That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  She got sick on New Year’s Eve and it was April before she made lunch for herself. She would get up at ten, watch television until lunch-time. Nap. Watch television until the evening, when she was often in bed before nine. The doctor said her immune system had gone into its overdraft, that it needed to spend time repaying it, an explanation which made sense to Cathy, strangely logical in the chaos of the illness she found herself living in.

  Cathy continued to recover over the summer and into the autumn. Everything she hadn’t been able to do during her illness was tentatively done, sometimes in small scale, in miniature, that autumn/winter. She baked a cake and lay down while it was in the oven. She took small trips out, but she rested in the back of the car on the way there.

  And then suddenly, in the following January, she was mostly better. She had been talking to a boy on MSN on her laptop, sometimes, when she was ill, reclining in bed. He was in her school, in the year above her, had been off for almost as long as she had, with a broken femur that wouldn’t repair.

  He’d come over that night, when she was in charge of Rosie. Rosie had been eight, Cathy thirteen, Joe fifteen. Everyone else had been out, at a family party that Cathy said she wasn’t interested in, but really just still did not have the energy for. She hadn’t wanted to hold everyone back, so said she’d look after Rosie instead.

  Rosie was fast asleep. Cathy and the boy had headed into the den, closed the door, watched a movie.

  Even now, with everything that happened after, and since, Cathy can remember odd details of that evening. The pavements glassed with frost outside. She’d lit three candles, three orange dots in the darkness on the mantelpiece. Never again would Cathy take for granted an evening spent with enough energy, not sleeping, not even the most mundane one, she was thinking, as she held hands with a boy called Sean she hardly knew but wanted to. Nothing bad would ever happen again, she really did think, on that exact evening. She’d had her dose of bad luck.

  They’d emerged from the den after the film ended. She’d gone to check on Rosie, found her in her bed.

  Completely still.

  Cathy had paused in the doorway, dismissing the anxiety she felt. She crossed the room and reached out to touch Rosie, just to check, and she’d been cool. Cooling. Not quite cold but not body temperature either. Cathy’s own body had reacted to the shock by turning boiling. She still remembers that panicked heat even now.

  Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, they said. It could happen to any child. Nobody knows what would have happened had Cathy been listening, checking more often.

  The rest Cathy hardly remembers. The 999 call, her parents meeting her in the hospital. She only remembers that frost outside, those three candles, the last, bottled feeling of happiness as she had sat hand in hand, a teenager, with that boy Sean, whom she’s not ever seen since.

  The only other thing that Cathy remembers is what she overheard. Mother-to-father, wife-to-husband, in what they thought was the quiet privacy of their kitchen, Cathy heard it.

  Well, she’s always done whatever she wanted to do without thinking.

  Cathy can see as an adult that that is an unfair assessment – she was a normal teenager; active, yes, selfish too – but nevertheless. It has come to define her adulthood. Every word ventured on dates is second-guessed. Life lived in greyscale, muted, always at work. It must be self-sabotage, she realizes now; bad things happen right after good things, right after you let go.

  Cathy looks up at this man who doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything at all. And see how happy he is, getting pissed on and smiling at her. Living his life in the rain. ‘Do you know what?’ Cathy says, looking up at him, rain dribbling down her forehead. She could try. She could try to be less shy. She could try to reach out. ‘Fuck it. Let’s.’

  35.

  Now

  Jason’s Office, mid March, 5.00 p.m.

  ‘All right,’ Jason says. ‘We have what we call disclosure in – from the other side.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, the term vaguely familiar to me, as legal jargon sometimes is. Proceedings, witnesses, defendants, the accused … I stare at my hands in my lap as I sit opposite him.

  ‘So I have been through it,’ Jason says, and I feel my shoulders sag with relief. It’s not my job, I sometimes have to remind myself. It is actually his job, to finish this, to help me, to end it.

  ‘Okay,’ I say in a small voice. Now that he’s told me, I see that the disclosure is spread out in lever arch files with my name on their spines. Three, four, five of them. They seem to crowd in. All that documentation about something that happened in a split-second.

