Day One: A Novel

YEAR EIGHT

MARTY

Long after I left Stonesmere, people asked about the Stonesmere Massacre, and if they didn’t ask, they wanted to. I would hand over my passport or fill in my hometown on some form or other. There—there it was. A solemn double take, as if the town might have left something on my face. At a hotel reception desk, a woman laid her hand over mine and said just how sorry she was. At some miserable team-building day, silence rippled across the circle of chairs. At an empty bar, the tender squinted at my ID and let out a long, low whistle. Did you know anyone? he said, and I shook my head and ordered another round.

It still surprised me: not just that he was disappointed, but that he didn’t try to hide it.

So I should have been ready. It was only a matter of time. In truth, I had become complacent. After the inquest, I bought a new phone. I no longer searched for my name online. I kept my hair short and blunt. I moved about the confines of a small, predictable life. The flat, hemmed in by identical other flats. The bar, squint-dark, where I wore the same black uniform as all the other girls. The company of my radios, beside the bed and at the kitchen window. The rocking of the Underground carriage, where it was neither day nor night, but always bright and loud: where few people looked up from their phones.

The night it happened, there were delays.

I was in a taxi, somewhere in the bowels of the city, at the end of a late shift. I watched the lights of the buildings, the names of the streets, one postcode flitting to the next. The driver watched me. He was talking about the state of the roads, about traffic and apps, but all the while he watched. In the mirror, his face was curious, then triumphant. Stopped at lights, he turned in his seat.

I feel, he said, like I know you.

There was a time when I smiled easily, and this was the smile I delivered. The stuff of winning goals and school tours. My manager had long advised me that I should smile more. It might never happen, he said.

One of those faces, I said.

Did you grow up here? the driver said. He gestured to a concrete slab, ragged with scaffolding. I was tired, I suppose. Tired and proud. I wanted to hear how beautiful it was. How wonderful it must have been—to grow up somewhere like that.

No, I said. I closed my eyes and waded into the cool of the lake. I did this, sometimes. I had not been back to Stonesmere for several years, but I revisited the place all the time. I would climb into bed anticipating it, savoring the arrival of its colors. Today, I would decide, it will be winter: and there were the Christmas windows, dusted in snow spray, enclosing angels and stables. There were the tourists, lifting baubles or candles, as if they could take a little of our warmth home with them.

I grew up in the north, I said. The Lakes.

The Lakes. Whereabouts?

Stonesmere, I said.

Stonesmere.

Yes.

The lights had changed, but there was nobody behind us. The driver’s face squeezed between the seats, bulging with interest.

I hear, he said, that it didn’t happen the way they said it did.

And my face was still pleasant enough, I knew, although inside was the old terror, a long-dormant organ beginning to churn.

I don’t know about that, I said.

The shooter was framed, the driver said. That’s what I hear.

I said nothing.

If it even happened, the driver said. Who knows?

He turned back to the road.

They just released that kid, the driver said. That’s what I read. The kid who exposed them. He paused triumphantly and drummed his palm on the wheel. About time.

When I clambered from the taxi I could feel his eyes still on me, impaled in my back. I climbed the shabby staircase and walked along the terrace, past the doors of strangers. Lights were coming on across the building, and within them, people moved hesitantly into the day.

I didn’t sleep much at night. I was allocated the latest shift, cash-up and clean-up, and I returned home on the first tube. It mattered little if the bar was busy or quiet. The sign outside said that we closed at four a.m., and that was what I did. The manager called me a glutton for punishment, but I enjoyed the little tasks. Polishing glasses, counting notes. The manager trusted me, he said, because I was unremarkable. He said this on the phone to his girlfriend, who was also a bartender; who was, in comparison, extremely remarkable. This, he explained to her, was why I was better suited to lates. Early in the morning, I would return to the little flat and settle at the table to eat breakfast. I would fall asleep to the noises of footsteps outside the door, traffic slow on the road beneath the building.

That morning, I prepared toast and tea and sat with my phone face down on the kitchen table. When I had seen the flat, the estate agent had explained that the table could be folded out for hosting. For hosting: I enjoyed that.

