I sometimes dream of Becky. Nothing much happens, I’m just watching her, as though my brain is trying to hang on to her features, to memorize her, so she doesn’t slip away. Her arched eyebrows. Her bottom lip, slightly bigger than her top. The crooked incisors. Those Bambi lashes.
Pulling the laces of my trainers tight still gives me a kind of Pavlovian pleasure, even though all of my last three hundred morning runs have been bleak. It takes only five minutes to get down onto the seafront, and the air seems to expand as I arrive. They are digging up the ground, near the marina, and I slow as I negotiate pedestrians on a temporary walkway, joining throngs of commuters in my leggings and T-shirt.
After a few minutes, I escape and run behind the beach huts.
Do they wonder how I could leave her? The lawyers didn’t question me on it. Perhaps it is too delicate, or perhaps it is irrelevant. Either way, I appreciate it.
In a funny sort of way, it was a morning run just over two years ago that led me to leave her, though she wasn’t born yet. Scott and I were in Kos, on an all-inclusive break during the school holidays, when I first saw the refugees, though such a word does not do them justice at all.
Nobody expected them. It was the very beginning of the crisis.
They arrived on the inflatable boats—as flimsy as our Li-lo that we used to float around on, drinking cocktails. Wet toddlers, their hair smeared against their scalps, curling and cowlicking like a newborn’s. A boy with one trainer on, one trainer missing. A woman, baby at her breast, whimpering into a head scarf so that the baby wouldn’t see. A life vest, bobbing in the water, its owner unknown.
We were there right as it happened, right as it hit the newspapers and social media. Scott held my hand when I got back to our hotel, and didn’t complain when, out to dinner, my eyes strayed to the sea, to the beach, again and again.
“They must be exhausted,” I said to Scott over prawns.
“Of course,” he said, the subtext a sad but stoic: What can you do? It was his response to almost everything. During extreme turbulence, he would calmly say, “Well, we can’t do anything about it,” as though that made it less frightening. As though he was fine with disaster, with destruction, with death.
“What must your life be like—to get on a ship like that? No, not a ship . . . a raft, pretty much. You must have to be so . . . desperate.” Their bodies flitted into my mind. The life vest. The missing trainer, bobbing alone somewhere in the sea. It was too much.
“Can we go down? And help?” I said.
He nodded immediately, never minding how he spent his free time, wanting only—it seemed—to please me.
We helped out for the rest of our holiday, taking parcels from the Red Cross center to a refugee camp. I handed over cheap fleece blankets, canned goods, plasters, and bandages. I gave them to anybody who would take them. Scott didn’t mind. He never once said he wanted to be back by the pool, eating unlimited food and reading books.
The Greek government put the refugees up in an old, abandoned airport. Anybody could go in, and I did, while Scott was showering one night. I sneaked over there, after an all-you-can-eat dinner at our hotel, a warm paper bag in my hand.
The noise and the heat of it struck me first. Worse than a dormitory. Strung-up sheets were makeshift curtains, held together with pink clothes pegs. The signs were still up: TERMINAL 1. TERMINAL 2. DUTY FREE. Plate-glass windows had shattered, leaving shards that somebody from the Red Cross was sweeping up. How could this be? How could we walk away from this and return to our sun loungers?
I sat on a wooden chair, not wanting to stand and stare anymore, and then I saw it: a dark eye. It blinked, then locked onto mine. I smiled. Could he see both of my eyes, or just one? I crept closer to the curtain, the wooden chair squeaking on the floor.
A little hand emerged from between two curtains, the fingers curling around a pegged-up sheet. The hand retreated after a second, leaving dirty marks behind it. I sat on a rickety wooden chair and watched. Then the brown eye again, peering out at me from between two grubby sheets.
He revealed himself, and there he was, a little boy, maybe two—he was so thin it was hard to tell. The other hand—dark with dirt, tidemarks of it across the back of his hand—was in his mouth, sucking on his index and third fingers. His feet were bare, slapping on the linoleum floor as he moved unsteadily toward me. Those brown eyes on me, on mine.
And then the thoughts came. I could leave here, leave Kos, finish my holiday, forget these children. I could read about them in the newspapers and donate to Save the Children and do all the right things—above and beyond the right things, even—that anyone might have expected of me. But that grubby hand in his mouth. His skinny little legs that should have been fat with rolls of flesh. Where were his parents? He was alone, behind that curtain, advancing toward a perfect stranger.
No. I couldn’t. I couldn’t buy The Big Issue and drink fair-trade coffee and leave it at that. I couldn’t. Those dark eyes. Those little hands. I could not leave them.
