Something Might Happen

by Julie Myerson

Genres: Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

Like Anita Shreve, Myerson writes in a literary and yet accessible manner. Her fifth book is a story of a troubled woman who falls for an outsider who has come to uncover the truth.

Release date: October 14, 2009

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 346

Sample

PEOPLE THINK WHEN SOMEONE IS STABBED THEY JUST fall down on the ground and die. Well they don’t. When Lennie is found on that morning in the car park on Pier Avenue, they
can tell from the mess that she dragged herself around for some time before she gave up.


Quite some time, in fact. Maybe even as much as a quarter of an hour. Crawling like a baby on her hands and knees, grabbing
and swiping at door handles and bumpers, fingers tacky with her own blood. Then at some point slipping down and losing consciousness
there in the nettles by the Pay & Display machine. They say they can’t be certain about when it was, the precise moment that
her heart stopped—but they can assure us that it was immaterial. She wouldn’t have seen, wouldn’t have known.



The one good thing, Mawhinney says, is that her brain would’ve shut down as her lungs filled up.


But I don’t want the details. One moment or several? A curdled sigh, a spattered red breath, brown saliva clotting in her
mouth? All I care about is that they’re right, that it was quick. All I need to know is that her heart was not still beating
when her attacker moved back in and cut it out.


Early October and four in the morning and no wind at all, just the blackest darkness, so dead and dark and black that if you
stopped to think about it, you might find you couldn’t breathe. All the lights out. And then all of them on, one by one—pop,
pop, pop—the world reviving, turning large and transparent.


Something’s happened.

He rings me at the deadest time, sleep holding me down. Since the baby that’s how I’ve been, a dead person, trying to surface.
Still I grab the phone the second its ringing hits my dreams.


Tess, he goes, Tess—and straightaway I can tell his voice is all wrong.

What? I say, struggling to sit up and focus. What is it? What’s going on?

I’m—

The silence crackles.

I’m sorry, he says.

What do you mean, sorry? Why?

Oh Tess, he says and he sounds like he’s going to cry.

Al, I go, for fuck’s sake—what?


She’s not here.


What?

You were right. She hasn’t come home.

She hasn’t?

She’s just—I don’t know where she is—she’s not here.

Outside, a dark whoosh of wind in the poplars. If it was light you would see them bending. You get that by the sea—sudden
changes, things getting crushed and flattened. I used to like it. It used not to scare me at all.


Next to me in the bed meanwhile Livvy is lying on her back in her white sleeper, snaps done up to the chin, mouth softly open
and arms flung back. A swirl of blackish hair on her head. Mick funnily enough is lying in a similar babyish way but on his
front—black matted hair pushed up, hands bunched into two hot fists. Dreaming of a fight is what it looks like.


Tess, he says, what am I going to do?

Call the police.

I’ve done that.

You want me to come?

He says nothing. Liv snorts. When did I feed her? I slide my fingers under to feel her nappy. Damply heavy with pee. I must
have fed her in the night, in my sleep.


I’ll come, I tell him. Wait for me.

I get out of bed, change the baby, get dressed.

In one way it is not a surprise. In the beach hut that night, the feeling is cold and hard, painful and unsettling. I
shouldn’t have let him come. It shouldn’t have to be complicated.


I take the tumbler of wine from his hands. Take a sip. Put it down on the wooden floor which is slippy with the years of sand
falling off our bare feet.


You should get back, I say. But he doesn’t move. He just looks at me.

She’ll be in bed. She’ll have gone to sleep.

No, I say. It’s not that.

What, then?

He reaches forward, half grinning, tries to take his drink back. I stop him.

The truth is, he’s lazy. Whatever he gets from me, he imagines he can’t get from anyone else.

It’s not that, I say again. Batting him away.

He settles back in the old deckchair and looks at me. His old jeans, his big feet in their salt-stained boots. A bleached
tidemark where he has walked in the edge of the sea. He looks at the joint in his hands—his rough, furniture-maker’s hands—tips
off the ash.


For God’s sake, Tess, he says at last, I wish you’d calm down.

I sigh.

You’re even making me jumpy, he says. What the fuck is it? Why’re you in such a state?

I say nothing.

He shrugs, smiles. He likes to think I’m this uptight person. He thinks he’s won.


I’m scared, I tell him and he leans forward.


