by B. A. Paris
Her eyes flicker open. Her skin is waxen, nothing to do with the rain.
‘Layla,’ she whispers. ‘Layla.’
I put my hand under her head, lift it slightly so that she can see me. ‘You’ll be alright,’ I promise desperately.
‘Layla.’
‘Layla isn’t here,’ I say gently.
She shakes her head. A trickle of blood seeps from her nose.
‘Layla,’ she says again. ‘Not Ellen, Layla.’
Her eyes fix on mine, then close. I stare down at her, my fear doubling in size. Still cradling her head, I check her neck for a pulse with my other hand, my fingers trembling on her wet skin. It’s there, but faint, so faint. Next to me, Peggy whimpers.
‘It’s alright, Peggy,’ I tell her. ‘It’s alright.’
I reach into my pocket, take out my mobile, switch it on. As I feared, there’s no network. I twist my head this way and that, looking for a house, for someone to help. There is nothing and no one, so I gather Ellen into my arms and carry her down to the car, trying to hurry, trying not to slip, or trip over Peggy, who is walking too close to my heels. I open the door, lay Ellen on the back seat, pull my jumper over my head. And as I fold it into a rough pillow, I see that my hand, the one that had cradled her head, is stained with blood.
Peggy climbs in and lies down on the floor. I close the door behind her, try my mobile again. There’s still nothing.
I drive as fast as I can, as fast as I dare, talking to Ellen over the sound of the wipers, telling her that it’s going to be alright, that she’s going to be alright, my mind chewing feverishly over what she had said. Not Ellen, Layla. Not Ellen, Layla.
‘No.’ Someone moans – me, not Ellen. ‘Please God, no, don’t let it be that, don’t let it be that.’
I reach the end of the single-track road, driving faster now because the road is better. As I get nearer to Stornoway, I hear the sound of what seems like a hundred messages arriving on my mobile, and realising that the phone signal has kicked in, I pull quickly to a stop so that I can call for help. There are missed calls from Harry, Ruby and Tony, text messages asking me to call them but I ignore them and turn to check on Ellen. And my heart lurches, because her face is death-white and she is still, too still. Throwing my phone onto the passenger seat, I lean into the back of the car and take hold of her hand, feeling clumsily with my fingers for a pulse. I can’t find one and I force myself to calm down, to stop my fingers from shaking, and try again. Still nothing. Letting go of her wrist, I wrench my door open and as I get out, the wind slams me back against the car. Opening the back door, I bend over Ellen, shielding her from the rain, and this time, search her neck for a pulse, praying that I’ll find something, just a flicker, to tell me that she’s still alive. But the towel under her head tells me otherwise; it is no longer stained with her blood, but soaked with it. Another moan escapes me. My phone starts ringing and I reach into the passenger seat and answer it in a daze, my eyes never leaving Ellen’s face.
‘Finn, thank God! Listen, Finn,’ Harry says, his voice urgent. ‘You need to look at your emails. I’ve sent you something, something I found on Ellen’s computer. You need to read it, do you hear me? You need to read it before you see Ellen. Finn! Finn, are you there?’
I hang up. He’s too late. I need to phone for an ambulance. But it’s too late, far too late. I sink back onto the road. Ellen is dead. The words beat in my brain. Ellen is dead, Ellen is dead, Ellen, not Layla. Not Layla. Please God, not Layla. I need it to be Ellen. If I’ve killed Ellen, I can take it.
I know, though. Even before I look at the email Harry sent me, before I even look at the attached file, I know. I read it anyway.
I’m still here. Ellen didn’t overpower me, not completely. I was stronger than she thought, stronger than I thought. She hasn’t gone away though. She’s still around, lurking in the shadows, I can feel her. But for now she is quiet and while she is quiet, my mind is clearer. So I’m going to use the time I have left to write to Finn, in case things don’t work out as I hope.
So, Finn, this is for you. When I disappeared that night, I didn’t think about what I was doing or where I was going, all I wanted was to get as far away from you as possible. I thought you were going to kill me, you see. I know now that you weren’t, I know that you walked away so that you wouldn’t hurt me. But I didn’t know that at the time. I only understood once I’d read your letter.
