That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  Until now. A noise in the distance. ‘What’s that?’ Joe says.

  Cathy stops, leaning on the spade. Her hands are filthy. ‘What?’ she says.

  Joe cocks his head, staring at her.

  ‘A car,’ she says.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Don’t panic.’ Cathy keeps digging, her shovel moving faster than before.

  Joe is paralysed, just listening. For sirens. For the call from the Italian police. The car’s engine gets louder as it approaches. It reaches a crescendo and then – thank God, thank God – begins to fade. Joe feels his shoulders drop in relief. Thank God it’s not near where Frannie’s fire will be.

  ‘I’m so fucking tired,’ he pants to Cathy. His hands are slick with sweat on the handle of his spade.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What are we going to tell everyone? What should I tell Lydia?’

  Cathy pauses. Her hair is everywhere, sticking to her neck. She looks mad, standing there in the grave. They both probably do. ‘You can’t tell her,’ she says. ‘Can you?’

  ‘No. The fewer people who know, the better – right?’ Joe says. ‘Plants only.’

  He always wanted to incorporate their surname into the veterinary practice, when his mother handed it over to him, Cathy and Frannie, but everybody said it didn’t work, said it sounded like a garden centre. And so instead they named it the anodyne Vets 24 – something so modern it makes his mother wince. Evan, the most senior vet who isn’t in the family partnership, is currently running it while they’re away, here, though Joe is sure they will hear all about that when they return. Evan thinks he is a real hero. Their retired mother, Maria, is helping out a couple of days a week too. Hopefully she will prop him up.

  Cathy nods quickly. ‘Yeah.’ Their eyes meet again. ‘Only us. Forever.’

  It takes another hour to finish digging. The last foot is the hardest. The soil is cool and packed, the night sky above Joe quiet and dark. Worms veer out of the sides of the hole, almost as if they are leering at him as he digs.

  Frannie’s head pokes over the edge of the grave at five thirty. She’s finished burning the blood on the road and the grass verges, and cleaned the car. She couldn’t get the dent out of the fender, she says, but Joe has a plan for that. She helps them get out of the grave, three chain-linked siblings, their hands in each other’s.

  When Cathy emerges, the sky is beginning to lighten, black to grey, dawn in monochrome. It’s still warm, the night heavily scented and close.

  ‘Right,’ Cathy says sadly. She picks up the wallet. ‘You didn’t check his name?’ she asks.

  ‘Didn’t want to,’ Joe says.

  He watches her run her fingers over the embossed name on a credit card. ‘Mr W. R. McGovern,’ she says softly. She finds his driving licence. ‘William. He’s thirty-one.’

  ‘Was,’ Frannie says, casting a glance at Joe.

  ‘Was,’ Joe echoes.

  Frannie leans back over William R. McGovern, aged thirty-one, as if blessing him. When she sits back, her forehead is anointed with blood. The grave dug, Cathy leans over and closes his eyes with the very tips of her fingers.

  8.

  Now

  Jason’s Office, mid February, 5.55 p.m.

  Jason and I are standing outside his office in the cold. He is shifting from foot to foot, wanting to head off, I guess, to wherever it is that he goes. He rushed me out with him at ten to six, but seemed to want to keep talking, asking me questions in the lift on the way down and as we crossed the shabby foyer, trying to make the most of the time given.

  ‘Before I go,’ he says for the second time, lighting a cigarette wordlessly, without explanation or excuse, ‘still no contact with the others?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Right,’ he says, flicking the end of the cigarette, evidently thinking as he breathes out two columns of blue smoke from his nose. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Well. Not what I expected,’ he says with a brief shrug. ‘Families – you know. They usually find it hard to sever the ties.’ His eyes catch mine, the tip of the cigarette a small sun in the descending winter murkiness. ‘No matter the circumstances,’ he adds.

  It’s strange to be continuing our session out here, in the dark frost, but I like talking to Jason and his clear mind so much that I find I don’t care. ‘You walking that way?’ I say, gesturing to the direction he always goes in.

  ‘Yeah. I’m almost late,’ he says, rotating his wrist to check his watch. I nearly ask then but stop myself. The relationship is one way: must stay so, for it to work. I confide my secrets to him, but get nothing in return. He is objective and me subjective, upset and wounded by the loss of my family, my estrangement from Mum and Dad, even from Joe.

