Anything You Do Say

by Gillian McAllister

  My case is committed to the Old Bailey, and then I am led out.

  The guard’s hand is gently resting against mine, and then, as we reach the foyer, he slowly releases it, and I am alone. I shrug, out of his gaze, of his touching distance, of the shackles of custody.

  Bailed. I am free. For now.

  But it is not true freedom, of course. It is temporary. A purgatory. Until later, when it will surely end. Now, it’s like a little taster, a teaser. A ceasefire. A friendly football match, on Christmas Day, in the middle of a war.

  13

  Conceal

  The GP thinks my hand and wrist need strapping. I enjoy her tender touch on my arm and hand, her concerned expression when I tell her I have had a lot on, that I fell when hurrying.

  ‘Be kind to yourself,’ she says, in the tone of an exasperated schoolteacher.

  When I get home, Reuben stares at the strapping, and I tell him the truth: that I fell over.

  I only omit to tell him when, and why.

  I don’t check the work rota much more than a day in advance – a fact which irritates Reuben – so I don’t know until the Monday – ten days After – that I have the Tuesday off.

  I kiss Reuben goodbye as he leaves. I haven’t kissed him since it happened, and a faint frown crosses his face as his lips meet mine, which I try to ignore. But I can’t un-see the way he draws me to him, wanting to extend the kiss like someone on rations might bulk up a meal.

  ‘You’ve got so thin,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, really,’ I say, self-consciously patting down my slim hips. The bones protrude into the palms of my hands. ‘Good.’ I want to disappear.

  When he’s left, I go out and walk, crunching around in the winter frost. Walking’s the only thing that seems to work for me. The only time I feel okay. The rhythm of it. The lack of thought. The cold, harsh air. Who knows what I’ll do when it’s warm again?

  Of course, I find myself walking towards Little Venice, but I steer myself south.

  It’s no longer snowing but it’s still bone-cold – the worst winter on record, the newspaper headlines scream – and I wrap my thin trench coat around myself, walking alone along an A-road in Paddington. A bizarre, sixties building with an extra bit on the top of it sits to my right, and I turn instinctively towards it, crossing the road, turning down a side street towards central London. I will go and look at the landmarks, I think. Look at my London: one of my favourite things to do.

  I wander for hours. And then, before I know it, without realizing how far I have drifted, it is there in front of me, a white, square building, a golden dome: the Paddington Mosque. I stand in front of it, blinking, and I know why I have arrived here, almost unconsciously, without quite knowing myself. To pay my respects. To say sorry. To express my regret. I’ll do it alone, and quickly. I think back to the news article. He was buried yesterday. I won’t be disturbing anybody. I’ll nip in. Find his grave. Leave. Nobody will know. It is necessary, I realize, for me to do this.

  I let myself in through the door – my left hand hangs by my side, strapped and useless – knowing just enough to remove my shoes and hold them in my hands as I cross the carpet of the women’s section. I cover my hair with my scarf.

  The mosque, on the inside, is nothing like a church. More like a living room. The carpet is red and swirling and the edge of the room is lined with pillars. Otherwise, it’s almost entirely empty. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling and it seems to sway slightly in a breeze that must be coming from outside. A few men are praying around the edges of the room, and I cross it silently, putting my shoes back on when I reach the door. But, after a second, I realize there’s no graveyard here. I ask someone, and she directs me to the cemetery over the road.

  It’s frosty and the grass crunches underfoot. My breath steams out in front of me, eddying like bathwater in the frigid air.

  The cemetery is completely empty. I take a deep, chilly breath. I am alone with him. He’s here somewhere. Imran. I’ll stop a grave or two away – I can’t risk going right up to him – and pay my respects to him from a few feet. I’ll pretend to be visiting someone else.

  They are different to Christian graves, to secular graves. The headstones are mostly smaller, but some of them have entire tombs, crypts, shining white in the sun. They are all pointing in the same direction, I notice immediately. It gives a strangely uniform effect. Rows and rows and rows of them, evenly spaced, like somebody has neatly laid out piles of paper.

