‘Do you have black hair?’ Oscar asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you a baddie or a goodie?’
The questions continue, but as we near the school, it is me who is becoming anxious, it is me that is tightening my grip on his small hand. I kiss Hailey goodbye as she goes to the upper school playground, leaving Oscar and me watching the school doors with trepidation. They are opened by the smiles of the teachers and are flooded with small, eager feet in shiny shoes and swinging lunchboxes, the faces of superheroes and unicorns battling for the spotlight, but Oscar isn’t moving. I crouch down and wipe away a stray tear with my thumb, but my thumb can’t go with him through those doors; my warm arm won’t be wrapped around his body, there to comfort him.
‘Please don’t make me go.’ The words explode from his mouth: they are urgent, desperate, their meaning indisputable.
He catches a glance from a girl in his class whose steps hesitate; the swing of her pink lunchbox changes trajectory, the arc of movement slowing. Oscar inhales a deep breath, trying to stop himself from crying, trying to be a brave soldier, but a tear drops from his lashes. I watch it fall down his perfectly pure skin, over the curve of his cheek, tainting it with a track that shouldn’t be there. The swinging lunchbox gathers momentum and passes us by.
‘Please don’t make me go.’
I don’t want to make him go.
So I don’t.
Chapter Fourteen
Ed
I’m not a complainer. OK, so I know I’ve only just been complaining about the sex stuff so I’m kind of contradicting myself, aren’t I? But do you know how scary it is to have the school on the phone telling you that your children aren’t there? How scary it is when you then can’t get hold of your wife?
I can understand why she did it, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t like my little lad looking so upset, but the fact of the matter is, well, that’s life, isn’t it? You get knocked down and then you get back up again . . . well, Kerry didn’t, but you know what I mean. Life isn’t easy, is it? Oscar needs to ignore the crap it throws at him, or learn how to deal with it at least. You don’t run away to the river and feed him ice cream, and if you do, you don’t just take him and his sister out of school without at least phoning in with a sicky.
This little episode has worried me for a few reasons.
1) Jennifer does things by the rules. She makes cakes for the school fair, she sews name badges into school uniforms, she keeps receipts in alphabetical and date order . . . ‘just in case’. So why has she decided to not just break a small rule but a big whopping one?
2) She never makes a fuss. Once we went out and she ordered a steak sandwich where the meat was so tough, she was chewing the same piece for about five minutes before she spat it out. When the waiter came over and asked how the meal was, I was all for sending the plate back, but Jen, well she smiled and said it was beautiful. Telling the school when they finally got hold of her that her kids needed a day out, is making quite a big frigging fuss.
I spent three hours thinking my family were hurt, or dead or abducted, but do you know what was the most worrying about it? It was almost like, deep down, I was expecting it. That deep down I know that something is wrong with Jen.
Do you know how I found out that my family weren’t dead? Instagram. Thanks to Instagram I have now made an excuse about a ‘family emergency’ and am currently exceeding the speed limit and on my way to Muddy Creek.
Which brings me to concern number three:
3) She didn’t even care if people could see that she had blatantly taken the kids out of school. There they were, smiling on a grass bank, eating ice cream.
An hour later, and I am parking the car next to the small café overlooking the stream. It’s where we always brought them when they were little: toilets, café, tadpoles, all within parking distance.
Jennifer is drawing a picture in the mud with a stick; Oscar looks like he is scouring the river edge for hidden treasure, his school trousers rolled up to his knees; while Hailey’s plaits hang upside down as she handstands on the grass verge in the background, her school skirt somewhere around her shoulders. I sit and watch them inside the heat of the car, with the hum and soft vibration of the engine.
I was angry when I drove here. Angry at Jen. But watching them now . . . I’m thinking that maybe she has got it right. Maybe it’s the rest of us that have got it wrong. Laughter catches at the back of my throat as Oscar chases Jen around with something either dead or very much alive; her hair is tangling around her, her cheeks are red as she runs towards a startled-looking Hailey who shrieks and hops along the stepping stones across the stream.
I open the boot, retrieve the football which had been rolling about in there for weeks, and lock the car; my suit and work shoes carrying me unsteadily to my family. Oscar stops his assault on the girls when he spots me.
‘Daddy!’ His bare feet and rolled-up school trousers run through the grass towards me; I pick him up with my free arm, spinning him around before replacing his feet back onto the grass, mud seeping between his toes. ‘Mummy said I didn’t have to go to school today so we came to Muddy Creek instead and look, I found a frog.’ The frog in question is not as impressed by my visit as my son and is hanging limply from his grasp . . . I’m sure it’s just rolled its eyes before giving me a resigned ‘gribbit’. Hailey approaches me; her smile is uneasy and in opposition to her legs, which are skipping. Jen is smiling at me from the water’s edge, her arms outstretched, opening up the scene like a page from a picture book: the sun breaking through the clouds, the small waterfall behind her catching the light and expelling rainbows, her expression saying, look at this . . . isn’t it wonderful?
‘Hello, Daddy. Are you cross? Mummy fetched me from class.’
‘No, how could I be cross when you’re all having such a lovely time?’ I kiss the top of her head as Jen walks towards me. She is chewing the corner of her mouth, waiting for me to react to her actions. Oscar turns to Hailey, raising the frog and chasing her away; her squeals are half outrage and half horror. Jen stands in front of me, tucking her hands into her back pockets and rocking on her feet.
‘Hello.’
Hello? I raise my eyebrows in disbelief.
‘I’m waiting for you to tell me off.’ She runs a finger along the top of her lip, a nervous tic that I’m not even sure she knows she has. Her eyebrows question me.
There are a hundred angry words hidden in my mouth: I want to tell her that two hours ago I thought she was hurt, two hours ago I thought I might have lost my family, that they could be dead. I smile at Jen; relief sags her shoulders as I pull her towards me and kiss her: two hours ago, this kiss wouldn’t have felt this good. Seeing my kids wouldn’t have felt this good. Life wasn’t this good.
She wraps her arms around my neck and sinks into me.
‘Ugh! Gross!’ Hailey exclaims.
Oscar has turned his back and is running his own arms up and down, making kissing noises. ‘Mummy and Daddy sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.’
The warm spring sun stays out, my jacket and tie are discarded, my trousers are rolled up, and we spend the next few hours trying to catch frogs, eating chips from cones while our feet dangle into the cool water.