  We fall into step beside each other. It’s the wrong direction for me, but that doesn’t matter. I have nowhere else to be, not really, not right now.

  ‘You know, I’m actually not surprised they haven’t been in touch,’ I say, as we pass a pound shop just closing for the night, navy-blue shutters noisy and crass in the soft mist.

  ‘No?’ Jason prompts, not seeming to mind the overrun of our session.

  ‘No. They just …’ I think of Joe, in particular, and how everything fell apart. My role in it, his role in it, the way he looked at me the night it all unravelled. It was the night that everything got discovered, just not in the way we thought it would be. ‘I think … probably …’ I say hesitantly, ‘I just think they actually only thought about themselves, in the end.’

  Jason lets out a sad laugh into the winter air as we come to a set of traffic lights. He jabs the button with his index finger and the WAIT sign illuminates his hand orange for just a second. I look behind me, back to his building, and at the side-by-side set of footprints we’ve made in the frost.

  ‘You know,’ he says, throwing a sidelong glance at me, ‘I have family who are just the same. It isn’t you. It’s them.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, not knowing quite how to convey the meaning to him, my confidant. We cross the street in silence and Jason curves us around to the left, down an alleyway lined with rubbish bins and out into a small square.

  ‘This is me.’ He looks up at a sixties-style brown building. It has small square windows, wooden cladding, like an old high school or sports centre. It’s unmarked, no sign telling me what it is. I look at it curiously and hope he takes the hint. ‘Until next time,’ he says, two fingers on his right hand touching briefly to his forehead, a semi-salute. He heads inside, pushing a dark-wood door with a letterbox across it, messenger bag slung across his body, and leaves me in the cold.

  9.

  Then

  Cathy

  Much like a return journey seems to take less time than an outgoing, putting the earth back over William is an easier task than it was digging it out. Cathy is amazed she is capable of thoughts like this, monstrous thoughts about the administration of killing, but the adrenaline has run out. The panic can’t sustain itself. It is a firework with no gunpowder left. Her shoulders and arms scream with pain. Anxiety is Joe’s Achilles heel, but Cathy’s will be guilt. With each layer of soil that suffocates William McGovern, Cathy thinks of something else he is deprived of. A funeral. His family of knowledge. An ending, a proper ending, with respect, not this.

  At seven thirty, Frannie says, ‘Paul will be awake.’

  ‘Lydia will sort him,’ Joe says. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Go, if you want,’ Cathy says to Frannie. ‘Lydia will be wondering – well. It isn’t fair.’ She tucks a strand of hair back into her bun, where it pulls tight against her hairline.

  ‘How are we going to get in without Lydia seeing us like this?’ Frannie says hoarsely. She gestures to them, to their dirtied and bloodstained limbs. Cathy shrugs, trying to stay in the now.

  ‘I think that looks undisturbed,’ Joe says, standing and looking at the grave in the woods. Cathy stares at it. It is impossible to tell. Like a hidden object,
her eyes are drawn immediately to it.

  Her younger sister stares too. Frannie, whom she’s always known so well, who had a baby after a one-night stand and never bothered to look up the man again. Cathy’s always known exactly who she is. Outwardly confident, sociable Frannie. But now … Cathy suddenly feels, there in the woods, like they don’t know each other at all. A stranger stands next to her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cathy says quickly to Joe. ‘Do you think it looks okay?’

  ‘It’s fine. I think. We need to put the spades away.’

  ‘Were they clean?’

  Joe exhales. ‘I can’t remember.’

  Frannie is silent, standing next to them. She’s looking at her phone. Worried about Paul, Cathy guesses.

  ‘They were clean,’ Frannie says, glancing up.

  ‘No – I don’t think they were …’ Joe says. ‘Why would they be? They’re for gardening.’

  ‘Just run the hose over them,’ Cathy says. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  They walk away. Cathy tries not to think of William lying there, seven feet under, alone. The sun has come up. The sky is a perfect, delicate blue. If you threw up a ball, it would shatter.