  I find his grave – marked with a wooden stake. I don’t know how long I stay there for. Just looking, three along from his grave. This is close enough. If he could see me now, he would know. He would know that I’m sorry. He would want you to hand yourself in, a voice inside my head says, but I gulp back tears and ignore it.

  Instead, I just stand there, my feet cold in the frost, breathing deeply, apologizing with each breath.

  ‘Rubbish, isn’t it?’ a voice beside me says.

  I turn and see a woman standing next to me. I didn’t hear her arrive. And, then, with a panicked lurch, I realize that it is obviously, unmistakably her. Ayesha. His sister. Her face is more drawn than it was on the television, but I recognize the turned-down lips, the mole. I can see hollows underneath her cheekbones. Like she is biting her cheeks.

  I want to back away, to turn and run, but I can’t. I can’t do that to her – scare her in this peaceful graveyard, where her brother rests. So recently buried.

  ‘I’m not supposed to be here again so soon,’ she says. ‘But I can’t stay away.’

  She raises her face to the sun. It kisses her features – lighting her forehead and shadowing underneath her bone structure – and I look away, embarrassed.

  It wasn’t right to come. It wasn’t right at all, I think, wanting to run far away. I am a monster, a killer, following the same murderous instincts that have preceded me for hundreds of years. Returning to the scene of the crime. Coming to the grave. Stupid. Selfish. Predictable.

  ‘I – I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m here to …’

  She’s looking at me expectantly and I wonder why I spoke at all. I can feel my eyes darting around the graveyard. I can’t pretend to have known him: that is a step too far. I will just … my gaze lands on a gravestone bearing the inscription Hanna Ahmed: lost too soon. It has this year’s date on it. She was born in 1983.

  ‘My brother’s girlfriend died,’ I say, the lie escaping my lips before I can really stop it, thankful for my fast brain, always good with numbers right from when I was young. ‘I’m just – I’m so sorry to have … disturbed you.’

  Her expression is soft, and I realize she wasn’t asking me. Her expression looks questioning, but it is only grief. Hollow grief that I have caused. Her eyes meet mine. They’re a dark brown, almost black, the pupils lost inside.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, gesturing to the grave, almost as new as Imran’s, the earth piled on it, covered in plants and flowers. ‘About your brother … about his girlfriend.’

  I wave a hand, like it doesn’t matter, which she must think is strange.

  ‘They’re at rest now,’ she says, looking out over the graves. ‘Mecca’s somewhere that way,’ she says. ‘You know?’ She looks at me. ‘I never believed all that, but he did. I think.’ She speaks with a cockney accent.

  She doesn’t care that I’m not answering. That I’m thinking about Imran and every grave in here. She leans down, looking closer at Hanna’s grave. ‘She was young, too. Did they bury her fast? As soon as the post-mortem was over, we got the body. It’s hardly been any time at all.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, a blush creeping across my cheeks.

  I take a step back, the panic descending again. What am I doing here? I have to get away. I can’t be doing things like this. Risky things. Cruel things. Things that don’t make any sense.

  I take two steps back, but, as I leave, I can’t help but wish her well. She nods gratefully, her eyes still on me.

  I dream of Imran again and wa
ke up sweaty.

  I shower, my arm feeling wasted without its splint on, ashamed at the strange concoction of emotions inside me. Sadness – it’s almost all sadness. But there are other things, too. Sadness is the main course, but there is a starter of guilt. No, make that a sharing platter.

  But then also, right at the end, after pudding – a biscotti on the side of the coffee, maybe – is something else. I see it for what it is, and wince as I realize.

  It’s relief. A chink of relief, because, as each day passes, it’s looking like I might have got away with murder.

  I am despicable.

  14

  Reveal

  Reuben finishes playing for me. His head is bent low, the fingers finishing the piece with the softest, quietest, most understated ending. A musical sentence, trailed off.

  ‘Calmer?’ he says, turning to me with a smile. He hardly ever plays for me.

