Lost and Found

Yesterday I lost Two of Two for the best part of half an hour. That’s a long time to lose one of your kids. He, as he will no doubt say when the story is recounted in later years, knew where he was all along.
 
It was a typical post-school Monday afternoon. A mixture of school misinformation, bowling and dance class, all with a time crunch element. I arrived at 2.45, thinking we’d have plenty of time for bowling before Two of Two had to be in jazz dance at 4.30. Turned out there was a carol concert which didn’t finish until 3.20, which I’m sure the school never mentioned, although it might have been that I wasn’t paying attention.
 
We went bowling in the local shopping mall, a few hundred yards from the school. Given that time had become shorter, we took the car. We bowled. We were rubbish. By the time we left bowling we were already likely to be five minutes late. One of Two and I legged it down the escalator to the car park. Looking back I saw Two of Two ambling behind. We got to the bottom, looked round, the wee man wasn’t at the top. Waited about five seconds, legged it up the stairs… He was gone. That quick.
 
Usually in the lose-one-of-your-kids situations, the initial reaction is maybe ninety percent it’s going to be fine, mixed with a small amount of initial panic. This, for some reason, was the other way round. He had gone so quickly, and at such an easy point for someone to have nabbed the little bugger.
 
I legged it round the supermarket element of the shopping mall, because we usually go in there. Nothing. I ran up and down like a headless chicken, all the time leaving One of Two standing at the Last Known Point of Contact which didn’t seem safe either. I legged it to the other end of the mall to see if he had his wee nose pressed up against the muffin case in the coffee shop. I legged it back. I ran outside, I ran down to the car park.
 
We’ve all asked ourselves this question at some time in our lives: if we were one of the Magnificent 7, which one would we be? Steve McQueen, cool, handsome and in complete control. Yul Bryner, authoritative and smooth. Horst Buchholz perhaps, headstrong and impetuous, but brave and true with it. Well, here I was, faced with a stressful situation, and I was Robert Vaughn.
 
A passing woman who had seen me charging pointlessly about like the Rangers midfield, suggested I try the security guard. The guy considered the facts – veeeery slooooowly – and then took me into the security control room. CCTV everywhere. It was like a movie. I didn’t want to be in a movie situation, I just wanted to be in a regular, shouting-at-my-kids situation. Then he pressed a button, gave me the microphone and told me to make an announcement over the tannoy. I was so scared at this point that I didn’t even say, ‘But I don’t speak!’ I garbled some mince to the wee man, and then legged it back out into the mayhem.
 
A mum from the school had appeared, and I dispatched her to the farthest reaches of the shopping mall. I ran around like a completely different headless chicken. I was called into the guard room to make another announcement. I ran back out and legged it once more round the supermarket. TPCKAM was on her way to the school to watch the dance class, so I called to divert her and to include her in the panic. Since I was panicking, it allowed her to be calm.
 
A guard grabbed me and said that they’d located the lad. I collapsed in a heap, picked myself up and went to find him. He took me upstairs to the bowling alley, where there was a party taking place, with twenty kids from the wee man’s school, all wearing the same uniform and matching the description I’d given. He wasn’t one of them. Ran back downstairs like a headless chicken. Panicked some more.
 
TPCKAM arrived, looking much calmer than she probably felt. I went off to the guard room to do the thing that I had put off doing, which was watch the replays of CCTV footage from the time when I’d last seen him. This was about twenty-five minutes in by now. Maybe I just didn’t want to see him being led off by a stranger. Maybe watching flashing black and white pictures of a shopping mall was too much like watching a grim story on the news. You never get shown CCTV footage when something good happens. ‘And here’s footage of Joey Barton buying his favourite pizza,' or ‘Here’s tv footage of a crowd of guys watching Scotland win the World Cup on a tele in Dixons.’ It’s always CCTV footage of people just before they get murdered.
 
While I was in the guard room flicking through images of the escalators and hoping not to miss anything, searching for some sign that I didn’t really want to find, another kid arrived at the shopping mall, saw One of Two, and said, ‘Hello, One of Two. Two of Two’s at the school.’
 
Another guard came and grabbed me and gave me the news. It was over as quickly as it had started. The guards all relaxed, safe in the knowledge that a kid hadn’t been snatched on their watch. We went to school, the wee man was sitting there wondering what we’d been up to, having been happily charging around the playground playing football.
 
What I’d been thinking: ‘Oh my God, it’s been twenty minutes without me, wherever he is, he’s going to be so scared.’
 
What he’d been thinking: ‘Gooooaaaaaaal!’
 
His logic was more or less faultless. He’d known we’d been going back to school,  (he’d forgotten we’d taken the car), and he knew it was dangerous to hang around a shopping mall on his own, and safer at school. So he walked the few hundred yards in his t-shirt in temperatures barely above freezing.
 
At least it has sorted out a couple of Christmas presents. Gadgets from the new Bond movie. For Two of Two, one of those electronic tags that Bond gets in his arm – I told him it wouldn’t be any more painful than the BCG – and for me, the mobile defibrillator, for the next time it happens.