No Further Questions

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Still falling out then?’ Mum says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  I feel myself curl inwards. We are out for lunch, and so here it is. The me-time I craved when I had a newborn. Enjoy it, Martha.

  It’s always in the afternoons and evenings that the thoughts creep back in. The sun begins its descent down to the horizon, and the thoughts fire up. Am I still a mother? Is Scott still a father? I can’t bear it otherwise. We are and always will be. Like non-practising doctors, like retired priests. What we were we are; we always will be.

  ‘I was thinking the other day about when you were little,’ Mum says tentatively. ‘When Dad stayed home with you for that year.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I say. I hardly recall it, but I do remember discussing it since. It’s become family lore: the trips we took, the things we did when Dad was, briefly, the primary carer.

  ‘Anyway. It’s a joint thing, you know?’ she goes on. ‘Everyone in that court is focusing on you. But that’s wrong. Scott went away too.’

  ‘I know,’ I whisper. ‘But thank you for saying.’

  She nods, then covers my hand with hers.

  ‘Will you discuss the trial tonight, with her?’ The question emerges unexpectedly out of me as if I were a pipe that’s sprung a leak.

  Mum pauses, pushes her glasses up her nose, then nods. She knows exactly who I mean. ‘She’s our daughter.’ Her hand covers my own. ‘As are you.’ She is avoiding my question.

  I wait.

  ‘She might discuss it. But she only ever says the same thing: that she is innocent.’

  ‘I see.’

  Becky moved in with Mum and Dad right after it happened. They are to supervise her contact with Xander. Marc can’t, Social Services say, because he believes too strongly that Becky is innocent. He wouldn’t enforce the contact order that she doesn’t see Xander alone. I don’t know what that says about my parents. I used to ask them often, in the early days. Mum would try to placate me – ‘We love you both’ – and Dad would avoid, as he always has. In the end, we had several evening-long talks about it. We read articles about wrongful prosecutions.

  At the end of one evening, I said, ‘I just don’t know what to think. Somebody tell me what to think.’

  Mum turned to me, and said, ‘Look. She’s accused. Layla was our granddaughter. Becky is our daughter. What do you think I think?’ The skin around her mouth was crumpled and puckering. ‘We don’t know, Martha! Nobody bloody knows! Now stop asking, for God’s sake.’

  She had apologized, the next day. She said the situation had got to her, and she had crossed a line. But I hadn’t asked again after that. It wasn’t fair to anybody. Nobody knew. Going over and over it wasn’t helping anybody. We had to let the justice system decide for us.

  ‘She watches true crime documentaries about people who were wrongly accused,’ Mum says now.

  ‘Does she?’

  She nods. ‘Tons of them. Late at night, mostly. She shows them to us, sometimes.’

  Her tone is hesitant, slightly ashamed. She leaves long pauses in between her sentences. It makes me wince. I have embarrassed her, my kind mother, out for Italian food with me even though I am no company.

  She stares back at me, and I don’t say anything. Can’t.

  ‘I see,’ I say softly. Some days, most days, I am just saturated with it, this situation, and the excess merely runs off me, as if I were a full glass of water with yet more liquid flooding in.

  ‘Marc keeps trying to tell us … he keeps trying to tell us why she is innocent. He brings things over sometimes – medical articles.’

  Of course Marc believes Becky, I find myself thinking. Even in separation they are a unit. Always have been. They are always looking at each other.

  I remember the first time I met him. I’d gone to visit Becky in her student house. She was nineteen, and pregnant, and I was twenty-two.

  ‘Come on then, Samuel,’ he had said to her as we were leaving to go out.

  ‘Samuel?’ I mouthed.

  ‘Long story,’ she said, sharing a smile with him.

  It was the first time I wasn’t privy to something of hers. A joke just for the two of them.

  A waitress approaches and Mum orders a Margherita pizza. I’m not hungry, but the GP said the hair loss could be because of weight loss, so I order the same.

  ‘You get to see Xander, at least,’ I say.

