And that’s when … that’s when it all went wrong…
—What happened?
—The tube must have packed in or something, because it stopped flickering and we were back in that half-light from before. But something had changed in Arla. She had this look in her eyes like it wasn’t her anymore. And I was scared. Proper scared. Arla had something in her hand as well and … God, this is going to sound just so … You see, at some point Arla had picked up this … this rusty hammer, like a claw hammer, from the rack on the wall and she was holding it in one hand and smacking the blunt end in her other. It was horrible. It wasn’t Arla. That’s the whole thing – it just wasn’t her…
Paulette sighs and one of her dogs trots inside and nuzzles at her legs; she ruffles its fur and the dog seems to make a sympathetic sound in its throat.
—Was this Arla playing a game?
—See, it’s going to sound wrong, but it was like being in another world down there, in the half-light with the bath and the junk and the dust. We were all sort of high somehow. We weren’t on drugs or nowt. It was just … I dunno. But when that bulb winked out and Arla was stood there with the hammer, there was something different about her.
She were holding that hammer and she were looking at me and Debs, back and forth. I were getting proper freaked out. But I didn’t show it. I kept still, just dead still, it was like there was some instinct telling me that if I moved, if I spoke, she’d…
—She’d?
—I don’t know.
But Debs … Debs says something – it were just something like ‘C’mon let’s go’, something innocent like that – and Arla just lost it. It were horrible.
—What did Arla do?
—She still had that look – that manic look – in her eyes and she was, like, slapping that hammer in her palm. That’s when Arla told Debs to come and stand in that old bath. I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t. It was mad; it was crazy. It should have been funny. Debs was looking at me and I just … I kept my eyes down. It was like in a lesson when the teacher shouts and everyone goes silent.
Arla tells Debs to get in the bath and she’s still slapping that hammer in her hand. I could see – I could tell – that Debs was scared too and she was trying not to show it. So Debs rolls her eyes and shrugs, putting on this show of not being bothered. She just gets in the bath, just as if she didn’t give a shit, like she’s in on the joke. I wanted to scream, to run, but I couldn’t. I just stood there, saying nowt.
That’s when Arla starts telling us about a game – this game she was obsessed with, something she’d read about on the internet. ‘Darumasan’ it was called. Christ, I hate even saying it out loud!
So we’re still dead quiet and Debs is stood in that bath. Arla starts telling us how she heard this story about a girl who came down into the boiler room in Saint Theresa’s a few years before and killed herself. She said that it happened in the bathtub. We knew Arla was bullshitting, making it up as she went along. Arla said that this girl only had one eye cos she smashed her own face in with a hammer. Again, it should have been funny. I knew it was a story – Arla used to go on like that all the time. But down in that boiler room … there was something about being there. Neither me nor Debs wanted to speak up – neither of us said anything. The bottom of that bath had all these brown rust marks in it, and Arla was telling us they were dried blood. It sounds stupid now, doesn’t it? But at the time, it was … it was like … like being in a dream or something. And Arla … with that look in her eyes…
—Is this why Debs left?
—No. It wasn’t the story that made her go. It was … it was what Arla did next.
—Go on.
—It was like we was in another world. Sometimes I wonder if any of it really happened. The bath, the boiler room. Debs was getting pissed off standing there in the bath. I could tell she were still scared but she was hiding it well. Arla told her to stand still, to stand absolutely still, and then she went back over to those light switches and hit one of them. Whatever lights were still on in the boiler room went out. It were pitch black.
I’m so ashamed, you know? I’m ashamed I did nowt – of being a passive observer. Let me tell you now, though, I never once thought Arla would use that hammer, not once. It was just … she was just messing on, sort of thing. That’s what I kept telling myself. She was just trying to scare us.
I could hear Debs blundering about in the bath and Arla’s voice right by her. Arla was shouting, ‘Close your eyes! Close your eyes and wash your hair.’
