The Unmaking of Ellie Rook

by Sandra Ireland

  Where the fence ends, the wilderness begins. My father fancies himself as some kind of scrap baron. Lawler Rook, King of the Scrappies. He tries to make out the den is part of his little kingdom, but it’s not his. It’s not the sort of place that can be possessed. It has its own agenda. If he fancies himself as a king, then my mother is the Queen of the Woods. It’s my mother’s place. She took the time to learn its language.

  The trees get bigger the deeper you go: oaks with thick trunks and leaves drooping like prayer flags; silver birches with bark so thin and papery you can touch the new skin beneath. I stride out in my mother’s wellies, placing my feet where she must have placed hers on that last walk. How many days ago? How many hours? I try to do the maths, attempting to quantify the amount of time I have been, to all intents and purposes, motherless, but jet lag and exhaustion make me fuzzy. I give up and slither to the ground at the base of a broad oak. My heart is thumping all the way through my body, an alien drumbeat. In an instant, our tight-knit, isolated little world has turned upside down. Everyone will have a way of coping, an opinion, a plan. But what happens next is up to me.

  3

  Three Days After

  I sit bolt upright, head swimming with sleep, fingers clutching the duvet, as if my bed is adrift and I need to be anchored. The wardrobe, the rose-patterned wallpaper – all so familiar. I check the floor. My rucksack is there, spewing clothes across the carpet. My mother’s wellies, one upright, one collapsed on its side, are caked in mud.

  Butterfly fragments of a dream spin out of reach. I close my eyes, shut down my breathing. Wait. Trees, skinny and bare, their branches low-set like eyebrows, pulling at my clothes. Fallen things smothered with old growth – moss and fungi I can’t name. Coarse, dead grass. Air that tastes of earth and rust and mouldy upholstery.

  I come to a place in the woods where the sound of my own footsteps disappears. A row of rusty car skeletons, painted with moss; rough grass and briars growing up through them. Empty eye sockets – gaping holes where their doors and windscreens should be. Seats shredded by foxes. Some of them list drunkenly, others bear the battle scars of old accidents. Look closer and you’ll see bird shit on the dashboards, mice’s nests in the gloveboxes.

  But I don’t want to get that close.

  With a gasp I come fully awake, scramble out of bed as if that too is tainted by the nightmare. I stumble over the wellies, stare at them as if I don’t know them any more. I throw on my old dressing gown and pad downstairs. River is already in the kitchen, plugged into his phone, making toast. I can hear the thump of a bass track, and I have to tap him on the shoulder to get his attention. He pulls out one earbud, but even then I have to repeat my question twice.

  ‘What was she wearing – Mum? Did she have a coat on? Boots?’

  He blinks at me, unsmiling. ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘What did you tell the police?’

  He sighs. ‘She was wearing a coat. Green, I think. The one with the little white flowers on it. And a thingy . . .’ He gestures to his neck. ‘A scarf. The red one with the birds on it.’

  ‘Owls.’

  ‘Yeah. Them.’

  He goes back to buttering his toast, but something else has been bothering me.

  ‘Wasn’t it Tuesday, when it happened?’

  ‘So?’

  He’s making such a mess. I set about clearing up, banging things around, although there’s no one here to care. I imagine Mum telling me to be careful with her good plates.

  ‘So why were you not at school? Why were you walking with Mum in the middle of the day?’

  River shrugs, pushes his earbuds in deeper and goes searching for his boots, toast in hand, leaving a trail of crumbs from the toaster to the back door. The boots are on a folded newspaper, where I put them after he’d abandoned them under the table the night before. He scuffs back in his socks, which may once have been white. I have a mental image of his room: curtains still drawn, unidentifiable heaps of dirty washing all around the bed. Who’s going to sort that out now?

  ‘You’re dripping marmalade all over the place. Get a bloody plate.’

  I give him a hefty whack across the arm and my fingers come away stinging. He’s going on sixteen, but he seems to have sprouted into a man. Last time I was home, he still had that little-boy look about him, but I suppose you have to grow up fast round here.

  ‘It was an in-service day.’

