‘Will he be released? What if he comes here, tries again?’ How vulnerable Mike was, unconscious on a bed.
He was just watching me, and I began to feel strangely ashamed. ‘Mrs Morris. It’s been a very difficult time. All this, so close to home . . . can I make a suggestion? Try not to think about what’s going on with Jake. Focus on your family, your husband. He got bail, as you know. We have to press on with preparing for trial, despite this . . . setback.’
‘He’s unconscious!’ I spoke too loudly again. ‘They’re cutting into him right now.’
‘I know. But the prognosis is good with this kind of injury. The liver can regenerate.’
He spoke so calmly I had to turn my face away. As if it was a good thing, that Mike would probably recover, so they could put him on trial for rape. The thought of Karen crystallised in me again, hard and sharp like I’d swallowed a piece of glass.
‘What will happen now?’ It was my overriding need. To know what would happen. To plan, and make lists, and be ready. I hadn’t been ready for any of the last few days and I was still scrabbling, trying to find the bottom with my feet.
‘We’ll let him recover. Meanwhile, the CPS will be working on the case. The defence can obviously apply to postpone the trial if he’s still in here.’
‘And Jake?’
He stood up. ‘I can’t talk to you about Jake, Mrs Morris. We’ll need to get statements from you, and your daughter. We have him in custody, I can tell you that.’
That should have been plenty, enough to keep him somewhere safe and away from Mike, at least until we could sort this all out, find out what on earth he’d been thinking. So why did I feel this fear still, this terrible slippery fear that the thing was not over? That the events set in motion on Saturday night were like a Greek tragedy, and would continue to unfurl until everything was destroyed?
‘It was like I didn’t know him,’ I said. ‘Like he – like he wanted to kill us all.’ Jake was like family. I’d practically brought him up, and now he’d tried to kill my husband. And Adam was there looking at me with his steady kind gaze, as if it saw all the way through me. ‘He’s not safe. I mean, he’s not, is he? You saw. Mike’s in danger if he’s free. And my daughter, even. I think he might have tried to . . .’ I swallowed hard, struggling to put it all into words, how a boy I had loved was suddenly an object of terror to me. How I knew I had to, as Mike had done, throw myself between him and Cassie. Just keep him away from my family, until we could sort all this out. If we ever could. ‘He needs help. He can’t be out in the world, hurting people. Right?’
He just nodded. ‘Try to get some rest. You’ll be no use to anyone if you collapse.’
I waited in the hospital for hours, bloodied and exhausted, until eventually they told me Mike was out of surgery. Alive, at least, but he wouldn’t wake up for ages. There was no point in me being there. I drove home through the town, realising I had no idea what time it was. Late, probably. The streets were empty, that worn-out feeling of delayed shock that comes after a long, hot weekend. Everyone else would have gone to work today, Callum, Jodi back in their offices, where things made sense. The rest of us, me and Mike and Karen and Jake, our lives were stopped short. I wondered if Benji had been OK at school. Would people know? Would he be bullied for it? Our house looked used and discarded, police tape still fluttering over the gate and the lawn trodden in strange footprints. I imagined the neighbours knew all about it. They wouldn’t be happy – there was an Alveston Lane Neighbourhood Watch association, just for the four houses on this road. I parked up and walked over the grass, and it felt cold and slimy somehow. The table in the garden hadn’t been cleared because the police had been searching the lawn, so I scooped up armfuls of crockery and glasses. There was a wine glass marked with Karen’s dark pink lipstick, a little heart of colour smeared on to it. Everything was swimming in rain and dirt, and there were smears of food on the table. I couldn’t carry it all but I had to. I was staggering back over the lawn when Bill came out. He was wearing jeans and a heavy jumper and flip-flops.
‘Ali, I’ll do that.’
I was almost panting. ‘It’s all dirty. It’s so dirty.’
‘Well, we’ll clean it up. Cassie and I have made a start.’ I saw her slim shape through the window, white and insubstantial. ‘Benji has homework,’ Bill said. ‘We just got a pizza. I hope that’s OK.’
‘Of course.’ I told myself it didn’t matter if the kids ate badly for one night.
