Anything You Do Say

by Gillian McAllister

  A passing doctor has delivered a baby born in central London’s flagship Topshop store

  How London is dealing with the growing migrant crisis

  I turn towards Reuben as I hear the final headline. It’s almost like I’m waiting for it. A bong, and then:

  London canal-side attack

  I know before I know. I know before they’ve said it. I know because of that bong, as though it is meant only for me. Unthinkingly, I grip the counter, scratching it with my nails.

  The news has moved on, back to the first story. Some politician fiddling his expenses. I don’t care about that, I don’t care about that.

  London canal-side attack. I repeat it, over and over, to myself.

  My body contracts as though I’m in labour. I feel it right in my heart, moving down my arms and legs. I don’t respond to Reuben about my hand.

  He has turned back to the television. ‘We’re ruled by the corrupt and nobody even gives a shit,’ he says, gesturing to the screen. ‘How am I supposed to teach young kids to stop lying and cheating when the people who run the country do it? How hard is it to think “I’m not going to fiddle my expenses now I’m an MP”?’

  It is one of the only topics he is verbal about; he is often sounding off at parties while people stare awkwardly into their glasses. The day Laura met him, she looked knowingly at me and said, ‘There is nothing as sexy as a socialist.’

  I usually sit there and think: I am glad my husband is the moral one, the uppity one, the one who actually does practise what he preaches, and not the one who finds it awkward. Like the time he said he thought women never lied about having been raped, and the room went silent. But now I don’t think anything. I can’t. I am hot and panicky, feeling as though Friday night’s act is written across my forehead, that my thoughts have materialized right there in the living room in front of us. I have turned around and am staring at the television, waiting.

  ‘Lying,’ he continues. ‘They call it these stupid names. Bespoke offences. No one calls it what it really is. It’s not an expenses scandal. It’s lying.’

  I raise my eyes up to the ceiling. What is the universe telling me? Should I keep quiet because I have already told lies, or fess up to stop myself telling even more?

  I sit numbly on the sofa.

  I try to control the wild anxiety. It might not be about him. It might be somebody else. Yes. A stabbing. A shooting. It’s London. So what if it’s by a canal? How many canals are there in London – miles, isn’t it? More than Venice – or is that Birmingham? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Oh God. How am I supposed to get away with a crime?

  Attack. It’s so presumptuous. They don’t know. They don’t know how it was. He threatened a woman. She was frightened. She fled.

  ‘I mean,’ Reuben says, gesturing with his coffee. It sloshes on to the wooden floor, fawn-coloured liquid seeping between the cracks. ‘Shit,’ he says. He immediately puts the cup on the table and goes to find a cloth. ‘I always thought power corrupts,’ he says, as he’s wiping up the stain.

  The presenter cuts to the baby news story, interviewing people who saw the woman’s waters break in Topshop. ‘Not sure why she was shopping,’ one of them says with a laugh.

  I’m half aware that Reuben is wiping up beneath my feet, but my whole mind is turned towards the television, and that last news story.

  ‘Don’t know why we put up with this shite for news,’ he says, standing up and reaching for the remote. ‘So what if she was shopping?’

  I go to stop him, then admonish myself. I can’t do that. No – I can. I’ve got to tell him. ‘Leave it on,’ I say, my voice casual. I’ll tell him when it comes on. I’ve got two minutes, max.

  ‘Can’t deal with this drivel.’ He ignores me and flicks to a cooking channel.

  Reuben does this every day. Puts the news on. Gets annoyed. Turns it off. He’s not very good at listening to my preferences.

  A man’s preparing to skin a rabbit.

  ‘Jesus,’ I say, involuntarily. I inch my fingers towards the remote control, wanting to switch back. It gives me the perfect excuse to put the news back on. But, as I press, a thought chills me.

  They know.

  It’s not on the news because they don’t know, but because they do. Soon, a grainy image of me – on CCTV, maybe, or a photofit – is going to appear. I really have only got two minutes left. Two minutes here with this man, in Before.

