I want to look at her—to see if her trembling hand means she’s as scared as I am—but I can’t take my eyes off the gun. I wrap my arms around Ella, as though they could stop a bullet, and I wonder if this is it: if these are the last few seconds I will spend with my daughter.
I wish now I’d banged on the car window. Shouted to the woman in the Fiat 500. Tried to kick out the glass. Something. Anything. What kind of mother doesn’t even try to save her baby?
Years ago, when I was walking back from a friend’s house, someone tried to pull me into a car. I fought like an animal. I fought so hard I made him swear.
“You fucking bitch,” he said, before he drove off.
I didn’t even have to think about it. I just fought.
Why aren’t I fighting now?
She jerks the barrel of the gun toward the corner of the car park. Once. Twice.
I move.
It isn’t just the gun. It’s because of who she is, because of how I’m programmed to be with her. She’s like a best friend who suddenly turns on you, or a lover who throws an unexpected punch; I can’t reconcile what’s happening now with the person I thought I knew. It is easier to fight a stranger. It is easier to hate a stranger than your own flesh and blood.
From outside I hear a noise like a distant machine gun, drumming on the sky. Fireworks. It’s still an hour till midnight—someone’s celebrating early. The car park is deserted; all the residents either out for the night or settled at home.
The lift opens onto a carpeted landing. Mark’s flat is at the end of the corridor and as we walk past his immediate neighbor, there are raucous screams. Top 40 music blares from inside the apartment. If the door is on the latch—for people to come and go from the party—I could open the door and be inside in a second. Safety in numbers.
I’m not aware that I’ve checked my pace, that my entire body is gearing up for this final attempt to save my life—to save Ella’s life—but I must have done because there’s a hard jab against my spine and I don’t need to be told that she’s holding the gun to my back.
I keep walking.
Mark’s apartment is a far cry from the way I remember it. The leather sofa is scratched and torn—the stuffing exploding from a rip on one arm—and there are cigarette burns all over the wooden floor. The kitchen has been cleared of the garbage left by the previous tenants, but the smell has been slower to leave. It catches the back of my throat.
There are two armchairs facing the sofa. Both are filthy. One is covered in what could be paint. The soft woolen throws Mark used to keep folded over the back of each one are scrunched into a heap on the other.
We stand in the center of the room. I wait for her to give me an instruction, to say something—anything—but she just stands there.
She doesn’t know what to do.
She doesn’t have a clue what she’s going to do with us, now she has us here. Somehow, I find that more frightening than knowing this is all part of a grand plan. Anything could happen.
She could do anything.
“Give me the baby.” The gun is in both hands now, clasped together in a parody of prayer.
I shake my head. “No.” I hold Ella so tight she lets out a cry. “You’re not having her.”
“Give her to me!” She’s hysterical. I want to think someone will hear her, knock on the door and ask if everything’s okay, but next door’s party is throbbing through the walls, and I think even if I screamed no one would come.
“Put her on the chair, then get over to the other side of the room.”
If she shoots me, Ella will have no one to save her from this situation. I have to stay alive.
Slowly, I move toward one of the armchairs and lower Ella onto the pile of soft throws. She blinks at me and I make myself smile, even though it hurts so much to let her go.
“Now move.” Another jerk of the gun.
I comply, never taking my eyes off Ella as my mother picks her up and cradles her against her chest. She makes shushing noises, bounces up and down on the balls of her feet. She could be any devoted grandmother, were it not for the gun dangling from one hand.
“You killed Dad.” I still can’t believe it.
She looks at me as though she’d forgotten I was there. She walks from one side of the room to the other—back and forth, back and forth—but whether it’s to soothe Ella or herself isn’t clear. “It was an accident. He . . . he fell. Against the kitchen counter.”
I cover my mouth with my hands, stifle the cry that builds at the thought of Dad lying on the kitchen floor. “Was he . . . was he drunk?”
It changes nothing, but I’m searching for reasons, trying to understand how my baby and I came to be imprisoned in this flat.
“Drunk?” Mum looks momentarily confused; then she turns away and I can’t see her face. When she speaks, she’s trying not to cry. “No, he wasn’t drunk. I was.” She turns back around. “I’ve changed, Anna. I’m not the person I was back then. That person died—just like you all thought she had. I had a chance to start again; not to make the mistakes I made before. Not to hurt anyone.”
