Water poured across the bridge, almost ankle deep. I didn’t know if it was rainwater or water that had come from the river, or a combination of both. The only thing I knew was that I had to hurry up. But as I took the last step down off the bridge, a wave of river water hit the bridge hard and chunks of stone dislodged, crumbling beneath my feet. It sent me off balance and I stumbled forward, dropping my phone into the river. My breath left my body as the freezing cold water hit me side-on, almost knocking me straight into the churning waters. I took a long sidestep like a crab, feeling the current trying to drag me along with it.
But the riverbank was soft and muddy, which allowed me to ram the heel of my wellie deep into the earth. The suction gave enough of a foothold to propel myself forward, clawing my way up the river bed towards the road. My left boot came clean off.
With my sock dangling from my foot I climbed my way up to the road, gasping for air as the rain pounded from above. When I was away from the bridge, I turned around and watched my boot slip under the water. I tried to find my breath, soaked down to my bra. That could have been me, and then who would be there to take Aiden home? No, I wouldn’t be bringing Aiden home, not with the river like this. I’d have to stay with him at the school. What an idiot I’d been. I’d ignored my dad’s warnings about water. A hard lump formed in my throat as I turned my back on the river. One misstep and I would have fallen into the same water as the stones, my phone, and my Wellington boot. One mistake and I would have been floating beneath the current where the water is calm, with my hair gliding out around me, an ethereal water-nymph who would never breathe again.
Another dead young woman. A statistic in a tragic flooding incident. A selfish woman who left her six-year-old motherless after lying to her father. I shook my head and made my way up Acker Lane like I had just told Dad. The road followed the direction of the river for a mile, before turning left onto the school road. The school road carried on for another half a mile before coming to the carpark of Bishoptown school. I noticed that the water had pooled in the car park, where it was halfway up the tyres of some of the cars. There was little chance of all these people making it home for the night. I turned my attention back to the school—it was my school, too, where I’d carved my name into the floorboards in the assembly hall to impress Jamie Glover; a boy who would later break my heart by kissing Fiona Cater on the rugby pitch in secondary school. By this time, of course, it was my son’s school. It was his time to make memories and carve his name into wood using the sharp point of a compass.
It was a small Victorian building, built like a modest church, with steep gables and old-fashioned leaded windows. There was more than a hint of Gothic about it.
Dragging my soaked sock, I ran to the entrance and let myself in, almost tripping over someone in the doorway. When I straightened up I realised that it was Mrs. Fitzwilliam, the same woman who had been headteacher when I was a child. When she saw me, her face paled, and her gaze moved from my eyes to somewhere above my head. There was something about the change in her countenance that made my stomach drop to my sodden feet.
“What is it?” I asked.
A dribble of rain water trickled down the wall behind Mrs. Fitzwilliam. We’d called her Mrs. Fitz when I was a child. She had always been firm but fair. We were a little afraid of her red hair, but it was almost completely grey now, and her stern expression was softer as she finally met my gaze. The tears in her eyes forced my heart to resume into its tattoo against my ribs. I clutched hold of my chest, trying to calm myself while my heart seemed to have been restarted with defibrillators.
“Ms Price… Emma… I’m so sorry.”
I took a step forward and she took a step back. Her expression told me that mine was wild. She put both hands up in front of her as if in surrender.
“We’ve called the police and they’ll be here soon.”
“Tell me what happened,” I demanded.
“Aiden slipped away. Miss Perry was with the children in classroom four. She was performing a headcount. We had collected all the children from year two in that classroom because the roof leak wasn’t as bad. But somehow Aiden left the classroom. We’ve searched the premises and we believe he has left the school.”
I clutched my chest, as if such a paltry action could alleviate the pain that radiated from my heart. “Why would he leave?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Perhaps he was curious about the rain.”
I crumpled in on myself, folding over like paper. Of course he was curious. Aiden was curious about everything. He was an explorer. He climbed trees in the park, he scurried over five-bar gates into fields filled with cows, he hid in the heather on the moors around Bishoptown, and played hide and seek in the forest. I had nurtured that side of him. I wanted a wild, brave child. I wanted that for him; I wanted him to grow into a strong man with a penchant for exploring. I’d pushed my wanderlust onto him.
But I hadn’t wantedthis. I hadn’t wanted him to wander away from safety during the most dangerous flood in over a hundred years.
“You’ve searched the school?” I asked.
“We’re still looking,” she said.
“I’ll help.”
The rest of that day was a blur. I checked each classroom myself, tripping over buckets placed under leaks and snatching open cupboard doors, screaming his name until I scared the other children. It was no use. Aiden was not in the school. I’d searched every nook and cranny of the school, even trudging around the carpark and the football field. Eventually Amy got me to sit down and Mrs Fitzwilliam brought me hot coffee.
The police had shown up hours later, along with search and rescue. Somehow amongst all that I’d been given an extra pair of shoes. No one had found Aiden. There was so much for the authorities to deal with. Search and rescue and the police were stretched so thinly that my boy, my missing boy, stayed just that. Missing.
And now, do I resent that? Do I hate the parents whose children were taken to safety in boats and helicopters as the Ouse finally burst and covered our small village in its murky lifeblood? No. I can’t. I can’t begrudge the men and women who worked tirelessly to help the living. But as I watched everyone moving around me, watched the rest of the children reunited with their parents, and watched the half-drowned people of my village receive blankets and hot cups of tea, I realised that my life was no longer in my own hands. On that day, when I lost Aiden, I lost all control of my life, and with him gone, I would never get it back.
ChapterTwo
All that wasted potential. That was the phrase I heard over and over again when I fell pregnant with Aiden in year thirteen of school. I had just turned eighteen when I pissed on the stick, and had already sent my UCAS application to several universities—universities that I had expected to accept me to their humanities courses. However, Rob, my boyfriend at the time, had not applied to any universities. He was hanging on by a thread, and when I announced my news, the thread finally broke.
Rob was never the kind of boy you took home to your parents. He was in a band at fifteen, tattooed at sixteen, and almost completely gave up on school at seventeen. He had stayed on at Bishoptown School to do his A-Levels, but when I look back on that time now, I wonder if he’d stayed to hang out with me more than anything. We were very much in love but it was young love; passionate and idiotic, full of mistakes and drama. The biggest drama was my pregnancy, which prompted a family meeting between the Prices and the Hartleys to discuss what should be done about the whole ordeal. At one point I wondered whether they might send me away somewhere for nine months to have the baby in secret. It all suddenly seemed like the early twentieth century, not the early twenty-first.
This was a small village of rich, rural people. My mother was the general practitioner for Bishoptown. Rob’s family owned the boutique B&B in the village and several holiday cottages outside York. We were supposed to have a future. We were middle-class children whose parents had worked hard for our future, and we’d pissed it all away like I’d pissed on that stick.
I could have had an abortion, and believe me, I considered it. Mum even sat me down and described the procedure in a calm and neutral way. Girls like me often chose that route. It’s often what they feel is the best decision for them. But there was something about that little bean I saw on the ultrasound scan that made me wonder whether there was a little magic growing inside me. I had the magic bean forming in my womb and I wanted to see how it would all turn out. Maybe there was some selfishness to my decision. Maybe there is some selfishness to every decision. But that was my choice.
My choice was Aiden.
And I never regretted it.
