by Holly Seddon
She breaks her toasted sandwich in two, hopping around with it as it scalds her hands. She slops her hot cordial out of the mug, so I take it from her to help before she ends up with third-degree burns.
We go into the living room and flick on the TV. A different set since I was last here.
We put on The Word and I lay down carefully, sighing as I ease myself into a comfortable position. She looks at me, her head to one side. “What’s going on with you?” she says. “Are you all right?”
So I just shrug and say it. “I’m pregnant.” Just like that.
Her mouth falls open like a cartoon character and she repeats what I’ve said like she’s trying to make sense of it. “You’re…pregnant?”
“Yeah,” I say, and I rub my stomach as if that proves something.
“Um, what? Seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously.”
“Did you just smile, Sarah? Are you happy?”
“Well,” I say, because that’s the first time anyone’s asked me that. “Yeah,” I say, and then I let myself smile properly. “Yeah, I guess I am. I shouldn’t be, but I am. I mean, it wasn’t planned.”
She bursts out laughing. “No shit!”
I tell her how far along I am. I answer the questions only she’s asked me. About how it feels. About what Dad had said, Mum. When I tell Robin that Mum doesn’t know, she says I should tell her with my head held high. That Mum is a bitch whose opinion I shouldn’t care about. I say it isn’t just her. I’m emphatic that I don’t want Drew to know. Or Callum, for that matter.
“Why? Who gives a shit what Drew thinks?”
“I just, I don’t know. Not yet, okay?”
“It’s up to you.” She shrugs. “But I don’t see why you care what anyone thinks.”
She’s right. Drew certainly doesn’t deserve my concern, but it isn’t that simple. If Drew knew I was pregnant, he would know it’s his. My biggest fear of all is that he would want the baby. Or, worse, the baby and me. I know I wouldn’t be strong enough to say no. I’d watched my mum snared in his tractor beam for long enough to know that.
“I just…” I fumble. “I just don’t want the earache,” I say. Robin is silent for a good minute, while the sound of Terry Christian’s grating little voice blathers in the background.
“You know I don’t believe you, don’t you? But if you don’t want me to tell them, that’s up to you,” she says. She stops asking questions and falls asleep with toastie crumbs sprinkled around her mouth.
THIRTY-SEVEN
SARAH|PRESENT DAY
Robin’s ringing the bell for the man who’s trying to kill himself, but he’s not answering. My hand is still in hers and the heat makes our palms sweaty, but she grips me tight.
“He’s not going to get down and answer, is he?” Robin says, more to herself than to me.
She starts ringing all the other bells. I worry about annoying people. A man’s life is at stake but it still rattles me.
Eventually a voice comes over the buzzer. “Yeah?” We don’t know which buzzer, but Robin puts her mouth to the microphone and pleads for them to let us in. “One of your neighbors is trying to kill himself,” she says.
“What?” The voice is skeptical rather than alarmed.
“Seriously. Please. We’ve called an ambulance but it’ll take too long.”
Bzzz. The door opens a crack and we push ourselves through. As we’re about to jog up the stairs, still holding hands but looser now that we’re inside, one of the ground-floor flats opens up and a young guy comes out. He’s dressed smartly but his face is ashen.
“I just buzzed you in,” he says. “Can I help?”
We’re already thundering up the stairs, but Robin beckons for him to join us. He’s out of shape, puffing with every step, but he catches up with us.
Robin stops outside a door that has a big bristly welcome mat and two potted plants on either side. It looks too cheerful to contain someone with a cord around his neck, but Robin drops my hand and starts hammering on the door anyway.
“Henry!” she’s shouting. “Henry, I’m sorry! Please don’t do this!”
My sister said she didn’t know him, but I don’t believe her. She seems to be taking an awful lot of responsibility for a stranger. I think he’s probably someone she’s fallen out with or maybe a jilted boyfriend, but I stay quiet and put my hand to my belly while I think what to do next.
