That’s where I stand.
That’s all the airtime I’ll dedicate to this issue, so let’s proceed.
What we know so far about Arla Macleod is that there were some issues that could have, and perhaps should have, been identified in her teenage years. Some of these stem from allegations about the family dynamic itself. Unfortunately not a lot is known about the inner workings of the Macleod family; by all accounts we’ve heard so far, they kept themselves to themselves. Arla’s parents had no close friends in Stanwel, Lancashire – the small mining town they moved to from Saltcoats, Ayrshire when Arla was two years old. We do know that the Macleods were staunchly Catholic and that Arla’s mother, Lucy, was very conscious of keeping up appearances. Sadly, Arla’s younger sister, Alice, has barely even been mentioned in this series.
So it is Alice Macleod I am going to try to explore in this episode. And Paulette English is someone who may be able to shed some light on her.
I open our chat with a question about Alice. A tumble dryer clanks away in the background, and makes the room faintly steamy.
—I’m sorry about the racket, love. I hope it don’t interfere with your whatssama-thingy there. It’s on the blink, this.
—Were you friends with both the Macleod girls?
—Yeah. Well no, not really. It were Arla I was mates with; Alice was the more … the more sociable one when she were younger, you know? Arla sort of floated round in her own little world, like she was always on the edge of everything, everyone.
—Did you meet the Macleod sisters together, then?
—That was a long time ago, but yeah, they was always together when they was little. You couldn’t have one without the other.
—Inseparable?
—Yeah, but in a funny way, you know? Like, you know when you see chicks? Baby chickens, little fluffy ones all crowding round each other under those hot lamps – they sort of reminded me of that. Arla would pick up Alice from primary after she’d finished at Saint Theresa’s. You’d see them both scuttling past, like, with their hoods up. All the other kids with their mams or dads or whatever and them two little girls on their own.
Mind you, my memory might be…
—What was your personal opinion of the Macleod sisters back then? I mean yours rather than the general one?
—This is going to sound well harsh, but it was hard to feel sorry for them. It sounds proper bad, doesn’t it, but I’m only being honest. I’m like that, me – speak my mind these days, more than I did back then; loads more. Anyway, it wasn’t just me who felt like that.
—Are you saying that people thought badly of Arla and Alice? Did people pick on them?
—Not so much picked on, but sort of not pitied either, like I say. It were more like people just … people thought they were a bit strange, you know, but not in like, an interesting way, more in a sort of … like they was, like, I dunno. There was summat odd about them, like, it were catching. I dunno, kids are funny aren’t they?
—Were there any rumours? Did anyone speculate about the Macleod sisters?
—Oh yeah, there was loads of daft stuff floating about. People used to say all sorts. But it was only when I got to know Arla in year eleven that I found out that most of it was sort of true … but … but not in the way you’d expect.
—Can you expand on that at all?
—So there was this rumour going round – this was in year eight maybe – that Arla was only allowed to whisper at home. Honestly, I dunno where it came from; someone might have made it up. But everyone used to whisper to each other – ironically, I suppose – passing it on that Arla and Alice weren’t allowed to talk properly at home. And … it feels proper bad now telling you this … but we used to, like, jump out on them – try and make them scream. It wasn’t anything nasty – not proper nasty, not bullying, but just enough to give them a fright, you know? Just enough to get them to make a noise. And sometimes people would try and make Arla swear.
—Make her?
—We would just crowd round her and get her to shout ‘fuck’ or ‘bitch’ or something – it was just daft stuff.
—What were the other rumours about the Macleods?
—Oh, most of them were just stupid. It was cos her parents were proper Jesus freaks and that, weren’t they? We heard things, like they had to get up at 5 am and pray, and that they didn’t get presents at Christmas – that sort of thing, you know? Just stupid stuff.
—You said that when you got to know Arla a bit better, you were surprised that a lot of the school rumours turned out to be true.
—I tell you what, I only ever went inside Arla’s house once. I always used to have to wait at the front door for her. No one told me to, I just got the feeling I had to, you know? And no one ever asked me to come in. Arla either poked her head around the door and was, like, ‘I’ll just get me coat’ and would shut it again, not properly, just so there was like a millimetre open, and then she’d come out.
—What happened that time you went inside?
—Nothing happened as such, it was just uncomfortable. Inside the house it were dead, like … still and cold, like a museum, and it smelled funny. You know how people’s houses have a smell, like, if they eat lots of chips, there’s that oily smell; or if they have a dog, that has a smell too? Arla’s house was like … it was like the smell of a museum or an antiques shop or something, like, cold, dusty stillness. It looked old too, like it had dead thick carpets and all this tacky stuff – these oil pictures on the walls of like, the Last Supper and Jesus and that, and the sort of stuff you see in a charity shop, you know?
—How old were you?
—Oh, we were in college by then, and I was … me and Arla were in a sort of wilderness phase, you know? We were going out all the time and that. I remember Arla creeping around that house and keeping her voice dead low as if someone was asleep upstairs. I just remember thinking about all the things we used to say about them in school and if some of it was true, like, just a little bit. And … well … how sad was that? How horrible it must have been for them girls when they was kids.
