One Split Second: A thought-provoking novel about the limits of love and our astonishing capacity to heal

by Caroline Bond

  As the afternoon wore on, he heard others being brought down. With each set of footsteps, his anxiety increased. When one of the sets of footsteps ended outside his cell, his mouth went dry, but when the door swung open, it was his dad standing in the doorway. The officer accompanying him nodded and walked away.

  Seeing his father step into the cell was a surreal experience. The officer left the door open. Harry must not have been considered a flight risk. Dom’s eyes swung round the tiny space. The only place to sit was on the ledge next to Harry. Dom picked up the sandwich wrapper and the empty crisp packet and sat down. There was no bin. He cleared his throat, but didn’t say anything. For the first time in his life Harry realised that his dad was at a loss. There was nothing Dom could do: no calls he could make, no one he could bawl out, no higher authority he could appeal to – that would make the slightest bit of difference to what was about to happen. He eventually summoned up a question. ‘How are you holding up?’ His voice was loud, ill-suited to such a confined space. Harry worried that the other prisoners might hear. Privacy, that was another thing he had sacrificed.

  ‘Not bad.’ Harry said, putting on a brave face. It was the only way to go – the only way he was going to get through the next couple of years.

  ‘They said it was okay for me to come in to have a word with you, just for a few minutes. It’s not normally allowed.’ His dad, swinging his dick – old habits died hard.

  ‘Yeah. So I see.’ Harry, being a dick back to his dad – another old habit.

  Dom didn’t bite. He compressed the rubbish in his hands. ‘Bit of a shock, the sentence. Especially after everything Ross said.’ It hadn’t been a shock to Harry. ‘The judge obviously decided to make an example of you.’

  ‘I was expecting it.’

  Dom chose to ignore Harry’s comment. ‘Ross has reassured me that they’ll reduce it. He said they want people like you out pretty quickly. If you keep your nose clean and your head down.’

  ‘People like me?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Do you know what, Dad – I’m not sure I do.’

  ‘Please. Harry. Not now. They’ll be taking you away soon. I don’t want our last conversation to be an argument.’

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you? Prison is for people like me. What were you expecting? A slap on the wrist? A fine? This isn’t something you can tidy away.’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Which I caused.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Dom got up, but there was no space to pace. ‘Stop! Just stop with the martyrdom, will you? This whole time – this hair-shirt routine. It’s so sodding self-indulgent. While you’ve been wallowing, it’s been me who’s been fighting on your behalf. Me who’s been spending time and energy, and a considerable amount of money, trying to keep you out of prison.’

  ‘Well, that’s not gone to plan, has it?’

  Dom paused, blinked, looked down at Harry. ‘Tell me, Harry, how come I’m the enemy?’

  Harry, as so often, when confronted by his father’s impatience, hunkered down behind his old defences: defiance and stubbornness. It left them trapped. For a few seconds they both said nothing. Further down the corridor a door banged. They both flinched.

  ‘Is this it, then?’ Harry asked.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You said “our last conversation”. Aren’t you going to come and see me when I’m inside?’

  Dom looked at Harry and slowly shook his head. He seemed about to say something, but decided against it. There were more footsteps and voices out in the corridor – another defendant being brought down from the afternoon session. Possibly the last one? The officer reappeared at the cell door. Time for the wagons to come and take them away.

  ‘Of course I’ll come. You’re my son.’

  It wasn’t the sort of statement for which there seemed an appropriate response. Harry stood up. Time to say ‘goodbye’. They faced each other.

  ‘Take care of yourself. Don’t let anyone push you around, but keep out of stuff as much as you can. It’s just a case of getting through it and coming out the other side. You’ll be okay. I’m sure you will. I’ll be up to see you as soon as I can.’ Then – if ever – a hug would have helped them both. Instead Dom stuck out his hand. And even in those last few seconds together, after all that had happened, his dad still couldn’t resist asserting his dominance. When they shook hands Dom’s grip was the firmer of the two.

