Try Not to Breathe: A Novel

by Holly Seddon

  The sun was smug and full, blasting orange light into every corner of the room. Most people would be leaving for work soon, and the showers up and down her road would be pumping away for the next hour. In moments like this, it was painfully clear that she could never handle an office job. Freelancing suited her lifestyle, however corrosive that may be.

  Her handbag was on the arm of the sofa, purse and notepad intact. No cash, but at least all the cards were still there.

  Opening her notepad, she slumped into the well-worn dip of the once-luxe cream corner sofa. Hugging her knees and sleepily reaching for the mohair throw, she started to flick through the notes.

  Another wave of nausea crashed over her and she squeezed her eyes shut. She wasn’t getting better, she’d just mistaken survival for progress. It didn’t matter how many times Alex had convinced herself she could get well, it wasn’t actually happening. She was treading water. Or maybe wine.

  “Hello, Mount Pleasant Medical Center?”

  “Hello, I’d like to make an appointment to see my GP.”

  “Name, please?”

  “Alexandra Dale.”

  “Axminster Road?”

  “That’s right.”

  “May I ask what the appointment’s for?”

  “I had some tests taken a while ago and I think I need to do something about them.”

  I don’t know what to do. I can hear my mum sobbing but what she’s saying doesn’t make a lot of sense. She’s not a big drinker, but every Christmas she necks Babycham all day and me and Bob take the mickey out of her because she laughs at the stupidest stuff and talks nonsense. She sounds a bit like that now, but with the opposite of laughter.

  “I should have got you a cat,” she’s saying. “All your life you wanted a little kitten but I always said no. Every time no. Just no, no, no. Not for any good reason, Ames, just because I didn’t want to have to look after it. I thought you’d get bored with the hassle and I’d be lumbered. And now I wish I had your cat to look after, my love. I wish I had something that you cared about, something special, so I could look after that at least.”

  I don’t know what to say. I never know what to say if she’s upset. I get so choked up, and it’s like making her happy again matters so much that it freezes me to the spot. I want to make everything better so much that I can’t move.

  “Oh this is pointless,” my mum says so quietly I can barely hear it.

  I know she’s angry now. Unlike most mums, when she gets angry she gets quieter and quieter until I have to lean into her breath to catch what she’s saying.

  “This is all completely pointless,” she says again. “It’s just pointless.”

  She sobs louder than she talks and I hear the chair hiss as she moves on it. But I have no answer for her and I don’t know what I’ve done so I don’t know how to make it better. The one person I never want to upset, hate to upset. I’ll walk the other way round the earth just to avoid crossing that line in front of us. But somehow, without realizing it, I’ve done it anyway.

  Does she know I lied? Does she know that I let those phone calls turn into meetings and hearing his side of the story? Even though it was short-lived, it still wasn’t right. I told her it had stopped before it got that far, that I’d listened when Bob put his foot down. I should have been honest, I should have listened to them.

  She says she has to go and I call out to her, “Mum! Mum!” ’cos I can’t play it cool with her, not my mum. But her footsteps don’t stop, not even for a second, and I’m crying, “Mum! Mum!” as loud as I can, and thinking, Shit, what the hell have I done wrong? I don’t remember anything. I’m so sorry, Mum.

  From leaving the hospital two days earlier, Jacob had now spent more weekday time in his house than ever before.

  It wasn’t so long ago that he and Fiona more or less shared one room in his tiny flat. They’d spent most evenings wrapped in each other. Sometimes they would lie on the living room floor between two duvets, like a sandwich. They’d watch cooking shows and soap operas and eat crisps from a big bag and drink too much wine. But then they’d got married and they’d bought a whole house into which they could spread. And they’d untwined.

  In reality, the transition from boyfriend to husband probably hadn’t been very fast, but looking back Jacob felt a lurching roller-coaster whoosh. From the time he’d fumbled with the ring box in the restaurant to saying “I do” in front of a congregation that was ninety percent the bride’s side. It had whizzed by. But before the roller coaster set off, there was Amy. Two days after proposing, he’d gone to see her.

