Am I Guilty

by Jackie Kabler

  ‘I pulled him out, and I shook him and called his name over and over, but he was completely limp, Annabelle. His eyes were wide open, his little face was bright red, and he looked like a doll, a little floppy doll, not like a baby at all. And he was … he was so hot. His skin was hot to the touch.’

  The tears were rolling freely down her cheeks, her voice now barely a whisper.

  ‘And that’s when I knew for definite. He was dead. Zander was dead.’

  12

  THEA

  ‘No, that’s all right, I understand. Thank you so much anyway.’

  I put the phone down and sighed, raking my fingers through my unwashed hair, wiping a bead of perspiration from my forehead, suddenly feeling sweaty even though the room was chilly. Another child modelling agency, another polite refusal to help me. I desperately needed to organize a photo shoot, needed pictures of my new spring stock for the website, but since Zander died, since all the publicity, it was proving nigh on impossible to hire any models at all. The refusals from the places I’d used previously were always gentle, always diplomatic, but the meaning was clear.

  ‘It’s just, Mrs Ashfield, in the light of events, you know …’, and ‘It’s a little tricky, you see, Thea, to persuade parents to allow it, you understand, after …’

  That kind of thing. Parents didn’t trust me around their children anymore, and why on earth would they? I asked myself for the hundredth time why I was so determined to keep doing this, why I didn’t just close the company, questions that so many people, some I knew, many I didn’t, had asked in recent months.

  ‘Who’s going to buy clothes for their kids from a woman who killed her baby?’

  ‘You’re probably going to be in prison soon anyway. Why bother? Give it up, Thea.’

  ‘Don’t you have enough to worry about with the trial coming up? You need time to prepare your defence. You don’t have to close it down for ever, just take a break.’

  This last comment was from Isla, and I knew she was probably right, but something in me just didn’t want to let it go, not now, not unless I really had to. I needed my work, needed the distraction, something other than alcohol to fill the long days when Nell was with Rupert. Something to make me feel that I wasn’t just a sick woman who had done something unspeakably evil, that I could still do something good, support myself and my child. And maybe, in some small way, forcing myself to keep the business afloat was another way of punishing myself. I deserved the abuse I got, understood it completely. I wouldn’t let someone like me, someone who’d done what I’d done, near my child.

  I was disgusting, a monster. A child killer. A vile excuse for a mother. A woman who was on police bail, awaiting trial, after being charged with the manslaughter of her own baby. I mean, who the hell would want to even talk to me, never mind work with me? I was amazed the modelling agencies were so civil. I doubt I would have been, in their position.

  I ran my fingers over the soft alpaca wool of the poncho that was folded on the table in front of me, a sample just in from Bolivia, trying to calm myself down, then pushed my chair back from the table and walked to the window, staring out at the wet, dull morning. On the pavement outside my front gate, two elderly ladies, one clutching a red umbrella, the other wearing one of those transparent, plastic headscarves, were chatting animatedly. I wondered if they were talking about me, if they realized whose home they were standing outside. The worst mother in Britain. The woman who drank so much champagne she forgot about her baby and left him to die in a hot car.

  It had happened in the UK before, but not often, and never like this. People who were rushing to work, stressed and harassed, forgetting to drop their children off at nursery. People popping into a shop on a scorching day, not wanting to disturb their sleeping baby, intending only to be a few minutes, not realizing that that could sometimes be all it took. But never a case as reprehensible, as abominable as mine. Nobody else had done what I’d done, not here, not like that. I’d spent hours trawling the Internet, for reasons I didn’t really understand, looking for similar cases. Trying, maybe, to make myself feel less alone. And then, as I read the details of others, of other lost children, I wished desperately that I’d never started looking. So many people, so much pain. I wasn’t alone, but knowing that didn’t help. Nothing did.

  I watched the two old ladies, but they weren’t looking my way, not casting their eyes sneakily towards the house. I’d seen people do that, so many times since September. The stand-and-starers, the pointers. Not for a while though – Isla had been right.

