‘No,’ Frannie said, her voice hoarse from crying, her eyes wet. Cathy stares at Joe. He’s nothing if not smart.
‘We can’t all lose everything,’ Joe said. ‘It doesn’t make sense for us to. Let me go down for it.’
‘You’ll never come out.’ Frannie turned towards him, buried her head in Joe’s chest. ‘You can’t. You’ll get fifty years. I can’t do – I can’t do fifty years without you.’
He shrugged against her, looking down at her, then across at Cathy. ‘I love you,’ he said simply to Frannie, his voice fractured and broken. ‘I love you.’
‘What’s the crime?’ Jason says now.
‘My brother, Joe,’ Cathy says. ‘I think he killed somebody on our holiday.’
74.
Now
One Hundredth Meeting with Frannie
It’s visiting hours at the hospital. My body is scanned, frisked, signed in. I have to confirm I have nothing dangerous with me. Sellotape. Pens. Knives. Drugs.
It smells of the specific smell that I know to be where my sister currently calls home. Vegetable soup. Sweat. Old clothes. Human stuff. Mundane stuff.
Frannie is waiting for me in her room. She’s sitting up on the bed in a patch of bright winter sunlight, reading a novel. She’s taken to reading at least two a week, something I’ve never really known her do in adulthood.
She has gained three stone in weight and been treated for major depressive disorder, triggered – though nobody really knows the full story – by the events in Verona. She is now almost ready for release from the institution we paid to get her into, and speaks with a wisdom, sometimes, that unlocks something for me often in the car on the way home.
‘How’s Paul?’ she says as soon as I enter the room.
‘Good – he’s good. He’s finger-painting at nursery,’ I say. And then I add: ‘It’s done.’
Frannie knows exactly what I mean. There may be triple locks on the double doors, but my sister is still – gloriously so – my sister, in here. It is not as I thought it would be. There is no heavy, sombre feeling. There is no shame or madness. Only people who have been dealt hard hands by life, by their mental health, by their brains, and sympathetic nurses trained to ease the wounds in their psyches. It is a more comforting place than most, because this is recognized and accepted and treated, not hidden away as it is elsewhere.
‘Did you look for my post?’ she says.
‘Yes, only an ASOS catalogue.’
Frannie smiles a half-smile. ‘Did you bring it?’ she says hopefully.
I toss it out of my handbag at her, and she places it very deliberately and squarely on her bedside table, like she is looking forward to it, this small treat for later. That very small and optimistic action makes something happy move around my heart and down my arms.
She’s aged in hospital. I notice it now that I no longer see her every day. She looks like a woman approaching her mid thirties. Forehead lines. Rounded brackets stretching either side of her nose to her mouth, despite the weight gain. Frannie has sacrificed her beauty to what happened in Verona.
‘Are you pleased you did it?’ she says, squinting as she looks up at me, folding out the novel spine like a butterfly across the cover of her bed.
The topic of the crime is still a tight, knotty ball that sits between both of us. ‘Yes,’ I say, looking at her. ‘It’s what he wanted.’
‘So he says.’
She stands and makes us two cups of tea. At the boiling of the kettle, the nurse outside her room turns his head just slightly, which seems to irritate Frannie.
She hands me the tea in a hot plastic cup with a quick, embarrassed smile. ‘It’ll probably bloody taste of melted plastic,’ she says.
‘Don’t worry.’
‘Do you think your testimony helped?’ she asks.
Because that’s what I was doing. I was helping, so Joe’s trial went ahead without Frannie under suspicion, like he wanted, but I was also trying to mitigate it. To explain why he did what he did. To tell the court he was of good character otherwise. We were trying to walk the line between the police believing Joe enough not to investigate but also to get them to treat him leniently. That was why it was so worrying that our statements didn’t quite match: we’d had only those few minutes in the outhouse to cook them up. Still, I hope I’ve done enough.
Frannie, who wasn’t charged for her role in burying the body because of her mental health, sits down, cradling her tea, and meets my eyes. The essence of Frannie still sits behind them. Sunny Frannie. She never lost that, in her depression. It was just masked for a while.
