My hair has been falling out since it happened. Long, wet strands in the shower. I don’t mind, really. There is more to life than hair.
I stare out into the public gallery. Mum; Dad; my husband, Scott; my brother, Ethan.
Ethan, a lawyer, looks relaxed among the wigs and the robes. I remember when he used to shake with laughter at juvenile jokes around the dining-room table. Becky used to say he changed, that he let life and its mundane struggles overcome him.
“You’re like a grumpy old man,” she once hissed at him. It was at the meet and greet at my and Scott’s wedding, and Becky hung back, downing her prosecco. I didn’t say anything to either of them, fussing instead with my gown. She was tipsy. Ethan was reserved, preferring one on ones instead. It was a microcosm of our family dynamic, my wedding. I don’t remember it fondly. Becky had accused me of being a bridezilla the night before. “She’s just organized,” Mum had said kindly.
Since Becky was charged, Ethan has been stoic: uncompromisingly uninvolved, refusing to speculate, to answer questions on procedure. “Not my area of law,” he has said, interrupting us mid-question.
Scott catches my eye and nods, just once, his eyebrows raised ever so slightly, an encouraging expression on his face. “You can do it,” he said to me last night, the night before the first day of the trial. “You can, you can. We can.”
Becky is led into the courtroom.
I swallow. I haven’t seen her for months and months. She has become thin. Her ribs are a birdcage, her hands oversize compared to her arms. I want to reach out and hold those bony shoulders of hers. She was always tall, and broad, which she hated but I loved; I thought she seemed somehow full of life. But today she is diminished.
She has the same walk. I shouldn’t be pleased to see it, but I am. You expect people will change utterly since the night of, but they don’t. It has been nine and a half months since it happened, and nine months since we last saw each other. We were prohibited from speaking from the moment she was charged. We became opposing witnesses. Me for the prosecution and she for the defense. Two sisters, carved in two by the justice system.
But here it is, months on: her beautiful walk, in the flesh, as if no time has passed at all. You can’t change a walk like that. She has always bounded, like an overly friendly Labrador, and she is no different today, standing at the door to the dock, somehow, in an extroverted manner. Loud, without being so.
Becky always worked hard at being cool. It was important to her. The right sort of bands and nail varnish and movies—“No, Marth, the rips must be across the knees,” she said last year when I tried on a pair of incorrectly torn jeans—and always the thick layer of liquid eyeliner, the pink blusher. But her walk gave her away; her eager walk that I once loved so much. Still do, I suppose.
I am sworn in and take the secular oath. My voice is clear and loud in the courtroom, which surprises me. I was a geography teacher for years, though. I was used to performing through winter colds and extreme end-of-term fatigue. I pretend the public gallery is a classroom of bright-eyed children, for a moment, and it helps.
Some water has been placed in front of me in a white plastic cup with ridges around its sides.
And here we are: I am in the witness box and Becky is in the dock. She is staring straight at me, her head turned to the left, like a very pretty zoo animal. A deer, maybe, or a giraffe. Her eyelashes, they were always so beautiful. So long and curved, like a Disney princess’s. Our eyes meet. I am only going to say what I know, I try to tell her. Afterward, I’ll join the public gallery, and watch. And, at the end of it, I will know the truth. For Layla.
Was it only a year ago when she came to the hospital right after Layla was born? I can’t believe it. It feels not just years ago but as though it happened to some other family, someone I know well, whose movements I’ve known all my life, like cousins or family friends we had over for dinner regularly. But not to us.
I avert my eyes from hers, and look at the jury instead. Eleven women. One man. None of them looks nervous, or as if they bear the weight of responsibility. One woman has a cat on her jumper, its black ears made of sequins. Becky would want to know what kind of selection process could lead to someone wearing a cat jumper to a murder trial. “That is quite the statement,” she would say.
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 anymore, 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 favoring 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 see only the back of her wig, the crimped pattern on 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 forever.
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 defense barrister rises as gracefully as a ballerina. “Ms. Blackwater, my name is Harriet. I act for the defense.” This, here, must be the most im
portant person in Becky’s current life. She has neat, straight dark hair—pulled back in a bun underneath her wig—slim shoulders and an elegant neck. 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 percent,” 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 good-bye 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 percent. 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 backward. “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 longtime 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 defense, 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 theater of the justice system.
I stopped hearing about her defense. 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 daffodils felt and whether a day seemed like an entire year to a wood louse—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 parlor, 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 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 emotions 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 enti
re 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 judgment. 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 judgment.
“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 on 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 in the accident and emergency department.”
The Good Sister Page 2