Something occurs to me at the same time it occurs to the neighbor, and we both reach for the handle. I pull my hand away again, to let him do it. He turns it to the right, nothing. Turns it to the left, the door opens. In any other situation, our stupidity not to try that first would have been funny. Not today. We pile in.
Robin seems to know the way, which confirms my suspicions that she’s been here before. She winds down the hall. To the right is an open floor plan that seems to be the living room, dining room and kitchen. I step into it briefly to get out of the way of the downstairs guy. It’s sparkling clean. Even the stovetop, no marks of grease, no tiny little specks that normally don’t come off. The floor is immaculate, right up to the kick board. The sterile perfection makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
Signs of a child drip from every surface. Arthur: his name peppered around the room, spelled out in magnetic letters on the fridge. I step back into the hall and see little shoes taking pride of place on the shoe rack. By the size of them, I see he’s probably the same age as Violet. I suck in air and look away.
How could this man, with a loved child the same age as Violet, want to kill himself? Unless the child is gone? Some terrible accident that I can’t let myself think about because it’ll start me imagining terrible things happening to Violet. No. Stop. I have to shake myself out of this spiral.
We pass two doors on the left that we don’t open and then head for the last one. Robin takes a deep breath and reaches for the door. Just then, we hear the scream of an ambulance outside. “I’ll go,” I say, before they can stop me. I’d rather never see behind that door.
I rush back out of the flat and down the stairs. As I make my way to the front door to let the paramedics inside, I realize an old lady is standing in the doorway to one of the flats. She’s wearing a tabard and twirling a duster in her hands. “Is everything okay?” she calls, in a thick Manchester accent.
“Yes,” I call back as I run, even though it’s not.
As I open the door to the uniformed medics and point up the stairs, the old lady comes right up to me and touches my arm.
“Careful, love,” she says, “you shouldn’t be running around like that in your condition.”
I put my hand on my belly. An instinct to touch, to protect, to check it’s still there.
“Oh.” I smile at her. “It’s okay, I’m being careful.”
“How far along are you?” she asks, running the duster along the banister as she steps up after me.
“It’s early days.” I smile. “About fifteen weeks.”
“Well,” she says, “good luck to you. Mine are all grown up now. I miss them being little but I don’t miss carrying them. I was sick as a dog.”
“I’ve been quite lucky,” I say.
“You look it. You’re blooming,” she says, and smiles for the first time.
“Thank you.” I smile back, but then I remember the darkness upstairs and bid her good day.
On the way up the stairs after the uniforms, I take it slower. I feel the old lady’s concerned eyes on the small of my back, and I put one hand there and rest the other on my bump. The adrenaline of the morning has washed away, leaving gritty sediment in its place. It slows me down, and by the time I get into the flat, I can hear Robin yelling.
“What the fuck?” she shouts. “How could you even think about doing that to your kid?”
He’s alive, then.
I hear the male paramedic telling her to go and cool off. Robin arguing. I stand awkwardly in the hallway of a flat in which I don’t belong. The guy from the downstairs
flat comes out from the back bedroom, his skin white and clammy. His neck is just a bit too fat for his collar, so it looks like a plinth for his head.
“I think a cup of tea is a good idea,” he says. I follow him into the kitchen. Neither of us knows where anything is and we destroy its perfect condition as we shamble around, opening cupboards, shaking loose dust off the tea bags, spilling slops of milk.
“Stick some sugar in his,” I say. “It’s good for the shock.”
“Yeah,” he says, “I think I’ll have some too.”
His hands are shaking and he scatters sugar everywhere. I take over.
“Thanks,” he says. And then he holds out his hand. “We’ve not properly met. I’m Sam. I live downstairs.”
“I’m Sarah,” I say, shaking his clammy hand. “I’m Robin’s sister.”
