by Holly Seddon
Rez is shaking his head, opening his mouth to argue, but Callum says, “I’ve said I’m sorry. She’s all right, isn’t she? She’s all right, she’ll live. We didn’t even take anything in the end.”
“That’s enough!” Jack yells again. “You’ve got a bloody nerve coming round here after what you’ve done. The pain you’ve caused my daughter.” He tries to move his stepson off the grass by force, pushing his back and pulling both his arms in turn. Tries to get him and Rez into the rusty old car they’d arrived in.
“You took everything!” Robin screams, and she starts to thump Callum’s chest. “She was pregnant. And you two killed her baby!”
Callum sucks in the late-summer air and wobbles on his feet. He stares down at Robin, his chest still absorbing her thumps.
“She’s pregnant?”
“Was!” Robin says, stepping away from him and leaning over, panting. “Was,” she says again.
“I’m…” He stops and looks at Rez, whose own face has also just drained of all color.
“Shit,” Rez says. “Look, I’m sorry too—”
“Both of you need to get the fuck off this lawn now,” Robin says. “Your sorrys are worth shit to us. Your sorrys won’t bring that little baby back, they won’t piece Sarah back together and they won’t make me love you again, Callum. I hate you. I hate you from the top of my head to the soles of my fucking feet. Now get away from this house!” Her voice is broken, feral, louder than bombs. Callum stares at his mum, who nods, stony-faced. Rez backs away, pulls Callum’s sleeve, so he follows dumbly. They get into their car, sit for just a moment staring at each other and then roll slowly down the road.
—
Just hours earlier Robin had stood on their postage-stamp lawn, in her shorts, and shouted things into her brother’s face that she hoped would destroy him. She’d wanted to destroy him. To annihilate what he’d become. To crush the love she’d had for him, grind it to dust and blow it into the wind.
She’d wanted to. But she’d calmed down a little as the evening plowed on. Had even managed to slip into a thin watery sleep, until the sharp ring of the home phone slashed through the stillness.
Hilary is up, phone in hand, by the third or fourth ring. Robin turns her pillow over to the cold side, burrows her face into it. Waits. It’ll be about Callum: he’ll be drunk, high, in some kind of dramatic state. Rez will have had enough of him, will have given up trying to pry his deadweight spaghetti limbs off the pavement and out of harm’s way. Let him stay there. Let him suffer.
Robin sighs, heaves herself up and shuffles to the bathroom. Sits down harder than she should on a toilet seat that constantly breaks, pees while she tries to listen. Hears the word “ambulance.” Stomach pump? Even though Callum’s been in big messes before, perhaps after the last few weeks and the argument he’d pushed himself too far. Taken too much, washed it down with the wrong thing. She wants to say “good,” like she would have a few hours ago, but she can’t. There have been too many ambulances recently.
In the room next to the bathroom, Sarah is stirring. Her mattress creaks as she rolls to the edge. Two dull thuds follow as she steps out of bed.
Robin wipes, flushes. She wouldn’t normally at night but everyone is up. She can hear her dad and Hilary downstairs, talking over each other. Robin splashes herself with the tap by accident as she reaches for the soap. Curses as she dries her hands, T-shirt dripping.
Sarah is already on the landing when Robin leaves the bathroom.
“What’s going on?” Robin asks. Sarah is leaning over the top of the staircase, listening. She spins round, grabs Robin by the shoulders.
“I think we should go into your room. It’s Rez on the phone,” she says.
“Rez?” Robin spits his name. “Why? What’s Callum done now? What’s he taken?”
Robin doesn’t want to push past her sister, especially at the top of these stairs, but the front door is open and her dad and Hilary are leaving. It’s been only a minute or two since the call came, and they’re already wearing coats over night things.
“Dad!” Robin calls, but he ignores her, the door closing.
“Sarah, let me past.”
“You shouldn’t go, don’t—”
“Let me the fuck past.” It’s a growl.
Sarah steps aside, head bowed, hand on her stomach.
