Don't Close Your Eyes

by Holly Seddon

  “Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck—” Robin keeps shouting until her dad pulls her back to him, and she cries until she’s burned out and yawning. The men laugh harder and Drew Granger’s face glows red. It’s highlighted even more by the yellowness of his hair. He’s twitching and pursing his lips. Callum slips behind his mum like he’s trying to crawl away undetected.

  “Why can’t he stay with you and Sarah stay with us?” Robin asks, jerking her thumb at Callum, who looks down at his feet and continues to sob.

  “He needs to stay with his mum, Robin,” Drew says.

  “Why?” Robin yells.

  “It’ll be fun,” Angie says to Robin. “You always said you wanted a brother.”

  “Yeah, but not instead of my sister!”

  “Well, you did say that sometimes,” Angie says, and she tries to laugh, but Jack looks at her like she’s terrible, and Hilary leaves Callum for a moment to crouch in front of Robin and say, “I know it’s hard to understand, Robin. I know you’re very upset about your mum leaving.”

  “I’m not,” Robin says. “I hate Mum. She started all this and now she’s taking Sarah away.” Angie chews her lips but her eyes fill with tears.

  “You’ll still see Sarah a lot,” Hilary continues, trying to touch Robin’s arms, but she swings them away. “And you’ll stay over there and Sarah will stay over with…” she falters, “with us, and we’ll try to make it the best it can be. And you do get on very well with Callum, don’t you, and you’ll be able to have fun together too.”

  “I don’t want him, I want my sister,” Robin says, quieter now but with chest-bucking sobs. “He’s just some boy. I don’t want him in my house.”

  Quietly, to the side of Robin, Sarah speaks in a low voice to her dad. “Please don’t make me go, Dad. Please let me stay.”

  “She can share my room,” Robin says louder, “and Callum can still come then, I don’t care.” Jack glances over at Angie, a look of pleading on his face, but she mouths, “I’m sorry,” and Drew shakes his head. “We’ve worked this all out,” he says. “Let’s not get it all messy again.”

  Robin figures that if she just makes it “messy,” then maybe they’ll work it all out differently. So she keeps screaming and yelling everything she can think of. If she can just keep this going all day, they’ll have to go back to their houses and rethink it all. But it doesn’t work that way. Instead, as if they’ve already talked it through, Angie goes in Drew’s car back to the Grangers’ house alone for the night, and Hilary and Callum pile into the Rover and go back to the Marshalls’ house. Before the cars leave, there is an exchange of overnight bags. Sarah’s is not one of them; she will stay until the end of the next week, pack her things and prepare for her new home. Robin is desperate not to let this happen. But no one seems to care.

  FIFTEEN

  SARAH|PRESENT DAY

  8. The Internet Searches

  This was the one that stopped my heart. The last item on the list: the Internet searches. The false comfort of an empty room. Free to spend a child’s nap time at the screen with no little eyes peeping over your shoulder. How liberating, to be able to really dig in, to be able to allow your brain free rein to go off in any direction, scratch itches, get answers and snap the computer off if you reach saturation point.

  With no thought—well, I certainly never gave a thought—to repercussions. I never considered that there would be any record, those lines of code recording every scraggly, knotty thought I’d tried to smooth out and tie up neatly.

  I would never have thought to look at Jim’s Internet search history. I would never have cared. I wouldn’t even look now, except perhaps to understand what his intentions are.

  But he’d certainly gone through mine. He, his parents, his brother. Raking over every absent-typed doodle and whim. Not to mention every deliberate and hard-typed word.

  “Angel cake recipe”

  “Calories burned sleeping”

  “Vitamin E deficiency”

  “Homemade face masks”

  “How to hide effects of child trauma”

  ROBIN|PRESENT DAY

  The Magpies are arguing again. They’ve been at it for a good hour. This isn’t just sniping, this is hammer and tongs. A wall rattler.

