Chapter 1: The Marble
The floor of the Blackwood foyer was Carrara marble, laid in slabs a metre square.
I know the dimension because I had washed it.
Twice a week, on my knees, warm water, soft cloth, no soap. Soap dulled it.
So when I went down on it, I knew precisely what I was lying on.
I am going to be accurate about this, because accuracy is the only thing I have ever had.
It was Monday, the fourteenth of September, 2026.
Seven forty-one in the evening. I know the minute, and later I will explain how.
I was twenty-six. I earned four hundred and forty dollars a week after tax, paid Fridays.
I had lived in that house for thirteen months.
I went down on my left hip and my left elbow, and the elbow took most of it. My head touched the stone and came up again.
There was no sound to it. Marble does not make a sound. It only stops you.
My right hand was pressed flat to my own stomach, below the ribs, where the pain was.
My left hand was out in front of me on the floor, reaching.
That is the whole photograph. One hand holding myself. One hand going forward.
Ethan was three metres away.
I measured it weeks afterwards with a tape from the utility drawer. I wanted the number to be a number and not a feeling.
Three metres and eleven centimetres, from the edge of the runner to the console table, which is where he had sat down.
He was fourteen months old. He was crying.
Not the tired cry. The high one, that goes up and does not come back down for air.
I counted it. I could not help counting it. That is what I do.
Eleven seconds of sound, then a gap of about two, then more.
A moment before, she had had hold of his wrist. I had taken him off her.
Then I had gone down.
That is all of it. Perhaps four seconds, and over before I hit the floor.
I have had to describe those four seconds in rooms full of lawyers, and they always want more of them than there were.
What I saw, from where I landed, was the after-image. Her hand still open at the height his arm had been.
I did not look at her again.
This is the part people get wrong, so I am putting it here at the start.
I never looked up at her face. Not once, in the whole of it.
Every account since contains a sentence about what I must have seen in her expression.
The statement. The report. The deposition. Two newspaper pieces.
I saw nothing in her expression. I was not looking at her expression.
I was looking at a boy sitting on marble with his left arm held against his chest.
If you want to know who I am, that is the entire answer.
I have never been a brave person and I am not going to start being one in a book about myself.
Her heel came down on the hem of my uniform.
Grey cotton, knee length, three sets, laundered on Thursdays.
The hem went under the ball of her shoe and the fabric pulled tight across the back of my thigh.
It was not a hard thing. It was not violence in the way people imagine violence.
It was a woman standing on cloth so that the person inside the cloth could not get up.
I put my left hand forward another few centimetres.
Not to rise. I could not rise. To be nearer.
His crying came down out of the high register into something wetter and slower, which is worse.
I said his name.
Not loudly. You do not shout at a frightened child. You give him something quiet to steer towards.
He turned his head. His face was red and wet and he was looking for me.
He did not try to come. He usually came.
He had walked since the end of July, badly, arms up, turning every fall into a grab.
He stayed sitting, holding his left forearm against his shirt with his right hand.
I had a word for that posture in my own notes. Guarding. It is a real word and it means what it sounds like.
I did not know then what it meant here. I know now.
Somewhere on the second floor a door closed, and opened, and closed again. Nobody came down.
The foyer had only the two console lamps. The chandelier ran on a timer that did not start until eight.
So the light was low and yellow and came from waist height.
Which is the only reason the other thing was visible at all.
Under the console table, against the skirting board, there was a small red point of light.
On, and off, and on again, once every second. It had been doing that since a quarter past six.
Nobody in that room looked at it. I did not look at it either.