The bath wasn’t connected to nowt but Arla kept saying it: ‘Close your eyes! Wash your hair!’ And in that darkness, it were proper creepy. Eventually Debs was, like, ‘I am, I am!’ It still felt like a game, but a really fucked-up one. It felt like none of us were in control – least of all Arla.
—So Debs was doing as she was told?
Arla was shouting at her again, making her say something, and Debs was chanting it over and over again. I’ll never forget it, that voice in the darkness: ‘Daruma-san fell down. Daruma-san fell down.’ She was just shouting it over and over. And soon we were all saying it. It was like a chant and it just seemed to go on and on. ‘Daruma-san fell down. Daruma-san fell down.’
—What does it mean?
—When she stopped, there was this horrible silence – like proper horrible. Worse than before. I’m not proud to have thought it, I swear to you, but I had this thought. I thought the lights would come on and Debs would just be gone. I used to dream of that happening, of searching for hours down in the darkness. Then Arla did turn on the lights. Debs was there and I felt this wave of relief. Debs was crouching in the bath with hair all over her face, her skin all red. I knew she’d been crying.
Arla was still holding the hammer. She was bending over Debs in the bath and said in this dead serious voice, ‘Ask her … ask her why she fell. Ask her why she died down here in this bath…’
And Debs does it, she says those words in this weedy little voice, this pathetic little voice. There was quiet for a second and then, suddenly, the spell was broken. All of a sudden we was just a few stupid teenage girls in a boiler room when we shouldn’t have been.
—What about Debs?
—She just got up out of the bath, her hair all over, her skin all blotchy, and staggered away. She didn’t look back at either of us. I wanted to shout, to say sorry, to tell her to come back, but I couldn’t. I looked at Arla and Arla just sort of shrugged.
That was it. Debs never knocked about with us after that. And I get why. I get it. I nearly left too. It was too much. It were all just insane. But then who would Arla have had? She would have had no one.
—Did Arla ever explain why she did that to Debs? Did she ever explain what Debs had done to deserve it?
—No. She didn’t say. All she did was, she nodded after Debs and said, ‘She won’t look back, her.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ Arla just shrugged and said, ‘She’ll see her tomorrow.’
—What did that mean?
—Arla said that the ‘ghost’ would now follow Debs. That whenever she looked behind her, she’d see her. That she’d spend the rest of her life running from her. I mean, what? Who does that?
—What was your reaction at the time?
—You know, I was more concerned we’d get into trouble for going into the boiler room! Like, if Debs went and told someone – a teacher – I was thinking whether I’d get in trouble too.
And I don’t know to this day why Arla did that to her. I never asked. I wish I had. I just remember thinking that whoever was there with us in the boiler room with the hammer wasn’t Arla.
—And did Debs tell anyone? Did she grass on Arla?
—I dunno. And that was another peculiar thing. As soon as it was over, as soon as we were back in form, by like, last period, I’d forgotten it more or less. Maybe it was too much for my little brain to take in…
—What about Debs? What became of her after that?
—What? Was she followed b
y a ghost? Sorry, no, I don’t know. I saw her about and that. I don’t think she ever told, though. I never spoke to her about it. Arla would have been excluded I reckon – me too. No teacher ever spoke to us about the boiler room.
—What about the caretaker? Did Mr Marsh ever find out about it?
—Marshy? Nah. He was just a little old oddball. He had this red face, all wrinkly and the lads used to say he was a convicted murderer on parole, that he’d killed his daughter. It was just another stupid story. No one who’d done that could work in a school, right? How would that even happen? Anyway, if Marshy had caught us, we’d have known about it.
