by C. J. Cooke
Maybe if I go to sleep too we can both wake up together.
When I woke it was dark. She was cold to the touch, her hands stiffened like a doll’s. Her expression had changed, emptied of her. She wasn’t my mother any longer. Her arms and legs had turned to stone. A noise sounded downstairs and I started, terrified in case it was Orhan. He had scythed in and out of our lives, in prison then out again, kicked out for good then back in her bed faster than I could blink. Mum would break up with whatever boyfriend she had at the time and Orhan would be back as though he’d merely been at work. He still had a set of keys. It could be him downstairs. He’d blame me for mum dying. He’d kill me for it. Or worse. There really were worse things than dying, I knew that. There were many worse things. Sometimes I told myself that the girl called Eloïse had died when she was four. That first time he locked the door.
I got up and hunted for the phone. We’d never had a landline in any of the other places but for some reason Mum insisted we get one for this place. She kept a black book of phone numbers in her bedside drawer that she warned me not to touch. I pulled it out quickly and flicked past all the names of her boyfriends and dealers. I saw ‘Mum and Dad’ written in the middle pages with a long number beneath. It looked like a foreign number, somewhere overseas. She’d talked about my grandparents some years ago, only once. Magnus and Gerda Bachmann, they were called.
I found the phone and dialled their number. I couldn’t believe it when someone answered. A man. I told him who I was and his voice changed, like he was scared, or maybe very upset.
We’ll come right away, Magnus said. Stay right where you are.
‘Eloïse? Eloïse, are you in there?’
A hard banging sound wakes me up.
‘Eloïse!’
It’s Sariah. My mouth is so dry I can barely answer.
‘I’m in here!’ I shout, but it comes out as a croak. The handle judders as she turns and turns it. Eventually I pull myself up to my feet, and as I do the door bursts open. Sariah crashes to the floor on her side.
I move on to my hands and knees and edge towards her, but I’m too weak to be much use. She rolls up slowly on to her knees. As she does so I have another memory of kneeling just like she is now, leaning over my daughter. My little girl.
‘I remember her,’ I tell Sariah. ‘My daughter’s name is Cressida.’
But Sariah doesn’t waste time.
‘George has gone out hunting,’ she says, rising to her feet. ‘We need to get out of here before he comes back. We need to get you on that boat and off this island right now.’
2 April 2015
Twickenham Police Station
Lochlan: I am released from custody. Welsh gives me back my phone, wallet and keys and Canavan gives me a nod that suggests I’m to heed his caution and tread carefully from now on. It has no impact, brings no relief. How can it? I’ve pulled back the curtain on a world I didn’t know existed, a world in which my wife was suffering from a severe mental illness and I was too distracted to know anything about it. In my head, I am screaming over and over.
Gerda and I confront each other, the tension between us dissolving in the light of what we’ve heard. It is likely that Eloïse has committed suicide. Nothing else matters. But something in me kicks against what Dr Goff has said, against the possibility of my steady, hard-working, beautiful wife leaving the kids at home to go off and commit suicide somewhere. I can’t process the fact that she was treated for psychosis, that she never told me any of it. I want to run to someone, to get answers. I want El so badly it crushes my lungs, my heart. I want to fall to my knees and howl in despair.
Gerda is stripped of her harshness, her face sombre and streaked with tears. I can tell she’s working very hard to dismiss everything that Dr Goff has said. I can hear her thoughts. She’s a British psychologist. What do they know? Utterly inferior to Swiss psychologists. Of course my granddaughter hasn’t taken her own life.
For once, I want Gerda to be right.
‘I took a taxi here,’ she explains, fumbling with her phone. ‘I guess I’ll call the same company and have them drive us back to your house.’ She dials and gives the address of the police station to the operator.
‘Where are Max and Cressida?’ I ask in a choked voice, aching to see them, to hold them both. How do I tell Max any of this? How do I begin to tell my son that his mother is dead?
‘They’re with Magnus.’ Gerda’s voice snaps me back into reality. She glances at her phone. ‘Oh, I’ve got a missed call from him.’ She dials his number and holds it to her ear. ‘No answer. Well, I suppose we’ll be seeing him in a moment.’
‘Daddy! You’re back!’
Max comes running up the hallway as soon as I open the front door. I catch him and lift him up into my arms. He’s already telling me about the things Mamie bought him, and did I know that someone has discovered a new species of dinosaur that ate T-Rexes for breakfast, and did I bring home Kinder eggs? I nod and try to act normal but I can’t speak. What if we never recover her body?
Cressida’s in the family room, lying on her stomach beneath her play mobile. She’s dressed in a clean Babygro emblazoned with ‘I love Mummy’ and tries to lift herself up on her hands, tilting her head to me when I walk in, grinning.
Cressida will never know her mother.
Gerda is calling Magnus’ name through the house. Eventually he comes downstairs, clearly flustered and pulling a jumper over his head.
‘We have an issue,’ he says when he sees us.
‘What is it, darling?’ she says, and we follow him into the family room.
‘Have you got your passport with you?’ he asks Gerda.
She does a double take. ‘My passport?’
