It is a very Martha thing to say. The logic of it. We sat up late, one night, on the day of her thirtieth birthday, post-takeaway, and she said to me, ‘I think I want a baby more than I don’t want a baby.’
‘Right,’ I had said, with all the annoying, knowing smugness of a parent. ‘It’s not that simple,’ I added. Though, really, I suppose I was jealous of her. Her decisiveness, and her control. She would never have an accident and spoil her career as I had.
‘We’re going to start trying tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘It can take years, and you only get two IVF cycles on the NHS if you are under thirty-nine.’
‘IVF?’ I said. ‘What?’
‘In case we can’t conceive.’
I shook my head. She sometimes made no sense in this way, was five steps ahead of herself, having imagined nine disasters along the way.
‘Look,’ I had wanted to say. ‘Look at the women who get pregnant immediately, the women who have all of their babies in their forties, the women who look like they might miss out but who it works out for, seemingly at the last minute.’ But anyway, this is what I love most about her. My lens is wide-angle. Hers is narrow, but clearer. I like the hyper-logic of it. She makes perfect sense, just not in the real world.
‘Everything is a phase,’ she says now.
I blink. The crying. Layla’s face, even now, is streaked with tears. This job of mine, this nannying a constantly crying child. It is going to go on and on. A year. The tears, mine and hers. I could get another job but … it is working, for Martha at least.
‘This too shall pass,’ I say faintly, remembering seeing it on Mumsnet one day but never having needed to apply it to my own child. Xander was a sleepy newborn, a docile toddler who played alone. It is only now, as he approaches his tenth birthday, that I foresee any problems; I can suddenly see him as a sullen teenager, withdrawn. But not quite yet.
‘Yep,’ she says, seeming happy.
Layla is her baby. I am thinking: It is different for me.
Her phone rings. I can hardly make it out at first over the crying.
‘Oh, hang on,’ she says, lifting Layla out of her sling and placing her in my arms. She walks over to the car, leaving me in the middle of the pavement. Just like that. She doesn’t even check if that’s okay with me.
Offload the baby on to the nanny, why don’t you? I think spitefully. As Layla cries, I get my phone out and text Marc back. Fucking right, I type, my head full of the reflux prognosis – ‘one of those things’ – and the way Martha presumes our arrangement will continue for ever.
I stand rigidly with Layla. It’s normal, I am telling myself. She just left the baby with me while she went to get her phone. But it’s another imposition. One in a whole line of them.
When she gets back, I don’t ask her who it was. That is, until I see her face. She’s white.
‘What’s up?’ I say.
‘We got the grant,’ she says quietly. It is her tone that makes me look up properly. Her phone is still lit up by her side.
‘The Lottery grant?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much?’ I say.
She whispers her answer. ‘One point two million pounds.’
‘Fucking hell.’
‘Yes. We can do so much with it all,’ she says.
‘You can.’
‘We could – we could even buy somewhere. In Kos. Somewhere – permanent.’
‘Jesus,’ I say.
She has this serious expression on her face, the one she only ever gets when she’s thinking hard. ‘Ami thinks I need to go. Next week. To look at places. She says there are a few great ones on the market at the moment, but they’re getting snapped up. And Scott’s going to be away again.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Where is Scott?’
‘This developers’ conference … I can’t take Layla, Beck.’
‘I know,’ I said, thinking of the flight, the premises, the hundreds of children. She can’t take a baby into that chaos.
She is going to ask me.
She turns to me. Layla is held close to my chest, but is looking up at Martha in adoration. Mother and baby. ‘I need to go next week.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s chaos there. I can’t be viewing properties with an eight-week-old. She hasn’t even had all her vaccinations …’
I wait for it. Braced.
‘Could you have Layla for a night? Scott is away for one night, but he can have her for the other. I’ll only be away two nights.’
‘Of course,’ I say, my voice husky.
‘And then, after the trip … I could set up loads of things. A place where kids could learn how to use computers and learn English and …’
‘Who are you going to get to do all that?’ I say sharply.