I never properly met her parents. Me and Arla, we was pretty close as we got older, but it was like … not like they avoided meeting me or didn’t want to; it was more like they just didn’t care. My existence meant nothing to them. I was their daughter’s best mate and that didn’t matter in any way to them. That was sad. I sort of understood, then, where Arla was coming from.
—Are you talking about when she rebelled – in her teens? From what I know about Arla Macleod, she changed a lot when she got to around year eleven in school, is that right?
—Yeah. But the thing about that, you see, I watched that documentary and read all the papers and that, and that’s what they all said – that something changed for her around that time, that she started listening to Skexxixx, dressing in black and became a maniac. But it was bollocks, all of it.
—How do you mean?
—Because what they didn’t say, what they didn’t point out was that that happens to pretty much everyone when they get to that age. They failed to mention that all over the world, loads of girls and lads start rebelling, start finding themselves. Every teenager does that at some point – every one of them. There was plenty of other things about Arla’s life that they didn’t want to look into. Things that would make the school, the authorities look bad.
—What sort of things?
—Well, the real reasons she changed. They never questioned how she went from this weird little nobody to … to what she became. They never looked properly at that. Instead it was all about the music stuff, the image: ‘Oooh, blame nasty, evil Skexxixx and his lyrics for corrupting our kids’. Proper Daily Mail bollocks, that’s what it was, but nearly everyone swallowed it. Everyone was happy to swallow it cos it were easier than looking at what they could have done to help her!
—Not you though?
—No. Like I say, I never properly knew Arla before year eleven, she was just this quiet little oddball, you know? We all k
new who she was, her and Alice, because we’d most of us been through primary school with them. But once everyone were used to them, they passed us by.
—So how did you two become friends?
—It was a strange one, that. You see, it was Alice who kind of got us together. At a netball match.
—How did that happen?
—They were always together at first, them two, but by year nine, they’d started going in very different directions. There’s no nice way of putting this, I’m afraid – Alice was the pretty one. Arla was gangly, skinny, wiry; her hair was always a mess and her skin was always, like, freckly and spotty. Alice though, she was, like, she was developing better and she never wore make-up and that; she just had this sort of natural beauty to her. I swear, even in year seven you could tell she was going to be a beauty. And Alice was on the netball team – she was good at sports, where Arla was just … she was different…
—Do you think Arla resented that?
—And that’s why she killed her? Sorry, no. I mean maybe, but I dunno. I dunno what was going on in Arla’s head.
—Sorry, we will go back to how you became friends with Arla, but I must ask: do you think, in your heart of hearts, that there were signs back then – of Arla’s problems, her mental illness?
—I … You know when you’re that age there are some kids who you can tell have real problems? Then there’s those that are just ‘mad’? We all just thought, ‘That Arla, she’s proper mad isn’t she?’ Huh, probably not the best word to use, eh?
—What was your personal experience of her? Who was the Arla that you knew?
—OK love, look, I’ve talked about it so many times. I’ve said so much, and you know what? No one’s listened. Those what made that documentary about her, all they was interested in was the violence, like, how she was with other girls and that.
—But you didn’t see that side of her?
—They said Arla was this, like cult leader almost. They had her up as the female Charles Manson! Some of the claims were just daft. They said that she had, like, a harem of little Skeks who ran riot over the school. Bullshit, all of it; utter crap! I’ll tell you the first and only time I ever saw Arla be violent was to that prick Jobba.
—Keith Jobson, the school bully, right?
—Yeah it was. It was early on, maybe the first week of year eleven. Not long before we became friends really. I can still hear what he said, his voice in my head, it were horrible. Sometimes, late at night it comes back. Arla had grown quite a bit over the summer – she’d got taller, skinnier. I’m not saying she wasn’t pretty but … but she was still just so gangly, like a stick insect – clumsy-looking. And she always wore that Skexxixx hoodie zipped up even when it was hot.
So, she’s walking past the wall where Jobba and his mates are all sat and he shouts out: ‘The fuckin’ state of that! Walks round like it got shagged all over!’
I dunno what he was on about, what he meant, why he said something like that, but Arla just lost her shit and battered him. He had two black eyes for about a week afterwards. It served him right, the prick. Jobba used to call all the little Skexxixx kids ‘vampire freaks’ but he never said anything to Arla again after that. He made sure he never even went near her. Typical of him, the twat.
—In the documentary, there was a notable scene where someone alluded to being ‘intimidated’ at school by Arla and her gang. Presumably that included you.
—Ha! Yeah. And we all knew who was accusing us!
—Who?
—Jobba’s little girlfriend. Tracey Allitt. A vindictive little cow. After it came out about what Arla did to her family, suddenly Tracey and her mates had all been ‘bullied’ by Arla and me and Debs. But everyone who went to Saint Theresa’s knew it was her who was the bully – Tracey and her nasty little gang. She were just a female Jobba. Match made in heaven them two. But no one said anything. Because of what Arla did. Because then maybe … maybe it wouldn’t altogether have been Arla’s fault, right?
