Chapter Eighteen
Amelia’s Story
1989-1996
Just before her 11th birthday, Amelia’s father, James McLean, woke up in the middle of the night in the downstairs bedroom where he slept alone at their home in Seattle. He’d been suffering from dementia for several years but had grown increasingly more confused. He turned on the gas on the stove and went outside in his pyjamas.
In the morning, his wife, Eloise, had come down from her bedroom, switched on the kitchen light and caused a massive gas explosion. She died instantly. James was found dead by the side of the road later that same day. The coroner’s verdict was hypothermia.
Young Amelia somehow escaped out of her bedroom window and scrabbled down the other side of the house into the backyard. She twisted her knee, broke her nose and suffered minor scratches and bruises. The police said it was a miracle she survived but now she found herself completely alone in the world.
An investigation discovered the only living relative of her parents was a distant cousin of her mother’s called Ruth, who had moved to the UK when she was in her twenties. As theauthorities on both sides of the Atlantic tried to track Ruth down, Amelia was placed in care.
The house was uninsured and, in the fog of his dementia, James had squandered his hard-earned savings on dodgy money-making schemes and had been a scammer’s delight. There wasn’t all that much left, and it was tied up in a tangle of red tape. Amidst his tattered possessions, most of which she’d thrown out, Amelia found two short letters. They were from a woman called Sheila, and they mentioned a daughter. James’s daughter. She was called Cara. When she read them, she felt like she had been punched. So this is who he had been ranting about. This was his secret. That knowledge festered in her heart: she could do nothing with it yet, but it contributed to her feeling that nobody was to be trusted.
While living in the home, Amelia had to grow up fast. She learned about survival and never to trust anyone.
She also became something of an expert in lying. It started small and sneaky. She’d tell lies to get herself out of trouble or to make sure someone else took the blame. Lying became second nature and, at first, she was amazed how easy it was to get people to believe her; then it became her normal.
She knew how to lie to get attention, to weasel her way out of trouble and to end up with exactly what she wanted.
By the time her cousin Ruth had been tracked down living in a respectable terrace in Crawley, thirty miles south of London, Amelia, who had been thoroughly spoiled by her step-mother, was a deeply unpleasant young woman.
She had always been a strange child, but now at just thirteen, she was cold-blooded and flinty, motivated by money and hellbent on getting her own back on a world she believed was out to get her.
Ruth was married to Eric, a clerk in an insurance company, who was struggling with new technology and was painfullyaware he would never be promoted. He had one of those faces you just don’t quite remember, pale and slightly pudgy with washed-out light eyes and deep lines on his forehead and around his mouth. He had a soft belly and sunken chest and walked with an apologetic stoop.
Eric couldn’t believe his luck when Ruth decided to marry him. She was thirty-four years old, small, thin, dark-haired and sharp-elbowed. She’d just been dumped by her married boss and had lost her job along with her lover. He’d found her sobbing into an Eccles cake at his favourite cafe and hesitantly asked if she was OK.
Bitter and full of resentment, she had felt soothed by gentle Eric’s quiet demeanour and open admiration. He’d ended up buying her three cups of tea and a selection of baked goods and they’d bonded over her whining about her ex while he murmured sympathetically.
It didn’t take Ruth long to realise Eric worshipped her blindly and would never cheat on her or leave her. He had some savings and a decent-enough job and Ruth believed she could whip him into shape and give him some much-needed backbone.
Eric was bedazzled, deeply in lust and convinced they could be happy together and cried tears of joy when she agreed to be his wife.
For the first few months, Ruth poured her energy into spending their savings on modern-but-uncomfortable furniture for their box-like two-bedroom house then painted everything magnolia. She set her heart on a peach bathroom suite and told Eric she wanted thick shag-pile carpets in every room.
He was aghast at the bills coming in but too scared to upset Ruth by telling her she would have to rein in her spending. After six months they were up to their necks in debt. Ruth was constantly telling her husband he was useless, weak andstupid. He meekly accepted all the insults she threw at him which made her even more furious.
“Why can’t you stand up for yourself for once!” she would yell at him. In fact, she had been seriously considering leaving him, when she got a call from child services in Seattle, Washington USA. Ruth’s beady greedy eyes lit up when she discovered there was money in it if she were to become Amelia’s guardian. Not nearly as much as there should have been but with child benefit and allowances, Ruth thought it would be well worth her while.
And so, Amelia arrived in the UK and found herself in the middle of a one-sided battle ground. It was a deeply unhappy marriage. Ruth constantly chipped away at Eric, belittling him with insults and the occasional slap which he meekly accepted.
After a few months, Amelia also felt the back of Ruth’s hand and was clobbered on the legs and the backside more times than she wanted to remember. Her way to survive was to have as little to do with them as possible.
She put her shields up, shut out the rest of the world and spent most of her time studying in the library after school. At first, her talent for lying quickly made her popular. She spun stories about the exciting life she’d led in the States and the tragedy of both her parents dying.
The other pupils in her class thought she was impossibly glamorous with her American accent and claims to have met movie stars. She told them her parents had both been killed in a plane crash while on their way to visit friends in Hollywood and everyone gathered around her at break time enthralled.
Amelia loved the sympathy and the attention but she couldn’t resist taking her flights of fantasy to absurd and easily disproved levels, and soon found herself being laughed at, a figure of ridicule.
At a sleepover she was caught going through the handbag of the mother of one of her new friends and although nothingwas proved, she had acquired a bad reputation and was soon ignored and left alone.
Back at the cold, unwelcoming house, Ruth and Eric slept in separate rooms and Amelia made do with a pull-down sofa bed in the living room which she gradually took over and turned into a sort of one-roomed studio flat. No one ever came round to visit them, and Ruth or Eric stopped coming into ‘Amelia’s room’.
Ruth spent her time lying down in her hot stuffy bedroom, cocooned in blankets, watching TV and munching Gypsy creams, and Eric sat at the small formica table in the kitchenette reading his paper and skulking off to his small monk-like bedroom at a ridiculously early hour.
Amelia had no idea what he got up to in there and she didn’t want to know. She was left to her own devices which suited her just fine. She landed herself a job as a waitress after school, was paid cash in hand and given a decent meal every night, which made a big difference, as Ruth existed on cakes and biscuits and Eric nibbled on sad sandwiches and sipped on packet soups.
