Try Not to Breathe: A Novel

by Holly Seddon

  “You’re such an old man,” she’d say, kissing him on the cheek.

  “How did a cool kid like you end up in a town like this?” he’d asked her on their first evening “date,” to the bowling alley, where teenagers were throwing chips at one another in the next lane.

  “Uni,” she said, sipping beer from the bottle as she sat back down after toppling three pins. “I did my bachelors degree at Rochester and then moved here for my shitty job. Don’t get me wrong, I’d hate to live here forever but Tunbridge Wells is all right. It’s quite arty, not that far from London, the rents are reasonable.”

  “You’re not as cool as you look,” he told her. Laughing, she’d acted mock-offended.

  “No, I’m definitely not.” She’d smiled and rested her head on his shoulder as she took another big gulp of Rolling Rock.

  She’d stopped acting quite so cool after that too. The flame-red hair that he loved was replaced by auburn hair with highlights and lowlights and other things he half listened to her talk about. She looked less like a teenager then, more sensible. He was disappointed and relieved.

  She moved into his one-bedroom flat and they spent the weekends and evenings in bed. She made him laugh from his gut. Almost nothing was off the table and they talked and laughed so late that he was often tardy for work despite living five minutes’ drive away.

  Actually, Fiona was late for work constantly, because she hated her job intensely. She’d made a mistake, she said, doing a marketing degree. She’d applied because it was a sensible thing to do, not because she wanted to do it. She had wanted to do graphic design, be a “proper designer,” but her parents had talked her out of it. So she ended up doing an approximation of the job she wanted, and it seemed to cause her a lot of bitterness.

  “I wish I had ambition, or a dream or something,” he told her one night as they quipped over cheap TV and drank even cheaper wine on the sofa. “I’m so jealous of you for knowing what you want to do.”

  She’d laughed sadly. “I don’t know,” she’d said, “I think it’s worse to know what you want and not be able to get it. I envy your crushing lack of ambition.”

  “What should I want to be when I grow up?” he’d asked her, mostly joking.

  “You’re fine as you are,” she’d said. And kissed him for a long time.

  A few months later, when he’d walked in on her crying in the bath, he’d offered to lend her the money for a post-graduate graphic design course.

  “I’ve been saving money for years for no real reason. I’d like to use it for something that matters so much to someone who matters so much to me.”

  She was speechless for several minutes. For the first time since he’d met her, she stopped talking.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay you back,” she’d said eventually.

  “Then you’ll have to stay with me for the long haul,” he’d said, smiling.

  —

  Jacob pulled into the car park near the old print shop with more force than he expected. He didn’t have long before his next appointment and he needed to buy a present for Fiona.

  A thick, instant sweat coated her skin and Amy became slowly aware of her own hair—wet and sharp—digging into her skin and eyes. A pathetic discomfort compared to her broken ankle and smashed skull, but it was this scratching pain that made her the most desperate.

  She lay on the soil, unable to move, unable to talk her way out of this, sweat cooling in the dip of her back. The dusky scent of the trees filled her broken nose with a thick perfume.

  She considered trying to scream. She had tried and abandoned pleading with her eyes as the noise neared her again. There was no hope to be had; if he had wanted to help, he would have. No matter how many footsteps, she was alone.

  Her eyes fell upward as the great murky bruise of blues and grays tumbled overhead. Deep gray clouds slid across the sky as two white-gloved hands gleamed in the sunlight. Slowly they crept onto her neck. She closed her eyes, waiting for the relief.

  Alex held Bob’s gaze as long as she could bear, trying hard to think of this as just another interview. After checking the iPhone was recording properly she looked into her lap at her notes.

  “Thanks for agreeing to answer some questions, Bob.”

  Bob leaned in toward her, distrustful of the technology. “It’s okay. You know my reasons for talking and I hope you’ll respect them.”

  Alex nodded.

  “Bob, I’d like to go back to the beginning, and ask you a few questions about your first years as a family with Jo and Amy. Are you okay with that?”

  “Yes…but you’ll have to bear with me if I get a bit upset.”