Robin thunders down the stairs, grabs her coat on the way out of the door and runs barefoot after the car’s rear lights.
They had to stop and let her in, of course, as soon as they saw she was there. No time to stop and argue. The cold quiet of the car rushes at her while she buckles up. An embarrassed held breath that means nothing when Robin realizes Hilary has her head in her hands, is breathing hard and crying.
“Faster, Jack,” she pleads. The car lurches forward, swings out from the cluster of houses and flies up the high street toward the road to Reading.
“What’s happening?” Robin asks quietly.
“You shouldn’t be here, Robin,” Hilary shouts. “You slowed us down.”
Robin can’t remember the last time Hilary shouted. Her dad ignores her, concentrates on the car, which is shaking along the outside lane of the A33, topping a hundred miles an hour. The mess of traffic lights by the soccer stadium start to flip yellow then red, but apart from a quick look to the left, Jack doesn’t slow down.
The car pulls up outside the small block of flats and stops across two spaces. Hilary and Jack unbuckle, shove their doors open and run to the front door. As they press the buzzer repeatedly, Jack grabs Hilary’s hand, holds it to his chest. Robin is out of the car and following behind, her feet sore from running along the road minutes earlier. Her chest burns with a nameless feeling. Her parents are inside already.
She can hear shouting, crying. Rez comes running out of the front door, and he shoves past her as he heads to the car park. He gets into his banged-up car, starts the engine and then covers both his eyes with his hands. As Robin goes into the block and starts up the communal stairs, she hears the telltale cough of Rez’s old engine as he drives away.
But mostly she can hear Hilary. Hilary isn’t crying, she isn’t shouting. She’s screaming. A sound Robin hasn’t heard before or since. Neighbors are rattling their doors open, poking their heads out. Robin takes a deep breath, walks up the last set of stairs to the top floor.
The door to the flat is open. She’s been here only a handful of times, and each time the place has been filled with people, laughter, smoke. Tonight the place is still and black.
Robin steps inside, follows the noise that Hilary is making. As she walks into the living room, Robin hears the ambulance pull up outside. The air in here smells male. Sweat and old clothes, beer and bad food. And even though he hadn’t been his groomed and particular self in a while, there’s still a top note over it all. A tang of shower gel and the aftershave that baby-faced Callum didn’t really need.
As the paramedics’ boots rush up the stairs toward the flat, past the dull hum of neighbors talking to one another, Robin steps into the bedroom. At first, she doesn’t see the real focal point.
Instead, she sees clothes scattered across the floor. A guitar with only three strings propped against the chipped window frame. And Hilary siting on the unmade bed. She’s motionless, the sheets bunched into balls under her rigid hands. Suddenly her thin shoulders start to pulse up and down under her jacket and nightie. She pulls the wrinkled sheets up to her face and screams into them again.
Robin stays rooted to the spot, squinting through the dim light of a swinging bulb, scanning for her dad. She realizes that he is merged with the wave of clothes spraying from the wardrobe. He looks at first like he is holding back another wave, but no.
“Oh God, no.” Robin scrambles over, bare feet skidding among crunchy socks and sweaty T-shirts. It’s all too late.
Her father is half in the wardrobe. He’s swaying slightly and panting with exertion. His arms shake as he holds up Callum’s body. Holds his head up closer t
o the high wardrobe rail.
Callum’s long arms and legs are dangling, and his eyes are closed. His toes twist and point among the clothes, just skimming their surface. As his weight slips from Jack’s grasp, his desperate stepfather heaves him up again. And again and again, with shaking arms. All for nothing.
The paramedics rush in and take over. Jack protests, quietly, almost silently. “I need to hold him up,” he croaks, stuck in a look of perfunctory punishment, grinding himself into the floor. They pry the deadweight from Jack’s hands gently and firmly, guide Jack to the bed as they lay Callum down among the discarded sweaters and blim-burned jeans. It’s a practiced move, all in one, wordless and graceful somehow. Like a ballet.
Jack shuffles closer to Hilary. Now that he has relinquished Callum, he notices his next task. Snaps to and wraps himself around his partner until she disappears into him, their bodies shaking together.