—So was it ever true? About you and Arla and … I’m presuming you mean Deborah Masterson?
—What do you think? It’s pathetic isn’t it? All those years, a family all killed and people like Allitt actually get money to go on telly and lie, just to wriggle out of any idea whatsoever that their bullying of Arla could have had any sort of influence on what happened. Pathetic. It goes to show that people like her, people like Jobba, they never really grow up; they never change.
—Are they still together?
—Oh yeah. They used to live near me when I were back in Stanwel. They moved to somewhere in the Midlands I heard. Filled another garden with rubbish and screaming kids. I mean, c’mon, they’re both stupid, ugly, ignorant people. They deserve each other.
—Was there not the opportunity for those of you who actually knew Arla to dispute what they said?
—Well, like I told you, we tried, but the newspapers and that, they just weren’t interested; it didn’t make a good story did it? I was going to keep going, keep trying to fight for Arla, to try and stop this story that she was … that it was all sort of inevitable but…
—But?
—I dunno … I’ve got kids and that now, life gets in the way, doesn’t it?
A part of me at this point wonders if Paulette has also been receiving strange communications telling her to leave things alone. I am about to ask, but something tells me it’s not a good idea, not now. I don’t want her to clam up, to ask to end the conversation.
So, for now, at least, I move back to safer ground.
—Going back to when you first really got to know Arla: you said it was during one of Alice Macleod’s netball games? Did Arla used to stay after school and watch her sister, then?
—Yes. That’s right.
—What about the girls’ parents? Were they ever there?
—I never saw her mam or dad come to any of those netball games, not even once, save to pick her up afterwards if she had swimming training. That’s proper bad that, isn’t it? And before you say it was cos they worked, that’s bullshit. Arla’s dad did the bins and her mam was in a school but she wasn’t even a teacher. And them netball games never started till four.
—So Arla attended those games almost as a surrogate mother to her sister, you think?
—Well, now I think about it, there was probably two reasons why she did it. She was either there to support Alice – to show her that someone cared; that someone gave a shit, you know? The other reason – and this was the more likely one, I thought – was that she preferred it to going home. Arla going to watch her perfect sister be brilliant at something was better than going home.
—Maybe Arla really wanted to support her sister?
—I doubt it. Anyway it was then, during one of those games, when me and Arla became mates.
—How did that occur?
—Well I think it started cos we was both wearing them Skexxixx hoodies, you know?
—Those infamous hoodies.
—Oh I know, it was just ignorant all that, just so ignorant. It made me proper mad. Did you notice on the reconstructions that the actresses that played me and Arla were wearing those leather jackets? Studs all over them. They cost more than we could have ever afforded. And it looked daft, I mean, like, they made it look like we proper stood out, like we were these proper freaks.
—Not an accurate representation of your image then?
—Ask anyone who was there and they’ll tell you the same thing. None of us looked anything like that. Hang on … I got these ready to show you.
Paulette reaches across the table and pulls out a pile of printouts – old photographs.
—I did a bit of digging around and found a pen drive with these pics. There were a few from school of me and Arla. Look … We were hardly extreme, were we? I think the most expensive thing I owned, that any of us owned, was a pair of knock-off Doc Martens from Stanwel market! But they weren’t even particularly rebellious! When you pulled your school trousers over them, they
just looked like school shoes.
I’m not sure whether it’s the way they’ve been printed, but Paulette’s few photographs have a sepia tinge. It looks like they were taken in summer. She and Arla are half in and half out of their uniforms – school shirts on, no ties, black hoodies with the Skexxixx ‘S’ logo running down each sleeve. Both girls have cigarettes in their hands and both are sticking their tongues out at the camera.
These could be any schoolgirls in any summer, anywhere in the country.
—You see? That was about as daring as we got! Miss McKay used to tell us to ‘tone down the eyeliner, girls’ but that was about it. That was the most anyone ever said to us. In the documentary, me and Arla were sat at the back in those expensive leather jackets wearing spiked wristbands and that; it looked ridiculous.
—You said that Arla adopted this, albeit not particularly extreme, look just after the summer holidays before year eleven, is that right?
—Well, that was when I noticed her, yeah. That’s how we started chatting.
—Why were you at the netball game? Did you know someone who was playing?
—That’s the thing, you see: I was there for the same reason that I thought Arla was. Maybe it was intuition or something. Maybe I thought I saw it in her too…
—That it was better than being at home, you mean?
—Exactly. It’s funny how people like us find each other, isn’t it?
I don’t press this point, and this seems to create a pause in the conversation. Throughout this part of the interview, my phone has been buzzing in my pocket, so I pull it out while we take what feels like a natural break. In front of our respective screens we both sip tea, and Paulette issues a few commands to her children, who have traipsed into the kitchen; they duly exit out into the garden to play with the dogs. Turning away from my webcam, I check my phone. There are a few text messages from a number I don’t recognise:
From: [Unknown number]
I told you to stop.
Hydra Page 11
