Little Disasters

by Sarah Vaughan

  ‘Are they checking up on me? Perhaps they’re questioning his statement? Why would they doubt him? I’d better text.’ She jabs away at her mobile phone. Maybe she should just call him, but what if he’d contacted the police? She’d avoided him when he got in from football last night; too ashamed to mention her impromptu visit to the hospital which she suspected Lucy would be discussing. When he set off to spend the night at the hospital, she pretended to be asleep.

  ‘They must want to talk to him about me.’

  ‘Come on. Let’s go,’ Martha repeats. She has been a source of support, though her presence makes it impossible not to feel redundant. Increasingly, Jess finds herself withdrawing. ‘What did you think about keeping the boys off school?’ Martha prompts her. ‘Are you happy with that?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ She is so distracted she barely takes it in.

  ‘Did you hear that, boys? We’re going to skive for the day!’

  Frankie punches the air and starts running around the room; Kit smiles at his aunt’s rebellion.

  ‘Some fresh air will do them good.’ Martha starts filling water bottles. ‘We’re not going to stay in, cooped up. We’re going to explore.’

  *

  They set out for Richmond Park. Jess manoeuvres her four-by-four through the London traffic; her driving by turns reckless and tentative.

  ‘Careful!’ Martha sucks in her breath. ‘Bit close to that car!’

  A horn blasts. ‘Watch where you’re fucking going!’ The driver of a white Ford Transit gives her the finger, his aggression spilling towards them; startling the boys into being quiet.

  She sees danger in every direction: cars ploughing into her; her children shrieking; her bonnet crumpling. Her breath flutters. She barely knows what she is doing: the vision of a van swerving off course and smashing into them is so strong.

  Another blast of a horn. She rams on the brakes and pulls into the side.

  ‘You OK?’

  She screws her eyes up tight. Their car hares to the right, her boys scream over the screech of tyres and the thud of metal. But the car’s not moving. Her hands are shaking but somehow she has stopped and wrenched on the handbrake.

  ‘Not really. Could you drive?’

  In the passenger seat, she shrinks into herself, letting Martha’s conversation wash over her. She didn’t crash the car. Of course she didn’t crash the car. They are all safe, Frankie chanting, ‘Look where you’re fucking going,’ Martha driving sensibly, eyes flicking to the mirror, hands at ten to two.

  She must focus on the boys. ‘OK, both of you?’ she asks, twisting around.

  ‘OK, Mum.’ Kit is her brave boy: conscious, with a ten-year-old’s newfound maturity, of the need to reassure her.

  Frankie is preoccupied with his Blu Tack: folding it over and over then rolling it between his fingers like overworked pastry. The ‘fucking goings’ have finally subsided.

  ‘OK, Frank?’ She wills him to look up at her. He gives a quick nod.

  *

  They tramp over rough grass and push into the centre of the park, as far from the roads and civilisation as possible. Kit loves it. He bounds ahead, evidently relieved to be free. Frankie is more hesitant: stumbling over the uneven ground, spinning his fidget spinner that catches the light, until he spies a herd of deer grazing beneath a tree.

  ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Look, Mum, look!’

  ‘Shhhhhh.’ A shot of adrenalin races through her. ‘You have to be quiet, Frankie.’

  A stag raises his head and she grips his hand, squeezing it tight. Will it lower its head and charge at them? He is regal. Imperious. Coldly assessing.

  She sees Frankie tossed as effortlessly as a pile of laundry; watches the stag gore him, antlers sinking into his abdomen, his jumper bleeding vermillion red. The herd joins in and Frankie is thrown high into the air: dark hair flying, neck snapped, limbs hanging at obtuse angles. Then they dance on his body: bones crushed, kicked, cracked.

  ‘Jess!’ Martha is racing through the grass towards her; grabs her arm; pulls her and Frankie back. ‘What are you doing? Move! Now!’

  ‘I . . . I’m sorry.’

  ‘Christ. What’s wrong? You were standing there frozen. Don’t you know you should never just stand stock-still like that?’

  ‘Why not, Martha? Why not?’ Frankie, sensing danger, skips along.

  Her sister ignores him, so he shifts his attention: ‘Was he going to get us, Mummy? He looked as if he would get us.’