  Robin notices it’s caught the attention of Mrs. Peacock. She’s walking in and out from her apartment’s patio doors to the garden, shaking and bashing rugs, working fistfuls of old hair out of brushes, letting it drift away for the birds to use for nests.

  The Magpie fight started at the table by the window. It was a sedate summit that snowballed, becoming increasingly animated until the pacing and hand waving finally descended into the kind of shouting match in which neck veins bulge and insults that can never be truly taken back are hurled.

  A few times now Mrs. Magpie has held her palms up, an offer of peace that is quickly dashed away by her husband. At one point, he grabbed her hands like he could scrunch them up and toss them, letting them go just as angrily.

  When he stormed out of the kitchen for a few minutes, the woman had immediately started jabbing frantically at her phone, shoving it quickly into her pocket as the kitchen door flew back open.

  Robin’s heart beats loudly as she watches, adrenaline surging as she grows more and more angry with Mrs. Magpie for choosing to play around with something so precious, to risk her son and husband’s happiness so callously.

  Eventually the Magpies go to different corners to fume. Downstairs from them, Mrs. Peacock goes back inside, absorbed into the belly of her own apartment.

  The adrenaline and rage is still crackling through Robin’s knotty muscles, and she kicks open the door of the gym and slides onto the bench. The rack above her is loaded from the last session, and she lifts it to untether the barbell and pulls it hard onto her chest. Robin shoves the metal bar up again as high as she can. Her muscles sting as she holds the weight for a few seconds over her body before pulling it back down. Her stomach gurgles; she can’t remember when she last ate.

  Staying home twenty-four hours a day has a curious scrambling effect on Robin’s body clock. Since she never feels the sun on her face, Robin’s days and nights are artificially painted on. She takes daily supplements of Vitamin D and tries to stick to normal bedtimes and meals.

  Manchester does not enjoy an embarrassment of seasons. It’s gray for two-thirds of the year. But even when the summer slaps stickily against the windowpanes, an air conditioner keeps it at bay. It clicks and gurgles, a companion on hot nights.

  She tries to respect the night, to sleep through it. Otherwise it coats her in a heavy tar, an anxious blackness settling over her skin. When she can’t sleep and exercising doesn’t help, she roams nervously, watching the house lie still like a film set.

  It’s when she’s alone at night that she finds it harder to forget. With no sunlight to bleach things, every memory is framed by a black background. Faces from the past sit next to her, silent and accusing.

  The last conversations she had with her family wash through her mind, unstoppable. She is forced to watch reruns of her last moments with Sarah, over and over again. They drag her tired mind on an endless circuit through anger, guilt, regret and back again.

  Perhaps one day, Robin thinks, she will get the chance to put those ghosts to bed. For now, though, she can barely get herself to sleep.

  SIXTEEN

  SARAH|1991

  I moved in with Mum and Drew the weekend after the beer-garden sentence had been handed down. Until then, Callum took my room—his now—and I slept with Robin. There was a sleeping bag on the carpet, but we lay curled up together in her bed until we got so hot and sticky or she got so wriggly and sleep-talky that I quietly slipped out from under the duvet and onto the floor.

  On the Friday night before I moved, she cuddled up to me, draped her leg over me and told me she was sorry that I had to go and she had to stay. I said I was sorry that she had to stay and had to have a boy living with her. That night, we fell asle
ep together, and when I woke up I wondered if that’s how we’d slept when we were in Mum’s tummy, but I had to stop thinking about it, because my heart felt like glass as it hit the floor.

  I’d never moved before. I’d lived in the same house my whole life. I didn’t want to pack up my room. I didn’t want to take the toys and teddies I’d had since I was tiny. Dad tried to help but that made it worse. He seemed so gangly and awkward, folding my things.

  Robin came and sat on my bed for a bit, and Callum went with his mum to collect the rest of his things. When they got back, he hid his stuff in Dad’s room—Dad and Hilary’s room, I should say—until I was out of the way. A straight swap.

