by Neil White
He stepped out of the car and walked slowly up the path to his mother’s front door. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find when he got there but he felt the need to go back to where it had started.
His mother still lived in the home he’d grown up in, a once happy family home, a semi-detached behind a low garden wall where he’d lived with his parents, his older brother Sam, and his younger sister Eleanor. Or Ellie, as she’d preferred it.
As he walked up to the door, the familiar sights calmed him, flooding his mind with images. Playing in the road with Sam; chalking arrows onto the pavement so he could follow. Falling out with neighbours over lost footballs and those slow walks to school. All of that innocence was lost when Ellie died. From then, the house seemed to be in shadow, always an unhappy place; even Ruby couldn’t brighten it.
So Joe had run away. First to university, then to a series of flats around the city, rented from landlords who crammed people into every tiny space they could create, until he bought his own place. Anywhere but home.
He knocked on the front door, and watched as his mother’s shadow grew larger behind the frosted glass panel. She opened the door warily, the chain still on.
‘Joe?’ she said, surprised. ‘Is everything okay?’ And she unlocked the chain to let him walk in.
‘Morning. I was passing and I fancied a cuppa,’ he said, trying to sound casual. It was if he was thinking through fog, only able to see a short distance ahead.
His mother smiled. ‘I’ll make you one,’ she said, and shuffled back along the hallway to the kitchen at the rear of the house.
Joe knew that she had a hard day ahead. She’d finally listened to his concerns that she was drinking too much, that Ruby, the baby of the family, needed looking after. Ruby was fifteen, at that age when being allowed to make her own decisions invariably led to bad ones. His mother had sunk into a routine of drinking that started earlier and earlier each day, and one day, when Joe had caught her reaching for a glass before Ruby had left for school, he’d told her that enough was enough.
So for his mother, each day was about not being left with nothing to do, the silence too easily filled by the sound of vodka pouring into a glass.
When Joe followed her inside, he felt the stifling heat of her radiators, the heating turned on even though it was early summer. The cheeriness of breakfast TV drifted from the living room and, when he looked in, his sister Ruby was sitting with her legs over the chair arm and a bowl of cornflakes in her hand.
On another day, he might have suggested that she used the table. Ruby had always been allowed to do what she wanted, treated like a precious doll. On this day, it didn’t seem important. After what the family had been through, eating breakfast sprawled in an armchair didn’t seem like much of a big deal.
‘Hi, sis,’ he said.
‘Joe, what are you doing here?’ she said, her mouth full.
Concern flashed across her face, perhaps expecting a long lecture. Their father had died when Ruby was young, so Joe and Sam had tried to step into the breech whenever his mother couldn’t cope. Which was often.
‘I just wanted to say hi,’ he said, and went into the room.
‘So you’re not here to have a go at me?’
‘No, I’m not,’ he said, and sat on the sofa. It sagged under his weight, and he wanted to sink into it. He closed his eyes for a moment, but the lack of sleep made his head dip and his legs twitch.
Ruby giggled. ‘You look like you’ve been out all night.’
Joe paused as his mother brought him a tea. He raised his cup. ‘That’s how it is sometimes.’
Ruby shrugged and finished her cereal, putting her bowl on the floor. ‘So what do you really want?’
Joe thought about that. The truth was that there wasn’t an answer.
‘Let me walk you to school,’ he said.
Ruby rolled her eyes dramatically and swung her legs over the chair arm. ‘This is a lecture. What have I done now?’
‘I just want to spend some time with my baby sister,’ he said. ‘There’s not enough of that.’
Ruby frowned. ‘Okay, if you must,’ she said, and stood up. She went upstairs to finish getting ready, leaving the bowl for someone else to clear away.
Joe looked around the room. It had hardly changed since he’d left home years earlier. A gas fire with fake coals sat beneath a wooden fireplace with glued-on mouldings. The wallpaper was thick and with two designs, a flowered border separating the two. He’d tried to persuade his mother to change the look, to go for something more modern, but she said she didn’t want the fuss. Joe knew the real reason, though: she didn’t want to move on.
The real reason for his visit was the large picture above the fireplace. His little sister, Ellie. Like Ruby, she’d been a tangle of long limbs that had not yet learned to be graceful. On Joe’s eighteenth birthday, she’d taken a short cut from school, along a wooded path that cut out the long sweep of the road. The path twisted as it wound through the trees, so that for a hundred yards a person would be out of view from the road near the school or the ginnel that opened out near the house. Ellie had been told not to use the path, but Joe knew that she did.
Joe had woken in a good mood on his birthday. He’d opened some cards in the morning and the family were due to convene later, his uncles and aunts and cousins coming together from the different parts of Manchester, some of them from even further afield. His father had promised to take him to a nearby pub, wanted to be the person to buy him his first legal beer. Joe had appreciated that. His father hadn’t been the expressive type, but the placing of a pint glass in front of him would somehow be symbolic, the passage from boy to man.