ROBIN|PRESENT DAY
Robin looks at Henry Watkins slumped on the small bed. He’s still in his dressing gown, which flaps open without its cord. Underneath, he wears flannel pajama bottoms and an old tank top she knows well. His hair is longer than it’s been before, the Magpie stripe as wide as a fist. He looks wrung out. His eyes are hidden among a scribble of wrinkles, his skin is pale—but not, she knows, as pale as hers.
He is sitting in his son’s room, surrounded by strangers, and he doesn’t seem to care. Just stares at nothing.
The paramedics have checked him over. He hadn’t taken that final step. Only stood there, on the table, with the cord around his neck. Whatever he was waiting for, it didn’t come. But they did: Robin and the guy from downstairs.
She’d rushed in first, locked eyes on his. His neck wore the cord loosely. He’d inched his bare toes over the edge of the table, which wobbled slightly when the door burst open and Robin arrived.
“Fuck,” the downstairs guy had said.
Robin had slowed to a stop, pulled him behind her and held her hands out to Henry, showing him her palms. “I’m not going to do anything,” she said, “but you know this isn’t the answer, so we’ve come to help you down.”
He’d bowed his head, pulled the small stuffed mouse from his pocket and held it to his face. “I just want my boy,” he said. “I can’t live without him.”
“I know,” Robin said. “But he can’t live without you either, not properly.”
She’d offered her hands and he’d taken them, but at first he didn’t move. Stood holding them, noose in place, like an exhibit. Behind him, through the window, Robin’s own house stared back at her.
“Please,” she said to Henry, “please take the cord off and we can have a chat.”
The little room wasn’t designed for any of this, not for this many people, not for this much sadness. When the paramedics had checked him over and accepted that he was not going to actually go through with it, they agreed to leave, but only after Henry called his mum and asked to stay with her for a while. It was a short conversation, no detail.
“She’s coming to get me,” he said.
“We’ll wait until she gets here, mate,” the man from downstairs said. He paused and added apologetically, “I’m Sam, by the way.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Henry said, without looking up. There was silence. The room still felt small with two adults standing and one sagging the little bed down in the middle.
Suddenly Henry looks up, stands. “How did you know?” he asks.
“I saw you,” says Robin, stepping forward. “I saw you from my window. You must know that I did, because you’ve seen me too.”
He wrinkles his forehead and sits back down but keeps his eyes on her. Dark brown eyes with very little white. “I’ve never seen you before in my life,” he says.
“I wasn’t going to do this now, but as you’ve asked, I saw you look at me the other day,” Robin answers, standing a little taller, “not long after you’d punched your wife.” Sarah entered the room and she and Sam flash a look at each other but say nothing.
“Punched my wife?” Henry screws his face up like he’s swallowed something sour. “I’ve never punched my wife, what the hell are you talking about?”
Sarah looks nervously at her sister now, and Sam lifts his free hand like he’s about to separate Henry and Robin but lets it fall to his side.
“C’mon,” Sam says, and then takes a sip of his tea like he’s not sure what else to do.
“No,” said Henry quietly. “I want to hear this. You think I punched my wife?”
“I saw you,” Robin says, holding his gaze. “I saw you make a fist, and I saw you throw a punch. And then I saw the argument after that, saw your little boy covering his ears. I didn’t see what you did but—”
“And you think you saw me punch my wife?” Henry says, shaking his head. He doesn’t sound angry. The words come out slower than that. Like he’s doing sums.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” he finally says. “You called the police.”
Robin stands planted to the floor, breathing in and out like a bull preparing to charge. “Yeah, I did. And it was the right thing too.” Only Sarah can see how fast Robin’s knees are shaking.
Henry stares at her, his mouth open slightly. Just as Sam says, “Look, I really don’t think this is the time,” Henry stands up and walks toward Robin. Robin stays still. Feet to the floor, hands on her hips. Henry looms over her, wraps both his arms around her shoulders and starts to sob. She looks at the others, panicking, but then pats Henry’s dressing gown, wraps her arms around him and holds him.
