Hydra

by Matt Wesolowski

  —Did she ever confide in you?

  —No! Of course not! I don’t think Arla ever confided in anyone. She was too … feral. Yes, that’s a good word for her. I don’t think she actually trusted anyone. But in those lessons we were in a delimited environment, where I could … study her. I’ll make no bones about it – she fascinated me. She really did. It was like there was this terrible emptiness inside her that was screaming, constantly screaming.

  —So what about this idea that she and her gang picked victims?

  —Horseshit, if you don’t mind the language. Like I say, it was a nice little narrative for the papers. And I suppose the people who were there at the time couldn’t help exploiting it. Imagine getting a message from a Sun journalist on Friends Reunited promising you hundreds of pounds to talk about some girl you hated at school who killed her family. It doesn’t matter what the truth is, then, does it? Her actions made her worthless, right? Imagine if you could get on prime-time television, tell a story with your face blacked out and your voice distorted, make even more money, look after your family, get your kids that present they’re hankering for? Who cares if it’s true – it’s only Arla Macleod, that psycho who killed her family. Who’s going to object?

  —What about her friends, Deborah and Paulette – did they sell their stories?

  —To be fair to them, they were as scared of Arla as the rest of us. As far as I know, they hid as far away as they could after Arla did what she did to her family. Cowards to the end, those two.

  —So why didn’t you make money from Arla’s story? Why are you telling me all this now?

  —Because I believe in what’s right. Because I noticed something about Arla that maybe no one else picked up on – not the teachers, not the other students. I’m not an expert; I’m not bigging up myself here. I’m just saying that it was easier to dismiss Arla as trouble rather than try to work out why she behaved like she did. Maybe if I tell you all this, it’ll exorcise some of my old ghosts? I don’t know.

  —So why do you think she behaved like that?

  —Remember those two boys who killed James Bulger back in 1993? And what about those two brothers in Edlington in 2009 – ten and eleven years old – who tortured and almost killed an eleven-year-old and only stopped because their ‘arms were tired’; those two were known as ‘the Devil Brothers’, for fuck’s sake. Look, I’m not saying that any of them should be absolved of the horrific things they did – all four of those children deserve punishment – but no one wants to look at why, about how those kids had been failed, had been turned into monsters … by eleven years old. They were monsters, yes, but also victims – victims of abuse and neglect. Victims of parents who had also been abused and neglected; parents who didn’t know how to parent. Monsters can only be made, monsters are not born.

  —So how do you think all that applies to Arla?

  —Look, I’m not here to accuse anyone of anything, I just think Arla Macleod killed her family for a reason. But I don’t know what that reason was.

  I will tell you about something I saw, though. I’ve never told anyone about it before because it’s not exciting, and it doesn’t fit the narrative. But to be fair it is a little bit strange.

  —OK…

  —Saint Theresa’s was pretty good about calling parents in when kids were playing up. So it wasn’t long after the start of year eleven that Arla’s mum got called to a meeting. It was Mr Whitton’s doing, as far as I know. How it worked was that the kid and their parent would have to meet with the head of year. I only knew Arla’s mum was there because I was on my way to the toilet in the middle of maths. The girls’ toilet was on the first-floor corridor. You had to walk along a kind of open balcony to get there, and from there you could look down and see the reception; they had this fancy new one – all glass and ceramics displays, trophies and signed football shirts, that sort of thing. Anyway, I was walking along to the toilet, and glanced down into reception and saw her sat there – Mrs Macleod, Arla’s mum.

  —How did you know it was her?

  —Arla was stood next to her. Honestly, they were the double of each other, those two. It was like a taller, fatter Arla had walked into school!

  Ms Caton, our head of year, was stood with them, her back to me. I stopped and I was scared. I should have kept going, but I don’t think I could have moved even if I wanted to.

  And I remember feeling there was something … wrong about it all. Arla was stood next to her mum, all sweetness and light, none of the tooth-blackener stuff or her Skexxixx hoodie; I’d never seen her look so meek, not since the year before. I mean, I fully expected her to be all attitude with her mum, but it was clear – no one was messing with Mrs Mcleod.

  —What were you scared of? Was it what Arla would do if she saw you and thought you were eavesdropping?

  —I … hmm … that’s a good question. I don’t think there was any one thing that scared me. I mean, like I say, the girl fascinated me and here was her mum too … I was scared, but I couldn’t resist listening. So I just sort of stood there, pretending to be fascinated by the netball trials poster on the wall. I knew I only had a few minutes to listen before either Arla, her mum or one of the reception staff saw me and called up to see what I was doing.

  So I stood, trying to keep just out of sight. I remember the sun was beating down outside and the air was totally still. I could hear Arla’s mum talking; she had this strong Scottish accent and it was like she was shouting and whispering at the same time. It came out like a sort of squeak, like the air coming out of a balloon.

  —What was she saying?

  —At the time, they resonated, those words, but I had no idea why; I was only young myself and had no clue.

  ‘I hope you realise, Arla,’ she was saying, her face really close to Arla’s, speaking almost through her teeth, ‘I hope you realise how this is making our family look.’

