The Lost Child (8 page)

I tell them that we do understand this. And I mean it. I think how glad I am, really, that our boy has these sympathetic, nurturing people behind him.

But, the boy's father tells them, his voice cracking slightly, that's all very well, I do understand where you're coming from. But the trouble is we're pretty sure he has a drugs problem.

He shoplifts, I tell them then - because a part of me wants so badly to shock them, to make them see how dramatic and sad all this has become. He just can't stop smoking cannabis and he's reached a point where he'll do anything to enable himself And we just don't think him getting away with coming to school so late is helping.

He needs clear boundaries, adds his father. I'm not saying we're managing all that well to set them at home. But it would help so much if school could be firm with him.

His teachers regard us with real concern. We can see they are trying so hard to keep an open mind and it's hard to blame them. They are exactly where we were a year or so ago. While they know what cannabis is, I'm not sure they know about skunk.

His father tells them some facts. The strength of it. The mental health implications. The fact that we only know all of this because we've been forced to educate ourselves so fast. I glance at his face - taut, sad, a touch too passionate - and hope they won't think he's lecturing them.

If they do, they don't show it. They regard us both with real sympathy. I feel tears springing to my eyes but I swallow them back. And his tutor explains - carefully, diplomatically that our boy is incredibly bright, really seriously intelligent, and they've known other boys like him go through similar phases and come out the other end. She really does want to reassure us. She and his other teachers fully understand that his behaviour at the moment can be, well, challenging. But If we don't mind her saying so, she's known a lot of seventeen-year-old boys.

And I've spoken to him, she says. We've had two long chats. He's been very receptive.

Receptive, I think. Of course. His biggest skill.

Please don't believe everything he tells you, I say and my heart sinks as I realise how cold, how destructively unmaternal and unsupportive I must sound. He's so plausible. Everyone wants to believe him. Everyone does believe him. The denial, the self-delusion. It's his biggest problem, in a way. I mean I love him so much, I add, but I just think it's time someone saw through him.

The look of careful kindness she gives me makes tears of frustration spring to my eyes.

His life could be so great, I tell her. He has so much life ahead of him.

I know that, she says.

OK, says the boy's father a touch harshly, so, cutting to the chase, how're we going to get him to come to school?

Calmly, the tutor shows him a piece of paper. Squares and boxes. A series of targets. He has to report in each day to various different teachers. They will all have to sign a sheet of paper. He will be encouraged very strongly by her to meet these targets.

I gaze at the boxes and squares.

Very strongly?

We'll be monitoring him very closely.

And if he doesn't meet the targets?

She blinks.

Let's just give him a chance first, shall we?

As we walk back to the car, I tell the boy's father off How on earth can we hope to get the teachers on our side If he loses his temper and shouts like that?

I didn't shout, he says, jutting out his bottom lip. And anyway you cried.

I didn't cry. I nearly cried but I stopped myself

I saw tears in your eyes.

OK, but I didn't let them come right out.

You nearly did.

I nearly did. OK, great, thanks, punish me for that.

We drive home in depressed silence. We know our son well enough to know that a set of targets will make no difference whatsoever to his attitude to school. But we also know the school well enough by now to understand that his teachers are doing all they can - doing everything they can to support this bright, like able, plausible boy who has experienced a traumatic time at home. Because no one can say that being thrown out of your home isn't traumatic. I think of how that fact must shock them.

I understand why they want to give him a chance, I tell his father. I just wish I still felt optimistic enough to want to give him one.

His father says nothing. I see tears standing in his eyes.

What none of us know at this point is that by April he will be stealing from us again and we'll have to put locks back on our doors. By early May he will have punched his father, who was, yet again, trying to stop him kicking one of these locked doors open. And by late May he will have hit me so hard on the side of my head that I'll find myself in A & E with a perforated eardrum.

CYCLONE

I'm a cyclone,

making trouble wherever I go.

3

ONE NIGHT ON the Internet, hopping between drug-information websites and Yelloly-related searches, I find something interesting. A page from the
East Cambridgeshire News
dated December 2003, with the headline
Cromwell Returns After Three Hundred Years But Keeps His Silence on Mystery Message:

I call Directory Enquiries and give the name, the initial (A for Anthony?) and the area and am immediately given a telephone number. Before I can lose my nerve, I dial it and when I get a man's voice on the answer phone I leave a quick, apologetic message.

Tony Yelloly here.

His voice is warm, friendly, he sounds about fifty.

This is all very exciting, he says.

I try to explain, better than I did on the answer phone, my interest in his family.