‘How’s Mike?’
‘He’s . . . stable, at least. They wouldn’t really tell me much more. He’s not awake.’ He was taking the plates from me, his hands big and capable. ‘Thank God you’re here, Bill. I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.’ I followed him back inside, noticing that the kitchen was clean, the dishwasher rumbling, the counters wiped down. He’d folded the dishcloth on the counter, neat, but different to what Mike would do, which was hang it over the cupboard handle. ‘Thank you for this. I think coming back to an untidy place would have finished me off.’
‘You remember Leyton Road?’
I smiled reflexively. ‘They practically had to condemn it after we moved out. We were disgusting. Except for you.’ It was Bill who’d kept that kitchen and bathroom tidy in our shared house during second year, the only one who’d actually learned that you had to clean up after yourself as an adult. The rest of us filled it with burnt pans and ashtrays and pants drying to a crisp on radiators. ‘Is Cassie OK?’ She had flitted out of the room as I came in, as if driven away by my presence.
He was stacking the plates from the garden by the sink. ‘She’s very quiet. In shock, maybe. There were a few phone calls – I think her school friends, though they sounded more confident than most adults I know. She wouldn’t take them. Not answering her mobile either.’
‘They all are at that school. I didn’t want her going there, but . . . well, Mike thought the comp wasn’t good enough. It had terrible results.’ I sat down at the table, enjoying how scrubbed and clean it was. Even the floor had been washed. I looked but the blood spot was still there, a small indelible stain. ‘Don’t you wish we’d had that kind of confidence? God, I was such a little mouse at Oxford. I wasted all those opportunities.’
‘You wouldn’t have been you if you’d been confident. Not that kind of confident, anyway.’ He paused for a moment, rinsing plates. ‘I saw you on TV, you know. I streamed it.’
‘Oh.’
‘You were brilliant. You took him apart, but not like you were angry or irrational or any of those things people say about feminists. Like you were his mum telling him off or something.’
‘That’s how I tried to imagine it. What I’d do if Benji comes home in a few years’ time and starts with this sexist crap they all seem to pick up. Where do they get it from?’
‘The internet, I imagine. It wasn’t like that for me growing up in Leeds. I only got what my mum told me. You remember her?’
‘Of course. Amazing woman.’ Bill’s mother had raised him alone after his father died, despite barely speaking the language.
‘Yeah. She liked you.’
I was remembering that Bill’s mother had died a few years ago. I hadn’t gone to the funeral. We were barely in touch then, which had been the case for the past twenty or so years, until he sent that email to us all a few months back, saying he was coming home, he and Astrid were over, and I’d had my bright idea. A reunion. Twenty-five years. If only I’d known. I should have gone to the funeral anyway. ‘I’m sorry, Bill. It must have been hard.’
‘Well, she was all I had, really. I knew I’d lose her sometime. But when she went it was – like I didn’t really know where to put myself in the world. I had a rough time after it. Astrid had to look after me.’
I was surprised by the pang of something that struck me. Something like jealousy, or more likely sadness at the friendship we could have had all these years. Had I not made the choices that I did. ‘Have you spoken to her?’
He shrugged ag
ain. ‘We’re over. She wasn’t expecting me back or anything. I was sort of planning to drift. There’s . . . well, there’s no one waiting for me.’
‘So . . . you could stay for a bit? I mean only if you can. I know it’s a lot to ask.’
It seemed to me that it was a long time before he answered. ‘I’ll stay.’
Bill was making me a sandwich. There was plenty of food left over from the weekend, he assured me. I should go and have a bath and relax. I doubted that would be possible, but a certain feeling of peace did engulf me as I sank into the hot perfumed water. I loved this bathroom, with its old cracked tub and antique sink. Another reason I’d begged Mike to buy the place, despite the dodgy wiring and leaky roof. I’d kept the original eau de nil tiles, scrubbing them up and filling in any cracks, and arranged white towels in piles, a wicker laundry basket, photos in white frames. Of course, going for that interiors-mag feel was deeply pointless when you had a teenage girl spilling make-up everywhere and a little boy walking in mud and grass, but I tried. I always tried, that was the point. Right now, there were blades of grass smudged on the floor under the sink, and I wondered would the house ever feel truly clean again.
