by Simon Lelic
“The dorky one. With the silly hair.”
I responded with a sardonic smile. “Tell her I’m flattered,” I said, “and that if I weren’t already spoken for—and if her brother weren’t such a dork himself—I’d be asking for her hand in marriage.”
Ali tutted. “I said she likes you, Jack. I didn’t say she wants to marry you.” He shook his head. “You English,” he said. “You always want to colonize everything.”
And that’s how we left it, with a grin and a handshake. You might have thought, given the stakes—for Ali and his family, but also for me—that I might have taken my friend’s concerns a bit more seriously. But Ali, I was convinced, was afraid about nothing. What I’d said to him was true: immigration officials didn’t act like members of MI5. They behaved like bailiffs, hammering on doors and demanding ID. So, no, I wasn’t worried. In fact, after what had happened with Elsie’s father, all I felt at that point was relief.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SYDNEY
THERE’S NOT A thing I remember about my sister that I can trust.
Take the stuff I told Elsie. She even looked like you, I said to her, which although I think is probably true, might just as easily be a lie. I have a picture of Jessica in my head but it changes, flickers, fades if I try to look at it directly. The last time I saw her I was thirteen years old, when Jessica would have been eleven, and I haven’t seen so much as a photograph of her in all the time that has passed since. So those high-drawn cheekbones I mentioned, those bottomless brown eyes—I can see them when I picture my sister but that doesn’t mean they were genuinely there.
And what I said about her being brave. Again, it’s how I remember her but it’s an impression based solely on one thing: the fact that she did what I couldn’t bring myself to do. I’m living proof that I simply never had the guts.
I have memories of us being together, of course I do, but even these feel like half-remembered dreams. So really, when it comes down to it, there are only two things about my sister I can be certain of. I know I never loved her enough. And I know it was my fault she died. Or perhaps it’s misleading to separate the two when one led so directly to the other.
—
I SAY I never loved Jessica enough. The truth, actually, is that I hated her. Not just because she was my annoying baby sister but because our father treated her so differently from the way he’d always treated me. He never hit her, not once, not even on one of those rare occasions when he lost his temper. Lost control, rather. She was spared too from the put-downs, the denigration, the subtle criticisms he’d so expertly honed. The humiliation. The fear. For me there was no escaping his sadistic games, whereas Jessica was firmly a spectator. Although of course this was part of the game-playing as well. My father was manipulating me to resent my little sister to deflect some of the hatred I felt for him. Manipulating my mother too. At the time I resented her as much as I did Jessica. She could have stood up for me. She chose not to. But Jessica was at least part of the reason why. It was as though my father had a knife to my baby sister’s throat. One little slip on my mother’s part and my father’s hand would have slipped too. He was doing what the Romans did. Was it the Romans? Dividing us, basically, so he could rule.
But whatever. It worked, is all that matters. My sister wanted to be friends; I wouldn’t let us. And I think, just as an aside, that’s why my memories of her are so unclear. The therapists I saw, they all said I’ve repressed those memories because I had to. Sort of like a defense mechanism. Not sort of. Exactly. They say those memories are all still there but to protect myself from the guilt I feel I’ve hidden them behind a wall. Except that wall, if you ask me, came earlier. I never paid my sister enough attention. Never cared enough about who she was to form any lasting memories of her in the first place. Plus the other thing is, I’ve tried. To remember, I mean. If those memories are all still there, how come I can’t see them? I mean, for fuck’s sake: I remember everything else. Everything. Why, if I can remember all the evil shit from my childhood, can I not remember the only thing that was good?
I killed her the day I left home. She died two months later, after an overdose of our mother’s sleeping pills, but it was my leaving her—my abandoning her—that cost my sister her life.
