Secrets in the Shadows
Hannah Emery
‘One of my favourite reads so far this year.’ HELLO MagazineA must-read for fans of Kate Morton & Barbara Erskine.In 1920s Blackpool, eleven year old Rose wanders away from her parents and has a unique gift bestowed upon her. This gift will leave a haunting legacy, seeping down through the generations…Decades later, Louisa has a vision of her mother walking into the sea. This isn’t the first time it happens and it won’t be the last, but what she sees isn’t always what she wants. The rest of her life is spent trying to change the future that haunts her.In present day Blackpool, Grace is going to be married someday. She knows this because she’s seen it; a vision of a white dress, daisies embroidered on the sleeves, the groom by her side, vowing to love her forever. Except the man in her premonition doesn’t belong to her- he belongs to her twin sister, Elsie.Haunted by what they know and what they are afraid to find out, all three women must make a choice: in the face of certain destiny should you chase the outcome that’s “meant to be”, or throw away fate and choose your own future?
Secrets in the Shadows
Hannah Emery
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Contents
Hannah Emery (#u0f11b048-c768-552a-b69c-b80ebdf5c58a)
Dedication (#u4077fc55-9c7b-51c4-a01f-77adeba9f5e8)
PART ONE (#u05e6991e-b1ff-52c6-bdc3-9f1e8fbfe8d9)
Chapter Two (#u4bd811b8-65e9-57f5-9e57-14a3ed95027a)
Chapter Three (#uabe5e4ec-df76-5ae7-91db-cf43648c17e0)
Chapter Four (#u6246cca1-5c71-5e1d-b121-cff4c905ce31)
Chapter Five (#u6ea09328-46da-586d-bdaa-e8734b96a0e8)
Chapter Six (#ufb695268-7f04-5c63-90b9-d11a1f71cebc)
Chapter Seven (#ub7b95297-59c3-56b1-896a-e713459556cc)
Chapter Eight (#uc7833e81-77cf-5140-85af-61112a5a54fa)
PART TWO (#u64a90fe4-599d-5ef8-9204-c2908250d3c6)
Chapter Ten (#u6c1910a1-063a-5629-b981-ee2e1c8baeb7)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Three (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
About HarperImpulse (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Hannah Emery (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
I studied English at the University of Chester and I have written stories for as long as I can remember. I love writing about how fragile the present is and how so much of it depends on chance events that took place years ago. My favourite things in life are my family, my friends, books, baking on a Saturday afternoon, going out for champagne and dinner and having cosy weekends away. I live in Blackpool with my husband and our little girl. Find out more at hannahcemery.wordpress.com and follow me on Twitter @hannahcemery.
For my family: past, present and future
PART ONE (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Chapter One (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Grace, 2008
Grace should be with Eliot.
Grace should be the one to take a bite of Eliot’s toast in the morning, to text him and see what he fancies for dinner, to carry around a solid weight of certainty that he is hers and she is his.
But Grace isn’t the one with Eliot, and doesn’t know how to be.
She sighs shakily and glances up as she walks along the promenade to Ash Books. She can barely see Blackpool Tower for the autumn mist.It’s a blue, cool morning and her icy breath streams behind her as she clatters down the glittering concrete. The tide is in, and to her left is the wide expanse of grey sea that she knows so well. Salty spray spits at her and she wipes it quickly from her face, disturbed by what the sea contains. By the time Grace reaches the shop an hour later, her face is stinging with the bite of cold air.
Even today hasn’t taken her mind off Eliot. She is tired of thinking about him, but her thoughts are pulled to the image of him like pins to a magnet. When Grace sleeps, which isn’t often, Eliot’s face floats through her dreams and his voice weaves around the jumbled stories of her subconscious. When she wakes, she can think of nothing but her connection to him.
Grace’s mother called it a gift.
There is only one person who has the power to make Grace think of something else. He is the only person who can make her feel as though the future might be different somehow. But he is not here.
After a slight pause, Grace tugs off one of her blue woollen mittens with her teeth so that she can find her keys in her bag, unlocks the heavy green door and shudders as she enters the bookshop.
As Grace enters Ash Books, she looks around and takes in her new business venture. Opening a secondhand bookshop with her twin sister Elsie seemed straightforward at first. Grace loves books, and Elsie loves books. The business loan application went through easily. It all seemed too simple to be the wrong thing to do.
There are new pine shelves lining each of the ivory walls, mostly filled with second-hand novels. Grace thought that they should sell only children’s books and Elsie argued that they shouldn’t narrow their target customer. The rainbow of creased spines is the result of their spat: a mixture of men’s black crime, women’s powder-blue romance and a colourful burst of children’s books piled up at the back of the shop. Grace runs a finger along the spines of the books on the shelf to her left, careful not to move them from their perfectly lined up positions. Her eyes wander to the stray leaflet on the counter.
ASH BOOKS OPENING DAY
COME AND SEE OUR NEW SHOP! DON’T LEAVE IT TOO LATE!
As she stares at the exclamations that scream out at her in acid yellow and thinks about the day ahead, a surge of panic fizzes through Grace’s blood and into her stomach, where it sits like a dissolving tablet. Hopefully Elsie will be here soon.
The scent of yellowed paper that has been thumbed through a hundred times hangs in the air like nicotine. The counter is to the left, cluttered with boxes of pens and lists of things to do before the grand opening. Grace moves over to a pile of stock behind the counter and picks up a stuffed owl that Elsie bought them as a good luck gift. Elsie has a thing for owls. She places him on top of the counter, then stands back to take in the view.
‘Perhaps you could be our lucky charm?’ Grace asks the owl, who glares at her with his frozen black eyes in response.
No, he doesn’t look right at all. And he might scare small children.Grace glances at the door uneasily, her nerves easing a little when she sees her sister appear behind it. Elsie is laden with tote bags and wearing a royal blue beret that Grace immediately recognises as her own.
‘You’re here already!’ Elsie says to Grace as she unwraps her gigantic yellow scarf from around her neck. She tosses the scarf on the floor next to where she dumps her bags. ‘Shall we make a coffee and then straighten up? We’ve got an hour until we officially open.’
Grace holds the owl up. ‘I’m worried he’ll scare the children,’ she says.
‘He won’t. He’s cute.’ Elsie snatches the owl from Grace and plonks him back in his rightful position next to the till.
The twins are quiet as they unpack the final boxes of books and gifts that they ordered last minute to try and fill up their shelves. As the boxes dwindle, the shelves begin to look a little more cluttered with choice and the counter and surrounding floor become tidy.
‘It’s finally starting to come together,’ Grace says, pushing a strand of black hair from her face. ‘It looks better than I thought it would when I first arrived.’
‘And still fifteen minutes to spare,’ Elsie says as she folds down the last empty box.
‘Yes,’ Grace frowns, ‘so why is somebody already at the door?’ As the tall figure behind the glass motions to be let in, Grace walks over to the front of the shop.
‘Oh, Mags! It’s you!’ Grace unlocks the door and ushers Mags in. ‘I’m so glad you made it. You’re our first customer! Come and have a look around.’
Elsie makes some more coffee in their little staff room at the back of the shop and Grace walks Mags around, pointing out the novels that she has given them to sell. Mags smiles at Grace and squeezes her arm as they return to the counter.
‘I’m so happy for you girls. It’s about time something good happened for you both, after everything you’ve been through.’
Elsie returns with three potently scented coffees and puts them down on the counter. ‘I hope it works out. We just kind of went for it without thinking it through in too much detail,’ she says, taking a sip of coffee and wincing when she realises it’s far too hot.
‘Well, that’s exactly what you have to do. People get far too wrapped up in what they think they should do, rather than what they want.’
Grace stares at Mags for a moment, thinking of her own mother. There’s a short silence, peppered with blows on coffees to cool them. After a few moments, Mags takes her oversized handbag from where she dropped it behind the counter and swoops out a bunch of roses wrapped in bright pink paper.
‘I brought you these. But I’ve just realised that you probably don’t have a vase here. I’ll pop and get you one later. Or I might send someone in my place.’
Just as Mags says this, the bell above the door tinkles again and two elderly women enter, cooing over The Wizard of Oz window display, which Grace assembled late last night after stumbling upon a 1960 edition of the book amongst their stock. Dorothy is a doll borrowed from the toyshop next door, and the yellow brick road is gathered crepe paper. Paper poppies surround the road, and in them nestles The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
It’s October, the last week of the illuminations, which always means that Blackpool and the surrounding towns are swelled with families who are there to see the flashing show of lights that dangles along the whole length of the promenade before the end of the season in November. The till is constantly beeping and at 2 p.m. they run out of paper bags. It’s the silly things that are sold first: the extras that Grace bought on a whim and Elsie didn’t think would match the shop of their imagination. Teddy bears wearing Ash Books hoodies; bundles of marshmallows in cellophane tied with curling ribbon; cheap children’s books with gaudy covers are all grabbed without much thought, paid for, probably forgotten soon after.
Towards the end of the day, when the buzz of new customers has died down, Grace is in the small office at the back counting through the money they have taken when she hears Elsie call her.
‘Somebody has brought us a vase for our flowers,’ Elsie shouts from the front.
Grace smiles as she piles the notes neatly on the desk and stands up, expecting to see Mags in the shop again, brandishing a vase. But when she turns around and sees who has just come through the door, Grace feels all the blood in her body rush to her head.
‘My mum said something about you needing a vase?’ Noel says, smiling at the twins and setting the vase on the counter.
‘When did you get back here?’ Grace asks, trying to dismiss the instant confusion that swarms around her mind, the warmth that blasts through her body at the sight of him.
‘Just now. I had a couple of days’ holiday to take, and I couldn’t miss the grand opening, could I?’
Elsie beams. ‘Grace, why don’t you show Noel all our stuff?’
‘I think he’s capable of looking himself,’ Grace says, suddenly sullen. Elsie shouldn’t try to pair her with Noel. Elsie has no idea. It’s just not that easy.
Noel touches Grace’s arm. ‘Come on, Grace. Give me a tour.’
Grace softens. ‘Okay.’
They wander around the shop, arm in arm to the back, where there are more boxes piled like bricks, two old office chairs and a small desk. The desk is crammed with the notes that Grace was counting when Noel arrived, piles of books and magazines, cups, a jar of cheap coffee, some powdered milk and a kettle.
‘So you came all the way from London just to see our shop on its opening day?’ Grace asks.
‘Yeah. I’ve heard how hard you’ve both been working, and I wanted to come and see how your first day was going.’
Grace flicks the little kettle on the desk on. ‘That’s really nice of you. Has Bea come here with you?’
‘No. She’s had to stay and work.’
There’s a silence, which is softened by the bubbling kettle. Grace glances across at Noel. He has been a part of Grace’s life for as long as she can remember, since those early, bright days that seem so out of reach.
‘How is Bea?’ Grace asks him, busying herself with cups, not really wanting to think about Bea at all, cursing herself for asking.
‘She’s okay.’
And then, because she has had a big day, and because it’s been so long since she has seen him, and just because she wants to, Grace puts the cups down, moves forward and hugs Noel.
A long time ago, the worst time in Grace’s life, a time filled with screams and horror and nightmares and loneliness, Noel made things slightly more bearable for Grace. She was only sixteen then, and full of jagged emotions that made her feel as though she might tear open at any moment. Grace hasn’t hugged Noel for a long time, but now his solid, strong arms are around her again, his clean, musky scent transporting her back in time, she remembers that when she did hug him all those years ago, she felt safe and still for that moment, as though nothing was moving.
With Eliot, everything is moving, all the time.
Grace sighs, and breaks away from Noel. ‘Come on. It’s almost time to close.’
Chapter Two (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Louisa, 1960
Louisa was in her bedroom when it happened.
She hadn’t been thinking about her mother to start with. She’d been lying on her bed with her feet up on the wall reading Bunty, when the strips on the pages before her became fuzzy as though they were hot.
This had happened before: it always happened before a vision. Louisa’s sight became silver around the edges and her head ached, as though what was in it was too big for her mind. And then she would see something that was about to happen. Louisa was the only girl she knew who had such premonitions. She delighted her friends by telling them what would be for school dinner before it had even been served, or what colour Miss Kirk’s dress would be before she came into the classroom.
So now, as Louisa’s head began to pulse with pain, she knew that she was about to see something that would happen shortly. It won’t be anything of interest, Louisa thought, for it never was. She shook her head, wanting to continue reading her strip about The Four Marys, but a stubborn image floated before her eyes, as though she was watching television. She scratched her leg idly as the vision began, but her body stiffened when, in her mind, she saw her mother wander out of their tall house, across the cool sand and into the roaring sea beyond. Louisa felt a suffocating pain in her chest as the sharp picture in her mind showed her mother’s skirt billowing out with water, as she moved further and further out to sea until she had vanished completely. The image disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. Louisa tasted salt and fear, and then nothing.
She flung her magazine onto the floor and sped downstairs to the kitchen, where she had heard her mother clattering about a few minutes before. Her mother had been more and more distracted lately, and Louisa had felt as though something might be the matter with her. There had been more of the nightmares than ever before. Twice in the night, Louisa had heard her mother moaning and crying. Those blue, anxious hours came back to her now, as she stood alone in the kitchen.