The man that you saw coming out of the toilet block wasn’t the driver of the car parked outside; he must have been one of the lorry drivers. The driver of the car was a woman and as I ran down the slip road onto the motorway, she nearly ran me down. When she screeched to a stop beside me, I opened the passenger door and climbed in. She looked terrified, but then a lorry came down the slip road behind us and she had no choice but to drive off.
She wanted to drop me at the next service station but I was too afraid that you would come looking for me so I made her drive on until we reached another one a couple of minutes later.
As I stood on the forecourt, my one fear was that you’d arrive at any moment. I didn’t know how I was going to get to England. I didn’t have my passport on me, all I had were the keys to the cottage in St Mary’s, because I was wearing the jeans I’d been wearing the day we left. Even my little Russian doll was missing and I realised I must have dropped it when you were shaking me. It distressed me more than the lack of a passport, because it was the only thing I had to remind me of Ellen.
I decided to worry about the lack of a passport later and try and get to a port. All I could think of was getting to Lewis and this surprised me, considering how desperate I’d been to leave. But I suppose home is home and there wasn’t anywhere else I could really go. Around the back of the petrol station, at the far end, I saw a couple of camper vans and a caravan parked there. The camper vans were impenetrable but when I tried the door of the caravan, it swung open, so I got in and groped my way to the back.
I must have drifted into sleep because I was woken by voices, a man and a woman talking together as they approached the van. The next thing I knew, we were moving off.
Nobody came to check inside the caravan at the port, but I suppose twelve years ago, there’d been no reason to. And it was the middle of the night. The motion of the boat soon rocked me to sleep. I only woke when we were docking, and the knowledge that I’d managed to get to England relatively easily made me confident I could get the rest of the way to Lewis.
When we eventually came to a stop a couple of hours later, the couple went straight into their house, leaving the caravan on their driveway. I looked around for some money. I knew I could probably hitch-hike all the way to Ullapool but once there, I would need to take the ferry across to Stornoway. I found a few crumpled notes in the pocket of a pair of trousers and in a black handbag, a purse containing sixty pounds and a few coins. In the end, I took the whole bag, and because I was cold, a man’s anorak which I wore over mine, and a woollen hat to cover my hair.
It was early morning and I remember wondering where you were, if you were back in St Mary’s, glad to be rid of me, or if you were still in France. I could hear some light traffic in the distance so I headed towards it, hoping I’d be able to hitch a lift. I immediately thought of Ellen and how horrified she’d be if she knew that I was about to do something so potentially dangerous, and a sob caught in my throat. I could hardly believe that I was about to return to the man who had so brutally murdered her and dumped her body in a peat bog. Because that’s where Ellen is, Finn, in a peat bog. You have never known her, only my version of her.
My father was a violent bully of a man who tolerated Ellen and hated me. The only one who could control him was our mother and when she died, our world, already fraught with difficulty, became a nightmare. Because of my father’s nature, we lived pretty much in isolation on Lewis. Although Ellen and I went to school, we had no friends. We were oddballs, part of a family who lived on the margins of society. At my mother’s funeral, there
were four of us, my father, me, Ellen and a teacher from school.
Ellen was sixteen at the time of our mother’s death and I was nearly fifteen. Ellen never went back to school and nobody came looking for her. Instead, she filled our mother’s shoes, caring for me and our father. My mother’s death had a profound effect on me. Something pinged in my brain, like an elastic snapping. I refused to accept that she was gone and would speak to her, then answer back in her voice.
‘Can we have macaroni for dinner?’ I would ask.
‘Yes, of course,’ I’d say in my mother’s voice, before Ellen could answer.
It drove my father into a fury and Ellen would implore me to only talk to Mum when he wasn’t around. But it was my coping mechanism and I was as incapable of stopping as my father was of not drinking. I began to adopt her mannerisms and she ended up sharing my head with me. As for school, I gave up going and nobody came looking for me either. They were too afraid of my father.