Well, he says, I can tell you right away that John Yelloly came from Alnwick in Northumberland and there are certainly plaques in the church there put up by his family. And he was a surgeon and I know that he had all his children immunised against smallpox, which was a very new thing to do in those days.

He did?

Yes. Dr Jenner. He was famous for developing the vaccine. I think he was a friend of the family or something.

That's strange, I say and I tell him how I read in Florence's book that smallpox was brought into the house and that Jane died of it. He agrees that doesn't quite make sense. But then may be the childhood vaccination only protected a person for so long? He says I should talk to his daughter Julia.

We're in our seventies, Bryony and me, but Julia knows an awful lot about the family history. She's definitely the one to talk to. Oh and by the way, I have a couple of oil portraits one of Dr Yelloly and another of his daughter Sarah.

Oh, I say, I'd really love to see them.

Well, you can, you can. I think I also have some pictures by Sophy Mary Yelloly.

Mary's sister?

That's right or - I'm getting confused here - they could be by Mary herself Anyway I know for a fact that some years ago my daughter swapped some old surgical instruments that belonged to Dr Yelloly for a book of pictures, a sort of album, it was.

You mean there's another book of pictures? By Mary?

Oh dear, I don't know who it's by. I'm afraid you'd have to ask Julia.

And do you know who has them now, the surgical instruments?

I've no idea. Again, Julia might know. They weren't very interesting. Just some old bits and pieces, you know. The pictures are much nicer.

I ask him what they're like.

Watercolours of Woodton, I think. But I'm really not sure which family member it was who did them. Mary was the youngest, you say?

The second youngest.

Oh well, you'll have to ask Julia.

I tell him that any paintings done by the Yellolys are probably quite valuable now.

Valuable? Oh I doubt it. Of limited interest, I imagine.

I can't resist telling him, then, how much Mary's book went for at auction. I hear him take a breath.

That's very interesting, he says and then, after a little beat: You're not serious?

He tells me that his grandfather was born at and lived at Cavendish Hall and the place definitely still exists.

A nice lady lived there, an American, I think, called Mrs Matthews or something beginning with M. And I dropped by one day a long time ago and she very kindly let me look around. She was very cordial and she said we must have a party in 2002 as the Hall was built in 1702! But I never did hear back from her. I expect she must have died.

He asks if I've been to Woodton. I say I have, a couple of times. But I don't know exactly where Woodton Hall was in relation to the church. Is it all gone now?

Well, Woodton Hall was just behind the church. Pulled down eventually, yes. But there's the remnant of the garden wall still there. It's perfectly visible if you know what you're looking for.

I tell him I never noticed it.

Oh well, you have to know what you're looking for, you see.

For a moment I remember the suggestion I sensed - the immensity of the Hall's great bulk - on that icy day.

I tell him I've been trying hard to find the graves. That I've looked everywhere. Does he have any idea where they are?

Oh, he says, the graves are there. I can't remember exactly where. I know they take some finding but they're definitely there.

I ask him then If he knows of Florence Suckling's book, the one I've been reading in the British Library.

He laughs.

Oh yes, we have a copy of that. A very treasured volume, but you'd be most welcome to borrow it. I think Julia's got it.

He tells me he's amazed I'm so interested in all of this.

Well, it's pretty amazing, I tell him, to be talking to a real live Yelloly.

He chuckles.

Well, we'll have to meet. I haven't got much but I'm more than happy to show you what I've got.

He invites me to lunch in three weeks' time. He says he'll pick me up at the station. I tell him that's really kind but there's no need to do that. I'll get a taxi.

Oh no, but I insist.

Dear Ms Myerson,

Amy McDonald has passed on your inquiry to me. I realize the press release you saw online is not quite accurate; the three sketchbooks are not all by Miss J. Yelloly and I apologize for any confusion. We do have three albums by members of the Yelloly family, dating from 1827-45, and only one is by Jane. We have the following in our collections (these are the labels for a display we just did of our Recent Gifts and Acquisitions):

2. Jane Davison Yelloly, 1808-1838. Sketchbook, 183 138.

3. Sophy Mary Yelloly, 1811-1840. Sketchbook depicting local tradesmen and villagers of Norfolk, 1839.

On a bright, warm, early-summer evening, we drive to see the addiction counsellor that the Manhattan psychiatrist originally recommended. She lives some way out of London, in the country. Because of work, we end up having to go at rush hour and we drive for ages, getting lost in the country lanes.