  ‘Shh, Frankie,’ Jess manages, and then to Martha, ‘Of course I didn’t, no.’

  How can she explain that she saw her son being disembowelled; that she sees death and danger all around her: when driving the car, when using a knife, when pushing a buggy, when walking down the stairs. That Betsey’s admission was the point when she tipped from a state where she could just contain her fears into an abyss where they spill out, limitless. That anticipating danger is her default position. That she fears she may be going insane.

  ‘Come on,’ Martha links her arm through hers. Jess feels her sister’s warmth and weight against her ribs. ‘Let’s catch up with Kit.’

  Where is he? She strains to see a figure heading for the horizon.

  ‘Kit. Kit . . .’ Her voice betrays her fear. What if he’s been abducted? What if he’s being abused? Who knows what might be happening now he’s out of sight? There may be paedophiles hiding behind the trees, ready to bundle him into a van, the crook of their arm locked around his neck, hands fumbling with their flies in anticipation. Fear catches in her throat like an irrepressible tickle; she begins to run.

  ‘It’s all right.’ Martha lumbers to catch her up. ‘He’s not going to come to any harm.’

  But how can she be sure?

  ‘He’ll be fine – look, there he is.’

  And so he is. Bending over to do up a shoelace. She rushes up to him and hugs him close.

  ‘Muu-um.’

  ‘Are you OK?’ She peers into his face, searching for any sign that he’s been harmed.

  ‘Of course I am. This is brilliant, isn’t it? Can we come more often? Why haven’t we been here before?’

  Because the place is riddled with danger, she wants to say. Because nothing here is certain.

  ‘I’d forgotten this was here.’

  ‘So we can come again?’

  ‘I guess so . . . if you really want to.’ She tries again, though it’s so very difficult. ‘Yes. Of course we can.’

  But her ordeal isn’t over. They have come to a small copse of oaks, the tree trunks sturdy.

  ‘They look quite scalable,’ Martha is saying. ‘I bet you like climbing trees, don’t you, Kit?’

  He glances at his mother. ‘I haven’t really climbed one.’

  ‘Jess!’ Martha half-teases then stops, incredulous. ‘Really? Well, why don’t you have a go?’ She gestures to a particularly fine oak, its bark mossed with green, imprinted with whorls, and studded with the stubs of branches on which to get a hold.

  ‘Wait a minute, he can’t do this,’ Jess manages, as her insides turn molten. He can’t trust that the branches will be strong and evenly positioned; that he’ll have the spatial awareness and fearlessness to get to the top. ‘I really don’t think he should,’ she adds, but her voice is weak and the words float away.

  ‘Jess.’ Martha puts her hands on her upper arms and looks her in the eye. ‘I know you’re under a lot of strain but he needs to enjoy just being a little boy. He needs to challenge himself. To be allowed to live in the moment. Otherwise you’re doing him a disservice. You’re not preparing him for life.’

  ‘I can do it, Mum. I know I can.’ Kit buzzes with energy. ‘Dad would let me do it . . .’ And, before she has a chance to concede that yes, Ed might let him but this isn’t on his watch, he’s not here; or to tell Martha that she needs to keep Kit and Frankie close, and out of harm’s way, he has pulled himself up onto the first rough stub of branch.

  ‘Go on, Kit,’ Frankie calls, jumping w
ith excitement, as his brother searches for the next handhold, the muscles in his calves straining as he eases himself up and away.

  ‘To your right, Kit, just above you . . .’ adds Martha, her face flushed with the excitement of it all.

  ‘Do be careful, Kit-bob.’ Jess reverts to his baby name. ‘Just concentrate, won’t you, Kit?’

  ‘I’m fine, Mum,’ he says as he pulls himself up to the next level, eyes searching for the next foothold. ‘Look! I can do this!’ and he turns his head and smiles.

  Don’t look at me! she wants to scream. ‘Just concentrate,’ she hears herself say. ‘No talking. And don’t look down.’

  ‘O-ka-ay!’ His voice drifts: cocky, carefree, the voice of a boy who has no concept that he might fall.