Before she’d died, our mother had given Ellen a box containing money she would take from my father’s wallet when he was too drunk to notice. It was her present to us, our ticket for getting away from our father, and as soon as there was enough money, we were leaving, Ellen and I together. Ellen began to calculate how much we would need to get to London. I wanted us to leave as soon as I was sixteen but Ellen wanted to wait until I was eighteen. I thought of London as a big adventure but Ellen was more cautious. We might not be happy where we were, but at least we were relatively safe. As long as we didn’t do anything to annoy our father. When he was around, Ellen kept within sight and I kept out of sight. If he couldn’t see Ellen he would yell for her, demanding to know where she was. If he saw me, he would roar at me to go away. I never knew why he hated me so much but I didn’t care; I would have hated for him to even tolerate me.
Ellen’s target was a thousand pounds. There’d been over seven hundred in the box when Mum had given it to Ellen and it took us almost three years to get the rest. By that time, our father’s eyesight had begun to deteriorate but he refused to do anything about it. Often, when dusk approached, I took great pleasure in leaving things lying around so that he would stumble over them, hoping he might fall hard enough to smash his head open on the stone floor. But it didn’t happen and I became desperate to leave. I wanted to spend Christmas in London but Ellen felt that it wouldn’t be right to leave our father before Hogmanay. I thought we could leave without telling him – but again, Ellen felt that it wouldn’t be right. Whatever he was, she said, he was still our father. Besides, she explained, if we just disappeared he might call the police and they might make us come back. I doubted he would, or that the police would make us come back if he did, but if there was the slightest risk of either of those things happening, I didn’t want to take it. So I deferred, and it cost Ellen her life.
It was my fault. A week before Christmas, our father flew into a furious rage when Ellen told him there was no milk for his tea. He began to attack her verbally, in a way he had never done before, calling her the worst names he could think of. And unaware of what I was doing, I began shouting at him in Mum’s voice, swearing at him in a way that she wouldn’t have dared, telling him that he was a bully and a lazy good-for-nothing and that she was glad we were leaving him.
‘You should go now!’ I said in Mum’s voice, turning to Ellen. ‘Go on, take Layla, before it’s too late!’
I don’t know if he actually believed we were going to leave but he was already thundering towards me, his arm raised. I tried to move out of the way, but he felled me with a single blow and as I lay winded on the floor, he bent over me and began hitting me with his fists. As I tried to protect myself with my hands, I heard an almighty thwack, followed by a grunt of pain from my father. Looking up, I saw Ellen, holding a shovel, which she must have grabbed from outside the door. Even from the floor I could see murder in our father’s milky eyes and I shouted at Ellen to run. But she was no match for him. It didn’t take much to wrestle the shovel from her, nor to hit her with it. She keeled over like a bowling pin, splitting her skull open on the stone floor, and as blood seeped from her head, my father hit her over and over again with the shovel until she was nothing but a pulpy mess. Then he threw the shovel down, gathered up her lifeless body and carried her out of the house, trailing blood behind him.
I didn’t move. Paralysed with shock, I didn’t even cry. I stayed exactly as I was, curled up on the floor, my hands still raised above my head. I don’t know how long it was before my father came back.
‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ he said, coming to stand over me. ‘Try and leave and you’ll end up in the bog, like your sister. Now get to bed.’ When I didn’t obey, because I couldn’t, he yanked me up by my arm, dragged me to my bedroom and threw me inside.
The next few days were a blur. I took over Ellen’s chores like an automaton, cooking and cleaning as she had done, barely noticing what I was doing. I knew that at some point I was going to have to wade through the sludge in my brain, but I took comfort in the sludge because it stopped me from accepting what had happened to Ellen. It allowed me to pretend she had merely gone away for a while, as I had pretended with Mum.
The sludge eventually moved to one side, allowing me enough clarity to work out that I needed to get away. It wasn’t difficult; I left in the dead of night while my father was drunk, walking all the way to Stornoway, and when I got there I used the money from the tin to buy a ferry ticket across to Ullapool, and then a train ticket down to London.
I was so naïve when I arrived. Still in shock, I hadn’t thought anything through. If you hadn’t come to my rescue, I’m not really sure what would have become of me. I couldn’t accept that Ellen was dead. It was why I wrote postcards to myself from her, postcards of Lewis she had bought from the store in Stornoway, to take with us when we left, to remind us of where we had walked with Mum. I also bought myself a birthday card, and one at Christmas, and when I read them out to you, I honestly believed they were from her.
