The Final Child

by Fran Dorricott

  He was right.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Right. You should have stayed in the house. I’m disappointed that you couldn’t even pass that one little test.” He paused. “Well. Since you’re here, we might as well make a move. Sorry.”

  My own apology repeated back with such a vicious edge was the final straw. It was an armour built of courage, bolted like a metal plate over my heart. Alex was never going to be the brother I’d lost.

  So I nodded. As if resigned. And then I waited, just a second, watching for the sloping tilt of Alex’s shoulder as he relaxed a little. Just a little – that movement, at least, hadn’t changed. And then I sprang up from my position on the ground, and broke into a run.

  But Alex was ready for me. His arm shot out faster than I would have thought possible, his fist connecting with my jaw so hard I felt it in my belly. I scrambled in the dirt, knees and elbows and fingers. Alex grabbed my jacket, but I kicked out. I managed to wriggle free. Instead of running, this time I threw myself at him, tackling him to the ground.

  Alex was taken by surprise. I heard the solid oomph of air rush out of him as his back hit the wet grass and I leapt to my feet, already running. I pumped my arms and legs as fast as I could, darting across the lawn with speed that shocked me.

  In the conservatory I threw furniture against the doors, just enough to slow him down. Alex was still a few hundred yards behind me, clutching his mid-section. I hurtled down the dark hallways, through the hidden door, panic bringing an iron taste to my tongue, until I was back opposite Harriet’s little room. She wasn’t there. I looked around, wildly, eyes scanning the dimness. She was meant to be back by now. She was—

  Alex was behind me. He was filthy, panting. I felt myself go cold. I couldn’t let this happen.

  I was trapped. My back to the room he’d shut me in.

  “Oh, Jilly,” said Alex.

  Where was Harriet?

  AFTER EVERYTHING

  Alex

  THE FIRST TIME HE had the thought he ignored it. He knew it was just the changes talking, adjusting to a new life. Dana had said it would take some getting used to – for all of them. They all had to take it slow.

  Alex was trying to move on. Even though he had only lived in that big old house for almost three weeks, he knew it would impact him forever. Sleeping in the basement, the promise of that bedroom with a view of the garden, it had really changed how he thought about things.

  The little house wasn’t bad. It was about the same size as the one he’d lived in before, with Jilly. And Mum and Dad. But it couldn’t have felt more different. Here he shared a room with Peter instead of Jilly. And there was no waiting for Dad to lose his cool. If anything, Dana was more worried about Alex and Peter than they were about her. She even let them keep the big bedroom.

  The house was old, but Dana had kept it nice when she got married. Her mother had lived there for a while. Dana had enough money saved to keep paying the bills after her mother died, and she had continued to clean it once every week without telling anybody. Now they were all glad she had.

  Slowly, a routine started to develop.

  Alex couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d seen Jilly on the TV. They’d talked about her ‘escape’ from the Father, how she’d risked her life to get away.

  But Jillian hadn’t risked anything. That had been Alex, all Alex. He thought about the way she was, even now, using him to protect herself, and his anger towards her grew. He had felt so guilty. He had mourned her. And it had been a lie.

  The rest of the world was just the same as before. But what wasn’t the same was Peter. And Dana. And everything Alex had done. He felt connected, now, in a way he never had before. Not even with Jilly, who always thought he was a bit soft, a bit weak, cute. She had never seen the way he felt when Dad picked on him. When Mum told him to stop being so sensitive. He’d hidden it from her, but she still should have noticed. Peter and Dana, though, they knew how capable he was.

  And, Peter said, Alex was like them now. He would be tied to them forever, or risk getting put in jail himself. Alex knew that was true.

  After a while Dana said she wanted the boys to interact with other children, but she never stopped working, probably hunting too, just watching other children now, old habits hard to break. The boys didn’t mind; she left them to do whatever they wanted, and they both knew she wouldn’t bring home another one. Alex was the final child she’d ever need.

