Hydra

by Matt Wesolowski

  A walking flagrant,

  A stalking irritant,

  A failure not fit to fall by your wayside…’

  [This dissolves into a clip of Skexxixx standing onstage at a concert, bathed in red light and dry ice, screaming into a microphone.]

  ‘Embrace your emptiness! Embrace it! We are nothing! We are nothing!’

  [This shot then dissolves into a photograph of Arla Macleod with her arms around two other girls with their faces pixellated. All three are wearing torn clothing. Arla has black eyeliner smeared around her eyes. She is grinning; some of her teeth are blacked out. She’s wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘I am nothing’ with an ‘S’ insignia below it.]

  —The thing was, Arla’s parents never even tried to understand the music, how she used to dress, any of it. It was far too complicated. They threw everything they had into Alice – the pretty one, the swimmer. They just had no idea what any of the music meant to Arla. It was her life. At least my parents made an attempt; Dad showed me his old Venom and Bathory cassettes from ‘back in the day’, bless him. It was all an escape for Arla, it was the most important thing in her life and they didn’t care. When she did what she did, everyone seemed to miss the point entirely.

  —What was the point?

  —That it wasn’t simple cause and effect. Why is that so hard to understand? You don’t listen to music and then kill your family. If that was the case, all of us – all of Arla’s friends – would have done the same. We all listened to that stuff, we all embraced it.

  —You and Arla were friends?

  —Not ‘friends’ exactly.

  —OK, so tell me about how you and Arla first got to know each other.

  —Alright … So what would you think if I told you that Arla … that it was clear to everyone that Arla needed help.

  —Let’s rewind a little – I’m trying to get a sort of timeline here.

  —OK, so I was in the same school as Arla Macleod from year nine, when she joined. I didn’t notice her – no one did, not until year eleven. So that would have been around 2008, 2009?

  —Go on.

  —So year ten, year eleven, it’s the time when most kids sort of come into their own, when they start working out who they are, why they are, yes? I remember that there were a few kids at the school who were into Skexxixx – you know, they dyed their hair black, wrote the logo on their bags in Tipp-Ex, drew that symbol in their books, that sort of thing.

  —Were you one of them?

  —That isn’t really relevant, to be fair. What matters is that Arla began year eleven … different…

  —She had taken on this image?

  —See, this is where it all goes skew-whiff, where what was actually going on with Arla is diminished into a ‘phase’ or ‘rebellion’. The truth was that the whole Skexxixx thing could have been anything – it could have been any musical group, any obsession. But the actual subject matter wasn’t important; what was, was Arla’s attitude towards it.

  The other thing was that, in this country it’s different. In the US, after Columbine, the whole ‘goth’ image was demonised, when in actual fact those killers – Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris – had nothing to do with goth whatsoever. The Christian right blamed Marilyn Manson, a singer who Klebold and Harris didn’t even like. It was a convenient way for them not to look at the deeper issues. In this country, on the other hand, the whole Skexxixx image was … Put it this way: the kids at Saint Theresa’s who cultivated that image used to get the shit kicked out of them. It wasn’t cool or dangerous to have that image, and, certainly, no one was scared of them.

  —OK, but Arla took on that image all the same?

  —For a while, yes. But she was … she used it differently…

  Tessa then tells me the story you heard at the beginning of this episode about the religious studies teacher – about how he lost his temper with Arla, who, up until year eleven, had been a quiet and conscientious student.

  —What had she done to make him that angry?

  —Not much – hardly anything at all. She’d only written things in the inside cover of her exercise book. We used to have these green exercise books and the inside covers were great for doodling in, if you had the right sort of pen – those black rollerballs or fineliners.

  —What had she written?

  —As you probably know, the whole Skexxixx aesthetic was ‘embrace your emptiness’ – a kind of call to disenfranchised youth. Arla had written all this stuff about God in her book: ‘God is nothing’, ‘I am nothing’ – all that stuff; and she’d drawn all these weird drawings, these – I’m not sure – they were like men, boys, with these black, inky eyes…

  —She got quite a reaction from Mr Whitton though, right?

