by Jo Baker
When I woke up there were two matching teenage girls sitting in the armchairs, staring at their phones, and another woman moving around in the kitchen area. The woman asked me if I’d like a cuppa and called me love; she had a soft lined face and mousy curls, two black eyes, and Steri-Strips on a cut across the bridge of her nose. She and Pamela shuffled round each other in the kitchen like old friends. I was getting up to answer her when Sammy called for me from the safety gate at the top of the stairs. One of the twins waved at me to stay put, and went herself to fetch him down. He came with her softly, hand in hand.
“You want some breakfast, little lad?” the woman called from the kitchen, and Sammy nodded and ambled through to her. He looked at her fascinated, but didn’t ask if she was sore. When he had spooned in his Rice Krispies, he came and sat on my lap, and then laid his head down on me, and we just lay there and cuddled and dozed.
Later, the telly was on, the sound turned down, and Sammy was crouched at the coffee table tucking into a flaccid cheese sandwich and a packet of Skips and there was a plate beside him with another sandwich on it, and a mug of tea.
I levered myself up and round and reached for the mug, and drank. The twins’ mum was standing in the kitchen door.
“He told me he was hungry, but I didn’t want to wake you. Hope that’s okay.”
“That’s great. Thank you.”
Sammy nodded enthusiastically, mouth full. And then the local news came on, and I dragged the plate over to me and lifted a sandwich, and then my attention was caught by the TV. Because the first item was me. Or rather it was Nicholas.
The twins’ mum noticed my shift in attention and came over and sat in on the arm of the chair.
I had never seen that particular photograph before, but I knew the room and the night that it was taken. I knew the faces surrounding his, though they were blurred out now: Meryl, Karen, Tim. He was in sharp focus. I saw again that broad, strong face; that dark hair in an artful mess, those pale silvery eyes. The way that he was almost ugly, but wasn’t, and that it didn’t matter anyway if he was. I saw too the way that he remained at one remove, a step away from the people clustering around him.
I wondered who’d provided the photograph—perhaps Richard had taken it, or Steven, that night. The night that he had walked me home. I wondered what they were making of things now.
I heaved myself up, reaching for the remote. The image shifted and now showed the lane outside Gill House, twined across with wind-tugged police tape. I pegged away at the volume and it was suddenly loud, blaring into the room, making the twins raise their perfect sculpted eyebrows.
…members of the public are advised not to approach the suspect; anyone with information should call the police hotline…
I fumbled to lower the volume again, and the twins’ mum took the remote off me and sorted it out, and then it was in other news, and the twins’ mum said “Okay?” and I nodded and she switched the telly off. She rubbed my arm, and put her arm round my shoulder, and I leaned against her.
That night I lay in my jangling single bed across from Sammy’s and I watched him sleep, and then I stared at the ceiling. I got up and took a blanket and went and made a cup of tea, and lay on the sofa and tried to read one of the wrinkled paperbacks. I blinked my way through a hallucinatory half chapter, set it aside and closed my eyes. I woke and it was six fifty, and I winced my way upstairs and lay down in my bed, to be there when Sammy woke up again.
Mark arrived that afternoon, straight off the motorway, all frazzled concern. He went to take my hand but then saw that it was splinted and let his own hand fall. He studied my face, peered at the dressing on my head. He looked around the place. The institutional carpet, the donated furniture, and the net curtains and the aspidistra on the windowsill. I saw it all through his eyes now. How very vulnerable I must seem; how prone to harm. I could not be left alone. I needed someone to look after me. He had decided that that someone would have to be him.
“Come home with me,” he said. “We’ll work it out. We’ll get things sorted.”
“What about Amy? Aren’t you living together now?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s uprooted herself, ended her marriage, done all that to be with you?”
“Well, yes.”
“So no, we can’t get that sorted. We can’t work that out. That’s just too messy.”
His face twisted; I was making him fight for something he didn’t want.
“But this is your life. This is about your safety.”
“Yeah but,” I shrugged, “this isn’t how to fix it. So.”
“We could,” he said, but his voice had gone thin. “We can.”
“Not on those terms, honey, no. I can’t.”
* * *
—
Tracey brought some of our things from the cottage. A bag of clothes, some books that I’d asked for, my laptop, some toys and books of Sammy’s. Out across the valley, a helicopter hung like a wasp; the buzz of it skimmed back and forth through those quiet days. They were using a heat sensor, Tracey told me, but all that showed up so far were sheep, and cars, and cows. They had boots and paws on the ground too, but they’d turned up nothing yet. They had the PCSOs on the beat in town, checking out the derelict buildings, bridges and ginnels, talking to homeless people and street pastors and hostel workers, but had turned up nothing there either.
It seemed that he had, after all, done what he intended to do; he had disappeared.
