Try Not to Breathe: A Novel

by Holly Seddon

  “I don’t think you understand. I’ve not been paid yet. I’m a freelancer and I’m writing this off my own back. The Times is interested in running it when it’s finished, but it’s not guaranteed.”

  “Then I don’t think there’s anything else for us to talk about.”

  “Oh, well, I’m sorry you feel that way. You’re the first person to ask me for money. I mean, maybe if I place the story, I could—”

  “Bob’s helping,” Jacob said, fixing his eyes onto Paul’s steely blues.

  “Is he now?”

  “Yep. He’s already helped a lot. He told Alex his side of the story, told her all about Amy. Told Alex what it was like raising her.”

  “Has he now?”

  “Yes,” Alex joined in, “he’s given me some really valuable insights into Amy’s life. You know he was accused for a while? Police took him in because they mistook how close he and Amy were. She was a real Daddy’s girl, by all accounts.”

  “Not by my account.”

  “How so?”

  “He controlled her.”

  Alex flipped her notepad back open, praying the iPhone, in her pocket, hadn’t stopped recording. “Go on.”

  “He wouldn’t let her out of his sight. Wouldn’t let her meet my family, her family. It killed my mum. Granddaughter she only met once. Killed her cold.”

  “Your mum met Amy? When?”

  “That’s how I found her the first time. I’m not gonna lie, when Jo told me she was pregnant, I weren’t happy. I was eighteen. I was a kid. No proper job, doing this ’n’ that.”

  “What do you do now?” Alex asked.

  “I’m a single father now,” Paul snapped. “Me and Jo weren’t really together. On and off, you know. She could be a stuck-up little cow. She looked down on me and mine. Not that she came from better. Anyway, we were back on this one time and she tells me she’s in the club and it’s mine. I didn’t know if she was telling the truth or not. Birds are sneaky.”

  “So what happened after she told you she was pregnant?” Alex asked.

  “I said she should get rid of it. It weren’t the right time. She told me where to go and I didn’t see her again. Just like that.”

  “That seems very extreme.”

  “It wasn’t a polite conversation like what we’re having.”

  “Did you threaten her?” Jacob asked.

  “No I didn’t threaten her. What’s your problem?”

  “So she just upped and left?” Alex asked.

  “She was a kid herself. Wasn’t tight to her family, I don’t even know where they lived. She could be a bit…what’s the word?”

  “Impulsive?”

  “Moody.”

  “So when did your mum meet Amy?”

  “She was in Sevenoaks one day with my auntie, few years after I last saw Jo. Mum said she was in Tesco and clocked Jo, recognized her straightaway. And Jo had a little girl with her. A little blue-eyed, dark-haired girl, the spit of me and my brothers and sisters.”

  “Amy.”

  “Yeah, Amy. ’Course, I didn’t know that was her name. Didn’t know anything about her then. Mum went over to see Jo and asked her straight-out if the girl was mine. She looked that similar.”

  “Your mum didn’t know?”

  “I didn’t tell her Jo was expecting. I still lived at home when Jo fell, I’d have got a hiding for getting a girl in trouble. Jo left anyway, there was nothing to tell.”

  “So what did Jo say to your mum?”

  “Told her Amy was mine, told her she was living with her new fella. Told her I’d known all along. Bloody told her I wasn’t interested, really threw me under the bus. Told Mum she lived in Edenbridge and that Mum could see her anytime she wanted. Even wrote down her address.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Mum came round my bedsit and gave me a clip round the ear. Told me I had a kid. Told me she was being brought up by some other bloke and it wasn’t right. We got in the car and she drove us straight round to Jo’s.”

  “You and your mum went?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what happened when you got there?”

  “I knocked on the door, respectful like.” Paul shot Jacob a look. “Waited. Nothing. Knocked again, saw the curtains twitch, you know what I mean. Nothing. That idiot Bob comes out, shouting the odds.” Paul was getting more and more animated, as the toddler next to him slept on obliviously. “He’s calling Mum all sorts. He shoves me. Tells my mum to get back in her car and never come back. He’s swinging at me and threatening her.”