  ‘Yes. That’s lovely.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s fine. He’s computer-game-obsessed,’ she smiles. ‘He’s a bit – I don’t know. Withdrawn, I guess, seeing Becky so much less, and living full-time with Marc. It’s a big change. But we are all struggling …’

  ‘Which computer game?’ I say.

  Xander and I used to play together, often. I had a little avatar on his Xbox One called Auntie Martha. It wore glasses, even though I don’t. When I asked him why, Xander said simply, ‘Because you’re so not cool.’ The next time we played, the glasses were gone. It was typically Xander: a desire to please, but not directly so. He was sweet like that. He has a PlayStation now. The Xbox stayed at Becky’s, switched off. Marc upgraded him when Xander went to live with him. As a treat, for all the upheaval, I guess.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Mum says.

  ‘She’s got nobody,’ I say. ‘Becky.’

  ‘She’s got Marc. And her lawyers. And she does have us. It’ll be …’

  I stare out of the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Becky, alone, away from her lawyers. Oh, to meet her in the street. ‘Whatever happens,’ Mum says, ‘it’ll be easier afterwards, when you’re not a witness. You can go and see her. Talk to her.’

  Go and see her. Not meet up. Not Becky coming to me. Prison. Surely. I look at my mother, sitting opposite me, staring into space, and wonder what she really thinks – deep down, beyond the unknowing. Whether she thinks her other daughter is guilty.

  Mum wants to drop me home, but I don’t let her. It’s only six o’clock. It’s not late enough. I need to be exhausted, so tired that I only have to walk up the stairs to my bed and fall asleep.

  I wander back down to the Brighton seafront. The restaurants are busy, their lights illuminating the concrete outside them in a futuristic glow. Every single person in the window of a Chinese is on their smartphone. A baby sleeps in a car seat, placed on the floor in front of the window, and I can’t help but drift towards it and stare in, until they see me looking.

  I walk down through the marina, then loop back up into the headlands that overlook the sea. It was here that we spent much of our childhood, unknown to our parents. They thought we were only a few streets away, playing safely, but we were always here, miles from home. There is an expanse of green, a sea view, and a bat house, standing tall and wooden against the sky. We were obsessed with the bat house. It was like a tree house on stilts. We used to sit on the grass underneath it and try and catch glimpses of them. Our bedtime was whenever it got dark, and so we never quite managed it. Becky liked the gothic quality of it; of being surrounded – invisibly – by bats at night. I liked the science of it, would get home and research them. Later, when I was a teacher, I led an entire session on bats. Everyone had loved it, and I’d told them to go to the bat house with their parents. I saw it as passing the joy on.

  I stay there, my arms becoming dry and salty as the sun sets, and I keep looking for her, even though I know she won’t arrive.

  We used to have all sorts of pretend games, here in these fields. We’d bring our bikes, sometimes, say that they were horses. I would always want to feed and water them, would often try to introduce the concept that the horses could talk. Becky was much more interested in pretending we were professional jockeys. She’d invent all sorts of politics about the other jockeys, which I found stressful. She liked the drama of it.

  The bike. The memory seems to rise up in me before I can stop it, even though I don’t want to look at such a horrible memory of Becky; such a troubling me
mory, like reading her diary or going through her pockets.

  It was all about the recorder group in primary school. Becky had been begging for weeks to join. Mum and Dad paid up front for the term, and Becky bought a tenor recorder from the Music shop, with a load of sheet music she couldn’t read. I found her fascinating; the joie de vivre with which she commenced her hobbies. It never seemed to cross her mind that she might be rubbish.

  One night in November, Becky announced at dinner that she was going to leave the club, saying smilingly that she would take up art instead. Mum and Dad refused; it was all paid for, they said. The sweet and sour rice I was eating was clogging my throat as Becky’s voice rose higher and higher.

  She started crying during pudding: big, dramatic tears that upset me, too. When Dad tried to change the conversational topic – as he always did in these situations – she left the table, wrenched the back door open, grabbed her bike from the drive and pedalled it at full speed all the way down the path and into the side of Dad’s car.