“I was told he was in a secure unit; I was told that he was sectioned. How did he even get out?”
“He was never sectioned, he wasn’t in a secure unit,” Tracey said. “You were misinformed.”
“Where was he then, all that time?”
“A private clinic down near Clitheroe; more like a retreat, or a spa, really; he could leave whenever he liked. His parents said…”
“What did they say?”
“That he was depressed. That it was brought on by the end of a relationship. And that the relationship was with his tutor. Meaning you.”
“That’s not true.”
“You weren’t in a relationship, or it hadn’t ended?”
“No. The first thing. Weren’t ever in.”
“Then why would they think you were?”
“Maybe they prefer to think that. If I consented…”
She just waited. But my voice was parched and the words wouldn’t come. “Consented…?” she asked. “You did have sex with him, then?”
I cleared my throat. Nodded. “I didn’t want to.”
“Did you say? Did you make it clear?”
“Yes. But then I gave up.”
A moment’s pause. Then she said, “When was this?”
“November. We’d been drinking. It was after a party. I was drunk. And I’ve wondered since, I didn’t drink that much in fact; I wonder if he spiked me.”
She sat back. “You didn’t report it at the time?”
I shook my head. I was expecting to be asked why.
“Giving up is not consent,” is all she said.
Her freckly face, her calmness.
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
“Would you be able to make a statement now about what happened that night, do you think?”
I said, “Yes.”
* * *
—
Late that night with Sammy spark out and the twins upstairs in their room and Bethany making up a bottle in the kitchen, Nicholas was on the news again, the same photo, same news, warnings not to approach. BBC One at ten o’clock and there was the same shot of the lane to my house twisted with police tape. The same information distilled down for the national broadcast, and then a piece to camera from someone I didn’t recognise, a grey fluffy man from the village, and he was saying that it was not the kind of thing they expecte
d to happen in a place like that; he seemed at once outraged and rather thrilled that his peace had been so rudely shattered, and to find himself on camera. But his point was a familiar one: Why would a boy like that, with everything going for him, why would he go and do a thing like that? That’s what this fellow didn’t understand.
I scowled at the telly, chewed my lip.
And then they moved on to a piece about the badger cull. Mel, the twins’ mum, leaned in a shoulder against mine as we watched the badgers’ stumpy-legged frolics in green night vision. “Stupid question.”
“Sorry?”
“Or, um, stupid rhetorical question.”
“What is?”
“ ‘Why would he go and do a thing like that.’ ”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is, you don’t have to understand.”
“You don’t think it helps, to understand?”
“It won’t help you. I spent fifteen years trying to understand, and you know where it got me?”
I shook my head.
She touched the scabbed bridge of her nose: “A&E.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Three times. First he broke two ribs; then he broke my wrist, and then he broke my nose.”
“God bless the NHS, eh.”
“God bless the NHS. Cos the NHS is what made it better. Not knowing why he did it.”
I looked down at my stockinged feet, elevated on a flattened cushion on the rickety old table. I felt a nostalgia-in-advance for this place, for this companionship; I knew that it was all, of necessity, transitional; that even if Sam and I could stay here, the other residents would change around us week by week, and it would never quite be the same again.
“I wish they’d stop killing badgers,” I said.
“I know.”
“It’s not like the badgers have anything to do with anything.”
“I know.”
“I wonder, though,” I said.
“What do you wonder, hon?”
“If I was wrong to say I wouldn’t go to London, back with Mark.”
“Because of Sammy?”
“Mark’s his dad, after all. And he was going to give it another chance.”
“Because of what happened.”
“Well, yes.”
“And he wouldn’t have, otherwise?”
“His mind was made up. His heart was.”
“And he’d sacrifice that for you two. So you’d be safe.”
“Looks like it. Yes.”
“He sounds like he’s a decent man.”
“He is.”
“Thing is with kids…” Mel said.
I spread my toes tentatively. My scabs snagged and eased. “What’s the thing?”
“Kids actually need you to be happy. Well, happy enough.”
“Happy enough?”
She nodded.
“Happy enough but not too happy?”
“Who’s too happy? Nobody, that’s who. Happy enough is all anybody’s ever going to get. But what I’m saying is, you have to take your own happiness into account. The kid can’t really be happy if you’re miserable.”
“You are very wise.”
Mel’s snort seemed to signify all the years, the broken ribs and wrist and nose that it had taken her to arrive at this understanding:
“Yeah,” she said, “right.”
* * *
—
I had stopped expecting anything to happen, and I was quite content with things not happening, with the slow knitting back of flesh and the itchy peel of replaced dressings and the quiet roll-around of bland meals and the cyclical kindness of coffee and tea. So when the unmarked car pulled up in front of the house one morning, it took me a moment to register that it might have anything to do with me.