‘I’ve got mine upstairs,’ I say. ‘Why?’
He tells us about a man who called him earlier from a town in Greece, the name of which I recognise. Eloïse rented a sailing boat from his company on the seventeenth of March.
I sink down into a chair as Magnus tells us about the man sailing to the island – Komméno, the island Magnus owns, the island where we got married – hoping to find Eloïse. He located the boat she’d rented, but it had crashed on to a beach on the west coast. No sign of Eloïse. He presumed she’d drowned.
‘But it can’t be her,’ Gerda says, turning to me. ‘You said she left her passports behind. She couldn’t have travelled.’
There is a pain in my chest that seems to swell and fill the room. Komméno Island. It’s likely that your wife committed suicide.
‘I never found her Swiss passport,’ I hear myself say.
Gerda’s knees fold beneath her and she collapses, but somehow I reach out and grab her before she hits the ground. She is sobbing and shaking to the point that I am sure she’s having a heart attack. Magnus kneels down and takes her by both hands, holding her close, his face blotched with grief.
‘Ssssh,’ he says, rocking her, and she clings to him. Max runs up to me but is silent, stunned by the sight of us all in tears.
‘I don’t … I don’t think I’ve come this far in my life to lose a daughter and a granddaughter,’ Magnus says in a wracked voice. ‘The island may be desolate, but there’s a good chance Eloïse is all right. I stocked up the farmhouse very well. I left it ready for rent, remember? There’s plenty of tinned food and water, and the solar panels should still be providing electricity. She might well be alive. And we can bring her home once more.’
I realise then that Magnus doesn’t know anything about what Dr Goff has told us. He doesn’t know what she’s been hiding from him, from me, from all of us.
Gerda wipes her face and straightens to look at him. ‘Du denkst?’ she whispers.
Magnus reaches for his coat from the coat stand. ‘Let’s not waste time. I have arranged a private flight to Chania. We can get there tonight. Nikodemos will meet us at the airport and take us to the island on his boat.’
2 April 2015
Komméno Island, Greece
Follow me,
Sariah says, and I stagger down the stairs after her. I stop midway and cling to the banister. Everything is hazy. The walls move inward and out, breathing. She turns to me.
Are you OK? What’s wrong?
I’m sorry … Give me a second.
I am doing everything I can to keep my legs from giving beneath me. After a few moments I give a nod to let her know I’m OK to keep going and we continue downstairs.
No sign of the others in the kitchen or front room. The farmhouse seems different, too. There is only a single chair at the table. Dust and clumps of dead grass carpet the stone floor, as though a herd of cattle clumped through the place overnight.
Where are Joe and Hazel? I say.
A sound outside makes her spin around. She reaches out and grabs my wrist, pulling me to the back door.
Come on, we have to hurry.
Outside, night is creeping in, and the rain is coming down like chain mail. Sariah holds on to me as she strides through the wet grass, pulling me along like a child. The bushes thrash painful welts across my legs.
I manage about a quarter of a mile before I fall to my knees on the wet ground.
I’m sorry, Sariah. I don’t have the strength.
Behind us, a shout. I turn and see a figure on the brow of the hill. It is George, holding his gun.
Sariah! he hollers, his face twisted in an ugly snarl. I’m going to rip your legs off and shove them down your throat. Bring her back here!
My arms and legs are heavy. The rain pings my face, deliciously cold as it seeps between my lips. I fall back into the mud’s clutches. Sariah grabs my arms and hauls me up into a sitting position.
Eloïse, you have to get up! You have to! Get up! Get up, please!
It takes so much effort to open my eyes.
If you ever find my children, please tell them I love them.
She hooks a strong arm across my shoulders and shakes me.
Eloïse!
I try to stand. She pushes against my back and helps me up to a standing position.
We’ve got to move. He’s coming.
I can hear George’s feet thumping across the ground behind us. I know he’s got the rifle. The boat is still so far away. The sea is heaving and angry, the wind in our faces. There is simply no way we can outrun him.
You go, I tell Sariah. You can make it.
I can’t. I can’t go. Not without you.
I nod. You can. It’ll be OK.
No, I can’t. I am you, Eloïse. Don’t you get it? I am you.
Her words strike me like a gong.
I straighten and open my eyes. She wavers like a reflection in a puddle.
We’re all you. All of us – me, Joe, George. Even Hazel. We’re you, sweetie.
Her words clang in my ears. I force myself to focus on her but she continues to fade in and out like a mist.
What are you saying?
She’s solid again and grabs my arms, her face close to mine.
I know, I know. I know it sounds crazy. But you have to listen to me, all right?
I nod.
I’m listening.
We are you, Eloïse. We are the parts of you that you couldn’t bring yourself to remember. When you had Max and Cressida, you felt you had to be one hundred per cent good, utterly perfect, no ugliness or meanness.
I can see my reflection in the dark mirrors of her eyes. Anger flashes through me and I start to cry.
Why are you saying this?
She shakes her head, dismissing my question.
You were so worried that the dark parts of your nature would cause the children harm that you tucked them away and refused to acknowledge them, but they haunted you. You worried that you’d fail Max and Cressida, and that worry enveloped you until it took over.