  This is what being a mother is about, she thinks, not wanting to look yet mesmerised by his agile body going higher and higher. Letting your children take little steps until they abandon you completely and you are left quite alone. Learning to relinquish control from the moment they begin to crawl until they are scaling trees, cycling to school, leaving home. Out in the big, wide world where she can no longer control what’s happening or offer any protection at all.

  She does not think she can do this. Live without managing to keep them safe, or knowing they are safe. Look what happened with Betsey. That one, stupid decision to leave them has upended her world. Her baby’s in hospital, the police are crawling all over them, and she thinks back to DC Rustin on the doorstep, her stomach cramping with anxiety. She would do anything to reverse what she did now.

  And so she mustn’t take her eyes off her boys but focus all her energy on keeping them safe. If she concentrates intently, perhaps she can keep Kit from harm. She is shaking, though, knees quivering as she wills him to make each move safely, to test each branch and not shift his weight until he’s absolutely sure he can go on.

  He’s going too high. He’s going too high. He’s going too high.

  ‘You’re going too high, Kit. No more please.’

  ‘Jess, he’s fine.’

  Martha puts her arm around her shoulders and she wants to shrug her off. It’s not like when we were small. When you could dare me to swim across the cove, or scramble up a cliff and I would do it. The stakes are so much higher. These are MY children. Instead, she keeps very still. ‘Don’t move,’ she hisses at her sister. ‘Don’t do anything that might distract him at all.’

  ‘You’re going reeeeaally high, Kit,’ Frankie calls. ‘He’s really high, isn’t he, Mummy? Go higher, Kit. High as a kite.’

  ‘Shh. He’s too high, Frank.’

  He has stopped climbing. His body, in its skinny jeans and Puffa jacket, is splayed against the bark, unmoving. His toes have found a crevice; his arms stretch wide.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Jess asks.

  ‘I think I’m a bit stuck. I don’t know where to put my feet . . .’ Kit’s voice floats down, high-pitched and suddenly too young.

  ‘That’s all right, darling,’ she says, moving closer. ‘You’re fine. You’re absolutely fine. You just need to come down now and not go any higher.’ She focuses on keeping her voice strong.

  He must be eighteen feet up. How did he get so high? High enough for a fall to prove fatal? ‘I’ll help you,’ she calls out – and of course she will. She can do this. She has to do this. To get him safely down.

  She skims the trunk with its ancient grooves and ridges, its furrows and dips that might prove steady if he presses his weight against them.

  ‘If you move your left foot – no, not that one, your left one – if you move it down a bit there’s a hollow. That’s it . . .’ Relief as his sneaker finds it. ‘Now, if you move your right hand you can put it on the tufty bit there.’

  ‘Here?’ He nods towards a whorl of trunk with fresh shoots sprouting from it, and she sees that he is blinking back tears.

  ‘That’s it. Well done.’

  He eases half a metre down.

  ‘Brilliant.’ Her voice sings with relief. ‘Now, if you put your left one down a little, that’s it, yes-’ He makes the step down, again, his foot juddering against the bark and causing her heart to skip. ‘-and your right there . . . yes, there . . . you’ve got it . . .’ He is now just twelve feet from the ground. Not much further and she’ll be able to touch him, help him down. ‘If you can put your left down a bit – on that branch there . . . yes that’s right, that one . . . then you’ll be fine.’

  Her anxiety is a helium balloon held in her chest but she can feel it rising from her, floating up, up and away the closer he comes. Twelve feet. Eleven. Ten. So tantalisingly close. Any moment now she’ll be able to pull him into a hug. She doesn’t hold him often enough, these days. Not since he’s turned ten. Not since she had Betsey. But she will hold him in a second, if he can just move down.

  He stops, his freshly confident movements stalling.

  ‘Kit?’

  ‘I can’t . . . I don’t know where to go now.’ He is pained by the situation, poised between embarrassment and the hope this could all be turned into a joke.

  ‘Nearly there, Kit,’ Martha breezes in. ‘Just put your right foot there and then we’ll catch you . . .’

  ‘Where? There?’ He turns to look at them – his foot slips, he slithers, and then he is tumbling, body falling to the earth as he lets out a guttural roar.