Paulette’s story about the boiler room, to my knowledge, has never been reported before. I ask Paulette why not, and she says that she was so disgusted by the coverage of the Macleod case that she felt if she spoke out about that day, it would be misconstrued, particularly as a hammer played a rather significant part. Paulette’s reluctance doesn’t sit particularly well with me though. Arla Macleod killed her entire family; what would have been the harm in sharing this story? Unless, of course, Paulette didn’t want to be somehow implicated in the killings. There’s also the shame that Paulette feels about her part in the game. Deborah Masterson was their friend and from Paulette’s description of what went on, the game got out of hand – out of control.
There is also the possibility that someone was putting pressure on Paulette not to speak. I think again of the text messages on my phone.
After a cursory internet search I find the origins of Arla’s bath game. It is known in Japanese as ‘Darumasan ga Koronda’ and is a sort of one-player version of Grandmother’s Footsteps or Red Light/Green Light, in which you will be followed by a ghost of someone that supposedly died in a bathtub.
I don’t for one minute believe that Arla indeed summoned a ghost, but I am interested in Paulette’s description of her as ‘not being Arla’. Could this incident be an early psychotic episode, perhaps – a psychotic ‘break’, as they are known? If this is the case, was there a trigger for it? Paulette mentions the flashing of the strip lights. That could certainly be a possibility. Paulette’s assertion that Arla was ‘normal’ afterwards – almost apathetic – doesn’t sit right though. It is common that people who suffer psychosis enter a state of depression after one of these episodes. Unless she experienced it in private, it looks like this did not happen to Arla.
Back to Paulette though. I ask her what she thinks was behind Arla’s behaviour that day.
—It’s like … there’s a bit more education for girls now – about abuse and that, isn’t there? I mean things aren’t perfect, but there’s posters and phone lines. I saw one just the other day when I was taking the little ones to the library: ‘That’s not love’, something like that, and a phone number. That’s more than we had back then.
—Is that what you think was going on with Arla? Some kind of abuse?
—Arla told me something, years later. I didn’t know what to say, how to respond. But it might have something to do with it…
—What did she tell you?
—She told me something about being on holiday and that something happened with some lads. She got invited to a party and they got her drunk and … something bad happened with them. Something really bad. She never said, not explicitly. She couldn’t. I think they took advantage of her.
—So why didn’t you say anything to someone about it after the killings?
—Look, just imagine I’d said something … Imagine if I’d said something and Arla had got off scot-free somehow. It would have been like I’d helped that … I couldn’t do it.
—I understand. So can you elaborate on the story Arla told you?
—It’s a long time ago that she told me. And she only said it that one time and never mentioned it again. There was nothing more to tell than I’ve said really. She were proper rattled. Shut down right after she said it. You know what’s so bad about that though? It’s that … it’s that for a lass, something like that is – I wouldn’t say normal, but I’d say common, more common than you think.
—Really?
—I’m not being funny, right, but you’re a bloke. I’m not saying you’re ignorant or nowt like that, but it’s different with lasses. We have to put up with all sorts and say nothing. You know there’s a nightclub in the Midlands somewhere, right, where women are expected to be grabbed. Like, that’s just normal. That’s a thing? Like, the attitude is, if you don’t want that don’t go. But why? Why is that OK in this day and age? And then if we speak up about it, we’re jumped on by the right, the trolls on the internet, who call us ‘radical feminists’ for not wanting to be treated like a hunk of meat. You can’t win.
I think of the Gamergate controversy in 2013, in which a female games developer received a barrage of rape and death threats online – a campaign of misogynistic harassment. I think of a UK newspaper’s headline comparing the legs of the, at the time, Prime Minister of England and the First Minister of Scotland (both female); the US President’s comments about grabbing women – and as much as I try to understand the feelings, being male in a male world, I know I will never truly be able to feel what it’s like to live in a world where these things are commonplace.
—So that could have been something, you think? I’ve been told Arla’s behaviour at school was often targeted at men and boys, wasn’t it?
—True, yeah. She really clashed with male teachers and she battered Jobba!
—So why Debs? Why did Arla turn on her friend? I feel we still haven’t got to the bottom of that.