  She didn’t break anything. Her nose bled, her tooth was chipped – she had to get it fixed – but she didn’t break anything. Dad’s car was scratched. She was grounded for a month. The only extra-curricular thing she was allowed to attend was the recorder group, which she did silently, like a martyr.

  Afterwards, Dad adopted the recorder group as synonymous with bad things. ‘Don’t do a recorder group,’ he would say when Becky got stroppy.

  I shiver as I recall it now. It wasn’t the recklessness of it, or the switch from charming to tantrumming. It was the expression on her face as she did it. I was staring at her through the living room window, my palm pressed to the glass just as hers was pressed to the dock this morning.

  It wasn’t rage on her face, that evening on the bike, exactly – it was something more complicated. Some sort of self-sabotage, as if she didn’t care what got damaged in the process of proving her point. Including herself.

  Did she look at Layla that way when she did it? That menace? That sabotage? I think of Layla’s injuries, and close my mind against them.

  Scott is stacking the dishwasher when I get in. The flat feels menacing. It has ever since my return, after it happened. Everything is just the same – the stylish exposed-bulb lamp in the corner of the living room that I have always hated, the navy-blue feature wall. But something is off, as though the air we breathe is filled with dread.

  Scott stops stacking as I arrive and looks at me with his hands on his hips.

  ‘I’m just going out,’ he says.

  He’s been going out more and more, lately. For longer and longer stretches. I didn’t ask where, at first – I couldn’t bring myself to – and now it’s too late; his absences have become tolerated within our relationship. I would look hysterical if I asked too much, now.

  I used to sleep with my cold feet against his shins. He didn’t mind. He said he had enough warmth for the both of us, would scoop his arm right around my waist and draw me in. They were our private moments, in bed together. His naked form against mine. Sometimes, just lately, I can’t remember the last time I looked him in the eye. Has it been several weeks? It feels like it. Is it just the isolation of grief, a measure of how inward-looking I have become? Or is it something more?

  Where had he been that evening, a few days ago, when he didn’t read my text message for hours? Maybe he’s looking at places to live. Maybe he’s taken up a new hobby, made new friends. Perhaps he needs space away from me, is preparing to leave me. I wouldn’t be surprised, though it feels as though my heart turns over when I consider the possibility.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, woodenly, now. I reach for his hand.

  It’s a cursory gesture. Neither of us can speak to the other yet, not properly, but we can reach for each other’s hands.

  ‘I’m going to the land,’ he says. He knows I want to know, that I don’t feel I can ask.

  This is what he calls it. He owns a tiny patch of land, donated by his grandfather, down in Hove, and on it he grows things.

  Four summers ago, he brought me back a punnet of strawberries. I commented on their sharp, sweet taste, and, after that, the gifts began. Peaches, proffered every day for weeks, until something else came into season. ‘We can have them with ice cream,’ he had said happily.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him I don’t even like fruit that much. When it started to take over, and he was going all the time, I began to resent it.

  Now, visiting his land seems especially pointless; pointless rearing.

  Alone, I venture into what was Layla’s room, though she never slept in it – she had still been in with us. But I promised her that I would go into her old room, once the trial had begun. To look at it. To acknowledge her. And to say goodbye.

  Layla’s room is untouched. It was never the crime scene. That was at Becky’s house. They photographed her spare room – the makeshift nursery where Layla had been sleeping while Becky looked after her. They’d done it immediately, before suspicion was even raised. A Scenes of Crime Officer attended. I haven’t seen the photographs yet; I’m not sure what they showed. Nothing, probably.

  I ease open the door and flick the light on. Her cot is still there. White railings. It looks enormous. She never slept in it.

  I think of the one-year-olds that I know. Fat feet. She’d have little fat feet, just like Xander did. Spongy bulges on the tops of his arches … and now, his are a bony child’s feet, stuffed into football boots. New school shoes every term. The luck of it. To experience that. Does Becky know how lucky she is that he is still here with us?

