Try Not to Breathe: A Novel

by Holly Seddon

  I knew it would hurt because we’re told it will hurt, just like you know it will hurt when you have a baby because your mum still complains about it years later. But I’m sure that when I actually have a baby, it’ll still be a surprise and I’ll probably yell at everyone, including my mum.

  The pain of him blinds me, right through the dream and out the other side. And I’m thinking about how you see pictures in More magazine of women wrapped around men, sitting on chairs to do it or throwing their hips around without a care in the world, no grimace on their face. But all I can do is lie frozen and try not to cry. I can’t imagine this ever being easy, never mind feeling nice. I can’t picture myself ever becoming a More magazine woman.

  Even in the dream, I feel sad knowing that the story I’ll tell my best friends about this will be full of lies. If I even tell them. And if I don’t, I can’t bask in the glory of getting there first. Which sounds pathetic and is pathetic but it’s also true.

  And as soon as it’s over, every single time I have this dream, I realize I’ve made some kind of mistake. Sometimes, I’m in the wrong place. Other times I realize I’m running late for something really important. Or there’s someone else there. One time I dreamed that my mum was calling me from outside the door. This time there was someone else actually in the room, a woman. I don’t know who she was but she was saying things like, “It’s not your fault, Amy, it’s not your fault he changed,” things like that. And I was trying to whisper to her to get out before he sees her but she wasn’t listening. Before I realized it, I was screaming and she was screaming and then everything went black.

  When I woke up this time, the dream was still hanging around me, caught in my sheets and my hair. I could feel the echo of the sting, the weight of him on my chest. I could almost smell his breath in my ear as it turned to wet drips of condensation.

  That’s it now, I’m never going to shake these dreams and how realistic they are. Robbed of the real thing by a stupid dream. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t really happen because my body, my brain and now my memory all think otherwise. It’s so unfair that I start to cry, but no sound comes out.

  Jacob was in the passenger seat, pushed as far back as possible to give his leg space as Alex drove him back to Edenbridge. He’d barely spoken for the last twenty minutes, while Alex had barely stopped.

  His girlfriend. His sweet, fun, normal girlfriend, sleeping with her own father? No. There was just no way. Alex’s latest idea was plain wrong. Not necessarily wrong about Paul Wheeler hurting Amy, he could well believe that, but way off base about the rest. She had to be.

  “What happens next?” he interrupted. “Are you going to the police about this?”

  “Not formally, no. Not at this stage anyway. It’s such a serious crime to accuse someone of, and like I’ve said a few times,” Alex looked at him briefly, “it’s just a theory, one of several.”

  Jacob nodded and looked dead straight at the road.

  “I’ve asked Matt to look into it to see if there’s anything more on Paul’s record that might be relevant.”

  “Okay.” Jacob ground his teeth as he watched his hometown creep into the windscreen and along the sides of the car.

  Amy’s stepfamily setup had always been a bit alien to him. He knew it was one of the many things that his mum looked down on about the Stevensons, even if she’d never openly admitted it. In his mum’s world, marriage was forever, no matter what. It wouldn’t have mattered what his own dad had done or not done, Jacob knew full well the Arlingtons would have remained resolutely, lockjawed together to the bitter end.

  He wondered what his parents really made of his own predicament. How far down the line from fracture to permanent break did they think he and Fiona were? How far down the line were they, for that matter? Would someone else end up as Weekday Dad to his child? He shuddered with a bolt of unexpected anger.

  Alex’s black Polo had just passed Edenbridge Town station when her phone rang in its cradle. Jacob watched her fumble to answer it on loudspeaker. She seemed almost ditzy, which was new to him.

  “Hi, Matt.”

  “Hi, Alex, can you talk?”

  Jacob looked at Alex, who looked at the phone.

  “I have someone in the car with me at the moment,” she said. Silence from the other end. “Hang on,” she added, “I’ll pull over and get out.”

  Alex pulled into the station’s overflow car park and swung across two spaces. She yanked the phone from the cradle, crushing it to her ear as she climbed out of the idling car.

  “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Well, I have something concrete, but you might not like it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Paul Wheeler didn’t do it, Alex.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Matt had perfected the policeman’s monotone delivery, Alex realized. Good news, bad news, the same flattened voice announced it. Even to her…maybe especially to her? Did he speak to Jane in the same low rumble? Alex didn’t remember his soft voice sounding so shapeless before. And she thought she remembered everything.

  “You sound very certain.”

  “I’m totally certain because he was in prison at the time.”

  “You’re kidding me! But he said he’d been—”

  “I’m sorry, Alex, it looks like he was puffing up his involvement for some reason. But he couldn’t have been anywhere near the school when he said he was.”

  “What was he in prison for?”

  “Shoplifting.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep. He’d been caught for it a couple of times already so he got three months. He went in a couple of days before your girl went missing.”

  “Shoplifting.” Alex shook her head.

  On some level, it was a relief. The idea of Paul and Amy locked in some kind of doomed love affair was repulsive at best. But that didn’t make Amy any less attacked then or any less alone now. Despite her reservations about Paul being the culprit, it still felt like a setback.

