I really hope I’m not giving the impression that I allowed a new relationship to distract me from what was, in retrospect, taking place right under my nose, but I’m sure you’ll understand that it was an exciting time. We all know the beginning is the best bit – who would begrudge a woman that? Especially one whose marital breakdown had left her with no heart for anything more than beginnings.
Even beginnings came with a level of weirdness. It was maybe our third weekend of seeing each other, the first time Toby had stayed the night at the flat, when I had a completely unexpected fight or flight reaction. Waking to find him in bed next to me, I got trapped in the delay of recognizing him, of recognizing the bed itself, the four walls around us. Why am I not in my home with my family? I thought. What is this sordid set-up? Even when my brain caught up, I was convinced I couldn’t sleep with Toby again. Not here, with Bram’s clothes in the wardrobe, his shaving gel in the bathroom, the air still fresh with the breath from his lungs. It was almost as if he were in the room with us, watching us.
Toby stirred then, and I slipped from the bed to make coffee.
Of course, by the time we were up and I was walking him back through the park to the station, I was myself again and he was oblivious to the episode.
‘So do kids not play with conkers any more?’ he said. ‘Or are they all too busy indoors bullying one another on social media and self-harming?’
‘Not all of them,’ I said, laughing. ‘Some still venture into the real world now and then.’ But as the spiky fruits rolled in our path, no children scampered forwards to claim them. It was possibly the most beautiful day of the month too, when the fire of autumn had not yet faded to ash. Leo and Harry should be here, I thought. ‘Maybe there’s some mass maths tutoring event I don’t know about. I’m going to get my two out here this afternoon. Enforced outdoor fun.’
‘Quite right.’ Toby had two almost grown-up children, Charlie and Jess, who he saw every few weeks; relations with the ex were fraught and she’d moved to the Midlands to be close to her parents.
‘You mustn’t have been much older than a teenager yourself when you had your kids,’ I said to him. He was in his late thirties, almost a decade younger than Bram. ‘I can’t imagine not talking about Leo and Harry the way you don’t talk about your two.’ Hearing myself, I laughed my apologies. ‘That sounds bad. What I mean is I’m impressed how you’ve let go.’
Toby examined the path ahead. ‘Just because I don’t talk about them doesn’t mean I don’t think about them,’ he said mildly.
‘I know, of course. I didn’t mean you aren’t a fantastic dad.’
‘I’m not sure about that,’ he said, smiling. ‘You just do the best you can, don’t you?’
‘You do.’
I remember thinking, Bram would fight harder than this to be in his kids’ lives. Then, Stop comparing!
(Comparison is the thief of joy: that’s one of Merle’s favourite sayings. So true.)
Anyway, that was when I saw them, Bram and the boys. Under a big old horse chestnut by the gates to Alder Rise Road. The boys’ hair was damp from swimming – Bram tended to forget hats – and their cheeks flushed. The wind was up and there was a sudden shower of green missiles, causing Harry to shout with excitement and throw up his hands to try to catch one. Leo, ever cautious, stepped away, but Bram pulled him back into the firing line and though he yelled in protest his face shone with excitement.
They didn’t see me and I didn’t point them out to Toby – who was in any case easing slightly ahead of me, checking his phone – but kept the sighting to myself.
I still think about it now sometimes, the three of them together and the way it made me feel to be watching them from across the park. It left me with an odd melancholy I didn’t know how to explain at the time, though now I think it was directly connected to that feeling I’d had in bed earlier. It was the day I let go of some last secret subconscious instinct that Bram and I might be reconcilable.
#VictimFi
@SarahTMellor This woman is still in love with her ex #BlindinglyObvious
@ash_buckley @SarahTMellor Don’t forget she said at the start she wanted to kill him.
Bram, Word document
There was a Saturday morning in October when I took the boys to the park that I think about a lot now. It was probably the last time, pre-medication, that I had the facility to clear my mind temporarily and be in the moment. I used to hate that phrase, in the moment, a bit too mindful for me, but it does describe it pretty well. As if I had no past and no future but had been transplanted to that corner of Alder Rise with two hilarious little boys purely to catch the conkers as they came flying down. I told them about the sign someone put on a tree a couple of years ago saying ‘Falling Conkers’ and Leo said, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if the person putting up the sign had been hit on the head by one?’ and Harry added, ‘Yes, and he died.’
Oh, it was all fun and games until we got home and they strung their favourites and within seconds Harry had hit Leo in the eye and Leo had to sit with a bag of frozen peas on his face and I swore the two of them to secrecy because Fi was exactly the kind of person who’d have thought that a warning sign about conkers was a good idea.
I kept apologizing to them, I remember that, and they kept saying ‘It’s not your fault, Dad’, partly because they always blamed each other, it was their default setting, and partly because they didn’t know what it was I was really apologizing for.
Perhaps I didn’t either, not truly. Not until the next morning.
*
I can record exactly the moment my final finger-hold slipped from the rock face, causing a loss of altitude so extreme I came close to fainting: 10.30 a.m. on Sunday 16 October, as I sat at the kitchen table playing Pokémon Monopoly with the boys while browsing the local news on the pay-as-you-go.
Police hunt killer in mother-and-daughter horror crash
The young victim of a suspected road rage incident in Thornton Heath last month has died in hospital from her injuries. Ten-year-old Ellie Rutherford, in the passenger seat of her mother’s Fiat 500 at the time of the crash on the evening of 16 September, lost her fight yesterday following multiple surgeries.
Karen Rutherford remains in Croydon Hospital recovering from her own injuries. Neither she nor her husband were available for comment.
A police spokesperson said: ‘This is incredibly sad news and we would like to assure Ellie’s family that we are committed to bringing the offender to justice. We are particularly interested in hearing from a woman who phoned Croydon Hospital to say that she had witnessed the incident. We would like to emphasize that any information she shares will be treated with the utmost confidentiality.’
Flowers have been left in tribute at both the family’s home and the collision site on Silver Road.
The words will be scored on my soul for as long as I continue to draw breath. A child was no longer critically injured, but dead. A child was dead . . .
‘Put the phone down, Dad,’ Leo said in Fi’s voice. ‘You have to concentrate on the game.’
A child was dead!
‘Daddy? Are we going to buy Nidoqueen?’ Harry asked.
‘You decide,’ I told him, sounding ghostly even to myself. ‘Do we have enough cash?’
‘It’s really expensive, 350 Pokédollars,’ Leo said, needling him. ‘Can you even count that high?’
‘Of course I can!’ As Harry began to count the money in his slapdash way, I sensed my impatience grow and feared the rage I might unleash: I pictured myself overturning the table, roaring like a monster, throwing myself through plate glass. It frightened me that the violence I felt towards Mike, Wendy, myself, might expose itself to the two people I most passionately wished to protect.
A child was dead. The charge would be upgraded from causing serious injury to manslaughter or death by dangerous driving – I didn’t know what the hell it would be called, only that I would be found guilty.
Not four years in jail but ten. Maybe more.
‘Give me a minute, boys, will you, while I just go to the loo? Help Harry count his cash, will you, Leo?’
‘But he’s not on my team!’ Leo whined.