‘She’s fine. What I just imagined meant nothing,’ Louisa said to herself, her voice too loud in the empty room. She tried to make herself calm down a little, but her breaths had become short and sharp, and her heart was light and trembling.
Louisa called her mother, but there was no answer. She looked all around the kitchen for a note, a sign that her mother might be back any moment, but all she found was a half-finished cup of tea and an uncooked blackberry pie. She thudded upstairs, into all the empty rooms, and then fled back downstairs to the kitchen, knocking the pie from the kitchen table as she flew past it and out of the back door into the whipping, salty air.
‘Mum,’ she tried to call. Her limbs dragged along as though they were being pulled back, and her shout for her mother was sucked back into her mouth. She could not speak. She could not yell. Come and find me, she pleaded silently.
Louisa searched and searched and searched; she waited until her voice returned and bellowed for her mother over and over again; she wandered up and down the beach until her feet were numb and prickled with sand. Eventually she gave up and walked from the beach to Dr Barker’s house.
Dr Barker lived a few streets down from Louisa and her mother. Dr Barker tells me what to do too much, her mother used to say. But Louisa liked him. Something about him made her feel safe.
Louisa rapped on the blue front door. There was an immediate fumbling coming from within: a shift in sound and movement. Louisa tensed as Dr Barker loomed towards the glass window. She had never visited him alone before.
‘Louisa, what can I do to help you?’ Dr Barker said as he appeared in the doorway. A single white crumb of bread, or perhaps cake, dangled from his beard like a charm from a necklace and Louisa wondered how long it had been there. She didn’t imagine Dr Barker was the type of man who looked in the mirror very often so the crumb could have been there for hours, perhaps even days. For a very short moment, this thought eclipsed Louisa’s day so far. But as soon as it passed, the bright, burning memory reappeared.
‘I’m sorry to bother you. I didn’t know who else to go to. It’s my mother. I think she might be in trouble. I think she might have gone into the sea,’ Louisa said, noticing when she had finished speaking that her face was wet and that she was crying.
It was as though Dr Barker knew exactly what had happened. He didn’t make an urgent attempt to reach for his big leather bag that he kept by the door. He didn’t swoop his big brown cloak over his gigantic shoulders. He just held out an old, papery hand and stroked Louisa’s head kindly, and gave her a grey handkerchief to dry away her seawater tears.
Louisa stayed in Dr Barker’s living room whilst he went out to try and find her mother. She sat alone with his half-eaten cheese sandwich (that explained the crumb, then), his ticking clock and his scratchy carpet. She kicked her heels against his fuzzy green chair, and realised that whenever she saw a cheese sandwich from now on, she would think of her lost mother wading into the sea.
She lifted a leg and kicked the plate from the table so that the sandwich split and fell to the ground.
Had her mother seen that from wherever she was now?
Louisa sprang to her feet and reassembled the soft spongy bread and waxy cheese. She put it on its plate and back onto the table, muttering something about kicking it by accident.
Just in case.
When Dr Barker returned, his face was puckered into a strange, sympathetic bundle of features. He took Louisa’s hand in his.
‘Louisa, my dear.’ Louisa waited for him to say more, for more words to come out from the depths of his beard. But none came. He shook his head and his eyes filled with grey water and turned pink around the edges. She looked down at his paper hands and at hers inside them.
‘You shall sleep here tonight,’ Dr Barker eventually said. ‘I’ll find you a blanket.’
So Dr Barker found Louisa a blanket and she found herself thinking about how much her mother would have liked the blanket because her mother loved colours and the blanket was made of hundreds of different colours, all wrapped around each other.
Louisa’s mother used to speak in colours. She used to ask what Louisa’s mood was, and Louisa would answer in a colour. It was a game Louisa liked and was good at. ‘Red’, she might say, if her day had made her angry; ‘blue!’ she would shout if she was cold; ‘yellow!’ she would holler if she felt happy and the sun was shining.
As Louisa lay wrapped in all the colours of the blanket on Dr Barker’s couch, she tried to think of a colour to describe how she felt now. But no colour came. Her mind and her thoughts were clear, like ice.
The next day, Dr Barker took Louisa back to her house. As they walked towards the front door, Louisa looked up at the grey building. It seemed different somehow: taller and more intimidating. Louisa could hear the sounds that she had always heard from the Pleasure Beach, but the squeals of joy now sounded more like screams of terror. They came in waves, like the waves of the sea.
The pie that Louisa had knocked over the day before was the only thing out of place. Its purple innards spewed out over the grey stone floor in a bloody mess and its sour scent drifted up around Louisa like a ghost.
‘Get together anything you want to bring with you, dear Louisa.’ The way Dr Barker spoke made Louisa want to cry. A lump of pain appeared in her throat. She tried to swallow it down as she climbed upstairs to her bedroom. The summer holidays had filled the small, square room with shells and books and socks, and Louisa had planned to tidy it up before she returned to school. Her copy of Bunty lay on the floor where she had dropped it after the vision of her mother the day before, making her feel sick and hot.
‘I don’t know what I’ll need.’
Dr Barker didn’t seem to know what a twelve-year-old girl with a missing mother might need either. But that didn’t matter. He knew to take Louisa’s hand, and to offer her his handkerchief and to walk beside her as she left her house behind.
Louisa stayed with Dr Barker for a time. She couldn’t remember how long. Those days were misshapen and blurry in her memory, as though they had been left outside and rained on. One day, while she was sitting in Dr Barker’s lounge, there finally came a moment when suddenly she felt a tiny crack of space opening between that terrible day when she had lost her mother and her life now. Dr Barker’s eyes twinkled when Louisa told him that she felt a little better and that she might be hungry. He slipped out of the room, leaving his newspaper and his reading glasses to peep at Louisa from the little table next to his chair. When he returned, he handed Louisa a plate with daisies around the rim and a ham sandwich stacked together in the centre. Louisa took a bite and focused on the daisies.
It was soon after the sandwich that Louisa found herself in Dr Barker’s car, which smelt faintly of leather and fish. Dr Barker was very quiet for most of the journey. It was after almost an hour when he turned to Louisa, his big hands settled on the steering wheel, and said:
‘Louisa, today is a very special day. Because today, you’re going to live with your father.’
Chapter Three (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Grace, 2008
‘A toast is definitely in order!’ Grace says as she struggles with the cork of a champagne bottle.
It’s the evening of the opening of Ash Books and the twins and Eliot are at Rose House, the old guest house that Elsie lives in by herself. The three of them ate at the pub across the road from the shop for dinner, Elsie warning them that they wouldn’t be able to eat away their profits every night and Grace rolling her eyes and pointing out that they deserved a treat.
‘Was it a huge success then?’ Eliot asks.
Grace avoids eye contact with Eliot. Tonight needs to be simple. She nods and allows herself a congratulatory ‘whoop!’ as she finally manages to pop out the stubborn cork.
‘Yes. A lot of people came in and looked at the second-hand stuff. And the head of English from a high school in Lytham came in and we did a deal with him on a collection of the classics we’d put on offer. He ordered about two hundred pounds’ worth of stock.’
Eliot strokes the peppering of stubble on his chin as though he has a full beard. It makes an unpleasant scratching sound and Grace wants to prod him, to make him stop.
‘Two hundred pounds is great,’ he says. ‘If you make that much every day you’ll be heading for world domination in no time!’
‘World domination?’ Elsie says, and grins at Eliot. ‘You’re ambitious.’
Eliot smiles back. ‘I’ll bet the free cupcakes had something to do with it. Good work on those, by the way, Grace.’ He bites into a leftover cake, and Grace sees a faint trace of pink icing line his mouth.
‘More champagne, anyone?’ Grace asks loudly as she fills up her own glass. Elsie doesn’t answer, but looks at her own glass, which sits on the battered coffee table, untouched.
‘Go on then, Grace. I’ll have a top-up,’ Eliot says, leaning forward and jostling Elsie, who sits up and rearranges her hairclip.
‘I think I’ll go to bed actually,’ Elsie says.
‘Bed?’ Grace asks incredulously. ‘You’ve hardly had any champagne. I thought we were celebrating?’
‘Yes, bed,’ Elsie answers simply as she stands and stretches. ‘Night.’
There’s silence for a few minutes after Elsie has clomped upstairs. Grace and Eliot hear Elsie’s bedtime ritual float downstairs and through the open lounge door: aggressive teeth brushing, cupboard doors opening and clothes being tossed onto the floor.
Grace sighs and downs her champagne. It’s cheap stuff, not even really champagne, and tastes woody and too sweet.
‘I’m so relieved that the opening day went well,’ Grace says after a moment. ‘I started to worry this morning.’
‘About what?’
‘About opening the shop. It all seemed a bit overwhelming. I was worried we’d perhaps done the wrong thing.’
Eliot shakes his head and loosens his tie. Eliot always wears a tie, even if he’s not at work.
‘Taking a risk like this is never the wrong thing. You’ve both been talking about opening a bookshop for a while, so it was the obvious thing for you to do. You can’t have any regrets about that.’
‘I hope not,’ Grace says. She shivers. ‘It’s always freezing in this house. Don’t you make Elsie put the heating on when you stay over with her?’
‘I hate being too hot. I’d rather be cool,’ Eliot says. Grace sees him start to reach for the blanket on the arm of the sofa to give her, then watches as he thinks better of it. If only things weren’t this complicated.
‘Elsie’s the same as me. She hates being too hot as well,’ Eliot finishes. Grace thinks she detects a look of defence in his slim, stubbled face.
‘So you’re staying over here tonight?’ he asks.
‘Yes. Elsie and I are going into the shop together tomorrow. She’s made one of the spare beds up for me.’
‘You’ve not slept over here for ages.’
‘I know. I don’t like sleeping here. But Elsie wanted me to stay over so that we could celebrate our first night and go in together first thing tomorrow. I’m trying to do things right at the moment. I want us to feel like a team again. I barely even feel like we’re friends at the moment. And that’s surely bad for business,’ she finishes with a weak smile. An unexpected lump lodges in her throat like a boiled sweet.
‘Yeah. She said things were a little tense between you both.’
The reason for the tension hangs in the air, between Grace and Eliot. Grace won’t say it. Eliot doesn’t know it.
‘Let’s have another drink,’ Eliot says, filling their glasses.
The next morning, Grace shuffles further under her blanket as wisps of her sister’s voice drift into the lounge like smoke. She wonders where she is for a moment when she opens her eyes, then remembers that she is in Elsie’s lounge.
When Grace and Elsie were younger they were never allowed in this room. It feels forbidden to Grace, even now. This was the guest lounge, only to be used at Christmas. Grace can still feel the visitors in the air. It’s like they never really left. Elsie has redecorated, trading the 1970s velour orange curtains and swirling gaudy carpet for classic beige carpet and blinds and chocolate brown leather sofas. But in the weak winter light of the morning, the new decor changes nothing. Grace can hear the sea here, and, for some reason, can’t bear it. She can hear it now: the clashing of the monstrous grey waves against each other. The more she tries not to listen to it, the more she hears it, until it feels as though the shards of water are crashing against her head.
Elsie is shouting at Eliot in the kitchen. The words blur into meaning. Grace can’t help but listen.
‘I’m not asking much, am I? My boyfriend in my own bed instead of downstairs with my bloody sister!’
There’s only a silence in reply.
So Eliot obviously didn’t make it upstairs to Elsie’s room last night.
Bad move.
Grace feels a tug of guilt. They got through quite a bit of champagne in the end, and Eliot had meant to go upstairs to Elsie. Grace remembers asking him to stay until she fell asleep in the lounge. She didn’t want to be alone in a spare room upstairs. She remembers her eyes closing slowly as they talked, the room in a blur around her. She wouldn’t have asked him to stay with her if she’d been sober.
The front door slams, the stained glass rattling in its splitting frame.
Sleeping here was a terrible idea. From now on, Grace will only ever sleep in her brand new flat, surrounded by brand new furniture and brand new other flats. There are too many memories here at their old home, creeping into Grace’s body and mind like damp. And it’s too cold. Rose House has always been horribly cold in winter. Even though the central heating clunks and bangs its way around the rooms like a metal snake, the old windows let all the heat out and all the outside air in.
Grace can remember being cold every single winter of her childhood in this house. She shared Room 5, the smallest, with Elsie. Their mother never came upstairs to bed until the very middle of the night. She would often come into Room 5 instead of her own room. Grace would wake as her mother banged around the bedroom, knocking over the twins’ things and whispering to herself. There would be further noise and cursing as their mother tried to undress; sometimes she didn’t bother, and Grace would wake to the sight of her mother, fully clothed, complete with jewellery and shoes, lying open-mouthed on top of her sheets.
Those nights, in the early days, had been quite easy to bear. It was the later nights that were the haunting ones. Elsie always claimed that she couldn’t remember, that she must have slept through it all. But how could she have slept through such potent alcohol fumes, such sickening screaming as their mother awoke from yet more nightmares?
Grace gets up and stretches her long pale limbs.
‘Eliot?’ she shouts.
He appears in the living room, his wavy, dark brown hair still crumpled on one side from where it has rested on the arm of the sofa all night. ‘Elsie’s gone to the shop—’
‘I know. I heard,’ Grace interrupts as she pulls her creased cardigan over her shoulders. ‘I’m going now. I just wanted to say sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have said I’d stay over, because I never feel relaxed in this house. It was my fault we both fell asleep down here.’
