Read by Claire Lacey
Sandra found out she was pregnant early on, when “your baby is approximately the size of a blueberry”. She’d never bothered with books when she was expecting the girls, it had all just happened. But it was different this time round. By the time the baby was size of a large plum, Barry had already fucked off, and she’d spent the weeks between grapefruit and watermelon entirely by herself.
Dave was on the scene by the time they stopped measuring babies by fruit.
What size was Ryan then? she wondered, as she sat in the darkness of the car park. Six months old. Christmas turkey for 20, maybe. Hefty.
The watermelon had become Ryan, who was very into his fitness these days. Krav Maga, at the leisure-centre on Tuesday nights. “A combat martial art developed for the Israeli Defence Forces.” She’d had to look that up herself. Ryan never told her anything. “Emphasising controlled aggression and situational awareness,” she read.
That must come in handy, thought Sandra, opening the window as she lit a cigarette, scanning the car park, straining to see him.
“Targeting attack on the most vulnerable parts – the throat, the groin, the eyes,” she read. Sandra twitched.
*
The day she brought Ryan home from the hospital, she didn’t know what to do with herself.
The child had slept, on and on, a hibernating ball. She thought of the early terror-filled days with the girls, not daring to undress or even lie down, in case the nap didn’t take, the sleep-hungover mornings that lasted for months.
This wasn’t the case with Ryan. Dave had laughed at her for asking the doctor if it was normal for a baby to sleep 20 hours a day, not that Dave cared either way. But Sandra had fretted. In his waking moments Ryan sat in his bouncer and drooled, soaking through bib and muslin and vest, always an oily sheen on his chest and chin. How could he produce so much liquid? she’d wondered, as he awoke, briefly, from another sodden nap on her shoulder.
The girls had been awake and assessing the world from the off, Beth and Sadie, her beady little women, exchanging knowing looks with each visitor. But Ryan was hardly there. She’d say his name but he wouldn’t notice, off staring at something she couldn’t see. And then later he would stop, for a minute, two minutes, five, at the top of the slide, or at the table, banana half way to his mouth, and be gone.
“Away with the fairies,” she’d said brightly.
“Not in this house,” said Dave going back to the paper.
*
“They’re called absences,” said the doctor, “Quite common in little ones, absence episodes. Sometimes it’s after a virus. He’ll probably grow out of it.”
Sandra let herself exhale a little.
“Then again it might be neurological, some sort of seizure, a type of epilepsy. Let’s wait and see, shall we?”
Relaxing was never a good idea, was it? Something worse was bound to happen.
*
He’d had that blank look the first time Sandra walked into his classroom, only mildly surprised, to hear about the incident of concern. She’d watched him swing his scuffed six-year-old knees and listened to Miss Taylor, rigid as a needle, jaw clenching, talk about his sexualised behaviour towards his female peer-group, so inappropriate in this setting, on and on to safeguarding officers and disclosure and satisfactory outcomes. She was desperate for a smoke.
At home she’d pulled the whole soft parcel of him onto her lap, willing him back into her body, back to the womb to begin again, but better this time. She’d stayed there, rocking gently until Dave came home, explosive, and she left as he unbuckled his belt.
Maybe he’ll just hit him, she thought, as she finally had her cigarette.
*
As Ryan grew bigger and odder, Sandra’s worries hovered over him. She shooed them away but they returned and bred. She was vigilant. No-one was saying anything, it was fine. Before the birthday parties petered out, she’d take him by the hand and stay with him, to hover and watch. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, but she’d know it when it came. She stood at the edge of the soft-play, chewing on sweaty chicken nuggets; barren hours sitting in the park, or waiting (oh God) in the changing-room at the swimming-pool. No dawdling. Situational awareness.
Every normal interaction was a victory: every sidelong glance, every head-tilt, every ponytailed eight-year-old who flinched and ran, a source of terror. No, no-one was saying anything, thought Sandra, but still, everyone knew.
*
The incidents had multiplied and the invitations had dwindled to nothing, as she’d known they would. She walked around the shopping-arcade, watching. There were little children everywhere. Small, sticky fingers wandering off. Flimsy little girls, ready to be blown away. Blank pastry-coloured parents, scrolling and scrolling. She hated them, with their vital, unambiguous sons and their brittle, neon daughters. Were they beating the living daylights out of their kids in the kitchen-diner, she wondered. Were their boys quietly tearing up paper for long pointless hours? Gently testing butter-knives against their skin?
