Try Not to Breathe (25 page)

“You don’t seem very upset,” Jacob said, flatly.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?”

The living room door opened and Matty’s mop of hair poked around.

“Can I watch telly?”

“Back to your room!” Paul yelled. “You’re s’posed to be off sick anyway!”

Socked feet thundered up the squeaky stairs.

“Tell me I’m not fucking upset, mate, I’m not having that. You don’t know nothing about me.”

“I find it odd that you never came forward with any of this, she was on the TV for weeks. And you’re describing your daughter going missing like…I don’t know, like a dog that ran away.” Jacob’s bravado was unsettling Alex.

“You wait until you have your kid,” said Paul, raising his voice to pub row levels. “You just wait. You can’t imagine what it’s like yet. Some evil bastard out there picks up your little girl and kills her. You have to decide, do I pick myself up, dust myself down and block it out? Or do I die with her? That’s your only choice.”

“I’m sorry,” said Alex. “I understand how upsetting this must be for you. But Amy didn’t die, she’s still alive.”

“No she ain’t. Her body’s hooked up to some machine, but she’s dead.”

“She’s not being kept alive by machines anymore. She’s breathing by herself and the doctors have registered brain activity,” Alex argued, quietly. Jacob frowned at her.

“Amy’s dead,” Paul said.

“So your other children don’t know about Amy, then?” Alex asked.

“There’s never been a reason to tell them. Look at Chloe sleeping, she don’t need to know how shit the world is. Let her sleep, let me worry about the world.”

“Where’s their mum?” Jacob asked, stretching his fingers out in his lap.

“Mums. Two of them. Matty was a one-off thing with a girl I knew. She was in no fit state to bring him up. Slag. Chloe was with my ex. She sees her weekends.”

“That’s quite unique,” Alex said.

“I wasn’t letting these ones go. I told both their mums, ‘You have this kid, this is my kid. You leave me, you leave the kid here.’ I walked away once, never again.”

Paul wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

“Now, how much can I get for a photo?”

W
hen my mum thinks someone is a bit dodgy, she describes them as “a case.” It’s the kind of mum language that doesn’t arouse suspicion, that doesn’t sound like she’s slagging them off or “casting aspersions,” as she also says. But if you know her, you know exactly what she means.

Bob’s dad—Granddad Pete, who died a few years ago—he was “a case.” And by “case,” she meant he was a mean old racist and a woman-hater.

The bloke in the greengrocer who always makes double entendres about fruit, he’s “a case.” Behind Mum’s eye-rolling smile you can see her opinion of him curdle more and more with every shopping trip. Eventually, she’ll just go to the supermarket instead.

And old Jack in our road, he’s another one. My mum has told me in no uncertain terms to give him a wide berth. She didn’t trust him as it was, you could see her invisible antennae go off the moment she first met him, even I noticed that and I was really young at the time. But when I told her I’d seen him being a case in the window when I walked past, she grabbed me by the wrist and told me that I was to walk away if I ever saw him coming my way, and to cross the road whenever he was out and about.

I didn’t tell Bob. I just knew, without Mum saying, that it was better not to. What words would I even use? “Fiddling with himself”? Or maybe I should be all biology class about it and say that I suspected he was “masturbating” as he watched me. Ugh, cringe! No, it was better just to avoid him and leave Bob undisturbed. The last thing any of us needed was Bob steaming round to a neighbor’s house, kicking off.

Not that Bob’s a thug, not at all. He’s just quiet and cheerful most of the time. But when it comes to me and Mum, he’s very protective. And that’s nice, more or less. I mean, it does my head in when he overworries and that means I can’t do something I want to do. Especially if Mum’s said I can go out and then Bob’s overruled it. But even when I’m at my most pissed off about it, I do get it. Some people don’t have a dad who cares that much, and I’m grateful that I do. Not that I’d ever tell him that.

I guess it’s like having a bodyguard. A short, fat bodyguard in dungarees. It makes you feel safe. And if you feel safe, you feel brave. Maybe that’s why I’ve always felt brave. Right now though, I feel a little less brave than I used to. I think it’s because I can’t remember my last conversation with Bob, I can’t feel his invisible hand on my shoulder. Has he had extra work on, maybe? I feel a bit foggy-headed today but it feels like it’s been a while.

In fact, everything feels like it’s been a while. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I can’t really place when I last did anything. Even stupid stuff, like go to the toilet. When did I last go to the toilet? What did we have for tea yesterday? Or the day before?

Maybe I’ve been sleeping too much and that’s got me all cloudy. Mum always says it’s just as bad to sleep too long as too little, your body clock gets scrambled and you don’t know where you are.

I’m not a big sleeper. Not like Jake, that boy can sleep. I called him at about 4 p.m. during half-term once, and his brother said he was still in bed. At 4 p.m.! Now, that’s a sleepyhead.

I guess it’s easier when you live in quite a big house. In our house, if one of us is up and using the loo, we’re all awake and queuing outside the bathroom. The kettle downstairs whistles me awake in the morning. I like our little house though. I like knowing Mum and Bob are right there, and it’s cozy. But I haven’t been waking up when they’ve got ready for work, I seem to be asleep more than I’m awake right now. Maybe this is just something that happens at this age. That’s the joke, isn’t it, about students and teenagers and that, sleeping all day? Maybe my time has come. Maybe this is just a part of growing up.