  I curse that I’ve spent my entire adult life scrolling in front of laptops and telephones and not paying attention to anything. Daydreaming. Thinking of career swaps I could do. Making up backstories for people. Not looking and listening and learning. Does it being on the television mean they know it’s me? Or does it mean they definitely don’t?

  They’re talking about the Calais migrant crisis. It goes on and on. I sit, rigid, like I am on a bench outside in the cold, not in my warm living room with my husband.

  And then. And then. It is my headline’s time. No, not mine. Not mine.

  A man was discovered by the side of a canal in Little Venice in the early hours of Saturday morning.

  It’s as though I have been plunged into a vat of hot acid. My whole body fizzes. I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. That this is happening. That this is my life. What have I done?

  Caroline Harris, our correspondent, is at the scene.

  They cut to her, right close up to her face.

  ‘I am standing at the scene of a strange attack,’ Caroline says, her voice clipped.

  The camera pans out slightly, and I feel the contraction again. Just don’t think about it, Joanna. Just ignore it.

  But I can’t ignore it. It’s right there in front of me.

  ‘A seventeen-year-old man was discovered at the edge of the canal at six o’clock this morning by a dog walker.’

  I sigh with relief. It can’t be me. Seventeen? Sadiq was not seventeen. There’s no way.

  And then the camera pans out further. And she’s right where I was, just eighteen hours previously. There are the steps. They’re no longer wet. They’ve dried out. The weather’s clear, the sky a navy blue. The reporter’s breath blooms in front of her, just like mine did. The police tape flickers in the breeze. It’s blue and white. A yellow and white tent sits inside the cordoned-off area. What on earth is that? I think, looking curiously at the television.

  ‘God,’ Reuben says. ‘Reckon it was that nutter?’ He has a fantastic memory for details, and I silently curse it.

  ‘What nutter?’ I say, hoping to throw him off the track. To pretend me and my nutter were somewhere else.

  ‘The one who followed you!’

  Reuben is looking at me, an expression of disbelief, almost derision, on his face. ‘You look mad,’ he says in his blunt way.

  I nod quickly, looking at the television. I can’t speak. It’s like I’ve only got so much brain power, and it’s all focused on one thing.

  The woman is still speaking, the yellow and white tent – tent? – quivering in the wind.

  I frown. Why was he only found at six o’clock? Was he drunker than I thought? He must have been freezing.

  And then I replay the sentence in my mind. Discovered.

  Goosebumps appear all over the back of my neck and on my shoulders. No. Please, no.

  ‘It’s always a dog walker,’ Reuben says. ‘Some scumbag’s left them traumatized.’

  Some scumbag. That’s me.

  He stands and goes into the kitchen, his empty coffee cup in his hand, and swills it out before putting it in the dishwasher.

  ‘The man was taken to hospital at six o’clock where he was unable to be resuscitated. The police are treating his death as a murder enquiry.’

  Before I know what I’m doing, I am sliding off the sofa and am face down in our rug. My left hand protests at the bent angle, but I don’t care. I’m not crying. I’m doing something else. Something a wild animal might do. Keening. Rocking forward. My mouth open, but no sound coming out. The r
egret washes over me. I don’t care. I don’t care that Reuben is just over there, his back to me, pushing the dishwasher drawers into place – I’ll have to tell him now anyway. The dishwasher must be full, because he puts it on: he is so good, and so good to me.

  Died.

  Died shortly after.

  Killed.

  Murder enquiry.

  Just like that. A life snuffed out. A few moments before, he was alive; a mesh of thoughts and hopes and views on music and books and the housing market. And now. Nothing. The machine off.

  Reuben is living with a murderer. If I tell him, he will march me straight to the police station. Asking him not to would be like asking him to write with the other hand. Like telling him to vote Tory. To rob a bank. To smack a child.

  And that bloody MP work he’s doing. How could he do that? Help his local MP out, while living with a known criminal? There’s no answer, I think, getting up off the rug and sitting down on the sofa.

  It’s not even that. No, it’s something else. It’s because he would – privately, alone, so as not to upset me – quietly wonder at me. He loves me – in all my fecklessness, my messiness, my disorganization, my crap job – and this would give him pause. He’d never let on, but I know it would happen, like coming back into a hotel room and seeing it’s been cleaned, the towels re-stacked, the toilet paper folded into a point. You wouldn’t know unless you were looking for it. But I would know.

