The River Child

Chapter 1-3

‘There are certain things I’ll take with me to the grave, Siobhan,’ she was often heard to say, and because I was a child, I laughed and made lists of what I thought those things might be. Perhaps her blue beads and the hat with the daisies or the pincushion in the shape of a cat.

I tried putting on a brave face on that first night. Knots of guilt gripped my stomach. I lay in my bed, checking off the sounds that shut the house down for sleep, but no longer found them soothing. The nightly patterns had always been a comfort, but now they rang hollow. I listened to the cook banging pots in the kitchen. I tried saying the cook’s unpronounceable Russian name aloud to take my mind off what was happening. Sch-liap-nik-ova. Schliap-nikova. Schliapnikova. The sound of Aunt Esther snoring in the room next door floated into my head. I could hear my brother Brenton’s radio, loud and static, the click-clack of the calculator as my grandmother did the accounts, and the jangle of my Aunt Sunita’s gold bangles as she paced up and down the hallway.

It’s all right, they’ll find her. It’s a small island; she’ll be somewhere. They haven’t found her body, so she’s out there somewhere. The police are searching even at night. She’ll be safe and well.

Gradually, the noises of the night faded as staff, guests, and family retreated to their rooms to sleep. Doors slammed in the guesthouse, the tread of feet in the hallways above grew soft and distant, and muffled conversation floated down the stairs. The guests were not real for me; they came and they went and they blurred into each other. They were unseen ghosts of stairs, doors, and landings. It was only when I cleaned their rooms that they took on the shapes and smells of reality; they had people things: brushes, combs, luggage, soiled clothes, and family holiday photos strewn on unmade beds. Finally, there was total quiet, but my thoughts could not keep still, rattling aloud in my head. I shuffled around in my bed, trying to get comfortable. My cousin Jamilla, who had come to stay for the school holidays, was sleeping opposite me. She complained I was keeping her awake.

Just wait a few days, my mother said. Every time the phone rang, my grandmother ushered me out of the room. It rang constantly after Elise’s disappearance. Sometimes it was Beatrice, my grandmother’s youngest sister, offering to help.

My grandmother told her to stay where she was.

Nothing seemed real in those first few days. Solid truths became slippery. Sarah Boatman turned up in our kitchen on day two. My own version of events blurred until I no longer could construct a sequence of the day before. I repeated the story of what happened over and over on that first day, but by the second day, it became more like what I wanted it to sound like and less like the reality. In cloudy panic, nothing was what it was. If someone had asked me if a tree was really a tree or a bucket was really a bucket because that’s what they’ve always been, I might have said no.

And on the third day, he rose again from the dead. Corinthians 1:54 gave me no comfort. Reverend Landers had organised a special prayer service. He prayed for the Boatmans, for the police and emergency service people, for those in the community who were searching. He chose his words carefully when he prayed for others who had been affected by Elise’s disappearance. My mother’s hands gripped the back of the pew in front of her. The veins between her knuckles stood out. I looked down at my own hands and at the finger that had recently bore the cut. Blood sisters, Boatman had told us. Elise, Boatman, and I had pressed our cut fingers hard into each other’s, so the blood crossed over. Bonded for life.

The small church sweated in the heat, in the crush of bodies pressed into the pews. I knelt, stunted and speechless, my mother beside me as the congregation intoned the prayer. And on the third day, she rose from the dead. I knew by then that wouldn’t happen. Prayers for Elise were no help. Reverend Landers told us not to abandon hope. In the pit of my stomach, I knew she was gone, and I had to take some of the blame. Down in the village, bubbles of grief floated to the surface of everyday life, where they dissipated in ripples that spread quietly through the small community. No one was left unscathed. My mother muttered to herself all day, smoking continuously. My grandmother said life must go on. The staff crept softly around, afraid of interfering with the process of grieving, but having to communicate with the family, nevertheless. They spoke in respectful tones about towels, washing, broken taps, and blocked toilets as if the items themselves had died. My grandmother, torpid with the heat, sat in her armchair on the veranda in the evenings, sucking in the slight breeze, silent. My brother locked himself in his room and turned the music up loud. The guests came and went. Life beat to a muted rhythm; we were going through the motions only. Olivia prayed aloud to Saint Hyacinth, Patron Saint of Drowning; nobody else would give voice to what everybody feared. The police had no reason to think Elise had been abducted. They had checked all punt crossings with the Rachley Punt Company and no staff on board had seen a child matching Elise’s description. That information pressed down on our family as we sat in our chairs, immobilised.

‘A family can only stand so much,’ my mother said.

‘It’s as if the Boatmans are cursed,’ my grandmother replied.

My mother banged an ashtray down on the table where the wreckage of an uneaten breakfast lay limp and cold.

‘It’s not the Boatmans I’m talking about,’ she said.

It took me days to psyche myself up to visit Elise’s grave and yesterday I went for the first time since her funeral. It was 1999, and it had taken me twenty-eight years to go there. The grief of so long ago had left its invisible markings on me. Strange, sombre brush strokes painted under flesh and bone. They seeped in under the skin, so deep that no one knew they were there. If I rubbed hard enough, they would come to the surface, but unlike the silver stretch marks on my body, they could not be treated cosmetically. I wrapped up my grief, tied it, sealed it and stored it away where no one could find it. No autopsy of my heart would ever reveal it, so carefully was it concealed. Sometimes my memories popped out of their packages without my permission, responding to songs and scraps of conversations about Elise, presenting themselves in full force, without warning. It took every effort to bind them up again. It is why I never had children; I didn’t trust myself after what happened.

