The Good Sister

by Gillian McAllister

  Nobody expected them. It was the very beginning of the crisis.

  They arrived on the inflatable boats—as flimsy as our Li-lo that we used to float around on, drinking cocktails. Wet toddlers, their hair smeared against their scalps, curling and cowlicking like a newborn’s. A boy with one trainer on, one trainer missing. A woman, baby at her breast, whimpering into a head scarf so that the baby wouldn’t see. A life vest, bobbing in the water, its owner unknown.

  We were there right as it happened, right as it hit the newspapers and social media. Scott held my hand when I got back to our hotel, and didn’t complain when, out to dinner, my eyes strayed to the sea, to the beach, again and again.

  “They must be exhausted,” I said to Scott over prawns.

  “Of course,” he said, the subtext a sad but stoic: What can you do? It was his response to almost everything. During extreme turbulence, he would calmly say, “Well, we can’t do anything about it,” as though that made it less frightening. As though he was fine with disaster, with destruction, with death.

  “What must your life be like—to get on a ship like that? No, not a ship . . . a raft, pretty much. You must have to be so . . . desperate.” Their bodies flitted into my mind. The life vest. The missing trainer, bobbing alone somewhere in the sea. It was too much.

  “Can we go down? And help?” I said.

  He nodded immediately, never minding how he spent his free time, wanting only—it seemed—to please me.

  We helped out for the rest of our holiday, taking parcels from the Red Cross center to a refugee camp. I handed over cheap fleece blankets, canned goods, plasters, and bandages. I gave them to anybody who would take them. Scott didn’t mind. He never once said he wanted to be back by the pool, eating unlimited food and reading books.

  The Greek government put the refugees up in an old, abandoned airport. Anybody could go in, and I did, while Scott was showering one night. I sneaked over there, after an all-you-can-eat dinner at our hotel, a warm paper bag in my hand.

  The noise and the heat of it struck me first. Worse than a dormitory. Strung-up sheets were makeshift curtains, held together with pink clothes pegs. The signs were still up: TERMINAL 1. TERMINAL 2. DUTY FREE. Plate-glass windows had shattered, leaving shards that somebody from the Red Cross was sweeping up. How could this be? How could we walk away from this and return to our sun loungers?

  I sat on a wooden chair, not wanting to stand and stare anymore, and then I saw it: a dark eye. It blinked, then locked onto mine. I smiled. Could he see both of my eyes, or just one? I crept closer to the curtain, the wooden chair squeaking on the floor.

  A little hand emerged from between two curtains, the fingers curling around a pegged-up sheet. The hand retreated after a second, leaving dirty marks behind it. I sat on a rickety wooden chair and watched. Then the brown eye again, peering out at me from between two grubby sheets.

  He revealed himself, and there he was, a little boy, maybe two—he was so thin it was hard to tell. The other hand—dark with dirt, tidemarks of it across the back of his hand—was in his mouth, sucking on his index and third fingers. His feet were bare, slapping on the linoleum floor as he moved unsteadily toward me. Those brown eyes on me, on mine.

  And then the thoughts came. I could leave here, leave Kos, finish my holiday, forget these children. I could read about them in the newspapers and donate to Save the Children and do all the right things—above and beyond the right things, even—that anyone might have expected of me. But that grubby hand in his mouth. His skinny little legs that should have been fat with rolls of flesh. Where were his parents? He was alone, behind that curtain, advancing toward a perfect stranger.

  No. I couldn’t. I couldn’t buy The Big Issue and drink fair-trade coffee and leave it at that. I couldn’t. Those dark eyes. Those little hands. I could not leave them.

  We played for a few minutes—peekaboo—until a woman in a head scarf came to collect him. Her arms were slim and toned and the veins on her hands stood out in the heat. She scooped him up and took him back behind their curtains. I saw as she disappeared behind the sheet that it contained a bench, an old airport bench. Exactly the sort Scott and I would sit on in a few days’ time as we waited to board our flight home.

