Don't Close Your Eyes Page 4

  As we wedge into the connecting archway, Robin slumping dramatically like she’s taken a massive heroin overdose, I see Mum.

  “Mum,” Robin whimpers, and I don’t think she’s really seen the full picture. Callum and I look at each other and Mum and Drew pull apart like a zip.

  “What’s wrong?” a voice behind us says. I spin around. Hilary is coming into the kitchen from the hall, hair in curlers and wearing a dressing gown.

  Robin moans and clutches her belly and I just watch, confused, as the two mums start moving around the kitchen like practiced colleagues, sorting Robin out and ferrying Callum and me back up to bed.

  “Where are your antacid tablets?” Mum calls after Hilary, who is chivvying Callum and me along the hall toward the stairs.

  “Top cupboard on the far left,” Hilary calls.

  Am I in the Twilight Zone? Did I just imagine seeing my mum cuddling up to Callum’s dad, while my dad snored on the sofa?

  ROBIN|1991

  Sarah and Callum are already awake and Robin opens her eyes slowly to the sound of their low talking. She swivels her head around and sees the bucket next to her side of the bed. She sits up, remembering her bellyache from last night and feeling hungry now.

  “What time is it?” she says groggily.

  “Nearly nine,” Callum says, reading the time from the radio alarm clock on his desk.

  “What are you two talking about?” Robin asks, irritated that they’ve been chatting without her and have managed to wake her up in the process.

  “Last night,” Sarah says.

  “What about last night?”

  “Nothing,” Callum answers. “We’ve got Variety Pack downstairs and you can have the Frosties if you want, Robin.”

  Robin nearly falls over leaving the bed in a hurry and rushing out the door.

  Downstairs, the girls’ dad is still wearing the clothes he fell asleep in last night. His socked feet are still on the armrest but now he has a pillow over his head. Their mum is in her nightie, nudging their dad to give him a pint glass of water with something white and bubbly at the bottom of it.

  “Morning,” Angie says, but she doesn’t look directly at her daughters or Callum.

  “Morning,” they trill in unison, just as they do at school (“good morning, Mrs. How-ard; good morning, ev’ry-bod-y”).

  Hilary and Drew are in the kitchen. He’s drinking coffee and looking at a big newspaper and she’s cooking bacon and sausages that fizz and spit in the pan. The adults’ bottles from last night have been washed up and are stacked neatly in a box, as Hilary has recently taken up recycling.

  “Why the hell aren’t you dressed?” Drew Granger suddenly explodes at his son. Sarah and Robin look down awkwardly at their own nightclothes and cross and uncross their legs nervously.

  “I’ll go and change,” Callum says quietly.

  “How are you feeling, Robin?” Hilary asks gently.

  “Okay. Hungry.”

  She’s not sure what she’s said wrong, but Robin notices Drew Granger frowning and ruffling his paper. Their mum is watching from the archway through to the kitchen. She’s changed out of her nightie double quick and is wearing a new summer dress that sticks to her body.

  “Very nice,” Drew Granger says to her, and she smiles and looks away. Hilary carries on turning the sausages and Robin’s tummy rumbles loudly.

  NINE

  SARAH|PRESENT DAY

  5. The Bruises

  When I first held Violet, I’d never seen skin so new. She was almost see-through and so soft you could barely feel her. She smelled of milk and talcum powder, at once ancient and fleeting.

  Until she filled out from all the creamy milk, Violet had scrappy red legs that folded up like a frog’s. She wore the smallest nappies and I felt like I was dressing a doll made of eggshells when I had to navigate the fabric over her tiny wrapped fist.

  She was a little dollop of innocence and her easy trust stirred up a near-murderous rage in me, just imagining that there was some generalized evil that could seep under the door and touch her. We loved each other immediately. I know that wherever she is, whichever familiar room she’s waking up in, she still loves me. And that the love she’s feeling must be tinged with pain and confusion because I’m not there. And I’ve always been there.

