‘It’s the thirty-first tomorrow. Almost February. This year’s going quickly, isn’t it?’
I looked at Rupert, who was sitting on the sofa opposite mine, and he grunted and shrugged, then turned a page of his newspaper and carried on reading, ignoring me. My attempts at small talk were not going well. I fell silent, tired of trying, and picked up an interiors magazine from the small glass table next to me, half-heartedly flicking through it, my mind elsewhere.
We were in Reading, at the clinic run by counsellor, Karen Ballerton, the woman recommended by Isla to help Nell with her mood swings and anger. Karen, a tall, gangly woman with wiry dark brown hair streaked with grey, large hoops swinging from her earlobes, had gently insisted that it would be better if she and Nell chatted alone, which had left Rupert and I sitting uneasily together in the small waiting room down the hallway.
I’d been surprised that he’d wanted to come – I’d planned to take Nell by train, as I wasn’t allowed to drive at the moment – in fact, my car had been sent for scrap back in October, the sight of it an unbearable reminder of what had happened, not so much a car any longer but a wheeled coffin, intolerable. But Rupert had said he wasn’t busy today, and that he could afford to take a few hours off to ‘try to sort my daughter’s head out’. He had asked me if he could just take her to Reading on his own, but I’d firmly told him I wanted to be there too – Tuesday was one of my days with her this week, after all – and he’d sighed heavily, given in and grumpily offered to drive us all.
So, here we were, the two of us, sitting together for the first time in months, just a few feet apart in this little overheated room, with its creaking black leather sofas, small TV tuned to a nature programme, the sound muted, and a coffee machine burbling gently away in the corner.
Nell, to my astonishment, hadn’t kicked up a fuss about today at all. I’d expected a fight, or a downright refusal from my wilful child to even get into Rupert’s car for such an appointment, but when I’d told her where we were going and explained why, she’d thought carefully for a minute then nodded.
‘OK. It’s a day off school I suppose. Can we get a burger on the way home?’
I’d looked at Rupert, who’d raised an eyebrow and grinned at me before turning to Nell and telling her, yes, of course, whatever she wanted. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked me in the eye, never mind smiled at me and, for a moment, my heart had leapt. Was he softening towards me, finally? Was this joint concern about Nell, about our damaged, troubled daughter, the thing that might fix us, bring us together again, even as friends?
The hope – in retrospect, pitiful – that my husband might still care, that we could somehow go back to something resembling normality, surged through me, but it didn’t last long. The drive to Reading was made largely in a silence filled only by Radio 4, and an occasional outburst of tuneless singing from the back seat, where Nell, wearing headphones, was bopping along to the new Little Mix album on her iPod. I loved my daughter with all my heart, but she could sing about as well as I could play the bagpipes, which was not at all.
There had been one brief conversation though. As we’d sped along the M4 at a steady 75, Rupert had cleared his throat.
‘Just for your information – I’m seeing somebody. Mia. She’s in accounts, at work. I haven’t told Nell yet but I will, soon, when it feels right. I’m just letting you know, in case she mentions it to you.’
The tiny little flame of hope from earlier, which had gradually shrunk as each mile of our silent, awkward car journey passed, dwindled to nothing and went out, and I stared out of the window, my body rigid, tears suddenly pricking my eyes. Seeing somebody. Already? OK, so we’d been apart for about four months, but even so …
I took a deep breath, willing the tears not to fall, and glanced over my shoulder. Nell, oblivious, was still humming along to her music, eyes closed, hands tapping her knees.
‘Right. Well, thanks for telling me.’ My voice was husky, and I coughed and continued. ‘If … if Mia is going to be around when Nell is there, I’d like to meet her too, though, at some point, if that’s OK.’
Rupert didn’t respond for a moment, indicating right to pull out and overtake a slow lorry up ahead. Back in the middle lane, he sighed.
‘Whatever. It won’t be yet. It’s early days, no need for her to meet Nell right now. But yes, OK.’
His voice was cold, and he’d reached out then and retuned the radio to 5 Live, the conversation clearly over. On the Daily show they were talking about sexual harassment in the workplace, but the words made no sense to me, a jumble of sounds, background noise to the sudden turmoil inside my head.
It had been inevitable, I supposed, but even so … yes, I’d known, deep down, that my marriage was over. What man would stay with a woman who’d done what I’d done, after all? But I’d still dared, now and again, to hope. Hope that he could forgive me, one day. Hope that, for Nell’s sake, we could give things another go. But now …
‘I need a coffee.’
