The Disappeared Read online

  ‘A pure girl, sir, cannot be forced to anything. She would rather die.’

  Mr Haycraft looked at him long and anxiously.

  ‘I wish it were true, Farid,’ he said in a whisper. ‘I wish it were true.’

  ‘It is true, sir. I know it is.’

  ‘I am sorry. I did not mean to upset you.’

  There was a long silence. The boy raised his fists to his face and pushed back the tears. On an impulse he reached into his satchel and took out the poems.

  ‘Sir, I meant to show you these.’

  Mr Haycraft shook himself as though wrestling free from demons.

  ‘Not now, Farid. What are they?’

  He shot a haunted look towards the boy, who was holding out the sheets with one hand while pressing the knuckles of the other into his face.

  ‘Poems I wrote. About that girl.’

  ‘About that girl,’ Mr Haycraft repeated in a whisper.

  He took the sheets with trembling hand and turned away while reading them.

  ‘I know they’re no good, sir,’ Farid offered.

  Mr Haycraft was silent.

  ‘I wanted only to say what she means to me.’

  With his back still turned Mr Haycraft whispered ‘In the tower of darkness shines an angel.’ Then, swinging suddenly round he handed the sheets to Farid with a brusque flick of the hand.

  ‘Thank you for showing me these Farid. Let’s discuss them tomorrow. There is some lovely, some lovely.…’

  He tailed off, walked quickly to the door of the chapel, and beckoned to the boy to follow him. As he unlocked it he whispered ‘thank you’, but so softly that Farid could only guess at the words. And Mr Haycraft hurried away from him into the heart of the school, leaving Farid with the thought that his teacher was after all just an ordinary person, and one whom it would be a mistake to love.

  Chapter 12

  Jim Roberts could tell Stephen nothing about the social worker who had brought Ryan Williams to school except that she was short and plump, with cropped brown hair and dingy features, and was called Mona, Groaner or Fiona. He imparted this information during a lunchtime talk devoted to ‘racism awareness’, in which an official from the City Council’s office of community relations addressed the assembled staff on the need to deal sensitively with cultural differences. Jim sat at the back of the staffroom, rocking back and forth with ostentatious splutters of amusement, as the official – a young man in casual dress who spoke the same grammarless English as Stephen’s pupils – explained that what might be truant in a white kid might equally be home education for a kid from Pakistan. ‘Notice,’ said Jim in a loud whisper, ‘the use of “white” as a term of racial abuse.’ The image of the abused Sharon caused Stephen to grip Jim’s arm and stare wildly at the mute faces assembled for their hour of ideological instruction – faces of people who had learned to live with the official lies, who knew how unprofitable it was to quarrel with doctrine, and whose triumph was to rescue some child, of whatever race, creed or class, from the pitiless dominion of morons.

  ‘I’m not feeling so good, Jim. I’ve got to go home.’

  Jim gave him an enquiring look.

  ‘You’ve gone a bit wan. And who wouldn’t, listening to this bullshit?’

  ‘I’ve just the one class. Fourth year English at 2. Are you free then? Can you read them something? Harry Potter, say, His Dark Materials. Or show them the video.’

  ‘As long as I can tell them it’s shit.’

  ‘Feel free, Jim. And thanks.’

  Stephen slipped away, bent over with anxiety. He dialled the contact number for the child social services, and was given an address in George Street, where the visitors responsible for Angel Towers were based. The bus into the city centre was empty and he stared in desolation at the streets of Victorian houses through which it passed – many boarded up, or with front gardens piled with rubbish. Curtains were drawn in most of the windows, and behind those curtains a new form of life was briefly clinging, a nomadic life that had found this niche in a foreign country without discarding its ancient ways.

  Stephen was a child of his time: he believed in the value of immigration and half accepted the official doctrine that such conflicts as arose from it were caused not by the suspicion and insularity of the incomers but by the racism and xenophobia of their hosts. Confronted with the intransigent bigotry of the Afghan fathers, however, he had begun to doubt this.

