by Caro Ramsay
Mum was there at the time, helping out, doing a bit of laundry and a bit of cleaning – nobody with the surname of Melvick did that sort of thing.
Beth had taken a few things with her, but her wedding ring and the Melvick necklace were left behind. She took some clothes though. The most difficult thing to believe was that one of the reliable witnesses who last saw her was my mum. At ten past eleven that morning. Mum loved being part of the drama. She tried to hide it but you could tell she was struggling to keep the smile from her face. Apparently she passed Beth on the road. And Mum said Beth was on her phone. Just as well Heather Kincaid and a friend of Ivan’s saw Beth Melvick after Mum did, as Beth then disappeared off the face of the planet.
FOURTEEN
Megan
I felt banished to the upstairs of the house. I had nipped down to make some toast, pour some coffee to take back to my room. I could tell from the dishes and the pans left out that the dining room had been set for breakfast. I caught the scent of fried bacon out in the hall but I didn’t go in and look. Jago might have my dad deep in conversation already so I slipped up the stairs, sneaking under Agatha who cast a beady eye on me wondering what I was up to. Once in my bedroom I could walk out the French windows and looked along the veranda where I must have walked. It looked the same as it always did.
But from here I could walk the full length of the upper floor of the house, listening to any conversation that happens to drift my way from unsuspecting guests, as long as I had my hearing aids in and there was no other background noise. Jago’s parents were probably around somewhere, chattering in the garden beneath me. As kids we learned early that it’s not easy to see from the ground floor up to the balcony. As long as we stayed low under the level of the balustrade, we were invisible.
So it was second nature for me to walk along there, keeping to the side of the wall to see the big picture and then I could duck down and tune in. It hadn’t happened often now that we were all adults and grown up but over the years there had been many a time when I’d sit there and spy on the guests at Mum and Dad’s drinks parties, then I’d spy on Melissa and her parties when she was a teenager when her mates would sneak off down the Benbrae for a swim or a sail or a snog.
But I knew this house well, I knew all its little spying secrets. Now, grown up, nobody’s life was so interesting that I needed to hear it, but when I did, this was still a very good place for eavesdropping. Even without my hearing aids. I could keep an eye on who was coming and going.
More than one person had commented how this house could have been built for spies. The kind of person who asked exactly what my dad did for a living, the words ‘civil servant’ and ‘foreign office’ not quite cutting it. People who were curious about the men in black cars and good suits that came and went when I was a child. These were people who were suspicious, those who had seen too many James Bond films. Or maybe, when Papa was alive, Dad really did drive an Aston Martin.
Then I spotted a car coming up the Long Drive. I thought I recognized it. By the time it pulled onto the gravel, I was running the shower, adjusting my hearing aids and closing the French doors behind me so anybody would think I was still in my en suite. Outside, crouching, I heard the front door open and Dr Scobie’s voice drifting up over the balustrade. Then he was standing outside, with Dad walking around slowly, no doubt thinking that a moving target was more difficult to eavesdrop on. There were low level mutterings for a few minutes, loud enough for me to catch the odd word but obscure enough to not make any sense.
Then the volume increased slightly, I heard my dad tut and could imagine him shaking his head; in my mind’s eye I could see him dislodging his long grey fringe then swiping it from his eyes.
‘What do I think might have changed her behaviour so violently? Losing Melissa?’
‘I think she was bound to crumple one day, maybe it’s better to have happened here, where the damage she can do is minimal.’ Scobie’s voice, quiet and insistent, loud enough for me to hear, said, ‘What you need to understand is that if the world was silent, then Megan would be sane. But it is a noisy world and she misses out on so much, things like social conditioning. She is frustrated and angry, many deaf people are angry and that might—’
‘Excuse me, but that seems a very long reach, I know my daughter. I know what she is like.’
‘She likes being deaf, have you never thought that a little strange, Ivan?’
My dad did not answer. For a moment or two, the silence was interrupted only by the rushing water of my shower and the chirping of the garden birds.
‘Have you ever thought that she might have found out about Melissa and Beth?’
At that moment, I felt my heart skip a beat. I exhaled slowly.
My dad’s voice was quiet but determined. ‘She doesn’t know, we have been very careful. Jago is the only other person who knows, and you. I hope. But now neither Melissa nor Beth are here. Megan tells me Melissa said sorry when she died. I think that’s why she apologized. Beth and Melissa always felt bad about it.’
‘Ivan, all I am saying is that Megan was a complex child. As an adult she was a complex patient, maybe not totally cured or even curable and she discontinued treatment before she was better. She has Dissociative Identity Disorder. We have been through this, it’s not a walk in the park, Ivan, it’s a serious condition and you allowed her to disengage from her therapy. You made it possible. It was not advisable. So this time, she sees it through.’
‘You said it was rare and there was an experimental programme. She’s my daughter, for God’s sake, not an experiment, Donald. I know Megan, she’s struggling at the moment, that’s all.’