  “Bob was?”

  “Yeah. Saint bloody Bob.”

  “I’ve met Bob a couple of times now,” said Alex, cautiously. “He’s not a very big guy.”

  “I’m not being funny—I just wanted to get my mum out of it. Yeah, I could have knocked him out cold. But her health was bad and she was upset. I didn’t want a row, I didn’t even want to see the kid then. Harsh but true. I didn’t know her. Didn’t have no money, didn’t want the headache. I was only there for Mum’s sake.”

  “So you just left?”

  “Yeah, we left. Got in Mum’s car and she drove us back.”

  “And your mum didn’t see Amy again?”

  “My mum died a couple of weeks later.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “S’all right, it weren’t your fault. It was his.”

  “What did your mum die from?”

  “Broken heart.”

  “Okay,” interrupted Jacob, “but what did the doctors say she’d died from?”

  “Heart attack. But she’d still be here today if it wasn’t for him.”

  “So you were angry with Bob?”

  “Of course I was angry with Bob! Bastard had my kid and killed my mum.”

  “That seems like a bit of a leap, you said your mum was ill already?” Alex said.

  “She’d still be here today if it wasn’t for him. So would Amy.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Jacob.

  “He kept her on a tight lead. Too tight. She rebelled and went off with someone. Look what happened.”

  “Who did she go off with?” Alex asked. “Do you know what happened to Amy?”

  “I don’t need to know what happened to know what happened.”

  “You said you knew all about me,” Jacob said. “How often did you talk to Amy?”

  “You know they upped and moved after Mum died?” Paul said to Alex, ignoring Jacob. “I sent a letter to Jo, told her what happened, asked her to bring Amy to the funeral. Never got a reply. Time I went back round there, they’d moved.”

  “When was that?”

  “Couple of years later.”

  “Years?”

  “Yeah, years. I was grieving for my mum, wasn’t I?”

  “So when did you get back in touch with Amy?”

  “When she was in her teens. I saw her in the paper.”

  “What paper?”

  “She was in the local news for some writing competition. My auntie saw the article, sent it to me.”

  “I remember that,” Jacob said, more to Alex than Paul. “She was embarrassed about her picture being in the paper.”

  “Yeah, well, Auntie Jean saw it. Amy was called Stevenson by then, but my auntie could see exactly who she was, she looked the spit. Paper said she went to the grammar school in Edenbridge. That’s not my genes, to be fair. She was lucky from her mum there.”

  “How did you get in touch with her?”

  “Phoned the school.”

  “The school?”

  “Yeah, the school. Well, my sister did. Put on a posh voice, told the bird on the other end that she was calling from a private school. Made out there was this writing scholarship for bright kids and they wanted Amy to apply on account of her winning this story competition. Woman gave out the number. Done.”

  “My school gave out a pupil’s home number, just like that?”

  “Yeah, just like that.”

  “I’m sorry, but that s
eems really unlikely,” Jacob said. “My mum worked in the school office back then and she would never give out information like that, she was way too fastidious.”

  “Whatever, someone gave my sister the number.”

  “And you called the number?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah. Called after school that day. First time, he answered. I just put it down. Next time I tried, Amy answered. I knew it was her, straightaway. She sounded like her mum but posh.”

  “Amy isn’t posh!” Jacob laughed.

  “Maybe not to you. I told her who I was. Said I was her dad. Said I’d tried to track her down and that I wanted to get to know her.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t say a lot. She was shocked, I think.”

  “She told me you’d asked to meet her,” Jacob said. “She told Jo and Bob too.”

  “I wanted to meet her. But I said I’d phone her a few more times first so we could get to know each other. I didn’t want it to be tricky when we met.”

  “She didn’t tell me that,” Jacob said, frowning.

  “No, don’t seem she did. She told me what times to call so she’d be on her own.”

  “I don’t think I’d be happy with my daughter telling people when she’d be home alone,” Jacob said.