  Reuben’s standing in the kitchen, his back to me. He turns, looking thoughtful. ‘There but for the …’ he says. ‘Imagine if you’d been a few hours later?’

  I start to feel the same panic I felt in Little Venice. A pounding heart. My hands involuntarily making fists. A cold sweat over my back and shoulders. I wouldn’t be surprised if, when cut open, I saw that my blood was black, congealing, or that I was full of cockroaches, or had an anvil, nestled weightily in amongst my organs.

  How can I tell him now? Now that it’s murder? It will ruin him. I will be the worst person he knows. An enemy.

  And, in the back of my mind, right in the recesses, among the archives and the distant, half-formed memories, is something else. Seventeen. There is no way Sadiq was seventeen. And so … perhaps it was not Sadiq.

  I can’t let myself think it. It was him. I was being pursued.

  And that is why I killed.

  That has to be true. Anything else would ruin me.

  I fall asleep on the sofa in the early evening. My mind must be exhausted, but napping isn’t exactly unfamiliar to me: I spent my entire time at university taking illicit naps. My natural reaction is to switch off. To ignore. I sleep deeply, but dream of Sadiq.

  Reuben wakes me with another coffee – he drinks so much of it, although it never seems to affect him – and walks out of the living room, probably going to his piano room to write up case notes. As he leaves, he says over his shoulder, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever known you to sleep talk.’

  ‘What?’ I say.

  He laughs under his breath, as he walks down the hall, and says, ‘You were talking absolute rubbish.’

  I can’t ask him. I can’t press him. But what if it was something damning? I draw my knees up to my chest and hope that it wasn’t.

  I stare at the news, even though they’ve moved on from my story. I hear two sirens rush past, and jump both times, a layer of sweat materializing between my skin and my clothes. There are so many sirens in London.

  I have never done anything alone in my life. I’ve led it by committee. Asking everybody’s opinions on how to have my hair cut and where to rent in London. Facebook and Twitter were devices where I outsourced my decisions to others. And now: I’m alone.

  I have almost finished the coffee when Reuben walks back in. ‘You were apologizing, in your sleep,’ he says, as if no time has passed at all.

  ‘What for?’ I say.

  ‘Don’t know.’ He throws me a strange look. I must look guilty. ‘You just kept saying I’m sorry. Over and over.’

  I should laugh it off, but I can’t. All I can think of is what I am sorry for.

  Murder. I am sorry for murdering a man.

  I meet Reuben’s eyes again. He is looking at me slightly quizzically. The slightest of frowns crosses his features.

  ‘Oh, right,’ I say faintly. ‘How strange.’

  ‘Unlike you,’ he says.

  No.

  Nobody must know. Not even Reuben. Especially not Reuben.

  6

  Reveal

  I have been on my own for what feels like fifteen minutes. I’ve been given a cup of tea that tastes like cigarettes.

  I wonder what the other people do in these cells. And then I see their sleeping forms in my mind, on those little screens in the custody suite. I look up, above the door, at the grimy ceiling – how did it become splattered with brown liquid so high up? – and I see it: the CCTV camera, white, like a robot, pointed down at me. I, too, will be on those screens. Being watched.

  The hatch opens, and I jump.

  ‘You’ve eaten, I presume?’ a man says, and I shake my head.

  ‘We were going to eat after,’ I say.

  Kebabs ;) Laura had WhatsApped me, when we were planning our night out.

  ‘And you’ve been drinking.’

  I can’t answer him because he huffs as he slams the hatch, like I am an animal in a pen.

  He appears again after a few moments. My body has begun to shiver and jerk. It was an accident, I want to tell him. I hear the hatch slide open and he peeks in.

  ‘All-day breakfast,’ he says.

  He pushes a box through to me. If I wasn’t there to catch it, it would’ve dropped on the floor. It’s in a white plastic tray that’s steaming. It hurts my hands and I carry it by its rim over to the mattress. There’s no table.

  He leaves again, and I remember a few weekends ago when I tried to make sweetcorn fritters. They came out like chicken feet, Reuben said.

