My Son Ran Away From Home On His 18th Birthday — Six Years Later, He Came Back With One Demand
My Son Ran Away From Home On His 18th Birthday — Six Years Later, He Came Back With One Demand
My first husband went when Elliot was four, so for years it was the two of us.
As he got older I could see he was not like most boys. Round about the first year of secondary I found him at my make-up, and later on he was buying dresses and heels with his own money.
It threw me at first. He was still my child and I wanted him to know there were no conditions on it.
Everything got harder when I married Gordon.
Gordon did twenty-two years in the Army and he believes there is one right way for a man to live. He was at Elliot constantly about how he dressed. He said the boy needed discipline, not indulgence.
However many times I tried to keep things civil, every conversation between the two of them ended the same way.
It came apart at Elliot's eighteenth. In front of my sister and her husband and my mother, Gordon looked at him across that table and said: "The day you stop dressing like that, get yourself in the Army and start behaving like a man — maybe then I'll have some respect for you."
That night Elliot packed a bag and left a note saying he could not stay in that house, and he went.
He was eighteen, so there was very little anybody could do, and in the end it stopped.
Six years.
Then in the October there was a knock.
I barely knew him. Taller, broader, in plain men's clothes, standing like somebody I had never met.
I went to put my arms round him and he stepped back.
"Not yet," he said. "First I need him to tell you the truth."
Then he turned and pointed past me at Gordon.
What Gordon had to say.
It took him about four minutes and I had to ask him twice to start.
There were letters.
Nine of them, between the February of 2021 and the November of 2022, from Elliot, to this house, addressed to me.
Gordon took every one out of the post and put them in the shed, in a tin, under the things on the bench.
They are still there. He went and got them while we were all standing in the hall.
Nine letters, unopened, in a biscuit tin — the oldest of them for five years and eight months.
What was in them.
I read them that night, all nine, in order, and it took me until about two in the morning.
The first one is from eleven weeks after he went and it is four lines. It says he is all right, that he is at Garrow, and that he is not asking for anything.
By the fourth one he has a job. By the sixth he is sharing a flat with two other people and one of them has a cat.
The eighth one, from the August of 2022, asks whether he can come at Christmas.
The ninth one is three lines long and it is from the November of 2022 and it says that he will stop writing now and that he hopes I am well.
What I did while Gordon was talking.
I want this down because it is the first four minutes of the rest of my life and I did not behave well in them.
I looked at Elliot.
Not at Gordon. I stood in that hall and watched my son's face while my husband described taking nine letters out of the post.
I was checking whether he knew about the other thing.
That is what I was doing. Four minutes, with a man confessing to my left, and I was reading my son to find out how much trouble I was in.
He let me do it. He stood there and let me look at him and he gave me nothing at all, which I took at the time for shock.
It was not shock. He had worked out on the doorstep that I would need about four minutes, and he gave them to me.
I know that because of what he said in the kitchen a fortnight later, and because he has never once mentioned that I did it.
What Elliot said in that hall.
He did not shout at Gordon. He did not shout at anybody.
He said: "Right. Thank you."
Then he said to me: "I needed you to hear it from him."
Then — and this is the thing I have not been able to leave alone — he said: "I'm not here to take him apart, Mam. He's done what he's done and he'll have to live in it."
He stayed about an hour that first evening. He would not sit down.
The clothes.
I have to put this in because of what I thought when I opened that door, and because he said it to me himself on the second visit.
I looked at him on that step — the shoulders, the plain jacket, the boots — and something in me went: he's grown out of it.
I did not say it out loud. I did not have to.
He said, in my kitchen a fortnight later: "You looked at me on that doorstep and you were pleased."
I said that I was pleased because he was there.
He said: "Mam. You were pleased about the jacket."
He had come from work. He works outside. That is all that was.
He wears what he likes, the same as he has since he was twelve, and he told me he had thought about putting something else on to come to that door and had decided against it, because he was not doing that man a favour.
