The Good Sister

by Gillian McAllister

  But we didn’t have time.

  “Thank you, Ms. Williams,” Harriet says. She sits down.

  A strand of my hair drifts down and lands on my arm.

  Ellen stands up to reexamine.

  “In your opinion,” she says, darting a glance at the defense lawyer she was laughing with just hours previously, “how did the shouting sound?”

  “Like somebody very angry. At the end of her tether.”

  “Frightening?”

  “Yes, certainly,” Theresa says. “Especially for a child.”

  “Witness can’t possibly know—” Harriet starts to say.

  “I can’t control her answers,” Ellen says to Harriet. “Nothing further,” she adds.

  As she sits down, I catch a tiny smile on her face. It’s a good day at the office, for her.

  24

  Becky

  Afternoon, Wednesday, October 25

  I am in Sainsbury’s and have forgotten how difficult everything can be with a baby. Xander never cried quite like this. The health visitor called his sleep abnormal, but Marc and I didn’t care.

  “Our baby sleeps too much!” Marc said to me one night while we were lying together on our cheap IKEA bed, Xander asleep in the Moses basket just a few feet away.

  We spent hours in that room, in those early days. We used to eat dinner in bed. We weren’t tired, and Xander would have tolerated sleeping downstairs with us and being carried up when we went to bed. We just enjoyed being lazy in there, together, watching television on the old TV set and eating.

  “Can you imagine what a doctor would think about that for a complaint? Please help us; we’re fully rested!”

  “Besides, he’s pretty fat,” I said, sitting up slightly on the bed and leaning over to look at Xander. The rings of fat around his wrists and ankles. It was warm in the bedroom, and he was naked save for a nappy.

  The memories are bittersweet, these days. “Don’t worry,” a friend once said to me when I mentioned Marc’s name one too many times on a night out. “Everyone has an ex they’re still in love with.”

  I had blinked, and denied it. And yet, later that night, in bed, I thought: Of course. Of course I am. But it’s too late for us, anyway, now.

  Is it?

  The quiet question rises inside me. But it is. I am incapable. I am incapable of telling Martha how hard the nannying is, and I am incapable of telling Marc how sorry I am about what happened between us. What a fuckup I am. Martha knows how to apologize. And Martha can cope with Layla. What’s the point of me? God, I want a glass of wine as big as my head, now. I’ll buy a fucking bottle.

  Layla has cried in the ready-meal aisle of Sainsbury’s, and through all of the fruit and veg. As I reach to grab a bottle of milk in the dairy aisle, Marc texts me, just a photograph of a beautifully laid carpet.

  Lovely! I reply, gritting my teeth while Layla cries as I adjust her in order to respond.

  You okay? he replies immediately. It’s true it’s unlike me to send such a short, dismissive reply.

  In baby hell, I send back. Lovely carpet though, really, I add. I love how a carpet can transform a room. I know I would’ve been an excellent designer; I could always select the exact right color. There’s a huge difference between oatmeal and fawn, trust me.

  When I started set dressing, and back when Marc was still my husband, I would gather up my materials and go with him on his carpet-fitting days. I would sit in the room next door to the one he was fitting in, spread out my cardboard and sequins and Sellotape, and we’d chat, and he would swear at the carpet stretcher, and his bad knee.

  We’d play games—listing celebrities beginning with every letter of the alphabet, or playing I spy—and he’d make me proud of him with how fastidious he was, how neat. I loved to watch the transformation take place, from bare floor to fluffy carpet. I loved the smell of it. Marc later told me it was caused by something called 4-phenylcyclohexene, which rather took the romance out of it. “No, it smells of newness and hope,” I replied, and he threw his head back with laughter.

  You need to tell her no, next time, Marc types back now as I stand in the supermarket. Takes the piss.

  Doesn’t it just, I reply, but say nothing further.

  What else is there to say? The last thing I want is Marc getting protective, intervening, trying to fix it, as is his way.