  Chapter 49

  MARCUS NOTICED the burn on Fran’s hand when they were in the car. He didn’t mention it. It wasn’t fresh. The skin was already healing. But it must have hurt when she first did it; the skin on the top of your hand is thin. Fran drove silently, cautiously, changing up and down the gears with laborious thoroughness. The trip had been at his instigation. They needed something to mark the end of the court process. After the endless months of waiting, it was finally over, the case against Harry made, the victim statements submitted, the judge’s deliberations delivered, the sentence handed down. It was at an end. Harry was in prison. But Marcus knew it wasn’t going to be that easy, especially for Fran.

  Fat splats of rain started hitting the windscreen. Fran switched on the wipers. The blades smeared back and forth across the windscreen, making the visibility intermittent. He should have noticed that she’d burnt her hand. He would’ve done in the past. But they were so rarely in the same room at the same time any more. They were losing track of each other, literally. What they needed was time together, if there was any chance that their relationship was going to heal. Hence this trip to a place where they were guaranteed not to be disturbed or observed. No one else they knew had cause to be in the cemetery on a wet Saturday morning. They parked and walked up the path side-by-side, the only noise the sound of the rain hitting their coats. Jess’s plot still struck a raw note amongst the mellowed dead.

  They both knew Jess wasn’t really here, but it was all they had as a destination. They stood and stared at the block of expensive marble. White, with black lettering. Marcus had known he would struggle to think of the right thing to say. That was the way it was between them now. They couldn’t talk about Jess and, because there wasn’t anything but Jess, they barely talked to each other at all. His attempts at even everyday conversation seemed to irritate Fran. It was as if his ability to notice that they were out of milk, or that the car was due its MOT, revealed a lack of respect. Weeks back, when he’d been foolish enough to risk a comment about his Year 10 classes being difficult, it had been met with not just a blank stare, but a look of hostility. Fran’s furious mourning brooked no normality. That had to change. The court had punished Harry. It was enough for Marcus; it had to be, he couldn’t face any more grief.

  They had to move forward. There was nothing else hanging over them – except the rest of their lives. Marcus desperately wanted things to change. He’d never felt this degree of loneliness before. It was like suffocating, a plastic bag wrapped round his head, while Fran sat and watched. Hence his hope that a quiet moment, facing the tangible evidence of their shared loss, might help to unite them.

  The rain grew heavier, but neither of them moved. Marcus looked at Fran, willing her to look at him, but she blocked him and continued staring at the headstone. His commitment wavered. This had been a bad idea. A grave, in the rain, was not the place to start to rebuild.

  She surprised him by speaking first. ‘Do you ever think about the recipients?’

  Marcus knew instantly what she meant – the people who had received Jess’s heart, her lungs, her kidneys and other tissues. The Donation Service had sent them a letter thanking them and confirming the number of ‘procedures’ that had been made possible by Jess’s death, and their sanctioning of Jess’s decision to donate. The letter sat in the rack in the dining room. Proof of life beyond death.

  ‘Sometimes.’ Marcus rationed such thoughts. They were too painful.

  Fran wiped rain from her cheek. ‘I try and imagin
e what it must be like to be on the other side of the equation…Being close to someone whose life has been transformed by what we allowed. I think about them getting the call to say that an organ has finally been found. The joy, the relief. How it must feel if it’s your child who gets the chance to survive. I always visualise someone young. Someone good. Someone deserving. Most often I think of a girl. Jess’s age, with her whole life ahead of her. I know that’s not likely to be true, but it’s what I imagine.’

  Marcus watched the rain slide down the headstone, the drops catching in the chiselled cuts of Jess’s name and the dates of her birth and her death. ‘She would’ve been proud of us, I think. That we supported her decision and that we managed to go through with it. She wouldn’t have wanted to waste what she had to give.’

