‘Poker?’ I sit back. I’ve been away too long. I’m out of my depth. ‘Is that where you got the money?’
‘No!’
‘What about Ned? Are you and Ned . . . River, are you gay?’
River snorts into his tea, and I realise he’s laughing. I’m not sure what he finds so amusing – the insinuation or my awkward attempts to connect with him. He grows serious and narrows his eyes at me, the roles suddenly reversed. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘Because . . .’ I dart a glance behind me, but the customers have lost interest in us. They’ve done the required, Oh, look at those poor things. Heard about the mother? and now they’ve moved on to other topics. ‘It’s hard, talking about private stuff, especially when you might not be sure of the reaction.’
My brain is already racing ahead. Lawler Rook is more nineteenth century than twenty-first. He’s not enlightened. The king would not tolerate a gay prince. There’d be war, and then what would we do? I couldn’t leave my brother here, with him. Maybe I could take River travelling with me? We’d hit the road, go to Europe . . .
‘You’re not even listening.’
‘What?’ I pull myself back to the present.
‘I just said – I was speaking with Ned because he’s into all this wacky dream therapy shit and stuff.’
‘Dream therapy?’
‘Yeah. I’ve been having these dreams and . . . Fuck.’ River drops his mug to the table. ‘I don’t think I know what’s real any more, you know? I have dreams, memories of Mum, but I don’t know whether I’m making them up or whether they actually happened.’
My breathing stops for a nanosecond, my chest squeezing shut like a fist. ‘Go on. Tell me. What do you think you remember?’
It takes a moment for the words to come out.
‘I remember one morning, we were upstairs in my room. I think I was playing with a train or something. Thomas the Tank Engine, probably. You were there.’ He looks at me with surprise, as if we’ve somehow been spirited back. ‘I was playing with the train, and you’d been promising to help me build a track in my bedroom. That’s right. You’d given me bread and jam.’
I give him a thin smile. I remember that, or at least a version of it.
‘Are you going to school, Ellie?’
‘It’s Sunday, silly.’
‘Where’s Mamma?’
‘Out. She said I was to get your breakfast. What do you want?’
‘Bread and strawberry jam. Why is she out so early, Ellie? Where’s she gone?’
What he doesn’t know was that I’d already been downstairs and had a similar conversation with my father. I’d already rifled through the drawer where Mum kept her purse and keys. They were still there, and the sight of them made my heart plummet. Something wasn’t right. I needed to look for her, but there was my wee brother, oblivious, chattering about Thomas the Tank Engine. I remember how he smelled so clean and wholesome; I wanted to hold him tight and cover his eyes and never let him see anything ugly.
‘What then?’ I ask him now.
‘You brought me bread and jam, but you went away before you could build a track for Thomas. I was up there on my own for ages. I started to get a bit scared. First Mum disappeared, and then you. I didn’t know where Dad was. I thought I’d better get dressed, so I put on a Superman outfit. Weird, the things that stick in your head.’
My jaw tenses, but I try to smile. ‘It is. It’s weird.’
‘I went downstairs to see if you were back, and Dad had just come in. He was in a bad mood because he had to wash his hands and Mum wasn’t there to dole out the Swarfega. I remember . . .’ He takes a deep breath, and his next words come out differently, as if he’s once again that scared little boy in the Superman suit. ‘Mum came in. She went right past me without speaking. She wasn’t walking properly. I looked down, and her feet were all cold and blue, and she only had one shoe on.’
River doesn’t know what had happened the night before. He doesn’t know about Liam and me, and he probably never will. There are some things that aren’t easily discussed between siblings. I’m not sure how much I should tell him now, how much he needs to know.
That night is etched on my brain.
I came running in from the woods and my mother was sitting at the kitchen table, white-faced and tight-lipped. She got up when she saw my tears.
‘What happened? What has he done?’
‘It’s not me, it’s Liam. I should have stayed with him.’ My voice broke and she clutched me to her, digging her fingers into my jumper. I could feel her heart pounding. ‘Offshore Dave was trying to drown him.’
