Beneath the surface, p.20
Beneath the Surface, page 20
‘Yes,’ said Grace. ‘But please don’t say anything to Mum. She has to tell him everything.’
After that Mrs Sylvester waited for them at the bus stop every afternoon to give them a sandwich, salad, fruit and home-made cakes. On Fridays she would pack a bag of treats that Grace carried home in her school bag and hid in her bedroom.
‘If you need me, you know where I am.’ Mrs Sylvester said the same thing every Friday and it helped them to get through the weekends.
Luca hugged her and only let go when she gave him a second piece of home-made flapjack. ‘Don’t tell Rudy,’ he begged Mrs Sylvester, as he devoured it.
‘What would he do if he found out?’ Mrs Sylvester asked, narrowing her eyes.
There were bigger problems than being hungry. But Grace couldn’t bring herself to share them with Mrs Sylvester. She wasn’t sure she even possessed the language to articulate what was happening. One of Rudy’s disciples, a man in his late twenties, had started coming into Grace’s bedroom in the night and trying to touch her. She could recall the exact sensation of waking up to feel his hand snaking beneath the sheet and pushing between her legs. She started sleeping in all of her clothes and would push him away with her fists until eventually he fell on all fours beside her and furiously rubbed his groin as if he was polishing one of Rudy’s Indian artefacts. She can still remember the way his mouth would droop open so she could see the slit of his tongue pressing against his teeth as his breath quickened.
When Grace told Olwyn what was going on, her mother shrugged and suggested she put a lock on the door. Luca took to sleeping in her bed every night and Grace no longer tried to persuade him back to his room.
Rudy became more and more controlling. To begin with, it was Olwyn who bore the brunt of his irrational demands and mood swings. Grace and Luca were used to their parents fighting downstairs at night, but although alcohol made their dad aggressive, it also meant he blacked out quickly. Rudy, however, was a teetotaller and had a manic energy that meant he could sustain his fury through the night. One evening Grace and Luca were upstairs in bed when they heard banging and shouting coming from the sitting room. Grace opened the bedroom window and the two of them leant out to listen. They weren’t allowed to come downstairs after the sun had set, but now that it was autumn this meant they were confined to their bedrooms for most of the evening. Rudy had discovered that Grace had been hiding food in her bedroom. They could hear Olwyn begging for calm.
There was the sound of furniture crashing to the floor and then a scream. Olwyn scrambled upstairs and they heard her turning the handle of Grace’s bedroom door. She thumped on it, imploring them to let her in. Luca started crying. ‘He’s going to kill her! He’s going to kill her!’ When Grace turned the key, it was Rudy who pushed his way in. Olwyn followed close behind. She had a deep gash across her forehead that was bleeding down her cheek so it looked like she was crying red tears.
Rudy marshalled them downstairs and made them sit at the kitchen table all night until they confessed. In the early hours of the morning he took them through his new regime, outlining ‘behaviour modification techniques’ that would help them to become better people. He introduced something called ‘prophecy time’ after dinner, where he claimed he could describe conversations that were taking place in other rooms. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he would tell them, pursing his full red lips and narrowing his eyes to slits. Grace knew he was lying because her thoughts mostly involved ways of killing him. But it was easier to second-guess Luca because all he thought about was food. Luca was terrified and began wetting his bed every night.
Worst of all, he banned Grace and Luca from sharing a bedroom, arguing that it was bad to mix male and female energy. He started interrupting his spiritual meetings several times an evening to come up and check that they were in separate rooms or he would send up one of his devotees to report back to him. The same man from before promised Grace he wouldn’t say anything about Luca being in the room as long as she allowed him to get into bed with her and touch her breasts. When Grace refused and called him a creep, he told Rudy that he had found Luca under her bed and the next day Rudy put a lock on the outside of Luca’s door. She tried to convince her mother Rudy was at best a fake and at worst insane but Olwyn gave the same stock answer to any criticism. ‘Luca needs to learn how to deactivate his negative energy.’