  The bus stopped frequently at traffic lights, when he could snatch glimpses through roughly draped curtains of a life that refused to be openly known. In one house the curtains were drawn apart to reveal a television showing pictures of a shouting crowd. But the room was empty of people, and the other windows were dark. Two doors on, gaps in the downstairs drapery revealed bearded men huddled in a circle. A book was open on a low table, and one of the men, whose beard flowed down the buttoned front of his smock to his belly, was running a long finger from right to left along the page. In an upstairs room two women in burqas sat facing each other, motionless, lit from above by a strip-light that edged their black drapery with silver. Women behind veils and nose-guards; men behind beards; children who were gathered behind curtains and who sat in his class as though startled by daylight – everywhere the gaze that could not be met, the eyes that would not be followed.

  And on the edge of this mystery Sharon, the foal abandoned by the herd and watched by eyes that refused to show themselves. As Stephen thought of this a groan started within him and sounded through the bus. The driver looked round before driving on as the traffic lights changed. Stephen left the bus at the next stop and walked with troubled thoughts to the address in George Street.

  The Department of Community Services was housed in a featureless modern building composed of glass and concrete strips, set among decaying nineteenth-century facades. He found himself in a room plastered with cheerful mission statements and pictures of smiling multiracial children under smiling multicultural suns. He tried to communicate the urgency of his business to the distracted young secretary who greeted him, but he had no name for the person he wished to see other than Mona or Fiona. The rest of his story was one that he found hard to tell.

  At the mention of Angel Towers, however, the secretary nodded, as though acknowledging that his tale might have a grain of truth in it, and asked him to wait while she made enquiries. He sat in a plastic chair staring at a notice about benefits. It was hung on the wall between two other notices, one in Arabic script and the other in what seemed to be Polish. Stephen assumed that their message was the same. The sight made him anxious. As a mere Englishman he was, in this environment, one of the dispossessed.

  Iona Ferguson was as Jim Roberts had described her: short, plump, in her thirties, with a round unsmiling face framed by short brown hair. She was dressed in a long green tunic of some artificial stuff, which came down over her grey trousers as far as the knees. She looked at him coldly as though he were intruding into her private affairs, and made no move to shake his hand.

  ‘We’ll go to my office,’ she said, and turned abruptly round, as though her words were not an invitation but a rebuke.

  Her office on the floor above overlooked the street, through long metal-framed windows that could not be opened. There was a desk with a computer, a few papers and a telephone. A filing cabinet stood beside the desk, surmounted by a plaster-cast figure of a cat. On the wall facing the window was a large poster, from which four men wearing dark glasses and leather jackets pointed their sightless faces defiantly at the observer. Above them was the word ‘Metallica’, in which the M and the final A were stretched to form bolts of lightning. He remembered Metallica from his Oxford days, when he had been forced to overhear the sounds of Heavy Metal from the adjacent room on his staircase. It had been a relief when, in his final year, he had been able to move out of college into a house where he was the only undergraduate.

  Iona Ferguson gestured to a chair beneath the poster and he sat facing her across the desk.


  ‘How can I help?’

  ‘I’m Stephen Haycraft, a teacher at St Catherine’s. I gather you asked my colleague Jim Roberts to make discreet enquiries about Sharon Williams, who is one of my pupils.’

  ‘I did,’ she said. She was eyeing him curiously, as though to penetrate his disguise. ‘It is a routine matter for every child in care. Whenever it comes to our attention that the domestic arrangements have changed, we try to forestall any trouble. If you have anything to tell us Stephen, it will certainly be useful.’

  He assumed that surnames were never used in the world of social work. But it was harder for him to speak, when his status as the one authority in Sharon’s mutilated life was so abruptly snatched from him.

  ‘What domestic arrangements do you mean?’

  ‘When we put Sharon with Mrs Williams, when was it, seven years ago now? Mr Williams was still around, and it was as near to a stable household as you are likely to find in Angel Towers. Apparently Mr Williams left quite some while back and there is a new man, a Polish guy, moved in – one reason why the boys are upset. When this happens young girls are at risk, as you will appreciate.’

