No Further Questions

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Just try it for a bit, maybe?’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Few months?’

  ‘I could get rid of the worst clients of mine,’ I say. ‘Keep the rest. The non-bastards.’

  She’s looking at me so earnestly and suddenly I just think: This helps her, and it helps me. It’s a no-brainer.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ I say.

  ‘First-day nerves,’ I say, four days later, to a very stressed Martha.

  ‘I’m glad. Means you’ll do it right,’ she says.

  ‘Whatever,’ I say. I know how to look after a baby. Xander is safely at school until three. We have ages. I don’t have to set-dress today, and so today is a good day.

  Martha is hastily changing a nappy, and Layla is bright red.

  ‘God,’ I say, startled at her expression. ‘What’s she angry about?’

  ‘You need to get her wind out,’ she says. ‘She’s got a bit of reflux. I will be three hours.’

  She has expressed some breast milk. She’s going to a café nearby, to make calls. To answer emails. She doesn’t want to do it in her house, where she can hear Layla cry, she says.

  ‘Oh, like massaging? Xander never really had much wind …’

  She shows me. The ‘tiger in the tree’ hold. Laying Layla on her back, cycling her legs. Layla on her front.

  ‘Do you understand that?’ she says.

  A slice of something cuts through me. Why is she saying it like that? Does she have to be so … patronizing? In my head, I imagine telling Marc about that comment, as I often do. In my fantasy land, we are still together, and he says to me, ‘Ignore her, Sam. She’s a patronizing arse.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say to Martha.

  ‘You’re lucky. Xander was a total dream,’ she says, perhaps sensing my annoyance, as she puts her coat on.

  ‘I know.’

  Even when he had mumps, Xander slept. Marc got them, too. God, how we laughed at his huge jowls; we called them his turkey wattles. Marc hadn’t been vaccinated, for some reason. He lost loads of weight. It was weeks before the swelling in his neck went down, and months before I stopped calling him moon-face.

  When Martha has left, I cycle Layla’s legs for her, and she cries and cries. I massage her stomach, hold her in the poses Martha showed me. I feed her. Burp her endlessly. Baby massage. Soothing songs. Little walks. Bounce her.

  I start to hear different tones within her screams, by mid-morning. By lunchtime, I feel certifiable, and take her out for a walk where strangers stare at me as we pass, as though I am a lunatic, as though it is me who is screaming.

  Martha isn’t back by two o’clock, and so Layla comes to the school gates with us, like a very loud alarm I have to carry around with me. Xander is less than impressed, and walks on ahead of us, trying to get away from the noise, I guess. I take him straight to Marc’s, who has to shout for me to hear him over the din.

  ‘What do you mean, nannying?’ Marc says.

  I see it before he can cover it up: irritation. The very specific brand of Marc irritation that only me and Xander can spot. His eyebrows go up, his mouth curls ever so slightly in disdain.

  ‘I’m going to be looking after Layla – for money.’

  ‘Why?’

  I shift my weight, moving Layla from one hip to another, and just look at him. ‘She needs a nanny. I need money,’ I say.

  ‘You don’t need money. You’ve got my money,’ he says shortly. ‘You don’t need them to employ you.’

  ‘I want to stop doing so much set-dressing. I hate it,’ I say. Something rises up inside me, as it often does. My mind treats me to a slideshow of my failures and of Martha’s perfection. Baby in her thirties. Strong, stable marriage. A blossoming charity. A flat that overlooks the sea. No unexplained infertility, unlike me. How come some people get it all and some people get nothing? How is that fair?

  ‘Oh, great,’ he says. ‘Sure, why not just swap jobs without telling me?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you anything any more,’ I say coolly to him.

  ‘Alright,’ he says, raising his hands, palms towards me, as if in surrender. ‘None of my business, is it?’

  ‘No,’ I say to him.

  He is like this, sometimes. Quick to anger. I used to see it all the time with Xander. He dropped a fork on the floor once and Marc blew up. I had to calm them both down. Xander had cried and Marc was crimson with rage. Over a fork, for God’s sake.