  ‘Kit!’ She reaches him as his body hits the ground, with a flat, definitive thud.

  Later, she will rail at Martha: ‘Why did you tell him we’d catch him? You confused him.’ But at that moment, blame is superfluous. Her boy is broken as he lies at the base of the tree.

  He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead . . .

  It is the near silence that frightens her the most. She hears the distant roar of traffic, a rustling in the grass, the pounding of her heart. Even Frankie is so shocked he resists screaming for a moment.

  And then Kit begins to cry.

  ED

  Wednesday 24 January, 9 a.m.

  Twenty-six

  ‘DC Rustin and DC Farron to see you, Mr Curtis.’ Jade Bridge, twenty-four years old, smart, streetwise, unapologetic in telling it as it is, leans her torso around Ed’s office door.

  ‘DC Rustin?’ Ed stands automatically. ‘Has something happened to Betsey?’ It is his unacknowledged fear. That his baby will slip away, her head fracture, unseen, incorrectly diagnosed, more sinister than any of them realised. She’s been having further seizures. None lasting more than five minutes, none clustering together, but still unsettling. He was with her when she had one yesterday: saw for himself the roll of her eyes, the fluttering of her limbs; experienced the sensation of being in limbo as he willed her to jerk back out of it; to behave normally. He feels sick thinking about it.

  ‘There’s no change to Betsey’s condition as far as I’m aware,’ DC Rustin says. But his relief is short-lived. His thoughts tip towards Jess: are they here because of her? That discovery on her laptop has skewed everything. He knows that something is seriously wrong: that she needs help, though since she won’t talk to him, refusing to communicate since that erratic phone call, he can’t see how he can help her. It’s surprising how swiftly having a child in hospital, and being the subject of a police investigation, makes everything unravel so that your thinking is clouded and you feel as if you’re losing your grip.

  ‘And Jess – is she all right?’ The words trip from him despite him not wanting to prompt questions about her.

  ‘It’s not Mrs Curtis we’re interested in talking to at the moment but you,’ DC Rustin says.

  ‘Oh.’ His skin goose pimples and sweat licks the back of his neck.

  ‘We wondered if you could answer a few questions for us to help with our inquiries?’ DC Farron adds.

  ‘Of course. What, now?’

  ‘There’s just something in the statement you gave us that we’d like you to clarify.’ He gives that reassuring smile, as if to say this is just a low-key chat.


  ‘That’s right,’ DC Rustin says. ‘I’m wearing a Body Worn camera, just so there’s no dispute about what’s said, by the way. And we’ll need to take a written statement.’

  ‘Do I need a lawyer?’ He had discussed this with his criminal lawyer friend when the scenes of crime officer visited their home but dismissed the idea as a panicked overreaction that would look suspicious. Now he wonders if he has been naive.

  ‘Not at all,’ DC Rustin says, doing a good job of looking nonplussed. ‘You’re just helping us iron something out.’

  Ed gestures to a couple of chairs and sits back at his desk. The detectives take their seats, DC Rustin perching on the edge of hers, as if primed to leap up at any moment; DC Farron leaning gently back.

  ‘In your statement, taken at your house, you said that on the day Betsey was injured you were “at work all day and then out with work colleagues for a drink”. That’s right, isn’t it?’ begins DC Rustin.

  ‘Yes.’ He thinks he knows where this is going. He didn’t tell them about popping back for lunch in his original statement because he didn’t think they were interested in that time period, and he didn’t correct it because he didn’t want to draw attention to his reason for doing so. But it’s been bugging him for a while.

  ‘But we’ve a statement from a witness who says they saw you arrive back home, at Kneighton Close, just before one-thirty?’ The detective wrinkles her nose, apparently bemused. ‘They checked the clock because they thought it unusual. We’re just wondering if there was anything you could say to explain this?’

  What should he do? Deny this outright? The witness must be a neighbour. Probably Jane, next door: a widow, in her late sixties, she has indicated that she’d love to be more involved with their family. Jess has never been keen: believes she’s too preoccupied with the comings and goings of everyone in the close, from the relationships of the teenage children living there, to an affair she is convinced poor David Frampton, four doors down, is having. Now, it seems her interest has been of use to the police.