I sank deeper into the water, feeling my back muscles soften. I tried to take stock. Mike in hospital, stable after his surgery, but unconscious. His liver held together with stitches and hope. And when he recovered, if he recovered, then a trial, and maybe prison.
But he wouldn’t go to prison. He wasn’t guilty. I still couldn’t believe he’d ever hurt a woman. He was a liar, yes, and a cheat, and I hadn’t known any of those things about him, but he wasn’t violent. I knew the signs of that and he’d shown none. Hadn’t I looked for it, all the way back at university? I wasn’t stupid. I knew that if you came from a home where violence was normal, it felt comforting to seek it out again, though of course you wouldn’t realise you were doing that. You’d think you’d chosen a man who was loving, and passionate, and intense, until the day you said the wrong thing or made the tea the wrong way and he’d throw the cup right in your face. That was not Mike, despite the lies. Sure, he got stressed at work, and yelled now and then, but everyone did that. If anything, he was more patient with the kids than I was. I’d lost count of how many screaming rows between Cassie and me had been defused by Mike, with a few well-chosen words. And there must be lots of trials that ended with acquittals. That was the whole point, surely.
There was a knock at the door. Soft, inconspicuous, unlike the way Mike roused me from the bath when he couldn’t find his running shoes or thermos or Fitbit.
‘Ali?’ said Bill.
‘Yeah?’ I was naked on the other side of the door. He must know that. It felt wrong, somehow. Too intimate, him there and me in here, in the silky water. I could hear him breathing, and I flashed back suddenly to the kitchen, the night of the party. We hadn’t talked about it – if it had even been a thing. There was a pause.
‘Um . . . sorry to disturb you but I think you should know . . . Karen’s here.’
Jake
‘Oi. Posh boy.’
He didn’t look round. Already his hands were trembling, his breath catching in his lungs. Don’t be scared. Just stop it. Stop it.
‘What you in for then?’ A kid – he looked about fourteen – was calling to him across the rec room. Jake had been sitting in it on an uncomfortable plastic seat for – oh, he couldn’t remember. Hours. Days. Over and over, every time he closed his eyes or couldn’t manage to hold the thought back like a door in the wind, he saw it. Mike going down. The way he’d held up his hands, the way he’d jumped in front of Cassie, like Jake was going to hurt her. The way Mike’s face had changed, from thinking Oh it’s Jake, Jake won’t hurt me to Shit he’s going to. And then the look when the knife had gone in. The terror. No one had ever been afraid of Jake before, and the power was terrifying in itself. He’d made that happen to Mike, Mike who he’d first known as part of Uncle-Mike-and-Auntie-Ali, then Cassie’s dad – and Jake had no dad of his own – but also as the man who came round sometimes without Cassie or Auntie Ali, and when he went away his mother cried. Jake was not supposed to tell when he came round, but one time he forgot and then his mum and Mike went quiet, and Auntie Ali looked between them, and his mum quickly said something about having to go, and it was all fine, but Jake knew he’d made a big mistake. He was seven, but he knew this was something he was meant to lie about. Even to Cassie, his best friend. Not long after that, Ali and Mike and Cassie and the bump in Ali’s tummy moved away, and Jake knew it was all his fault. His mother cried even more then, in the kitchen when Jake was supposed to be sleeping on the other side of the thin wall. Back then, he’d sworn not to trust the Morrises again, not ever. They pretended you were family, but then didn’t mean it. They didn’t mean anything.
Something hit him on the face and he flinched. A bit of paper, soggy with spit.
‘I said, what you in for?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Stabbed someone.’
The kid whistled. He was skinny, his arms like broom handles, and he had freckles all over his white face. ‘No shit?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Who’d ya stab, fella?’
Jake shrugged. ‘This guy. He hurt my mum.’
The boy was nodding. ‘You stood up for her. Good on ya.’