  I say nothing else, and walk down the drive with just Layla, who is still bright red and crying.

  I used to think the desperate mothers asking forums about these babies were exaggerating. Newborns sleep twenty hours a day! I would scoff, inwardly.

  By the time Martha returns, my whole body is rigid, covered in sweat. I am wrung out. I think about what Marc said: You don’t need them to employ you. Is it true? Is that how far I have sunk? Am I Martha and Scott’s staff now?

  My next day with Layla is a week later. The nannying arrangement starts to take shape, allowing Martha some control over what’s happening with her charity.

  But ten days after that, everything changes again.

  11

  Martha

  The prosecution want to call a woman called Sophie. Becky’s brow looks heavier. It’s an expression I can easily recognize, and I think: Sophie must mean something to her. Though I don’t know what.

  Becky wore a similar expression on that first day of nannying. At the time, I’d thought it was attitude. She’d left every job she’d ever had, I had realized the night before the arrangement began. What had I let myself in for?

  I look around the courtroom as Sophie is ushered in. This is what I had let myself in for. This is where it ended.

  In death.

  In murder charges.

  In destruction.

  Sophie is young, maybe slightly younger than Becky. Her ankles are slim in skinny jeans and as she takes her place on the stand her hand flutters at her chest. She must be nervous.

  Ellen lumbers to her feet.

  ‘Sophie,’ she says. ‘Can you tell us about the day you saw the defendant?’

  ‘I just saw her. One day.’ Her tone is defensive, that of a person who has perhaps said too much, and now she finds herself in a witness box, taking part in a trial for murder.

  ‘And can you tell us a bit more about that?’

  She opens her mouth to speak, and then begins.

  12

  Sophie Cole

  4.00 p.m., Tuesday 10 October

  Sophie had discovered that she liked to study in dirty pubs. The cheaper the better. She drank gallons of Pepsi – she preferred it draught, from a pump – and ordered chips after she had read fifty pages, the halfway point.

  Today’s topic was dose calculations. She was studying to be a veterinary nurse. She took her shoes off and sat cross-legged, her knees resting on the underside of the table. It was just the sort of place her father used to take her, this pub in particular. Here, amongst the barmen who called her sweetheart and the bloke who couldn’t get off the slot machine, she felt at home.

  She checked her phone. Jay was at after-school football until six. She had two hours.

  She heard a heavy sort of walk behind her, but didn’t turn around. She would only get distracted. That was her deal with herself: she could work in pubs so long as she didn’t get talking to anybody.

  She heard a baby’s cry behind her, and a child’s voice, all at once. She reached into her bag for her headphones and began untangling them. She had enough of children at home, thank you very much.

  Just as she was untangling the final knot – how did they get so entwined? – she heard the woman’s voice.

  ‘Alright, what do you want?’

  Sophie cocked an ear. That was definitely Becky, from the school. Sophie didn’t know her well. She thought she might be divorced. She was always cracking up with Xander, her son. They seemed to get on like friends.

  ‘Coke?’ Xander said hopefully.

 
‘No way,’ Becky said.

  Sophie peeked a look. Yes. It was her. She didn’t realize she’d had a baby. It must have been ages since she’d last seen her. She put her headphones in, regardless. Becky was a chatterer. She’d never get anything done if she realized it was her. She’d see if they stayed quiet, and, if they did, she didn’t need to put any music on; she could just pretend.

  Right. If a spaniel weighs 18kg … she diligently copied down the equation that followed the preamble, even though she didn’t have a clue what it meant.

  Sophie heard Becky’s tread again after a few moments, returning from the bar. And then the distinctive splash of liquid on the wooden floor.

  ‘Shit,’ Becky said.

  Sophie raised her eyebrows and took another look. Wine. God knows, people had judged her, when she still had a young person’s railcard and a five-year-old, and yet, she couldn’t help but judge back, sometimes. White wine in the afternoon, with two kids. Huh.

