Little Bee

Little Bee and Lawrence stared at me, wide-eyed, and I remember the last rational thought that went through my mind: He isn’t on the sand, and he didn’t go up the steps, so he must be in the river. Even as I thought it, I could feel the second stage of my mind shutting down. The panic simply rose up out of my chest to engulf me. I splashed out into the Thames, knee-high, then waist-high, staring down into the muddy brown water, screaming Charlie’s name at the floating plastic bags and the startled gulls.

I saw something under the water, lying on the muddy sludge. Underwater, distorted by ripples, it looked like a bone-white face. I reached down and grabbed for it. I lifted it up into the bright day. It was a cracked plastic mask from a tourist stand, with its snapped elastic showing how it had blown into the river. As I held it up, dripping muddy water, I realized that my phone had been in the hand I held the mask in. My phone was gone, somewhere—my life was gone—lost in the sand or the river. I stood in the water, holding a mask. I didn’t know what to do now. I heard a whistling sound and I looked down sharply. I understood that the breeze was whistling through the empty eyeholes of the mask, and that is when I truly began to scream.

Charlie O’Rourke. Four years old. Batman. What went through my mind? His perfect little white teeth. His look of fierce concentration when he was dispatching baddies. The way he hugged me, once, when I was sad. The way, since Africa, that I had been running between worlds—between Andrew and Lawrence, between Little Bee and my job—running everywhere except to the world where I belonged. Why had I never run to Charlie? I screamed at myself. My son, my beautiful boy. Gone, gone. He had disappeared as he had lived, while I was looking the other way. I looked at the empty days before me, and there was no end to them.

My voice sank to a whisper. I breathed Charlie’s name.

Then I felt hands on my shoulders. It was Lawrence.

“We need to be systematic about this now,” he said. “Sarah, you stay here and keep calling for him, so he knows where to come back to if he’s wandering. I’ll go and ask people to start looking, and I’ll keep looking myself. And Bee, you take my phone and you go up on the embankment and you call the police. Then you wait for them, so you can show them where we are when they arrive.”

Lawrence handed his phone to Little Bee, and turned back to me. I stared at him dumbly.

“I know it sounds extreme,” he said, “but the police are good at this. I’m sure we’ll find Charlie before they get here, but just on the off chance that we don’t, it makes sense for us to bring them in sooner rather than later.”

“Okay, do it,” I said. “Do it now.”

Little Bee was still standing there, holding Lawrence’s phone in her hand, staring at Lawrence and me with large and frightened eyes. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t already running.

“Go!” I said.

She still stared at me. “The police…,” she said.

Understanding buzzed dully in my mind. The number. Of course! She didn’t know the emergency number.

“The number is 999,” I said.

She just stood there. I couldn’t work out what the problem was.

“The police, Sarah,” she said.

I stared at her. Her eyes were pleading. She looked terrified. And then, very slowly, her face changed. It became firm, resolved. She took a deep breath, and she nodded at me. She turned, slowly at first and then very fast, and she ran up the steps to the embankment. When she was halfway up, Lawrence raised a hand to his mouth.

“Oh shit, the police,” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head.

“Never mind.”

Lawrence ran off. I began shouting again for Charlie. I called and called, while the tourists stared, and the breeze left me shivering in my wet jeans. At first I called out Charlie’s name as a sound for him to home in on, but as my voice began to go I realized that another line had been crossed and I was shouting the name just to hear it, to ensure its continuing existence. I realized that the name was all I had in the world.

Then a voice came from behind me. It was Lawrence.

“Sarah?” he said. “It’s okay. I found him.”

Lawrence held Charlie in his arms. My son was filthy, and his bat cape hung straight down, heavy with water. I ran to him, took him into my arms and held him. I pressed my face into his neck and I breathed in his smell, the sharp salt of his sweat and the sewer tang of the dirt. The tears streamed down my face.

“Charlie,” I whispered. “Oh my world, my whole world.”

“Get off, Mummy! You’re squashing me!”

“Where were you?”

Charlie held out his hands to the sides, palms upward, and answered me as if I was simple.

“In mine bat cave.”

Lawrence grinned and pointed at the wall of the embankment.

“He was right inside one of those drainage pipes.”

“Oh Charlie. Didn’t you hear us all shouting? Didn’t you see us all looking for you?”