36
36
Y OUR DAD SITS TO the left of you. Your mum sits to the right of you. You are in the middle. It’s like you’re in a taxi cab. You are not in a taxi cab. You are in a police car. Throughout the journey, no one says a word.
Your mum gets dropped off first. She gives you a forehead kiss before she goes, then the red-haired police officer escorts her inside the ward. This takes ages. You wait with your dad, as patiently as you can – stare into the back of the front seat for as long as you can. This isn’t very long. You want to move, burst free, run, explode.
‘Dad, I don’t think I can do this for much longer,’ you say, wriggling and fidgeting, tossing and turning.
Your dad nods. ‘How much longer is this going to take?’ he asks the blond police officer.
The blond police officer exhales. In the reflection of the rear-view mirror, his eyes look glassy. Perhaps, you think, he is bored. Perhaps, you think, he is drugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Could be a while.’
A while later, the red-haired police officer returns and drives you and your dad to the police station.
‘I might want a solicitor,’ your dad says as the pair of you get out.
At this, the police officers smirk. ‘OK,’ the blond one says, in a tone you cannot interpret.
You aren’t kept in a cell. You are kept in a room. The room looks like it could be in a school, only there are no school things: no school desks, no piles of teaching plans, no heaps of marking codes, no teachers, and no kids apart from you. Instead, there are a large number of chairs, fluorescent overhead lights, and a carpet that is thin and worn. When either of you speaks, your voice does a short echo. Other than this acoustic quirk, the room is featureless.
From down the corridor, you can hear someone yell some sentence or other. A man. You can’t tell what he is saying, but his anger really comes across. Perhaps that is the point of the yell, you think, as you yourself feel like yelling.
‘Do you think we should ask if they’ve forgotten about us?’ you ask your dad.
‘I don’t know,’ your dad says.
‘Do you think we should just ask, though?’
‘I don’t think so.’
You are holding a polystyrene cup. Once, this polystyrene cup had hot chocolate in it. It doesn’t have any hot chocolate in it any more. You’re just piercing its rim with your thumbnail now. You make tears all the way around, make them evenly spaced so it looks nice and orderly. You think about the word ‘tears’ and the word ‘tears’. You know they are not homophones because homophones sound the same and ‘tears’ and ‘tears’ don’t. You know they are instead homographs. You try to be patient. You wish you had something to read. Maybe something about language, but really, you’d read any book.
Then – just as you think you can’t bear this place any longer – the police officers come back.
‘Sorry for the wait, guys,’ the red-haired one says.
‘Sorry for the wait,’ the blond one repeats.
‘All right,’ your dad says.
‘So, just to clarify,’ the red-haired police officer says, holding his hands up. ‘Aiding someone out of a mental hospital is not a crime.’
Your dad frowns. ‘Well, no. I knew that.’
‘Well, I thought it might be. That’s why you’re here.’
‘Right.’
‘But I just asked someone more senior than me about it, and it turns out it’s not, so we can’t detain you here.’
There is a pause. During this pause, your dad wonders whether he should kick up a fuss, make a complaint, express some degree of outrage. ‘Right,’ he says eventually. ‘Are you two new to the job, by any chance?’
‘Pretty much,’ the red-haired police officer says.
The blond police officer raises an index finger. ‘Out of interest, though, what were you thinking?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You thought if you got your wife out of the ward, took your daughter away from her temporary care placement, everyone would just let that happen?’
Your dad looks at you, then looks at the police officer, then looks at you. He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again. Despite being an adult of above-average intelligence, I imagine he doesn’t have the words to explain his motivations. I imagine he doesn’t know how to explain that he just wanted to take his family and hide from the world in a safe, small space for an indefinite period. He doesn’t know how to explain how big and strong this desire was, how he wanted you and your mum to stay still, keep cosy and come to no harm.
‘Yeah, well, not quite,’ he says, eventually, rubbing his eyes. ‘I don’t really know. I realise it sounds a bit mad.’
The red-haired police officer nods. ‘Yeah, it does,’ he says. ‘You could’ve at least fled the country or something.’