‘I could. With this money,’ she says, like it’s obvious. Like she doesn’t even have a baby to look after.
‘I thought you were just arranging the premises and then handing over to someone?’
‘But everything’s changed, Beck,’ she says, her eyes bright. ‘This is really working, isn’t it?’ she adds, gesturing to me and Layla and demonstrating – as usual – a total and complete misunderstanding of reality. How she runs a charity is beyond me.
‘What?’
‘The nannying. Look – we could … couldn’t we make this long-term? You could stop all of your freelancing. I could pay you handsomely,’ she says. She’s absolutely pumped.
‘Oh – I don’t know,’ I deflect, a fixed smile in place. Like fuck we will make it long-term, I am thinking.
‘We can get out of the fish market …’ She pauses, then adds, ‘We teach them every day in the old fish market and it stinks, Beck. They even queue up to come – to spend their days in a horrible old market. If we had somewhere new, I could teach them seriously, with proper equipment, about geography, and science …’
I can’t argue with her altruism. It comes from a good place, I tell myself with gritted teeth. She takes Layla off me and she stops crying. For a moment, the night is blissfully silent.
In the quiet, I tell myself that I’ll do the night. The one night. I can handle it. I take a few breaths. Of course I can. But I can’t continue after that.
‘Let’s get – let’s get you to Kos for the premises and then see. Okay?’ I say.
I’ll tell her when she gets back. I’ll tell her that it can’t go on.
16
Martha
I don’t eat lunch. Everybody else orders fry-ups, and they arrive, steaming and greasy in front of them. I wonder what Becky eats for lunch with her legal team. She always had funny taste in food; would eat beans and processed pork sausages on toast, drink Cherry Coke. She’d eat Angel Delight when hung-over. The sound of the whisk would signal it for me when we were teenagers. I hope she’s eating rubbish somewhere now, that she’s happy.
I can still remember the words Ami used as she told me about the premises in Kos. She wasn’t passing on the information just so that I, as CEO, would know, so that I would be kept in the loop. No. She was expectant. ‘You’ll come, won’t you?’ she said. I recognized the tone, too: used by employees who give their all to work, who have nothing else to balance it with. ‘Of course you’ll come,’ she was saying. There was no question. She wasn’t asking one.
And how could I not go? I needed to sign the documents. It was my charity. There were hundreds of refugees who were relying on me. In that moment – on that phone call, with Becky already nannying – it seemed so obvious, so logical.
It was only when I went to say goodbye to Layla that I saw the things I had missed in making that cold, dispassionate choice: that I loved Layla more than I had ever loved anybody. That my chest ached when I was away from her. That time away from her felt suspended, unreal, and only recommenced when I held her again. And that I suspected she felt the same about me.
I couldn’t go, I remember thinking, as I brought her close to me for the final time. I jus
t wouldn’t go. But the details of cancelling – the people I would let down, the flight I had booked, the premises viewing I had lined up – seemed insurmountable. And so I went. As I prepared to settle Layla in the Moses basket, she shifted her head closer to my chest and wrapped her little warm hand around mine, nuzzling into me. She didn’t want to be put down. I gave her one last breastfeed, even though I was late. She sucked until her eyelids were heavy, milk drunk. I tried to unlatch her, but she wouldn’t let me. Every time I did, she sucked again. Eventually, I unlatched her with my finger, breaking her seal, and she wailed.
I left with both of us crying.
My tea is delivered on an old-fashioned wooden tray that says potatoes on it. The teapot is transparent and has a miniature milk bottle with it. Dad taps the lid once, awkwardly, and looks at me. It’s just a silly gesture.
Chin up, he is saying. Or maybe, I’m thinking of you. He doesn’t know how to say these things.
I stare across at him and a memory forms in my mind. He’d taken us to the park. It must have been when he was looking after me and Becky. His year as a stay-at-home parent. I’d climbed to the top of the steps of a slide. He’d been holding Becky’s hand; she was walking carefully across the bark chips towards us. He raised a hand to me and waved.
