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.
The sludge eventually moved to one side, allowing me enough clarity to work out that I needed to get away. It wasn’t difficult; I left in the dead of night while my father was drunk, walking all the way to Stornoway, and when I got there I used the money from the tin to buy a ferry ticket across to Ullapool, and then a train ticket down to London.
I was so na?ve when I arrived. Still in shock, I hadn’t thought anything through. If you hadn’t come to my rescue, I’m not really sure what would have become of me. I couldn’t accept that Ellen was dead. It was why I wrote postcards to myself from her, postcards of Lewis she had bought from the store in Stornoway, to take with us when we left, to remind us of where we had walked with Mum. I also bought myself a birthday card, and one at Christmas, and when I read them out to you, I honestly believed they were from her.
You made me feel so safe, so loved, that I quickly fell in love with you. So if I truly loved you, how could I have slept with someone else? Having had too much to drink was only part of it. The speed at which our relationship was moving was the other part. I had come to London to experience life and there I was, already settled down. My friends that night joked about it, and when they dragged out of me that I’d been a virgin when I met you, they were appalled that I would never know what sex was like with anyone else. I’m not going to blame them, but I was aware they were trying to get me a little bit drunk, aware that they were pushing a man – I don’t even remember his name – at me. And suddenly, I wanted this other guy, I wanted to have sex with him. It sounds terrible now but I was young and stupid and in the end, my stupidity cost me everything. It cost me you.
If someone had told me back then that fifteen months after I first left, I would be back on Lewis, caring for the father I was so terrified of, I would have thought them mad. It took me two days to hitch-hike to Ullapool. Nobody on the ferry over to Stornoway recognised me – why would they? It wasn’t as if Ellen or I had been well-known members of the community. Anyway, with my distinctive hair hidden under a hat, wearing clothes that I would never have chosen to wear, I looked nothing like my former self.
As I made my way down the Pentland Road towards our house, I prayed that my father had drunk himself to death, or that he had died from complications arising from the cancer or from the diabetes. He hadn’t, but I was about to witness first-hand how a relatively short amount of time can ravage a person’s mind and body to such an extent as to render them unrecognisable. My first inkling of this was when I pushed open the door and stepped into the hallway.
‘Ellen, is that you?’ a voice called, and it took me a moment to realise that it was my father speaking, not some stranger as I’d first thought. Taking a breath, I walked into the room on the right and found myself staring at a man I barely recognised. He was so diminished he was only half the man he’d been before.
‘Ellen?’ he said again, leaning forward in his armchair, and I realised, from the way he was squinting at me, that he couldn’t actually make me out. And my heart leapt, because if I could make him believe I was Ellen, I would have a much easier time. But surely he knew that Ellen was dead, surely he remembered he had killed her?
‘Yes, it’s me,’ I said, inflecting my voice with Ellen’s softer, more gentle tone, glad he couldn’t see that I was shaking, because being so close to him again brought all the old feelings of terror back.
He relaxed back into his chair. ‘Make me a cup of tea, then.’
I escaped to the kitchen, wondering if it was all some trick, if he knew very well I was Layla and was playing with me. But when I opened the cupboard, I saw that my father was barely capable of looking after himself, let alone playing tricks. The cupboards were bare apart from the tea and a huge sack of porridge, and the sink was piled high with crockery. While I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I went to his bedroom and pushed open the door. The sour smell told me not only that my father hadn’t changed his sheets for months but that he was incontinent.
I took his tea to him. It was black and, remembering how the lack of milk in his tea had led to Ellen’s death, my hand shook as I handed it to him.
‘So where you been, then?’ he asked.
‘Edinburgh,’ I said, marvelling that Ellen’s voice came so naturally to me.
He grunted. ‘That sister of yours, she upped and left too.’
‘She went to London,’ I said, realising that not only had diabetes robbed him of his sight but that his abuse of alcohol, or maybe the cancer, had begun to erode his brain. I felt no pity, only relief.
The next day I cut my hair to my shoulders, because that’s how Ellen had worn hers. I still needed to make it darker like hers so when I went into town to buy hair dye and food, using Ellen’s old bicycle, I wore her clothes and a scarf around my head.
I only realised that I was the subject of a missing person’s search from a discarded newspaper I found on a bench outside the supermarket, a week or so after I returned to Lewis. It sent me into a complete panic. There was no mention then that I was from Lewis, the article only mentioned London. A few days later, however, the police turned up, swiftly followed by a reporter. I quaked with fear that someone would know I was Layla but with my father yelling ‘Ellen’ at me, demanding to know what was going on, the only thing they asked was when I’d last had contact with my sister and to let them know if she contacted me again. The strange thing was, I already felt like Ellen, so it wasn’t hard to speak of Layla as my sister. I didn’t want to be Layla anyway. I was ashamed, ashamed that I’d blown my chance to make a better life for myself. I didn’t deserve to exist.