by Simon Lelic
Tomorrow I meet my new solicitor. It’s a good thing. I keep telling myself it’s a good thing. If anyone will be able to help me, he will, because I don’t doubt he’s as competent as my parents say. Except when we spoke on the phone, he was already talking about my options. About the potential benefits, as he put it, of pleading guilty. That’s the phrase he used. The “potential benefits.” He wasn’t advocating it necessarily, he said. It was just something for us all to bear in mind.
The other thing he said to me was that I should have faith, and that’s the part that’s been bothering me most. Faith in what? I keep asking myself. Not God. I don’t think he meant God, and if he did that’s not much help to me at all. In my parents, then? In him? Maybe—but again it’s hard advice to follow given that this man my parents have imposed on me has already countenanced amending my plea. Plus, however good a solicitor Mr. Garrie Dalton is, there’s no escaping the fact that he’s part of the system. And if the system functioned as it’s supposed to, there’s no way I’d be sitting where I am.
Which just leaves Syd.
I’ve given up on expecting her to visit. What I’m still struggling to come to terms with, though, is how things between us have got to the point they have. It can’t simply be to do with what’s been happening. Or if it is, there’s something obvious I’m failing to understand. Or . . . I don’t know. Something I’m missing. Except the worst part is I don’t think there is. I’ve been going over and over everything that’s happened, and all I’m left with is this sense that I’ve been betrayed. Syd didn’t want me by her side; I’m as sure of that as I’m sure of anything. She didn’t want me there, and she doesn’t care that I’m here, that’s what it boils down to. And though there’s still a part of me that insists that can’t be true, all the evidence tells me that it is.
So faith in what? I keep coming back to the same question. And as much as I try, I can’t come up with an answer. All I can do is lie here in the silence, trying to work out how it all went so wrong.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
SYDNEY
WE’RE SIX FLOORS up. I can barely distinguish one figure down below us from any other but I scan them all nonetheless. Doctors and nurses smoking cigarettes, patients admitting themselves or being released. One or two people who only seem to loiter and it’s these I study closest. My fingers are prying apart the blind slats and it feels like I’m opening up my suit of armor, presenting an opening to my enemy through which he might fire his arrow.
“Syd? Is that you?”
I spin at the unexpected voice but when I see Elsie lying there with her eyes open, that rush of fear ebbs rapidly away.
“You’re awake,” I say. “I can’t believe you’re really awake.” I step from the window toward Elsie’s bed and try to take in the sight of her. “How are you feeling?”
She smiles at me thinly. “Pretty numb, I guess.”
I can’t tell if she means physically, mentally or both.
“Do you want some water?” I ask her. There’s a jug on her tray table. While she was sleeping I made sure it was fresh.
“Uh-uh.” She struggles to sit straighter but she can’t, shouldn’t.
“Stay there, Elsie. I’ll get a nurse if you want to sit up.”
She shakes her head and sinks, defeated, into her pillow. “It doesn’t matter how I lie anyway. The only time I’m not uncomfortable is when I’m asleep.”
“Rest then,” I tell her. “You need to anyway. And I won’t go anywhere, I promise.”
She shakes her head again. She swallows and it looks from her expression like she’s swallowing glass.
“Are you sure you don’t want some water?”
This time she allows me to hold the cup up to her lips. The gratitude in her expression afterward makes me want to cry.
“Where have you been?” she asks me, her voice less fractured now when she talks. “I wasn’t sure you were ever going to come.”
It’s been three days since Elsie woke up and I can still hardly believe she has. The doctors had been saying she was improving but I didn’t allow myself to accept that it was true. Although I must have. Mustn’t I? At the very least I must have had hope.
There’s a visitor’s chair by the window and I drag it closer to Elsie’s bed. I sit down then stand up again and adjust the chair so I can still see the door. We’re six floors up, I remind myself. With all the security doors and nurses’ stations that are between us and the hospital’s entrance, we’re as safe here as we would be practically anywhere.
