A/N:
[1] This story was first posted between May 2017 and April 2018, and has now been curated, edited, re-written and (arguably) made better over the past few months. If you haven't read the new version, I'd say give it a go because while the general plot stays the same, the particulars have changed quite a bit. All the chapters are written and finished. I was originally going to post it all at once at the beginning of April (still have to run it chunk by chunk through Grammarly to check typos) but given the current state of the world, I figured you might need something to entertain yourself.
[2] The general rating of this story is a strong T, although different chapters may have different ratings. I'll signal them in A/N, as well as any relevant trigger warnings.
[3] My most sincere thanks go to asummerevening on Tumblr for the time she gave this story a couple years ago and to orbythesea for her guidance, friendship, and general awesomeness.
[4] This is set right after the end of the show. All is (should be) compliant with cannon, with two caveats:
- I am assuming that when Martha says in series one: "it only happened the once, Clive," she means it only happened the once within the realm of possibilities which could have caused her "condition," not generally.
- Unless I've missed something (if I have, please give me a shout), there's an issue in the timeline of Silk. Basically, in series 1, when Martha gets pregnant, she's 37. We know that because she tells Nick she's been 35 for a couple of years, in s1e1. I'm assuming, for the purposes of this fic, that at that point she's just turned 37, but obviously that's just an assumption. That being said, between s1e1 and s1e6, we know that about 14 weeks have passed, give or take, considering that Martha says she's 14 weeks pregnant before she miscarries. S2 picks up at most a couple of weeks after that, so she's probably still 37.
Then, between, s2e1 and s3e1, we can assume a year has passed, because Silk promotions only come once a year, and Clive gets his a year after Martha. So, following this timeline and assuming that there are a few months (maybe 4-5 months) between s3e1 and s3e6, why on Earth does Martha tell Sarah Stevens in s3e3: "three years ago, I got pregnant"? By that point, it's been a year and a half, two years at most. This is a plothole that just drives me mad. The only way you could potentially reconcile this is by thinking that Clive takes Silk two years after Martha, but considering the way s2 is written and the continuity between s2 and s3, it just doesn't feel realistic.
So, I'm calling it: Martha's just plain wrong when she says that. Per my calculations, she's 38 in s3 (and at the beginning of this fic), and was pregnant 1.5 years ago, not three. Hope this makes sense :).
[5] Martha Costello clearly loves music, and so do I. All songs and lyrics contained in the body of this fic are listed at the end of each relevant chapter.
Please, brighten my quarantined days and leave a review! :)
Children
i.
.
.
The cleaners are coming one by one; you don't even want to let them start. They are knocking now upon your door, they measure the room, they know the score. They're mopping up the butcher's floor of your broken little hearts.
O Children – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
.
.
When she thinks about him, she thinks about them and all she sees is children. A boy and a girl and her pale skin against his cheek, pulling at each other's hair, laughing, loud, like Nick and Niamh on court benches - school benches - and the autumn leaves scattered around their feet. Well, she's old, now, and wise. The weight of the air digs into her shoulders and it's hard to sit up straight, stare into the reflection of her blue eyes and not see ghosts.
A few days ago, Sean was on trial and Martha sat there in a courtroom, wig sitting straight over her head, and thought this was what fear - actual crippling fear – was meant to feel like. Something like danger and freedom crossing paths, like fingers intertwined, like someone holding you back. When she was a kid, her family took the boat to Ireland, once: cliffs a hundred metres high and the sky dark above them, shivers running down her spine, thinking that she'd reached the end of the world. That's what this all feels like, too, when she thinks about it. The end of the fucking world.
.
At the time, Martha's father used to read her stories. Late at night, tucked under the covers in her pyjamas with her hair pulled back in a tight braid behind her head; he'd tell the tales of boys going on adventures and fighting for things that they believed in, of Robin Hood and Peter Pevensie, and Martha would listen, quietly, her eyes wide open, heart beating fast in her chest.
'You think I can do that, too?' she remembers asking, once, as he turned off the lights.
He smiled, dropped a kiss to her forehead. 'Of course.'
They didn't have Harry Potter, back then, and Martha was never one for comics, but she remembers being fascinated with narratives of foreign lands and leaving home to explore a world she didn't know existed. Her dreams used to be big: high buildings and cars rushing past, tube stations, and thousand-page novels that lulled her to sleep. Recently, her dreams got smaller: four walls, metal detectors. 'For the first time in twenty years, I feel homesick,' she told Sean.
Now, Martha Costello is an animal terrified of fireworks, dreams of tiny, comfy, secluded spaces that shelter her from the wolves. Dreams of home, of quiet nights watching football on the telly, nasty, cold rain tapping against the window while a fire burns inside.
"Marth," a voice whispers, next to her. The last syllable of her name dies against the person's lips; she hums, smiles, feels a familiar touch against her shoulder. In front of her eyes, she sees grass, wild in a field, and whiskey in a tumbler, neat. Her dad's gaze set on hers from the other side of the room. They sit on a bench by the river, watch the water run below their feet: the flow is calm, soothing, nothing like the Thames, and he looks young, like he did when she was a kid, holding her hand to cross the street.
The sun is high in the sky, lighting overexposed.
"Martha, wake up."
Her eyes open to harsh, neon lights, bright and ugly above her. Her father's dead, she remembers as she sits up, stretches on a chair. Reality stings like salt on her wounds: she's at the hospital, waiting on Billy, and Clive is the one standing in front of her, hand awkwardly dropping to his side, yearning brushing against her skin. He points at someone in a white coat by a door next to a sign that reads: no entry – medical personnel only.
