18

One day a friend brought me a present. ‘I saw it and thought of your search and couldn’t resist it,’ she said. Beautifully wrapped, it turned out to be a message-in-a-bottle kit. A nice little box covered in cliché pictures: desert island, frolicking dolphins, three-mast sailing ship, seagull, whale, starfish. Inside sat a glass bottle with a cork stopper, a small bag of red sealing wax and a tea-light. The message was already written – all that was left was to fill in the gaps:

Ahoy,

Be it known that [. . . name]

set this adrift on [. . . date].

I live at [. . . location].

And, in a picture of a lifebelt, there was a little space for a photograph. Couldn’t be made any easier really. I was very touched that she had thought of me.

Just as I was tucking the sealing wax back under the bottle and closing the lid of the kit, I caught sight of a red helicopter hovering outside my study window, clearly seeking somewhere to land. Then it veered off and landed a few hundred metres up the road, on a patch of open ground. Police cordoned off my street, and when I asked an officer what had happened, he said that a young lad coming home from school had been hit at the zebra crossing and the helicopter was taking him to hospital. That day my own son was travelling home from school on his own for the first time, using the bus and train. He had tried the previous two days, but the buses had failed to stop on his request, and after an hour and a half, as darkness set in, I had gone to collect him. Today was to be his third effort, and if the bus ignored him again he was determined to walk to the train station. I quickly calculated where he would be – not out of school yet – and my daughter also still at school for a play rehearsal. Then I thought of Maurice and my heart went out to this child and his mother. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean your child is not in danger. Life is fragile and I felt a renewed sympathy for the mother and her loss.

In between trying to find the letter-writer and the interminable, boring minutiae of motherhood – the precious neurons dedicated to remembering what stage of the laundry cycle the rugby gear has reached, or where a history essay has been secreted, the constant juggling of domestic and school needs, the trips, events, homework, social life of children – I walked the dog, and thanked my fate for the precious trivia.

In the park I met a woman who was sad because she had sent her child away to boarding school. ‘I’m sure I’ll get used to it,’ she told me, though in her eyes there was the panic of empty days that had previously been filled with school runs and tea parties and tennis lessons and the weekly family shop and the nightly dinner to cook.