  There on the floor is Flappy – the cuddly toy Becky and I used to share – that Becky passed to Xander, that Xander passed to Layla. It’s an unidentifiable animal: small, yellowing, with long soft brown, ears that flap.

  Becky and I discovered it in the loft when Mum and Dad decided to sell our childhood home. They were downstairs. Becky had hit her head on one of the rafters in the hot loft and was sitting cross-legged, a hand held to the developing lump, when I found the box marked ‘miscellaneous’.

  ‘Look,’ I said, pointing to the items spilling from the box.

  ‘Oh, man!’ she said, reaching for him. ‘Shit, what was his name?’

  ‘Flappy,’ I said immediately.

  I always had the better memory of the two of us. Becky remembers almost nothing of the past. Where I know every date, every event and its relation to another, Becky seems to remember only the broad emotional tone of something, not who was there, or when it happened, not even the year. I wish I could forget things now, of course. Perhaps I will remember every moment of this trial for ever, whatever the result, and hold it against her for ever.

  ‘Flappy. Of course.’ She brought him close to her face and breathed in.

  ‘Let’s have him,’ she said. She was in her early twenties. She already had Xander, who was two. ‘My babies can have him, then yours.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We binned the rest of the box, but we kept Flappy, emerging down the ladder with him. On the cooler upstairs landing, Becky passed the toy to me.

  ‘I used to suck his ears,’ she said.

  ‘Gross,’ I said, holding it carefully by its body.

  ‘It’ll have helped your immune system,’ she said with a sage nod. ‘So you’re welcome.’

  Becky put Flappy in the back pocket of her jeans and its ears moved as she walked. Marc was waiting downstairs for her.

  ‘Look,’ she said, showing him Flappy.

  ‘Ah, a Blackwater relic,’ he said, with no sense of irony at all. He took Flappy off her and turned it over in his hands. ‘Let’s put it on the mantelpiece,’ he said, and she cracked up; evidently it was yet another inside joke between them.

  He enfolded her into his arms, then, and I looked away. They were perfect together. Where could Scott and I find that secret language? I found myself thinking. I wished fervently I could purchase it, bottled.

  It was a strange day, clearing out the family
home all together. Mum removed a canvas photograph from the living-room wall that Becky had always hated and the wallpaper was fresh underneath it, a bright square surrounded by faded paper. I reached a finger out to touch it as we were leaving.

  Standing now, in the room that Layla never got to sleep in, holding Flappy, I find myself thinking: This cannot be right. It cannot have been her. Becky cannot have done it. I feel it with a certainty, right in my stomach. I cannot help but notice, though, that I also have the other moments. When I remembered the recorder club, I was sure she had done it, too. They are both true and untrue, at the same time. Becky is suspended, Schrödinger’s cat in the dock. And next week, we will know. Ethan keeps trying to tell me we might not. That the trial may run on, get adjourned, that it won’t give me the answers I’m looking for, but I ignore him.

  I’m going to make a list. In here. Of likely scenarios and outcomes. There must be another possibility besides murder.

  There was no suspicion, at first, in A&E, just shock so intense I can’t remember anything except images. A brick-coloured circle of a cup of tea on my knees. A medical tag around Layla’s tiny grey wrist.

  Becky came straight over when they charged her. She was still holding her charge sheet in her hands, on police bail. Marc brought her and sat in the car, the engine running, outside on the street. Layla had been dead for ten days, a sixth of the length of her life; something I knew to be a fact, but struggled to comprehend.

  Becky was to attend the Magistrates’ Court a couple of days later. Scott was sitting on the sofa, staring at nothing. I was pretending, as I unthinkingly let my sister in, that Layla was with him, that he was winding her, that she was crying, not sleeping, being red and angry and alive.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ Becky said, as she stood in the centre of our hallway. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  I didn’t say anything to her. I was poorly prepared, didn’t know how to behave. My sister was accused. My baby was dead. What was the done thing?

  When I hadn’t spoken for a moment, she said, ‘Please believe me.’