Try Not to Breathe (21 page)

“H
i, Amy, it’s Alex.”

Alex waited for the nurse’s footsteps to move away before she picked up Amy’s hand. It was cold and still but delicate blue lines were busy under her skin.

“I don’t know if you recognize my voice or if you can even hear me but I’d like to think you can.”

Alex smiled in surprise as she thought she saw a twitch spread from the corner of Amy’s mouth and up to her cheekbone.

“I used to spend a lot of time in hospitals—in this hospital actually—but I still don’t feel very comfortable here. I feel like I’m intruding.” Alex paused. “I guess I am intruding.”

Alex bit her lips and looked around the quiet ward. She was the only visitor today, and that lay like a burden. In the background, the radio played “Wonderwall” by Oasis.

Alex remembered hearing it for the first time.

“I used to love this one,” she said. More to the ward than to Amy. “You probably didn’t,” she added, remembering that Oasis’s rivals, Blur, adorned Amy’s cubicle.

Amy’s breathing was quick and quiet, her narrow chest shaking slightly as it rose and fell. Her arms were covered in goose pimples, so Alex pulled the blue hospital blanket over them, tucking it around Amy’s shoulders without thinking.

“I used to visit my mum every day here at the end of her illness, y’know. I probably shouldn’t have bothered,” Alex laughed, and sniffed, “she didn’t know who I was anyway. I could have saved all that time.”

Alex chewed the inside of her cheek and looked around the ward. “I wonder what else I could have done with those months. Written a book, maybe.” She sighed. “Stupid thing is, Amy, I could write a book now. Or learn to paint, or do cookery classes. I have hours free every day, just like I could have had then.”

Alex wanted to be asked what she spent her time doing. She realized that, even after all this time, all this practice, she was still craving a two-way street that would probably never come.

She tried to imagine Amy’s voice in her ear, her soft Kentish accent, a songbird’s version of Bob’s gruff speech.
Well, Alex, what do you spend your time doing?
she’d ask.
Oh,
Alex would sigh,
I just drink and I stare at my hands and sometimes I gaze around the room and I read my notes and stare at the TV and I just kill the time. I just kill the day. Sometimes I get my wedding album out and I fall asleep crying, and then I wake up covered in my own piss.

Visiting hours were nearly over and there was a sudden sense of activity and urgency seeping out from the nurses’ office. Nurse Radson came over, and Alex was all set to leave in a cloud but the nurse put her hand on Alex’s shoulder.

“I’m not coming to boot you out,” she said. “It’s okay, stay where you are. We’re just having a shift change.”

“I should probably get going anyway,” Alex said, slipping her shoes back on and gathering her jacket. “Can I ask you something?” she asked.

“Okay,” the nurse said warily.

“Do you think Amy can hear me? I mean, do you think any of this gets through to her?”

“I’m certain of it.”

“Really? You think she’s taking this all in?”

“Good grief, I couldn’t have done this mad job for so many years if I didn’t think so. I sing to them sometimes, you know.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. Music can be very powerful, don’t you think? I wish more visitors sang to them.”

“Well, I’m not going to torture her with my voice,” Alex smiled, “but maybe some of her own music would help?”

“I’m sure it would, love. And between you and me, I don’t care what anyone says, you can tell the ones that are still in there, and the ones that’ve gone. No matter what the tests reckon. And she’s still in there, listening. I can feel it in my bones.”

“I think so too,” Alex heard herself saying. “I feel like we’re building a connection, I really do. Does that sound nutty?”

“Not at all. It’s probably doing her a world of good to have a new friend visiting.”

“It’s doing me good too,” Alex said, and the nurse gave her a strange look.

“Glad to hear it.”

“Okay,” said Alex, embarrassed, “I’d best get going. Nice talking to you.”

The sun was over the yardstick, but the bottles stayed in the fridge. They would chill there for over an hour.

On her list of suspects, Alex had circled the name “Tom Arlington.” He had been a teenager, barely, and was too young to drive. But it sent shivers through her that a man now in his late twenties would secretly visit his brother’s teenage sweetheart fifteen years after she was attacked. For no reason.

Alex’s instinct used to be her greatest gift. The ability to be counterintuitive, to follow a hunch in the seemingly wrong direction and create a fresh new take on a situation. That ability had been long lost. Alex didn’t trust her rusty tool kit anymore, and was frequently paralyzed by second-guessing herself and deleting everything.

Jacob answered in two rings. “Hello?”

“Hi, Jacob, I’m sorry to call you like this.”

“My mum’s in the other room, I can’t talk to you.”

“I’m sorry, but I have some questions and I really need your help to understand some things.”

“Alex, I have to go.”

“Perhaps I could talk to your mum instead?”

“Okay, what questions?”

“I just want to understand a bit of background. I want to get to know Amy better.” It sounded weird when she said it so overtly.

“I don’t know what you want from me here,” Jacob started.

“Okay, like, what was her favorite film?”

“I don’t remember,” Jacob said flatly.

“Okay, well, what about music? Who was her favorite band?”

“Look, Alex, I don’t have time for this, so if you’re skirting around something important, please just come out and say it.”

“I’d like to know more about your brother, Jacob.”

Jacob didn’t say anything but Alex could hear him breathing, she could almost imagine his nostrils flaring.

“Are your mum and your brother close?” she tried.

“Not especially, he’s a grown man who lives miles away.”

“But your parents must be in touch with him at least?”