‘He hurt her . . .’ Jake cleared his throat. He wasn’t going to cry in here. No way. No matter what. ‘He hurt her bad.’ It was a joke, this kid calling him posh boy. When the only holidays he and his mum ever had were on the Morrises’ charity. When his trainers were from Tesco. His bloody mum, making him not one thing or the other. Going to Oxford but failing, so she couldn’t even get a proper job. Giving him a posh-ish accent but no dad and no money. Landing him here, because you had to defend your mum when someone hurt her, no matter who he was. She’d been so drunk. So drunk and so stupid, like a twenty-year-old, a girl half her age. If a girl at his school acted like that they’d call her a slut. But it was his mum. And look what had happened.
If only he hadn’t gone to the garage, left her drunk with the men. Laughing, shouting almost, remembering their oh-so-fun time at Oxford. His phone had lit up with a text from Cassie as he climbed the stairs to Mike’s stupid office. This one time, at Oxford, we stayed up past eleven o’clock!
He’d smiled and texted back. LOL. So you gonna do it or what?
She replied with a shrugging emoji.
Mate, don’t, he’d texted back. You’ll regret it, honest.
Cassie was a terrible liar. She always had been, even when they were little and her mum was on the warpath asking who’d eaten all the bourbons. So when she said she was going to bed, Jake knew exactly what she meant. He went into Mike’s ‘den’. His mum’s wheelie case was on the floor, her clothes spilling out of it, and the cover on the sofa bed already messed up. When they’d arrived, his mum had said something about wanting to change and sent him up to Cassie’s room, but then she’d taken ages, almost an hour.
He could see the light in Cassie’s window as he sent another message. Are u going to c him?
She didn’t reply for a while but he knew she would. In the meantime he concentrated on what a twat Mike was, with his boring DVDs and his drinks cabinet shaped like a jukebox and the red leather armchair, like a gentleman’s study. When he was little his mum had pushed him to spend time with Mike – boys’ day out! – thinking he needed a male role model or something like that, but Jake had made it clear he didn’t like football or golf or any other stupid male bonding activities, so it had stopped.
None of your business. Cassie had texted back, after a while.
Don’t do it.
Cassie sent back an angry-faced emoji and Jake knew she’d do it anyway, sneak out to see that guy, and he’d pressure her, and she’d give in, and then he’d throw her away like a bit of tissue he’d wanked into. Anger swelled into him and he got up, walking round the room. The urge to smash something was strong. What if he broke one of Mike’s DVDs and put
it back in the case? He was willing to bet they were never watched and that Mike spent all his time up here clicking through internet porn instead.
Nothing after that. Cassie was ignoring him, going ahead with her stupid plan, and his mother was outside on the lawn laughing too loudly, and he was alone. He’d kicked the side of Mike’s desk to relieve some feelings, but after that he’d sat down on the sofa bed and kind of got into one of Mike’s lame DVDs – The Hangover! FFS – and so he hadn’t realised things had gone quiet in the garden. Hadn’t known his mum was being attacked, until she started screaming, then Ali was running out shouting Mike, Mike. She was almost worse than Mike. So patronising, with her birthday presents and little questions. How are you, Jake? How’s the uni search going, Jakey? Got a girlfriend, Jakey? She was so fake, they both were. He didn’t know why his mum was still friends with them. Callum and Jodi were even worse, always competing over who could cook the fanciest dinner or go on the most expensive holiday. This new guy, Bill, he was alright, but the rest could go suck it.
‘Rampling?’ Back in the here and now, one of the guards was calling him. They weren’t too bad. In fact it wasn’t too bad at all in here, there were video games and TVs and you could wear your own clothes.
‘You’re in for it now,’ said his new friend, whatever his name was. ‘Don’t tell ’em nothing, y’hear?’
He stood up. The guard beckoned. ‘Your mother’s here.’
He hoped his new-found mate hadn’t heard that, but the kid was engrossed in Mario Kart. No violent games allowed. Jake was led out through door after door, clanging shut behind him until he stood in the visitors’ room, and there was his mum, the bruises on her neck standing out against the white of her skin. The anger rose up in him again, at Mike, at Ali, at his mum. All of them.
‘What do you want?’ He hated her, for letting this happen, and he also loved her, so much he’d put his hand through the glass of the window if she needed him to.
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