The Choice

by Gillian McAllister

  What else?

  No fingerprints. But fibers from my glove on his chest.

  The tread of my heels. Was there mud, or just concrete? I can’t remember. It stacks up against me, the evidence. There is no point trying to stop it. They are coming. I lie rigid, listening for sirens, for the knock at the door.

  The anxiety seems to bloom across my body, as if an elephant has taken up residence on my chest. It shifts around as I think, harder and harder, about what I’ve done. I’ve ruined my life, and ended another’s, with that push. That reckless push. I will surely never be the same again. I’ve killed a man. It feels so abstract to me, here in my bedroom.

  The right time is now, isn’t it? Before they find me, and after I realize that it’s over for me. That there is too much evidence. That I am too unskilled to pull it off. That the stakes—murder—are too bloody high.

  I sigh, trying to shift the elephant, and I roll onto my side. Instinctively, Reuben reaches out for me, scooping me up and pulling me close to him. The duvet’s too hot and his arm’s too heavy. I can’t take it, and so I shift away from him. He makes a disgruntled, disappointed noise, a sort of ohh. But I ignore him.

  And then it is morning and Reuben is cooking downstairs like everything is normal. But in the bedroom, I am a prisoner inside myself.

  * * *

  —

  I can’t believe I’ve gone back to work, but I have, and I’ve managed a day.

  Ed often drops me home, then takes the bus back to the garage to fill it up with petrol and park it, safely under cover, for the night. That’s how it works. He is nice like that.

  I used to find the library bus comforting, being surrounded by the pages and pages of other people’s thoughts: whatever you’re going through, I would think, somebody has been there before you. I don’t think that today.

  I have gone to tell Ed three times today, during our proximity together on the bus. He has always brought out a confessional quality in me, like a priest. He would be less judgmental than Reuben—of course—but he has almost too much perspective sometimes. If we’re not in war-torn Syria, if we have a roof over our heads, there can be no problems in his world.

  We met six years ago, when he hired me. He never asked once about Oxford, and never has since, even though I mention it often. It’s one of the things I like most about him. He observes me dispassionately. He brings me in a cake on most Mondays—he bakes on Sunday night, to stave off the pre-work feelings, he says. We eat it and peruse the new books that have come in. I have become used to always having a copy of the latest bestseller, for free. A few years ago, that would have been all I wanted from a job.

  We pull up outside my flat. It’s in darkness. Reuben’s at his youth club’s Monday meeting.

  Ed has left the engine running, is waiting for me to collect my bag and go. It’s just after five thirty, and pitch-black outside.

  “You have guests,” he says mildly, gesturing with a liver-spotted hand to my door. His glasses glint as he turns to look at me.

  And that’s when I see them. Two figures at my door. I can only see the tops of their heads, one dark, one blond, lit up by the streetlamp above them. They’re at the bottom of the stairs to our basement flat, their legs disappearing into the shadows. It’s the police. It must be.

  I wonder how they have walked down past all the plants I bought recently on a whim.

  And then the panic sets in.

  The sweating is back. The late-night animal is sitting heavily on my chest again.

  I can’t make Ed drive me back now. I can’t raise his suspicions. I try to think of a story, a reason to go back, but my mouth is parched, the well of lies dried out.

  “Oh, I know what that is,” I gabble.

  “The pigs,” Ed says mildly. He looks at me, his eyes moonlike in the darkness.

  “The what?”

  “Police,” he says, gesturing down at the men.

  They’re not moving.

  “How do you know that?” I say.

  “Oh, two blokes. A Vauxhall Insignia. A second rearview mirror. Pretty obvious,” he says.

  His voice is toneless, no judgment, no suspicion. And no derision that I didn’t know myself. That’s Ed’s way. Once again, I am struck by how much the people in my life trust me.

  “You’re expecting them?” he adds, looking closely at me.

