Page 75 of Stolen
two years missing
chapter 33
alex
The meeting is held in a classroom at a small primary school in Tooting Bec, two minutes’ walk from the Tube station. I’m half an hour early, so I stop for a coffee to kill time. Edie, the woman who runs the café, brings me my usual: American, black, no sugar. She sets it down in front of me without a word. She knows what day it is.
A little before seven p.m., I leave the café and head to the school. I never got the chance to be a school mum myself, but it smells exactly as I remember from my own school days: boiled carrots, floor polish, erasers and marker pens. No one seems to have considered the irony of holding the meetings here, in a primary school.
The caretaker lets me in and I make my way upstairs to the Year 2 classroom. The corridor is painted a bright, cheery yellow and an illustrated alphabet is tacked to the walls at the height of a five-year-old:Harry Hat Man. Munching Mike. Quarrelsome Queen.On either side of the classroom door are a row of coat pegs and I scan the names taped beneath them, looking for Lottie’s. George, Taylor, Ava, Muhammad, Oscar. Lottie’s should be third from the end, but I don’t see it. And then I remember it’s October, and a new school year has started since I was last here, with a new intake of Year 2pupils. Lottie has moved up to Year 3 and a little boy called Noah now has her peg.
It’s stupid, of course. It’s notmyLottie. But there was something oddly comforting about seeing her name there, as if, in some parallel world just out of reach, my daughter was going to school, hanging up her coat on a peg with her name on it, making snowmen out of cotton wool, learning to read.
Inside the classroom, the tables have been pushed to the side to create space for a circle of chairs in the centre. The first time I came here, not long after I returned to England, the group was using the classroom chairs, designed for six-year-olds. It took a minor mutiny to obtain the full-size chairs that are now brought in from the school auditorium when the group meets each month.
It’s been a while since I came to a meeting, but I recognise all but one of the faces. Our group leader, Ray, is setting out thick china cups and saucers on a table beneath the window. I know from experience the tea will be weak, the coffee undrinkable. But Ray was a pastry chef in a former life and his chocolate eclairs and puff pastry elephant ears melt in your mouth.
I help myself to a couple of palmiers, and take my seat in the centre of three vacant chairs, so that there’s no one immediately on either side of me. I never used to be claustrophobic; until Lottie was stolen, I wasn’t afraid of anything. Now, the list runs off the page. Crowds, open spaces, flying, the dark. It makes no sense: the worst has already happened, so I should have nothing left to fear. It’s down to grief, Mum says. It attacks you in the most unpredictable ways.
The newbie to my left is clutching her cup and saucer as if they’re the only thing tethering her here.
I smile. ‘You really should try one of these,’ I say, taking a bite of my palmier.
‘I’m not really hungry.’
Before Lottie, empathy wasn’t my strong suit. Now, I make the effort. ‘My name’s Alex,’ I say.
‘Molly.’
‘How long has it been?’ I ask.
‘Thirteen days. You?’
‘Two years.’
She blanches. Ray’s seven-year-old son, Evan, had been missing six years when I first came to group. I remember wondering how he could have survived that long: six Christmases without his son, six birthdays, six anniversaries of the last night he tucked his son into bed. But I know now you learn to exist in the spaces around your grief. You keep on living, whether you want to or not.
‘Is it your son or daughter?’ I ask Molly.
‘My daughter,’ she says. ‘She’s sixteen. They say she’s a runaway, but youknow, don’t you?’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Mallory,’ she says. ‘What about you?’
‘A little girl. Lottie. She’ll be six in February.’
I see the sudden recognition in her eyes as she kicks herself for not having realised who I was before. She drops her gaze to the cup and saucer in her lap, and I know she wishes now she hadn’t come. I’m an A-lister in this bleak new world of missing children and grieving parents:Lottie Martini’s mother.If she’s part of a group that includes me, it means her nightmare is real.
When I finally returned to England twenty-one months ago, I thought being home would make me feel less alone. But I quickly realised the opposite was true. I was living in a foreign country where no one spoke my language. The same mothers who’d once invited me on playdates and made me their pet pity project in the wake of Luca’s death – the poor widow, in need of friends – now crossed the road to avoid me. I was a living reminder of their worst fear.
Even my bond with Zealy has become strained. She’s on the board of the Foundation, of course, and her fundraising efforts have been heroic, but at the end of the day she still has a life, whereas I’m suspended in limbo. Finding Lottie is the only thing that matters to me, other than work, and even though Zealy has never said anything, she must miss the friend I used to be: the woman who’d take her out to lunch to commiserate after a bad date and text instantly if Sweaty Betty had a sale. These days, we hardly see each other any more and, when we do, we have pitifully little in common.
I joined a support group for the parents of missing children because I was desperate to be around people who knew what it was like, but it took me a full year to accept I was one of them.First you have to admit you have a problem.
Ray waits a few minutes for any last stragglers and then shuts the classroom door. We introduce ourselves, giving our names and that of our missing child. Some people add a few details – Andrew would be thirteen now, April used to loveFrozen– while others barely look up. Ray doesn’t really belong here any more: his son’s body was found a few months after I started coming to meetings, at the bottom of a well half a mile from his mother’s house. But the little boy’s killer has never been found and Ray doesn’t need to explain why he still comes to group.
‘Do you want to start today, Alex?’ he says.