The longing for the girl snapped in Morocco to be Madeleine McCann rippled round the world. This story has taken so many twists and turns, many of them savage, but it has always been underpinned by a hope, however remote, that the child may still be alive. So it is heart-breaking to learn that the pictured girl is, in fact, a blonde Berber called Bouchra Benaissa. One can only imagine the new misery suffered by the McCanns themselves as yet another dawn proved to be false. They must wonder each morning how many varieties of Hell are left for them to be put through.
I was reminded of a passage in Ian McEwan’s brilliant but (if you are a parent) almost unbearable novel, The Child In Time, in which the central character, Stephen Lewis believes that he spots his daughter Kate, three years after her abduction when she was three, and chases the girl frantically into a school:
Of course, as the reader has long guessed, the child is not Kate at all.Stephen was thinking about Kate’s spirit, how it might hover high above London, how it might resemble some kind of brilliantly coloured dragonfly, capable of unimaginable speeds, and yet remain perfectly still as it waited to descend to a playground or street corner to inhabit the body of a young girl, infuse it with its own particular essence to demonstrate to him its enduring existence before moving on, leaving the empty shell, the host, behind.
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