Eliot shrugs and looks at the table of empty bottles and toast crusts. Eliot always makes toast when he’s drunk. Grace remembers him fiddling with the toaster in the early hours and burning the first two slices. The sickly smell of charred crumbs still lingers in the air.
‘I know Elsie’s mad with you now but she’ll get over it.’ Grace says, then sits back down on the jumble of blankets and cushions.
‘I hope so. I told her nothing happened between us. But she won’t believe it.’
‘Well, I’ll tell her later as well.’
‘She’ll believe you even less than she believes me.’
Grace stares into space. She supposes that’s true. Is this what things have come to? There used to be a time when Elsie would believe anything Grace said, and vice versa.
But not now. Never, now. The time when things were straightforward between the twins glints beyond the darkness of the past, and Grace can’t work out how to grasp it.
She stands up, suddenly unable to stay in the house any longer.
‘See yourself out,’ she says to Eliot as she grabs her handbag and heads out to the hallway.
When Grace arrives at the shop, Elsie is standing stiffly behind the counter.
‘So did you have fun with Eliot last night?’ she asks as soon as Grace has closed the door behind her.
‘Yes. I did. Surely you don’t think I should apologise to you for that?’
Grace watches as Elsie drops her eyes to the wooden counter. They have splashed out on oak. The joiner who made it for them claimed that oak was a hard wood and would be able to survive a little better over the years. If only their sisterly bond was made from oak, too.
‘For God’s sake, Elsie,’ Grace replies. ‘We had a few drinks and crashed on your sofa. Honestly, you should be pleased that we get on. It’s you who Eliot wants, you know,’ she continues, her tone softening a little. ‘I’m his friend. That’s all. You were the one who went to bed. We wanted you to stay up with us.’
Grace moves forward and traces a line along the oak counter with a purple fingernail as she speaks. She thinks back to last night as she waits for Elsie’s answer. Surely Elsie doesn’t blame her for staying up. Early nights aren’t for everyone. Old ladies and children. But not Grace. Not Eliot.
Elsie follows Grace’s finger with her eyes and sighs, relenting. ‘Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s forget it. Do you want a hot chocolate?’
‘I might have a coffee,’ Grace says, relaxing at Elsie’s truce. ‘Ugh, I won’t be drinking champagne again for a while. I hope I don’t look as rough as I feel.’
‘You’re so gorgeous that you couldn’t possibly look anything but amazing,’ Elsie assures her twin with a smirk.
‘It’s funny that you of all people should think that,’ Grace laughs, returning an identical smile. ‘I’ll make the drinks, shall I?’
As Grace stirs cheap coffee granules into two new mugs, she sees the vase of flowers that Mags brought the twins the day before. She wonders if Noel will come and see them again today. Her stomach tightens at the thought. She squints out of the window to the square beyond as she wanders back to the front of the shop. Noel never wanted to stay in Blackpool. Grace remembers him reading about other worlds, other people, for the whole of their lives. Wherever they were when they were all young, Noel was usually tucked away in a corner, head deep in a book full of facts. The moment he could, he bolted from Blackpool to university in London. Grace was mad with him, for a time. She was mad that he had left her alone with a sullen Elsie and a distracted mother. She was mad that he was seeing new places and meeting different people, while Grace was stuck in her green bedroom that she knew every single inch of. She was mad that Noel suddenly wasn’t always just there, reading in the corner, in case Grace wanted him.
But then, as Noel phoned Grace every week and sent her cards and the occasional gift: a keyring, some sweets, she began to forgive him for leaving. She began to miss him a little, and look forward to his phone calls and visits home.
But somewhere, somehow, between Grace wandering around town with her friends, being in plays after school and being out when Noel made his phone calls, and Noel getting his first job in London and wearing shirts and suddenly being important, the cards and gifts faded. Their phone conversations became less frequent, and when Noel visited Blackpool, Grace felt like she knew him less.
And then her mother disappeared, and it all changed again.
Chapter Four (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Louisa, 1960
Along the bumpy road they went. Dr Barker didn’t say any more and Louisa didn’t ask him to. She had never met her father before, and the news that she was going to live with him made the ham sandwich she had eaten hours before at Dr Barker’s house feel heavy in her stomach, as though she had eaten a dollop of glue. It swerved around the corners as the car did and threatened to come up into her throat.
And then suddenly, the car stopped. Dr Barker tugged at his handkerchief until it came loose from his pocket, and wiped his face with it. Louisa felt a sudden urge to take the handkerchief and keep it forever, but she didn’t tell Dr Barker this and she didn’t tell him that she almost loved him, and that if she had been allowed to stay with him and his daisy plate with ham sandwiches on it for longer she would have been almost happy. Instead, Louisa looked up at the house that loomed over them.
Maybe, just maybe, Louisa’s mother had known all about this house, and had sent Louisa here. Maybe it was all planned. Maybe her mother would be inside.
Louisa let herself be pulled from the car by Dr Barker. He held her hand as they ascended the steep, green hill. The front door was shiny and tomato red. When it opened, Louisa stared at the man behind it.
Her father.
He was a grey man: grey hair and grey clothes and grey skin. He looked down at Louisa and gave her a half-smile. She gave him a grim smile in return. He would, she decided, have to work for a real smile.
‘Well,’ Dr Barker said brightly. The word hung in the air like a sheet out to dry, flapping this way and that, getting in the way of things.
‘Well,’ Louisa’s grey father repeated after a while.
They stood for a few moments.
‘It happened, then. You knew it would,’ her father said to Dr Barker, looking over Louisa’s head and directing his words only at him, as though that would make Louisa unable to hear them. Dr Barker bowed his head slightly, his hands held together in a steeple.
They all shuffled through into the hall. It was a pretty hall, with an umbrella stand and a huge framed painting of a girl and a dog on the wall. Louisa looked up at the girl. She looked sad, and Louisa wondered why. Louisa’s mother would have been able to tell her. If her mother was here, she would stare into the painting and hold Louisa’s hand and tell her a rich, beautiful story filled with colour and happiness and sadness. But Louisa could tell by now that her mother wasn’t here after all. Tears burned the backs of her eyes, but she would not let them fall. Not now.
‘So, you’re all ready for her then?’ asked Dr Barker.
‘Yes, yes. I have a bed made up. Thank you, Gregory. For everything.’
Louisa watched Dr Barker’s face droop in a sad smile as her father said this, and knew then that Dr Barker liked her father, and had met him before, that he knew him more than Louisa did. Then she looked at her father. Did she like him? The man who had an umbrella stand and grey hair and grey skin?
Not yet, no. But she knew that one day, she would.
Just a year after Louisa had gone to live with her father, a silent, steady drift of snow began to fall one Monday afternoon and continued on and on, until nothing could be seen from the highest window of the house but a blue-white world with no boundaries.
The day Louisa had arrived at her father’s the previous autumn, he had enrolled her at the local school that smelled of scrubbed potatoes and old shoes. Louisa had liked school in Blackpool and she’d had good friends there who adored the fact that Louisa could see into the future, and who had given her sweets in return for a clue about what might happen that day. But in her new town, with her new father and her new school, things were different.
Oh, how different, Louisa thought each night as she lay underneath a cool eiderdown and listened out for the sound of the sea that never came. Louisa’s gift was stronger than ever: she knew exactly what the teacher would be wearing every day, and she knew whose knuckles would be rapped and what would be served for lunch. But she said nothing now. If she ignored the visions, then perhaps they would eventually go away. Her vision of her mother had been too late. No good could come of them.
So, because Louisa had apparently nothing to offer them, and perhaps because her face was plain and her hair a little too dark for her pale complexion, the other girls at her school made no real attempts to befriend her, or to poke fun at her. They simply let her be.
At weekends, Louisa and her father took little outings. They walked to the park, the duck pond, the high street. Her father spent more money than her mother ever had done and Louisa’s tummy swelled ever so slightly with a weekly bag of fudge from Spencer’s sweet shop. The outings were strange at first, and Louisa and her father spoke little. Words seemed to be difficult to find now, and when Louisa did push a word from her lips, her father might simply nod, or shake his head, or give a small smile.
After a year, Louisa’s life still seemed to be colourless. And the snow that fell that Monday made it even whiter, even more unreal. School was out of the question, Nancy the maid said that morning as she cleared away Louisa’s toast crumbs. And Louisa’s father would stay at home too.
Louisa sat and watched her father eat the last of his eggs. He ate slowly, and neatly. Her mother had always made eggs that oozed orange onto the plate and the bread. Her father’s eggs were more like foam and he cut them carefully so that there was no mess on his plate. He could, Louisa supposed, have just eaten them off the table.
‘What will we do, then?’ he asked Louisa once he had swallowed the last of his breakfast.
Louisa shrugged. She didn’t think they would be able to go for a walk in this weather.
‘Come with me,’ he said, as he stood and pushed his chair back. He took Louisa’s hand, led her to the coat stand in the hallway, and offered her the red wool coat that he had bought her a few weeks ago. Louisa put it on. The buttons were gold, and made her feel as though she was a queen.
When they both had their coats and shoes on, Louisa’s father opened the front door. The snow was piled so high that they could see nothing beyond it. Louisa’s father pushed at it with both of his hands and then, as though he was a boy of ten, launched himself on top of it. Snow puffed out from underneath him, and his face turned red.
He’s gone mad, Louisa thought.
And then she threw herself into the snow too.
Freezing water raced through her shoes and her wool coat, and Louisa shivered. She felt a strange laugh escape her mouth. Guilt coursed through her immediately: she had vowed that she would never laugh again, not unless she found her mother.
But then her father laughed: a deep, loud laugh that made Louisa giggle more. She choked and wiped her eyes with her cold, wet sleeve.
‘I’m not used to snow. We hardly ever get any in Blackpool,’ she said.
Her father didn’t correct Louisa’s present tense. He smiled and wiped a piece of ice from his rounded jaw. ‘It’s because of all the salt near the sea. It stops the snow from settling.’
Louisa nodded, her face frozen and all her words used up, for now. But it had been a start. A very good start.
When they had thrown snowballs, and made a tall snowman with currants for eyes, a stone nose and a shoelace mouth that insisted on falling and dangling on one side, Louisa and her father went back inside. Louisa changed into some dry clothes and her father asked Nancy to make them some hot chocolate.
‘I don’t often have hot chocolate,’ Louisa’s father said as they sat sipping.
‘It’s nice,’ Louisa said.
‘Nancy is good to me.’
‘Yes. She’s nice.’
There was a stretch of silence dotted with sipping. Louisa looked out of the window. The sky hung down heavily, yellow grey. The snow would continue forever, it seemed.
‘Mum talked about somebody,’ Louisa said all of a sudden, leaning forward a little, her heart racing. ‘She talked about a boy with purple eyes. She talked about finding him. But I don’t know who he was.’
Louisa’s father scratched his chin and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said sadly, ‘I don’t know who he was, either.’
‘Perhaps if I could find him, he would be able to tell me where Mum went?’
Louisa’s father put down his hot chocolate and Louisa saw that he hadn’t finished it. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Is somebody else living in my house now?’ Louisa asked. Her toothbrush and clothes and a couple of dolls she had outgrown had been parcelled up and sent to her a few weeks after she had moved into her father’s, and she still hadn’t looked in the box properly. She felt that if she did, a sorrow too deep to recover from would pull her in. So the things that had been sent were still untouched, in Louisa’s big fancy wardrobe next to her new, soft bed.
Her father sighed sadly. ‘Yes. It’s being used as a guest house now.’
Louisa swallowed a big gulp of chocolate and scalded her throat. So that was it. She couldn’t go back. ‘It feels strange to think of somebody else brushing their teeth at my sink,’ she said, wondering if her father would understand.
He nodded, and sighed again.
‘I can’t sleep at night,’ Louisa said next. It was as though her words were suddenly dripping out with no control now, like her mouth was a broken tap. ‘I can’t seem to sleep without the sounds of the sea.’
‘I see. And a girl needs her sleep.’
Louisa nodded, pleased that her father appeared to be listening to her and thinking about what she had said. It seemed so long since she had had a conversation, a real one where she felt like something had happened at the end of it.
‘You know,’ her father said after a little time, ‘if you hold a seashell up to your ear, then you can hear the sea.’
Louisa raised her dark eyebrows, interested. The idea reminded her of something her mother would have said, and made Louisa’s insides tremble a little with grief.
‘I’ll try to get you a shell so that you can listen to it each night before bed. We need you to sleep well.’ Her father stood and left the room, and Louisa finished her hot chocolate, and when she was sure that her father wasn’t coming back, had the rest of his too.
That night, even though going out was out of the question, and even though Louisa and her father were goodness knows how many miles from the coast, Louisa saw that there was a small, shiny seashell on her pillow. It was cream, with tiny pink veins running through it. It was beautiful.
Louisa held the shell to her ear to hear the crashing of the sea, and wondered how her father had managed to find it for her.
And as she sank into bed, and listened to the waves, a little bit of colour seeped back into Louisa’s world.
Chapter Five (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Grace, 2008
‘I’m going to go and get us some lunch,’ Grace says.
Ash Books has been busy on its second morning of business, making the whole venture seem real and feasible. Two groups of Eliot’s students have already responded to an email from him promoting the shop by turning up and wandering around the small section of plays, giggling and jostling each other and fighting over the only copy of Talking Heads.