“This is what you call not hurting anyone?”
“This was a mistake.”
An accident. A mistake. My head is spinning with the lies she’s told, and if this is the truth, then I’m not sure I want to hear it.
“Let us go.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can, Mum. You said yourself: this has all been a big mistake. Give me Ella, put down the gun, and let us go. I don’t care what you do after that—just let us go.”
“They’ll put me in prison.”
I don’t answer.
“It was an accident! I lashed out, lost my temper. I didn’t mean to hit him. He slipped and . . .” Tears trace the outline of her face and drop onto her jumper. She looks wretched, and despite myself—despite everything she’s done—I feel myself weakening. I believe her when she says it was never meant to be like this. Who would want this to happen?
“So, tell the police that. Be honest. That’s all you can do.” I keep my voice calm, but at the mention of the police her eyes widen in alarm and she resumes her pacing, even faster and more frantic than before. She pulls open the sliding door to the balcony and a gust of icy air rushes in. There are cheers from somewhere on the street—seven floors below us—and music competes from every direction. My heart pounds, my hands suddenly clammy and hot despite the open door. “Mum, come back inside.”
She walks out to the balcony.
“Mum—give me Ella.” Trying to keep my voice calm.
The outside space is small—designed more for cigarettes than for barbecues—protected by a toughened glass surround.
My mother crosses the balcony. She looks down and I don’t even know what I cry out, only that it leaves my mouth and makes no impact, because Mum’s staring down at the street with horror on her face. Ella’s tight in her arms, but so close to the edge, so close . . .
“Give Ella to me, Mum.” I move slowly, one step at a time. Grandmother’s footsteps. “You don’t want to hurt her. She’s just a baby.”
She turns around. Her voice is so faint it’s a struggle to hear her against the noise of the city below us. “I don’t know what to do.”
Gently, I take Ella from her, resisting the urge to snatch her and run, to barricade myself in another room. Mum doesn’t resist, and I hold my breath as I reach out one hand. She must know this has to stop.
“Now give me the gun.”
It’s as if I break a spell. Her eyes snap to mine, as though she’s just remembered I’m there. Her grip tightens and she pulls away, but my hand is already around her wrist and, although I’m seized by terror, I can’t let it go. I push her arm away from me—away from us—toward the night sky, but she’s trying to turn back toward the apartment and we’re both using every ounce of strength we have. We tussle like children over a toy, neither letting go; neither brave enough to do more in case it—
It doesn’t sound like a gun.
It sounds like a bomb. Like a building collapsing. Like an explosion.
The glass surround shatters. An echo to the gunshot, to the fizz of fireworks overhead.
I let go first. Step back from the edge of the balcony, where there’s nothing now between safety and the night sky. My ears are ringing as if I’m in a bell tower, and above the ringing Ella is screaming, and I know it must hurt her because it’s hurting me, too.
My mother and I stare at each other, eyes wide in mutual terror of what just happened. What could have happened. She looks at the gun in her hand, holding it flat in her palm, as though she doesn’t want to touch it.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispers.
“Put down the gun.”
She walks inside. Puts the gun on the coffee table and paces the flat. She’s muttering something, her face twisted and her hands on her head, fingers grabbing at her hair.
I look down from the balcony, Ella held safely away from the edge. Where are the people? Where are the police cars, the ambulances, the crowds running to see where the gunshot came from? There is nothing. No one looking up. No one running. Revelers on their way from one bar to another. A man in an overcoat, talking on the phone. He walks around the shattered pieces of glass. Drunks, litter, broken glass—just more unwanted fallout from New Year’s Eve.
I shout, “Help!”
We are on the seventh floor. The air is filled with snatches of music as doors open and close, a continual thump of bass from somewhere a few streets away, fireworks from partygoers too impatient to wait for midnight.
“Up here!”
There’s a couple on the sidewalk below. I glance back at my mother, then lean over as far as I dare and shout again. She looks up; he does, too. He raises one arm—what looks like a full pint glass in his hand. And the tinny cheer that drifts up to me tells me my shouting is pointless.
I’m about to turn away, when I see it.
Parked on the street, oblivious to the double yellows, is a black Mitsubishi Shogun.