Something Might Happen

by Julie Myerson

  So I keep quiet. When I pick up on Ali Ledworth’s pregnancy long before the doctors do (two tests in a row come back negative), I say nothing about it at home. And when poor Janey Urbach is knocked down in Bury on a one-way street by a car going the wrong way and suffers appalling spinal damage, I know better than to mention to Mick that the last time I treated her I felt something—a heavy weight hanging over her—as unmissable as a cloud blotting out the sun on a hot day.

  And when I tell Alex I feel that Lennie will be OK, it’s a lie. I don’t. Not at all. Ever since that moment in The Polecat her presence—normally solid and resilient and unremarkable—has been unfurling and undoing itself, snagging, tearing, falling apart.

  Anne Addison types out the minutes from that night’s meeting. She tells me it feels almost wrong, putting down on paper what amount to Lennie’s last words, her last recorded comments—made only an hour or so before she died. She types them up and copies them, but does not circulate them yet, out of respect for the family, she says.

  There is a report on the Quiz Night—Lennie recorded as saying she’s disappointed by how little was raised and querying the amount spent on food. Maybe we should just get people to bring stuff next time? she suggests. Nothing fancy, just maybe quiches and baguettes and cheese and maybe a dip or two?

  One or two people disagree. They feel that, for the price of the ticket, a hot meal is expected. Lennie’s shrug is not minuted of course, but I can see it, clear as anything—her sitting back, blonde head bent, picking intently at her nails, deciding not to push her comments any further.

  Lennie is good—better than me—at knowing when to shut up. Which is a good thing because there’s always a bit of trouble at these meetings. There’s always someone disgruntled, someone who resents the way someone else says something, someone who refuses to cast a vote.

  There’s a brief discussion about the Carnival Parade, which is going to be the last week of June along the sea front. Last year I took this on, but this time Lennie’s agreed to do it. Someone suggests a competition at the school to design a Carnival poster—Maggie says great, she has a book-illustrator friend who would judge it. Maybe his publisher would even donate prizes? I know there would have been a murmur of pleasure at that. But Barbara Anscombe, who likes to get her oar in, ignores Maggie and says the post office should also be approached—see if they’d be willing to provide balloons and maybe smaller prizes for runners-up.

  Then there’s the usual argument about who the proceeds should go to. Barbara says Marie Curie.

  What? Again? says Sally Abrahams, whose son is on his gap year in Nepal. Shouldn’t we be raising awareness of something beyond the town—Christian Aid, Action Aid, something a little more multicultural?

  Cancer affects people in all cultures, says Barbara firmly and Polly Dawson points out that many people in the town know someone who has died of cancer, though no one dares look at John who lost his wife so recently.

  But Lennie agrees with Sally, that it might be nice to have a change. She knows, for instance, that the WI in Westleton are raising money for African farmers (a snort here from Barbara)—and what’s to stop them going back to Marie Curie at Christmas?

  All of this, except Barbara’s brief snort of derision, is minuted by Anne Addison.

  Later, shocked, baffled, interviewed by police, everyone who attended the meeting agrees that Lennie behaved quite normally, that there was nothing strange or different about her behaviour at all. A bit tired, perhaps, they all concede, but then who isn’t tired on a Monday night after a day’s work followed by feeding the kids before rushing out again?

  At a quarter to ten, the meeting is declared closed and Lucy, Lennie, Polly, Sue Peach, her daughter Sophie and Maggie lay out a selection of crudités, tortilla chips and dips. Bottles are opened, paper cups pulled from their cellophane.

  Sue lets drop that she’s thinking of doing an Open University degree, now that her youngest has started full-time school. And Lucy says something along the lines of how terrific and that if she had her time all over again she just knows she’d study with a whole lot more passion.

  And Lennie laughs and says, Ah but isn’t that what being a student is all about? Taking life for granted? Living in the moment and for the moment and with no sense of what the future holds?

  Everyone—Sue, Maggie, Polly, Sophie, Charlotte, Sally, Lucy, Barbara, John, Anne—remembers this comment of hers. They all mention it in the police interviews. No one can bear to think that, less than an hour later, the person who made it is dead.