  “Of all the pathetic things, Matt. God.” Matt’s voice in her ear offered little in the way of consolation.

  “I’m sorry, Al.”

  Al. She hadn’t been called that in years and it knotted her chest.

  “Well, thank you anyway. I appreciate you taking the time to look,” she said, in an echo of his emotionless tone.

  Matt paused. She could hear him breathe heavily. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s not like I wanted it to be him, I just wish I was a little closer to some kind of resolution,” she said, giving more away than she’d hoped. “For Amy, I mean.”

  “Don’t give up, will you?”

  “Of course not,” she said, pursing her lips. “I told you, I’m dead set on finishing what I started.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.” For a moment, it sounded like he had more to add but after a few seconds, he said: “Take care.”

  “Thanks. And you.”

  Fuck.

  She propped herself on the bonnet and sighed. That rotten, slimy bastard had been willing to string her along for a few quid. Just to scam some cash for an interview full of lies. Selling out Amy’s memory when he’d never given her anything.

  Bob was right not to want him in Amy’s life.

  Bloody Paul Wheeler.

  She needed to get Jacob home, and then get back to her kitchen. Her story still had no conclusion, she was kicking up dirt and getting nowhere. What on earth was she thinking, really? A lifestyle journalist whose recent idea of research was a hasty Wikipedia search or copying and pasting from a press release. Even as a columnist, the details were extracted from the depths of her head, just memories or observations. You couldn’t get those wrong.

  She looked across at Jacob in the passenger seat, who was clearly nervous about what she might have just been told. “It wasn’t Paul after all.”

  “Is it wrong to be glad?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Not even
slightly. But it does mean there’s more work to be done.”

  There’s a woman here. She’s introduced herself as Alex and I think she might think I’m someone else, although she knows my name is Amy. Maybe there’s another Amy here, wherever “here” is.

  I don’t put her straight, I just bite my tongue because it’s nice to have a visitor. I hope Other Amy isn’t missing out too much because of me.

  I know it’s selfish but I’m just so lonely, the days and weeks are blending into a wide black sea and it’s rare that I see land. And the land that I glimpse doesn’t really satisfy me. I miss my mum. I know it’s been a long while since I saw her or Bob but I can’t let myself dwell on that. I tell myself that their work is in the way but something in the pit of my tummy knows it’s worse than that. I let it stay there. I feel weak and scared right now. So I’d rather be lied to than told a difficult truth.

  Alex’s voice sounds familiar, like I heard it years ago or maybe she sounds like one of my mum’s friends or the ladies she works with in the shop. It sounds like a posher version of my voice. It’s soft and quiet, but you know that she really means everything she says, like she’s planned each word and they all matter. I like people who are decisive and know what they want to say or do. That’s how I want to be.

  She’s a journalist too. I mean, I’m not yet, but I want to be. And at one time she must have wanted to be, and now she is. Sometimes, it works out that way. Maybe it’ll work out that way for me. Maybe if Alex keeps coming back to see me, she could help me get what I want. I’d work for it. I’ll tell her how hard I’d work for it.

  In the background, while Alex talks, I can hear music. It sounds like Oasis but it’s not a song I know. There’s been talk of a new album for a while.

  Liam Gallagher is singing about a “wonder wall” and about being saved.

  Alex says she likes it but I’m too into Oasis’s rival, Blur, to admit that I quite like the sound of it too. It lulls me like a nursery rhyme and I start to feel sleepy again.

  When I wake up, she’s gone. For a minute, I’m not sure if I dreamed her all along until another voice—the one that sings like my mum—mentions me having a visitor.

  “It’s nice to have a new friend, isn’t it?” she says. But I don’t reply.

  The lyrics I heard earlier with Alex keep drifting back to me in snatches as the other woman washes my face.

  I hope Alex comes back.

  “Hi, Alex,” Jacob answered, foggily, holding his phone loosely to his ear. His other hand covered his scrunched-up eyes.

  “Did I wake you?” her voice sounded distant and watery.

  “No…well, yeah, you did, but it’s fine. I need to get used to early mornings again. What’s up?”

  “I just…I guess now that Paul is ruled out, I wanted to look at what’s left to explore,” Alex said, her voice without any of the adrenaline of the previous day.

  “I guess there’s nothing else you can do.” Jacob always felt uneasy when Alex took pains to explain her process to him.

  “Right. Well, Paul may have lied about his own time line with Amy, but that doesn’t mean he lied about everything. There’s still the claim that he saw her with another guy one time.”

  Jacob was silent for a few beats; he didn’t want to give this thought any oxygen. He sat up slowly and blinked a couple of times. A tatty toy box caught his eye and he felt a sudden pang of nostalgia. He half expected to hear a Game Boy through the wall, or even the awful depressive music Tom had turned to in his teens.

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “I know you don’t and I know it’s hard for you to even consider. But knowing that Amy probably had consensual—”

  Jacob cut her off. “Please, I don’t need to hear this again.”

