Silent Child(3)

“What is it?” I asked.

A dribble of rain water trickled down the wall behind Mrs. Fitzwilliam. We’d called her Mrs. Fitz when I was a child. She had always been firm but fair. We were a little afraid of her red hair, but it was almost completely grey now, and her stern expression was softer as she finally met my gaze. The tears in her eyes forced my heart to resume into its tattoo against my ribs. I clutched hold of my chest, trying to calm myself while my heart seemed to have been restarted with defibrillators.

“Ms Price… Emma… I’m so sorry.”

I took a step forward and she took a step back. Her expression told me that mine was wild. She put both hands up in front of her as if in surrender.

“We’ve called the police and they’ll be here soon.”

“Tell me what happened,” I demanded.

“Aiden slipped away. Miss Perry was with the children in classroom four. She was performing a headcount. We had collected all the children from year two in that classroom because the roof leak wasn’t as bad. But somehow Aiden left the classroom. We’ve searched the premises and we believe he has left the school.”

I clutched my chest, as if such a paltry action could alleviate the pain that radiated from my heart. “Why would he leave?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Perhaps he was curious about the rain.”

I crumpled in on myself, folding over like paper. Of course he was curious. Aiden was curious about everything. He was an explorer. He climbed trees in the park, he scurried over five-bar gates into fields filled with cows, he hid in the heather on the moors around Bishoptown, and played hide and seek in the forest. I had nurtured that side of him. I wanted a wild, brave child. I wanted that for him; I wanted him to grow into a strong man with a penchant for exploring. I’d pushed my wanderlust onto him.

But I hadn’t wanted this. I hadn’t wanted him to wander away from safety during the most dangerous flood in over a hundred years.

“You’ve searched the school?” I asked.

“We’re still looking,” she said.

“I’ll help.”

The rest of that day was a blur. I checked each classroom myself, tripping over buckets placed under leaks and snatching open cupboard doors, screaming his name until I scared the other children. It was no use. Aiden was not in the school. I’d searched every nook and cranny of the school, even trudging around the carpark and the football field. Eventually Amy got me to sit down and Mrs Fitzwilliam brought me hot coffee.

The police had shown up hours later, along with search and rescue. Somehow amongst all that I’d been given an extra pair of shoes. No one had found Aiden. There was so much for the authorities to deal with. Search and rescue and the police were stretched so thinly that my boy, my missing boy, stayed just that. Missing.

And now, do I resent that? Do I hate the parents whose children were taken to safety in boats and helicopters as the Ouse finally burst and covered our small village in its murky lifeblood? No. I can’t. I can’t begrudge the men and women who worked tirelessly to help the living. But as I watched everyone moving around me, watched the rest of the children reunited with their parents, and watched the half-drowned people of my village receive blankets and hot cups of tea, I realised that my life was no longer in my own hands. On that day, when I lost Aiden, I lost all control of my life, and with him gone, I would never get it back.





2


All that wasted potential. That was the phrase I heard over and over again when I fell pregnant with Aiden in year thirteen of school. I had just turned eighteen when I pissed on the stick, and had already sent my UCAS application to several universities—universities that I had expected to accept me to their humanities courses. However, Rob, my boyfriend at the time, had not applied to any universities. He was hanging on by a thread, and when I announced my news, the thread finally broke.

Rob was never the kind of boy you took home to your parents. He was in a band at fifteen, tattooed at sixteen, and almost completely gave up on school at seventeen. He had stayed on at Bishoptown School to do his A-Levels, but when I look back on that time now, I wonder if he’d stayed to hang out with me more than anything. We were very much in love but it was young love; passionate and idiotic, full of mistakes and drama. The biggest drama was my pregnancy, which prompted a family meeting between the Prices and the Hartleys to discuss what should be done about the whole ordeal. At one point I wondered whether they might send me away somewhere for nine months to have the baby in secret. It all suddenly seemed like the early twentieth century, not the early twenty-first.

This was a small village of rich, rural people. My mother was the general practitioner for Bishoptown. Rob’s family owned the boutique B&B in the village and several holiday cottages outside York. We were supposed to have a future. We were middle-class children whose parents had worked hard for our future, and we’d pissed it all away like I’d pissed on that stick.

I could have had an abortion, and believe me, I considered it. Mum even sat me down and described the procedure in a calm and neutral way. Girls like me often chose that route. It’s often what they feel is the best decision for them. But there was something about that little bean I saw on the ultrasound scan that made me wonder whether there was a little magic growing inside me. I had the magic bean forming in my womb and I wanted to see how it would all turn out. Maybe there was some selfishness to my decision. Maybe there is some selfishness to every decision. But that was my choice.