The Man With the Funny Colours

"There is no decent name for what I felt when my son told me. The closest I can get to it is relief."

I got across that lawn. I could not afterwards have told anybody how.

I know that my legs were not working properly and that the wet grass came up through my socks, and I know that I went down onto my knees in the sand beside him hard enough that the pain came straight back up through both of them and made me gasp out loud. But the crossing itself is gone. One moment I was standing in the middle of my own back garden making a noise like something caught in a trap, and the next I was down in the sandpit with my hands on my son.

He was building. That was the thing that nearly finished me. He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the sandpit in the near-dark with his back to the house, patting the sand into a shape with both palms, entirely absorbed and entirely content, and the little wooden spade was lying beside him where he had put it down because he had decided that hands were better.

There was sand all through his hair. It was in his curls and down the back of his collar and worked right into the wool of his jumper, and there was a fine grey dusting of it across both his shoulders — and I knelt there in the cold with my hands gripping him and looked at all of that sand and did the sum, and the sum said that my son had been sitting out in the open in the freezing dark for a long time, on his own, in the dark, while I slept in a chair twenty feet away with a book on my chest.

"Sammy," I said. "How did you get outside? Did you open the door?"

I had both hands on his shoulders and I had turned him round to face me and I was holding him far too hard, and I knew that I was holding him too hard, and I could not make my fingers let go of him.

He looked back at me with his face completely open and told me the truth as far as he understood it.

"Uh-uh."

And then I did the thing I had been coached to do, which is the part of that evening I have been least able to forgive. Six weeks of appointments, and Dr Carmichael had taught me — kindly, patiently, sitting under a shelf with a jar on it that I never once looked at directly — how to put a question to a small child without putting the answer into it. Do not lead him. Do not hand him the shape of the thing you want. Ask it flat, ask it twice, and let the silence do the work.

So I knelt in the sand with my knees bleeding through my jeans and my son's shoulders under my hands, and I ran the protocol on my own child.

"Are you sure? Sammy, you have to tell me the truth. Did you open the door?"

He shook his head again, and slower this time, because something had come into my voice that he did not like.

"It was open," he whispered.

And the whole world went a very long way away from me.

Because I had not opened it. I had come in through the front door at half with two bags of shopping in my arms and I had not been near the back of that house once. And Sammy had not opened it — I knew that, I knew it absolutely, because I had watched children lie to me for a living for a decade and there is nothing on this earth easier to spot than a three-year-old who thinks he has been naughty. He would have told me about his sock. He would have told me about the dog. He would have handed me a long and beautiful and entirely irrelevant story about somebody else. He looked me straight in the face and he said uh-uh, and my son was not lying to me.

So the door had been open.

Somebody had opened the back door of my house.

"Are you sure, darling?" I said, and my voice came out of me from a long way off.

He nodded. He had gone back to the sand already. It was so entirely settled for him, so obviously true and finished and of no further interest to anybody, that he had turned back to the corner of his castle and was pressing it into shape with his thumb.

And then he stopped, and his bottom lip went, and his whole small face came apart.

"Mummy. Did I do bad?"

God forgive me. God forgive me for whatever it was I had let him see in my face.

I had him up against me before he had finished saying it, both arms right round him, his cold cheek pushed into my neck and my hand up in his sandy hair, and I rocked him there in the sandpit and said it into the top of his head over and over again until he stopped shaking.

"No, Sammy," I said. "You did nothing wrong."

And he did not. He did nothing wrong. He was three years old, and he had woken up in a dark house and found a door standing open and gone out to play in his own sandpit, which was the most reasonable thing that any human being did in that house all day — and the one who did the wrong thing was asleep in a recliner with a paperback on her chest.

"Did you see Daddy inside?" I said, with my mouth still in his hair.

He shook his head against my collarbone. Once. That was all, and it went through me like cold water.

I got the phone out of my pocket one-handed with my other arm still round him, and I rang my husband from the middle of a sandpit in the dark with my son's heart going against my ribs.

"Hi. This is Nial Triffett. I'm busy at the moment, but if you—"

I killed it. That cheerful, ordinary, forty-second-long recording of a man saying his own name into a phone in a car park somewhere in 2016 — and it came out of my hand into the freezing dark of my own back garden, and I could not bear the sound of it.

And as the screen went out, something moved at the far end of the yard.

My head came up. Down by the back fence, in among the trunks where the light had gone completely, something had crossed — or had not crossed, or had never been there at all, because by the time I had my eyes on it there was nothing there but gum trees and the dark between them and the line of the fence going away into it. And I knelt in the sand with my child against my chest and stared down that fence line until my eyes ached, and nothing moved again.

"Mummy?"

"Yes, sweetheart?"

I pulled back a little way so that I could see his face, and so that he could see mine, because I wanted at least one of us to be all right.

"Why did the man take Buffy away?"

Everything stopped. Not slowed — stopped. The cold stopped. The kookaburras stopped, and the traffic on the wet road stopped, and the whole enormous business of my own heart going stopped with them. And what was left standing in the middle of it was a very short and very quiet piece of arithmetic that took no time at all: Buffy was not on the rug. Buffy did not come when I moved in the chair. Buffy has not come out of that house since I woke.

"What man?" I said.

He shrugged. His shoulders came up and went down again, and his lip had started to go, and he did not want to be asked.

"The man with the funny colours," he said.

The words came out of him small and reluctant, straight up into the wind that was moving through the gum leaves over our heads. They were the words of a three-year-old. They meant absolutely nothing at all.

"What do you mean by funny colours, sweetheart?" I said, and I put my hand up and smoothed the sand back out of his hair, and my voice was warm and gentle and entirely unhurried, and I was giving the performance of my life.

