Siobhan #2
Two hours later, Siobhan and Zara stand in Edinburgh Waverley train station.
It’s 5 p.m. on a Thursday, rush hour, and the station concourse is bustling with people and suitcases, announcements and platform changes ringing out every few seconds from the Tannoy.
It’s almost laughable to Siobhan that she was supposed to be at work today, but that instead of sitting behind the box office with its smeared glass and ancient till, she’s here, on her way to the one place she said she’d never go back.
Zara is quiet and pale as they make their way to the platform. She grips her bag of recording equipment with white knuckles.
“Do you really think we’ll be able to find it?” she asks, as their small train rumbles into Waverley. “The house?”
Siobhan breathes deeply, feeling the air push at the outlines of her lungs.
She hasn’t had a drink in twelve hours now, and a damp sweat is plastering her hair to her forehead.
She feels shaky, unreal, can’t stop herself from seeing Owen’s face in the seconds before she let him fall.
Her hex, releasing his body to the night – the part of the house that never left her. “I’m sure,” she says.
Their train is busy with commuters talking on their phones, standing guard next to their Brompton bikes and eating bags of Pret crisps, but with each station that takes them away from Edinburgh and deeper into the countryside, it gets quieter and quieter.
Zara and Siobhan sit at a table, looking out of the window.
“Tell me about her,” Siobhan says eventually. “Tell me about Margot.”
Zara smiles. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything you want to tell me.” The Margot that Siobhan remembers always had a strange, haunted quality. She’d seemed brooding and immature but also somehow nurturing – Siobhan could never figure out whether she was a lost child looking for a mother, or a mother looking for a lost child.
“Margot had a bad childhood,” Zara is saying.
She keeps staring out of the window, at the fields and farms passing by, rather than at Siobhan.
“I guess we both did. Our parents were pious. Strict. Physical with their punishments. I look back on it now and think, Fuck, but we just didn’t know any different.
I could have tolerated it my whole life, I suppose – I didn’t have much imagination.
Margot, though…” Zara makes a little noise in the back of her throat.
“Ever since she was tiny, she just couldn’t pretend, like the rest of us could.
She didn’t know how to be like everyone else.
She asked questions and she was loud and she broke rules.
My parents were ashamed of that, I think, the way she saw colour while everyone else only saw black and white.
They’d hide her away. Forbid her from doing things.
It was probably the worst thing they could have done. ”
The train stops and the last passengers from their carriage disembark, leaving them in the quiet.
Zara shrugs. “She was so stifled and unstimulated that it should have surprised no one when she got pregnant. Some local boy, I still don’t know who.
She was fifteen, and she was bored, so I didn’t blame her for any of it.
I blamed myself. It was my job to look after her and I failed. I failed her so badly, Siobhan.”
The ticket officer arrives to check their tickets and Zara stops abruptly, her words hanging in the air. She waits until he’s left the carriage to continue.
“I knew Mum and Dad would make her have the baby, but she just wasn’t ready, you know, in her mind, and our parents would have made her life hell.
I just wanted to do what I could for her.
So, we ran away together, we came to Scotland.
It was all my idea. At first, we were only going to come so we could figure out what to do.
But we loved it here. I was eighteen, so I got a job to provide for us both.
Our parents didn’t even look for us. I found out from a friend that they told the community they’d sent us away on a charitable mission.
It made me realise that maybe their strictness wasn’t because they cared about us, like I’d always thought.
It was only about how we made them look.
And the longer time went on, the more obvious it became that Margot was going to keep the baby.
I think she’d gotten the idea of it in her head by that point.
Being a mother. We felt free, for a while. We were happy.”
Siobhan remembers the picture of Margot and Zara standing in front of the castle, Margot heavily pregnant, her eyes twinkling. “She never mentioned a baby,” Siobhan says.
Zara shakes her head. She looks down and Siobhan pretends not to see the tear she wipes away with her sleeve.
“We called her Willow. You should have seen her. God, she was so beautiful. And we were okay for a while. We were. But being a mother – it was all too much for Margot. She was so young, and Willow wasn’t an easy baby.
She’d cry for days on end, she wouldn’t eat.
We never slept. One day, Margot disappeared with Willow and when she came back she was alone.
I screamed at her and shook her but she’d never tell me where she’d taken her.
And she was never the same after that. Not really. ”
Siobhan thinks about the Margot she’d met at the house, her intense fractiousness, her roving eye. It had felt as though something were always simmering under the surface of her skin, about to boil over.
Zara rubs roughly at her cheek. “She couldn’t cope with what she’d done, I don’t think.
But she’d never talk about Willow. She never wanted to speak to me at all.
She started coming home less and less. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for days on end.
She started hanging out with a group of guys she’d met down the local pub.
Horrible guys. It was them that got her hooked on it. ”
Siobhan doesn’t ask on what. It barely matters.
“Of course she couldn’t afford it. We barely had anything. Everything I made she stole to pay them, until there was no money left to steal.” Zara takes a deep, trembling breath. “That’s why they took her eye. Payment. Punishment.”