She swore. She’d known I’d been out there in the woods with Liam. I suppose she could guess what we’d been doing. She hugged me tighter. ‘It’s all right. He won’t drown him. He’ll be all right.’
‘I just ran! I should have stayed.’
‘Go on up to bed.’ She dropped her arms and gave me a little push.
‘No! I want to stay, in case he—’
‘Bed.’
Her voice was faint and cold, and I knew better than to argue. There’s no point in telling River about how I crept into his bedroom to watch him sleeping, all defenceless, with his arm flung out, as I waited for the slam of the back door. No point in telling him how I breathed in the comfort of his talcum-powder scent as Dad’s voice swelled through the house. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, just odd combinations of harsh words, filling me with dread. And Mum’s wheedling tone, trying to pacify him. Something crashed to the floor and River gasped in his sleep. His relaxed infant fist clenched. I remember the soft blue of his eyelids, the dark shadows in the soft creases of his neck. I’d willed him not to wake up.
My father never hurt me, only the things closest to me.
Fast-forward to the present, and my brother is expectant. He wants me to fill in the gaps, and perhaps it’s time. I take a deep breath.
‘Okay. I’m going to tell you where Mum was that night. You need to know the truth.’
22
That night, after my father’s shouting had stopped, I settled down beside my little brother and let the soft purr of his breathing lull me to sleep. I didn’t want to leave him. Maybe I just didn’t want to be alone. In the morning, he’d woken me up, bemused but delighted to have company. Was this a new game? I bribed him to stay in bed with The Gruffalo and the promise of jam sandwiches, and then I crept downstairs.
My father was alone at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of porridge. My Nokia was lying on the table beside him. It looked oddly vulnerable. Now I knew where he’d got his information from. When I’d pleaded for my own mobile, Mum had been fairly agreeable. It would make me safer, coming home from school in the dark evenings. Dad had been dead against it, until she’d pointed out that he’d be able to get in touch with me at the press of a button. He’d know my whereabouts all the time. At sixteen, I’d thought a wee bit of parental smothering was a small price to pay for the novelty of being able to text Liam Duthie in secret. Except my messages hadn’t remained secret. How else would Dad have known what we were planning to get up to in the car cemetery?
He glanced up at me when I demanded to know where my mother was. He replied with a single word.
‘Out.’
‘Out where?’
He shrugged and continued with his breakfast. ‘She walked out. Last night. Your fault.’
Panic bubbled inside me. ‘Last night? How is that my fault?’ I rushed to the window. Her car was still in the yard. ‘And where’s Liam? Did you hurt Liam?’
Dad grunted. ‘He went home with a wet arse and a flea in his ear. He’s fine. Don’t even think about contacting him.’
I raced to grab my phone from the table, but Dad was faster. He scooped it up and hurled it at the wall like a cricket ball. It broke in half and crashed to the floor, bits of it skittering across the tiles.
‘You bastard!’
He scraped up the last of his porridge and swallowed as he considered t
his, before tossing the spoon into the bowl. He wiped his moustache with a square of kitchen roll.
‘Your problem, Ellie, is you don’t consider other people. You break my rules, and you drag everyone down with you.’
‘You mean Mum? She didn’t know. She didn’t.’
He made a smug I know better face and scraped his chair back. ‘You’d better clear up these dishes.’
‘But Mum—’
He moved to the back door, where his work boots were sitting on a pad of newspaper. ‘I can tell you this much,’ he said. ‘She won’t be back today.’
My temples are aching and I feel wrung out, as if I’ve been crying for days, when in reality I’d remained dry-eyed and calm as I gave River the facts.
I’m in the clifftop car park, my head leaning against the steering wheel. I sit bolt upright as a seagull lands on my bonnet with a thump. Its eyes are round as saucers, and sly. I bang on the windscreen and it takes off with a noisy flapping of wings. It had felt like a momentous moment, sharing all this with my brother. Ned left us alone, waiting until he thought we were finished before approaching us with a fresh pot of coffee.
‘I’m not going to give you the whole “tea makes everything better” crap,’ he’d said. ‘Coffee won’t make it better either, but acknowledging things is sometimes a start.’