  “Of course I will.” Alex swallowed. “Could you tell me when you first met Jo?”

  Bob smiled. “It was in the spring of eighty-four, and I was an apprentice plumber at the time. Tony, the old boy I worked for, used to drink in a pub called ‘The Castle’ and I’d go in there with him lunchtimes and sometimes after work. Jo worked behind the bar and we used to banter with each other. She was a bit older than me and I knew she had a little girl but…” Bob ran a thick hand over his face.

  “It’s okay, there’s really no rush. So Jo was a little older than you?”

  Bob cleared his throat, leaned in again. “Yeah, Jo was twenty-two when I met her. We had about eighteen months between us, which doesn’t sound like anything now I’m an old codger but at the time we used to joke about it.”

  Alex smiled. “So where was Amy when Jo was working?”

  Bob paused, looking upward briefly. “Jo was good friends with her neighbor at the time, a girl called Carole. Carole had a little boy who was a few months younger than Amy, so they’d take it in turns minding the kids so the other one could work. Things were different then, you left your kids with people. You trusted them. Jo couldn’t have afforded to pay anyone to look after Amy.”

  Alex looked down at her notes. “Did Amy’s birth father have any contact with her?”

  “No. No, he didn’t. He’d never met her. He was a brute, a really nasty piece of work. Vicious and violent. When Jo found out she was expecting Amy, she upped and left him, moved to Edenbridge and started again, just her and the baby. She’d told him she was pregnant, and he’d said he didn’t want nothing to do with it, with her. And that was for the best…” Bob stared at the cars whipping past the window. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that scumbag. It makes my blood run cold just thinking about him.”

  “Okay, that’s okay. So when did you move in with Jo and Amy?”

  Bob tilted his head and leaned forward. “Looking back, it was quite quick but it never seemed it at the time. We’d been going out for about three or four months before I met Amy…”

  “It’s okay, take your time, it’s okay.” Alex found the sight of men crying difficult and hoped to God Bob held it together or she’d end up in tears too.

  “Jo didn’t want her to meet anyone that wasn’t for real, you know. She didn’t want to disrupt Amy’s life or get her attached to anyone. She was such a good mum.” Bob spluttered the words a little. Alex had to stop herself reaching across to hold his hand.

  Bob cleared his throat again. “What was I saying? Yeah, when I met Amy for the first time I thought she was brilliant. She done me a picture and I read her a story and me and Jo took her to the park down the road from their house. I was skinny as a rake back then, and I showed off walking on my hands. You probably can’t imagine that now. We got on straightaway and I think that sealed it for Jo, really.”

  Alex smiled at the image. “So you moved in?”

  “Yeah, well, sort of. I started staying over and after a few months we decided we should make it permanent. I moved in with them and we all lived in the house that Jo rented. I was doing a bit better by then ’cos I was qualified and after about a year we’d scraped up a deposit to buy a little place.

  “We wanted to do things right, and I got down on one knee, you know, and we got married on the Monday because it
was cheaper than the Saturday. Amy was the bridesmaid and Carole and her fella were the witnesses. We moved onto Warlingham Road on the Wednesday. We never had a honeymoon but Carole had Amy for the wedding night. Other than that, it was always the three of us. Always. Jo couldn’t have any more kids so Amy was everything to us.”

  “Did Amy call you Dad?”

  “Sometimes, yeah. That’s one of the things the police kept asking me. I don’t know why but they kept on and on about it. At first she called me Bobby, ’cos that’s what Jo called me, then when Amy was about six or seven she started to notice that all her friends had dads or daddies, and she started to call me Dad in front of them. I never pushed for that. At home she still called me Bobby, and then Bob when she got older. She’d call me Dad when she knew she’d done something wrong, or she was…” Bob’s voice broke, “or when she was scared.”

  Alex lowered her voice, hoping to hold herself and Bob together. “How did you get on as she got older?”

