The Day That Went Missing Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Richard Beard

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Cover photograph courtesy of the author

  Cover © 2018 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Author photograph by Dru Marland

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  First ebook edition: November 2018

  Originally published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage, a division of Penguin Random House, April 2017

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  ISBN 978-0-316-41846-1

  E3-20180823-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1. What Will Survive

  2. 18th August 1978

  The Boy Will Die

  The Boy Dies

  The Boy Is Dead

  3. Words Are Singularly Useless

  The Day After

  The Week After

  The Week After That

  The Rest of 1978

  Forever After

  Now

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Richard Beard

  Newsletters

  1

  What Will Survive

  Most days, on holiday in Cornwall, the family walks to the beach. A path drops steeply, and either side wheatlike heads of wild grass grow at waist height. Some of the seeds strip away neatly between childish fingers, and some do not. Each time I scatter a pinch of seeds into the greenery, I win. I made the right choice, and at the age of eleven it feels important to be right, or lucky.

  We are a family from Swindon, England, on our summer holiday to the seaside. In 1978 this is what landlocked families do: spend a high-season fortnight on the coast, in Wales or Cornwall, in search of quality time that later looks bright and simple in photographs.

  The family is Mum, Dad, and four boys. I am second in a declension that goes 13, 11, 9, 6. My brother Nicholas Beard is nine. For nearly forty years I haven’t said his name, but in writing I immediately slip into the present tense, as if he’s here, he’s back. Writing can bring him to life.

  On the sand at the wide Cornish beach we set up camp. Mum lays out a blanket, while we tip plastic buckets and spades from a canvas bag. We take off our trainers, stuff socks inside. The picnic is in a wicker basket, and hopefully today’s Tupperware contains hard-boiled eggs, my favorite.

  The beach is huge, the sand compacted and brown. We sprint up and down, leaving crisply indented footprints, evidence that we exist with boyish mass and acceleration here, now, or verifiably just moments ago. Every year, wherever the holiday, we run faster—the prints lengthen and deepen, rows of four in races for a made-up podium.

  In the sea, we jump the waves. Look, look out, here comes another. We cherish our special knowledge that every seventh wave will be bigger. We swear by our one and only fact about the rhythms of the sea, but rarely count to seven to check it’s true. Some waves are suddenly huge, not thigh-or waist-height, but up to the chest, the neck. These are the best of waves, sent from the mysterious deep to amuse us. We don’t go out farther than we can stand, and we’re not interested in swimming. The fun is in the contest against wave after wave, whatever the Atlantic’s got; we tumble for ages like apes, never feeling the cold.

  At some point we’ll dry off and try a game of cricket, but coastal winds blow the ball off-line and the bounce on sand is variable. The cricket never really takes because Dad wants everyone to bat, as if life is fair. He doesn’t understand that we’re in it to win it.

  What do I know? I mean what I remember, what I carry with me.

  One summer day in 1978, eleven years old, toward the end of a bright seaside afternoon, I left the broad stretch of beach with my brother Nicholas, aged nine. I don’t remember why. Facing the sea, we ran to the right, away from the family camp, and clambered round or over some rocks. On the other side we found a fresh patch of unmarked sand. I see this place as a cove, with dark rocks close in on both sides, rising steeply to cliffs. The new sandy beach doesn’t reach back very far.

  The two of us are in the sea, jumping as the waves roll in. Until now I have tried not to know this and many times I’ve stopped, squeezed shut my eyes and closed the memory down. I can do that, crush it out of existence. All it costs me is the effort.

  We were having fun, buffeted and breathless. I can believe I know this, even though the effort to forget has been immense. The memory is in ruins, but the foundations are traceable.

  He was out of his depth. He wasn’t and then he was. I can’t remember everything, not each separate moment.

  I don’t know how, but suddenly he was out of his depth. I think I tried to push him back toward the shore, but the logistics are confused and I, too, am up to my neck. With my feet touching the sand my mouth is barely above the water. The instinct, because I’m not a good swimmer, is to walk back in but when I feel with my toes the sand sucks out from beneath me. The next time I try, only the tips of my toes touch solid ground. The ocean floor sweeps from beneath me. Nicky is farther out into the sea than I am, and I don’t know how that happened either. Is he?

  His head is to my left as I look toward the horizon. I’m looking to him, away from land and safety, so I must be worried. He’s farther out than me and too far to reach by walking, and anyway I’m in too deep to walk. I don’t understand how he got there. I search with my foot for solid ground and my head is under and I just about touch and the sand rushes out. I push back up. His neck is stretched taut to keep his nose and mouth in the air, and he is panicked into a desperate doggy-paddle, getting nowhere. He whines, his head back, ligaments straining in his neck, his mouth in a tight line to keep out the seawater.

  I couldn’t reach him and I didn’t want to go in deeper. I shouted at him not to stand. He had to swim. I shouted he shouldn’t try to stand. He tried to put his foot down and his head went under.

