Mouths of Babes

by Stella Duffy

  By the time Molly arrived home very late that night, Saz felt like she’d been crying for days. She and Matilda were staying with Chris and Marc, had taken some clothes and left the flat as soon as they were allowed. Saz gave Molly a brief account of what had happened and then agreed to explain in more detail later. Molly wasn’t ready to hear it yet. While she put off the reasons for Carrie’s blood on the lounge floor, Molly told Saz about Asmita, how she’d been, the tears, the horror of watching her mother wailing her loss. And then a nice early morning out in the hills, talking about Ian with some joy as well as pain, the bittersweet of moving on. Saz listened to the mother—daughter story, listened for the signs and accents she’d want to recognise in her own daughter, the depth of child and parent understanding she’d want Matilda to have with her own parents, all of them. Then there was silence and it was time for Saz to speak. She opened her mouth and nothing came out.

  The silence grew and Molly said she’d been thinking about the flat anyway, they needed to talk about moving house. They couldn’t go back there now. And they needed somewhere larger, not so nice probably, there was no way they could afford such a great location with a second proper-sized bedroom, let alone the three bedroom house they’d been coveting for a while now, but a boxroom wasn’t going to do Matilda for all that much longer. Molly had spent a few days in her own family home, small house but a huge garden, the trees she’d climbed when she was little, the place she’d hidden in the hedge when Ian and Asmita were the worst parents in the world and Molly was sure she’d probably been adopted. The shops might not be so good wherever they could afford a larger place, the heath not so close, they might need to move further out on the tube line. But it was time to move on.

  Saz agreed. It was definitely time to move on.

  “Moll, there’s stuff I need to tell you. More than just what happened this afternoon.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t think that mad bitch came into our house entirely out of the blue. What about?”

  “Me. About me. About what happened, why it happened.”

  Molly turned over, away from Saz, buried her head into her pillow. “I know about you, Saz.”

  “No, you don’t. There’s things I need to tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  Molly turned back to Saz, looking at her partner though the dark room, the space between them both stretched with lack of light and compacted by the knowing in that space. “Why do you want to tell me things about you?”

  “Because you’re my partner, because you love me, because we have a child together?”

  “That’s right. I do. I do love you. But I don’t need to know your secrets, Saz. You’ve always had secrets. I think you’ve had secrets you didn’t even tell yourself, let alone me. And if you didn’t want to acknowledge them for all this time we’ve been together, why do you think I should?”

  Saz was thrown. She’d been expecting an interrogation, demands for truth, fury that Matilda had been put in danger, horror and anger about Carrie. This was not what she’d been frightened of. “I just … ”

  “You want absolution, Saz.”

  “No, I want to tell you … ”

  “Crap. You want me to listen to whatever you have to say and then tell you it’s OK. But I’m not a priest and I’m not a therapist and I know you’ve been lying to me. I know stuff’s been going on, was going on. I’ve never seen you so relieved as you were the other day when I said I had to go up to Scotland. You wanted me out of the way, it was obvious. And it was really hurtful, but I knew you weren’t going to tell me what was happening, because you’ve never told me all of what’s going on with you, and I’ve ended up just figuring that’s what you’re like. It’s who you are. So I went off and you got on with whatever it was that you needed to do. Ending in this. This fucking mess.” Molly was shaking with the effort of keeping her voice down, holding in her anger.

  “I need to tell you about it, why it happened … ”

  “But I don’t need to hear it. Whatever has been going on, you want me to listen and hear your story and make it OK for you. It’s like me telling everyone I could find about Matilda’s birth. And then all the details of my dad’s death. The funeral and the wake and all of it. I needed to make those things into stories so I could deal with them. It’s what we do, we turn our events into stories so we can handle them.”

  “Right, and … ”

  “Shut up, Saz. I’m telling you I don’t want to know. I don’t want you to tell me a story that’s going to make this OK. Carrie is dead. You can’t make that OK.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry. And it’s my fault.”

  “Did you push the bottle into her neck?”

  “No.”

  “Did that woman – Janine – did she mean to?”

  “No … I don’t think so.”

  “Right, so it was an accident. A really bad one.”

  “But it’s my fault she was there, in our flat.”

  “Yeah. It is. But you didn’t kill her.”