  Chapter 2

  WHEN YOU LIVE RIGHT BANG UP CLOSE TO SOMEONE, IT can be hard to get far enough back to see them clearly. Or maybe your eyes do look, but your brain can’t take it in. Like you never notice your own kids growing, or your own baby getting proper hair.

  When Alex tries to give the police a physical description of Lennie, he gets confused. He goes almost crazy trying to think what she had on—earlier for instance when she screamed at Max about the state of his room, or kicked the washing-machine door shut and swore because it hurt her foot, or made the boys’ tea in a hurry and upset Connor by slightly burning the frilled edges of his second fried egg. He knows she did these things, but he can’t see her doing them.

  This shocks him.

  Like she’d already gone from our lives, he tells me later.

  You were in a panic, I say. It’s not your fault. You couldn’t think.

  I say it but I know it’s meaningless. And he just looks at me—just screws up his eyes and rips the skin from the ragged side of his thumbnail and I know what he’s thinking: he’s trying to imagine the last time he saw her, trying to retrieve it from the deadest, most faraway part of his mind.

  He tells the police he thinks she may have had on a red shirt, a shiny one.

  Satin? they say.

  He nods.

  Something with a sheen anyway. Satin or silk, he says. Is there a difference?

  Al shuts his eyes.

  And jeans, he says. Jeans and slip-on trainers, blueishgrey ones, the type with the knobbly sole—

  After clothes, they ask him about other things. The state of his marriage. He tells them it’s fine, it’s normal—no, no rows recently, not that he can think of. Nothing major anyway. And does Mrs Daniels have any history of depression or other illness such as seizures or fits?

  No, Alex tells them, relieved that this part at least is completely true. Never, no. Lennie’s a fit and healthy person, never ill, never down, nothing like that.

  He explains that she’s a potter, a ceramicist—that she’s just had an exhibition in London. That a couple of big stores have bought her stuff—that she’s doing well. They ask him what he does and he tells them he makes furniture. And maybe he smiles because he knows how it must sound. The potter and the furniture maker in their cottage by the sea. They ask him how his business is doing and he says, Good—thinking it a strange question—good enough, he says. Trying to stop his stupid hands from shaking so hard.

  She would never go off without telling me, he adds then, hating the small whine of helplessness in his voice. But they seem to accept this and he relaxes. It’s only when the officers step outside for a moment that he finds himself overwhelmed by the lingering tang of their aftershave and rushes to the downstairs toilet to be sick. A quick, odourless and painless throwing up, like a dog or a baby.

  Almost six. I crouch on the edge of the musty sofa and feed Liv by Alex and Lennie’s gas fire in the half-dark. She’s not hungry—just gums my nipple in a kind of half-dutiful way, then relaxes her lips and lets it slip away off her tongue. You think that babies are these fragile little creatures, at everyone’s mercy, but they’re not. I know that and Liv knows it too. She knows what she wants from life and she’s learning the knack of how to get it.

  I pull my bra back up and replace the pad and at that moment hear the upstairs toilet flush and then Max’s voice saying something cross. Then the creak of the stairs.

  Not just Max,
both of them.

  Where’s Mum and Dad? Why’re you here? Is it a school day? Connor wants to know, one hand in his mouth, the other down his pyjama bottoms.

  Mum broke down somewhere, I tell them, and Daddy’s had to go and pick her up and sort out the car—

  He can’t fix cars, says Max straightaway.

  No, I say, I mean, get it to a garage or whatever.

  But Max looks suspicious.

  So—you mean she broke down and stayed in the car all night?

  No. I think she stayed at Maggie’s, I tell him.

  That’s weird, he says, frowning.

  Is it?

  You know it is. Why wouldn’t she just walk back here?

  I search for an answer but it’s not necessary, I’ve lost him. He’s already switched on the TV and is holding the remote and staring intently at the screen.

  Are you allowed TV in the mornings? I ask him. He shrugs and turns it off, chucks the remote on the sofa. He’s a good boy really.

