The Unmaking of Ellie Rook

by Sandra Ireland

  ‘I don’t care! I’m not a fucking skivvy like Mum!’

  ‘Don’t fuckin’ swear at me.’

  River gets up from his seat at the table and looms over me. I see his fists clench and take a step back. When I think of River, I recall a chubby toddler, trailing through the woods after me; a school boy building a rocket out of old plastic bottles on the kitchen table. This isn’t my wee brother, this giant with hands like shovels. I’m breathing hard, with fear and injured feelings, and I’m glad when Dad comes in and eases the tension. He jingles some car keys at me.

  ‘Bring back some fish suppers after your meeting.’

  He pulls out his wallet and opens it with care, peeling a couple of tenners from the doorstep-sized wad of notes he always carries. He doesn’t trust banks. Would he have stowed some dishonest cash in the freezer? It seems unlikely. He doesn’t trust us either.

  ‘It’s not “my” meeting. We’re planning a search party. Aren’t you going to come along?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, lass. You can tell me how it goes. Tell them I’m grateful, of course. Maybe I’ll come along, to the beach, but I’m not one for crowds.’

  ‘There’ll hardly be a crowd.’ Does anyone know my mother well enough, care enough about her, to come along? She has no friends apart from Sharon. So much for keeping ourselves to ourselves. ‘River?’

  My brother just shrugs. He won’t meet my eye. ‘I’ll help look, but I don’t want to go to the meeting.’

  ‘Fine.’ I grab my phone and purse and storm out.

  The car smells like a flower garden. Mum used to place fragrant potpourri in the drinks holder to try to counteract the stink of the yard. A little koala swings gently from the rear-view mirror. She longed to see Australia.

  I haven’t driven for ages. In Asia, I bombed about the streets on a moped, zipping to and from my job at the Language Centre. I’m still wearing my flip-flops and manage to stall twice before I get out of the yard. I imagine Dad watching me through the window and shaking his head. Maybe River’s standing beside him, mimicking his put-downs. They’re growing alike.

  The village is fifteen minutes down the road, and I’ve promised to pick up Liam. He’s standing at his gate, swinging an empty canvas shopping bag.

  ‘Grabbing some beers for after,’ he says, buckling his seatbelt. ‘Another thrilling night in front of the box.’

  ‘Could be worse.’ Switching off in front of a movie sounds quite appealing. ‘I’ve been ordered to bring back fish suppers. The larder is bare and apparently it’s my responsibility.’

  He laughs at my tone. ‘You’ve got used to being irresponsible, with all your travelling. Welcome to the real world.’

  ‘The real world isn’t necessarily here. I used to think it was, but coming back . . . Jesus, nothing changes. Apart from . . . circumstances.’

  Liam sighs. ‘Life sucks.’

  I want to point out that your wife chucking you out isn’t quite the same as your mother falling over a waterfall, but I don’t have the energy.

  ‘So what happened, with you and Katie?’

  I’m curious. My parents were at the wedding. It was a big affair and my mother couldn’t stop talking about the cake and the favours and the bridesmaids’ dresses. The guests were given white umbrellas embellished with the couple’s initials, although the weather had played fair on the day, with not a drop of rain. Mum’s always been great at remembering the tiny details of everything.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ Liam says gruffly.

  ‘Another woman?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Ouch.’ I make a face like I’ve been pinched. ‘Maybe she’ll forgive you in time?’

  ‘It’s not looking likely.’ He turns to me. ‘It’s the finances!’ I recognise panic when I hear it. ‘I can’t stay with my mother. I need to get a flat, but I can’t afford it, not while I’m signing on. It’s hard to get your head round it, ending up back at home.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ I glance in my mirror. Nothing behind me but a clear stretch of road. Ahead, all the old familiar landmarks: Mrs Cheney’s storybook cottage; the house that used to be a shop; the low bridge; the sign warning us to slow down for deer.

  ‘You think everything’s going to change when you leave home, don’t you?’ Liam is warming to a theme I don’t particularly like. ‘The world’s your oyster and all that, and then boom. You’re back where you started.’

  ‘Yeah. Boom,’ I echo faintly.

