That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  Everything is unresolved. They’ve left it as they found it: a mess. Joe stormed off home. Cathy is alone now, wondering what the hell they’re going to do. The components of their mess orbit around her as she stands there, shivering in the darkness.

  When she feels calmer, she turns, ready to walk back inside. Only one window is lit up in their block of houses. Paul’s bedroom, the second window on the left. An egg-yolk-yellow square in the night. Frannie is leaning over his bed. Cathy can see only her thick plait of dark hair, her slender arms. Even now, in the worst of times, the love is so obvious, the smile Frannie can’t help but let tug at her features as she gazes down at him. An ironic smile, an indulgent smile, just for him. She loves him. She loves him so much. She wouldn’t survive being parted from him. She loves him so much. Even now. Even in the darkness. It’s there.

  ‘This rain,’ Cathy says, when Tom answers his door the next evening.

  ‘I know,’ he says, a hand to his chest as he reaches with the other to take her coat. ‘It’s mad.’

  ‘It’s impossible to do anything,’ she says. Her hair is soaked through from just walking from her car to his door. ‘Where’s it all coming from?’

  ‘Who knows,’ he says. ‘Never understood weather systems,’ he says over his shoulder.

  ‘So this is you,’ she says simply.

  ‘This is me,’ he says. He hasn’t brought up last night. Cathy can’t work out if he minds, but of course he did. She doesn’t know how to broach it.

  He has two ragdoll cats milling around. There is absolutely nothing on his floors. His doors are farmhouse-style, painted such a bright white they shine. It’s very tidy.

  ‘You’re very neat,’ she says as he hangs her coat on a hook. His parka and a lighter jacket hang there. Nothing else, no jumble of scarves or reuseable bags that flap around. ‘Where’s all your stuff?’

  He throws his head back and laughs in that way that he does, his face creasing like a fan. ‘Stuff’s overrated,’ he says.

  He’s cooked for her. Baked aubergines that swim in cheese as he removes them from the oven in a cloud of heat. She stares at the aubergines. It doesn’t look like this is something casual. Something fun. ‘What?’ he says, a small laugh escaping his mouth.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ she says, glancing away from them and up to him.

  ‘No, what?’ He puts down the tray and places a hand on his hip, looking at her, an amused expression on his face.

  ‘You’re, like, cooking for me.’

  ‘I am cooking for you. Would you rather I didn’t?’ He goes back to the aubergines. ‘Or what?’ he says, throwing a sidelong glance at her.

  ‘Maybe,’ she says with a small laugh. Tom looks at her. It might be the first serious long look he’s given her. Gone is the banter, the childlikeness, the laughs. In its place are a pair of serious brown eyes.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says. She rubs at her forehead. ‘I’m just mad.’

  ‘Oh, crazy is the best,’ Tom says, she thinks earnestly. He pushes away the aubergines.

  ‘Last night … I didn’t mean to … I didn’t want to …’

  ‘Come here,’ he says. She crosses the short distance between them, into his waiting arms. ‘Come up,’ he adds. They walk upstairs, their bodies joined together, a three-legged race, into his bedroom. The third – and last – door on the right. It opens on to a room painted a pale, duck-egg blue. More immaculate emptiness. More clean lines.

  ‘I like your skirting boards,’ she says.

  Tom laughs. He laughs so easily, like the laughs are queued up there waiting for him to release them. ‘My what?’ He glances at her then. It’s just a glance, but Cathy’s insides turn to burning liquid. They’re standing so close together in the doorway.

  ‘It’s all so neat and lovely,’ she says. And then she points to them, to the bright, white skirting boards.

  His curtains are open, the twilight sky beyond them. Cathy heads further into the room, thinking that they should eat the dinner, that she should go. Should, should, should. Tom crosses the room and lies down on the bed, both a clear invitation and an act of relaxation. He pats the space next to him.

  She sits, an elbow propped up on the pillow, feeling so warm and comfortable up here with him. He entwines his feet with hers, pulling her towards him. ‘What’s with the aubergine fear?’ he murmurs into her ear.

