My Sister

by Michelle Adams

  ‘Did you go to school in Horton?’ I ask. ‘You grew up nearby, right?’

  ‘Nearby, but not in Horton. I was living in Selkirk until my parents’ divorce. After Fair Fields I moved to Peebles with my mum. Why?’

  ‘Well, there’s this woman, a teacher from the village. She’s the only person who knew my family back then that I could contact. She must have known about Casey.’

  ‘Worth a try,’ Matt suggests.

  I pull out my phone and dial Miss Endicott’s number. There is no reply.

  ‘Do you know where she lives?’ Matt asks. I think back to our conversations in the school, how she told me that she had lived in Horton all her life. What was it she said? The little cottage on the end of the row?

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then let’s go and talk to her.’

  ‘OK. Head to Horton.’

  After a few minutes of driving, he speaks. There is no warning, nothing to pave the way. ‘I’m so sorry, Irini. For everything that has happened to you.’

  I reach over, stroke his leg like Antonio used to do to me. I realise now that to comfort somebody who has suffered is difficult. There is no easy way to soften the past, or make things right. But for the first time I know I have to put my own memories aside and try. I have to do this for Matt. Because I must also learn how to do the same for Elle.

  39

  By the time we arrive, the sun is hanging low in the sky and the shadows are starting to creep across the fields, cast by the distant trees and the steeple of the church. We pull up alongside the stone wall of the graveyard. There are a couple of people heading into the Enchanted Swan, and another tending the grave of a loved one. Fresh, the soil still heaped on top, waiting for the land to settle. I let my eyes scan across until they find the mound that covers my mother. It will be weeks, maybe even months, before the ground is firm enough for it to be covered with grass.

  ‘Which one?’ asks Matt as he closes his car door.

  I slam my door shut and move towards the front, my fingers lingering on the hot bonnet. ‘I think that one,’ I say when I spot a cottage decked out with colourful primroses and beautiful topiary hedges.

  We walk towards the house and find all the lights off, except for a small lamp that is glowing in the downstairs window. It’s a humble home, naturally beautiful in a quaint, imperfect way. The paint on the door is peeling like the walls of Fair Fields, and the garden from up close is a smidge overgrown. The edges of a once neatly trimmed lawn ragged, the almost dead buds of a dahlia clinging on to the last days of life. We walk up the pathway, closing the gate behind us. I knock on the door and wait.

  ‘Maybe she’s still at the school,’ I say when there is no reply. I knock again but get the same. Nothing.

  Matt checks his watch. ‘It’s a bit late for school, isn’t it? Nearly five o’clock.’ He pulls the sleeve of his mac back down, wraps the coat around himself. He peers up the side alley, looking for an answer. Knowing that he is right, I knock again, louder this time.

  ‘Miss Endicott, hello. Are you home?’ I call through the letter box.

  ‘Irini, what did you call her?’ I turn. Matt has taken a step back, is staring at me.

  ‘Miss Endicott. I don’t know her first name. Listen,’ I say, turning back to the door. ‘I can hear the television.’

  ‘Maybe we should come back another time,’ Matt suggests, edging away from me, towards the gate. I ignore him, step over the flower bed, a carpet of red and purple petals. ‘Irini, I really think we should leave. I’m sure she doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ I balance on an old green bench set against a black wrought-iron frame. I cup my hands around my face and peer in through the window. I see an uncomfortable-looking settee, 1950s design, floral cushions balanced along the back in neat diamond rows. Behind, a bookshelf loaded with books, and a fireplace with a roaring fire. There is a tray on the table with a plate full of what looks like roast chicken and vegetables. And then I see it.

  ‘Break down the door,’ I shout to Matt as I leap off the bench, trampling across the flower bed. ‘She’s on the floor.’

  Matt hesitates, but then pushes past me towards the door. He tests the handle, finds it locked from the inside. He pushes against the door with his shoulder, but it doesn’t budge. He grips one fist in the palm of his other hand and jabs the point of his elbow at one of the glass panes in the door, then fiddles his hand carefully through the shattered glass and finds the latch. The door pops open.