  I realize I have already shown my hand, already said I knew who they were. I try to think of benign offenses, but my mind is blank.

  “Three,” I spit out, after an embarrassing silence. “Three burglaries in two weeks on our street. Must’ve been another.”

  “Oh, Jo,” Ed says, his eyes full of compassion. “How scary for you, in the basement.”

  My eyes fill with tears at how much he cares about me.

  I grab the door handle with my good hand and leave without saying good-bye, walking toward our flat. I can’t speak to them. I must hide.

  I hear Ed pull away, the engine fading as he disappears down the road, leaving me alone, trusting that I am not trying to dodge the police who wish to speak to me, that I am not—whether I intended to be or not—on the run. How slippery that slope really is.

  I don’t want to walk past them, and Ed dropped me almost at my door, so I have no choice but to ascend the steps two doors down from mine, not looking at the police, looking only straight ahead. I don’t press a buzzer. I don’t try the door. I merely stand in the alcove, hoping I am in complete darkness, an anonymous figure the police don’t want to speak to. I can hear them murmuring, two doors along, beneath me at my basement door, but can’t make out their words.

  My back is flat against the blue door, and my heart is thudding heavily in my chest. I close my eyes and pray for them to leave. To give up. That nobody comes out of this door, expresses surprise, calls me by my name. I stand there in silence, hoping I haven’t been seen, and wait.

  It is ten minutes before they leave.

  It is a further five before I come out, my knees trembling.

  They have left me a note. Please call them, it reads.

  8

  REVEAL

  The solicitor arrives at nine o’clock in the morning. Sergeant Morris is back—I don’t understand her shift patterns—and she comes to get me from my cell. I leave my cell in my prison-issue wear and meet the solicitor in a large interviewing room.

  I am hungover. I have had half-hourly wakings for seven hours. The one time I didn’t acknowledge my name being called, the police officer came into my cell and shook me awake. Every time I fell asleep it was time for the next one.

  Sarah is not how I imagined her, but she’s not far off, either. Long, dark fluffy hair. Tall and willowy, perhaps as tall as Reuben. There is an air of chicness about her. Red lipstick to start the day. Crooked teeth, but very white.

  “Joanna—the duty solicitor, Sarah Abberley. Sarah—Joanna.” Morris turns and leaves without another word.

  “So,” Sarah says, once we’re alone.

  I like that proactive so. She explains the caution to me. She breaks down all the words, even though I know what they mean.

  “You’ve been assigned to the CID, who are for serious crimes,” she adds, when she’s finished.

  “I just . . . what’s happening? It was just a push.”

  She looks up at me sharply. Her eyes are blue, and incisive, like a hawk’s. They move quickly, darting around, taking in my clothes, my shoes, my shaking hands.

  She gets out a pen and a branded notepad from her law firm.

  She is looking down at the pad, taking down my name, the date, and the time, but then she raises her eyebrows to me. They’re plucked but not overly so. Smooth, angular dark lines.

  “What happened?” she says simply.

  I start from the beginning.

  Sarah writes notes occasionally, but she mostly just
sits, looking at me. Nodding and mmm-ing.

  I tell her everything.

  Except one thing.

  It’s not even a lie. Not really. Simply an omission.

  I don’t tell her of my pause. My tiny pause as the man in the street lay in that puddle. I can’t tell her, don’t want her to know that I dithered. That, in another life, I might’ve fled. I tell her I got him out of the puddle immediately.

  When I’ve finished, she says, “Look, they won’t give me any disclosure. So you need to give a no-comment interview.”

  “No comment? Why would I do that? I have lots of comments,” I say. “I want to explain.”

  “I know. You have a strong defense. But they are being obstructive. They won’t tell me anything. What you said at the scene. The position the victim was in. His injuries. If they have witnesses.”

  “I . . . he was at the bottom of the stairs. I said I pushed him—”

  “My advice is to give a no-comment interview,” she says, her voice razor-sharp, cutting me into ribbons.