I took the tea to bed and set my phone on the stool I used as a bedside table, and I tried to summon Stonesmere. The lake, Crag Brow—any of it. But the town was elusive. The streets were incomplete. The mattress came with me, embedded in my spine. After half an hour, I picked my phone back up. I had to brace myself before I entered his name, knowing that his face would appear many times over. There were still people who believed him to be a martyr for the truth. The poor bastard. The taxi driver’s hero: the kid who exposed them. I would have liked to read the letters he received. I could imagine the exact satisfaction of his face, sitting on the terrible bed, opening them. When he was sentenced, I spent a lot of time reading about the prison. I read abandoned blogs and advice for visitors. I searched for photographs of the rooms. I liked to picture him, I suppose. I read that he spent twenty-two and a half hours a day in the cell, and that internet access was limited.

The driver was right. There was a news story at the top of the search page, a new addition, and the blood paused in my veins.

They had included a photograph I had never seen. He stood holding a scrap of paper and a prison official’s hand. He had pioneered a prison newspaper. His smile was perfectly timid. He wore a suit that made him look like a child at a wedding. He had behaved himself.

As of last week, he was a free man.

It was another thing I should really have been ready for.

Outside, the traffic was moving. Rush hour almost done. The engines roared into rotor blades. The town emerged through summer haze. Not here, I thought. Not this. But it was too late. The bedroom was falling away. The shift smells subsided, unsettled by the wind from the lake. I was already back in the playground, and running.

DAY ONE

MARTY

I passed the hopscotch, climbing frame, goalposts chalked on the wall. I passed the first huddles of police, gathered helmeted and armed in the shadow of the school. They gestured to me to move, move, to get out of the way. The hall was long behind me, looking as it always did, still and placid, a place for hymns, exams, gym. Are you hurt? somebody said, and I shook my head and kept running. In the car park there were others, cowered behind tires, fled from the hall. They clutched at their bodies, shrinking against the rubber. I stopped at the first vehicle and held to the bonnet. I could see myself in the windscreen, and I checked my face, peering for the features, expecting to find the morning engraved on my face. Instead, I looked ordinary, vacant. I adjusted my ponytail, collar, scraped makeup from below my eyes. The school gates were open. I walked through them and out onto Old School Road.

Drive Slowly for Our Children.

It was still early, and where the trees shaded the road, the air was cool. Police cars were abandoned at angles, like toys left by a child. I was already seen. The people of Stonesmere were gathering halfway down the road, pressed back behind police tape like runners at the beginning of some ragged, desperate race. My skirt had stuck to my thighs, and I plastered it back down and walked toward them, one of the last stragglers, staggering from the school.

If you grew up in Stonesmere, you went to Stonesmere Primary School. I knew it better than most: had spent seven years careening through the bright corridors, and seven more sitting under the Star Board in the foyer, waiting for my mother to finish work. She was always late. There was always a painting to Blu Tack, a parent to appease. Whenever the headmaster saw me, he stopped to talk. He asked about this friend or that; he asked how football was going. More recently, he asked about my plans. He was sure—quite sure—that I was destined for great things. On his more sentimental days, he pointed to the cabinet outside his office and gave me a knowing smile. He’d had lighting installed beneath the trophies, and I could make out several bearing my name.

There was a line of police officers quelling the crowd. Somebody pointed to me, and a policeman turned to watch me come, waiting with his arms spread and his face contorted with pity.

Were you in there? he said. My God. She was in there.

I couldn’t speak. There was a commotion at the front of the crowd, a woman on her knees and howling. She was older than my mother, with beige tights and a brooch pinned to her dress. Katie Malone. She had three sons; she would tell you that before she told you her name. I ducked beneath the cordon and into the crowd. Wait, the policeman said, but his voice was lost beneath the wailing, the noises of sirens and children. The tarmac had torn bloody ladders into Katie Malone’s stockings, and the policeman went to lift her.

Like the rest of us, she had dressed that morning for a different occasion.

I couldn’t recall my mother’s outfit, and I assumed that was why it was so difficult to find her. The details were flustered by panic. She would be wearing something beautiful: this, I knew. Her wardrobe was a bazaar, spilling with silks and lace. There was always a ruffle or a feather peeking between the doors. And so it was strange, because she should—

She should have been easy to find.

She would be at the heart of things. Calming her class or else cradling a stranger. She would be holding a small child in her arms, telling a tall story.