  Inside we are hit by a smell: burning, charcoal, food? I am not sure what. We dash through the dated living room, towards drifts of smoke coming from the kitchen. I am the first to see it. Only seconds pass before Matt sees it too, my tongue so tied I couldn’t warn him.

  Miss Endicott is lying on the floor, her skin blackened, smouldering like an ember. She is bound to a chair with garden wire, red gashes circling her from where it has cut into her flesh. There is a fireplace poker sticking out of her chest. Smoke is rising from her body like an abandoned city after a night of rioting, when whole streets are left to burn.

  Matt grabs the nearest towel, soaks it in water and throws it towards the charred body as if there is something left to save. Steam rises with a sizzling sound as the wet material makes contact. He looks up to me for an explanation for the inexplicable, but his eyes are drawn away and I follow his gaze, turning to see the words painted on the wall in blood: This is where you will be judged.

  ‘Like Fair Fields,’ he says, backing away from the body, finally realising there is no hope. Or that perhaps Miss Endicott didn’t deserve to be saved.

  He rushes to the front of the house with his phone to his ear. That’s when I see the file sticking out from underneath the table to the side of the body. I grab the wet towel with one hand, the other clasped firmly over my mouth, then reach forward and pull at the file. It is just like the one I have in the car for Casey Harringford. The corners are blackened, but as I open the cover, the image is clear to see. Elle as a little girl. I stand up and take the file to the window, cracking it open to clear the smell. I can hear Matt in the background requesting an ambulance and the police. I turn the pages, but as I do, I see something from the corner of my eye: movement outside near the rear gate.

  I dash towards the back door, running towards danger for the first time in my life. I scramble through the garden, push open the gate, looking first right, then left along the row of houses to the rear of Miss Endicott’s property. I see the flash of blonde hair slip around the corner and I know it was Elle. I close the file, slip it into the back of my jeans and pull my baggy jumper down over it. Whatever she has done, no matter why she was here, I know I need to protect her. My only wish now is that I had realised it sooner.

  40

  We sit on the bench at the front of the house, waiting for the emergency services. We can’t find anything to say, and nobody walks past us to break the silence. I watch the mourner in the nearby graveyard, focus on the sounds of cheer coming from the Enchanted Swan. When we hear the distant wail of an ambulance siren, Matt turns to me, his face ghost-white.

  ‘What are we going to tell them?’ he asks. ‘They’ll want to know why we are here.’

  Blue lights flicker in the distance. ‘The truth, I guess.’

  He licks at his dry lips, but there seems to be no moisture on his tongue. ‘I don’t think we should tell them that I was at Fair Fields.’ He looks away, wrapping his arms around his body as if he is cold.

  ‘I don’t think we should tell them about Fair Fields at all,’ I say, aware of the file digging into my back. ‘And we probably shouldn’t mention Elle, either. Perhaps we were just passing, on our way to the pub, and thought we could smell something?’

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, but I bring my finger to his lips, and kiss him on the cheek. We stand up together to greet the ambulance as it screeches to a halt. Matt reaches for my hand. I take it, and hold on tight.

  In the police station we make
our statements: who we are, where we’re from, what we were doing at Miss Endicott’s cottage. They interview us separately; stern faces and tired eyes look back at me over the table. One of the officers has such a strong accent I can barely make out what he is saying to me. But I do catch the gist of the story from the other. It turns out that Miss Endicott’s neighbour saw us arrive, and heard me calling out for her to answer the door. Plus she had heard a scream about half an hour beforehand. Her statement pretty much rules us out of any offence, so they let us go a little before midnight.

  Matt drives us through a busy Edinburgh city centre, the tyres rumbling over cobblestoned streets until we arrive at his apartment. It is a beautiful building, grey Georgian elegance. I’m glad to be back in the city, somewhere I can slip into the shelter of endless brick and a populace of more than a few hundred.