  ‘Xander, for God’s sake,’ Becky suddenly said. Sophie knew the tone well herself. She called it the bedtime tone, when she was just waiting for the minutes to slide away so she could justify being on her own. No moans of Muuum or sticky hands or random shouts at the television, no legs kicking her on the sofa as Jay, unaccustomed to his new lanky frame, tried to get comfortable, no Robinson’s Fruit Shoot spillages on cushions that couldn’t be machine washed.

  Sophie turned around. Xander was rocking back on his chair, teetering precariously. He wasn’t friends with her own son. Jay had once described him as weird.

  Becky was definitely separated, Sophie remembered now. She had referenced it obliquely, as was her way, saying, ‘Oh, I don’t need to share the remote control with anybody, now,’ at some school social occasion. Sophie had always quite admired her. She seemed to be one of those people who really did not care what anybody else thought of her.

  Sophie drained the Pepsi from her glass just as the baby started crying, properly crying. Hmm. She opened the music app on her phone and scrolled through it, trying to find something ambient and non-distracting. She wouldn’t turn around and chat. She wouldn’t.

  Ed Sheeran, that would do. She found her favourite song. Right before she pressed play, she heard it.

  ‘Xander!’

  She turned around. Becky’s face was bright red. The baby was in the car seat, crying. Becky was ignoring her, which Sophie thought was odd. She couldn’t ignore that sound. Weren’t we programmed not to be able to?

  As Sophie watched, Becky reached for Xander’s hands, her teeth gritted. She pulled on his wrists, forcing him forwards, and his chair back on to the floor. He had to steady himself as he flew towards the table.

  ‘Xander. If you do that again I’m going to smack you,’ Becky added.

  As if it wasn’t already bad enough.

  13

  Martha

  I can’t help but look straight across at Becky. Her bottom lip is glistening. She has opened her mouth in shock. The whites of her eyes shine and she looks down, trying, I think, to look dignified.

  The constant references to wine are not good. I have often thought – privately – that Becky loves wine a little too much. She will often joke about wine o’clock in the late afternoon. Every Friday, without fail, she posts a glass of red on Instagram. But don’t a lot of people?

  What if the worst moments of my life were paraded in a courtroom? That time I lost my temper in Curry’s when Layla was a week old and we needed a new washing machine immediately. The time I huffed at a train conductor when we were delayed for Becky’s hen do. The time I leaned on the horn when somebody cut me up on the way to see Ethan after work. How would they look? Anybody could be made to look guilty.

  But what about Layla? my mind says. My other mind. Whose side am I on? I am a traitor, caught in no-man’s-land between my daughter and my sister. My daughter should trump her, but I know my sister. I look at that still-glistening lip and wonder if I truly do.

  ‘Of course she did it. What do you think happened?’ Scott will say. He isn’t as clinical, as dispassionate, as that makes him sound. I try to make myself remember that he is hurting, deep down inside, too. That he blames himself. And perhaps he should. Sometimes he will spend forty minutes in the shower, and emerge with his eyes red. Sometimes, he will say, ‘If I had been there … if I hadn’t stayed longer …’ and not be able to finish his sentences.

  But these witnesses – they were innocent bystanders, and are now forced to recollect, forced to process the events in the light of death, of disaster, of guilt. What was it? Situational bias. ‘Did the defendant ever seem violent to you?’ they will have been asked. Of course they will have stories to tell. Of course they will. Everyone would, when asked that question, knowing what happened to Layla.

  Becky had always been hard to read. Sometimes volatile. If you didn’t know her well, and know all that she’s been through, you could easily assume she was – well … a bit unstable.

  She had given birth to Xander in the autumn. She should have been starting her second year of university, but instead she was asking for an epidural. I had arrived after he was born. I was twenty-two, and unable to imagine myself in her situation. She had seemed both childlike and grown up to me, then. She told me that Marc had been making her laugh. She’d spent the time in between contractions creased up, laughing, batting him away. As she recounted it to me, I was standing quietly, watching them, thinking: Maybe this will work out, after all.

