Come a Little Closer

by Karen Perry

  ‘A good dose of Vitamin D will do you the power of good,’ Hilary says, noting as she sits down that they are fully visible now from the upper storeys of the house. Likewise, behind the shield of her sunglasses, she can cast her gaze up at the windows without it being obvious.

  She wonders if he’s inside now, witnessing this. Something tells her that he is. They are alike in that way, Anton and Hilary, both keen observers.

  ‘Thank you for calling to see me,’ Leah says, in that quiet voice of hers. ‘Jake told me he bumped into you. He said you’d had a similar experience.’

  ‘It’s true. I know only too well what you’re going through right now. That confusion of feelings. One minute you’re empty and wrung-out, like there’s just nothing left inside you, and the next you’re moved to anger at the sheer bloody unfairness of it all.’

  Leah nods, her eyes sweeping the grass in front of her.

  ‘Miscarriage is far more common than people realize,’ Hilary continues. ‘It’s just that no one seems to talk about it and I could never figure out why. But it does help to talk.’

  She looks at the young woman’s face, notes her complexion has lost all its bloom. There’s a dullness to her features now, and Hilary experiences a rise of genuine sympathy. Oh, yes, she can still feel that pain. She remembers acutely what it was like.

  ‘You know, the first time it happened to me –’ Hilary stops abruptly. Her attention has been drawn to movement inside the flat, a raised voice, and Leah’s head also turns.

  ‘Don’t fucking lie to me! It’s right there in black and white!’

  A woman’s voice, shrill with fury.

  ‘I’m telling you – I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about!’

  Through the open French windows, she can see Jake on his feet, the boy still and watchful on the couch, the game forgotten. The woman moves and comes now into view. Small, elfin, in shorts and a T-shirt, her limbs tanned against the ice-cream shades of her clothes.

  ‘I left my son with that woman,’ she is saying. ‘You told me I could trust her!’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ Jake says.

  ‘Read that and tell me I’m being ridiculous!’ she shrieks, and Hilary watches as she thrusts something at him – a newspaper. Half of it drops to the ground and he bends to reach for it.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Leah says to Hilary, in that small, distracted voice.

  She’s on her feet now, moving cautiously through the grass, but Hilary isn’t going to wait in the garden and miss the action. Enthralled by what’s unfolding in front of her, she stands and follows.

  ‘Well? Did you know?’ the strange woman is demanding.

  But Jake is lost to her, his eyes scanning the newsprint. ‘What the fuck …’ he says, and then looks up.

  The woman sees them first.

  No sooner has Leah stepped down on to the patio than the woman is out of the door, crossing the paving, her small face a tight knot of hostility.

  ‘Jenna,’ Leah begins, but before she can say another word, the woman has slapped her hard across the face.

  ‘You bitch! You murdering fucking bitch!’ she says, slapping at Leah, whose hands go up to shield her face from the blows.

  ‘Stop it! Stop this at once!’ Hilary barks, appalled at the sudden violence. She grabs the woman’s wrist and pulls her back.

  Leah is crouched on her knees, her hair falling forward over her face. The woman – Jenna – is breathing deeply from her exertions, and it is only now that Jake appears through the doors, walking slowly as if in a daze. The newspaper is still in his hands. Hilary glances down at it. Murdering bitch was the accusation the woman had thrown.

  ‘I’m taking Matthew,’ Jenna states, wrenching her wrist free from Hilary’s grasp, but before she leaves, she takes a step towards Leah, points a finger at her and hisses: ‘You are never to come anywhere near my son again – do you understand me?’

  Leah lets out a sound like a whimper, but it’s response enough for Jenna, who turns on her heel. From inside the flat, they can hear her barking orders at Matthew to gather up his things, quickly. Jake stares down at Leah, a stunned expression on his face. He makes no attempt to help her up. The front door bangs shut and silence surrounds them.

  ‘Is this true?’ Jake asks quietly.

