Robin notices it’s caught the attention of Mrs. Peacock. She’s walking in and out from her apartment’s patio doors to the garden, shaking and bashing rugs, working fistfuls of old hair out of brushes, letting it drift away for the birds to use for nests.
The Magpie fight started at the table by the window. It was a sedate summit that snowballed, becoming increasingly animated until the pacing and hand waving finally descended into the kind of shouting match in which neck veins bulge and insults that can never be truly taken back are hurled.
A few times now Mrs. Magpie has held her palms up, an offer of peace that is quickly dashed away by her husband. At one point, he grabbed her hands like he could scrunch them up and toss them, letting them go just as angrily.
When he stormed out of the kitchen for a few minutes, the woman had immediately started jabbing frantically at her phone, shoving it quickly into her pocket as the kitchen door flew back open.
Robin’s heart beats loudly as she watches, adrenaline surging as she grows more and more angry with Mrs. Magpie for choosing to play around with something so precious, to risk her son and husband’s happiness so callously.
Eventually the Magpies go to different corners to fume. Downstairs from them, Mrs. Peacock goes back inside, absorbed into the belly of her own apartment.
The adrenaline and rage is still crackling through Robin’s knotty muscles, and she kicks open the door of the gym and slides onto the bench. The rack above her is loaded from the last session, and she lifts it to untether the barbell and pulls it hard onto her chest. Robin shoves the metal bar up again as high as she can. Her muscles sting as she holds the weight for a few seconds over her body before pulling it back down. Her stomach gurgles; she can’t remember when she last ate.
Staying home twenty-four hours a day has a curious scrambling effect on Robin’s body clock. Since she never feels the sun on her face, Robin’s days and nights are artificially painted on. She takes daily supplements of Vitamin D and tries to stick to normal bedtimes and meals.
Manchester does not enjoy an embarrassment of seasons. It’s gray for two-thirds of the year. But even when the summer slaps stickily against the windowpanes, an air conditioner keeps it at bay. It clicks and gurgles, a companion on hot nights.
She tries to respect the night, to sleep through it. Otherwise it coats her in a heavy tar, an anxious blackness settling over her skin. When she can’t sleep and exercising doesn’t help, she roams nervously, watching the house lie still like a film set.
It’s when she’s alone at night that she finds it harder to forget. With no sunlight to bleach things, every memory is framed by a black background. Faces from the past sit next to her, silent and accusing.
The last conversations she had with her family wash through her mind, unstoppable. She is forced to watch reruns of her last moments with Sarah, over and over again. They drag her tired mind on an endless circuit through anger, guilt, regret and back again.
Perhaps one day, Robin thinks, she will get the chance to put those ghosts to bed. For now, though, she can barely get herself to sleep.
SIXTEEN
SARAH|1991
I moved in with Mum and Drew the weekend after the beer-garden sentence had been handed down. Until then, Callum took my room—his now—and I slept with Robin. There was a sleeping bag on the carpet, but we lay curled up together in her bed until we got so hot and sticky or she got so wriggly and sleep-talky that I quietly slipped out from under the duvet and onto the floor.
On the Friday night before I moved, she cuddled up to me, draped her leg over me and told me she was sorry that I had to go and she had to stay. I said I was sorry that she had to stay and had to have a boy living with her. That night, we fell asleep together, and when I woke up I wondered if that’s how we’d slept when we were in Mum’s tummy, but I had to stop thinking about it, because my heart felt like glass as it hit the floor.
I’d never moved before. I’d lived in the same house my whole life. I didn’t want to pack up my room. I didn’t want to take the toys and teddies I’d had since I was tiny. Dad tried to help but that made it worse. He seemed so gangly and awkward, folding my things.
Robin came and sat on my bed for a bit, and Callum went with his mum to collect the rest of his things. When they got back, he hid his stuff in Dad’s room—Dad and Hilary’s room, I should say—until I was out of the way. A straight swap.
I was collected in the BMW. They arrived five minutes early and I felt cheated. Mum and I loaded the bags into the boot and footwells while Drew stayed in the driving seat with the engine running. Robin, Callum, Hilary and Dad all stood on the front lawn and waved me off. My dad slowly bent in two as the car slid away.
It took only that one short journey to learn two important things. One: that Dad had agreed to let one of us go so he could keep one of us—if he hadn’t, the courts would probably have let Mum take us both. Two: that Hilary had given up her claim on the Granger house so she could keep Callum. No one had let anything go to keep me, from what I could gather. Even though I was the good girl who always tried her best. Over the following week, Mum tried to tell me that she’d wanted it to be like this. I think she realized how badly her behavior had come across that day in the beer garden, and she didn’t want to lose her one remaining ally besides Drew.
School starts next week, and I’ve spent most of the end of summer lining everything up in my new room, picking the new furniture that—I think—Mum made Drew buy me as a bribe and then rearranging it all again. Last weekend, I went to stay with Dad. That doesn’t sound right. I wonder if it ever will. I don’t stay with my dad; my dad is not a separate thing. He and Mum and Robin, we’re all something connected. We’re all supposed to be on the same sofa, eating the same tea. But now Callum sits on the sofa where I used to sit. Where do I fit now?
ROBIN|1991
The first time that Robin and Callum went to stay at the Granger house with Sarah, it was a disaster. Their mother was so keyed up and anxious about it that she ended up burning dinner—some gross quiche thing that made Robin gag—and then after she’d served it up and they’d eyed it suspiciously, she’d yelled at them all. Drew Granger had told them off: “Angela went to a lot of trouble over this meal,” he said.
“Sorry,” Callum had said, his hand shaking on his glass.