  12

  The cafe has a large ‘CLOSED FOR PRIVATE FUNCTION’ sign taped to the door. I suppose it’s the nearest Ned, the proprietor, can get to ‘SEARCH PARTY HQ’. Although we’re a good ten minutes early, a small crowd has already begun to gather inside: anonymous bodies, faces blurred by the condensation on the windows.

  We troop in, blinking like owls in the bright yellow light until Ned rescues us. He presses us into a corner booth, from where I’m able to scan the rest of the crowd. I recognise a couple of staff from the Spar and the woman from the post office. Various childhood friends wave at me from across the room. Piotr is here too, sitting alone over a small espresso.

  Ned strokes my shoulder. He has a shaved, shiny head and a massive russet beard, gold piercings and a better tan than me. He’s a bit camp and writes poems about food which are taped artistically around the kitchen door. My mother loves him. My father not so much.

  ‘Now what would you like? It’s on the house, sweetie.’

  I tell him I’m fine, thanks, and Ned claps his hands a half dozen times and everyone falls silent.

  ‘Okay, people – you know why we’re here. I’m not going to say anything, because there is NOTHING we can say that will make this better, but we can DO something, so Liam’ – he gives a wide, theatrical gesture – ‘is going to give you the low-down.’ Ned drops into a spare chair, crosses his legs and takes a sip of what looks like lemon tea. A woman I vaguely recognise leans in and mutters something to him, and Ned makes a reply that sounds like ‘We all knew this was on the cards’, but I’m too far away to hear properly. I must have imagined it. Liam is on his feet now. I narrow my eyes at Ned, but his expression is unreadable.

  Maps are passed around, along with A4 sheets of instructions. Who knew Liam had the capacity to take charge like this?

  ‘Health and safety guidelines,’ he says. ‘Obviously, nothing will happen until tomorrow morning. If each of you could choose a specific area of beach, we’ll note it down.’ He brandishes a clipboard. ‘We need to look out for any items of interest. Do we know what your mother was wearing, Ellie?’

  The question takes me by surprise. All eyes turn to me. ‘Um, well, River says she had on a green coat, walking boots and . . . and a red scarf, I think.’

  ‘Where is River?’ Ned asks. ‘Wouldn’t it help if he was here?’

  ‘He . . . wasn’t feeling up to it.’

  Liam recovers the situation. ‘So what we need is for you to be on the lookout not just for . . . for the obvious, but for items of clothing – a belt, a scarf, a shoelace, a button – anything that might belong to Imelda.’

  Liam is asking me something, and when I don’t react, he reaches for my arm.

  ‘Are you okay, Ellie?’

  I need to get out of here. I mumble some excuse, and people shift their knees and chairs to let me clamber past.

  The car park at the side is far enough away from the pitying stares. I pace around in the shadows, wishing I was a smoker, that I could take a great jagged breath of something other than cold air and be numbed by it. They do that all the time in films. Real life isn’t so accommodating.

  The car park is full, although most folk live in the village. Dad used to make us remember people’s cars. You never know, he’d say, when you might spot a car and think, ah, that guy owes me money. How many times he lay in wait outside a pub or a shop I don’t know – maybe he got Offshore to do it – but by the time I was eight I could identify every make of car on the road. River was better than me at matching th
em up with their owners. Dad would test us every time we went out.

  Looking round, I realise how out of touch I am. This is now the foreign landscape: grey stone and whipping winds that smell of seaweed and salt. I close my eyes and try to conjure up what I’ve left behind – warm, spicy breezes and endless sand. Unfinished roads. Unfinished adventures. It’s all slipping through my fingers, and I have to face this nightmare.

  The cafe door bangs. It’s Piotr, not Liam. He comes to stand beside me.

  ‘You are not okay.’ His slightly foreign inflection makes it a statement rather than a question.

  ‘No, I’m not. This whole thing . . .’ I gesture towards the cafe. ‘I didn’t expect this. I can’t help thinking we should be leaving it to the police.’

  Piotr gives a sad smile. ‘This from a Rook?’

  ‘You know what I mean. It’s too close, too personal. I can’t do it.’

  ‘You can do it. You are strong. Anyone who grew up in that place is strong.’