What are you scared of, Tess?

I don’t know.

It’s not true though. I think I do know, even then.

The thing is, she is not the type to have something happen. She has everything going for her. Beauty, talent, kindness. She
even sometimes goes to church.


It’s the one thing she and Alex argue about, the only thing. It’s not God, she says, just something bigger, greater than her.
She needs to feel there is a larger Good out there.


You might think she’s this good and pliable person but actually she’s not, she’s dogged and fixed. She’s the strong one. She
does exactly as she pleases. When we first came here, she was the one who said it would all be fine, who believed most certainly
in the dream we had.


The only thing I have more of than her is kids. Double the amount. People ask me how I do it, as if there’s some kind of trick
to having four. But it’s easy. I do it for myself. I can’t help it. There’s nothing to beat walking down the street on a sunny
day with them all clean and happy and no one crying or fighting behind you and knowing just how it all looks. A perfect mother
with her perfect life.


These are the facts. That she dies on a Monday night in October, some time between eleven and midnight, following a PTA meeting
at the school on Marlborough Road. That she gets to that meeting around seven and it ends around
twenty to eleven—later than usual, but then it is Lucy Dorry’s first time as Chair and most people who can, stay on for a
drink after.


That they reckon, anyway, that she reaches her car around 10.45, but that she never manages to get into it. She never even
makes it around to the driver’s side. Her keys are found lying on the ground just beneath the passenger door. All the paintwork
around the lock is scratched furiously and the nails on her right hand are ripped and bloody and broken.


Both of us, with our perfect lives. She can’t believe it when I tell her I’m expecting Liv. At thirty-eight!

You’re saying I’m past it?

No, she replies and I notice the flicker of a frown in her eyes. Just the thought—and she shudders—of going through it all
again.


I can’t wait, I tell her as boisterously as I can. And it’s the truth, I can’t.

And work?

I can do that too, I say. Because I’ve already decided that I’ll have to.

She turns and looks at me with eyes full of something, but what exactly I can’t tell.

I wish I had your guts, she says. And your energy.

Which makes me laugh because, in my book, it takes guts and energy to deny yourself these things. And Mick and I have never
been good at limiting ourselves, at sitting down and planning. In fact, none of our kids were planned exactly—or that’s what
we always tell people, laughing at
ourselves. Just one big happy haphazard family. That’s the story we tell ourselves.


And I am over the moon about Liv—from that first mysterious morning when the simple act of stirring the hot milk into Rosa’s
instant oat cereal makes me turn and hold myself, perspiring, over the sink.


When I tell Mick, he does nothing. He doesn’t move. He is sitting there at the table and I bend and whisper it in his ear
and maybe I expect that he will pull me to him, but he doesn’t move a single muscle.


You’re not pleased?

He looks at me.

I don’t know. I’m not ‘not’ pleased.

Oh great.

I fold my arms and feel the buzz of my blood, my heart.

It’s a shock, that’s all.

We haven’t been using anything.

I know, he says, I know, but I thought—

You thought what?

That we were being careful.

I laugh.

I suppose I thought it was very unlikely, he says.

His voice is small and tight. He sounds like a little boy who’s been jumping again and again out of the highest tree and then
the very last time has forgotten to bend his knees when he lands and has got himself hurt. Cross with the tree, cross with
himself.


I’ve just chucked in my job, he reminds me, as if I didn’t know.


Well, I tell him, this is good. You can be the nanny. You can do some writing.


He doesn’t laugh.

With a new baby? I hope that’s a joke.

But when he sees me looking at him and half laughing and half about to cry, he does get up and come and put his arms around
me, bends his head to mine. I smell the blackness of his hair, the familiar day-old smell of beard, of husband.


So, he says.

So—what?

So we’d better get on with it then.

And that’s it, that’s all. That’s the beginning of our daughter Olivia.

The last person to see Lennie alive is John Empson, PTA Treasurer and Chairman of the Christmas Lights. I know John well.
His bookshop is next door to the clinic and he gives me discounts. In return I gave him ultrasound for nothing when he tore
the ligaments in his knee. It’s how we live in this place. You give what you can and you get back what you need.