‘Tuna salad sub for me please,’ Elsie says, rooting in her purse.
‘Don’t worry about the money. I don’t think we need to split things down to the penny now that we have a business together.’
Elsie looks up at Grace and smiles. It’s an excited smile, full of the promise of success. Grace smiles back, seeing her own face reflected by Elsie’s: pale skin, an angular cat-like grin, dark arched brows over kohl-lined violet eyes.
Grace tugs her coat around her tightly as she steps out of the shop to protect her from the icy whip of the sea air. She has lived near the sea all her life and still the salty wind can take her breath away. People used to visit Blackpool for this clean, fresh air; it was good for their health and their souls. The stretch of promenade a few miles north of Ash Books is still stuffed with the same old attractions as it was in the 1960s. Blackpool Tower stands over the promenade that it has spawned: the south of the promenade is filled with the sounds of clicking, whirring Pleasure Beach rides and the screams of tourists’ rickety descents down roller coaster tracks. In the summer season, Central Pier is gaudy with lights and colour, and amusement arcades and cheap food shacks squall for custom. From north to south, a string of giddy illuminations hover over the line of cars that queue to see them.
Grace squints into the distance and sees Blackpool Pleasure Beach. When half term is over, the rides will stop and the park will fall silent. There is always something dead about Blackpool in winter. Grace’s whole life has peaked and fallen with Blackpool’s peaks and falls, as the town has breathed in and out over summer and winter. The dazzling attractions and pleasant weather used to make Rose House bustle with loud, excitable overnight guests for the first few summers of Grace’s childhood. But the guests dwindled over the years. Eventually, they stopped coming altogether. Grace’s mother didn’t seem to care.
‘It’s all too much trouble. We’re better off with no guests. We’re better off just us,’ she said to the twins when they were about fifteen, an empty brandy glass beside her.
Of course, it wasn’t running the guest house that had caused trouble. It was the other thing their mother did for the guests, night after night, behind the closed door of the dining room. The twins listened sometimes, kneeling on their bedroom floor, ears pressed to the musty-smelling, swirling green carpet and hearing nothing but muffled voices. Their mother used to come upstairs afterwards, clinking coins and smelling of smoke and grown-ups. That’s when she’d come into their room, and think that they couldn’t hear her. Grace will always remember the sound of her mother’s sleep. It’s mixed in with the sounds of the night sea. Shallow breaths, hoarse with alcohol.
Grace and Elsie never understood what their mother was doing in the dining room until the day of the car crash. That was the day that changed everything.
‘Yes, love. What can I get you?’ Grace’s memories are interrupted by the deli assistant, poised over her clean white chopping board.
When Grace arrives back at the shop, a tall, chubby man in a green waterproof jacket is just leaving.
‘Another cold day, eh?’ he says politely as he lets Grace pass. As she does so, she sees him rapidly scanning her face, hesitation clouding his own. She smiles.
‘I think we confused that customer who just left,’ she grins at Elsie as she plonks the sandwiches down on the counter. ‘I don’t think he was expecting to step out of the shop and see a carbon copy of you.’
Elsie smiles weakly. ‘He wasn’t a customer,’ she says as she pulls a sandwich towards her and begins to unwrap it.
‘Who was he then?’ Grace asks over the rustling of the sandwich paper.
Elsie shrugs. ‘A salesman.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘This one’s yours. I don’t know how you can eat prawns. Didn’t you know that they are the maggots of the sea?’
‘A salesman of what?’
Elsie shrugs and bites into her own sandwich neatly. ‘Books and stuff.’
‘So, did he have anything good? Did he give you any ideas of any other stock it might be worth ordering?’
‘No. He wanted to sell us a load of old stuff.’
‘Like what?’
‘It was just old stuff. Not really what we’re going for.’
‘I would have liked to have seen it. Did he leave a number?’
‘No,’ Elsie replies simply as she pops a piece of cucumber into her mouth. Just like that, as though the matter is closed. As though she is the boss.
‘Elsie, we’re meant to be a team! Why didn’t you at least take his number?’
‘Why don’t you trust the decision that I made? Who would buy horrible dusty books from a hundred years ago?’
‘They were from a hundred years ago? There could have been all sorts in his collection, Elsie. There could have been first editions that we could have made actual money from! Why do you think that you are the one in charge? Why can’t we both be the adults here?’
Elsie shrugs and screws up her sandwich paper, soggy with tomatoes that she has delicately removed.
‘I thought I made the right decision. People want new stuff these days. Even if they’re buying second hand, they want it to look new.’
‘No, they don’t all want new stuff. Don’t be so narrow-minded,’ Grace shoots back.
Elsie scowls at her sister as she grabs the ball of tomato-smeared paper and pushes past her. Grace picks up her own sandwich and bites into it. She frowns as Elsie’s words are finally processed in her mind. Maggots of the sea. She swallows her first mouthful uneasily, poking at the remainder of the sandwich’s pink, veiny innards before pushing it away.
The apology comes the next day, just as Grace knows it will.
‘I really am sorry.’
Grace looks up from her pile of pound coins to her twin’s apologetic saucer eyes. ‘It’s fine, Elsie. Honestly, I’m over it. As long as you promise we can decide things as a team in the future.’
‘I will, I will. I promise. I was just feeling stubborn yesterday. I thought I could handle things on my own. But today I can see it all a bit more clearly. I know I was out of order,’ Elsie says, her voice slightly high-pitched as though she has sucked an old helium balloon. ‘So, I’m going to leave you to it for the afternoon. To show that I trust you.’
‘You’re taking the afternoon off?’
‘Well, not exactly. I’ll start some stuff for the tax return. Boring stuff.’ Elsie gives Grace an impulsive hug over the counter, her earrings catching on her sister’s glossy black hair. ‘I’m not skiving. I just want you to know that I trust you.’
A few minutes after Elsie has left, Grace drums her fingers on the counter. She takes a sip of the hot chocolate she has made herself, even though it’s too hot to taste the sweetness. She watches a lone man in a brown suede coat browse the small selection of biographies they have stacked near to the doorway. When was the last time Elsie hugged Grace before today? She can still smell her sister’s perfume: a leathery, almost manly scent. A scent that makes her seem like the boss. She has been worse since their mother left. Elsie seems to think that telling Grace what to do might fill in the horrific, inexplicable gap in their lives that they are forced to step over each day. Elsie seems to bound over the gap easily, like an exuberant Labrador, and has done since they were sixteen. But Grace, even now, constantly finds herself edging over it cautiously, trying not to fall.
The twins’ mother vanished on their sixteenth birthday: a day when she should definitely have stayed until the end. In many ways, she had gone long before the day she disappeared, but the traces of her at least made Grace feel as though they had a mother. Sticky hairspray wafting through the hall. Perfume. Brandy. All toxic fumes, seeping into their skin, making the twins’ faces grey and their thoughts jumbled. She had been even more distracted in the days leading up to the twins’ birthday, and Grace had felt as though something might be the matter with her. There had been more of the nightmares than ever before. Twice in the night, Grace had heard her mother moaning and crying. Those blue, anxious hours of thirteen years ago came back to her now, as she stood in the shop.
Grace had woken up suddenly on her sixteenth birthday. She’d had a frightening dream that she was drowning, pulling for something to grab onto, her mouth and eyes and nose filling with stinging seawater. She had clawed at her duvet, gasping, and shot up in bed, disorientated and dizzy with breathlessness. She’d looked over at Elsie, who lay still as a corpse, breathing deeply and steadily. Although the curtains were shut, Grace could tell it was still early.
But not early enough.
She sat up, feeling a suffocating pain in her chest, tasting salt and fear and loss. When she went downstairs to find her mother, she found sixteen fairy cakes with silver balls on top, two glasses of cloudy lemonade, a blood red bottle of wine from a neighbour, presents wrapped in pink foil paper, cards stacked up in the hall. A lone balloon.
But no mother. Grace remembered her dream: remembered being pulled into the slicing waves, water filling her lungs until there was nothing but blackness.
‘She’s fine,’ Grace said to herself, her voice too loud in the empty hall. She tried to make herself calm down a little, but her breaths had become short and sharp, and her heart was light and trembling.
She called her mother, but there was no answer. She looked all around the kitchen for a note, a sign that her mother might be back any moment, but all she found was a half-finished glass of brandy in the kitchen. She thudded upstairs, into all the empty rooms, into the one where Elsie still lay sleeping. Elsie couldn’t know that their mother had tried to leave them. She would never forgive it. Grace had to find her. She fled back downstairs to the kitchen, knocking the brandy from the worktop as she passed so that it crashed onto the stained stone floor. She rushed out of the back door into the whipping, salty air.
‘Mum,’ she tried to call. Her limbs dragged along as though they were being pulled back, and her shout for her mother was sucked back into her mouth. She could not speak. She could not yell. Come and find me, she pleaded silently.
Grace searched and searched and searched; she waited until her voice returned and bellowed for her mother over and over again; she wandered up and down the beach until her feet were numb and prickled with sand. Eventually she gave up and walked from the beach, back home to Elsie.
Now, Grace looks at her watch. Nearly half past two. She picks up her phone from the counter and pauses slightly before tapping into her caller list. Eliot finished work for the half term break the other day. He went on to a teacher training course after his degree and now he teaches Theatre Studies in a sixth form college. He is probably still in bed. Grace pictures his bare chest rising and falling with sleep, his mouth slightly open, his face immersed in a dream he won’t remember when he wakes.
Her hand hovers over his number, until she remembers the hug from Elsie, the feeling of their hair and earrings and scents being entangled. She locks her keypad and places her phone back on the counter. As she does, she glances up at the door, which has opened.
‘Eliot! I was just thinking you’d still be in bed, enjoying your break.’
‘Thought I’d come and check in here. How’s it going? Good day?’
‘Yeah. Pretty quiet, after a surge yesterday.’
Eliot nods then looks round. ‘Isn’t Elsie here?’
‘She’s taken the tax stuff home to work on,’ Grace says, not wanting to go into the reason why Elsie has left Grace to it. ‘She’ll be back in a bit. She won’t be able to stay away, although it seems to be going quieter this afternoon.’
‘I suppose with this kind of shop it will always be a little up and down. Have you had many students in? I was thinking if you did some kind of student discount then it might work in your favour.’
‘Yes, we’ve had a few, thanks to your promotional email. Student discount is a great idea.’
‘If you decide on the discount then I can email my students again, in case they’re thinking of buying anything.’
Grace laughs. ‘Did you used to spend your college holidays buying books?’
‘I certainly did! You know I did!’
Grace bites her lip. ‘I remember. You were always reading.’
‘Reading or drinking,’ Eliot shrugs. ‘But drinking’s a student’s prerogative.’
‘And what’s your excuse now?’
‘It’s a teacher’s prerogative too! Some of the banal things I have to teach and the misery that some of the students put me through are both enough to make me reach for a drink.’
‘I can’t imagine your lessons being banal.’
‘My lessons aren’t banal!’ Eliot retorts. ‘It’s the bloody curriculum that’s the problem. Bores the students to death. If I followed the lesson plans that I was meant to, as well as sticking to the set plays, then everybody would have slipped into a tedium-induced coma by the end of the lesson – me included.’
‘Have you got much marking to do over half term?’ Grace asks, remembering that Eliot normally spends most of his time off lamenting what he should be doing to keep in the head of department’s good books.
‘Nah. A bit of planning. Nothing that I can’t do on the day before I go back. So I’ll probably help out here a bit. I like the idea of reading all day.’
‘We don’t just read all day! We’re actually very busy,’ Grace says in mock outrage. ‘In fact, I have a load of new stock to put out. Mags found some of Noel’s old books we could sell at her house the other day, so I need to catalogue them and decide where to place them. I’m considering changing the window display at some point so I need to think of some ideas for that. And I have to cash up, too.’
Eliot rolls his sleeves up. ‘Well then. We’d best get started.’
Chapter Six (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Grace, 2008
When the phone rings in the shop, Grace knows who it’ll be. They have had a landline installed but it hasn’t rung, apart from now. Grace can’t even remember hearing the ring before, and the noise shocks her at first, a shrill shriek straight through her body. She takes a moment to register what the sound is, then picks up the receiver.
‘Grace? How’s it going there?’
‘It’s going well,’ Grace says perkily, ‘how’s your afternoon?’
‘Oh, you know. It’s fine.’
‘So what’s up?’
‘Nothing. I just wanted to check you’re okay. I could have come back to help if it was busy.’
‘Elsie, please. I’m fine here. In fact, I have some brilliant news. You know the teacher who bought all those books on our first day?’ Grace doesn’t wait for Elsie’s response before continuing. ‘Well, he came back in about an hour ago and bought a load of novels! So I’ve taken over £50.’
‘That really is brilliant!’ Elsie’s voice lifts.
‘So I was thinking we could go out tonight to celebrate. Dinner? On me?’
‘I’d love to!’
Grace smiles. ‘Great. Let’s go to that new tapas bar, you know the one—’
‘It’s called Sombra,’ Eliot interrupts cheerfully, as he places books on an empty shelf.
There’s a silence. ‘Is Eliot with you?’ Elsie asks Grace, her voice tensing.
‘Oh, um, yeah. He was looking for you, actually.’