  I buy only the necessities, now, alone: milk, a reduced baguette, some hummus. I have four bottles left of Martha’s milk, so Layla will be okay. I need to get home and tidy: I cringe as I think of the house waiting for me. I have always had a tendency to let things get sinful before I tidy, enjoying the dramatic transformation even a bit of housework brings about. I’m looking forward to removing the soiled dishes piled high on the kitchen windowsill just as soon as Layla gives me a moment.

  My phone rings in the car and I answer it on hands-free. Marc’s deep voice booms through the in-car system. “I can already hear her,” he says.

  “Don’t, Marc,” I say.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t . . . it’s fine. Just don’t.”

  “They’re taking advantage of you,” he says.

  “They’re not. They’re really not. I volunteered. It’s only tonight. One night.”

  “But it’s all the time, Sam,” he says.

  I shrug in the car as I wait at a set of traffic lights, even though he can’t see me. “Yeah,” I say. “I know. I know it is.”

  “Why is she crying so much, anyway?” he says. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s a baby,” I say. We hang up soon after that. God, I don’t need him to tell me they’re taking advantage of me. It makes it worse, not better.

  We are hot when we get home, and Layla is bright red and screaming as I open the car door. It won’t open fully, and closes back onto my hip, and I clench my jaw. “Please be quiet,” I say, taking a moment to lean against the side and try to breathe. “Please, please just be quiet.”

  As I scoop Layla up, I see her. My neighbor, Theresa. She’s in yoga wear. A vest top and a long-line cardigan. Leggings. Ugg boots. No doubt about it: She has been eating avocados and meditating. Straight out of a fucking rom-com.

  She lifts her arm in a wave. The smile dies as she sees Layla’s bright-red screaming face.

  Theresa once complained about one of the other neighbors, Sheila, who liked to cook and listen to reggae every Saturday afternoon. I liked to hear the reggae drifting through the walls, and smell the spices and the jerk chicken. Sometimes, Sheila brought leftovers round on paper plates covered in foil, and I liked that, too—like party food. She had stopped bringing Theresa leftovers, she told me, after the complaint. And she had turned her music down, too, so on Saturdays I had to strain to hear it.

  “My sister’s baby,” I say, swinging Layla’s car seat. It’s weightier than I remember with Xander. How did I carry this stuff around all the time? I must have had absolute guns for biceps, like Michelle Obama, or something.

  “Oh, is she struggling? Your sister?” Theresa says.

  “No, no. Not really,” I say. “Her job is . . . I’m stepping in. Sorry for any crying,” I say with a grimace. “She’s not very settled. At times.”

  “Why are you . . . That’s so generous,” she says.

  “Yeah, well. She couldn’t find a nanny who she could just call up. You know?”

  She lifts her chin and looks at me squarely. She has moaned, in the past, about me, too. About Xander and his footballs. She doesn’t much like children, is my guess, and she doesn’t want there to be a baby next door. She is one of those people who sees kids, somehow, not as volatile little humans with fat hands and short legs and tempers, but as another species entirely. “Give him a bloody break,” I have wanted to say, over and over, when she texts me: Another ball in our garden. Always full stops at the end of her sentences.<
br />
  Layla has been crying for the entire conversation.

  “You see?” I say with a laugh as we turn to go in, holding tightly on to the car seat, even though it is making my arm tremble. Oh well, I think bitterly. Martha’s life may be perfect, but her baby sure isn’t.

  “She’s very noisy,” Theresa says. “Has she been fed?”

  “Yes,” I say, testily. Does everybody—every single person—insist on treating me like a piece of shit? Like a child? A rubbish employee who needs micromanaging? I clench my jaw in rage.

  As I turn to leave, I see Theresa’s eyes taking in the plates in the kitchen window, piled so high it looks as if they may fall at any moment.