—That’s another thing about Arla – you could never properly relax around her. She were properly skittish. Like, she was always testing you somehow, making sure you wouldn’t sack her off. With Arla there was a friendship test round every corner. I don’t know what Debs did. I honestly don’t think she did anything. I think it were just … it was more about Arla.
—In your opinion, though, as someone who was there: why did she do it? Why did Arla do that to Debs?
—Looking back now, as an adult, I feel bad for her – Arla I mean. I don’t think she could ever accept that we liked her. So she were giving us every reason not to. I guess that’s what came of living in the shadow of her perfect sister. Maybe she had to show us she was a terrible person after all, and Debs just got caught in the firing line? That’s the only reason I can think of.
—You mentioned earlier about the netball match; about Alice having phone calls or texts from a ‘boyfriend’ she’d met on holiday. Are we talking about the holiday Arla and her family went on before year eleven?
—Yeah, it would have been then. Devon or somewhere on the south coast?
—Who was he, this boyfriend?
—I don’t even know. I’ve got no idea. But I remember the buzzing of that phone, like. The text alert was turned on and the way it was just buzzing over and over again, it was like there was a wasp trapped inside or something. I remember feeling that it was wrong, proper … wrong. Like no one should be texting someone that much.
—Did you ever ask Arla about it?
—Hmmm … no. It was, like … Arla never ever mentioned anything about anyone at home – not her family, nothing. And neither did I. We never said, because it was, like, when we were together, we could forget all that. We didn’t have to think about it anymore, we could be free.
I didn’t think about it at the time, but in editing this episode I see Paulette has managed to be excruciatingly vague about a couple of things. The first is why she didn’t fight to try to explain Arla’s actions, or even to clear her own name, which the media so blackened in its coverage of the Macleod Massacre. Then there’s the question about Alice Macleod. So far in this series, Paulette’s memories are the closest I’ve got to Alice, but that’s not anywhere really. Still, something tells me not to be too explicit in what I ask.
My phone is still vibrating in my pocket as we chat – a grotesque synchronicity with our subject matter. These texts seem to permeate everyt
hing I try to do. And I want nothing more than to ask Paulette if she too has been receiving threats via text; whether she too harbours a strange feeling of being watched; whether she notices things slightly different outside her home – an open gate; rubbish in the front garden; dog shit in the drive? Does she too feel scrutinised? Does she wonder if this is just coincidence?
But saying it out loud, asking someone else would confirm my own fears; it would be admitting that I think something is going on. Also, if Paulette says nothing – if she looks at me as if I’m insane, as if I’m paranoid – what would that say about me and my ability to create these podcasts? So, instead, I carry on with the planned interview. I won’t let … whatever it is win. I won’t look at my phone.
Paulette asks me an interesting question next.
—You ever regretted doing something?
—Many things. I think we all have.
—Ever regretted not doing something?
—I guess so, I think we could all do more.
—Sometimes … sometimes it keeps me up at night, you see. Sometimes, I get proper terrors thinking about it. I just … I wish I’d been a bit more bothered about it. Not just Debs, but Arla. I should have said something, tried to stop her. But I didn’t. I had the chance – with Alice and the whole boyfriend thing – to intervene, to ask, to question what was going on. I could have asked her properly about what happened to her on holiday. Told someone. I wish I’d paid a bit more attention, you know?
—Hindsight’s a wonderful thing. We sometimes forget that we were young as well.
—True, true. We didn’t know anything back then; certainly I didn’t. I liked to pretend I knew about boys, about love, all that, but I was just a daft young girl, same as Arla. Same as Alice, to be fair.
—Was there a problem with this boyfriend? Did you get the vibe that he was controlling? Obsessive? Something like that?
—Arla used to tell me that he was always messaging, constant, like, again and again. Alice would never tell no one what he said. I felt like Arla was perhaps was too far gone, but maybe I could have saved Alice? I dunno, it sounds daft.
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