The Good Sister

by Gillian McAllister

  “I see. Sounds traumatic.”

  “It was.”

  “And so, in your opinion, it was a traumatic birth?”

  “Yes.”

  “The birthing canal was too small for the baby?”

  “She needed assistance, yes.”

  “And so her injuries could stem from that traumatic birth—old injuries that hadn’t quite healed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your witness,” Harriet says to Ellen.

  “Are you an expert as to Layla’s specific type of injuries?” Ellen says.

  “No.”

  “Do you know how those injuries result—whether from physical suffocation or from birth?”

  “No.”

  “No more questions,” Ellen says, throwing Harriet a look of disbelief.

  59

  Becky

  Time unknown to Becky, Thursday, October 26

  I’ve shouted at Layla. I’m so pissed I’m shouting at her even though I’m on my own. I’ve googled all sorts of things to try to help her.

  I’ll just go to bed. I’ll just go to bed and maybe all of this will go away. Since Marc left—he said he could stay, but I didn’t want to subject him to the crying; I want to be with him properly, alone—all I’ve done is drink.

  I bring my arm up to look at my watch, but I misjudge, and my wrist hits me in my face. I can’t see the time anyway. Everything is blurred. The room moves with my gaze, like when I had bad flu one Christmas. I shake my head, which makes it worse.

  Bed, anyway. And then tomorrow Martha will be home and I will have one hell of a hangover for sure. But just bed, bed, bed, now, and I can forget everything.

  I sit on the sofa. Not moving.

  The noise of it.

  60

  Martha

  I’m alone in the bathroom in the court, until Becky comes in.

  In some ways, I knew it would happen; perhaps she intended it, waited patiently outside with her legal team until I came inside. Or perhaps just because it was bound to occur, with us existing in such close quarters all week.

  Bathrooms. A no-man’s-land between camps. They trust us, for some reason, to enter this room and not speak to each other, even though they keep an eye on us everywhere else. But then, I suppose, Becky is bailed. Neither of us is a prisoner. We are free to wash our hands on our own time.

  She joins me at the sink. She doesn’t pretend to use the toilet. She is here for me and only me.

  Her eyes meet mine in the mirror. That green gaze I had almost forgotten. Direct. Her dark eye makeup. I know Becky: That’s war paint. Armor.

  I look at our faces, side by side in the mirrors. How similar we look. The same bone structure. I was always slight where she was broad, but now we are almost the same. Both diminished. She is gaunt underneath her cheekbones, her décolletage herringboned where her shirt lies open at the neck. I have become stooped. She still has the Blackwater mane of hair. Mine has visibly thinned at my temples and lies flat and lifeless against my collarbone.

  She’s still looking directly at me, while my eyes rove all over the place.

  “Becky,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says simply. Like: It’s me.

  And it occurs to me now that I haven’t heard her voice for nine months. Every single action in that courtroom—the witnesses’ oaths, the sweep of the barristers’ robes, the jurors listening so intently—is about her, and yet she has no voice in any of it. None at all.

  She gets a tube of hand lotion out of her bag and rubs it into her fingers. She was always good at stuff like this. She liked self-care. Would often send me photographs of her feet in candlelit baths, her eyes green behind a mud face mask. I can’t tell you how much I need a bath-time wine and face mask, she would sometimes text. Or, occasionally, a message would come through at seven o’clock in the morning: Manicure day today, it would say. A running commentary from her, to me, about her life. It was a privilege. We were so lucky.

  I watch her massage the lotion over and under her palms, her hands twisting, the fingers interlacing.

  I can’t stop looking at them. Clearly, she is here to say something to me. She knows, I can’t help thinking, as my eyes dart to meet hers again. And those hands . . . those hands know. Those eyes know and that brain knows and her mouth knows. But is she lying to me, my sister standing here in the bathroom, using a sage and sea salt hand cream like she has no cares in the world.

  “Come tonight. To the old spot by the bat house,” she says to me. “Nine o’clock.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

  She says nothing further. She replaces the hand cream in her handbag, hoists it over her shoulder in that way that she always did—the movement used to look assured, dramatic, almost like an actress, but she is too frail to pull it off now—and she leaves the bathroom, the dark wood door banging softly behind her.

  We are dismissed again. The defense is stop-start. Xander needs a morning slot to give his evidence by video, and tomorrow is the final day of evidence. The judge just lets everybody go, like children the day before half term when nobody can really be bothered anymore.

  Except this isn’t a primary school; it is a courtroom. The defense needs the momentum I, for some reason, urgently feel.

  We go home and look at Rightmove, at places where we would like to live. Places different to this sterile flat. Rambling old houses. Doer-uppers. Squat bungalows.

  “We could go anywhere,” Scott tells me, which I like.

  “Kos,” I say with a tentative smile.

  He shrugs and says, “Maybe.” Then he adds, “Anywhere with you, really.”

  He holds me to him, the lengths of our bodies pressed together, and I feel truly safe.