  25

  Martha

  Scott puts the television on, low, when we get in. We both behave in this way. Taking up as little space as possible. We hardly make any noise. It is as if we have spent most of our happiness. The dregs are being meted out, and they have to last a lifetime. That’s grief, I guess.

  I drum my fingers against my leg as I try to think about it. I consult the lists I made the previous night, holding the pages close so that Scott can’t see. Timelines, but nothing more. What am I doing? I rise and go into the bedroom. Scott says nothing.

  I spread the timelines out on the bed and look at them. Layla died between eight and nine thirty. Becky was out at quarter to eight. Somebody could have been in the house. With or without Becky.

  No. That’s mad. Ludicrous.

  I start a To Do list instead.

  Visit the house.

  Research wrongfully convicted mothers.

  My handwriting is shaky, unpracticed. It looks more like Becky’s spidery scrawl than my own.

  I stand by the window and hold the list in my hand. Scott appears in the bedroom. He asks me a question with his eyebrows.

  “Nothing,” I say. “I’m not doing anything.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just . . . solutions.”

  “Solutions?”

  He takes his trousers off and changes into shorts. Our flat is always too hot during the summer. The veins are standing out on his hands.

  “Just explanations. Other than . . .”

  His face drops. “Other than Becky?”

  “Well. Yes.”

  “I thought you were leaving it to the jury,” he says. He runs a hand through his blond hair.

  I am standing, framed in the floor-to-ceiling window, staring at him. “No. Why should I?”

  His hand drifts slowly down to his side. “You know what I think.”

  “I don’t know how anybody knows what to think.”

  “Who could it have been, other than Becky?”

  “I don’t know. Anybody. There was a whole evening where we don’t know what happened, Scott.”

  “But everything points to her.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It’s just slander. Road rage and leaving Layla alone and forgetting Xander—none of it is evidence about how Layla died. About what actually happened.”

  “But it is,” he says softly. “That’s why it’s being brought up.”

  “But . . . there is other evidence.”

  “Is there?”

  “Yes. Like who she is. What I know about her . . .”

  “People act out of character all the time,” Scott says.

  “This is killing, Scott.”

  “I know,” he says, spreading his hands wide. “But.”

  “What? What’s the but? I’m just trying to see if there’s anything else that someone might’ve—”

  “Nobody’s missed anything. Sweetheart.” He moves toward me, slowly. He reaches a hand out. “I just want you to be happy again,” he says. He waits for a moment, looking at me, then sits down heavily on the bed.

  I can hardly believe he is the same person whose arm would feel weighty and secure across my shoulders as we walked along the river together at university.

  “Martha. You’re hurting yourself. Going over and over it like this. It’s like picking a scab,” he says gently. His eyes are damp.

  Our gazes have finally locked, after what feels like months. Suddenly, I am anchored. I was adrift, and now, here I am, not yet at shore, but anchored by him, my husband. Safe.

  “What was the but?” I say, still frozen in the window.

  Scott is looking at the floor.

  “Say she gets off . . .” he says.

  I grit my teeth at the phrasing.

  “Would you leave another baby with her?” When he looks back up at me, his eyes are watchful.

  “No,” I say quietly. “Not at the moment. But maybe something will happen?” It sounds hopeless, even as I say it. “Maybe someone else was seen.”

  I think of the near-endless procession of witnesses to come.

  Experts and doctors. And Marc . . .

  “We’re not going to know anything. They will either decide that she did it or she didn’t. There’s nothing you don’t know. The trial won’t help. You’ve got to stop thinking it will provide the answers. The answers are . . . the answers are in moving on. Keeping on,” he says.

  He has said it to me before: during bad jobs and the recession, when we were in negative equity. During a horrible holiday, once, staying in a hotel that had slugs. “Keep on keeping on.” I had always loved that. His calm optimism. On the last night of that holiday, with the slugs leaving trails around the bed late one night, I said, “Keep on keeping on,” and felt actually, properly happy, a bubble of pleasure in my chest, there with my husband in a slug-infested nightmare. It was as though he had taught me to enjoy life despite itself, and not merely to wait for the good times. I felt dizzyingly liberated. I can choose to be happy, no matter what, I found myself thinking. “Exactly.” He smiled at me. “Keep on keeping on.”