  Out of my depth, I was about to die. Nicky was trying to stand in water that was too deep, and in any case the undertow would drag him out. I decided to leave him. A conscious decision. I kicked my legs up and launched into a desperate crawl, face submerged, no breathing, a last resort to create forward momentum toward the shore. Front crawl was the fastest stroke over the shortest distance, though I didn’t really know how to do it, and if I stopped to breathe I would die. I smashed my arms and hands into the water, head down, feet thrashing, because I understood that for me it was now or never.

  Faster! Harder!

  I understood with absolute clarity that I had one go at this. Run out of breath too soon and I would drown, exha
usted and unable to find my footing. Keep going and I might get close enough in to stand, to live.

  The memory is unsatisfactory. I experience the pain of remembering though I can’t clearly remember. I was going to die so I decided to save myself, and staying alive took total concentration. I swam my frenzied approximate crawl until finally I had to breathe, and when my legs dropped down, my feet touched sand. The sand dragged me out, but I was far enough in to fight the undertow. I swam again, until I needed to breathe again. Chest-high in the water, waist-high, the sea was around my thighs and I could almost run, heaving my hips one way then the other, driving hard toward land, knees raised, escaping the water.

  I don’t remember looking back, or arriving at the camp on the main stretch of beach. I’m out of the water and running. I see a man. He is higher up, on rocks (or on a path above the rocks?). I tell him… I don’t know what; whatever I said isn’t part of what I know. I communicate the situation and the man stands up, gazes out to sea as if primed to make a decisive intervention. He takes off his sunglasses, and in a purposeful gesture hands them to the distressed and dripping boy.

  I’m running again, to the right, over patches of hard sand between flat rocks, from one terrain to another. I remember looking down on myself, as if from above, running with the stranger’s metal-framed sunglasses and finding them an absurd responsibility to have accepted. I throw his stupid sunglasses to the ground and they smash on hard rock and I don’t care. I’ve broken an adult stranger’s sunglasses, intentionally, and I don’t care. I’m crying, I’m running. My face is out of control.

  And that’s about it. Of the incident itself, that’s close to all I know.

  My younger brother’s name is Nicholas Beard. He was nine years old, and I was with him in the water when he drowned. Events that happened before and after are a blank to me. I don’t know the name of the beach in Cornwall where he died or the date when the drowning took place. I’m not even certain of the month.

  The general area is July or August 1978, the season of summer holidays, and 1978 because I was eleven. I can’t remember everything and I can’t erase everything, however fiercely I’ve tried. The scar left by that summer disfigures the age of eleven, and plenty more besides, but the month is obscured, the date lost to me. In nearly forty years, either alone or with my family, the anniversary of my younger brother’s death has never been acknowledged or commemorated.

  Which is an epic level of denial, because it can’t be that difficult to pin down a date. The headstone at his grave will have it, but until now I haven’t chosen to look. As it is, the older I get the harder it is to pretend that denial works as a strategy for sustaining inner peace. The memories I’ve wanted to suppress refuse to stay down, especially in stories I think I’ve invented.

  Write what you know, they say. In my novel Damascus the main character Spencer Kelly is about twelve or thirteen when his sister Rachel, two years younger, dies in a car crash. More recently I’ve been closing in. Lazarus Is Dead, also a novel, provides the biblical character Lazarus with a younger brother called Amos. As teenage boys, the brothers go swimming in Lake Galilee. Amos drowns.

  He didn’t need to die, not in a fiction, but as early as primary school I learned in English Composition that the narrator can never die. If the narrator dies at the end of the story, how can he possibly tell it? I am alive and I get to tell the story. Only I haven’t told it, not really. In the novel, Lazarus comes back to life and doesn’t know what he owes, or what he should do with himself. Like him, I had a second chance. I write books. That’s what I do, as if proving I’m the one who survived.

  In which case, to write this story directly—without any fictional evasions—I should find out the date. It sounds easy, but I don’t set out for the church and graveyard straight away. I have to free up an afternoon, which takes a while. One of the kitchen cupboards isn’t closing properly and needs attention. I feel compelled to research emigration to Canada, then look into buying a narrow boat. Before setting out on a rash new writing project, of a type I’ve never before attempted, I should join a voluntary organization, or bite the skin just so off my fingertips. My teenage daughter invites me to debate the merit of piercings, at inconceivable length.

  The trouble with denial, I realize, is that it makes life so damn busy. I should wash my mum’s MX-5, which I’m borrowing, but the absence of the date nags away. It seems remiss to know so little when the death of a brother is a not insignificant life event.

  I do have another memory of that day. Later on, in the darkening evening, in a gray house in a green Cornish valley (wherever this house might be), I went to bed. I am on the bottom bunk in a small room, and the room is at the end of a corridor. There are no carpets or soft furnishings in the house, only stone and wood.