George is almost upon us. I can hear him running through the tall reeds about thirty feet behind, huffing as his bulk thuds against the ground.
What about George, then?
George is the part of you that helped you survive. You’re terrified of him because he is ruthless. But you need him. You’d never have made it without him. You had to come to a point where you would do anything to get off this island. You had to understand what was inside the box before you opened it.
What about the phone? The satellite phone? I spoke to Nikodemos. I know I did.
There was no phone, Eloïse. There was only you trying to figure out how to fix all the harm that Orhan and the others caused you.
George stands at the top of the hill directly above us, legs wide. He is naked to the waist, the rifle in his hands, his eyes fixed on me.
We can make it to the boat, Sariah says. We can make it. But you have to acknowledge that he is you. He won’t go until you do.
I remember the goat at the side of the road.
I remember lifting a fork and stabbing it into the hand of one of my mother’s boyfriends when he tried to touch me.
I remember leaving my mother’s dead body in that cold, disgusting flat, and willing myself to leave who I was behind, still curled up in her cold arms.
George is below us now, at the bottom of the ravine, so close that he could easily lunge forward and grab me. I can see the rain on his face as he lifts the rifle as though to ram the stock into my face. He snarls at me.
I told you to stay here.
I am on all fours, trying to pull myself up the muddy bank towards the cliff-edge that leads to the boat. I can hear Sariah panting above me, her hands pulling at me. But I know that I have to face him. There is no other way.
Slowly I turn, pull myself upright and watch him as he approaches.
He lifts the rifle.
But right then Hazel and Joe appear, grabbing George from behind. There is a scream as Hazel is knocked to the ground, and as I lunge Joe manages to wrestle the rifle from George. Panting, he swipes the hair from his face as he aims it at George.
Enough of this, George! he shouts. Enough, or I’ll shoot!
2 April 2015
Potter’s Lane, Twickenham
Lochlan: Komméno is derelict, a complete wilderness. When Eloïse and I got married there, it was a hidden paradise, thriving with a new hotel, shops, and regular ferries from Crete. They were building villas on the west bank and Magnus restored the old farmhouse that had sat at the very top of the island for centuries. It’s where Eloïse and I spent our first night as man and wife.
But with the recession, the island’s economy evaporated. The shops were the first to close, then the hotel and building contractors, and once the shops went the ferry operators shut down their scheduled routes. The farmhouse may still have clean water and some electricity from solar panels. Magnus tells me it was left ready to rent, that there would have been tins and jars of preserved food in the pantry, blankets and clothing in the bedrooms, enough wood around the place to feed the stove. But the transport links to the island have ceased and it is fiercely remote. Eloïse has been gone for two weeks. Even if she didn’t go there to kill herself, there is every chance that she has drowned. I lurch between hope and harrowing certainty that she is dead.
Please be alive, El. Please be there. I’m coming.
Max runs in as I’m retrieving my wallet and an overnight bag from the closet.
‘Daddy, where are you going?’
I kneel down in front of him, taking both his little hands in mine. He studies me with those beautiful, innocent eyes of his and I can barely speak.
‘I’m … I’m going on a little journey, Maxie …’
‘Are you going to pick up Mummy?’
And I won’t ever leave you.
I pick through my words carefully. I have to hope. For his sake.
‘We think we have found where Mummy might have gone. It’s not definite, but—’
‘Can I come, Daddy?’
I hang my head. I should have expected this. ‘No, absolutely not. It’s best that you stay here …’
‘I want to come! I want to come! I want Mummy!’
He bursts into
tears, and I pull him towards me in a tight embrace. I want so badly to protect him. It’s simply not fair that he should be caught up in all this. Before I know it, tears are sliding down my cheeks and wetting the collar of his T-shirt. How can I tell him his mother is dead?
Max doesn’t let go, doesn’t say anything, but allows me to wrap my arms around him and hold him tight.
When I let go, he pleads with me.
‘Please can I come, Daddy? I promise I’ll be good.’
I wipe my eyes with a hand and reach out to stroke his cheek with the other. I can’t say no to him, I can’t. And besides, we don’t have time to start organising childcare.
‘OK, Maxie. If you can get a change of clothes, you can come.’
Even as a voice shouts in my head that I am reckless and downright mad for relenting, he darts into his bedroom and returns a minute later with a handful of Y-fronts, a Thomas the Tank Engine backpack trailing behind him.
‘I’ve brought clean pants. Have you got clean pants, Daddy?’
I stuff his smalls into the bag. Quickly he darts back into his room.
‘Come on, Max. We’ve got to go.’
He returns a moment later, his face crumpled in concern. ‘I want to bring Mummy my Rosie.’
‘We can’t bring flowers on the plane, Max.’
He grows upset. ‘No – Rosie … Mummy likes Rosie. I want to bring her Rosie so she’ll very definitely come home.’
My usual impulse would be to take his hand and pull him anyway, disregarding whatever he’s trying to explain. But instead I resist the urge to rush him. I kneel on the ground before him, and seeing my own calmness he takes slower breaths and finds his words.