by Vikki Patis
Alicia is silent while she speaks, the story spilling out like it has been rehearsed. Because it has. Izzy spent those days in the hospital thinking about what she would tell people, the story that would be the most palatable. Stupid Izzy, making stupid decisions again. It is easy for everyone to believe.
‘Have you spoken to Seb?’ Alicia asks.
Izzy shakes her head again. She doesn’t want to speak to him, doesn’t want to see the pain and pity in his eyes.
Alicia sighs. ‘You should. The police are involved now, Iz. This is serious.’
She feels her stomach tighten at the word police. She doesn’t want them involved, wonders if it was her mother who called them. She realises that, in order to find out, she would have to talk about it, and nibbles at her lower lip, torn.
‘Mum didn’t call them,’ Alicia says, as if reading her mind. ‘It was the school. Someone reported the photo to a teacher apparently.’
Izzy stares at her sister, shock hitting her like a wave of cold water. Who would report something like that to a teacher? Or is that what you’re supposed to do? Tell an adult. Tell someone you trust. Don’t suffer in silence. But it is my suffering, she thinks, my silence.
‘You need to speak to her. Mum. Tell her everything. She’ll sort it all out.’ Alicia places a hand on Izzy’s knee, squeezes gently. ‘We’re here for you, both of us. Forever.’ The front door slams, making them both jump. They hear Michael’s voice in the hall and pull a face, forever in sync. ‘Come on,’ Alicia says, leaping out of bed. ‘I’m gasping for a cuppa.’ She holds out a hand and Izzy takes it, trying to absorb her sister’s strength as she follows her downstairs.
‘I just don’t get it, Cait,’ Michael is saying as the girls enter the kitchen. ‘I thought it was all over. I–’
‘Morning!’ Her mother’s voice is too loud, her smile too bright. Izzy cringes from it, tries to hide behind her sister, but they are almost the same height now and Alicia is slimmer, showing no signs of her poor student diet of cheesy chips and oven pizzas. ‘How are we?’ Caitlyn asks. ‘Tea? Coffee? I can make some porridge if you like.’
‘Tea!’ Alicia says, heading for the kettle, leaving Izzy trying to blend into the wallpaper. It is a dark blue with a gold metallic coat, glistening in the morning sunlight flooding through the skylights. She makes her way to the island, sliding onto a stool and hiding her hands in her lap. She wishes she’d worn long sleeves.
‘Nice flowers,’ Alicia says, fingering a petal. ‘Who are they from?’
‘Seb,’ Caitlyn says brightly. ‘His nan dropped them off yesterday. Wasn’t that nice of her?’ The question is directed at Izzy, but she does not respond. ‘Did you sleep okay, darling?’ her mum asks when the silence stretches too long, sitting down beside her, a mug of coffee clasped between her fingers. Michael is leaning against the cooker, hiding behind the newspaper.
Izzy nods, swallows. ‘Fine,’ she says. She watches her mother’s eyes light up, realising that this is the first word she has said to her since they were in the ambulance together, Izzy’s brain hazy and scared, so very scared. She can’t remember the things she said, has only a few memories between the razor slicing her skin and waking up in a hospital bed, the sheets beneath her white and scratchy. She clears her throat. ‘Mum, I–’
‘Izzy,’ Caitlyn says at the same time, then stops, smiles. ‘Sorry, you go.’
But the moment has passed. Izzy shakes her head, gratefully accepting the cup of tea from Alicia and sipping it, the liquid warming her throat.
Caitlyn takes a deep breath. ‘There’s some news, sweetheart. From the police.’ She glances at Michael, who is watching them now, his expression carefully blank. ‘They want to come over tomorrow, to speak to you. Would that be okay?’
Izzy feels panic begin to rise up inside her. ‘T-tomorrow?’ she stammers. ‘But I don’t… I can’t…’ Her chest begins to tighten, her breath coming in short gasps.
‘It’s okay, Iz,’ Alicia says, putting an arm around her shoulders. ‘We’ll be here, won’t we, Mum? It’ll be okay.’