"They want to talk to you," he adds, looks away.
Martha's quiet when she nods, but can't bring herself to move. Sighs, closes her eyes. Ultimately, she thinks Clive knows that she stayed for Billy.
.
It's a point that she wants to make. A point to reaffirm because it's an important point, a point that explains, in her brain, her desire to function like a recluse, without talking to or interacting with anybody within the vicinity. If it were up to Martha, right now, she would choose to fade into the wall, be part of the fixtures, disappear from view; if it were up to her, really, she wouldn't be here at all. But, she stayed. Not for Chambers, or Mickey Joy, or even Sean. Billy. It's always been about Billy.
In hindsight, for a moment or two, Clive probably thought that she stayed for him. If anything, he's the one who found her, in the end. Went up towards Fleet Street while she ran down to the river but in the end, he won their game of hide and seek. She remembers the dusk outside, that summer light that fades into midnight and already rises after three. Clouds tinted pink, behind Clive's apartment building. Of all the places he'd looked, of all the hours he'd spent scouring London, he came home holding his phone in one hand and his keys in the other to find her standing there on the pavement as he closed the door to his taxi, heard the car speed off in the opposite direction. There was a look on his face, a look that she doesn't think she'll ever be able to forget, and she remembers the way his voice shook when he spoke her name.
'Marth?'
'Where's Billy?'
Billy, Billy, Billy. The rushing cars, the sirens. In the seconds that the passage of the bus had afforded her, a few hours before, she'd made a spur of the moment decision to disappear, stepped over the stone railing and onto the pier below, scratched her knees on the ground and wondered if mud and dirt really were what freedom was supposed to taste like. Moments later, Martha was on a city cruise boat filled with tourists when she saw the ambulance on the quays, stood there, motionless, paralysed with fear and ego, and an inability to admit what guilt really felt like.
She made it to the airport. And back. Couldn't bear to board the plane, couldn't let Billy go.
'Marth?' Clive stared, later, insisted, when he found her outside his flat. The street was lit with lampposts and the moon, shadows of tree branches interlinked like snakes on the ground. She retreated when he stepped towards her, careful to leave a few metres of distance between them.
'Billy's in hospital,' Martha stated, finally crossing his gaze. Her phone was out of battery; she couldn't reach anybody, and the more time went by, the less she felt like she wanted to. Would it really matter if Billy died without seeing her? She swallowed, shook her head, like nothing between them had ever mattered, to her. 'Which fucking hospital, Clive?'
The look of surprise on his face was the only indicator she'd had, at that point, that he may not have known, may have spent the evening somewhere other than Billy's bedside.
'Jesus, where the fuck were you?' Martha caught herself asking, she'd waited for him all night, she'd –
It was a second before she saw it, smiled to herself as the thought occurred to her: skewed tie, tired look, untucked shirt. Messy hair. Her jaw clenched - she tried not to shake her head, not to – her voice got quiet, like it used to when she'd trace the lines of the veins of his hand, feeling the breeze against her bare legs – a lifetime ago. 'Never mind,' she said. 'Call Jake. I'll get us a cab.'
Their ride to Barts was silent; Martha sat looking out the window as the 4 a.m. sun slowly started to rise over Clive's neighbourhood. A few years ago, he used to live in Chelsea. She used to make fun of that, of course, but at least it had a bit more personality than the glass towers of the City. She's always wondered if he was trying to punish himself for some sort of crime by moving here, leaving To Kill a Mockingbird on display to woo the girls into bed and make up for the fact that most of the pictures in his flat probably came with the frame.
Martha exited the cab as soon as it stopped, left Clive to pay the bill. He caught up with her close to the entrance of the hospital, caught her wrist between his fingers.
'I was looking for you.' A pause. She could read the need to explain in his eyes, the need for her to hear him out. 'You disappeared after the election, I was –' he spoke in a quick breath, running a hand over his face. The dawn had broken, by then, a soft coral light reflecting in his eyes. He didn't look attractive, just exhausted. 'I was worried. They said they lost you on the quays and I –' he shook his head, bit his lip, caught her gaze. 'They shot Mickey Joy, Marth.'
Her laughpierced through the car park. You've got to be joking, Martha almost said, didn't know what Clive's goal was, with that kind of big revelation, chivalry or whatever he was trying to achieve. You were worried? she thought. Really? Because unlike Mickey Joy, she did everything the Monk family wanted her to do, didn't she? Jumped into every trick that had been laid out for her and lost her case, sent Sean to the slaughterhouse. Frankly, she's pretty sure that felt worse than being shot. 'And, so, what? You went looking for me? Thought of trying to protect me?'
Clive drew in a breath. It sounded a bit like her name, whispered, annoyed. 'Marth -'
'Was that before or after Harriet left that hickey on your neck?'
It's weird, isn't it, that instinct humans seem to have to try and see something that they know they materially can't see? Clive tried to look down, his hand suddenly covering his neck (wrong side, she thought), like an innate need to check everything, to keep things under control.
She could see it, though, the bruise left by Harriet's lips. Even more so then, in the daylight, than she did before, in the dark, in front of his apartment, when she wondered where he'd been. Martha thought she might have left one right there, too, back in the day, in that exact spot, behind Clive's ear. Threw one last glare at him and walked away (in her head, tried to make him disappear).
.
For days after that, she spends every waking minute (and there are a lot of waking minutes — she barely sleeps, her head against the wall, limbs painfully stuck on a hospital chair) wishing she'd boarded a plane and never looked back. Wishing she were strong enough, uncaring enough to be stuck for over twenty-four hours in a box, thirty-five thousand feet above ground, because at least she could have pretended that none of this was really happening. That Billy wasn't lying on a cold bed, his head resting on a couple of pillows, the blue sheets covering his body, sun barely coming through.