‘Do you know her, Ivan?’ Dr Scobie’s voice was firm but empathetic. ‘No dad really knows what their daughters are like, it’s a self-protection mechanism. Do you think your brain would allow you to imagine the pain that Melissa was in, something so bad that she starved herself to death? Of course …’
They were now walking in the direction of the woods, but walking under the long balcony, easy for me to track them from above, knowing they couldn’t see me but I could hear every word.
‘… you can’t. You have spent the last ten years trying to find a cause for the deadly worm of psychology that ate her up. And there is no cause, it’s not your fault, nor Beth’s, nobody’s. She was what she was. And then look at Carla, how did her dad cope with that little monster?’
‘He loved her, despite everything.’
‘He loved her and lied to himself, that’s what parents do. He coped by lying to himself about her. I was reading that Keke Geladze convinced herself that her son was angelic. He was Stalin.’
I heard my dad’s response, quieter now, thinking. ‘It’s a bit of a jump from Stalin to Carla but I take your point. How Tom must have deluded himself about Carla, lied to himself time after time.’
I sat down again, behind the balustrade, placing my head against the marble upright, eyes closed, painting the words in my head.
They had all lied about Carla.
And I had no idea just how they were lying about Carla.
Just as they were lying about me.
Carla
I’ve always been a nosey bitch, always been on the big outside, always looking for a way in, then when I got in I discovered that most folk are awful once you get to know them. Being a nosey bitch, I had only been staying with my dad a week up in Kilmun when I discovered that with Mrs Adamson’s binos I could look out right over the top of the loch to the trees that surrounded the Benbrae and, if I fiddled about with the focus and lifted it up slightly, I could see the Italian House, but not close enough though. Then I thought if I could cycle round the loch and maybe to the folly, I could see it closer.
If I knew there was a party coming, I’d pull on my big jumper and climb out gran’s bedroom window and down the drainpipe, holding the leather strap of the binos between my teeth, a wee bottle of something in my pocket. Then on my bike round the top of the loch and onto the roof
of the folly. It was always awkward getting onto the top but it was nothing a monkey couldn’t manage and then I was up, crawling on to the roof, feeling the cool tiles on my bare feet and under my fingers. The old folly sat slightly up the hill, it was a good viewpoint to see everything that went on. I climbed along for the best view and then I’d sit and drink, and watch. Watch the perfect family live their beautiful lives.
I really enjoyed it when they had one of their house parties; I watched the rich and glamorous float around like ethereal creatures, iridescent faerie people at the bottom of the garden, and get pissed as farts.
Megan was never invited. Melissa was there if she was back in Scotland for a holiday, spending her long summer holidays with her lovely young friends. It was a difficult angle but sometimes I would catch sight of Megan standing on the veranda, above the heads of those out on the terrace as they sipped drinks and danced to the music that blared out of the French doors. Melissa liked jazz, that syncopated stuff where men snapped their fingers and nodded their heads with their eyes closed. No hokey-cokey for them. I kind of liked it. I’d sit there for ages, watching, pretending that I could hear something so far away. I couldn’t, of course. I was experiencing it as Megan would.
As the summer rolled on, and Megan and I got to know each other, she knew where to look and would wave. Although she could not know I was there, she couldn’t see me, not from that distance standing on the veranda, hiding.
Megan could know stuff she couldn’t know.
She said there were not five senses, more like twenty. People said that the blind have acute hearing. Megan said they probably didn’t as nobody expected the deaf to have better eyesight. But Megan could sense stuff, what was in the air, a drop in temperature, the variation of the airflow across her skin. Megan said that we could all do that, but we didn’t have the words, the vocabulary, to explain it. But I knew that feeling of being watched, of knowing that somebody was there when there was nobody to be seen.
I knew.
So I didn’t doubt her.
I bet she could ‘hear’ over the air, like a shark does with its special senses.
And sharks are dangerous things.
Megan
We were sitting in the main living room, the room with the modern sofas from Ikea, the big television screen in the corner. There are new pictures on the wall, prints, nice things, flowers and men walking over a desert in dull light, their camels stick thin against the sand.
Dr Donald Scobie was sitting in the chair opposite me, holding a cup of tea, one leg over the other, showing three inches of creamy woollen socks, in this heat. He had no neck, just rolls of fatty, pasty flesh between his shirt collar and his chin.
I didn’t know if he knew about last night and Jago.
We had gone through the pleasantries, well Melvick pleasantries about the latest round of tragedy, the loss of Melissa and the feeling of being back in the lion’s den. The feeling of being trapped was a constant theme of mine.
‘Megan, you know that your condition gives you selective amnesia, anxiety and you do experience a sense of being out of your body, hearing things that you cannot possibly hear. You do not have a split personality, you have DID that can lead to you having two distinct personality states but you don’t, not as yet. We must keep you safe, you are a bigger danger to yourself than anybody else and you need support and treatment, the drugs are there to get you through until the counselling and behavioural therapy can work. I was reading a paper that suggests ninety per cent of cases stem from childhood abuse maybe war, or health problems in childhood, maybe a disability in childhood. You can see the boxes I am ticking.’
‘My sister trying to drown me, and the fact I am not sad that she has now died?’