T
he doctor’s surgery had no record of an appointment for Fiona Arlington today.

“The midwife is in again next Monday, perhaps she has an appointment then,” the baggy-faced receptionist had told Jacob, brusquely.

“Fiona’s my wife, so I need to be there. Can you please tell me when I should come back?”

Jacob’s hands gripped the reception desk, where he had often signed Fiona in as she’d flopped down exhausted in the waiting area.

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t. You’ll need to ask your wife for that information.” Jacob pushed away hard from the desk, partly for momentum, mostly not.

Outside, he furiously jabbed at his phone. Fiona picked up after three rings. “What is it, Jacob?”

“I’ve come for our appointment but you’re not here,” he said.

“It’s my appointment,” she said.

“Don’t punish the baby.”

Silence.

“We’re still the baby’s parents, regardless of what’s happening with us.”

“You should have thought about that before you cheated on us.”

“Did you listen to nothing I said the other day? Sweet Jesus, Fiona, I’m not cheating on you. I’ve got stuff I need to sort out, and I don’t even care if you believe me right now, but I’m not cheating on our baby and you can’t shut me out like this.”

He heard Fiona take a deep breath. “Fine. You can come to the next appointment, if you answer me one question.”

“Blackmail now? Fff.” Jacob trailed off and sought a shot of patience from the sky. “Fine. What’s the question?”

“Is there another woman?”

“Not in the way you mean.”

Click.

The phone went straight to voicemail as soon as he tried to call back. As patients shoved in and out of the surgery doors, Jacob kept calling until he had barely any battery left, and no idea what to say if she did answer.

“H
i, Amy, it’s Alex again.”

Amy’s breathing made its gentle “shh-shh” sound like the sea retreating. Her skin was almost luminous in the sunlight and her face looked softer than during the last visit.

It was easy to imagine Amy as a little girl, sitting in the garden, pouring water between cups. Or catching ladybirds on the ends of her fingers and peddling in decreasing circles on a tiny bike. Bob and Jo would have watched her grow from a little thing to a young woman. Did they feel misplaced relief that she was no longer small and vulnerable?

Of course, Alex realized, she was just reimagining her own childhood. When she’d sorted through her mother’s things she’d found a small leather photo album at the bottom of a box. Inside, pictures of Alex on a trike, Alex with a four-leaf clover, Alex sitting in a washing-up bowl, playing with a bucket. And one of her father in his sixties, two-year-old Alex folded into the crook of his elbow, both smiling rigidly. She couldn’t remember meeting him then, didn’t remember any visits clearly except the last one.

She was eleven and about to start high school. He had shown up, flustered and irascible, with a My Little Pony sticker book that Alex at once hated for its babyishness and loved because it was all there was.

“I didn’t think I missed having a dad, you know,” Alex told Amy. “I didn’t know what it was like to have a real dad anyway. I mean, a dad who doesn’t have to keep you secret from his wife. But the older I got, the more I felt cheated, like I’d missed out on something fundamental. I bet it would have been different if I’d had a stepdad like Bob,” Alex said carefully, watching Amy for tiny reactions.

Alex’s father was a high court judge, a highly regarded one. He died just after her twelfth birthday, by which time he was nearly eighty. Her mother was left a sum of money and that’s how his wife found out about Alex. It was all there in the will.

“My mum had held out for years, Amy. I think she’d hoped having me would get her a pay bump. Obviously she saw other men on and off—lots of them actually,” Alex snorted, “but she was always holding out for that golden ticket.”

Alex closed her eyes. She had absorbed all the talk of “The Judge” and ignored as much of it as possible. She hadn’t asked about her siblings after the first time. Her mother had not reacted with kindness to Alex’s lonely questions.

For a while after he died, they would drive to the cemetery at night and her mother would rage about the family plot and the discrepancies on the stone. Her mother would pour red wine from a Thermos and what sometimes started as a toast would fast descend into yelling at the gravestone. After a few months her mother fell in with a new boyfriend, and the mourning abruptly ended.

Alex sat back in the hospital chair and looked around Amy’s fabric room. It must have been bigger than her bedroom at Warlingham Road had been. A sort of softened version of it. Alex imagined Jo and Bob carefully removing the posters from Amy’s walls at home, rolling them up and carrying them like newborns into the hospital. They would have unfurled them, maybe quarreled over where best to put them for “when she wakes up.” Or perhaps they moved silently, tacking the posters up to the one solid wall, working without words.

Thinking about her playlist, she noted the band names from the posters in her Moleskine. Pulp and Blur, she already knew, but there were several T-shirts with pictures on the front folded on a chair. Alex walked over to them, looking over her shoulder to be sure she wasn’t being watched. They appeared worn and faded, the kind of aging that makes them soft. Alex touched the first T-shirt gently and eventually picked it up and held it from the shoulders so it unfurled. It had pictures of Iggy Pop on it, in a pastiche of Warhol’s “Marilyn Diptych
.
” Alex folded it carefully and put it to one side. The next T-shirt was a blue Blur T-shirt, possibly the one Amy had been wearing on Alex’s first visit to the ward. Without picking up the last, Alex could see the familiar typeface of the Smashing Pumpkins. She folded them all back up and placed them neatly back on the chair. From everything Bob had said, she imagined Jo would have taken great care over folding clothes, laundering for her little family.