As he looked, Joe pictured the scene again, as he did often. His birthday cards over the fire, presents in the corner of the room, his uncles and aunts and cousins and longstanding family friends all standing around and talking too loudly.
He’d come straight in from college; his A levels were looming –the last stop before university – so he’d spent the day in revision classes. The backslapping had started the minute he got home.
Nearly an hour passed before anyone mentioned Ellie. It was his mother who raised the alarm. Joe had swallowed and said nothing, just grimaced at the first churn of worry as he knew something had gone wrong.
His route home had taken him past the entrance to the wooded path. As he got closer, he saw Ellie ahead, her school bag swinging, wearing headphones that would blot out any shout he thought about making. She had turned into the path. She would be home a long time before him. She might have wanted it that way, so she could take in his delight at the gathering. If it had been another day, she might have walked home the long way. The safe way.
Joe had seen him. A figure in a grey hoodie, loitering, making as if to tie his shoelaces, his foot hoisted up onto a street sign. He looked up as Ellie walked towards him. Once she’d gone past, he strolled down the path after her.
Joe hadn’t thought anything of it, wouldn’t have carried on walking the long way if he had. It was just a man, a jogger, perhaps, stretching before his run. The man had seen Joe, caught his gaze. A blond fringe coming down from the hood, his face boyish almost, with pale and unblemished skin. The man had seen that someone had noticed him, so how could he pose a threat? Joe watched the man walk down the path. As Joe passed the entrance himself the man was a long way down it, Ellie already around the bend and lost to the trees.
Ellie hadn’t been there when Joe arrived home, but the fuss he’d received made him forget about her. She could be unreliable. She had a boyfriend she didn’t talk much about and sometimes went there after school. Ellie liked attention, and the focus would be off her for a few hours.
The police car came later. Joe had been upstairs, playing on a computer game he’d been given. He had known what it meant as soon as he heard the screams. Ellie.
A police officer had been holding his mother as Joe made his way down the stairs. His father was slumped in a chair, his arms around hi
s head, muffled no, no, no, no coming out.
The questions came later.
Ellie had been found partially undressed in the woods, her books scattered in the undergrowth, her underwear dragged down her legs and torn. Her school blouse had been ripped and deep bruising around her throat gave away how she died.
Joe could have stopped it. He’d seen the man follow her. If he’d gone, Ellie would still be alive. He would have been close enough to hear her screams. He could have rescued her, but he hadn’t. He’d let her walk along a shadowy path with a predator following her; he’d let her walk to her own death.
So when the police asked, he had said nothing, too scared to say what he’d done.
The face of the man had imprinted itself on his memory, though. He saw it whenever he thought about Ellie, however pleasant the memory was. Ellie as a young girl cooing over dolls, or annoying him deliberately by pulling faces at him when she thought no one could see her. Just the silly stages of childhood he was supposed to reminisce with her about, but he couldn’t. He never would.
And he’d seen the man’s face again that morning.
He’d been taken by surprise – at the police station for something innocuous – and then suddenly his mind had flashed back through the years as if rushing down a time tunnel. A memory was awakened that Joe knew to be true as soon as he saw him. A certainty that was whole.
Joe had seen the man who’d murdered his sister.
Five
He woke. He was in a chair in the workshop at the bottom of the garden, a blanket over him. Sweat drenched his forehead and his hair was plastered to the back of his neck. He looked around the workshop, hardly breathing, his eyes darting, certain he wasn’t alone. He listened: were there people outside his door? The murmurs of police or the soft clump of careful feet?
No, it was quiet.
He threw off the blanket and stretched, went to the window. A net curtain hung over the bottom part of the frame, a mix of yellow from nicotine and grey from age, making him invisible to those outside. The glass was covered in cobwebs and mould. He rubbed at it to get a view outside. A light was on in the house but he wasn’t ready to go up there yet.
He fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. The packet was crumpled, squashed against him in the chair, but there were still three left. He shuffled across the room, wiping his eyes, his skin tired and drawn, to the small Calor gas stove in the corner. When he lit it, the air was filled with that familiar smell of bottled gas. He bent down to light his cigarette and closed his eyes as he drew the first long lungful of smoke before placing a kettle onto the gas ring, shaking it first to check whether there was water in it.
There was a heater next to a wall. It needed a few pushes of the button to make it come on but it lit suddenly with a whoosh. The day would get warmer outside but it took a while to make its way into the workshop.
He went back to his chair and sought the warmth of the blanket once more. He looked at his fingers. Nicotine-brown.
The workshop had been standing for a long time. Pebble-dashed sides and single-glazed windows, the roof corrugated iron, it was filled with tools along one wall: chisels, small files, gardening equipment further along. It had been his wife’s father’s haven before he died, and his own retreat ever since he’d moved in. There were memories here, times of reflection.
