Our House(54)

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.

‘Just do it!’ I yelled.

Defiantly opposed though the two of them were, the shock on their faces was identical as I ran from the room and vomited in the downstairs toilet.