Thirty-Eight

The telephone was ringing as I ran up the stairs, files under one arm and holding two bags full of supper for that evening. I tripped over Anatoly, cursed, dropped the bags and scooped up the phone just as the answering machine clicked on.

‘Hold on,’ I said breathlessly over my courteous, recorded voice, ‘this’ll switch off in a bit.’

‘Sam, it’s Miriam. I’m just checking on tonight. Are you still on?’

‘Of course. The film begins at 8.30 and I’ve told the others to meet at 8.20 outside. I’ve bought some ready-meals to eat back here afterwards. It’ll be lovely to see you again.’

I unpacked the food into the fridge. Elsie and Sophie would probably be back from the park in an hour or so. They’d be surprised to see me here before them. I went through to my bedroom (though personally I thought ‘box room’ would have been a more precise description of a space in which I had to squeeze past a small chest to get to my single bed) and picked up the pile of dirty clothes in the corner, shoved them into the washing machine.

A pile of bills lay on the kitchen table, a pile of dishes teetered in the small sink, books and CDs were standing in crooked towers along all the skirting boards. The rubbish bin was overflowing. Elsie’s bedroom door opened on to a scene of extraordinary chaos. The plants which numerous friends had given to me when I moved here were wilting in their pots. I sloshed water over them recklessly, humming one of Elsie’s absurd little ditties as I did so, making lists in my head. Ring the travel agent. Ring the bank. Remember to speak to Elsie’s teacher tomorrow. Ring estate agent in the morning. Buy present for Olivia’s fortieth birthday. Go through the report on the Harrogate train disaster. Write that promised paper for the Lancet. Get someone to come round and fit a cat flap for Anatoly.

The key turned in the lock and Sophie staggered in, laden with Elsie’s picnic box and skipping rope.

‘Hi,’ I said, as I searched through the letters scattered over the table for the note from the ferry company. ‘You’re back early. But where’s Elsie?’

‘The most extraordinary thing happened!’ She dumped her load on the table and sat down, plump and glossy in her fake-leopard-skin leggings and her tight and shiny T-shirt. ‘We met your sister just as we were going into Clissold park. Elsie seemd really pleased to see her, rushed into her arms. She said she’d bring her back in a bit. I last saw them going hand in hand into the park. Bobbie, that’s her name, isn’t it, was going to buy her an ice-cream.’

‘I didn’t know she was going to be here,’ I said, surprised. ‘Did she say what she was doing?’

‘Yeah. She said her husband had dropped her off on the way to some meeting or other and she’d been choosing curtains in that really swanky fabric shop along Church Street. Anyway, she can tell you herself later. Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?’

‘Coming all the way to London to buy curtains. That’s my sister. And then, now that we’ve got time and no child, we could make a start on sorting the books and CDs. I want everything in alphabetical order.’

We’d got as far as G, and I was covered in dust and sweat, when the phone rang. It was my sister.

‘Bobbie, this is a lovely surprise. Where are you? When will you be here?’

‘What?’ Bobbie sounded quite bewildered.

‘Shall I come and meet you in the park?’

‘What park? What are you going on about Sam? I rang up to see if Mum had rung you, she…’

‘Hang on.’ My mouth had gone strangely dry. ‘Where are you speaking from, Bobbie?’

‘Well, from home of course.’

‘You’re not with Elsie?’

‘Of course I’m not with Elsie, I have no idea what…’

But I was gone, slamming down the phone on her bewilderment, yelling to Sophie to call the police immediately and tell them that Elsie had been kidnapped, pounding down the narrow stairs, two at a time, heart bumping in my chest, please let her be all right, please let her be all right. I fell through the front door and sprinted, feet hurting on the hot pavement. Up the street, pushing past old ladies and women with buggies and young men with large dogs. Through the slow trudge of people coming home from work. Across the road as horns blared and drivers wound down their windows to curse.

