What You Did

by Claire McGowan

  He put his arm around Cassie, shielding her, and she shrugged him off. ‘Dad, what’s going on? What did you do?’

  ‘Not now, darling, please. We’ll talk at home.’

  Together we got our daughter out through the crowd, who were all the while shouting my name. I was panting, sweating into my heavy dress. I heard Mike say, ‘Jesus Christ,’ and then the court officers were pushing people back, clearing a path for us.

  ‘The car’s on London Road. Get her there!’ From the corner of my eye, I could see Karen and Jake standing on the road outside, by the bushes. She looked stooped, devastated, as if she’d aged ten years overnight. I wondered how they would travel home, if they’d have to get the Megabus again, or if they would stay in town. She spotted me, and I saw my name in her mouth. Calling out to me, maybe. Asking for help, or trying to explain herself. Part of me wanted to run to her, take her in my arms like she’d done for me so many times, get her away from all this. But I remembered what the police said about harassment. And what Mike had told me. Having sex in my house. And so I turned my back on her. I remember that very clearly. If I hadn’t, if I’d kept my eye on her or even gone over and asked was she alright, ignored the official advice and just been her friend instead of the wife of the man she’d accused, then maybe what happened next would not have occurred. Maybe everything would be different now.

  I was pushing my way along the road to the car, head down, focusing on Cassie and Mike beside me, when I heard the running footsteps. I turned, saw Jake flying at us. I’d never seen him run before. I heard Karen shout something – I don’t know what. I saw what Jake had in his hand.

  Mike saw it too, and his instinct, as I think mine would have been, was to protect our child. He threw himself in front of Cassie, and so when Jake reached us, still running fast, sobs trapped in his throat, the knife he was holding went into Mike’s side. I saw the flash of it in the morning sun. I saw the effort it took for Jake to push it in, through the layers of suit and shirt and skin and flesh. It was horrific, and I felt bile in my throat. The knife was sticking out of Mike, red blotting his shirt, and he fell down, putting one hand out to catch himself, then crumpling, as if all the strength had gone from his arm. His head hit the kerb. Jake was shouting, ‘You bastard, you bastard, you hurt my mum, you hurt her . . .’ Cassie was screaming, shielding her dad now, flailing at Jake with her bare hands. The knife was in Mike’s side – and now I recognised it, the black rubber handle. It was my own, one of the Japanese set I kept wicked-sharp. Jake must have taken it from our kitchen.

  All of this happened in a matter of seconds. Then there was a flash of reflective jacket, and the court officers were there, one holding Jake by the arms – he was sobbing, no resistance in him – and the other kneeling over Mike, on his radio for an ambulance. I remember there was blood on the tarmac and on Cassie’s shirt. I remember that I turned, frozen and disbelieving, and I looked down the hill at Karen. But the sun was in my eyes, and I couldn’t see her face.

  1996

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I hissed. I’d hoped it was all some horrible misunderstanding, but no, there was my dad’s old Ford Focus outside the lodge, and I could already see the irate porter marching out to tell him you couldn’t park there.

  Dad looked old and tired and my ears almost popped at the dissonance of seeing him there in his beige anorak, when just paces away, on the jewel-green lawn, my friends were drinking Pimm’s and lolling in the sun. ‘What? I’ve come to fetch you home.’

  ‘It was tomorrow, Dad! Not today!’

  Anger creased his brow. ‘I’ve not got time tomorrow, I’ve an extra shift on.’ He managed the bar in a working men’s club, something that Callum and Mike always teased me about. Does your dad have ferrets down his trousers, Al? Does he sup ale and eat gravy? I smiled along but it wasn’t funny. It was my life.

  ‘But tonight’s the ball! I can’t come home now.’ My mind was racing ahead. I hadn’t packed my room up yet – it would take ages to peel all the posters down – maybe I could send him off with some of the bulkier stuff then get the coach back . . .