Billy slips in and out of consciousness. Martha tries to be there when he's awake. They're feeding him through a tube and there's a dead light at the corner of his eyes; it makes her look away.
"Miss," he mutters, smiles every time she enters the room. His voice is low, breathing laboured. He reaches for her hand and she squeezes it as strong as she can, tries to engrave that memory in her brain, wishes for time to stop and never run away. She's a waitress now, puts the drinks and bread on the table and wishes there was enough time to wait for the food.
"You don't need to call me Miss anymore, Billy," she tells him, sitting on a chair by his side. The door of the room is ajar; Clive stands, silent, against the frame. "I'm quitting."
A sigh escapes from behind her, she doesn't turn around. "Oh Miss, you'll always be Miss to me," Billy says, smiles, his soft gaze upon hers. There's a lump in her throat; she has to remind herself that she's not one of those women who cry, anymore. Martha Costello had always thought this would be her whole life, from the age of twenty-two. The bar, Billy, and Clive.
She thought they were going to be forever, too.
.
Truth is: she was naive. Should have known. Her dad passed away when she was twenty-five and Martha doesn't remember it changing anything to her day to day, to tell the truth, save for a passing state of melancholy, a sense that maybe, she'd somehow become alone in the world.
Pints on a Friday, began to last well into the night now that she didn't have to drive home every other weekend and a drink with Clive often ended up back at his with an empty bottle of red sitting between the both of them.
Martha's not sure what Clive talked about, most times. Work, probably. His family. Oddly enough, he was always more open to sharing than she was, talking about his siblings and his mum and what a dick his father was. Not in those terms, of course. That was just the conclusion Martha reached.
Sometimes, though, he'd stop speaking, and she'd start talking. A couple of sentences at most, never much, but once – she can't exactly remember when but she recalls the way he touched her calf, that night, his fingers tracing lines against her skin – she recalls telling him: 'I don't know, I think that family is the one you create, not the one you're born with.'
He looked up at her, stunned, and maybe he hadn't expected that, not from her. Dad always said that, she thought but stayed silent, both did and didn't want to justify. Clive laughed. 'Did I hear that right?' he asked, leaning over to refill his glass. 'Miss Bolton-born-and-bred?'
She laughed, too, shook her head at him. 'I just –' she paused, trying to organise the thoughts in her head. Time felt suspended, that night, like the both of them were everything there was to anything. 'These days, Billy tells me what to do, what not to do, who to talk to. Kind of feels like my dad, to be honest. Is that weird?'
Clive burst out laughing, then, and she joined in, just a tad, because it felt good to simply sit there and watch him laugh, happy. 'I think you're drunk,' he said and took her glass out of her hand, kissed her like she belonged to him.
They were young, she thinks. Too young.
.
When she's with Billy, now, time is also suspended. They don't talk, not too much; she doesn't want to have any serious conversations with him, doesn't want to acknowledge what is actually happening before her eyes. Sometimes, he gets emotional (like he always does), tells her something she doesn't want to hear - anger doesn't look good on you, Miss – and she laughs it off, because, well, that's what she always does, too.
"I think you love me, Miss," Billy tells her, one morning. She sat on the hospital bed holding his hand when she got in, thought he was asleep. Through the window at the top of the door, she could see Clive talking to Harriet in the corridor, his features hazy through the frosted glass. Martha smiles, shakes her head at Billy.
"We've been through this before," she tells him, rearranging the magazines on his bedside table. "You mean that the other way around."
Billy laughs (as much as he can laugh, really, starts coughing pretty quickly and brings the oxygen mask back to his mouth for a minute), watches her sit back down on her chair. She glances at Clive through the window before finding Billy's gaze again. They're quiet, for a moment, just listening to each other's breaths. Martha feels Billy's fingers wrap around hers – "'A good thing never ends,' Miss," he says, his voice calm and peaceful.
She takes a moment to think, raises an eyebrow at him. "JFK?"
Billy chuckles, shakes his head. "Mick Jagger."
Ten minutes later, they're interrupted by his sister, a tall woman with shoulder-length dark red hair and a sad look on her face. Without necessarily intending to, she makes Martha feel out of place, like an impostor, watching Billy as they check his vitals. She stands up, grabs her handbag, biting her bottom lip. "Thanks for coming, Miss," Billy says and she can't bring herself to look into his eyes, take the comment for what it is.
She glances at her watch. "I'll go change, I'll be back in an hour," she says, nodding at him.
The corner of his mouth twitches; she pretends not to notice the long silence that follows. "Bye, Miss," he tells her as she opens the door. She smiles, doesn't find the strength to say the words back.
Never gets to say them, in fact. Forty-five minutes later, he falls into a coma, quietly, like her dad did before he forgot how to breathe.
.
That's when the doctors begin to talk to her. They talk to her because it seems that Billy left her a present, on his way out of this life. Forged her signature on it, by the looks of it – she wonders who his bloody so-called witnesses were - but it's not like she's going to contest the power of attorney now, is she, when he's lying there unconscious and they're asking her questions that nobody wants to answer? Jake and his mum sit next to her in the waiting room with a look on their faces that tells Martha all she needs to know about how glad they are not to be in her shoes, at this particular point in time.
