Jake played with Paddy, showing him how to skim stones, bending down at an angle, releasing flat shapes over the water. The waves were too big; the stones kept falling instead of skipping. I tried to get Ted interested in making a castle, but the wind blew sand in his eyes. He cried, buried his face in my chest, his hair flying upwards, teardrops raw on his cheeks. I rocked him from side to side, pressing my nose to his sweet-head smell, watching Jake and Paddy play their game against the sea, their bodies almost silhouettes in the glaring light.
We ate our picnic lunch in the dunes, the wind and sun less brutal here, facing the marshes instead of the churning ocean. This part of the coast was a nature reserve, a haven for rare birds and rodents, pure green stretches in sight of the nuclear dome. The boys were calmer away from the sand and waves, with food in their stomachs. They balanced along the wooden boardwalks across the marshes, their legs teetering above the waving grasses, their arms wide out for balance. It was parental perfection: they were free, but we could see them, could – if needed – swoop down at any moment.
I smiled at a silly wave Paddy was doing at us, sticking his bottom out, his hands flapping by his face. I saw Jake watching too, but he wasn’t smiling. He hadn’t eaten much, just a couple of crisps, a few bites of an apple before sailing it into the dunes.
How are you feeling now? I forced the words out slowly, continuing to watch Paddy.
Better. He pulled up a clump of sea-grass beside him, tossed it away.
The boys seemed to have invented a game now, Paddy in the lead, directing his little brother with his finger.
We’re carrying on with it, aren’t we? My voice was reedy against the sound of the sea, the yells of the boys.
Jake blew out his breath, tugged at the grass again.
Yes, he said quietly. The word crept across the sand with the wind.
Yes, he said again, louder this time, more convincing. I think we should. He turned to me, not smiling or frowning, his face entirely open, his gaze steady. I saw myself reflected in his eyes, miniaturized. Harmless.
There are so many different ways to make a family: to keep making it, day after day. And this was ours: the plan was real, had already begun, was as tangible as our hands in the sand, the small boys we had created from nothing. Trips away had always made our lives feel malleable, easy to change, a toy world, lit from above. In this place – with the sea behind us, the marshes in front, the landscape stretching to the horizon – things were, at last, wide and simple: a man and a woman, our legs folded under us, our children playing in front of our eyes.
II
~
I have never strangled an animal, but I have eaten dead ones, over and over and over again. I have wrapped my hands around a classmate’s arm, twisted, as though wringing out damp washing, watching redness spread underneath. I have read many books about a girl murderer, a child whose eyes were invisible in photographs, two pits I couldn’t see the ends of.
I have stood in the kitchen with my face folding, my nose sharper, my brow lowered, my changing turned to the wall.
~
19
It was nearly Christmas; I knew the next one would have to wait. What we were doing had no place in the boys’ cyclical sense of time, the reassurance of the same ornament coming out of the box, the same song being sung at school. There was no tradition for our actions, no precedent; we were making it up as we went along. Certain boundaries had been established: they would all be surprises, we had agreed, like the first. He wouldn’t know what was coming.
I was saying no a lot, declining invitations to drinks, carol singing, book club socials. I spent most evenings by myself, pretending to work. I had some new hobbies, it seemed, interests that were nothing to do with my life, made no money, contributed negatively to the smooth running of our household. Jake was often home late, having texted me carefully – too carefully – with all the details of his train mishaps: signal failures, leaves, bodies on the line. I put the boys to bed as early as I could, went upstairs to my warmly lit desk, to the open mouth of a search engine.
My laptop was now my most intimate companion, a thin space containing so many places to slip to. One week, I looked at nothing but tornados, giant dark chimneys of air spinning around fields, followed by the camera, an eye that revealed its humanness every time it retreated, realizing it had gone too close. Every time, I willed it to keep going, to go straight through the swirling, smoke-grey mass, through the cows and chairs lifted in the air, right into the centre, where everything is calm. Occasionally, one of the children would wander in sleepily; I shut the laptop fast, before they could even glimpse what was on the screen.
I watched tsunamis, bodies of water that were able to bring down buildings, to lift and carry cars, sweep away a city like the wipe of a cloth. The website suggested other videos I might like: landslides, helicopter crashes, explosions. I clicked from one catastrophe to the next, soothed by their repetition, by the way terror unfolded across the smooth shapes of my bedroom. The images stopped – for a few minutes at a time – the racing of my mind, its skimming over the surface of my life, across the surface of the planet itself, unable to slow down. I had not felt such speed since my early twenties, learning forgotten languages, feeling their contours rise and open as I pressed them. Before my eyes, ancient symbols became moist, pliable: they gave themselves to me, gladly. But now my own pace scared me: I was barely in control, it seemed, lifting endlessly through columns of thought with no clear way to land.
I was always ashamed the next morning, as though I had spent the night looking at bad porn instead of witness accounts, live footage, shaking images, covered in screams. I could see that there were legitimate cravings for violence, and repugnant ones; watching news footage, at the time, was acceptable. Watching it five or ten years later was not. Reading true-crime books, listening to podcasts about mass murder: all fine. Watching a video of a man dragging his bleeding friend down the street, listening to the audio of a school gun attack, a plane going into a building, over and over again: these were signs of disturbance. And yet, I wasn’t alone. Ten million views, twenty million, three hundred million views, said the pale grey text below the clips, the number sometimes scrolling upwards even while I watched.
On Christmas Eve, we were due to have our annual drinks party for neighbours and friends, featuring fairy lights, mistletoe, mulled wine, no one left sober. All year, it was my single gesture towards sociability, towards making friends of our school acquaintances, people we knew from choirs and sports clubs and taking out the bins. To not have it would show that something was wrong, I reasoned, during one sleepless night. It would make people ask what was happening.
We’re not doing that this year, are we? Jake had said, when I’d brought it up casually one breakfast time, the garden winter-bare behind us, a weak, egg-white sun beginning to break through the clouds.
Why not? I’d replied, daring him to answer in front of the boys, to break their absorption in bowls of cereal, their thick morning breathing. Jake said nothing, his eyes shadowed from lack of sleep. Every morning, he staggered from the living room in boxers and a T-shirt, waving cheerily to the children as though it was normal.
I had tried not to think of last year’s party. Or I had thought of it, deliberately, until the thought made me feel I was coiling inside, twisting like a swinging rope. Vanessa and David Holmes, both of them in elegant, timeless clothes, hovering by the tree like the elder statesmen of the party, at least ten years older than everyone else. David’s message on my voicemail – left unanswered and whole, deleted automatically after seven days – had only just left my mind, and now there was this to remember. The awkward, last-minute invitation – Jake’d sent Vanessa a text, he told me – the obviousness of their difference from the rest of our guests.