The prosecution barrister stands up. She tells me her name is Ms Ellen Hendry, even though we have already met briefly. It is all a performance, to her. She has an upper-class, raspy voice, like you would expect of a strict violin teacher or a housemistress at a private school.
‘And you are Martha Blackwater. You are Layla’s mum,’ she says.
I almost double over on the stand. The present tense.
‘Yes,’ I say softly.
She regards me seriously over her glasses.
My hand shakes as I reach to push my hair back behind my ear. Scott used to do this, just occasionally. I would close my eyes and relax into his touch, like a contented animal. He doesn’t do it any more, doesn’t venture his hands within a few feet of my body; it’s as if I am surrounded by a force field.
‘Now, Martha, I know this is going to be incredibly difficult for you,’ she says.
I don’t say anything back: what is there to say? Becky always accuses me of favouring silence when things get awkward, and I suppose she’s right, but anything I could say would be useless; trite, maybe.
‘Why don’t you tell us a little bit about baby Layla, her history.’ She turns away from me, so I can only see the back of her wig, the crimped pattern on the back of her robes. The jury’s eyes trace her hand as it reaches to straighten her wig like they are watching a famous actor in a play.
I am Mum and Layla is Baby Layla, and I see that, to her, we are merely proper nouns, legal constructs. Perhaps she must distance herself in this way, but to me it is distasteful. I would usually exchange a glance with Becky at a moment like this. She would raise her eyebrows, and say, ‘And the barrister speaks like Winston fucking Churchill.’
My cheeks heat up just like they did at school whenever I was asked to speak.
I flounder for a few moments, thinking. I knew she’d ask this – and yet. The world tilts around me. How can I possibly explain it all, here, now?
‘She wasn’t an easy baby,’ I say. ‘She had reflux.’
In the distance of the courtroom, in the dock, I see Becky’s head drop. I have condemned her.
‘How bad?’
‘She would writhe around after feeds. She cried – well …’ I give a sad laugh. ‘She is – was, she was – my first baby. So I don’t know how normal any of it was. But she seemed to cry –’ I stop, unable to continue. Those little tears of hers would break my heart for ever.
I close my eyes, just for a second. Her peach-fuzz skin. I can’t open my eyes. Her tiny feet, those warm feet that would fit in the palm of my hand.
‘She cried an awful lot,’ I finish, returning to reality and looking at the barrister.
‘How many hours out of every twenty-four?’
I throw up a hand. ‘I don’t know.’
The barrister says nothing, merely looks down again at her notes. ‘Can you give us a rough guess?’
‘It felt, to me, like she was crying whenever she was awake.’
‘Whenever she was awake.’
‘Yes, sometimes.’
‘Thank you. And did she ever have fits? Was she ever unwell?’
‘No,’ I say, my voice sounding thick and coated. ‘She was perfectly healthy, save for the reflux.’
‘Nothing further,’ she says. She pushes her glasses up her nose with a large hand. I catch a glimpse of her ring finger. Bare. Married to the job, maybe. Prosecuting on behalf of other broken families, instead of having her own.
The defence barrister rises as gracefully as a ballerina. ‘Ms Blackwater, my name is Harriet. I act for the defence.’
This, here, must be the most important person in Becky’s current life. She has neat, straight dark hair – pulled back in a bun underneath her wig – slim hips and a boyish waist. She is inscrutable, neither smiling nor frowning, her eyes cold as they meet mine.
‘You arranged for the defendant, Rebecca, to become your baby’s nanny, did you not?’
I draw my lips tight. ‘Yes,’ I say shortly, not looking at Becky, though I can feel her gaze on me. ‘She was both her aunt and her nanny, for a while.’
‘And did money change hands?’
‘Yes. Of course. She left her job so I … so I could have the childcare that I needed.’
‘And that was why she was Layla’s nanny?’
‘Yes. Becky – Rebecca – she had this job that – where she – that she didn’t—’
‘Why did you specifically appoint Rebecca to be Layla’s nanny?’
