by Holly Seddon
He stands up. Walks to the middle of the room and bends down. He’s fiddling with something when the knock on Robin’s door comes. It’s only quarter past eight, and she was promised eight-thirty. She made it very clear she wouldn’t answer at any other time. But…she’s desperate to get the work done, desperate for it to be Kevin from the security firm. She wavers but continues to watch the flats.
This knock is polite. It’s gentle. It must be Kevin, mustn’t it? She was so clear about the time though.
She hovers on the landing, listening for clues that don’t exist. The knocks come again, and still they’re quiet and gentle.
Robin ignores the door, just like she told the woman on the phone that she would when she arranged the appointment. They’d really seemed to take her seriously, and this betrayal feels more personal than it should.
Irritated and anxious, she looks back at the Magpie flat. The Watkins flat, she corrects herself. Henry has pulled the little chair into the middle of the room and is stepping on it with one foot, like he’s testing it. He stops, puts the chair back where it was and drags the small table to the center of the room instead. He takes the LEGO house from the surface, places it carefully on the floor.
When he takes the cord from his dressing gown, Robin realizes what she’s seeing. Not this. Please, anything but this.
There’s another knock on the door, but it barely registers with Robin. She’s breathing hard, staring as Henry Watkins ties the cord carefully into a loop. His concentration is creating the same frown it used to when he built a new toy for his son or when he took his wife’s mobile from her bag and scrolled through it, stopping every ten seconds to check for her in the hallway.
He’s tugging on the cord now, checking that the knot slides up in the way he wants it to. Testing it over his head, around his neck.
Robin can’t think straight. Can’t move. She’s watching uselessly as he keeps screwing up the knot he’s trying to make. The knocks come again. Kevin the security man, please be Kevin the security man. He can go over and stop Henry Watkins.
Robin runs down the stairs. Her knees shake; she’s Bambi-legged and clumsy. She takes a deep breath and opens the door as far as the safety chain will allow. Pushes her eye to the gap of daylight and jumps in surprise.
It’s not the security man.
THIRTY-FOUR
SARAH|1998
My mother knows, I’m sure of it. Knows what happened and what I did. She avoids me now or watches me carefully when I am in the room with her.
“Are you okay about moving back?” she asks me. “Do you want to stay in Atlanta by yourself? Take up your uni place? I’m sure we could find the money when we’ve sold the house.” She looks away, fiddles with the scatter cushions. I know why she wants rid of me. “Drew would do anything for you, you know.”
I turn to walk out. I don’t know what point she’s trying to make and I don’t know what she wants to say. I don’t want to hear it.
“You two have always been close, haven’t you?” she asks, but it’s not really a question. It’s an implication.
“I want to go back to England,” I say. “And I’m glad we’re leaving, because I want to live with my dad.”
“Are you sure?” she says, eyebrows raised.
“Deadly. And don’t try to talk me out of it.”
I leave her sitting openmouthed on the couch and go up to my room to carry on packing.
When I come back down it’s late afternoon and I can hear my mum on the phone to my dad.
“You don’t have to gloat about it,” she says. A pause. “Yes, you are, Jack.”
I say I’ll make my own dinner, just as I have for the last few weeks. I can’t bring myself to sit at a table with them, not while they prattle on about their great English adventure and Drew rubs my mother’s leg and pinches her bum when she stands up. I’d think that he’s wiped it from his memory, but he’s barely met my eye since that night. I can’t wipe it from my memory. I’ll never forget.
I’ve stayed in my room watching TV endlessly.
The phone trills and I ignore it as I always do.
“It’s for you,” my mum calls up the stairs.
“I’m not here,” I say, as I have since graduation.
“Yes you are. It’s your sister.”
It’s the first time we’ve spoken since we fell out. Neither of us mentions it. My moving back is bigger, so it pushes the argument into the past.
