Annie Christie's Family Fictions:
Episode Twelve
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A couple of mild ones.
Description: Drowning hope.
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I didn’t know what to do. I mean, normally I’d have told mum and dad and expected them to sort things out. But dad wasn’t there and mum was acting weirder than Ellie, so I didn’t want to open any sort of a can of worms. I just didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. Which I know isn’t the right thing to do, is it Casey? Sometimes you have to face the truth, however unpleasant it is, right?
But while I was trying to decide what I could or should do about Ellie, the shit hit the fan. We sat down for dinner, another Marco masterpiece, without any idea what was coming. Then it came. And when it did it was pretty ugly.
‘Marco and I have something to tell you,’ mum said.
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Ellie said and left the table.
Mum went to go after her but Marco put his hand on her arm to stop her.
‘Let her go,’ he said. ‘You can talk to her later.’
I looked at Ollie. His face showed no expression. I waited for the inevitable.
‘Your dad and I have filed for divorce,’ mum said.
There was a silence.
‘Why?’ I said, though it felt like a pretty redundant question. I didn’t mean why were they divorcing, I didn’t really care what their reason was. I meant why were they doing this to us.
‘Lots of reasons,’ mum said and looked at Marco.
‘We should tell him,’ Marco said.
And at that moment I wanted nothing less than to be told.
‘If you think it’s best,’ she said.
‘It’s because Marco is my dad,’ Ollie said.
And my world collapsed.
I mean, looking back I guess it could have been worse. They could have told me Marco was my dad. But I didn’t have time to feel sorry for Ollie, who didn’t seem to feel that sorry for himself after all. I didn’t have time to feel anything except for myself. And perhaps for dad – my dad – who had been conned by the woman I’d called my mother all my life.
‘How could you?’ I asked her, unable to disguise the tone of disgust I felt now that my worst fear had come true.
‘It was a long time ago,’ she said, somewhat stupidly. Of course it was. As if that would make it any better.
‘Things happen,’ Marco said. ‘After Alasdair…’
And I didn’t wait to hear any more.
‘Christ, Alasdair,’ I shouted and ran out of the room.
I know they probably thought I was talking about my dead brother, but I wasn’t. He was dead and gone to me, whether he was my brother or not. It was my sister I was thinking about now.
They let me go. Probably reckoned it was time to re-calibrate their nuclear family, I guess. They probably thought that now it was all out in the open it would be easier all round. That was never going to be the case. Not for dad, not for me or for Ellie. The family was now split down the middle. It was two families, not one. Me, dad and Ellie and Ollie, mum and Marco. Where my dead brother Alasdair fitted in wasn’t my prime concern at that moment. But Ellie was. She was all I had left to look after.
I went to Castle Dare, running all the way, to find her. She wasn’t there. I kicked myself. Of course she wouldn’t be there. She was off to find Alasdair. And he was on the other side of the loch. So I went back down to the loch-side. She wasn’t there either, nor was the boat.
Then I saw her, out there in the middle of the loch, standing up in the boat. She was shouting. It was too far away for me to hear what she was saying but I could tell she was shouting out loud. And then it happened. It was so fast that I can’t honestly say whether she fell or jumped. All I knew was that she was in the water, fully clothed. And she wasn’t that strong a swimmer.
I pulled off my shoes and jeans and jumper and ran into the loch. As soon as I could I struck out for the boat. My lungs were bursting. It seemed so far away, and I couldn’t see Ellie. I knew she wasn’t wearing a life jacket, though. We’d left them behind with Marco after day one. We didn’t need buoyancy aids, did we? We weren’t stupid. We wouldn’t drown. Right then I didn’t feel so confident on that score.
The water was cold and it was a lot further than I could comfortably swim, and it was still pretty choppy as it had been earlier, but I wasn’t going to let anything put me off. I kept swimming to where the boat was bobbing, upside down.
I still couldn’t see Ellie, even when I reached the boat. As I made my way round it, I saw her, in the water, holding on to the upturned side. She was breathing and that was all I cared about.