The skin! She had to steady herself against the wall, as the thought of Ryan’s softness and smell filled her head and her chest until she was dizzy. This boy, this good boy. He filled her up but it counted for nothing. The children talked, the parents talked: the time in the toilets, the time on the school trip. Everything was ruined and so was she.
*
These days they mostly stayed home, on their own. Ryan in his room, watching God knows what on the iPad, Sandra downstairs, waiting. Her girls were mostly gone, and when she was lucky, Dave left her in peace too. The days, the weeks, the years had flitted past her, while she’d stood still, and Ryan grew. Dave with his plastery hands and his belt. The girls, her beady little birds, wise to him from the start, kept their distance. They were wise to Ryan too, even as they doted on him.
Beth had stood in the kitchen, bouncing Ryan on her jutting hip, such a natural with the kiddies, like she was born for the job, everyone said approvingly, which caused a different unease in Sandra. Back then Beth used to take him up to the reservoir with her, to the ponds, to hang around with the lads.
Sandra remembered them returning one day, Beth sunburnt and excited, three-year-old Ryan distraught, heaving with sobs, rivers of snot flowing with such force that his nose had finally bled, bright liquid pouring from him.
“There were boys shooting frogs with a catapult,” said Beth, panting and agitated, “Ryan completely freaked out. And, get this, they asked me, ‘Is he yours?’”
She was appalled, delighted.
“And I said ‘No, he’s my brother, you dicks!’”
Beth, all of 14 then, trying on adulthood for size, already following her sister out the door.
These days Ryan liked it up there by the reservoir, on his own, fishing or whatever, unwatched by Sandra. He’d spend all day there in summer. Her mind hovered with him, in the water and the undergrowth, buzzing persistently.
*
“You could go,” Carol was always saying, “Stay on at the Post Office and just move out, you’d have enough for a flat, or stay with me.”
She started talking about the domestic violence team at the council, and restraining orders. She’d been on a course, she said, she knew all about safeguarding.
Sandra stayed silent, alarmed.
How could Carol, sensibly divorced, bathed in the light of Jesus, understand that Dave wasn’t the point? Dave and his hands and his anger were the least of her worries. He’d only howl and needle, fill the room with noise and motion, and then deflate. That was something she could keep hold of: sometimes it made her feel invincible, proof she was still there, at least.
It was Ryan, of course, what was she supposed to do with her boy? Where could he go? Everywhere there were people, talking and watching and having bloody children. What could Carol, her work-surfaces uncluttered, her laundry pearly-white, do about that?
Carol’s daughter chirruped into the room: fragrant, exotic, lost in the rapture of her phone. The sign above the cooker said, “This kitchen is for dancing!”
There was no place for Sandra and Ryan here.
But then what, just her and the boy? Forever?
On Carol talked, as Sandra felt herself fading, blurring into the background, floating untethered from the ground beneath her feet.
*
In the end she went to New Kingdom with Carol. It was in the old cinema by the garage and there was a praise band and people raised their palms aloft as they told Jesus he was a Lighthouse in their Dark Ocean. Sandra did what they did, not wanting to seem rude, but when Pastor Ken told them that the Lord takes hold of their hand and says ‘Do not fear, for I am with you,’ she closed her eyes tightly and willed it to be true.
And for a year or two, she came to believe it was. She could fix it. She would fix Ryan, take him away to somewhere quiet where everything was clean and dinner wasn’t something heated up from a tin and the windows didn't stick. She’d stand under a waterfall, among the rocks and moss; feel it splash onto her head and into her mouth, washing away the effluent and the sin.
But there was always broken glass or a dead sheep or something, wasn’t there? Just out of sight, polluting everything with … what did sheep have? Botulism?
You could never really get away from the dirt.
*
No one had noticed they were gone, Ryan and Keighley. They’d all been out the back. Dave had asked his mates round, the girls were there, a few neighbours. They were all outside, vaping around the breeze-block barbecue, Dave pouring lighter fluid over it and saying “Wa-hay!”, cackling as the dog squatted in the sandpit.