After Joe was taken in, and after I told the police the first handful of lies, Frannie didn’t come out of her cottage for nine days after her interview. She lost more weight. Wouldn’t answer her phone, not even to Joe on his daily call. Our parents thought she was sad for Joe. I knew exactly what the problem was, but couldn’t solve it, and sat there most evenings of that strange, surreal week worrying for Paul.
Things escalated pretty quickly after that. A mental-health professional assessed her, asked if I would have Paul for a night, which, in the way of things that feel so disturbing they must be temporary, eventually became hundreds of nights.
‘So-so,’ I say. ‘I just told everyone what happened really. The judge went through the crimes at the end.’
‘Do you think he’ll get them down to manslaughter? Do you think you helped?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What does Jason say?’
‘Nothing. He’s such a lawyer,’ I say, which is unfair, really. Though unconventional, Jason still refuses to speculate, still won’t cross certain lines.
‘He’s a hot lawyer,’ Frannie says, which almost makes me spit out my tea.
‘We’ll have to see what happens,’ I say. ‘The jury seem fair.’
I reach for Frannie’s hands across the bed. Somehow, she’s made this sterile, medicalized room smell like her. Her laundry, her perfume. She lets me touch her. Her nurse outside the door watches carefully. He’s standing on the royal-blue linoleum which we can see through the hatch-like window in her door. It looks like a lake. Frannie ignores him, but her body language changes.
‘Joe was in the wrong too, you know,’ I say lightly to her. Just trying to ease open the door to the conversation we need to have. We have circled it for so long. It’s been surprisingly easy to do so, to repress it. To make small talk, to bring Paul to see her, bearing the cookies he’s baked, to chat about the weather, the news, work.
Frannie freezes. She has gained weight in the fast, unnatural way of people recovering from something. There is fat in her cheeks and on her arms, but she looks uncomfortable with it, somehow, like an overfed baby. Her skin is pale. She doesn’t exactly look healthy, not yet. But she’s getting there.
She gets up from the bed and opens the window. I’ve been surprised by the freedoms she has, here in the hospital, under watch. It’s not as you would imagine. Frannie washes her own clothes, has visitors, open windows, gets take-out McDonald’s delivered. Browses ASOS catalogues. She isn’t restrained or overly medicated. She is just my sister, as she’s always been, closing her eyes against the open window, against the fresh spring breeze.
‘He murdered somebody,’ Frannie says, her eyes wet and wide as she turns to me. ‘As did I.’
Wood smoke drifts in on the breeze. The room quickly cools, but Frannie leaves the window open, coming to sit on the bed. ‘Do you know how it was?’ she asks me.
‘No.’
‘It was like being put into somebody else’s body.’
‘Your illness?’ I say. Blood rushes to my cheeks, not sure I’m ready for this conversation, not sure I can get it right, that I can listen and understand her, but not betray myself either.
I’ve been seeing a therapist called Stuart, who has been unpacking with me what happened with Rosie, and beyond. I’ve been experimenting with him. Working less. Observing that nothing catastrophic happens. Opening up more. Doing more t
hings. Fun things. Letting the fuck go. We all have our own mental-health demons, I think, looking across the bed at my sister. Tonight, I am going to fight mine by determinedly having fun and observing that nothing bad happens. By telling somebody, anybody, how I really feel.
‘Imagine if suddenly, everything you liked to do, you don’t enjoy any more. You don’t want to eat. Your body aches you’re so tired,’ Frannie says tentatively. ‘That is what it’s like.’
‘I know,’ I say quietly.
‘Everything was grey. It’s frightening and bewildering. You’re snappy. You feel uncomfortable in your body. There is a constant pressing sadness.’ She pushes a hand into her stomach. New rolls of fat protrude around it. ‘Right here – you can’t ignore it. Your whole mind feels like a wound. You could cry at anything. The stupidest stuff. I kept reliving what happened with Will – when I lost my temper in a way no human should.’