She blames Clive for it. Doesn't expressly tell anyone but she blames him when she passes him in the corridors, blames him as she looks away every time he tries to provide a pointless ounce of comfort, blames him both for things that are actually within his control and for things that probably have nothing to do with him (perhaps, Billy only developed that tumour because Harriet and he wanted to take over Chambers, who knows?). Martha goes over it again and again until she repeatedly dozes off in her chair, because it's easier, right now, to have someone to blame. If she'd left after the election and boarded a plane like she meant to, she'd never have known about aggressive chemo protocols and multiple organ failures, and statistics as risks to consider. With Billy unconscious and her on a plane, they probably would have asked the family to make the final call. To say: stop.
It's easy to hate Clive when she's standing outside the hospital, chain-smoking, a lighter borrowed from a doctor sinking into the pocket of her jeans. He tries to grab her hand, make her look at him. The hickey on his neck has faded by now and in fairness to him, there doesn't seem to be any new ones.
Martha doesn't know what she thinks about that, really. Doesn't know what she thinks about anything. So, she steps aside, kills her cigarette against the wall.
I know what I need to do, she'd tell him, if she trusted him, still, would bite her lip and look away. Admit: I just can't –
He'd smile at her, his fingers lifting her chin. Of course, you can, he'd say. That's why Billy chose you.
Well, she's made a lot of wrong decisions, lately: she trusted Sean, trusted Clive, so maybe Billy wasn't all that right to trust her, after all.
"Fuck you," she enunciates, clearly, blowing smoke in Clive's face before pushing her earphones back in her ears, the volume loud enough that she won't hear anything else he has to say. Picture me in a hospital, Pete Doherty singsongs in her head. The blood runs raw and the bags are full of –
Oh, you're terrible. I'm invincible.
.
After that, from the day Billy loses consciousness, her life becomes ruled by a routine she can't remember summoning. Mornings, she swallows a couple of ibuprofens and takes the tube to St Paul's, walks the road to Barts. She stays in Billy's room as long as they allow her to, and sometimes, she fools herself into thinking he's waking up, watching for a breath to be drawn a bit longer, for an eyelid to bat open. In the evenings, she drinks until she passes out on the sofa. Repeats the next day.
There's a con, though, one afternoon. It was the last one Billy had booked before everything, the last one on her calendar, set a few days after he knew Sean's trial was scheduled to end. Martha knows why he booked it, that con in particular: Robin Laurel is a lovely young girl she's had the pleasure of defending half a dozen times before, having the somewhat annoying habit of taking possession of people's purses on busy tube trains. Her mother, Muriel, an overworked, overwhelmed, overspent beautiful woman on the heavier side of the scale, had always held a special spot in Martha's heart, with her stunning ability to unfailingly believe in the redeemable character of her daughter. Her daughter, who had now been arrested on pretty baseless drug importation charges, carrying a package on her boyfriend's behalf. It's the kind of case Martha likes - used to like, at least - the kind of case with a purpose, and Billy must have thought it would keep her here, even after she'd lost Sean's.
Martha considers returning it, while gathering the binder from her flat, while on the way to the con, but when she sees Muriel's friendly face outside the jail, she can't bring herself to. Maybe Billy did know everything about her life before she did, didn't he? He even knew about Sean, now that she thinks about it, looked at her with eyes that begged her to understand the kind of mistakes she was making. All she saw when she looked at her client, though, was Sean McBride, the boy she fell in love with when she was fourteen, full of laughter, heart and bravado. Everything he did, at the time, she thought sounded grandiloquent, rebellious: everything that she wanted to be. Well, there's not much of that left, anymore, is there?
She did what she could, at sentencing. Maximum security, solitary (for his protection, only). He shouted, afterwards, said: 'You can't do that to me, Mar.'
'You lied to my face.'
He paced. She sat. Wanted him to just stop, still.
'You can appeal.'
He did stop, then, shot her a look. Asked: 'Will you help?'
A million years ago, CW had asked if he was her first 'toxic cocktail'. And, of course, he was. Like that time in uni when she drank a few too many vodka-cokes and ended up in hospital. Now, Martha keeps expecting someone to turn up on her doorstep to tell her he's dead. Knifed by another inmate like Micky Joy fell in the Thames.
'Come on, Mar. Help me out, here,' he pleaded, again. She never responded.
That's why Billy can't die, she thinks, now, as she decides to take on Robin's case: she can't lose everyone, can't lose him. Not after all of this, not after she lost everything, not after Sean. More cowardly, Martha guesses, she doesn't want to be there when he's gone. Doesn't want to know. 'Dying' was his state of being for so long, and she was so preoccupied with helping, defending, caring, that she forgot that state of being would lead to not being, one day, at all. That she'd be all alone.
Robin's trial is not scheduled right away but has a procedural hearing that Friday, so Martha works from the hospital until then, only going back to her flat for a change of clothes. She shuts off her phone, doesn't want to see it ringing anymore, can't make the decisions they're asking her to make. 'Just keep him alive,' she begged Billy's doctors and she recalls the way they looked at each other like it was the wrong thing to say.
.
She can win this, she wants to believe. Clive laughed at her in the pub, once; she was sitting there, looking at her hands, moping at a recent loss. They were young. 'You're such a sore loser,' he smiled, pointed out that if at least eighty per cent of their clients were going to be guilty, she'd better get used to it.
'I just don't like losing when it matters.'
He laughed again, then, caught her gaze. 'Except it always matters with you, doesn't it?'