  ‘People have short memories,’ she’d said. ‘It’ll pass. Just wait it out.’

  She’d said it again when I’d told her how weird it was, just before Christmas, to see business slowly picking up again, after virtually coming to a halt for the three months before that, those dark, terrifying early days, when I thought my life was over.

  I’d almost given up then, and not just on the business, my horror at what I had done overwhelming me, making me question whether I deserved to even go on living. But when my legal team urged me to plead not guilty, told me they were planning to mount a defence, that there were mitigating factors they could use, told me there was a chance that if I flung myself on the mercy of the jury I may get a suspended sentence, however unlikely many others around me thought that was, it was as if somebody had turned on a faint, flickering light. I threw myself back into work. It was either that, or throw myself entirely down the neck of the gin bottle.

  First, I removed my name and other personal details from the website, then invested some time and money in foreign advertising, where I hoped people were less likely to have heard about the case. And, to my astonishment, it worked. It took some time, but things slowly started to improve, mainly overseas orders at first, and then a steady trickle of orders from the UK again, mostly new customers. They would probably all dry up again, when the trial started, when the name of my company would be bandied around once more, but for now, at least I had a chance to get some money in the bank. Rupert was paying a decent chunk into my account every month, for Nell, but I couldn’t rely on that. I needed to prove to him, to myself, to everyone, that I was still self-sufficient, a competent, successful business woman, and not just a-a whatever I was now. A monster.

  I stared blindly out of the window, suddenly feeling nauseous, and tried to drag my thoughts back to the photo shoot. I’d have to use Nell again, for the older girls’ clothes, and maybe Millie would like to take part too, I thought. But that would mean approaching Greg and Annabelle, and while they seemed happy enough for now to allow Nell and Millie to continue their friendship – Annabelle had been very, very kind to Nell in fact – I felt certain it would be a step too far to allow their daughter to appear on the Just Enfant website.

  What I’d do about the boys’ and baby clothes I had no idea. I’d done a few shoots recently of just the clothes, laid out artily Instagram-style on white backgrounds, pegged up on clothes lines, hanging from wooden ladders. They were nice photos, but they didn’t really show off the clothes to their best advantage. It seemed I had little choice for now, though, and I rested my forehead against the cool glass of the window, thinking.

  What else could I do? Maybe my photographer friend, Melissa, who often worked with me on shoots, could help? She had a little boy, a toddler. I’d make some calls later, but it was Friday morning and that meant I needed to go into town, two appointments beckoning.

  I glanced in the mirror and decided that today I didn’t care that my hair was greasy and that the dark rings under my eyes spread halfway down my cheeks. There had been a time that I wouldn’t even have considered going out looking like this, but recently I no longer cared. What did it matter, in the grand scheme of things? And I had so much on my mind today, the anxiety prickling now at the edges of my brain, pinpricking my skin. I headed into the hall, pulled my long black coat off its peg, picked my handbag up off the floor where I must have dropped it last time I came in and grabbed a pair of sungla
sses from the drawer in the side table. They would do, in lieu of make-up, I decided, as I slammed the front door behind me and headed for the police station.

  It was one of a list of bail conditions that had been imposed when I’d been charged – a weekly trip to report to the police, to prove I hadn’t done a runner. Not that I could drive myself anyway, even if I was thinking about it – I’d also been charged with drink-driving, of course – and I’d had to surrender my passport until the Crown Court trial, which had been set for the twelfth of March, just over six weeks away.

  I’d been terrified, in the beginning, that I’d be jailed until the trial, almost collapsing with relief at what they called my plea and case management hearing, when I’d been told that I could go home.

  Rupert left me soon after that, but the joint custody order was swiftly put in place too. At that hearing, I’d agreed to everything he wanted immediately, shaky with fear, incredulous that I was still going to be allowed to share the care of my daughter after what I’d done.

  Soon, there’d be another court room, and in the coming weeks I’d have to sit down with my legal team to plan my defence for what I’d done to Zander. And that made me feel sick to the stomach, for what defence did I have?

