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Here’s what I don’t know:
Why she took him, or how she treated him.
Why don’t I know that?
Because Ben won’t speak of it.
Why not?
We don’t know. I guess that aside from the things he’s willing to say, there must be other things he
can’t remember, things he’s confused about, or things he might be frightened of talking about.
I think he doesn’t like the way the eyes and attention of everybody around him sharpen when he so
much as mentions that room or Miss May. I think that makes him feel uncomfortable, and ashamed. He
doesn’t want to be the centre of attention, he would rather it all went away.
So we have to be careful, because we don’t want to make things worse, damage him further, or
send him into a shell where he doesn’t communicate at all. That can happen to children in his
situation. I’ve read about it.
And though I hate to say it, I do sometimes wonder if he’s trying to protect her with his silence.
They did, after all, have a close bond before this happened.
And why can’t we get the rest of what we need to know from Joanna May?
Because she and Ben have something in common, beyond the seven days he spent in her home.
What they have in common is that she refuses to speak about it as well. She has done ever since her
arrest. Her guilty plea has been her only word on the matter.
Just when we need her to talk, she has decided to remain silent. As is her right.
And so we speculate. We have built a story that seems to fit the scant evidence. And the story goes
like this:
In return for Ben’s trust, for the way he slipped his hand in hers so easily, Joanna May led him to a
place where she incarcerated him against his will.
I think she did it because she either loved Ben, or she wanted to very much. It was a distorted,
selfish love that was the product of a damaged mind, but I think it existed.
I think that she formed a bond with him during the first year she taught him, and she began to want
him for herself. Her diagnosis of infertility, which has emerged in the public domain now, was
simultaneous with my divorce, with me asking her to help us support Ben, and I think that at this very
vulnerable time in her life, when her urge to be a mother was strongest, she might have mistaken him
for a child who wasn’t loved enough, or cared for enough, and thought that taking him could solve
both her longing for a child and Ben’s sadness.
That thought must have grown stronger for months until it was fully fledged, and formed into a
careful plan, which she executed flawlessly one year ago on Sunday, 21 October.
Once she’d incarcerated him, I think she began a process of trying to make him believe that his
family was bad for him and she was the right person to care for him.
We don’t know what her long-term plans were, but Ben has hinted to us that she might have been
planning a trip for them and I suspect she was going to take him away. I don’t know where, or how.
The bedroom she made for him is testament to her desire to make his environment nice, to look
after him well, and I actually think she meant to, even though it was in reality no more than a carefully
decorated cell.
But I think it went wrong, the reality of having him. I don’t think she anticipated how much he
would miss home, or miss me, and his father and his stepmother, or his dog. I don’t think she expected
him to be so desperately unhappy without us. She didn’t realise that he was already deeply loved, and