The neighbours’ kids were playing in the dirt. Sandra ran her eyes over them all, radar on each child. Situational awareness. Next door’s twins danced to something on the radio, less flimsy, longer legs, still girls. She watched the men watching them. Sandra prickled.
“She’s got her eye on you,” Dave was always needling Ryan, fifteen now and bigger than him. Dave knew full well that fat little Keighley, a year out of primary school, was a hand-grenade waiting to go off.
Sandra turned and went indoors, hand at her forehead. Up, up the stairs, panic just reaching her scalp, heavy stone of disaster already settling in her stomach.
Keighley was coming out of Ryan’s room, scrunchie askew, red welt on her neck, panting from the top of her lungs, not even crying yet.
“What? What is it? Where is he?” She had to stop herself shaking the child.
She pushed past Keighley into the room. He never let her in. Ryan sat squat and hairy on the bed, chin on palm, blank and dumb. He glanced up.
“What?” he said, “We were just talking.”
She wanted to slap him and scream in his face. Instead she said,
“Go out the front door, go to grandad’s and stay there, he’ll get your tea.”
She ushered him down the stairs and away.
There would be no cleansing waterfalls, she knew now. There would be secure mental-health facilities and offender management, if things turned out well.
Out the back the music cut off. She could hear wailing coming from somewhere. Dave was getting up, expanding to fill up the space, all shoulder and thigh and resolve.
Oh God, thought Sandra, it’s now, it’s now.
*
Finally, Ryan was here, lurching out of the leisure-centre into the night. She could smell the rubbery gym odour that hung about him in a cloud these days. But she didn’t mind, it got him out if the house, he was trying. He’d been afraid after the Keighley trouble, kept himself away, gone to his appointments. Dave had kept a lid on it. Sandra had left the church.
The suspension slung itself lower as he slouched into the car. Her tiny boy, her little man, her hulking brute of twenty, now. She glanced at his hands, pudgy as an infant’s. He’d patted her face, edged sticky fingers up her nose. She’d taken food from her mouth so he might digest it more easily. She’d numbered the very hairs on his head.
“Did you know the human brain doesn’t fully mature till like, 23?” he began. “Or that a two-year-old has the same mental capacity as a Labrador?”
She stayed silent, startled. He rarely spoke to her at any length: she’d forgotten how it sounded.
“Or that they used to operate on newborn babies without anaesthetics,” he continued, “Because they thought they couldn’t feel pain?”
She glanced at his profile; he was sweating, and animated. He was never animated.
“So when people are so fucking up in arms about kids, right? They just need to stop and think about it logically. Look at what the evidence actually says.”
“And what does it say?” she asked, but he didn’t hear her.
“They never ask themselves if they actually care or if it’s just what the media told them to think. Because I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ve done the work. I’m not just some ignorant arsehole. I’m at fucking peace with myself.”
He actually talks quite well, she thought, as she turned on the engine, letting the indicator tick-tock for a while in the darkness. Still a boy really, a clever boy.
“We’ll stop at the chippy, shall we?” she said.
But he had already gone back to wherever he usually was.
She drove along the edge of town, past the leisure-centre, and out towards the darkness of the reservoir. She had parked there many times, not thinking, just sitting, just to be near him, just in case. In fact, here was the gap where the barrier had never been mended, after the council packed up and left last time. It was just along here.
There was no waterfall and no moss, but there was a pipe clogged with bin bags and a shopping trolley, brown sludge just visible beneath a sodium lamp.
That would do. That would be enough for them.
She had toiled and spun.
Now she would speed up just here, as fast as she possibly could.
She took his baby hand, and held it to her cheek.
This was enough.
(c) Darinka Aleksic, 2023
In spite of her name, Darinka Aleksic is boringly British and lives in Kent, where she’s trying to write a novel about motherhood and madness. "Absence Episodes" is her first story for Liars’ League.
Claire Lacey has recently had roles in upcoming TV series Treason and Flatshare, and Netflix series PanTau. Film credits include Kavita & Teresa, Game Day and County Lines and recent stage work includes Ethel in Barefoot in the Park at Vienna’s English Theatre and Mother in Aphiemi. She is also an experienced voice-over artist.
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