  “Got kids, have you?”

  “One on the way,” Jacob said, carefully.

  “Well, let me tell you, she wasn’t telling ‘people,’ she was telling her dad. Her real dad. And she knew I was her real dad because I knew so much about her mum. I told her about when we got together and I knew about Bob and I told her everything. I told her about when I came looking for her before, and she told me she remembered.”

  “So did you call back again?” Alex asked, pen hovering.

  “Most days. At first I did all the talking and then she started to tell me more. She told me about school, about her little boyfriend over there.” Paul smirked at Jacob. “All about her friends.”

  “But you never met?”

  “No. After a couple of weeks of us talking, she told Bob and Jo.”

  “A couple of weeks?” Alex’s eyebrows rose.

  “Yeah, a couple of weeks. She told Jo and him that I’d called. Told them I’d been nice and reasonable—which I was—told them she wanted a chance to get to know me. They told her no. Told her I was this and that, none of it true. Confused her for a while so she wouldn’t even talk to me, but she came round. We started talking again. After a couple of months, she agreed to meet me.”

  “So you’re saying you did meet her?”

  “Nope, we hadn’t made a formal arrangement, but I wanted to check she was all right. I wanted to see her in her own world, y’know? So I went to meet her from school one day, but she was with some fella.”

  “What fella?” Alex asked, sitting up straighter.

  “How am I s’posed to know? Some bloke, older fella, teacher maybe.”

  “When was this?”

  “A week or so before she was on the telly.”

  “What did this bloke look like?” asked Jacob, his voice wavering.

  “Fuck should I know? It was fifteen bloody years ago. It was a bloke. I think he was white, and taller than her. I didn’t get a good look but he weren’t a school kid. And he weren’t you.” Paul nodded slightly at Jacob.

  “And did Amy speak to you?” Alex asked, staring directly at Paul.

  “No,” Paul said, avoiding her eye. “She didn’t see me, I left her to it.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “What do you think I am, a mug?”

  “But you had information about your daughter, you’d seen her with someone. And all those phone calls, she might have told you something that could help.”

  “She didn’t tell me nothing that would help them. And I wasn’t sticking my neck on the line. It don’t take a genius to see how that would go.”

  “You don’t seem very upset,” Jacob said, flatly.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  The living room door opened and Matty’s mop of hair poked around.

  “Can I watch telly?”

  “Back to your room!” Paul yelled. “You’re s’posed to be off sick anyway!”

  Socked feet thundered up the squeaky stairs.

  “Tell me I’m not fucking upset, mate, I’m not having that. You don’t know nothing about me.”

  “I find it odd that you never came forward with any of this, she was on the TV for weeks. And you’re describing your daughter going missing like…I don’t know, like a dog that ran away.” Jacob’s bravado was unsettling Alex.

  “You wait until you have your kid,” said Paul, raising his voice to pub row levels. “You just wait. You can’t imagine what it’s like yet. Some evil bastard out there picks up your little girl and kills her. You have to decide, do I pick myself up, dust myself down and block it out? Or do I die with her? That’s your only choice.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alex. “I understand how upsetting this must be for you. But Amy didn’t die, she’s still alive.”

  “No she ain’t. Her body’s hooked up to some machine, but she’s dead.”

  “She’s not being kept alive by machines anymore. She’s breathing by herself and the doctors have registered brain activity,” Alex argued, quietly. Jacob frowned at her.

  “Amy’s dead,” Paul said.

  “So your other children don’t know about Amy, then?” Alex asked.

  “There’s never been a reason to tell them. Look at Chloe sleeping, she don’t need to know how shit the world is. Let her sleep, let me worry about the world.”

  “Where’s their mum?” Jacob asked, stretching his fingers out in his lap.

  “Mums. Two of them. Matty was a one-off thing with a girl I knew. She was in no fit state to bring him up. Slag. Chloe was with my ex. She sees her weekends.”

  “That’s quite unique,” Alex said.