  He turned off the engine and got out of the car. The porter had retreated after I waved him away apologetically. I stepped back as Dad reared up beside me, shock flashing through my head. He wouldn’t . . . not here . . . surely. Then his hand was gripping my upper arm, hurting the sunburned skin. ‘Stop this bloody nonsense. I’ve driven six bloody hours to pick you up, spoiled little bitch that you are, and you’re giving me this about a ball? Grow up, Alison. You’re back in the real world now. Real people have jobs, they don’t swan about in ball dresses.’

  I pulled away, noticing the marks of his hand on my arm. ‘I’m not coming with you.’ My voice was one I hated, the one that always came out of my mouth when I spoke to him. Pinched and scared. Not Ali the Oxford student. Ali the frightened little girl.

  ‘You have to. Your mother needs you, she’s not well.’

  ‘Why, did you break her arm again?’

  He didn’t answer but I saw anger streak across his face and knew I was right, or close to it. And I knew what that would mean. A summer doing all the cooking and housework, a summer back in Tesco if I was lucky. I knew that, if I did go home, the town would suck me in, just as it had my mother. I would never leave.

  ‘I’m not coming.’ My voice was louder. I was on home turf. I did belong. He couldn’t hurt me here, in front of the college lodge.

  His voice went dangerously quiet, like the noise of air rushing out before a hurricane strikes. As a child, that was the most terrifying sound I could imagine. ‘If you don’t get your arse into this car, Alison, you can forget about coming home. Ever again. Support yourself, if you’re such a big woman now.’

  Fear gripped me. I was twenty-one, how could I support myself? I had nowhere to live and no job lined up, no way to even move my things out of Oxford. But I made myself raise my chin. ‘Fine by me. Guess you’ll be driving back alone.’

  His slap took me by surprise, though it really shouldn’t have. He’d been hitting me since I was five years old, and my mother for as long as I could remember. A small mewling sound escaped my mouth. As the sting spread out across my face and my eye watered and blurred, I remembered the way my mother used to take her slaps and punches. Hunching her shoulders, closing her eyes, accepting it as her due. As if staying very still and quiet would make him stop. As if she somehow deserved it. And I resolved: I would not be like that. I set my shoulders and made myself look at him, though my eye was swelling already. How would I cover that, for the ball? ‘You’re an embarrassment. Just fuck off, Dad. I don’t need you any more.’

  As I turned to go to my room, I saw Karen standing in the gateway to the lodge, watching the entire thing, her eyes wide with horror. And it was her I went to, and she pulled me into a fierce hug and whispered in my ear, ‘You don’t need him. He doesn’t define you.’ Then she shepherded me back to my room before anyone could see I was crying, helpless jagged sobs, and calmed me down with booze-spiked tea, held ice to my face and covered it with make-up, did my hair and helped me get dressed so that when she was finished, you couldn’t tell what he’d done to me. You couldn’t even see the cracks.

  Karen has always maintained Martha Rasby was on the lawn that day too. She must have been. Everyone was there, soaking up the heat and the last time we’d all be together. But as I got up to go, passing from the light into the dark, I have no memory of seeing her among the faces on the lawn, turned up to the sun like daisies.

  Likewise, I do not remember seeing her at the ball at all, packed as it was, a whirl of silks like the ball at Twelve Oaks in Gone with the Wind. I suppose it was unseemly, the way we all jostled to be part of her story, a story that began sometime that night, or maybe months or even years before it, when she first arrived at college perhaps, with her smile and long netballer’s limbs and her Nordic blonde hair that was almost white. Maybe girls like Martha are doomed from the moment they’re born, or the day they grow
breasts. She had even more glamour after it – tragic, doomed, beautiful. The press adored it. It had the quality of a locked-room mystery, even, though the college was quick to play that down. Although it was only our students at the ball, they insisted anyone could have climbed over a fence or wall or hedge. Anyone could have come across Martha alone in the Fellows’ Garden, in her white silk dress – and who else would have dared to wear white? I had ketchup stains on my own precious ballgown within an hour. It did not have to be a member of our college, the upstanding young men who in a few short weeks would be in offices and suits, would be bankers and lawyers and brokers, set for life. It did not have to ruin anyone else’s life, what happened to Martha. And how sad, to be so drunk that this kind of thing happened to you. To let it happen, like standing out in a lightning storm, as if no one else had control over what they did to you, not when you were so pretty you were like a walking wound.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Bill met us at the hospital, and I’d never been so relieved to see anyone in my life. It was hard to explain. When I caught sight of him in the waiting room, leaning forward in the seat in his leather jacket and jeans, his shaggy hair around his ears, I knew he would help me, as if I was eighteen again and going to him for advice with essays and tutors and things Mike had said to upset me.