  I have never deliberately hurt Violet. I have spent the last three and something years chasing away any pain she might be at risk of, at least kissing it better when I didn’t manage to prevent it. Hugging her tiny body as it bucked with the force of her tears.

  THE BRUISES.

  Again, no explanation. His expression was almost goading. Just try to deny it, his raised eyebrows said.

  I couldn’t deny it. She did have bruises. Every kid has bruises. She didn’t have bruises as a baby. She picked up a few murky smudges on her legs when she first started toddling, but those were not the bruises in question. The bruises I think he was referring to were from last year, when Violet was two and a half. The truth is, I don’t know how she got them. And I realize how bad that sounds.

  We were at a big adventure playground in Bracknell Forest with a bunch of other kids and mums from our local toddler group. We’d carpooled, Violet and I, in the large SUV of a woman I’d never even spoken to before, grappling for conversation that crash-landed in silence three-quarters of the way there. The woman had twin boys, a little younger than Violet but bigger and louder. Little tanks. The back of the car was rowdy until all three fell asleep just as we pulled into the car park.

  The adventure playground was organized into different sections, and a bank of picnic tables ran alongside the fenced play equipment, benches stuffed with women and a few men, hands wrapped around plastic cups of coffee or decanting tea from flasks. I stood holding the fence of the playground, watching Violet’s every move as she tentatively followed the others up cargo nets and down slides. It was a world away from our little village park, and Violet looked more daunted than excited. She seemed eager to leave almost as soon as we arrived.

  One of the mums had tapped me on the shoulder and offered me tea from her flask. It was a kind gesture and I turned to smile at her as she poured it for me, and we had a brief conversation about how awkward we both found these events. “Us shy ones should stick together,” she’d said, and I felt a little shiver of kinship.

  She went back to her table, but when I looked back at the playground, I couldn’t see Violet. She wasn’t on the cargo net, where she’d been moments ago, and she wasn’t on the slide, where she’d been before that. The big twins were there, snot-nosed and oblivious. The other children who’d been near her were there, playing and feuding, but she wasn’t. I was immediately frantic. My head whistled with fear. “Where’s Violet?” I’d shouted to the twin boys, who ignored me. I ran to the cluster of mums, grabbing one of them by the arm. “Have you seen Violet?” I asked. They shook their heads and looked concerned. A couple of them joined me to look. “Which one is she again?” a redheaded mum asked. I found it near-impossible to describe her. I saw her when my eyes closed. I lived for her. I couldn’t put any of it into words.

  “Don’t worry,” the mums had all said, rubbing my back and gathering me up in their energy. We covered all of the ground. I was desperate, spinning uselessly around. Suddenly I turned toward the café and saw a woman holding Violet tightly. I ran over, heart pounding, and tried to rip Violet from her arms.

  “Hey,” the woman had cried, “what are you doing?”

  “She’s mine!” I’d cried.

  “Are you her mum?” she’d asked. “She was lost.”

  “I only looked away for a second,” I said, outraged but near-sick with relief. I’d stroked her hair, kissed her cheeks. She was still shaking and sobbing. “Where did you go, darling?” I’d asked her. The woman who’d had her was hovering but I barely noticed. Violet just hugged into me, her tears soaking my coat.

  “She was wandering around by herself and she was crying and hurt,” the woman said, her hands o
n her hips.

  Violet must have thought I’d gone somewhere when she couldn’t see my face. I felt unbearably guilty at prioritizing a conversation with someone whose name I didn’t even know. A conversation long enough for Violet to fall off the cargo net or run into something or slip off a slide and not know where I was. She had bluish-green marks all up her legs and the side of her arm, but it wasn’t the bruises that upset me. It was the feeling that I’d put anything or anyone before her that stayed with me. I vowed never to do that again. After all, I knew how that felt.

