October 2013

It was gone eleven on Tuesday night, a few weeks later, when we got the call.

So many. So often.

So many ambulances, police cars, spent nights.

You weary of the worry after the years.

Gatsby wouldn’t have told us: of course not. But he had been frightened into ringing the police, and they at least have the sense and compassion to care about the next of kin.

About the people who really love you, when the chips are down. And go on doing so thirty years later.

For all that Bink eventually started calling him “my partner” – mostly to entitle her to have her carer, her stooge, at social events – they really weren’t.

Not at all.

And of course the police wanted information. Unlike Gatsby, they had the wit to realise we might know something. Because we had known and loved her a very great deal more and longer.

Walked out into the night.

Left what they took as a suicide note.

Perhaps now you’ll take me seriously. Something like that.

Serena often seems the only one with a clear head.

What do you do, how do you spend the time, when you are up all night worrying? I can’t remember. I’ve done it for Bink so often I can’t remember how the hours pass, exactly.

Two am.

Serena said, the only one who might know where she is, is Rosie. She might have kept contact with Rosie.

Rosie. Ten years old. Just started as a chorister in Durham Cathedral, over two hundred miles away.

We asked the police for advice.

You have to, they said. If there is any chance she might know, you have to ask her, yes.

As Alex pointed out very much later and far too late the next day, that is their job. It’s not the police’s responsibility to work out what that does to poor Rose. Or whether Bink really is suicidal. Or any of the finer points.

The police’s job is TO FIND HER. Whatever it takes. This classifies as a suicide call. It’s not their job to weigh up whether it really is, or indeed to care about anything else.

After all, losing your sister to suicide is going to be a lot more traumatic than being hauled out of the dormitory at two am, however bad that is.

Poor Rose...

Groggy as she was. She had no idea where Bink might be.

Could she find her telephone? It was an old-fashioned school: we used the call-box to speak to her.

In my locker, maybe? Can’t remember. Yes, there it was found, eventually.

Out of battery. Couldn’t remember where the charger was.

Could the school IT man be roused at this kind of time?

Perhaps it’s in my desk. In my classroom.

Eventually, yes, there was a message from a number she didn’t recognise. Few days before. Something like, hope to see you soon.

Could it be Bink?

Could it be significant...

She was ten years old, for pity’s sake.

In the hour of the darkest hour of the dark night.

She had hardly been there half a term.

Eventually, some time after three, the dear child was allowed back to bed. In the sick bay, so as not to disturb the others. The matron with her for company.

Oh dear God, spare us.

Before it was dawn she saw it, Bink’s body, swirling in the dark river of the black water in the murk wood.

She was the one to find her.

No child should ever have to dream such dreams, or nightmare such nightmares.