  I nod, but I’m not really. ‘Yes. No,’ I say. We are about to leave to go to my parents’. Wilf has said he will be there, too. We’re telling people. We can’t avoid it any longer.

  Nobody saw my bail hearing in the press, of course. They wouldn’t have believed it if they did; would think it was a coincidence. Somebody with the same name. That’s what I would think. It would be too far out for me to even consider it.

  ‘They’ll think I’m pregnant,’ I say, as I take my trench coat from the hallway.

  ‘Fuck ’em,’ Reuben says, as I walk back into the spare room.

  He closes the lid on the piano keys. As he does it, I think suddenly of Imran, on some life support somewhere. I think of him dying. I think of my charge changing to murder.

  Mum and Dad live in Kent. They call it London, but it isn’t. Not proper London. There are open, green spaces and its own town centre, and houses, not flats. There are no London buses or tube stations or constant sirens. There are no jaunty, confident urban foxes or pop-up yoga studios or night buses. It is not our London.

  Reuben’s father texts on the way. Reuben got me a new phone, this afternoon. It’s a different type, and I’m not used to it. Transferring my number over was a pain. Reuben glances across as it beeps.

  ‘Does your dad know?’ I say, before I open the text.

  Reuben nods, his hair flashing, orange and then auburn, orange and then auburn, as we pass underneath street lamps.

  He doesn’t defend telling him. I’m glad he doesn’t. But … there is something strange about it. I would have liked him to have asked me, maybe. But no. I won’t let the thing that I have done create a space between us. We are seeing my parents and it is only right that Reuben’s should know too.

  I look down at the text. Hope my boy is treating you well, it says. I frown. He has never sent such a text, has never needed to. Reuben has no temper, no moodiness, no edge. Not with me, anyway.

  I tap out a response, not looking up at Reuben. Always, of course xx, I say.

  You know where I am. All sounds very unfair to me, Jo. Hope R is good to you. You know how he can be, he writes. I feel my mouth slacken, my eyebrows knit together. How he can be?

  I can’t ask what he means by that. You know how he can be. It would be awkward. And so I don’t; I avoid it, but I do think about it as I watch London spread out as we travel, like the universe is expanding as we drive. Perhaps he means because he can be blunt. Perhaps he means because Reuben is always completely honest about what he thinks of people and their actions, is moralistic. But he’s not, with me. No, not really.

  But none of these things really makes sense. There is no obvious thing that would necessitate a text like that.

  ‘He alright?’ Reuben says while we are paused at a set of traffic lights.

  ‘Yeah,’ I lie. ‘Just – chat.’ I like to chat to Reuben’s father, and he respects that.

  Mum opens the front door when we arrive. She is tall, unlike me, and has her hair in a conservative up-do. She looks just like Wilf: lithe, with bulbous eyes. They both have the same exaggerated mannerisms. They’re heavy-footed; when we stay over I can always hear her and Wilf stomping around upstairs. The occasional time she tells a story she thinks is actually funny, she juts her jaw out as she tells it, self-consciously, as though she shouldn’t be laughing.

  ‘What’s all this?’ she says.

  The tone immediately annoys me. As though I am being a nuisance. Creating drama. That’s the assumption they always make about me. I try to catch Reuben’s eye, but he’s staring fixedly down at the welcome mat. I once told him off, in the car on the way home, for huffing throughout a Christmas dinner with them, and he behaves differently now, less antagonistic and more mournful.

  Wilf is sitting in the dining room, at the head of the table, and Dad is pouring wine from an actual carafe. Reuben nods to them, not saying anything, and sits at the other end. I sit next to him, and his hand lands on my knee, squeezing gently. Mum and Dad sit, too, opposite each other, and look at us expectantly, slightly impatiently. I find myself thinking I’m glad that I’m not pregnant; that I don’t have to tell them like this. I could just imagine their tight smiles, their tiny congratulations. They don’t know how to be joyful. They would say they gave us a happy childhood, my parents. That they took us to meadows where we ran amongst the wildflowers. But those tiny smiles, the condescension, their Oh, Joannas – they erased it all. Only, I am not brave enough to ever say. I might be wrong. Wilf seems happy enough. And so it’s not legitimate, my suffering. It doesn’t feel it, anyway.

