If You Knew My Sister

by Michelle Adams

  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 caut
ious 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?

  I step from the room and stare at the photographs on the dresser. Elle and another little girl. A girl I know cannot be me. I take each photo one by one, looking for the mistake, looking for me. But I don’t find it. I’m not in any of these photographs.

  I allow my anger to get the better of me and snatch up the heaviest frame, launching it at the dresser. It clatters forward, smashes into the back of the cupboard. I stand there in silence, shaking. But as I look up, I notice that along with the glass of the frame, part of the dresser has shattered too. Wood splinters fly up, and a chink of light creeps through the hole. I push my fingers into it and find space on the other side. I grip the wood and pull, breaking another flimsy part away. Beyond there is no wall. Instead there is a corridor, and as I put my eye to the hole, I see the same red carpet that runs underneath my feet.

  I pull the dresser away and find that the corridor continues behind it, with only a narrow outline of bricks built to mask the remaining gap around the edge. I step through the space where the dresser once stood, into a side of the house that I’ve never been able to access from my bedroom before. I follow the corridor as it turns to the right, and at the end I see the same upturned table that I was kneeling at only moments ago. Beyond that I hear music, and I can see the open door of Elle’s bedroom just up ahead.

  But I retrace my steps because there is another door that had remained hidden until today. I open it, bursting through as if I want to catch somebody in the act. Before me is a room, pink, a small bed to match my own. More sad, dated furniture, everything grey with dust, as if it is slowly fading away. A large bay window with the curtains pulled shut. On a shelf there are three albums, the same size and style as the albums in the study. I pick up the first, faded gold lettering reading 1984. My mother isn’t pregnant any more. Instead there is a baby in her arms. I turn the page. The same baby, a little bigger. Two children in the background. One of them is Elle, and she is holding a red marker in her hand. There is a butterfly on the baby’s plaster cast. A cast that extends all the way up her left leg, above the hip. My hip. The other little girl has her hands on the edge of my crib. She has blonde curls. Blue eyes. She is the girl from the tricycle. The girl I thought was me, but who was not.

  Because I am Casey, the youngest of three, born in February 1984 with a dysplastic hip. I am the child who is supposed to be dead. But if I am Casey, who is the other girl?

  I snatch at the album marked 1985. I flick through the pages, and there I am. Bigger. Growing. Alone. No other children. My parents are there with me, pictures of them holding me, of bath time, nappy change, days in the garden. All the pictures are from the house. As if they never took me out. My parents’ features are heavy. The easiness of their youth has gone. Their faces talk of the decision to exclude one of their children, and the unexplained loss of another. 1986 is the same, me with my parents, until it stops halfway through, an album unfinished. A family disappeared.

  I stare at my mother, wish I could ask her what happened, beg her to tell me the truth. But it’s too late to ask for the answers, because all that remains is her grave, the secrets of the past buried with her and out of reach. I remember what Matt told me: that when our parents die, they take part of us with them, the part that belonged to them all along. I wonder if the reverse is true. Perhaps they leave part of them behind with us. The part of them that was always ours to keep. Maybe if I wish for it hard enough, part of her will live on in me.

  And that’s when I remember. I run from the house, grabbing my keys just before I slip out of the back door. I am panting by the time I reach the car, rain streaming down my face, my heart pounding. I drive towards the village, screeching to a halt as I pull up alongside the graveyard. I hobble forward, my hip throbbing in pain as if it knows, as if it is excited that the secret will finally be uncovered. I stagger towards the muddy mound under which my mother lies, and right next to it, just as I remember from the day of the funeral, is the other grave. The headstone with no dates, filled instead with an empty promise, no stronger than the one they offered me.

  I peel back the covering of moss and brush away the remnants of mud, read the engraving.

  Our
dearest Casey.

  You live on in her.

  41

  It took weeks for the exhumation licence to be approved. But it came through for early November.

  Who will they dig up? My bet is that we will find a little girl who once went by the name of Irini Harringford, the second child of Cassandra and Maurice Harringford. The little girl whose place I took. I’m not sure what happened to her yet, or if Elle had anything to do with it. If she was here, maybe she could help answer the questions. But my best guess is that Elle was involved with her death and that my parents sent her to Fair Fields in a desperate bid to help her. Casey’s reported death at roughly three months old ties in with Elle’s admission. So they passed me off as Irini, perhaps easier to convince people of the death of a baby with health problems than it was a toddler. I became Irini, and nobody became any the wiser. I inherited her name, and she inherited my health problems. But when my parents found out what was happening to Elle, they had to bring her home, leaving them with no option but to send me away, or risk losing Irini all over again.

  I suppose there will be questions afterwards. The police will open an investigation, will want to know who killed little Irini, the actual Irini. They’ll want to know who knew the truth, and who kept it hidden. Somebody must have signed the death certificate for a baby who didn’t die. Somebody in the village must have wondered why Irini was suddenly kept at home. Perhaps some of them were even at Casey’s funeral.

  But until I know for certain what happened to Irini, I continue to live as her. Casey doesn’t quite seem to fit. Perhaps it is because I am fourteen months younger than the age I have believed I was for most of my life. Aunt Jemima must have known the truth, so it’s no wonder she didn’t want Elle in our lives. But she can’t keep hiding, and now that the police are involved she will have to face the truth. I wonder if she will want to talk to me, apologise, atone, beg forgiveness for the lies. Perhaps that is the least I deserve, but really I just want to move forward, find a new life, one that feels true to who I am. Whoever that might turn out to be.