The House: The brilliantly tense and terrifying thriller with a shocking twist - whose story do you believe?

by Simon Lelic

  He waited two weeks. Enough time for Pipkin (what can I say? Watership Down was my favourite 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 myself 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 invited Helen over. For a birthday tea, if I wasn’t too grown up for such a thing. I was sceptical, 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 – standing 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 towards 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 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, 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 rumours 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 I’d never be able to have a relationship with anyone on terms that weren’t dictated by my father. And 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 wa
s 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 at that point 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 made it to London in the end 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 favour that someone, at some point, 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 in the end that’s all Jack’s input amounted to. Suggestions. There’s no wriggling 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 any more.

  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 anyway 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 short-sightedness 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.

  Sound familiar? Yep: me again. What a fountain of wisdom I’m turning out to be.

  It was me who pointed out that flicker in the dark, who ushered Elsie down the burning staircase. I told her about Jessica. I told her how she got out. I even praised her for it! Jesus Christ. I might as well have pushed Elsie in front of that train myself.

  The thing I remember clearest was the scream. Not Elsie’s. Elsie didn’t make a sound, nothing I could make out over the clamour of the 8.16. It wasn’t a woman’s scream, either. This, it was a bloke roaring in anguish. A noise there’s no way he’d ever be able to repeat.

  I’d spotted her first outside the station. I’d been watching for her constantly since … I was about to say since social services had told us they had no grounds to intervene but actually I’d been watching for her before then. I hadn’t stopped watching for her virtually since the day I first met her. But I noticed myself watching after that. In the street. At the playground. From the spare-bedroom window. After a week had passed and I hadn’t seen her I had to restrain myself from marching round the corner and hammering on Elsie’s front door. And then, when I was least prepared – when I was shambling from the coffee queue towards the train queue, on my way groggily in to work – there she was. Twenty, twenty-five yards ahead of me and weaving through the crowd like a leaf again dancing on the wind.

  I called out to her but she didn’t hear. I started to hurry, spilled my coffee, dropped the whole thing in a passing bin. I almost caught up with her but got trapped at the ticket barrier. Fucking Oyster cards. Fucking running out of credit. By the time I was through, Elsie had disappeared into the tunnel that led towards the platforms. There were three at our local station, though only two that were ever in use in the mornings. One for trains into town, the other out.

  I checked the boards at the bottom of the stairwells. There was a train in ten minutes heading into Surrey, another in two for London Victoria. My train, as it happened. I remember half wondering at that point whether Elsie hadn’t come to the station looking for me. I thought about this afterwards as well – whether the timing implied Elsie was sending me some kind of message. I don’t think she could have been. I don’t remember ever telling her how or when I went to work.

  But even so.

  It took me a minute to spot her. A precious minute. The platform was as crowded as it usually is on a weekday morning and Elsie had made her way along to the far end: the point where the train, as it came into the station, would have been travelling at its fastest. In fact I could see the train approaching in the distance. The rails looped out from the station the way a running track curves towards the finishing straight and the train was rounding the final bend.

  ‘Elsie?’

  I’d called out just loud enough to turn heads in the area around me. I saw Elsie move closer to the edge of the platform. Her attention was away from me, towards the oncoming train. Once again I wondered what she was doing there, where she might have been going. Two men in suits passed between us and Elsie was obscured for a moment by a curtain of pinstripe. When I caught sight of her once more she’d again shifted where she was standing, so that one of her feet had crept beyond the yellow safety line. All along the platform people were beginning to form ranks in anticipation of the scuttle for seats but out where Elsie stood there was
barely anyone else around her. She had no reason to be standing so close to the edge. No reason, except one.

  ‘Elsie …’

  I started to move more quickly. I collided with one of those businessmen, ignored his coffee-splattered curse. I dropped the folder I was carrying, hesitated, left it there.

  ‘Elsie!’

  She heard me then. Turned, saw me, seemed confused for a moment – then smiled at me over her shoulder. That smile. I remembered it as her hello to me, that day I’d followed her home from Mr Hirani’s. I recognized it this time as her goodbye.

  ‘Shit, Elsie, wait, stop …’

  Maybe I said those things, maybe I just thought them. To be honest I have no idea. The train by this point was the same distance from Elsie as I was – right on top of her, in other words, whereas I was still a hundred miles away. She …

  Fuck.

  She just … I mean I can’t even describe it. But I think … I mean, what they tell me is … she hit the side of the train and not the front of it. Or the corner or … I don’t know. Maybe she hesitated at the last. Maybe she mistimed her leap. Except she didn’t leap, I remember that too. She stepped. Just as if she were climbing aboard. Calmly. Quietly. She just … stepped.

  I tried to force my way through to her, didn’t get anywhere close. The man who screamed, I didn’t see who he was. I don’t remember seeing much of anything after that. Just Elsie, through the crowd – lying broken where she’d ricocheted on to the platform, that leaf-green raincoat of hers steadily blooming red.

  They say she has a chance. They say, if she’s a fighter, she might pull through. They actually used that phrase. But it’s bullshit however they choose to say it because, firstly, I could see what they were really thinking when they told me and, secondly, because I know Elsie hasn’t got any fight in her left. That’s the whole entire point. When you fight it has to be for something and as far as Elsie’s concerned there’s nothing in her life that’s worth the struggle. I want to tell her she’s wrong. I want to prove it to her. But even if they were to let me see her there’d be no guarantee she’d be able to hear me – and even less, given everything, that she would listen.