  He saw me. ‘Christ, what happened?’

  I ran to him, breathing in his smell of soap and leather. I forgot Cassie was there, I think. I sort of fell into him, clutching his arms. ‘He stabbed him.’

  ‘I know.’ Gently, he detached himself and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘Cassie, are you alright?’

  She was white, her top still smeared with blood. ‘It’s – it’s Dad’s. It’s not mine.’

  ‘Have they brought him in?’ My eyes were swivelling, looking for a doctor or anyone to ask. The ambulance had come so quickly, within minutes it seemed, and the paramedics said to follow them straight over. Everyone was so calm. It was amazing, really. Here was the worst moment of my life, terrible seconds crowding on top of each other until it seemed things could hardly get worse, and there they were in their reflective coats, the ambulance and court officers and the police, putting it all calmly back together just as fast as we kicked it to pieces.

  ‘Let’s go and see, shall we.’ It occurred to me that Bill was one of those people. The ones who put things back together, who helped in a crisis. Who made meals and washed dishes and held hands. On top of all the other feelings, I was hit by a terrible regret that we’d lost each other, that I hadn’t seen him in so long, not since Jodi and Callum’s wedding, where even then he’d ignored me most of the night. My fault, like so much else. But I couldn’t think about that now.

  We made our way to the reception desk, which was crowded with people looking lost and confused. Legs propped on chairs and rags clutched to heads. A man in the corner was raving to himself, facing the wall. The receptionist, a middle-aged woman with thick blonde streaks in her hair, looked cross. ‘You’ll have to wait. You’ll have to wait. Have a seat. Have a seat.’ She said it over and over, till the words seemed to lose all meaning.

  When we’d fought our way to the front, I said, ‘Mike Morris?’ Fully expecting to be told the same. But instead her gaze lifted from the computer screen. She picked up her phone and murmured into it. It sounded like the wife’s here. And the trails of fear were back, like snails crawling down my skin.

  I turned to Bill. ‘Keep Cassie out here.’ He nodded. Then there was someone at my elbow, a doctor in green scrubs, or maybe not a doctor, maybe a nurse. I didn’t know how to tell.

  ‘Mrs Morris? Can you come with me please?’

  The hospital was full of activity, in that hushed controlled way. I tried to be comforted by it, by the soothing tone of the doctor or nurse’s voice, the beep of machines and swish as we pushed through automatic doors. He was saying something: ‘. . . husband was quite badly injured . . .’

  ‘Is he alright?’ My voice was too loud but I couldn’t seem to control it.

  ‘He’s stable for now. I’m afraid there was extensive damage to his liver where the knife went in. He also has a head trauma, from where he fell on the pavement.’

  ‘Is he awake?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. We’d try to keep him under in any case. He’ll need a head CT but we’re waiting for the neurologist to come in. Busy weekend, you know. We’re a little backed up.’

  I followed dully, waiting to be told where to go, where to sit. It was easier in a way, surrendering like this. I remembered it from being in hospital having the kids. The comfort of it, giving up all responsibility for yourself. Mike was being looked after, capable strangers putting their hands on his body, cutting off his expensive suit. But still I was afraid.

  Behind the scenes was chaos. In three cubicles doctors were working fast, and I saw a child struggling and screaming on a bed, her arms livid with burns, and on another an emaciated young woman, machines beeping round her as doctors pressed on her chest. She looked no older than Cassie, but her legs were marked with sores and cankers. A drug addict, I told myself. Outside the realms of my life. Poor girl.