  For the first time in months. Years.

  At ten to nine, I excuse myself.

  “A walk,” I tell him.

  * * *

  —

  I am here. Back at the stretch of grass by the water that overlooks the sea, where normal grass blends with tough marram grass. The bat house stands on a raised part that banks upward, gently, and underneath the bat house there’s a flatter patch of ground, almost thatched-looking, where we used to sit.

  I can still see the childhood things we used to imagine here. The lamppost we pretended was a giant friend of ours. The old electricity box with the DANGER OF DEATH sign peeling off it. We ignored the sea. We were far more interested in other things.

  She is not there before me but arrives two minutes later. She was always late.

  She sits next to me, slightly too close—she was always so tactile—and says nothing. Together, we look out to the sea, sitting on the flattened grass. It’s still warm from the sun, even though it’s late. The breeze is soft against our arms, feeling rounded. It’s body temperature, as though we are sitting in a tepid bath of air.

  She looks at me now, her eyes meeting mine. Our eyes are completely different. Mine are round and close together, brown, hers spaced far apart, and a clear green that catches the moonlight. Above us, a bat squeaks, and she winces.

  “Can’t believe we used to come here and sit right under the bats,” she says.

  “I always thought it was kind of cool,” I say.

  “You would,” she says, with a little laugh, a sad little exhale. “You geek.”

  “There could be a retrial, if they knew about this,” I say.

  She shrugs. “You’ve given your evidence.”

  “But still.”

  “Yes, I know,” she says. She tugs at a clump of grass. She flashes me a quick smile. “Don’t tell Ethan.”

  I put off the inevitable question I must ask her tonight, and instead say, “What’s with the road rage?”

  “Oh God,” Becky says, putting her forehead in her hands. “They made that sound so much worse than it was.”

  �
�What was it?”

  “It was just—this guy cut me off going into a car park. I got out and had a word with him.”

  “What, and he called the police?”

  “They were there anyway. Passing. He flagged them down. He was a tosser. BMW wanker.”

  “I see.” I would have laughed at that, a year ago.

  We lapse into silence.

  “You’re tanned,” I say.

  “I’ve been sitting in the garden, smoking, for three months straight. It’s all I do,” she says. “Mum and Dad hate the smell. They say their roses smell of Marlboro Lights.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I see.”

  So I was right. She’s not been sunbathing. She’s been worrying. Haven’t we all?

  We don’t say anything for a while.

  “I want to say something, before we talk about it,” Becky says suddenly.

  “Okay,” I say in a small voice. I never could argue with her, not really.

  “Did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “How jealous I was of you.”

  “What? No,” I say quickly. “No.” I look across at her in surprise. Her nose is turning red in the cool summer air. “Of me?”

  “God, Martha, you’re so obtuse,” Becky says, rubbing at her forehead. “I was so bloody jealous of you. Every day. Every day of my life.”

  “When? Why? I was jealous of you, Beck. All your jokes with Marc. You were like . . . I don’t know. You seemed so together.”

  “Wow,” she says softly.

  “Why were you jealous of me?”

  She looks at me. Her green eyes are bright in the night. “You really don’t know?”

  “I have no idea,” I say.

  But slowly, slowly, something clicks into place. Becky’s barbed comments. Her cageyness. Her sarcastic attitude. “Martha will have a sensible orange juice,” she would mock sometimes, in restaurants. “Well, Martha and Scott read the Telegraph every weekend,” she once said to Ethan, as though it explained something. Of course. Of course she was jealous. The oldest, most timeless reason for comments like that.

  “After Stop Gap was probably when it got really bad. But, if I’m honest . . . since forever.”

  “But . . . why?”

  “You just had it all, as they say. Husband. Baby. The ability to make a baby, which I’d somehow lost. Beautiful flat. Job—charity work, too. You seemed to—I don’t know, Marth—you seemed to pass through life so smoothly. It was so organized. You were always so organized,” she adds, with just the ghost of a smile.

  I look at her, not quite believing her. “I didn’t,” I say in a small voice. “I definitely didn’t.”

  “I started drinking, you know. Not too much, but definitely too often. Wine o’clock here and there. Then Wine Wednesdays to get through the midweek dip. Wine Thursdays, because Thursday is the new Friday. Every night of the weekend. Then no days off wine, all week. In the end.”

  “I thought you drank a little too much,” I say quietly, wondering what’s to come. A confession?

  “Yeah, I did. I’ve stopped now. Totally. It’s the only way.”

  “I see. But why were you drinking?”

  “The jealousy. Everything. I just felt like a fuckup. I missed Marc, in the evenings. What started as a treat became a weird kind of companion. And then—well, I was hooked. But the jealousy . . . I saw you all the time, you know? And I just felt so inferior. That’s it. And then I went home—alone, with no baby, no husband, just a shit job—and I downed red wine.”

  “Oh, Becky.”

  “I know.”

