Kit is calling, I watch the missed calls mount on my screen, the voicemails, and then the messages come:
Where are you?
Is this a joke?
Pick up your phone.
My hands are shaking. In law school, we learnt that there are two elements to a crime, the act,actus reus, and the mental state,mens rea,the concept so simple, Kit and I applied it confidently, won easy distinctions. But now, when I turn the theory on myself, I can’t find the knife edge where my thoughts sharpened to intent.
I’ve known this day would come, I’ve prepared for it in the soil of the garden, the pots of my greenhouse, further back even, before Millie, before Kit. When I read the letter this morning, it was as easy as pressing a button, the thinking complete. But while I might have planned what I’d take on the trip, I am wildly unprepared for the panic quivering through Kit’s messages or the ruin of leaving my daughter.
Disused dockyards and warehouses whip past the tube window before morphing into the glass monoliths of Canary Wharf’s investment banks, the business hotels with their white-gauzed windows. At Heron Quays, a woman in a cream trouser suit takes the seat next to me, thanking me when I shift to make room. Can’t she see that my side is blown in? My lungs aren’t working,my heart has stopped because the air I breathe, the blood in my veins, is Millie and I have left her nine stops back.
My hand is trembling as I click on the Nanny app. Kit and I bickered about getting this baby monitor, he thought it was too expensive but I insisted – Millie had always slept next to me, my hand on her heart – if she was going to move into her own room, I needed the best monitor on the market. So, when the picture flickers on and I see my daughter screaming for me, it is in the highest possible quality.
Kit is on the other side of the bars, I can see the top of his head as he leans over her cot bed, ‘Honey, honey, calm down, let Daddy pick you up.’ But she isn’t having any of it. She kicks out at him, thrashing her head from side to side, her dark blonde hair plastered against her forehead in sweaty strands. ‘Mama!’ she screams. ‘I – want – Mama!’ It isn’t just her words that tear me apart but the sounds between them – the wet in her throat, her hiccupping breath.
I can’t bear it. I stand up – too fast, my stomach spasms. I wince. The woman in the cream suit asks me if I’m okay, but I edge my way past her, push my way to the front. The tube pulls into Limehouse Station. Commuters swarm past me as they spill onto the platform or climb onboard, huffing angrily, because I am blocking exits and entries, one arm protective round my wounded stomach, the back of my fist pressed against my mouth, I am on the brink of getting off. But I don’t. What did I think I’d do when I was gone, send her home-cooked meals, read her bedtime stories? There are no half measures. Not with what needs to be done.
The doors slide shut. Ahead, the tracks split, the tube swerves to the right. There’s an inevitability to a journey, the lostopportunities, the clutch of chances to take a different path. Kit calls me again. I turn off my phone.
From: Kit McDermott
18:17
Where are you? You left Millie on her own? I know it’s bad right now, really bad, but we can sort it out. Just come home.
3
Mews
Now
His place is where it’s always been, on Holland Park Mews. I hate the word ‘mews’, sickly sweet, a basket of kittens, when it really refers to the row of converted horse stables behind the grand Victorian villas that exploded into popularity after a spate of noughties British romcoms. The street itself was named one of the prettiest in London,I saw it in one of those coffee table books at King’s Cross Station, my heart stammering at the sight of his house on the edge of a photo. Trust him to have chosen well, to have lucked out after being locked up – eighteen years later, after one financial crisis and well into another, the value of his stable conversion has skyrocketed. He always managed to come out on top.
Each house is the same as the next – two floors, ironwork stairs and balconies, front doors painted in charming pastels. The frontages of the ground floor are taken up by stable doors, a distinctive period feature.
I’ve dreamt about this door. Sometimes, the paint is bubbled up like tumours, splintered in a network of veins. I pick at it lightly.The paint slides off, like it’s aching to give. Other times, I dream that I push the door open. The house is helpless against me; I am not its first intruder – the lock is already jimmied, the door is ajar. Inside, it smells of urine and beer. A mattress with unspeakable stains lies in the debris of empty bottles, cigarette butts, clods of earth. The walls are graffitied with words I don’t understand.
But none of that is true. I walk back and forth, nursing the sting of early defeat, because the sight of his house makes me want to give up, go home. The windows are whole and unfractured, the balcony is clean and swept. I turn on my phone, shine it on the stable door. A rich olive. I stumble back. It is the exact colour I chose for my kitchen a few months ago; it framed the greenery of my garden perfectly. But standing here, I am frightened that all of my choices are his.
A light flicks on upstairs. He’s in, unbearably close, separated from me by no more than wood, brick, concrete. ‘Come on, come on,’ I whisper, because I know if I glimpse him now, raw from the guilt of abandoning one daughter, the grief of losing the other, I’ll be reckless, I’ll be dangerous, I’ll throw off all my best-laid plans, press a knife to his throat, a gun to his temple. This will be finished.
But I don’t see him. And I don’t have a knife or a gun. Only roots and seeds and a plant I am clutching so hard to my chest. Slow-acting weapons.
Tomorrow then. I’ll meet him at his favourite place, where he said he’d wait for me. But when we meet, I’ll know I was here first, where he was least expecting it. Where he thought he was safe.
From: Kit McDermott
19:31
I found your note. I don’t understand. You have nothing to be sorry about, you’ve done nothing wrong, you couldn’t help what happened. None of this is your fault, Laurie, do you hear me? Come home.
4
Hotel
Now