I don’t remember what happened next. I’d never done capsize drill and I didn’t care if Marco’s boat went to the bottom of the loch, but I was damned sure Ellie and I weren’t going with it. Not for all the Alasdairs in the world. So somehow I managed to swim back with her to the shore.
She didn’t panic and she didn’t struggle like I expected her to, given what had happened. When I got her to the shore she just lay there. I would not let her be dead. I didn’t care about any of the rest of it as long as Ellie lived. But there was no one around and I wasn’t going to leave her, so I did mouth to mouth for all I was worth. Until I couldn’t do it any longer.
I woke up in hospital. Dad was there beside me. He held my hand. And I didn’t want to ask him, but eventually I had to.
‘Ellie?’ I said. ‘Is she all right?’
He sat there and the tears rolled down his cheeks. It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry. It was beyond awful.
‘I should never have left you,’ he said.
‘Is she… she isn’t… she can’t be..?’ I couldn’t say the word.
I’d lived with a dead brother all my life, but I couldn’t stand the fact that my sister had died and it was all my fault.
You want to know how the story ends, Casey? Let’s go right back to the beginning. I told you that a family’s story doesn’t have a beginning and I guess it doesn’t have an end either. We are all just part of something bigger. We all have our own perspective and our own place in the narrative. But that’s not what you want to hear. You want to hear that Ellie was fine and that we all lived happily ever after. Life’s not like that, though, is it? Not real life.
Ellie did survive. I survived. After a fashion. She and I were saved by Marco of all people. Ollie raised the alarm – he came down to the shore and found us there but it was Marco who did all the things that needed to be done to make sure we got to hospital okay. So we are forever in his debt. Which in narrative terms might be the ultimate dramatic irony but it’s a lot harder to live with that as fact. In a story it might be the thing which brings the fractured family back together but this is not really a story, is it? At least, it’s only a story to the people who read it, maybe even you, Casey. It’s just a story until you become part of my real life and we learn to live together with the ghosts of the past. The secrets. The family fictions. The things that happen and don’t make sense and change you beyond recognition. The things that separate people from characters.
Stories have a purpose. Life is just lived. One way or another. Things get broken and they change you and the mark of a man is how he copes with adversity and all that. I know that we are all broken people, all doing our best. But when someone breaks your life… and I’m not saying any one person is to blame, but the truth is what happened to me that summer broke my life. I’m not whining. I’m just saying I’m not the man I could have been. I’m a different person from who I was meant to be. And that’s a burden I carry with me every day. Mum and Marco broke my life. They did that to me. And I don’t ever want to do that to another person. Which is why I don’t want to marry you unless you know exactly who I am and who I was. But will you ever really know me? Is it even possible to know another person, much less to trust them or believe in them? Isn’t what we trust and believe always a projection of our own version of a story?
The practical consequences, if that’s what you’re interested in, presents a fairly mundane reality. We were lucky in that there was enough money to paper over the cracks. Before we went back to school that autumn, Dad moved out and me and Ellie went with him. We had a comfortable enough life, finished school and went to Uni. We got jobs and made new friends and… and I met you. And fell in love. Ellie has boyfriends aplenty and she still smiles that sunny smile. And sometimes I even think it’s not a fake. But we don’t see each other that much any more. She’s moved to London. Where the ‘action’ is. She’s an actress now. I guess she reckons that reality is over-rated. Or she still has issues to work out. Or she just doesn’t want to face things. I can’t blame her. Reality is over-rated most of the time.
Marco and mum stayed in our old family home – I don’t know how they did it – though I suppose it really was true that Marco had built himself into the place – and Ollie stayed with them till he left school. I think Marco hoped that Ollie would go into business with him, but Ollie took off abroad when he was eighteen and no one has seen him since. I guess he’d been lied to once too often. Or maybe he just couldn’t find where he fit in the family fiction. He went off to find his own reality. Mum and Marco sold the house a few years later and moved away. Ellie and I don’t see her that often but probably no less often than most people in their twenties see their mum.