‘Remember when you looked after Becky and me for a year?’ I say to Dad.
He blinks, looks at Mum, then back at me. He doesn’t like to take sides, to have difficult conversations. If he could, he would have simply watched Sky Sports all day, every day this summer and never mentioned the trial.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It was tough and brilliant.’ He winces.
Nobody knows what to say to me. To admit the positives of parenting, or to complain, is insensitive. Nobody can win.
I smile reassuringly at him.
Scott reaches for my hand and grasps it, under the table. ‘I wish I’d done more. More,’ he says to my father, his voice cracking slightly, fractures showing in his stoic demeanour. ‘Like you.’
It surprises me. I should feel warm towards him, but instead I want to push him away. How could you have left her? I want to say. But then: I did too.
‘How do you think it’s going?’ I ask Ethan quietly, later. I feel Mum tense next to me.
Ethan rests his elbow on the table and gestures with his fork, finishing his mouthful. And then he puts another slice of sausage in and chews that, too. ‘How do you think?’ he says back to me, when he has finished.
Will nobody here just say what they’re actually thinking?
I think of the reflux appointment in full, now, without the distraction of the cross-examination playing out in front of me. Layla wasn’t crying as badly as she often was. Isn’t that always the way? And so I was over the top, with Irene – ‘She’s normally much worse than this!’ – but Layla wasn’t exactly happy, either, looking back. She was giving a low murmur, a kind of cat’s growl, when Irene examined her, her feet kicking in her footed pyjamas. Images walk onto the stage in my mind, unbidden. Layla’s tiny feet, soft after a bath; they would fit into the palm of my hand like lucky rabbit’s feet. Those feet, those sounds: all gone. I swallow.
Ethan pours my tea for me. It’s fresh, and a tea leaf makes its way into my cup, floating for a second on the top, glossy black, before being doused away by the milk he adds second.
‘Badly,’ I answer, eventually.
Mum takes a bite out of a toastie. Beyond her, the sea is moving steadily. The movement of it makes me feel drunk.
‘It’s unfair they’re talking so much about Layla’s crying,’ she says. ‘It’s irrelevant.’
‘God, Mum – it’s obvious why,’ Ethan says.
I wonder when he became so snappy. He didn’t use to be like this. He broke his leg when he was fifteen, and I spent the whole summer inside with him, watching Friends DVDs. We are word perfect on the early seasons, can recite them at length. One recent Christmas, we moved the sofa to fit the tree in and both shouted ‘Pivot!’ at the same moment.
He picks up the spoon and stirs my tea for me, even though I don’t take sugar, as if I were an infant who needed caring for.
‘It’s to make it look like Becky lost control. Because of the crying,’ I say to Mum, who looks baffled. As I say it, her expression closes down.
As I stare at the sea, a memory comes back to me. Becky and I as teenagers, sneaking off one Saturday to the Brighton naturist beach. Becky was so excited, the day we decided to go, telling Mum and Dad we were going to the Lanes. Finally, we arrived, our feet sore in flip-flops in the heat. There were naked people for miles. I felt my cheeks heat up.
‘I can’t believe it’s pebbled,’ was all Becky said as we reached the sign and stopped, gawping.
‘Why?’ I said.
She arched an eyebrow and shot me a sidelong look.
‘All the beaches are pebbled around here,’ I reminded her.
‘Martha.’
‘What?’
‘Pebbles. Hardly comfortable on a bare arse-cheek or two,’ she said. ‘Or, indeed, a bollock.’
‘Becky,’ I said, but her humour was infectious; always was.
‘Jesus, look at them.’
‘There’s … so many of them,’ I said faintly.
‘I have never seen quite so many dicks in my whole life,’ she said. With that, she took off her top and skirt and ran into the sea. Just like that, right in her underwear, just a teenager herself. She never thought. She was so impulsive. I’d been both in awe and frightened of her. She didn’t care. She just didn’t care. It was that self-destructive streak again. Only the moment seemed to matter to her. Not afterwards, when her clothes clung to her wet skin, when she was shivering on the way home. Everybody had seen her body: her teenaged body.