I left on my fourteenth birthday. The night before, to be precise. Birthdays were always special to my father. The day I turned seven, he held my face down against the candles on my cake. Not for very long. Just until I began to scream. And over time his means of celebrating my birthdays (my mother’s too—she didn’t escape the annual ritual; only Jessica did) became more elaborate. He began to plan for them, the way normal people plan for Christmas. For my twelfth birthday, for example, he bought me a kitten. A little gray one. At first I couldn’t believe my father had been so generous. I don’t mean in terms of money. My father was well-off enough—and I suppose, by extension, we all were—that money itself was never an issue. What I mean is, generous in terms of his affection. Because that’s what it must have been—right? For him to have bought me something I’d so desperately wanted? He must have loved me on some level after all. Maybe I’d finally done something to make him proud.
He waited two weeks. Enough time for Pipkin (What can I say? Watership Down was my favorite book of all time.) to establish himself as the central focus of my life. To be honest a day would have been enough but I suppose he wanted to be sure I was truly in love, and the anticipation, for my father, would have been half the thrill. A fortnight then, before he killed him. What he said was that Pipkin got hit by a car. That when I’d left for school that morning, I’d forgotten to close the front door. But I hadn’t forgotten. I was sure I hadn’t. I’d been careful to the point of paranoia for the entire fortnight. And when I saw Pipkin’s body—when my father showed me his body, laid out on a sheet of newspaper in the middle of the kitchen table—there wasn’t a mark on him. No blood, no dirt, nothing. Even through my tears I was sure of that. Plus, if it had really been my fault, my father would have been furious. Instead it was all he could do not to smile.
It was my next birthday—my thirteenth—that proved the tipping point. After Pipkin you might have thought I would have wised up a bit but part of my father’s talent lay in lulling you in the build-up to his next assault. This time he promised me a celebration. I didn’t have friends, so there was no sense in my even wishing for a party. I wasn’t unpopular as such, just overlooked, I suppose you could say, because at school I kept to myself. But there was this one girl, Helen Donohue, who gradually, over about a year, I’d become sort of close to. That’s what I thought, anyway. Once or even twice a week, and at first more by accident really, we’d fall in next to each other on the walk home from school. And I guess my father must have seen us. I tried to deny it when he asked me about her—she’s not a friend, I don’t even know her full name—because somehow, even though it had never been explicitly stated, I knew a friend wasn’t something I was permitted to have. But my father saw through that, obviously, saw through my longing to have someone, anyone, I could confide in. And he suggested that for my birthday we invite Helen over. For a birthday tea, if I wasn’t too grown up for such a thing. I was skeptical, of course. Not of my father’s suggestion—I’d been desperate to have a birthday tea since I’d turned four years old. Rather, that this wasn’t just another of his tricks. But like the naive fucking wanna-be-loved I was, I decided to trust in what he promised. I couldn’t help myself. The potential reward, compared to the risk, was just too great.
On my birthday Helen was due at five. My mother took me shopping in the afternoon—for a new dress, for a birthday banner, for something special for me and Helen to eat and drink. It was the happiest day I could remember . . . until we came home in the middle of the afternoon and found Helen already there.
My father had rearranged the time. When my mother, Jessica and I walked in, Helen was seated on the sofa. My father was in the living room as well—s
tanding up and with his back to the window. He didn’t say anything when we entered the room. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on Helen. I looked at her too and saw what I’d missed when I’d first entered. She looked afraid. Not just afraid. Terrified. The way I felt inside whenever my father threatened me.
“Helen? What are you doing here? What . . . what’s the matter?” I turned to my father. “Dad? What did you . . .”
Helen stood and, after a frightened glance toward my father, scurried in the direction of our front door. I trailed her into the hallway, catching my father’s glint of satisfaction on my way out.
“Helen? Helen, wait. My birthday . . .”
She turned on me, showing anger rather than fear now that we were alone.
“You’re a freak,” she hissed, through tears I’m not sure she was aware she was shedding. “You, your dad, your entire family: you’re freaks.”