  ‘I know.’ Fran reached out and took his hand. ‘It’s the only good thing to come out of all this misery.’

  He held her hand, gently, conscious of the burn. ‘Not just one good thing, Fran. Eight amazing things. Eight desperate people – and their families and all their friends. Hundreds of people’s lives transformed by our Jess.’ She turned into him and he put his arms around her, and they stood in the rain paying homage to their daughter.

  Chapter 50

  SAL WAS surprised to see Mo walk into the shop. Most eighteen-year-old boys didn’t have much call for DIY products.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’ He didn’t say anything else.

  ‘Can I help you with something?’ She smiled to prompt him. His relationship with Tish puzzled and fascinated Sal. Chalk and cheese. But he was good for her, there was no denying that.

  He gathered himself. ‘I wanted to ask your permission for something. I’d like to take Tish out for the day.’

  The old fashioned formality of it made Sal want to laugh, but she smothered the instinct when she saw that he was serious. ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s just…I’d like it to be on her actual birthday. That’s why I thought I should ask. I didn’t know what you might have planned. Tish hasn’t mentioned anything.’

  They hadn’t anything special planned. How sad was that? Tish’s eighteenth birthday and there wasn’t going to be a party, no ‘rite of passage’ night out in town, buying her first legal drink. Tish hadn’t even asked for anything specific as a gift. Sal understood.

  ‘No. We were going celebrate at home in the evening when I got back from work.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. So might it be all right for me to take Tish out during the day?’

  He really was a kind lad. ‘Sure.’

  But Mo wasn’t finished. ‘The trouble is…it would probably end up being for most of the day.’

  ‘Well, it’s up to Tish really. You’ll have to ask her. It’s fine with me.’

  He hesitated. ‘The thing is…I wanted it to be a surprise.’

  ‘Okay.’ Sal was touched by his thoughtfulness, but at the same time she was worried. Mo was such a serious lad. Tish might not want a full day with him and whatever he had planned.

  ‘I’d have to call for her at eight-thirty a.m.’

  ‘In the morning!’ Sal exclaimed.

  That’s when he did smile, a proper full-on grin. ‘Yeah, I know, she’s going to love me for that, isn’t she? That’s why I thought you might be able to help.’ He screwed up his face – comic contrition. ‘Maybe pretend that she had to be ready for something?’

  ‘You want me to wake her up early, tell her to get ready to leave the house by half-eight, on her birthday?’

  His smile wavered. ‘Yeah. Sorry. But I know she’d want to have enough time. It would spoil it, if she felt rushed and not ready.’

  Sal knew what he meant. It took Tish twice as long to do her make-up these days. Mo’s awareness of her daughter impressed Sal. ‘And what do you suggest I tell her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Thanks for that. So I get the joy of coming up with a credible excuse for dragging her out of bed at the crack of dawn, and you get to arrive and whisk her off for her birthday treat, like her knight in shining armour!’

  Mo grinned. ‘Yep.’

  He was hard to resist. ‘Sounds fair enough to me.’

  ‘Thank you. Oh, and I don’t think we’ll be back until about eight p.m. Is that okay?’

  ‘Looks like it’s going to have to be, doesn’t it?’ They were both smiling by now. ‘So, where are you planning on taking Tish for her big birthday surprise?’

  When Mo told her that he was going to take Tish for a day at the seaside, Sal gave up masking her feelings and had a little cry. For a change, they were happy tears.

  Chapter 51

  FRAN WAS making an effort and cooking a proper meal. When Marcus got in from his parents’ evening they would sit at the table, eat together and have a conversation about their respective days, exchanging snippets of news and bothering to tell anecdotes. It was all part of their new commitment to get ‘back on top of things’. Work, the house, their relationship – the day-to-day stuff they’d been neglecting for months – focusing their energy into something constructive. She had promised Marcus, and herself, that she would try; and so she was.

