Try Not to Breathe (9 page)

J
acob pressed hard on the accelerator and slipped through the junction just as the amber light gave way to red.

Fiona took a sharp breath. “What’s up with you today?”

Jacob didn’t answer. He locked his jaw and squinted at the road.

“J?”

“Sorry, what?” He flicked his eyes at her for a split second before turning his frown back to the road.

“J, what’s wrong with you? Are you even listening to me?”

“I’m fine, why?” He tried to smooth out his expression.

“You’re not fine,” she said quietly, looking dead ahead. “You’re all over the place. I wish you’d tell me what’s up.”

“You’re worrying about nothing, just relax.”

Swinging the car onto Royal Avenue was always difficult.

He wished his parents had left Edenbridge, wished he didn’t have to return to its streets. The town had wrapped around him like a duvet when he needed it the most, but leaving home for good was like ripping a plaster off, and the old wounds seeped every time he visited.

He felt guilty that he frequently turned down invitations from his mum, who had always loved him so completely, so protectively. He was the only one left, in any real sense.

As he parked on the crunchy, wide drive and slowly took the key out of the ignition, Jacob wondered if his younger brother, Tom, really would be here for the family lunch. He tried to imagine Tom perching on the edge of his chair, picking at his roast dinner, his floppy black head with its scowling eyes nodding politely at the conversation and asking Fiona if she was having any twinges yet. The picture didn’t work.

Tom worked in the Midlands. Within the family, it was referred to as “Birmingham.” In reality it was a West Midlands wasteland no one had heard of, burrowing into the backside of Walsall, nearly 200 miles from Edenbridge. They’d not visited. Jacob had often texted to offer when a planned trip took them along Tom’s section of motorway. Tom would invariably make excuses, or only receive the text once the trip was over. Each time, Jacob wondered whether Tom was as slow to reply to the teenagers he worked with. Then he would stop himself going down that line of thought.

The last time any of them had seen Tom in the pale flesh was at Jacob and Fiona’s wedding in Lancashire, in the north of England. Several of Tom’s planned visits to Kent had fallen by the wayside since. Tom hadn’t seemed comfortable in the pretty Lancastrian countryside that framed the wedding. He’d been clearly—and inexplicably—itching to get back to his adopted urban mess.

Jacob loved visiting Lancashire. He loved the warmth and openness of Fiona’s family, the work-to-live attitude, the pubs and the big knotty open spaces. He loved the dry stone walls in the villages and he especially loved how relaxed and happy he felt away from Tunbridge Wells. Until he thought of Amy, and then his chest would hurt and his eyes would darken and guilt would pull him back under.

“Hello, darling, come in,” said Sue, Jacob’s mother, who was standing on the hall doormat wearing lambskin slippers and kissing Fiona on both cheeks.

As soon as the heavy front door had swung open, Jacob picked up that distinctive smell of “home.” The Fairy liquid and Comfort fabric conditioner his mother had always used, the dark pink potpourri in the porcelain dish, the Shake n’ Vac on the carpet, the Pears soap in the downstairs loo, his mother’s buttery cooking.

“Hello, Mum,” Jacob said, stooping down to kiss her cheek. Sue was five foot two; he—like both of his brothers—was more than a foot taller. “Is Tom here yet?”

Sue looked away, her ears turning pink at the tops. She smiled awkwardly and explained that Tom wasn’t coming after all.

It’s because I’m here,
thought Jacob. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had happened because there were whole months, years maybe, when Jacob had been completely wrapped up in himself. But at some point, his younger brother, who had just always been there, whose loyalty he would never have questioned, who looked up to his big brothers and mirrored everything they did, had just pulled clean away.

With a wince, Jacob remembered the afternoon Tom moved out. Although Jacob was eighteen at the time, it had been sixteen-year-old Tom who left home first. Jacob barely noticed. His brother’s spiky silhouette had appeared in Jacob’s doorway, black dyed hair drooping in front of his eyes. He’d had a big duffel bag over his shoulder, a couple of carrier bags in each hand. Tom had just stood there, waiting, possessions hanging off him. Jacob had looked up and said, “You off?”

“Yeah,” Tom had said.

“Where you going?”

“New Cross.”

“Oh, right.”

It was only later that night when he walked into the kitchen to find his tearstained Mum eating cold cherry pie from the foil and splashing wine over baby photos that he realized Tom had gone for good.

Jacob’s memories of teenage Tom before that night were thin. The remains of toast crumbs in the morning, the sound of mopey music seeping from one bedroom to the next, a door slam. A shadow who had become a lone wolf and stalked away.

