The Choice

by Gillian McAllister

  And that’s what makes me want to tell him.

  “I was talking to Sarah about how long the guy was facedown in the water . . .”

  “In the water?” Reuben says.

  “Yes.”

  He doesn’t say anything, but something in his body language changes. It stills. I am about to tell him, but then he is looking at me peculiarly. It is as though he is reassessing me.

  “And how long was it?” he says.

  “No time, really,” I lie. “I got him out straight away. But she asked,” I add uselessly.

  Reuben nods, once, a firm, downward movement. “Good,” he says. “She probably just . . . she’s probably just checking.”

  “Yes. It was immediate.”

  He doesn’t say anything else. I give it a few seconds, but he sips his coffee, swallows audibly, and then sips again. Not speaking. Not quite looking at me.

  But I can read his features so well, even though what I see on them now surprises me. He is usually sympathetic to the wrongdoer, the underdog. But now I see his brow wrinkle, his top lip curl up slightly, and I know that he is thinking, How could you do this, Jo? But he doesn’t say it. Why would he?

  11

  CONCEAL

  It’s all over the newspapers.

  I can’t google it. Can’t ask anyone. Can’t browse BBC News on an iPad, for fear of leaving an evidence trail, but I can read it in the papers that come every morning—the papers Reuben devours with his coffee.

  I grab the local newspaper before he can and spread it out in the sunlit kitchen. It’s stopped sleeting, finally, and outside the frost sparkles in the light.

  The police are treating his death as suspicious, an article on page nine says. I read that sentence over and over. They are appealing for anybody who was in the area that night to come forward. The funeral will be next Monday, it adds.

  I go to bundle the paper up, to throw it away before Reuben sees and asks me if I have volunteered what I know, but then I see the quote, in bold. Imran will be missed, it says. It is signed off Mohammed Abdullah, Imam, Paddington Mosque. He will be missed. Because of me.

  I screw the paper up and take it outside, putting it in Edith’s recycling bin. My left hand aches as I do so. I call the GP. I’ll make something up, I reason. I make an appointment. I’ll get that hand sorted, if nothing else.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, I swing my legs out of bed. The ever-present sweat evaporates off them, feeling like needles on my skin.

  I haven’t hidden any evidence yet. I have been watching endless Netflix episodes in the night when I can’t sleep and not doing anything about my problems. It is classic Joanna, Reuben would say, if he knew. Vintage Joanna. Not in a disparaging way. Just in a factual way: It is what I do.

  Only, I’m not able to ignore it completely. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Usually, I have no trouble ignoring things. The huge gas bill we got that quarter when I had the heating on constantly. I just hid the bill under the bed. The lump in my armpit I had for more than eighteen months but never saw the doctor about. It went away, in the end, but what if it hadn’t? And yet this—this I can’t ignore. It keeps popping into my mind, making me sweat and shake intermittently.

  I’ve got to get rid of the evidence. That’s the most important thing. I’m not trying to get away with it. Not yet. I can’t decide that. The guilt is too bad. But I need to protect myself. For the time being. And that starts now.

  I call work, speak to Daisy in the office, say I’m at the doctor’s. I’ll go in later. And, next week, when I really do go to the doctor for my hand, I’ll have to say I’m somewhere else. I’ve got form for this unreliability, sadly, a fact Wilf—who has never called in sick once—finds astonishing.

  We were the Murphy siblings. Off to Oxbridge. Ruling the school, in the musicals and the orchestras and the swimming teams. We were almost famous. We used to be so similar. We were high achievers, but we were also piss-abouts, behind the scenes. Used to do our homework reluctantly so we could be free to find our Narnias in the back garden (Wilf once did a wee in the bushes and Dad told him off for being vulgar) and bounce on our beds. We were allies against our oppressive parents and the silent, huge house. And then he changed. Or rather, I floundered. I went to Oxford and couldn’t do it without somebody cracking the whip, and Wilf . . . well, he rose to it. Becoming the kind of person who enters six marathons a year and talks endlessly about training runs. The kind of person who has extreme opinions about the stock markets and discusses them in Zizzi at your thirtieth birthday dinner—for example.