  After a few minutes, Joe stops still on a lattice of tree roots. ‘What if he wasn’t dead?’ he says.

  ‘What?’ Frannie says, a harsh, loud exclamation in the early morning. ‘Joe, honestly.’

  ‘He was dead,’ Cathy says reassuringly. Joe blushes.

  Funny how anxiety manifests itself. Joe once became convinced he’d left a surgical instrument inside a great Dane. Cathy had been present at the operation – there was no way it could have happened – but, nevertheless, Joe had wanted to open her back up. In the end, they’d compromised on an X-ray, which had shown nothing, of course.

  She sees Joe’s chest rise and fall slowly. ‘Okay,’ he says slowly.

  ‘Let me see that piece of paper,’ Cathy says. Joe passes it to her. It’s illegible. Some sort of form, all in Italian. She looks at Frannie, ready to explain why they took it and the wallet, but she is lost in her own world, wandering haphazardly, staring up at the sky, lost in thought, lost in guilt, probably. Hopefully. Hopefully not just daydreaming.

  ‘We need to think,’ Joe says, as they walk. ‘We need to think.’

  As the three of them step into the sunlight, Frannie reaches for Cathy’s hand. They wind their fingers together. The shovels clink against each other in the silence.

  The blood on their skin and clothes looks even worse in the daylight. ‘We’ll have to throw everything we’re wearing away,’ she says quietly.

  Frannie nods. ‘We can go in the back way,’ she says.

  Cathy can’t wait to shower. To slough off the dirt and blood and the history of it from her skin, the steam warm and wet in her lungs as she breathes it in. And then she can’t wait to work, to forget the world around her, to lose herself in admin.

  But, first, they must make sure this is sorted, covered up.

  The clothes. The blood. The car. Alibis. CCTV. DNA. Forensics. It seems so endless to Cathy, walking next to her siblings, their faces squinting into the sun.

  She turns her mind to the first thing. Because this isn’t over. It’s actually just beginning. This is the first day, in a whole lifetime of lies.

  10.

  Lydia

  Lydia has become crazy about – of all things – the precise meaning of first-morning urine. That is her first thought as Paul wakes her up. He does it in exactly the way Frannie said he would when she briefed her and Joe. ‘More an angry, hungry shout than a cry,’ she had said drily. It had been one time – of many – when Lydia had wanted to be like Frannie. A single mother, still seeming to enjoy parenthood. Still wry. Still groomed, glossy, the same as all of the Plants. Dark hair, skin that tans easily, unusually bright eyes.

  It’s 5.55 in the morning. So does this count as first-morning? Or is it still the night? What exactly is the idea behind first-morning urine anyway?

  Lydia has been pleasantly surprised to find that – unlike the art of conception – looking after a two-year-old overnight has been quite simple. Paul hadn’t woken up at all and now, as she looks at him standing indignantly upright in the cot, he’s thoughtful, his face a perfect facsimile of Joe’s. It would be so easy to pretend for a second that he is theirs, but Lydia doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to muddy the future with fantasies.

  Paul smiles to himself, as he often does, as if remembering something deep in the past that made him laugh. She has noticed this week that he has an actual formed personality, something she wasn’t sure most toddlers had. He pretends he is a dinosaur when he eats. Broccoli because brachiosauruses ate from trees. Fish fingers because spinosauruses ate fish. He knows a handful of words, and almost all of them are the names of dinosaurs. ‘He can’t say yes but he can say velociraptor,’ Frannie said yesterday in a restaurant, while they all laughed.

  Lydia picks him up and holds him to her hip, his soft bare feet dangling down and hitting her thighs. Hazy from sleep, she turns towards the bed, in the dimness from the heavy curtains, and squints. Where’s Joe?

  She changes Paul’s nappy while he gazes up at her, completely trusting. His thighs are cold and cushiony, delightful, the texture of a blancmange. Lydia presses a finger into his calf, watching the perfectly smooth skin yield and release. One day she might have one of these, she finds herself thinking, as though he is an object or coveted possession. She hopes her baby is as nice as Paul.

  And today’s the day. First-morning urine.

