Our House by Louise Candlish (27)

28

Bram, Word document

Are you beginning to see how appalling it looked on paper? How trapped I felt, how terrorized? The confessed – and recorded – guilt to the Silver Road crash, the driving ban, the suspended sentence for assault, not to mention a conviction for possession . . . the last was ancient history, but what did that matter? As Mike said, it all counts when the time comes.

Counts against me.

I can only defend myself by saying these have been my only crimes in forty-eight years and I believe that there are very few people who haven’t committed some variation of at least one of them, even police officers themselves. Seriously, have you never gone over the speed limit? Have you never tried drugs or got a bit lairy outside a pub? I didn’t say did you get caught doing one of these; I just asked, did you do it?

Well, I got caught for all of them. Which meant that there could be no barrister in the land convincing enough to argue that Silver Road was a one-time mistake. Not when the record showed that I was someone who was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Doing the wrong thing.

Okay, so the fight at the pub was pretty damn serious. I didn’t start it, but I certainly finished it: the guy was hospitalized, off work for weeks. I was lucky the sentence was suspended and that, miraculously, I managed to hide the prosecution process from Fi. I won’t go into the labyrinthine logistics of that (it helped that there were renovations going on at the house and, the boys not having started school yet, she had based herself with them at her parents’ place, leaving me to my own devices). Nor will I explain what I imagined would happen if my remorse had not convinced the court and I’d been sent down (‘Fi? I’m calling from a prison payphone. I need to tell you something . . .’)

‘In return for a guilty plea, was it?’ Mike said that night at the flat, his gaze voyeuristic, as if he was able to see into my soul and measure my pain. And his instinct was sharp, I’ll give him that. I would have pleaded guilty to far worse if it meant avoiding jail time. I won’t say prison is a phobia of mine, because that would make it irrational, all in the mind.

Whereas it is rational, real. So real that I would have done anything, sacrificed anyone, to avoid it.

‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:37:11

I really hope I’m not giving the impression that I allowed a new relationship to distract me from what was, in retrospect, taking place right under my nose, but I’m sure you’ll understand that it was an exciting time. We all know the beginning is the best bit – who would begrudge a woman that? Especially one whose marital breakdown had left her with no heart for anything more than beginnings.

Even beginnings came with a level of weirdness. It was maybe our third weekend of seeing each other, the first time Toby had stayed the night at the flat, when I had a completely unexpected fight or flight reaction. Waking to find him in bed next to me, I got trapped in the delay of recognizing him, of recognizing the bed itself, the four walls around us. Why am I not in my home with my family? I thought. What is this sordid set-up? Even when my brain caught up, I was convinced I couldn’t sleep with Toby again. Not here, with Bram’s clothes in the wardrobe, his shaving gel in the bathroom, the air still fresh with the breath from his lungs. It was almost as if he were in the room with us, watching us.

Toby stirred then, and I slipped from the bed to make coffee.

Of course, by the time we were up and I was walking him back through the park to the station, I was myself again and he was oblivious to the episode.

‘So do kids not play with conkers any more?’ he said. ‘Or are they all too busy indoors bullying one another on social media and self-harming?’

‘Not all of them,’ I said, laughing. ‘Some still venture into the real world now and then.’ But as the spiky fruits rolled in our path, no children scampered forwards to claim them. It was possibly the most beautiful day of the month too, when the fire of autumn had not yet faded to ash. Leo and Harry should be here, I thought. ‘Maybe there’s some mass maths tutoring event I don’t know about. I’m going to get my two out here this afternoon. Enforced outdoor fun.’

‘Quite right.’ Toby had two almost grown-up children, Charlie and Jess, who he saw every few weeks; relations with the ex were fraught and she’d moved to the Midlands to be close to her parents.

‘You mustn’t have been much older than a teenager yourself when you had your kids,’ I said to him. He was in his late thirties, almost a decade younger than Bram. ‘I can’t imagine not talking about Leo and Harry the way you don’t talk about your two.’ Hearing myself, I laughed my apologies. ‘That sounds bad. What I mean is I’m impressed how you’ve let go.’

Toby examined the path ahead. ‘Just because I don’t talk about them doesn’t mean I don’t think about them,’ he said mildly.

‘I know, of course. I didn’t mean you aren’t a fantastic dad.’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ he said, smiling. ‘You just do the best you can, don’t you?’

‘You do.’

I remember thinking, Bram would fight harder than this to be in his kids’ lives. Then, Stop comparing!

(Comparison is the thief of joy: that’s one of Merle’s favourite sayings. So true.)