  And so, despite what he’d say, I feel no guilt in calling in sick. I’m not even a librarian. I am unqualified. It hardly matters. Besides, it’s Ed’s day off today, thank God. Hopefully he’ll never realize I have been off, too.

  I can’t make a list, and so I sit on the end of our bed and consider the evidence. I itemize it in my mind.

  My coat.

  My shoes.

  CCTV.

  My gloves.

  My scarf.

  My appearance.

  Witnesses.

  DNA?

  I catch sight of myself in the mirrored wardrobe doors and wince. It’s all so amateur. If this had happened to Reuben—not that any of it ever would have, I think with a frown, not only because of his morals but also because of his gender—he would have had some idea of what to do. Do police look at the tread of a shoe at a crime scene? Do they check every CCTV camera, question everyone in the area, search for minuscule bits of DNA that might have drifted down onto the steps? Or would they think: This is unexplained; perhaps this man tripped? I have no idea. None.

  The first thing I must do is get rid of everything I was wearing.

  I can’t burn them. It would draw too much attention. I don’t want to bin them. I would worry about where they’d end up, that they could be traced to me.

  Sainsbury’s, I think. There’s a clothing bank. I could put them in there. They will become anonymous, tangled with all the other clothes. I get in the car, having stuffed the clothes and shoes—those beautiful shoes, with their cream ribbons, worn once—in a reusable bag, and drive there. My hands are slick with sweat on the steering wheel and leave an imprint on the plastic door handle as I get out.

  I stand next to my car, the milky winter sunlight in my eyes. A man is ahead of me at the clothing bank, meticulously opening and closing the tray as he loads blouses and skirts onto it. I cannot help but stop and stare at him. It’s not what he’s doing. It’s the look on his face. I think he’s trying not to cry. His chin quivers violently. His hands shake.

  I can see the clothes from my position by the car. A sage-green blouse. A creased-up linen skirt. A pair of pointed shoes with a heel. As I stare at him, he clutches a cream blouse and brings it up to his nose.

  They’re a wife’s clothes, I find myself solemnly thinking. No wonder his chin shakes. I wonder how many weeks or months it has taken him to accept it. To clear out her side of the wardrobe—to bring the clothes here—and to donate them.

  How could I possibly go over and interrupt that? Not only interrupt it, but taint it, with my sordid activity?

  What if I am found out? And he—a widower—is called to court, because he witnessed me burying evidence, and is forced to relive the day he finally summoned the courage to throw away his wife’s clothes? I couldn’t make him do that.

  I stand in the cold sunlight and continue to study him. He’s well dressed, with a nice car. They had a nice life, I think. Barbecues every bank holiday Monday with their friends. Three children who visit all the time, not like me and Wilf, weirdly aloof but needily competitive, too. Little bowls of Maltesers and M&M’S around the house, and not just at Christmas. She will have loved Glade PlugIns, and I bet he would have been irritated by their synthetic smells. I can picture them now. I turn away. I can’t bear
it. His sadness.

  I shouldn’t put all the clothes in one bin, anyway. I should spread them out.

  I’ll take them somewhere else.

  It is the first time in my entire life that I am being meticulous. That I am thinking and planning and going over things. And it is to get away with murder.

  It would surprise everyone. This attention to detail I’m exhibiting. Everyone except Reuben. He wouldn’t be surprised at all.

  “That brain,” he had once said, almost sadly, to me, at Wagamama’s for lunch when I seamlessly ordered eight dishes for everyone from memory.

  Wilf was looking at me carefully.

  “Joanna’s brain?” Mum had said. “Silly Joanna?”

  Silly Joanna has its roots in a phrase Mum, Dad, and—sometimes—Wilf used to say, while laughing. They would laugh when I admitted I didn’t know whether Germany had a coastline or confessed that I wouldn’t know how to start a fire. Joanna could never survive on a desert island, they would say, while laughing at the very thought of it.