  Bob leaned back in. “We always got on great. I know she got mad sometimes ’cos I was on at her about things, but deep down I think she knew it was because I cared. She was a bright girl, our Amy, and I didn’t want her to piss it away like I did, if you pardon my French. She could be a bit of a daydreamer, and she did silly things sometimes, but she was a good girl.

  “She had a nice boyfriend and I know she and Jo had the talk about all of that but we didn’t have to go on at her much.”

  Bob’s mouth smiled but his eyes drooped. “We were always laughing too. Right from when she was small, she’d always have us in stitches. I’d take her out in the van with me when she was little, let her do the gears and all that. Have a little chat. She always cracked me up. They were special times.”

  “I know this is really difficult but you said that Amy was silly sometimes, what did you mean?”

  “Oh no, I don’t want you getting the wrong idea, I just mean the stupid stuff that teenagers do. Walking home in the dark, a bit of drinking, nothing worse than what I done.

  “She and her friend Jenny cobbled this plan together once. Jenny said she was staying at ours, Amy said she was staying at Jenny’s and the pair of them got a train to Redhill and went to a disco there.

  “Well, the reason I know this is because we got a call from Amy about midnight. They’d read the timetable wrong, missed their last train and had nowhere to stay. It was bloody freezing and she was crying and she asked us to pick them up. Which we did, obviously. We was cross with her, don’t get me wrong, but I was so glad that she phoned, ’cos a lot of girls wouldn’t have. Amy could always be honest with us.”

  “She sounds a lot like me and my friends,” Alex lied. “I know this is really hard but I’d love to hear more about Jo. All I know is what I’ve read in the newspaper clippings and what I saw on television at the time.”

  “Jo was a diamond, I loved her to bits. She was a brilliant mum and a brilliant wife. We didn’t have much but she loved our house and she was proud of everything we did have. And she loved that girl to death. She’d talk about how Amy would do all the things she’d never done. She’d go to college—university even—she’d have a career. Jo had high hopes for Amy, we both did. But more than anything, we wanted her to be happy.”

  “Where was Jo when Amy went missing?”

  “She was at work. She worked in a ladies’ clothes shop in town. She got back at teatime and Amy wasn’t there. I got back from a job not long after and Jo was already worried.”

  “When did you realize she was missing and not just running late?”

  “It got to about seven, and that just wasn’t like her. She knew not to miss dinner.” Bob gulped his tea. “We knew something was wrong, we just knew. There’s nothing like it. It’s like this icy cold feeling in your belly. Anyway, I started driving around, knocking on doors of friends I remembered, driving to school and back, not really knowing where to go. Jo rang all the mums she could think of, got Amy’s boyfriend’s number and called over and over until someone answered. I think she was hopeful that whole time, you know, thinking they must be together, ’cos no one was there either. Then someone answered and told her they were having some kind of celebration meal and Amy wasn’t invited.”

  “When did you decide to call the police?”

  “It was when I got back from driving around. It was getting dark, probably about nine o’clock by then. They told us to check her clothes and look for a note to say she’d run away. We knew she hadn’t run away. Next day, they came over.”

  “Did you sleep at all that night?”

  “Not a wink. I don’t think anyone can understand what it’s like for a child to go missing.”

  “Did you continue living with Jo after Amy was found?”

  “If you can call it that. I don’t think Jo really carried on living after she was told Amy was brain dead. That’s what we were told, an’ all. As for me and Jo, well, I loved her with all my heart, but when the police took me away…the look in her eyes…I don’t think any marriage can survive that. What they made her think I’d done.” Bob stared out of the window and rubbed his eyes. A young woman was trying to fit her toddler into its booster seat in the back of her car, little legs rigid in protest.

  “When I finally left, Jo barely noticed. The papers said I was hiding, but I wasn’t running away from them. I pleaded with her not to do anything stupid but I don’t know if she even heard me. And then a year after Amy was found, Jo couldn’t take it anymore. There was no one there to stop her and she took her own life.”

  Alex stopped the recording and held Bob’s hand, trying to ignore the depth of her thirst.

  Jacob pressed hard on the accelerator and slipped through the junction just as the amber light gave way to red.

