Bring Me Back (B.A. Paris)(68)

My father was a violent bully of a man who tolerated Ellen and hated me. The only one who could control him was our mother and when she died, our world, already fraught with difficulty, became a nightmare. Because of my father’s nature, we lived pretty much in isolation on Lewis. Although Ellen and I went to school, we had no friends. We were oddballs, part of a family who lived on the margins of society. At my mother’s funeral, there were four of us, my father, me, Ellen and a teacher from school.

Ellen was sixteen at the time of our mother’s death and I was nearly fifteen. Ellen never went back to school and nobody came looking for her. Instead, she filled our mother’s shoes, caring for me and our father. My mother’s death had a profound effect on me. Something pinged in my brain, like an elastic snapping. I refused to accept that she was gone and would speak to her, then answer back in her voice.

‘Can we have macaroni for dinner?’ I would ask.

‘Yes, of course,’ I’d say in my mother’s voice, before Ellen could answer.

It drove my father into a fury and Ellen would implore me to only talk to Mum when he wasn’t around. But it was my coping mechanism and I was as incapable of stopping as my father was of not drinking. I began to adopt her mannerisms and she ended up sharing my head with me. As for school, I gave up going and nobody came looking for me either. They were too afraid of my father.

Before she’d died, our mother had given Ellen a box containing money she would take from my father’s wallet when he was too drunk to notice. It was her present to us, our ticket for getting away from our father, and as soon as there was enough money, we were leaving, Ellen and I together. Ellen began to calculate how much we would need to get to London. I wanted us to leave as soon as I was sixteen but Ellen wanted to wait until I was eighteen. I thought of London as a big adventure but Ellen was more cautious. We might not be happy where we were, but at least we were relatively safe. As long as we didn’t do anything to annoy our father. When he was around, Ellen kept within sight and I kept out of sight. If he couldn’t see Ellen he would yell for her, demanding to know where she was. If he saw me, he would roar at me to go away. I never knew why he hated me so much but I didn’t care; I would have hated for him to even tolerate me.

Ellen’s target was a thousand pounds. There’d been over seven hundred in the box when Mum had given it to Ellen and it took us almost three years to get the rest. By that time, our father’s eyesight had begun to deteriorate but he refused to do anything about it. Often, when dusk approached, I took great pleasure in leaving things lying around so that he would stumble over them, hoping he might fall hard enough to smash his head open on the stone floor. But it didn’t happen and I became desperate to leave. I wanted to spend Christmas in London but Ellen felt that it wouldn’t be right to leave our father before Hogmanay. I thought we could leave without telling him – but again, Ellen felt that it wouldn’t be right. Whatever he was, she said, he was still our father. Besides, she explained, if we just disappeared he might call the police and they might make us come back. I doubted he would, or that the police would make us come back if he did, but if there was the slightest risk of either of those things happening, I didn’t want to take it. So I deferred, and it cost Ellen her life.

It was my fault. A week before Christmas, our father flew into a furious rage when Ellen told him there was no milk for his tea. He began to attack her verbally, in a way he had never done before, calling her the worst names he could think of. And unaware of what I was doing, I began shouting at him in Mum’s voice, swearing at him in a way that she wouldn’t have dared, telling him that he was a bully and a lazy good-for-nothing and that she was glad we were leaving him.

‘You should go now!’ I said in Mum’s voice, turning to Ellen. ‘Go on, take Layla, before it’s too late!’

I don’t know if he actually believed we were going to leave but he was already thundering towards me, his arm raised. I tried to move out of the way, but he felled me with a single blow and as I lay winded on the floor, he bent over me and began hitting me with his fists. As I tried to protect myself with my hands, I heard an almighty thwack, followed by a grunt of pain from my father. Looking up, I saw Ellen, holding a shovel, which she must have grabbed from outside the door. Even from the floor I could see murder in our father’s milky eyes and I shouted at Ellen to run. But she was no match for him. It didn’t take much to wrestle the shovel from her, nor to hit her with it. She keeled over like a bowling pin, splitting her skull open on the stone floor, and as blood seeped from her head, my father hit her over and over again with the shovel until she was nothing but a pulpy mess. Then he threw the shovel down, gathered up her lifeless body and carried her out of the house, trailing blood behind him.

I didn’t move. Paralysed with shock, I didn’t even cry. I stayed exactly as I was, curled up on the floor, my hands still raised above my head. I don’t know how long it was before my father came back.

‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ he said, coming to stand over me. ‘Try and leave and you’ll end up in the bog, like your sister. Now get to bed.’ When I didn’t obey, because I couldn’t, he yanked me up by my arm, dragged me to my bedroom and threw me inside.

The next few days were a blur. I took over Ellen’s chores like an automaton, cooking and cleaning as she had done, barely noticing what I was doing. I knew that at some point I was going to have to wade through the sludge in my brain, but I took comfort in the sludge because it stopped me from accepting what had happened to Ellen. It allowed me to pretend she had merely gone away for a while, as I had pretended with Mum.