Siobhan feels cold suddenly. She wraps her arms around herself as Zara continues.
“I should have tried harder to keep her in line. I was her sister, for god’s sake, I was the one who’d brought her up here and then everything just went to shit.
But you’ve got to know, Siobhan, she was so difficult.
” Zara leans over the table, her eyes crackling with something fierce.
“She didn’t make anything easy. She’d hiss at me like a cat and bite me so hard she broke the skin.
She’d set fire to things and leave them in my bed while I was sleeping.
She’d take every pill in the cupboard just to see what it felt like.
At first, when she went missing, I was relieved.
I’m not even ashamed to say it anymore. I was.
” She holds Siobhan’s gaze for a moment before looking away.
“I only started looking for her when it had been two weeks. Obviously, the police didn’t want to know.
She’d turned eighteen by that time, so she was legally an adult, and she’d run away plenty of times before.
The police already knew her, because of the drugs.
They started an investigation but it was half-arsed and there were no leads.
They didn’t give a shit. It feels like no one has ever given a shit about Margot.
They told me she’d turn up.” Zara grimaces. “I guess, eventually, she did.”
“How is she getting those letters to you?” Siobhan asks. “From inside the house?”
Zara is staring into the middle distance.
“She told me about a kind of network of women, on the outside. She’d memorised my address, and when things started getting…
bad, with Haina, she wrote letters and left them at the treeline.
When they started disappearing, she just had to hope one of the women was collecting them, that they were getting to me.
She just kept writing and writing. Of course, I can’t write back to her, so for all she knows, I never got any of them. She won’t know I’m coming for her.”
There’s a strange feeling in the pit of Siobhan’s stomach, tossing and tumultuous. She pictures the treeline, where the manicured gardens of Hex House give way to the darkness of the woods. The invisible threshold there, the boundary between one world and another.
“I have to bring her home,” Zara says. “She isn’t safe, I know that much. Haina intercepted the letters.” She pauses, swallows. “I pushed the documentary so hard because I thought it was my only way to find Margot. But it turns out you were, Siobhan.”
“What do you mean?” Siobhan asks flatly. She needs a drink so badly that her stomach is churning, her hands shaking.
Zara keeps her level gaze fixed on Siobhan.
“When she found out about those letters, Haina must have been so happy. They gave her all the information she needed: that Margot was my sister, that I was in Edinburgh, that I was a journalist. Margot was Haina’s way to get to me. And I was her way to get to you.”
The view changes again, becoming a long stretch of lush countryside as the train rumbles on.
“She could have gotten to me herself, if she’d wanted to,” Siobhan says, almost too quietly for Zara to hear. “Sent her women after me. Made me come back.”
Zara leans forward. Siobhan hadn’t noticed the purple rings around her eyes until now. “But that’s just what I’ve been trying to tell you, Siobhan,” she hisses. “She isn’t the same Haina she was when you left. The women on the outside don’t listen to her, not anymore.”
When they finally terminate, they are amongst the only ones left on the train. The station they pull into is small, old, sleepy. Without looking back, Siobhan heads away from the empty car park and towards the overgrown path that runs alongside the track. It’s lined with dead brambles.
“Is this the right way?” Zara asks, tripping over a half-empty beer can.
It’s almost completely dark now. There are hooded figures on the path up ahead, smoking – teenage boys that stop their conversation as the women approach and only continue again once they’ve passed. “How do you know where to go?”
“It’s the woods you need,” Siobhan hears herself say. “Just keep going and don’t stop.”
Before long, they find the woods, or the woods find them, and the darkness is almost absolute. They can just about see the outline of the three hills, silhouetted against the completeness of the sky. There’s a waxing moon, pale and sad, helping to light their way.
“Can we stop for a while?” Zara asks after they’ve been walking for a couple of hours.
Siobhan shakes her head. She isn’t sure how she knows, but this time is different to the last, when she’d been invited to the house by Haina.
They’ll only find the house when they’re starving and desperate, when they’re freezing and falling asleep on their feet.
But with every step she feels it getting closer – feels something inside her calming, quelling.
So, they walk. Blisters bloom and burst inside her trainers.
Zara keeps pace with her, silent, every so often peering through the trees for a sight of golden windows and smoking chimneys.
At one point she brings out a camera and turns it on herself.
The sight makes Siobhan giddy. She’d held a camera in these woods herself all those years ago, trying to find the house. It feels faintly ridiculous now.
“It’s almost midnight, and the temperature is below zero,” Zara says, her exhales forming clouds of mist as she speaks. “I think we might be lost.”
Siobhan wonders if they are, in fact, lost. It’s true that she has no idea where they are, and yet, she knows they’re going in the right direction.
And when, half-dead with tiredness, she trips over a root and stumbles forward, when a nearby tree twists and falls, revealing a house behind it, a house of honey stone with pink roses climbing improbably up the walls around its door, she doesn’t feel frightened, and she isn’t tired anymore.
All she can think is, Finally.