Elsie relaxes a little. ‘I’ve been trying to call him.’
‘I think he left his phone at home. I’ll put him on.’
Grace hands the phone over to Eliot and tries not to watch him, tries not to take notice of whether his face lights up, or tenses, or changes at all.
‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘I didn’t realise I’d left my phone at home until I got to the shop. I was just going to ring you. I could come to yours now? We could watch a film or something?’
He smiles as he speaks again. ‘Yes, Grace seems to be doing rather well, actually. If you’d have seen her make that sale on those novels before, you would have been really impressed.’
There is a pause, and then Eliot swallows uncomfortably. It is a sickly sound. ‘Yeah. I’d just arrived when the guy came in. Yes, I’ve been here an hour.’
Silence. Then:
‘Elsie, you’re overreacting to this. I came here to see you! Elsie, I—’
But she’s gone, and Eliot is left holding the buzzing receiver.
Grace holds her head in her hands and groans. ‘I don’t know if I can take much more of this. I thought this morning that we had made some kind of progress. It actually felt like we were sisters again.’
‘I know, I know. And now you’re back to square one. Because of me.’
‘It’s not because of you. Not really. If Elsie trusted me properly, then she wouldn’t be so quick to jump to conclusions.’
‘I think we should try to spend less time together,’ Eliot says quietly. ‘I don’t want to lose Elsie.’
‘And I don’t want to lose you!’ Grace explodes. ‘She’s got you! You’re hers! And it’s still never enough.’ She opens the till and snatches out some notes before banging it shut again. ‘I’ve had enough of being good, of going against what I should actually have, just for her, and it still not being good enough, her still not trusting me.’
Eliot watches Grace as she rants her way through the shop, to her jacket at the back, and to the front again, where she stuffs the notes from the till into her pocket.
‘Well, I’m still going out for dinner,’ she finishes. ‘And I think that you should come with me. What do you say?’
Eliot scratches his head, probably to stall time, to give himself a bit longer to think of an answer.
He glances at Grace, almost guiltily. Then he glances at the phone, as though Elsie is still in it, trapped in the shiny coiled wires.
There are stinging tears in Grace’s eyes now.
‘I don’t want to lose you,’ she repeats. ‘You’re my friend, Eliot. Just because Elsie’s going out with you, it shouldn’t mean that I can’t ever see you.’
‘Okay. I’ll come out for dinner. Elsie probably needs some time to cool off anyway. I’ll compensate for all this with her tomorrow. But it’ll have to be just dinner, Grace. I don’t want to cause any further problems, and I don’t want to hurt Elsie.’
‘Fine. Just dinner,’ Grace replies hotly. ‘God, I need a drink. Come on. This shop is now officially closed for the day. Pick me up at eight. I’m going home for a hot bath and a vodka.’
She hears Elsie’s voice in her head: Vodka? The things you drink are disgusting, Grace.
She sees their mother clinging to an empty bottle, hears her demented wailing.
‘I’ll pick a bottle up from the shop on the way home,’ she says to herself, shaking her head slightly to shuffle the images to the back.
As soon as Grace reaches her flat, she runs a scorching bath and lowers herself in carefully. She plunges her head under the water, hearing the blurred clunking of pipes. Even underwater, the feeling of tightness in her stomach does not disappear. She considers calling Elsie to apologise, to explain that nothing has ever happened.
She opens her eyes, water stinging them, her black hair floating above her like smoke. Elsie wouldn’t believe her. So what’s the point?
The day of the car crash was the day that Elsie started to change. The twins had been invited to Rachel Gregory’s twelfth birthday party. Elsie had wanted to wear a dress that Grace had never liked. It was red: a dirty, blood red. Elsie always wanted to stand out as the most grown up. Grace didn’t mind that Elsie was growing up before her. She was, after all, five and a half minutes older.
‘Mum, where’s my red dress?’ Elsie hollered as the twins stood in a rubble of discarded clothes. ‘I can’t find it anywhere!’ She lowered her voice and frowned as she rooted through the pile of tangled items that she had tossed from her wardrobe. ‘Everyone else will be wearing something new. I just want to look nice.’
‘I don’t have a new outfit,’ Grace pointed out. She didn’t want Elsie to feel as though she didn’t look nice. She decided that she would try to get Elsie to wear the same as her. She loved dressing the same as her twin.
‘That’s not the point. I have absolutely nothing to wear.’
‘Just wear your jeans,’ Grace suggested. She was wearing her favourite white jeans that Mags had bought her for Christmas. Elsie had been given a bright pink pair.
Elsie looked at Grace and pretended she was horrified, even though Grace knew she was just trying to be dramatic. Rachel Gregory was turning twelve before anybody else in their year. She looked older than all the other girls, and always had new clothes and hairstyles. Elsie always tried to copy Rachel, and tried to make herself look older as well. Grace could tell that Elsie wished they were twelve now too: that another six months of being eleven was too long for Elsie to bear.
‘Jeans are fine for you. But I want to appear as though I have made an effort for this party.’
Grace shrugged and looked at her watch. ‘Well, if we’re any later, then it won’t look like you’ve made an effort. The party started ten minutes ago.’
Elsie shook her head as though she didn’t know what to do any more. She wiped a tear that was sitting on her cheek and beckoned for Grace to join her in their bedroom.
‘The consequences of this are going to be catastrophic,’ she said, shutting the door behind them.
Once the door was closed, Grace laughed. ‘You’re so funny, Elsie.’
Elsie tried to look adult, but Grace could tell she was struggling to stay serious. A little smile was trying to break through her sister’s lips. It won in the end, and Elsie let out a giggle.
Elsie found her dress eventually. It had been crumpled up in the guest lounge, which, Grace supposed, seemed strange, but she didn’t think much of it at the time. She just wanted to get to Rachel’s party. She saw her mother frown as they pulled away from the kerb, as though something had gone wrong. A few minutes later, their mother jolted the car to a stop and turned round, staring at them in a way that made Grace wish they were already at the party, safe, and where they were meant to be. Her mother’s eyes were wide and scared, and Grace felt a shiver curse down the whole of her body, even though she wasn’t cold.
‘Grace. Come and sit in the front, please,’ her mother said. Even her voice sounded strange, as though she was being strangled.
Elsie obviously hadn’t noticed her mother’s bizarre stare, because she sighed and said, ‘Mum, we’ve already established that we’re late. We haven’t got time to start playing silly games.’
But their mother ignored Elsie. ‘Grace. Now. Otherwise we’re turning around and going home.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Grace clambered out of the back and sat in the front seat, sneaking a glance at her mother and seeing that she already looked much calmer. It was minutes later, when they had reached Rachel Gregory’s wide, pretty street, when a gold car whizzed beside them, and suddenly came closer and closer until there were the horrible sounds of metal on metal and glass on glass, and Elsie screaming.
After the crash, after they had ruined Rachel Gregory’s birthday by making it all about them, and after Elsie had been checked over and given a lollipop that she had pretended to be too old for but crunched on anyway, the twins went home.
Elsie slept when they got back to Rose House, and everybody said that it was for the best, to leave her. But Grace couldn’t rest without thinking about the crash and how they had ruined Rachel Gregory’s party. She was worried about Elsie’s arm, which she had seen soggy with burgundy blood. She tried to watch the comedy programme that her mother had put on for her, but she couldn’t concentrate. So she wandered into the hall, where the telephone was, and dialled Mags’s number.
When Noel answered, he couldn’t tell if it was Elsie or Grace.
‘It’s Grace. I’m glad you answered. I wanted to talk to you.’
She told Noel about the car accident.
‘I know,’ he said when she’d finished. ‘Mum told me. She’ll be coming to see your mum soon.’
Grace told Noel that her mother had made her move seats in the car.
‘That’s strange,’ he said.
Grace nodded, then remembered that he couldn’t see her. ‘Yep,’ she replied.
‘But you’re both okay?’
‘Yeah. Elsie’s worse than me. I’m worried about her arm. It was bleeding a lot. The people at the hospital said it would be fine.’
‘Well, then it will be.’
‘What if it scars? We won’t be the same as each other anymore.’
‘Yes, you will. A scar doesn’t change anything. Not really.’
They chatted some more. Noel told Grace that he had a scar on his right knee from when he fell off his bike when he was six. There had been a lot of blood that day, but the scar was only small now. That made Grace feel better. Perhaps she’d ring Noel again soon.
As she was hanging up, Grace saw Elsie edging down the stairs, wincing with every step. Her face was even paler than normal, and her hair, which was normally plaited or twisted into clips or bands, was hanging down like a pair of dusty black curtains. Grace leaped up the stairs and helped Elsie down to the lounge. They switched over from the comedy and watched cartoons together instead, mocking them and pretending to hate them. The light dipped in the room until the television was the only brightness. The twins heard Mags arrive and bustle into the kitchen. There was always a lot of noise when Mags was around.
‘I’m going to see Mags,’ Elsie said, and disentangled her legs from Grace’s before limping out into the hall.
It was after that day, after the few moments that followed, that Elsie changed: hid in her own shadow and refused to come out into the light.
Now, Grace picks up her shampoo from the side of the bath. Cold water drips from the bottle onto her skin, making her flinch. Elsie will be angry about tonight. But she is the one who is choosing not to come. She could be in her own bath right now, getting ready for dinner, wondering which dress to wear, if only she would trust Grace like she used to, before things changed.
Chapter Seven (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Louisa, 1965
Tomorrow, Louisa decided, she would go for a walk. She would set off after her father’s breakfast, when he was having his morning doze, and she would walk down the hill, to the very bottom. She would call into the shops and buy the things she never bought: fresh flowers, shampoo, and some meat for their dinner. Nancy always bought these things. But tomorrow, Louisa would tell her not to.
And if the morning was taken up with buying fresh flowers and shampoo and meat for dinner, then an afternoon sitting in her brown chair next to her father in his blue chair would seem a little more bearable. All she needed was some exercise, and more purpose, and Louisa would be fine.
The next day, Louisa woke early. The promised fuzzy heat of the day shimmered through her curtains and she wiped a faint line of perspiration from her forehead as she sat up in bed. After a few moments, she remembered that she was going out today and her heart fluttered.
‘Dad?’ Louisa said quietly as she descended the staircase that she still felt was rather too grand just for her and her father.
There was no reply, only the sickly scent of fried eggs lingering in the hall to confirm her father’s presence. She took her coat from the stand next to the front door, lifted it around her shoulders and crept into the piercing May morning.
Louisa meandered as much as she could, but it was her habit to walk quickly, to rush as though she was late. But she wasn’t late; she had nowhere to be. That was the problem, she thought as she chose a bunch of wilting roses from the meagre selection on offer at Pilkington’s. She stuffed the roses into her basket and continued along the street to Geoffrey and Sons, where she thought she might buy some sausages.
As Louisa stood and stared into the cabinet of pink flesh, she felt a tug on her arm.
‘Is that you? Louisa?’ Hatty Kennedy, one of Louisa’s old school friends, stood beside the counter, some pork chops cradled like a baby in the crook of her arm. She smiled as Louisa turned to face her. ‘I thought it was you! And to think I didn’t want to come to the butcher’s. Such a chore, isn’t it?’ Hatty rolled her eyes as she gestured towards her pork chops.
‘Yes, a chore,’ Louisa repeated, feeling herself turn pink with embarrassment at the thought of her excitement about her walk.
‘I normally try to get out of coming to the high street, don’t you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ nodded Louisa, feeling the rude tingle of the blush staining her cheeks.
But Hatty didn’t seem to notice Louisa’s pink cheeks. ‘I wouldn’t mind shopping so much if there were some interesting things to buy. If there were great big shops with dresses and handbags I’d come every day! But I don’t have too much longer to wait until I can buy more exciting things than meat. This time next week, I’ll be in Hill’s buying all the dresses I want.’
‘Hill’s? In Blackpool?’ Louisa asked, the stench of the raw meat suddenly making her feel quite sick.
‘Yes! I’m off to Blackpool! With my parents, worse luck. But they’ll leave me to it, I hope. It’ll be sunbathing, shopping and dancing. Hopefully I will meet some boys. There are none round here,’ Hatty said with a scowl. ‘None.’
There was a silence as Louisa scrambled for something to say. But the only thought in her mind, and the only word on her lips, was ‘Blackpool.’
‘Hey!’ Hatty suddenly exclaimed as the silence grew to an uncomfortable length. ‘You should come with us! Mum offered to take a friend of mine, but between you and me, I couldn’t really think of anybody. Everybody is either already going to Blackpool or staying here to do some silly shorthand course. But you’ll come, won’t you Lou? We haven’t spent any real time together since school! Think what fun we’ll have!’
Louisa thought of the week to come. Her stomach lurched, and the smell of meat and blood drifted down around her. ‘Yes. I’ll come to Blackpool.’
As Louisa said goodbye to Hatty and paid for her sausages, she remembered the last time she had planned to go to Blackpool. Since that day when Dr Barker had brought her here to live with her father, she hadn’t been back.
Louisa had planned to return to Blackpool on her fourteenth birthday. Three weeks before her birthday, she had written a list of things to take with her. Two weeks before, she had cracked open the piggy bank that her father had given her and transferred the coins to her new red velvet purse. One week before, Louisa had asked her teacher, Mr Marlowe, how she might best travel to Blackpool. She was going to take her father there as a surprise, she told Mr Marlowe, bits of the lie trickling down her throat like poison and settling heavily in her stomach as she spoke.
