by Simon Lelic
My irritation with myself manifested in a sigh. These past few weeks I’d got worked up over things that for all I knew had been solely in my imagination, and all the time Syd had been struggling with this. Not just Syd. Poor Elsie, too.
‘The friend you mentioned the other night,’ I said. ‘The one you told me was in trouble. You meant Elsie. Right?’
Reluctantly it seemed, as though she knew I would be blaming myself, Syd nodded.
‘I’m sorry, Syd. I should have asked. I just … I’ve been preoccupied, I guess, like you say, and –’
Syd interrupted me by taking my hands. ‘You did ask, Jack. Remember?’
‘I know but –’
This time she silenced me with a kiss. ‘All that matters now is what we do from here. And as much as I try I just can’t come up with an answer.’
I frowned at that, pulled slightly away. ‘Surely we’ve got no other choice. We call the police. We have to.’
Syd left her hands resting on mine, as though she was worried I was about to bring my phone back up to my ear.
‘Please, Jack. Don’t. There’s a reason no one was there to witness it when he attacked you. And it’s the same thing at home. If he’s careful enough to hurt you without anyone seeing, he’ll be careful enough to cover his tracks with Elsie too.’
I sighed again and slid my phone on to the table.
‘So … what? He gets away with it? He attacks me in the middle of the street and I’m supposed to let him walk away?’
I knew the answer already, of course, even if I wasn’t ready to accept it. Syd was just staring at me, as though she didn’t like it any more than I did.
‘What about … social services?’ I said. ‘I mean, forget about what just happened. I’m talking about your friend now. About Elsie. They can help her, Syd. I know exactly who to call.’
Syd was already shaking her head. ‘They won’t help.’
‘They might, Syd.’
‘They won’t. They never do!’
Which was massively unfair, on the one hand, and I felt a certain sense of wounded professional pride. But on the other hand it was Syd talking and Syd had earned the right to be as critical of social services as she damn well pleased.
‘Things are different now, Syd. Better. I’ve seen it for myself. I promise you.’
‘But it’s the same thing. Don’t you see? Like with the police. Social services are going to want to see evidence. Any bruises Elsie’s got, her father will explain away. And Elsie’s not going to say anything. Trust me.’
‘She might. Mightn’t she? Given the opportunity.’
Once again Syd was shaking her head, in frustration now more than anything. ‘I just … I don’t know, Jack. I mean I barely know the first thing about her. About him. I know she needs help but I can’t … I mean … it’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. I just don’t want to make things worse for her.’
‘But how would you have reacted? If, when you were Elsie’s age, someone had come along and …’
‘And what? People did come along, Jack. Plenty of fucking people came along.’
All at once Syd was glaring at me. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what.
‘Look, I’ll talk to her,’ Syd told me before I could apologize. ‘OK? Before we do anything else, let me just talk to her first.’
It was a compromise and I wanted to accept it, but it wasn’t like talking to Elsie didn’t have its dangers, too.
‘I’ll be careful,’ Syd assured me. ‘Really, Jack. I know a place and … I’ll be careful.’ She smiled at me. ‘I promise.’
Sydney
It was my eighth day waiting and as cold a morning in July as I could remember.
‘Elsie?’
I’d been rotating glacially on the roundabout. I stood when I saw her, caught unawares by an onrush of relief. I’d been desperately trying not to think about what Elsie’s father might have been putting her through as punishment for the friendship, unsanctioned, that she’d struck up with me. There were no obvious signs that she’d been hurt but when she saw me she turned the way she’d come.
‘Elsie, wait!’
When I caught up with her it was back inside the tunnel. I reached out to try and grab her by the arm.
‘Elsie, please. Just wait a moment.’
She shook her head, shook me off.
‘I can’t speak to you.’ She was cradling her forearm where I’d grabbed for her, even though I’d barely made contact with her sleeve.
‘Elsie, please. Of course you can. Or if you can’t speak to me you can listen. Can’t you? Just for a moment.’
