by Alex Marwood
My therapist is called Melanie. I’m not sure why I need to see her, and assumed at first that it was some sort of surveillance thing. But everyone has assured me over and over that I’m not under suspicion. Melanie says that there is something called survivor’s guilt, and something else called PTSD, and I am a prime candidate for both. As such, I have a high chance of suicide, depression and ‘social disability’. She believes in these things, has spent years studying them, the way I spent years learning to butcher animals and build shelters from sticks. Horses for courses, I guess. ‘I’m not sure you’re right about this “survivor’s guilt” thing,’ I told her once. ‘I’ve spent my entire life being trained for survival. Surviving the Apocalypse was all we ever thought about. It was our purpose and our identity. Being a survivor is something to celebrate, not feel guilty about. I’ve done exactly what I was meant to do.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but this is the real world.’ And then she went a bit pink and clammed up, because I guess that wasn’t the sort of thing she was supposed to say.
Melanie isn’t a specialist in cults. There aren’t many to hand in Weston, I suspect. She does her best. I don’t mind. I enjoy the opportunity for conversation. Everyone I used to know is dead, and I am invisible.
I quite like the Halfway. I grew up communally, after all, and I’m used to having people around me. What terrifies me is emptiness. The silence that would descend in the police station in the small hours once the drunks had passed out. The sound of the spyhole sliding back for the hourly suicide check was an intense relief because then I would know, just for a moment, that the world had not ended. Here, though, in these plasterboard cubbyholes, I can hear the creak of bedsprings and the coughs and sobs of my housemates, smell cigarette smoke combining with the salty murk of seaside air, and feel comforted in the knowledge that they’re all still alive for now.
Melanie says that I must make myself go out every day. An hour a day at first, then more, then more, until I can leave my four safe walls all day, if I want. ‘You can build yourself up,’ she said. ‘It’s like a muscle. It gets stronger every time you use it. Think of it as physiotherapy for your brain.’
I nod and frown. I have learned that this is a good way to make them stop explaining stuff. If you smile, they know you’re not listening. I hope that if I look as though I am, if I convince them I have improved, they will let me go. That they will think I’m safe to leave before they spot that my growing belly is more than just the sedative carbohydrate diet they serve us. The Outside fills me with fear, but I must achieve living there.
So I do what she says, and make myself go out into the streets every day, limp down to the seafront to savour the crash of the waves and the cries of the gulls and the scattered litter and dropped ice cream cones, but oh, the fear I have to fight to do it. Every day at Plas Golau we would hear another tale of slaughter among the Dead: the knives and the guns and the lead in the water, the trucks driven into crowds, the women sold for sex, the glittering silver towers of Mammon plunging to the ground. You don’t forget those tales, if you’ve heard them every day for almost twenty years.
Mostly what Melanie does is sit in her padded office chair and write notes, and say, ‘And how did that make you feel?’ And I will think up some words – sad, lonely, isolated, afraid, angry, resentful, though I will throw in the odd hopeful to encourage her – and she will write another note and nod. When they noticed that I was throwing up, it seemed to make her happy. She called it ‘a symptom of emotional turmoil’. ‘It’s quite common, when people are experiencing powerful negative emotions,’ she said.
‘It happened this morning when I was deciding between tea and coffee,’ I told her. ‘And again when I was reading the newspaper. An article about how they train monkeys to look after blind people.’
‘Well, we’ll talk about those issues another time, perhaps,’ she said, and wrote another note. I’ve noticed that you don’t have to do much to divert people’s attention. Once they’ve assumed something, most things they see or hear will confirm it. All you have to do is not point out the obvious, though most times even doing that won’t make much difference. It’s fine by me if she wants to think I’m throwing up because I can’t handle the sight of a few dead bodies. I’m naïve in many ways, baby, but I’m not so clueless I don’t know that your existence will complicate things. Much better to let Melanie think she’s helped my neurosis by making me vomit.
‘Let’s talk about your family,’ she says. ‘How do you feel about them? Your brother and sister. Do you miss them?’
‘I … ’ How do you explain, to someone who didn’t live it? ‘Not particularly.’
She makes another note.
‘No, look. We weren’t, you know, a family family, the way you’d think of it. All of us were family to each other, whether we were related by blood or not. We were a … ’
I search for the words. I know she’s waiting for me to say ‘cult’, but I’m damned if I’m going to. I hate this, more than I hate anything about my life now. The fact that our vocabulary was so different from their vocabulary, so I have to hunt for the words that they would use instead of the ones I’ve used every day of my life. No one ever gives me credit for this; they just assume that because we spoke English the problem must be that my vocabulary is lacking. If I were Syrian, they’d be offering translation services. But then, who could translate for me? They’re all dead, or disappeared. I might as well be speaking Mayan.
‘I suppose you’d call it a commune. It was communal,’ I tell her for the umpteenth time. ‘Because we were all raised together and the adults took turns to care for us.’
The Pigshed. That’s what it was called, the schoolroom where we did our learning while the adults worked the fields. I tend to avoid using the name with Melanie.
She extrapolates. ‘Ah, a sort of kibbutz?’