  “Is that why you asked me about Scott? You seemed to think, sometimes, that he wasn’t good for me. Was that jealousy?”

  “No,” she says. “No. I was just concerned for you then. I thought maybe he wasn’t right for you. I was wrong. It’s nothing to do with me. Concern grew into jealousy, I guess, when I saw that he was right for you. That he made you happy. Like I said, you had it all.”

  I can’t help but be touched by her misguided concern.

  She was looking out for me. As sisters do.

  “But, Beck,” I say, “I was just doing everything I thought I should do. I didn’t want any of that material stuff. I didn’t want any of it.”

  “No?” she says, sounding bitter, an eyebrow raised.

  “No. I want to live in a rambling old house. I don’t want to be a slave to a job. I don’t want to do the done thing. No matter how much everyone else expects it of me.”

  “But you did.”

  “I don’t want to. Not anymore.”

  “Right,” Becky says softly.

  I hope she realizes. I hope she realizes that I didn’t have it all. And even if I did before, that I don’t anymore. I have lost it all.

  We watch the sea in silence. Not talking, but being together, is companionable. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

  “Okay, so,” Becky says in a sort of breathless way. “Marc . . . he came over that night.”

  The twilight air seems to still around us. Marc came over.

  I was right. I was right. I wasn’t mad.

  They have lied.

  They have lied to the court.

  “What?” I say.

  “He came over to help.”

  “What? When?”

  “He was there when I got back from Londis. He stayed for a bit. We talked. We . . . well, you don’t need to know that.”

  “Know what?”

  “We reconciled,” she says with a shrug. She looks down at the grass.

  “You’re back together?” I ask, even though I want to ask her why they lied, and what happened to my baby. I ask because, despite myself, I still care. I still care about their marriage. And about her.

  “Yes,” she says, finally glancing up to look at me. “We are.”

  “He believes you,” I say.

  “Of course he does.”

  “Did he always?”

  “Completely. Unfalteringly. Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “We said he wasn’t there because . . . God, it escalated so fast, the suspicion, and we didn’t want both of us to be investigated. He needed to lie, for Xander. Otherwise we’d both be tried. And where would Xander—?” She stops herself just in time.

  Where would he go, indeed? At least she still has him.

  At least she still sees him.

  “You could have told me,” I say. “I’ve been—bloody hell, Beck. I’ve been going mad theorizing. I even spoke to him.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “You owed it to me to tell me.”

  “I couldn’t tell you because . . . because I love him.”

  I stare at her. Loyalty. Hers is with Marc. Who is mine with? Scott? Layla? The refugee children? Suddenly everything seems unbearably complicated.

  “But another thing,” she says, sitting forward slightly. Where is this leading? I am finding myself thinking. I haven’t uncovered any truths. There has been no confession. The truth has become more confusing the longer we have spoken. I don’t know who’s guilty or who’s innocent anymore.

  “And I need to say this,” she says. “Marc coming over that night made me realize something.”

  “Okay.” My shoulders tense up.

  “I found the nannying really fucking hard,” she says. She holds a hand up as I begin to protest. “No, listen, please, Marth. I found it really difficult, and I was very angry a lot of the time.”

  “Why?” I say. Fear breaks out across my body. Goose bumps spread across my skin. She was angry.

  “At first I thought it was because . . . Layla was . . .” She is choosing her words carefully. “She was quite demanding. Far more than Xander. And I was . . . I was so shocked you would leave your baby. I wanted another baby so badly and I would . .
. I’d never have left my baby, I kept thinking.”

  “Yes,” I swallow. None of it is easy to hear.

  “And I was frustrated by how hard I found it. And then I was frustrated because I could never tell you how hard I found the nannying. I felt like such a fuckup. I thought it was the solution. The bloody set-dressing job had made me forget Xander God knows how many times . . . I needed an out. I thought nannying was it. But it was even harder, and I couldn’t say it to you. I’m so inept, I couldn’t even say it to you.” Her eyes go glassy.

  I look away. Oh, please don’t let this be leading where I think it is.

  “Looking after children is always hard,” I say neutrally. “I would have understood.”

  “I know, but I had this complex about Xander having been an easy baby. I thought you’d think I was hopeless if I said . . . if I said I couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “But I could barely do it,” I say. “Why are you telling me this?” I look sideways at her. She looks beautiful, here in the dusk. “What did you do?”

  “I put aside so much for it. For our arrangement. I forgot Xander again, and the school went wild—as you’ve heard.”

  “Yes,” I say quietly.

  “I gave it all up for you. I had her whenever you wanted me to. Even though I couldn’t have my own.” Her voice is thick and strangled. “We couldn’t have our own.”

  “I know,” I say. I want to go on, to defend myself, but she stops me again.

  “I want to tell you what I found so hard, first. I realized something. I realized what was actually difficult about it. For me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I found it so hard not because of the imposition on my time, but because of how I felt for Layla.” She is speaking quickly now, her words ringing out in the night.