Years later, Jacob had tried to build bridges. He had asked Tom by text message to be his best man, had insisted upon it. To his surprise, Tom had agreed, the only request being that he didn’t have to do a speech.

The stag do was held in their hometown, a small night with several half friends from work and university. Many pints into the night, the others drifted away. Jacob had staggered to his feet in the corner of a bar and asked his brother outright what the problem was, did he blame Jacob for something.

“I don’t blame you for anything,” Tom had said, looking away.

“I never hear from you, mate,” Jacob had said, without expecting eye contact. “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.”

“You’ve not done anything wrong. Look at you. You’ve done everything the right way.”

“How do you know that?” Jacob had asked, louder than he’d intended. “You’re not here to see how I’m doing anything.” He’d scuffed his shoe along the sticky floor, pushing himself away and pulling himself back on the brass rail around the bar. “I miss you.” Even steeped in beer, the words were awkward.

Tom had paused for a long time. “You’re better off without me,” he said, his words slurring like they were too big for his mouth.

Defeated, Jacob had sloped out of the bar and to the kebab shop next door. After tramping up and down the main High Street in Edenbridge, looking for a taxi without saying another word, the brothers had called their mother. Cradling their cold food, they had been driven to Royal Avenue in silence.

That night, Jacob had laid queasily in his childhood bedroom with the sounds of Tom’s snoring rattling through the wall. He’d stared into the black, listening as Tom had risen to pee, heard the creaks and sighs as Tom had tried to get comfortable in the narrow bed again. Jacob had closed his eyes and tried to work out what he could say the next day to change things. In the end, he had said nothing.

“It’s so good to have you both here.” Sue clasped Jacob’s hand over the table, surprising him. Fiona took a deep sip of her faux-wine grape drink.

“I wish we could see you more often,” Sue said, the tip of her nose belying her Sunday dinner tipple.

“We’re just up the road,” Fiona interrupted, “you’re always welcome to come over.”

“Thank you, darling.” Sue lifted her hand from her son’s and placed it carefully back in her napkinned lap. “Newlyweds need their space though.”

“Oh God, we’re hardly newlyweds,” Fiona said, her eyes struggling not to roll. “We’ve been together forever, we really don’t need any more space.”

Sue smiled in Fiona’s direction for just a moment.

“Well, perhaps I could pop round when you go on maternity leave?” she said, directing her question more to Jacob, who looked at his wife uneasily.

“I’m sure she’d love that, wouldn’t you, Fi?”

“Come round anytime, Sue.”

“You’re welcome too, Dad, now you’re retired,” Jacob added, taking a shallow sip of his blood-red wine.

“Thank you very much, Jacob,” Graham answered, swirling his drink. “Thank you, Fiona.” The older man smiled at Jacob and then, for a little longer, at Fiona, until she blinked first and looked down to carefully cut a roast potato.

“I’m on the court every day at the moment,” Graham continued, looking back at his son. “Maybe you could join me for a game?”

The court. When Jacob was a young boy, before he’d seen that “the court” was in reality a slab of ground with white painted lines on it, he’d imagined it to be some grand building where only the brightest, fittest and most manly were allowed to go. Simon had been allowed to go. The next in line to the court’s throne. As the eldest, taking his position seriously, he had stood in the hallway, matching white socks with green trim, an upright, silent, knock-kneed version of his father, with a miniature racquet.

Jacob had thought it might become his turn at some point, but his turn never came.

Tom, always desperate to be Simon’s sidekick, would beg to join them. Jacob remembered him coming downstairs even as a toddler, taking the steps carefully in little white shorts and a T-shirt, pleading to go with them.

By the time Tom had grown into a genuine replacement for Simon, Jacob had judo and tried not to feel left out. He’d never mastered any ball sports.

Of course Graham was on the court every day. Graham was a seesaw of health and nourishment. He drank far too much whiskey and wine but put in hours of intense tennis practice every day. He scooped chunks of gooey gourmet cheese onto yet bigger chunks of white bread for elevenses but took nine hours’ sleep a night, every night. Graham watched any sort of television show, almost indiscriminately, but never had Jacob seen such an appetite for books of every kind. Russian fiction, crime thrillers, academic papers, manuals for cars he no longer owned and had never serviced himself.

Jacob’s mother said it came from all those years of commuting, consuming books to make the time passable. Today, of course, an executive’s work would start the moment the train left the station. Emails on phones, laptops with dongles hanging out, but back then Graham had an hour on the train and half an hour on the Tube, each day, each way.