Robin is silent. Her knees are shaking, her hands feel icy, but she doesn’t move. Can’t move. She didn’t even move as the paramedics pushed past her, carving a small curled path in the fabric on the floor.
The light is dim, but as the paramedics unwind the rope and attend to Callum—another fruitless gentle dance—what little light there is outside shakes free through the wonky blind and rushes to outline him.
Still Robin stares at his neat, slim body in disbelief. He’s wearing only boxer shorts. His long limbs with their dusting of golden hair taut and surprisingly muscular. An almost-man.
The matching tattoo they both have is just visible from her angle. The quote from Labyrinth, mirrored on her own arm: “It’s only forever, not long at all.”
This is the last time I’ll see his skin, she thought, clapping her hand over her mouth in case her thoughts broke free. Even through his size and his emerging man’s shape, you could still see how he’d looked as a kid, could follow that line all the way to imagine how he looked as a baby. When all of this was still to come.
And a baby must have been what Hilary had seen when she burst through the door and knew that it was already too late. That her life and everything she had done with it was gone forever. Her boy was gone forever.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Marshall,” the female paramedic said after laying a stained duvet cover over Callum, from his face down. “There really was nothing anyone could have done.”
Ashtrays overflowed and abandoned pints of Coke were stacked up on old bits of furniture. There were books everywhere, the most Callum thing about that room. He died surrounded by books, so,…well, it didn’t mean anything, because he was still dead. None of it had meant enough, and nothing that could be said or done would change that.
Everything is cold and slow now. Hilary shakes herself free from Jack, wipes her eyes and nose on her jacket and walks gingerly to where her son is lying. She kneels down next to him, pulls the duvet cover back down so his face is no longer hidden. She strokes his cheek, brushes his hair away from his eyelids. Her shoulders shake and she wipes her eyes again, the tears pouring faster than she has any hope of catching.
Hilary lies down next to her son, on the uneven fabric-coated floor. He’s so much taller than her, somehow elongated in death.
The spell on Jack breaks and he realizes Robin has been there the whole time.
“Oh love,” he says, and she stumbles and falls to him, her eyes springing with tears that seem too small, so pathetic that she starts to beat her own head with her fists, but that’s still not enough.
“He’s gone?” she asks no one. She knows. They all know. Rez knew, when he fled, the others too no doubt.
“I’m so sorry,” Jack says, the words catching. “You shouldn’t have been here tonight.”
“He shouldn’t have been here tonight. I should have been here for him, Dad. A long time ago. Fuck.” He doesn’t argue, doesn’t console. Just holds her until she can stand by herself again.
There are formalities, papers, calls to make…Robin isn’t really listening to the calm words from bright uniforms. As one paramedic leads Jack out and into the living room, Robin goes into the kitchen to get a drink of water, splash her face, paw at her new emptiness in solitude.
That’s where she sees it. The note.
It is the only clean thing in the room. Dirty plates, bowls and takeaway trays teeter on every surface, while ash piles sit next to overflowing ashtrays. The note is written on lined notepad paper, the kind they once wrote their songs on together. It’s held in place by a half-empty cup of black coffee that isn’t completely cold. His cup. The last thing his mouth touched. Robin traces her finger along the edge, collecting his dust.
She reads the words quickly without touching the paper.
She reads it again. And again. Again. Eyes spiraling helter-skelter from top to bottom, lurching back up.
Now it’s inescapably committed to memory. Stamped into her like animal flesh under a branding iron.
As the words tick over, she claws at them. To their soundtrack, she thinks about who he’d become and whose fault that was. She thinks about Hilary lying on stinking clothes next to her only child, touching his skin for the last time. She thinks about how much worse this note could make everything.
Robin picks it up like it’s poisonous, folds it carefully and slips it into her pocket. She takes it into the bathroom, sits on the watermarked toilet with the door locked. And the words still tick through her.
“I’m so sorry,” he wrote, in his beautiful neat writing, just curly enough.
