The constant references to wine are not good. I have often thought—privately—that Becky loves wine a little too much. She will often joke about wine o’clock in the late afternoon. Every Friday, without fail, she posts a glass of red on Instagram. But don’t a lot of people?
What if the worst moments of my life were paraded in a courtroom? That time I lost my temper in Currys when Layla was a week old and we needed a new washing machine immediately. The time I huffed at a train conductor when we were delayed for Becky’s bachelorette party. The time I leaned on the horn when somebody cut me off on the way to see Ethan after work. How would they look? Anybody could be made to look guilty.
But what about Layla? my mind says. My other mind. Whose side am I on? I am a traitor, caught in no-man’s-land between my daughter and my sister. My daughter should trump her, but I know my sister. I look at that still-glistening lip and wonder if I truly do.
“Of course she did it. What do you think happened?” Scott will say. He isn’t as clinical, as dispassionate, as that makes him sound. I try to make myself remember that he is hurting, deep down inside, too. That he blames himself. And perhaps he should. Sometimes he will spend forty minutes in the shower, and emerge with his eyes red. Sometimes, he will say, “If I had been there . . . if I hadn’t stayed longer . . .” and not be able to finish his sentences.
But these witnesses—they were innocent bystanders, and are now forced to recollect, forced to process the events in the light of death, of disaster, of guilt. What was it? Situational bias. “Did the defendant ever seem violent to you?” they will have been asked. Of course they will have stories to tell. Of course they will. Everyone would, when asked that question, knowing what happened to Layla.
Becky had always been hard to read. Sometimes volatile. If you didn’t know her well, and know all that she’s been through, you could easily assume she was—well . . . a bit unstable.
She had given birth to Xander in the autumn. She should have been starting her second year of university, but instead she was asking for an epidural. I had arrived after he was born. I was twenty-two, and unable to imagine myself in her situation. She had seemed both childlike and grown up to me then. She told me that Marc had been making her laugh. She’d spent the time in between contractions creased up, laughing, batting him away. As she recounted it to me, I was standing quietly, watching them, thinking: Maybe this will work out, after all.
She never went back to interior design school. She couldn’t, for a few years, and then she just didn’t. She had a string of sort-of-related jobs, before set dressing. Some dressmaking, some space planning, consultancy work. The television people had been horrible to her but, other than that, she had always seemed happy enough. But maybe the wine said different.
Harriet is standing up now, and looking pointedly at Sophie. “So you overheard the defendant threatening to discipline her own nine-year-old.”
“Yes.”
“Did she discipline him? Did she smack him?”
“No. Her hands were gripping his . . .”
“Did she smack him?”
“No.”
“Did she ever seem irritated with Layla?”
“No.”
“Nothing further.”
* * *
—
The judge orders a short break after Sophie’s witness evidence. It’s eleven o’clock and so Scott and I decide to walk down to the beach. We need this time, too. This thoughtful downtime. Next week . . . next week, we really will have to move on. Deal with the verdict, whatever it is.
We sit on the sun-warmed pebbles, which stick uncomfortably into my dress, but I don’t care. His shirtsleeves are rolled up to his elbows. I take a breath, ready to speak.
“Let’s not pick it all apart,” he says. “I can’t do it to her.”
“To Layla?”
He looks at me and nods, just once. “She deserves better than this”—he gestures back at the court—“this circus. About her little life.” His voice cracks.
“I know,” I say quietly. “I know.” I gulp back the tears, which always seem ready to fall, and I look across at Scott.
His blond hair catches the sun. “Two blond men,” Becky often said of Scott and Marc. “And yet so different.” Scott is tall and wiry. Marc is shorter, broader, with huge blue eyes and dimples.
I squint, trying to frame the sea in my vision so that I don’t get the old or the new pier in the picture, trying to make the sea look just as it did in Kos.
Becky came out to Kos with me, the March after Stop Gap was set up, and I was managing it from afar, while pregnant. “Would you like to come?” I had said shyly to her, after she had grilled me about it.
“Sounds beyond cool,” she had said, and that was that. We went straight there after our flight. I opened the door to Stop Gap and found myself holding my breath, like I was about to unveil a new haircut or give a personal speech. Months later, it still smelled of fish. The morning lesson was in full flow, and I forgot about the pain in my limbs, aching and tired from the early start.
“God, it’s amazing,” Becky said, looking first up at the grubby ceiling, and then at the expanse of children sitting listening to a story. There was a stilling of the air as I arrived; the two volunteers—gap-year students, whose expenses I just about managed to cover using a tiny EU grant—had stopped and were staring at me. It still felt strange to be that: the boss.
Becky engaged immediately in a way I hadn’t seen her do before. She crossed the room to where the teacher was reading a story and sat down next to her. And then she just sat quietly, on one of the children’s seats, right at the front of the crowded room. I studied her, my sister, with her elbows on her knees, her hands cupping her face, as she listened to the story, rapt.
And then, toward the end of the story, one of the refugees—Sayid, I thought, though Stop Gap had become so popular I was struggling to keep track—inched closer to her. I saw it happening, felt myself smiling as he did it.
