Cath Staincliffe - Crying Out Loud

I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind: banishing Charlie Carter and Damien Beswick, Ray and Laura and their baby Oscar. I struggled to fill the space with fantasies. Holiday dreams, perhaps. When that failed and scenarios started playing out where Ray and Tom and Digger moved away, leaving Maddie and I weeping on the threshold, I resorted to doing multiplication: working out how much rent to charge Leanne and what that would be per month, per year. The dullness of that succeeded, enabling me to sleep but then the dream came.

I was in the garden, by the pond. It was summer, high summer and uncommonly warm. I was on the sun lounger and Lola was in my lap. She was happy, gurgling. A shadow fell across us. I looked up, dazzled by the sun and saw the silhouette of a man. Dread shot through me. Nick Dryden was there. He was shouting and as he did he tore at his shirt, pulling it apart. The scar on his stomach, ridged and ropey, began to open, peeling apart like a zip, and blood poured out. Dark red and sticky, glistening in the sun. I was screaming, trying to get up from the lounger but my legs had no power in them: my bones had turned to water.

Then I was standing in the house and he was breaking all the windows, the sheets of glass crazing then collapsing like a crash of ice cubes. Over and over. Leanne came in through one of the broken windows; she had a gun in her hand.

‘Get out!’ I screamed to her, ‘He’s here.’

She didn’t move. She was staring at me, her face urgent, deadly serious. She just said, ‘Where’s the baby?’

I had lost the baby. I couldn’t find the baby. I started hunting under the cushions, behind the settee. The television was on the floor. There was blood on the carpet. There was something under the television. I saw a small hand, tiny fingernails, like translucent shells. I began to cry. I had killed the baby.

‘I’m sorry.’ I turned, gulping. Leanne had gone. But Valerie Mayhew was there, with her straight, silvery hair, bright eyes, her smartly tailored suit.

She held the gun now. ‘That’s your baby,’ she said. ‘You have to go to the police.’ She was shaking her head, severely disappointed in me.

It was Maddie. I’d killed Maddie. My eyes filled with tears as the enormity of what I’d done, that dreadful, dreadful mistake tumbled through me. I’d destroyed everything: my lovely precious girl dead, Ray gone and Tom, too. Maddie was dead.

I reared awake, slick with sweat, my heart aching, bile in my throat. It took me a few moments to really believe that it had only been a dream. I felt so sullied by it, so tainted, that I needed proof, to reorientate myself in the here and now. To banish the monsters.

The children were there: safe, asleep. The night light glowing, the toys and posters and bedding familiar. I watched them for a while. If I could have wept, it might have helped; I craved release but I couldn’t let go. The fear and the tension clotted in my chest, gripping my throat. As if I had swallowed a rock.

Downstairs I found the arnica that we give the kids for upsets and minor injuries. Something I should have taken straight after I’d been hurt. I swallowed a pill. Digger, sleeping under the kitchen table, opened one eye, then decided it wasn’t worth his while to do more than that and closed it again. His tail twitched. Dreaming already. Swap you, I thought. Rabbits and tree trunks for dead babies and guns.

I’m not completely lacking in self-awareness, just a bit slow getting there at times. A few bouts of counselling in the wake of other traumas meant I recognized what my body or my psyche was telling me to do: to slow down, to care for myself and take some space to recuperate. But what about work, was my knee-jerk reaction. It’ll keep, I reminded myself. Take a day, one day. Nothing is going to change significantly in twenty four hours. Then reassess. See if you are ready to go back. The case won’t disappear, no one is expecting to see you tomorrow and you’ll be better able to work if you’re not spending half your energy pretending to be fine instead of licking your wounds and going easy on yourself.

Ray was taking the kids to school. I hugged Maddie before they left. ‘We’ve missed some bedtime reading recently, haven’t we? I’ll do double tonight.’

‘Triple,’ she said.

‘Deal. You were snoring, you know,’ I teased her.

‘Was I?’ Her eyes beamed.

‘Like this.’ I made outrageous snoring sounds.

‘I was not,’ she yelled, laughing.

‘No, OK, you’re right,’ I said, ‘that was Tom.’

‘Huh! No way!’ Tom objected.

‘Does Ray snore?’ Maddie said to me. Pointedly. The kids now knew we sometimes shared a bed. They must have absorbed the chilling of relations. The lack of affectionate gestures or kind words, the absence of a little light flirting or gentle sparring between us. They are like little Geiger counters, really.

‘Snores like a pig,’ I told her.

He didn’t even grace me with a look.

‘We could go shopping,’ I suggested to Leanne. ‘Get a couple of the things for your room.’

‘It’s really definite, then?’ she asked. ‘Have you talked to him?’

‘It’s definite,’ I said, choosing not to answer the second question.

‘Cool. I haven’t got any money, though. I’ll have to go to Jobcentre Plus, register here, then get on to the housing benefit.’

‘Tomorrow. Let’s do the fun stuff first,’ I said. ‘We can get a TV, too.’

‘Maddie said they couldn’t have a telly because they had broken it.’ Leanne studied me.

‘Yeah, well.’ My agreement with Ray went straight out of the window. I seemed to be making a habit of disregarding his views: moving Leanne in, reinstating the TV. But it didn’t seem unfair to me, not in the scale of things, not half so bad as his refusal to include me in his personal life. I wanted us to be sitting up till the early hours, chewing it all over. I wanted to be supporting him, listening as he worked through his confusion. Not cut off like someone who didn’t matter, who didn’t have a special, intimate place in his life.

We measured the windows in the flat and I explained to Leanne that we’d need different amounts of fabric depending on whether she wanted to pleated curtains on a rail like the existing ones or ones with a pole and rings across the top.

‘I like these,’ she said, and then looked troubled. ‘Will that be more money?’

‘Yes, but it won’t break the bank.’ Though the new telly might, I thought to myself.

Her reaction to Abakhan’s material shop, a treasure trove of fabric piled in great bins and stacked in piles, much of it for sale by the pound weight, was all I had hoped for. I’d no idea if Leanne had any capacity for sewing, it didn’t matter, really, but she loved rummaging around and kept getting distracted.

‘I can make Lola a tiger outfit,’ she hooted, holding up some stripy fun fur.

She had even more fun looking upstairs at all the trimmings, ‘Check the feather boa! Maybe you need one of those for the old man.’

‘He’s not my old man,’ I said. It just didn’t sound right; like we were some old married couple.

‘The old man,’ she said, stressing the ‘ the ’. ‘He’s old, and he is a man, or am I missing something?’ She cocked her head on one side, scrutinized me. ‘So what’s the story?’

I hesitated. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘You saying I’m thick?’ she challenged me. Oh, boy! The touchiness of teenagers.

‘No,’ I blew out, constructed an opening. ‘His ex, Laura…’

‘He was married?’ she said.

‘Girlfriend. She’s had a baby. He’s only just found out. It’s thrown him.’

‘So he’s got a downer on you?’

‘No,’ I said.