  There are three half-drunk mugs of coffee on Jason’s desk and his hair is more snarled than usual.

  ‘And matched it up to your statement that I took.’

  ‘Right. Is it bad?’

  ‘No, it isn’t bad,’ Jason says, but his voice elongates on the final word, emphasizing it, like shining a spotlight on to it.

  ‘But it isn’t good?’

  Jason’s eyes slide to the side. ‘I mean – look,’ he says, his gaze turning directly towards me and locking on to mine. For a moment, my heart seems to spasm and I think he’s going to tell me that none of this is good, that everything is over, that we’re done for. ‘Joe has disagreed with your version of events.’

  I close my eyes. It’s funny how, even in estrangement, I still feel close to Joe. We might no longer live in those beautiful, tiny cottages with their mullioned windows and stone floors, work at the vets’ together, hang out every night. I might be here, in a lawyer’s office, and he in his own, and yet … I feel I could reach out to touch him, my brother Joe.

  ‘How bad?’ I say. The statements were taken separately, as they have to be. Maybe, maybe, maybe there are just small inconsistencies. Maybe our recollections are only slightly different. Maybe it’s nothing.

  But, like everything that followed Verona, the best-case scenario just simply doesn’t materialize. It is a run of bad luck, like throwing a one on a dice a hundred times in a row.

  ‘It’s very different,’ Jason says plainly. He reaches for the file marked ‘R. v. Plant – File 1’, and, as it sleets outside in random flurries, he starts to explain it to me, and we get to work. With fixing it. With fixing the mess we all made. I stare as the sleet becomes rain as it hits the dirty glass in Jason’s office. Of course we are done for, I think. It was foolish to have hope.

  I blink as I look back up at Jason, underlining a section of Joe’s statement. The crime is done, and now to the punishment.

  36.

  Then

  Cathy

  Cathy gets out of her car, her feet submerging immediately into the puddles that surround it, and walks up to Frannie’s front door instead of her own. She barely saw her today, at work, and she has decided to speak to her after she saw her wandering the country lanes with Joe. They need to clear the air, and Frannie is an easier person to do that with than Joe.

  Cathy has exchanged numbers with Tom but hasn’t yet heard from him. As they parted, he’d touched her shoulder, and Cathy’s body moved towards his like it was no longer within her control. Other than that, though, the coffee date ended like many dates have before. A half-hearted promise, an intended plan. It will be cancelled by him, she assumes, a new plan made, cancelled again, the potential dying off like snow that falls but doesn’t settle.

  Frannie answers the door with their parents, who have their coats on. Frannie is wearing a colourful headscarf and holding Paul, who’s in one of those towels with a hood. His eyes are dark brown, framed by straight, wet lashes. He smells of lavender and biscuits and milk. Paul startles at her, surprised to see her, then hides his face for just a second, a game he often plays.

  ‘You all right?’ Frannie says, smiling.

  ‘We’re off-duty now,’ Owen says to Cathy, pulling her towards him for a quick hug. ‘Nice to see you briefly.’ As ever, when he looks at Paul, his face transforms. Gone is the stoicism. And gone is her mother’s anxiet
y. They hide behind their hands as they walk backwards up the drive, peeking out to make Paul laugh, displaying a whimsy Cathy never remembers them having with her. So many parents are better off as grandparents.

  Frannie’s hair is piled on her head around the scarf. Her make-up has faded. She’s so thin. Cheekbones with deep cuts underneath them, like somebody with a wasting illness.

  She steps aside and lets Cathy in, as she always does. ‘Joe with you?’ she says, and Cathy feels a pang. Like Frannie would rather Joe were here than her.

  ‘No. How’re you?’ Cathy asks.

  ‘You know,’ she says, her back to Cathy. ‘Up and down.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Glad we’re back. Tea?’

  ‘Yes, I’d rather be on today than a few days ago,’ Cathy says. ‘How were Mum and Dad?’

  ‘Oh, the same,’ Frannie says drily. ‘Exemplary grandparents. Dad actually sang to Paul. Was singing “You are My Sunshine”.’

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  Frannie laughs, picking up a stack of post as she walks down the hallway.