Still, Robin talks guardedly. She says she’s excited about having me back, but then she asks so many questions about my plans and the sleeping arrangements that I can’t help but think she’s the opposite of excited.
Just as, in the background, Dad tells her to wrap it up, she asks me, “Are you okay?”
Am I okay? No, I want to say. I’m pretty much the opposite of okay. My mother has thrown me to the wolves, my sister doesn’t want me home and I don’t know if I should go to university in England, a country I barely remember, stay here on my own or try to get a job, when I haven’t the first clue what I want to do let alone what I’m capable of doing. But none of those things really stand up next to the big one. The one I can’t possibly say right now. Not here. Not on the phone. Not to my sister.
I’m pregnant.
ROBIN|1998
Last week, Callum came to the house for dinner and got drunk with Robin for the first time in a long while. Rez was working, though Robin was skeptical about the kind of work that a welder would need to do at night.
It started with a tense dinner, a shared bottle of red turned into raiding the spirits after Jack and Hilary went upstairs.
They lay on the sofa, heads at each end, jostling to get comfortable as the TV shimmered silently in the background.
“Want to hear a story?” Callum said.
“Sure.”
“Before I got the call-center job, I went for an interview in the sweets factory that Dad used to work for, back when he sold chocolate and stuff.”
“Mmn? Did you get offered it?” Robin had asked, her eyes closed.
“No. But I was a mess. I did a bad interview. I couldn’t even get a job packing sweets. Fuck!” He laughed, a bit—she didn’t.
All Robin’s thoughts were occupied with their other family, soon to return from America. What would it be like to see her mother after all these years? Looking back now, every decision her mother had made revolted her. But at least there was one silver lining. Despite the animosity of recent months, despite his horrible choice of boyfriend and waste of talent, she really loved her brother. Almost more than anything.
THIRTY-FIVE
SARAH|PRESENT DAY
Robin’s front door finally opens. Just a crack. I hear my sister gasp. Her voice, even wordless, is just the same.
Now she’s fumbling with something metal and the door clicks shut again before finally she opens it fully and I see her. God. I see her.
“Sarah!” she says, like she’s seen a ghost.
“Robin, I’m so glad to see you,” I say. But I’m not glad to see the way she looks, and I feel huge next to her. Her smallness frightens me.
She doesn’t seem happy to see me, just shocked and agitated.
“I’m sorry to come here unexpectedly,” I say, and I can feel my eyes filling up, and I’m so embarrassed and hurt by her reaction that I want to shove her hard out of my line of vision and then run away and give this whole idea up.
“No,” she says, looking at me and looking behind her at who knows what. “No, it’s not that.” She’s speaking fast. “I’m shocked,” she pants, shaking her head, “but I’m really happy to see you. It’s just there’s something awful happening behind me and I need to stop it.”
“In your house?” I ask, and try to peer round her.
“No, one of the flats behind me. I—” She looks down at the mobile phone in her hand like she’s surprised to see it and says, “Hang on one sec, I’m sorry.”
She dials three numbers and lifts it to her ear. She starts to
talk—she’s calling an ambulance, saying maybe fire brigade too, for the ladder—now she’s giving an address and it’s not this one and she says, “Hurry,” and all the time I’m standing there, staring at my sister and trying to understand what the hell I’m seeing.
“The ambulance is going to take too long,” Robin says, and her eyes search my face like she’s adding things up.
“Ambulance for who?”
“Can you come with me? Can you help me do this?” she asks.
“Yeah, of course,” I say, but I still don’t know what’s happening. She’s wearing only a pair of shorts and a tank top in March, and she just shoves her bare feet into some trainers in the hall. She grabs her keys, and after such a flurry of activity inside, she takes an age to step down onto the pavement. As she does, she reaches for my hand.
She looks so different from the last time I saw her that I look straight forward in case she thinks I’m staring at her. She’s bent over, hunched and scrawny but with these lumpy little muscles on her legs, sloping shoulders and the palest skin I’ve ever seen, crisscrossed with scratches. She looks like something emerging from a hole, not really a person at all. Not a savior. Someone who needs to be saved.
