by cass green
The rest of that night was a blur. Anastasia paid for a taxi all the way back to her room, where they had drunk brandy and cried and gone over everything time and time again.
All Liam could do since was imagine what that train would have done to the woman – Alice Adebayo was her name, he now knew because it was in the local paper.
He kept imagining her shattering into a mess of blood and bone, like someone had detonated her from the inside. This was where the nights took him now. The days were spent endlessly going over what had happened; the nights, when he finally slept, a gruesome slideshow of bodies being torn and ripped apart in different ways.
One night he’d dreamed he had looked over the platform edge but there had been no blood; just a pile of brown limbs like a doll’s, with a head sitting neatly on the top.
Liam throws back the covers and gets out of bed. He can’t stand being inside his own skin any more. He’s going to see her. They’re going to the police.
He can’t live with this a moment longer.
SUMMER 2019
ELLIOTT
Olivia Rose Little landed in our world like a tiny red-faced missile in the early hours of one June morning.
Anya had quite a long, rough labour. It all feels blurry in my mind and I haven’t even got hormonal surges to blame for the bits I can’t remember.
Because her waters broke at home early in the whole process, she was told to come in. Then, because of the Strep B, she had to be hooked up to antibiotics throughout. For hours and hours she didn’t progress but was in an uncomfortable level of pain.
Anya was, it’s fair to say, quite angry about the whole thing. When the pain became bad, she refused an epidural for some reason and I pretty much watched uselessly while she bared her teeth, told the world to ‘go fuck itself’ several times, and told me she hated me at least three times. Then, finally, a second midwife was rushing into the room. Anya transformed into an astonishing warrior woman then, who pushed out our slippery little daughter with a sound that was almost inhuman, from a deep, animal place inside her that I had never seen before.
My primary emotion was astonishment. Despite the visible evidence that Anya had been growing a small person over those months, the actual sight of her – scrunched, slimy, beautiful – was truly awe-inspiring. I didn’t even know I was crying until the midwife said something like, ‘Come on, Daddy, blow your nose,’ highlighting what a useless spare part I was in that room.
I stumbled out into a pale, drizzly dawn at about five that morning and looked around, wanting to tell someone, anyone, that I’d witnessed a miracle.
I was a dad now.
How did that work, then?
I had no precedent from my own life to show me how to do it. All I could do was think about Patrick, my only blueprint.
Anya needed a couple of stitches but was home by the following afternoon.
Neither of us really knew how to fit the car seat into the car. We hadn’t had a practice run, and as I tried to strap it into the seat, the weight of this new responsibility felt heavy round my shoulders.
Anya seemed cheerful, despite the various physical discomforts, and somehow didn’t lose patience while I battled to get it sorted out. We drove home at about twenty-five mph, just in case it still wasn’t completely safe, and came into the house as three for the first time.
Livi – as we slipped into calling her within days – was asleep and I laid the car seat in the middle of the living room and gazed down at her. Her tiny chin was creased inwards, her lips puckering as she dreamed of suckling.
We met eyes across the room and Anya said, ‘What the fuck do we do now then?’ and we both started to laugh. It was an exhausted, slightly hysterical sound and in that moment, for the first time, I felt something settling inside me. A peace, despite the fear this new unknown brought. Maybe we really could put all the secrets behind us now. Maybe Anya, me, and Livi would be a self-sufficient unit.
But Anya’s post-birth happiness only lasted for a couple of days. The health visitor arrived a few days after she came home and found her crying on the sofa, Livi screaming for milk and in a wet nappy upstairs with the bedroom door closed.
I arrived back from the supermarket a little while later. Anya tried to make light of it, saying she had been told that day three or four was classic ‘baby blues’ time. The health visitor – a young, thin woman with spiky blonde hair, glasses and a gentle country accent – said that it was indeed common to feel like this. But she emphasized that Anya needed to sleep ‘when baby slept’ and generally try to look after herself.
I’d been trying to feed Anya as much as possible but she claimed she felt sick and only seemed to want Diet Coke and toast. When I voiced this to the health visitor, Anya had given me a look that gave me an unpleasant jolt. There was a hardness there, bordering on dislike, that chilled me a little.
The next two weeks, before I went back to work, passed in a blur of broken nights and meals eaten with one hand, our snuffly little animal pressed into our necks, other hand against her squirmy, delicate back.
One night I woke up suddenly, drenched in shock. I couldn’t work out what was wrong until I realized Livi wasn’t even making her usual nocturnal grunts and snorts. Anya was so deeply asleep I couldn’t sense her breathing. Moonlight edging the curtains in a glowing border gave the room an unearthly feel and my heart was thudding so hard it felt as though it would push its way out of my chest.
Scrambling out of bed, I raced round to Anya’s side to the Moses basket on its stand next to her.
Livi was lying with her arms flung back, chest rising and falling quickly. She let out a surprisingly loud fart and I held my breath in case it woke her, but it didn’t.
A wave of pure, sweet joy at this funny little girl spread through me.
It was a shock when I looked at Anya and saw her eyes were wide open, the moonlight making them shine oddly.