  “I wasn’t letting these ones go. I told both their mums, ‘You have this kid, this is my kid. You leave me, you leave the kid here.’ I walked away once, never again.”

  Paul wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

  “Now, how much can I get for a photo?”

  When my mum thinks someone is a bit dodgy, she describes them as “a case.” It’s the kind of mum language that doesn’t arouse suspicion, that doesn’t sound like she’s slagging them off or “casting aspersions,” as she also says. But if you know her, you know exactly what she means.

  Bob’s dad—Granddad Pete, who died a few years ago—he was “a case.” And by “case,” she meant he was a mean old racist and a woman-hater.

  The bloke in the greengrocer who always makes double entendres about fruit, he’s “a case.” Behind Mum’s eye-rolling smile you can see her opinion of him curdle more and more with every shopping trip. Eventually, she’ll just go to the supermarket instead.

  And old Jack in our road, he’s another one. My mum has told me in no uncertain terms to give him a wide berth. She didn’t trust him as it was, you could see her invisible antennae go off the moment she first met him, even I noticed that and I was really young at the time. But when I told her I’d seen him being a case in the window when I walked past, she grabbed me by the wrist and told me that I was to walk away if I ever saw him coming my way, and to cross the road whenever he was out and about.

  I didn’t tell Bob. I just knew, without Mum saying, that it was better not to. What words would I even use? “Fiddling with himself”? Or maybe I should be all biology class about it and say that I suspected he was “masturbating” as he watched me. Ugh, cringe! No, it was better just to avoid him and leave Bob undisturbed. The last thing any of us needed was Bob steaming round to a neighbor’s house, kicking off.

  Not that Bob’s a thug, not at all. He’s just quiet and cheerful most of the time. But when it comes to me and Mum, he’s very protective. And that’s nice, more or less. I mean, it does my head in when he overworries and that means I can’t do something I want to
do. Especially if Mum’s said I can go out and then Bob’s overruled it. But even when I’m at my most pissed off about it, I do get it. Some people don’t have a dad who cares that much, and I’m grateful that I do. Not that I’d ever tell him that.

  I guess it’s like having a bodyguard. A short, fat bodyguard in dungarees. It makes you feel safe. And if you feel safe, you feel brave. Maybe that’s why I’ve always felt brave. Right now though, I feel a little less brave than I used to. I think it’s because I can’t remember my last conversation with Bob, I can’t feel his invisible hand on my shoulder. Has he had extra work on, maybe? I feel a bit foggy-headed today but it feels like it’s been a while.

  In fact, everything feels like it’s been a while. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I can’t really place when I last did anything. Even stupid stuff, like go to the toilet. When did I last go to the toilet? What did we have for tea yesterday? Or the day before?

  Maybe I’ve been sleeping too much and that’s got me all cloudy. Mum always says it’s just as bad to sleep too long as too little, your body clock gets scrambled and you don’t know where you are.

  I’m not a big sleeper. Not like Jake, that boy can sleep. I called him at about 4 p.m. during half-term once, and his brother said he was still in bed. At 4 p.m.! Now, that’s a sleepyhead.

  I guess it’s easier when you live in quite a big house. In our house, if one of us is up and using the loo, we’re all awake and queuing outside the bathroom. The kettle downstairs whistles me awake in the morning. I like our little house though. I like knowing Mum and Bob are right there, and it’s cozy. But I haven’t been waking up when they’ve got ready for work, I seem to be asleep more than I’m awake right now. Maybe this is just something that happens at this age. That’s the joke, isn’t it, about students and teenagers and that, sleeping all day? Maybe my time has come. Maybe this is just a part of growing up.

  The doctor’s surgery had no record of an appointment for Fiona Arlington today.

  “The midwife is in again next Monday, perhaps she has an appointment then,” the baggy-faced receptionist had told Jacob, brusquely.

  “Fiona’s my wife, so I need to be there. Can you please tell me when I should come back?”

  Jacob’s hands gripped the reception desk, where he had often signed Fiona in as she’d flopped down exhausted in the waiting area.