  I fall asleep, as at the end of a normal day. I wake up in the night, and I need to pee. I go out into the corridor, and Mum intercepts me on the way to the bathroom, or the way back. She wraps me in her motherly arms.

  “It’s all right,” she says (though I’m inventing her words, after all this time), “you can’t sleep—I understand that. Don’t be frightened, or feel bad. It wasn’t your fault.”

  But I’d been asleep. This is the memory I’ve chosen to shape and fix: on the night of my brother’s drowning I went to sleep then later I woke up and I needed a pee. No drama. On the night her third son died my mum stayed wired and awake, so she misunderstood why I was up and about. She assumed I shared her sleepless grief. Because the banal truth would have made her unhappy, I let her believe I was feeling deeply, even if I was not.

  Now, with age and delayed curiosity, I see other possible reasons for fixing such a moment in this cold and distant way. Already, on the night of the death, I had decided to pretend I was fine. Let Mum lose sleep and roam the corridors of the night. I felt nothing. I needed a pee. This is what I have convinced myself I remember, as if in truth children feel little, as if a death in the family creates less of a wound than people might think. Really, death is no big deal—adaptable little creatures, children.

  I was an eleven-year-old telling myself stories. Nicky needed to be forgotten. I have persuaded myself that the drowning of a small boy who was also my brother, in front of my eyes only hours earlier, could barely disturb my sleep. Everything’s fine, I don’t feel bad. Mum just said I shouldn’t, at night in the house with the words I’ve invented for her, though in the circumstances what else can she be expected to say?

  “Don’t be frightened. It’s all right, my baby. Don’t feel bad. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Increasingly, though, I do feel bad, in a more general sense, and hate myself for pretending that everything is fine. At home, in my work, I’ve made a habit of looking away, as if a direct sight of life as it is might shatter me like glass. I create distractions by keeping busy, by writing fictions. The drowning set the pattern, an unwelcome reality I’ve chosen ever since to avoid.

  I could get drunk. I don’t get drunk. I’ll fix the kitchen cupboard, but I already fixed it. Those voluntary organizations hum along just fine without me, and I don’t have a clue about narrow boats. I want to find the missing emotional content in a lost true event, those feelings absent from my arch fictional glances at the edges of the incident. However late in the day, I want to conduct an inquest.

  Nicky died, and the purpose of an inquest is to find out when, where, how, and in what circumstances. Once I have that information, in as much detail as possible, I want to believe that an intact memory will make itself known. The logistical and emotional truth of what happened may be held in storage in my brain; if I find the route to the correct door, the hidden closet, I can reveal what’s inside.

  A verifiable date of death is the place to start, with an inquest. I find a pen for taking notes at the churchyard, then lose it while I’m lacing my shoes, which means I can’t leave the house. The car keys aren’t in their place. Today isn’t a good day of the week, or the right weather. I have an unlucky notebook, in a
discouraging color. And anyway, Nicky’s death and whatever I feel about it is unimportant. Nobody cares. It happened a long time ago.

  My nine-year-old brother is buried in the graveyard of a Domesday church in Liddington, a village on the slope of the ancient Ridgeway in Wiltshire. Church Lane fills with the breeze off the side of the hill, high enough for views of Swindon a smudge on the plain below. Dandelions and buttercups yellow the green verge of the lane, while the petals of blown daffodils have shrunk into brown papery claws.

  In the shelter of the lych-gate I’m reminded that young people die all the time. In memory of the 8 fallen 1914–1919 —“In Proud and Grateful Memory.” This is how the young are supposed to pass away, for a reason. They are then commemorated at regular intervals, which is deemed right and proper, lest we forget. Please, reads the sign on the wooden gate, No Artificial Flowers. Thank you.

  I could have chosen a better time, I think; there’s always a better time. As it is, at about a quarter to five on a May afternoon this is where I am, outside an English country church beneath a canopy of high white cloud at the end of a sunny day. The church dates back to 1086, but centuries later a black-and-gold clock-face was added to the tower. The gilded hands have stopped at 10:31, but the rust on a metal downpipe is nature’s more reliable measure of time passing. I lean into the wind blowing straight off the Ridgeway, buffeting the long grass beside the graveyard path, punching the tough yellow heads of the buttercups.

  I missed my brother’s funeral. I wasn’t invited. But I’ve attended five burials in the churchyard of All Saints Liddington since 1978, and on each of those occasions I could have checked the month and day on which Nicky died. The simple fact of the date is available, and factual confirmation will not break me apart. I don’t think it will. Though I must have feared desperate suffering to have avoided his gravestone at the funerals of two of my grandparents, buried not far away, twenty meters at most. My dad is buried within touching distance, and his funeral was only a couple of years ago. Even last year I managed not to look, or not to memorize the information if I did, because my dad had a friend from the village who died; back to the churchyard I came, and left after tea and sandwiches none the wiser. Same again after my most recent visit, for a great-uncle I’d never met.