  The investigation into Miss Endicott’s murder happens fast. I keep Elle’s records hidden along with Casey’s, but it doesn’t take the police very long to reach a conclusion as to what happened. There have been several unsubstantiated complaints against Miss Endicott over the years, and her time spent working as a teacher at Fair Fields before she arrived in Horton is nothing to be proud of if the rumours are to be believed.

  There was a series of suicides in the 1990s, victims from all over the Scottish borders. Each had been a patient at Fair Fields, each of school age at the time of their admission. Where some of her colleagues were charged and sentenced, it seemed nobody wanted to believe what had been suggested regarding Miss Endicott, especially those that lived in Horton. Because of that, she had been allowed to remain free, and had never paid for her crimes.

  Matt doesn’t say much about the events of that night. He seems to want to put them behind us, move forward together, and I think I might want that too. But at some point we will have to talk about what happened, and until then we are stuck. I need to admit that I saw Elle at Miss Endicott’s house, and he needs to confess everything he knows about Elle’s past. By association, that also means that he must confess to his own.

  I decide to hand in my notice, tell the hospital I won’t be going back. The managers wrangle over procedure, tell me I can’t just make a phone call and consider it finalised. But I can. I have done it already. I don’t want to return to London. I need a fresh start, and for the first time in my life I think it might be within reach. I am starting to understand that I was wanted by my family, that none of this was my fault. I have no plan, no escape route, and no commitments to hide behind. I am just Irini.

  A couple of nights after Miss Endicott’s murder we go to Fair Fields to pick up my car, and I return to Mam Tor. The mother mountain, a house that, thanks to my father, is mine. I am certain that at some point Elle will come back. She is a scared little girl, running from her past. I know how that feels. I’ve tried to be angry with her. She is a murderer, twice over most likely. The first time she attacked the man who wanted to rape me, and I always believed she went on to kill him. But she did it to save me, and I kept quiet. Now she has killed to save herself, so I will keep quiet again, and keep her secrets safe. Accepting that she could do such a thing isn’t easy. But neither is facing up to what happened to her at Fair Fields. Facing up to the number of times I abandoned her when she needed me is harder still.

  Her file has answered many questions. That’s why I haven’t handed it over to the police. I fear they would put two and two together and come up with four. It wouldn’t take a genius to work out that Elle is responsible for Miss Endicott’s death, even with all the missing pages, which perhaps were deliberately lost to the fire. Perhaps those pages might have explained the missing gaps in my own history, but I guess there are some things we can just never know.

  What I do know is this: Elle was admitted to Fair Fields by my parents when she was six years old, in June 1984. They complained about her destructive nature, her difficult behaviour, her desire to harm others, especially other children. In one incident she had tied a boy at nursery to a radiator and turned up the heat. She was four years old at the time. Was she aware what she was doing? With everything I now know, I can’t help but think that she was.

  I read the reports from the psychiatrists, and the description of the EEG they performed, which showed an increase in the delta and theta activities in Elle’s frontal lobe. They proposed a diagnosis of antisocial personality, claiming that she was basically unsocialised, as if she was some sort of farm animal. They speculated about the coexistence of childhood manic depression, and that she was a self-harmer. There were other notes, written in near-illegible handwriting, that suggested she be diagnosed with sociopathic personality disturbance, but this was contradicted as inappropriate and outdated in later entries. In fact, the notes went on and on. Height and weight charts documented the passage of time. The argument concerning how to label her was never resolved, and at no point was I ever convinced that a diagnosis was made. Elle, it seemed, remained a mystery.

  Then, without explanation, her treatment stopped and she returned home. No doubt when my parents discovered what was happening to her. That was right before the day I left. If there remained any doubt about why I was handed over to Aunt Jemima, the correlation to Elle’s return was all the confirmation I needed. They made a choice. They kept her, gave me away.

  But reading about her history is overwhelming, so not for the first time I leave Elle’s records on my bed and head outside. Walking in the autumnal wind is a relief, clears my head, gives me a chance to breathe. It’s becoming a daily habit, this walk around the perimeter of the house. But the temperature has fallen overnight, and after about twenty minutes the first drops of rain begin to fall, stinging my face. I run back to the house, head towards the kitchen door. I reach for the handle with my coat pulled over my head, but as I push open the door I realise that above the sound of the rain I can hear music coming from inside. For a split second I reason that I must have left something on, but even as I’m thinking it, I know that isn’t the case.