She was terrified, I could see it. That prick, I remember thinking. That balding, bullying prick.
‘What happened to your arm, Elsie?’
She let her hands drop to her sides. ‘Nothing. Nothing happened. Just leave me alone.’
It was damp underfoot even though it hadn’t been raining and the tunnel stank of beer cans and piss. I hardly noticed, though. I’m not sure how I’d expected Elsie to greet me but I know I hadn’t prepared myself for this.
She tried walking away again. This time I moved around to block her exit.
‘I want to help you, Elsie. Please let me help you. Everything you’re going through: I’ve been through it too. I’ve been through it and …’ Worse, I almost said. And I worry now that I actually believed it. I mean, how sodding arrogant is that?
I’d stopped myself from saying the word but Elsie caught the sense of what I was implying nonetheless.
‘Screw you,’ she said and even though I’d heard her swear before, I recoiled as though she’d reached out and slapped me. She brushed past me, openly clutching her arm now, and I was too stunned in that instant to try to stop her.
‘Elsie, wait, I …’
She was only a pace or so from the tunnel’s entrance. Almost in daylight … but then I called out and hauled her back into the dark.
‘Don’t let him win, Elsie. Don’t let him turn you into a coward.’
My words echoed around the archway of the tunnel. Elsie stopped and for a second, ten, twenty she stood perfectly still. I opened my mouth to say something more but a part of me I rarely ever listen to – a part of me I mostly never fucking hear – warned me I’d already said enough.
When Elsie turned she was crying. She looked so small all of a sudden. So lost and tired and defeated that for a moment I almost cried too.
‘It’s too late,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’m just so worried it’s already too late.’
We found a bench overlooking the common not far from the play area. It wasn’t raining, but it looked about to and the bench was under the cover of a sycamore tree. We were out of the wind as well, in a spot almost as secluded as in the tunnel.
‘You should put some ice on it.’
Elsie considered me doubtfully. I was looking at her forearm. It was blotched with bruises – on the underside mainly, as though her arm had been raised when it had been damaged to cover her face.
‘Ice for bruises,’ I instructed, ‘pressure for cuts. The odd painkiller can help sometimes too. Although … maybe stay off the pills if you can avoid them.’
‘Cuts?’ Elsie echoed. ‘Your father used to cut you?’
‘God, no.’ I rolled up my own sleeve and showed her my scars. Other than Jack, I’d never willingly shown them to anyone. ‘Cuts would have been too difficult for him to explain. These were entirely my own creation.’
I turned my arm to inspect it. I tried not to look at the scars at all and I always dressed in a way that covered them. In Elsie’s presence I found myself considering them more objectively. Mostly my memory of how I’d suffered them was as messy as the marks themselves but a few – the most pronounced – I remembered vividly. When I’d got them, what I’d used. Why.
‘They’re on my legs too. Naked I look like a chopping board.’
It was a joke – not a very good one – but Elsie didn’t find it funny.
‘I bet that’s not true. You’re …’ She looked at the ground. ‘You’re beautiful.’
Which in any other context would have been the funniest thing I’d ever heard. One thing I could never be accused of being is beautiful.
‘See these?’ I pointed to some dots amid the dashes: hard little nodules of shiny flesh, most still pink around the edges even after all these years. Fresh they’d looked like mini solar eclipses. Now they looked like the calloused remnants of some medieval pox. Even though I tended to conceal them, the scars from where I’d cut myself I didn’t much mind. It seemed futile wasting energy resenting them when I’d inflicted them entirely on myself. Those other marks, though, I hated. If I could have I would have gouged them out. Once – one evening when I’d been particularly off my trolley on a cocktail of vodka and magic mushrooms – I’d even tried. ‘These are cigarette burns,’ I explained to Elsie. ‘When he found out I was cutting myself he thought he’d join in the fun. Because at least these look like I could have done them to myself.’