  Now that he was to hobble around the house for the next few weeks, Fiona had insisted on looking after him with gusto. “It’ll be like the old days,” she’d said when he came out of hospital. “We can lie around all day eating crisps and I can blame the weight gain on the baby.”

  It was 10:43 a.m. He should have stayed in bed, he should have pulled her back under the duvet with him. Just talked about nonsense all morning like they used to, mucked about as the day fell away. But lying down was agitating and he’d done nothing but lie flat in the hospital.

  The painkillers had knocked a level of fight out of him, leaving just a throb in his limbs and peppery itches on his healing face. His leg had been plastered and bound in a bright blue invalid sock. The whole thing weighed heavily and sweated like fury.

  “Oh, J, you look miserable,” Fiona said, surveying him warily. “I’m popping out for a bit. Will you be okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I’ve got my phone if you need anything.”

  “Okay. I love you.”

  As the front door clicked shut with a jingle of keys, Jacob reached into his pocket, squeezed his phone out and ordered a taxi.

  —

  “This’ll do fine.”

  “That’s £8.60, please.”

  The taxi driver left the engine ticking as he came round to open Jacob’s door.

  “Keep the change.”

  As the tires crunched away, the sudden cool and quiet of the road halted him. Jacob was alone in Bedminster Road, where the alleyway to the back of Axminster Road slashed two blocks of terraced houses.

  This part of town was a beehive. Identical, neat and full of workers.

  Most of the houses were empty by day, their occupants working in shops or answering phones somewhere. Alex Dale’s house had also looked abandoned when the taxi had driven through as requested. The black VW nowhere to be seen.

  The alleyway was cool and a little dank. Jacob’s painful movements forced him to take in every brick, twig and stench as he slowly labored his way through to the back of the journalist’s home.

  An ant house writhed around under the gate of number fourteen, behind it he could hear children shrieking and bickering.

  Alex Dale’s gate didn’t hide any children. The little garden inside was more of a yard. A graveyard of pots.

  Jacob peered through a crack in the gate, blistered with green paint. The yard was empty, as ever, its lopsided clothes drier partially obscuring his view of the kitchen window.

  Taking a last look up and down the empty alley, Jacob leaned on his crutches, struggled up on to one tiptoe and reached over the gate to grapple and swipe at the bolt. Eventually it squawked back.

  Softly, holding his breath like a safecracker, Jacob flicked up the catch, pausing for a moment to quiet his panic. While this was not his first time, it was his first attempt to get inside in the full glare of sunlight, with crumpled legs slowing him down.

  The rucksack he’d brought kept slipping off his shoulder as he swooped the gate open as quickly and quietly as he could manage.

  Jacob shuffled and swung on his crutches, hunkering down, along the gravelly concrete.

  He hobbled to the kitchen window, pausing briefly at the semi-paned back door, and leaned his crutches against the sill. This wouldn’t be easy.

  The window opened just as quickly as before, but pulling his broken bottom half up and through it re
quired a level of athleticism that Jacob had never before had to display. In the end, he shoved his way through and flopped like a decked fish.

  Pulling his crutches inside was comparatively easy. Blood pumping and adrenaline surging, he finally got to work.

  “Hi, Amy, it’s Alex, I hope you don’t mind me visiting you again.”

  Alex looked at her hands, which were shaking. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am for freaking out last time I was here. I’m so embarrassed. I honestly thought they wouldn’t let me back in.”

  Sunshine streamed through the tall windows, the dust particles danced and a nearby visitor was snoring rhythmically next to her loved one, motionless on the bed. Alex could see the nurses training their eyes on her from the doorway of the office.

  “Amy, I’ve been finding out a little bit more about you and what was happening in your life before you came to the hospital.”

