No Further Questions

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Is there a question here?’ Ellen interjects, beginning to rise to her feet.

  ‘Is your only evidence the forgetting?’

  ‘Well – Xander, her child, also occasionally seemed a bit – I don’t know. A bit meek and frightened, I suppose, which can indicate an overbearing parent … at home.’

  A memory pops into my head. They come from nowhere, these days. Sometimes I find myself waiting for them, frightened of my own thoughts – what I might find in the back rooms of my mind. Becky and I were at her house, years ago, when Xander was only little, and would still sleep like a frog in his cot, his legs all tucked up. A car had sounded outside. One, two, three beeps of the horn. A pause, and then the same again. Xander was napping. It was a warm day, and the windows were open. On the tenth toot of the horn, Becky held a hand up to stop me speaking, stood up, and wrenched open her front door. ‘Can you shut the fuck up?’ she yelled. I had flinched. Xander had woken up – roused from sleep by his mother’s voice, not the car horn. Afterwards, she sat back down like nothing had happened. Volatile. That’s how she was. ‘A loose cannon, is Becky!’ Dad used to say.

  ‘Are some children not more reserved – more timid – than others?’

  ‘Yes, they are, that’s true.’

  ‘With no reason?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So your only evidence, actually, is that the defendant was somewhat forgetful. Isn’t it?’ Harriet says now.

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘The mother, Martha, wasn’t able to care for Layla, despite being on maternity leave. She needed Becky’s help. Becky was trying to spin the plates that day she forgot Xander, but she dropped one. That’s all. Did you have any other evidence?’

  I am winded in the public gallery. People shift around me, embarrassed, or perhaps that’s just my imagination. Wasn’t able to care for Layla. Is that the truth? Surely not. Our private arrangement – our botch-job, our shambolic solution to an impossible situation – has the beam of the spotlight on it, now, in court. Our private life, made public.

  Scott reaches to take my hand again. ‘The mother. Always the mother,’ he sighed a few weeks ago as he read about me in the newspaper. My eyes dampen now with the injustice of it.

  ‘No other evidence,’ Carol says.

  ‘How sure were you that the defendant had alcohol on her breath?’

  ‘Very sure.’

  ‘Is this the first time you have smelt alcohol on a parent’s breath?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would it concern you – usually?’

  Carol pauses, looking at the floor, then up again. ‘Not on its own. Not when it was just once.’

  ‘Had you ever smelt alcohol on the defendant’s breath before?’

  ‘No.’

  I swallow. Poor Becky. I can’t help but sympathize with her. All of her flaws, all of her ill-judged decisions, things she has done privately – a cheeky cocktail in the afternoon, just once – discussed in open court for all to see. And to judge.

  Harriet adds, ‘Why did you issue the final warning?’

  Carol pauses, seeming to think for a moment.

  ‘Well – our handbook advises to issue a final warning before arranging a home visit if we … if we ever suspect any sort of neglect.’

  ‘So not out of personal concern?’

  ‘Well, the handbook—’

  ‘Were you personally concerned for Xander? Did you think he was being neglected?’

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ Carol says after a few seconds, ‘I’ve always had a bad feeling about Becky.’

  ‘We’re talking facts, not feelings,’ Harriet says icily, but her cheeks redden, and she backs out of the questioning. ‘Nothing further.’

  Harriet turns around in her seat and tries to catch Becky’s eye. Becky’s body stiffens, but she doesn’t look at Harriet. After a few moments, Harriet turns back to her papers, tapping her pen softly against them. Her angular eyebrows are drawn together. I see her shoulders rise as she inhales, and then sink as she breathes out: a long, sad exhalation. It could just be the toil of the job, the seemingly endless prosecution case, each witness raining pejorative facts down like gunfire. But as I stare at her rising and falling shoulders, I think it might be something else.

  She is worried. Either because she thinks the prosecution’s case is too strong, and her innocent client might get sent to prison.

  Or because she is persuaded by their case. Forgetting Xander. Xander being withdrawn. Carol’s clear expertise, and her feeling about Becky. The alcohol. They all add up to more than the sum of their parts.