Line by line, he scooted closer to Becky, until by the end of the story he was almost upon her shoes, like a dog might sit at an owner’s feet. Unthinkingly—or so I imagined—she reached down and scooped him up, placing him in her lap. And then she didn’t turn her attention back to the teacher. She looked straight down at him, at Sayid, smiling at him gently, her gaze encouraging, with just a hint of sadness behind her eyes, in the crease of her brow.
No, I think now, as Scott shifts on the stones and I open my eyes fully and Brighton comes back to life around us. It can’t have been her. Not that Becky who cradled the refugee child at my shelter, who understood it—and me—completely, reverently. No. It wasn’t her.
Then it was an accident. Somehow. A tragic accident. One she either didn’t know about or covered up. But not a murder. No.
14
Martha
The health visitor, Irene Fox, walks into the courtroom, led in by the same usher who brought me in. She has a sleeve tattoo just poking out from underneath a black jacket, and a haircut that looks like a crop being grown out. She seems nervous, her features pinched, her shoulders held stiffly. As she takes the secular oath, she gives a small, sardonic smile, showing pointy teeth.
“When did Layla and her mother first come to see you?” Ellen says. She is thicker-set than Becky’s lawyer. Less poised, too, but seems affected by the proceedings.
“October time.” Irene looks over at me.
“Do you have the exact date?”
“The eleventh.”
Becky had been nannying for us for just over a week.
“And when was the second appointment?”
“The twentieth.”
The leaves had dusted the car park. Becky was keeping me company. Scott was away, at an overnight developers’ conference, so it was just the three of us: Becky, Layla, and me. She died in the last week of October. Ten days after tha
t, Becky was charged.
“Thank you. And why were they there?”
“Layla was a difficult baby. Lots of wind, the mother thought.” She looks at me again.
How strange this is. To attend a routine appointment and then to hear it rehashed and repeated back to me, months later. Deconstructed by the court system, and constructed again, into witness statements, testimony, cross examination. It’s so artificial. It was just an appointment. Just us.
“Why?” Ellen says.
“The baby—Layla—cried a lot, especially after food. Writhing, going red and angry. Looking uncomfortable.” She pushes her hair back from her forehead. It’s getting in her eyes. “Raising her legs up.”
“And did she have reflux?”
“Yes. I diagnosed that. I asked the GP to prescribe Gaviscon Infant. And then, when they came back on the twentieth, I asked him to prescribe ranitidine, which is stronger.”
Becky pushed for the second meeting. By that time, I was on the phone for three hours a day, trying to sort out the staffing and the equipment and taking new premises. There was so very much to do, and nobody could do any of it but me. They seemed so vital, those calls that seem so stupid now. Was Becky concerned for Layla or was she . . . at the end of her tether? “Martha, you need to sort this out,” she had said fiercely to me one night. Was that motivational, or had it been a threat?
“Did the Gaviscon seem to work?”
“Not really, no. The mother said that she was still symptomatic. Still crying a lot. Not being sick very much, though, so I thought it might be silent reflux.”
“Silent reflux?” Ellen balances her fingertips on the desk and leans her weight against them. The tips blanch white.
“Reflux without so many outwardly obvious symptoms. The babies are uncomfortable, but it’s less clear why. They don’t always vomit. Sometimes they swallow back the stomach acid. It causes discomfort and wind.”
I sink my head forward onto my hands. Scott shifts in the gallery next to me, placing an arm across the back of the bench and curling it around my shoulders. Mum tuts, behind us, a soft, sympathetic clucking noise.
Becky is looking at me, as she always seems to be now, when I raise my eyes again.
“How much—in your experience—do babies have to cry before people seek professional help?”
“Your Honor, if I may . . .” Harriet says. She stands and looks attentively at the judge, her mouth set. “This witness is a witness of fact. She’s not an expert.”
“I entirely agree,” the judge says, simply and quietly.
“I’ll rephrase,” Ellen says. “Do you know how much Layla was crying?”
“No,” Irene says. “I don’t. But Martha seemed to suggest it was more than other babies—more than was normal. Her symptoms were on a par with classic silent reflux.”
“And how was she when you got the GP to prescribe the ranitidine? In the second appointment?”
“The same. She needed walking around a lot. She needed jiggling after meals. She was crying for much of the second appointment.”
“So would it be a reasonable assumption that a typical refluxy baby, with these symptom patterns, prescribed what you prescribed . . . would have been crying pretty much all the time?”
“Not all the time. But a lot. For many hours per day.”
“Crying for many hours per day.” Ellen nods. She pauses, letting it sink in for the jury, then turns to look at them meaningfully. The pause stretches out in the courtroom. Still, she doesn’t speak. I can almost see the awkward, loaded silence, stretched thin, its surface like gossamer.
Here was a baby nobody could cope with, the silence says. Here was a woman lacking the resilience needed to cope with a baby in as much pain as mine. Did it hurt Layla, when it happened? I wonder. Did she know her heart was stopping, her brain dying? My eyes are damp and I blink.
“And in what percentage of cases would you say the ranitidine works?”
“Thirty—forty? Sadly, reflux often seems to have to run its course. Sometimes the medicine works, but more often, reflux has to go away on its own.”
