I Know My Name: A stunning psychological thriller

by C. J. Cooke

  ‘Sariah? Are you there?’

  ‘Eloïse.’

  I recognise the low, rumbling voice immediately. It’s George. My heart leaps in my chest. I spin around but it’s so dark – impenetrably dark – and I can’t see anything.

  ‘George? Where are you?’

  ‘Take a step to your left.’

  I do this, stepping across the wooden floor.

  ‘Now turn forty-five degrees to your right.’

  Immediately a shaft of light reveals the figure of George crouching over Sariah, who is lying on the ground on her side, arms over her head. She doesn’t move.

  George straightens to his full height. Then he produces his rifle and lowers it, pointing it at her stomach.

  ‘She wouldn’t feel a thing if I pulled the trigger,’ he says mildly. ‘Best way to go, really.’

  ‘George, please put the gun down.’

  It’s as though time has slowed down. His face is vacant and serious, no sign of the drunkenness I saw clearly before. I flick my eyes down to Sariah to work out the cause of her injury but it’s too dark. With a sickening twist in my gut, I consider that she might be dead.

  ‘Sariah is your friend, George,’ I plead.

  ‘You think I won’t do it,’ he whispers, his eyes wide.

  Joe and Hazel are too far away to be alerted. I can’t think fast enough. There is no way of escaping him without abandoning Sariah, and there’s no way of helping her without risking my life. I have to talk to him, persuade him.

  ‘I know you wouldn’t dream of it, George. Come on, now. It’s late. Let’s go back inside. Put the gun down …’

  His expression is eerily composed and sincere, as though he’s offering to help me out in some way.

  ‘I would do it, you know,’ he whispers. ‘I’ve seen people die. It’s not as bad as they say.’

  I take a small step to the left but he lifts up the rifle and points it at me, his manner agitated.

  ‘Don’t you move. Don’t you dare think about leaving this island.’

  ‘OK, George,’ I say, anxious for him to move the gun away from Sariah. One slip and he could shoot her by accident. ‘OK. I’ll stay.’

  I raise my hands by my head and he moves the gun away from Sariah. But she still isn’t moving.

  ‘Now,’ George says, visibly appeased. ‘I think we ought to establish a few ground rules, don’t you? First of all, no more trying to leave.’ I nod but he seems unconvinced. ‘I’m telling you, it’s for your own good. You say you can’t remember anything, and that’s as may be. But what I know for certain is that you haven’t got any money. There’s a rumpus going on in Greece right now. Riots on the street, tear gas and stuff like that. The police aren’t going to give a monkey’s about your so-called amnesia with all that going on, so I hardly think it’s wise to go running off there.’

  I start to speak, but he raises a hand and points at me.

  ‘Shut it. OK? No more questions. Two rules, think you can manage that?’

  I nod in earnest but don’t speak. I’m too terrified. Sariah is starting to move her fingers and I can hear her moaning. It looks like she’s taken a terrible blow to the head.

  George grins. ‘Good. Now remember, when you disobey George, bad things happen. Understand?’

  ‘I understand.’

  He hoists the rifle on to his shoulder and stumbles off into the darkness, the swishing sound of reeds indicating that he’s climbing back up the hill. I wait another long handful of seconds before racing towards Sariah. There’s a dark patch of blood on the left side of her head. I take off my T-shirt and press it against the wound, and she jerks.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I say. ‘Sariah, are you all right?’

  She sits up slowly, moaning.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I think George hit you,’ I say, helping her sit upright. I wrap the arms of the T-shirt tightly around the wound, watching it carefully to check that the bleeding is slowing. She is in serious trouble if not.

  ‘We need to leave,’ I say. ‘You need to get out of here.’

  She is woozy and disoriented, and I’m terrified in case she falls unconscious again. I drape her arm over my shoulders and help her rise slowly to her feet. She begins to moan from the pain in her head.

  ‘It’s OK, Sariah,’ I tell her, moving us closer to the barn entrance. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Take me … take me to Joe,’ she mumbles.