  Reuben’s expression had darkened at that. In the car, on the way home, he had said, “Do they always do that?”

  “Do what?” I’d said.

  “Drag you down.”

  “They’re only joking,” I had said meekly, and he’d looked at me, aghast.

  I smile faintly at the memory now. He’d be proud of me, if it weren’t for the subject matter.

  I am facing Sainsbury’s, away from the man, still holding my bag of things, not really looking, when my eyes land on it.

  On the side of the building. Like a webcam. White, with one black eye. A CCTV camera, it must be. My eyes trail across it. There’s another. And another on the far corner. I crane my neck, leaning out of the car window. I see them, different shapes—some rectangular, some like domes, some shabby and rusted—stuck to the buildings on the other side of the street. A café. A deli. A card and gift shop. It’s like the whole world is opening up in front of me. I’ve never noticed before. CCTV. CCTV. CCTV. It’s everywhere. Like ants in a nest, the more I look, the more I see. It’s everywhere. It’s absolutely fucking everywhere.

  It is only a matter of time before they find me.

  People do not get away with murder. And this is one of the reasons why.

  I see my attack framed in the lenses of a hundred cameras, a kaleidoscope of Joannas and Imrans. My back to the camera, as I push him. A side view of my hand lifting up, striking his. A view from down the canal, Imran tumbling down the steps. My mind skitters into irrationality. A view, close-up, of Imran’s face as he dies, as he breathes in the water. A view from inside as he struggles for breath. From inside his cells as they die. From inside those cells’ nuclei as the lights go out. From inside his brain as his memories die and become nothing at all.

  It’s remarkable that here I am, a killer, and I am still outside Sainsbury’s. That Sainsbury’s even exists.

  I go inside, just in case anybody’s keeping an eye on me. I’ll buy something. Anything. So as not to arouse suspicion.

  I pay at the kiosk, holding a pint of milk, trying not to think. The handle cools my fingers.

  A paper catches my eye as I queue. I almost rub my eyes in astonishment.

  CANAL-SIDE RACE HATE

  Race hate? Race hate?

  I shift closer to the paper, trying not to draw attention to myself. I can’t buy it, of course. I can’t even reach and touch it—there’s probably a bloody camera right behind me—but if I shift a bit, I can read the front page.

  I scan it quickly. They think it was racially aggravated. Because he was Pakistani, Muslim, I think dully. That area of London has been rife with racial unrest.

  I stand, staring at the paper, holding my milk, and thinking of Reuben. He is always my first thought. Poor Reuben, and the work he does for his charity.

  I pay for my milk in cash: 45p.

  How can they decide it was racially aggravated when it wasn’t? How can they unilaterally tell their side of the story? What about mine?

  But then, I think, as the automatic doors open for me, why wouldn’t they? This is the price I pay for anonymity. I have no right of reply. No right to even ask them why they think that. A man is dead because of me, and living with people’s assumptions about my motivations is surely part of my punishment. I can’t believe I’m even thinking it. I have no rights in this situation, and nor should I. None at all.

  I get in my car again and stare at my mobile like it is a snake about to attack me. I could call now: 999. Or google the number for the nearest police station. Drive there and end it all.

  I reach over and hold the phone in my hand. It’s weighty. One call, and I would likely go to prison for life. Life. It’s said so casually on the news. But—life. One call, and I could explain, to those dear to me, how it happened. That I was frightened. That it wasn’t about his race. That I didn’t leave because I didn’t think . . . because I didn’t think that his Pakistani life mattered.

  There are a million reasons to call, of course. To do the right thing. To make amends. So the family can finally know what’s happened. To trust in the justice system that it won’t punish a good person for making a bad mistake, and let it decide my fate for me. So I can stop lying to Reuben. So I can stop living with it, stop waiting for the police to knock on the door. All those pros, listed out in my mind. All those pros, and then just one con, but with a weight as dense as mercury: I would more than likely go to prison. Jail. Inside. Just one con, but it matters more than any of the others.