Robin's case is winnable, she knows, and yes, it matters. Maybe that's why Billy picked it out in the first place. But the girl won't press charges against her stupid boyfriend who's profusely apologised since, and that drives Martha a bit mad. It will only escalate, she knows, and there'll be other cases, other cases Robin's mum thinks Martha will be there to handle when in truth, all that Billy's illness did by bringing her back from the airport was to postpone the inevitable. She won't help Sean. She won't help anyone, after this. She'll just try and help herself.
In her dreams, sometimes, Martha owns a pub or a café, somewhere far away. It has a great playlist that barely covers the sounds of glasses clinking against each other, happiness and laughter. As soon as this is finished, she decides, she'll be out of London on another plane and her café will be surrounded by palm trees, on a beach.
The only problem with that is: she's not quite sure what this is.
'Shut up, Clive,' she told him, back then, at the pub, with a large smile on her face. 'Make me dance.'
On the tables, she thought. Until the sun comes up.
.
The doorbell buzzes outside her flat that night. She's listening to the police tape recording of the 999 call from Robin's case, doesn't get up, waits for a second buzz that never comes. Martha finds a bouquet of flowers on her doorstep, later on, a dozen of white roses with a short note in Clive's handwriting. A peace offering. "Talk to us," it just says and she wonders who the hell us could be when he tore through chambers with all he had, and kicked Billy and she out of their own family.
.
When Martha's father passed away, Billy almost had to physically push her out of Chambers for her to attend the funeral. Denial is a cunt, she knows. On Thursday night, the night before the hearing, she looks at Billy as she sits on a chair in his hospital room. He looks –
They hooked him up to a machine to help him breathe and closed his eyes for him. They say the movements behind his lids are automatic, that he doesn't dream, doesn't feel them, anymore. When she holds it, his hand is cold, feels like she's running her palm over the tiles of her bathroom wall. A few days ago, Martha still used to talk to him, tell him about her days and how much she missed him. She can't bring herself to, anymore. As she told him a while back, she believes in a big bang beginning to the universe, doesn't think he can hear.
'He's dead and I feel relieved,' she confessed, once, after she came back from Bolton, her father's body in the ground. 'How awful is that?'
They were smoking outside, a pitch dark winter night; there was a chill in the air, dark brown leaves on the ground. Martha pushed them around with the toe of her shoe. 'It's not, Miss,' Billy just said, his arm lightly brushing against hers.
Billy looks dead, Martha decides, now, looking at him, lying flat on his hospital bed. Like her dad did when he sat there for hours on end on a rocking chair, not knowing who he was. She felt like she'd finally reached the end of one of those stories he used to read her, back then, bittersweet, not knowing what the next one would be. Billy glanced at her as she puffed out smoke into the air, and smiled.
'I never liked you picking up that habit, Miss,' he said, nodding at her cigarette.
She tapped it with her finger, ash dropping to the ground. 'I just hope it kills me before –' she started, trailed off.
The night was clear, stars far up in the sky. When she was five, her grandmother passed away and her parents told her: That's Nan, up there, do you see? Back then, she thought she did. She thought –
'Before something else does,' Martha sighed, quick, breathing in another drag. That night, she thought of hospital beds and childhood memories, of what the doctors had told her about genetics and the inner workings of brain cells (her brain cells), after her dad passed away. She threw the information booklet from the testing company in their faces and later, just stared at his coffin as they put him to the ground, the grass wet around her feet. She never wanted to know if she had it, too. The disease, what Dad had; her mum always said she should prepare, and Martha always shrugged. She liked the idea of it being an eventuality, something that might or might not be. At least, maybe I'll forget that, too, she thought to herself, dropping a rose at the bottom of the hole they'd dug for him.
When Billy heard her speak, outside of Chambers, he laughed. She remembers that, the sound still echoes in her ears. Her desert island playlist. 'There are nicer ways to die than lung cancer, Miss.'
She scoffed, let ash drop to the ground. 'Like what?'
'In your sleep?'
Billy's nurse interrupts her train of thoughts, now, for a moment, entering the room and checking the monitors around him. She's nice, always asks if Martha wants tea, coffee, told her where the best machine was, a few metres down the hall. "I feel like he's dead, already," Martha confesses, the room oddly quiet, spare for the rhythm of Billy's heart, artificially regular, like a metronome.
Alicia – that's her name – smiles, looks down at the foot of Billy's bed. There rest the forms that they asked Martha to sign, earlier, when she couldn't muster up the strength to hold a pen in her hand. "Maybe you should make that official, then," she suggests. Her skin is dark; she looks calm, like the kind of person who reads bedtime stories to her children and scares the monsters away.
Martha looks down at her fingers, still against the keys of her laptop, breathes.
.
'You've ever been scared?' she remembers asking Clive, a long time ago. It was her first appearance in front of the Appeals Court; she was twenty-seven. 'Like, really, really scared?'
He laughed. Looked up from his desk and caught her gaze from the other side of the room. 'Yeah,' he admitted, smiled. 'First time I kissed you.'
She rolled her eyes and groaned at him (clearly not what she had in mind), look focusing back on the brief in front of her.
'What?' he chuckled, hands thrown up in the air in surrender. 'I thought you were going to hit me in the face! That has to count!'
Martha smiled, shook her head at him. Teased. 'Maybe, I should have.'
.
In court, fighting for Robin the next day, things go her way, so to speak. By some incredible twist of fate (considering, well - everything), Martha gets the brother's hostile evidence thrown out on irrelevance grounds; she's almost surprised that she's even able to formulate full sentences, standing in court. Her brain feels fuzzy, like she is there but also not, distant, as if whatever is happening to her is happening to someone else. She didn't sleep, last night.