  Even through the heavy door, I can hear somebody say, ‘We’ve got a probable section eighteen in there. Worse if …’

  A section eighteen? I wonder what that is. Maybe it’s police speak for somebody who is incorrectly detained; who will be released just as soon as her solicitor arrives.

  Hypothesizing makes me uncomfortable, and I automatically reach for a mobile phone I no longer have, am no longer allowed to look at freely. It has been years since I have sat with nothing to do. I can’t even imagine eating my dinner without some device playing in front of me.

  There’s no clock, and no sun, and so I eat, and I look at the items in the room – the cell – with me. The circular fluorescent light. The inside of it is lined with dead flies. The black arrow. It’s painted so neatly; somebody must have used a stencil.

  The food is awful. It’s as if somebody has blended an all-day breakfast into a liquid, then cooked the whole lot. Marbled through the eggs and bread are occasional chunks of bacon. It’s cold in the very middle. The eggs feel like jelly in my mouth.

  As I finish, lacking anything to do and having run out of thoughts, I reach my hand out in front of me and trace a finger down the blue wall. It’s cool. The cheap paint bobbles underneath my fingertip.

  The eggs catch in my throat as I start to cry. I’m crying for lots of things. At my unluckiness, I suppose. At where I find myself, aged thirty. But mostly for Reuben. Because I miss him. Because I know he’ll be missing me. But also because of that judgement. That beat of judgement I heard the second after I told him. I didn’t imagine it. I know I didn’t.

  When Reuben and I first met, he was standing at the edge of an end-of-university party, observing coolly, not speaking to anybody. At first, it was his height that caught my attention, but by the time I was uncapping a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, it was other things, too. The way he wasn’t talking to anybody. The way he was simply standing at the bookcase in the bay window, running his finger along it.

  ‘I’m Jo,’ I said boldly.

  After a few minutes’ chat, he inclin
ed his head, led me to the stairs perfunctorily. They were quiet – he preferred them, he said. I liked that he wanted to sit on the stairs and talk about books with a girl he’d only just met. I liked that he didn’t give a shit what anybody else thought of him, that he’d been obviously bored beforehand. A man called Rupert walked past us, talking about where he was going to be summering, and Reuben and I, as naturally as our hearts were beating, exchanged a glance.

  ‘I hate Oxford,’ I said, and his green eyes lit up.

  We slagged off Oxford on the stairs. I made him talk, he kept saying in surprise. He hated talking, but he liked talking to me. Only me.

  I saw him the next day. We’d been texting all morning and, when I rounded the corner to him, he nodded, a half-smile on his face, like he was remembering something enjoyable, but he said nothing.

  ‘Duty solicitor,’ a male police officer says now.

  He jerks me from my memories. It can’t have been more than an hour since I requested one. I hope he’s good. Diligent.

  I’m taken to the same phone I called Reuben from, the handset dangling like a noose. I thought it would be nice to be out in reception, but it’s not.

  My knees shake as I pick up the phone.

  ‘Joanna?’ my solicitor says.

  I’m momentarily surprised it’s a woman. How awful of me. ‘Yes. Hi.’ My voice is hoarse.

  ‘Hi. I’m Sarah Abberley. Don’t say anything, please,’ she says crisply, her voice clipped. ‘The police are very likely listening.’

  ‘I just need to explain myself,’ I say desperately, my voice hushed, into the phone. The receiver is sticky against my chin. ‘Clear it all up.’

  ‘Don’t say another word to the police. No doubt you’ve said some things. They’ll be standing there drinking their tea, but listening …’

  I look over at them. They’re just sitting at the desk, mindlessly watching the CCTV monitors. ‘Um, okay,’ I say, sceptical.

  ‘I’m afraid I am serious, Joanna.’

  ‘When will you be here?’

  ‘Soon – they have to …’ I hear a tapping sound.

  I picture her in a slimline suit, cigarette trousers. Geek glasses. Dip-dyed hair. Tapping a pen against a minimalist kitchen counter. A man behind her – tall, a wiry-looking academic, maybe – making avocado smash. They eat late, most nights.