The night before her birthday, Louisa counted out her money. There was definitely enough to buy a train ticket for the 9.47 that Mr Marlowe had told her about: her father had been generous during the time that she had been there. When Louisa arrived in Blackpool, she would surely find somebody who remembered her from when she lived there with her mother. Perhaps they would help her to find out what had happened and piece together why her mother might have disappeared. Perhaps she would find out if she really had wandered into the sea, her skirt billowing out with the grey waves. Perhaps she would find out if there was anything her mother had wanted to tell Louisa, something that Louisa had missed.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, Louisa thought as she drifted into sleep.
And then it was morning. Louisa had dressed quickly and stepped out of her bedroom, expecting her father’s bedroom door to be firmly shut as it always was early in the morning. But the door was flung wide open, and she heard the clattering of pots and jars coming from the kitchen. Louisa followed the sticky smell of flour and eggs until she was standing in the doorway of the large, upturned kitchen, watching her father whip a grey mixture in a bowl. He looked up, and his face fell in despair.
‘Louisa,’ he said. ‘This was meant to be a surprise. Nobody was meant to see me … ’
Louisa had thought how odd it was to see a man holding a spoon. She pictured her father getting out of bed early to make her goodness knows what kind of birthday cake on Nancy’s day off. And then she thought of the 9.47 train, and how she would not be getting on it.
That, Louisa recalled now in the bloody air of the butchers, was the day she had decided that Blackpool could wait.
Until now.
‘So your father didn’t mind you coming along with us, Louisa?’ Hatty’s mother, Mrs Kennedy, asked the following Monday as their train began to amble along the tracks.
‘No. He doesn’t really notice whether I’m there or not, these days. So he didn’t mind,’ Louisa murmured, noticing as she spoke that Mrs Kennedy’s face was a shade darker than her neck.
‘Ah, Doctor Ash is a busy man. I am sure he does notice you, even if it doesn’t feel as though he does,’ Mrs Kennedy offered, misunderstanding.
She must have known my father some time ago, Louisa thought, when he was busy and important. Time seemed to have washed away his importance like a tide. Each day, Louisa would sit with him and talk to him about his life, his house, their happy times together. As dusk fell, he would be shining with the knowledge of his life, but with the morning sun his face and mind would be blank again.
‘Yes,’ Louisa sighed, not wanting to explain. ‘Maybe you’re right.’
‘So!’ Hatty said rather more loudly than she needed to, eyes wide. ‘Let’s get into the holiday spirit! What do you want to do when we arrive? There’s the beach, and it’s a gorgeous day so we could sunbathe. Or we could go dancing in the Tower, or we could go to the Pleasure Beach, although we’re probably best waiting until tomorrow for that so we have a full day there, or we could … ’
Hatty’s voice drifted away as Louisa stared out of the train windows into the fields beyond. Had she done the right thing coming on this holiday? Perhaps she should try to get a train back somehow, and explain to the Kennedys the truth about why she had come and why she definitely shouldn’t have.
‘Louisa? What do you think? I don’t feel exposed in it, so I don’t see a problem. Sally Smith has a bikini, and she’s fatter than me. If she can wear one, then I certainly can.’
Louisa nodded. ‘Hatty,’ she began, ‘I think that I’ve perhaps made a bit of a mistake. I don’t … ’ Her words stopped abruptly as she thought of what she was speeding away from. She looked at Hatty, who sat waiting patiently for the rest of Louisa’s words. ‘I don’t remember packing my sunglasses,’ she finished, embarrassed by the sad little ending to her sentence.
‘Well, that’s not a problem. I’ve packed three pairs,’ said Hatty.
When the girls were finally settled on the swarming sands, Louisa lay back. She draped her arm lazily over her eyes, having yet to receive an offer of sunglasses from a rather bikini-preoccupied Hatty. Eventually, the sun managed to glare through the crook of Louisa’s arm, and she sat up. Hatty was splashing about in the sea with some boys who were staying at the hotel next door, her headscarf tied carefully over her rollers and her new bikini showing off her lean legs and flat stomach. Louisa glanced down at her own stomach, and pulled it in, suddenly self-conscious, then looked away again, not wanting to dwell on her old-fashioned bathing costume.
I can’t believe I’m here, she thought, as she drank in the sights of the beach and the promenade. The last time she had smelled salt and skin and sun had been so long ago. Those smells had belonged to her old life, and had been replaced by the meaty, heavier smells of soup and wood fires and her father’s cologne, and later, his sweet medicines.
Smelling her old life reminded Louisa that it hadn’t left her. She had left it. Hadn’t she? After her failed plans to return to Blackpool three years ago, the idea that her mother might be dead lay untouched in a shaded corner of Louisa’s mind. The thought was sharp and Louisa never took it out to inspect, for fear of the pain of handling it. Her father never mentioned her anymore; he never mentioned anything. But now, here, with the thought of what was about to happen to her father trapped in her mind too, Louisa’s mother seemed to float out, freed with the evocative sights and sounds of the sea.
Louisa scoured the beach for anybody who might look like her mother would now. But after a few minutes of gazing into the crowds, of seeing horribly stiff hairstyles and velvet lapels and wide smiles and sultry frowns, Louisa covered her eyes with her sand-dotted palms. It was too much. Her mother wasn’t here. She wasn’t anywhere. All because Louisa had been too late to save her.
‘Lou! Lou!’ Hatty shouted, her dampened scent of hairspray preceding her grip on Louisa’s arm. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
Louisa allowed her hands to be peeled from her face. ‘Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.’
‘Then why on earth are you sitting there like that? Join in the fun for heaven’s sake! I didn’t bring you on holiday to mope. Now,’ Hatty continued, her tone changing promptly and effortlessly, ‘what do you want from the van over there? There’s tea, or ice cream, or oysters, but my friend Anita came to Blackpool last summer and got some oysters and she had the most terrible stomach problems for months after. She puts it all down to those oysters, you know, and she said that she bought them from a little blue van. So with that van being blue, I think we’ll give the oysters a miss. What do you think?’
Louisa looked over at the blue van, a snake of people queuing right into its mouth. ‘Ice cream,’ she said, trying to cram as much joy into those two words as she possibly could. She winced as she heard her voice: too high-pitched, too false. But Hatty didn’t seem to care. She gave a firm, single nod, and stood up.
‘You know,’ she said, as she brushed flecks of sand from her golden thighs, ‘I think we should find ourselves some men tonight.’
‘Yes,’ Louisa agreed, her merry tone much improved second time around, ‘I think you’re right.’
Later, when Hatty had carefully backcombed her hair and applied plenty of eyeliner on herself and Louisa, they followed Mr and Mrs Kennedy down to the hotel bar. The Fortuna was a very grand hotel, Louisa thought as she descended the rather regal staircase. She wished she had on a long, sweeping dress rather than her short blue dress, a dress that she could swoosh along the red carpet.
‘Mother,’ Hatty was grumbling as they reached the bar, ‘I don’t see the harm in just one drink. After all, we’re eighteen on our next birthdays.’ She turned and rolled her eyes at Louisa.
Mrs Kennedy fiddled about with the clasp on her cream leather handbag. ‘Okay, darling.’
Hatty squeezed Louisa’s arm excitedly. ‘Knew she wouldn’t put up a fight,’ she hissed in Louisa’s ear.
And so, one drink turned into two drinks. Two drinks gave Hatty the courage to ask her parents if she and Louisa could leave the hotel bar and go to Yates’s, and gave Mr and Mrs Kennedy the courage to say yes.
Louisa and Hatty stumbled along the promenade, the summer wind fresh on their faces. Louisa licked her lips and tasted salt, sand and loss.
Yates’s was just as Louisa had imagined it would be when she had stared up at it as a little girl. It was smoky, hazy and hot. Hatty bought them a glass of wine each, but the woman behind the bar misheard the order for two glasses of white wine and slopped two glasses of deep purple wine down in front of them. It tasted of wood and winter, not summers on the beach, and it burned Louisa’s throat as she swallowed. But after their first glass, they found they had a taste for it. So when a tall, rather hairy man wandered over to them and offered to buy them a drink, they asked for more of the same. Louisa stared at the man as he queued at the bar, waiting to be served. His shirt was unbuttoned at the top and his chest looked almost as though it wanted to leap out of his clothes. Hair sprouted from his chest, his neck, his face and his head. Later, when he stroked Louisa’s cheek and smiled at her, she noticed that he had hair on his fingers too.
‘What’s your name?’ Louisa asked the man, over the hum of voices and laughter and music.
‘Nicky. Yours?’
Hatty cleared her throat and leaned forward, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Never mind that. I think we’d better be getting back.’
‘I don’t want to get back,’ Louisa frowned. ‘What is there to get back for?’ She liked how philosophical this sounded, and laughed. Nicky smiled appreciatively.
‘My parents. They’ll kill me if we’re much later.’
Louisa groaned as Hatty stood up.
‘Tell you what,’ Nicky said in Louisa’s ear, his yeasty scent floating around her as he spoke, ‘I’ll meet you under Central Pier in a bit.’
It was this thought that kept Louisa going as she stood up and the room lurched towards her, as Hatty dragged her back to the hotel, as there was a knock at the door of their shared room.
‘Yes?’ Hatty asked as she opened the door, her eyes wide at the unexpected drama of somebody visiting them in their hotel room. Louisa couldn’t see past the door, but knew exactly what news was going to come from behind it.
‘Yes, yes, she’s in here,’ Hatty said. ‘Hold on. It’s the manager. He’s asking for you,’ she said to Louisa, frowning in confusion.
Louisa clambered over the bed to receive the news that she was waiting for, the words that she knew would be spoken at this precise time, whether she was at home or in Blackpool, or drunk or sober.
‘Miss Ash? I’m afraid to say that I have some rather bad news for you. It’s your father,’ said the manager. ‘We’ve had a telephone call from your maid. I’m very sorry to tell you that he’s passed away.’
Louisa said very little and focused on not vomiting on Hatty’s unmade bed, on the jumble of clothes and bikinis and make-up. She thanked the manager, and then swung the door of Room 35 shut abruptly. The click as it closed seemed to mark the change in direction of Louisa’s life.
‘My father is dead,’ she said simply. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
Hatty wailed. ‘Oh Louisa! I’m so sorry!’ She fumbled in her bag for the room key. ‘I must come with you. Or do you want me to wake up my parents?’
‘No. Please. Just let me walk,’ Louisa said, and left the room.
At first, Nicky was more gentle than Louisa had expected him to be. He stroked her cheek again, and then he kissed her forehead. Louisa thought how strange this was, and remembered her mother kissing her forehead before bedtime. Nicky kissed her cheek next, and his fingers moved to her thigh. The sand beneath them was cool and uncomfortable: it seemed less welcoming than it had done during the day. She wondered what she should do with her hands, so decided to run them through Nicky’s hair, like she had seen in the film at the cinema last year. Nicky didn’t seem to like this. He swatted her hand away as though he was angry. Then he began tugging at her dress and all of a sudden Louisa remembered her father and wanted to cry. She pushed against Nicky with all her weight, but he just grunted and forced her back into the sand. The grains prickled into her like glass.
‘My father’s just died!’ Louisa shouted after a minute of grunting and pushing. ‘Please get off me! I feel sick, and I—’
Nicky straightened up for a moment and knelt above her. He looked as though he was about to say something, and Louisa felt relief flooding through her, mixing with the wine and sadness already coursing through her blood. But then Nicky lurched towards her again, even more fiercely this time. Louisa heard her dress rip and felt Nicky’s hands grip and burn her waist, and then she felt another pair of hands on her, gentler ones, and she saw Mr Kennedy above her and Hatty’s pale face floating somewhere behind him.
Chapter Eight (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Louisa, 1965
The next day, as Hatty and Louisa waited in the reception of The Fortuna Hotel while Mr Kennedy checked them all out two days early, Hatty patted Louisa’s hand.
‘I’m so glad that I brought my dad with me to look for you last night. I had a feeling you’d run into that awful man. I’m just glad that we caught him before he … ’ The sentence skulked away, its content apparently unsuitable for the finery of the hotel’s foyer. ‘I know you’d had a terrible shock, Louisa, and so I don’t blame you for doing something silly. But the thing is, you were quite taken with that man before you’d even found out about your poor father, and it was clear that he was bad news. We were all lucky that nothing worse happened to you last night under that pier. You need to be more careful.’ Hatty saw that her father had finished at the reception desk and was heading towards the girls, so quickly wrapped up what she was saying. ‘You won’t always be lucky enough to have somebody to rescue you.’
Louisa thought of how Dr Barker had rescued her years ago, thought of her father, thought of Mr Kennedy’s gentle grip last night. She looked up from the red swirling carpet, at Hatty’s smooth clean skin and her sleek hair and neat black eyeliner.
The thing about being lucky enough to always have someone to rescue you, she thought, is being unlucky enough to always need rescuing in the first place.
It was as they were waiting for the train back home that Louisa saw her.