At the end of the day, Muriel hugs her like she always does, body wrapping around Martha's like it wraps around her daughter's. "Thank you," she says. Martha looks up at her and smiles, something discreet, half-dared.
"You look sad," Robin tells her, later, in her cell. It feels odd, being told that (especially by someone locked up between four walls) and the familiar feeling of guilt immediately comes back to haunt Martha's mind; she didn't mean to scare the girl. She's just a kid, Martha thinks, and young people can be incredibly perceptive - it's just tough, today, to pretend. Pretend that shit doesn't keep piling up, pretend that she doesn't feel like life has been sucked out of her.
(She's just someone who feels a lot, generally. A guy in her bed once told her: 'When you're happy, you're very happy. When you're sad, you're very sad. Wouldn't want to be in your head, to be honest. Must be exhausting.'
And yes, Martha guesses, sometimes it is. But at least, it feels like life. Now, since this morning, she feels nothing. Hasn't cried, or held her breath, screamed. It all just feels like a vacuum.)
Maybe, sometimes, she is just such an open book.
"Is it good?" Robin asks, after a pause, quickly catching Martha's gaze. "What happened? The evidence? Please tell me it's good."
And yes, Martha imagines that it is. It mattered so much, yesterday, yet somehow barely registers, today. The case appears to have moved forward through very little action of her own, as though someone had taken over her body and mind, and had pleaded with the judge on autopilot, albeit successfully so. Maybe, she'll win this, she muses, go out on a professional high, against all odds. So: "Yes," Martha says, forces a painful smile across her lips. "Don't get your hopes up, but yes, it's good."
.
On the way back to the robbing room, she takes her time. There's no rush, no other case to tend to or courtroom to be in, nobody else to see. Usually, she'd sprint back to chambers, say hi to Billy in the clerks' room, go into –
She's turned her phone back on, today, and Jake's ring shakes her out of her thoughts like Billy's used to. Martha picks up on autopilot as she walks down the corridors, comes to a standstill around the corner of the one that leads to the robbing room. "Thanks," she says, the call barely a couple of minutes long. When she hangs up, though, Martha hears familiar voices rising from the other side of the wall. A memory of Billy's face flashes before her eyes: they're young and just moved into new offices, Chambers so poor they had her creepy neighbour put the furniture together for them; her desk collapsed as soon as Billy set a couple of heavy binders on it. They laughed, she recalls, so hard tears ran down their faces, painful cramps in their stomachs. 'Miss,' Billy said, barely able to speak as he watched her look at the remnants of her desk on the floor. 'What a great start –'
Martha wants to laugh again, one day, wants to cry again, too. Instead, she stands there and pushes the memory away, buries it deep down in the sand never to be seen again. She's always been good at that: ignoring the things that rack up in her brain. Billy, Clive, Sean, she pushes them so far away that they don't exist, replaced by the here and now, the day to day, one step at a time until she gets through the door.
She did the same thing the moment she got silk. Pushed aside the pain in her belly and the blood that was still staining her pants and decided: yes, this is the happiest I've ever been. The rest? It didn't exist (technically, she guessed, it never really did). People spend hundreds of pounds on expensive therapy sessions and yoga gear – she heats up frozen crumpets in the oven and gets on with it.
In the ambulance, she remembers: her hand on her stomach, her heart racing in her chest. For a minute, her eyes shut. I'll miss you, little one, she thought.
.
It's quarter to four when Martha stops dead in her tracks, after speaking to Jake. The corridor to the robbing room is shaped like an L - she's on one side; they're on the other. She doesn't know why (maybe she just doesn't want to see them) but Martha doesn't turn the corner, just hides with her back to the wall as soon as she recognises their voices, listens in. The sounds escape from her left, whispered arguments and no-listen-to-me-s uttered with pseudo authority.
Generally, Martha hates people who can't argue in private. Granted, it may be a bit rich coming from her but it reminds her of the rare times she would overhear her parents fighting. Back then, Martha used to sit at the top of the stairs, hugging the plush rabbit she'd carry around everywhere, desperately trying to block out the sounds from her ears. Today, she recognises the voices, though, and it's what throws her off, makes her stay.
"Oh, so she showed up for court?"
"Look, Harriet, she just needs —"
"Needs what, Clive? We're prosecuting, she doesn't want to prosecute, she doesn't show up in Chambers, doesn't make any decisions regarding Billy, doesn't pick up her phone, you expect me to —"
"She needs time. Billy and her —"
"Oh," Harriet laughs. "So, you're telling me she slept with him too?"
"Of course not," Clive starts, scoffs. "That's not -"
And there and then, for the life of her, Martha realises that she can't fucking fathom why the both of them chose here, of all places - the middle of the Bailey - to have this conversation. Sure, she can neither see Clive nor Harriet from where she stands (and more importantly, she guesses, they can't see her), but she can definitely hear them, of course, and imagine them. She's argued with Clive enough in the past fifteen years to know how he behaves, frowns, scoffs when something so utterly ridiculous to him is said that he doesn't even want to discuss it. Harriet insists: "You just think she's some sort of Saint –" And in that moment, Clive scoffs at Harriet the same way he scoffed at Martha's arguments in defence of Sean and it feels like a knife pushed slowly through the muscles in her back.
"Really?" he argues back. "You want to go there?"
In Martha's brain, then, an instinct of self-preservation kicks in, says: leave. Something heavy feels like it's closing in on her, downing on her, suffocating her in a toxic fog. There's frankly no real need for her to hear this, on top of everything else - it's a private dispute and Harriet is jealous – frankly, has every right to be. Clive's probably been using her the same way he's used every woman before her, thought she was hot and likely to help him become Head of Chambers, couldn't keep it in his pants while he climbed the ladder.