  We both walk carefully, hip to hip, towards the light of the farmhouse. I begin to tremble, the shock of the events just before and the icy wind against my bare skin making it hard to climb the hill. The wind is so strong it almost lifts us off our feet, and we have to hold fast to each other to keep grounded. I glance around again and again in case George lunges out of the shadows, but he is nowhere to be seen.

  It seems to take an eternity to make it back, the wind strong in our faces, the stars bright above and on the black sea. At the back door of the farmhouse, Sariah seems steady enough to walk inside by herself and I tell her to get Hazel to look at the wound.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asks.

  I tell her about George’s threats to me, how he made me swear I wouldn’t leave. It’s much too risky for me to go back inside the farmhouse.

  ‘You can’t,’ Sariah says. ‘You’ll not last in this weather.’

  Somehow I persuade her, and she reaches inside and hands me the fisherman’s jacket.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I wait until she closes the door before heading into the night, utterly terrified. As I feel my way across the bracken and stones, I turn and look back.

  At George’s bedroom window, I can see the form of him in silhouette, hands in his pockets, looking down at me.

  24 March 2015

  Potter’s Lane, Twickenham

  Lochlan: I dream all night of dark tunnels lined with CCTV cameras. At first I think I’m in the Channel Tunnel, only I’m on foot and there are no cars. I can sense someone is at the end of the tunnel and that’s what keeps me walking. But every time I reach the end, the tunnel veers sharply to the right or left. I never reach the end.

  I wake in the bathtub. It takes me a solid minute or two to work out where I am and how I got here. I vaguely remember drinking last night, then going somewhere in the car. I think I might have crashed it into the garden gate.

  I struggle out feet first and fall forward on my hands and knees. There’s a puddle of vomit on the tiles close to me. I straighten painfully and splash cold water on my face at the sink. The face that looks back at me in the mirror is haggard and sunken-eyed. I haven’t shaved in three days and the stubble that has emerged is patched with silver. I feel fragile, in the exact way I felt the morning my mother walked out. I couldn’t tell you what day it is, or even the month. There is so much chaos in my head right now that it seems wrong for things to go on being ordinary: the hairline fractures in one of the tiles that Eloïse asked me to fix. She threatened to do it herself if I didn’t. I brush my teeth and clean up the sick on the floor and make a plan to fix the cracked tile.

  I bump into Gerda on the landing. Her blonde hair is flat at one side from where she’s been sleeping, her face bare and pinched. She’s wearing a white cashmere robe and has her arms folded.

  ‘Morning,’ I say.

  She squints at me and frowns. ‘You were in quite a state last night. You’ve wrecked your poor car.’

  How can a car be poor? Does it have feelings?

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘This isn’t the time to fall apart, Lochlan.’

  Childishly, I make a show of padding myself all over. ‘I think … yes, I think I’m still intact.’

  ‘Where are you going now?’

  I nod at the bathroom. ‘Got a cracked tile. Got to fix it.’

  ‘Lochlan—’

  I’m halfway down the stairs. ‘I’ll get Cressida’s bottles sterilised and set up for the day while I’m downstairs,’ I tell Gerda.

  ‘Lochlan
,’ she calls again, a firmer tone. I turn and glance up at her.

  ‘Yes?’

  She sighs. ‘It’s five in the morning. Go back to bed.’

  ‘Can’t,’ I say, mildly aware afterwards that I sound childish. ‘I’ve loads to do.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The cracked tile in the bathroom, for one. And Eloïse wanted the dining room painted. I’d best get a move on.’

  There’s a stack of newspapers on the kitchen table, purchased by Magnus, who seems to spend his days pacing our street and angrily scrutinising media reports of Eloïse’s disappearance. Despite myself, I find my eyes straying to the paper on top of the pile, a page folded over at a headline: Refugee Activist Amidst Racist Row in Abduction Hoax.

  Don’t read it, Lochlan.

  I have to.

  Continue doing the tiles. Ignore what the media says.

  I need to know what they’re saying about my wife.

