The Good Sister

by Gillian McAllister

  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 new tires. 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 restaurant 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 second 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 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 granddad. 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 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 onto the table and I brush it onto the floor. I’ll be bald by the end of the trial.

  “Still falling out, then?” Mum says.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I feel myself curl inward. 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 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-practicing 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 am 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 afterward, 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 restaurant 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 toward 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 to 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 memory, 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 pedaled 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 extracurricular thing she was allowed to attend was the recorder group, which she did silently, like a martyr.

  Afterward, 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 threatening. 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 we
eks? 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 hadn’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 hand.

  “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 nurturing.

  * * *

  —

  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 good-bye.