Yet, Martha stays. She can't explain it, maybe it's a sick kind of curiosity or a sign of the state of shock she's been in since last night but as Harriet's stunned silence fills the corridor, she finds herself unable to move.
Harriet is angry (of course, she is, who wouldn't be?), so her response comes in a loud whisper, like someone trying desperately not to shout. "Yeah, we're going there, Clive, what do you fucking think?" He tries to argue back, Martha can tell from the short moment of silence that stands for the breath he draws, but gets interrupted again. "Look, you promised, Clive," the other woman argues, case in hand. Her voice is cold and factual; she quotes from memory, uses the evidence she has to make her point (would have made a great barrister, all things considered). "'I don't give a crying fuck about Martha Costello,' isn't that what you said?" she tells him, the words quick out of her mouth. "'If we have to throw her under the bus, then so be it. She doesn't have children to feed.' Well, now is the bloody time, Clive," Harriet swears, her heel clicking against the floor as she takes a step forward. "I'm not one of your fucking girls."
Something falls off Martha's arms. Her handbag hits the floor in a loud bang, a couple of binders sliding out. She bends down automatically, picks the mess up from off the floor, hoping to remain hidden from view, but by the time she catches her breath, the voices seem to have stopped. She stands, looks up and finds both Clive and Harriet's stares set on her, a few meters out. Clive takes a quick step back, freezes.
It's funny: the phrase Harriet used must have rung a bell for both of them, Martha muses. She dropped her stuff to the floor in surprise but Clive almost looks shell-shocked from what he heard, like he doesn't want to look at Martha but also can't take his glare off her. The distant memory almost makes Martha sick to her stomach, makes her want to disappear. It's a flashback from fifteen years ago and it hits her in the face like a truck: she's twenty-five again, after she slept with him for the first time in her shitty flat out in a council estate in Peckham, with walls so thin she could hear the neighbour's kettle go off every day at 7:30 on the dot, like clockwork. 'I don't want,' she started, stopped, didn't know how to explain. I don't want Chambers gossip, she thought. I don't want my career to be defined by who I sleep with. I don't want – 'I don't want to be one of your girls,' Martha ended up saying, glaring at him with her arms crossed over her chest. He lay in her bed as she stood against the wall of her bedroom, bracing herself for his response.
Clive smiled, shook his head and simply said: 'You won't be.' Made his way over to her, took her face in his hands and kissed her.
Fuck you, she thinks, now. Fuck this.
"Marth –" he starts (to try and explain, maybe, as though words could possibly explain this) but her vision is distorted, hazy; Martha sees Harriet step out to look at her, too, and try to open her mouth before Clive's glare stops her.
Frankly, Martha doesn't know what makes her do it. She's not a violent person, generally, gets angry - sure - and feels a lot, but has never in her life felt the desire to do this before. Yet, wordlessly, she lets herself step forward towards Clive - once, twice, and before she knows it (before Clive knows it), her hand flies flat against the side of his face, leaves a big, red mark on the skin of his cheek. The slap lands and the world stops; it's almost an out of body experience, but also seems to pour out of Martha with more determination and deliberation than anything else she's done in the past twenty-four hours. Even her time in court felt fuzzy, this morning, whereas this feels so unbelievably real. The world stops and she watches, notices that people are staring, all around them, clerks and barristers, and the whole of Middle Temple - most importantly Harriet, who just glares at Martha with hatred in her eyes.
Clive says nothing. His hand reaches his cheek when Martha's falls by her side, the both of them stunned; Martha swallows. Their gazes cross and there is pain in her eyes like she knows he's never seen before - you fucking cunt, she thinks.
"What the -" Harriet begins to speak but Clive stops her, expertly, a hand on her forearm. Martha watches, motionless. There is a moment of silence - he stares at her, takes the hit.
"Okay," he says. "I guess I deserved that." A breath. "Marth, I -"
She shakes her head. "Not here."
.
Not here, not ever, she thinks. So, in a second, she takes the quick decision to run, escape. Guesses that he didn't want to speak to her, before, and she doesn't want to talk to him, now, so it's only fair that she runs. Martha's always been good at that: running. Everyone tends to think she's confrontational, faces things head on, but who are they kidding? At seventeen, she ran from her father's disease like it was the first wave of a tsunami and then ran again and again until pain shot through her calves.
The door of the robbing room opens under her weight and bangs in her wake, flies opens again seconds later when Clive follows suit. He glares; Martha refuses to look at him, heart heaving in her chest. "You're not fucking running away from this -" he shouts and thankfully they're alone, thankfully -
"Clive, I swear to God, you don't want to do this! You have no idea -"
She doesn't want to tell him, can't be the one to tell him. It's not the plan, not - "Oh, so this is about Sean, again?" Clive roars back, she can almost see his temper rising. "You know what? I'm growing real tired of you playing the injured party, here -"
He's interrupted by the door bursting open again. Neither of them really looks at Harriet stepping in, asking: "What's going on, here?" because Martha screams.
Or at least that's what she'd say happened, if asked, in retrospect. She screams words to stop him from saying other words. But maybe, also, screams doesn't quite cut it. It's more like a howl, a deperate howl, an animal in pain, finally reacting, begging that the beating stop. Martha howls like Clive just cut through her heart with words and feels tears in her eyes that she hasn't felt in a long time.