I had six years of hoping for my son back and about four seconds of being glad he had come back the way Gordon wanted.
What Gordon said after Elliot went that first evening.
The hall emptied and the two of us were standing in it.
He said: "Well. Now you know."
Not sorry. Not an explanation. Three words, and he went and put the kettle on.
About twenty minutes later he said the only thing he has ever said about it that sounded like a reason.
He said: "You'd have had him back in a fortnight and we'd have been straight back to it."
He is right that I would have had him back.
He is also saying, out loud, in his own kitchen, that he took nine letters because he preferred the house with the boy out of it.
I did not say anything to that either.
That is twice in one evening. Twice in four hours, with my son gone six years and the tin on the table between us.
I have been doing that in this house since 2012 and it did not stop working on the night it all came out.
The thing I have not told anybody.
He rang me.
Not a letter. An actual telephone call, to my own mobile, on the ninth of April, 2023.
Five months after the last letter.
I answered it.
What was said.
It was four minutes and nine seconds and I have gone over it so many times I could put it down word for word, and I am not going to, because most of it is him being careful with me.
He asked how I was. He said he was all right. He said he had been writing but had stopped.
I said I had not had anything, which was true and which I said in a voice that meant I did not want to go into it.
Then he asked.
He said: "Could I come over? Just for a bit. I'd come on the bus."
I said: "Let me have a word with Gordon first, love."
What that did.
He said all right.
Then he said he had to go, and he went, and he did not ring again.
Three and a half years.
I rang that number back nine days later and it was dead. He changed it that month, which he told me in the November of this year, and he did not say it to hurt me; I asked him straight out and he answered straight out.
What I did with it in 2023.
I did have a word with Gordon.
That is the part nobody would believe. I actually did it. I raised it with him on the Tuesday evening and he said what he always says, which is that the lad knows where we are.
Then I let it go.
I did not ring Elliot back on the Wednesday to say come anyway. I did not ring my sister. I did not get in a car and drive to Garrow, which is an hour and fifty.
I waited for Gordon to come round to it, which he was never going to do, and after about a month the whole thing had turned into a thing that had already happened.
The years before the eighteenth.
I have given Gordon as the problem and he was the problem, and I am not taking one word of that back.
What I have never set out is what I actually did in that house between 2012 and 2020.
Eight years.
My method was the same every single time, and it had a name in that family before I ever admitted it to myself.
I would wait until the two of them were apart, and then I would go to Elliot.
Never to Gordon. I would go to my son, in his room, afterwards, and say that his stepfather did not mean it like that, and that he was old-fashioned, and that it would be easier if we just got through the evening.
Eight years of a woman going upstairs to ask the fourteen-year-old to be the reasonable one.
Elliot said something about it in the kitchen in the November that I have not been able to put down.
He said: "You were always on my side in my bedroom."
What I have been telling people for six years.
***He went and there was nothing. Not a word in six years.***
I have said that to my sister. To two women at my work. To my own mother before she went in the November of 2024.
My mother died believing her grandson had never once been in touch.
That is the one I cannot do anything about and it is the one I think about at four in the morning.
She asked me about him in the October of 2024, about three weeks before the end, and I gave her the same line I had given everybody.
She said: "He was a lovely lad."
Was. She said was, in a hospital, about somebody who was alive and well and an hour and fifty up the road, because of what I had been telling her for three years.
The note.
I have said for six years that he left a short note saying he could not stay in that house.
That is what it says. It is four lines on a page out of a pad and it was on the kitchen table.
There is a fifth line and it is at the bottom and it is in smaller writing, and I have never read it out to one person.
It says: This isn't about you, Mam. But you have to see it.
***You have to see it.***
Not come with me. Not do something. He was eighteen years old and what he asked his mother for, on his way out of a house at one in the morning, was that she look at what was happening in it.
I have had that note in the drawer of the unit in the hall since the twelfth of September, 2020.
I have taken it out perhaps twenty times in six years and I have always stopped at the fourth line.
I read the fifth one properly on the night the tin came in off the shed.