  —Yeah, he went mad. He actually ripped the back off her book and threw it in the bin, started ranting. It was pretty scary actually. The rest of us were pretty freaked out. And that’s when I knew there was something not right about Arla … because she started laughing. It wasn’t nervous, and it wasn’t a reaction to Mr Whitton’s shouting. It was … it was like she just didn’t care anymore. Like she didn’t give a single, solitary shit. Just think how much those drawings would go for on Ebay now … It’s disgusting.

  —Tessa, you said earlier that you were shocked but not surprised about Arla doing what she did. That was about five or six years after the incident you’re talking about, right?

  —That’s right. But that thing with Mr Whitton was the first time I saw that Arla Macleod had changed – not just changed, she had undergone a complete metamorphosis. She had become someone … something else.

  —That sounds rather extreme!

  —It was! There was this girl, this nondescript little nerd, this good girl, who suddenly became … just … someone else.

  —And this incident in the RS class was the first time you noticed it?

  —Yes, it was the first time I did, but there were more, I’m sure of it. What was disgusting, what just made no sense, was that everyone blamed it on the music; like, if Arla hadn’t listened to Skexxixx, she would have been fine. That was what angered me the most. And … I guess that’s what drew me to her in the first place.

  —So talk me through the Arla you knew.

  —I’m not sure if I ever really knew her. Like I say, from the very start of year eleven, she was … it was like Invasion of the Body-Snatchers or something. Looking back on it now, it was clear that Arla was suffering from some sort of mental illness.

  Anyway, we had a lot of new staff that year. Maybe we were all starting again? A lot of the teachers were young; some of them good, some not.

  Anyhow, we were year eleven, we were practically adults, right? We had our favourites and we weren’t going to take any nonsense from these upstarts. So imagine having to try and teach us lot; it must have been hell. Those young teachers are probably older teachers now, some of them will be freezing classes with the raise of an eyebrow…

  But with Arla … she … it was the male ones, the men, that’s who she seemed to save her bad behaviour for. You could tell she relished it; that she couldn’t stand … well, the men. There was Mr Whitton for RS, who’d been there for years, and two new ones: Mr Larsson, who taught French, and Mr Mahlik, who was … history; yes, that’s right. Mahlik was the first black teacher we’d had. He had a funny accent as well – Birmingham or somewhere. There was always a tension, a silence when he taught us about apartheid. I remember that. Not knowing where to put your eyes, a laugh building in your throat – if you met someone else’s eyes you were done for.

  —And Arla?

  —Yeah, she was just … just awful … to all of them. Mr Larsson got it the worst though. He was young, enthusiastic, posh – sort of like a dog; a big blonde Labrador. You could practically see his tail wagging as he pranced around the classroom, pointing at people with a big stupid grin on his face and getting them to repeat ‘je vais à la pêche’, ‘je vais au théâtre’.

  —Sounds like quite a fun way of teach
ing to me.

  —Remember though, this was Stanwel – a shit, little, angry mining town in the northwest. One of those mad, racist, indie councillors nearly got elected a while back didn’t they? Mr Larsson’s progressive teaching methods were looked on either with derision or indifference!

  —Where were you in all this?

  —Oh, I was a stuck-up little madam back then. Thought I knew better than everyone.

  —That doesn’t sound like the sort of person who would associate with Arla Macleod, then.

  —No. And I didn’t really. I did sit with her in French though. Thanks to Mr Larsson.

  —I have to say, you’ve been pretty careful about dissociating yourself from Arla – you don’t want to be seen as one of her friends.

  —That’s true. If you ask anyone else who was at school with Arla, you’ll get the same view of her. It’s the reason she sat with me – was made to sit with me – in French.

  —And what was that view?

  —Let me finish this story first, then you’ll get your answer.

  —OK.