  Leah is still crouched, but she pushes back her hair, and Hilary can see her face streaked with tears, an angry red mark on her cheek and across her mouth from the blow she’d received. Her eyes, turned to Jake, are round with fear.

  ‘Is this true?’ he asks again. ‘That baby’s death. Were you, in some way, involved?’

  The hard thing that is lodged in Hilary’s chest seems to collapse, leaking a cold liquid that spreads through her insides.

  Leah’s small teeth are biting her lower lip, a flash of panic in her face, and then she nods quickly.

  Hilary gasps, she cannot help it. Surely that cannot be true.

  ‘Let me see that,’ she says, reaching for the newspaper in Jake’s hand but he snatches it away before she can take it.

  ‘I think you’d better leave, Hilary,’ he tells her, in a voice like ice.

  She nods, and glances back at Leah. There is something forlorn and defenceless about her that makes Hilary take a step towards her, but Jake is adamant.

  ‘Now, please,’ he says, raising his voice, and she can hear the crack in it. The sharp warning.

  She backs away. ‘Very well,’ she says.

  And just as she is turning from them, she sees him. There, in the window gazing down, is Anton, his arms wrapped around his chest, his face pressed right up against the window. All she can manage is a snatched glance at him, but Hilary is sure – she would swear on it – that he is looking down on this scene of disaster, smiling.

  22

  Leah

  ‘I think you’d better go,’ Jake tells Hilary, and Leah watches the swish of her purple skirt disappearing into the gloom of the flat.

  Overhead, the day has darkened.

  ‘Come inside,’ Jake says. ‘I’m not doing this out here.’

  He scowls up at the house as he disappears indoors. She follows, weakness in her legs. There’s a smeary, indistinct feeling in her head, thoughts muddled, and when she comes inside, the darkness of the flat disorients her. Her face hurts where Jenna struck her, and the memory of that hard slap, all the venom within it, frightens her. She puts a hand out to hold on to the back of a kitchen chair, steadying herself.

  Jake is walking around the room, one hand clasped to the back of his neck. He’s still holding the newspaper. She’s never seen him so agitated.

  ‘Can I please see that?’ she asks, pointing to the newspaper, trying to keep calm.

  He moves quickly towards her, throws the paper on to the table in front of her. His face is white, a thin-lipped expression of barely controlled rage.

  She glances down and sees the headline:

  A MATCH MADE IN HELL

  Killer’s New Love Interest Has Her Own Dark Past

  She sits down quickly. Even though one part of her knows she ought to remain standing, face him on her feet, the horrible plunge of nerves going through her has made her weak. Her eyes scan the text.

  Convicted killer Anton Woodbury has found love again after serving an eighteen-year sentence for the cold-blooded murder of his wife. Pictured last week leaving Anton’s home in the early hours of the morning is sultry twenty-six-year-old Leah Sullivan. Miss Sullivan, who appears to have taken up residence with the newly released killer, has her own dark history. For in 2007 she was at the centre of a case involving the death of a baby that chilled the small midlands town of _____. Eight-month-old Cian Hannigan had been left in the care of Sullivan, his teenage babysitter, when he died under suspicious circumstances. Although never formally charged, rumours continue to swirl around Leah Sullivan’s involvement in tragic Cian’s wrongful death. When contacted by this newspaper, Cian’s parents declined to comment, however several neighbours we spoke to confirm
ed that the babysitter had sole charge of the child in the crucial twenty-four hours leading up to his death.

  She reads the words on the page, white noise filling her head, a loosening happening deep in her bowels. A surge is beginning inside her – all those dark feelings she has kept down for years are clamouring now to be heard, threatening to rise and overwhelm her.

  ‘Well?’ Jake asks. ‘Were you ever going to tell me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yeah, right!’

  ‘I wanted to. I knew that I should, but –’

  ‘But what, Leah? I mean, what the hell was stopping you? Were you going to wait until after our baby had been born? Was that it? Wait until I was fully trapped before revealing the truth to me?’

