the gift of domestic tools as an insult but Sarah knew that the specialist icing tools had to be sent away for and she had hugged them to her chest, grateful for Doug’s understanding of her need to do something else and occasionally be somewhere else. The idea for the wedding cake had begun with a faintly remembered dream of her own wedding.

She worked late into the night with only her own thoughts for company. She worked in the easy silence of a house at the end of a long day.

She worked through the heat of the summer and then she had worked as the rain began to fall. The beautiful, wonderful, needed rain.

Doug and the children had been asleep and she had worked on the cake. Well, the children had been asleep. She had known that Doug was awake when the rain came, listening to the drops and working out how much and how long.

She had watched her own hands produce the beautiful flowers and admired her ability to do such a thing. She had not been able to believe the beauty of the cake when it was completed. For the two days before they left for the Show the house was filled with friends and neighbours. They came to admire and to congratulate and to wish her luck.

The drive up had been nerve-racking and she had made Doug pull over numerous times so she could check that the cake was safe in its layers of tissue and cardboard and wood. It wasn’t until she placed it on her stand that she had relaxed and embraced the idea of some time away from the farm.

And then to win the prize had been incredible. She felt like she was being seen, actually being seen, for the first time in the endless years of being a mother and a wife.