  She can’t help but giggle, and he laughs too at the absurdity of it, of her. ‘Oh, you know, just terrified of aubergines and painfully shy,’ she says lightly. She feels him nod in comprehension next to her.

  ‘Look,’ he says, ‘it’s only me.’ And that sentence is enough for her body to open up to his. They become a hot tangle of limbs immediately.

  Afterwards, Tom offers her food – ‘No aubergines, I promise’ – and drinks, repeatedly, but she doesn’t want them. Wants to lie in this warm room that smells of his clean laundry, with him. She can’t risk him leaving and coming back, upsetting the balance, this room a rare ecosystem that might change at any moment.

  ‘So last night was …’ he says. His tone is casual. He’s obviously waited hours to ask why their evening was cut short.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ she says. ‘My brother.’

  Tom messes with a cushion. Buying time, maybe. His chest is covered in deliciously dark hair.

  ‘He’s just – he’s a bit, I don’t know. Difficult,’ she says.

  Tom evidently draws a conclusion from his purchased time, but Cathy doesn’t know what it is, because he says nothing, just looks at her.

  ‘You know how you said – about us all living basically together …’

  ‘And working together.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’d never say a bad word about them,’ she says truthfully.

  ‘But …’

  ‘Well – I just wonder now. How healthy it really is.’

  Tom turns down his mouth, evidently considering what to say. ‘What do you think?’ he says eventually.

  ‘I just wonder … no – I mean. I shouldn’t gripe about them.’

  ‘I hope they’re as loyal to you as you are to them.’

  ‘I’m sure they are,’ she says softly, but she isn’t, she isn’t at all. Frannie lied to her about the crime. They keep things from her. They are the opposite of loyal. Aren’t they? As ever, sometimes the facts are clear to Cathy when set out this way, but she can’t seem to really see them.

  Cathy draws up the duvet over her as she begins to fall asleep, even though her stomach is rumbling. She and Tom are completely naked, their bodies giving off a special kind of warmth under the covers.

  ‘They are loyal to me,’ she says.

  He draws her to him and it is exquisite. The feeling of his bare, hot, smooth skin against hers. It has been worth the wait, she thinks to herself as she goes under. It has been worth all the bad dates, it has been worth wearing pyjamas for all these years.

  52.

  Now

  First Day of Trial R. v. Plant

  ‘And what, exactly, Ms Plant, if you don’t mind telling the jury, happened after the remains were uncovered?’

  ‘There was a port-mortem,’ I say. The courtroom smells of Pledge furniture polish today. The jury is silent, not even shifting in their seats, just looking at me. There is something papal about the court. The dark wood. The various signs and symbols – the justice crest, the wigs and gowns. They merge with the statues of Jesus in Verona in my mind.

  I can’t meet my family’s eyes. Mum and Dad are stoic, looking straight ahead. Joe is staring at his feet. And Frannie isn’t there – of course she isn’t.

  ‘Do you miss her?’ Jason said, a few weeks into our meetings.

  I knew who he had meant immediately. I had thought, in the past, that it would be hard to miss somebody when everything in your life had changed. If the world upended on to its side, could you still yearn for small things, a chat across the fence in the back garden before bed, a shared tea-
making session in the middle of the working day? But I now know that emotions are organic, pushing up through the soil regardless of the terrain they will meet outside. ‘Every day,’ I’d said to Jason.

  ‘You don’t feel angry,’ he’d said, in that way of his. Direct questions, direct eye contact. Lawyers might sometimes feel like your therapist, but really they only ever want to get to the centre of the thing, to absolute clarity.

  ‘No, I don’t feel angry with Frannie,’ I said, thinking back to how she started it all, and is now … well.

  Caring for her child is a curiously intimate experience. I was unprepared for the tasks that parenting Paul requires. Baths and walks and washing his tiny little clothes I expected. But not the juxtaposition of big questions – Where is the end of the earth? – and small – Do you like pegs?