‘I – she loved her. And I trusted her.’
‘Absolutely?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you never would have believed anything would happen to Layla in her care?’
‘Never. I trusted her one hundred per cent,’ I say. I can’t look across at Becky, or over at my family in the public gallery. I don’t look at anybody. Just down at the untouched cup of water on the edge of the witness stand, its clear surface trembling.
I remember when I hurriedly said goodbye to Layla for the last time. I don’t recall her milk and lavender smell, or the weight of her. Instead, I see it from her point of view, watch myself retreating gradually away from her. Was she scared? Did she miss me in the primal way I missed her? Life had always been about so many things before her – reading novels and brunches out and mowing the lawn and my job – and then she came along: the linchpin. My large hand, so like my mother’s, against her small back. I became fully adult the day I had her.
‘One hundred per cent. Nothing further,’ Harriet says quietly.
The lawyers want to address the judge at his bench, so everybody files out after my evidence. Mum joins me and we sit together in a side corridor. The others have stayed in the foyer. To give us space, I guess.
A man across from us is struggling to bring a shaking hand to his lips, his cup of tea taking a precarious route to his mouth.
Mum leans her head backwards. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m okay.’ I look across at her and wonder how this is for her. Her grandchild. Her daughters on opposing sides of a criminal case. Sometimes, when I call her up, her voice is hoarse and strangled, as though she has been crying. But she’s stoic. She won’t show her grief to me because, she would reason, mine is greater.
‘You were good. Dispassionate and clear. They didn’t trip you up.’
‘They didn’t ask me why I left her,’ I say.
‘And why would they?’ She turns to me in surprise. She has a line of white roots at the top of her hair, dyed dark every few weeks by her long-time hairdresser, Anwar. She rests her leg against mine, and I could become a puddle of tears right here.
When Becky was first charged, Mum and Dad told me everything. The evidence against her, the charge, her defence, what the prosecution were alleging. They never said outright whether they thought she was guilty or not. They couldn’t seem to and, soon after, not having said either way became an obvious omission. Taboo. Only Ethan has spoken out about his belief in her innocence. Mum and Dad prevaricate, and avoid the issue, caught between us.
And then, when the cogs of the justice system began to turn, Mum and Dad withdrew, telling me less and less. ‘Leave it to the experts,’ Dad would mutter, while Mum stared at the floor. I can’t blame them: they didn’t know what to do. Becky and I are opposing witnesses in a trial, after all. Unwilling participants in the theatre of the justice system.
I stopped hearing about her defence. About her side of it. What her medical experts said. Who was going to testify that she hadn’t done it. It made them uncomfortable, I suppose, to be facilitating the exchange of dangerous information between two opposing sides. It was contraband. I was – in all but law – the victim. She was the accused. In the end, I couldn’t take their guilty, shifty expressions, their anguish, and so I stopped asking.
‘You were a funny child,’ she says. ‘Really funny. Do you know?’
‘A bit,’ I say.
‘So thoughtful, and sensitive. It was wonderful. You thought about how the daff
odils felt and whether a day seemed like an entire year to a woodlouse – all sorts of things.’
‘It started with the homeless people,’ I say with a shy smile. It’s a well-worn family story, just like the old ragged towels Mum still has in her airing cupboard with their seventies prints. Becky hates those towels – she brings her own when she visits – but I love them, and still like to put my finger through their familiar holes, like to feel their threadbare fabric against my skin after a shower.
‘It did. I never, ever thought I would have a six-year-old worrying about homeless people. And then asking and asking!’ She reaches over and takes my hand.
The tears begin a waterfall in my chest and I let a few drops out before I resolutely turn the tap off again.