  I left, making my way back to our hotel, which sat at the top of a hill, away from the beaches and the life vests and the children. I arrived back at our hotel room half an hour later. Scott was asleep on the bed, in his towel.

  I sat down carefully next to him. He opened his eyes immediately, a smile already on his face. That was one of the things I loved most about him: He was always—unfailingly—pleased to see me.

  “You’ve been sleeping,” I said. “I’ve been to see the children.”

  “I was sleeping to forget them,” he said. He rolled over onto his side and pulled me toward him. “How can we think about going home?”

  “I know,” I murmured, lying next to him. I closed my eyes. Of all the people on the planet, here I was, lying next to the man who felt the same as me.

  I returned just under seven weeks later, my registered charity set up. Scott paid for it with his bonus. “My gift to you,” he said shyly over dinner one night. “No. Not gift. My—” he stammered. “Our joint venture. For the greater good.”

  I clinked my glass against his and didn’t think I could love him any more than I did then.

  The local Greek authority let me have the old building the fish market used to operate before the recession. They didn’t seem to care who took it. It was cool, and dark, but the smell: oh my!

  I scrubbed it. Cleaned the walls during the last week of the summer holidays. I would set something up—something helpful—and be home by September, I told myself. I returned a few months later, pregnant with Layla. Stop Gap had grown from a tiny start-up to an established charity with a budget and a business bank account. The children lined up every morning for lessons, for food, for a go on an iPad. We had to turn half of them away most days.

  Those dark eyes, those little hands. So vulnerable, so desperate, that I forgot my own baby, in need of me at home.

  I wonder if she missed me, if she wondered where I had gone. If she knew that I would be back. That I was coming back to her as she died.

  * * *

  —

  Scott and I ascend the court steps together.

  “Ms. Blackwater—what do you think happened?” Another morning, another microphone.

  This time I forcibly push it away: How would I know?

  “Where were you, Ms. Blackwater?” a male voice says.

  I can’t help but turn and look at him.

  “That night?” he adds, like a prompt. Like I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  My face is scalding, and I will it to cool down, even though that only makes it worse. Scott glances at me, just briefly, his eyes full of concern. He reaches for my hand and takes it in his: We were both missing that night, he is saying with his hand, as he has said to me a hundred times before. No matter what the court says, the media, other people. We were both missing.

  I remember when I took Becky’s call. It was only afterward—after I had attended A&E and I had seen Layla for the final time—that her words had sunk in: “Scott stayed an extra night.”

  I closed my eyes to it. Surely not. I had been away for two nights, and Becky was supposed to have Layla for only one of them. Scott should have been back for the second.

  But he hadn’t come back. He had simply extended his stay.

  I thought of all my preparations to leave Layla. All the things I put in place: making sure Becky was available, transferring the Moses basket over, expressing enough milk, washing enough muslin cloths, giving Becky the reflux medication, the sling, the pushchair. It had seemed like a military operation. Later, I learned that Scott had just sent a text to Becky. One measly text. The conference was really useful: He wanted to stay
an extra night. How easy it was for him.

  I try to be fair: Would I ever have done the same thing? Stayed another night, because I was enjoying myself, because it was useful? No, I think miserably. I wouldn’t have.

  But it started with me: I chose to go away. And I chose not to come back until the Friday, by which time it was too late. Scott’s actions—to the media, to the lawyers, and so to me—seem incidental somehow to what happened to Layla.

  I, the mother, left her baby. It began with me.

  I look up at the building. It feels different on this, day two. Much like a house on the second viewing, things are coming to light that I hadn’t noticed before. The sprinkling of cigarette butts just outside the doors in two distinct clusters.

  I notice more about the lawyers, too, as I settle myself down at the very back of the public gallery. I eyeball Becky first. She’s not looking at me.

  The prosecution and the defense are chatting as the courtroom fills up. The prosecutor has taken her glasses off, and she’s leaning in toward the defense lawyer as if they were two women in a café or a bar. Of course, I think. Of course they know each other. Of course they have countless trials at Hove Court against each other. The prosecutor is tapping her pen against the desk, faster and faster, as they chat. Harriet, the defense barrister, lets out a tiny laugh, and they stop speaking.

