Michael Robotham: When children don’t come home

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/11/28/michael-robotham-when-children-dont-come-home/

Michael Robotham is the author of Shatter, Bleed for Me, and The Wreckage, among other novels. His latest book is Say You’re Sorry. Robotham, who lives in Sydney with his family, will be guest editing The Afterword all this week.

Everyone reacts differently to the disappearance of a child. Some husbands and wives look straight into each other’s eyes without needing words, while others are like strangers lying side by side at night, still as corpses, staring at the ceiling.

There are men who want to beat someone so badly they can’t walk right for a month, while others drink themselves into oblivion or pretend nothing has changed. And there are women who can’t look at another child or family without remembering what they’ve lost.

As a journalist working in Australia and the UK, I reported on far too many stories that involved missing or murdered children. Right from the outset, I was thrown into the deep end by a grizzled old chief of staff, who decided that my young, fresh-faced teenage innocence meant I was less likely to be punched.
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Back in those days it was up to media organizations to obtain photographs of victims. I was designated as the ‘death knock’ specialist and was sent to knock on doors within hours of the families being informed of the tragedies.

It was a horrible job. I once did twelve in a day after a mining disaster in Cobar in western New South Wales in 1979. Often, I would vomit in the flowerbed before reaching the front door. One of the things I discovered was that people react differently to tragedy. Some invited me into their homes, sobbed on my shoulder and took me through every photograph in the album, wanting to tell me about their son, daughter, wife, husband, mother, father; how wonderful they were and how sadly they’d be missed. Others showed no emotion at all and appeared almost detached and untouched, as though nobody had told them the news or they were in denial. Grief, I discovered, is an individual as a fingerprint.

It was during this period of my career that I covered the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain in the famous as the “Dingo Baby Case.” Azaria was an 18-month-old baby who disappeared from a campground at Uluru (then known as Ayer’s Rock) in August 1980. Her mother, Lindy, told police she saw a dingo leaving the tent with something in its mouth.

Lindy Chamberlain was convicted in the court of public opinion long before she was ever tried in a courtroom. People didn’t like her. She was cold. Distant. She didn’t look like a mother whose baby had just been snatched. With her Beatle’s haircut and her saucer-sized sunglasses and her stony face, she failed to shed a tear through two inquests and a criminal trial. She blamed a dingo. The entire nation blamed her.

I didn’t believe Lindy either. I trusted the evidence of forensic experts (later discredited) and I thought there was something about her detachment and stoicism that came across as cold and calculating. I was wrong. I should have known better. I had seen how differently people grieve.

This is something I wanted to investigate in my new psychological thriller Say You’re Sorry, which is about two teenage girls who go missing from a small British village. Their two families react very differently. One is torn apart and the other is bound more closely together. Missing children create a particular silence around them that is filled with a dreadful wondering.

I remember being in Europe with my whole family in May 2007 when Madeleine McCann disappeared from a holiday apartment in Portugal. My three daughters were fascinated and appalled by the case. We were driving through Spain and Italy and they would look at vans, or study little girls to see if they bore a resemblance.

Since then, Maddie’s parents, Gerry and Kate McCann have devoted themselves completely to the pursuit of the truth, campaigning fiercely to keep the story in the news. They have grieved in public, written books, made documentaries and lobbied police and politicians.

I have no insight into Madeleine’s whereabouts or what might have happened to her that night, but many people forget there were twin toddlers in the room that night, sleeping only a few feet away.

Kate McCann has admitted that the twins are “haunted by the tragedy” and that they “help her grieve.” This disturbs me a little. They were two at the time – too young to comprehend what happened. Why should they have to live in this shadow? Why should they be haunted? Does there come a point when the family must accept what’s happened and say goodbye, or should they fight to keep hope alive, regardless of the cost?

These are some of the questions that are touched upon in Say You’re Sorry. Piper Hadley and Tash McBain go missing on the last Saturday of their summer holidays and their disappearance captivates the nation. There are prayer vigils, church services, makeshift memories and messages of support. In a sense the missing girls become public property, belonging to everyone, as their fate is discussed over garden fences, water coolers and in post office queues.

This is the emotional landscape of Say You’re Sorry. The families of the missing girls each react very differently. The Hadley’s are drawn closer together, campaigning tirelessly to keep Piper’s memory alive, while the McBains are torn apart, unable to look at each other without being reminded each other of what they’ve lost.

There is a mystery to be solved, of course, and the trail is dark and twisted, but it is the characters and psychology that fascinated me most. Long after people have forgotten the plot, they will hopefully remember Piper Hadley and Tash McBain.

Kate McCann has admitted that the twins are “haunted by the tragedy” and that they “help her grieve.”

Why should the twins be haunted by it? They were 2 years old and they had never spent much time with Madeleine, according to Kate McCann. They should not be helping her to grieve, she should be helping them to lead a normal life free of the shadow of a sister they hardly knew at the time and any memory of her will be long gone, replaced by the emotional guff they are getting from their parents.

He's not too hot on accuracy with the glaring error about Azaria Chamberlain who was not quite two months old, not 18 months.

The bit I like about the McCanns is that they "have devoted themselves completely to the pursuit of the truth".

AnnaEsse wrote:

Kate McCann has admitted that the twins are “haunted by the tragedy” and that they “help her grieve.”

Why should the twins be haunted by it? They were 2 years old and they had never spent much time with Madeleine, according to Kate McCann. They should not be helping her to grieve, she should be helping them to lead a normal life free of the shadow of a sister they hardly knew at the time and any memory of her will be long gone, replaced by the emotional guff they are getting from their parents.

The parents have a history of using their two remaining children in photoshoots and videos, as well as losing no opportunity to refer to them and their supportive behaviour - even to the point of quoting them - in interviews. They have reduced the twins' role to that of props in a carefully planned and implemented PR campaign over the past 5 years. The twins believe their story - the twins are searching etc. It's only when one stops to think, like the author, "Hey! Wait a minute... those kids were only two years old at the time ... what could they possibly remember?" (apart from what the parents have told them and apparenty continue to drum into them of course) that one starts to question the motives. It's when one starts to question the motives and dig a little deeper that leads one to start to question the parents' role per se.

In the leveson enquiry Kate McCann said...."they had no respect for a grieving mother'....


Firstly , she was grieving, in public, because she chose to do that, she chose do that because that was the path SHE chose to go down.


Secondly, she added that they had no respect for Madeleine....neither did she, if she did she wouldnt off done what She done...Madeleine is always an afterthought where she is concerned , included to add impact where needed and always last.


The twins...off course they have been irreversibly harmed in all this, but who's fault is that.....it's the mccanns fault off course , not the newspapers, not the bloggers and off course not the PJ....they themselves are to blame for all the hurt they WILL suffer in the future.


I bet you wish you could turn the clock back, don't you..I was YOUR decision ruin then twins life...poor poor souls.