  He plonks himself onto a chair and shoves his enormous feet into workman’s boots. He must be a size nine. I’m not sure I believe him about the in-service day, but his boots are leaving treads of dried mud on the floor, so I go and get the sweeping brush. It occupies my mind.

  ‘So where are you going now?’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to school. You get a week off for a parent.’

  ‘River!’

  ‘It’s true. I don’t mean anything by it. And anyway, the police lady says there’ll be a lot of media attention, and we should keep a low profile.’

  I regret sounding so shocked. Moving close to him, I ruffle his hair. He smells of shampoo.

  ‘So where—?’

  ‘Stonehaven, with Dad. There’s a car he wants to see. A vintage Daimler.’

  ‘Doesn’t that seem a bit … callous? Even for Dad?’

  ‘It’s his way of coping, I guess. Business as usual.’

  Business as usual. This family has always been about business. I should know that by now.

  ‘But you can’t leave me here to deal with stuff.’ Something breaks loose in me, skitters through my innards. ‘I don’t know what to do. How to handle . . . this.’

  ‘The yard’s closed.’

  ‘Not that! This other stuff. Police stuff. They’ll be sniffing around and—’

  ‘We don’t have a body.’ River’s voice is gruff, too grown-up. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do. We’ll only be half an hour. The police lady – the family whatsit cop – she was here before. She might come back. She left a load of leaflets and shit.’ He nods towards the table, where a small stash of papers sits under a blue-striped milk jug. Shuffling his boots, River stands up, giving my elbow an affectionate dunt. ‘People deal with things in their own way. Dad needs to get away from here for a bit.’

  With River gone, I stand in the empty kitchen for a long time, listening to the steady drip of the tap and the distant barking of a dog, before sinking into the nearest chair. Last night’s sandwiches are curling on the plate and the smell makes me want to heave. I push them away and sit with my face in my hands for a long time, and when I finally look up, all I can see are the leaflets River mentioned, poking out from under the milk jug.

  Very slowly, I ease them out. They are basic, factual, printed on pastel-coloured paper, with line drawings of the recently bereaved. One of them talks about funerals and pensions. None of them reflect what is happening to us. They fail to mention dirty laundry, or food shopping, or skipping school. Fear burns through my gullet like acid. I pick up a clutch of business cards. ‘PC Lorraine Sampson. Family Liaison.’

  It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with me. I set about crumbling the leftovers into small pieces for the birds. Mum always does that. She likes the sparrows and the blackbirds and the wrens, but most of all she likes to feed the crows. So I tear the bread into little bits, fingers greasy with salmon and butter. Who will feed the crows now? The leaflets don’t have an answer.

  Being home brings up all manner of forgotten things. My mother is the thread that connects me to my childhood. Even when I’m far away, she updates me regularly on neighbourhood gossip and the goings-on of people I went to school with. She was the first to tell me that Liam Duthie had broken up with Katie Coutts last year, even before Liam changed his status on Facebook. I think I punched the air – not because I harboured any ambition to rekindle an old flame, but because Katie Coutts had it coming.

  It’s strange, the way old grudges slumber away under a rock, until someone pokes them with a stick. When I think of Shore Road
Primary now, it brings back that sick, awkward feeling of first-day nerves. I didn’t like the newness, the strange smells. The bigness of it all. It wasn’t an outside bigness, like the yard or the woods, but a closed-in bigness, with no promise of escape. They slammed the doors on us, shut out the sea and the sky and the screaming gulls. I was a feisty kid. I’m surprised they could keep me contained in that little classroom. My first day at school was a catastrophe, although I remember it now with something like amusement.

  When the paints come out in the afternoon – bright, solid greens and blues – a thrill of hope makes me leap from my red plastic chair. I will paint home! I hunch over the table, serious and scowling, working the paint with a stiff, stubby brush into something I can recognise. And then Katie Coutts ruins it. Poisonous little Katie Coutts, only five years old. She comes up behind me and deliberately spills her dirty water all over my picture. It’s an accident, she says, but rage and homesickness boil up in me like scarlet paint, and I burst into tears. Mrs Cargill is there in an instant, but I can barely spit out my objections between sobs.

