‘Not cry!’ Ang told him so fiercely that he stopped. ‘Be good! Not cry! Go home!’
Then he left him there and shut the door.
He shut the door.
Daniel wanted to go home. He wanted Daddy not to be angry any more and he wanted Mummy to hug him.
So he tried his best to be good. He said please when he wanted a toy or more paper to draw on, and thank you for the fish fingers and the apples and the milk, even when it tasted funny. When Ang came home from work every night, just like Daddy used to do, they played with old toys he recognized from TiggerTime, or the new wire ones Ang made for him. Cars and animals. When he was alone, he wore the crash helmet and played racing drivers on the bed.
And all the time, he tried to be good and he tried to be quiet.
‘When can I go home?’ he asked every day.
‘Soon,’ said Ang. ‘Be good. Be quiet. Go home …’
Home,
home,
home.
The cement was ruined
and he’d get the blame.
And Daniel had started to cry.
He’d held him too hard,
and there would be bruises.
He’d torn his picture.
Ang bad! Ang bad!
He’d put him in the room,
just until he calmed down.
And when he stopped crying,
he’d let him go.
In a minute.
An hour.
A day, a week, a month.
Home,
home,
home.
Each time he meant it. Each time he lied.
Because of the shame.
Daniel could never go home.
He would tell them about the room in the pit, and they would know everything …
Too hard.
Too horrible.
Ang could never go home.
And when Immigration finally came for him, there was only one way to hide his shame for ever.
Blue Circle.
Ang turned a final somersault and landed on the spikes.
The post-mortem would show that death was instantaneous.
But that was just his lucky body.
For as he shuddered on the iron palings, Ang Nu – who was not a grown man, and never would be – knew that nothing could be hidden from the waiting ancestors.
And that the greatest shame of all was yet to come.
48
JAMES WADED SLOWLY from the dark little room with his son in his arms. His eyes sought out Anna, kneeling at the edge of the pit.
I found him! he said in his head. We found him! But his throat was too clogged with exertion and emotion to make words.
Instead he raised his son up and gave him back to his mother, who said, ‘Daniel,’ so soft and unsurprised that he might have been gone for five minutes, not a lifetime. She tipped back the helmet and stared in mute wonder at her son’s new face.
As he stood there, knee-deep in burning concrete, with his arms still raised and as stone as a statue, James Buck heard the door in his head click gently closed behind them all.
49
MARVEL GOT THERE as an ambulance pulled away.
There was a cement truck on the forecourt, and a thick pipe running from it through the front doors. A man in fishing waders was rolling a broad hosepipe on to a reel, and a sopping wet Anna Buck stood nearby, holding a child who was really too big to be carried.
Marvel splashed through the streams of grey water running across the forecourt.
‘Where is she?’ he shouted at Anna. ‘Is she in there?’
He didn’t wait for an answer but ran past them all into the garage.
The concrete in the bottom of the pit was a few feet deep.
The door to the tool room stood ajar – held open by the grey sea.
Marvel started down the ladder.
‘Oi!’ The man in the waders was striding towards him. ‘You go in there and I’ll call the police!’
‘I am the police,’ said Marvel. ‘What happened here?’
‘Christ knows,’ said the man. ‘All I know is, I’m doing my job, as requested, and this bloke jumps in the pit and opens the door and finds a bloody kid in there!
‘Edie? A girl?’
‘Nah, a boy. He’s outside.’
‘Fuck!’ said Marvel. ‘I have to search that room.’
‘Oh no you don’t,’ said the man. ‘Already got one bloke gone to hospital with alkali burns, and Health and Safety on their way to kick my arse.’
‘There’s somebody else in that room,’ said Marvel. ‘Give me your waders.’
The cement was drying fast, but Marvel still left a trail of footprints to the open door.
A couple of times he hit a softer spot and his foot went in up to the shin, but the waders were slick and not too hard to tug free.
He had to turn sideways and duck his head to get through the shortened doorway, and when he turned to face the room he felt every hair on his body stand on end.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘My God.’
The fresh concrete had made the ceiling so low that his head almost touched it, and had covered anything that might have been on the floor. All that was left was the strip light overhead and the walls, which were solid blue-black.
Except in one place, where a window opened on to another world.
Even through a veil of bitty black, Marvel could see the curve of the lawn, the coloured-in flowers, the trees at the bottom of the garden.
The view from Edie Evans’s bedroom window.
And on the sill, the bicycle bell, somehow revealed.
Marvel held his breath and touched the bell. It felt greasy under his fingertips.
Just as he had done to the pictures he’d found in the skip, Marvel reached out and scratched at the black wax near the window, and watched the colours emerge magically under his nails.
He was a child again, his past overlapping his future here, in this moment.
It was all circles.
Marvel pulled off the waders and walked out of the garage and on to Northborough Road.
Numb.
A lost boy found. A dramatic rescue. There should have been mayhem outside. There should have been fire trucks and ambulances and police cars parked from here to the bridge. There should have been TV crews and flapping tape and top brass arriving to take credit for all the stuff they hadn’t done.
Marvel would have called them all, except he wouldn’t have known what to tell them.
He didn’t know what to tell himself.
Anna Buck had disappeared, so all there was to show for the drama was the driver smoking a fretful cigarette next to his lorry.