  ROBIN|PRESENT DAY

  It was just some knocks on the door, Robin had told herself last night as she tried to sleep, duvet tangled in her legs. Just a few knocks. And what harm could someone knocking on the door do? Robin lived in a busy suburb of Manchester, on a bus route and with the front of her house facing a popular green. There were witnesses everywhere—there were hundreds of people whose very presence should stop anyone even trying something dangerous. So why hadn’t she just opened the door?

  Tomorrow, she told herself, she would open the door if he knocked. More than that, she would fling it back and say, “Yes?” phone in her hand, ready to call the police if there was any need. And surely there’d be no need.

  The decisiveness calmed her at first, but the thought of the door opening, the rush of daylight, the face of someone angry and desperate emerging, possibly someone with a score to settle…She had climbed under her bed before she knew what she was doing, tugging her duvet down after her.

  She swung through these loops often— The logical part of her taking charge, then the broken part of her swinging a wrecking ball through all that sense. There were so many things that a reasonable person would have done differently over the years. A reasonable person would open her own post, would open her own door, would sleep on top of her own bed, would leave her own house, wouldn’t count her daily steps, would watch normal adult television and not seek out the nursery comforts of CBeebies. A normal person wouldn’t believe that she holds other people’s mortality in her scrawny hands. Wouldn’t take responsibility for strangers as if that could bring anyone back. But then, a normal person wouldn’t be responsible for someone else’s death. A normal person wouldn’t be so swollen with guilt that she could barely fit in the real world.

  Robin pushed open the door of the “gym”—one of the first-floor spare rooms—lay down on the weights bench and tried to focus on the bar of metal over her chest. At least working out was a fairly normal thing to do, even if she did do it for hours on end, getting stuck in loops of round numbers and having to keep things equal and burning her muscles to oblivion.

  —

  The hole she was in had opened up in L.A., California. The band had been in the city to work on their fifth album, a trip that was an indulgence designed to inspire.

  Robin had gone outside to get some fresh air—air warmer and grittier than in the air-conditioned room she’d just left, an unexpected arrival the day before still pressing on her mind. Then she saw it. A triple drain. Three drains in a row. She walked around it, slid into the road to avoid it, just like she had as a teenager when it was a pavement in Berkshire rather than a sidewalk in L.A.

  Why did that old phobia kick in then? She didn’t know for sure. The letter, perhaps. Its ugly words pasted onto cheap lined paper, sitting in her hotel room.

  The drain thing was just a stupid habit from the nineties, a kind of socially contagious fear. An urban myth of a superstition that no one could actually explain or find a history for when pressed. But why are all these teenagers in the suburbs lunging into the road to avoid triple drains? And why are double drains lucky? None of this makes any sense. No, it didn’t. It didn’t make sense in the south of England and it certainly didn’t make sense in the San Fernando Valley nearly twenty years later, where there were far more frightening things near that studio than three manholes in a row.

  But that was it. The final trigger. The Pavlovian bell that had her up on her tiptoes, walking carefully to the top of a landslide of panic attacks and weird rituals, hurling herself down it with furious determination. The more she tried to grasp control any way she could get it, the more slippery her life felt.

  From avoiding triple drains, it was a hop, skip and jump into washing her hands three times every toilet visit, carrying antiseptic wipes, sprays and alcohol hand rub (L.A. is amazing for germaphobes—she couldn’t have been better placed). Soon she was obsessed with security in the hotel, checking the small balcony on her room repeatedly, pulling back the curtain to catch someone standing there, fully expecting to see eyes every time.

  Where once the band’s drummer, Steve, had only to give or receive one loaded look—the shared shorthand of the hungry and the wanting; where he was used to being pulled inside her suite—always larger than his—and used willingly and secretly (he was only the drummer after all): now he was left outside in the hall.