  ‘We’ll go with postnatal depression and issues with alcohol,’ they had said. ‘That’s a good defence, Thea. You weren’t yourself, you were ill. It will go in your favour, especially if there are women on the jury. Trust us.’

  Desperate to stay out of jail, I’d weakly agreed. But had I had postnatal depression, really? When I, under duress, finally went to see my doctor after Zander died, I’d been able to tick almost every box on the checklist – persistent low mood, feeling tired all the time, trouble sleeping at night, problems concentrating and making decisions.

  But I’d been going through some stuff, back then, struggling with a few things that had been going on, and I’d put how I’d been feeling down to stress, anxiety.

  In any case, postnatal depression or not, was that really an excuse? I mean, the facts were horribly simple. I got drunk. I got drunk, and I drove home in that state, and then I forgot about my baby, and left him alone in a car on the hottest day of the year. The most terrible, most horrific crime a mother could commit, and I’d done it. I’d killed my own baby. Not with my bare hands, but as good as.

  The Crime Prosecution Service rarely decided to prosecute in cases like mine, apparently, normally deciding the loss of a child was punishment enough and that prosecution wasn’t in the public interest. Not in my case though.

  I shuddered violently as I walked, a fresh wave of nausea washing over me, the words that haunted me flashing through my head: Involuntary manslaughter due to gross negligence – a breach of duty of care to the deceased, which caused the death of the victim.

  That was the legal description of my crime, but in the days after Zander died the newspapers said it very differently.

  WEALTHY BUSINESSWOMAN ‘LEAVES SON TO DIE IN HOT CAR’ AFTER CHAMPAGNE BINGE

  FACE OF THE BABY WHO DIED IN A SCORCHING CAR AS HIS DRUNK MOTHER SLEPT

  HORROR AS CHILDREN’S FASHION ENTREPRENEUR IS CHARGED AFTER ‘FORGOTTEN’ CHILD DIES IN HOT CAR

  I swallowed hard and walked faster, sunglasses on, head down, remembering again those early days, the shock, the shame, the grief, the disbelief. The jeers, the taunts, the vile abuse on social media. The horrified reactions of friends and family when they’d heard what I’d done.

  It was the only time in my life that I’d been glad that my parents were no longer around. They’d died, both of them, within a year of each other, when I’d been in my mid-twenties. Dad had had a heart attack, collapsing and dying on his beloved golf course. Months later mum had been diagnosed with a late-stage, already terminal pancreatic cancer, and had passed away within weeks.

  It had been a terrible, traumatic time, one I’d only managed to get through thanks to Rupert and Isla, and I’d missed my parents desperately ever since, especially since becoming a mother. It was devastating that they’d never had a chance to meet their grandchildren, but when Zander died, I had, for the first time, felt grateful that they weren’t here. The thought of the anguish they would have gone through because of what I’d done was simply unbearable.

  Rupert’s parents were still around, though, and that had been horrendous. They had always been so incredibly kind to me, especially after I lost Mum and Dad, and the fact that I’d always got on so well with them, always loved them, had made their disgust and horror heartbreaking.

  I’d lost them too, now. I’d killed their much-longed-for grandson, and they’d simply walked away, and told me they never wanted to see me again.

  And then, of course, there was all the stuff about the pram. I still wasn’t really sure how it started, taking the pram out with me, that sad, empty pram. But it was a way of feeling closer to him, somehow. A support, something to cling on to, both physically and emotionally.

  When I was near that pram, I could still smell my baby, the soft, clean scent of him on the blankets, still see his beautiful face, blue eyes shining up at me, his rosebud lips parting in a glorious smile, and for a few brief moments I could pretend he was still there and everything was all right. Except it wasn’t all right, of course, and it never would be again, and I was now the freak, the unhinged mother whose baby was dead but who still pushed his pram around, still talked to him as I did so. Everyone was horrified, of course – Nell, Flora, Isla, Rupert … they took it in turns to cajole, scold, beg me to stop doing it.

  ‘Mummy, please don’t take the pram out. It’s so weird. Please, Mummy, it’s embarrassing.’