Instead, I saw Mrs. Hutchinson, her head above the crowd, her hands pressed like delicacies against her lips. I saw my dad’s school friends—men who had bought me early drinks; men who had sought me out after football games and congratulated me with fond hands—gathering their families in their arms, and turning, sheepish, away. I saw Leah Perry’s mother in Lakeview Hotel uniform, the white apron and the embarrassment of frills, standing with her troupe of children. Recognition eased her face. I hadn’t seen her in years, and I was surprised she still knew me. She would have last seen me standing at her door, ten or eleven, hoping to avoid her cramped little lounge.

My mum, I said. Have you—

Not yet, Martha, Leah’s mother said. Not yet.

She pointed to the police hats, bobbing over the crowd.

We’re all still waiting, she said, which wasn’t true, because Leah’s mother was surrounded by children. Because Leah had been working the breakfast shift at the Boaters. Because her whole family was accounted for.

I was so cold. I wore a tennis skirt and a thin T-shirt. In some other life, I was on the courts, lining up the eleven-year-olds, reminding them how to hold their racquets. A policewoman offered me a silver blanket, something from a spacecraft, and I wrapped it around my shoulders and continued to walk. People were moving in the opposite direction, hurrying, all of them going toward the school. Their faces were stunned and unspeakable. They wore the vestiges of ordinary mornings, Lycra and dressing gowns, cheeks still imprinted with bedsheets. A man clipped me as he went, and I ended up on the ground. I caught a flash of his panic, eyes wild. Other than the trees, the footsteps, there was a terrible silence. I sat on the road and watched the people pass, heading to where I’d come from. I didn’t think I could get back up again.

Two students from the high school trotted past, wet-eyed with the thrill of it. It was a bomb, one of them said.

If it was a bomb, why are we going closer?

They clutched at each other, pleasure in their hysteria. They spared me a glance. It was a sight to behold, I guess. Martha Ward, prostrate on the concrete, tangled in a space blanket. If I could have stood, I would have mutilated them. Would have stamped their jaws to the curb. I reached a hand to the road and tried to get up, but my body was trembling, disobedient. Another of the runners stumbled over me, caught my shin with his shoe. He righted himself and continued down the road, and I sat back down.

Darling, somebody said, just above me. Oh, darling. Are you all right?

A shadow fell over my face. There were two of them, a woman and a man, and a great rectangular eye poised between them.

That’s her, the man said. That’s her. She came from the hall.

Here, the woman said. Let me help.

She was smiling. She had too many teeth. She reached for my elbow and helped me to my feet, and it was only when I was standing that I understood they had a camera, tilted expectantly over the man’s shoulder, waiting for me to talk.

Now, tell me, the woman said. Tell me. We saw you. You came from the hall.

The whole town had seen me running from the scene. That was where I had come from. Wasn’t it? The school hall.

I was nodding. In my head there was a void of panic.

Are you able to tell us, the woman said, what happened?

From the past hour there came scraps of light and noise. The movement of the doors, swinging in the wind. The things in the aisle. Legs of chairs, bodies. Small shoes. The stealthy movement of liquid on wood. A cheerful, expectant humming, which I realized—in time—to be the ringing of mobile phones.

What happened, the woman said, in that hall?

My memories trembled. I reassembled the room, just as it should have been. Gathered the children back to the stage. Put the chairs back in place. Dried the floor. Tucked phones back into pockets, handbags, palms. There I was, in the heart of the audience, with my mother’s hand in mine.

It was Day One, I said. It’s an annual thing. At the primary school.

The woman looked at me the way everybody likes to be looked at: as if all she wanted to do was listen to me talk. She touched my shoulder, ever so gentle, and held her microphone to my mouth.

—

If you had asked me, the day after it happened, I wouldn’t have been able to recall what I said. The journalist thanked me. She wished me well. She left me standing embarrassingly alone, the blanket tangled around my shins. I don’t remember how long I stood there. Nobody was running by then. Stillness stretched from the school and down the road. The police lights were still turning, but there was no need for sirens.

That was where my father found me. He ran differently from the rest of them; ran, as he always did, as if he was in the midst of a race. He already knew some of it. I could tell that right away. There was no discernible line or expression, but his face had changed. The blanket crunched between us. He lifted me into his arms, and my trainers left the ground.

Were you there? he said. God, Marty. Are you OK?

I nodded.

Where is she, then? he said. Where is she?

I didn’t—I didn’t see—

You didn’t see if she got out?

And when I said nothing: Let’s go find her.