Then she spoke, in a wide-awake voice that was a bit too loud.
‘I’m not sure I want to do it.’
‘What?’ I whispered, puzzled.
But she turned over then and her breathing told me she was asleep again within seconds.
Just as we were beginning to fall into some sort of new routine as a three, something happened that sent everything spinning once again.
Julia hadn’t been round at ours to help with Livi as much as I’d expected, citing a series of bugs that had laid her low. Then, when Livi was three months old, Anya rang me at work in a hysterical state. Julia had been diagnosed with Adult Acute Myeloid Leukaemia – cancer of the blood and bone marrow.
The remission rate for treatment, we learned over that next week, was high, but the relapse rate, in turn, was also high.
When I got home that night, I could hear Livi screaming from outside the house. I let myself in with the key and found our daughter, puce-faced and roaring her outrage from her bouncy chair in the kitchen. I scooped her up and she arched her back and yelled even harder. Shushing and murmuring nonsense words, I took her to the changing table and sorted out the Armageddon in her nappy that had seeped yellow up to her hairline.
I shouted for Anya, but she didn’t reply. I could hear movement above though, and once I had cleaned up the baby and myself, I carried her against my shoulder and climbed the stairs. She was only making little grunty sounds now.
Anya was in our bedroom, leaning into the wardrobe. A wheelie case was open on the bed and she turned and threw in tops that she was wrenching out so hard the hangers were bouncing and tinkling together.
‘What the hell are you doing? Didn’t you hear the baby crying?’ I said.
She didn’t look at me as she yanked a cardigan down and rolled it into a messy ball before stuffing it into the side of the case.
‘She was alright,’ she said. ‘Mum needs me. I’m going over.’
I was momentarily speechless.
‘They need peace and quiet, surely?’ I said, trying to keep my voice level. ‘You can’t take a
small baby there.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ she said crisply.
Anger burned, hot and quick then. Here we were again. Anya running ‘home’.
‘It won’t be fine!’ I said, trying not to shout, because Livi was stirring at the air of stress in the room and I didn’t want to set her off. ‘It’ll be noisy and unrelaxing and everything Julia doesn’t need right now!’
She turned to me, eyes glittering with unshed tears and wired energy.
‘What do you know about it?’ she snapped. ‘I know my mum better than you ever will.’
I sucked in my breath then. I’d never seen her like this before. She had an almost feral air about her, like she would attack if pushed into a corner. It was as though all the usual guy ropes of her reason that tethered her to the ground had been severed.
‘I’m only going for a few days, while she has the first round of treatment,’ she said, her voice a little more reasonable now.
I stared at her as she went to the chest of drawers and then began throwing balls of paired socks into the open case.
I laid our daughter, who was watching us with her knowing baby eyes through all this, on the small sofa under our window. Anya glanced up at me and turned back to what she was doing. I pushed the lid on the case closed, making Anya turn again with a surprised expression.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘You’re not going to stay there,’ I said. Her eyebrows shot up and she took a step back, before giving a sharp little laugh.
‘Look at you, all macho,’ she said. ‘And why is that, oh Lord and Master?’
‘Because it would be extremely selfish to do that,’ I said, keeping my voice even. She glared back at me.
‘How’s that then?’ she said.
‘You can’t take a small baby into a house where someone needs to rest.’
Anya regarded me then shrugged.
‘I’ll leave Livi here then,’ she said.
‘What the fuck, Anya? I’m at work!’
‘Take a few days off,’ she said flatly. ‘Not like you haven’t before.’
Maybe the anger was still a leftover from what had happened in the autumn but the next thing I knew was that I was shoving the whole case onto the floor, where it landed upside down, spilling clothes into a slithery pile on the carpet.
‘No,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘This isn’t happening.’
Anya looked at me with wide, shocked eyes. I hated myself then for frightening her. I wished the baby hadn’t seen my actions too.
Then my wife’s face crumpled and she began to cry, silently at first.
Covering her eyes with her hands, she slid down the wall into a ball on the carpet and I felt something soften inside me. I went round and crouched next to her, pulling her into my arms where she shook and sobbed.
She said something I couldn’t decipher and I gently asked her to repeat it.
Anya pulled away and then looked up at me, her eyes pink-tinged and her nose running a glistening line to her top lip.
‘I’m being punished, Ell,’ she said, bottom lip squaring into another sob. ‘It’s never going to go away. I’ll never be allowed to be happy.’
I hugged her and shushed her, much as I had our baby ten minutes before. I told her she wasn’t being punished and that she needed to stop thinking that way.
She murmured something else into my shoulder.
‘What’s that?’
‘She hates me,’ she said. ‘The baby.’
This chilled me. I had no idea what to say and just hugged her a little harder.
AUTUMN 2003
LIAM
Liam checks his watch as the bus winds its way around the lanes. It’s cloudy but hot today and the heat seems to squeeze his already aching head like a giant fist.
A baby is crying at the front of the bus, a piercing sound that drills into his brain while its mother casts defiant, angry looks around at the other passengers, as though daring them to say anything. An old man is mumbling to himself gently in front of Liam and he sighs at how depressing it all is. Lately, all he can think about is white sand and deep blue sky. Something different to this endless grey that feels like it is filling him up from the inside and suffocating him.