  I shake my head now. There seems to me to be an endless amount of information I wasn’t aware of. Hardly any of it is material, but almost all of it is new. The previous conviction. Maybe the defense has bombshells, too. Maybe there is a medical reason, a preexisting condition. Something congenital that caused my baby to suffocate. Is there such a thing? Oh, please say so: that she died naturally, not knowing it even herself. In my mind I can see her eyes closing peacefully, those translucent eyelids.

  But . . . maybe Becky went somewhere before or after Londis? Maybe Becky left Layla with somebody when she went to Londis?

  On my pad I write down everybody’s name. As many as I can think of. All of us: Mum, Dad, Becky, Scott, Marc, Xander, Marc’s parents, Becky’s neighbor Theresa. I strike through the names of those who have strong alibis at the time of death.

  There they are. A list of suspects. I hold the pad close to me. I’ll never show it to anybody—of course I won’t—but it feels both good and horrible to see them written down. Like I am doing something.

  Next to each name left, I make a note of where they say they were between 8:00 P.M. and 9:30 P.M. on the night Layla died.

  My pencil stills across one name: Marc’s. Where was he? Alone. Fitting a carpet for work, so he said. Could anybody vouch for that?

  wednesday

  26

  Martha

  Ms. Blackwater, is it true you were in another country the night it happened?”

  It’s the same reporter again, the one with the curly hair. She’s wearing a wraparound top. I can see the top of her rib cage above it, two small sweat patches underneath her armpits.

  I look at her again, and she looks back, expectant.

  I push past her and into the courtroom.

  * * *

  —

  The next witness, Alison, is one of the few people in Becky’s life who I didn’t really know. She is the mother of a school friend of Xander’s. She was at Becky’s house at 11:50 P.M. on the night in question. A few hours after Layla’s death.

  I
tried to ask her about it—what she saw—at the school gates, where I lurked for a few days until I saw her, back in the winter. But she told me she couldn’t discuss it. I went again the next day, but that time, she looked frightened of me and my pale, haggard form. I didn’t go back again.

  It’s like a fragmented nightmare, a kaleidoscope. One piece of evidence to my left, one to my right. Another behind me, another in front. Perspectives of paramedics, nurses, neighbors, friends. I look at them all, these different angles from which to view the same crime, but I can’t piece them together myself and decide whether or not my sister is guilty of killing my child.

  Alison enters the witness box at ten o’clock. Outside the windowless courtroom, the sun blazes relentlessly. It’s the kind of weather that would once have had me wanting to take a sabbatical and do insane things. Get a tabloid newspaper and a smoothie—one of those ridiculously huge ones from Costa or similar—and head to the beach, buying a disposable barbecue on the way.

  She is wearing flared jeans and a kimono. I almost smile to look at her. I know exactly what Becky would think of her, and I dart a look across at the dock. “Fucking hippie,” Becky would say. “A kimono.”

  Alison tells the prosecution barrister that her son Forrest goes to school with Xander, and that she has one other child.

  “Tell me about the night of October the twenty-sixth,” Ellen says. “You saw the defendant between three and four hours after, as we allege, she had smothered Layla to death.”

  27

  Alison Jones

  11:50 p.m., Thursday, October 26

  Alison poured herself a measure of cucumber fizzy water in her kitchen. She had organized her day around this evening. She’d written one thesis chapter—she’d had to turn off the internet to do it—and here she was, halfway through her reward. She was watching reruns of Sex and the City in the snug. Jones, her husband—she’d always called him by his surname, everybody did—was out, and the boys had a friend over. It was totally joyous, these hours alone on the cracked old leather chesterfield.