  I think he means here, on the east coast, where the gales will flatten you like a blade of grass and the cold seeps into your bones. We are dour and stroppy, but I’m not sure that’s the same as being strong.

  I pull a doubtful face. ‘When the going gets tough, I have a habit of leaving the country.’

  ‘I mean the scrapyard. It is a hard place to live.’ He shrugs. ‘All that destruction. Shiny metal waiting to be crushed.’

  I can find nothing to say. Sometimes people come into your life who make you see things differently. I suspect Piotr is one of those people, but there are things I’m not ready to see.

  Piotr inclines his head and says goodnight. ‘I will be on the beach tomorrow.’

  And off he goes, a tall figure with a backpack, striding down the main street. This is such a one-horse village, I can track him all the way to the narrow lane that leads to the cliffs. I wonder where he lives. As I turn to go back, Liam is standing in the doorway.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Nothing. We were just talking.’

  ‘Bloody Eastern Europeans. I could have had his job. I applied for it.’

  ‘He was a mechanic back in Poland. Have you worked with cars before?’

  ‘No, but that’s not the point. British jobs for British workers.’

  Suddenly I’m back in high school and Liam is whingeing about not being picked for the football team. I feel suddenly weary. Now all I can think about is bright metal crushed, becoming broken and rusty.

  ‘Oh, give it a rest. Go back inside.’

  I give him a push, and we re-enter the cafe.

  13

  Ten Days After

  The landline rings as I’m about to leave the house. I’m lacing up my boots, which haven’t had an outing since my sixth-year Duke of Edinburgh hike up Ben Nevis. Clomping into the hall, I stand on the neat rug my mother has positioned beside the telephone table and lift the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Good morning. Is this Mrs Rook?’ The voice sounds distracted and far away, as if the caller is multitasking. I can hear my own heartbeat in the handset. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. I wasn’t expecting my mother’s name to pop up like that. Not on the morning I’ve arranged to look for her body. It’s impersonal, out of context, and I don’t know how to tell this stranger she’s dead. My mother is dead. She fell from a waterfall – didn’t you hear?

  I must have mumbled something, because the caller rushes on, probably juggling coffee and a full diary. Papers shuffle in the distance.

  ‘This is Mandy Cotton from the council’s family services unit. I believe you were speaking to my colleague recently, and she’s passed on those details to me.’

  ‘Yes?’ My heart begins to race. Curiosity kicks in.

  ‘I’d like to arrange a time to come to the house to see you, Mrs Rook, is that all right? We might be better to choose a time when River is actually there.’

  There is a short pause. I get the impression Mandy is reading her notes. ‘You say that he’s refusing school? I can’t promise you an instant solution, but if we can start up a dialogue with him . . .’

  ‘Yes, that would be very helpful.’ What the hell am I doing?

  ‘Okay. So, from what you were saying to my colleague, his behaviour towards you has been quite aggressive, so let’s make it sooner rather than later. We don’t want things to escalate. I can do next Monday?’

  I make a date, put down the phone. I stand for a long time, waiting for my body to settle, for the cold sweat to dry on my back. I’ve just misled social services, and my brother is in danger of turning violent?

  This nightmare has taken a turn for the worse.

  ‘Bring Ellie over for her tea this evening, son.’

  Sharon is pottering about in her overflowing kitchen. She’s not going on the search – her ankles wouldn’t hold up – but she’s coordinating the food, whatever that means. I’m not sure food is even necessary, but I’m being swept along on a tidal wave of compassion and false hope. The Duthies are on a mission, and I can see myself watching from the sidelines.

  Sharon is buttering a mountain of bread. She licks her fingers and moves across to the kettle, dog biscuits crunching under her feet. Their Jack Russell stirs in his bed beside the radiator.

  ‘I’ll just heat up a pizza, but it’ll give you a break from the men. You’ll need sturdy boots. Have you got boots, Ellie? Remember it’s a shingle beach.’

  Shingle is an understatement. The shoreline is filled with whopping great stones, as far as I recall. I don’t say anything, just wave towards my ancient walking boots, reclaimed from the cobwebs beneath my bed.