They were the last words she ever uttered that were addressed directly to me. I don’t know what my father said to her that day. Nothing, obviously, that Helen would ever have been able to prove. All I knew at the time was that the birthday celebration my father had promised me was another mirage, and that my friendship with Helen was over before it had even begun. Worse—and this, I came to realize, was the real point of my father allowing Helen over, other than the heartbreak he got to witness in me—whatever my father said to Helen convinced her to turn the other kids against me too. Maybe he instructed her to spread the rumors she did. Maybe he didn’t have to. Either way, from being ignored I became the most hated girl at school. That’s what it felt like, anyway. Not only was I a freak, I was a dyke, a bed-wetter, a slut: every cruel and vindictive label my teenage peers were able to think of somehow got tarred to me. School had been my refuge up until that point, the one place in the world I felt safe. But then, after Helen, there wasn’t anywhere I didn’t feel afraid.
And that’s when it hit home, I suppose: the realization that I’d never be able to have a relationship with anyone on terms that weren’t dictated by my father. Even harder to bear was the sudden knowledge that my father didn’t love me one bit. I’d always assumed I must have been precious to him on some level, no matter how deeply his affection was buried. But it wasn’t true. He hated me, loathed me—and rather than let me be happy, he would do whatever he could to ensure everyone else in the world hated me too.
—
SO YEAH, IT was that, together with the prospect of another birthday celebration, that finally prompted me to leave. In the middle of the night, with a backpack full of peanut butter and Dairy Milk, and a rolling pin from the utensil drawer for protection. Just in case my father should think to follow me. My leaving, though; it changed everything. I wasn’t supposed to go. I wasn’t allowed to. My father wouldn’t just have been angry. He would have been vengeful. Old Testament–level pissed. I can’t imagine what he must have put Jessica through in the weeks leading up to the day she died. Or I can, actually. I can imagine it all too well. All those barriers he’d set up around her would immediately have come tumbling down, all the wickedness that had been kept at bay sent crashing in. I’ve had years to hone the images I carry with me, to refine the scenes that play sharpest in my sleep. Ironically, it’s when I imagine my father hurting her that my memories of my sister are at their clearest. It’s not her face I see, though. It’s her feelings. I can see the pain that twists her fragile features and the fear that shadows her eyes. The hurt is there too. The sense of betrayal.
I only heard about Jessica’s death by accident. When I left, I left for good—I became Sydney Baker, in my head, the very next morning. (Sydney because I liked that it was sort of a boy’s name and also that it was a place so far away. I don’t remember why I chose Baker. Maybe I was standing outside a Greggs or something at the time.) For the first two months, however, I didn’t venture beyond the borders of my home county. My medium-term plan was to go to London but at first I didn’t have the courage and flitted instead between the innumerable B&Bs that served the tourists who in the summer came to visit the coast. If I’d left right away I might never have seen the story that ran one day in the local newspaper.
“Tragedy Strikes Prominent Local Businessman,” the headline read, and there below the fold was a picture of my father. My first thought—my first hope—was that he was dead. Hit by a bus, crushed by a tree, struck by a divine bolt of lightning. I’d imagined so many potential scenarios over the years that there was very little I could have found written in the story that would have taken me by surprise. About the only thing that could have, I suppose, was the news I eventually read.
Even the newspaper blamed me. It was only the reasoning that they got wrong. They implied Jessica’s suicide was a response to my running away, which I suppose was accurate enough. But it was grief that induced her to take those sleeping pills, they said, anguish at whatever fate she imagined had befallen me. My father was depicted as a victim. An upstanding pillar of the community who, in the space of two short months, had seen calamity intrude on his life twice. They even ran a quote, addressed to me. “If you’re out there,” he said, “reading this, I’m begging you to please come home. For my sake. For yours. And for your mother’s.” They said it was a plea. It was obvious to me it was a threat.