He screwed his whole face up with the effort of it. On any other evening I would have thought it the most delightful thing I had ever seen.

"Like... like the rainbow, Mummy," he said. "They came from his hands, just like Spiderman."

And what went through me then was not horror.

It was not fear. It was not the crawling of the skin or the standing of the hair or any one of the things that ought to have gone through the body of a woman kneeling in a sandpit in the dark, being told by her son that a strange man had come into her garden with light pouring off his fingers.

It was relief.

It came up through me so hard and so fast and so warm that I very nearly laughed out loud into my son's hair — and the shame of it arrived about half a second behind it and has never once left me.

Because this had a name.

This was a thing that lived in a book somewhere, in a chapter with a heading on it, in a room with a man in glasses in it. A child who sees colours coming out of a stranger's hands is a child who is unwell, and unwell has a doctor, and unwell has a Tuesday, and unwell has a woman getting off an aeroplane from the mainland to look at my boy and tell me what he has got. It was the worst news in the world and it was the best news I had had in eleven weeks, because it put the thing back inside my son's head, where a person could get at it — and it took it out of my house, and out of my garden, and off my husband's desk, and out from behind the tinted windows of a car parked three doors up.

Not real. Please. Let it not be real. Let my son be sick, and let it be my fault, and let there be a Tuesday.

I knelt in the sand and let myself have that for about four seconds.

"Sammy," I said. "Can you tell me more? What happened after the colours came from his hands?"

And his whole face lit up.

That was the thing I could not afterwards put down. He was not frightened of it. He had never been frightened of it. I asked him, and he sat up straight with his eyes going wide, and my son was delighted.

"It was so pretty, Mummy!" he said. "The colours made a big circle, like a door. And then…"

And he stopped, because the next part was hard, and his forehead came down into a knot with the work of finding words for it.

"And then what, sweetheart?" I said.

"Then the man and Buffy went through the circle." His voice had gone right down to nothing at all. "And then they were gone."

Gone.

And I knelt there in the wet sand with my son in my arms, and the four seconds ran out.

Because Buffy was gone.

Not imagined gone. Not gone the way a shadow behind tinted glass was gone, or a rustle in a hedge, or a shape between two trunks at the bottom of a garden. Gone off the rug in my son's bedroom. Gone out of a house with the front door locked and the deadbolt across it. Gone out of a garden with a six-foot fence the whole way round — thirty kilos of Dalmatian who had never once in her life left that property, who came when she was called, who could not lie in a room with a person without lying against them.

My son could see a man made of rainbows standing in an empty garden. He could not take a dog out of a locked house.

And I had wanted it. I got both hands round it and I held on. For four seconds in a sandpit in the dark I wanted my three-year-old to be ill — I wanted it with the whole of my chest — and then the dog was gone, and the thing I was holding came away in my hands, and there was nothing underneath me at all.

"Mummy," Sammy said.

He had put his hand flat on my cheek and turned my face round to his, the way I did to him when he would not look at me, and his palm was cold and gritty with sand.

"The colours were like in my dreams. But not scary this time. Pretty."

The colours were like in my dreams.

Eleven weeks of him screaming at the corner of his bedroom in a language nobody on this earth has ever spoken. Three pages of phonetics in the back of a green notebook in my handbag. The bruises coming up on his arms in shapes. The stars are aligning. The gateway will open soon. My son sitting up in a leather chair with both hands flat on his thighs and telling a consultant paediatrician, in a voice that was not his, that the shadows were growing.

And a tired man taking his glasses off and pressing his thumb and forefinger into the bridge of his nose and telling me, in his careful, deliberate, second-hand English, that what was happening to my son did not align with any diagnosis he had ever encountered. That it was unique. That it might require a more specialised approach.

He had known something. I had watched it go across his face and I had watched him put it away again, and I had told myself I was imagining it, because I have read faces for a living since I was twenty-two years old and the alternative was more than I could hold.

"Sammy, sweetie," I said. "We're going to go inside now, okay? It's getting cold out here."

He put his arms up.

I got him onto my hip and stood, and my knees very nearly did not have it in them, and he weighed more than he had ever weighed in his life. Which was not true, and I knew perfectly well that it was not true — he was three, he was the same boy who had been eating toast at that bench at nine o'clock in the morning — and I carried him across that lawn and he was heavier than I could hold.

And halfway over, at the very edge of my eye, down where the gums went into the fence line, the dark moved.

Not the wind. I had been standing out in that garden for ten minutes and I knew exactly what the wind was doing in those leaves. This went between two trunks, low and smooth and unhurried, and it was going somewhere — and then the fence line was a fence line again and nothing else.

My arms went round him so hard that he squeaked.

"What is it, Mummy?"

"Nothing, darling. Just the wind in the trees."

Warm. Easy. Light as anything. Twenty years of training, and I had never in my life delivered a line better than that one — and I did it with my son's face six inches from mine and my heart going like a fist on a door, and he believed me completely, and he put his head down on my shoulder.

I did not run. I wanted to run so badly that my legs were shaking with it, and I made myself walk, because if I ran he would know — and because whatever was down at that fence line would know as well, and I was not going to hand it that.

The back door was still standing open. It had been standing open the entire time, the whole way through, letting the cold into my house while I knelt out in a sandpit finding out what had happened inside it.

I carried us both through it and kicked it shut behind me harder than I meant to, and the frame jumped in the wall, and I got my hand up onto the deadbolt and threw it across.

And then I stood there.

In my own laundry, in my socks, with sand all down my front and my son on my hip and my hand still flat against the bolt.

And I understood, far too late, and with a calm that frightened me more than anything else in that entire day, that I had just locked us in.