  Fiona took a sharp breath. “What’s up with you today?”

  Jacob didn’t answer. He locked his jaw and squinted at the road.

  “J?”

  “Sorry, what?” He flicked his eyes at her for a split second before turning his frown back to the road.

  “J, what’s wrong with you? Are you even listening to me?”

  “I’m fine, why?” He tried to smooth out his expression.

  “You’re not fine,” she said quietly, looking dead ahead. “You’re all over the place. I wish you’d tell me what’s up.”

  “You’re worrying about nothing, just relax.”

  —

  Swinging the car onto Royal Avenue was always difficult.

  He wished his parents had left Edenbridge, wished he didn’t have to return to its streets. The town had wrapped around him like a duvet when he needed it the most, but leaving home for good was like ripping a plaster off, and the old wounds seeped every time he visited.

  He felt guilty that he frequently turned down invitations from his mum, who had always loved him so completely, so protectively. He was the only one left, in any real sense.

  As he parked on the crunchy, wide drive and slowly took the key out of the ignition, Jacob wondered if his younger brother, Tom, really would be here for the family lunch. He tried to imagine Tom perching on the edge of his chair, picking at his roast dinner, his floppy black head with its scowling eyes nodding politely at the conversation and asking Fiona if she was having any twinges yet. The picture didn’t work.

  Tom worked in the Midlands. Within the family, it was referred to as “Birmingham.” In reality it was a West Midlands wasteland no one had heard of, burrowing into the backside of Walsall, nearly 200 miles from Edenbridge. They’d not visited. Jacob had often texted to offer when a planned trip took them along Tom’s section of motorway. Tom would invariably make excuses, or only receive the text once the trip was over. Each time, Jacob wondered whether Tom was as slow to reply to the teenagers he worked with. Then he would stop himself going down that line of thought.

  The last time any of them had seen Tom in the pale flesh was at Jacob and Fiona’s wedding in Lancashire, in the north of England. Several of Tom’s planned visits to Kent had falle
n by the wayside since. Tom hadn’t seemed comfortable in the pretty Lancastrian countryside that framed the wedding. He’d been clearly—and inexplicably—itching to get back to his adopted urban mess.

  Jacob loved visiting Lancashire. He loved the warmth and openness of Fiona’s family, the work-to-live attitude, the pubs and the big knotty open spaces. He loved the dry stone walls in the villages and he especially loved how relaxed and happy he felt away from Tunbridge Wells. Until he thought of Amy, and then his chest would hurt and his eyes would darken and guilt would pull him back under.

  —

  “Hello, darling, come in,” said Sue, Jacob’s mother, who was standing on the hall doormat wearing lambskin slippers and kissing Fiona on both cheeks.

  As soon as the heavy front door had swung open, Jacob picked up that distinctive smell of “home.” The Fairy liquid and Comfort fabric conditioner his mother had always used, the dark pink potpourri in the porcelain dish, the Shake n’ Vac on the carpet, the Pears soap in the downstairs loo, his mother’s buttery cooking.

  “Hello, Mum,” Jacob said, stooping down to kiss her cheek. Sue was five foot two; he—like both of his brothers—was more than a foot taller. “Is Tom here yet?”

  Sue looked away, her ears turning pink at the tops. She smiled awkwardly and explained that Tom wasn’t coming after all.

  It’s because I’m here, thought Jacob. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had happened because there were whole months, years maybe, when Jacob had been completely wrapped up in himself. But at some point, his younger brother, who had just always been there, whose loyalty he would never have questioned, who looked up to his big brothers and mirrored everything they did, had just pulled clean away.

  With a wince, Jacob remembered the afternoon Tom moved out. Although Jacob was eighteen at the time, it had been sixteen-year-old Tom who left home first. Jacob barely noticed. His brother’s spiky silhouette had appeared in Jacob’s doorway, black dyed hair drooping in front of his eyes. He’d had a big duffel bag over his shoulder, a couple of carrier bags in each hand. Tom had just stood there, waiting, possessions hanging off him. Jacob had looked up and said, “You off?”