  I think of the timeline I made last night. It clarified nothing. Only what we already know. That Becky had Layla all evening, and that Layla died, sometime around eight or nine. My brain can’t make sense of it.

  “The prosecution calls Carol Richards,” Ellen says, when the case has reopened.

  A small, mousy woman about fifty years old is brought in by an usher. She confirms her name and is sworn in.

  I settle back to listen, but my eyes scan the jury, searching. What do they think? What do they think happened?

  8

  Carol Richards

  Afternoon, Friday, October 13

  Carol was preoccupied by the tea bags. Why did people find it so bloody difficult to clean up after themselves? She stared at those still-warm oozing tea bags, clustered like disgusting profiteroles on the little plate next to the staffroom kettle.

  “Carol,” her colleague Alicia said, hurrying inside. Carol turned around quickly. Perhaps she should not, as the head teacher, be pondering the tea bags so seriously. She ought to be thinking deeply about discipline policies or oppositional defiance disorder. But one tea bag was still steaming, like a fresh dog turd, right there on the counter.

  “Hmm?” she said.

  “Xander’s mother isn’t here again.”

  “Again?” Carol said, before she could stop herself. Most unprofessional.

  “Phone’s off, too.”

  Carol looked at her watch: 4:00 P.M. An hour late. “Where’s the dad?” she said with a sigh. What was his name? They were getting divorced, she knew, but his name escaped her.

  “Away with work—near Oxford. He’s coming in an hour, if she doesn’t turn up.”

  Carol looked out into the hallway. She could see Xander, a curious child, swinging his legs, the tips of his school shoes hitting the underside of the chair in front of him, jostling it slightly with each thump. Inch by inch, it moved away from him. He wasn’t sullen, exactly. She thought he might simply be anxious, shy.

  As if he could sense her looking, he darted a glance at the window to the staffroom, then looked quickly away again. He had his mother’s elegant neck.

  “Are you worried?” she said simply to Alicia.

  “It’s . . . she was very sorry the first few times. They were right after she’d split up with Marc,” Alicia said.

  Marc, that was it.

  Carol remembered the first occasion well. It had been spring, and Becky had rushed in, her cheeks flushed pink. Her expression was rueful, her words rushed and panicked, Carol had thought, while listening in, pretending to be looking at the timetable on the whiteboard out in the foyer. “I’m so, so sorry,” Becky had said, dropping her usual cool exterior. Alicia had nodded, and Xander had gone to Becky.

  Becky’s head wasn’t in a good place, Alicia had explained later, which Carol thought was pretty fair. Of course not. Carol remembered those post-divorce days. She’d lost her house keys twice in the same week. It was as though her brain had simply emptied itself of normal life.

  Forgotten, Carol had said to Alicia. Becky’s first indiscretion should be forgotten. It was a one-off. And Carol had forgotten, mostly. At parents’ evening, she saw Becky across the room, wearing an artful scarf, not with Marc, yet so cordial toward him, which was interesting in itself—and recalled the incident again. But other than that, it had been forgotten, along with a handful of other parents’ indiscretions. But then it had happened again. And again.

  And now, Becky was missing for the fifth time in recent months. It couldn’t go on. Carol had to intervene, as the head, though it pained her to do so.

  “Next steps?” she said brusquely now to Alicia. She mustn’t be too indecisive, get caught up in the politics of it all. She mustn’t, either, be too sympathetic, let her own experience cloud her judgment.

  The door opened, letting in a blast of cold air. And there she was. Becky, shaking raindrops off a yellow umbrella.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” she said again, rushing over to Xander. He stood up and stepped toward her, leaning into her as she embraced him, Carol noticed. Good. She didn’t want to have to alert anyone. But she should. Her heart felt fat and full. I’m sorry, she thought. For making your single-parenting life harder. For making the burden heavier. Carol knew it well: the burden of the life led alone. Remembering to buy wrapping paper, and to get euros, and to buy rinse aid for the dishwasher . . . still, she got 25 percent off her council tax, as an unhelpful friend once told her.