  I step inside, leaving the door open. The music intensifies as I walk towards the hallway, a trail of wet footprints in my wake. I recognise the urgent, tremulous arias of the final acts of Madam Butterfly, and I know in that instant that Elle has come back, just as I believed she would. I take cautious steps through the kitchen, glance up the stairs to my old room, but the music isn’t coming from there. I pass through into the hallway, the music louder still.

  ‘Elle,’ I whisper. I look back at the open door, the rain beating down. I could leave, I tell myself as I grip the banister. I could leave right now, call the police if I wanted. Instead, with somersaults of nausea stirring in my stomach, I begin to climb the stairs.

  With every step it feels as if I am being weighed down by lead boots, and each is heavier than the last. But I reach the top of the stairs and follow the music, which is coming from Elle’s bedroom. The light is on, the music so loud I can no longer hear my own breathing. But I can feel it, staccato breaths stuttering in and out as I harness my courage and push open the door.

  ‘Elle,’ I say again, my voice shaky and frail, trying not to scare her. I don’t want her to run. But she isn’t here. At first I think the room is as I left it, the scrunched-up sheets from the sex with Antonio, the bowl of burned-down matches on the side. But as I look up at her portrait, I see it has been defaced, a deep red stain smeared across her face. Proof that she has been here. Then I freeze as I hear the crash of a door behind me.

  At first I’m sure she must be there in the room with me. I’m convinced I can feel her, her presence like a weight on my body. But then I hear footsteps on the stairs. I spin around, rush after her.

  ‘Elle,’ I call, but I get no reply. ‘Elle!’ I scream, louder this time so that she might hear me over the music as I reach the top of the stairs. ‘Wait.’ But I know I’m too late. I sit down on the top step to catch my breath. That’s when I notice that just around a bend in the corridor a small table has been overturned, the contents scattered about the floor
. I stand up, move towards it. I crouch down, pick up a photo frame, being careful not to cut myself on the broken glass. I shake the frame clean and hold it up.

  The image is from the same sequence that I was looking at in the album in the study. In this picture, Elle is sitting on my tricycle, her legs too long, her form awkward but face determined. I am standing at the side, tears rolling, my mouth wide midway through a scream. Nobody is concerned. Nobody interrupts. Somebody was watching the whole thing through a lens, relishing the memories that they would laugh about in the future. But in this final picture my mother is also in the frame, on her way towards me, her face a mixture of sorry and amused. She is glancing over her shoulder at the camera and trying not to smile. Not in a way that makes me resent her, though, because what is happening is just normality, before we all became what we became. This picture depicts a time when everybody was wanted, when nobody feared for their place in the family, and before Elle spent time in Fair Fields.

  As I look again, I realise there is something else in this picture. My mother’s swollen stomach, unmistakably pregnant. The baby who went on to become Casey. My lost sister. And then my eyes are drawn back to the two children; to Elle on the tricycle, and her younger sister standing nearby on her own two perfectly formed legs. Not a sign of plaster with butterflies scribbled up the sides. By the time I was three, I couldn’t even walk. Nobody in these pictures has a dysplastic hip. This little girl cannot be me.

  I race down the stairs and charge towards my bedroom. I slam open the door and snatch Casey’s Fair Fields record, hidden underneath scattered pages from Elle’s. I rifle through it for the truth, turning pages so fast that one of them rips. All the details are there. Casey is the one who was born with hip deformities. Casey is the one who was strapped in plaster soon after birth. Casey is the one who would need surgery, surgery that would leave a long vertical scar on her left hip. Casey is the one who was registered at Fair Fields Rehabilitation Hospital for the Infirm and Mentally Insane. Is Casey the child my mother was carrying in her womb when Elle stole the tricycle in the photograph? Am I Casey?