‘If you say so. And besides, Eden’s only fifteen and Ilo is thirteen. I was out training most of the day by the time they were out of nappies.’
‘Training?’
‘Everybody has a function,’ I recite. ‘Everybody is a nobody, and everyone is a someone.’
She looks impressed. ‘Is that something you came up with?’
I look back at her with my ‘oh, please’ look. I’m quite pleased with this look. I learned it in group therapy. And then I start feeling sick again, and have to excuse myself to run to the toilet. Which uses up another few minutes before I come back to Melanie and her own trademark look: ‘you see?’.
‘And how is the anxiety?’ she asks, pointedly, when I return.
I get out my NHS-issue notebook and read out my homework. Over the last seven days my anxiety levels, on a scale of one to ten, have been eight, eight, six, ten, nine, nine, eight. The first nine was the day I nearly got mown down by a bus on the seafront. There are skills I have yet to fully master, and it seems that crossing the road is one. I rarely get down below eight even now, breathing exercises and mindfulness notwithstanding. I love beta blockers, though. The wonderful slow, calm beating of my heart after I take one.
She isn’t delighted, I can tell from her face. Then she brightens, because optimism is Melanie’s default, just as expecting the bombs to start dropping at any moment is mine. ‘Well!’ she says. ‘Friday looks like an improvement! What did you get up to on Friday?’
I consult my diary. ‘That was the day I stayed in and cleaned my room. I think it would have been lower, actually, except that I started worrying about the chemicals in the cleaning products. They won’t harm me, will they?’
The ten, the next day, was when I thought I saw Uri down on the seafront, buying an ice cream from a van covered in cartoons of dancing confectionery. And my heart started thumping until he turned full-on to me and I saw that he was just a random man with a shaved head and a thick neck.
‘Oh,’ she says. I must be a frustrating patient. I must start lying in the notebook, or I’ll never get out of here. And I need to get out of here, soon. If I regist
er a few threes and fives, it’ll make her happy. Last week I had a bout of paranoia that chemicals from laundry detergent could leach from my clothes through my skin, and ended up rinsing everything I own in the bath. It’s a shame, as I am still amazed by how easy cleaning is when you use chemicals. And how good the food tastes. But you can never be too careful.
Chemicals are one of the ways that the human race will end, Father said. Chemicals, plague, war, famine, nuclear winter, endless summer, economic collapse, devolution. ‘All-natural is the way we live,’ he would intone from his podium on the Great House steps as the Launderers scrubbed and squeezed at our clothing in bath-sized laundry coppers filled with soapwort. ‘All-natural is the future. All-natural is life itself.’ Our clothes were all-natural grey because bleach is a chemical, too, but it was convenient that they were, because soapwort, like feverfew, is not all that effective.
‘Will they?’ I ask.
‘I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘There are lots of laws about chemicals. They have to test them a lot before they start selling them.’
You say, I think.
Of course, what I really mean is whether they will harm you, but I can’t tell her that, because she doesn’t know you exist. But I can’t kill my baby. Not now. You’re the future.
I don’t know why I’m worrying so much about the chemicals. After all, everyone at Plas Golau died an all-natural death.
2 | Sarah
Next of kin.
Sarah Byrne last saw her sister twenty-one years ago. She left when Sarah was ten, and their parents never spoke of her again. And, because she had never liked Alison much, Sarah just went along with it. She remembers her more as a looming presence, a whirlwind of rage ready to go off and destroy the world, than as a sister. Seven years is a big gap to bridge when you’re children, and by the time Sarah was old enough to form solid memories and opinions Alison had been consumed by hormonal rage. In a way, her leaving was a relief. Sarah had just dismissed her from her mind as their parents had dismissed her from their lives. She’d felt the death of their old tuxedo cat, Mimi, two years later, more than she ever felt Alison’s absence. It’s been twenty-one years and she doesn’t remember thinking about her in a decade. And now …
Helen is looking at the centre-spread of the Mail on Sunday where Sarah first found her sister. One of these multi-page spreads with which the papers fill the space between ads in the silly seasons, while signalling that they care. There have been three this year already. At New Year, a round-up of every woman killed by her partner in the UK in 2015. At Easter, a year’s worth of London’s knife crime. And now, the holidays under way, every one of the identified dead of Plas Golau, in full colour.
NOT JUST A CROWD, reads the headline. Beneath, across sixteen full pages, a yearbook layout of the dead, a pious little editorial about how ‘we’ forget that behind the headlines and the body counts are real people. People whose lives fit neatly, with mugshots, eight to the tabloid page. And there was Alison, in among them, and Sarah’s world imploded.
Helen looks up. She’s on Sarah’s great-grandfather’s high-backed sofa, pretending she’s comfortable. The fact is, there isn’t a comfortable seat in this house. Just formal furniture for people who took pride in discomfort, and Sarah has been too sad, too demoralised by life, to do anything about it since she moved back in.
‘So how does it make you feel?’ asks Helen. She’s the counsellor at the school where Sarah is administrator, and a lot of her conversation consists of questions like this. A professional tic, like always having a Kleenex pocket-pack about her person.
