Last spring, he had returned to the house at midnight to find her sitting in the kitchen. He could see from her eyes that she’d been crying. A bottle of wine stood on the table, half of it already gone. She had smoked a cigarette too, which was unlike her. He should have been home much earlier — his shift had ended at ten — but he had driven down to the estuary. He had sat in the dark with the heater on and listened to jazz. He’d been thinking about his father. The usual unfinished thoughts. Looking at Sue’s tear-stained face, he felt a certain guilt — or a sense of regret, at least — but he knew he would do the same again. He hung in the kitchen doorway, his arms held slightly away from his sides, as if he had fallen in the river and his uniform was wet.
“I’m terrible,” Sue said.
“What do you mean?”
She glanced at him, and then away again. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
Though tired, he pulled up a chair. “Tell me about it.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. Really.”
He poured some wine into her glass and drank it. “Tell me, Sue,” he said. “It can’t be as bad as some of the things I’ve done.”
She looked at him wide-eyed, but dubious as well, then lowered her head again.
“Just tell me what’s troubling you,” he said. Then we can go to bed was the rest of the sentence, but he left it unspoken.
She put both hands up to her face, using the middle finger of each hand to smooth the tears from beneath her eyes. “You remember when I went to Whitby last year?”
“Yes. You took Emma with you.”
“I almost killed her.” Sue kept quite still, her hands in her lap now, not daring to look at him. “I don’t mean accidentally.”
He stared at her lowered head, the white line of her parting.
“I didn’t plan it,” she went on. “At least, I don’t think I did. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.” She glanced at him quickly, through her hair, then let out a short, oddly resonant laugh.
He wasn’t sure what to say to her, but he also realised that he couldn’t leave too long a silence, and he knew he couldn’t judge.
“Tell me what happened,” he said quietly.
The journey north took longer than she’d expected, Sue told him, but it was only when they arrived at their hotel that Emma started playing up.
“She would have been tired by then,” Billy said.
Sue nodded. “You know how she gets.”
She was in the car-park, trying to unload the car, and Emma kept wandering out into the road. She spoke to Emma calmly, warning her, then she tried to bribe her, then she shouted. None of it worked. In the end, she had to half carry, half drag Emma up to their room, with Emma bellowing the whole way, that awful, almost inhuman bellowing she did, and all in front of the other guests, who were watching from the lounge.
“Sometimes you want to punch her on the jaw,” Sue said. “Just knock her out. Like they do in films.”
“It’s not that easy,” Billy said.
“Well,” Sue said, “you’d know, I suppose.”
They stayed in their room that evening and ate the sandwiches and chocolate that were left over from the journey; she couldn’t face the dining-room, not with all those people staring. Next morning, the weather was bright and clear. She stood at the window in her pyjamas, trying to shut the jabber of cartoons out of her head. Sun slanted across the hotel car-park. They would climb up to East Cliff, she decided. Visit the ruined abbey.
As they crossed the swing-bridge, Emma walked with her head tilted back and her mouth open, watching the seagulls as they wheeled, shrieking, above the harbour. The path to East Cliff was steep, and paved with slippery flagstones, but the two of them took it slowly, holding hands. By the time they reached the top, a cold wind was blowing in off the sea. It was a weekday, out of season; they were the only people there.
When Emma saw the abbey, she turned to Sue, her eyes glinting behind her spectacles. “Like Hunchback,” she said.
Billy grinned. “She loves that video.”
Later, as they explored the graveyard, Sue told Emma the story of Count Dracula. This was where he’d landed, she said, here in Whitby, during a ferocious storm. She led Emma towards the cliff-edge, thinking they might be able to work out where the vampire’s ship had run aground. Leaning forwards from the waist, hands clenched and pressed against her hips, Emma peered down — she was imagining how Dracula had changed into a great black dog and leapt ashore, perhaps, or else she was simply hypnotised by the rhythmic creasing and folding of the waves — and in that moment, as they stood next to each other, no more than twelve inches from the edge, Sue thought, She could fall, and then, without a beat, I could push her. It was a drop of at least two hundred feet. She wouldn’t have survived. Couldn’t have. I could push her now, Sue thought, and that would be the end of it. She hesitated for several seconds, then she took a step backwards. She was behind Emma now, but near enough to be partly covered by her shadow. All our troubles would be over. She stood in her daughter’s shadow, and she came so close to reaching out that her hands seemed to throb.
A terrible accident. A tragedy.
And since they were alone on that bleak cliff-top, who would have been able to prove otherwise?
She stepped back so abruptly that she bruised her leg on a gravestone. “Emma,” she said, “I think we should leave now.”
“Leave,” Emma said. “Go down.”
“That’s right, my darling. It’s lunchtime.” Sue reached for Emma’s hand and gripped it tightly.
“Fish and chips.”
Sue smiled. “If you like.”
In half an hour they were sitting in a restaurant on the waterfront, their cheeks glowing from the wind.
Sue’s eyes fixed on Billy’s face. “I came that close.” She measured a gap with her thumb and forefinger. A very narrow gap.
“It’s not just you,” Billy said. “I’ve thought the same thing.”
She pulled away from him. “You have?”
He poured another glass of wine. “Not exactly the same,” he said. “I just used to wish that she hadn’t been born.”
Except no, he thought, as soon as he had spoken, that wasn’t entirely accurate. Emma never came into it, not as a person. It was much more abstract than that. What he wished was that they’d been dealt a different hand. But Sue’s eyes had already drifted to the kitchen wall. She looked infinitely sad, and he knew that she was thinking about her only child — her brightness, and her burden. If Sue was ever out for very long, he would find Emma sitting by the window in the lounge, watching the road. Waiting for Mummy, she would say, and her voice would have something of the goose’s honk about it, as always. But Mummy’s going to be late, he’d say. She would glare malevolently at him through her thick spectacles. Put you in the tower.
“It hasn’t exactly been easy,” he said. “If we didn’t have thoughts like that sometimes, we wouldn’t be human.”
He wasn’t sure he was right, actually. It was just something to say. But at least they were equally at fault.
“The main thing is, you didn’t do it,” he said.
“I could have,” she said. “I almost did.”
She didn’t want him to dismiss the urge she had felt as a one-off, an aberration — the exception to the rule. It was serious, and real, and it was there all the time. That was what she was trying to tell him. It’s there all the time.