“I know, Elsie. I’m so sorry. I would have come sooner but this week it’s . . . it’s just been mad.”
As excuses go it’s worse than pitiful. What can I tell her, though? I couldn’t come and see you because I didn’t want to put you in danger. Because my father’s back and he wants to hurt me and if he sees how much I care about you, there’s a chance he’ll try to hurt you. Probably if Elsie knew the truth she wouldn’t want me visiting at all. And in fact that would have been safer. I should have stayed away, at least until this is all over. But I couldn’t. I tried but in the end I simply couldn’t. With Jack it’s been easier. Not easier—I miss him so badly the ache is a physical pain. But at least I’ve already told Jack everything he needs to know, even if he doesn’t understand it yet. With Elsie, there’s still so much I need to explain.
The problem is, now that I’m here I don’t think I can. Which makes it doubly foolish that I’ve come. Doubly reckless.
“I’ve missed you,” Elsie announces—and this time I do cry. I can’t help it. And actually? So fucking what. I think I’ve earned a few tears. Before I would have considered them an indulgence, a show of weakness. And maybe they are . . . but it’s not like I’ve got any vestiges of self-respect left.
“I’ve missed you too,” I tell Elsie and I take her hand. I try to smile and the effort of doing so makes me sob.
“Syd?” Elsie’s expression shifts from one of surprise to alarm. “Are you OK?”
This little girl who’s suffered so much she felt she had no option but to throw herself in front of a train, she’s lying in a hospital bed asking me if I’m OK. Now those tears do feel self-indulgent. As for self-respect, apparently it’s a bit like love. The opposite of it. With love there’s no upper limit, no brim past which you can’t fill. With self-respect it turns out there’s no bottom. You think you’re empty, then something happens and you leak just a little bit more.
I don’t say anything. For a moment I can’t. I just look at Elsie and try to bask in the change in her. Her injuries, I know, are beneath the bedcovers. The most serious deep beneath her skin. But she’s out of danger now and from the parts of her I can see you wouldn’t be able to tell she’d been hurt. In many ways she looks better than at any point since I first saw her, that day I trailed her through the breeze to Mr. Hirani’s. She’s tired, no doubt, but she looks rested. The skin on her arms, her face, is free from bruises. She still looks fragile to me, small in her oversize bed, but I realize this is an illusion. If events have proved anything, it’s that whoever made her made this girl tough.
“Nothing’s the matter, Elsie. Nothing you need to worry about.”
I smile again, manage it. I was starting to regret coming here but seeing Elsie the way she is now—maybe it was worth it. Maybe it was all worth it, I allow myself to think. But that just reminds me again of Jack, who’s probably more scared now than I’ve ever been.
Elsie is watching me closely.
“They told me about my father,” she says, her voice testing the silence.
I allow my head to nod. “I know.” I spoke to the staff before I came in. “Elsie, I’m . . .” Sorry, I want to say but somehow it doesn’t feel appropriate.
“I’m glad,” Elsie declares and I see that steeliness in her I’ve come to recognize shining out from behind her eyes. But then that shine becomes a shimmer and I realiz
e Elsie is about to cry too. “I am,” she says again. “I am.”
“Oh Elsie.”
I want to hold her but the bed makes it impossible so I grip her hand, tighter now, and I stroke her cheek, her forehead, her tears—only occasionally breaking off to wipe away mine.
“Oh God, Elsie. Look at us. What a pair.”
Which makes her smile, which in turn only makes her cry more.
“I hated him, Syd,” she tells me. “I did. I really did. But . . .”
We’re both doing our best to get a grip on ourselves.
“. . . but I didn’t want to,” Elsie says. “You know? I only hated him because he hated me first.”
She says it like it’s something she’s ashamed of. Like it’s her fault—all of it. And I can’t have that.
“Elsie, listen to me.”
She looks up.