  ‘Thea, are you sure about this? Do you think maybe you should see a doctor, talk to someone?’

  ‘Come on, Thea. Stop doing that. Stay in, open a bottle of wine, take your mind off it that way. We’ll get drunk and forget about it for a bit. This isn’t right, OK?’

  ‘You look like a crazy woman, Thea. For fuck’s sake leave the fucking thing at home, you mental bitch.’

  That was Rupert, obviously. I tried to stop, and after a while I only did it occasionally, on the really bad days, the worst days, the days when I felt I couldn’t go out on my own, when I needed something to cling to. Days when I missed Zander so much I could barely move, barely cope with the agonizing pain and loss.

  Those were the days when gently rearranging the blankets, clutching onto that handle, manoeuvring the Silver Cross around corners and up and down steps and on and off pavements, somehow helped me get through.

  It was crazy, of course; they were all right about that. And then there was the day when somebody, some stranger in the street, stared at me, recognizing me from the newspaper coverage, and then peered into the pram, and then looked at me again, face contorting in shock and disgust. That evening he posted something on his Twitter account, a horrible sneering remark with a photo of me, and it got retweeted and retweeted, the comments multiplying, hundreds of abusive messages being sent to my own feed, the one I used to promote Just Enfant, forcing me to close my account, until it seemed the whole Internet was jeering at me, at the woman charged with killing her baby, who was now so deranged she was pushing an empty pram around Cheltenham.

  And even then, I carried on. Who does that? But I just couldn’t, couldn’t put the pram away, couldn’t bear to. Until now. That day at the school, with Nell, had made me realize that it had to end. I’d hurt Nell, damaged her, enough already. And so I’d put the pram away, finally, hidden it out back in the shed, tears running down my cheeks as I shut the door on it, leaving it there in the dark, among the cobwebs and garden tools.

  Today, I was out, heading to the police station to report in, on my own. No crutch, nothing to hold on to. And actually, I thought, as I hurried down Lansdown Road – past the Texaco garage where I used to stop sometimes when I was out for walks with Zander, and where the lady behind the shop counter used to tell me he was the ‘’andsomest baby’ she’d ever seen – actually, it was better to be w
alking on my own, in my circumstances, I realized now. I was less conspicuous, just a frumpy, weary-looking woman with her head down, the sort of woman you wouldn’t look twice at. It was safer.

  Reporting to the police station done – the usual perfunctory scribble of my signature on a page pushed across the counter by a bored-looking officer – I started walking again, headed for my weekly doctor’s appointment. As I walked, I thought about Isla, who’d be coming down from London, as usual, and a ghost of a smile twitched on my lips. She’d insisted on booking us the exercise class she kept going on about for tomorrow morning, and we’d agreed to keep the alcohol to a minimum tonight.

  ‘Well, obviously we’ll have a couple of glasses. Let’s be realistic, it’s you and me, and it’s Friday night after all,’ she’d said on the phone the night before. ‘But we don’t want to be rotten, not if we have to be there for eleven. I decided on reformer Pilates in the end, not yoga, by the way. We need a bit of reforming, you and me …’

  She’d sniggered, and I’d laughed too, and then immediately felt sick, as I always did now if I ever found a moment’s happiness, forgot even for a second what I’d done and what a tremendous mess my life was.

  At least I hadn’t drunk this week, I thought, not at all, not after the hangover from hell last weekend, and although I probably would have a few tonight, I felt better for the week of abstinence, my head clearer, my eyes a little brighter.

  For a week or so after Zander died I’d vowed to never drink again, so devastated was I that my drunkenness had led to me doing something so appalling, so catastrophic. But the pain was so bad that I needed something to help me forget, to take the edge off the agony, and the gin bottle, the wine bottle, the anything-with-alcohol bottle was the only way I knew. I’d gone through phases ever since, days of not drinking and vowing to stop, then crazy binges, and I couldn’t blame Isla for all of them. I couldn’t blame anyone, for any of it. Even if I didn’t remember what happened, I knew that there was only one person to blame, and that was me.