Try Not to Breathe: A Novel

by Holly Seddon

  “Yeah,” Tom had said.

  “Where you going?”

  “New Cross.”

  “Oh, right.”

  It was only later that night when he walked into the kitchen to find his tearstained Mum eating cold cherry pie from the foil and splashing wine over baby photos that he realized Tom had gone for good.

  Jacob’s memories of teenage Tom before that night were thin. The remains of toast crumbs in the morning, the sound of mopey music seeping from one bedroom to the next, a door slam. A shadow who had become a lone wolf and stalked away.

  Years later, Jacob had tried to build bridges. He had asked Tom by text message to be his best man, had insisted upon it. To his surprise, Tom had agreed, the only request being that he didn’t have to do a speech.

  The stag do was held in their hometown, a small night with several half friends from work and university. Many pints into the night, the others drifted away. Jacob had staggered to his feet in the corner of a bar and asked his brother outright what the problem was, did he blame Jacob for something.

  “I don’t blame you for anything,” Tom had said, looking away.

  “I never hear from you, mate,” Jacob had said, without expecting eye contact. “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.”

  “You’ve not done anything wrong. Look at you. You’ve done everything the right way.”

  “How do you know that?” Jacob had asked, louder than he’d intended. “You’re not here to see how I’m doing anything.” He’d scuffed his shoe along the sticky floor, pushing himself away and pulling himself back on the brass rail around the bar. “I miss you.” Even steeped in beer, the words were awkward.

  Tom had paused for a long time. “You’re better off without me,” he said, his words slurring like they were too big for his mouth.

  Defeated, Jacob had sloped out of the bar and to the kebab shop next door. After tramping up and down the main High Street in Edenbridge, looking for a taxi without saying another word, the brothers had called their mother. Cradling their cold food, they had been driven to Royal Avenue in silence.

  That night, Jacob had laid queasily in his childhood bedroom with the sounds of Tom’s snoring rattling through the wall. He’d stared into the black, listening as Tom had risen to pee, heard the creaks and sighs as Tom had tried to get comfortable in the narrow bed again. Jacob had closed his eyes and tried to work out what he could say the next day to change things. In the end, he had said nothing.

  “It’s so good to have you both here.” Sue clasped Jacob’s hand over the table, surprising him. Fiona took a deep sip of her faux-wine grape drink.

  “I wish we could see you more often,” Sue said, the tip of her nose belying her Sunday dinner tipple.

  “We’re just up the road,” Fiona interrupted, “you’re always welcome to come over.”

  “Thank you, darling.” Sue lifted her hand from her son’s and placed it carefully back in her napkinned lap. “Newlyweds need their space though.”

  “Oh God, we’re hardly newlyweds,” Fiona said, her eyes struggling not to roll. “We’ve been together forever, we really don’t need any more space.”

  Sue smiled in Fiona’s direction for just a moment.

  “Well, perhaps I could pop round when you go on maternity leave?” she said, directing her question more to Jacob, who looked at his wife uneasily.

  “I’m sure she’d love that, wouldn’t you, Fi?”

  “Come round anytime, Sue.”

  “You’re welcome too, Dad, now you’re retired,” Jacob added, taking a shallow sip of his blood-red wine.

  “Thank you very much, Jacob,” Graham answered, swirling his drink. “Thank you, Fiona.” The older man smiled at Jacob and then, for a little longer, at Fiona, until she blinked first and looked down to carefully cut a roast potato.

  “I’m on the court every day at the moment,” Graham continued, looking back at his son. “Maybe you could join me for a game?”

  The court. When Jacob was a young boy, before he’d seen that “the court” was in reality a slab of ground with white painted lines on it, he’d imagined it to be some grand building where only the brightest, fittest and most manly were allowed to go. Simon had been allowed to go. The next in line to the court’s throne. As the eldest, taking his position seriously, he had stood in the hallway, matching white socks with green trim, an upright, silent, knock-kneed version of his father, with a miniature racquet.

  Jacob had thought it might become his turn at some point, but his turn never came.

  Tom, always desperate to be Simon’s sidekick, would beg to join them. Jacob remembered him coming downstairs even as a toddler, taking the steps carefully in little white shorts and a T-shirt, pleading to go with them.

  By the time Tom had grown into a genuine replacement for Simon, Jacob had judo and tried not to feel left out. He’d never mastered any ball sports.

  Of course Graham was on the court every day. Graham was a seesaw of health and nourishment. He drank far too much whiskey and wine but put in hours of intense tennis practice every day. He scooped chunks of gooey gourmet cheese onto yet bigger chunks of white bread for elevenses but took nine hours’ sleep a night, every night. Graham watched any sort of television show, almost indiscriminately, but never had Jacob seen such an appetite for books of every kind. Russian fiction, crime thrillers, academic papers, manuals for cars he no longer owned and had never serviced himself.

  Jacob’s mother said it came from all those years of commuting, consuming books to make the time passable. Today, of course, an executive’s work would start the moment the train left the station. Emails on phones, laptops with dongles hanging out, but back then Graham had an hour on the train and half an hour on the Tube, each day, each way.