Jacob had no interest in any of those things. He didn’t trust what he read, for one, and the thought of whacking a ball up and down, especially against someone with a ruthless instinct and years of training, appealed like a bed of nails.

“Sure thing, Dad.”

G
irls. When Sue first married Graham, she’d imagined them having two little boys and two little girls, alternating like good dinner party table settings. The boys would be rosy-cheeked and handsome like their father, with bright grass stains on their knees. They’d tumble around, kicking a ball and getting up to mischief. The girls would wear matching pinafore dresses, with rosebud lips and bright blue eyes like little china dolls. While the boys would play football with Graham in the garden, Sue would sit and brush the girls’ long hair, tying the sharpest, neatest of plaits in matching ribbons.

The girls that her sons had brought home were nothing like her girls would have been. “The angels,” Tom called them. Sue thought he’d picked it up from Simon, who she suspected used the term ironically. As brash as boys, the angels flicked their hair around and seemed to have a staggering ability to use their bodies to get their own way, from a ridiculously young age.

Her girls would have been different. Her
girl
would have been different.

Every once in a while she felt a pang for the missing number four. The one that, maybe, finally, would have been pink. But she couldn’t complain—she had three strapping sons. Graham had been happy to stop at three anyway. More than happy. But from her first pregnancy, Sue had planned the second, third and fourth.

She’d loved carrying the babies, but Simon’s pregnancy held a special magic. The only one bathed in ignorance and plans, nothing but hope.

She’d expected the baby stuff to come easily once he arrived. She’d intended to have him sleeping through the night after a month, planned to snap back into her old clothes thanks to the Jane Fonda workout tapes that she would use while the baby napped. Potty training, she’d thought, would be done during the baby’s second summer and then the next baby would come along. And so she had planned to continue until there were four shiny-faced children, lined up in height order like the von Trapp kids. Boy, girl, boy, girl.

From the agony of his breech birth to Simon’s first reluctant day at school, it hadn’t gone to plan. Sue had lived in her flannel jumpsuit until six o’clock, barely finding the time to apply makeup before Graham’s car pulled into the drive.

A baby with endless needs, Simon would absorb every shred of attention throughout the day, and at the same time reject it outright. He wanted her eyes on him at all times, until Graham would appear in the doorway and then Simon would frantically look for his gaze.

All the while, Sue had crumpled into a world of loose clothing, while Graham’s career was in an upswing. He remained handsome and controlled, while she was becoming hollow and scatty.

It had taken two hours of the baby’s tears, and sometimes Sue’s, to vacuum a room, so several weeks would go by.

Graham never once complained at the state of the house. But he surveyed it with a slower gaze through narrowed eyes each night, and started to catch the later train home, losing the haste of their early married years.

Eventually, Sue had resorted to carrying Simon under one arm as he suckled milk feverishly, pushing the Hoover with the other, lactic acid shooting up to her shoulders.

She’d relied on Lean Cuisine in the day and TV dinners at night and the rest of the time she had drunk tea by the bucketload and blown smoke out of the window and just stared at her angry, red-faced infant.

It got easier with Jacob, easier still with Thomas, aside from the secret sadness at another blue bonnet. And when Thomas approached kindergarten, talk—Sue’s talk—turned hastily to the final piece in the puzzle. The one that would be a girl.

Then, just as some elasticity had appeared in Graham’s silent, abstinent reticence, the letter had arrived. Written in calm text on cold paper, it spoke of “abnormal changes” and “repeat smear tests.”

“Don’t worry,” Sue was told, “these things often correct themselves, the next smear could be completely clear.”

Six months later, the calm letter was replaced by an urgent phone call from the surgery. From mild to severe changes. Cells were removed and Sue walked home from the cottage hospital tenderly, gingerly, with Thomas clawing at her legs to be carried.

After two years of repeated, failed treatments, Sue made the decision one day while all the boys were in school. Sitting sore in the empty house after another painful outpatient operation. Graham later described it carefully as “cutting our losses.” The thought of him raising the boys alone was inconceivable. She had to forgo future fertility, the stakes were too high.

The preparation for the hysterectomy was as brutal as the operation. Fistfuls of pills every night, nightmares about being scooped out like a soft-boiled egg, crying fits behind closed doors, following women with baby girls around supermarkets, nothing in her basket.

When she woke up after the surgery, head thick with morphine, she just felt empty. She’d stayed that way for a long while.