  Alex swallowed, this hackneyed monologue didn’t come easy. The ward lay still around them and the smell of bedpans and antiseptic curdled at the back of Alex’s throat.

  Amy’s small breasts rose slowly up and down, her skinny wrists at her side, palms open and upward. Her seaside eyes were open. Amy was “awake” but her skin had a sheen of sleepy sweat on it. She looked like she’d been wrapped in cling film.

  “Amy, I still feel like I’m intruding a bit because you don’t know me but I know so much about you. I hope I’m not upsetting you by being here.”

  Alex looked around at the other beds. The blond woman with the satisfied look lay next to a huge bouquet of flowers wrapped in gold ribbon, which spilled out of the hospital vase. An old couple sat entirely motionless, he in his checked pajamas, propped up with pillows, she holding his hand and hanging her head, like her batteries had run out.

  “We might have been friends if we’d known each another in our teens, you know. And I can definitely imagine you going on to do something like journalism, like Becky said.”

  Amy’s chest continued to rise and fall softly.

  “Amy, I know that you were going out with Jake for quite a while before you were attacked.”

  The steady “shhh shhh” of breath continued, unchanged. Alex put her head in her quivering hands, running them up and through her hair.

  “But I’ve had some time to think about it and I have a feeling you might have been seeing someone else, as well as Jake. I just don’t think you’re the kind of girl who would have met someone for the first time, gone off with them and given them your virginity.” Alex squinted to look for a reaction. “I just don’t.

  “I think things must have been building up for a while and I think this other person might have been older. You probably felt like you had to keep it all very secret.”

  Alex held her breath and tried to tell if the tiny twitch she saw on Amy’s nose was a trick of the light.

  “Amy, I’m sure that he made you feel special, like you could trust him.

  “If it was me and if I’d started seeing someone in secret when I was fifteen, especially if he was older, I’d have been so excited and at the same time I think I’d have been quite scared. Especially the first time.”

  Amy’s breathing was half a beat faster, Alex was sure of it.

  “At some point, Amy, I think this guy changed. I think you saw something in him that you’d not seen before. Maybe you didn’t feel special anymore or maybe he stopped treating you nicely. Perhaps the guilt was too much. And I think something happened and this guy hurt you really badly.”

  Was Amy’s breathing quicker? Alex tried not to get carried away. Perhaps it was her own fast breath confusing things.

  “Amy, I’ve thought about this a lot and whatever else this guy was, he was smart. The police combed the area, they went through all your things, they had your clothes and your fingernails,” she lowered her voice, “and your teeth to look at, but they found nothing. I just don’t think that’s possible on the spur of the moment.”

  Amy’s sleepy sheen had faded and her eyes were wider than ever.

  “I think he planned this meticulously, Amy. And you couldn’t possibly have known that. He tricked you and none of this is your fault.”

  —

  Alex scraped her hair back into a ponytail and rubbed her eyes. She had been sitting and talking for about an hour, but the one-way flow had sucked more out of her than she’d anticipated. Had she been allowed, she could quite easily have slipped under the covers of the spare Bramble Ward bed, lay perfectly still and drifted away.

  In the corner of the ward, Alex could see Nurse Radson washing the face of an older, male patient. Alex could just make out that the nurse was singing quietly while she wiped away the tiny suds. An old Frank Sinatra song or something similar.

  Alex watched as the nurse lifted the patient’s chin slightly. Then she dipped her fingers into a little red pot and worked the contents into her palm. The nurse smoothed the man’s hair, using a tortoiseshell comb to create a sharp parting.

  “There,” she said, standing back to survey her work. “You look like a young Cary Grant, Burt.”

  She folded the comb into a small black case, straightened Burt’s collar and gave his eyebrows a final tidy with the tip of her finger. The comb and pomade were tucked away, Burt’s hands were patted and the nurse went back to her office.