  They didn’t want to go to school. Alex had never liked school anyway, and Dana didn’t make them go. Alex wasn’t sure how he’d get into a school even if he wanted to, how anybody wouldn’t know who he was. And eventually he realised he didn’t want to be found, not any more.

  But the boys couldn’t settle in the little house, no matter how hard they tried. It felt safe, sure, but not special. That early connection between them was never the same as in those few days when Alex had first been allowed out of the bathroom. Before Randeep. Before Alex found out about Jillian.

  “I feel like I’m dying,” Peter confided years later. Alex didn’t know how long exactly. He’d sort of lost track. Days, weeks, didn’t mean anything any more, especially when they kept having the same conversations. Peter always confided in Alex, never his mother. Alex wasn’t afraid of him like Dana was. Not after what had happened with Randeep all that time ago. He’d learned, since Randeep, that there were worse things than Peter. Monsters that lived inside you like dreams until they were nightmares.

  “It’s like somebody has unplugged us,” Alex agreed. “And we’ve slowly been running out of battery since we left the old house.”

  “Exactly. I can’t focus. I can’t sleep. I’m going crazy. I need the house and the lake and the fields and the woods…” Peter got that wistful look on his face. Alex loved this expression the most; it was Peter’s most beautiful one. His dark hair and pale skin made him look like an angel.

  “You’re not going to die,” Alex said. “You can’t die just because you’re bored. It’s not possible. Why don’t we get Mother to let us take the car this weekend, you can teach me the gears again? We could even go up to the house, look around.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s not possible to die from boredom,” Peter said, ignoring him. “It’s like being without oxygen. Her decisions will kill us both eventually. If we’d stayed in the house after what happened, things would be fine now. The police would never have found the door anyway. We could move back any time, but she won’t let us. It’s all got to be on her damn terms.”

  And that’s when Alex had the thought: Peter and him, wouldn’t they be better off without Dana?

  * * *

  The second time he had the thought it was more intrusive. She came home with three shopping bags filled with cakes and chocolates – a gift for them. The boys had tried to work through some of the schoolwork she’d left them, which they usually did diligently. Alex missed school these days in the same way that Peter did; he missed the books, the learning, but not the people. Even though Alex was sixteen now he still yearned for it sometimes, the real teaching that Dana’s lessons never quite captured. He couldn’t believe he’d ever hated it.

  But when Dana got home that night she was disappointed – in something or other that they’d been working on so hard all day – and she left their treats on the kitchen table instead of giving them to Peter and Alex.

  It was such a small thing, but here it meant everything. It meant a storm was coming. Peter went into one of his quiet rages. He disappeared into the garden, stalking out into the autumn night without even his jacket, leaving Alex alone with her.

  Even after all this time he hated being near her without Peter. He understood his brother; they communicated without words, sometimes on such a basic level that they went days without speaking at all. Dana was different. She was distant, selfish to the point that he could see nothing beyond her desire to be the perfect mother – even at the expense of being a decent human being. It was always the way things looked
on the outside that mattered. How people in the village looked at them, even though it had been years, whether they paid too much attention to the boys, whether Alex’s blond roots were showing again. She didn’t care how anybody felt so long as things looked right.

  When Alex and Dana were alone together, something always shifted. The power, the balance, it all felt wrong. And Alex didn’t like it.

  Wouldn’t the world be better without her? Without her they could go back to the house, back to the freedom of that comforting quiet. He knew how to do it, too. Peter had told him all of the tricks for not being caught. The gloves, the shaving, the ritual. He could do it so easily.

  He was sure Peter wouldn’t mind.

  * * *

  The third time Alex had the thought it was a long time later. Years had passed. The big house was a distant memory, but it still haunted his dreams – like Jilly did. Then Dana came home later than usual one night. Somebody had finally accused her of stealing patient medicines, and although they hadn’t been able to prove it, the stain had stuck.