We walked back toward the school with our arms locked around each other, like we were running the three-legged dads-and-daughters race. Like we were winning. People greeted my dad as we came. Even then, they liked him to notice them. He offered a series of solemn smiles. He parted the crowd with his height. When I was seven years old, in Mrs. Hutchinson’s class, we had to write a piece about My Hero, and among the Ronaldos and the Mandelas, I wrote about him. That’s embarrassing enough, I suppose, but what’s worse is that even then, at nineteen, crushed to his chest, I was sure nothing bad could happen if he was there.

—

Later, we were gathered outside a white tent, assembled by the police in the school car park. I had seen other tents, closer to the hall, and the people entering those tents wore strange plastic suits and avoided our eyes. I didn’t know what time it was, only that the crowd had thinned. Children had emerged throughout the day, led by police officers and reclaimed fiercely by their families. I wore my dad’s coat, and he held me against his body. He held me a little tighter whenever the tent flap moved. A tired man emerged at irregular intervals and said a family name each time. Larkin. Whitfield. I was thinking of reality television, of groups summoned into different rooms to hear their fate. Their fate was that they would sing for another week, perhaps, or be flown to Spain to cook an elaborate six-course meal.

Once a family was inside the tent, they did not emerge again.

It’s OK, my dad said, every now and then. It’s OK.

Somebody had scraped Katie Malone from the tarmac, and she was waiting, too. I focused on not crying. I hadn’t cried, at that time, for a good few months, not since everything that happened back in the spring. I had started to consider it something of a record.

When there were very few people left, the tired man drew back the tarpaulin and called for Ward.

It’s OK, my dad said.

He took my shoulder. He walked us forward. The stupid tears were already here, muddling my way. I saw the officer’s face as the curtain fell behind him, and I knew. This was the elimination room. We would not fly to Spain. We would not last the week. A gunman had attacked Stonesmere Primary School that morning, the officer said, and Ava Ward was believed to be one of the victims.

I’m so very sorry, the officer said. He must have said the line many times that day, and still he played his part well, with grace.

Can we see her? my dad said. In the hospital?

My dad: this wasn’t a role he knew. For fifty-one years he had been cast as the winner. He’d established a carpentry business the same year Stonesmere was named the UK’s Prettiest Town by VisitBritain. Five years later, he’d won a contract to install oak flooring at a development of twenty-two luxury second homes just off Lake View. Famously, he scored the last-minute winning try for Stonesmere’s First XV in the Northern Combined Divisions Charity Cup. And now—now he was here, in the losers’ tent, with Larkin and the Malones.

The officer gave me a quick look, as if I might be the one to do it. I was looking at my dad: saw the exact moment his life changed. Whenever I think about Day One, this is the worst part. I’d remember it at first because I couldn’t remember anything else; and later I’d remember to try to dull it, as if in practicing the remembering, I could deprive it of its importance and stop thinking about it altogether.

It never worked. When I remembered this part, it always hurt. It wasn’t the mortification of my own sadness, but bearing witness to his.

DAY ONE

TRENT

When Stonesmere happened, he was living at Tim’s house. He was sitting on the guest bed with his back to the wall. He was the first awake, and he had made it to the kitchen and back without having to talk to anybody. There was a plate of toast on the duvet, teetering next to his laptop, his phone, a book of local photography.

Trent was working on his latest article, which was entitled The Dead Sea. The Dead Sea described the decline of the UK’s seaside towns over the past forty years. Trent had spoken to the men straggled along the seafront, had visited their stained mattresses and shopping trolleys. He had interviewed an arcade manager and the owner of Smugglers World. He had quoted his mother, incensed by second homes and their architectural mishaps, as an anonymous source. Before Tim, he and his mother had lived over in Fairlight Cove, in a bungalow outnumbered by solar-paneled boxes. She was Trent’s first and most loyal reader.

Trent had submitted the article to twenty online papers, and now he was incorporating early feedback. The feedback tended to focus on the article’s length, which, at fifteen thousand words, had been described by editors, in turn, as ambitious, challenging, and unpalatable.

I don’t know about that, his mother said. I think it’s wonderful. She touched his laptop screen with a glossy nail, where he had recorded her words. There were many things his mother could do—charm a teacher, hold court at the golf club, remove a stain from just about anything—but her writing was slow and labored, and in Christmas cards, beneath the printed greeting, she wrote only her own name. I sound terrifying, she said. Don’t I?