  Embarrassed, chastened, by her tone, I look around the room. There’s cladding on the walls. Gray-green, the color of a dirty pond. It’s spongy and makes the room look smaller. Soundproofing, maybe. There’s a gap in the cladding, like a chair rail, only it’s white plastic, with a red strip running around it. I extend my fingers toward it.

  “Don’t,” Sarah says, reaching a slim arm out to stop me. “It’s a panic alarm. You’ll send a load of police in here. The last thing you want.”

  “Okay. I’ll give the no-comment interview,” I say after a moment’s thought.

  “Good. Now, Joanna. I think they will be talking about causing grievous bodily harm with intent.”

  “What’s causing grievous bodily harm with intent?”

  “It’s very serious.”

  She passes me a sheet of paper, an internet printout. It has Offenses Against the Person Act 1861 written across the top.

  Offenses Against the Person. “Sorry,” I say. “I’m still not really understanding.”

  “Okay,” she says, grabbing a blank sheet of paper and a pen. On a page she writes murder, followed by attempted murder, manslaughter, s18 (GBH with intent), s20 (GBH), common assault. “These are in descending order of seriousness,” she says. “Killing, trying to kill, killing with reason or excuse.” She points to the words as she runs down the list.

  “But I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Section eighteen is causing grievous bodily harm with intent. Section twenty—causing grievous bodily harm. GBH.”

  “Right.”

  “Lastly—common assault.” She taps her pen against the sheet of paper.

  I wonder dimly if she loved law school, if she always wanted to be a lawyer. If the bureaucratic justice system disappoints her. I’d never thought of being a lawyer. But perhaps I should have. I would like to do what she does. Turn up on weekends and save the day in a pinstriped suit.

  “Causing grievous bodily harm with intent. Just below attempted murder,” I say, tracing a finger over the words. She’s pressed hard with the ballpoint pen, and the letters feel three-dimensional, the paper curling underneath them. “I didn’t have any intent,” I say.

  “You pushed a man.” She says it kindly.

  “But . . .” I say. “He was . . . Sadiq was . . .”

  “I know. And we’re going to run that. We’ll say it was self-defense, but back it up with another legal doctrine. Called mistake. It says if you believed the mistake you made—genuinely—then the court will treat you as if it were true.”

  “Good,” I say.

  Causing grievous bodily harm with intent. What intent? Am I a monster? I wish there was a mirror in the interview room that I could look into and inspect myself. To see if I have changed. I haven’t seen myself since Friday evening.

  She pushes her hair back. It’s flyaway, fine, like mine, and it falls forward again, like grass swaying in a spring breeze.

  “Okay, Joanna,” she says, leaning forward. Her foot squeaks against the linoleum underneath us. “Let’s talk worst-case scenarios.”

  She’s leveling with me. Making the mistake that—because I am well-spoken and intelligent-looking—I am not a mess, a fuckup. That I deserve to be leveled with.

  “No, I . . .” I say. “I don’t want to know. I don’t like worst-case scenarios.”

  I don’t add that I prefer to bury my head in the sand, that I have lost jobs and failed exams and simply not turned up to things when it mattered. That I have quit things that just seemed to be—somehow—too hard to continue with.

  She sits back now, looking at me with those birdlike eyes. “No?” she says. “I would want to know.”

  “No.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I work in a library,” I say. “A mobile library.”

  Already, that life—my job—feels like another universe. The regulars who I would nickname. Quiet, calm Buddhist Ed, the librarian and my manager. The children I help to discover reading, a world of complete magic. I love lots of things about the job. I love sitting in the sun under the skylight on quiet days. I love recommending my recent favorite thriller to people. I love meeting everybody: babies, elderly people. Lonely people.

  Sarah nods. “There are some things in your favor, anyway,” she says to me. “Some good news.”

  “Yes?” I say.