  Jacob had no interest in any of those things. He didn’t trust what he read, for one, and the thought of whacking a ball up and down, especially against someone with a ruthless instinct and years of training, appealed like a bed of nails.

  “Sure thing, Dad.”

  Girls. When Sue first married Graham, she’d imagined them having two little boys and two little girls, alternating like good dinner party table settings. The boys would be rosy-cheeked and handsome like their father, with bright grass stains on their knees. They’d tumble around, kicking a ball and getting up to mischief. The girls would wear matching pinafore dresses, with rosebud lips and bright blue eyes like little china dolls. While the boys would play football with Graham in the garden, Sue would sit and brush the girls’ long hair, tying the sharpest, neatest of plaits in matching ribbons.

  The girls that her sons had brought home were nothing like her girls would have been. “The angels,” Tom called them. Sue thought he’d picked it up from Simon, who she suspected used the term ironically. As brash as boys, the angels flicked their hair around and seemed to have a staggering ability to use their bodies to get their own way, from a ridiculously young age.

  Her girls would have been different. Her girl would have been different.

  Every once in a while she felt a pang for the missing number four. The one that, maybe, finally, would have been pink. But she couldn’t complain—she had three strapping sons. Graham had been happy to stop at three anyway. More than happy. But from her first pregnancy, Sue had planned the second, third and fourth.

  She’d loved carrying the babies, but Simon’s pregnancy held a special magic. The only one bathed in ignorance and plans, nothing but hope.

  She’d expected the baby stuff to come easily once he arrived. She’d intended to have him sleeping through the night after a month, planned to snap back into her old clothes thanks to the Jane Fonda workout tapes that she would use while the baby napped. Potty training, she’d thought, would be done during the baby’s second summer and then the next baby would come along. And so she had planned to continue until there were four shiny-faced children, lined up in height order like the von Trapp kids. Boy, girl, boy, girl.

  From the agony of his breech birth to
Simon’s first reluctant day at school, it hadn’t gone to plan. Sue had lived in her flannel jumpsuit until six o’clock, barely finding the time to apply makeup before Graham’s car pulled into the drive.

  A baby with endless needs, Simon would absorb every shred of attention throughout the day, and at the same time reject it outright. He wanted her eyes on him at all times, until Graham would appear in the doorway and then Simon would frantically look for his gaze.

  All the while, Sue had crumpled into a world of loose clothing, while Graham’s career was in an upswing. He remained handsome and controlled, while she was becoming hollow and scatty.

  It had taken two hours of the baby’s tears, and sometimes Sue’s, to vacuum a room, so several weeks would go by.

  Graham never once complained at the state of the house. But he surveyed it with a slower gaze through narrowed eyes each night, and started to catch the later train home, losing the haste of their early married years.

  Eventually, Sue had resorted to carrying Simon under one arm as he suckled milk feverishly, pushing the Hoover with the other, lactic acid shooting up to her shoulders.

  She’d relied on Lean Cuisine in the day and TV dinners at night and the rest of the time she had drunk tea by the bucketload and blown smoke out of the window and just stared at her angry, red-faced infant.

  It got easier with Jacob, easier still with Thomas, aside from the secret sadness at another blue bonnet. And when Thomas approached kindergarten, talk—Sue’s talk—turned hastily to the final piece in the puzzle. The one that would be a girl.

  Then, just as some elasticity had appeared in Graham’s silent, abstinent reticence, the letter had arrived. Written in calm text on cold paper, it spoke of “abnormal changes” and “repeat smear tests.”

  “Don’t worry,” Sue was told, “these things often correct themselves, the next smear could be completely clear.”

  Six months later, the calm letter was replaced by an urgent phone call from the surgery. From mild to severe changes. Cells were removed and Sue walked home from the cottage hospital tenderly, gingerly, with Thomas clawing at her legs to be carried.

  After two years of repeated, failed treatments, Sue made the decision one day while all the boys were in school. Sitting sore in the empty house after another painful outpatient operation. Graham later described it carefully as “cutting our losses.” The thought of him raising the boys alone was inconceivable. She had to forgo future fertility, the stakes were too high.

  The preparation for the hysterectomy was as brutal as the operation. Fistfuls of pills every night, nightmares about being scooped out like a soft-boiled egg, crying fits behind closed doors, following women with baby girls around supermarkets, nothing in her basket.

  When she woke up after the surgery, head thick with morphine, she just felt empty. She’d stayed that way for a long while.

  The mirrored reflection of Alex’s heels raced to meet their originals, colliding with a loud click. The hospital had recently been the subject of a media-friendly “deep clean” and everything shined and whined as if polished beyond practical use.

  Alex had called several hours before, and with surprising ease had been granted a little more time with Peter Haynes. She was already regretting the high heels, which pinched at her running blisters and slowed her walk to a slug slink.

  She knocked on the closed office door, the space inside sounding hollow and empty. After a couple of polite coughs, followed by some not so polite coughs and a sharper knock, the door finally opened. The doctor was ablaze with mess. His hair seemed to be clambering over itself and his eyes were wild. As he showed Alex to the worn leather chair again, she noticed that the room was immaculate.