  Alex had preferred it when she was out of the house all of the time. He and Peter would sit and smoke weed, sometimes do the odd job here and there to earn some cash, steal Dana’s bank cards and go on spending sprees. Peter’s favourite thing to do was to draw out cash using his mother’s card and hoard it like dragon treasure – just because he could. Just because he liked the way she panicked, every time, that he was planning to run away.

  After Peter taught him how to drive, Alex liked to take the car into other towns on Dana’s days off and pretend he was somebody else. It was like a game. Dana and Peter didn’t worry about him by then because nobody ever recognised him. The world thought he was dead.

  But he realised that the best part of these trips was coming home at the end of the day. Peter waiting for him with a cold beer. They trusted each other and there was a thrill in that.

  With Dana home all the time, things were different. There was a tension in the house. All she did was smoke and drink and talk about all of the precious things they’d left at Dove Manor. She talked about the films she’d starred in, about the lady who’d left her all of her money and the house. How she’d once been wildly wealthy. Alex and Peter didn’t give a shit about things and they didn’t care about stories.

  And this one night, when Dana came home, she was already drunk.

  “The jobs are gone, boys,” she sobbed.

  Peter couldn’t get another word out of her, but Alex – after Peter left to shoot beer cans with a BB gun – managed to get her to tell him a little more. She’d been caught stealing. Again.

  “We could move back to the house,” Alex said. He pleaded – he never pleaded any more. “Couldn’t we? Start over?”

  “What would that solve? The money won’t last forever and neither of you two is good for anything.”

  “It would be better, there. Like Peter said it was before.”

  “No,” Dana slurred. “For God’s sake, boy. No. I’ve told you. We are never going back to that house, never ever ever again.”

  Alex didn’t try to fight the maelstrom that rose and battered his defences like a tide. It had been years since Randeep, but he still remembered how it felt. The relief after it was done, like picking at a mosquito bite so hard that it bled.

  He turned to her, to his mother, and said, “Okay, Mother. I won’t bother you again. Why don’t you go and get changed, and I’ll run you a nice, hot bath. Sit with you a while, like when I was little. We can talk about your movies.”

  “Oh, my Bear,” she said. He never knew why she called him that, only that it never felt quite right. “You’re a good boy. Yes. A bath sounds like just the thing.”

  When Alex had the thought this time, he didn’t reason with it. He didn’t ignore it.

  He listened.

  1 SEPTEMBER 2016

  Alex

  IT HAD RAINED IN the night. The earth was spongy underfoot, the dirt clinging to the soles of his boots. He didn’t come out here much any more – it reminded him too much of the time he and Peter had picnicked on the sand at the end of the long grass near the water. That was about a year after they moved back into the house, and the tension hadn’t quite boiled over yet.

  That day had been hot and they’d carried a rucksack full of beer and sandwiches down to the lake. They lived on sandwiches in those days. The bread was cheap if you got it discounted and you could always toast it over a fire when it started to go stale – which it did, often, without a fridge to keep it fresh.

  They’d lounged until they were hot, frustrated. Everything was piling on. The broken windows, the graffiti that wasn’t theirs, the teenagers who disturbed their peace. They would go to the little house sometimes, just to have a space to think, or sometimes to read. Peter had used some of their meagre cash to join a gym, just for the shower, and it drove Alex mad. They didn’t talk about it but it was there, in every inch of their conversations. Or lack of conversation. At some point they would run out of money, they would stop being able to live like this, camping in the old house without drawing attention to themselves.

  Peter was angry that Alex hadn’t redirected Dana’s savings to a different account, that he hadn’t thought about electricity or council tax or how they’d be paying for that little house for the rest of their lives because it was in Dana’s name and nobody knew she was dead.

  That day, on the beach by the lake, something had split. One minute they were drinking beer and the next they were sprawled in the sandy dirt, clawing and elbowing, knees in soft flesh and spittle flying. It ended with Alex’s broken nose, Alex holding Peter in the water for a second too long.