I considered it. Not because of my mother. Frankly, she only entered my thoughts again years later. What I wanted was to punish myself and what could have been more fitting than to let my father do it for me? On the other hand I wasn’t prepared to let him win. For a time after my sister’s death that was the only thing that kept me going: the determination to make my father suffer to the same degree that Jessica had. I hope he was punished, Elsie said to me and ultimately I suppose he was. Not enough, though. Not in my book. Not anywhere close to enough.
That rolling pin wasn’t the only thing I’d taken to protect me. I took paperwork too. Notes, bank statements, the contacts book my father kept in his briefcase—anything and everything I could gather from his office in the hours before I stole away. I didn’t know what any of it proved but I was sure some of it would show something. Because on top of everything else my father was also a crook. He was a cheat, a swindler, a liar—and a flagrant one at that. He wasn’t careful. He never even bothered to lock his briefcase. For him that was part of the game: the brazenness with which he got away with all the awful things he did. No one in their right mind would try to defy him. Unfortunately for him I wasn’t in my right mind, not after what had happened to Jessica.
All it took was a postage stamp and a phone call, to the same newspaper that had lauded my father as an upstanding pillar of our community. Probably not even the documents I supplied were strictly necessary. A hint would have been enough: the suggestion of where to start digging based on the information I’d picked up eavesdropping over the years on my father’s phone calls. With the interview he’d given about Jessica, you see, he’d set himself up for a fall. All I did was give him a push. And I got to watch, most importantly, where he landed. In a vat of boiling sewage would have been my choice but prison was the next best thing.
After that—after I was safe—I came undone. The booze, the drugs, the comfort fucks—the real self-harm, it started then. I eventually made it to London but London, in my state of mind, was the worst place in the world for me to be. Christ knows how I got a job. Christ knows how I kept it. For an entire decade my life felt like an oversight—an accounting error in my favor that someone was inevitably going to call in.
But I thought I was through it. I thought that, thanks to Jack, I’d finally come out the other side. Apparently, though, I was kidding myself. This isn’t a new episode in my life. It’s part one again playing on repeat.
—
JACK SAYS THAT what happened to Elsie is his fault. He was the one who made the call. He was the one who suggested involving children’s services in the first place. But that’s all Jack’s input amounted to. Suggestions. There’s no wri
ggling out of the fact that ultimately he was following my lead.
The system then. The people who came back to us saying there was nothing they could do. I suppose I could try blaming them instead. Except I knew the system as well as they did. I knew how carefully they would have to tread, how protracted any intervention in Elsie’s situation would need to be. I’d said as much to Jack. I’ve written it down in these pages. It’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. What did I think? That just because I wanted things to be different this time, they would be? I know I’m not that naive. Not anymore.
I’ve tried blaming Elsie, whose courage failed her at the last. Again, though, I remember exactly what it was I told Jack. Elsie’s not going to say anything. Trust me. How can I hold her responsible when her only failing—not even a failing, a feeling—was to be afraid? And blaming Elsie would be like blaming the victim for the crime. They deserved to get burgled for buying themselves a nice TV. She was asking to get raped when she chose to wear a dress that didn’t cover her knees. I know I’m not that naive either. I know I’m not that fucking stupid.
I do blame Elsie’s father. I don’t know what he did to her after the nice man from social services finished up his cup of tea. Maybe he didn’t do anything. Maybe he only promised he would. That’s how it works sometimes. When people are watching, the debt you owe isn’t always called in right away. You pay it eventually, though, and the interest in the interim begins to accrue. Elsie would have been as much aware of that as anyone.
But even Elsie’s father can’t deflect the responsibility that lies with me. I showed the same shortsightedness I’d demonstrated with Jessica. The same selfishness. Apart from anything, I was the one who gave Elsie the idea. When you’re caught inside a dungeon, even the faintest flicker in the dark is like a promise of daylight. And if it turns out not to be, if it turns out instead to be a burning staircase . . . Well, you take your chances anyway.