  They add up to guilt. That’s how it seems. She thinks her client is guilty.

  10

  Becky

  Evening, Friday 29 September

  I am holding a bag of beansprouts so large that one of Martha’s neighbours stares at me. ‘What?’ I want to say. ‘They were 89p for almost a kilogram. A total bargain, even if we bin almost all of them.’

  It’s eight o’clock at night when I knock on her door. She opens it and Layla is curled up in the crook of her arm.

  ‘How’s my niece?’ I say. ‘She’s not crying.’

  ‘It’s a miracle. How’s the Dalmatian chair?’ Martha says drily.

  ‘Used and abused. I expect they’ve finished with it already. It’s probably in some skip.’

  ‘All your hard work,’ Martha says, her forehead wrinkling as she steps aside to let me in. There are three Masai masks on the wall from when she and Scott went to East Africa, which I always eyeball as I walk in. I expect Martha thinks they look eclectic and cool, but the reality is they are absolutely fucking terrifying – guests always pause slightly, staring at them, like: Oh, right, Jesus. Perhaps she will let me make it over, one day. Her flat is such a nice space.

  ‘How’s the sleep going?’ I say.

  ‘Badly. She doesn’t,’ Martha says over her shoulder.

  I followed the Gina Ford method with Xander, but I know better than to say so – Martha would call the attachment parenting police. It bloody worked, though. He was sleeping through the night within a few months, and has never really stopped, not even when he had chicken pox and spent a furious week trying to sneak away from me so he could scratch. Even now, he sleeps for twelve hours a night, often emerging in the afternoons on Saturdays after more than fifteen hours. Marc and I – though we should be having barbed, separated sorts of conversations – still marvel at it. Still going after 14.5 hours … I will sometimes text. He will send a gif back of a sloth, which always makes me laugh, even though he sends the same one each time.

  ‘I’m starving,’ I say, walking into the kitchen and pulling out one of Martha’s bright-orange kitchen chairs. I put the beansprouts on the table. ‘For stir-fry,’ I add.

  Martha nods distractedly. She has the sort of tired/happy look of a marathon runner, or a person who’s just submitted a PhD. Worthy and happy and worn out. New motherhood. At the time, I was desperate to regain my life, to separate the ties between me and my baby limpet, to get back to wine bars and hobbies, but now I find myself remembering it with nostalgia. Xander had been born with a head of tangled, black hair. Even now, if I see a baby with a head of dark hair my innards twist. God, that second baby. How we wished for it to come, and it never did.

  Xander was born at three o’clock in the morning exactly. Marc was there, but nobody else. I was just nineteen. Jesus, I don’t recognize her now, the teenager who went ahead with that pregnancy. But it felt correct. Meeting Marc, even getting pregnant. From the outside, in the distant past, I would have abhorred teenage Becky getting pregnant by a carpet fitter and dropping out of university. I would have curled my lip in distaste. But, from the inside it was … I can’t describe it. But it was different. It was Marc’s eyes crinkling at the corners as I made drinks without boiling the kettle, presented him with a cold cup of tea. ‘Lovely, Samuel,’ he said. ‘Have you been concentrating?’

  What did I love? His nickname for me – Samuel �
� and how he never, ever called me Rebecca or Becky, like I was reborn when I met him. The way he brushed my hair back from my forehead, repeatedly, when we were watching television, after I said I liked it one time. And – yeah – the innocence of him, too. He led a simple life, he enjoyed plain things. He liked crap films and curries every Friday night and drinking a can of Coke on a Saturday morning. He seemed to enjoy his lowbrow life, and I, subsumed into it, did too. Life, before, had been about adventures across London. Barcelona for a hen do. Marc made it simpler: watching twelve episodes of Friends in one day at the weekend. Ordering a Domino’s pizza for lunch. Life was smaller, but richer, with him.

  Labour had been full of pain, but Marc ensured it was also full of laughter, and I could not wish for anything more for Xander; for his life to have begun with happiness.

  ‘He looks like an ape,’ I had said, holding him and looking at that shock of wild, dark hair, soft as candyfloss.

  ‘Like mother, like son,’ Marc grinned, and we dissolved into laughter again.

