Xander seemed happy enough, sitting on the bed, studying the bedsheets. Not in too much pain if he was still.
‘So you’re Dad,’ she said, looking across at the father.
He was staring at Xander.
‘Marc, yes,’ he said. ‘Pleasure.’ He nodded at her.
‘Your son will be right as rain in no time,’ she assured him.
Marc turned to Xander as though she wasn’t there. ‘So, mate. Climbing frame? A bit of rough and tumble?’
Xander frowned at him, confused, while Bryony watched.
So he didn’t know. Oh. They were divorced, separated, maybe. ‘Almost done,’ she said to Xander, noticing he hadn’t answered Marc yet.
The boy lifted his right arm and raked his hair back. ‘No,’ he said to his dad eventually.
‘What then?’ There was just the slightest edge to Marc’s tone.
Xander was quiet.
‘Nothing,’ he said after a few moments.
Bryony’s hands stilled. Xander was staring fixedly at the curtain, as though he was concerned it would be slid across at any moment.
To Bryony’s annoyance, the father didn’t push him. She carried on strapping, the under/over motion as rhythmical and as natural to her as walking or swimming. Under and then over. Pull it tighter. Under and then over.
Marc evidently knew his son better than Bryony thought because, eventually, Xander spoke. ‘She just yanked me,’ he said.
‘Mum?’ the man said, his blue eyes suddenly even wider.
Goosebumps appeared all over Bryony’s body.
Okay. This wasn’t courses. This wasn’t paperwork. This was real.
A woman. It was never a woman. It was almost always the man, they said on the course. She had nodded, feeling vindicated in her single status.
She finished strapping.
‘Yeah. In the kitchen,’ Xander said.
The hairs on her arms stood up. He was contradicting his mother’s story. One of them was lying.
She ought to stop and report, refer up to Social Services. Perhaps even direct it to the police. But she couldn’t help herself. She felt a fizzing in her veins, the way lay people would never understand. Rare cancers, abuse, interesting blood work. They got all the medics going. She had forgotten. She had forgotten how it felt.
‘The kitchen, you say?’ she said, trying to make her voice sound friendly but detached. ‘Our kitchen growing up was full of dangerous things.’
Xander looked away, then, not saying anything more.
She was putting the final piece of tape down when Becky reappeared. Xander’s expression dropped, turning sullen.
Marc looked at Becky. ‘Alright?’ he said to her.
Becky met his eyes and held his gaze for just a moment longer than was usual. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
That was interesting, too. So they were divorced or separated, but he didn’t accuse her. Still looked at her with warmth, and just a dash of wariness. But no accusation.
Marc brought his hand across his face and rubbed at his stubble.
Bryony turned to leave them. ‘All done,’ she said to Becky. She couldn’t let her know. That was one of the rules. Act naturally, then refer. Don’t arouse suspicions.
She couldn’t help but sneak a look at Becky. Green eyes, nice make-up. Cagey-looking, if she were being critical. Becky’s eyes flicked down towards the corridor, then back to meet Bryony’s gaze again. I know you, Bryony thought. You might be middle class, in a thigh-length camel-coloured cardigan. You might not be typical. But your son is frightened of you.
She reported it immediately.
‘Yes, that’s suspicious,’ the social worker agreed. ‘Very. We’ll take it from here.’
The words rang in her ears just like the red telephone. Trauma. Abuse. Poor kid.
5
Martha
‘Thank you,’ Ellen, the prosecution barrister, says to Bryony. She is the barrister for the State, trying to prove Becky’s guilt. Bryony nods back, not saying anything. ‘And so your suspicion – during the A&E visit – was raised by what, exactly?’
‘Differing accounts of an injury are always a red flag,’ Bryony says. ‘And the way Xander looked at his mother was – it was nervous. He looked nervous.’
Nervous. Was Xander nervous of Becky? I didn’t think so. He was more likely to be nervous of Marc. Marc had been quite a strict parent, a disciplinarian, which had surprised me. ‘Oh, Marc has a steely core,’ Becky once said when I raised my eyebrows after Marc shouted at Xander at a family barbecue. Later, Xander was sneaking a piece of meringue in the kitchen and said, very seriously to me, ‘Please don’t tell Dad.’ I’d laughed it off, but Xander had simply said it again, his blue eyes holding mine. ‘Please don’t tell Dad.’