  She checks her phone, but there’s nothing from Joe. He must have gone to breakfast earlier than usual. It is strange for him – he’s the night owl, she the lark. But in some ways she isn’t surprised. It is not possible, Lydia learns over and over again, for an in-law to be truly knitted into the fabric of the Plant family. They shoot the breeze together, share bottles of wine, but she isn’t quite invited into the true intimacy: the sun-lounger confiding sessions she sometimes overhears between Frannie and Cathy. The spontaneous trips into Verona she’s implicitly not invited to. The late-night swims.

  Anyway. Lydia is now tasked with the juxtaposition of taking a pregnancy test and looking after a toddler. She sets Paul on the floor in the bedroom and unwraps the packet, scrutinizing the plastic stick.

  Each test is £15.99, and Lydia’s bought hundreds of them. Like, actual hundreds. Picked up casually, these days, with milk and bread. She tries not to visit the same checkout twice, in case she gets put on some sort of watch list.

  The sky outside the window is lavender-coloured. Lydia stares at it as she wees on the stick, listening out for Paul.

  ‘Paul?’ Lydia had exclaimed when she had received the text from Joe on the labour ward. ‘Come visit! Now!’ he added.

  Joe’s verve, his vigour. That’s what Lydia remembers thinking that night as she drove to the hospital. The world was out there for them, if they wanted it, and Joe was the one who could help her get it, even if the world on that day was just a hospital Costa, cuddles with a baby and an evening car ride. It all added up. She didn’t even mind that he’d insisted on living near his sisters. Didn’t mind that no private occasion, involving only Lydia and Joe, not even wedding anniversaries, were off-limits. That was family, Lydia figured.

  So first-morning urine, then. Eighteen periods since they started trying. Nothing. Not even a weak positive, even once. No chemical pregnancy. No period a day late. Nothing. It’s almost laughable.

  But today. Day twenty-four. She stands up, flushes the toilet, leaves the stick on the windowsill and picks up Paul.

  This would complete it. It would. She sends out a bargain to the universe. ‘I know,’ she says, ‘that I have had so much good lately. So much sun. But haven’t I sacrificed?’ Not a single drop of wine has crossed her lips in a week and a half. She’s been meticulous with the sun-cream. No fish. Going way beyond the NHS’s advice. Because, you know. Why not?

  Lydia does know – she reall
y does – that she shouldn’t look at the test early. She knows too that, if there is a God, he won’t be interested in bargaining with her about how much Italian wine she’s turned down, citing tiredness, faked hangovers and antibiotics. Everybody probably thinks she’s already pregnant, but the truth is that she’s lost her mind.

  Sod it. She will just look. The time is almost up. She jiggles her leg nervously.

  Seriously, where is Joe? She opens the door to the bathroom. Paul reaches for the handle – he loves door handles. Anything he can pull. He also loves to remove the entire contents of a drawer and put it back again.

  Lydia brought six pregnancy tests with her to Italy. This is the sort of thing she means: there is no situation that, in two weeks, would warrant six pregnancy tests, but here she is. The stick is on the windowsill, three distended globules of urine next to it, shining in the morning sun. She holds Paul against her hip and creeps towards the test, still bargaining, then peers at it.

  Not pregnant.

  The words are an offence to Lydia, who has tried so hard, who has been so patient, so stoic, even able to laugh at how insane it’s driven her. But these words. They are as traumatic as HR have requested a meeting and Your hospital test results are back.

  Her period is due tomorrow. It’ll be right on time.

  Joe isn’t at breakfast. It’s after eight. Lydia has texted him twice, called three times, texted Frannie, eventually too, though she felt like a pain. God, Frannie is such a flake: the texts are undelivered. One tick on WhatsApp.

  She stands in line for breakfast, thinking. She’s trying to pretend to Paul, who has his small, warm hand in hers, that she’s not worried, but she is. She worries about Joe all the time. She knows that she can never detach his volatile core from all of the things she loves about him – his dedication to work, his loyalty to her – but, nevertheless, she wishes she could. If he is home late – or not at all, in this case – her first thought is that he is fighting. Joe has kicked lamp-posts in her presence, punched Italian men in bars, shouted at bouncers in clubs, told parking attendants to piss off. And he regrets it. He always regrets it. That’s the weirdest thing. The stupidest thing.