  “I’ve been looking after my sister’s baby, Layla, and my sister only just got back, and I didn’t have a car seat and . . .” Becky was saying.

  Carol caught a scent of something on her breath. She paused. Alcohol, was it? Surely not.

  “Your phone was off,” Alicia said simply.

  “I know—it died, and I was at my sister’s flat and we don’t have the same chargers, and she doesn’t have a landline . . .”

  Carol looked properly at Becky. There were myriads of solutions, it seemed to her. Borrow a neighbor’s phone. Send an email. Send a text from a website. Becky’s eyes were darting around the foyer.

  “Becky,” Carol said. She tried to say it gently.

  “Yes?” Becky said. She was fussing with her bag, but looked up and stilled, maybe sensing Carol’s tone.

  Xander reached over and unlooped the strap. It was caught in her coat. Becky smiled at him gratefully, and he smiled back. A quick, genuine, broad smile. Carol was pleased to see that moment pass between them.

  “I’m afraid— This is the fifth time . . .”

  “I know. I do know.”

  “. . . he’s been left,” Carol finished, nodding discreetly to Xander.

  “Yes, I know.” Becky turned to Xander and passed him a key. “Go to the car,” she said, smiling widely, falsely.

  Carol tried to suspend her judgment. Of course he would be fine in the car by himself. Perhaps Becky was trying to shield him from the conversation she knew was coming.

  “Becky,” Carol said. “If it did happen again . . .”

  “Yes,” Becky said.

  “We would have to arrange a home visit—to check everything is . . . well.”

  Becky let out a gasp and Carol stepped back. A charged moment passed between them. Becky’s eyes widened and she covered her mouth. Carol could tell that Becky knew she knew, that she could smell it. The alcohol.

  “It was wine o’clock, this afternoon, before I went to pick up Layla,” she said. “Happy hour with some of the other mums.”

  “I see,
” Carol said.

  Becky’s lips parted. Her whole face blushed, even her forehead. “It’s not like that—this isn’t how it looks. There were a few of us, we went to a cocktail bar—God, that sounds seedy. It was someone’s birthday, and it was rubbish weather and we just thought we’d go and have a drink and a giggle in the middle of the day. It’d been organized for ages. I only had one. It was hours ago. It’s not—it’s not how it seems. I wasn’t—I wasn’t drunk or anything, when I collected Layla. It was nothing. Just one drink.”

  “This is the last warning,” Carol said.

  9

  Martha

  Thank you,” Ellen the prosecutor says when Carol finishes speaking. “So tell me . . . you had to issue the defendant with that final warning—why?”

  I stop looking at Carol and instead look down at my hands. I had no idea. I knew Becky had forgotten Xander a few times, but I didn’t know about the most recent occasion. The sacrifices she made for me. Without telling me. That was true loyalty: suffering things without ever letting on.

  But . . . five times? How could that be? I close my eyes and think of Layla. I would never have not known where she was. Not even when I was away from her. Not even then. But . . . I admit to myself. That’s not true, is it? I hadn’t texted to check in, the night she died. I didn’t know.

  Was Becky neglectful? I examine the thought, this way and that. Maybe. Maybe. She was young, and chaotic, and sometimes selfish, yes. Perhaps she hadn’t bonded with Xander, as I worried I hadn’t bonded with Layla in those early weeks. Perhaps there really is more to Becky than I know.

  Nor did I know about the cocktail. Did I mind that she had been in charge of my daughter after a cocktail? God—did I? If this hadn’t happened, I would have thought nothing of it. A couple of glasses of wine at a barbecue, mothers marching their children back home, their tread laughingly uneven on the way home . . . it was just life, wasn’t it? Wine o’clock, a few too many gins, a bit of a tipsy lunch in the middle of the day. None of us are saints.