  … Eloïse Shelley (37) recently walked out on her charity, Children of War, where she had campaigned against immigration reform and condemned the Rt. Hon. Giles McBratney MP as racist. Now it seems Ms Shelley has also dumped her husband and young children and absconded from their plush Richmond home, but a close source revealed that this so-called disappearing act is a calculated move to draw attention to her charity and breathe some much-needed fresh air into her media career …

  A large photograph of Eloïse in a short red dress and gold stilettos with a glass of champagne in her hand sits at the top of the article. They’ve pinched it from her Facebook page, overlooking all the ones of Eloïse with Max and Cressida in her arms for the one that seems to portray her as a ruthless career woman, someone morally lax enough to fake her own disappearance.

  You see? It’s all lies. No one’s interested in helping to find her. You shouldn’t have looked.

  I head into the kitchen and flick on the espresso machine. There are flowers everywhere: five bouquets in the kitchen, two of them standing in plastic B&Q jugs as we only have three vases; and I can make out a number of new pot plants in the family room. The place is a mess. Why did Eloïse ever get rid of our housekeeper? I pull out a pair of gardening gloves from a cupboard, and even though they’re far too small and have roses on them, I keep them on as I gather up the flowers and take them into the back garden. A part of my brain tells me that these gloves last held my wife’s hands, that there are traces of her there and on my skin, all through this house, so many traces and remnants, and yet no sign of her. It would make your head spin if you thought too much about it.

  Gerda comes out into the garden, her expression oddly sympathetic. She glances up at the pink sky and stifles a yawn.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ I ask her.

  ‘What? No, I … Lochlan, this behaviour is not helping anybody. I know it’s difficult but … the children, Lochlan. The children need you to be strong. This isn’t the time to be silly …’

  ‘No one’s being silly, Gerda. I’m just … dealing with things until my wife gets back, that’s all.’

  She begins to cry, and I watch her, that same sense of ghostliness coming upon me, as if I’m no longer here but part of the atmosphere. I hear myself tell her it’s OK, I know this is hard on everybody, but the words are no more than sounds my body is making. The part of me that I can feel and identify as me is somehow detached, looking on.

  Gerda takes her mobile phone out of a pocket and checks it, sniffing and mumbling in German.

  ‘I’m still waiting for her to call,’ she says. ‘I have to charge it twice a day to keep up with how often I’m checking it. Looking at the Facebook page, checking the news. Every second, every minute, I’m expecting her number to pop up on the screen. It’s agony, all this waiting. All this unknowing.’

  A long silence.

  ‘For the first time in my whole life, I feel utterly helpless,’ she says, folding her hands between her legs.

  I am about to agree when I feel a pain in my chest and a tightening in my throat, and so I push the thought of my own helplessness away and set about planting the tray of small seedlings Eloïse has placed beneath a plastic shield on the ground nearby. My thoughts are a mishmash of clichés and their terrible truths. Missing a limb. Half a person. Keep working, that’s the trick. Work provides structure and squashes those spiralling questions that have no answer. Right now, my wife is a question mark, and I’ll tear down the house and rebuild it with my bare hands if it distracts me long enough.

  Eloïse would fall on the ground laughing if she saw me now. I don’t think I’ve been into our garden since last summer. I leave the house at seven each morning, except Sundays, and I’m not back until seven at night, at the earliest. No time for the garden. It was just a long strip of soil and concrete when we bought the house, but Eloïse has transformed it. There’s a playhouse at the very bottom, a plastic castle for Max and six raised beds. I have no idea whether I’m pulling plants or weeds, but being out here amongst the things my wife cultivated, in her space, brings a small amount of comfort.

  ‘I can’t help but feel this is a punishment,’ Gerda says. Tears are streaming down her face and she catches them at her jaw with her fingertips. ‘We never knew, did we? We were in Switzerland. I mean, when she contacted us at – what? Thirteen? Twelve years old? We came back and took her in immediately. We did all we could to … you know. Rectify the damage that had been done.’

  She glances at me with large wet eyes.

  ‘What damage?’ I ask.

  She tuts impatiently and glances away.