  ‘What were you painting, Ellie?’

  ‘It’s a’ – sniff – ‘WATERFALL!’

  ‘Oh well then.’ Mrs Cargill pats my head. ‘A little extra water won’t do any harm.’

  The casual injustice stabs me in the heart. I glare at Katie so hard she flinches, but that isn’t enough. I’m so mad I need more. The only ammunition within reach is the colourful words Offshore Dave hurls about the yard. I know them all, so I pick the ones I like best and fire. I can still hear the echo of them, like an arrow, arcing past the scandalised noses of Mrs Cargill and the teaching assistant.

  ‘Katie, you’re a fuckin’ cunt!’

  4

  Out in the yard, I find Mum’s battered little blue Fiesta, tucked in between the giant tow truck and Shelby’s ancient Land Rover Defender. The police van is gone, leaving the little car exposed. Dad’s Range Rover – current model and so white he has to wash it every day – is absent, of course, purring its way to Stonehaven as if none of this matters. All that’s left is the faint stink of fuel. I’m jealous of my father’s ability to hold on to the threads of his own life while mine are unravelling. I’m angry, too. Raging at him – and yes, raging at my mother. Three days ago, I was sipping rum from a coconut in Hanoi. It’s not fair. None of this is bloody fair.

  The Fiesta is locked, so I peer through the side window, shielding my eyes and pressing close. The interior is empty of anything personal – not a scarf, or a shopping list, or loose change. It’s parked up all wrong, as if Mum had had it in mind to sneak back out at some point and straighten it up before Dad had a chance to complain. My father is a man of straight lines. He never got her curlicues.

  There’s movement in Shelby’s caravan, a faint rumbling and rocking, and the man himself appears. He looks unwashed and washed out. He sees me but doesn’t speak, slumps down on the caravan step to light his roll-up. Smoke is soon curling from beneath the black fedora. I go and stand in front of him, so he can’t ignore me. He takes a slow drag of his cigarette and slants his gaze at me, still saying nothing.

  ‘Hey.’ I flip the brim of his hat with two fingers and it tumbles to the ground. His iron-grey hair is tied with a bootlace and his scalp looks oddly vulnerable, the hair flattened and pink skin showing through in patches, like one of the silver birches in the woods. He makes no effort to pick up the hat, just narrows his eyes at me some more.

  ‘Be careful with that. Got that hat from—’

  ‘A banjo player in Nebraska. I know. I know all your stories, Shel. You’ll have to come up with some more.’

  He smiles a bit. ‘Mebbe I will. Mebbe so. How are you doing, my love?’ He’s looking at the ground, not at me, but the air between us is suddenly tense.

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t.’

  ‘One day at a time. That’s all we can do.’

  ‘I feel like I’m holding my breath. All the time.’ I shake my head miserably. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Holding the line.’ He squints up at me, eyes the same green as the van. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been a chameleon, still and quiet and ready to run. ‘You went to the den last night? What did you see?’

  I’m not sure what he wants to hear.

  I pick up his hat, dust it off and plant it back on his head. ‘What would you expect me to see? Nothing. There were more cops on the bridge, but I stayed down low and followed the bank. I couldn’t hear anything but the roar of the water. I couldn’t see anything disturbed at the edge, no skid marks in the mud, no rocks disturbed. No sign that she was there at all.’

  ‘What were the rozzers doing?’

  ‘How would I know? Sitting in their van eating doughnuts, maybe.’

  He doesn’t answer, just nods in the direction of the back door. ‘You got a visitor, my love.’

  I look where he’s looking, towards a young woman with a black folder in her hand. Although she’s hatless, her fair hair tied back severely, she’s unmistakeably a cop. My heart sinks.

  ‘Jesus, does this look kind of official to you?’ I glance back, but Shelby has already nipped his fag and ducked into the caravan. Question answered.

  ‘Lorraine Sampson, Family Liaison. I thought I’d touch base with you. You must be Ellie?’

  The newcomer’s hand in mine is freezing. She makes some comment about the weather and I invite her in, pull out a chair at the table for her.

