The Body Lies

by Jo Baker

  Sammy and I go swimming out at the Leisure Centre on Saturday mornings. He thrashes across the pool and comes out sleek and pink-eyed and weak with hunger, and I feed him Bourbons and put him on the back of my bike and we cycle home along the towpath. He will start school next year, at the little local primary up the hill. I admire him, honestly, I do. His resilience, his kindness, his pleasure in small things. I know that till he’s old and failing, he’ll remember that night; the din that started him from sleep, the sight of his mother pressed against the door as the silly man tried to break it down. He’ll remember the rock landing with a spray of bitter glass along the hallway tiles, the race across the night-time meadow; he’ll remember having to go off all alone to find Grace, and he’ll remember Mr. Metcalfe’s gun. He’ll remember the blood and pain and fear and the getting through it anyway. It’ll be the archaeology of the man that he’ll become; he’ll always know what it is not to be safe. I hope that hasn’t done him harm, but helps him understand the world, and how some people have to live in it.

  He doesn’t have nightmares, and he is certainly not afraid in a day-to-day way. Sometimes I watch him play, circling round the courtyard on his scooter or chalking on the paving slabs with the girls from two doors down, and I try to reel the image forward, try to grow him up into a man, imagine him with crushes, girlfriends, boyfriends, a husband or a wife; I know that things won’t always be easy for him, and he’ll mess up and make mistakes, but I can’t imagine him being anything other than himself, essentially kind.

  And I try, despite what Mel said, to reel the others back, rewind, to understand what made Nicholas the man he was, and Blue Anorak Man too: the brokenness, the lack of love, the excess of cortisol or unlucky quirk of brain structure, or just the simple sense of entitlement to a woman’s attention, and her body, that brought them to act the way they did. I’ve come even to feel sorry for them, both of them, for the lives they must have lived, but that doesn’t mean that I forgive them. They could always have just decided not to. It’s always a choice. It’s always possible to simply leave someone alone.

  Mum and Dad come up to see us from time to time. It seems I’ve suffered just enough for Mum to forgive me just enough to resume contact, and get to know her grandchild. Sam was wary of her at first, this new stranger, but they were soon firm friends. She makes a huge fuss of him; I think she does it to needle me. She seems to be endlessly astonished that such a disappointing creature as myself could come up with someone as utterly delightful as her grandson. I’m okay with that. I do tend to agree.

  We squeeze the two of them into the house okay, but when Mark comes up to see us, he stays at the Premier Inn. There isn’t enough room for him; I don’t think there ever could be, even if we had a place twice the size. He just takes up too much psychological space. He is, I think, happy, but he wouldn’t want to flaunt it in front of us, and I haven’t specifically asked. I don’t want to. I half expect a wedding, or a new baby, but neither’s happened yet. I signed the divorce papers, though; I contested nothing. My behaviour had, indeed, been unreasonable.

  His mum comes to see us, more often than my parents do; she catches two trains to get here, two trains back, all in the one day; she doesn’t stay over; says doesn’t want to be an imposition and she never is. She brings me expensive moisturisers, little perfumes, pretty expensive things; she brings clothes and toys for Sam. At first, I think, she was trying to apologise, though no apology was needed.

  We ran into Patrick in Sainsbury’s a while back, in the main aisle that runs down the middle of the store. He wheeled out of Jams and Marmalades, and Sam pointed and announced delightedly, Look, Mummy, there’s your friend! Patrick and I locked eyes; I smiled. I was going to say hi, and sorry; I was going to try and make some kind of rapprochement. But his expression went blank and vague, as if he’d not seen us at all, and then he did that Oh I suddenly remembered something face, and swerved into Pickles and Condiments. Often in a supermarket you see the same people over and over again as you weave up and down the aisles, but we didn’t see him again; we did pass an abandoned trolley, though. I don’t know that it was his, but it had Parma ham and olives and cheese and salad things in it, and they looked like they could be his.

  I felt bad. I still do; I feel guilty about him. I mean, he still has to face that place, and those people every working day. Whereas I just burned another bridge and walked away.

  But I still see Mina and Laura quite often; Sam and I go walking with them and their cockapoo, Teddy. Sometimes we meet up for lunch or tea. Laura makes amazing cakes, and Mina keeps me up to date with all the departmental gossip. Simon Peters still has an on-off relationship with the university: he gets signed off for a term; returns with a great show of determination and positivity, which lasts exactly long enough for him to be entitled to another four months’ leave. Michael Lynch returned from Toronto and found the Augean stables waiting for him; he’s had to roll up his sleeves and start shovelling, and take a formal reprimand for his unorthodox approach to admissions. They’ve already reappointed to my post, as well as creating two new jobs in Creative Writing; she’d taken a look at the workload model for the previous year, Mina said, and it was, to quote, off its fucking trolley; I was carrying about three times as much as I should have been; hence the new roles. Patrick is getting married in the summer, to a former PhD student; quite the whirlwind romance. Christian Scaife left at the end of the year for a post at the University of Malta; Mina has taken over as Head of Department. A sudden, stratospheric promotion; also, no one else would take it on.