Anyway, that was when I saw them, Bram and the boys. Under a big old horse chestnut by the gates to Alder Rise Road. The boys’ hair was damp from swimming – Bram tended to forget hats – and their cheeks flushed. The wind was up and there was a sudden shower of green missiles, causing Harry to shout with excitement and throw up his hands to try to catch one. Leo, ever cautious, stepped away, but Bram pulled him back into the firing line and though he yelled in protest his face shone with excitement.

They didn’t see me and I didn’t point them out to Toby – who was in any case easing slightly ahead of me, checking his phone – but kept the sighting to myself.

I still think about it now sometimes, the three of them together and the way it made me feel to be watching them from across the park. It left me with an odd melancholy I didn’t know how to explain at the time, though now I think it was directly connected to that feeling I’d had in bed earlier. It was the day I let go of some last secret subconscious instinct that Bram and I might be reconcilable.

Bram, Word document

There was a Saturday morning in October when I took the boys to the park that I think about a lot now. It was probably the last time, pre-medication, that I had the facility to clear my mind temporarily and be in the moment. I used to hate that phrase, in the moment, a bit too mindful for me, but it does describe it pretty well. As if I had no past and no future but had been transplanted to that corner of Alder Rise with two hilarious little boys purely to catch the conkers as they came flying down. I told them about the sign someone put on a tree a couple of years ago saying ‘Falling Conkers’ and Leo said, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if the person putting up the sign had been hit on the head by one?’ and Harry added, ‘Yes, and he died.’

Oh, it was all fun and games until we got home and they strung their favourites and within seconds Harry had hit Leo in the eye and Leo had to sit with a bag of frozen peas on his face and I swore the two of them to secrecy because Fi was exactly the kind of person who’d have thought that a warning sign about conkers was a good idea.

I kept apologizing to them, I remember that, and they kept saying ‘It’s not your fault, Dad’, partly because they always blamed each other, it was their default setting, and partly because they didn’t know what it was I was really apologizing for.

Perhaps I didn’t either, not truly. Not until the next morning.

*

I can record exactly the moment my final finger-hold slipped from the rock face, causing a loss of altitude so extreme I came close to fainting: 10.30 a.m. on Sunday 16 October, as I sat at the kitchen table playing Pokémon Monopoly with the boys while browsing the local news on the pay-as-you-go.

The words will be scored on my soul for as long as I continue to draw breath. A child was no longer critically injured, but dead. A child was dead . . .

‘Put the phone down, Dad,’ Leo said in Fi’s voice. ‘You have to concentrate on the game.’

A child was dead!

‘Daddy? Are we going to buy Nidoqueen?’ Harry asked.

‘You decide,’ I told him, sounding ghostly even to myself. ‘Do we have enough cash?’

‘It’s really expensive, 350 Pokédollars,’ Leo said, needling him. ‘Can you even count that high?’

‘Of course I can!’ As Harry began to count the money in his slapdash way, I sensed my impatience grow and feared the rage I might unleash: I pictured myself overturning the table, roaring like a monster, throwing myself through plate glass. It frightened me that the violence I felt towards Mike, Wendy, myself, might expose itself to the two people I most passionately wished to protect.

A child was dead. The charge would be upgraded from causing serious injury to manslaughter or death by dangerous driving – I didn’t know what the hell it would be called, only that I would be found guilty.

Not four years in jail but ten. Maybe more.

‘Give me a minute, boys, will you, while I just go to the loo? Help Harry count his cash, will you, Leo?’

‘But he’s not on my team!’ Leo whined.

‘Just do it!’ I yelled.

Defiantly opposed though the two of them were, the shock on their faces was identical as I ran from the room and vomited in the downstairs toilet.

‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:41:20

On my return to Trinity Avenue that Sunday, Harry was the first one I saw as I let myself in. Though by now accustomed to the comings and goings of his separated parents, he always came into the hallway to announce the news headlines.

‘Leo hurt his eye!’

‘Did he? How?’

‘Totally by accident, it wasn’t my fault. And we’ve finished marking everything with the special police pen!’

‘Well done! Did you do all the phones and iPads and things?’

‘Yes, every single one. Oh, and Daddy’s being sick again,’ he remembered, as Bram appeared from the bathroom.

‘Really?’ I said. Again? ‘Are you all right, Bram?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just a bit of food poisoning. How was your weekend, Fi?’

‘It was good. I . . . I spent it with a friend.’ We held each other’s gaze and I surprised myself by blushing. Bram’s response was peculiar to say the least: one side of his face began to convulse, as if sustaining blows from an invisible opponent. He looked, in fact, just as a more vengeful ex-wife might fantasize about him looking: at her mercy, crushed.

Hypothetically – because I wasn’t that woman – it didn’t feel nearly as satisfying as I might have expected.

‘Let me go and have a look at Leo’s eye,’ I said.