On that night, John walks with Lennie as far as the junction of Marlborough Road and North Parade. It is bitterly cold by
then, the kind of rough, sea cold that goes right through your clothes and hits your bones. A light rain has started up and
Lennie is hurrying, they both are, and since she only has on a thin cardigan and no umbrella, she holds her papers up over
her head.



Like this, John says later, using his big, grey hands to show the police. As if they could protect her, he says, terror and
disbelief cracking his voice.


John and Lennie chat briefly about this and that—about how glad they are to have Lucy on board, about what should be done
about the frustrating delay to plans for bike racks outside the caretaker’s office (despite the money having officially been
raised)—and so on. Then, because John is heading back to the High Street on his bike, he zips his big green waterproof and
they separate, each making a dash for it.


In any other town perhaps, he might have seen her to her car, but not in this one. No one expects that here. This town really
is a safe place, everyone knows that. Even in winter, even after dark, it’s a place where, once kids know how to cross a road
sensibly, they can pretty much go around alone.


What happens next is Alex says sorry to Gemma Dawson, who popped over from Trinity Street to keep an eye on the kids when
he went out. She’s only supposed to have been there for ten minutes or so, until Lennie came back. Gemma says that’s OK. She
imagined the meeting had gone on longer or that they’d all gone to the pub or something. She wasn’t bothered. And she was
watching TV and she lost track of the time anyway. Monday’s a good telly night and it makes no difference to her where she
watches it.


When Gemma’s gone, Alex stands for a moment in the front room. Turns off the gas fire. Picks up Gemma’s empty
Coke glass and the TV guide. Then, after checking the boys are safely asleep in their beds, he opens the front door and, leaving
it ajar, goes a little way down the lane with a torch.


He’s not that worried, not yet. Alex is practical. He doesn’t worry until he needs to. But it’s not like Lennie—she isn’t
the type to take off and go somewhere without telling him. That’s him—he’s the one who does that.


In October the night dew gets so heavy it feels like rain. You can smell woodsmoke and, yes, if you breathe in hard enough,
the larger smell of sea. Alex looks but he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He shines the light into the black tangled
hedgerows, lets it move across the pale grit of the road—not perhaps wanting to think of why he is doing it, but doing it
all the same.


Well, I couldn’t just sit there, he tells me later. I had to get up and do something and I didn’t know what else to do.

He sees nothing, hears nothing.

He thinks of leaving the boys asleep and setting off on foot up to the school but knows Lennie will think that’s irresponsible.
What if a fire starts? What if Connor has one of his dreams and wakes in a panic to find the house empty?


In the end he goes back in and calls the Farrs. Geoff answers—no, it’s fine, they’re not in bed yet. He gets Maggie. Who sounds
surprised. And then worried. She can only confirm what Alex realises he already knows. That Lennie left the meeting an hour
ago—at least an hour in fact, since she wasn’t even the last to go.


Alex feels his stomach start to slide. He holds off calling for as long as he can bear it. Then he rings the police. And me.

* * *

He is standing outside in the drive when I get there. Next to him, a police car—sour stripes in the fuzzy dark. The dirty
moon of the porch light shining, not yet dawn, not even close—the lane still grey, the hawthorn hedge a smudge of black at
the bottom of the lawn.


I heave Livvy’s seat up over one arm. She’s getting heavy, the plastic digs into my arm, rubs against my hip. For a second
her eyes flick open, unseeing, then back shut again.


You should have called, I tell him.

I did.

No, I mean sooner—straightaway.

He looks blank.

What could you have done?

I can’t bear his face.

Been here with you—

He rubs his eyes.

I feel bad enough getting you up now—

Oh Al—don’t be stupid, I tell him, shivering.

And Mick—?

Mick’s asleep.

He looks at me.

Tess—I mean, how could you have known—?

I didn’t, I tell him again, I don’t—

But—what you said?

I shake my head.

You know what you said.

I’ve no idea why I said it, I tell him.


Tess—


OK, I say, I felt afraid.

What d’you mean afraid? Of what?

I don’t know, I tell him, I mean it, Al. I don’t know what of.

We stand in silence for a moment. I hear the crunch of footsteps by the back door. Police.

Do you think she has left me? he says.

I try to laugh.

No, I say. No Al, I don’t.

A policeman comes out of the house and nods at us.

I watch him cross the gravel to the car and lean in to speak into the radio.

Lennie would never leave, I tell him, though it’s only as I say it that I know it’s true. She never would. Not just go.