  That’s when things had started to go wrong. And then, just like today, they’d been talking about Jillian. It was always fucking Jillian. Peter would say something casually, something mean, and Alex would retaliate. It was the one thing they hadn’t beaten out of him.

  Alex dug his heels into the damp earth now, sucking in the evening air. There were gnats out, an autumn haze of them around his head. He wafted at them half-heartedly but his focus was elsewhere, on the earth under him and the mound of dirt.

  Jillian didn’t know the damage she’d caused when she hadn’t come back for him. It had splintered him in more ways than he knew at the time – and only now did he appreciate the mess he’d made. Dana was long gone and he didn’t regret that. Not really. But the stuff with Peter…

  He tried to sort through his emotions. He’d had a drink too many, which was unusual, and he couldn’t get his brain to kick into gear. He thought of Dana, of her gin-and-tonic smell, and wrinkled his nose. She had always got drunk to soothe her pain; he drank because it made him bold. It was different. It didn’t make him like his father.

  His thoughts kept circling back to Jillian. She was Erin, now. One day, months ago, he had been at the soup kitchen that had sprung up in a community centre in Arkney. Arkney was his favourite place to drive to, the winding roads on the way, the quaint sort of feeling to everything – just close enough to civilisation to feel like an escape from the country. He went to the soup kitchen whenever he could; it was a free meal and they didn’t ask too many questions. Besides, nobody had ever recognised him. He was a ghost. And any money he could save on food was grand.

  And as he was leaving – he’d seen her.

  His sister.

  It was like a jolt through his heart, like a defibrillator that sent him into a tailspin before the rhythm evened out again. He would have known it was her even if she hadn’t spoken, even if he hadn’t heard the same upward lilt she’d always talked with. She had his face, only wider, and his shoulders. Their dad’s jaw, just like Alex. He didn’t spare a thought for his parents – he tried never to think of either of them, especially after Peter told him how they’d always talked of Jilly, only Jilly, during all those bloody press conferences in the early days. How glad they were she was alive. She was a miracle. They were so relieved…

  And Alex, whenever he thought of
Jilly, always tasted that bitter anger on his tongue. She had never come back for him. He refused to admit that he missed her.

  Refused, until the second he saw her. She was skinnier than he’d thought she would be. Her hair was darker, especially at the ends. Her nose was very fine and pointed and she wore sunglasses that dwarfed her face. But God, it was her. And she was walking out of the bank with her phone to her ear and she looked… fine. Normal. Happy, even.

  Alex couldn’t begin to explain the rage that blossomed within him. Rage and impossible sadness that made him dizzy. The scent of the air was stuck in his nose and he swore he could smell her perfume and the anger boiled over.

  His parents had let him go. They didn’t care about him. But here was Jillian and she should have cared because he had always loved her and protected her. Suddenly he saw his life for what it had been: gold leaf over tin. A lie. A substitution.

  The anger was a monster that he could not fight. He held himself together long enough to see where she went next, hanging back with his hood drawn up over his face just in case.

  Over the next few weeks, he began to follow her more and more. It was laborious progress, but it gave him something to do. He found a few of the parents, too, from the old notebooks and journals he and Peter had brought back to the house. Dana had documented her life in fits and starts, but it had felt important to keep them.

  He liked to follow Jaspreet Singh because she reminded him of Randeep. Of that feeling of power. And that other lady, George and Jacob’s mum. Peter had always liked to talk about the way she’d broken down at her press conference after her sons were taken, and again when only one was found. Alex thought she, of all of them, would still be sad.

  Yet they were the same as Jillian. He had hoped to find these people in tatters – some memory of their dead and missing children in their faces, the way they walked or talked. But everywhere he looked the families of the children Dana and Peter had taken were simply moving on. His own mother – he’d seen her with a man. Alex’s dad was gone. Probably dead. Good fucking riddance. But his mum looked… happy.