  We approached the last cubicle, and I felt the doctor’s hand on my arm, gentle, but stopping me. ‘Wait here a moment, Mrs Morris.’ He pushed aside the green curtains and I heard murmured voices. My stomach lurched. The swish of the rails was a terrible sound, somehow. He was back in a second, and I noticed he was careful not to let me see past him. ‘We’re just taking him to surgery, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘We need to get into his liver . . . there’s a bleed we’re concerned about.’ How they couched it. A bleed. Concern. Panic seemed to be creeping up from the bottom of my lungs, so that I could only breathe into the top of them, as if concrete blocks sat on my chest.

  He directed me calmly back to Reception, but then he turned and I saw him dash – sprint, really – to where Mike was. I saw his face change. And I remained standing where I was, unnoticed, as seconds later a whole team rushed out of the cubicle pushing a bed with Mike on it. Someone was holding an IV bag. Someone was on the cart with him, pumping at his chest. And I could see they all were spattered in blood. Mike’s blood, all over the scrubs of the nurse running beside him, calling out codes and numbers, and the person on his chest, and the one with the IV. Mike himself I could barely see. He seemed shrunken, grey, his face settled with the awful stillness of stone. As I watched they swept him away, down the corridor and into the bowels of the hospital. I heard a loud sob, and turned to see Cassie standing behind me, watching her father wheeled away, unconscious.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Bill took Cassie home. He said he’d get Benji from school, and feed him too: ‘Though I don’t know what I can make. Does he like soused herring?’ I was so grateful. I was already trying to imagine in my head how I could thank him, and failing. Karen would normally have done these things. It was her who’d come when I was having Benji, when my father finally died and I had to spend a week at my mother’s, when Mike broke his ankle running and I was back and forth to hospital for three days. I wondered where she was and what she was doing. I imagined her in a flat maybe, with the kind of scuffed and bland furniture you found in cheap hotels. We’d helped women get into them from time to time. Now it was someone I knew going through this. I still couldn’t take it in. Karen accusing Mike. Jake stabbing Mike. I remembered the little boy who’d throw his arms round me. I love you, Auntie Ali. The way he’d sat at the table and cried, so quietly, when I told him we were moving away. It was never really the same after that. I saw him running at us, the knife flashing, Cassie in his path. My head was twisted, full of blood and lies and screams. I told myself I just had to get through this. Mike just had to survive, and then we’d sort it all out.

  One breath at a time.

  DC Devine turned up at some point, still in his suit. He looked neat and fresh, whereas I could smell my own body, sweaty and terrified, a smear of blood on my arm that I hadn�
�t washed off. I should have told Cassie to take her shirt off and soak it. He sat down beside me in the waiting room. ‘Have you eaten anything today?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You should drink at least. Let me get you something. Tea?’

  ‘Thank you. Black, please.’

  He came with something in a small plastic cup, tasting metallic and flat. I drank it anyway. I was dehydrated, I knew, but it seemed wrong to drink and eat while Mike was somewhere in this place, being cut open.

  ‘Did you catch him?’ I asked. ‘Jake, I mean.’

  ‘We have him in custody, yes.’

  ‘He’d brought the knife with him. I saw him hiding it before the trial, I think. In the bushes. I think it’s from our house.’

  ‘I saw the whole thing myself, Mrs Morris. I was watching from the court steps.’

  ‘Right, so . . . what will he be charged with? He stole the knife. That’s premeditated, right? That means he planned it.’ It chilled me to think of it. When had he taken it? After everything happened – or before?

  Adam said nothing. He just watched me, his eyes almost sleepy. ‘Are you close to Jake Rampling, Mrs Morris?’

  ‘I was. Karen and I used to share childcare when the kids were small. But lately he’s – well, you’ve met him. He’s a teenager.’ That made me think of something else. ‘Would he be tried as an adult? He’s almost eighteen, you know. Do you have to be eighteen for that?’

  ‘Usually. The court can use its discretion, in certain cases.’

  Like for murder? Was that what this was, an attempted murder? Jake, little Jake, trying to stab my husband? Again, the image of Cassie flashed behind my eyes, frozen as he ran towards her with the knife. The glint of it in the light, the moment I realised what it was and saw Mike hurl himself in front of her. Karen, further up the road, watching as her son did this. Had she called out? Tried to stop him? I didn’t know.