Later, when we got back, we didn’t tell anybody where we’d been, not even Ethan, who was sort of our ally. Becky had wet hair, but nobody seemed to notice.
I blink, now, looking at Ethan, who’s gazing intently at me.
I know he’s going to ask it before he does. I can see it in the way he moves the wooden tray.
‘Do you think they’re going to vote guilty?’ he says. The words fire into me like bullets. How could he ask so casually?
‘I don’t know,’ I say tightly. ‘Ask them.’
It’s what I tell myself every day. Trust the justice system, and we will know for sure next week, after it has performed its excavation, its deep, focused mining of that night in October last year.
‘I think the prosecution case is strong,’ he says. His tone is resigned. ‘I’m worried it looks convincing.’
‘I don’t want to talk about this …’
‘Let’s not,’ Mum says.
‘She is adamant,’ Ethan says. After he has said it, he stares at me again. He’s got Becky’s jawline. It looks clenched, sometimes, even when it isn’t. He has said it before. I thought he would be cynical, but he isn’t. He is almost as staunch as Marc about her innocence. ‘I’ve never seen her so adamant,’ he says now, again.
‘The evidence is quite clear,’ Scott suddenly says tightly.
‘Oh, is it? Let’s just do away with trials then,’ Ethan says. ‘Lock her up and throw away the key.’
‘That’s not what …’
Mum is staring down at the table. Her shoulders are tensed. They start to shake. It is almost imperceptible, but I see it. She is suppressing tears.
‘This is why I don’t want to discuss it,’ I say. ‘This always happens.’ And it has: over and over and over again last winter, we picked it apart and it always blew up.
Ethan protesting her innocence.
Scott arguing for her guilt.
And me, Mum and Dad, not knowing, just not knowing, our shoulders shaking.
‘This always happens,’ I add.
‘Forget it,’ Ethan says bitterly.
We cannot possibly make up our minds. Becky swears she didn’t do it, but all of the evidence points to her. We are in limbo. My parents live with her. The
y still – presumably – eat meals together and take walks and talk about the weather. Their judgement is suspended, too; has been for almost a year now.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, my voice rising several octaves. ‘I don’t know.’
Ethan is silent for a few seconds. Behind him is an entire wall of clocks. They tick out of sync with each other.
‘Nobody knows,’ I say. ‘Clearly. How many professionals are involved in finding out?’
‘Loads,’ Ethan says quietly, his mouth drawn tight. He pushes his plate of unfinished food away.
I suddenly feel deflated, guilty. He struggled to get this week off. Emails answered, calls returned quietly in side rooms. He doesn’t need to be here with me, watching a trial, eating awkward lunches, but he is.
‘She knows,’ I say. ‘But that’s it.’ I shrug.
‘I feel like I know,’ he says. ‘I know Becky.’
Mum darts a look at me, and I see her eyes are wet. How must this be for her? Her two daughters: at war. Unwillingly.
‘You know Becky,’ Ethan says.
Mum flags a waitress down and mimes for the bill.
‘I didn’t know either of them,’ I say, the punchline open to me like a swinging door.
But the words I say aren’t true. I thought I might not know Layla, when I sat looking at her for the first time in the hospital, feeling unable to understand how I was now somebody’s mum, that my daughter was there in front of me. But I did. I knew what her cries meant and when her tiny hands were about to tighten around my fingers. It was as if somebody blurred the edges, just slightly, so that she and I continued to overlap.
And I knew Becky. I knew before she told me that she was separating from Marc. I knew from the way she held her shoulders when she was desperate to interject with an anecdote of her own, at parties, and I knew when it would be to tell the story of the time I was so nervous about my SATs results that I wet myself.
But did I know my sister and my daughter now? Did I know them together? No. I was too busy being busy; being absent.
No Further Questions Page 10