  “Place won’t be the same, with Scaife gone.”

  “We’ll muddle through somehow.”

  I scan the review pages every week. I’m expecting Halfway to appear any time. I’m also expecting it to become a massive bestseller; I’m expecting to go and see the film adaptation at the local Vue, and to feel, well, the kinds of feelings that only German has the exact words for. It hasn’t turned up yet, but it can take longer than you’d think to finish a novel. I spotted Steven Haygarth’s Winter’s Blood on a table in Waterstones. On the cover was a softened, silver-blue image of a beautiful naked dead woman. It also had a sticker on it, saying that it’s being adapted for TV. I don’t know if Karen already had a title for her short-story collection; if she did, she never told me. I keep an eye out for her, though; I really want to read her other stories, follow all the grotesque transformations that she can conjure up.

  It was strange going back to the village, stepping off that bus again, making my way down the lane. The Palmers’ house had been sold: there was now a swing set on the lawn, and the grass was worn away in patches by children playing. I walked up to Gill House too; there’s a board up at the end of the lane, advertising a new development of “Homes of Distinction”—the farmyard was a clutter of men in high-vis jackets, diggers, stacks of timber, builders’ bags of sand, churning cement mixers. John and Grace have a bungalow now, near the sea. Sam and I cycle out and see them from time to time. Gill House itself had a new, old-looking front door to replace the one that Nicholas smashed up, and a conservatory tacked onto the side, and a glossy Merc parked on the lane.

  I met up with the gamekeeper, the old fellow who found Sarah. He showed me the patch of the beech wood. He touched his nose with the side of his thumb. I apologised for making him revisit such difficult memories. He shook his head and said there wasn’t a day went by that he didn’t think of her anyway; it was like she was always there, curled up there in a corner of his head, and he was glad to be able to talk about it. He’d never got used to the idea that a girl like that, whole life ahead of her, could go and do a thing like that, and then it turned out that she hadn’t, that it had been done to her, and now he couldn’t get his head around that at all.

  “It doesn’t bear thinking about,” I said.

  But that was a stupid thing to say. It bears thinking about. It requires thinking about. I pick my way throug
h the local paper archives, study the statements presented at my disciplinary hearing, and the findings of the inquests into Sarah’s and Nicholas’s deaths. I lay out pages on my desk, and photographs; I shift and slide them, finding the links, the connections. I have a photograph of Sarah that Grace pressed urgently into my hands, one day when we were visiting. Sarah’s friend Judith had printed it out and given it to her; it was taken just before it all started to go wrong. Sarah’s half turned from her friend’s snapping phone; she is wearing a striped sundress, her hair a wild tumble of curls; it’s a village fair, or show, or something of the sort; there are stalls and bunting behind her. Low sun, freckled shoulders, her teeth slightly crooked as she smiles. There she is. That is her. She’s not his lost girl yet: she is her own self there.

  My tongue still snags from time to time on that chipped tooth of mine; but like the dentist said I would, I’ve got used to it; I mostly just don’t notice. Now there’s also a white line on my scalp where the hair doesn’t grow, and the soles of my feet are a web of pale scars, but I don’t mind so much; nobody sees them. Wrapped up in socks and walking boots, I get around my route with my post-trolley perfectly well. It’s a hilly maze of Victorian stone terraces, and a pleasant villagey 1930s council estate with mature trees and plenty of green spaces, and a sprawl of ugly private new builds—including ours—along the canal where the old cotton mills used to be. My new job leaves me time to think; the rhythms of walking are sympathetic; they help form sentences and paragraphs. At night, while Sammy sleeps, and the rats slip in and out of the water, and next door’s cat paces across the patio out back and stops in the spilled light to stare in at me, I sit in the glow of my laptop, at the kitchen table, and I write. I edit. I tamp the different sections into shape, then shift the shapes into place. This is how it fits together. This is how it happened. It may be messy and imperfect, but this is my truth.

  Acknowledgements

  I’m very well aware of how fortunate I am in the people that I get to work with. My editors, Jane Lawson and Diana Miller, are both brilliant: their patient, intelligent guidance has been enormously enabling in bringing this book to completion. I owe my agent, Clare Alexander, a huge debt of gratitude; her insight and steady patience, with this book and with all the others, have been utterly invaluable. I’m also immensely grateful to Anna Stein for her support, for the clarity of her eye and intellect. To Alison Barrow and Abigail Endler, for all the good things they make happen, heartfelt thanks. And as for my first reader, Daragh Carville: I don’t know where I’d be without him.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jo Baker was educated at Oxford and Queen’s University Belfast. She lives in Lancaster with her husband, the playwright Daragh Carville, and their two children. She is the author of the best-selling novel Longbourn, which is due to be made into a film.

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