  ‘I do appreciate. And I wish I didn’t.’

  ‘So what has Sharon told you, Stephen? You can call me Iona, by the way.’

  She leaned back in her chair and gave an abrupt mechanical smile. He noticed that her small brown eyes, which were closely packed against her nose, had been outlined with mascara. There was a hint of henna in her hair, and her coral pink nails bore the mark of a professional manicurist. There were other signs too, that Iona had tried to improve her appearance, struggling to make the best of nature’s gifts, and in the course of doing so, spoiling them. And he thought with a pang of Sharon’s quiet blemished beauty, which shone through every coating of neglect.

  ‘She has told me nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s good to hear. I assume you are in a position to ask her the right kind of questions?’

  ‘If you mean can I ask her directly whether she has been raped, then the answer is no.’

  She discerned his bitter tone and looked at him for a moment in silence.

  ‘Of course you are her teacher only,’ she said. He did not like the word ‘only’, which seemed to imply that he might be something more.

  ‘I happen to know she has been raped,’ he said, and a hot flush suffused his face.

  ‘Oh? By whom?’

  ‘By a gang of foreigners, I suspect Afghan or Iraqi, who live in Angel Towers.’

  Iona sighed and wiped a small hand across her brow.

  ‘You will appreciate Stephen that every time we put an Asian family into Council accommodation we have to cope with racist attacks and insinuations. It is our policy not to believe this kind of thing until there is proof.’

  ‘Suppose there were proof. What would you do?’

  ‘Well, we could go to the police of course. But we would first of all move the child to safe accommodation elsewhere.’

  ‘That is what you should do with Sharon. I beg you to do it. Now.’

  Iona sighed again and shook her head.

  ‘You tell me she has said nothing. In which case I don’t see how we can act.’

  ‘There is a way of saying nothing, Iona, which is also a way of saying everything.’

  ‘Perhaps, if you are very intimate with Sharon…’

  He interrupted her angrily.

  ‘She didn’t speak to me about it, but I have the evidence in something she wrote.’

  He reached into his briefcase for the story of Miranda and Caliban. But he recalled the incriminating words with which it ended, and hesitated. At last he detached the first page and put it down on the desk. Iona held the sheet out long-sightedly in front of her.

  ‘Nice handwriting,’ she said.

  And she read aloud the first paragraph, pausing from time to time to look at Stephen quizzically.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘this is a clever child with a pronounced streak of fantasy. I am sure she is a pleasure to teach. But you can’t honestly expect me to take this seriously as evidence of rape. And listen to this for racist language: Miranda pitied him, took pains to make him speak, taught him each hour one thing or other; when he did not (savage) know his own meaning, but would gabble, like a thing most brutish, she endowed his purposes with words that made them known. Strong stuff.’

  ‘It’s a quotation,’ said Stephen, ‘and a very clever one.’

  ‘A quotation?’

  ‘Yes. From Shakespeare, from The Tempest, the play that features Caliban and Miranda.’

  ‘So I was right, then. Listen Stephen, you will appreciate that we can’t act on something like this. It is not evidence of anything save the girl’s fantasies.’

  ‘So you are going to let the matter drop, even though it is you who raised it?’

  ‘Not at all. I appreciate your coming to see me. You wouldn’t have come without a reason. And I am going to go back and explore. We’ll keep an eye on Sharon, and if there’s anything suspicious we will act. If necessary we will alert the police.’

  Iona talked on in a relaxed way, referring to other examples of girls at risk, of girls who had gone astray, of girls who had disappeared, so that Stephen could not resist the thought that it is easy to take attractive girls out of circulation by putting them into care. One of Iona’s examples especially troubled him. Moira Callaghan had been taken into care at the same time as Sharon, being like Sharon the victim of drug-addicted parents who had neglected and finally abandoned her. Like Sharon, too, she had been placed with a family in Angel Towers, since it was Council policy to look for working class homes for working class children, not least because it was working class homes that needed the extra money. Moira’s adopted parents were real racists, however, and took against the Afghans and the Iraqis in a big way, so that when Moira fell for one of the Afghan boys they started spreading stories of rape, and making the girl’s life such hell that eventually she ran away.