  I was collected in the BMW. They arrived five minutes early and I felt cheated. Mum and I loaded the bags into the boot and footwells while Drew stayed in the driving seat with the engine running. Robin, Callum, Hilary and Dad all stood on the front lawn and waved me off. My dad slowly bent in two as the car slid away.

  It took only that one short journey to learn two important things. One: that Dad had agreed to let one of us go so he could keep one of us—if he hadn’t, the courts would probably have let Mum take us both. Two: that Hilary had given up her claim on the Granger house so she could keep Callum. No one had let anything go to keep me, from what I could gather. Even though I was the good girl who always tried her best. Over the following week, Mum tried to tell me that she’d wanted it to be like this. I think she realized how badly her behavior had come across that day in the beer garden, and she didn’t want to lose her one remaining ally besides Drew.

  School starts next week, and I’ve spent most of the end of summer lining everything up in my new room, picking the new furniture that—I think—Mum made Drew buy me as a bribe and then rearranging it all again. Last weekend, I went to stay with Dad. That doesn’t sound right. I wonder if it ever will. I don’t stay with my dad; my dad is not a separate thing. He and Mum and Robin, we’re all something connected. We’re all supposed to be on the same sofa, eating the same tea. But now Callum sits on the sofa where I used to sit. Where do I fit now?

  ROBIN|1991

  The first time that Robin and Callum went to stay at the Granger house with Sarah, it was a disaster. Their mother was so keyed up and anxious about it that she ended up burning dinner—some gross quiche thing that made Robin gag—and then after she’d served it up and they’d eyed it suspiciously, she’d yelled at them all. Drew Granger had told them off: “Angela went to a lot of trouble over this meal,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Callum had said, his hand shaking on his glass.

  “Well, she shouldn’t have,” Robin said. Drew’s brown eyes flashed black. “And her name’s not Angela, it’s Angie. She hates being called Angela.”

  After the first few weekends of this arrangement, the adults had another of their secret summits and it was decided that it would be one weekend with all three in the Marshall house, then a weekend off, then a weekend with all three in the Granger house, then a weekend off, and so on. Robin was perfectly happy not to see Drew Granger so often, but as much as she hated the weird posh food her mum kept burning, she wanted to see her. She didn’t want to speak to her or make her smile. She didn’t want to be told off by her or even be hugged by her—she was still too whirled up inside about everything for that. But she wanted to be near her, just for a bit. Like she’d always been near her.

  She wanted to be with Sarah too. Just with her, just on the sofa watching TV like they always did, or going to the shop to pick up something for their parents and buying a tenpenny bag of sweets to split with some of the change. The Granger house was too far from the center of the village to do that, but at least the neighborhood had a playground.

  After the first few months of the new plan, things started to settle. The kids were still sad and confused. And the three still talked in whispers about when things might change all over again, but they got used to it. Got used to calling the adults living with them by their first names. Mum and Drew. Angie and Dad. Jack and Mum. Dad and Hilary. Never simply “Mum and Dad.”

  It was their last year of primary school. Kings and queens of the playground. They scattered from one another as they always had, but when they could work together or play together without recrimination, the girls did. After school, Callum and Robin would walk home like the twins used to, and Sarah would be collected by her mum in a new BMW with a soft top. A gift from Drew, one that complemented his own.

  At first, the walk home with Callum was a stilted affair. Where once Robin would have scrambled up and walked along the railings on the wall, she simply dragged her lunch box so it made a loud noise. They didn’t speak, just walked in silence like they were on shift work.

  Then one day at school, Mrs. Howard had a heart attack. Right there in front of the class. It didn’t happen like on films. She didn’t clutch her chest and go purple or make a big fuss. She stopped what she was doing, fanned her face like she was hot, held on to her left arm and bent over slightly. She’d sat down a bit heavily in her worn fabric chair behind the desk and beckoned Sarah over, telling her to hurry to the office to call an ambulance.