Why on earth they had to meet there, he had no idea.
When he had called Anastasia and told her they needed to talk, that this couldn’t go on any longer, she had been surprisingly calm on the phone. He’d expected a bit more of a fight but she had quietly told him she agreed, then suggested they go for a walk out towards Chesterton where they could speak freely.
He had complained about this plan but she insisted she needed to build up to telling people and that he shouldn’t push her. So he agreed, and now he was on this sick-making bus in the middle of frigging nowhere.
Liam doesn’t want to ask the driver where to get off because it feels a bit naff, but it strikes him now he has no real idea where he is going. Thankfully, after another five minutes or so, he sees a sign advertising the adventure trail playground and remembers Anastasia saying to meet him on the opposite side of the woods to there. Near somewhere called Camelot Lake.
He leans over to the middle-aged woman sitting on the seat opposite him and says, ‘’Scuse me, love,’ with a grin. Her first flash of suspicion melts away at his easy smile, just as he knew it would, and he keeps it fixed on his face as he asks her how many more stops to the one nearest the lake.
She tells him to get off at the next one and then to head in past the car park. He thanks her, then pings the bell. Giving her another smile as he exits the bus, he feels for his rollie tin in his pocket.
There is a trail leading off from near the bus stop and he lights up the rollie as he makes his way into the trees. It feels gloomy in here, the pale light of this muggy day not penetrating the dense tree cover. But now he has made the decision, he feels a little lighter than he has for the last week or so. He’s fully prepared to take the blame for giving Anastasia the drugs. He knows exactly what this means, and what his mother is going to think. But he hopes that one day she will be able to be a little bit proud of him for finally doing the right thing.
When he has smoked the rollie, he crushes the butt underfoot, then gets out his phone to call Anastasia. He’ll see if she is here yet. But all he gets is the discordant chime of the ‘number no longer in service’ message. His spine stiffens at this and he wishes he didn’t have the curdle of disappointment in his stomach. What did he expect, after today? That they could still be friends?
Ahead he sees the trees opening out and the blue of a car bonnet.
He steps into the car park and sees Anya leaning up against a car on the other side of the small car park – a black Beamer. She pulls herself away in one fluid motion and Liam swallows down the feeling that swells in his chest at the sight of her, the effect she always has on him.
She gives him a small smile, which he returns, a little uncertainly. He can’t quite work out how he is meant to be today; what sort of mood to strike with her. He’s fully prepared for a row, almost certainly for tears … but he is adamant that he won’t be budged now he has reached this major decision.
‘Let’s have a wander,’ she says.
He still hasn’t spoken as they head into the trees towards the lake. There is a smell of damp leaves and the white sky makes the bare trees look ominous and spiky. A Canada goose takes flight by the water with a slow crack of wings, almost like a mechanical thing.
There is a neglected-looking bench in long grass at one end of the small lake and Anya heads for there and then sits, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. Liam steals a glance at her. She’s in jeans and a white T-shirt, with battered white Converse on her feet. When she lifts her arm to push back her hair from her face, metal bangles jingle against her creamy skin. Liam feels a stab of pain in his chest, remembering the way they stretched out their arms and compared hand sizes as they lay in that attic room, warm and happy in the after-sex glow.
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‘So what are we going to do then?’ she says after a moment’s silence, still looking out at the water.
Liam hesitates.
‘I think you know,’ he says quietly. ‘There’s only one thing we can do.’
‘I’ll say you spiked my drink,’ she says and he twists to look at her. There’s a gap between her easy tone and the content of what she said that he doesn’t understand, an unknowable space.
He turns his head back to the water and gets out the rollie tin again, more for something to do than a genuine desire for nicotine.
‘You can if you want,’ he says easily and it’s Anastasia’s turn to look at him now. He lights up and turns slightly. Her face is pinched and furious and he recognizes that she has been doing a very good job of pretending to be calm until now.
‘I’ll deny it,’ he continues, ‘but even if they don’t take my word for it, it’s a price I’m willing to pay. I just can’t walk around another day knowing what I know.’
Anastasia is silent, then very softly murmurs, ‘No …’ almost on a breath.
An urge to cry washes over Liam now, and he sucks hard on the damp paper of the rollie, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs.
‘Why did you do it?’ he says now and Anastasia sighs heavily and thumps both feet back down onto the ground at the same time.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I can’t really remember. I was just so … angry. I wanted you to pay attention and listen. Just to listen.’
They meet eyes then, two sets of such similar light brown, like they are twins. The sadness in Liam’s chest seems to swell. Something softens in her expression and he feels the creep of her hand reaching for his. They squeeze hands tightly and a kind of relief, a glimpse not of peace, but of a time when it might be on the horizon, steals into his brain.
‘I’ll explain that it was all about the coke,’ he says. ‘And that I gave it to you.’ His words are coming out too quickly now, in the relief of this being so much easier than he expected. ‘I bet it will be worse for me than it will for you at the end of the day.’