The policeman comes over.

All right? he says.

Alex takes a quick breath.

We’re going to the school.

You’ll call me?

I pick up Liv’s seat. He nods.

They’re going to search the creek and the marshes, he says. If they get nowhere at the school.

Pure terror on his face.

She wouldn’t go anywhere, I tell him again. Not willingly. I just know she wouldn’t.

Sometimes there are things that I know.

Sometimes at the clinic, treating a patient, I feel my fingers slip in between the usual rhythms and catch something
else, something I wasn’t looking for. It might be something I don’t want to know—superfluous to the treatment. It’s possible
in my work to have too much information—to have it all come flying so hard at you that you lose focus.


What bollocks, says Mick as he sorts the washing on the kitchen floor. What sort of things, anyway?

I don’t know, I say, just things.

You mean if someone’s going to move house or get divorced or win the lottery?

No, I’ll say. For fuck’s sake, Mick. You know I don’t mean that.

Well what then? If they’ll live or die?

I’ll flush.

I don’t know.

And he laughs. Not because he doesn’t understand, but because of the opposite: he thinks he understands too well. I can’t
surprise him any more. All these years together and what is there left to discover?


So I keep quiet. When I pick up on Ali Ledworth’s pregnancy long before the doctors do (two tests in a row come back negative),
I say nothing about it at home. And when poor Janey Urbach is knocked down in Bury on a one-way street by a car going the
wrong way and suffers appalling spinal damage, I know better than to mention to Mick that the last time I treated her I felt
something—a heavy weight hanging over her—as unmissable as a cloud blotting out the sun on a hot day.


And when I tell Alex I feel that Lennie will be OK, it’s a lie. I don’t. Not at all. Ever since that moment in The
Polecat her presence—normally solid and resilient and unremarkable—has been unfurling and undoing itself, snagging, tearing,
falling apart.


Anne Addison types out the minutes from that night’s meeting. She tells me it feels almost wrong, putting down on paper what
amount to Lennie’s last words, her last recorded comments—made only an hour or so before she died. She types them up and copies
them, but does not circulate them yet, out of respect for the family, she says.


There is a report on the Quiz Night—Lennie recorded as saying she’s disappointed by how little was raised and querying the
amount spent on food. Maybe we should just get people to bring stuff next time? she suggests. Nothing fancy, just maybe quiches
and baguettes and cheese and maybe a dip or two?


One or two people disagree. They feel that, for the price of the ticket, a hot meal is expected. Lennie’s shrug is not minuted
of course, but I can see it, clear as anything—her sitting back, blonde head bent, picking intently at her nails, deciding
not to push her comments any further.


Lennie is good—better than me—at knowing when to shut up. Which is a good thing because there’s always a bit of trouble at
these meetings. There’s always someone disgruntled, someone who resents the way someone else says something, someone who refuses
to cast a vote.


There’s a brief discussion about the Carnival Parade, which is going to be the last week of June along the sea front. Last
year I took this on, but this time Lennie’s agreed
to do it. Someone suggests a competition at the school to design a Carnival poster—Maggie says great, she has a book-illustrator
friend who would judge it. Maybe his publisher would even donate prizes? I know there would have been a murmur of pleasure
at that. But Barbara Anscombe, who likes to get her oar in, ignores Maggie and says the post office should also be approached—see
if they’d be willing to provide balloons and maybe smaller prizes for runners-up.


Then there’s the usual argument about who the proceeds should go to. Barbara says Marie Curie.

What? Again? says Sally Abrahams, whose son is on his gap year in Nepal. Shouldn’t we be raising awareness of something beyond
the town—Christian Aid, Action Aid, something a little more multicultural?


Cancer affects people in all cultures, says Barbara firmly and Polly Dawson points out that many people in the town know someone
who has died of cancer, though no one dares look at John who lost his wife so recently.


But Lennie agrees with Sally, that it might be nice to have a change. She knows, for instance, that the WI in Westleton are
raising money for African farmers (a snort here from Barbara)—and what’s to stop them going back to Marie Curie at Christmas?


All of this, except Barbara’s brief snort of derision, is minuted by Anne Addison.

Later, shocked, baffled, interviewed by police, everyone who attended the meeting agrees that Lennie behaved quite normally,
that there was no. . .