I looked up from my magazine as Rupert stood up and stomped across the waiting room to pour himself a drink. He didn’t offer to get one for me, and I didn’t ask. I had to just deal with this now, I thought. Nell was my first priority, not Rupert, and if I was going to get through this, through the next few weeks, through the trial, I was going to have to toughen up, to harden my heart.
There were several solicitors’ meetings in my diary for the coming days, and the thought made me instantly nauseous. The sick fear I’d felt ever since I realized the consequences of what I’d done was worsening by the day. I hadn’t just killed my child, filling me with a grief and shame that I would never recover from. There was still so much to come, so much to face. I was terrified, I realized now. Terrified of it all, but most of all about leaving Nell.
She would go to Rupert, of course, if the worst happened – if I was locked up. It was one of the few proper conversations we’d managed to have since he’d left, and even that had been terse.
‘Of course. Why would you even need to ask that? She’ll come and live with me, and she’ll be fine,’ he’d said.
But would she, really? A little girl, her mother in prison, being brought up by just her father – and, it seemed now, possibly by some woman called Mia I’d never even met? Would Nell really be fine? The nausea worsened, and I looked around for a door that might lead to a toilet, suddenly feeling that I might actually have to go and throw up.
I didn’t allow myself to think about it, not usually, not unless I was in one of my legal meetings – I’d become an expert at banishing the thoughts from my mind, focussing only on the here and now, in recent months. But soon there would be no avoiding it – the trial was a matter of weeks away. Final decisions had to be made: most importantly whether I definitely wanted to continue to plead not guilty, as recommended, and put my faith in a jury, or change my plea, which would spare the expense of a trial and hopefully get me a more lenient sentence – a reduction of up to a third was possible, my solicitors had told me.
It was what the sentence would be that took over my dreams, my nightmares … the permutations racing through my mind, waking me in those dark, cold small hours and making a return to sleep impossible.
There was, in the UK, no mandatory sentence for manslaughter – it was at the judge’s discretion. Life imprisonment, a shorter sentence of up to ten years, suspended imprisonment, community service or even a hospital order – a stay in a mental health hospital. Who knew which way it would go?
I knew already, too, what my judge, this man or woman who held my fate in his or her hands, would take into consideration when deciding my future. Were there any mitigating circumstances? Did I pose a threat to the public? Was I likely to commit another crime? Did I have any previous convictions? Yes, no, no, no. But would that be enough? Would the circumstances which surrounded this terrible thing that had happened be enough to keep me out of prison?
I’d tortured myself with far more than thoughts of incarceration since it happened, though, of course. For weeks afterwards, I’d obsessively searched websites, newspaper articles, looking for information, trying to convince myself that Zander might not have suffered, that he may have just fallen asleep. There was no such comfort to be found. The facts appalled me, sickened me, rendered me a howling, sobbing mess of pain and guilt, seared across my heart forever.
The car temperature would have risen ten to fifteen degrees Celsius every fifteen minutes, my baby becoming increasingly distressed, hyperthermia occurring within minutes.
Young children overheat fast, with dizziness, confusion, profuse sweating, agitation … then, as heatstroke takes hold, headache, seizures, and the beginnings of organ failure, before a slow slip into unconsciousness. It is not a painless death – it is a horrific one.
I swallowed down the nausea as Rupert returned with his coffee, trying to appear normal, trying to stop the sudden tremor in my hands as I turned the pages of my magazine, seeing nothing on the smooth, colourful pages. Instead, the pictures that had begun to so frequently float into my mind since they had first surfaced at the weekend suddenly seemed to dance across the paper. The images of my hands unclipping the seat belt holding Zander in place, slipping under his sleeping body, hefting his weight up onto my shoulder, floated across my vision, and I blinked hard, trying to make them disappear.
Again? What was wrong with me? I was going crazy, I must be. We all knew what had happened that day. So why was I repeatedly now seeing this other version, the one where I didn’t forget my baby, where I brought him inside as I was supposed to do, made sure he was all right before I lay down to sleep off the booze? It was impossible, a false memory, wishful thinking, my brain refusing to accept that I did this terrible thing. Because if I had brought Zander inside, the rest of the day, the way he died, made no sense whatsoever. I knew that. So why, each time I saw it in my head, was this new version becoming more and more clear, sharpening, as if seen through a slowly focussing camera lens? This is ridiculous, Thea. Stop it.