‘And what did you suspect?’ Ellen says now.
‘That she had caused the injury.’
‘Thank you,’ Ellen says.
Bryony appears to brace herself as the defence barrister stands up.
Harriet, Becky’s defence lawyer, looks ready, her mouth drawn in a thin, grim line. Her eyes track Ellen as she sits down and shuffles some papers, and then she stands, looks directly at Bryony, and tilts her head to one side.
‘So, let’s talk this through,’ she says to Bryony. ‘You immediately made this urgent report to your colleague, a social worker, didn’t you?’ she says. I am surprised by the sarcasm she has imbued her question with. Like a fierce animal protecting her brood.
‘Yes. That day. She took it over.’
‘And we have the report, here, which has been admitted as agreed evidence. It says—’
She reaches down to the desk and picks up two pieces of paper. She then picks up the white plastic cup and takes a sip, seemingly not caring who waits for her. I almost smile: she must get on well with Becky, as that’s just the sort of thing my sister would do. The theatre of it. I admire it.
‘Paragraph 5.3: “After a one-to-one meeting with me on 21 September, Xander retracted what he told Ms Riles in Accident and Emergency on 12 September. He had walked into traffic the week before, and his father, Marc, had admonished him. He’d told him he was on his last warning. So, in front of his father, he had fabricated something else. After a long talk, he confirmed the account of the kitchen was fiction, and that his mother had been telling the truth.” Paragraph 9: “During my meeting with Xander, I saw no evidence at all that he was frightened of either parent, beyond what might reasonably be expected, or that he told lies about their treatment of him. His home with Rebecca Blackwater seemed stable and loving and his relationship with both parents healthy and functional.” Paragraph 19: “I therefore closed my file on 28 September, having fully investigated matters and having satisfied myself that nothing was amiss.” Have you read that report?’
‘I – yes,’ Bryony says.
‘So, really, not only had the defendant been telling the truth, she had also rescued her son from traffic. Thus making her a good parent. Rather than a bad one.’
‘I only told you what I heard in A&E.’
‘Nothing further.’
The prosecution lawyer is biting her bottom lip in an exaggerated way, looking thoughtful. How could they do this, day after day? A new case when ours finishes, next week. Another after that.
Ellen sits back in her chair, seeming to consider the situation. She rises, says, ‘No re-examination from me,’ and then sits again.
Bryony looks at the judge, who nods at her, and says, ‘You’re free to go, Ms Riles. Thank you for your time.’
Becky’s eyes track her as she moves across the courtroom.
We finish at lunchtime. A witness isn’t ready, and will come tomorrow instead. The judge turns to the jury, and says, ‘Now, ladies and gentleman. Thank you for listening so carefully and attentively. In order that you should feel well rested, and not overworked, I would like to finish now and start afresh tomorrow morning at ten.’
I follow Mum, Dad, Scott and Ethan out into the heat. The day is sadly onl
y half done. Hours and hours until I can call another day over and go to bed.
Becky remained in the courtroom, released from the dock by an usher but lingering with her barrister and solicitor. She’s on bail. The court said she wasn’t a risk; that she wasn’t likely to hurt anybody or try to flee the country. And so they bailed her. She is allowed to reside with Mum and Dad. It’s only during the court hearing that she is imprisoned in the dock. It is a strange artifice.
Will she walk in through Mum and Dad’s door later? What will they talk about?
The press are still clustered on the steps, a few spread out even further, on the street, and they swoop down on us as we emerge. ‘You’re in the public gallery, Martha. Are you supporting your sister or wanting to see justice for your child?’
I say nothing, but I turn and gape at the reporter asking. She has a mop of curly hair, smile lines around her mouth. Surely she eats breakfast, goes to the cinema, can’t be bothered, maybe, to take her make-up off, late at night? And yet, here she is, a human being, asking me the most inhumane of questions. Does she have children? I look closer, for rudimentary evidence – a wedding ring, a telltale tiredness around the eyes, a certain sort of pear shape I’ve come to recognize – but my sight is momentarily blinded by tears. I blink, and our eyes meet, just for a second. She looks wounded.