  Her house has a different smell to Cathy’s. Play-Doh, fresh laundry, old cooking. She is always making things with and for Paul. Finger-food, kitchen experiments, papier-mâché.

  Frannie walks down the wooden-floored hallway with him, knowing that Cathy will follow. It is always at Frannie’s cottage where they congregate, never at Cathy’s. Cathy knows why, knows it’s logical, but it still stings. She could host them at hers, even though her small kitchen table is always covered with paperwork, even though the beamed ceilings are so low she needs the lights on in the day. Her house might be a poorer version of Frannie’s, but it still has nice features. Neat stacks of logs by the real, open fire. Wood-panelled cladding in the front room that she painted a navy-blue. A bell by the door that she kept from when it was a Victorian post office.

  Cathy goes to sit by Frannie’s modern bi-fold doors, as they almost always do. Frannie brings over two teas, and they sit there, their legs hanging down over the patio, together.

  ‘Joe says you told him that his name is on that warrant,’ Frannie says casually to Cathy as she passes her the tea. Her tone is not accusatory. The world, to Frannie, is quite simple and benign, has none of the complexities Cathy seems to find in it. Joe once threatened to punch a boy who dumped Frannie when she was fifteen, and Cathy still remembers her saying to Joe: But I’m not bothered. I liked him, but not that much!

  ‘What?’ Cathy says, but, really, she is thinking, There is a triangle here, and Cathy is at the point of it. The angle that’s most likely to bear the brunt of any impact. That’s how it feels anyway. Immediately, she wants to leave. To go to sit alone in her house, the doors and windows closed to her siblings.

  ‘He says you asked him about it?’ Frannie says.

  She is tinted green by the glow of the cottage garden in front of her. Frannie’s house is effortlessly stylish. She buys things Cathy would never think to – sheepskin rugs draped on benches, old-fashioned movie posters framed on the walls. She buys almost everything off eBay.

  ‘I did – because his name is on that document,’ Cathy says. ‘Isn’t that weird? That it says Joseph?’

  Paul toddles over and Frannie picks bits of something yellow out of his little fists. ‘Bath sponge,’ she says, unable to resist smiling at him. ‘The paper could be anything – couldn’t it?’ she continues. ‘A traffic offence. He did a lot of driving there. Anything. He thinks you’re suspicious of him.’

  ‘Well, maybe I am.’

  Frannie straightens and Cathy just catches her expression. Troubled, somehow.

  ‘Sorry,’ Cathy adds quickly. ‘I just … you have to admit it’s weird.’

  ‘Yes, it’s weird,’ Frannie says, her face clearing. ‘But Joe says whatever he thinks. He couldn’t keep a secret from us even if he wanted to.’

  ‘Same as you,’ Cathy says.

  ‘Right,’ Frannie laughs. ‘I’m just too dumb to tell lies to you two. Is Joe around? Should I make him a tea?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cathy says, wanting suddenly, forcefully, to be alone with her sister, wishing that Joe weren’t right next door all the time. She would maybe even tell her about Tom.

  Their parents had been shocked by Frannie’s pregnancy. She’d told them all over dinner, but it was clear Joe already knew. What had surprised Cathy most was Frannie’s drive to keep the baby, to raise him alone. She – previously somebody who spent the generous wage they paid her on trainers and jewellery – started saving immediately.

  She’d intended to take leave but had been lonely in the cottage, so instead brought Paul into the practice in his pram every day, Macca sitting next to him.

  Frannie gets to her feet and starts getting things out of the fridge. ‘We can’t turn on each other,’ she says to Cathy.

  She goes to the cupboards and gets down a bowl. She puts something in it and presses a button on her microwave and turns her back to Cathy. ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cathy says.

  Paul lines up three dinosaurs in a careful row on the wooden floorboards. Cathy watches him, thinking.

  She stares at the rain splattering into Paul’s paddling pool, the drops little eruptions, like somebody is blowing bubbles from beneath the surface. Frannie’s garden is wild, full of herbs and flowers and bushes all mixed up together. At the moment it’s a riot of green and purple, a moving painting along the back of the house.