The blond police officer frowns at the red-haired police officer. ‘If anything, it fuelled our concerns rather than allaying them,’ he says. ‘If you went home, we would’ve picked up your wife, left you as is, and you could’ve carried on living your life. Finding the house empty, we were concerned that you had abducted your child.’
You like how the blond one is talking. It is orderly – like every sentence is informed by protocol, policy, and the law. Indeed, his words are somehow so orderly and well trodden that they reassure you – even if the meanings behind the words aren’t actually conveying anything reassuring.
‘Can you abduct your own child, though?’ your dad asks.
‘Sometimes, yeah.’
Your dad looks at the police officers with raised eyebrows, and the police officers leave you two in the room again. They leave you, they say, because they want to order you a complimentary taxi.
No one has talked to you or even looked at you for a while. Just to double-check you’re still there, you pinch the skin on your forearm. It hurts – and thus you conclude that you are still there.
You are tired. Ignoring the ample number of chairs, you lie on the floor and its thin, worn carpet. You lie on your back, look up at the ceiling. The ceiling is covered in square panels, some of which are broken, some of which are actually lights. The lights are bright and white. When you look directly at them, they hurt. You know, from experience, that ceilings sometimes break. You think of the ceiling that came down on your lunch that day. The day you and Bobby tore down the sports hall. Then you think of the day you blasted off into space. Then you think of the day you schlepped off to London. You feel that everyone is on the cusp of finding out the truth about you – that you are not of this world, that you were never meant to be here.
You wonder what time it is. It’s hard to know the time in a room with no windows or clocks. At some point you fall asleep, or maybe half asleep. Your body cools as you lie perfectly still, your mind hovering just above the state of full rest. In surface-level dreams, you hear them speak.
‘Discharge in due course.’
‘Discretion.’
‘Section two.’
Your mind flits through dreams of corridors and canteens, handcuffs, and cells the size of hamster cages.
‘Sweet pea,’ your dad says gently in your ear. ‘Wake up, darling, wake up. We’re off.’
When you fail to respond, your dad shakes you a little. You open your eyes, regard your dad narrowly. Not because you’re moody, but because you’re tired. Your nose is doing its weird, night-time breathing still.
Your dad hoicks you up.
‘Some people will be checking in on you tomorrow or the next day, though,’ the red-haired police officer says, as your dad helps you put on your coat.
‘What? Why? Who will they be checking on?’
‘They’ll be checking in on this one.’ The red-haired police officer points to you.
Your dad and the police officers look at you. The look they give you is curious. It’s a look that suggests they are only just seeing you – that they are just seeing you for the first time – something that you know is not the case. Their eyes scan your face. You wish they’d look away. You wish they’d stop looking at you like they are looking at a creature.
‘But why would anyone want to check in on her?’ your dad asks.
The red-haired police officer shakes his head. ‘We just want to see if…’ he says, before trailing off. ‘We just want to, um…’
‘We just want to make sure everything is OK,’ the blond one says instead.
‘Yeah,’ the red-haired police officer agrees. ‘That’s right. We just want to make sure everything is OK with her.’
FIRST, THE TAXI DROPS you both back at the motorway service station. There, your dad checks you out of the hotel room. While he does so, you hover just outside – looking at the shopping complex entrance with suspicion. You regard the people entering and exiting the building, half looking to see if one of them is the man behind the till or the security man. To your relief, neither person materialises by the time your dad returns.
Silently, you both walk across the car park, get into his car. Your dad starts the engine and begins to drive. You sit in the passenger seat, close your eyes. Before you fall asleep, you think of your mum in that prison hospital. You wonder if she is in the corridor with her flip-flops, or if she is maybe lying down in her cell. You wonder if the stuffiness of the air is bothering her. If it were up to you, she’d have lots of air to breathe. The air would be big, clean, and fresh. It would fill her lungs and make her feel light.
When you wake up, you are on your home driveway. Your dad cuts the engine and you both get out. He opens the front door, lets you enter the house first. You go to the kitchen, grab yourself a glass of squash to take up to bed.
‘You going to have a good sleep?’ he asks you, as you climb the stairs.
‘Yeah.’
‘Great. Goodnight, angel.’
‘Goodnight, Dad.’
Further reading:
Off Duty: Police Officers and Performance Improvement Plans