I am not sure whether I remember the moment itself, or a retelling of it. Mum used to let me have any ice cream I wanted, on the day she did the food shopping. We always collected the ice cream – always mint chocolate chip, in winter and in summer – and then went to Sainsbury’s, where it dripped as I trailed around each aisle. On the way to the ice cream parlour, there was a homeless man in one of the Lanes in Brighton. He had bare feet, exposed to the cold air. My glimpse of him was only fleeting, but as Mum led me away, and we headed to Sainsbury’s, I kept seeing those feet, those toes, the dirt of the streets set into the grooves of his flesh.
‘Mummy, why was that man outside like that?’ I asked.
Mum said something comforting. That some people weren’t as fortunate as we all were. I liked that, repeated it to myself. But then, they were everywhere – the homeless men and women. The one on the pink blanket outside Woolworths, the one with the bull terrier, the one who sat on the seafront holding her empty coffee cup. More and more of them. I would lie awake in my bed and try to recite their descriptions. Pink blanket man. Dog man. Seafront woman. If I could name them all – if I knew them – then perhaps they would be okay. Maybe, I thought often, I was the only one who could really see them, and it was up to me to do something about them. I asked Mum about them so often that she agreed I could buy one of them a hot drink per day. Eventually, I had too many homeless people on my weekly list, and I was allowed two per day.
‘It must have been weird,’ I say now, with just an iota of parenting experience. ‘How do you explain all of that to a child?’
‘I couldn’t. Not to a child with a social conscience stronger than mine,’ Mum says with a smile. ‘And, anyway – look where it led you.’
Stop Gap. My refugee charity.
‘True,’ I say, my feelings mixed, a happy-sad feeling inside me.
Maybe Layla would have been similar to me, in adulthood: cautious, too empathetic, neurotically organized. I could see that. She arrived on her due date; right on time. Or maybe she would have been more like Becky. Dramatic, sarcastic. Hilarious. We’ll never know, I think, my eyes wet again.
‘Does Becky talk about it?’ I say without thinking.
The air stills around us as Mum digests what I have asked her, what I have resisted asking for months.
‘She says she’s innocent. That is all she ever says.’
‘I see.’ My own view on Becky’s innocence seems to change with the tides.
One morning I am sure of it: she didn’t do it. She is experiencing a miscarriage of justice, a catastrophe. Of course she didn’t do it, my fun-loving but caustic younger sister. By that evening, I am convinced she is guilty. Of course she is. She always had a fiery temper. We all knew it. My baby was in her sole care for the entire evening preceding her death. It is obvious.
The rest of the time, the jury is out, in my mind. She’s nothing. Neither innocent nor guilty. Play is suspended until I know. I have always been able to do this, to reserve judgement. To see things from all sides. Becky was useless at it – said I was a pushover – but it always came naturally to me. I never experienced staffroom politics or clashes with the head teacher. I could always understand why people did the things they did. ‘People are complicated,’ I once said to Becky, to which she replied, ‘People are dickheads.’
But sometimes, now, late at night, when the toil of another day is over, I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, and admit it to myself: I want to believe her. I want her to be innocent so badly, I can’t trust my own judgement.
‘She doesn’t want to discuss it beyond that,’ Mum says. ‘She says she doesn’t know what happened. She doesn’t know.’
She makes a kind of moue with her mouth. Her skin creases either side of it. What used to be dimples are now wrinkles, and I wish I could reach out and stop time from marching on. Instead, we sit there outside the courtroom, her hand in mine.
I take my position in the public gallery. There is a shifting as the journalists let me in. Some of them stare at me. I try not to judge them. They are only doing their jobs, I tell myself. Stop being such a saint, Becky’s voice says in my head. They’re morbid. They’re making money off this stuff.
The prosecution’s second witness is a nurse called Bryony. She has dark hair and freckles, rimless glasses and a stoic pragmatism to her, as if she might often say, ‘We are where we are. Now, let’s sort it out.’
I have never met her. She did not treat my daughter after it happened. She did not call a time of death. She did not take me into a side room, sit with me, make me a cup of hot, sweet tea.
She met Becky, six weeks before it happened, in an incident that began its life separately from Layla’s but became sinister in its connection to it.