  ‘It’s not like that. And I wasn’t trying to trap you!’

  ‘Well, tell me, then. What is it like? Come on, I’m all ears.’

  He’s shaking with rage and she knows she must tell him, but not like this.

  ‘If you could just calm down,’ she begins.

  ‘Calm down?’ His voice screeches against the side of her head. The veins threading through his neck are pumped to the surface, his eyes bulging. ‘I thought you loved me,’ he says. ‘I believed you trusted me. But you’ve been lying to me the whole time.’

  ‘I haven’t been lying.’

  ‘Withholding the truth, then. It’s the same thing.’

  ‘I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid.’

  ‘Of what? I’m not a monster, Leah. What did you think I’d do?’

  ‘I thought if you knew you wouldn’t want me any more.’

  He stares at her, then shakes his head, his shoulders slumping forward. His voice drops, a note of bewilderment entering it. ‘I don’t know what I want.’

  Fear is alive in her chest. She tries to control it. ‘What this article says,’ she starts quietly, ‘what it suggests, is false. I took care of Cian, but I never hurt him.’

  ‘Then why the suspicion? Look – what about this?’ He grabs the newspaper, finds the line he’s looking for and reads it to her: ‘Another local tells us that Miss Sullivan was spotted in Supervalu with the baby late on the Friday afternoon before his death. The child was crying, and the babysitter appeared to grow impatient, rocking him in a way that alarmed onlookers. “I told her that she should put the child back in his pram, that she was rocking him too hard, but she didn’t listen. Just turned away and ignored my advice.”’ He puts the newspaper down and looks at her.

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘You didn’t rock that baby?’

  ‘No! Not in the way they’re suggesting. I didn’t shake him. I didn’t damage him. He was upset, I picked him up out of the pram to comfort him. And most of the time that weekend he was fine – he was perfectly happy! Just that one time, in the shops, with everyone around. I got flustered.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing! I paid for the shopping, and then when we were outside, I put him in the pram and by the time we got home he was calm. The same thing that happens every day of the week with women and babies, but the only reason people talked about it – the only reason they pounced on that one little thing – was because of what happened afterwards. I swear to you, Jake. I didn’t do it.’

  ‘So what happened to him, then?’

  He’s giving her a flat stare, and she cannot tell how deep his suspicion goes. She’s aware of rain outside in the garden, the patter of it on the stone paving, foreign-sounding after weeks of drought. But all she can think about is the baby, the soft weight of him in her arms.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, in a small voice.

  ‘It says here the cause of death was a bleed to the brain.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you don’t know anything about that?’

  She wavers and, for a moment, she is back in the police station of her hometown, facing a detective asking her the same question. Her father had been sitting alongside her, gently coaxing her to answer. And when the question had come, as she had known it would, Did you see Cian fall, or bang his head?, she had stumbled over her reply. The same reply she gives Jake now:

  ‘No.’ She has never said any different. Nor will she, ever.

  Jake is silent. Leah can tell he is unsure of what to believe and wishes there was some way of reassuring him, of drawing him back to her, but he seems so distant, as if he’s speaking to her from behind a wall of glass. Instinctively, she has sealed herself off, allowed herself to be paralysed by fear.

  Instead, she looks down at the paper once more. Two photographs accompany the article. The larger one shows Anton on the steps outside his house, half turned towards the camera, his expression caught in a grimace of irritation. An unflattering shot, something vaguely reptilian about the cast of his features, the slicked-back hair and suspicious gaze – nothing like the Anton she knows. The picture of Leah is blurry and out of focus, but the impression it gives is quite different. The diaphanous dress, the sunglasses, the way her hair is lifted around her face, caught in a sudden breeze – it depicts youth and beauty and a certain blitheness of spirit. She has no recollection of the photograph being taken. A distance shot, captured on camera by a photographer hidden across the road in the park. It must have happened as she was leaving for work one morning.