Once we are out of the throng, I turn to Scott, and say, ‘Did you know about the social worker?’
He shakes his head, looking solemnly back at me. ‘No. It doesn’t sound like it was—’
‘No,’ I say. I try not to think of what happened leading up to it, and after it. Had Xander really lied? He was withdrawn, sometimes. Thoughtful – he used to ask me the most profound questions, when he was four or five. And, yes, maybe slightly shifty at times, taking a biscuit and lying about it, despite the crumbs around his mouth. But weren’t all children?
And besides, is it any wonder? I try to go through it logically. I think of Marc again at the barbecue. ‘Xander, I’m going to count to five,’ he had said. Xander had continued to kick his football against the side of the house. ‘Xander,’ Marc had said, then he’d stood up, calling him into the house with him. He’d shut the patio door, and I didn’t hear anything else. When I’d looked over at Becky, her cheeks had been flushed.
Unless … unless Xander hadn’t been lying in A&E. Maybe he had lied to Social Services. Later. After Becky had spoken to him. I can see how it would play out, as though it is happening in front of me. ‘It’s for the best,’ she would tell him. She could be so persuasive. Marc’s temper might be quick to rouse, but Becky was charmingly manipulative. Sometimes.
No. I can’t think it. The lawyers clearly aren’t. Or, at least, they have never raised it.
I try to reverse my thoughts. They’re traitorous. Would Becky be thinking these thoughts, if it was me in the dock, accused, and her in the public gallery? No, she would believe in me wholeheartedly. I know she would.
She would regard me as innocent until proven guilty, as is right. As is the way it should be.
Scott and I fall behind everybody else. His shoulders look tense; he is not good with stress. He is a developer for an IT firm who walks along the seafront when he has coding problems he cannot figure out. ‘I know,’ he will say, as he walks through the door, his hair blown back by the sea air. ‘It’s a segmentation fault. Of course.’ But this problem, our life, has no solution.
He takes my hand now. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to. Our hands remember how to hold each other: muscle memory that spans the length of our relationship.
Mum, Dad and Ethan are up ahead. They never look at Becky or speak to her while we are in the courthouse, I have noticed. Mum and Dad live with Becky but, publicly, they support me. I frown. Is that right? But then – what else could they do? It is an unprecedented situation. I try to imagine Becky, later, in their living room, in her casual guise. Shoes off. Legs tucked up underneath her on the sofa. A cup of tea in her hand. I can’t see it. I haven’t spoken to her for nine months. I think I can remember everything about her, but the truth is that I don’t. Does she take sugar in her tea? I find I have to think twice before landing on the answer: yes, three. ‘It’s why I am so fat,’ Becky had once said, poking her stomach. She was laughing, but there was a bitter edge to it, a mournful expression flitting across her features as she took in my slimmer frame.
‘Bite to eat?’ Mum turns and says kindly to me.
We stop walking. The ground underfoot is hot, and it warms my feet in my ballet flats. I’ve never known an August be this warm. Usually summer seems to die off quietly, like leaving a party without saying goodbye, with rain and blank white skies.
Dad lifts an arm in a wave to me, up ahead. ‘Chin up,’ he says softly. His eyes linger on mine for a few seconds. ‘Okay?’
I nod.
‘I’ll walk home,’ he says. He walks everywhere, has to do twelve thousand steps per day. ‘Even through murder trials, obsession prevails,’ Becky would say drily to me. I can hear the wry comment as clearly as if she was standing here, right next to us.
‘I need to go to the office,’ Ethan says.
‘Really?’ Scott says. ‘Aren’t you off for the day?’
They have stopped a few metres in front of us. Scott is rhythmically rising up and down on his feet, his head bobbing. He was doing this the night we met, in the hallway of an acquaintance’s house, though I didn’t then know the significance of the blond man standing in the entranceway, unsure where to hang his coat. He was as insignificant as anybody on the street. I sometimes see that same Scott, these days, late at night. That shy, hesitant man.