Izzy tries to absorb the words, tries, fails, to control her breathing. The world begins to spin around her and she leaps up, knocking Alicia’s arm away and running, running, running.
15
Liv
After visiting Paige, I check on Mum, hanging another load of washing up on the rickety airer and cooking her a batch of soup which she can reheat without blowing the house up. Hopefully. I get home in the early evening to find Seb washing up, his headphones covering his ears. He jumps when I place a hand on his back.
‘All right, Nan?’ he asks, knocking one earphone off with his elbow. ‘How’s Granny?’
I make a face. ‘She’s… herself. Seven tuts today.’
‘Seven.’ Seb smiles. ‘What did you do wrong?’
‘Oh, everything and nothing. The usual.’ I slide onto a chair, my lower back hurting after hoovering the upstairs landing and Mum’s bedroom, around the piles of crap. I’ll do downstairs next week. ‘How was your day?’
Seb turns back to the sink, lifts a shoulder. ‘All right. Did some studying. Left Dad a message.’
I feel myself bristle at his words. I know he does this, leaving voice-note thingies for his dad, listening to Brad’s responses. I’m not quite sure how it all works, and I’d rather not know if I’m honest. If I knew how to leave that man a message, well, I couldn’t be held responsible for the things I’d say. Eleven years ago, my daughter died at the hands of the man who was supposed to love her. He’d strangled her, his large hands circling her neck, leaving vivid purple bruises. Bruises I’d seen before on her body; fingermarks on her arms, a yellowing bruise on her hip, all accidents, or so she claimed. But I knew. I’d seen it before. I’d lived it.
I shake myself back into the present. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I ask, bracing myself to get up. Seb puts out a hand.
‘You sit down, I’ll make it,’ he says, and I smile at how the roles have reversed, the young taking care of the old.
‘Thanks, love,’ I say, remembering my mother’s icy responses to my offers of help. Was she always so bitter? Yes, I think. Yes, she was.
We sit together in the living room, Seb tapping away at his phone. My phone rings just as EastEnders is starting. PC Willis introduces herself, and I feel a stab of fear. Seb is quiet while I speak to her.
‘They want to come tomorrow,’ I tell him when I hang up. He doesn’t say a word, his eyes flicking away from mine, unease pouring from him. I should speak to him, I know, but the words won’t seem to come. All I can think about is the way Caitlyn looked at me, asking me what my grandson knew. As if he is at fault.
I would be lying if I said I’ve never worried about it. The sins of the father and all that. Seb was four when Brad killed my Paige. He saw it happen, watched from his hiding place in the dark wardrobe as his father strangled his mother.
It wasn’t the first time Brad had hurt her. I’d known something was going on behind closed doors. But they lived a few towns away, in a one-bedroom flat Brad had lived in since he was sixteen, and I couldn’t be there every second of the day. They’d met at a pub in town, vaguely knew one another from nights out, and soon Paige was spending all her time at that flat, slowly moving her stuff over; a toothbrush, some spare underwear, the blanket I’d knitted for her one Christmas. She was seventeen and in love with this twenty-two-year-old man who had no job and no prospects.
‘You’re going to university next year,’ I said, one day I’d caught her at home. I was seeing less and less of her by that point, the house empty and silent. ‘Are you sure you want to get mixed up in something now?’
Paige rolled her eyes in that way only teenagers can. ‘What difference does it make?’
‘You should be focusing on your exams, Paige. Studying. Not wasting your time on someone like him.’
She glared at me then, a mixture of anger and indignation. ‘Someone like him,’ she repeated. ‘Black, you mean? I didn’t hav
e you down as a racist, Mum.’
Her words had stunned me. No matter how much I tried to tell her that I wasn’t racist, that the colour of his skin had nothing to do with how I felt about him, that it was her future I was concerned about, she wouldn’t listen. And then, six months before she was due to leave for university, she found out she was pregnant.
The violence started soon after Seb was born. Or had it always been going on, and Brad no longer cared about hiding it? He had her then, trapped and isolated in that tiny flat, her days and nights full of cooking and cleaning and taking care of Seb, while he drank the child benefit away down the pub. I watched my daughter turn from confident young woman to a haggard, unkempt version I barely recognised. I saw her going down the same path as I did, throwing her future away, the future I’d worked so hard to secure, and there was nothing I could do about it.