ROBIN|PRESENT DAY
Robin can’t take the time to consider why her twin sister, Sarah, is standing on her doorstep, because right now Henry Watkins is standing on his child’s table with a cord around his neck, and he looks very much like he’s going to step off and kill himself. Robin cannot let this happen, no matter what.
Robin’s front door is wide open, the ambulance called. There are shoes on Robin’s feet, shoes that have never stepped on this pavement. Robin reaches for her sister’s hand, the weight of the world she’s stepping into bending her in two. The sun is brighter than it has been in weeks. Unfiltered sun on her bare arms and legs. She squints into her sister’s face, thinner and pinker than she remembered, her sister’s concerned eyes, her spiky nose. Sarah. She would have to help. They move as one.
Robin’s body is not used to any of this. The changing breeze, the sun, the noises all around. People, so many people, on bikes, on foot, scrambling buggies and dragging kids. People stepping backward without looking, people so entwined with the world around them that they don’t need to look.
As the sisters make their way along George Mews, Robin starts to straighten up. She has to focus on getting to that apartment. She can’t look at the big expanse of green, mustn’t notice the battle of smells between exhaust fumes and spring grass. The rustling of glass as the pub takes a delivery, the distant beeps of traffic that blanket this city. She just has to focus on getting into the flat and not dropping and curling into a hard little ball.
As her legs become used to the pavement and her eyes stop watering and adjust, Robin finally notices the warmth of the hand on her arm, how her sister is clinging to her too and not just propping her up.
“The man who lives behind me is trying to hang himself,” Robin says.
“Oh shit,” Sarah says. Sarah, who never used to swear. “Do you know him?”
Robin falters. No, she doesn’t. And yet…“No, I just happened to see from the window. And if he steps off the table, I don’t think the ambulance will get there in time.”
They go a little quicker. A three-legged race. Robin’s legs and arms are goose-pimpled but she won’t feel that yet. The sisters turn in to Jewel Street, which runs behind George Mews.
Robin has never seen the flats from the front, but she knows which flat Henry Watkins is in. She remembers his address from sending his wife her gift and starting all this trouble. She feels sick at the memory and other memories too, which surface unbidden.
THIRTY-SIX
SARAH|1998
For the first month back in England, I lay on my new bed in my old room and tried to be glad I was home. Robin still tiptoed around me, still refusing to apologize but seemingly aware that she should.
Callum had gone, and Hilary seemed keen to forget his absence by concentrating on cooking and fussing over me. All I wanted to do was hide. And sleep.
Out of gratitude and duty, I tried to join in with the family meals Hilary had cooked, even though I felt queasy from mid-afternoon until bedtime. I lay still for many hours, just expecting that my pregnancy would end. Remembering something I heard about what a high percentage of early pregnancies end in miscarriage, often without the woman even knowing. I tried to want that to happen, tried to will it. God knows, if any pregnancy deserved to fail, it should be one borne out of such a terrible moment. Moments.
What took my breath away, what made the tears roll into my pillow, was the pain I felt at the thought of it ending. An unplanned pregnancy, with a man who should never have so much as looked at me that way, growing in a body that was not his to touch. Jobless, without a plan, without a friend, and yet…The thought of being “saved” from this catastrophe through the raw odds of loss punched holes in my heart.
This was my baby.
I got away with being quiet that first month. No one expected much from me anyway. I was tired from the flight and then I was overwhelmed by the move. I was daunted by having to choose from the limited university options that last-minute applications offered. I was looked at sympathetically, except by Robin, who didn’t look at me much, because she was out all the time.
After six years apart, our differences had hardened. I’d become an only child but she’d been one of a pair. Callum had gone, fled into an easier life with fewer questions, no expectations. But instead of seeing the twin-half now in front of her, Robin just retreated too. Staying out until all hours or hiding in her room.