The eighteenth birthday.
I have had six years of Gordon saying that sentence at that table, and it is the thing everybody in my family points to.
What I have never told any of them is what I did next.
I got up and got the cake.
That is it. That is the whole of my response. My husband said that to my eighteen-year-old in front of five people, and I went into the kitchen and came back with a cake and the candles and I said something about getting the lights.
We sang. Elliot sat there and let us.
Three hours later he was gone.
The nine days in the April of 2023.
I rang that number back on the eighteenth and it was dead, and I have always had those nine days as me working up to it.
I went and looked at what else was in that week.
On the eleventh of April, 2023, two days after the call, Gordon and I went to Pellam for his brother's sixty-fifth and stayed the night.
On the fourteenth I had my hair done.
On the fifteenth and sixteenth we had the back fence done, which I remember because of the man and the van.
That is nine days of an ordinary life being got on with.
I was not working up to anything. I was waiting for the feeling to pass so that I could ring him when it was easier, and by the eighteenth it had, and so I rang — and by then he had changed the number.
Nine days. He gave me nine days and I spent them at a sixty-fifth and a hairdresser's.
If I had rung on the tenth, he would have answered.
What my sister said in the November.
She came over after it all came out and she was not kind about Gordon, which I expected.
Then she said something I did not expect, in my kitchen, with her coat still on.
She said: "Marion. I'd have had him."
I asked her what she meant.
She said: "In 2020. If you'd rung me that week and said he's got nowhere, I'd have had him in that house in an hour and so would Mam."
Then she said: "You never asked."
Three miles away. My own sister, three miles away, with a spare room, and in six years it did not once come out of my mouth.
The eighth letter.
The one from the August of 2022, asking about Christmas.
It is the longest of the nine and it is a page and a half, and most of it is him making it easy.
He offers to come for the day only. He offers to come on the Boxing Day instead if that is better. He says he will get the bus both ways so nobody has to drive.
There is a line in the middle of it that I had to put the page down over.
He wrote: I'll wear whatever you want for the day. I don't mind. It's one day.
He was nineteen when he wrote that.
He had been gone two years, he was in a flat with two other people and somebody's cat, and he sat down and offered to dress for his stepfather for a Christmas dinner.
Gordon put that letter in a biscuit tin in a shed.
I would like to be able to say I would have said no to that offer. I would like to be able to say I would have rung him and told him not to be ridiculous, that he should come as he is.
I have thought about it for six weeks and I think I would have said yes.
Why Elliot did it the way he did.
I worked this out on my own and then I asked him and he did not deny it.
He could have come to that door and said it himself. He had nine letters and a dead telephone number and a date in April 2023, and he could have laid all of it in front of me on that step.
Instead he made Gordon say the letters part.
That gave me a version where I am a woman who was kept from her son.
It is true. Gordon did take those letters and he did it for nearly two years.
It is also a version with no ninth of April in it, and my son built it on purpose, standing on my step, before he would let me touch him.
What he said when I asked him.
The fourteenth of November, in that kitchen.
I said: "You knew about the phone call. You knew that was mine and not his."
He said: "Yeah."
I asked him why he had not said it.
He said: "Because then you'd have had to go away and think about it for six months, and I've not got another six years in me, Mam."
He is twenty-four and he said that like a man reading out a delivery time.
Then he said: "And because Gordon's easier. Everyone agrees about Gordon."
The grave.
He came for my mother's anniversary and I have put that down as him turning up.
There is more to it.
He knew the date. I had not told him; it had not come up in any of the four visits and I had been working out how to raise it.
He turned up at that churchyard at ten o'clock on the correct morning, on his own, having got the bus.
When I asked him how he knew, he said: "I've always known, Mam."
Then he said that he had been in the December of 2024 as well.
Three weeks after she went. He saw it in the paper online — Welcombe is small and it goes up — and he got the bus down and stood at that grave on his own and got the bus back.
He did not come to the house. He was four streets away and he did not come to the house.