Chaos and crisis, those were the breeding grounds for bad things to go on unnoticed. Not enough eyes watching. Visitors who should not have been made welcome, slipping in through cracks. Nothing about Jo and Bob’s life smacked of chaos, or distraction. The tiny little house, the regular jobs, the one child. What could they have missed? How could they have missed anything? But they missed Paul. And maybe, if Paul was to be believed, they missed an older guy too.

Alex thought of her own mother. She had slept through whole days, leaving Alex to run empty for the school bus in the previous day’s crumpled clothes. So many times she wasn’t there. And nothing dramatic had happened. All those dark corners and very little happened. So why Amy?

Alex looked at the posters, and the silence of the ward boomed. She took her iPhone from her bag, pulled out her earphones and tucked one bud into Amy’s ear, the other into her own. She leaned in, cocking her head toward Amy, scrolling until she found the right playlist. She put the volume way down so it was barely audible, and allowed Pavement to seep into their ears. Amy’s lips ever so slightly parted and a long exhalation seeped out. Tonight, Alex would add the others—Iggy, yet more Blur, Smashing Pumpkins.

When Alex had listened to the mix on the way down to Devon, she’d allowed herself to mull over her own cultural experiences of that time,
her
1995. She’d thought about using that imagery to inspire some personal connection, to help open up the article. Until it dawned on her that one of the biggest challenges with this piece wasn’t finding her way in, it was unpicking herself from the story altogether. In her best work, she’d always been the story.

As her mother had lay concave as a chicken carcass, whiskey sour untouched on the hospice nightstand, Alex had scrawled her thoughts and observations into a notepad on her lap. As her mother took her last, ragged breath, Alex had noted her feelings, the accuracy of the term “death rattle,” her sole situation in a room occupied by two just moments before. She had watched her mother’s face wilt as the sun came up. She’d sent her five-hundred-word column to her editor in a series of long text messages as the day broke, gulping warm bourbon from the rubber hot water bottle usually tucked in her mother’s nook.

The morning after her mother died, Alex had returned to Matt’s arms but didn’t cry for four days straight. She didn’t cry until she read her column that Sunday, and finally knew how she was supposed to feel.

Her compassionate leave was dead time. She spent it sculpting the house into their home. As she prepared to go back to work, she had her own surprise hospital stay. And then Matt left.

She’d returned to her Tuesday column, working on it from home in wine-splattered pajamas. She stared at the blank page for three nights in a row, head swimming with painkillers and wine. Whiskey was too strong for pills like those. The white space had danced around as she’d tried to catch a line. Finally, twelve hours after her deadline had passed she wrote:

Question: What have my mum, my baby and my husband got in common?

Answer: I’ve lost them all. It’s not a great punch line, but it’s the only one I’ve got…

Four hundred and seventy words later, she emailed the column in, crawled halfway up the stairs and passed out.

Her phone woke her up three hours later. “Firstly,” the voice had said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Then he’d asked, though she’d barely known who he was, “Can you come in this morning? We need to talk.”

Two hours later, hair still wet from a cold shower, Alex held her head still in the conference room and tried to work out what face she should be trying to pull as they talked.

“We need new ground,” said one of the execs she barely recognized from the other side of the walnut table.

“This miserablist stuff has served us well but it’s getting old hat. People become blind to it after a while. You know?”

“I see.” Alex had managed to say, focusing on the basket of fruit at the center of the table to keep her eyes straight.

“What other ideas do you have?” they’d asked.

“This is all I’ve got right now,” she’d burped, and coughed the words away.

“Alex, perhaps take a bit longer, you’ve had a terrible time,” said the woman exec.

“Yes.” The editor had nodded. “Richard is covering your column and the reception has been good. Very good. There’s no rush to return. And when you’re ready, we’ll look at other opportunities for you.”

Alex had stood quickly, knocking her knee so sharply on the table leg that tears splashed from her eyes without warning. “Forget it,” she’d said. As the anger swept up her chest, she’d let it out with a “Fuck it all.” Then she’d screamed it to make certain they’d heard. “Fuck it all!” and then “Fuck you!” And she’d wobbled out of the room and into the hands of the summoned security guards. She’d hit the darkness of The Flowers pub minutes later. She’d drank until she could barely squint, and fucked the glass washer with the weepy eye in the tiny kitchen off the bar, door open. She’d made it into the media gossip column in
Private Eye
that week.

Alex looked at Amy’s clear skin. Barely a wrinkle, just a tiny dusting around her eyes and darker hairs on her top lip than she probably would have recognized. There was one sprig of gray hair along her parting. Alex reached up and plucked it out. Letting the hair fall to the floor, she stroked Amy’s face and felt the skin give a little beneath her hand. The lightest of light sighs came from Amy’s open mouth.