  And, anyway, it’s almost impossible to feel angry with somebody when their innocent little avatar lives in your house, sleeps on a cot bed in your spare room, sometimes in your bed. Who still carries little clutches of puzzle pieces and model dinosaurs around the house with him. Who still walks a little toddler-like at times, picking up his entire feet, soles flat. Who still confuses my and mine, and it seems impossible to explain the difference to him in a way that he will understand.

  He would look nothing like Frannie if you sat them side by side. He doesn’t have Frannie’s large eyes or her big mouth. Paul is delicate. But there are similarities that I can’t even name that some days are so striking it is as if Frannie has appeared right there in the room. The way the light would hit her eyes. The shape of her frown. I can never imagine it, can only see it when it’s right in front of me.

  ‘And then what happened?’ the barrister says in a bored tone, bringing me back to the courtroom, to my family over there, the empty seat where Frannie ought to be.

  ‘They started to investigate,’ I say. ‘And that’s when …’ I take a steadying breath. ‘That’s when things started to go really wrong, I suppose.’

  I look at Joe now, his face as familiar to me as my own. That heavy brow. His braced shoulders. He’s trying to look upstanding, as he sometimes does. We’ll never be estranged, even if we never speak again, not truly. It isn’t possible for family, for our family.

  ‘Okay, so, you were all worried you would be – found out?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It was a bit of that. But it was mostly the threat of the body being found, and what would be found, that made it unravel.’

  ‘And why was that?’ the barrister says, his tone a perfectly pitched curious. He’s an actor. He knows the answer to this question. Everything is at stake for me, and nothing for him. I am a real victim caught at a murder-mystery party, and nobody will believe me about the danger. I take another big breath and steady my shaking hands in the witness box. ‘Ms Plant,’ the barrister says. ‘I have to remind you that you are under oath.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know. I know.’

  ‘Well?’

  I glance at the jury again. Roughly half men and half women. Glazed expressions. ‘It was what we did in response to the fear,’ I say.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me, Frannie and Joe.’

  I’m sure I sense a frisson as I say Frannie’s name in court.

  ‘So in what ways did the fear motivate you all?’ the barrister says. A simple question. I wonder how much the jury knows about what happened next. Is it true that they can’t have read the news about us? Or is that an American rule? Do they know that it wasn’t the police who got to us, in the end? It was ourselves.

  53.

  Then

  Lydia

  Lydia is sitting in her back garden, smoking, looking up at the dark windows of Cathy’s and Frannie’s houses. She hasn’t smoked for years, but she found Joe’s roll-ups. She needs to think, and something about cigarettes aids that process. The quiet, the breathing, the night air. An owl hoots nearby, and she looks up at it, thinking.

  Where is she in all this? That is what her old therapist would ask her. Where are you in all this, Lydia?

  It’s a valid question, Lydia thinks, staring at the seam where the cigarette meets the ash. It’s lit up bright red like a wound in the night, everything else in darkness.

  Has he considered her? Did he think of her, when he agreed to do it? Lydia frowns as she asks herself the tough questions, as she has been taught to do. Where is she in all this? The Plants are top, clearly. And then her? She can only hope for second.

  Joe arrives home. She hears the door, then watches the house light up, window by window, as he looks for her. Eventually, he arrives in the garden.

  He smells of the vets’. The twist of antiseptic lingers on his clothes. It is rendered sinister, tonight.

  ‘You’re smoking,’ he says, a question in his voice. He’s rubbed the gel out of his hair, making it fluffy and matt-looking. It must have been a bad day.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, not wanting to discuss that, not wanting to let him distract her. ‘Can I ask you something?’ she says.

  He sits down opposite her on a wooden patio chair. He’s facing her; she’s facing the house. He’s left all the lights on in the downstairs, one on in the upstairs too; an advent calendar of their life.

  ‘Okay,’ he says easily, in that way he always does, with her.

  ‘Where am I in all this?’ she says plainly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he says, predictably. Lydia lights a second cigarette and sighs. Do men ever get it on the first go?