Grace moved her bed so that it was parallel to Luca’s on the other side of the wall. When he started crying, because he was scared to be alone in the dark, she would tap on the wall. When this stopped working she picked at the plasterboard until she had made a tiny hole so their fingers could touch.
Grace became increasingly suspicious of everything Rudy said. She found a letter showing that he had been declared bankrupt and owed money to lots of different people. Olwyn told him everything Grace had said. He slapped her and announced that he wanted them to stop going to school. ‘Intellectualism is unspiritual,’ he declared. ‘It’s tempting you from the righteous path.’
School was Grace’s lifeline: there were snacks at break; free meals at lunchtime to supplement the disgusting sandwiches; a library where she could read books in peace; other people who could be relied on to look after Luca; and teachers who encouraged her to imagine a future where she might go to university. She was close to the top of the class in most subjects. Doing well at school was her main strategy for escaping home.
‘He’s right,’ Olwyn agreed. ‘We do everything for ourselves out here. We grow our own food and make our own clothes. Maybe I could home-educate you.’
‘Social Services will notice. They will come here asking questions,’ said Grace. ‘They might take us away and then you won’t get any child benefit.’ It was possibly the most intelligent thing she had ever said.
In mid-March Rudy announced that he was starting preparations for the Celebration of the New Fire Ceremony. Grace was immediately apprehensive. It felt as if it was the end of something whose beginning she didn’t fully understand.
‘What does that involve?’ she asked suspiciously. Rudy explained that it was his personal interpretation of an ancient Aztec ceremony to purify themselves before the beginning of spring. It would involve everyone carrying a lit torch into the River Lyd on the stroke of midnight during the spring equinox in five days’ time. Everyone, apart from Olwyn, Grace and Luca, would be paying a thousand pounds to participate in the ceremony. As a special treat he would allow them to take part for free.
Rudy immediately began preparations: no one was allowed to work; Grace and Luca were banned from going to school; they could eat only after sunset; and everyone apart from Rudy had to be silent. He terrified Luca by repeatedly telling him how the energy in his body would turn from negative to positive when he immersed himself in the water. Luca clung to Grace’s arm and refused to go anywhere without her.
‘I’m scared of water. I can’t swim.’
‘We’ll leave before it happens,’ she promised him. But isolated from school, there was no one to turn to for advice.
‘When?’
‘We’ll go the same evening. They’ll be so busy they won’t notice we’ve left.’
‘But we don’t have any money,’ Luca whispered. She held his hand and noticed how his skin was mottled, his nails were covered with white spots and the cuticle almost transparent. His breath was quick and rasping.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve got it all sorted,’ said Grace, trying to sound confident. She opened her notebook and showed him the plan. She had drawn it so that it would be easier for him to understand. There were five pictures, each with a number and arrows leading from one to the other: (1) Our house. (2) The log across the Scarrowbeck. (3) Mrs Sylvester’s house. (4) School. (5) SAFETY. Safety was a house Grace had drawn with the two of them standing outside smiling.
‘What’s safety?’ Luca asked.
‘Safety is bedtime stories, mealtimes, packed lunches, clean clothes, a fridge full of food, plasters for cuts, toothpaste for teeth.’
‘Is safety a particular place?’
‘It’s a place where we’re heading but we don’t know where it is yet,’ said Grace, who was trying to conceal her own worries. He briefly fell quiet and Grace thought he had gone to sleep.
‘Like Heaven?’
‘Not exactly. Mrs Sylvester will help us get there.’
‘Will they find somewhere we can live together?’ He clung to Grace, like a monkey.
‘Of course,’ said Grace, although she knew it might be difficult to find foster carers who were willing to take in siblings.
‘Do you think Mrs Sylvester could adopt us?’
‘Sssh,’ said Grace, putting her finger to his lips. She could hear Rudy coming upstairs. He moved fast, like a shape-shifter. Olwyn called him from the kitchen where she was boiling vats of violets in big saucepans.
‘I heard noises coming from Grace’s room,’ he shouted down to her.
‘Rudy, come here and be with me,’ Olwyn simpered.