  “Sorry, it’s just, if there was someone else,” Alex asked carefully “who would she have told?”

  “Probably Jenny.”

  “Jenny threatened to have me arrested when I tried to talk to her.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Jacob said.

  “When was the last time you saw Jenny?”

  “My last day at school, fifteen years ago.”

  “Did you get on?”

  “We got on okay, I guess. She was quite brash and full-on, not my kind of person, but she was a decent enough girl. I think she was quite a good friend to Amy.”

  “So if you were to, say, call her up out of the blue, how do you think she’d react?”

  “Oh God, I can see where this is going.”

  —

  Jacob had expected some reticence, so Jenny’s eagerness to meet him had made him uneasy all over again.

  On the phone, she’d offered to meet first thing the next day and he’d felt his bravado instantly seep away.

  Now Jacob sat squirming in the back of a café tucked disconcertingly around the corner from their old school.

  The café door swung inward and the first thing Jacob noticed was how big Jenny was. Not just chubby or overweight, she was really very fat. Jacob could clearly see the familiar face, but it was floating on a much larger face.

  She had thick fingers, a gold ring cutting deeply into one of them. And she looked far older than thirty—the ageless, sexless quality of the obese.

  They hugged an awkward, squashy hello after she made her way over.

  “Don’t worry, Jake, I know you’re in with that journalist.”

  Jacob raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  “Come on, I’ve not heard from you for fifteen years and then just after she tries to pull a number on me, you get in touch. I’m not daft.”

  “You’re right. But I think you’ve got her a bit wrong.”

  “Hmn, well, whatever, I’m not interested in her. How are you?”

  “I’m okay, thanks. I’m married now and expecting my first baby any day. How are you?”

  “It’s okay, Jake, I’m not going to try it on with you, you’re safe.”

  Jacob smiled, and immediately worried about the depth of relief he’d shown.

  “I’m loved up too, and we have a little girl,” Jenny said.

  “Well, congratulations to you both. How old is she?”

  “She’s three.”

  “Oh, lovely. Not long until school, then. What’s her name?”

  “She’s due to start next September, yeah. It’s flown by.” Jenny hesitated. “And, um, she’s called Amy.”

  Jacob stirred his tea without looking up. Eventually, he complimented her on the choice of name.

  “My partner suggested it. He knows all about our Amy, obviously. I wasn’t sure at first, but…it really suits her.”

  “It’s nice that you could do that.” Jacob swallowed. “Jenny, I understand that you’re not impressed by Alex’s methods, but she’s starting to get somewhere. She’s starting to find answers and I know I’ve still got lots of questions. Don’t you?”

  “You need to be careful with journalists, Jake. And she’s a sneaky one.”

  Jacob frowned. “Look, I don’t like saying this, but Alex thinks that maybe Amy, um…” He cleared his throat. “That Amy might have been seeing someone else before she went missing and it turned sour. Do you know anything about that?”

  Jenny opened her mouth to say something but looked down.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “That journalist told you about the virginity thing, didn’t she? I’m so sorry, it really wasn’t—”

  “What virginity thing?” Jacob heard his heartbeat over his voice.

  Jenny’s eyes searched his face. “It was just stupid. I mean, I didn’t think she’d take it seriously. I didn’t even consider it at the time.”

  “Jenny,” Jacob lowered his voice and stared into her eyes, which were filling with tears, “you’re really freaking me out. Can you please tell me what you’re talking about?”

  Jenny exhaled and sucked her lips in for a moment as if she had completely deflated.

  “God. Okay, so Amy, Becky and I had this stupid game going to s
ee who could lose their virginity first.”

  “Amy did?”

  “Yeah, all three of us did. It was just a bit of fun, it was silly. It didn’t change anything. I didn’t do anything because of it and I hadn’t thought Amy took it seriously.”

  “Hadn’t thought?”

  “The journalist. She said Amy wasn’t a virgin when she was attacked. She said Amy had, y’know, done it. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not.”

  “Believe her,” Jacob said quietly.

  “Shit. Look, I didn’t know. I really didn’t know. If I had, I would have told the police.”

  “Told the police what?”

  “About the other bloke.”

  The walls of the café seemed to pulse and loom in as Jacob gripped the table. He felt the blood drain from his head.

  “I don’t want to upset you.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jenny, we’re beyond that now.”

  A cold sweat crept up Jacob’s neck as Jenny described holding back Amy’s hair in the Sleeper Pub toilets a few weeks before she went missing.

  “She was pretty pissed and even when she was throwing up she was babbling away. At the time I thought it was just the drink talking and I wasn’t exactly sober either but, y’know, maybe there was more to it.” Jenny looked up and opened her eyes wide. “If I’d known how far it’d gone, I’d have told the police. I just didn’t think anything of it.”

  “Didn’t think anything of what, Jenny?” Jacob said impatiently.

  “She said she was feeling guilty. ’Cos she was interested in someone else and he was interested in her.”

  Jacob sat back like he’d been yanked by the hair.