  ‘Don’t you think?’ Frannie prompts.

  ‘I’m not turning on anyone,’ Cathy says.

  ‘No. We know that.’ Frannie folds her freckled arms, looking at Cathy. We.

  ‘Just forget – forget I said anything,’ Cathy says, her voice as tense as a glass clasped too tightly.

  ‘Oh, there’s no need to be like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Difficult.’

  ‘I’m not being difficult. You seem to be being so … finding it so … easy.’

  ‘What?’ Frannie says, turning to Cathy in surprise. She frowns, obviously confused.

  ‘Nothing,’ Cathy says, already feeling guilt – an effect only the baby of their family can have on her. She was lashing out because she felt isolated from them, she tells herself.

  ‘No, what?’ Frannie says.

  Cathy thinks of the lawyer’s details, and of the warrant, and of Will’s blood, and how much of it there was, and finds she doesn’t quite know where to start. ‘I just wondered how you really are, underneath everything,’ Cathy says.

  ‘I’m really fine,’ Frannie says shortly.

  ‘I mean – exactly.’

  ‘What?’

  Cathy says nothing. Frannie’s eyes widen as she looks at her. ‘Oh, I’m too fine, am I? Classic you.’

  ‘Classic me?’

  ‘Draconian self-punishment.’

  ‘Jesus, Fran. I was only concerned,’ Cathy says, but it’s a lie. She wasn’t concerned; she was suspicious. Frannie does seem too fine. Shopping in duty free and – right now – wearing a pair of feather earrings she must have put on that morning. Cathy can’t imagine doing such a thing. She is barely getting through the days.

  Frannie stands and gets some potatoes out of a drawer and throws one at Cathy. ‘Peel this and stop being moody,’ she says. ‘Ready?’

  Cathy catches the second and third potatoes while Paul shrieks with laughter, trying to do as she is told, but still thinking. She could ask about the lawyer. Frannie is already pissed off. Cathy may as well seize upon it.

  She sits, looking out over the garden, a bowl between her knees, and curls the peeler around the wet, fleshy texture, thinking. Wanting to ask a million things. How often she and Joe discuss her. If they trust her. Wanting to ask if Frannie is sorry. If she is thankful, for what they did. For what they have done for her. Or if, perhaps, she doesn’t think about it. Cathy glances across the kitchen at her sister as she chops a carrot. Is she as straightforward as she makes out? Or is the directness
actually cover, a deflection, like somebody who pretends to be direct but is actually a ball of neuroses, like Cathy herself?

  ‘What I mean,’ Cathy says, while peeling the potatoes, ‘is just …’

  Frannie’s expression has hardened. She waits, silently, for Cathy to finish, like a police officer with the upper hand. ‘Just what?’ she says eventually.

  ‘I saw your phone in Verona. I know I shouldn’t have looked. But I saw that lawyer contact you back.’

  Frannie’s eyebrows rise. ‘Right,’ she says archly.

  ‘Don’t be mad.’

  Frannie sighs and leans against the kitchen worktop. ‘To be honest, I thought it would be sensible to have a lawyer on hand – for all of us. In the current climate. If anyone is searching my phone and finds his details, then it’s likely too late anyway …’ A sad laugh escapes through her straight, white teeth. And in that moment Cathy believes her. That laugh is vintage Frannie.

  ‘There was so much blood, Fran. There was so much. And not calling the ambulance –’

  ‘I know.’ Frannie shifts her weight on her bare feet.

  ‘Were you going faster than you said?’

  ‘No. I wasn’t.’ Frannie looks Cathy dead in the eye. Cathy holds it for a moment, bolstered by her own honesty.

  ‘Were you drunk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I feel like – you and Joe –’ Cathy starts, but at that moment, she hears him enter through the door, calling out to Frannie. ‘Speaking of.’

  ‘You feel like me and Joe what?’ Frannie says. Joe raises a hand in greeting to both of them and pours himself a Coke from Frannie’s fridge. They stand there, both of them in Frannie’s kitchen, looking at Cathy, a united front.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ Joe says. ‘Let’s just say: a Labrador and a Nerf bullet walked into a bar …’