69236538256563

RACHEL
Zhang agreed to come and give me a lift to the nursing home. She drove carefully and we didn’t talk.
Sitting beside her in the silence, I felt, for the first time since Ben had gone, a sort of awakening, an
impulse from within, which told me to lift my head up from the sand, to stop burrowing into my
memories of Ben, and instead to look around me, to be more alert.
I needed to consider people, to assess them, as a detective might, as Clemo might, and I needed to
do it now. I’d placed my trust in my husband and my sister in the past, and both of them had proved
themselves unreliable.
I needed to consider my assumptions about life too.
I’d also placed my trust in the veneer of a civilised society, the lie that is sold to us daily, which is
that life is fundamentally good and that violence only happens to those who warrant it; it tarnishes
only the trophy that’s already stained. That’s the same logic as the age-old accusation that a raped
woman somehow deserves it, and based on that, without questioning it, I’d trusted that if Ben ran
ahead of me in the woods then he would come to no harm, because I believed myself to be
fundamentally good.
And, worse, the betrayal had been a double one because Ben had also put his trust in me, in the
way that children must, and so I’d failed him as well as myself: abjectly and possibly finally.
I looked at Zhang’s hand on the wheel, her knuckles white as she gripped it firmly at ten to two, and
I realised that beyond my first impressions I hadn’t before thought about who she really was, or what
she might be like.
‘Do you have a family?’ I asked her as the car idled at a junction.
‘I have a mum and dad,’ she replied.
‘I mean children of your own?’ Though as I said it, I realised she was probably too young.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I won’t have children for a while, if ever.’
‘Oh. You know that already?’
‘I do.’
‘Can I ask why?’
‘Because I’m not ready to be responsible for somebody else’s life yet.’
She said it so simply that it gave me a frisson of shock because I realised that she already knew
what I was only just working out – that we should look very carefully indeed before we leap, or
believe, or trust – and that this younger woman had recognised that before I did only made me feel
more foolish.
I didn’t know how to respond so I fixated on what was around me. Outside the sky was the kind of
grey that looks perpetual and heavy, and the clothing of the people in the street was flattened against
them by a strong wind. I retreated back into silence and the slow unfurling of the thoughts in my head,
where I was starting to doubt everything I ever thought I’d known.
There was one consolation at that moment when everything weighed unbearably heavily and when
suspicion was beginning to edge into every corner of my mind. It was that I was on my way to visit
Ruth. I desperately wanted to see her because she was one of my favourite people in the world. Ever
since Ben was a baby, she’d been a reassuring presence in my life, offering me gentle, unconditional
support, and our friendship had grown alongside him.
Life hadn’t been easy for Ruth. To those who didn’t know her she would appear dignified, proud