In Which I Lose My Child. Again.

“Yeah,” I say to Z. “It’s too cold to walk a mile in this. Let’s catch the Metro…”

After our chilly arrival, we are beginning to, umm, warm to Sofia a little.

Or, at least, to accept that, given we only have a day here (I hate travelling fast), we should get out of our pyjamas, abandon our warm room and check out some of the city’s amazing churches, and possibly a museum or two to boot.

At the bottom of the stairs, I turn into the subterranean shopping precinct where lies the Metro. “This way,” I say to my son.

Or, more accurately, to the empty, Siberian air.

Because, as I turn to Z, I realise that he isn’t there.

My son is not beside me. He is not behind me. He is not in front of me.

He has vanished. Disappeared. Vamoosed. Done a bunk.

“Z!!!!” I yell.

Answer comes there none.

Now, when it comes to losing children, as you may recall, I have form. I awoke from a sleepover in Bali last year to find I had misplaced a child. The year before, I achieved the difficult feat of leaving poor Z on an international ferry.

The funny thing is how much calmer I am now about what is, I figure, every travelling parent’s worst nightmare, than I was a couple of years ago.

My immediate response, in fact, is not fear or panic, but a wave of irritation bordering on fury.

The shopping precinct, you see, is lined with souvenir stores, most of them, no doubt, selling axes, daggers and even swords. I therefore assume that my son is in one of these, questing, as ever, for something as lethally sharp as the machete he wielded in Indonesia.

I do a swift circuit. No sign.

I go round again, peering balefully through the glass of each and every souvenir stall.

I head back out to where I last saw Z, or think I saw him, anyway.

“Z!!!!” I yell.

No response.

B*gger, I think. What do I do now?

I consider panicking, and decide against it.

Z has navigated himself across Hong Kong, not to mention rural Laos and Bali, taken himself to the shop unescorted in most South-East Asian capitals, and negotiated mainland Chinese roads.

He is confident being left alone for long stints of time, and has a healthy sense of street smarts.

As demonstrated in a Thai bus station, aged nine, when he returned from a trip to the shop to say, “Mum. The man in the shop said something weird, and I thought I should tell you. He said, ‘I love you so much. You can have anything you want…'”

Now, even though I know damn well that stranger abduction is vanishingly rare, I still subscribe to the media terrors on the matter.

In an average year in our home country, Britain, about 5000 children will be killed on the roads; fewer than 20 will be murdered by a stranger.

I try and imagine what sort of perfect storm of circumstance, opportunism and street smarts failure could lead to Z’s abduction.

I fail.

He has clearly not been abducted. Had he in some atypical brainstorm run out into the road and been hit by a car, I would have seen and heard the ambulance.

So WHERE THE HELL IS HE?

I descend from the place where I think — I hope! — we last saw each other towards the Metro to which I think — I hope! — he knows we were headed.

I yell some more. I do another circuit of the precinct. I head back up the stairs and yell a bit more.

Nothing.

I begin to feel rather alone. As in, in need of an adult to bounce ideas off about what, precisely, I do next.

Not to mention an adult that I could leave at a fixed rendezvous point while I went off scouting further afield. (Two-parent families have it easy in this regard.)

I haven’t kept good track of time, but I figure we’ve been separated for well over half an hour, which means that Z might well be starting to panic…

Right, I decide. I’ll head to the Metro, explain the situation to the station staff, and get them to grab him if he comes past.

One small problem. I don’t speak Bulgarian.

“Do you speak English?” I ask the lady at the Metro in high school Russian.

The lady shrugs and shakes her head. It is a Slavic shrug, not a Mediterranean shrug. A sh*t-happens-and-it-happens-a-lot-round-here shrug, not a mais-madame-je-suis-désolé shrug.

“Do you speak Russian?” I ask in high school Russian.

“A little,” she says.

EXCELLENT, I think. But I cannot remember the word for ‘child’ for the life of me.

I have a stab at English.

She *really* doesn’t speak English.

The only language that bubbles up from the linguistic soup in my poor brain which might conceivably work in Bulgaria is German.

There are two main problems with this. The first is that I don’t speak German: like Spanish, I basically make it up and hope. And the second is that the woman will probably think I’m German and, given she’s in her 50s, most likely hate me for it to boot.

“Sprechen-sie Deutsch?” I ask, hopefully.

She shrugs again.

I make frantic child-height waving gestures as I embark on a bloody massacre of the language of Goethe and Schiller: “Ich nicht habe meine kinde. Ich habe meine kinde gelosst.”

The lady’s capacious, potato-fed bosoms lift in quite the most expansive shrug to date, accompanied by a distant hum that, I imagine, is Goethe spinning in his grave. She casts a weary arm around the Metro. “Nicht hier,” she says.

Well, yes, I think. Precisely. He is, indeed, not here.

I flannel for more German. The relevant vocabulary emerges from my brain in French, Chinese and, finally, Indonesian.

Not a great deal of help in this neck of the woods, really.

Though she MAY, of course, grab my child if he passes by. You never know.

Anyways, I figure, it’s one way to pass the time before my next patrol. To where I did — I did, really, didn’t I? — see Z last.

I pace back up to the top of the steps.

Right, I say to myself, purposefully, in the manner I might say it to a sentient companion with whom I was making plans.

Z is going to do one of three things. Wait for me where he last saw me (here, I hope). Go to the Metro where he knows (I hope) I am going and wait for me there. Or (oh god) try and work his way back to our hotel.

He knows, of course, the name of the place we’re staying at. I’m not sure, however, he knows the street address. Or, for that matter, the route back.

Well, I figure. I’ll give him another half hour hanging around here and the Metro. If I don’t find him here or at the Metro, I head back to the hotel. And if he’s not there…

Well, I guess, if he’s not THERE I throw myself on the tender mercies and linguistic competencies of the folk at the guesthouse and… file a police report, I guess.

Ulp.

I head back down into the Metro to pace and yell. By way of variety, I head back up to the stairs to pace and yell some more.

And then I hear it. Faint, high-pitched and in the distance: “Mum?”

Am I hallucinating? Is it a Bulgarian child?

“Z?” I yell.

He stumbles towards me, out of the snow, in the manner of a polar explorer headed for a food cache, with an expression that combines dazed bewilderment and relief but not, I am pleased to note, any sign of panic.

I’m so hugely relieved that he’s a) alright and b) not upset that I slip seamlessly into livid rage and proceed to make him so.

“Where the F*CK were you?!” I hiss.

“The sun was in my eyes,” he says. “I couldn’t see you… I was over there…”

I take a deep breath. “Were you worried?” I say.

“Not really,” he says. “In fact, the only thing that’s worried me has been you YELLING at me, just now. I just thought that you’d be up here, or in the Metro, and if I didn’t find you soon I’d go back to the hotel and wait for you there.”

“That’s very sensible,” I say.

“I left you a note in the snow,” he says. “We’d better go and rub it out in case some other mum sees it.”

He did as well. Pure genius.