  She never went back to interior design school. She couldn’t, for a few years, and then she just didn’t. She had a string of sort-of related jobs, before set-dressing. Some dressmaking, some space-planning, consultancy work. The television people had been horrible to her but, other than that, she had always seemed happy enough. But maybe the wine said differently.

  Harriet is standing up now, and looking pointedly at Sophie. ‘So you overheard the defendant threatening to discipline her own nine-year-old.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she discipline him? Did she smack him?’

  ‘No. Her hands were gripping his …’

  ‘Did she smack him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did she ever seem irritated with Layla?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing further.’

  The judge orders a short break, after Sophie’s witness evidence. It’s eleven o’clock and so Scott and I decide to walk down to the beach. We need this time, too. This thoughtful downtime. Next week … next week, we really will have to move on. Deal with the verdict, whatever it is.

  We sit on the sun-warmed pebbles which stick uncomfortably into my dress, but I don’t care. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows. I take a breath, ready to speak.

  ‘Let’s not pick it all apart,’ he says. ‘I can’t do it to her.’

  ‘To Layla?’

  He looks at me and nods, just once. ‘She deserves better than this …’ he gestures back at the court, ‘this circus. About her little life.’ His voice cracks.

  ‘I know,’ I say quietly. ‘I know.’ I gulp back the tears which always seem ready to fall, and I look across at Scott.

  His blond hair catches the sun. ‘Two blond men,’ Becky often said of Scott and Marc. ‘And yet so different.’ Scott is tall and wiry. Marc is shorter, broader, with huge blue eyes and dimples.

  I squint, trying to frame the sea in my vision so that I don’t get the old or the new pier in the picture, trying to make the sea look just as it did in Kos.

  Becky came out to Kos with me, the March after Stop Gap was set up, and I was managing it from afar, while pregnant. ‘Would you like to come?’ I had said shyly to her, after she had grilled me about it.

  ‘Sounds beyond cool,’ she had said, and that was that.

  We went straight there after our flight. I opened the door to Stop Gap and found myself holding my breath, like I was about to unveil a new haircut or give a personal speech. Months later, it still smelt of fish. The morning lesson was in full
flow, and I forgot about the pain in my limbs, aching and tired from the early start.

  ‘God, it’s amazing,’ Becky said, looking first up at the grubby ceiling, and then at the expanse of children sitting listening to a story. There was a stilling of the air as I arrived; the two volunteers – gap-year students, whose expenses I just about managed to cover using a tiny EU grant – had stopped and were staring at me. It still felt strange to be that: the boss.

  Becky engaged immediately in a way I hadn’t seen her do before. She crossed the room to where the teacher was reading a story and sat down next to her. And then she just sat quietly, on one of the children’s seats, right at the front of the crowded room. I studied her, my sister, with her elbows on her knees, her hands cupping her face, as she listened to the story, rapt.

  And then, towards the end of the story, one of the refugees – Sayid, I thought, though Stop Gap had become so popular I was struggling to keep track – inched closer to her. I saw it happening, felt myself smiling as he did it.

  Line by line, he scooted closer to Becky, until by the end of the story he was almost upon her shoes, like a dog might sit at an owner’s feet. Unthinkingly – or so I imagined – she reached down and scooped him up, placing him in her lap. And then she didn’t turn her attention back to the teacher. She looked straight down at him, at Sayid, smiling at him gently, her gaze encouraging, with just a hint of sadness behind her eyes, in the crease of her brow.

  No, I think now, as Scott shifts on the stones and I open my eyes fully and Brighton comes back to life around us. It can’t have been her. Not that Becky who cradled the refugee child at my shelter; who understood it – and me – completely, reverently. No. It wasn’t her.

  Then it was an accident. Somehow. A tragic accident. One she either didn’t know about, or covered up. But not a murder. No.