  He won’t be long, I say.

  How long? Connor asks. How long will he be?

  He pours himself a bowl of Coco Pops. Some have spilled on the table and he leans over and thumbs them straight into his mouth.

  I ask Max to get some milk and he does.

  Not semi-skimmed, says Connor quickly.

  Yeah, yeah, says Max, ignoring him.

  Just normal milk, says Connor, looking anxious. No lumps.

  I love these boys. I love them just about as much as my own—my Nat, my Jordan, my Rosa, my Liv. When they were born, I was the third person in the world to hold them—after Lennie, after Al.

  Connor pulls up his T-shirt with a basketball player on and looks at me.

  Look, he says.

  What? Look at what?

  At this.

  He stretches backwards. So skinny I can see right through him—through to the blood that threads between his little snappy bones. Nipples so tiny, like an afterthought that you can’t believe in. A network of pale blue and mauve. Goose pimples.

  You’re cold, I tell him. Haven’t you got anything to put on? Where’s your pyjama top?

  I don’t like it, he says. And I’m not cold.

  He stares at me and shivers, still holding up the T-shirt. He has got it, all of Lennie’s whiteness—her creamy skin and hair, a real, milky blondeness you think you can taste on your tongue.

  Connor, I say, what am I supposed to be looking at?

  This, he says, indicating a small, scrubby mauve tattoo on his breastbone. Already coming off.

  And this—

  Pulling his elbow round to show me the snake tattoo curled there, It’s not real, he says. It soaks off.

  He rubs at it, frowning.

  Wow, I say. Great.

  It’s from a comic.

  The Beano, supplies Max, mouth spilling cereal.

  Has Jordan got one? Connor asks me.

  Um, I don’t think so.

  Jordan’s too old for The Beano, Max informs him.

  Shut up!

  Mum’s getting a real tattoo, Max tells me, keeping his eyes on my face. On her bum.

  Connor whips around, to see if he means it.

  She is! Max insists, laughing now. Connor relaxes and his eyes rest on Liv.

  Why’s she here?

  Because she’s too little to leave behind.

  He gazes at her thoughtfully. Like Lennie too he has no eyebrows—just a ridge of white-blonde hair. And where are the others? he says. Where’s Jordan?

  At home asleep, I tell him. Why aren’t you asleep? It’s dreadfully early.

  Something made me wake up, he says. I don’t know what.

  Liv makes an upset noise and I pull her out of the seat and lay her on a blanket on the floor. It’s not the cleanest—stained with old Ribena and covered in dog hairs. Liv lies there, almost happy for a second, then suddenly and inexplicably not so happy—kicking, fast and angry and breathless. Building to a wail.

  I pick her back up and she pants furiously, rescued from herself.

  I want Mum, says Connor.

  Shut up, says Max in a vicious monotone.

  Shush, Max, I say, be nice.

  I’m not nice, Max says.

  I do, says Connor, I want her. Where is she?

  Sweetie, I say and touch his head.

  I joggle Liv up and down to keep her quiet. Every time I stop she takes a breath, ready to cry, so I joggle her again and the breath subsides unhappily.

  Max gets up and windmills the air with an extended right arm, practising his bowling technique. After that, he hops around the room on one leg, hugging himself, the sleeves of his pyjamas stretched right down beyond his wrists.

  OK, I say, do you want to see what’s on TV?

  No, says Max.

  Can’t you go now? asks Connor with a little wail in his voice. Can’t Mummy get up?

  Didn’t you listen? She’s not here you stupid fat moron, Max tells him, lunging suddenly and shooting a hand from a flopping sleeve just long enough to pinch him hard on the thigh.

  Quickly, Connor slams his hand into Max’s face. The TV remote control falls to the floor and the casing splits off.

  Now look what you’ve done you little bastard, says Max.

  He’s not allowed to say that, says Connor.

  He looks at me to see what I’ll do and then when I do nothing he begins to cry and so does Liv.

  OK, I tell them, I’m going to sit down and see if I can feed Liv. Who wants a chocolate biscuit?

  They’re for Saturday, Connor says helplessly.