Dad remarried a really nice woman called Grace. From the outside it all looks like any other family situation. We only become dysfunctional at weddings when it can be hard to know where to seat whom. I don’t want to have to think about that, Casey, which is why I’d rather we get married somewhere on our own without all the family ties. A wedding is a party but a marriage is something more important than trying to pretend that we are all part of some big family fiction, isn’t it? I want to marry you, Casey. I want to share my life with you. But I want it to be us – starting afresh – creating something of our own. With no secrets. At least not between us.
But I guess as long as there are closets there are skeletons to lurk within. There are always fictions that don’t match what we choose to believe as the facts of life. And there are always things we can’t explain. Not truly explain. I can tell you Ollie was Marco’s son but how does that change things? I don’t know whose son Alasdair was. I don’t know if anyone does. And I don’t know when my family fiction began. It could have been long before I was even born. All I know is I’ve lived with ghosts my whole life and I want to start a new life with you by laying them all to rest. I want to move on. Together, if that’s possible.
I don’t know what to tell you about Ellie. You’ll have to make up your own mind about what was ‘real’ in that summer of ghosts. We never talked about it again, after that day. As a family we all packed it away in a closet and there it stayed. Ellie threw away her jotter when we got back home. I picked it out of the bin and kept it, simply because I wanted some kind of evidence of what had just happened to us all. I guess I held onto it like mum held on to her pictures of Alasdair, because on some level it was something I couldn’t let go of.
I thought that one day I’d be able to make sense of it, tease out the truth of it all. But even as I’m telling the story to you, I can’t do that. I don’t know what happened that summer except on a very superficial level. And none of us know what the truth was about Daisy Cheape. That’s got to be just a story to us. But it was a story that had real consequences for my family, even a hundred years after the event. That’s the power of ghosts. Or maybe it’s just life. Casey, do you still want to marry me?
Swearwords: A couple of mild ones.
Description: Drowning hope.
_____________________________________________________________________
I didn’t know what to do. I mean, normally I’d have told mum and dad and expected them to sort things out. But dad wasn’t there and mum was acting weirder than Ellie, so I didn’t want to open any sort of a can of worms. I just didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. Which I know isn’t the right thing to do, is it Casey? Sometimes you have to face the truth, however unpleasant it is, right?
But while I was trying to decide what I could or should do about Ellie, the shit hit the fan. We sat down for dinner, another Marco masterpiece, without any idea what was coming. Then it came. And when it did it was pretty ugly.
‘Marco and I have something to tell you,’ mum said.
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Ellie said and left the table.
Mum went to go after her but Marco put his hand on her arm to stop her.
‘Let her go,’ he said. ‘You can talk to her later.’
I looked at Ollie. His face showed no expression. I waited for the inevitable.
‘Your dad and I have filed for divorce,’ mum said.
There was a silence.
‘Why?’ I said, though it felt like a pretty redundant question. I didn’t mean why were they divorcing, I didn’t really care what their reason was. I meant why were they doing this to us.
‘Lots of reasons,’ mum said and looked at Marco.
‘We should tell him,’ Marco said.
And at that moment I wanted nothing less than to be told.
‘If you think it’s best,’ she said.
‘It’s because Marco is my dad,’ Ollie said.
And my world collapsed.
I mean, looking back I guess it could have been worse. They could have told me Marco was my dad. But I didn’t have time to feel sorry for Ollie, who didn’t seem to feel that sorry for himself after all. I didn’t have time to feel anything except for myself. And perhaps for dad – my dad – who had been conned by the woman I’d called my mother all my life.
‘How could you?’ I asked her, unable to disguise the tone of disgust I felt now that my worst fear had come true.
‘It was a long time ago,’ she said, somewhat stupidly. Of course it was. As if that would make it any better.
‘Things happen,’ Marco said. ‘After Alasdair…’
And I didn’t wait to hear any more.
‘Christ, Alasdair,’ I shouted and ran out of the room.
I know they probably thought I was talking about my dead brother, but I wasn’t. He was dead and gone to me, whether he was my brother or not. It was my sister I was thinking about now.
They let me go. Probably reckoned it was time to re-calibrate their nuclear family, I guess. They probably thought that now it was all out in the open it would be easier all round. That was never going to be the case. Not for dad, not for me or for Ellie. The family was now split down the middle. It was two families, not one. Me, dad and Ellie and Ollie, mum and Marco. Where my dead brother Alasdair fitted in wasn’t my prime concern at that moment. But Ellie was. She was all I had left to look after.
I went to Castle Dare, running all the way, to find her. She wasn’t there. I kicked myself. Of course she wouldn’t be there. She was off to find Alasdair. And he was on the other side of the loch. So I went back down to the loch-side. She wasn’t there either, nor was the boat.
Then I saw her, out there in the middle of the loch, standing up in the boat. She was shouting. It was too far away for me to hear what she was saying but I could tell she was shouting out loud. And then it happened. It was so fast that I can’t honestly say whether she fell or jumped. All I knew was that she was in the water, fully clothed. And she wasn’t that strong a swimmer.
I pulled off my shoes and jeans and jumper and ran into the loch. As soon as I could I struck out for the boat. My lungs were bursting. It seemed so far away, and I couldn’t see Ellie. I knew she wasn’t wearing a life jacket, though. We’d left them behind with Marco after day one. We didn’t need buoyancy aids, did we? We weren’t stupid. We wouldn’t drown. Right then I didn’t feel so confident on that score.
The water was cold and it was a lot further than I could comfortably swim, and it was still pretty choppy as it had been earlier, but I wasn’t going to let anything put me off. I kept swimming to where the boat was bobbing, upside down.
I still couldn’t see Ellie, even when I reached the boat. As I made my way round it, I saw her, in the water, holding on to the upturned side. She was breathing and that was all I cared about.
I don’t remember what happened next. I’d never done capsize drill and I didn’t care if Marco’s boat went to the bottom of the loch, but I was damned sure Ellie and I weren’t going with it. Not for all the Alasdairs in the world. So somehow I managed to swim back with her to the shore.
She didn’t panic and she didn’t struggle like I expected her to, given what had happened. When I got her to the shore she just lay there. I would not let her be dead. I didn’t care about any of the rest of it as long as Ellie lived. But there was no one around and I wasn’t going to leave her, so I did mouth to mouth for all I was worth. Until I couldn’t do it any longer.
I woke up in hospital. Dad was there beside me. He held my hand. And I didn’t want to ask him, but eventually I had to.
‘Ellie?’ I said. ‘Is she all right?’
He sat there and the tears rolled down his cheeks. It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry. It was beyond awful.
‘I should never have left you,’ he said.
‘Is she… she isn’t… she can’t be..?’ I couldn’t say the word.
I’d lived with a dead brother all my life, but I couldn’t stand the fact that my sister had died and it was all my fault.
You want to know how the story ends, Casey? Let’s go right back to the beginning. I told you that a family’s story doesn’t have a beginning and I guess it doesn’t have an end either. We are all just part of something bigger. We all have our own perspective and our own place in the narrative. But that’s not what you want to hear. You want to hear that Ellie was fine and that we all lived happily ever after. Life’s not like that, though, is it? Not real life.
Ellie did survive. I survived. After a fashion. She and I were saved by Marco of all people. Ollie raised the alarm – he came down to the shore and found us there but it was Marco who did all the things that needed to be done to make sure we got to hospital okay. So we are forever in his debt. Which in narrative terms might be the ultimate dramatic irony but it’s a lot harder to live with that as fact. In a story it might be the thing which brings the fractured family back together but this is not really a story, is it? At least, it’s only a story to the people who read it, maybe even you, Casey. It’s just a story until you become part of my real life and we learn to live together with the ghosts of the past. The secrets. The family fictions. The things that happen and don’t make sense and change you beyond recognition. The things that separate people from characters.
Stories have a purpose. Life is just lived. One way or another. Things get broken and they change you and the mark of a man is how he copes with adversity and all that. I know that we are all broken people, all doing our best. But when someone breaks your life… and I’m not saying any one person is to blame, but the truth is what happened to me that summer broke my life. I’m not whining. I’m just saying I’m not the man I could have been. I’m a different person from who I was meant to be. And that’s a burden I carry with me every day. Mum and Marco broke my life. They did that to me. And I don’t ever want to do that to another person. Which is why I don’t want to marry you unless you know exactly who I am and who I was. But will you ever really know me? Is it even possible to know another person, much less to trust them or believe in them? Isn’t what we trust and believe always a projection of our own version of a story?
The practical consequences, if that’s what you’re interested in, presents a fairly mundane reality. We were lucky in that there was enough money to paper over the cracks. Before we went back to school that autumn, Dad moved out and me and Ellie went with him. We had a comfortable enough life, finished school and went to Uni. We got jobs and made new friends and… and I met you. And fell in love. Ellie has boyfriends aplenty and she still smiles that sunny smile. And sometimes I even think it’s not a fake. But we don’t see each other that much any more. She’s moved to London. Where the ‘action’ is. She’s an actress now. I guess she reckons that reality is over-rated. Or she still has issues to work out. Or she just doesn’t want to face things. I can’t blame her. Reality is over-rated most of the time.
Marco and mum stayed in our old family home – I don’t know how they did it – though I suppose it really was true that Marco had built himself into the place – and Ollie stayed with them till he left school. I think Marco hoped that Ollie would go into business with him, but Ollie took off abroad when he was eighteen and no one has seen him since. I guess he’d been lied to once too often. Or maybe he just couldn’t find where he fit in the family fiction. He went off to find his own reality. Mum and Marco sold the house a few years later and moved away. Ellie and I don’t see her that often but probably no less often than most people in their twenties see their mum.
Dad remarried a really nice woman called Grace. From the outside it all looks like any other family situation. We only become dysfunctional at weddings when it can be hard to know where to seat whom. I don’t want to have to think about that, Casey, which is why I’d rather we get married somewhere on our own without all the family ties. A wedding is a party but a marriage is something more important than trying to pretend that we are all part of some big family fiction, isn’t it? I want to marry you, Casey. I want to share my life with you. But I want it to be us – starting afresh – creating something of our own. With no secrets. At least not between us.
But I guess as long as there are closets there are skeletons to lurk within. There are always fictions that don’t match what we choose to believe as the facts of life. And there are always things we can’t explain. Not truly explain. I can tell you Ollie was Marco’s son but how does that change things? I don’t know whose son Alasdair was. I don’t know if anyone does. And I don’t know when my family fiction began. It could have been long before I was even born. All I know is I’ve lived with ghosts my whole life and I want to start a new life with you by laying them all to rest. I want to move on. Together, if that’s possible.
I don’t know what to tell you about Ellie. You’ll have to make up your own mind about what was ‘real’ in that summer of ghosts. We never talked about it again, after that day. As a family we all packed it away in a closet and there it stayed. Ellie threw away her jotter when we got back home. I picked it out of the bin and kept it, simply because I wanted some kind of evidence of what had just happened to us all. I guess I held onto it like mum held on to her pictures of Alasdair, because on some level it was something I couldn’t let go of.
I thought that one day I’d be able to make sense of it, tease out the truth of it all. But even as I’m telling the story to you, I can’t do that. I don’t know what happened that summer except on a very superficial level. And none of us know what the truth was about Daisy Cheape. That’s got to be just a story to us. But it was a story that had real consequences for my family, even a hundred years after the event. That’s the power of ghosts. Or maybe it’s just life. Casey, do you still want to marry me?
About the Author
Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project and is now happy to be welcomed into McStorytellers with her first published serial, Family Fictions.
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project and is now happy to be welcomed into McStorytellers with her first published serial, Family Fictions.