  I look across at Reuben. I can’t do it. I can’t say it. But I know he can. They trust him. But I become different around them. No, not different: a worse version of myself.

  ‘On Friday night Jo was harassed by a man,’ Reuben says.

  He omits the bar, and the night out. I’m glad of it. I’m glad of all of it. That he’s explaining, and not me. He legitimizes it somehow. It’s not right, but it’s the way it is.

  ‘Right,’ Dad says, his eyebrows drawing together, not in concern but in confusion.

  ‘She thought he was following her, but it was another, similar-looking man,’ Reuben says. He swallows, withdrawing his hand from my knee.

  Mum picks up a coaster and starts turning it around rhythmically, so that its square edges bang against the table, one side, then the next, then the next. It’s a sound I remember from a thousand awkward childhood dinners. We ate good food – organic food, balanced diets – but we had no conversation. Not real conversation, anyway.

  Wilf is sitting back in his seat, his body language languid, but his face serious, appraising mine. He’s grown a goatee. It looks ridiculous.

  ‘When he got too close she pushed him, and he’s injured and in hospital. The police are involved …’

  It’s the best he could do with a bad story. It’s factual, unemotional; exactly as I want it to be.

  ‘Involved how?’ Mum says sharply.

  ‘They’ve charged me,’ I say, breaking my silence.

  ‘With what?’ Wilf says, speaking for the first time.

  He’s a City worker. Something in finance. I have no idea what. But he seems to know things about the world. True to form, when I say causing grievous bodily harm with intent, his eyebrows raise, and he says, ‘Section eighteen?’

  I cringe when I recall thinking a section eighteen meant I was going home without charge. How do these people know so much more than me?

  ‘Right. Well. When’s all … that?’ Mum says, awkwardly swirling wine around her glass.

  ‘The summer,’ says Reuben, before I can. ‘Early June.’

  ‘Well, there must be something more to it than that,’ Dad says. ‘It’s preposterous for them to charge you for self-defence.’

  I suppose his indignation is on my behalf; that it has its roots in sympathy, somewhere, hidden deep.

  ‘It wasn’t self-defence. Because I was mistaken,’ I say.

  ‘How badly injured is he?’

  ‘Quite,’ I say. ‘He was … I didn’t realize it but he was face down in a puddle �
��’

  ‘For a few seconds,’ Reuben interjects, and I swallow hard.

  ‘They must think you did something else,’ Dad says.

  He was always this way; sure he was correct even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. About immigration and benefit claimants and London’s knife crime. Reuben used to try to tell him, in the early days, until every visit ended in a row and he stopped.

  ‘They must,’ Dad says again.

  Mum nods ferociously next to him and I see now: this is how it’s going to be. Everybody will have an opinion on me, on what I did, and on what the State did to me in response. Everybody is wearing lenses, and they see me through them now, filtered through their own views of what constitutes violence and self-defence and the law. Even Reuben does it. I see him looking at me sometimes, when he thinks I am engrossed in something else. His expression is puzzled. Incredulous, even.

  I am public property. Nothing is private any more. My life has been blown up, projected on to a wall for everybody to watch. A decision I made late at night after too many drinks is being played out in front of us like a tragedy on the stage. I’m not sure even I would defend that reckless, quick decision I made, and yet I have to, to stay free.

  ‘That sounds really unfair,’ Wilf says. ‘It’s an honest mistake. And you’re … you know.’

  ‘Well, quite,’ Mum says. ‘Your imagination. You were always … imaginative. Your make-believe world.’

  Reuben’s head snaps up and then he lets out a derisive snort. ‘That’s the best you can come up with?’ he says. ‘That’s your sympathy?’ I put a hand out to stop him, but he stands up. ‘I knew you’d be like this,’ he says. ‘Can’t you see she needs …’

  He walks across the dining room and I follow him, not out of anger for myself but out of loyalty to him.