“You did nothing wrong,” I tell her. “Nothing. Do you hear me?” I wait for her to nod. “The hard part for you, Elsie—it starts now. I’m not belittling what you’ve been through. I’m the last person who would ever do that. But it’s what comes next that will be the real test. Do you understand what it is I’m trying to say?”
She doesn’t answer. But I can tell from the fear I see that she understands perfectly. Better than I ever did anyway.
“You’re free now, Elsie. You’re safe. But it might not . . . it might not always feel like you are. There are ways you can still let him win. It’s important to remember that. He’s gone but he’s still playing. This game, once it starts . . .” I swallow. “It never stops.”
God, I hate myself. I hate who I am, who I’ve had to become. Maggie Robinson, Sydney Baker. They’re the same and I hate them both.
“You’ll help me, though,” says Elsie, “won’t you? You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
“Elsie, I . . .”
“Please, Syd.” She’s gripping my hand so tightly I can feel the sharp ends of her fingernails. Before her accident they were always bitten to the quick.
“I’ll help you if I can, Elsie, of course I will.”
“Because I don’t want to feel the way I used to. I don’t want to do . . . what I did.”
“You won’t,” I tell her. “If you remember what I told you, you won’t.”
“How do you know?”
I look at her. I wait until I’m sure she’s looking properly at me.
“Because I know you, Elsie. I’ve seen how strong you are. How brave.”
“Like your sister,” Elsie says. “Like Jessica.”
I shake my head at that. “Jessica was . . . trapped. It was brave, what she did. I mean, I always thought it was. But only because I could never do it myself.” I’m looking at my hands, I realize, and I raise my head. “The thing is, Elsie, you’re braver than both of us. And carrying on, being the person you want to be. I think that’s the bravest thing of all.”
“Like you then,” Elsie says. “Isn’t that what you’ve done?”
I smile at her sadly. “It’s maybe what I tried to do,” I say. “What I thought I was doing. But I don’t think that’s quite the same thing.”
I’m talking in riddles now. Not helping at all.
I reach toward the floor and into my handbag. “I almost forgot,” I say. “I brought you these.” I hand Elsie the packet of Fruit Pastilles I picked up from the little Sainsbury’s on my way in.
Elsie laughs. “For a moment I thought you were going to give me cigarettes.”
I laugh too. “I’d probably get arrested if I tried.”
My laughter withers.
“Listen, Elsie, when they told you about what happened to your father,” I say. “Did they . . . I mean . . . what did they . . .”
Elsie’s fingers interlock with mine. “I know what you’re going to say, Syd.”
If she does she’s doing better than I am.
“You’re going to tell me it wasn’t Jack. Right?”
I barely hesitate. “Right,” I say.
Elsie looks at her bedcovers. “I thought at first that’s why you were staying away,” she says at last. “You know. When they told me who they’d arrested.”
Did she speak to Inspector Leigh? I wonder. I hope so. I liked her, even if I gave the impression I didn’t. And I know she would have been kind.
“But then . . . I don’t know. I kept thinking about when the woman . . . the policewoman . . . about when she was talking to me. It was like she didn’t believe what she was saying. Like . . . like she had to tell me what she was telling me but she didn’t want to. Does that even make sense?”
It does and it gives me hope. Precious, dangerous hope.
“I swear to you, Elsie, Jack would never hurt anyone. Whatever happens, whatever people say, please don’t ever think that it was him.”
All the reassurance I’ve offered Elsie, assuming I’ve actually offered any, it comes undone. “What do you mean? What’s going to happen?”
I open my mouth to respond but all of a sudden there’s movement in the room and I spin, startled. I’ve let my guard down. I can’t think when I even last checked the door.
But it’s just a nurse. She slips into the room with a tight, don’t mind me little smile and makes herself busy with the equipment that surrounds Elsie’s bed.
“I should go,” I say. I stand and kiss Elsie on the forehead. Her skin is warm, alive, and that kiss has power like you’d read about in a fairy tale.
“Syd? What’s going to happen?”