—
Sam has left for work now and Sarah and Robin are left with Henry, sitting at his table while they wait for his mum to arrive.
“I thought Karen had called the police and lied to them. I was so fucking angry, I can’t tell you. I thought she was trying to paint a picture of me so she could take my boy away.”
“They won’t let you have your son if you’ve hit your wife,” Sarah says carefully, the first time she’s addressed him directly.
“But I didn’t hit my wife. I’d never hit my wife—I’d never hit anyone. I know when you’re talking about, Robin. I threw a punch: look.” He gestures to a crack in one of the wooden cupboard doors. “I regretted it straightaway. But I didn’t hit my wife; I never would. She was cheating on me and she’d left me and I thought she was trying to take my boy away completely, but I would still never hit a woman. We had some blazing rows, and I hate that Art heard them. I’ll never forgive myself for that, but I would never hurt Karen. Not like that.”
Henry had been hoping to sell the flat, find something cheaper so he could afford to get a part-time job and share custody of his son, Arthur, with his wife.
“I know she did the dirty on me, but I wanted us to live close by, try to do it right. I wanted to be a proper dad to him still, even if I only had him part of the time. But then the police got involved and it blindsided me. Even after the cheating, I trusted what she’d said about Arthur. That she would share custody and try to keep things as easy for me as possible. So when I thought she was trying to stitch me up with the police, paint me like that to get custody…” He trails off, fiddles with the toy mouse in his hands.
He still had a chance to put things right. Arthur’s mum hadn’t turned against him, hadn’t dismantled his chance with his son. It was Robin’s meddling that had nearly done that. But now, finally, that meddling had saved Mr. Magpie’s life.
THIRTY-EIGHT
SARAH|1998
Night and day, that’s what our dad used to say when we were little. And we’re still so different in many ways, but my sister has been kind to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve been knocked flying from my high horse, maybe it’s just because Callum has left and she needs a distraction, but for the last few weeks, Robin has helped put the air back in my lungs. She doesn’t treat me like the elephant in the room. She talks about the baby like it’s an actual living thing, who will grow and have a name and wear little clothes and run around in the playground with his or her auntie.
She refuses to let me be ashamed
at growing such a thing, even though I am embarrassed. I was going to be a normal girl who went to college, got a nice safe job, met a nice guy, got married and had two planned children. I was embarrassed that I’d believed that and ashamed that I’d blown it.
Most importantly, my sister takes the mickey out of me to help keep everything as normal as possible. And I’ve noticed she’s spending more time at home now, sitting next to me on the sofa like a guard dog, giving my dad warning looks when he says something she thinks might offend.
Robin came with me to the midwife today. My first appointment at the village surgery. As soon as we were in the room, Robin asked the midwife if she was going to give me an internal examination and then added, “Because she’s not had any action for about four months.”
“I hope you’re not going to be too much trouble, young lady,” the midwife had said.
“I’ll be on my best behavior,” Robin had said, wide-eyed.
“So,” the midwife had said, clapping her hands together, “I can see that you’re a little further along than we’d expect at a first appointment.”
I told the midwife the date that I got pregnant. “Are you certain that was the day?” she’d asked, filling in a little card with notes.
“It was a one-off,” I said, and I saw Robin’s brow knit, her dark eyebrows curling in thought.
“I see,” the midwife had said. “And was this a surprise, then?”
“Yes,” I whispered, “a big surprise.”
“Well,” the midwife said quietly, “shall we see if we can hear your surprise’s heartbeat?”
I looked at Robin. I hadn’t expected this. She nodded in encouragement.
I lay down on the paper-covered bed and lifted up my top as she gestured. The midwife dragged my stretchy jogging bottoms down so the waistband sat below the small bulge that had sprung up in the last few weeks. I instinctively wanted to bat her hand away. She squirted something cold on my tummy and then put something called a “Doppler” on my belly, jiggled it roughly until a beat filled the room. It was real. It was alive. It was mine.