I feel drained. Until now, I hadn’t realised how little I’d confided in my brother. It feels like we’ve opened a door, and now the door is stuck. Whether we like it or not, we can’t look away from what’s out there.
I get out of the car, bundling my jacket around me as the clifftop wind takes away my breath.
I’m not sure what I’m doing here. I should have gone to the Spar, done the shopping and driven home; but I feel the need to be washed clean. I stumble down the steps. The wind is doing its job. The cold is exhilarating.
I couldn’t tell River the whole story, of course, because everyone remembers things in their own way. I couldn’t tell him precisely what I found that morning. As he said himself, the weirdest things stick in your mind. For me, it’s the eerie red gloom of the garage, the dark skeletons of cars. And throwing the milk down the sink. That was my cunning plan. To look for Mum, I not only had to occupy River with bread and jam and the promise of train-track building, but I had to get my father away from the house. Once he’d had his porridge and left, I knew he wouldn’t return until his elevenses. By eleven, my mother always had milk heating in a small pot on the stove, and Dad’s ‘World’s Greatest Boss’ mug carefully prepared with two and a half spoons of Nescafé. Two digestives on a china plate. But my mother was missing.
At five minutes to eleven, I grabbed the half-full carton of milk and tipped it down the sink. With both taps on full, I didn’t hear the door. Only the smell of petrol and old cars told me that Dad was standing behind me. The last telltale dregs of white disappeared down the plughole.
I turned around and held up the empty carton.
He scowled suspiciously. ‘You finished the milk? What about my milky coffee? I always have milky coffee at eleven and again at three.’
He started searching for his car keys, and my heart leaped in triumph. I’d have at least thirty minutes until he returned from the shop. After he left, I waited a full two minutes before slipping out the door. Mum couldn’t have gone far – no purse, no phone, no car. I knew she wouldn’t leave us like that. She wouldn’t leave us with him.
Scrambling down the last few steps to the beach, I reach the dunes. I can see the three abandoned bothies, and beyond them, the sea, far out. Unburdening myself to River has brought all my feelings crashing back like waves, and fresh guilt ripples through me as I walk.
I’d thought she might have gone to the woods – climbed a tree, like Finella, to better see the enemy – but I’d left her with the enemy, hadn’t I? I’d slept in my brother’s room and left her downstairs with him.
That morning, the yard had been like the proverbial Wild West town holed up ready for a gunfight. Blank windows in the Portacabins; the mechanical grabber, that great bird of prey, motionless, its head tilted; and the crows still and silent in the car stacks. I always hated the car stacks – all those squashed bundles of cars, some with their guts exposed, like casualties of war, seats bleeding foam and ripped leather.
There’s a man-sized gate in the perimeter fence around the yard, so you can get in without having to unlock the big gate on runners. Dad had left it open a fraction. That was a clue. It seemed unlikely that Mum would have come through the yard, but something made me keep walking.
I found myself heading towards Dad’s garage, situated on a little patch of waste ground, within the yard complex but set apart – a bit private, exclusive, like the king’s counting house in the nursery rhyme. Maybe he’d locked it, taken the key with him? The door was closed, but with quiet satisfaction I saw that the padlock was hanging loose. Carefully I opened the door.
The interior was dim, lit by the sinister red glow from a battery of heaters he’d salvaged from a derelict office. Hitting the switch didn’t help much. The only other light was from a dusty bulb suspended from a beam. Laden shelves occupied one wall, and on the other, rows of spanners hung in size order. Everything was unnaturally neat, arranged, accounted for. And in the centre were his prized cars: a Morris Minor, a vintage Ford and, closest to me, his work in progress, a sports car with its bonnet up. In the eerie gloom, they were silent humps, sleeping beasts. I could smell diesel mixed with stale sweat. It felt hostile: this place didn’t want me here. I tried to shake the feeling off. I didn’t have much time.
‘Mum? Mum?’
The silence was complete. Why would she come in here? She’d be hiding in the woods. I’d misjudged this. But I tried again, louder.
‘Mum?’