For a while - me reading the map and getting it wrong, him pulling in so he can have a look, me complaining that he never trusts me to navigate him anywhere, him saying: Yes, and I wonder why not - it almost feels like fun. Long-ago carefree holiday afternoons when getting lost didn't matter. When we had no one else to look after and weren't due anywhere and could make life up as we went along.

The air outside London is fresh and golden, cows lowing in the distance. A smell of manure as we get out of the car. And the counsellor doesn't look at all how I imagined her. Homely, kind-faced, but reassuringly authoritative, she reminds me of my old piano teacher.

She makes us tea. There are biscuits. And we sit on comfy sofas in her large, pale-carpeted sitting room and, taking it in turns, try to tell her our story. A slightly enlarged and more detailed version of the story we told the psychiatrist.

We tell it haltingly, struggling to get the timelines right, struggling to be absolutely fair to our boy, handing the narrative back and forth between us when it gets too tough. Once or twice I have to bite my lip. But, although there is a big white box of tissues on the low coffee table, I don't cry.

When we've finished, she looks at us both. Asks us a few things about our boy. Does he do this? Is he like this?

Yes, we say, Oh yes - slightly amazed as she somehow guesses accurately about so many specific aspects of his behaviour over the past year.

What you're describing, says his father with an exhausted face, well, I couldn't have said it better myself That's exactly what he's like.

She looks at us carefully.

Then, just like the psychiatrist, she asks if we know the difference between cannabis and skunk.

Now we're quick to tell her we do. The frontal lobes. The potentially irreversible damage. We tell her we worry for our youngest child too, who was given the drug by his brother when he was only just thirteen.

The look on her face makes me feel momentarily sick.

Certainly all the evidence says the younger they start the more likely the damage is to be irreversible, she says gently. But there is hope. First, your youngest may well never develop a problem with the drug. Not everyone who tries the drug gets addicted, remember. And even addicts can get clean and lead normal happy lives again.

That's what we want, I tell her quickly.

It's a tough one, she says, because so few people understand the true nature and seriousness of cannabis addiction. There's an awful lot of denial out there. And ignorance. Skunk's been around less than ten years. Back when cannabis was reclassified from B to C, there was no such thing as skunk - not that anyone had heard of, anyway.

She tells us that she is currently working with many families whose children are either in denial, like our son, or in and out of rehab. She tells us that addiction often runs in families. She's working with several families where two or more siblings are affected in exactly the same way.

More than one child? I whisper, thinking of our youngest.

She reaches to pour more tea.

The children who're experimenting with it now are guinea pigs, in every sense. For instance, I'm treating some people at the moment, a lovely couple, you couldn't ask for better parents, both of whose teenage sons are out there on the streets right now, trying to prove they're not addicted.

And they are? Addicted, I mean?

She looks at me.

Of course they are. And as soon as they realise that, we can help them. Meanwhile, though, their parents, these poor people, are going through hell.

People think cannabis is a soft drug, she says. And in some ways the old-style cannabis was. But it's actually harder to deal with than almost any other drug, because the addiction is far more mental than physical. And of course social attitudes don't help. In my opinion, she says, skunk is more dangerous than heroin.

We both stare at her.

Unlike heroin, it's being used regularly by children. And unlike heroin, it's much less likely you can make a full recovery.

Because of the damage to the brain?

I'm afraid so, yes.

Silence as we take this in. I can't look at the boy's father's face. I know he is feeling what I am feeling: pure despair.

Outside the evening sun slides over the warm green slope of the garden. I have a brief sense of freedom - of floating out of my body and up, up into that bright evening sky. At last I think of the question I want to ask her.

So, if this happens to your child, to someone you love so very deeply and feel so responsible for, then what do you do? How do you go about getting them clean?

She takes a breath and looks at me kindly, hands me a box of tissues.

In it, he's about nine or ten years old, dressed in cricket whites, leaning rather self-consciously in the hall doorway at our old house, hand on hip, one leg crossed over the other. He's beaming- one of those smiles that use up his whole face. And it's Sunday and I've probably just picked him up from cricket practice and am asking him to lay the table for lunch. And this is something he will do cheerfully, with good humour and without complaint.

I know that, in the kitchen, his father will be baking fish and roasting vegetables, Van Morrison or Springsteen playing or else some political discussion programme turned up loud on the radio. And the boy and I will be having the same old tired debate about whether or not he should change out of his whites before lunch.

He'll insist that he doesn't need to, that the trousers are already all grass-stained and dirty, so why does it matter? And in the end I'll probably give in and let him change afterwards. He's so good-natured when he argues, so reasonable most of the rest of the time. What's the harm in letting him get away with this?