  The Council tried to keep track of her; they knew that she was on the game for a while in Hull, they heard rumours of her involvement with a gang of Polish mariners, and eventually got wind of her from the British Embassy in Moscow, where she turned up one day, with a confused story of having escaped from the mafia boss who was protecting her. The Embassy had been trying to arrange her passage back to England and her adoptive parents. But within days she had disappeared again, and there was nothing further to be done.

  Stephen heard Iona’s narrative, sick at heart. For clearly it described the girl whom Sharon had called Ophelia, her only friend in times of true adversity. On the bus back to Whinmoore he re-read the story of Miranda and Caliban. Walking from the bus-stop, in a cold winter evening when every huddled figure seemed to turn from him towards comforts that he could not share, he knew that he should pack up and go, leaving behind him forever this situation that he could not remedy and this grief that cut him to the heart. But by the front door of his block, shivering in her flimsy uniform, stood Sharon Williams. She was pale and agitated and made a point of blocking his passage.

  ‘I just wanna say, sir, you shouldna take that last one seriously. I made it all up, sir. And dunna you never show it to no one else, please, sir. Promise, sir?’

  She clung to him and he could not meet her gaze. How could he tell her that he had just done what she begged him not to do? More than anything she wanted respect from him. And at every turn he slighted her.

  ‘Of course I won’t, Sharon. But really you should be at home now.’

  ‘Home’s where you are, sir.’

  She hid from him, and he sensed that she was crying. And when she raised her eyes at last, and the blue-grey irises shone on him through the flood of tears, all his defences fell.

  Chapter 13

  When you start out of the blackness he is standing there, the packet of condoms unopened in his hand, his face puzzled and uncertain. You are shaking still, but there is a little corner in your fear where reason has entered
. He finds it difficult to look at you, now that your eyes are open. His own eyes are dark but somehow distant, as though captured by hidden thoughts. The flesh is smooth, nut-brown and boyish, and his pale blue cotton shirt above the jeans is clean and neatly ironed, as though a mother somewhere still looks after him.

  ‘You’re alive then,’ he says.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ you reply. ‘And anyway, what do you care?’

  His face wrinkles, rejecting your words.

  ‘I’m no’ the kind of pervert who can fuck a girl when she’s dead, man. Or when she’s blacked out neither. Where’s the fun, if she dunna know what’s happening?’

  He assumes an expression of transparent reasonableness, as though inviting you to argue the point. You are thinking quickly now. You have only one chance to find a protector on this ship, and this is it. Keep him talking. But it is hard to talk when you feel sick to the core.

  ‘And where’s the fun if she knows what’s happening and would rather die?’

  He looks at you curiously.

  ‘That’s what they say. But they dunna mean it.’

  ‘There are vile creeps who think of women like that. But do you really want to be like them – like those two who tried it out on me?’

  ‘You bad mouth my brother, man, and you’ll regret it,’ he says through clenched teeth. He is coming forward now, as though the thought of his brother has reminded him that he too is a man. This gives you an idea.

  ‘Just hold it. So you can have a brother and still be an animal? Do you have a sister too?

  ‘You leave her out of it, or I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Feel free,’ you say, and fix him with a look into which you distil all that you can of female vulnerability. ‘Just don’t tell her about it.’

  He hesitates, offering you an advantage.

  ‘Look, what’s your name?’ you ask.

  ‘Yunus.’

  ‘Look, Yunus, before you try it out on me I want you to imagine that you are some great thug of a white man, the kind you have always hated because he takes the prizes that you hope to win, and that I am your sister, whose life is going to be ruined and whose family is going to be dishonoured by what you do. OK?’