The Boy Who Came Back

Extraordinary scenes yesterday in Cardiff. On the last leg of our tour of the country we made good on our long-standing promise to W that he would be able to visit is his old school and see all his old friends once more. By the time we were on our way to Wales I had developed misgivings and doubts. I tried to hint that places and people could change and that this could be unsettling. I needn’t have bothered. If anything Cardiff was too familiar and (perhaps unsurprisingly after only 5 months) little seemed different. Either way, W was unconcerned – the reception he got was staggering.

It started in the playground. As we arrived, one half of his year group were outside and they rushed forwards delighted and bewildered shouting his name. ‘Where have you been?’ said one. ‘I haven’t seen you in ages!’ Almost immediately the questions stopped and they fell into an exhilarating game, chasing him around and around. W seemed transfigured, his face shining, his spirit unfettered. He was wearing a suit jacket that we had found in a supermarket (his Doctor Who jacket) and the tails flapped as he ran, looking back, laughing over his shoulder at the chasing pack, the soles of his sneakers flashing white.

The other class was waiting inside and I eventually got him to go in to the Victorian school buildings to find them. They were sat on the rug, about to have a story, when he barged in just ten or fifteen minutes before the end of the school day. The children erupted from the floor and fell upon him like a crashing wave, shouting his name, grabbing him. At the front is one old friend, and they hug each other as the crowd surrounds them, literally mobbing them. Those at the centre even try to hoist him up but after that doesn’t work they calm ever so slightly and make do with just touching him, manic grins on their faces. Those further back are straining forwards and there are strange haunted smiles from those too far away to reach. It’s a little like the end of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. W himself is laughing, eyes wide. The cut of the jacket’s shoulders make him look older and taller, more alien and stranger. They look at him as if he has returned from the dead. Some of the girls are just stroking him, as if trying to convince themselves he is real.

This class has lost several children - both before we left, and since. I remember friends leaving my school at a similar age and it is like a death – sometimes there’s no warning and a child just vanishes. They never return. But W is the Boy Who Came Back. Whatever the nothingness is into which their former classmates have vanished, he has returned. They are amazed, delighted, stupefied.

The teacher temporarily regains control and gets the class to sit back down so they can ask some questions. W leans nonchalantly back against a desk, occasionally ruffling the hair of some friend or other. He is so assured, so unfazed. Such attention would scare me now, let alone when I was 5 – he is merely glad to see them. Always on the verge of laughter, he waves away the forest of raised hands, the babble of competing questions with an easy smile: 'Now, now, one at a time..'

I don’t listen to the questions although I gather that they want to know what he got for Christmas; almost overwhelmed, I turn to C who has been curled up on my hip throughout most of this. He looks shell-shocked. Other teachers appear and begin talking to me, asking questions about Houston but I struggle to answer, as I have done all day: here in Cardiff, our Texas life seems an impossible fantasy, unreal and exotic.

Once the bell goes and they have all pulled on their coats and scarves, the class processes out with W, back into the playground to show him to their parents. In their wake I ask C how he’s doing.

‘Too much,’ he says.