  —

  The sun was still high as Alex drove back, and her clothes felt close and uncomfortable. She was irritable, rattled by Amy’s almost-there anxiety as much as she was excited by it.

  Everything felt awkward and aggravating. Alex’s bag slipped hard off her shoulder, her car door didn’t shut the first time—clanging against the seatbelt—and she had a tiny stone in her shoe as well as a deafening headache.

  As she backed through the front door with her various belongings dangling painfully, something stopped her dead, as still as a held breath.

  She placed her stuff down silently and stepped carefully down the hall.

  “Hello,” she said to the sitter. “What the hell are you doing in my house?”

  “Oh shit,” said Jacob Arlington. “Oh shit.”

  “Well? What are you doing in here?” Alex asked, heart banging in her chest.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Jacob sagged to the side, leaning heavily on his right crutch and sinking his face down to his chest.

  “How did you get in?” Alex Dale kept one eye on her front door.

  “I climbed through the kitchen window. Fuck, I’m so sorry. I just needed to know what you knew. About me.”

  “Well, what is there to know about you?”

  “About me and Amy.”

  “Go on,” Alex said.

  “I’m married,” Jacob sat quietly. “I have a baby on the way.”

  Patting her phone in her pocket and making sure her door was still open, she gestured to the living room.

  “Look, sit down. I’ll get us both a drink. Let’s start this again.”

  —

  “So I’m Alex. Which I guess you know already. And you are?”

  “I’m Jacob.”

  “Jacob Arlington? Amy’s boyfriend?”

  “Yes. Amy’s boyfriend. But you knew that already.”

  Alex sighed. It was all so obvious. Why would a young guy choose to visit a ward stuffed with people he didn’t know, every single week, for no reason? He was there for Amy, and Amy alone.

  “Jacob,” Alex started, groping for the right words. “Have you been going to see Amy for the last fifteen years?”

  “No, not the whole time. At first, my mum wouldn’t let me out of her sight.” He trailed off, looking at the door and then at his crutches, askance on the floor.

  “Go on,” said Alex, chewing her lip.

  Jacob sat back, wincing and lifting his ankle to rest it on the coffee table. “May I?”

  “Of course you can. It looks very painful. What happened?”

  “I fell down the stairs. Stupid, really.”

  “No,” said Alex gently. “I mea
n, what happened after Amy was attacked? When did you start visiting her?”

  Jacob sighed. “I suppose I don’t have a choice but to tell you, right?”

  Alex looked at the open kitchen window and then back at Jacob’s red face. “Under the circumstances, I think it’s only fair.”

  “Okay,” Jacob conceded. He took a deep breath, and exhaled sharply. “After they found Amy, the police called my mum and told her what happened.”

  “Where were you when they called?”

  “At home. I was sitting on the stairs when the phone rang. Mum wouldn’t let me answer it. It’d been a couple of days and things weren’t looking good. She answered and immediately turned her back. I just knew. She sort of did this weird little sound.”

  Alex sat down slowly at the other end of the sofa.

  “My mum got off the phone and she just stood there with her back to me. Then she came and sat on the stairs and put her arm around me and I knew it must be really bad. She couldn’t get the words out. I just sat there. I didn’t cry, I didn’t know what to do. Eventually my mum told me that Amy was in a bad way and that the police needed to talk to everyone close to her.

  “I didn’t get it at first. I told Mum they didn’t need to talk to me because she’d already told me. I just wanted to go to Amy and see how she was, be there for her. I didn’t realize that the police wanted to talk to me to find out if I was involved.” Jacob turned to look at Alex, coughing to clear his throat.

  “I was a fifteen-year-old kid, I didn’t know what to do. I was in shock, I guess. And then I was really scared.

  “My mum was beside herself. The police turned up that night and carted me off to the police station. She came with me and I’ll never forget the look on her face. Or my brother’s. Tom was watching from the living room when I got into the police car. He looked horrified. I felt like I’d really let everyone down, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong.