I Am Heathcliff

  ‘YORKSHIRE ISN’T WHAT IT used to be.’

  Ellis’s mother addressed the kitchen window of the holiday cottage, as if the entire county had spread itself out before her, waiting for an evaluation. They’d only been there half an hour, but her mother had already found herself a dishcloth to run over the draining board.

  ‘It’s the same as it always was, Carole. Still sandwiched between Lancashire and the North Sea.’ Ellis’s father didn’t address the kitchen window, but carried on opening and closing the drawers and the cupboards, because when you walk into a holiday room, the first thing you do is look at all the empty space and wonder how you might go about filling it.

  ‘There’s no view. The brochure promised a view.’ Her mother rinsed the cloth under the tap, and gave herself something else to wipe. ‘Brochures aren’t what they used to be either.’

  There was a view, it just wasn’t the one her mother had expected to see. It was a view of another, identical holiday cottage, a recycling bin in the back yard of a pub called The Cow and the Canary (a ridiculous name, said her father), and a single, wooden bench decorated in graffiti, because there are certain things in life that are so important, they need to be written down somewhere to make sure they are always remembered.

  ‘There’s a view from my window. You can see the edge of the moors if you stand on tiptoe.’

  Ellis looked at each of them in turn, but her parents didn’t answer.

  She turned and headed back to her room, listened to the sound of her feet on an unfamiliar staircase and the echo of herself in another house. Unlike the carpeted world they usually inhabited, the cottage had floorboards and flagstones. It made every noise more important than you intended it to be.

  ‘Ellis, you sound like a herd of elephants,’ shouted her mother. ‘Do try to be more graceful.’

  It took seven trips for her father to unload the car. Ellis watched from the bedroom, using her rucksack as a step and breathing silence into the glass. People go on holiday to escape their lives, yet her mother seemed to have packed as much of their life as she could into the back of the Ford Focus and brought it along with them.

  ‘I’m fairly sure they have frying pans in Yorkshire,’ her father had said that morning.

  On the seventh trip, her father just carried one thing. The photograph. Ellis wasn’t surprised to see it, because it accompanied her mother everywhere in its tired gilt frame, but she was surprised to see it carried in all by itself. Perhaps her father was worried about dropping it, or losing it somewhere between their car and the front door of the cottage, or perhaps it was just that the photograph weighed far, far more than you might think.

  At home, the photograph lived on top of the television. Ellis found that her eyes always seemed to move upwards and she would catch herself staring into the past, no matter what TV programme she had wanted to watch. However, in the holiday cottage, after several false starts, her mother decided the photograph should be placed on the kitchen windowsill.

  ‘There,’ her mother said. ‘That’s better. Now it feels like home.’

  So her mother had her view after all. Even if it wasn’t a view she had ever expected to see.

  They all ate fish and chips that night, and stretched out their motorway legs on a walk around the village, but it still took Ellis a long time to find her sleep. The bed was decidedly difficult. It was wooden and panelled, and Ellis thought it seemed more like a coffin, but she could never say that to her parents, because any reference to illness or dying had been hoovered out of their conversations. They lived in a sterile world now, where no one got sick or passed away, for fear of opening a door none of them would ever be able to close. As well as the bed issue, there was a lot of noise, too. Mainly from the bar at The Cow and The Canary. But there was something else. The house creaked and complained each night, as it settled itself into sleep, in a way their own house never did. Any sound Ellis made was nurtured, grown somehow by the floorboards and the leaded-glass windows, until even the sound of her own breathing seemed to be carried away down the landing, and passed around from room to room.

  Ellis had reached an age when her parents didn’t know whether to cut her free or tie the knot a little tighter. Before, they had examined every inch of her existence, but now, after, it felt as though she had finally been allowed her freedom, but she only ever cashed it in in order to drift around the outskirts of her parents’ lives, waiting to be questioned. Everything in Ellis’s life fell into either before or after. She was divided into two people, and no matter how hard Ellis tried, she never seemed to be able to glue the bits of herself back together.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said from a doorway, on the morning of the second day. ‘To the moors, probably.’

  ‘Right.’ Her mother was rearranging the cushions on the sofa. Diamonds or squares. Crouched in corners or pulled out into a line.

  ‘Enjoy yourself.’ Her father returned another paperback to the little shelf next to the fireplace.

  ‘I’ll be back later.’ Ellis pulled a cagoule over her head. ‘Hopefully. I mean, it can get quite wild up there, can’t it? So who knows when it might be.’

  She waited for as long as she could, to see if someone would fit words into the silence, but no one did, and so she lifted the latch on the front door.

  ‘Ellis,’ her mother shouted.

  Ellis smiled before she turned.

  ‘Why don’t you tie your hair back from time to time, love? It would really suit you.’

  There was a path between the two holiday cottages. It didn’t really look like a path until you were close up, but Ellis found she always noticed the things most people seemed to miss. The path was overgrown with grass and weeds, and the grass and weeds were just wet enough to change the colour of her trainers and bathe her ankles in yesterday’s rain. Either side of her journey was the litter of other people’s holidays. People who had managed to spot the path as well, and who had left small pieces of themselves, like clues, along the way. She studied the clues as she walked. A receipt from the off-licence. A child’s glove. A plastic football, abandoned, perhaps, by a disinterested dog. After a few minutes, she reached a fork in the path and studied the alternatives to see which looked the less travelled.

  ‘It’s the one on the left for the moors.’

  The boy leaned against a gate. His skin was bleached like the wood, and his eyes were the grey of a battlefield sky. The landscape seemed to have borrowed back all of his colours.

  Ellis looked up at the path. It was steeper than she had expected.

  ‘It’s not as bad as it seems,’ said the boy. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

  He began climbing. Ellis frowned at the boy, but she followed him anyway, because she couldn’t think of any reason not to.

  ‘You’re staying in the other holiday cottage,’ he shouted as he walked, the distance growing between them.

  It wasn’t a question. Ellis said ‘yes’ anyway.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ellis.’

  He turned and looked at her. ‘Isn’t that a boy’s name?’

  ‘It’s either. It’s Irish shorthand for Elizabeth.’

  ‘You don’t sound Irish. Are you Irish?’

  ‘No, I’m not, but my mother says you can always borrow, can’t you?’

  Ellis waited for the discussion. There was always a discussion.

  ‘Cool,’ said the boy, and he carried on walking.

  She smiled. When she looked up again, he had moved further away, and Ellis tried to be heard and catch up all at the same time. ‘What’s yours then?’

  ‘I’m Leo,’ he shouted back, and then, ‘no, I’m not, but you can always borrow, can’t you?’

  As they walked, there must have been a point where grass turned to moorland. Ellis hadn’t noticed where exactly that point was, but now, all around her, everywhere was held at the moment when purple becomes brown, when walkers become trespassers. The point when you had to let go of the need for a path. br />
  ‘It’s not that far,’ said Leo. ‘It just looks that way.’

  They were there before she knew it. When Ellis lifted her head, it seemed as if the whole world had unfolded itself when she wasn’t looking, and she stared across blankets of heather, towards the sea. It looked like one shade at first. A single layer of dark pigment, painted on the landscape. It was only when you studied it, when you really creased your eyes, you realised there were so many colours, it was impossible to discover them all with a single stare.

  ‘From the car, it looked as if it was all brown,’ she said.

  Leo stopped walking and sat. There wasn’t a seat, but it didn’t seem to bother him. ‘You need to stop sometimes, to see things properly,’ he said.

  Ellis sat next to him, because when something didn’t bother other people, it didn’t bother her either.

  ‘I never knew there was so much space left,’ she said.

  ‘Five hundred and fifty-four square miles.’

  Ellis turned to look at him.

  ‘I’m an only child. I read a lot.’ He spoke without returning her gaze. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Am I what?’ Ellis knew what he meant, but she needed time.

  ‘An only child?’

  She hesitated. Some questions were more difficult than others. ‘I’m a twin,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Cool,’ he said. ‘Identical?’

  ‘I guess so. I’m flat-footed though, and I wear my hair different. Sometimes, my voice is louder.’

  ‘I can’t imagine anything more brilliant than being a twin.’

  ‘Actually, it’s the least brilliant thing there is.’ Ellis drew her knees to her chest. ‘In fact, there’s just one thing less brilliant than being a twin, and that’s being a twin when you’re the only one left.’

  It was a lot easier to let the words go when you were on the moors. There was so much more space for them all to fall into.

  They sat on the same bank of grass. So close, their arms almost touched, but he still didn’t look at her. ‘That’s really shit,’ he said.

  It was the best description Ellis had heard so far. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is really shit.’

  ‘What was her name, your sister?’

  ‘Eleanor. Ellie,’ she said. ‘Ellis and Ellie. One letter different.’

  ‘One letter, but a whole person.’

  ‘People forget that,’ said Ellis. ‘They only look for the bits they miss seeing.’

  ‘Come on.’ Leo brushed at the heather on his coat sleeves. ‘Let’s walk on, and then we can stop and talk some more.’

  Before she stood, Ellis glanced at Leo’s legs, where the material of his trousers had ridden up. The bruises were purple, like the heather. He saw her looking and turned away.

  The next morning, he was waiting for her on the wooden bench. She spotted him from the kitchen window, as she was rinsing her cup and trying to avoid looking at the photograph.

  ‘I’m off out again,’ Ellis shouted.

  Her mother had discovered a vacuum cleaner in a small cupboard under the stairs, and she was admiring all its attachments. ‘There’s no need to shout, Ellis. Why does everything have to be at full volume?’

  Ellis closed the front door as quietly as she could.

  ‘Hey.’ She walked over to the bench and looked over Leo’s shoulder.

  ‘All these people.’ He ran his hand over the graffiti on the bench, tracing the carved names with his fingertips. ‘Why do they do it?’

  ‘To stay remembered?’ Ellis said.

  It was a question, but Leo didn’t answer.

  ‘It’s why we write things down, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘So we don’t forget them? I guess it’s the same with people.’

  ‘Is your sister’s name here?’

  ‘No,’ Ellis said.

  Leo took a key from his pocket. He found a space near to where the boards of the seat curved into a leg, and she watched him scratch an E into the wood.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back to the moors. But don’t walk too fast, I’m tired.’

  ‘Tired?’

  Ellis told him about the noise. Not the noise from the bar at The Cow and The Canary, but the other noise. The noise she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  ‘It’s like a tapping. It sounds like someone’s trying to get into the house,’ she said.

  ‘Or out.’

  ‘Out?’ They were on the overgrown path now, and Ellis stopped next to the child’s glove. Time had begun to steal it away, and blades of grass curled around its fingers.

  ‘Doors and windows,’ said Leo. ‘They keep people in, as well as keeping people out.’

  She waited for him to elaborate, but he just carried on walking.

  Now, they always met by the bench. And Ellis would watch, each day, as Leo carved another letter into the wood.

  He twisted the tip of the key into the dot of an i. ‘It’ll be time to go home soon,’ he said.

  Each morning they’d returned to the moors, and every so often, Ellis made sure she stopped and creased her eyes, to be certain of seeing all of colours. They always walked in silence, and only spoke when they found somewhere to sit. Ellis didn’t ask about Leo’s bruises, and Leo didn’t ask about Ellis’s sister, but Ellis talked about her anyway, because all the space seemed to pull the words out of her. The words her parents were never still enough to hear. Ellis talked about the noise, and how she could still hear it each night, about what it might be.

  ‘A bird?’ she said. ‘Or a mouse? Perhaps something’s trapped in the chimney breast?’

