She wanted to drop me at the next service station but I was too afraid that you would come looking for me so I made her drive on until we reached another one a couple of minutes later.
As I stood on the forecourt, my one fear was that you’d arrive at any moment. I didn’t know how I was going to get to England. I didn’t have my passport on me, all I had were the keys to the cottage in St Mary’s, because I was wearing the jeans I’d been wearing the day we left. Even my little Russian doll was missing and I realised I must have dropped it when you were shaking me. It distressed me more than the lack of a passport, because it was the only thing I had to remind me of Ellen.
I decided to worry about the lack of a passport later and try and get to a port. All I could think of was getting to Lewis and this surprised me, considering how desperate I’d been to leave. But I suppose home is home and there wasn’t anywhere else I could really go. Around the back of the petrol station, at the far end, I saw a couple of camper vans and a caravan parked there. The camper vans were impenetrable but when I tried the door of the caravan, it swung open, so I got in and groped my way to the back.
I must have drifted into sleep because I was woken by voices, a man and a woman talking together as they approached the van. The next thing I knew, we were moving off.
Nobody came to check inside the caravan at the port, but I suppose twelve years ago, there’d been no reason to. And it was the middle of the night. The motion of the boat soon rocked me to sleep. I only woke when we were docking, and the knowledge that I’d managed to get to England relatively easily made me confident I could get the rest of the way to Lewis.
When we eventually came to a stop a couple of hours later, the couple went straight into their house, leaving the caravan on their driveway. I looked around for some money. I knew I could probably hitch-hike all the way to Ullapool but once there, I would need to take the ferry across to Stornoway. I found a few crumpled notes in the pocket of a pair of trousers and in a black handbag, a purse containing sixty pounds and a few coins. In the end, I took the whole bag, and because I was cold, a man’s anorak which I wore over mine, and a woollen hat to cover my hair.
It was early morning and I remember wondering where you were, if you were back in St Mary’s, glad to be rid of me, or if you were still in France. I could hear some light traffic in the distance so I headed towards it, hoping I’d be able to hitch a lift. I immediately thought of Ellen and how horrified she’d be if she knew that I was about to do something so potentially dangerous, and a sob caught in my throat. I could hardly believe that I was about to return to the man who had so brutally murdered her and dumped her body in a peat bog. Because that’s where Ellen is, Finn, in a peat bog. You have never known her, only my version of her.
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.