‘Frannie,’ I say, my eyes filling with tears. ‘I’m so sorry you went through that.’
‘You’re thinking that if the guilt was that bad, I should have just said it was me, right? Joe says he was responsible for Evan, and me for Will. Carina called the police, said she was worried by how much Joe was calling. It was almost easy, how guilty he’d made himself look.’
‘I …’ I hesitate. It has crossed my mind. Joe slickly glossed over it. Why would two people go down when one could? he says simply. But Frannie has kept her counsel on that particular issue, right up to now.
‘The truth is that I’m only just opening the windows,’ Frannie says. She looks at Cathy, a small smile of disbelief on her face. ‘You know? I had to deal with one trauma before the other.’
I nod. The windows are the perfect metaphor. ‘I know.’
We sit in silence for a few seconds, sipping the too-hot tea, not quite sure where to go next.
‘I wonder … I don’t know. I think what happened with Rosie made us, me and Joe … I don’t know.’
Frannie is nodding quickly. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I know. I’ve had enough therapy to know.’
Something lifts in my heart, even within the tragedy. A kind of space, enough to let in the light. We don’t need to go over it. The past, our actions. We don’t need to validate the others’ pain. It hangs unsaid, in the air between us, where it needs to be.
‘To call your siblings when you’ve fucked up,’ Frannie says. ‘I don’t know. That’s kind of childish. Isn’t it? To want your family to bail you out. And I was still the baby. Still a kid.’
‘You were the baby of the family because we liked you that way,’ I say. ‘Loved you that way,’ I add softly. ‘We needed a baby of the family, because we lost one. We needed you. We babied you.’
‘Yeah. But I’m not Rosie.’ Frannie’s voice is warm, her eyes crinkled. ‘You have to sometimes move on. You know? Into adulthood. Away from the flowerpot you grew up in together.’
‘I know,’ I say. Maybe we won’t live in the same row of houses together. Maybe we won’t work together. Family’s complicated, isn’t it? I go to ask for her view, for Joe’s view, on my part in Rosie’s death, and if it contributed to my slight distance from them, but then stop myself. I don’t need to. What I believe is what matters. And I believe it wasn’t my fault. That, even if it were, I’ve got to stop paying for it, or we’ll all lose another life too.
‘And thanks,’ Frannie adds softly to me. ‘I owe you and Joe …’ She touches a hand to her chest. Her breasts are ample and full again, womanly. ‘Everything.’
‘It was nothing,’ I whisper.
I scoot closer to Frannie on the bed and hold her to me, my head resting on top of hers. I feel my chest become damp with her tears, thankful tears, regretful tears. Tears of relief too maybe.
‘We love you,’ I say to her, right in her ear. She nods quickly against my ribs.
‘I know you think I should do the right thing,’ she says. I say nothing in reply; I don’t. ‘But I just can’t leave Paul. I just – I know what the right thing to do is but I just … I can’t bring myself to do it.’ She shrugs, the motion a heavier movement than it used to be. ‘It’s so easy to say you would do the right thing,’ she says, rubbing at her nose. She puts down her tea on the bed, where it wobbles precariously.
I think of those emails from Will, aggressive emails, scary emails, and of Frannie’s position as a single mother, and everything that’s happened since. Joe’s stoicism in the dock at his trial. Frannie’s weight loss, and then weight gain. The way she seemed to deliberate, sometimes, before doing things, as though they required the effort of a marathon. The way the waterline underneath her eyes was red for a year. She lost Paul temporarily in her depression, but that doesn’t mean she deserves to lose him permanently. What is justice, anyway, if not suffering?
I reach across the bed and grasp Frannie’s hand. It’s warm, where it used to be cold, even with the window open letting in the spring breeze and the sun, a sharp-and-sweet combination. Frannie grabs the throw from the end of her bed and scoots closer to me, wrapping us both up in it.
‘I think it’s time to move forwards,’ I say. ‘Don’t you?’
Frannie smiles at me, a wobbling smile that only partly resembles her old, unhindered grin, and grasps tightly at my hand. ‘Let’s,’ she says.
