Writing All Your Little Lies

When my son was 6, a local child went missing and many posters were hung up on the streets around us. My son would come home from school every day and insist that he had seen the girl on the poster and ask that we all go out searching - he couldn’t bear the thought that there wasn’t some way we could help.

The way he experienced that stuck with me and I began thinking about the effects of public campaigns on different individuals and how it’s so easy to get caught up in a collective emotions. I remembered walking through the streets of London after Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and wondered how that mass outpouring of grief would have felt in the current age of social media.

Well-publicised missing children’s cases – and not all are well-publicised – often attract many calls from members of the public, including sightings from around the world. What sort of person might make a call to an investigation team in good faith but without any really useful information? Many years ago, BT had the marketing slogan ‘It’s good to talk’ and I remember being told by staff in one of the call centres that there were regular callers who rang up just to do that. People who lived on their own or were housebound for whatever reason and didn’t have much opportunity for human contact, perhaps.

The character of Annie started take form in my mind. What would it take for Annie, living alone and socially isolated, witnessing a community pulling together to look for a missing child and desperate to join in, to put herself forward as a potential witness? And what then, if an investigating officer took her seriously? How far would she go to feel part of this mass outpouring of human emotion?

So, this is a story about loneliness and vulnerability set against a world where everyone else seems connected and how one wrong decision leads to another until the whole thing becomes too difficult to unravel. Annie has a secret too that she’s afraid will be revealed, but I wonder how many people at one time or other in their lives might make a bad decision that starts out small but has big consequences? How many of us are pulled back from doubling down on it because we are surrounded by family or friends who act as a buffer and stop us stepping into the darkness?