The word sat heavy in the air. I heard a tapping. Faint at first, but growing stronger. A muffled voice: ‘Ellie? Ellie!’
It was coming from the boot of the Morris Minor.
‘Mum? What the hell?’ I was over in a flash, rattling the handle.
Mum’s voice, faint and measured: ‘It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m okay.’
‘It’s locked, Mum. What do I do?’
My chest grew tight with fear, my hands slippery with panic.
‘Get the key.’ Her voice sounded rusty. ‘It’s hanging up somewhere.’ A tight band of anxiety wrapped around my head. I ran to the tool racks, scouted high and low, disturbing spanners and screwdrivers and musty rags. A hammer crashed to the concrete, narrowly missing my foot. Where would my father leave a bunch of keys? Where would he hide them?
An old kitchen cabinet sat in the corner beside his workbench – one of those old-fashioned ones with the frosted glass doors at the top and the drop-down front. Once, it must have held Grandma Rook’s china, but now it was groaning with grease guns and cans of spray paint. There were three drawers, and I hauled out the top one – a litter of nuts, bolts and metal brackets nesting on yellow newspaper. There was a metal box, the kind you keep cash in. Frantically, I pulled it out, breaking a nail as I set about prising it open. Mum’s silence spurred me on more than her words. The key was still in the lock. With a sudden twist I was confronted with a mad tangle of discarded keys. Elation turned to anger. How the hell was I supposed to figure out which key?
‘I found a box of bloody keys, Mum, but I don’t know—’
‘The Morris key fob – look for that. A bull on it.’
‘I’ve got it!’ It was sitting on the top of the pile, a blue and white badge with a red bull pinned to a scuffed leather fob. It took me a few minutes to insert the key, my hand was shaking so badly. Mum had gone silent again, but as soon as the lock clicked, the boot sprang open with a groan. A waft of that old-carpet smell took me right back to the woods, to what I’d done with Liam to cause this. You must have known. Dad’s voice swelling up through the ceiling. I’ll teach you . . . fucking covering up for her.
I didn’t have time to dwell on it. My mother was curled up, a crumpl
ed doll in a toybox. An elbow, a denim-clad knee, one bare foot. In the red light, her toes looked purple with cold.
‘Jesus, Mum!’ I grabbed at her arms, her legs, pulling her into a Mum-shape, straightening her up. She groaned, just like the boot lid. I searched the space around the spare wheel for her other shoe but could find nothing.
Mum swallowed once, painfully, and licked dry lips. ‘Somewhere out there.’
I wasn’t certain whether she was referring to the lost shoe or my father. I could think of nothing comforting to say, so I just gave her a hug. She was unresponsive, staring straight ahead, her pupils contracting in the strange red light.
‘He’s gone for milk,’ I whispered. She reached for my hand and squeezed it. Maybe I could smuggle her in before he came back.
Back in the present, I play the scenes over and over in my head. I’ve reached the sea without noticing, and it’s a shock to find myself here on the shoreline. The tide is out. Halfway to the horizon, a fishing boat, red against the blue, chugs into open water, trailing a white cloud of squabbling herring gulls.
Mum used to take River and me to the beach as often as she could. She encouraged us to tell stories about the alien landscape revealed at low tide: sandy deserts; slimy green mountain ranges; bottomless black pools. A magical place, far away from the scrapyard.
But, at some point, you have to get real.
My father was at the sink when I helped my mother back into the house. River was right – she was crushed and broken, like a doll. Dad didn’t notice at first, too busy wiping down the fresh milk cartons before storing them in the fridge. River, now dressed in his Superman outfit, was at the table, pulling the limbs off some plastic figures. Mum walked right past them. She was holding herself all funny, like it hurt to be properly upright, and limping a little, on account of the single shoe. I think she was making for the bathroom – she must have been desperate for a pee after being shut up like that all night. She walked right past them. Even when River shouted, ‘I missed you, Mamma,’ and Dad muttered, ‘I’m sorry, darlin’,’ under his breath, she kept right on going.
The Unmaking of Ellie Rook Page 10