But I loved Seb the moment I saw him. He was large, bigger than Paige had been when she was born, with a head of dark curls. He grabbed my finger in his tiny fist as I held him for the first time, as if telling me that I’d better make room for him. That I was his as much as he was mine.
Brad missed the birth, of course. He didn’t see his son until Paige was discharged from hospital two days later. I drove them to the flat, keeping well below the speed limit, my knuckles white as I gripped the steering wheel, a new, nervous driver. Paige held Seb in her arms, her eyes trained on his face the whole way. The flat was a mess. Empty cans and pizza boxes littered the floor, dirty dishes piled up in the sink. Brad was sprawled across the sofa, one big toe poking through a hole in his sock, the scent of weed in the air.
‘I can’t leave you here,’ I hissed to Paige when Brad didn’t stir. ‘Come back home, love, your room’s still the same. The cot will fit on the back seat.’
But Paige had fixed me with her gaze, those bottomless blue eyes of hers, and shook her head once. And I had left her there, to four more years of neglect, hunger, abuse. If anyone is at fault, it’s me.
‘Nan,’ Seb says, and I jump, startled out of my memories. ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’
I stare at him, noting the same ski-slope nose as Paige, the same arched brows. He has so much of her in him; his laughter when you catch him unawares, a high giggle that bursts between his lips; the sparkle in his eyes when he’s being cheeky, or has been caught with his hands in the biscuit tin; the way he stirs a cup of tea three times, then taps the spoon on the side twice, just like she used to. But when I look into his eyes, I can’t ignore the shadow of his father. Did he see too much when he was a child? Was he irrevocably scarred? Is he destined to follow the same path? No. I can’t let that happen. I won’t.
‘Of course I do, love,’ I say, reaching out to place a hand on his cheek. ‘Don’t ever doubt it.’
16
Seb
He tries not to worry about the radio silence from Izzy, or the impending police visit. He cooks dinner for his nan, chopping carrots and onion for a stew. He helps her with the dishes, puts on a load of washing, mops the floors. He makes her a cup of tea when she gets home from work, and goes to feed next door’s cat. He spends the days in his room, reading the same page of his textbook over and over, unable to focus. He is consumed by anxiety, by guilt. Because he does feel guilty for what has happened. Izzy didn’t have to take that photo, but his friends have been sharing it, laughing about it in the group chat, and he hasn’t said a word. He is complicit.
By night he dreams of his mother, memories interwoven with fiction to paint a picture he knows doesn’t reflect the truth. By day he thinks of his father and his upcoming parole hearing, and wonders if someone can change from murderer to model citizen. Vile to virtuous. Evil to good.
His dad has told him everything, given his side of the story in lengthy voice notes, played and replayed until Seb felt as if his father’s memories match his own. But he is still just a child, and try as he might, he cannot understand the complexities of his parents’ relationship.
‘I killed her,’ Brad told him, not without shame but without hesitation. ‘I hold my hands up to it. I was in a bad place, a really, really bad place. The kind of dark that no light can penetrate. I had no boundaries, kept pushing my limits. Just one more shot, another zoot, try a pill. I was trying to chase the darkness away, but instead I was plunging deeper into it.’
His father sometimes tells him about his mother, his voice softening every time he mentions her. He tells him about her hair, how he loved to run his fingers through it. He tells him about her smile, the way she would laugh when tickled. And he tells him the truth, the side Seb is afraid of, the half-remembered shouts and the tears running down his mother’s face. He is afraid of those memories, wants to tell himself that they aren’t real, but his father does not flinch in the face of them.
‘There was love,’ he says, ‘but it wasn’t enough. I should have done more, but nothing was going to pull me out of that hole.’
Nothing except prison, and, more recently, Jesus. His father found God a couple of years ago, back when they only wrote letters to one another a few times a year. Christmas, birthdays, Father’s Day. Before the voice notes, which are so easy they almost feel natural. Normal. Seb hated writing letters, would sit at his desk with a sheet of paper before him, his mind blank. The words wouldn’t come. But with the voice notes, he feels as if he is having a real conversation with his father, hearing his words in his own voice, instead of the memory of it.