  “I’m sorry, Alex, I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to find something but I don’t know where anything is anymore.”

  Alex wondered if in this case, “tearing my hair out” was more than just a saying.

  To no one in particular Peter Haynes muttered, “Bloody cleaners.”

  He sat in the other leather chair, but fidgeted like a child with worms.

  “Thanks so much for seeing me at such short notice, Peter.”

  “That’s okay, but I really have squeezed you in, so I don’t have long. How can I help?”

  “I just have a couple of questions about Amy, then I promise I’ll leave you in peace.”

  “All right, Alex, shoot.”

  “Well, after Amy was found, some of the newspaper reports seemed to contradict one another. A few say there was no evidence of sexual assault but others allude to recent sexual activity. That’s only via unnamed sources though, never official statements. More or less all of them say there were signs that she’d fought off her attacker. I just wondered if—medically—you know which story is correct?”

  The doctor held her gaze for a few moments and then walked to a dull gray filing cabinet next to the brilliantly sparkling window.

  Muttering, he opened and closed each of the four drawers in quick succession before returning to the desk empty-handed.

  “I’d rather not do this on the computer,” he said, hovering his fingers above the keyboard, “but I can’t put my hands on the hard copies right now.

  “Okay,” the doctor continued, “so let’s think this through. You need to know about the examinations that were undertaken when Amy was first found, yes?”

  Alex felt her pulse quicken. “Yes, I suppose so, if that’s okay?”

  “Well,” Peter Haynes began, “it’s rather a gray area. Amy has no known next-of-kin so she’s under the care of the health authority,” he paused, catching up with his thoughts, “and that means we can make decisions but we can’t be seen to abuse that control.”

  He looked up and fixed his eyes on Alex’s lips. “I would never abuse any position of trust,” he said.

  Alex sat in silence, unsure what she was supposed to say, meanwhile the doctor tapped cautiously at the keyboard, like he was cracking a safe.

  He cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t give this information out liberally, so anything I say needs to be handled with absolute discretion.” He paused, and Alex held her breath. The doctor was frozen, fingers over the keys. His eyes were locked on Alex in a way that made her wiggle awkwardly in her seat.

  “Okay,” he lowered his gaze, half smiling, “I’m doing this for you because I think the more people know about these patients’ stories, the better. But that relies on you doing a sensitive job, so I’m taking a leap of faith.”

  “I promise I’m not out to sensationalize, that’s not the kind of writing I do.”

  Peter Haynes’s neck was newly flushed and he seemed unsure where to start.

  “Okay.” Alex scanned her notes. “Was Amy a virgin?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, really? Had she recently had sex before she was found?”

  “Yes, she had, sometime within the previous seventy-two hours, according to this report.”

  The secret information thrilled Alex. It was at once revolting and exhilarating.

  “Okay, so, were there signs of sexual assault?”

  “There were no signs of trauma to the genitals.”

  “So she’d willingly had sex?”

  “It would appear so.”

  “Were there signs she had fought off her attacker?”

  “Oh God yes,” Peter Haynes looked Alex in the eye, furrowing his brow slightly. “I don’t need to look at the records to tell you that. She was still black and blue when she reached me, and I can remember what a state her fingers were in. Most of her nails were broken off and she had a missing tooth where she had tried to bite something. Or someone.”

  Alex felt the exhilaration subside; now she just felt sick. Amy had managed to fight just enough to condemn herself to purgatory.

  “And there were signs of strangulation?”

  “Yes, strangulation, deep bruising, some internal injuries to the abdomen, splintered bones, several cracked ribs…”

  “Was she beaten with some
thing or did the examiner think he’d done it with his bare hands?”

  “It doesn’t go into that here, but from what I saw, I’d say she’d taken everything he had. Kicks, punches, whacks with objects, who knows.”

  “Christ. So Amy was as close to death as the papers made out when she was found?”

  “Probably worse, there’s a lot of information on her record that was marked as confidential and wouldn’t have been in the papers.”

  These details would have been gold dust to a prosecutor, thought Alex, and they wouldn’t have given them away in case that jeopardized a trial. It felt like just another quiet injustice that Amy never got her trial. “Do you think her attacker thought he’d killed her when he left the scene?”

  “Who knows?” The doctor held her gaze. “I mean, really, who knows what a person like that thinks.”

  Alex nodded. The uncomfortable facts were seeping through her notes like a dark ink blot. It appeared that Amy had willingly had sex with someone, and been attacked soon after. She was there, in part, through trust and choice.

  “So she wasn’t raped or sexually assaulted, it was a non-sexual attack?” Alex clarified.

  “That’s what it looks like on paper here, but there would be far more details in the police forensic reports. I’m just looking at the bare medical facts, just the stuff we needed to know to treat her.”

  “Could the person she had sex with, and the person who attacked her, be two different people?”

  “Yes, possibly,” Dr. Haynes said, looking at his watch. “It’s possible she willingly had sex with someone then toddled off and ran into someone else, who attacked her, but…”

  “But no one ever came forward who’d had consensual sex with her,” Alex finished, “right?”

  “Right.”

  Alex continued: “So she had a boyfriend, but apparently they hadn’t slept together, so…”