You made me feel so safe, so loved, that I quickly fell in love with you. So if I truly loved you, how could I have slept with someone else? Having had too much to drink was only part of it. The speed at which our relationship was moving was the other part. I had come to London to experience life and there I was, already settled down. My friends that night joked about it, and when they dragged out of me that I’d been a virgin when I met you, they were appalled that I would never know what sex was like with anyone else. I’m not going to blame them, but I was aware they were trying to get me a little bit drunk, aware that they were pushing a man – I don’t even remember his name – at me. And suddenly, I wanted this other guy, I wanted to have sex with him. It sounds terrible now but I was young and stupid and in the end, my stupidity cost me everything. It cost me you.
If someone had told me back then that fifteen months after I first left, I would be back on Lewis, caring for the father I was so terrified of, I would have thought them mad. It took me two days to hitch-hike to Ullapool. Nobody on the ferry over to Stornoway recognised me – why would they? It wasn’t as if Ellen or I had been well-known members of the community. Anyway, with my distinctive hair hidden under a hat, wearing clothes that I would never have chosen to wear, I looked nothing like my former self.
As I made my way down the Pentland Road towards our house, I prayed that my father had drunk himself to death, or that he had died from complications arising from the cancer or from the diabetes. He hadn’t, but I was about to witness first-hand how a relatively short amount of time can ravage a person’s mind and body to such an extent as to render them unrecognisable. My first inkling of this was when I pushed open the door and stepped into the hallway.
‘Ellen, is that you?’ a voice called, and it took me a moment to realise that it was my father speaking, not some stranger as I’d first thought. Taking a breath, I walked into the room on the right and found myself staring at a man I barely recognised. He was so diminished he was only half the man he’d
been before.
‘Ellen?’ he said again, leaning forward in his armchair, and I realised, from the way he was squinting at me, that he couldn’t actually make me out. And my heart leapt, because if I could make him believe I was Ellen, I would have a much easier time. But surely he knew that Ellen was dead, surely he remembered he had killed her?
‘Yes, it’s me,’ I said, inflecting my voice with Ellen’s softer, more gentle tone, glad he couldn’t see that I was shaking, because being so close to him again brought all the old feelings of terror back.
He relaxed back into his chair. ‘Make me a cup of tea, then.’
I escaped to the kitchen, wondering if it was all some trick, if he knew very well I was Layla and was playing with me. But when I opened the cupboard, I saw that my father was barely capable of looking after himself, let alone playing tricks. The cupboards were bare apart from the tea and a huge sack of porridge, and the sink was piled high with crockery. While I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I went to his bedroom and pushed open the door. The sour smell told me not only that my father hadn’t changed his sheets for months but that he was incontinent.
I took his tea to him. It was black and, remembering how the lack of milk in his tea had led to Ellen’s death, my hand shook as I handed it to him.
‘So where you been, then?’ he asked.
‘Edinburgh,’ I said, marvelling that Ellen’s voice came so naturally to me.
He grunted. ‘That sister of yours, she upped and left too.’
‘She went to London,’ I said, realising that not only had diabetes robbed him of his sight but that his abuse of alcohol, or maybe the cancer, had begun to erode his brain. I felt no pity, only relief.
The next day I cut my hair to my shoulders, because that’s how Ellen had worn hers. I still needed to make it darker like hers so when I went into town to buy hair dye and food, using Ellen’s old bicycle, I wore her clothes and a scarf around my head.
I only realised that I was the subject of a missing person’s search from a discarded newspaper I found on a bench outside the supermarket, a week or so after I returned to Lewis. It sent me into a complete panic. There was no mention then that I was from Lewis, the article only mentioned London. A few days later, however, the police turned up, swiftly followed by a reporter. I quaked with fear that someone would know I was Layla but with my father yelling ‘Ellen’ at me, demanding to know what was going on, the only thing they asked was when I’d last had contact with my sister and to let them know if she contacted me again. The strange thing was, I already felt like Ellen, so it wasn’t hard to speak of Layla as my sister. I didn’t want to be Layla anyway. I was ashamed, ashamed that I’d blown my chance to make a better life for myself. I didn’t deserve to exist.