In the version of the story where Rudy was a psychopath and Olwyn his victim, Grace liked to think that their mother was trying to lure him away from them. But there was a darker version where her mother was a straightforward narcissist who cared only about her own needs. Either way, Olwyn didn’t protect them.
‘The ceremony will purge him of his negative energy,’ she heard Rudy say, as he turned back downstairs.
On the evening of the celebration everyone was given a bonfire torch to carry down to the river where the ceremony was going to take place. Rudy was sitting by a fire in the garden. He had burnt a piece of cork and was drawing strange patterns all over his face, which made him look even more menacing. Luca sat next to him. He looked at Grace and she could see tears streaming down his face. At this point she knew she hated Rudy. It was the purest, most visceral sensation she had ever felt. Even now she still carries that feeling inside her. The biggest regret of her life is not killing him at that moment. He made Luca sit beside him and told Grace to go back into the house to collect some blankets from the cupboard outside her bedroom so that Luca didn’t get cold. When she came back they had all disappeared.
It was dark but Grace guessed they would head down the hill through the woods to the river. She dropped the blankets and started running. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and flip-flops, and the nettles stung her legs through the denim. She glanced back a couple of times in case Luca had appeared but there was no sign of him. Rudy had planned this.
‘Luca! Luca!’ Her voice pierced the night air. She remembered where the track started and to begin with it was easy to stay on it because the terrain was scrubby and flat. As the slope got steeper, however, it became less uniform, until it narrowed into a meandering series of switchbacks. The rhododendrons and camellias gradually gave way to ancient trees that became denser and denser. Their canopy stole the light of the moon and Grace became disoriented. She hugged her way around thick tree trunks and found her path blocked by brambles. She had to stop more and more frequently to listen out for Rudy and the rest of his group. She could hear laughter and Rudy’s voice yelling instructions. Once when she shouted Luca’s name she was almost certain she heard him call back. But the wind played tricks with the sound so that at one minute the voices seemed to come from one direction and the next they came from completely the opposite. Grace rationalized that as long as she kept going downhill she would surely reach the river. She realized she had strayed from the path because ferns and brambles were licking her thighs and it was spongier underfoot. It smelt of damp and decomposition. She tripped over a couple of times on tree roots and tumbled to the ground where she knelt on all fours sobbing while she tried to get her bearings.
As she got closer to the river, stones became boulders and she was forced to slow down. She could hear people singing but when she tried to move towards the noise the soft earth beneath gave way to a steep granite escarpment. In the distance she could see flames flickering from the torches. She got on to her hands and knees so that she didn’t fall down the drop but the ground seemed to give way and she found herself uncontrollably rolling down a steep slope until she landed with a heavy thud. She was winded and took a moment to catch her breath but she had reached the river. To her left she could hear people shouting and knew that Luca must be close by. She called out for him again.
‘Luca! Luca! Take deep breaths!’ She guessed from the noise of frantic splashing that Rudy was submerging him in the water. She crawled towards the river and waded in. The water came up to her stomach. It was freezing. She couldn’t swim so she half ran towards the noise but she was going upstream against the current and when it got too deep she had to head to the bank again, which slowed her down. She could hear Olwyn shouting and then the shouts turned to screams. By the time Grace got there Luca had disappeared.
Luca’s body was found several days later in a tributary of the River Severn. Grace pleaded with the police to be allowed to hug her brother one last time but she was gently told it would be too distressing. The police liaison officer explained that when people drown the air sacs in their lungs act like a sponge, until their body is so heavy with water that it sinks to the riverbed: Luca was bloated out of all recognition. Grace wanted Rudy to be charged with murder. But the police said that if he had been killed before he drowned his body would have floated because his lungs would have been full of air. It would be impossible to prove Rudy meant to kill him and he could only be charged with manslaughter. It quickly became irrelevant because Rudy had already disappeared. He was never found and charged.