I can’t help but look across at Becky. She has stopped looking at me, and is instead focusing her gaze up at the judge, or perhaps at the crest behind him. She looks impassive, but I can see the areas of tension she’s holding in her body. Her jaw is quivering just slightly. She always used to feel the cold so much more than me—and I now remember what her jaw used to do. Our walks home from school, from Brighton to Hove, along the coast. We’d talk about what our adult lives would look like, where we would travel, what we would do for a living. How it would feel to own an entire house, ours to decorate exactly the way we wanted. Her jaw would always be chattering like that. When she would arrive at pubs with Marc to meet Scott and me in the winter, her jaw would be working like that against the cold.
It’s not cold in the courtroom. She is condemned. That is how she looks.
“And did it work? For Layla? Was she in the thirty to forty percent?”
“I don’t know,” Irene says. “I never saw Layla again.” Ellen sits down, triumphant, and I can barely look at her. The point scoring of it. The games. The wordplay. The strutting theater. Peacocks. It is despicable. Disgust rises through me, unexpectedly, and I swallow, trying to dampen it down.
Harriet stands up and looks at the health visitor.
“How many babies do you see with reflux, Ms. Fox?” she says icily.
“How many babies . . . ?”
“Say, per year.”
“Well—four times a day, maybe, it gets mentioned. Forty-six weeks per year, for me . . .”
Harriet looks at her notes. “So we’re talking, what, up to a thousand a year?”
“Maybe—I really have no idea.”
“I wonder how many health visitors there are in the UK,” Harriet says.
Ellen turns her head and looks sharply at Harriet. Her mouth parts. Her brows draw together.
“Just wondering,” Harriet says. “Seems like quite a lot of refluxy babies.” She brings her attention back to Irene. “So reflux is—I would say—all round pretty common.”
“Common-ish. Yes. Maybe fifty percent of babies have an episode of it.”
“Fifty percent!” Harriet says, like she’s been handed a rare diamond.
Irene doesn’t care, I see. It’s not her baby. It’s not her sister. She is cool, up there on the stand, and has no opinion about my sister’s likely guilt or innocence. She hasn’t taken a side. She will leave the courtroom, after this. Head home and watch television, no demons in her living room, sitting over her shoulder in case she relaxes.
“Right. So fifty percent of babies are refluxy.”
“Yes, at times.”
“What would you say the outcome is—with these babies?”
“The reflux passes,” she says immediately.
“They are not killed. Thank you,” she says.
“If I may . . .” Ellen says, rising to her feet.
The judge doesn’t even say anything. He merely looks at Harriet, exasperated.
“Nothing further,” she says. “Withdrawn.”
* * *
—
We break for lunch. It’s all so civilized, like we are playing cricket or at a training course, not like we are watching a trial play out in front of us.
The door creaks behind Ethan and me as we make our way across the hall and out into the sunshine. Mum, Dad, and Scott are just in front of us. Mum’s body language is hunched. Perhaps she, too, is thinking of Layla, in pain in her final weeks.
Ethan looks at me over his menu in the café we end up in. He doesn’t say anything for a second, but I can tell he wants to. “Now it’s started,” he says tentatively, “I just feel so sure she’s innocent.”
I shrug, not wanting to discuss it. I have nothing—and everythi
ng—to say on the subject, but I’m exhausted. “Who knows,” I say.
“But if she is . . .” he continues.
“Hmm?”
“Imagine if she’s totally innocent.”
“Yes.”
“Then she’s wrongly accused. And hardly anybody believes her.”
I gulp. I can’t imagine. “You do,” I say instead. It is easier to be prickly, to be spiteful, than it is to be nice, for the first time in my life.
How did we get here?
I gaze down at the menu, not pondering what to eat, not really here at all. Instead, I am back in July last year.
I was seven and a half months pregnant when it happened. When I did it. The most significant event leading up to Layla’s death. It was late one night. I couldn’t sleep, was too uncomfortable, and was idling on the internet.
I had three internet tabs open, two for grants of a couple thousand pounds, and one for much more: the National Lottery’s charity page. I wanted to show Scott that I had used his money well. That it had been worthwhile. That we were helping people—together.
I would just fill in the charity details, I thought.
On the next page I had to fill in the financial information. It was dark in the spare room, just the glow of the monitor, and the cursor was blinking, the only movement in the still summer night. I knew the sea was rolling outside, but I couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear it through the triple glazing. I reached to open the window, my bump pushing against the desk. I reached and stroked it, instinctively, the first time I had done so.
Ambivalence, we kindly called it. The broodiness didn’t hit in the way I thought it might. But one morning, the day before my thirtieth birthday, I was baking, and carried a sugar bag on my hip from the pantry to the kitchen. That was the first time I felt it. A solid presence in my arms. How nice it might be to look after a baby, a child. The rest of the leaps came easily. “Why not?” we said. And then, the sex: so easy to have unprotected sex. So unconnected with the decision-making, it seemed to us. The pregnancy test. And here we were, and I was stroking my bump for the first time, like: Hello to you.
The Good Sister Page 9