She's not numb, anymore, she's hurting, she's -
"BILLY'S DEAD!" she shouts, then. Loud, in the middle of the deserted robbing room, and she swears that for the second time that day, the minutes stops. Her voice breaks, for the first time since last night, for the first time since Alicia promised, promised Martha that she was doing the right thing, by signing the papers. Cancer had turned Billy into a vegetable and yet, the both of them held his hand until 4 AM, until he actually went, and Martha didn't cry, had to be strong, for him, carry on. She's been strong all morning, all afternoon, through court, hell and highwater, but this, she -
It's the little things. The straw that breaks the camel's back. Breaks her. What Clive said, or what Harriet said he said, him shouting at her that made her snap, say the one thing she never meant to say to him. He shouldn't have found out like that, Martha muses. Jake was supposed to call him, but -
There is silence, amongst the three of them: Harriet, Clive, her. Clive checks Martha's face for signs that this might be a lie, a bad joke, but it isn't and she holds his gaze, tells him. He sits. On the bench, between rows of lockers, even Harriet looks stunned. "I didn't -" the other woman starts and Martha glares, makes her stop.
"Jake decided not to tell you," she explains, almost on autopilot; her gaze catches Clive's. "Didn't want to tell you until you were done with your speech."
'Clive's on this huge robbery,' Jake had said, last night. 'If we tell him, he'll -'
So, they didn't tell him. Until now, she guesses.
.
Martha's not sure how long they stay quiet, listening to the rain tapping against the windows. There seems to be about a hundred questions on Clive's lips and Martha imagines that she'd be willing to answer them, in time, but Harriet ends up breaking the silence before either of them can find their words.
"I'm sorry to bring this up but we'll need to put out something on Chambers' website -"
"Harriet."
Clive's voice is hoarse; he catches her gaze, words dying on his lips. There is nothing to say, nothing for him to say and Martha is quicker, anyway, cuts through any warnings he could give. Her handbag is hanging from her shoulder when she glares at Harriet, swears: "You fucking bitch."
Martha Costello is out of the room before the woman even has time to respond.
.
'Do you think Billy knows?' Clive asked, years before, his fingers slowly trailing down her skin in post-coital bliss. In her memories, she's thirty-two, hotshot barrister at the top of her game, and one of the men she loves is in her bed, asking about another (entangled, like a web of broken threads). Clive and she had gone to a party, barristers and solicitors everywhere and escaped before dessert was served.
She looked up at him, her head propped up on her hand, raised an eyebrow. 'About what?'
'About…' he started. His hand left her arm to gesture between the both of them, a bit of red on his cheeks. 'About us?'
She puffed out a loud laugh, something laid-back and genuine, shook her head at him. 'That what?' she asked, amused. Maybe, back then, she played games with him, too. 'That we fuck sometimes?' she chuckled, dropped a quick peck on his lips before lying back to stare at the ceiling. It was summer, hot; she wore his shirt, two buttons done above her midriff, and nothing underneath. 'I doubt that's any of his business.'
The thing is, even before Nottingham, Clive and she were a thing. An intermittent, messy thing that at the time felt easy, like he was her friend, more than anything else. Sometimes, weeks, even months would go by before she sat on his desk one evening, toed off her shoes and let her skirt ride up, to the edge of her stockings. The night before, he'd been sat next to her at the dinner party and she'd felt his hand against her thigh, trailing up. What do you think you're doing? she'd whispered, in his ear.
Stop me, he'd dared. It didn't even occur to her to.
Later, that morning, Clive smiled and moved to steal a kiss from her lips, pulled away. 'I think he hates me because he thinks I'm not good enough for you.'
She laughed, shaking her head at him. Teased. 'And you think you are?'
.
Somehow, she doesn't jump into the incoming traffic, on her way home. For a split second, she thinks that she might, watches a bus heading her way and thinks she could just - but then what would be the point?
Instead, when she gets home, her brain sings a quiet lullaby. Martha slips off her shoes, her feet bare and cold against the floor. When I go don't cry for me, in my father's arms I'll be, a voice whispers, in her head, and maybe that's the thing about her, isn't it? The thing she's forgotten about herself, the fact that she's not not a crier. Has never actually been one of those iron-clad women that people seem to think she is, one of the ones who walk in and out of court like nothing ever gets to them, like anger and injustice, and sadness don't drive tears rolling down their faces. When she started out at the bar, her main problem was that her voice would always catch in her throat, out of stress or frustration; she would have to make herself pause, swallow, and breathe out before she continued. She taught herself this trick, hiding it behind a harsh comeback, focusing the attention elsewhere, or taking a discreet sip of water. Maybe that's when the misjudging started happening, she reflects, when people started calling her a cold-blooded bitch behind her back. She put up this angry front, played with it and the aura it gave her and the tears disappeared out of the professional arguments as quickly as they'd come. She became someone else, someone she thought was stronger, smarter in her retorts, never letting herself cry in front of anyone ever again. When the tears did come, sometimes still, she let them go holding her own body in the quiet of her flat, listening to Joy Division.
She only ever broke that rule once, didn't she? When her belly hurt so much, cramping like someone had thrust a knife through it, that she had to trust another person with her feelings, and that clearly hadn't been a good choice, now, had it?
When she gets home, the evening after Billy dies, she collapses on the floor with her face between her hands, unable to see, unable to speak. 'He's gone,' Alicia's voice said in her ear and now, Martha wants to be gone, too. Wants her mum to hug her and her dad to hold her hand, lie and say it will all be okay. She wants them to tell her about naming stars after people.
Hidden in the dark, she finds herself rocking her small frame back and forth, her eyes a waterfall.
.
.
[1] Picture Me At A Hospital by Babyshambles
[2] All My Tears by Ane Brun