“Of course they are, they talk to him from time to time. He keeps to himself though. He’s very busy with work.”

“When was the last time you spoke to Tom?”

“A couple of years ago, at my wedding.”

“Where does he live?”

“You mean you haven’t already found out?”

“Look, I’m just trying to piece this all together and I need some help. I have found a few things out, I know he works in social care, does something to do with kids. I don’t think he’s married, he’s in his late twenties and he lives in the Midlands. That’s pretty much all I know.”

“That’s pretty much all I know.”

“Were Amy and Tom close?”

Jacob drew breath. “He was thirteen.”

“But were they close?”

“I know what you’re implying and you’re way off. He was thirteen and he was just a kid. They’d barely ever spoken.”

“I know it’s tricky for you, but can we meet?”

“No. Look, I’m genuinely sorry about your house, about what I did. But you promised you wouldn’t do this.”

“Jacob, I don’t know how to prove to you that I’m on your side.”

“How are you on my side?” Jacob whispered. “You’re calling me at my mum’s house, you’re digging up stuff about my brother, you’re disturbing Amy’s memory—”

“I’m trying to get justice for Amy!”

“You’re trying to sell newspapers.”

“I’m not some tabloid hack!” Alex spat the word as if it was a shot of vinegar. “This isn’t my beat, but no one else is trying to find out what happened to her anymore.” Jacob tried to interrupt but the words were flying. “And if I don’t find out what happened and if you don’t help me find out what happened, then somewhere out there, there is a man—or two men, or seventeen bloody men, for all I know—who seduced a young girl, seriously assaulted her and left her for dead. And if they’ve done it once—”

“
Seduced?
Amy wasn’t
seduced,
she was raped. Raped, beaten and strangled.”

“I…yes.” Alex’s temples pulsed.

“ ‘Seduced’ implies consent. How fucking dare you imply consent!”

“I didn’t mean to imply anything, Jacob. I’m just trying to—oh fuck it, do you know it was rape? Do you actually know it was rape? Because that’s not what the evidence suggests and maybe this was more than a random attack.”

“Amy and I had never slept together, she was a virgin. And that meant something to her. It meant something to me.”

“Okay, but what if I said she wasn’t a virgin anymore? What if it was consensual?”

In the background, Alex heard a woman’s voice saying something about tea.

“Wrong number,” Jacob said fiercely.

Click.

Alex took a cold bottle from the fridge and stared at it for as long as she could.

She woke early, sticky with dream sweat. The tang of ammonia perfumed her sheets. Her legs were wet, and the dark round was still warm. This was the first “accident” in a while and it sat heavily in a way that it hadn’t before.

The shower felt too hot and the coffee felt too cold and she was considering blowing it all off and taking a bottle to bed—because what was the fucking point—when the phone rang.

“Blur.”

“Sorry?” Alex said, baffled.

“Amy’s favorite band. It’s Blur, she loves them. But listen, I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Jacob said.

“And?”

“And I need to move past this and I’m not getting anywhere on my own. It makes less sense now than it did fifteen years ago and it’s about time something changed.”

“I still don’t know how much I can help you.” Jacob looked around Alex’s living room as if he’d never seen it before. “Everything is falling apart around me and I can’t carry on in limbo. Things have gotten so bad with my wife that I’m staying with my parents. It’s all really messy and I can’t seem to get my head together.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I know I’ve brought this to the fore.”

“It’s not your fault, it was becoming a bigger and bigger issue as time went on. I just need something to change for the better, you know? It’s been fifteen years and I need to move past this, I’m being a crap husband because of it and I can’t be a crap father as well, I just can’t.”

“I know you don’t think you can help much but you never know what little detail was overlooked back then that might be really useful now. Let me get my recorder going again and let’s just have a chat and see what comes up. Okay?”

“I guess.”

“Let’s start at the beginning—how did you and Amy get together?”

“We were in most classes together throughout school. I’d had a crush on her since I was eleven when we were paired up in biology. She was a pretty girl and she made me laugh. She was really sweet to me, even though I wasn’t one of the rowdy boys that most of the girls seemed to go for.”

“Who asked who out?”

“I asked her.” Jacob smiled. “She’d been out with a couple of other lads in school over the years. I was always jealous but I never said anything. They weren’t particularly nice to her. Most boys that age are morons, I guess.”

Alex sipped her tea. Her own teen memories were pretty sharp, even after all these years. The time she’d woken up in a flat above a shop, two boys from the year ahead of her at school slobbering all over her body as the dying embers of a party fizzled to the side. Losing her virginity blind drunk, holding her hair out of her own face as she threw up on the floor, a fleshy boy from her school working busily behind her, in his own drunk trance.

“When we were about fourteen,” Jacob continued, shaking Alex from her sour memory. “Amy was going out with a lad called Steve Dixon. He’d been mouthing off in the changing rooms after PE, bragging about how he’d seen Amy’s bra and done this and that with her. He said he was going to break up with her as soon as he’d…y’know, as soon as they’d gone all the way.” Jacob rolled his eyes.

“She told me later on that Steve had never even kissed her, but at the time I was furious, I thought she deserved better. I called him out on it right there and then, which was unlike me, but I was just incensed. She was so lovely and she was being disrespected by a total plonker. And then afterward I told her what he’d been saying. I said I thought she deserved to be treated better, like a lady.” Jacob laughed. “I mean, she wasn’t a lady, she was a fourteen-year-old kid, but
I
thought she was a lady.