Elsie was staring at the marks intensely. As I’d been talking I hadn’t noticed how closely she was looking, but when I did I felt suddenly ashamed. I pulled down my sleeves, hooking the ends as I habitually did around my palms.
Elsie turned away from me. She was trying to lift up the back of her coat. I watched her, until I realized she was waiting for me to help.
‘Do you see it?’ she said.
‘What am I looking for?’ I answered as I gathered up the fabric. ‘All I can see is … Jesus Christ, Elsie.’
And I’d thought my arms were a mess. The skin around Elsie’s left shoulder blade was a silvery moonscape of scar tissue. There were lumps of knotted flesh around thin, shimmering valleys, so that the entire area formed a patchwork of crevices. It started at the midpoint of her spine and stretched to the base of her neck.
‘He did that with a beer bottle.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said again. ‘How did he manage to explain that?’
Elsie shrugged. The damaged skin didn’t shift as it was supposed to. It held its shape, like something viscous trapped under cling film. ‘He didn’t have to.’
‘He didn’t take you to the hospital?’
‘He treated it himself. Cleaned it, bandaged it, all that. It was weird because even though it was him who’d done it, he acted afterwards like he really cared if I got better. Like he was sorry.’ Elsie turned to try and get a view of the faded injury herself. ‘I remember thinking that maybe what he’d done wasn’t that bad. If it meant it was the last of it. You know? If it meant it wouldn’t ever happen again.’
I did know, all too well. Not once did my father ever tell me he was sorry. But occasionally, after something bad had happened, I managed to convince myself that he looked sorry – and that maybe, deep down, he genuinely was. But that was all part of his game. Because that’s what it was for my father: one big, hilarious fucking game.
‘He was drunk when he did it,’ Elsie was saying, as she wriggled her coat down so it covered her waist again. ‘All the worst things happen when he’s drunk. Except when he’s so drunk he can’t even stand up. You’ve probably seen him,’ she went on. ‘In the alleyway? Or heard him even. That’s the way he walks home from the pub. I say walks. If he falls over on the way, knocks over someone’s bin, that’s when I know it’s safe to go to sleep.’
I had indeed heard a clatter from the rear of the house once or twice and, now that I thought about it, always sometime around midnight. I’d assumed it was cats.
‘What about your dad?’ Elsie asked me, hesitantly.
I blinked. ‘My dad?’
‘You said … before. You said you’d been through it too.’
It was odd. I was trying to be the grown-up, to be open with Elsie so she’d open up to me, but every time the attention turned my way I had an urge to crawl back into that tunnel.
‘My dad …’ I began. ‘He … he never drank, nothing like that. He didn’t even have that as an excuse. And I don’t think he ever enjoyed the things he did. The violence, I mean. Hurting me. I mean, he did but … it wasn’t the point. He wanted to control me, that’s all. That’s the part he liked best.’ My eyes met Elsie’s and rebounded. ‘It took me a while to realize that, mind you. At the time all I could think was that it was my fault. That he was only hurting me because of something I’d done.’
I watched Elsie from the corner of my eye and saw her gaze drop towards her knees.
‘Mine enjoys it,’ she said after a moment – and that was all.
We watched the clouds for a time. Rather than bringing rain the morning had brightened and sunlight filtered weakly through the branches of our sycamore. It didn’t cheer me as it might have. It only reminded me how rapidly our time here was already starting to wane.
‘So what happens now?’ Elsie said into the silence, as though she’d been having similar thoughts herself.
‘Now …’ I echoed. I took a breath and exhaled it slowly. ‘Now, if you’ll let me, I’ll talk to Jack. He’ll talk to some people he knows – some good people, Elsie – and then …’ And then what? Quite honestly I had no idea. ‘And then … they’ll help you. They’ll help put an end to it.’
‘Is that how it happened with you?’
‘I … in a manner of speaking,’ I lied.
Elsie nodded, reassured. ‘Was he punished? Your father. I hope he was punished.’
‘He was,’ I agreed, tentatively. ‘Just for … other things.’
Elsie squinted at me through the sunlight. ‘Other things?’