  I make tea first. Martha’s with no sugar – perfect Martha – mine with three. Martha picks up the steaming mug and sips. She closes her eyes.

  ‘Are you asleep?’ I say.

  ‘I’m dreaming of a takeout naan bread …’ she says, opening her eyes and looking at me.

  It is one of our things; we are incapable of attending each other’s houses without ordering a takeaway. We vowed, last week, to stop – ‘Layla will be full of tikka masala and she’s only four weeks old!’ – and we said we’d buy vegetables and cook together. ‘It might even be good fun,’ I had said.

  ‘No,’ I say now. ‘We said we wouldn’t … I bought the beansprouts.’

  Martha looks at them. ‘That is a lot of beansprouts.’

  There is something mildly condescending in her tone. As though I have even bought beansprouts incorrectly. She would have bought them from a farmers’ market, no doubt.

  ‘I know. But sod it. Let’s do takeaway. We deserve it,’ I say.

  We order an Indian and it arrives in under half an hour. I peel away the crimped metal edges of the carton and remove the cardboard lid. The curry steams out. It is more beautiful than the finest art in the world. ‘Why do I like crap things?’ I say, dipping a finger in. ‘Cigarettes and curry. Booze.’

  Martha likes running and carrot sticks. She will turn down chocolate biscuits. She willingly drinks sparkling water in bars, even though it tastes like balls – to me, anyway.

  ‘You enjoy the finer things in life,’ Martha says. She passes Layla to me and the baby settles into my arms as though they are Martha’s.

  ‘Oh – yeah – tobacco and curry.’

  ‘I meant your artistic flair, of course,’ she says. ‘Your interiors.’

  Martha’s phone rings, and she disappears off to answer it, so I dish up one-handed, which takes for ever. ‘Even getting a takeaway is too much effort, sometimes, isn’t it?’ I say to Layla.

  Martha’s flat is big, so I can’t overhear her call. I put the plates on the table and hoist Layla up over my shoulder and wander around. Martha, fastidiously organized of mind, does not know how to organize a house. It’s full of stuff that’s been placed in strange locations: a floor lamp halfway along the hallway, jutting out; two pictures of Layla, framed already but different sizes, right next to each other, no space between them on the wall. I pass the Masai masks as I wander. ‘They are going to give you nightmares,’ I say to Layla, and show them to her, but her eyes are closed. ‘We should replace them with an old driftwood coat hook, shouldn’t we? That would go so nicely in this space.’

  Layla and I are standing by the full-length living-room window, looking at the nearby still life of the sea, when Martha finishes her phone call.

  ‘That was Ami again,’ she says.

  Ami is her intern at Stop Gap.

  ‘How often are you taking work calls?’ I say, thinking of my own maternity leave, spent tipping bags of Maltesers into my mouth and watching Homes Under the Hammer while Xander slept.

  She lowers herself on to the sofa, not taking Layla as she usually would. I am glad of it. I am enjoying her warm body against my chest – the baby smell. I had forgotten the baby smell. Xander now smells earthy, of outside air and boyhood. Sometimes, when he’s kicking a football against the side of the house, or when he’s deep into his computer games, his body moving with the controller, this way and that, I will feel so full of love my chest might burst. When he catches that look, he gives me this lopsided, self-conscious smile. He feels my love, but he is shyly embarrassed by it. It is the way it should be. I hope it stays that way.

  But, oh, that baby smell. Marc and I tried so hard for another. At first casually, and then more scientifically, with ovulation sticks and temperature charts. It never happened. I never once had a single symptom of pregnancy. ‘It’s like our bodies forgot how to make one,’ I said one night to Marc. He’d avoided my gaze. Later, I thought I heard him sobbing in the shower, but I wasn’t sure.

  Martha’s phone rings again, silently. She cuts it off. Layla stirs against my chest, her little hand flexing against my finger that she’s holding. God, Martha. Don’t you realize how lucky you are? That baby smell. Their little fat fists. Their soulful eyes.