She swears in, confirms her name and her profession, and then the prosecution lawyer turns to her and says, ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘It was a Tuesday afternoon in A&E,’ Bryony says. She has a thick northern accent.
I sit back, watching her. Listening to her story.
4
Bryony Riles
Afternoon, Tuesday 12 September
Every year, the student nurses got obsessed with that bloody red telephone. Bryony could see two newbies standing next to it now, waiting for it to ring. It signalled trauma, and the juniors hated that.
The two student nurses moved out of her way as she brushed past them, ready to deal with her next patient.
The boy’s face was young-looking – plump-featured and sheepish – but his body was more like eleven or twelve. Tall, like the buxom woman standing in the bay next to him, and muscular, too, across the shoulders. He was holding himself cagily. His shoulder, she guessed. She checked the clipboard. Xander Burrows. His mother: Becky.
‘He’s hurt his shoulder,’ Becky said.
Dislocated shoulder, was scrawled on the notes. Nine-year-old boy. Mother pulled him out of traffic. Relocation, reset with intranasal diamorph.
It would need strapping. ‘Okay,’ Bryony said. ‘Won’t take long.’
Xander hadn’t said a word yet. Bryony silently noted it.
She had started attending further study courses a couple of years ago, when everyone she had trained with started going on endless, back-to-back maternity leaves. It gave her something to do to pass the time while her friends were off. They were full of extra-keen people, but she liked the day away from the hospital and the cups of tea. First was the advanced ulcer prevention course. But after that was the safeguarding course – now, that really had been interesting – and she was soon promoted to be the safeguarding nurse, tasked with referring suspicious admissions upwards. As with everything, though, it hadn’t exactly turned out as planned, and she now spent her days spotting paedophiles and abusers and drug addicts and filling in forms about them.
She looked down at the notes again. Mother pulled boy out of oncoming traffic.
‘Traffic, then?’ she said.
‘Nightmare,’ the mother said.
The boy still hadn’t said anything. He was staring down at the floor, chin almost on his chest. He had thick dark hair, black eyelashes and blue eyes.
‘You really look like my nephew. Though he’s not as big a lad as you.’
‘Right,’
Xander said.
‘What are you – ten?’ She knew his age from the notes, of course, but she wanted to flatter him. To put him at ease.
‘Nine.’
‘Big school next year?’ she said.
‘Year after.’
Xander darted a nervous look at his mum, then flicked his eyes back down to the floor. Bryony watched, waiting for it again.
A man arrived in the bay behind her, drawing the curtain back. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Xander’s dad.’ He looked youthful, with blond, boyish hair, tanned skin and Xander’s blue eyes.
‘Alright,’ he said, more to Becky than to Xander.
She started strapping Xander’s shoulder. ‘This will pull a bit,’ she said. She didn’t like to bullshit. ‘But it’ll be worth it for feeling better.’ He met her eyes and she smiled. ‘My nephew comes over every Wednesday evening,’ she said as she tightened the strapping and he winced. ‘He likes my rabbits.’
‘Rabbits?’ Xander said shyly.
He was coming out of his shell, she could tell. Very slowly.
‘I’ve got two. House rabbits – giant.’
‘Wow,’ he said. He smiled. Two dimples, either side of his mouth.
‘Yep. They like to sleep by the fire.’
‘I need to call Martha,’ Becky said to Xander’s father, rising from her perch beside her son on the bed. ‘I was supposed to be meeting her and Layla in the park, and I’ve dashed off.’
Becky had that artfully messy hair the new nurses were sporting. It drifted around her shoulders as she walked out the door.
‘See you,’ the man said easily, sitting down so heavily that Xander bounced on the bed and set his mouth in a grim, straight line. But he didn’t cry out.
That was unusual, too.
She concentrated on the strapping. The tape was rough underneath her fingertips. She liked doing a tight, deft strap. This was all nursing used to be. Not a risk assessment form in sight.
No Further Questions Page 2