I adjusted the way I was sitting. That tunnel was beckoning again. ‘It’s complicated. But my father was bad in other ways too. He stole people’s money. Slyly. Subtly. They found out what he was doing and he went to prison.’
‘Like Al Capone,’ Elsie declared.
‘What?’
‘Like Al Capone. I saw a documentary. He was like this massive gangster and in the end they couldn’t get him for all the bad stuff he was doing so they arrested him for not paying his taxes.’
I had to smile, at the thought of Elsie watching documentaries as much as anything.
‘So that’s when you left?’ she said. ‘When he went to prison?’
I wiggled my head. ‘More or less.’
‘Do you think my father will go to prison?’
‘Do you want him to?’
Elsie didn’t answer right away. She turned and looked out across the common. ‘Sometimes I hope he rots in there,’ she said, with a steeliness to her tone that frightened me. But then it softened. ‘Other times,’ she went on, ‘I just wish it could be like it was after he hurt me. That time all he was doing was looking after me.’
I wanted to hold her then, to wrap my arm around her narrow shoulders. It would have made me feel better … but it wouldn’t have helped Elsie.
‘You know why he was doing that, don’t you?’ I said to her, my voice even firmer than I’d meant it to be. ‘Why he was so desperate for you to heal?’
She looked at me then almost pleadingly, the way she would have had she dared to show me her favourite toy but instead of admiring it I’d snatched it away. It took all of my self-control just to wait for her to answer.
‘Because he didn’t want to get in trouble,’ said Elsie at last.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Because he was worried about himself. Not you, Elsie. He doesn’t give a damn about you.’
Elsie dragged the heel of a palm across each of her eyes. ‘I’m scared,’ she said, so softly I almost didn’t hear her.
This time I reached for her hand. I almost flinched, it was that cold.
‘Do you know what?’ I said. ‘You remind me of the bravest person I ever knew.’
She looked across.
‘My sister,’ I told her. ‘She was about your age the last time I saw her. She even looked like you, a little bit.’
My sister: two words I’d avoided uttering virtually since the day I’d left home. I’d told Jack about her, aga
in when I was loaded and because I’d recognized that if I wanted to be with him I would have to. But Jack had been perceptive enough afterwards to know never to mention her unless I did, and I hadn’t ever spoken about her again. To anyone. I only brought her up now, talking to Elsie, because I thought it would help. I genuinely thought it might help.
‘Now my sister was beautiful,’ I said. ‘She was slight like you and had these cheekbones, and big brown eyes you couldn’t look away from. They were just … they were bottomless.’
‘What was her name?’ Elsie asked me and I replied before the syllables could stick.
‘Jessica.’
‘Did you call her Jess?’
I laughed at that, unexpectedly. The laughter also brought a tear. ‘Only if I was trying to annoy her. She hated it when anyone called her Jess. She said it made her sound like a cartoon cat.’
Elsie frowned.
‘Postman Pat,’ I explained. ‘It … never mind. It was just a stupid TV show.’
I wiped my eyes the way Elsie had, hating myself for having fallen to pieces. For going back on a promise as well. I’d spent the best part of a decade crying about my sister. It was weak, and self-indulgent, and one day I simply decided it had to stop. It was the same with the drugs. I didn’t need them, not chemically, not to the extent some people do. I’d just wanted them because, for a short while after I took them, they made things easier. I’d given up both – the crying, the coke – at exactly the same time: the same time as well that I’d got serious about my relationship with Jack.
Elsie seemed as surprised as I was that I was crying. ‘What happened to her?’ she asked me, once again in a voice that was barely a whisper.
It was obvious to us both that I didn’t have to answer. Elsie wouldn’t have been offended and Christ knows I’d already said enough. But somehow I didn’t feel like I had any other option. That door I’d unbolted was open wide now, all the dark things inside tumbling out. And it was like I said before: it was something I felt Elsie needed to know. Like a parable. A lesson that would help her make her own choice.