  I turn on the car’s ignition, the bag of soiled clothes with—no doubt—Imran’s DNA on them sitting next to me like a bomb.

  * * *

  —

  That afternoon, I think, I’ll put them out. For charity. I’ll go through the donation bags left over in our kitchen, and then the incriminating items will be gone, jumbled up with everybody else’s, like unidentifiable faces in a crowd.

  I’ll say I was having a clear-out, if anybody asks. Only those close to me will know how unlikely that is. I’ll tell them I read an article recently about minimalism. And even if they don’t believe me, confusing my loved ones is the best option I have now.

  It’s better than the alternative: keeping the clothes, hanging like specters in the back of my wardrobe.

  * * *

  —

  Reuben’s father sends me a text. He texts me often. He started tentatively, when he got a mobile, but texts in earnest now. It’s always overly formal, and almost always signed off with a P, but I like them.

  I don’t open the message now. Can’t look.

  It’s already after two in the afternoon, and I am rifling in our kitchen drawer for four charity bags that I will distribute evenly along our road, each containing a contaminated, criminal piece of clothing. I should be at work, of course. No doctor’s appointment takes this long. Much longer, and they’ll request a note, but it’s hard to care.

  The gloves in one. Cancer Research. The scarf in another. Barnardo’s. Laundering my possessions through a charitable system. I disgust myself.

  I pause over the shoes and the coat.

  The shoes. Ordered Before. An emblem of my life as it once was. An ASOS order I knew would irritate my husband. Frivolous shoes before a much-anticipated night out. My only problem’s the credit card bills and the pinching sensation the shoes produced in my toes.

  The coat. Filled with duck feathers. A present from Reuben, for my thirtieth. I have no idea how much it cost. I expect hundreds. But I was always shivering, on the way to work, in a stupid trench coat, the skin on my arms cold to the touch when I arrived. I didn’t think he’d noticed. And then, in August, the day I turned thirty, he placed a squishy, large package on the bed. It was the coat. “Ready for the winter,” Reuben said. I have worn it every day. It’s like a duvet. Wrapping me up, reminding me of him as I walk to work.


  I ball it up, bringing it to myself like it’s a baby, squeezing it tight. The feathers inside it crinkle underneath my arms. I bury my head in it as though it is his and he is long gone. Just like the man in Sainsbury’s did. Only, I am saying good-bye to myself. To the Joanna whose husband bought her thoughtful birthday presents.

  I shove it in the last bag. Macmillan Cancer Support.

  I put the bags in my car. I’ll deposit them along another road, next to bins and by doorsteps.

  But first: the shoes. They are too distinctive. I can’t risk it with those.

  I drive to the dump on a whim, the shoes sitting on the passenger seat next to me. I look at them as we sit at traffic lights and at junctions. Right outside the recycling center, I see the sign.

  This waste disposal center is monitored with 24/7 CCTV: Smile—you’re on camera.

  I loop back around, driving past the sign, pretending I was never going in. My lower back is sweating against the seat. My legs tremble so much my feet slide off the pedals. There are cameras everywhere. It would only take one to see me acting suspiciously, disposing of evidence, for them to know. I can’t go to the dump, and I can’t put the bags out, either.

  I return home with the bags and the shoes and shove them in the back of my wardrobe.

  12

  REVEAL

  Westminster Magistrates’ Court is not how I imagined. We are here for my bail hearing. This happens at the magistrates’ court. The trial happens at the Crown Court. Mine will be at the Old Bailey, Sarah tells me.

  The magistrates’ court looks like a sixties office block, the grandeur only apparent if you get closer and can see the crest with the lions on it. Otherwise, it’s an unassuming building in central London where, inside, people’s lives are changed forever. If it wasn’t me, if it wasn’t my bail hearing, it would be so interesting. These people at the heart of the justice system, at the juncture between freedom and imprisonment. The lawyers in robes sweeping by. The divide between the suits and the laypeople who have wronged, or are unfortunate enough to know somebody who has.