Through the iron gates of Clissold park, past the little-bridge and the overfed ducks, the deer who nosed at the high fencing with their velvet muzzles, along the avenue of chestnut trees. I ran and I looked, my eyes scattering from small shape to small shape. So many children and none of them mine. I tore into the playground. Boys and girls in bright anoraks were swinging, sliding, jumping, climbing. I stood between the see-saw and the sand-pit, where last month the park warden had found used syringes scattered, and stared wildly around.

‘Elsie!’ I yelled. ‘Elsie!’

She wasn’t there, although I saw her in every child and heard her in every scream. I looked over to where the paddling pond lay turquoise and deserted, then ran on, to the café, to the large ponds at the bottom of the park where we always fed bread to the ducks and the quarrelsome Canada geese. I peered over the fence to where crumbs and bits of litter drifted, as if I would see her little body drifting under the oily water. Then I started to run up the other side of the park. ‘Elsie!’ I called at intervals, ‘Elsie darling, where are you?’ but I never expected a reply and I received none. I started to stop people, a woman with a child about her age, a group of teenagers on skateboards, an elderly couple holding hands.

‘Have you seen a little girl?’ I asked. ‘A little girl in a dark blue coat, with blonde hair? With a woman?’

One man thought he had. He waved his hand vaguely towards the circle of rosebushes behind us. A little boy whose mother I accosted said he’d seen a little girl in blue sitting on the bench, that bench, and he pointed towards the empty seat.

She was nowhere. I shut my eyes and played nightmares in my head: Elsie being dragged along, screaming; Elsie being pushed into a car and driven off; Elsie being hurt; Elsie calling and calling for me. This wasn’t helping. I ran back towards the park gates again, stumbling, my side hurting, fear burning into my stomach like acid. Every so often I called her name, and crowds parted to let me through, a mad woman.

I raced into the cemetery close by Clissold park, because if someone wanted to drag someone off and harm them, this would be the obvious place. Brambles tore at my clothes. I tripped over old gravestones, saw couples, teenagers in groups, no children. I called and I shouted and I knew that this was futile because the place was huge and full of hidden corners, and even if Elsie was here there was no way I would find her.

So I went home, hope that she’d be waiting for me turning my stomach to water. But she wasn’t there. Sophie met me, her face scared and baffled. Two police officers were there also. One of them, a woman, was on the phone. I gasped out what had happened – that it hadn’t been my sister in the park – but they’d already had a fragmentary account from Sophie.

‘It’s my fault,’ she was saying, and I could hear hysteria in her normally undemonstrative voice, ‘it’s all my fault.’

‘No’, I replied wearily, ‘how could you have known?’

‘Elsie seemed so happy to go off with her. I don’t understand. She doesn’t take easily to strangers.’

‘This was no stranger.’

No, I didn’t have a photograph of Elsie. At least not here. And as I embarked on a detailed description of my daughter, the doorbell rang. I ran down the stairs once more, opened the door. Then my eyes slid down from the smiling face of another uniformed policeman to a little girl in a blue coat who was licking the last of an orange ice-lolly. I sank to my knees on the pavement, and for a moment I thought I was going to throw up all over the policeman’s shiny shoes. I put my arms around her body, buried my face into her squashy stomach.

‘Careful of my lolly,’ she said, a note of concern at last.

I stood up and hoisted her into my arms. The policeman grinned at me.

‘A young lady found her wandering around in the park and handed her over to me,’ he said. ‘And this clever little girl remembered her address.’ He chucked Elsie under the chin. ‘Keep a better eye on her next time,’ he said. He looked round at the other two police officers who were coming down the stairs towards us. ‘Little girl wandered off.’ The officers nodded at each other. The woman walked past me and began to say something into her radio, cancelling something. The other raised a weary eyebrow at his colleague. Another mad mother.

‘Well, not exactly…’ I started to say and then gave up. ‘What did she look like, the woman who “found” her?’

The policeman shrugged.

‘Young woman. I said you might want to thank her personally but she said it was nothing.’

With an imitation of effusive thanks, I managed to close the front door and be alone with my daughter.

‘Elsie,’ I said. ‘Who’ve you been with?’

She looked up at me, her mouth smeared orange. ‘You lied,’ she said. ‘She came back to life. I knew she would.’