I glance at the nurse, who has her back turned. I adjust Elsie’s covers, so that the Fruit Pastilles I brought her are tucked out of sight.
“I’ll see you soon, Elsie,” I say. “OK? I’ll be back soon.” And with that kiss still lingering on my lips, the power I’ve drawn from Elsie’s skin, for an instant I almost believe it.
—
WHEN I WALK out of the hospital I walk out openly. There’s no more hiding. No turning back. I’m not sure I’m ready, because I’ll never be ready but I’m as prepared as I’m ever going to be. And I’m tired of waiting. My father’s been more patient than I gave him credit for but I don’t doubt he’s had enough too.
So let’s just finish this, shall we?
For Elsie’s sake, for Jack’s. Let him come.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
SYDNEY
I’M LYING IN bed when I hear the house begin to shift. I’m attuned by now to every creak and there are so many in this old building of ours that I’ve come to understand how Jack, back at the start of this, must have felt when he thought he heard someone walking around. The feeling, it’s almost electric, the same sensation you get when you’re being watched.
The noises I hear are coming from the staircase. I almost panic then but I still have time and the adrenaline helps. I was worried that when it came to it I would freeze. That’s what used to happen when I was young. At the sound of my father’s footsteps, his voice calling me if I’d done something he’d perceived as being wrong, my muscles would seize, tense up, so abruptly and so hard that my entire body would permanently ache.
I place my phone face up on the bedside table and slip quietly from beneath the bedcovers. Deliberately I position myself in a corner, trapping myself in case I feel the urge to run. I’m in my pajamas, as I would be, but also the hoodie I wear sometimes when I’m ill. The black one, with the deep, double-width pockets.
When the door begins to open I edge away from it. I can’t stop myself. It’s how I’ve been programmed, like a pet that flinches whenever its owner raises a hand.
The light enters the room as my father does.
“Sydney Baker, I presume.”
Up close I see he looks almost exactly the way he did when I was young. A little grayer, perhaps, but trimmer and if his hair is thinning it isn’t doing so from his temples. He’s a hand span taller tha
n me, two shoulders broader and, as ever, he wears a suit.
And that voice. As before it hits me like a spell, paralyzing me for an instant the way I thought the fear would. I forget to breathe.
My father steps warily into the room. This is new: my father being cautious. Before, he always behaved like he had no need, that more important than being careful was being clever. Perhaps he’s both now. Perhaps that’s something he’s learned in prison. Should I be worried? Has this old dog acquired new tricks?
“It’s a little gloomy in here,” he says. “I can’t even get a proper look at you.”
He’s beside the light switch but he doesn’t flick it on. The window is on my side of the room and I’ve deliberately left the curtains open. Given the hour there’s unlikely to be anyone in the street but even in his more brazen days my father wouldn’t have taken the risk. The dark suits him as much as it does me.
I edge into the light even so—mainly, ridiculously, because I don’t want my father thinking I’m afraid.
I catch the outline of his smile, feel his eyes crawl greedily over me. He steps forward and I feel my heels touch the skirting board.
“It was kind of you to leave the back door open for me,” he says. “I was half-expecting to have to knock. I presume by now you’ve changed the locks?”
We have. We got someone in the day we emptied out the house. It was a case of horses, stable doors, but there was no way Jack would have let us stay here until it was done.
With a gloved hand my father pulls out a set of keys from his jacket’s inside pocket. The set of keys, I assume, he got from Evan. “I suppose technically these belong to you.” He tosses them and I let them hit me, let them fall.
So much for my father being cautious. This time when he steps I catch that circular movement of his thumb and index finger and I realize that, for all his outward calm, the truth is he’s struggling to control himself. Like the way he looked at me when I stepped into the light: there was hunger plain to see in his gaze. It’s hardly surprising. Fourteen years he’s been waiting. I cost him his family, his fortune, his freedom. Regardless of what he might have had planned before he came here, what he most wants to do probably is beat me bloody.