Life cannot resume for us, since Layla’s death. Not properly. Not the way it used to be: there are no conversations about work as the oven heats up. No shared showers, no sex. But, sometimes, something will appear on the fringes, as tentative as a wild deer stepping out into a clearing. Scott will stand on the landing, a T-shirt in his hand that he will throw into the laundry basket, and a lightness will come over me. We will be able – for ten seconds, for five minutes – to resume life. A shared smile. A small laugh. His warm touch on my shoulder. It never lasts, but every time, I hope it will.
‘I’ve got stuff to do,’ Ethan says to Scott now. ‘I’ve said I’ll work in the gaps, so I can see the whole trial.’
I wonder what sort of employer would make this arrangement with somebody whose niece has died, and whose sister is on trial for it, but I decide not to ask. It would be unkind. My family are at one remove from all of this. Of course their lives go on, full of work emails, social engagements and cars needing MOTs. It is only me, Becky and Scott whose lives have stopped completely, stuck in October last year.
‘I’ll get home, if you want,’ Scott says, and I’m grateful for that. He gives a small, shy squeeze of my hand, and I nod, and say, ‘I’ll just pop out with Mum for a bit.’
He knows what I need; he always has. Right now, I need a bowl of pasta and my mother. I want to feel as though there is a whole line of mothers before me, and that there will be after me, too. While I have ceased to be a mother, I still have my own, and can still be comforted. Momentarily no longer a grieving parent, but a child once more.
With one last squeeze, Scott releases me. He waves as he begins the long walk back to our car, his back to us, his raised hand silhouetted against the sky.
‘Just us then,’ Mum says when we are alone. She smiles tentatively. All of her wrinkles have joined up, the smile lines and the laughter lines, and there is not a single smooth spot of skin on her face.
We head to an Italian in the Lanes. Outside, fairy lights zigzag across the blue sky. Mum wafts her hand in front of her face as she walks, and I see a cloud of tiny flies disperse.
We’re seated at a table in the window on the first floor, looking down at the streets, and I wonder how we must look. Mother and daughter, out for lunchtime pizza. Nobody would believe what we have been doing today.
We all live within
a mile of each other, and Mum, Dad, Ethan, Becky and I came here for dinner a year ago. It was nothing, really. An impromptu meal arranged over WhatsApp after we had all had a mediocre day. I was heavily pregnant. Scott was away, attending more and more developer conferences. Marc had annoyed Becky over childcare arrangements. Ethan had closed a big deal the week before and still hadn’t caught up on sleep. And there we were, one Wednesday at nine o’clock, squabbling over dinner – Ethan had ordered a pizza with macaroni on that Becky said was disgusting, and she thought he ought to pay for it separately. Ethan said, ‘Those were not the terms we agreed,’ and Mum threw her head back and laughed, and said, ‘We didn’t realize we should have read the small print.’
On our way out, I excused myself and went to the bathroom. As I washed my hands, I looked at myself in the mirror, took a deep breath as my baby kicked inside me, and thought: Here I am. Here we all are. Our family was about to expand, and my baby would be part of all these in-jokes and impromptu pizzas with her aunt and uncle, her grandma and grandad. Those were the best times. In a posh toilet in a restaurant. In the garden at a New Year’s Eve party. Temporarily alone, with the bubble of my family waiting just inside, in the next room, just over there. My eyes fill with tears now as I study the menu. Here we are now, down from five to two. From six to two.
‘You should eat,’ Mum says.
I order a sparkling water which arrives fast and sits, untouched, in front of me, slices of lemon bobbing on its surface.
‘The nurse was good,’ Mum says. She drums her wrinkled fingers on the table.
‘Yes.’
‘Fair. Balanced,’ Mum says. ‘Sorry. Not good. I didn’t mean good.’ She leans down over the menu, her dark hair falling in front of her face.
‘She didn’t seem nervous at all,’ I say.
‘No.’
‘They’re trying to make Becky out as an abuser,’ I say. ‘Set her up, even. The A&E incident … it was nothing, in the end. Wasn’t it?’
‘It’s their job, I suppose,’ Mum says.
I push a lemon segment under the water with the end of my straw. A strand of my hair falls on to the table and I brush it on to the floor. I’ll be bald by the end of the trial.
No Further Questions Page 3