  Liam enters with a pile of photocopies, his water bottle, his phone. The maps flutter slightly as Sharon shuffles past him into the hallway. The dog pricks its ears. Things are getting intense. I can hear muttering from the cupboard under the stairs, and then a random string of items emerges from the darkness: an ironing board; a coal scuttle; a tub of rat poison; and finally Sharon, puffing away in reverse like a locomotive, clutching a cool box as big as a small fridge. Liam shakes his head.

  I’m already doing a quick headcount: me, Liam, his mother, my father and River – and the cool box – all in the Fiesta. Sharon begins packing it with foil-wrapped sandwiches, two-litre bottles of coke and chocolate biscuits, as if this is nothing more sinister than a family picnic. I’m itching to call the whole thing off, but I have no choice. I have to play my part. I help her secure the lid, listening to her rattling on about her ligaments, and all the while I’m quaking inside.

  ‘It was last November. A wee patch of black ice outside the post office and boom. Down I went. Tore all my ligaments – and ligaments are worse than a break. Your life can change in the blink of an eye.’

  Boom. I manhandle the cool box towards the front door and the waiting car.

  ‘All it takes is just one slip.’

  We bump along the road to the coast, the giant cool box stuffed into the boot, my father riding shotgun with a stout walking stick between his knees, the others squashed into the back. Sharon keeps up a steady stream of chatter which no one responds to. River, squashed between the Duthies on the back seat, spends the whole journey texting. The constant bleeping makes me itch to stop the car and chuck the damn phone out of the window. The radio is blasting out something inappropriate and the DJ is making it worse. And that was ‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Katrina and the Waves reminding you to have a great day, folks!

  I switch it off.

  When we get to the clifftop car park, people are already parked up. I spot a Land Rover with fluorescent chevrons and ‘Mountain Rescue’ on the side. People I’ve never seen before, wearing climbing gear and bobble hats, check their rucksacks and first aid kits. My legs go weak. I’m scared I won’t have the energy to search.

  Liam slots into his coordinator role, divvying up the squares he’s drawn on the map. He confers with mountain rescue, reminds e
veryone about health and safety. We’re just about to move off when Piotr arrives, and again I find myself wondering where he lives. I smile at him.

  ‘Thanks, Piotr. You can come with us.’

  Liam glowers at me as we head off down to the beach. There are 355 steps, built into the cliff face by some nineteenth-century philanthropist I can’t name. As a child, I counted them more than once. Now here I am, walking in my childish footsteps without my mother. We climb down in single file – Piotr, Liam, me. Simmering resentment stiffens Liam’s back, and I wonder how much he’d like to give the foreigner a shove. All it takes is a split second, a lapse. A chill travels up my spine.

  I was right about Sharon downplaying the ‘shingle’. From where I’m standing, there is no beach, just acres of round tortoiseshell pebbles, sloping to the sea. When we walk, our soles skate over them and our ankles give way. There are mutterings from the searchers. Treacherous. Watch yourself. Don’t want another casualty.

  I strike off on my own, ears filled with the hollow growl of the stones beneath my feet and the mewing of the gulls. The North Sea is different today. I’ve become used to blue tropical seas, but this one has always been a brute, an elephant seal basking in the mist. Not today, though. Today, the sea rolls over like a porpoise, blue under the shards of sunlight. It has a twinkle in its eye. The ebb of the tide sounds slurred, a lazy shhh, broken by the occasional boom as a wave hits the waterline. It’s saying, ‘Look at me. Look at what I can do.’ Water obscures things.

  My gaze turns to the cliffs, great red lion paws guarding the coast. Between each toe there is an inlet, a chasm, a cave. Liam has been quoting recent cases at me about humans who have survived against the odds: a young surfer plucked alive from the sea after over thirty hours; a diver in the Pentland Firth who drifted away from his boat. But we both know a miracle is unlikely.

  As I toil along the shore, assessing the tide marks and the landslips and the serrated rocks, the boom and shhh of the sea follows me. By the time it gets here, where the Den of Finella spills out onto the beach, the river has dulled to a trickle, broken by its great fall and the profusion of rocks on the shoreline. The rocks are blacker here, sharper, wrapped in chains of seaweed and topped with gulls who watch us keenly.