  Arla was nodding; she was nodding but her face was absolutely still, almost like a doll or a mannequin. She had tears pouring down her cheeks, but she was utterly silent.

  Mrs Macleod went on – I remember her teeth – they were bared, big, yellow and thick. It was like she hated Arla.

  ‘Do you want them calling round?’ she hissed. ‘Do you want them talking to your dad? Is that what you want? You’re making our family look awful. Is that what you want?’

  Arla was crying and shaking her head fast, like little kids do. She looked utterly humiliated.

  ‘What about your sister?’ Mrs Macleod kept saying, and she was jabbing Arla at the top of her arm with a long finger. ‘What about your sister? You want to destroy it all for her too? Everything we’ve built here. Is that what you want? You remember when we came here, do you? You remember me telling you about taking your chance, how you only get one? Well Alice is taking her chance, even if you’re not!’

  Something must have tickled my senses then because I … I somehow knew that one of them was about to look up. I remember just turning tail and walking back the way I had come, head up, shoulders back. Even if Arla spotted me, it would just look like I was walking along the balcony towards the corridor.

  But those words: ‘how this is making our family look’. I remember walking back to maths with the weight of them dragging at me. It’s like when you hear your parents swear. I thought about Arla’s tears and there was something … something, this flicker of understanding that everything wasn’t right, that there was something wrong for her.

  If you look at it and try to make sense of what she said … well, I mean, her daughter was stood there, crying, clearly messed up and she was more interested in how it was making her look, all the trouble Arla was getting into, you see? ‘I hope you realise how this is making our family look.’ She was almost saying that they’d given up on Arla. Like, instead of asking why Arla was behaving the way she was, they’d given up and were now concentrating on her sister instead. I think it was then when I really started feeling sorry for Arla. I only wish I’d been mature enough to rec
ognise that sort of narcissism back then. But it makes sense now, I suppose. No wonder Arla wanted to escape to ‘another place’.

  —So you got close to Arla after that day?

  —I was interested in her. We weren’t proper friends. But even that’s not quite right. Like I say, her whole … her whole thing fascinated me.

  —And you reached out to her?

  —In a small way at first. Like with a wild dog – you offer little bits of food to begin with, to show it you mean no harm. I’d sometimes point out answers, show her how to do little bits and bobs. We neither of us had much interest in French but, sat next to me, Arla didn’t really have much of an audience and didn’t disrupt as much. Soon enough, she began to treat me like I was … well, like she trusted me a little.

  —You and Arla talked, then?

  —Yes. Not intimately, not at first, but it was alarming how quick Arla was to share certain things with me. That’s what it was like with her: she was either furious with you, trying to control the conversation, or she was curled into herself, tucked away inside a shell so you couldn’t even get close.

  —Attachment issues?

  —Clearly. Again, I see that now, but why did no one see it then?

  Tessa pauses for a moment. I can tell she’s thinking carefully about what she’s going to tell me next.

  —Arla used to slash, she used to cut. Her forearms were criss-crossed with scabs and scars. She never tried to hide them, but she never showed them off either. They were just there. She told me she used to do it when she was so angry, or so sad, she didn’t know what else to do. It would ‘let some of the pain out’ she used to say. I used to tell her I understood. It was a cry for help. To anyone who’d listen.

  —None of the teachers picked up on this?

  —I don’t know. Maybe they did. In classes, though, I certainly never saw any sort of attempt to understand the way Arla was. But then again, they had thirty teenagers who all needed help, school inspectors breathing down their necks, and the government telling them they’re crap and worthless. You can see why a troublemaker like Arla might have slipped through the net.

  —Did you ever bring up Arla’s home life in your chats? Did you ever mention the incident with her mother?

  —I learned pretty quickly that if you asked Arla things she would clam up, shut down, retreat; you had to wait for her to volunteer information. And when she did it would be scattergun. So, she’d turn and ask me whether a word was masculine or feminine, then the next thing was, she’d tell me about how her mother hit her in the face the previous night…

  —She said that?

  —Yes. Just like, matter-of-fact. She wouldn’t look at me; just said it. Just dropped it into conversation: ‘My mum slapped me across the face last night.’

  I never asked why, I never said that was awful or anything. I just nodded, listened. Maybe that was why she kept telling me stuff.

  —What else did Arla tell you about her home life?

  —Not a great deal. I know she spent a lot of time on her own. Her sister was forever being driven to sports training and Arla would just be left in the house. And she’d just drop these things in when she felt like it: her mum slapped her, her dad made them all pray for an hour when they got home, that sort of thing.

  —Being left alone, being hit and being made to pray – it doesn’t sound like a happy home…

  —I suppose it doesn’t. But – and this sounds awful – I was more interested than concerned. How cold is that? But I’ve had my comeuppance. I’ll always live with the guilt that maybe if I’d said something, raised a concern, things may have been different.

  —So, do you think that some kind of intervention could have prevented Arla doing what she did to her family?

  —I think it’s pointless to speculate. Arla was, what, twenty-one when she killed her family? Still not a proper adult really. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. That’s the thing about looking back and regretting; you’ll never ever know for sure. It sounds so stupid now, but back then, if you’d have seen her, experienced her, this whirling dervish; all angles, all anger … I think a lot of people – school staff included – were more frightened of her than they wanted to admit.