  A great ripple of excitement spread through the class, who stared goggle-eyed as their teacher—just a year or so from retirement—sat there worrying that she might die in front of twenty-five ten- and eleven-year-olds. Before the ambulance arrived, the head teacher had bustled in and taken the class into the school hall, where the lunch things were still being packed away, and they sang hymns while trying to look out of the window to see the flashing lights as the ambulance screamed into the schoolyard.

  That day, walking home, Robin and Callum couldn’t help but talk.

  “Sarah loved it, did you see?” Robin said to Callum.

  He smiled a little. “Yeah, she really did.”

  Robin was torn. Sarah was a goody two-shoes who loved to insert herself into any kind of drama. But she didn’t want anyone else to make fun of her twin.

  “Don’t take the piss out of her,” Robin snapped.

  Callum reeled back in surprise. “I wasn’t.”

  “Just make sure you don’t.” She felt bad but also like she had a surge of energy to burn, so when they got to the recreation ground by the cricket pitch, Robin grabbed Callum by the coat and dragged him to the swings and they found that, even without Sarah, they could play pretty well together after all.

  SEVENTEEN

  SARAH|PRESENT DAY

  After leaving the Surrey B&B to come up north, I’m now staying in a similar place called Cornell Lodge. It’s cleaner and smaller than the last one, and the couple running it are friendlier. The room in Surrey had been arranged by Jim’s mother, and I had a strong suspicion that the beady-eyed landlady was reporting back to her. It was hard to know whether my sadness and shock were making me paranoid or whether she really was going through my bag when I went out. I kept everything that mattered with me at all times, just in case. One thing in particular I could never leave in my room. Something Jim didn’t even know existed, something he wouldn’t know about until it was too late.

  The room I’m in here in Manchester has pale lemon walls and sun streaming in the window. It’s pleasant enough and has a little bathroom for me to be sick in most mornings, when it all gets too much. I have a stack of pastel-colored towels and a kettle in my room, with a handful of tea bags, sachets of Nescafé coffee granules and tubs of long-life milk. I’ve restricted myself to one coffee a day. I’m trying to do this right.

  I’ve calmed down and started to think clearly. I’m not exactly relaxed. There is still something twisting and broken in my chest without Violet, but I’ve started to feel like this is all possible. Like I could stay here, in this busy city I’d never considered before. Like Violet could come here too.

  I have a plan. The first part, the toughest part, will be finding my sister. Robin holds the key to everything that follows. She has money, she has energy and she has a place for me to hide.

  Nobody knows I’m here;
that’s important. I’m untraceable. Tomorrow I’m going to buy a cheap pay-as-you-go phone.

  ROBIN|PRESENT DAY

  Both the Magpies are home but there’s no sign of their son. It’s unusual for both of them to be home this early, and the sight feels jagged and uneasy. Robin’s watching in mute, but the woman in the flat to the left of the Magpies isn’t. She’s standing, hip cocked toward the Magpie flat, holding her baby in her arms and craning her neck—it’s obviously another barnstormer.

  Mr. Magpie had seemed to believe his wife’s explanations when Robin had napalmed expensive lingerie into their kitchen, but since then they’d been fighting almost every day. Robin watched as the husband swung between head-hanging defeat and chest-beating rage. Perhaps Mrs. Magpie has done the decent thing and told him about her infidelity.

  Suddenly, Mr. Magpie looms toward his wife with his fist raised, just as someone hammers hard on Robin’s front door. She drops to her aching knees and rolls under the bed, fighting to breathe.

  Robin didn’t actually see Mr. Magpie’s fist smash into his wife’s face, but she feels sick, reliving what she saw. Sick that he’d finally noticed what was happening under his nose, in his house. Sick that maybe he’d pulled Robin’s gift into the fray, that it might have been the tipping point. That Robin could very well have pulled a man’s fist back and driven it into another woman’s face with her meddling.

  Robin hid under the bed, replaying the scene over and over in her head, which worked fairly well at blocking out the sound of the banging on the door.