The Boy Under the Table by Nicole Trope Read Free Book Online Page A

wait for dawn and hopefully then she could sleep. Hopefully.

Sarah
     
    On the day, on that day, the day they lost him, he had refused the breakfast at the restaurant.
    The eggs weren’t cooked properly. He liked his scrambled eggs dry and separated. The eggs on the plate in front of him oozed and clumped together. He had folded his arms and stared in horror.
    Sarah had tried a minute of bargaining, offering Lockie a lamington as a treat if he ate his eggs before she heard Doug’s irritated hiss of breath.
    ‘He’ll eat what’s there or he can leave it. Eat your food, Sarah.’ Doug wasn’t one to send food back in a restaurant. He was out of his element and it showed. Sarah had listened, biting her lip—keeping the words inside. She hadn’t wanted to make a scene. She hated to stand out for the wrong reasons.
    As it was she could feel the stares. The country dust stuck to her no matter where she went now. Doug never looked like anything but what he was. Everyone in the restaurant could tell they were in the city for the Show. She could not remember the casual Sarah who needed her morning latte before she did anything else. She had willingly given that Sarah up, it was true, but when she was back in the city she yearned for the ease with which she used to walk in and out of coffee shops and giant shopping centres.
    The irony of her situation was not lost on her now. The whole of Australia knew her name for some very wrong reasons.
    Lockie had eaten toast with peanut butter instead and Doug had said, ‘Leave him be, Sarah. We’ll be eating all day at the Show.’ Sarah had known that Doug was probably right. The excitement of the show would make the hours fly past and lunch would come soon enough. Lockie’s choice of a corndog was already set firmly in his mind.
    But Lockie was lost before lunch and he didn’t get to have his corndog or his lamington.
    The promised cake had occupied her mind completely at first. She should have given it to him before lunch. What difference would it have made? She spent so much time keeping to routine and saying no. Children needed routine. That’s what all the books said. That’s how her mother had done it; or, rather, how the nanny had done it. Routine and discipline made children feel secure.
    What difference would the lamington have made? Perhaps the sweet chocolate taste would have been something for him to cling to wherever he was now. She imagined how he would have crammed the cake in his mouth, not pausing for breath or to chew properly. She saw the streaks of chocolate on his cheek. She saw his smile.
    Sarah wondered what they—the ‘they’ who had taken her child; the ‘they’ or the ‘him’ or the ‘her’—were feeding him.
    Sometimes a fear dug at her until she acknowledged it: maybe they weren’t feeding him at all.
    Who would do that? Who would willingly starve a child? Who would hurt her baby? Who would take her baby? Who was this person and why were they allowed to exist?
    And what would I do to that person if I got the chance?
    There were days when she lay on the bed and concocted scenarios in her head. She would see herself finding Lockie. She was never really sure of the place. It would be a dark room in a dark house but the location wasn’t important. She would see herself rescuing her child, folding him in her arms and saying his name. Then she would see the person who had taken him.
    There was never a face, just a body with a blank head, but Sarah would see herself grow until she towered over the person and then she would hit and hit and hit until there was nothing left and all the time she would be screaming, ‘How dare you take my child? How dare you take him?’
    She had to find him. The desperate need to find him swirled around her body with everything she did. It ate into her soul and sometimes she had to hold on to the kitchen counter to stop herself running out into the road and screaming his name. She wanted to be looking for him all the