‘Yes,’ I say.
It’s been hovering in the background, in the doorway, for the whole meeting. Waiting to be asked. Hoping it was a mistake.
‘What’s the sentence?’ I say. ‘For attempted murder?’
She looks at me and blinks, twice, in quick succession. She’s surprised. ‘Jo. They essentially sentence you as though it’s the complete offence.’
‘What complete offence?’
‘Murder.’
I can’t say anything.
She must realize, because she speaks again. ‘With Imran’s injuries … it would be twelve to twenty.’
‘Twelve to twenty what?’ I say, thinking she means odds. Short odds.
‘Years.’
‘Years,’ I repeat.
Neither of us says anything for a few minutes.
‘How can they do this?’ I say. ‘The hypoxia is … so his injuries are worse?’
‘They have taken their expert’s report and used it to infer something needed in an attempted murder charge,’ she says, her eyes on me, looking at me carefully. ‘They’ve presumed you didn’t get Imran out of the puddle … that you waited. Deliberately. Looking at him.’
‘What’s that?’ I say naively, not wanting to know, bracing myself for what’s to come. ‘What’ve they inferred?’
‘Intent,’ she says softly. ‘Intent to kill.’
They interview me again, afterwards, on only the new evidence.
‘When did you get Imran out of the puddle, Joanna?’
‘Immediately,’ I say.
‘So how come he has got all of the injuries a drowning person might have? Why was he so cold? Joanna?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say quietly.
Sarah sits next to me, impassive.
‘I don’t know.’
‘They have upgraded the charge,’ I say to Reuben as we are undressing.
He’s been home for three hours, and I’ve said nothing.
His eyes widen, aghast. ‘What to?’ he says.
‘Attempt,’ I say, my voice strangling. ‘Attempted murder.’
But how could I have been attempting to kill somebody I also rescued?
I know the answer, of course. You only need to momentarily attempt to kill somebody. It only has to happen once. No matter how much time you spend undoing it afterwards.
Reuben crosses the room and gathers me up in his arms. ‘Why?’ he says softly to me.
‘The puddle,’ I say to him. ‘The stupid puddle.’
If he requires more information, he doesn’t say so. He merely stands there, holding me.
25
Conceal
We meet Wilf for a drink after work. It’s the first evening where the sun has some warmth to it, even though the air is still cold. Apricity. That’s what it’s called. A word Reuben taught me: the warmth of the sun in winter.
‘How’s things?’ Wilf says levelly.
He looks guarded, standing in his suit, while Reuben and I are casual. I’m too casual; my clothes swamp me. The splint is off but my wrist is no better. Wilf leans over, takes a careful sip from his beer, which is almost overflowing, then looks at me.
‘Alright,’ I say. I consider my brother, the boy who used to stamp his feet with excitement whenever we played together. ‘How’s work?’ I add, because it’s what I suspect he wants to be asked about.
He’s standing oddly, his feet turned almost inwards, self-consciously, and I wonder why. Reuben shifts next to me. He’ll be hating this. Usually I would throw him a sympathetic smile, a grateful smile. Promise him some quiet time later. A movie and some introversion. But I don’t. He has hardly looked at me lately. His gaze has stopped landing on me. I don’t know what to say to him, so I say nothing at all. Our life used to be so full, I find myself thinking.
Wilf hasn’t answered, is looking vaguely behind me, so I say, ‘How’s your list?’
He told me about the list in the autumn. He was going to do ten big things a year. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover I am a different species from him, from people like him. People who go to Indonesia to build an orphanage or who start up their own newspaper when they’re twenty-five or join the UN.
‘Alright – Stonehenge is all booked,’ he says.
‘You’re going alone?’
He nods. ‘Why not?’ he adds after a moment. ‘It’s on my doorstep and I’ve never been.’
‘I didn’t think you’d be interested in Stonehenge,’ I say, thinking that perhaps I would like to go.
‘More up your street than mine,’ Wilf says with a ghost of a smile.
Mysticism was one of my very first fads (I bought twelve quartz crystals), and it’s been subsumed into the narrative of our family.
‘What’s after that, on your list?’ Reuben says. ‘You put us to shame. We’ve got no plans except a party, in July.’
And it’s just that sentence which starts it all. As though it’s an ignition, a catalyst.
‘Laura’s boat thing?’ I say. ‘I haven’t been invited.’ I remember last year, and the year before – always this time of year. They’ll come over and invite us, in person.
But he had been invited already. And he didn’t tell me.
‘They texted me. I said we were both going,’ Reuben says quickly, but his tone is off.
His eyes meet mine, for the first time in weeks and weeks, and I see clearly what he’s thinking; the error he’s made in speaking without thinking. His brow wrinkles.
He doesn’t know where we’ll be in a few months’ time, even though we are married, even though we promised to stay together forever. He’s not sure.
Wilf turns and orders another drink, moving a few feet down the bar. He always drinks quickly. He does everything quickly. It leaves me alone with Reuben.
Perhaps he feels more able to confront me in a bar, because he says, ‘Did you see my message? On the blackboard.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but it said … if I rubbed it off that would be that.’
‘So you rubbed it off,’ he says, looking across the crowds of people clustered near a set of high tables.
Two of them are holding hands, tightly, under the table, and I gaze at them wistfully.
I nod, though he’s not looking, and when he turns his gaze back to me it is imploring.
‘What’s going on with you?’ he says, and the sentence, and the context – when Wilf is only a few feet away, due to turn back any second – is so not like the considered Reuben I know that I overreact.
‘Nothing’s going on with me,’ I say.
I intended my tone to be final, as though the conversation is closed, but it comes out hysterically. I thought I was putting on a better front of remaining the same. Just the other week I went out for coffee with Reuben’s father – he brought me some political history tome to lend to Reuben – and he couldn’t seem to tell. I thought I was holding up okay.
‘You’ve changed – overnight,’ he says. ‘I know I said … I know I said you could just rub it off.’ He looks at me. ‘But I didn’t think you would.’
‘I haven’t changed.’
‘You’re totally different. You used to be … affectionate and happy and … cool. You’re so thin now. Skeletal.’
‘Cool?’ I say, my tone imbued with distaste.
Reuben considers me. The hand he’s holding his red wine in is shaking ever so slightly, the liquid rippling. ‘Yeah – cool,’ he says. ‘Happy with life. Not uptight and secretive.’
‘I’m not secretive,’ I say, though the animal on my chest is shifting again.
It disappears, for a while, when I am with people, when I am distracted. But it’s back now. It comes back every night, like a domestic pet with a bedtime, a curfew.
And then Reuben says it: the sentence I have been waiting for, second only to ‘Joanna Oliva, you do not have to say anything … but anything you do say may be given in evidence …’
He says, ‘Is there someone?’
He says it quietly, his eyes on me. He isn’t looking for Wilf. He isn’t sipping his wine. He’s looking straight at me, the lights of the bar reflected like candlelight in his eyes.