I asked him why not and he said: "Because of April."
Where things are.
Gordon is at his brother's at Pellam and he has been since the second of November, and I do not know what happens next and I am not going to pretend to.
He has not apologised to Elliot. He has said twice that he did it for the family.
Elliot has been to that house four times in six weeks. He will not stay over yet and I have stopped asking.
He came for his nan's anniversary, which I did not ask him to do, and he stood at that grave and said he was sorry he had missed it.
He meant he was sorry he had missed her.
What I did in the first month after he went.
This is the part of it I have told the most and examined the least.
I rang the police on the second day and they were perfectly decent about it and told me what I already knew, which is that he was eighteen.
I put something up online and about forty people shared it.
I rang four of his friends from school.
Then I stopped, and I have always said that the search came to an end, which is a phrase I have used about nine times and which does a particular job.
Searches do not come to an end. People stop looking.
I stopped in about the October of 2020, six weeks in.
Gordon said one thing to me that autumn that I have never repeated to anybody, because it would make him look worse and because it would make me look exactly as bad.
He said: "He'll come back when he's hungry."
I did not argue with him.
What I have told people since the October.
Everybody, is the honest answer. Within about a fortnight.
My sister, the two women at my work, Elliot's old form tutor who I ran into, the woman in the shop at Welcombe who asked after him.
It is a wonderful eight minutes. The knock. The six years. Not yet. The pointing. A tin in a shed with nine letters in it.
Not one person has come out of it badly except Gordon, and he has come out of it as badly as a man can.
A woman at my work said I should go to the police about the letters. Another one said she hoped he rotted.
The ninth of April, 2023, is in none of those tellings.
Six weeks, somewhere between thirty and forty conversations, and I have not put four words — let me ask Gordon — into a single one of them.
My son handed me that version on a doorstep so that I would not have to, and I have been using it every day since, and he has not once asked me whether I am telling it straight.
Three things Elliot has not done.
I have been keeping a kind of list, which is a strange thing to admit to.
He has not asked me for anything. Not money, not an apology, not a single explanation about why nobody came to Garrow.
He has not said one word against his stepfather in six weeks, beyond he'll have to live in it, and he has said that once.
And he has not asked me the question.
That is the one.
In six weeks and four visits, Elliot Slade has never once asked his mother why she did not come looking.
Any son would ask. It is the first thing anybody would ask.
He has not, and he is not going to, and I worked out why in that churchyard in the November.
He is not asking because he already knows the answer, and because asking would mean I had to say it out loud, and he has decided that I do not have to.
My son has been managing my feelings since he was about fourteen and he has not stopped.
The dresses.
There is a box of them in the loft of this house and there has been since the September of 2020.
I put them up there in the October, about six weeks after he went, and I have told myself for six years that I was keeping them for him.
Gordon did not ask me to do it. I want that clear; he never touched anything of Elliot's.
I did it on a Tuesday while Gordon was at work, which is the detail that gives it away.
If I was keeping them, I could have left them in his room. That room has been a spare room with his things in it for six years and nobody has ever minded.
I took the dresses and the shoes out of it and I put them in the loft, on my own, in the week I stopped looking for him.
He asked about that room on the second visit. He went up and stood in the doorway of it for a minute.
He did not ask where anything was.
And the last thing.
Something was bothering me about those letters and I could not get at it for about a fortnight.
Nine letters, the February of 2021 to the November of 2022.
Then I counted the months.
Elliot went in the September of 2020. The first letter is the February of 2021.
Five months.
He was eighteen, he was at Garrow, he had nothing, and he did not write for five months.
I asked him about it in the December, expecting him to say he had been angry.
He said: "I was waiting for you to find me."
Then he said that he had kept the same mobile number for four and a half years after he left, until the April of 2023.
May you like
The number I had had in my phone since he was fourteen.
He was eleven digits away the entire time, in a flat an hour and fifty up the road, waiting — and the first time that telephone ever rang with my name on it was the ninth of April, 2023, and it was him ringing me.