  “You stayed and called 999. You did CPR. The court likes all this stuff.”

  “Yes,” I say, not telling her how close I came to walking away entirely. How easy it would have been. How much I regret it. “Is it very serious?” I say after a pause, wanting her reassurance.

  But, just like her steel-gray bag and her stern red lipstick, she doesn’t hold back. “Yes,” she murmurs. “I’m afraid so.”

  I look down at her papers, avoiding her eyes. She keeps staring at me. Not intensely. Just thoughtfully. Impassively. My eyes run over her notes, and I avert them after a second, in shock.

  I look at the wall, at the door, down at my hands. Anything to stop my brain from processing what I’ve seen, like a partner in denial about a text spotted on their other half’s mobile phone.

  But I can’t forget it.

  I can’t unsee it.

  A printout from the internet. The CPS Sentencing Guidelines. Three years was written at one end of an arrow.

  And at the other, there was simply one word.

  Life.

  9

  CONCEAL

  Reuben’s made a fry-up. The smell turns my stomach. I am now 126 pounds.

  “All right,” he says as I walk, ghostlike, into the kitchen. My pajamas are damp from sweating all night. I have made lists in my mind, lists that I am too afraid to commit to paper for fear of creating evidence.

  Tread marks. Hairs. Glove fibers. CCTV.

  Reuben kisses me on the top of my head. Unconsciously, I duck away from him, jerking my head back as though I am infectious, poisonous, and he might catch it from me. And isn’t that true? I can’t believe we were on the verge of making a baby together.

  He looks at me in surprise. I have never done anything like that—have always been the needy one, the clingy one, childlike in my need for cuddles.

  “Made you eggs,” he says, instead of asking me what’s wrong.

  I don’t reply for a second. He hates eggs. He never cooks them. “Tuesday morning cheer-up eggs.”

  I can feel tears waiting in the wings, but they won’t come. I am too frightened to cry. I can’t bring myself to say anything, either. I have become almost mute with guilt.

  “Really,” I say eventually. My voice is hoarse.

  He knows I need cheering up. What else has he noticed?

  “Look,” he says, flopping a fried egg out of the pan. I nod, once. He’s still staring at me, but I ignore him and
silently take the plate to the breakfast bar.

  I push the egg and beans around my plate. They leave orange smears that start to congeal.

  Reuben’s silent, too. He’s hurt, I can tell. He would never say so, would never be so petty as to pick an argument over eggs, but I can tell.

  “I can’t eat this,” I say. I can’t force it down my dry throat.

  I stand and scrape my egg into the bin. Right there, on top of the other rubbish in the bin, is another floppy white disk. Another egg, already in the bin, slightly blackened underneath. He must have burned the first one. Made me a second.

  * * *

  —

  Sky News is on a silent loop in the background as I dress. I try to use both hands, but my left is still useless; stiff, now, more than painful. We have a TV in our bedroom. Reuben resisted it at first, said it was dysfunctional, but I like to watch Don’t Tell the Bride and scroll through Instagram on my iPhone before bed. I loved that time.

  My top hangs off me. I can see my ribs, just below my collarbones.

  I avert my eyes from my changing body and reach for my mascara. I have to leave in half an hour, and all I am thinking is that I shouldn’t be putting on makeup. Maybe if I hadn’t worn mascara, hadn’t worn those shoes . . . maybe Sadiq would have left me alone. Maybe he’d have approached Laura instead. Or somebody else entirely. Maybe I looked up for it.

  And then he wouldn’t have followed me.

  And then it wouldn’t have happened.

  And now I wouldn’t be hiding.

  Just as I apply the last stroke of mascara, the news bulletin changes again.

  “The body of a man left for dead by the side of the canal has been identified by his sister. It is that of Imran Quarashi.”

  I am staring at the television. Waiting.

  A photo pops up. Imran in a field in the summer. They zoom in, cropping out a woman. He’s smiling. Happy.