I closed the magazine abruptly, my hands pressing down on the glossy cover, trying to squeeze the images into oblivion. Instead, a new image, that of Flora, drifted into my mind, the shock and anguish in her eyes as she stumbled into the room that day, the pallor of her skin as she held Zander’s limp, lifeless body in her outstretched arms.
Flora. She’d stayed afterwards, for a while, tried to keep on doing her job as usual, trying to support me through it, despite her impish little face crumpling with grief every time she passed the pram in the hallway, but she didn’t manage it for long. I knew she would leave, and I never blamed her for that. Within a month, she was gone.
I had a sudden urge to see her now, and slowly put the magazine back down on the table, wondering if I had the nerve to give her a call. Would she want to see me? Maybe, if she did, I could talk through the events of that day with her, try to clear the confusion that was increasingly fuddling my mind.
I felt the desperate urge to tell somebody about it, and although Isla was the obvious choice, the thought of trying to explain this to her, with her cynical, no-nonsense attitude, made me nervous. She’d dismiss it out of hand, and she was too close to what had happened anyway, whereas Flora … well, Flora would listen, I thought. And if she didn’t want to see me, well … what did I have to lose? I’d call her, later this week. Or text her maybe. A text would be easier, give her the chance to think about it before she replied …
‘Hi Mum, Dad.’
Nell’s voice, chirpy and light. She was standing in the open doorway, Karen Ballerton behind her, both of them smiling.
‘Nell! How did it go? Are you OK?’
‘Fine. I feel better actually.’
I stood up, and she skipped across the room and into my arms. Rupert and I both looked at the counsellor, and she nodded.
‘I’ll send you a written report, but I think she’ll be all right. She was struggling with feelings of deep sadness, of course, but also of guilt … she seemed to think that she could have saved her brother. I’ve made her see that it was … well, an accident. Given her some coping strategies for days when she feels low …’
Nell released me from her bear hug and looked up at me, dark eyes seeking mine.
‘Yes, bad things happen and we have to move on, Mum. All of us. You can’t keep going over and over them in your head, because it’s not good for you. You have to think about other things to help you stop doing that. It’s OK to be sad, sometimes, but then you must find something to do, like a TV programme or a walk or something to take your mind off it … that’s right, isn’t it, Karen?’
‘That’s right. Very good, Nell.’ Karen nodded vigorously, her enormous hoop earrings swinging wildly, and gave Nell a double thumbs-up sign.
Rupert and I exchanged glances, and I felt it again, another brief moment of solidarity, of shared relief. Then he turned to Karen.
‘That’s fantastic, Miss Ballerton, thank you so much.’
He held out a hand to Nell, and she moved towards him, away from me, grabbing onto his fingers.
‘Burger time, Dad?’
He patted her head with his free hand, and grinned.
‘Burger time.’
That night in bed, Nell safely tucked up in her room, calmer and more content than I’d seen her in months, I dozed off quickly. I felt a little more relaxed myself tonight, something of my daughter’s improved demeanour possibly rubbing off on me.
I’d spent half an hour in a deep, hot bath, scented with orange flower oil, emerging pink and slippery, my very bones seeming to be melting with sudden weariness. Crawling beneath the duvet, I’d fallen asleep thinking about Nell. But when I woke with a start an hour later, there was something very different in my head. I’d been dreaming, or had I? It had been so vivid, more like a memory than a dream. But even so, like the earlier images, they couldn’t possibly be true, these brand-new pictures that had just flashed so clearly through my brain, could they?
I sat up, my breath coming in ragged gasps, fingers clutching at the edge of the duvet, trying to order my thoughts. I’d been back there, yet again, back on the fourth of September. Back in the car, with Isla and Nell and Zander, pulling up at our house, expressing surprise and delight that there was an empty space right outside the front door, something which never happened. The car sliding neatly into the space, the engine being turned off, Nell, waking from her slumber in the back seat, shouting at us to hurry up and open her door, because she needed a wee.
All of it, exactly as it happened. Exactly as it happened, except for one small detail. As we pulled up outside the house, as we parked the car, as we laughed at Nell’s impatience, it wasn’t me in the driving seat. I was sitting on the inside, the side closest to the pavement, to the house. The passenger seat. I wasn’t driving the car. It was Isla.