He smiled and took another long drag. As he took his cigarette from his mouth, he thought he saw something ingrained in his fingers. Something red lodged into the fine ridges of his fingerprints.
He wiped his hands on his trousers and looked back towards the window. The light that filtered in was murky, struggling to make shadows across the floor. There were large candles spaced around, for those moments of reflection, so that the workshop came alive with warmth and flickering light. They were unlit. Not yet. Later.
His thoughts were interrupted by the shrill whistle of the kettle on the gas ring.
Ruby came downstairs in her school uniform. Her dark blue skirt was shorter than it ought to be, her legs covered by grey socks that went over her knees. Her tie wasn’t much more than a stub under the knot. She collected her bag, which had been discarded in a corner by the stairs, and shouted, ‘Bye, Mum,’ as she went through the door.
Joe’s mother appeared in the kitchen doorway and said, ‘Bye, love,’ and then to Joe, ‘Good to see you.’
Joe smiled. ‘I might come round later,’ he said, and then went to follow Ruby.
Just before he got out of the door, his mother called, ‘Are you all right, Joe? I mean, really all right?’
He nodded and waved. ‘I’m fine,’ and then joined Ruby on the street.
She was waiting with her arms folded, looking sullen. She gave a slight shiver. The day’s warmth hadn’t really got going and a light breeze fluttered her hair.
‘Come on,’ Joe said, and started walking.
‘So you’re not here to lecture me?’ she said, as she caught up.
‘Should I be? Anything you want to confess?’ When she didn’t respond, Joe turned to her. ‘I’m only teasing you. Nothing’s the matter, I promise.’
Ruby unfolded her arms and linked her arm in his, in that unselfconscious way that teenagers have sometimes.
The normal route to Ruby’s school was to turn right further along and follow the long curve of the road until it ended near her school. The quick way was to turn left and into the darkness of the path. To the spot where Ellie was killed.
Ruby was silent as they walked, but she faltered as they got to the entrance to path, as if she knew she ought to keep going because Joe was there, but really her habit was to turn left.
‘Come on, take the short cut,’ Joe said, pointing to the wooded path. ‘You’ll be fine with me here.’ He crossed the road and Ruby followed.
A canopy of trees cast deep shadows over the tarmac path, which sloped steeply to a small wooden bridge over a stream.
Joe was soon swallowed up by gloom. The morning sun was lost, except where it streamed through in the gaps between the branches, making spears of light. Their footsteps were in time with each other, the regular thump-thump broken only by the occasional rustles from the bushes and the loud chirp of a bird high up in the trees.
Joe’s nostrils filled with the crisp smell of damp grass and weeds. This was the part of the path that Ellie had never reached. A peaceful haven, the noise of the streets soon lost.
As they walked, Ruby said, ‘What was Ellie like?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because I never knew her.’
Joe wondered what to say as he thought about Ellie again. He remembered their fights, how she used to scream at him to come out of the bathroom, or when he’d chased her along the landing, flicking a towel at her legs because she’d shouted out that he had a girlfriend. Her younger days, when Ellie had dreamed of being a nurse and would make him pretend to be injured so that she could wrap his wounds in toilet paper, red felt tip marking out the blood on the make-believe bandages. Long trips in the car, with Ellie talking in his ear, a stream of nothing for the sake of just something to say, with sensible Sam ignoring her, looking out of the window.
‘She was a lot like you,’ Joe said.
‘I wish she wasn’t,’ Ruby said. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Because I know that I’m supposed to be her replacement, and it feels like I disappoint everyone because I don’t quite live up to her.’ She paused. ‘Mum says things.’
‘What like?’
‘We’ll argue about something, or I’ll say I won’t do something I don’t like, and it’s all, “Ellie would have done it,” and I want to scream at her that I’m not Ellie. I’m me. Ruby.’
Joe stopped walking. Ruby stopped too, her arm dropping from his.
‘It’s been difficult for Mum,’ Joe said. ‘She lost Ellie, and then Dad, and I know it’s made it tougher for you. Just don’t be too hard on her. I remember the Mum she was before Ellie died.’
‘What was she like?’
‘She was different. She was warm and fun and had time for us. If we had homework to do, she’d help, as if she enjoyed it. I remember I had to make a Roman helmet for history, and she made this fantastic one out of gold card, with red wool cropped and stuck on for the plume. I’m sad for you that you don’t know that woman. She won’t always get it right, because losing Ellie broke her, changed her so that she could never go back to the woman she was. Just try to understand her.’
‘I do try,’ Ruby said. ‘But why can’t my life be about me? Ruby Parker, not Ellie Parker.’ And with that she turned to carry on walking.
Joe watched her go for a moment. He understood what she meant, but it was impossible not to think of Ellie. She was right.