  By the time the band arrived back in England, three-and-a-half-star album in the can, tour dates looming, Robin was a nightmare to be around. She was a nightmare to be. She barely scraped through a shortened rehearsal at the Manchester Apollo— Too busy trying to stop herself curling into a ball to notice the anger on the others’ faces.

  Steve avoided her eye, lest she mistake it for that hungry look. Alistair, the bassist and singer, talked to her mostly via text message or pushed notes on hotel paper under her door, with dissolving courtesy and an increase in passive-aggressive question marks.

  Her days revolved around strict milestones of hand washing, swallowing, lock checking, nail cutting and knee scratching. Red raw all over, her fingertips throbbed constantly and she could barely hold a conversation because she’d be frantically scheduling the next hour, day, week and month in her head. Of course, Robin told none of this to her bandmates, manager, tour manager, driver, A&R contact, press officer or anyone else. What she did instead was nothing. She just stayed in her hotel room, doing all of this stuff, thinking all of these things. Or, worse, sat with everyone else but contributed absolutely zero.

  The band started the UK tour in Manchester.

  In Manchester, it finally snapped.

  Robin never managed to leave.

  —

  The morning of the first gig, Robin had gone to ground. She’d tried to get out of the show that night with minimal fuss, texting various people to say she’d lost her voice and had a high fever. A session musician would have to do.

  A few minutes later, there was a knock on the room door. Before Robin had a chance to get up, Bev, the tour manager, was yelling. “Bollocks, Robin, I’m not having any of this shit today.”

  Robin had laid down on the floor, not replying.

  “Enough of it, Robin. If you’re well enough to text, you’re well enough to play.”

  Robin texted: “Told you, lost my voice, so can’t answer, please don’t be so hostile.”

  “Fuck off, Robin, no one expects you to open your mouth, but you’re part of a machine. We can’t just lose a big chunk of the machine a few hours before you’re all due on.”

  Bev had paused. Probably weighing whether to try to bash her way through the faux mahogany door.

  “Look, love, it’s the first show, you’re bound to feel a bit funny, but it’s only the small room and it’ll be a friendly crowd. Relax, yeah? You just have to try out some of the new stuff and play the faves. It’s nothing to worry about, Robs.”

  Robin hadn’t replied. After decreasingly patient “interventions” from pretty much everyone in the band and staff, a brief chorus of “fuck you, then,” “bollocks to you, Robin,” bubbled up, and then finally the footsteps stomped away. Robin stood again, still wearing an extremely thick hotel dressing gown and single-serving slippers with the hotel crest on them. A note written on hotel paper lay on the carpet in Alistair’s handwriting: “When will you grow the fuck up, Robin?”

  She breathed in and out hard, that creeping gruesome feeling that she could never quite fill her lungs enough,
and then lay carefully on the floor again, eyes wet and hot, and counted every bead on the cornice until she fell asleep.

  —

  It wasn’t the first time everyone had been angry with her. But whereas she’d thrived on it, courted it and rolled it up into a big boulder as a kid, this anger crushed her. Sat on her chest, stole her voice. And now, nearly three years later, she sometimes had to say things out loud to herself just to check she still had a voice.

  “Good morning, Mr. Magpie.”

  TEN

  SARAH|1991

  Dad’s working on an old oak at a big house about an hour’s drive away. It’s a specialist job that keeps him out of the house more than I’d like. There’s something unbalanced about our place when he’s gone until late. Like there’s a missing tent peg so the fabric flaps a bit and lets the wind and rain in. Mum’s not the most patient person at the best of times—she always seems to be irritated by something. I find myself tiptoeing around even more so I don’t get caught in the crossfire between her and Robin sniping at each other. But this time, she’s quiet. She doesn’t sigh dramatically and talk about all the things she could be doing with her life instead of standing there in front of us refereeing our squabbles. She doesn’t chase Robin up the stairs, threatening to smack her legs for being cheeky. She doesn’t complain when we ask what’s for tea, every half an hour until teatime. She just says, “Oh um, not sure,” and things like that.