‘I should have done more.’ His dad’s words echo inside his head, exploding like fireworks in his brain. Seb is suddenly galvanised, seized by the knowledge that he could, should, be doing more to help. To be there for Izzy.
He goes upstairs to get dressed, pulling up Snapchat and tapping on Izzy’s name as he pulls on his jeans.
Are you free today?
To his surprise, she reads his message straight away.
Yeah, why?
Let’s do something. I need to get out of the house.
He waits, expecting her to go silent again, but then she responds.
OK. Come to mine in an hour?
It takes him half an hour to walk to Izzy’s. He stops by the shop and picks up two cans of Coke and chocolate bars – Snickers for him, Boost for her. He realises that he has gone about this the wrong way. He should have stood up for her, should have called his friends out. He should have tried harder to reach her, should have gone to her house when she wasn’t answering his messages. He should have protected her.
And so he arrives at her house full of purpose, a renewed sense of the way forward. The police will realise that he had nothing to do with what happened when he speaks to them, and Izzy will be okay. Everything will be okay.
Seb rings the doorbell and waits, already grinning when the door opens. But it is not Izzy who opens it. It is her stepdad, Michael, who Seb has always got on with, but there is no sign of that man now. He is frowning, his lips twisted as if he has just bitten into a lemon.
‘You. What are you doing here?’
‘Is Izzy here?’ Seb asks, his smile faltering at the venom in Michael’s words.
‘No she bloody isn’t,’ he says, stepping out of the house and bringing the door closed behind him. ‘And even if she was, she wouldn’t want to see you.’
Seb swallows hard, his mouth flooding with saliva. ‘But she asked me to come,’ he begins, but Michael waves a hand, cutting him off.
‘I suggest you leave. Before I call the police.’ And then he slams the door in his face.
17
Caitlyn
Isabelle sits at the far end of the sofa, picking at the skin beside her thumbnail. I fight the urge to grab her hands, to force her to keep still. She is still furious with Michael for telling Seb to leave earlier, and I have to admit that I am too. But he was only trying to protect her, I try to tell myself as we sit opposite two police officers, untouched cups of coffee on the table between us. Michael comes in and sits beside me, squeezing my hand in his as he addresses the offic
ers, and suddenly I am grateful for his presence.
‘What happens next?’ he asks, his voice all clipped and professional, and I picture him talking to his subordinates at work in this way. ‘Have you made an arrest yet?’
The officers exchange a glance before the woman, PC Willis, speaks. ‘We need to talk to Isabelle now, to get her side of the story, before we decide how to proceed.’
‘Story?’ I interject, glancing at my daughter. ‘There is no story, no sides. It’s pretty clear what happened.’
‘There are always sides,’ PC Willis says calmly, flashing a small smile which she probably hopes will be disarming, but actually only serves to make her look smug. ‘Now, Isabelle,’ she says, turning her upper body away from me and towards my daughter. ‘Or is it Izzy?’
‘Izzy,’ she mumbles, her sleeve half-covering her mouth.
PC Willis smiles at her. ‘Izzy, can you tell me what happened, in your own words?’ Isabelle is silent, the clock ticking too loud above the fireplace.
‘I’ve explained everything already,’ I begin, but PC Willis silences me with a look.
‘We need to hear it from Izzy, Mrs Bennett,’ she says, and I feel myself bristle. But I stay quiet, watching Isabelle’s face for signs of distress. She is clearly uncomfortable, chewing on the end of her sleeve. Alicia takes her sister’s hand, moving it away from her mouth and gripping it tightly in her lap. Isabelle takes a deep breath, blowing it out slowly before speaking.
‘I took a photo. I sent it to someone. They shared it around. End of story.’
‘Who did you send it to?’
‘No comment.’
Michael makes a noise of frustration and I lean forward, touching Isabelle’s wrist, once more surprised by the rough bandages beneath my fingers. ‘That isn’t helpful, Isabelle,’ I say gently.