  “She’s still dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “And there are lies, Moll.”

  Molly groaned, rolled onto her back, eyes scanning the no-vision ceiling. “I expect there are. Have you been having an affair?”

  “No.”

  “Is Matilda OK?”

  “Yes … yes she is. You saw her. Don’t you think she is?”

  Saz’s thigh, the healed but still jagged skin. “I accepted these burn scars of yours, all that time healing, because I love you. Sure, you told me some of how it happened, but not all of it. You’ve never talked about all of it. And when you came back from the trip with the band? I knew stuff had happened. Not just the violence, but other things. And I never asked you about that, because I didn’t want to know the answer. All I’ve ever wanted from you is that you be here with me. And now with Matilda and me. That’s what I want. You with me.”

  “I don’t know how to be with you without telling you, though … there’s things from way back. Stuff about who I was, how I was, when we were kids. Well, not even that young really … ”

  Molly put her hand on Saz’s arm, lightly, definitively. “I’m sorry, but that’s your problem, not mine. I’ve always known that you had stuff you didn’t look at, things you were running away from.”

  “You never said?”

  “Why should I? I don’t need to know everything, Saz. I don’t want to know everything. I don’t want to know about the things in your past you want me to forgive. Because it’s not my job. Dealing with whatever guilts you have is not my job. I’ve loved you from pretty much when I first met you – that Saz. That woman.” Her hands now moving, to Saz’s face, shoulders, arms. “This woman. I still do. If you have things to deal with about your past, then that’s yours, not mine. And it’s not fair of you to ask me to take it on. What if I didn’t like what you had to say?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What if I let you tell me whatever it is you want to confess, and then I discover I can’t love you? Can’t bear to be with you?”

  “But you do love me … ”

  “My Saz, that’s who I love. Like you love the Molly you know. Your Molly. You might not love me in the hospital, at work. You might not love me when I make decisions about people’s lives every day. And sometimes I make the wrong decisions. I’ve made terrible wrong decisions that really matter. Because I’m human, I fuck up. Sometimes we all fuck up.”

  “But this is different.”

  “Maybe. It doesn’t matter.” Molly reached for Saz’s hand in the dark. “Of course it all feels bloody horrible just now, it is bloody horrible. Please don’t risk us just because you want me to make you feel better about some crap from your past, and the awful thing that happened today. I can’t fix how you feel, you have to do that for yourself.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “Then you can’t. And you move on anyway. People do bad things all the time, Saz. Telling me all about it, let
ting someone else know? That doesn’t make the bad go away, it just shares it round. I do love you, but I don’t want to share your bad.”

  “I don’t know how to do this, Moll.”

  “Neither do I. So cry and get on with it. Time doesn’t heal, but you do get used to it eventually. At least that’s what I’m hoping.”

  All over and nothing resolved. Molly folded herself into Saz’s body, talked out and tired. There was a light rain in the wind outside, leaves glistening in the blown damp. Matilda smiled in her dream. Saz barely slept, and in the morning Matilda woke and laughed and cried and Saz and Molly carried on.

  Janine Marsden killed herself two nights later on the remand wing of a women’s prison. They couldn’t get her to a mental hospital in time, there just weren’t enough beds. She was one of fifteen women who killed themselves in custody that year. The suicide watch that kept her awake by shining a torch in her face every quarter of an hour still gave her another fourteen and a half to cut her veins with the hair clip she’d found wedged into the gap between floor and skirting board. Janine Marsden had no intention of going back to a place of pale green walls.

  Will Gallagher was a tabloid hero. Saved his old friend’s life, and that of her child. And even when he admitted some of the story, a little of his own past involvement with Janine Marsden – careful not to name any other names, not to implicate anyone else who’d been involved, honourable mentions only – even when he talked about his less than gentlemanly actions towards her back then, his unfortunate laddish behaviour – he sounded OK. He sounded good actually. Someone who’d learned from his mistakes, who’d tried to put it right, wanted to do good. Will Gallagher became the spokesman for an anti-bullying campaign in schools. They made some great ads.

  Molly wore the white suit to Carrie’s funeral. Saz wore black, and the fucking gorgeous boots. Carrie wore a high-necked pink and orange minidress. She looked amazing.