  It looked like beetroot juice, spreading across the chopping board. She traced her finger through it, creating patterns. Who knew that scraping carrots could be so dangerous? On automatic pilot, she walked over to the sink and ran the cold tap. After a few minutes the numbness in her fingers began to hurt. She kept her hand under the stream of water. The blood continued to seep through her grated skin.

  She had been knocking and chopping chunks out of herself a lot recently. It was careless of her. There was still an ugly bruise on her left shin, which she’d got from banging into the edge of the bed when she was changing it – another positive chore, stripping and washing all the bedding, except in Jess’s room. That she hadn’t been able to face. Fran turned off the tap and reached for a square of kitchen roll. She wrapped it loosely around her finger. Instantly it flushed a light, wet pink. The bleeding would stop when it stopped. Skin was like that; it healed in its own time. She left the dinner prep and went through to the lounge. While she waited for the scrape to stop seeping, she decided to permit herself a small indulgence. Even good wives, who were working really hard on their recovery, were allowed to spend some time on the treasure trove that was YouTube.

  She clicked onto the next film in the series. It was fascinating to see how the confrontations played out. The uncomfortable clashes between the victims and their families and the people who had committed the crimes. Fran watched each film all the way through to the end of the credits, sucked into the drama, the anger, the excuses, the sense of unfairness, and the very different reactions of the victims to the perpetrators’ remorse. Many of the videos were re-enactments based on the transcripts of actual meetings. What she was listening to was real dialogue, real emotions. Sitting with the laptop open on her knee, in her spot on the carpet, in the corner of the room, Fran felt alive in a way that she seldom did any more. The people in these films had more in common with her than anyone she met in day-to-day life. They knew and echoed her pain. Time flew as she watched their stories. And it never normally did that.

  The film she’d chosen today was about a manslaughter case, where a young lad had died after being punched in the head on a night out – one drunken punch and that was it: a life snuffed out. The footage ended, and the contact details for the Restorative Justice Service appeared on the screen. Fran pressed pause. It took her a few seconds to re-root herself back into her own front room. The calmness of the victim’s mother, her willingness to listen and, ultimately, to forgive the brutish-looking older man who had killed her son, was awe-inspiring. Fran sat and contemplated the strength and depth of character that it must take to respond like that.

  Unconsciously her fingers sought out the patch of damaged carpet. They had told Jess time and time again not to paint her nails in the front room, or at least if she was going to do it there, to put the polish down somewhere safe. But, of cours
e, in one ear and out the other. ‘Iridescent Indigo’ was not an easy colour to get out of a pale grey carpet. The nail polish remover that Jess had unwisely used to lift the stain had only served to fuse the carpet fibres together, making the damage even more noticeable. Why she needed her toenails painting in January in the first place, Fran hadn’t understood. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to be looking at her bare feet in the middle of winter. Fran ran her fingertips across the carpet. The bald patch was now one of her anchor points in the house.

  The details for the Restorative Justice Service were still onscreen. She fetched a pen and paper and copied them down. She put the scrap of paper away in her purse, closed down YouTube, went back into the kitchen and picked up her carrot peeler. The scrape on her knuckles had stopped bleeding.

  Over dinner, she and Marcus talked about work and the weather, like two people who had a normal life. She supposed it was an achievement that, to a casual observer, it might look as if they actually did. They watched TV and went to bed. And in the morning they got up and started all over again.

  The contact details stayed hidden away in her handbag. They whispered to her every time she went to pay for something or took out her car keys. But she was disciplined, committed to weaning herself off her ‘addiction’. She had promised Marcus. She kept herself busy and on-track – for three whole days.

  She sent the email from her work computer on the Friday afternoon – as she’d known she was going to do, from the moment she wrote down the contact details. No, that wasn’t true. She’d known she was going to reach out to the service from the very first day she’d stumbled across the videos and discovered there was a way to get in to see Harry. Once she’d made that discovery, there had been no chance that her promise to Marcus, and herself, was going to survive.