I squeeze her warm hands, inside the blankets. Together, our grips are encased within the kind of forts we used to make when we were little.
Tom is waiting for me in his house.
‘How was it?’ he says to me, opening his front door wide. He’s wearing a cream-coloured woollen jumper and holding a cup of half-drunk coffee. His feet are bare. ‘Made you a pot and then drank almost all of it myself,’ he says with a smile.
‘It was okay,’ I say. ‘I saw Frannie too, after.’
‘Tough day,’ he says softly.
My nose must be red from crying in the car, thinking of Frannie tucked up under that blanket. Her nurse said on the way out that she will be strong enough for release soon. That Paul will begin to spend overnights with her shortly after that.
‘Yeah,’ I say, looking into his brown eyes and thinking that I never would have done it if it weren’t for him. Who knows where they would have ended up. A worse place, surely.
‘What now?’ I say to Tom. ‘Now that it’s over?’
‘Whatever you want,’ he says. ‘Whatever you want.’
‘All rise,’ a clerk says. The jury and the judge file in. I watch from the public gallery, only a few feet but several hundred light years away from my mother and father. They say they don’t understand why I have testified against Joe, but I hope one day they will. Maybe one day we can tell them the real story. When they’re ready.
When everybody is settled, the judge addresses the jury. ‘Have you reached a verdict on all charges upon which you are all agreed?’
‘Yes,’ the foreman says. He is exactly as you might imagine a foreman. In a jacket and shirt, where everybody else is tired and casual. Glasses. I wouldn’t be surprised to spot a briefcase at his feet.
‘And have you reached that verdict unanimously?’
‘Yes.’
I stare as we wait.
They recite all the counts. Murder. Preventing the lawful burial of a body. Criminal damage. Perverting the course of justice. Conspiracy to bribe. Misappropriation of corporate assets. Fraud. Murder again.
‘On count one: murder. How do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?’
‘Not guilty.’
Joe’s head drops.
He is found guilty of preventing the lawful burial of a body, criminal damage, of perverting the course of justice, of bribery and the fraud charges. He is found not guilty of the second murder charge.
They are instead replaced with reckless driving and manslaughter by reason of loss of control.
‘A family man,’ the judge says. ‘You were driven to the edge of sanity by trying to cover up your first crime. What you did was unforgivable, hostile and violent, but it wasn’t murder
.’
The judge doesn’t know it, but he is speaking exactly the truth.
Joe’s shoulders have dropped. He’s looking directly up at me.
I see my older brother, in all of his guises. The first flash of that temper I saw when he was eleven and somebody fouled him on the football pitch. What a good, incisive vet he was, logically making his way down differential diagnoses, trying a, trying b, trying c, noticing things other people didn’t notice. That dog was licking its lips. That cat was holding its head tilted slightly to the right. Always calm in the veterinary theatre. We have had to pretend to be estranged. So that everybody would believe my evidence. The evidence that brought his charges down.
‘Please remain standing for sentencing,’ the judge says to Joe. I stand. I can’t bear to watch. I walk out of the public gallery, shuffling past my parents. I open the door to the foyer and let it close softly shut behind me.
Epilogue
It’s summer again. Cathy is in Birmingham city centre, sitting on a blanket that Tom thoughtfully brought along with him. They’re in St Philip’s Square. He’s brought strawberries and wine; she’s brought six doughnuts. ‘A mixed picnic,’ Tom says with a laugh. ‘But a good one.’
He takes a strawberry and holds it up to the light. His hair has grown in in the past few weeks. He’s forgotten to shave it, and his head is covered in a kind of babyish fuzz which Cathy finds adorable.
He deheads the strawberry and pushes it into her mouth. Cathy feels the rough texture of the seeds, the sweet bite as the flesh resists, then yields beneath her teeth.
She lies back, her head in his lap, sunglasses on, an arm across her forehead to stop her burning across her hairline. ‘Good day?’ she says dozily to him.
That Night Page 32