Had I not spent so long lying on my side with one hand on my belly, feeling giddy and sick, I would have been more hurt. Perhaps I would have had it out with her, cleared the air.
For the next month, while my pregnancy became my “baby” and I crept ever closer to that three-month mark that chose my path for me, I started to think about how I would explain it. To whom I should explain it. And I started to worry about the logistics. Unemployed, living in a small room in my dad’s house, making excuses not to see my mother. How would a baby fit into that? I remembered distant talk about council houses for single parents, about benefits. I remembered them from snatched snippets of adult conversations, and they weren’t favorable snippets. This world hadn’t been one I’d considered before, certainly not when I lived in Atlanta, with a bathroom bigger than my current bedroom.
And yet I looked out on the little lawn that my dad and Hilary were so proud of and I imagined a little girl or boy playing there. Squashy knees and dimples. I looked at the new table-and-chair set in the kitchen diner, and I imagined a little high chair pulled up to it, wedged between the chairs. I looked down at my body, and I imagined it swollen fully, and I put my hand there and wanted to see it sooner. And then I knew, I had to tell someone.
I asked Hilary and Dad if I could talk to them, and they nudged each other jokily. “This seems very serious!”
When I first got to my dad’s house after our flight from Atlanta, I’d been amazed at how much he’d aged. His curly brown hair had more gray strands than brown, and his face was weatherworn. He moved slower than I was used to but he still had an impish excitement to him, a bubble of energy that Robin said, on one of our rare evenings together, was because I was back. “Don’t embarrass him by saying anything, but he’s been like a bloody kid at Christmas ever since Mum told him you wanted to move back in.”
We sat at the new dining table. They were so proud of it that we seemed to sit here for everything. And now I was about to taint it. I swallowed hard. “I have something to tell you.”
My dad asked, of course, whose baby it was. I’d got a story already lined up: a boy at a party in Atlanta, I didn’t know his name. I don’t think Hilary believed me but my dad did. I could tell by the way his face fell.
“Does your mother know?” Hilary asked, touching my hand lightly.
“No, and please don’t tell her.”
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“She’d understand, love, she wasn’t much older when…” My dad left it hanging in the air.
“And how far along are you?” Hilary asked, moving her hand to my dad’s as he stared at his tea, looking a hundred years old.
“Over three months,” I said. “Going from the date that it, you know, that…”
“I know,” she’d said.
“It’s too late,” I’d added. “There’s nothing I can do.” Perhaps I’d said it too soon, but they didn’t push me.
Ever since I told him my news, Dad hasn’t known how to be with me. He never asks about the baby directly but offers me warm drinks and makes me sandwiches. He bought me herbal tea at Hilary’s suggestion but didn’t acknowledge why I was off caffeine. Hilary’s asked about tiredness and sickness a few times, but I can tell she starts to think about her own pregnancy with Callum, and his name carries a black cloud now. He hasn’t been back to visit since I got here. He doesn’t know about his nephew or niece. And he’ll never know that this mound under my baggy sweater actually holds his half brother or half sister.
It’s getting late, but I can hear Robin crashing about in the kitchen, so I go down. She’s making hot cordial and a grilled cheese, smears of melted cheddar trailing between the sandwich maker and the sideboard. She’s drunk.
“Been out?” I say.
“Just practicing with the band,” she slurs. “Few beers. Sorry, I should have thought. You could have come.”
“It’s fine.” I almost laugh, because imagine.
There’s a smirk breaking on her face but I don’t think it’s at my expense. Something about the way she adjusts her clothes and runs her fingers through her tangled hair.
“Are you seeing someone?” I ask.
The smirk flickers fully. “Not really, just a guy who works behind the bar at the Purple Turtle. We…” She rolls her eyes and giggles, a sound I’ve not heard for many years. “Have a connection. Of sorts.”