  ‘I’ve told you what it is,’ Leo said.

  It was the last night before Ellis found out the truth. She did what everyone does in really bad horror films, she did what she promised herself she’d never do. She left the coffin bed, and tiptoed out on to the landing. When she peered over the bannister, she realised exactly where the noise had been coming from.

  It was her mother.

  ‘She was walking around the house,’ Ellis told Leo on the last morning, as they watched their separate lives returned to the back of each car. ‘The shuffling and creaking. It was her slippers on the floorboards. Up and down. Backwards and forwards. Room to room. She never stops.’

  Leo pushed his key into the wooden seat.

  ‘She must do it at home as well,’ Ellis said. ‘Only I can’t hear because of the carpet.’

  ‘I was right all along, then.’ Leo brushed at the wood. ‘It’s someone trying to get out.’

  She didn’t answer, and after a moment she heard Leo sigh.

  ‘She’s trying to get away from it, Ellis. The grief. She thinks if she keeps moving, she’ll manage to leave it behind. All that misery. Everyone does it.’ He returned the key to his pocket. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Finished.’

  Ellis looked across.

  ‘The “s” was really hard,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to draw a curve in the wood.’

  She was going to say something, but the words disappeared, and all she managed to do was frown and say ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ he said. ‘Because what would you do if you’re worried you’ll forget something?’

  Ellis stared at the letters and looked back at Leo. ‘You’d write it down,’ she said.

  It wasn’t a question, but Leo answered anyway.

  ‘Exactly, Ellis,’ he said. ‘Exactly.’

  Half an hour later, Ellis watched from the back of the car. She hadn’t studied Leo’s father until now. He was wiry and loud, and he pointed and shouted instructions at Leo and Leo’s mother. He looked like a man who had made a lot of anger for himself, but hadn’t yet decided where to put it.

  ‘You spent a lot of time with your friend this week,’ her mother said from the front seat.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Where is he from?’ Her mother pulled some knitting out of a bag for the journey, because if her legs weren’t allowed to move, at least her hands could try to make up for it.

  ‘I don’t
know,’ said Ellis.

  ‘What does his father do for a living?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She watched Leo climb into the car. ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘Whatever did you talk about then?’ said her mother.

  Ellis was going to wave, but Leo didn’t look back. His father’s car turned slowly on the gravel, and Ellis watched as it crossed the bridge by the pub and was swallowed up by a line of cars heading towards the main road and back into a pool of ordinary lives.

  ‘We talked about all the other things,’ she said.

  Their own car climbed out of the village, her father pressing hard on the accelerator to make up for the weight of all their things in the boot.

  ‘The sun’s really caught you, Ellis,’ her father said.

  ‘The wind’s done your hair no favours, though,’ her mother said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to put it in a ponytail? I’ve probably got an elastic band in my bag somewhere.’

  Ellis said no, no her hair was fine just as it was, and she listened to the knit-and-purl click of her mother’s needles, and leaned her face against the glass.

  ‘I don’t get the attraction of it.’ Her father nodded at the heather through the car windscreen. ‘Far too bleak for my taste.’

  Ellis watched the moors roll by, and thought how much she would miss it. The space. The being still. She felt as though she had left all of her thinking up here, but Leo had said that was fine, because she could always go back another time and collect it again.

  ‘So bland,’ said her mother. ‘So brown.’

  ‘Stop the car!’ Ellis shouted from the back seat. ‘Stop the car right now!’

  Her father pulled straight into a space at the side of the road, and both her parents stared at her through the gap between the front seats.

  ‘Are you not feeling well?’ said her mother.

  ‘Turn off the engine!’ Ellis was still shouting, and for once her mother didn’t criticise the volume. ‘We need complete silence. We need to be still so we can see properly.’

  Her father cut the ignition. The only movement was a gentle rocking of their car, as other vehicles whipped past them on their way to somewhere else.

  All three stared through the windows.