  ‘You know fine well “what damage”. It’s hardly something I feel proud of, is it? Jude. Our only child, a heroin addict.’

  She presses her fingertips against her mouth and shakes her head, as though suddenly overwhelmed by letting the words come out of her mouth.

  ‘El never says much about her mother,’ I say. ‘She counts you as her mum. Even though she calls you “Mamie”.’ Mamie’s Swiss for ‘Granny’, apparently.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking of all the things I regret doing, the things I regret not doing,’ she murmurs. ‘I should have helped her more. I know it’s pathetic, but … When Jude left, I had an instinct that we should have insisted that she left the baby behind. But Eloïse was three. Maybe four. I told myself she needed to be with her mother.’

  Eloïse rarely mentions Jude, though from snippets of conversation I know that she fell pregnant with Eloïse at the age of sixteen. When El was four, Jude looted her parents’ safe and ran off to London with an older man. Eight years later, she died of a drug overdose in some squalid flat. El found a telephone number for Magnus and Gerda and rang them. To their credit, they flew straight to London, picked Eloïse up, brought her home and raised her.

  I say, ‘I really don’t think this has anything to do with all that.’

  But she’s not listening. She’s caught up with her memories, with the chapters of El’s life that I don’t know how to translate.

  ‘Why Eloïse?’ Her voice shakes again and she presses her fingertips to her lips to control her emotions. ‘Of all the people to go missing, why her? She’s done nothing to deserve this, has she? Two darling children. Puts her heart and soul into raising them. A charity campaigner, changing the lives of thousands of poor refugee children.’

  For a moment it crosses my mind to record this to play to Eloïse when she returns. Gerda does nothing but criticise Eloïse and order her about like a drill sergeant. I’ve lost count of the times that El has complained wearily to me about her grandmother’s words of disapproval, how she seems to do nothing right in Gerda’s eyes. It was Gerda who persuaded her to give up her job when the children came along, if I remember correctly, only to chide Eloïse for handing in her notice.

  ‘When we lived in Geneva, she was too afraid to go more than ten feet away from us,’ Gerda continues. ‘I gave her so much freedom and yet she was a timid thing, always by my side. She’d climb into our bed some nights, even as a teenager. It’s wrong, all of this. She
shouldn’t be gone.’

  I say nothing more but go about digging and planting until my muscles ache. When I’m done, I leave Gerda in the garden and go upstairs to tackle the tiles in the bathroom.

  The crack is still too apparent, so by the time Max wakes up I’ve hacked all the tiles off and am ordering replacements online. Max saunters into the bathroom, bleary-eyed and half-asleep, his blanket trailing after him.

  ‘Morning, Daddy,’ he says. He frowns over the mess on the floor. ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Making the house nice for Mummy when she comes home,’ I tell him.

  He holds me with those beautiful blue eyes of his and shakes his head disapprovingly. ‘You’ve made a big mess. Mummy will be very cross.’

  ‘But Daddy’s going to buy new tiles, you see? Nice shiny ones. And Mummy will be happy, won’t she?’

  He considers this, then gives a nod.

  ‘You tell Mummy she has to come back now. OK, Daddy?’

  I stroke his face. Helplessness is one thing. Lying to your boy like this is something else entirely. I clear my throat and make a tight fist behind my back. I have to keep it together.

  ‘Yes, of course, Maxie. How about we make some cookies for Mummy, shall we do that?’

  His face lights up. ‘Thomas the Tank Engine ones?’

  ‘Thomas the Tank Engine cookies.’

  Both Cressida and Max have rejected the sleeping routines that Eloïse worked so hard to create and are still asleep in my bed. Max has started wetting the bed again, though luckily I managed to find an old packet of swimming nappies which has prevented our bed from getting soaked. Cressida refuses to sleep unless she’s touching me. I go and check on her, wedged in between two pillows in the middle of the bed. I’m struck with a sudden tenderness for her, a gladness that I hadn’t felt at her arrival. I mean, of course I love her, she’s my daughter. But I guess I felt we had enough on our plate with Max and my job and El’s charity. I had to force myself to get used to the thought of double that amount of work.