Ever since he could remember, Trent had wanted to be a journalist. When he was sixteen, he created a school newspaper, the Daily Stun. He was assisted by the Head of English, who had some long-standing grudge with the headmistress, some business about a book banned from the library many years before, and was overjoyed at the opportunity to cause a little disruption.

Against all odds—the headmistress’s extensive censorship program, the abominable school printers—the Daily Stun had a successful two-year circulation. Trent was polite and inconspicuous enough to get away with articles that might, under another editor, have been construed as rebellion. He had arrived at that particular school at thirteen, halfway through the spring term, and his backstory preceded him. The period before he was introduced, his form teacher informed the class that Trent’s father had died, abroad and in service, so everybody needed to be extra, especially nice to him. It was his fourth school. He knew what to do. He walked down the corridors with a nonchalant face and his shoulders back. When people asked about his dad, he told variations of what his mother had said to him, with fewer tears and more guns.

The Daily Stun’s greatest scoop was the discovery that school lunch was provided by a disgraced contractor that had once been found to add horsemeat to hamburgers. It was a discovery made by Trent himself, who noticed the branded truck parked outside the cafeteria early one morning. The Sussex Express picked up the story, and Trent spoke on the phone to its editor, Arthur Manning, who congratulated him on his audacity. Trent could hear Arthur smoking between sentences, imagined him sitting in a wood-paneled study, encased by books and liquor. When the Express was printed, Trent’s mother bought five copies. At the end of the article: This story was first broken by Trent Casey of the Daily Stun.

He had been early at school because his mother had started dating Tim, who would sometimes materialize at their breakfast table wearing a terrible dressing gown. The Daily Stun was a refuge of sorts. Trent had wrangled an old broom cupboard in the English block for the newspaper office, and sometimes he worked there long before the first bell and after the last, until the corridor light beneath the door had slipped away.

—

At Tim’s house, Trent lived in a cream room, with fat pillows and towels of different sizes. Other than the bath towel, he didn’t know what anybody would do with them. Trent’s mother liked to use this room as evidence Tim liked him, but Trent noticed that Tim only ever referred to it as the guest room. Like: Will you be joining us for breakfast today, Trent, or lurking in the guest room? Tim didn’t believe in privacy. He believed in open doors, good manners, family meals. He believed in keeping Trent’s mother in beautiful dresses, in good shape, in close proximity.

I see, Tim said, that you’ve already helped yourself.

He stood at the bedroom door. Trent didn’t look up from his article, but he could feel Tim’s smile, peering over the screen.

On days like this, Trent, Tim said, it feels like we should all be together.

Tim liked nothing more than knowing something before anybody else. Trent glanced around his laptop.

I’m sorry? he said.

Oh, Trent. You must have heard.

Trent opened a new browser window. There were already live feeds on the news websites. Politicians tweeted condolences. A police officer stood before a thicket of microphones, close to tears. There were photographs of people running, their arms held aloft. In one photograph he could see the lake, a glimpse of blue beyond the school fields.

Your mother’s been beside herself, Tim said. He had been comforting her all morning, of course. He comforted her in their palatial bedroom, looking over the old town. There were three spare rooms in the house, but Trent had been consigned to the only one that shared a wall with the master bedroom. At night, he played white noise from his phone.

Stonesmere, Tim said. Of all places.

He gave Trent a careful, tender frown.

I should go now, he said. I should be with your mother.

—

Stonesmere. It was the first place they had lived after his father died, when they were still reeling. When his mother still disappeared in the middle of sentences. When she spent most of her time on a message board for widowed military wives. When he still harbored quiet hopes of his father appearing at his classroom door, the way it happened on YouTube videos, to surprise him on his birthday.

He remembered little of the fabled beauty of Stonesmere. They had lived in a pebble dash house far from the lake. The house was usually cold. There was a vague impression of mountains, crowding the town like vultures. Of all the schools he attended, this was the hardest to crack. There were old orders in place, students whose parents had known one another since their own school days. People had hobbies he hadn’t even heard of, canyoning and wakeboarding. Newcomers were as good as tourists. He spent many lunchtimes alone, perfecting a nonchalant expression. His mother worked at a café called the Teapotter, where the drinks were named after local writers. She had to wear a jaunty white hat with a teacup on the top of it. He