She had soft brown hair that hung down over her face, and a rounded jaw just like her mother’s. She stood alone in the midst of all the shrieking groups and families and couples. She held a fashionable rounded suitcase in her hand and her dress was bright, almost garish. She looked, Louisa realised with a creeping nausea, just like her mother would do now. Louisa banged her suitcase down on the platform and raced over to the woman, hearing vague calls from Hatty as she did so. The woman didn’t notice Louisa charging towards her. She stared down the empty platform, lost in her own world: a world that Louisa was certain she had once shared.
As Louisa reached the woman, she slowed down. She tried to stretch out that last glorious moment when anything was still possible for as long as she could by sidling up to her mother gradually. But closer, Louisa could see that she had been mistaken: that the woman’s hair was not soft, but hung in waves that would be sticky to the touch. As she moved closer still, she could smell a dark, exotic perfume. It wasn’t unpleasant. But was it how Louisa had imagined her mother would smell now?
Oh, how Louisa had imagined.
The woman turned, then, and the heavy scent wafted over Louisa, drenching her aching body. All at once, as nausea swept over her and the woman gave her a cool, unknowing glance, Louisa knew: it was not her. With sudden ferocity, the certainty that her mother was dead crashed over Louisa, and all the hot, sharp pain that she had tried to lock away for so many years engulfed her, burning and pinching her whole body. She began to sob: huge, heaving sobs that were too big for her lungs and choked her, twisting air out of her chest and making her shake.
‘Louisa,’ Hatty appeared then, grasping at Louisa’s elbow gently. ‘What are you doing? Our train will be here any minute.’
‘I don’t want to leave,’ Louisa wept.
Hatty took a deep breath, a breath which seemed to say I’ve been expecting this. ‘Darling, I know that the idea of going home must seem a little overwhelming. I know how close you were to your father. But there is so much to sort out, and we’re all going to help you. Once the funeral is over, perhaps we could return to Blackpool, if that’s what you’d like.’
‘But I need to find out what happened to my mother,’ Louisa said, noticing that she was crying. How long had she been crying for? She couldn’t remember.
Hatty’s pretty face crumpled into a frown. ‘Your mother?’
‘Yes. My mother. I lived here in Blackpool with her, before I knew you. She disappeared.’
Hatty’s features blurred with confusion. ‘Louisa, I don’t understand. You’ve never mentioned living in Blackpool before. I thought that your mother was … well, I thought she was dead,’ Hatty finished in a whisper. ‘I’m worried that you’re confused,’ she said finally, her face suddenly snapping back to perfection. She steered Louisa towards Mr and Mrs Kennedy and spoke conspiratorially into their ears. They looked at Louisa with inclined heads and matching frowns.
‘You all think I’m mad, don’t you?’ Louisa wailed. ‘Well, I’m not! My mother disappeared, and I want to know why, and so I need to find the boy with the purple eyes! I know you don’t believe me, and that you think I’m shocked by my father’s death, but the truth is that I knew he’d die, I could see it all in my mind before it happened, and that’s why I came here with you. I knew he’d die after eating his fish supper last night, and I know that the plate he had his fish on will still be in the kitchen stinking the house out when I get home because the maid’s gone now that he has, and I knew that I’d get a visit from the hotel manager, and that I would be wearing my blue dress with the white belt. I knew it all!’
‘Let’s get you home, Louisa,’ Mrs Kennedy said. ‘Here comes the train, see, and we all have a ticket to get on it. Perhaps you could have a little nap when we are settled, and then before you know it—’
‘You’re treating me like a child!’ Louisa screamed.
The station stopped. The people stared, their conversations frozen by the hysterical teenager and the possibility of one last Blackpool spectacle before the dreary trip home. Well, Louisa wouldn’t give it to them.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly.
Mrs Kennedy, her face flushed by the slap of Louisa’s outburst, nodded silently, gesturing for Louisa to step a little closer to the platform; a little further away from her.
And so Louisa didn’t remain in Blackpool that day. She returned to the house on the hill, now hers, and dealt with papers and letters and stiff visits from people her father had known, and finally it was time for his funeral.
The first time Louisa met her father, his face was grey and his hands were grey and his life was grey. But slowly, as Louisa grew and ate side by side with him and walked with him and chattered to him about colours and stories and painted him pictures and asked him questions, he began to have more colour. His cheeks became pink with lively conversation, his hands brown from walking in the sun, and his life coloured in.
Now, as Louisa stood before his imposing coffin, and looked down at his sunken cheeks and that Roman nose she knew so well, and those kind eyes closed in final resignation, she noticed that her father was grey once again.
Things had come full circle.
PART TWO (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Chapter Nine (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Rose, 1921
The last heat of the summer had made the train to Blackpool smell of other people’s sweat. Rose could still smell it when they stepped out of the carriage onto the swarming platform. She looked up at the sharp blue sky, wondering if the whole holiday would smell brown and dirty, until her worries were melted away by what she saw.
Past people’s hats, past people’s faces that were blurred from Rose’s jerky movements through the crowds, and up, up in the sky, was the place she had wanted to see for all of her eleven years. It was just as wonderful as the picture her father had shown her: Blackpool Tower stared down at Rose proudly, calm amongst the hullabaloo of the station.
Rose, who had only ever been to Scarborough on her holidays, stared up at the Tower all the way to their hotel. She didn’t look at anything else. She tripped over twice and was scolded by her mother four times for not watching where she was going. But she didn’t care. It would take something very, very special for Rose to want to look anywhere except way up above her, to the tangle of iron crisscrosses that stretched high, high up into the sky, to the beautiful peak that floated in the clouds.
It wasn’t until the middle of her holiday that something very special took Rose’s mind and eyes from Blackpool Tower.
Rose and her parents had been walking along the promenade, from the north to the south, for what felt like a very long time. Rose kept glancing backwards to look into the sky, and every time she did, Blackpool Tower bore down upon her. The crowds of people moved slowly along the promenade, for everybody was gazing at something: the endless roaring sea, or the sands crammed with families, or the fairground rides that soared round and round. The walk to the Pleasure Beach was taking so long that when Rose’s mother spotted a space on a bench, she pulled Rose and her father over to it so that they could all rest their aching legs.
They had been sitting on the bench, the early September sun blazing down on them, for only a few minutes before Rose’s father spotted a friend of his walking by. Rose’s father jumped up and patted his friend heartily on the shoulder as they exclaimed about the chances of spotting each other away on holiday, and Rose’s mother smiled politely at the man’s wife, who wore a fancy yellow hat.
As her parents stood and laughed about things Rose didn’t understand, she stared up at the Tower some more. When the sun began to make tiny white dots on her eyes, and her neck became sore, she dropped her gaze and looked along the colourful promenade that was shining with people. She looked at the green trams and the stalls selling salty seafood. She looked up towards The Pleasure Beach, at the row of hotels opposite a man holding some donkeys, and it was there that she spotted the door.
A tiny handwritten sign above it made every little hair on Rose’s body stand on end in excitement.
Gypsy Sarah. Fortunes Told Here.
Rose knew that her mother would scold and her father would frown if she moved from her spot on the bench, but something inside Rose made her stand and wander over to the door. The door was blue, which was Rose’s third favourite colour. Rose pushed at it, wanting to know what was behind it so much that her insides seemed to quiver a little as it gave way.
Colours and shapes that Rose had never seen before in her quiet Yorkshire life dangled and jingled behind that door. And amongst all the purples and pinks and golds and crystals and gems sat the oldest woman Rose had ever seen.
Gypsy Sarah’s crinkled face puckered as she saw Rose hovering in the doorway.
‘Are you here for a reading?’ she whispered, gesturing to Rose with a hand that looked as though it was made of the brown paper Rose’s dresses were sometimes wrapped in when they were new.
Rose tore her gaze away from Gypsy Sarah, and turned to see her mother and father still deep in conversation with the people near the bench. She could quite possibly have her fortune told before her parents even noticed that she’d gone.
She turned back to the room. ‘Yes, please,’ she answered quietly, her words flying out amongst the exotic colours.
Rose knew little about fortune tellers: she knew little about anything. She did not expect her life’s story to be told, or for Gypsy Sarah to smell of a strange combination of burning wood and lavender and raw meat, or for her hands to be grabbed and squeezed, or for Gypsy Sarah to cry out in a scratchy voice:
‘You must find the boy with purple eyes, for he will give you your life! He will give you a gift!’
‘A gift?’ Rose asked, intrigued and wide-eyed.
A gift, Rose thought as she carefully placed every coin of her holiday pocket money into Gypsy Sarah’s quivering hand, as she shuffled out of the shadows of the room and blinked in the bright sunlight, as she sneaked back to her place on the bench and sat as though she had never moved while her parents continued to talk to their friends, as she slept by the side of her snoring mother and father in Room 35 at The Fortuna Hotel.
Puppies and hair ribbons and books and dolls filled Rose’s mind each time she thought of Gypsy Sarah and the boy with the purple eyes. For what else, to an eleven-year-old girl, could a gift mean?
Rose thought of the boy with the purple eyes as she was swept along the crammed promenade, as she ran her hands through the gritty beige sand on the beach, as she sat up straight in the hotel restaurant. She looked into the eyes of the boy who helped the man holding the donkeys, of the boy selling oysters in the little white hut, of the boy who was staying in the room next door at The Fortuna Hotel. But she saw no purple eyes.
On Saturday, Rose bathed in the sea as her parents snoozed on the sand. She paddled at the water’s edge for some time, and then walked out until the water reached her shoulders. Although Rose wasn’t a very good swimmer, she managed to propel herself a little by kicking her legs haphazardly and waving her arms against the cool waves. The water was calm and lulled her gently out to sea. The swarms of people bathing and splashing and shouting became more diluted as Rose moved away from the water’s edge. The silver water blurred around her.
And then, everything shot into a burst of magnificent colour.
He was swimming towards her, shooting through the water like a fish. His eyes were not the purple that Rose had imagined. They weren’t a pale, striking lilac as she had thought they would be, but a deep, velvet violet. When he smiled at Rose, she began to tremble and lost her momentum beneath the water. She fumbled, her legs kicking wildly, bitter salt flying into her mouth and making her want to spit and cry out.
‘Well! What’s the matter with you?’ the boy giggled, treading water expertly. His voice was a twinkling bell, light with laughter.
Rose frowned. ‘Nothing’s the matter, you just frightened me.’
The boy held out his hand, which was brown, and shiny with water. Rose took it, and they moved towards the shore. She continued to kick and the boy pulled her along, so that she moved almost gracefully through the waves.
‘What’s your name?’ the boy asked as they felt sculpted sand appear beneath their feet.
‘Rose. What’s yours?’
The boy laughed again, his dark face screwing up in pleasure. ‘I’m not going to tell you.’ He stuck out his tongue, then smiled. His teeth, although crooked, looked white against his skin. He rubbed his black hair from his face as they walked away from the water.
Rose stiffened, and wished that she hadn’t told the boy her name. She felt hard little goosebumps prickle her skin as the sea breeze washed over her, and wondered again what her gift from him might be.
‘What are you doing tomorrow afternoon, Rose? I have something exciting planned,’ the boy said, wiping his nose with his hand and leaving behind a streak of water on his cheek.
‘I’m—’ Rose squinted over to where her parents lay on the sand. Tomorrow was their last day: their train home was at 6.30 tomorrow evening. She thought about how long and bleak the day would seem, knowing that it was their last. ‘I’m not doing anything, really. But we have a train home to catch tomorrow evening, so my parents might want me to stay with them all day.’
‘Stay with them all day? But you’re not a baby,’ the boy, who didn’t look much older than Rose, said.
Rose puffed out her shiny wet chest. ‘No, I’m not. What have you got planned?’
The boy shrugged and moved closer to Rose conspiratorially. ‘I’m going to sneak into the Pavilion. You should come.’
‘On the North Pier? But won’t it be closed in the afternoon?’
‘Yes, that’s why I have to sneak in. If I manage it, we’ll have it to ourselves.’
Rose frowned as she thought about this strange boy’s plan. She had watched a concert in the Indian Pavilion on the North Pier a few nights before with her parents. It was a beautiful, exotic hall full of blue and green and red decorations that reminded Rose of other worlds, ones she would probably never even see. The Pavilion had been filled with people and perfume and hats and music when Rose had visited. She imagined being there when it was still and quiet, and a delicious shiver coursed through her body.
‘I’ll come. Where shall I meet you?’
The boy leapt with joy, high into the air, and Rose smiled, glad that she had made him happy.
‘I’ll meet you on the pier at 4 o’clock. Outside the sweet kiosk. We’ll take some fudge in with us.’
Rose nodded, wondering what she could tell her parents, and thinking that she had perhaps made a terrible mistake, but before she could change her mind, the boy with the purple eyes had shot off through the crowds.
At 3.30 on Sunday, Rose’s mother was folding clothes very carefully back into the suitcase, and Rose’s father was sitting in the hotel lounge reading his newspaper. Rose sat on the bed, swinging her legs forwards and backwards. She stood up, then sat down again. The boy with the purple eyes would be expecting her soon. Rose didn’t want to let him down, and she didn’t want to get the train back home to Yorkshire’s black streets without her gift.
‘Mummy?’ she said after a little while, her legs kicking furiously against the bed. She had practised her speech in her head over a hundred times in bed last night, but now that she had to say it, she didn’t feel very confident.
‘Yes, Rose?’ her mother replied, as she held up a stained blouse to the light and shook her head.