  ‘It’s constant,’ she says. ‘She’s going back to uni shortly.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t hire anyone. Well, I don’t trust anyone. Not with the big stuff. It’s all still being set up …’

  Stop Gap is Martha’s charity, designed to help refugees by providing them with a school in which to play and learn. She saw the refugees on holiday and started setting it up almost immediately after getting home. Her change of career surprised everyone except me. She’s always been this way: empathetic, helpful. It made perfect sense, to me, that she would do that.

  ‘You like to be in control,’ I say.

  We sit in silence for a second. Martha moves into the kitchen and sits at the table. So I do, too, Layla still in my arms.

  I look up at Martha. She’s rolling an onion bhaji directly into the pot of raita, seemingly lost in thought. She has a husband, a baby, a blossoming charity that’s expanded enough to pay her a wage and help refugees. I glumly rip off a massive piece of naan bread and mop up some sauce with it. What have I done, compared to her? Had a baby at nineteen. Worked for a load of television twats since. I’m separated, soon to be divorced. A single mum. Probably infertile, or just drinking too much to conceive, if that’s even a thing.

  It’s true that comparison is the surest route to unhappiness, I know, but, God, does that stop us? So is Facebook. So is smoking. So is wine.

  ‘Don’t drop tikka masala on her head,’ Martha says, watching me bring the naan bread to my mouth as Layla sleeps.

  ‘I’ll try not to marinade your baby,’ I say, my jealous thoughts forgotten. She is nice. She deserves these things. ‘Couldn’t you do bits and bobs for Stop Gap? To keep your hand in, so you can do it on your own schedule and don’t get disturbed all the time?’

  ‘Could I?’ she says. Her eyes go wide. I remember it well. Like: Shit. There is a world beyond nappies and milk and controlling nap times with the zeal of an army general.

  ‘Of course you could. If you don’t trust people. Just do like ten hours a week or something. Remotely. Pay someone to have Layla.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought – she’s so tiny,’ Martha says, looking at Layla, asleep in my arms. ‘She’s never usually this docile, either.’

  ‘Do you want to?’ I say.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then do.’ I point with my spoon. ‘Scott does. You could get a nanny. Few hours a week?’

  ‘Yeah …’ She pauses. ‘I don’t know. It feels wrong.’

  ‘You’re hardly wanting to go and do seventy-hour weeks as a trader,’ I remark. I spoon some tikka masala into my mouth. ‘This is spicier than usual.’

  ‘But I need a nanny who could be – ad hoc. Just when things kick off.
At the moment we’re trying to hire a proper teacher for the school. That’s what that was about.’ Martha looks at her phone, then points to the curry. ‘It is spicier. I kind of like it, though. Listen – I could do ten hours a week, couldn’t I?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But they’d have to be … whenever I want them. To put out fires, like this. Scott’s put the money in, but he doesn’t have the time. The gap-year student can’t be expected to run it. And … I want to. To keep it going. The school is my other baby,’ she says with a self-conscious smile. ‘It has to be me. Just in the initial stages. Then I can hand it over. But I have to … I have to find the premises. Hire the people. Don’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say honestly.

  ‘I need flexible childcare.’

  ‘That’s like gold dust,’ I say, thinking of Xander’s old nursery and its ridiculously ruthless rules. A pound for every minute after 6.00 p.m. you were late picking up.

  She looks at me, and I at her, and, I swear to God, we have the idea at the exact same time.

  ‘You could do it,’ she says. ‘And set-dress much less.’

  She says it simply. Neither of us needs to hash out the specifics; we have never needed to. We leap over them. It must be something unique to us, and not our upbringing, because Ethan is never on the same page as we are.

  ‘Be your nanny?’

  ‘Yeah. God – you’d be brill. I can pay you. Really well. If you could—’

  ‘What, be at your beck and call?’

  ‘Basically.’

  She doesn’t sense the warning in my tone. I want to help. It seems to make sense. But … don’t take the piss. That’s what I meant by that.

  We sit in silence for a few seconds in Martha’s warm flat. I could sit here, looking after Layla. See more of Martha. Collect Xander from school every day. Not have to worry about bloody set-dressing all the time. I could be around more, stop him playing endless computer game after endless computer game. Get him outside – running, or something.