  —Arla’s younger sister, Alice – was the same thing happening to her?

  —Alice was in a very different world from Arla. She was a swimmer, wasn’t she? Some sort of athlete. She was pretty as well – stunning if I remember right. She was one of the elite. She had the looks, the body, the winning smile. Alice Macleod certainly didn’t associate with the likes of me. You know, Arla never mentioned her to me, not even once. What does that tell you?

  —You say Mrs Macleod said ‘Alice is taking her chance, even if you’re not!’ What do you think that meant?

  —It’s a funny one. At first it sounds like the Macleods had clear ideas of how they wanted their daughters to behave. Arla maybe was a prototype? Alice was the real deal? They’d failed with Arla so they stopped bothering with her. Like I say, we never once talked about Alice. I sometimes wish we had.

  Tessa’s account of the Arla she knew has now added a bit more to the picture we are building up here. We already know that Lucy Macleod fled an abusive home life in Saltcoats when Arla and Alice were very young, that she then grew up in a staunchly religious environment. Stanley Macleod seems to have used the fact he ‘saved’ the family from Arla’s violent father as some kind of justification for the strictness he imposed. But Tessa’s story is now suggesting that Lucy Macleod was not the nurturing type either.

  Were these the beginnings – the touchpaper for Arla’s psychosis? Possibly. But I still feel we’re missing something significant.

  —Did Arla ever talk to you about things that sounded … odd. Seeing things that weren’t there, for example?

  —See that’s interesting. A lot of that was discussed when she was in court, wasn’t it? That she’d lost her grip on reality; that her psychosis had taken over, that sort of thing.

  Arla did used to talk a lot of rubbish about seeing things – demons, beings, ghosts, all that stuff.

  —Go on…

  —She used to tell me about the ‘thin places’ – places where you could go back and forth between here and other worlds.

  —To me, that sounds pretty significant.

  —Like I said earlier, Arla was obsessed with that second Skexxixx album. She spent her time on message boards, chat rooms, forums talking to other Skeks about it. All the theories behind it. To me, it seemed like just an escape to her … nothing more. What fifteen-year-old doesn’t want to escape?

  I’d like to take a moment to draw your attention to another track on the Through the Mocking Glass album entitled ‘Dead-Eyed March’, which, after speaking to Arla herself, strikes a strange chord within me.

  Again, like much of Skexxixx’s output, especially on Through the Mocking Glass, the lyrics deal with isolation and alienation. ‘Dead-Eyed March’ is a rather experimental track, mainly instrumental; it reminds me of one of the more languid and indulgent tracks on The Cure’s Disintegration album, but maybe that’s me showing my age. On this track, in the midst of the whirling guitars and feedback, Skexxixx’s voice wails a brief chorus:

  ‘A thousand black-eyed girls,

  A thousand black-eyed boys,

  Marching to a distant drum,

  Looking for a place called home…’

  It’s conjecture, of course, but was there something in this track that Arla fixated on? Arla’s story of the night she killed her family features a black-eyed girl and boy. Is this simply a coincidence?

  According to the various reviews I’ve read, Through the Mocking Glass was an attempt to speak about conformity and how it can alienate those on society’s fringes. But coming in 2007, it was seen by many as behind the times and even irrelevant.

  But this is what a great many other alternative musicians talk about in their music, and always have. Arla, by year eleven, when she was about fifteen, clearly felt this way, so pe
rhaps it’s no wonder she identified with the content of the album.

  The link between this music and Arla Macleod cannot be ignored, therefore. Whether it is right essentially to blame music for heinous deeds committed by its listeners I don’t think it’s my place to say. But, I do agree with Tessa: things just aren’t that simple.

  Let’s go back to Tessa.

  —You said earlier that you weren’t surprised that Arla did what she did to her family. You also describe Arla as being troubled and intimidating.

  —I’ll tell you a bit about what it was really like to be at school in proximity to Arla Macleod. Now, like I say, I was in this privileged position of not being ‘in’ with her, but being deemed ‘alright’ enough not to get the full force of her rage.

  So I told you the story about Mr Whitton, the things she wrote in her book, the way she laughed and got everyone else laughing. That’s what was frightening about Arla, she had no fear. She was not intimidated by anyone. She looked like this meek little thing; and I saw first-hand when she was with her mother that buried under all this anger there was a quiet girl. But there was one thing in particular that would bring the rage out. If anyone made a sexual remark to Arla, or said something about her body, she’d go … she’d go for them like an attack dog.

  —Can you give me any examples of this?

  —So the ‘bully’ at Saint Theresa’s was a lad called Keith Jobson – or ‘Jobba’ as everyone knew him. Jobba was like a silverback gorilla, but an ugly, white one, more like a troll, with a big scar down the side of his face. I’d been to primary school with Jobba, so I knew that it was from having a birthmark removed, but he used to tell people in high school that it was from ‘getting glassed’.

  Jobba liked to pick on the quiet little introverts – the boys with long hair and ‘Skexxixx’ written on their bags in Tipp-ex.