  ‘Tea?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head, and then gets straight to it. ‘There’s nothing new to report,’ she says. ‘The search is ongoing and we’re still checking the coastline.’

  ‘There are caves. Along the coast.’ I’m sitting opposite her, squeezing my hands together like I’m praying.

  She looks at me with professional, weary compassion. ‘As I explained to your father – where is he, by the way? Are you here on your own?’

  ‘He’s gone out’ – I catch sight of the blue-striped jug – ‘for milk. He’s taken my brother with him. Just to get out of the house for a while.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  I catch her looking at the plate of scraps and feel the need to explain that too. ‘My mother likes to feed the crows.’

  Lorraine’s smile flickers and fades. She makes deliberate eye contact. ‘Ellie. While this is still being treated as a missing person investigation, the fact that your brother witnessed your mother’s fall means that the chances of a positive outcome are not good. Do you understand that?’ My heart ticks to a stop. She rattles on. ‘As I explained to your father, the more time a casualty spends in the water, with no sighting of them, the less chance there is of a positive outcome. Your brother states that he didn’t see your mum after she fell, and our general guideline is that after this much time in the water . . . I have to be honest with you, Ellie. There’s no—’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I get it.’ I spring up from my seat, gather up the plate of bird food and stand there with it clutched to my ribs, refusing to look at her. She takes the hint. I hear her sigh, and three more business cards appear on the table.

  ‘That’s my number. You can call me at any time, Ellie, and I’ll get you whatever help you need.’

  She gets up to leave and I know she’ll be straight on the phone to whatever agencies produce those pastel-green leaflets. Whatever. I’ll make sure I’m out when they call.

  5

  Four Days After

  Another morning after another restless night, and daylight finds me sitting on the side of my bed, googling ‘what happens after a death’ and ‘seven stages of grief’. I make a brief, chilly visit to the bathroom and pull on yesterday’s clothes. The stairs lead down into the front hall, and I pause for a moment, hearing the dull rumble of voices beyond the closed kitchen door. I don’t particularly want to see Dad or River; I just want to be alone with my thoughts. Quickly, before I change my mind and volunteer for breakfast duties, I let myself out the front door.

  The front garden runs
parallel to the drive, screened from it by a mass of unruly privet. There’s evidence of a genteel past: a path of herringbone brick leading to the road; a rusty Victorian gate. I suppose there were borders here once, with hollyhocks and roses, but coarse grass has taken over and the plants manage as best they can. Springtime is coming slowly – a lone red tulip pushing its way through the wilderness and a stubborn clump of bluebells in the far corner.

  There’s a green-painted bench just outside the door, where Mum sits in good weather. She calls the garden her sanctuary, a place where she can go to avoid the mountains of scrap, but you can’t dodge the death rattle of doomed vehicles beyond the hedge, or the film of fuel that clogs your throat. There is no escape either from the things that Dad thinks are ‘worth a bob or two’. Mum has done her best to upcycle them. Old coal scuttles, weighing scales and tractor seats, all painted glossy black and studded with flowers. Her initials are on the back of each piece, as if she fears being anonymous.

  I plonk myself down on the bench, beside a clutch of pebbles and shells and a handful of sea glass. My mother is a jackdaw, a collector of sparkle and colour. All her favourites are here: blues, greens, china white, like chinks of sunshine on water. There’s a cushion here too, made of crocheted squares. I hug the cushion to me and sniff, but it only smells of damp, not of her. I feel like she’s just out of sight, maybe gone to the shop, or for a walk.

  My pilgrimage to the waterfall is still playing on a loop in my head. I close my eyes.

  There were police on the bridge, at least two of them, standing beside a big white van. I could hear static as they talked on their radios, but the sound of rushing water was so loud that I couldn’t make out the words. As I slipped past, I noticed that one of them was holding a bunch of flowers. Of course there’d be flowers. This new truth hit me like a dart. I’ve seen it on the telly often enough – people leaving bouquets at the scene of a tragedy, propped up in cellophane shrouds, handwritten cards gushing all sorts of crap about someone they never really knew.