‘I … awful. Guilty.’
‘Guilty? Why guilty? You were only ten when she left, you said?’
‘Yes, but I’m not ten now, am I? l’m thirty-one. l’ve been an adult for over a decade.’
‘And?’
Sarah swings her hands out, wildly. ‘I should have … I could have done something. I could have tried to find her.’
‘Really?’ Helen picks up her wine glass and takes a sip. So kind. She could be home now with her two kids and her quiet husband, but instead she’s taken time out to come and look after Sarah. I guess she probably thought l’d feel bereaved, Sarah thinks. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you, if someone told you their sister had died? But she’s grateful, whatever. She’s felt very alone in the three years since her divorce, knocking about in her dead parents’ museum of a house the past two. To find out that she has even one friend prepared to drop stuff for her is a pleasant surprise.
‘You said you didn’t know where she was,’ says Helen. ‘You know that’s more down to her than it is to you, right? I think in the end, given that there was always someone here to contact, you can fairly safely assume that Alison didn’t want to be found.’
Sarah finds herself tearing up for a moment. She doesn’t know why. It’s not as if she missed her sister when she was alive. She picks up the Mail and looks at Alison’s pitiful biography.
Alison as she remembers her. A photo taken at school, in her dark blue uniform cardi. Alison at fourteen, fifteen, hair still unembellished blonde – it went every colour in the rainbow once she entered the sixth form – and cut to the shoulders with her mother’s kitchen scissors. Glaring at the camera as though she wanted to blow up the world.
Sarah puts her wine down, feels slightly sick all over again, though she’s read it and read it until she should be immune, really. She stares at all the other faces on the page. Young ones, thin ones, sad ones, ones that smile dutifully for the camera – decades-old photos donated by long-abandoned families. She still doesn’t know where they got this photo. They certainly didn’t contact the school; it would have been Sarah who would have answered the phone if they had. One of her sister’s former friends, she guesses.
She reads again, though she remembers the words by heart:
Alison Maxwell, 38. Born Finbrough, Berks, a member of the Finbrough Congregation evangelical church. Having developed a reputation in the town as a ‘wild child’, she left the family home at 17 when she fell pregnant. Last seen in Finbrough in the winter of 1995. Spotted a handful of times with her baby, working stalls on the music festival circuit the following spring and early summer, then vanished from sight. Two further children, born at the compound in 2001 and 2003. ‘She was lovely,’ said an old schoolfriend. ‘She was a rebel, but anyone would be, coming from that set-up: it was stifling. I can’t believe this was what happened to her. But I can see, if you’re all alone with a baby and you’re looking for something better, how easy it would be to catch you.’ The Finbrough congregation apparently disbanded some time ago, and her family are uncontactable.
Sarah sighs. Drinks. Puts her glass down. So much for the press’s fierce reputation for tracking down their targets. Though to be fair they will have had enough easy pickings available that they’d not have needed to spend much time on the dead ends.
‘So, what do you think?’ asks Helen. ‘About the kids?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t, Helen. Social Services are all over my arse about taking them, but I don’t know anything about children.’
Helen makes a pfft noise. ‘You deal with them literally every day.’
‘No, but … that’s shouting at them about lunch money and telling them not to run in corridors. It’s not … it’s other people’s kids. Not my own.’
Helen wrinkles her nose. ‘Nobody knows anything till they have them. The global population was still growing last time I looked.’
They fall silent. She knows Helen is waiting, like the therapist she is, for her to say something, but she doesn’t know what to say. Looks around her gloomy parochial home, all dark wood and ancestral portraits, and listens to the sound of the grandfather clock clearing its throat in preparation for striking. All those nights lying awake in the dark, feeling its malevolence as it waited to count off another hour of life with nothing achieved.
How can I provide a happy home for another generation here? she thinks. This
place I was so keen to leave that I married the second I got the chance? I’m so stupid, coming back here when there was literally a whole world out there to move to after my marriage broke down. I should have sold it straight away. The only use for a house you hate is to get the money to buy a house you don’t.
She especially hates that clock. Hates the sound of it, the tick, tick, tick, the whirring strike mechanism. Hates the sound of all clocks striking. She wanted no clocks, she stipulated, in her marital house in Reading, and Liam went along with that. They timed everything by mobile phone. Yet now, every Saturday night, she dutifully winds the evil thing, like her father and his father before him.
‘I’m going to meet them on Saturday,’ she says, eventually. ‘It’s the right thing to do. I’ll put faces to the names, at least.’
‘Okay,’ says Helen. ‘But that doesn’t commit you to anything, just remember that … What are their names?’
‘Eden,’ Sarah says, ‘and Ilo. Fifteen and thirteen. And there’s a girl – woman, she must be twenty or so by now – called Romy. She’s the one they found in the Infirmary. The sole survivor. Adult survivor.’
‘Oh, God, I remember the photo,’ says Helen. Sarah does too. A skeletal form that looked dead itself, oxygen mask strapped to her face, body strapped to a stretcher, snapped by a thousand lenses as they carried her past the piled-up corpses to an ambulance. ‘I didn’t realise she was … another of yours … ’