  Never mind. I’m in charge. Have one now.

  What, in the morning? says Max, eyes fixed on my chilly, half-bared breast. But he gets the packet and helps himself to one anyway.

  Outside, the sky is losing its thickness and blackness. Soon, if you were to go upstairs and stand in Lennie and Alex’s wide, bare bedroom you’d be able to make out the two rigid funnels of smoke rising from the Harriman’s Brewery.

  Mick rings. Behind his voice are all the ordinary sounds of our house: Rosa shrieking, Fletcher barking, Nat shouting at him to shut up.

  Mick shouting at them to be quiet.

  What’s going on? he says. I tell him I don’t know.

  Where’s Alex?

  You mean you haven’t heard anything?

  No.

  I take a breath. It’s hard to know what to say with the boys listening. Mick knows what I’m thinking.

  Don’t, Tess, he says, it’ll be OK.

  Silence. Max is screwing the Yoyo wrappers into a hard, green foil ball.

  Shall I come and get the boys, then? Take them all to school?

  I don’t know—I begin.

  I’ve got to take this lot.

  I don’t know, I say. I mean, should they go to school?

  Come on, he says, of course they should go. What else are they going to do today?

  I catch Max’s face watching me, then turning to see if he can flick Connor on the back of his head with the ball. Livvy begins to cry: a slow, spiralling wail.

  In his heart, or so he tells people later, Alex already knows. It can happen. That the usual rules melt away and you just find you know things. Facts queue up and slide, unasked, into your head, ears, heart.

  Or, maybe it’s true. Maybe Lennie’s pain and dying does somehow get to him across the car park, over the tangly dark of Bartholomew’s Green and down into Spinner’s Lane. Or, more likely, is it just that when the worst things happen, time isn’t the same any more? It twangs and collides and you can’t any longer tell the hot and dirty moment when you knew from the clean, sweet, cold one when you didn’t.

  Alex’s father killed himself when he was twelve and Alex was the one who found him there on the landing with the inside of his head pouring black stuff on the carpet. He always holds this fact up as a blanket—a protection against anything else happening. You can see why. Shouldn’t he be safe now? Hasn’t he had the worst? Hasn’t he?

  Alex is in the p
olice station for a very long time. The longest hour of his life, he tells people later. Finally two police officers come to find him. One is called Mawhinney. He’s not from here—that’s how he knows it’s serious. He’s a black-haired, slightly European-looking man with big thick wrists and straight dark hair poking up beneath the collar of his shirt. A funny name, he’ll remember it. It’s about to be dawn but the air still holds the cloaked-off smell of night. Dim and quiet. Despite that, in the black conifer between the police station and Flook’s newsagent’s next door, a single blackbird is singing its heart out. Alex keeps hearing it, poor fucker, coping with the whole dawn chorus alone.

  Slowly, through the tiny square of window, the light grows less dirty, shrubs and telegraph wires get more distinct. Alex remembers this. He tells me later that he remembers every detail of that room, that place, every sound, every smell. As if his body is on high alert: unable to stop itself from taking everything in.

  And he is sitting at a table and smoking. And he hasn’t touched his tea which tastes horrible, of the machine, but he has a pack of freshly opened cigarettes in front of him.

  I keep trying to give up, he tells the duty officer behind the desk. And then something happens and I start up all over again.

  The officer thinks what a nice fellow Alex is. Just an ordinary chap, friendly and approachable. A good guy—the type you’d lend money to, or trust with your wife and kids. He’ll remember this fact later, when friends ask him about this terrible night, this terrible case. How can there be a God, for Christ’s sake, he’ll say, when the worst things always happen to the most decent people?

  If Alex could think at this moment, he might be thinking the same. Instead, Oh God, oh God, he goes when he sees them coming in, Mawhinney and the other one. Oh, he goes, oh God, oh Jesus Christ.

  Mawhinney holds out his hand—a forthright hand, used to facts and upset and awful things. Alex quickly stubs out his cigarette. Holds himself very still.

  He wishes they didn’t have to tell him what he already knows.