The headstone was simple. There was no angel or clasped hands. I felt no connection to the grey, flecked stone. She would always be with the river. That’s how it felt to me.

The therapist said it’s not my fault. You were a child yourself, she told me. You can’t blame yourself for Elise’s death. She wanted to talk about my mother. I agreed only because all my friends were going to talk about their mothers, so it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I really wanted to talk about Elise. After some time, we did talk about her and gradually my guilt about Elise was slowly syringed out, dripping steadily onto the therapist’s pea-green carpet. I spoke as well, for the first time, about my terrible lie. Children lie sometimes, the therapist simply said. At times, my guilt went into remission, only to return with a cancerous vengeance. And then there were those two words, spinning in dark circles of despair, loaded with a dreadful history and a future that never was. If only…

The therapist knew Elise died all those years ago. She knew about my lie. She knew about the guilt that crushed me. She knew about the years of drinking, the drug-addled years where nothing seemed to block out the past, the nightmares where a water-logged child, tumescent, eyes eaten by fish, floated by. We went over the same ground for a long time but always stopped when it came to talking about how Elise died. Then two things happened.

I received documents from a solicitor. Aunt Beatrice, my grandmother’s sister, the last remaining member of the Montrell family, had passed away. She had no children. When my mother passed away, my grandmother left the guesthouse to Beatrice, and Beatrice left it to me and my brother Brenton. I spoke to my therapist about how I wanted nothing to do with Gables Guesthouse. I’d have to speak to Brenton about what he wanted to do with it. I just wanted it sold. The therapist spoke about how going back there might be the solution to finally being able to talk about what happened. Perhaps you’ve been given an opportunity, she said. She leaned forward and looked at me with a steady gaze.

‘If you don’t deal with your past, it will deal with you,’ she said.

Her words scrolled across my head for days. When I closed my eyes, I saw them written in big white letters on a black background. The next session, it all came out. I told Brenton that I was going back to Gables. What should we do with it? I asked him. Sell it, he told me. I knew Beatrice had let the business go under years before and the house had been vacant for a very long time. It would probably need a lot of work before selling it. Brenton didn’t agree with the idea of me going back there. He told me I was mad. I knew he didn’t mean it; to anybody else it was a simple phrase to which no literal meaning was attached. ‘You’re mad to go back there,’ he said. But to me, that phrase cut deep. It was a mirror reflecting a bleak future.

Madness was in the family. These days they have names for it. It wasn’t nerves anymore. But it all came down to the same thing. I put on my protective, matter-of-fact armour and told him that I had to see the state it was in and what work needed to be done before we sold it. Then I casually added that while I was there, I would visit Elise’s grave. Leave the past alone, he said. I didn’t tell him the therapist said it was a good idea. My cousin Camilla offered to come and help me and I said I’d consider it. I told her I would visit Elise’s grave. She told me it was the right thing to do.

‘It’s no big deal anymore,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Camilla said. ‘You’re right.’

We were both lying.

I walked through the house that morning, the place where I grew up, running my hands along the walls. Getting the feel. I had been trying, willing myself to make it feel mine, although I had not been there long enough to become familiar again with the spaces and cracks, the smells, the patina of walls, floors, furniture, not long enough for something of myself to be marked on this place, to claw back the territory that once was mine. I found my grandmother’s tortoise-shell hairbrush in a drawer in the bathroom.

In the house, the rituals of deception, the dark undercurrents of the tides of secrecy, were all practised here and passed on to me so that I mastered the art quite young. I understood the art of madness as well and the consequences of pretending that we were just like any other family.

The image of Billy’s red toenails was burned into my memory, and although the colour had faded and time had softened the edges, the picture, now in sepia tones, still lingered almost three decades later. The image of Elise loomed up large; it grew bigger and bigger and then it exploded, fracturing into pieces that didn’t fit back together. I saw Elise, twisting in her muddy grave. At night, my memories wandered over the island, as if I was high above it, looking down. I saw the turn-off tree, the place where, over twenty-eight years ago, I saw Walter Heather running through the rain, coming from the east. I heard the soft chant of Olivia.

‘Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, take a look around, something is lost and it needs to be found.’

She clutched a small medallion in her hand. St Elizabeth, Patron Saint for the Prevention of Death of Children.

They found her, finally. Brown and full, the river spilled its sides and gave up its secrets, carrying with it plastic picnic plates, old tyres, a doll’s dress; the debris of daily life laid to waste on the surface. A week after the flood, it gave up Elise, but it did not give anyone any peace.

I remember the sun on the morning she vanished, an apocalyptic sun, a small tight grey ball that told us this was the end. On that first day, when Olivia returned home from Gables after being sick, she made a steak and kidney pie. She always made the pastry from scratch: egg and flour. She placed the pie on the middle rack of the oven and picked up a packet of matches. She lit a match. The radio spat out a static report about a possible child abduction. She turned on the gas and said a quick prayer to St Jude, Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. Olivia then blew out the match, took the pie out of the oven, and put her head in.