‘I made a friend yesterday. And I’d like to see him again before we leave. He has something for me.’
‘I see. I wonder if this is vinegar?’ Rose’s mother lay the blouse on the bed and scratched at the stain gently with her rounded fingernail. ‘I don’t remember spilling anything.’
‘So, can I visit my friend?’
Rose’s mother turned, distracted from the blouse for a moment. ‘He’s staying here, is he?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Rose remembered the boy’s tough skin and long hair, and doubted that he was staying anywhere like The Fortuna.
‘Ah!’ her mother said, her eyes suddenly becoming wide. ‘I remember! It’s a wine stain! My glass was a little too full and I spilt some. Well, that should wash out without too much of a problem.’
‘Mummy?’
‘Well, that is a relief. This was new for the holiday. Yes, Rose?’
‘Can I go and see him? Quickly?’
Rose’s mother folded the blouse, and placed it in the case. ‘Yes, yes. But be quick.’
Rose sped out of the huge front of the Fortuna Hotel, clattering down the wide steps and tearing along the promenade towards the North Pier. She wound in and out of jostling bodies, past the refreshment rooms and the portrait studios. When she reached the end of the pier, she saw the pink and blue sign hanging above Seaton’s sweet kiosk. There were two girls who looked about Rose’s age waiting to be served, and Rose hung back, feeling as though she didn’t want anybody to see her. She watched the girls take their paper bags from the man in the stall, and then looked around her. Everybody seemed to be in a group, bouncing from one person to the next, and Rose suddenly felt very alone.
And then, past Seaton’s sweet kiosk, past the ticket kiosk and next to the closed doors of the Indian Pavilion, Rose saw the boy, his face a shadow amongst the bright, swirling colours of the pier. He smiled and beckoned her, and although there was a flurry of noise around her, Rose’s world fell into a blurry, underwater silence.
As Rose moved nearer towards the boy, she noticed that he was holding a small, glistening box. Could this be her gift? Her heart fluttering with all kinds of ideas about what a small silver box could contain, she broke into a run. When she reached the boy, she was breathless and laughing, although she didn’t quite know what she was laughing at.
The boy didn’t speak to her. He took out of his pocket an odd, gold key, and without looking like he was doing anything he shouldn’t, unlocked the grand, high door of the Indian Pavilion. Rose stared at the boy, wondering how he looked so confident when he was doing something he wasn’t allowed to. Rose knew that she would have dropped the key and been caught red-faced straight away. The boy turned to her and grabbed her arm.
‘Quickly!’ he hissed, and they tumbled into the giant room, the door blowing shut behind them with a bang.
The Pavilion looked different in the daytime. Although Rose had thought it beautiful when she had visited the other night, the crowd of people and roar of the orchestra had hidden much of the extravagant decoration. It was even grander than the Winter Gardens. Rose lay back and rested on her elbows so that she could stare up at the huge glass skylight that ran along the centre of the roof. She could make out gulls circling ahead of them, their grey wings bouncing on the blustering winds.
‘You know, I am going to live somewhere like this one day,’ the boy announced, making Rose sit up and look at him.
‘It’s true,’ he said, seeing Rose’s doubtful expression. ‘It’s meant to look like an Indian temple. And I have Indian blood.’
‘You can’t be all the way from India,’ Rose said, wrinkling her nose in confusion.
‘Well, my grandfather was. I could be an Indian King for all we know. And one day, I’m going to travel there, and I’m going to find out. And my palace will look just like this.’
‘Can I come and visit?’ Rose asked.
The boy shrugged as though he didn’t care either way, and Rose wondered, not for the first time, if she had found the right boy after all. He flicked open his silver box, but before Rose’s heart could begin fluttering again at a possible gift, he picked out a drooping cigarette and lit it with a matchstick.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Rose said, suddenly feeling very much like her mother.
The boy stared at her with his violet eyes, smoke floating out of his mouth and curling around Rose’s face. The smell was heavy and almost pleasant in a way, and Rose took in deep breaths until her head was filled with grey, making her cough delicately into her powder blue sleeve.
I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in here, Rose was going to say. But something stopped her. Not the fact that the boy might be an Indian King, or the fact that Gypsy Sarah had told Rose to find him, but because Rose wanted this moment to last. She wanted to be in the Indian Pavilion in Blackpool with smoke curling around her ears and weaving through her hair and her mouth, with the boy and not with her parents. She felt as though she had left a grey world behind and had stepped into a world of power and movement and colour, and she didn’t want to leave it. Not just yet.
And so they sat, with the colours of India all around them, yellowed and hazy with smoke.
After a time of sitting, the boy jumped to his feet, tossing his cigarette end away. ‘They’ll be coming in to set up for tonight’s concert soon. You’d better go. I’ll lock up again.’
They walked to the doors of the Pavilion and Rose looked out to the sea which was glinting with the dipping sun, and then back at the boy.
‘You can come and visit me, if you like,’ he said after a few seconds. ‘When I’m King.’
Rose smiled at the boy. ‘Goodbye.’
She skipped a little as she headed back to the north of the pier. She liked the idea of seeing the boy again, in a land as exotic as the Pavilion. She pulled her collar up to her nostrils and inhaled the smell of cigarette smoke, smiling as she did so. She surely hadn’t been with the boy for too long. She would be able to get back to the hotel in plenty of time for the train home.
But as Rose neared the end of the pier, she saw that the swarm of people in front of her had swelled. There were screeches and wails floating out from the crowd, and Rose felt a prick of fright at trying to find a path through it. People were gesturing, clambering over one another. They all seemed to be looking past Rose, behind her.
She turned, and what she saw in that moment haunted her forever.
The end of the pier was a terrifying orange. Flames roared up into the sky, shooting higher and higher with each second. The dark smell of burning wood was suddenly thick in the air.
‘The Pavilion!’ she heard someone wail.
At that moment, a burst of sparks flew from the pier and shattered the sky into fragments.
‘Good thing the Pavilion is empty,’ the man next to Rose murmured.
And suddenly, Rose was running towards the pier, snaking through the gasping crowd, the flames pulling her like a magnet. She thought of nothing but his purple eyes as she moved closer and closer towards the rumbling pavilion. The crowds trickled to nobody but two pier officials, who launched buckets of water towards the flames in panic. They didn’t see Rose: didn’t see her pause for half a second for fear of being eaten by the flames; didn’t see her sneak down the side of the crackling wooden sweet kiosk. They didn’t see her pull a boy underneath the tangled iron of the pier, into the safety of the sea. Everybody watched the frightening, flashing sky, mesmerised by the cloud of black smoke dancing above their heads.
The water tasted black, and Rose struggled to swim and clutch the boy’s bony body at the same time. He seemed to be dozing, his eyes half closed in a sort of dream. Rose tried to shout, but the sound of her voice was washed away with the waves. She pounded her legs against the heavy water, trying to move away from the splitting pier. Shards of glowing wood floated around her and slices of fire hurtled beside them.
She pounded, and moved, slowly, slowly, until the boy’s eyes began to open.
‘Swim!’ Rose shouted as his eyelids flickered. ‘Swim!’
And soon, his weight became lighter, as he began to move beside Rose in the littered waves. The tide was working with them and carried them towards the shore. Rose felt her legs give way as they reached the sand, and she felt herself retching, her body forcing black water from her stomach out onto the sand. She felt his arm around her and his smoky breath next to her face as they lay together. Still, nobody saw them, nobody noticed their entwined bodies, for everybody was staring up at the flashing sky.
‘My train,’ Rose moaned, and tried to shuffle herself up on the sand. She lifted her hand to her hair, which was slick and cold. ‘My parents,’ she said next.
‘I’ll come with you. I’ll tell them what you did for me,’ said the boy.
Rose looked at the boy, who, even after almost drowning in water, was still filthy. She looked at his nest of knotted black hair and his jutting collarbone and his clever smile.
‘No. You mustn’t do that. They wouldn’t like you.’ She stumbled to her feet, which squelched beneath her like two jellies. ‘I have to go.’
The boy lay on the sand and stared up at her. ‘Come back to me one day, won’t you.’
Rose smiled and thought that she might love him. ‘Of course I will.’
She climbed the stone steps up onto the promenade and made her way through the sighing crowds.
It was only after she had told her parents that she had gone in the sea to rescue a little girl’s dog, after she had joined them in the dash to the train station, after she had flopped down on her seat on the train in a dry lemon-yellow dress, that Rose remembered.
She remembered as their train huffed through the damp green countryside, over steep hills and past glassy lakes.
She still didn’t have her gift.
Chapter Ten (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)
Grace, 2008
Eliot is late picking Grace up.
‘I wasn’t ready anyway,’ Grace waves Eliot’s apology away with her hand, bracelets twinkling and jangling with the movement.
‘Did you book a table?’
‘No, but it’ll be quiet, it’s a weeknight.’
Eliot shrugs. ‘Okay.’
They walk from Grace’s flat into Lytham square. The grand, tree-lined houses they walk beside gradually give way to small, independent shops, much like the one Grace and Elsie have just opened. Towards the square, the gold light spilling from the restaurants and wine bars twinkles with the movement of people.
When Grace and Eliot arrive at the new tapas restaurant, a troubled middle-aged waiter with a faint smear of sweat on his forehead greets them at the door. ‘Name?’
‘Oh, we didn’t book. Do you have a table for two?’ Grace asks.
‘You didn’t book? Not a chance. We’ve got an opening special, and it’s gone down a storm. You’ll be waiting hours,’ the waiter sneers, apparently cheered a little by his bad news. ‘Should’ve booked,’ he smirks, as Grace and Eliot turn to shuffle out of the door.
‘Sorry. I didn’t think. Shall we go somewhere else for a few drinks and see if they have room for us in a bit?’ Grace suggests.
‘Can do. Look, Grace, I feel guilty about not having Elsie with us. She’s my girlfriend … your sister. She should be here with us.’
Grace looks down to the cobbles, feeling sick. ‘You’re right. Phone her.’
As Eliot wanders away, shoes crunching on the ground, phone to his ear, Grace wonders what it would have been like if she had told Elsie the truth in the first place. If she had told Elsie her secret, then Eliot wouldn’t be phoning Elsie now. Grace wouldn’t be wearing a heavy necklace of resentment around her neck. And Elsie, most probably, would have met someone else.
But then, Grace reminds herself, Elsie would never have forgiven her. That’s why she could never tell her.
‘She’s not coming,’ Eliot says abruptly as he walks back towards Grace. ‘She’s still angry.’
Grace sighs. ‘Come on. Let’s get a drink.’
As they queue at the bar, jostled by people who are ordering pints, Grace remembers when she first met Eliot.
‘Shakespeare is a genius,’ Eliot had been insisting in the student union. A few of Grace’s friends from her English degree were having drinks there, and Eliot, who was studying some English modules as part of his Drama course, had joined them. ‘Imagine writing something now that people still care about and can still relate to hundreds of years in the future!’
‘But his writing doesn’t make any sense!’ Grace had cried before swigging from her alcopop bottle. Elsie was working on a presentation with a group of people from her course that night so wasn’t there. Grace had been tense to start with; it felt strange to be without her twin. Since they had started at university, they had been inseparable. They had chosen mostly the same modules, and at every social event, Elsie sat next to Grace, a silent observer. For the first half hour of the evening, Grace had found herself turning to her side on more than one occasion to try to bring her sister into the conversation, surprised to see an empty seat. But now, feeling light-headed from her Bacardi Breezers, and in the full swing of conversation, she realised with a sticky sensation of guilt that she was enjoying being alone with these people.
‘Of course it makes sense. Love, death, murder, friendship! What more is there?’
It was as Eliot threw out these words, carelessly as though he had better things to do, that Grace’s head had suddenly split with pain and an image of a wedding had flown into her mind. It was her own wedding. People threw confetti that was carried away by the wind. Grace wore a heavy wedding dress with lace daisies stitched onto the sleeves. And Eliot stood by her side, wearing a suit, his hair a little longer, his stubbled jaw a little wider.
Grace had paused, her heart shuddering. She had her mother’s gift to see into the future. This was a vision. Although it was the first premonition Grace had ever had, she knew exactly what it was, and she knew exactly what it meant.
‘I bet Shakespeare didn’t even write half of the plays he is famous for,’ Grace said, after taking a few minutes to pull herself together. Her heart hadn’t slowed yet, and she placed a hand on her chest to try and steady it.
Eliot threw his head back and laughed: a deep, throaty laugh that somehow managed to imply that he was sure of himself, affluent and popular.
‘I can’t believe you’re throwing that in! Nobody has ever proved that theory. Everybody knows it’s a load of bollocks.’
Grace shrugged, feeling a little fluttery and nervous, like a moth trapped under a glass.
‘I’m not going to defend the theory, because I haven’t done my research. Yet,’ she smirked. ‘But when I have, I’ll be in touch.’
The group of friends she was with went to a house party after that. Grace went with them and drank primary-coloured strong drinks that she hadn’t even known to exist before that night. She saw Eliot a couple of times. Once, in the kitchen, she dared herself to go up to him and kiss his cheek. She edged towards him slowly, through shards of conversation and a net of cigarette smoke. She caught his eye. He had green eyes, like a cat. She smiled. He smiled back, his face fractured by people moving around in front of him. Somebody called his name. He turned. And the moment was gone.
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