  —So, Arla had been sent out of French for the third time for – I don’t even remember: turning around in her seat, not listening, whatever. Anyhow, Mr Larsson was so desperate to be liked, we soon worked out that the worst he would do was send you out of the room, and you could either have a wander round the corridors, because he’d inevitably forget you were out there, or else you could pull faces through the window.

  Arla usually did the window faces. But the thing that struck me was that none of Arla’s gang were in our French class, so she had no audience. Which meant she was just doing it to be vindictive, for no good reason, you know. And she was only ever like this with the men. It made me wonder if something had … happened … to her to make her that way.

  —So after that third time she was sat next to you … as a punishment?

  —Not really. It was more like … I think Mr Larsson was hoping I might be good for her in some way.

  —You mentioned Arla had a ‘gang’? Were these her friends – the ones we see in the photos in the documentary?

  —That’s them: Deborah Masterson and Paulette English. I’ll never forget those names.

  —Were you a … victim of this ‘gang’…?

  —Sort of. But they were hardly a gang, to be fair – just three little Skeks, ha! I’d forgotten that word till now – a collective term for a bunch of girls in ripped clothes and too much eyeliner who crept around the edges of the corridors and huddled in their little covens at break time, talking about how life was so deeply unfair and how no one understood them.

  Anyway, having Arla sit next to me in that lesson was a godsend; it meant that there was a sort of begrudging truce between us. I also got a lot of insight into her as a person. I guess that’s why I got in touch with you. I feel I can be objective about the whole thing, but still remain vaguely anonymous.

  —Why is it so important to you to remain anonymous?

  —I … I guess that some fears don’t leave you, not properly. Some fears leave, like, teeth marks that will never fade.

  Imagine not feeling safe in your own home … imagine them…

  Sorry. Excuse me. Can we take five, please?

  Both Tessa and the television documentary allude to the violence and intimidation that Arla and her two friends dealt out at the school. This behaviour seems utterly at odds with the current image of the UK’s ‘goth’ subculture, which is composed mostly of quiet introverts. When we start again, I ask Tessa if the bullying seemed in any way strange or out of the ordinary to her.

  —In retrospect, yes; but at the time, no. So, at the start of year eleven, like I say, there were a few kids who shared the same sort of aesthetic, the same look, as Arla. But they were your typical introverts, loners.

  —I’m a little confused; did Arla have a gang at school that people were scared of or not?

  —The thing you have to understand about Arla back then was that she wasn’t like the others, she wasn’t like anyone. Arla had suddenly become this violent, messed-up kid but no one wanted to look at why. Saint Theresa’s staff were quick to snap off any ugly-looking heads that reared up from among the students; but as soon as they turned their backs, two would grow back in their places. So Arla would get in trouble and be punished for her behaviour, but what did that achieve? An hour’s detention after school for terrorising teachers was all she got. Anyway, to answer your question, yes, Arla did have friends – Deborah and Paulette. And no one messed with her, so no one messed with them. Any power those two had was granted to them by Arla. And I suppose they shared the more-or-less immunity that the school seemed to allow her.

  —There was a lot of talk after the killings about some kind of external influence playing a part in what Arla did. Do you think that was an attempt to pin the blame on something – on someone – perhaps?

  —You’re right. In that documentary, they were quick to blame Skexxixx’s lyrics and songs, weren’t they? That all this stuff about embracing emptiness, about being nothing, was preying on young people’s insecurities. When actually what it was doing was simply making money. I mean, I hate to sound cynical, but it was. And no teenager can say they’ve ever felt wholly adjusted growing up, that they’ve never felt worthless. They didn’t need Skexxixx to tell them that.

  But there was something else going on with all that Skexxixx stuff – something that never even got picked up on.

  —What was that?