‘Maybe more the fact that you are deaf and are back here as the lady of the house, abandoned by both your mother and your sister. In this house which you admit feels like a prison to you.’ He smiled slightly, as he continued, ‘With a pond at the end of the garden where your sister used to try to drown you, I’ll give you that. But now that you are back, I’d like to touch on Melissa’s wedding. And Carla, do you remember the first time that you met Carla?’
‘Yes, I was lying on the ground bleeding.’ I lifted my fringe to show the scar that was still there. I needed to chat, otherwise Dr Scobie would stare at me and intimidate me. ‘She rescued me. Then I rescued her in Frasers. I had never met anybody quite like her.’
‘Were you friends?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you admire her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Seems to me you had more to give.’
‘I had more to gain. Carla was always there, down at the boathouse. I first remember seeing her when she pulled that boy off me. He was kicking me in the face, he was stepping back for a big kick. I closed my eyes, waiting. But it never happened. I thought I was going to die and then there was a noise. Something small and fast hit him in the chest. It was Carla, rugby tackling him right in the guts.’
‘Do you know why she did that?’
‘She was protecting me.’
‘Maybe, I’ll read you this.’ He unfolded a piece of typed A4 paper. ‘By this time in her life, her father, Tom had remarried and not told her. She was living with Mrs McEwan, who was in her early seventies, and she was struggling to fit in at school.’
He cleared his throat.
‘“I was all ready for the school dance that Christmas.” This is Carla talking about the Christmas before the incident when she came across you. “The rest of the class had shared limos, the girls had fancy frocks and piled-up hair that fell in ringlets over fake-tanned shoulders. I was chalk white, skinny and not one of them. I was dancing around on my own, already on the floor when a slow Adele song came on and Wullie Campbell came up to me and asked me to dance. Me. In my charity dress with my hair washed and everything, he chose me. He led me onto the gym hall floor, right to the middle, as the lights went down, everybody was watching, amazed at my good luck.
“He put his arms up as if he was going to give me a hug. Then he shouted that I was a stinking wee mong and he ran away, holding his nose. So everybody was laughing and the teacher put the lights on. The rest of the class were all laughing and chanting ‘stinking wee mong’. They had all been in on the big joke, they were all laughing at me”.’
‘Poor Carla, that’s horrible.’
Donald Scobie looked over. ‘It goes on: “the teacher was rushing to catch me before I got to Wullie Campbell. But I was quicker, he was singing about me, my mum and how she’d seen more pricks than a cactus when I knocked his teeth out”.’
Scobie folded the paper.
‘That was the brother of the boy who attacked you, it was nothing to do with you, Megan, it was about her. Her and him.’
And I looked at him with this paunch and his face like a pig, thinking where the hell did you get your degree? Could he not see, it was about the hunted and the hunter? It was about redressing the balance. Poor Carla, the humiliation if it, I could feel the burn of anger for her. I would have put that boy in a faerie pool for doing that to her.
‘Did you feel responsible for her after she saved you?’
‘I think she was always saving me. She never stopped.’
‘Would you have liked her to be your sister?’
‘No, then she would have been Melissa, and one Melissa was enough for any of us.’
‘Did you prefer Carla to Melissa?’
Like I was stupid enough to answer that.
‘We have to talk this through, Megan, you know that. You need good, effective psychotherapy.’
Well you had better find a good effective psychotherapist then. Sometimes I can hear Carla’s voice in my head very clearly. But I don’t repeat her words, I am too well brought up for that.
Scobie crossed his legs and continued, enjoying the shit he’d just thought up. ‘But she was not a part of this family. There must have been some sense of her looking up to you or being envious of you? Maybe
that got to her after a while, the more she saw yet the more she was locked out.’
I looked at him. ‘Envious of me?’ I pointed to my own chest. ‘Me? You don’t know Carla. She’s not envious of anybody. She was a hedonist. She hated the structure I have to have in my life.’
‘I saw Carla at Melissa’s wedding. I wonder if I spoke to her?’
‘You would have remembered if you had.’
‘People have commented that Carla at thirteen was a scrawny wee spotty girl with pale skin and blue hair. The Carla I saw at the wedding was groomed and tanned and dark-haired and healthy looking. She could have been a Melvick.’
He thought I was stupid. ‘She was my friend. I know how scared I was walking home, it was a long walk, and Mum had got caught up in traffic after taking a pony to the vet. The local kids were walking behind me, I knew they were there, a gang of them. They were shouting. I couldn’t hear the names they were calling me. You have no idea how that feels.’
He looked confused.
‘It was only when I turned around to see them, I saw their faces and I realized how much I was hated. I wasn’t used to that. I was used to puppies and strawberries, not being spat at. Carla knew how that felt.’
And I was there for an hour talking shite about Carla, stuff we had talked through a hundred times before. I knew it off by heart. I knew the lies to tell.
Dr Donald Scobie was so full of crap.
Carla
Dr Scobie is going over old ground, there’s a load of stuff he cannot fix, but gets paid a fortune for talking it over. Megan’s dad is flinging money to try to get her better, when I think I know the one thing that will get her better is not being here at this bloody house and all the gawping ancestors that she can never live up to.
It’s this place and its malevolent memories, it’s toxic to her soul.