We played for a few minutes—peekaboo—until a woman in a head scarf came to collect him. Her arms were slim and toned and the veins on her hands stood out in the heat. She scooped him up and took him back behind their curtains. I saw as she disappeared behind the sheet that it contained a bench, an old airport bench. Exactly the sort Scott and I would sit on in a few days’ time as we waited to board our flight home.
I left, making my way back to our hotel, which sat at the top of a hill, away from the beaches and the life vests and the children. I arrived back at our hotel room half an hour later. Scott was asleep on the bed, in his towel.
I sat down carefully next to him. He opened his eyes immediately, a smile already on his face. That was one of the things I loved most about him: He was always—unfailingly—pleased to see me.
“You’ve been sleeping,” I said. “I’ve been to see the children.”
“I was sleeping to forget them,” he said. He rolled over onto his side and pulled me toward him. “How can we think about going home?”
“I know,” I murmured, lying next to him. I closed my eyes. Of all the people on the planet, here I was, lying next to the man who felt the same as me.
I returned just under seven weeks later, my registered charity set up. Scott paid for it with his bonus. “My gift to you,” he said shyly over dinner one night. “No. Not gift. My—” he stammered. “Our joint venture. For the greater good.”
I clinked my glass against his and didn’t think I could love him any more than I did then.
The local Greek authority let me have the old building the fish market used to operate before the recession. They didn’t seem to care who took it. It was cool, and dark, but the smell: oh my!
I scrubbed it. Cleaned the walls during the last week of the summer holidays. I would set something up—something helpful—and be home by September, I told myself. I returned a few months later, pregnant with Layla. Stop Gap had grown from a tiny start-up to an established charity with a budget and a business bank account. The children lined up every morning for lessons, for food, for a go on an iPad. We had to turn half of them away most days.
Those dark eyes, those little hands. So vulnerable, so desperate, that I forgot my own baby, in need of me at home.
I wonder if she missed me, if she wondered where I had gone. If she knew that I would be back. That I was coming back to her as she died.
Scott and I ascend the court steps together.
“Ms. Blackwater—what do you think happened?” Another morning, another microphone.
This time I forcibly push it away: How would I know?
“Where were you, Ms. Blackwater?” a male voice says.
I can’t help but turn and look at him.
“That night?” he adds, like a prompt. Like I don’t know what he’s talking about.
My face is scalding, and I will it to cool down, even though that only makes it worse. Scott glances at me, just briefly, his eyes full of concern. He reaches for my hand and takes it in his: We were both missing that night, he is saying with his hand, as he has said to me a hundred times before. No matter what the court says, the media, other people. We were both missing.
I remember when I took Becky’s call. It was only afterward—after I had attended A&E and I had seen Layla for the final time—that her words had sunk in: “Scott stayed an extra night.”
I closed my eyes to it. Surely not. I had been away for two nights, and Becky was supposed to have Layla for only one of them. Scott should have been back for the second.
But he hadn’t come back. He had simply extended his stay.
I thought of all my preparations to leave Layla. All the things I put in place: making sure Becky was available, transferring the Moses basket over, expressing enough milk, washing enough muslin cloths, giving Becky the reflux medication, the sling, the pushchair. It had seemed like a military operation. Later, I learned that Scott had just sent a text to Becky. One measly text. The conference was really useful: He wanted to stay an extra night. How easy it was for him.
I try to be fair: Would I ever have done the same thing? Stayed another night, because I was enjoying myself, because it was useful? No, I think miserably. I wouldn’t have.
But it started with me: I chose to go away. And I chose not to come back until the Friday, by which time it was too late. Scott’s actions—to the media, to the lawyers, and so to me—seem incidental somehow to what happened to Layla.
I, the mother, left her baby. It began with me.
I look up at the building. It feels different on this, day two. Much like a house on the second viewing, things are coming to light that I hadn’t noticed before. The sprinkling of cigarette butts just outside the doors in two distinct clusters.
I notice more about the lawyers, too, as I settle myself down at the very back of the public gallery. I eyeball Becky first. She’s not looking at me.
The prosecution and the defense are chatting as the courtroom fills up. The prosecutor has taken her glasses off, and she’s leaning in toward the defense lawyer as if they were two women in a café or a bar. Of course, I think. Of course they know each other. Of course they have countless trials at Hove Court against each other. The prosecutor is tapping her pen against the desk, faster and faster, as they chat. Harriet, the defense barrister, lets out a tiny laugh, and they stop speaking.
I think of the timeline I made last night. It clarified nothing. Only what we already know. That Becky had Layla all evening, and that Layla died, sometime around eight or nine. My brain can’t make sense of it.
“The prosecution calls Carol Richards,” Ellen says, when the case has reopened.
A small, mousy woman about fifty years old is brought in by an usher. She confirms her name and is sworn in.
I settle back to listen, but my eyes scan the jury, searching. What do they think? What do they think happened?