  ‘I mean – when you answered Frannie’s call – did you think of me?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ he says, Lydia thinks honestly, ‘I only thought of you. Waking up alone, with Paul –’

  ‘But you went anyway,’ she says. ‘To rescue Frannie.’ She throws the stub of the first cigarette on to the ground. ‘That’s the thing,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I would have done that.’

  Joe is immediately defensive. Big shoulders up. Fingers drumming on the wood of the table. He goes to speak, then hesitates.

  ‘You didn’t think of the implications of it – for us,’ she says.

  ‘What are they?’ he says, his expression wounded, like a small child’s. Joe the rescuer. Lydia, for the first time in her life, wishes she could erase that quality of his, that she could focus him away from helping others and on to himself, on to her.

  ‘If you get found out – what happens?’ she says. She spreads her arms wide, the cool summer air moving across her flesh. ‘I lose you. If I get pregnant soon – then what? You’d be lost to both of us.’

  ‘I’m doing everything I can to stop that happening,’ Joe says, lurching suddenly across the table towards her, his eyes imploring. ‘Literally everything.’

  Something about his urgency frightens her. ‘Don’t be like that.’

  ‘Like what?’ he says, hurt. ‘I’m just trying to get you to see –’

  ‘But if you hadn’t picked up the call, we wouldn’t be in this position,’ Lydia says, but he’s wearing her down with his desperate expression.

  ‘How could I not pick up that call?’ he shouts. His voice is hoarse with it. ‘Fucking hell, Lyds.’ He bangs his fist on the table, which rattles.

  ‘Don’t shout at me,’ she says in a low voice, a warning tone. ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do, then?’ he says. He stands and turns around, his hands on his head, a man who doesn’t know what to do. He kicks the leg of the table, which makes her jump.

  ‘Joe.’

  ‘I’m sorry – I’m sorry.’

  ‘If you do that again, I leave.’

  ‘I’m sorry …’ He runs a hand through his hair. ‘How can I … what can I do?’ he says. It sounds rhetorical, but it isn’t. ‘You think I shouldn’t care about my sister?’

  ‘Put. Me. First,’ she says. Her hand moves almost unconsciously to her stomach. She isn’t pregnant, but she is already a mother. She knows it. The eggs are in there, waiting for their moment. Her children are out there, waiting to meet her.
She puts them first already.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Joe says. But Lydia can tell he already knows. Those intelligent brown eyes are on hers, asking her not to ask him.

  ‘Stop rescuing the kestrels,’ she says softly.

  ‘Hand her over?’

  ‘Just – just stop. She’s killed somebody, Joe.’

  ‘I can’t stop. I can’t.’

  ‘What are you even doing?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘But it’s her problem,’ Lydia says. ‘It isn’t your problem. She’s your sister. I’m your wife.’

  ‘We’re being blackmailed,’ Joe says. Lydia swallows. ‘We’re going to pay it.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Evan.’

  The word is like a cold breeze in the night. Lydia is suddenly freezing. Evan. Joe’s original cover story, back when the lies to her began. ‘Right,’ she says softly.

  ‘We’re going to pay him off.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A stake in the business,’ Joe says.

  ‘God, Joe.’ Lydia stands up. ‘I can’t be part of this,’ she says. ‘When we do have a child –’ she sees Joe’s shoulders relax at the when – ‘I can’t … I can’t have them be involved in this. This is criminality, Joe. Murders. Blackmail. Bribery. What next?’

  ‘It’ll go away,’ Joe says. ‘I said – we’re going to pay him off.’

  ‘And then what?’ Lydia says softly, looking down at him, his skin bronzed and illuminated by the lights from their house.

  ‘What are you saying?’ Joe asks, looking up at her.

  ‘I’m saying there’s a choice here,’ she says. ‘You have a choice.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘They’re the family you came from – but I’m the family you chose,’ she says.

  Joe hesitates again. Lydia can tell he’s going to say it. The breeze seems to still around them, the night holding its breath too.