  She tries to think back, but her brain is muddled and confused, her feelings too anxious and troubled to remember. The idea of someone spying on her like that, a hidden presence watchful of her movements, brings a shudder of fear. She remembers the journalist outside Anton’s front door, calling through his letterbox in a wheedling tone.

  The thought crosses her mind: how did he find out?

  ‘This thing they’re implying about you and him – this love affair,’ Jake says, his voice snarling around the term. ‘Where did they get that impression?’

  ‘Oh, Jake, I don’t know,’ she says, wearily. ‘They made it up. Put two and two together and made seventeen.’

  ‘You have been seeing a lot of him,’ he tells her, in a voice made quiet by a new suspicion.

  ‘Because he’s been unwell. I felt sorry for him.’

  ‘Even though I told you I was unhappy about you spending time with him. Even though you knew I had my doubts.’

  A challenge.

  ‘You don’t seriously believe what’s printed here? That I’m having some kind of a romance with him? Come on!’ Despite the gravity of the situation, the thought is so absurd she cannot help but poke fun at it.

  ‘Do you think it’s funny?’ he snaps. ‘This isn’t some little domestic tiff between you and me. It’s printed in the fucking paper! Everyone can read it! My parents will probably see it. Jesus Christ, my ex has read it. How am I supposed to square it with her?’

  ‘You’ll talk to her,’ she says calmly. ‘Explain that all of this has been taken out of context, misrepresented. These are lies – deliberate falsehoods.’

  But Jake doesn’t appear to be listening. He’s over in the kitchen now, plucking an apple from the fruit bowl, then putting it back and pacing to the sink. He’s like a wind-up toy ready to rattle off in a new direction. His agitation scares her a little.

  ‘Bad enough that I kept it from Jenna about Anton. That our landlord who lives right above us, with whom we share a garden, has a criminal record. I didn’t tell her because I thought there would be no point in worrying her. That we wouldn’t be staying here all that long, probably, just until things improved and we could move somewhere else. And I figured that Matthew would never be left on his own here, anyway, because either you or I would be on hand to keep an eye on him. But how the fuck am I going to explain away both of these things, Leah? Not just about Anton, but about you?’ His voice cracks, and she can see that he is close to tears. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why?’

  Leah gets out of her chair and goes to him. It’s a risk, but she feels compelled to put her arms around him and draw him close. He lets himself be pulled into her embrace, and she reaches a hand up to his h
ead, strokes his hair back, runs her fingertips down over the crevice at the base of his skull where it meets his neck. Only this morning, she had lain in bed beside him, his body spooned into hers, and she had kissed him there in that tender place. Now, everything is different.

  ‘Why?’ he says again, whispering it into her hair.

  ‘Because I was ashamed,’ she answers truthfully. ‘Because I didn’t want anyone to know.’

  She draws back so she can look him in the eye while she says these things. ‘It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, Jake, and for a long time, I thought it would destroy me. But then I learnt that if I could just put it behind me, if I could force it deep down into a dark corner of my past – try to forget about it – I could survive. That was the only way. I had a choice, and I chose to live, even though that meant cutting myself off from my home, my parents, all my old friends. I had to start over. To take that second chance. And when I met you it suddenly seemed possible that I really could begin again. A clean sheet, a fresh start – all those stupid clichés were real. I love you, Jake. I’m still the same person. This terrible thing happened to me ten years ago, when I was just a teenager. It doesn’t define me. It doesn’t change how I feel about you. But the question is,’ and here her voice falters a little, ‘does it change how you feel about me?’

  She lets her arms fall, a little pocket of air coming between their bodies, and waits. Her eyes pass over his face, see the seriousness in his frown. His skin is ashen, and he looks thin and grey in the gloom. Outside, the rain is coming down heavily now, but she doesn’t turn to look at it. Instead, she tracks the changing expression on his face. He opens his mouth to speak, but pauses, his frown deepening into a question.

  ‘How did the newspaper find out? About what happened to you all those years ago.’

  Her heart gives a hard beat. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then who knows about it?’