Grace was allowed to select which objects to put in Luca’s coffin with him. She chose his favourite T-shirt and shorts, one of Mrs Sylvester’s flapjacks and one of her lists from ‘The Certainties’. At his funeral, when the time came to scatter the cold, dark lumps of earth on to the child-size coffin, Olwyn tried to throw herself into his grave. ‘My baby, my baby,’ she cried out, over and over again, as the vicar pulled her back.
Even at Luca’s funeral Olwyn had to make it all about her. She was wearing a long, flowing floral dress in a stiff fabric that looked as though it was made from a pair of curtains. It kept slipping off her shoulder, revealing the bruising on her back. Grace felt no pity for her. She was as responsible for Luca’s death as Rudy. What kind of mother fails to keep her child safe?
Mrs Sylvester kept a firm grip on Grace’s hand throughout the funeral. Grace could feel people staring at her but they looked away whenever they caught her eye. She understood. There was only so much pain they could endure. Afterwards Grace stayed with Mrs Sylvester for a few months until she turned sixteen. But memories of Luca were everywhere and her mother was just up the road. So she went to London, found a room in a flat and got a job as a waitress.
Over the next three years she quickly spiralled into a pattern of self-destructive behaviour that she found terrifying because it reminded her of her mother. She drank too much, took too many drugs and had unprotected sex with men who weren’t necessarily unkind but were similarly untethered.
She met Rob when she turned up for her first appointment with a therapist at the wrong time. By her early twenties Grace was beginning to grasp that she couldn’t simply erase her past and, without change, she wouldn’t survive it. There were days when she could bury the loss deeper than others, but it always came back in nightmares, self-recrimination, fear and regret. She remembered sitting in the waiting room, as far from Rob as possible, studiously avoiding his gaze. She preferred not to engage with people because they would inevitably ask a question she couldn’t answer. She could tell, just by looking at him, that he was an extrovert. His shirt was too bright, his long hair too artfully tousled, and he had immediately started talking to her.
‘What are you in for?’ he asked, tapping the pointy toe of his cowboy boot.
She thought for a moment. She wasn’t used to people being so direct. ‘The loss of the most important relationship in my life, I guess,’ she had finally responded. It was the first time she had ever mentioned the loss of Luca to anyone and she only said it because he had asked the question. Fortunately he was too wrapped up in himself to digest what she had said.
‘What are the odds?’ he had replied. ‘Me too.’
‘You’ve lost a sibling?’ she asked, in surprise. The coincidence was too much.
‘No, I’ve given up drugs,’ he said, ashen-faced. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He was filled with remorse for his glib insensitivity and shallowness. For the first time in ages, however, Grace had laughed. They had become friends, but it was an offbeat, occasional friendship that flourished during a dark time in their lives when they were both all kinds of messed up. They understood intuitively that it wouldn’t endure beyond their recovery because they would remind each other of what they were trying to forget.
Back then Rob wasn’t well known as a music producer, but a couple of years after they met, he invited Grace to a gig played by the band that eventually made his name and his fortune: he was worried he wouldn’t get a big enough audience. The venue was filled with his family and friends, including Patrick, who seemed to Grace like the antithesis of his wild younger brother.
Neither Rob nor she ever referenced where they had met. He didn’t want his family to know about his problems with addiction. And she wanted a new beginning where no one asked awkward questions about her past. But there had always been an ease between them and a comforting sense of mutual responsibility for each other’s wellbeing. It was a simple friendship: they wanted each other to be happy. They were both survivors. People make too much of remembering, Grace thought. Remembering can drive you crazy because some things are just too brutal. She carried Luca in her heart and that was enough. The rest had been buried. Until now.
13
It was Grace who insisted Patrick should go on a bike ride before their meeting with Lilly’s consultant the following week. He would never have dared suggest it himself. Everything he did seemed to invoke the Wrath of Grace. Yesterday she had flown at him for his underwhelming reaction when she mentioned that the receipt she had found in Lilly’s bedroom came from a grim pub in the Fens, notorious for drug-dealers. She had presented him with copies of newspaper articles, and he had made a flippant joke about how nothing changes because it was the same pub where Rob used to buy grass as a teenager. It wasn’t like she’d uncovered Watergate!