It was a cool but cheerful summer day. Sammy was playing out in the back yard—there was one of those red-and-yellow kiddie pedal cars that look like they’ve been stretched upwards; he’d been beetling around on the paved area for ages, perfectly content. The twins were out there too, involving themselves with him in a low-key way; keeping an eye out. I could hear their voices from time to time, and his higher-pitched patter as he gave them lengthy replies. I heard a car coming up the road; it pulled over; the engine died. I didn’t think anything of it. Then there were voices, footsteps and a knock on the door.
* * *
—
“How are you doing? Okay?”
Prickly with apprehension, actually; swallowing with a dry throat, shoulders up and knotted. But: “Okay.”
I had to excuse the abruptness of this, but they could only hang on to this for so long because the news were on to it already and they wanted me to hear it from them, and not through any other channel.
They had found him.
A rush of adrenaline.
Or rather: They had found his body.
What.
Yes, I’m afraid so.
Are you sure that…
Father has identified.
And so…
Tracey spoke so evenly, was so functional and steady, and I took it in but I took it in at a shallow level, a thin wash of understanding. He was found, and he was dead. And it was like someone had thrown a board game up into the air and sent all the pieces flying.
How?
They couldn’t talk about that yet, not in any detail. For operational and legal reasons. But they could tell me that he had been dead for some time. They think he probably died later that same night. The night that he came for me. That would explain why the heat-detecting helicopter had had no success in finding him: by the time it was up and searching, he was already cold.
Where?
They’d found him in the beech woods, not far from the river.
I felt the aching ghost of his grip round my ribs; I could feel his breath on my neck, and at the same time I could hear the sound of Sammy and the twins drifting through from out back, feel the warmth bleed from my coffee cup into my palm. One moment overlaid the other like tracing paper; the shapes and colours of that night, along with the lines and patterns of his writing, leached through into the bright day and threw it into shadow.
“Was there a suicide there, some years back?” I asked.
Tracey sat back, remembering. “God. Yeah. The Metcalfe girl. God…”
“I think that might need looking into again,” I said.
“Why do you think that?”
“I think Nicholas might have had a hand in it.”
Tracey slowly nodded.
* * *
—
His suicide was confirmed at the inquest. He’d taken a load of ketamine; he’d vomited, sweated, died there, his heart had given up. He was found splayed half-naked on the woodland floor. That was where I was being dragged to, that night; to the spot in the woods where Sarah had died all those years before. He was going back to where he started. That’s how stories work: there’s something instinctively satisfying about circularity.
He’d cached a waterproof rucksack there, containing his laptop, along with a bundle of zip ties and a roll of duct tape, and a shedload of ketamine. All that time in the clinic—or retreat, or spa—he’d still been writing; I know that Forensics had a mass of stuff to look at, but I never saw any more of it, and I was glad to be spared that. The nylon ties and duct tape were of course superfluous to suicide. They were meant for me; that ketamine was originally intended for me too: he had meant for me to die that night, and then, I guess, he was going to write about it. Make my death part of his art.
But I’d been one of those awkward characters, that swerves off and goes its own way, that won’t do what the author wants. Because all I’d wanted, all along, was not to be a part of his story. To be left alone to get on with mine.
I’m still wary. That doesn’t go away. I make sure the bin goes out in daylight. I don’t answer the door after dark. It’s not the dark I particularly mind; it’s thresholds, the crossings-over, the transitions between spaces. There’s always a chance that something will follow you across. I’m still a bit OCD about checking locks and bolts.
But there are tally marks on the cream gloss frame of my new front door; the pencil is tucked neatly on the windowsill beside it. Every time I come home and lock the door behind me, I notch up another day that I’ve got through without being hurt. Line after line mark these small victories, the growing sense that the world is somewhere I can mostly safely live. On my thirty-fourth birthday—a cupcake with a candle, a crayon drawing of Sam and Mummy—I worked out that I had lived twelve thousand four hundred and eighteen days—including leap years—on which I was not assaulted, and three on which I was. I’m no statistician, but it struck me that those weren’t bad odds: it looked to me like I’d only a one-in-over-four-thousand chance of getting attacked on any given day, and I’m quite comfortable with that. So the maths helps. But still those three excepted days loom bigger and weigh more heavily than any of the others.
We’re living in town now. In one of the new houses by the canal. This is where I keep my tally by the door. In the day, swans go sailing past the back fences, and people belt along the towpath on bikes, or they jog by in all weathers. Kids feed ducks with grandparents and the swans get uppity and hiss. At night the rats slip into the water and steam across, leaving the moonlight broken in their wake. On the far bank are old terrace houses and people living out their lives, watching TV, eating dinner, drawing their curtains, stopping to stare at smartphones, and once I saw a couple silhouetted, caught in the moment of a kiss.