“I didn’t know that Sarah was pregnant and I can never forgive myself for what I’ve done. I’ve made so many mistakes over these last years, but I can’t come back from this one. My greatest fear was turning out like my dad, and what I did to Sarah is far worse than anything he ever did.
“I love you all but I don’t deserve you. It wasn’t Rez’s fault. It was my idea to steal that stuff, and it must have been me who pushed Sarah. So it was all me, all of it. I’m sorry.
“Forever is too long after all. I love you always.”
It’s three in the morning. Back at home now, Robin spreads it on the bed in front of her as Hilary frantically vacuums every inch of the house, howling, and Robin’s dad paces the living room, hiding from all the women he doesn’t know how to help.
THIRTY-NINE
SARAH|PRESENT DAY
So here we are, back at Robin’s front door. A couple of hours after we were last here.
My twin is spent. Utterly wrecked by bashing doors and standing up to a suicidal man who she’d thought was a wife beater. It’s just so Robin.
Once inside her hall, my sister bends down to pick up a card from the hall carpet. While she reads it, she leans on the wall, exhausted, and I click the door closed behind us.
It’s just a normal family house. Nothing special, nothing fancy. It’s solid, neutral, a bit old-fashioned. There’s not a trace of personality.
“Damn it. I just missed them,” Robin says, finally moving down the hall. “Sorry,” she adds, “come in. Let’s get a cup of tea or something.”
We walk into the kitchen and she puts the kettle on. She pulls down two chunky pastel-colored mugs. The kitchen is a basic wooden affair—it’s so normal it makes me feel sad.
She slides the card toward me along the counter.
“It’s from a security company I called. When you were knocking, I thought it was them. I—” She stops. “I missed them.”
“Oh,” I say. And automatically open the fridge to get out some milk. It takes my breath away. Everything in there is organized into colored sections, in Tupperware boxes. Robin’s certainly changed. In fact, unlike the grime of the outside, the whole house is spotless.
“Why did you need security?” I ask quietly. I wonder if she’s having trouble with fans, maybe a stalker. It seems a bit much.
She doesn’t answer. Just suddenly turns and hugs me. I’m nearly knocked over.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Robin says, and she looks up into my eyes in a way that no one els
e has for weeks. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer the door before. I didn’t know it was you.” She laughs, and I don’t know why but I’m so happy that we’re finally together that I hug her again. We uncouple and then she laughs once more. “And you’re pregnant!”
I smile. “Yeah.” And I say aloud for the first time, “I am pregnant. My second baby.”
“You mean, you have a child?” she asks.
My voice catches in my throat. “Yes, I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you before. I have a little girl.”
“A little girl,” she repeats, nodding. “That’s…that’s really good. You deserve to have a little girl. I’m so happy for you—oh my God, that means I’m an auntie.” She’s gleeful and I feel guilty. Because how can you be an auntie to a child who doesn’t know you exist?
“Yep, you’re an auntie. Violet’s nearly four, and she reminds me of you.” She does. It’s the serious eyes. The compact strength. I’d never told Violet, of course, never told anyone. Just silently enjoyed it.
“How far along are you?” She gestures to my belly. It shows more on me because I’m slim. Slimmer than I should be maybe, but all I’ve tended to eat has been toast at breakfast and the odd chocolate bar. I’ve been too worried and felt too queasy and nervous to eat, and who knows how long my money will last.
It was getting to the point in time where I would’ve had to tell Jim. I wanted to get to that point too late for him to make any rash demands. I knew he thought we weren’t ready. I wouldn’t have been able to keep it secret much longer. But he took care of that.
Robin is throwing back tea and asking questions, and she’s so happy to see me that I’m stunned. She thinks this is a happy visit. I can almost reach up and touch my guilt. It hangs around my neck.
—
The adrenaline has swept away and Robin has slumped on the sofa, two hands on her mug, third cup of tea nearly drained. The questions have slowed and her eyes are droopy. She’s asked enough questions about Violet to re-create her out of clay, and she’s the first person I know to ask questions about my bump.