  —So, his second album – which was the one everyone was listening to at the time, by the way – was much less … controversial than the first one. It was much more melancholy and introverted, with less defiance than Embrace Your Emptiness, which was the one everyone knew him for, and that fitted nicely into Arla’s story, didn’t it? In my humble opinion, though, Through the Mocking Glass holds much more significance – and it was the album that I know for a fact Arla listened to the most. She was obsessed with that CD when the rest of Skexxixx’s fans were just starting to grow up a bit.

  Skexxixx’s 2007 album, Through the Mocking Glass, which Tessa mentions, saw much less commercial success than 2004’s Embrace Your Emptiness, and received mediocre reviews in Kerrang and Metal Hammer magazines, which cite it as the beginning of the end for the artist.

  However, Tessa is right about the significance of some of the album’s themes for Arla’s case. Look at some of the lyrics to the title track, ‘Through the Mocking Glass’:

  ‘…driven to the place where our world ends,

  Never look back, never look back.

  Where all that remains is a pale door,

  Never look back, never look back.

  And a mocking reflection that beckons us forth,

  Never look back, never look back.

  To a place where our failures are marked by ticker-tape scars,

  And our mistakes, pedestals where we gaze at the stars…’

  (Copyright Wormfood Records, 2007)

  The lyrics of many of the songs on this album are about disappearing to a place where our mistakes and our failures are embraced and treated as lessons. At least that’s an interpretation shared by many on the numerous fan sites and forums surrounding Skexxixx, which often cite these themes as the reason the musician made Through the Mocking Glass his swan song. He seemed to vanish not long after its release, only making a brief appearance on Twitter in 2015 before disappearing once again.

  —Arla used to listen to that Through the Mocking Glass album constantly – she was obsessed with it. She used to write the lyrics all over her books. Everything about failure, about mistakes, about vanishing, disappearing. I don’t know how much more of a cry for help she could have made. Blaming the music for what Arla did is just too easy, isn’t it? People should look at what those lyrics really said about her state of mind.

  Extract from She Never Told Us

  (Blamenholm Productions)

  [A montage of promotional photographs of Skexxixx and footage of fans dressed in s
imilar attire fades in and then out. A shot of a priest shouting from the stage in a school hall; below is the caption ‘Concerned Parents of America – Santa Barbara Division’ meeting 2007.]

  ‘Parents! Teachers! I urge you to talk to your kids about the music they’re listening to! Go in their bedrooms! Read these lyrics that they’re listening to, listen to this music! Then you can come back to me and tell me that I’m being hysterical!’

  [There are whoops and applause.]

  ‘Tell me I’m being hysterical when he’s telling you it’s OK to embrace nothing! Tell me I’m being hysterical when he’s telling your babies that they’re nobody!’

  [Wild applause and shouts.]

  ‘Then, when you take these CDs and burn them, you are showing your kids that you reject his nothing, that you reject his emptiness!’

  [The audience give this a standing ovation.]

  There’s so much I want to ask Arla herself about all this, but Elmtree Manor has very specifically told me not to. Which is unfortunate, because this part of the story clearly goes so much deeper. And now I can see what Tessa is getting at. Because I saw the photos of Arla from back then, and I watched the documentary and read the newspapers, and I admit that, at the time, I believed the simplified narrative they presented.

  Extract from She Never Told Us

  (Blamenholm Productions)

  [On screen, a silhouetted teenage girl talks to the camera. Her voice has been altered electronically.]

  ‘They would … they would just prowl the corridors, wait till they caught you on your own and then surround you. She – Arla – once told me that I’d been ‘chosen’ as their ‘sacrifice’. She was the ringleader, Arla was. She had the others totally under her control … like, totally under a spell or something…’

  —So let’s go back to the tentative relationship between you and Arla. You began speaking together in French lessons, correct?

  —Yes. Arla had this … I don’t want to say aura, but this sort of hum coming from her, this energy, like she was this restless soul that couldn’t be stilled. I admit I was scared of her – scared of her unpredictability. The others – Paulette and Deborah – they were just normal, I guess, but liked to pretend they were all messed up inside. With Arla it felt genuine.