Summer’s Shadow

by Anna Wilson

  To ‘the rocks’ – a beautiful

  place of endless inspiration

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Summer was asleep when the phone rang. She heard the shrill noise as though from far away; her body and brain slow to respond. She resisted the ringing as it tugged her out of the comforting depths of sleep.

  Someone else will answer it.

  The sound continued, like an alarm.

  Summer groaned, shifted, rolled on to her side and scrabbled to find the switch on the bedside lamp.

  Fumbling with the tangled sheet, she freed her legs and slid out of bed. The summer was one of those freak heatwaves; the kind the Met Office loved to term a ‘barbecue summer’ – which was fine if you liked barbecues. Not so good if you had spent stifling days sitting by a hospital bed. Watching and waiting.

  Jess’s mum had apologized to Summer for the stuffiness of the house. ‘It’s these terraces – they trap all the heat. I’ve not given you a duvet, just a sheet. Hope that’s OK?’ She had fussed constantly from the minute Summer had arrived to stay with them. Her fussing was as suffocating as the heat.

  Why isn’t anyone answering the phone?

  The ringing seemed to become louder and more urgent.

  ‘All right, all right, I’m coming!’ she muttered, shuffling towards the bedroom door.

  She stopped, realizing she was walking away from the noise. She rubbed at her eyes fiercely.

  It wasn’t the house phone. It was her mobile. Her mobile which she had turned off before going to bed, as she always did. Her mother insisted on it. ‘Screen time’ was something they often fought over.

  Wouldn’t mind an argument with her now over stupid things like that.

  The glow from the phone was unearthly, its ‘vibrate’ mode adding to its alien appearance as it jumped and shuddered on the windowsill. It rang and rang.

  A jolt of panic surged through her.

  It’ll wake everyone!

  She was fully awake now. She grabbed the mobile and saw the word ‘unknown’ the second before she answered.

  ‘Hello?’

  Silence.

  ‘Hello?’

  Summer glanced at the bedside clock. Only a few minutes to go before midnight. ‘The magic hour’, her mum had jokingly called it, when a smaller, younger Summer had crept into bed with her, snuggling down after a nightmare.

  Summer shook her head. These images of Mum had been swimming in and out of her mind ever since the accident, as though she were preparing herself, stocking up on memories, just in case.

  She shook her head again.

  Mustn’t let myself think like that.

  Still nothing from the phone. Summer swallowed, her throat dry, her tongue sleep-logged.

  ‘Hello?’ She was irritated now.

  Great, a prank call.

  Summer made to turn off the phone and crawl back to bed.

  The voices reached out to her, distant at first, as though under water or at the end of a long, dark tunnel; snatches of muffled conversation.

  ‘Hello?’ she repeated. Less annoyed than fearful now.

  Still only those watery voices. Her heart banged in her ears. She shifted the phone to try to listen more closely. Then, from among the crackling white noise and eerie chatter, came something else. Faint. Very faint.

  ‘Bye, love.’

  A familiar, throaty laugh rippled down the line. As though the caller were joking with someone in another room.

  ‘Hello? Mum?’ Summer’s tone was urgent, pleading.

  Bye, love. As though she were popping to the shops. Back in a minute. Back before you know it.

  Summer was shouting now, all concerns of waking Jess and her family forgotten in her panic. ‘Hello! Hello! Mum! It’s me!’ She would know that, wouldn’t she? Mum had called her.

  Then there was nothing again: or at least, nothing but the hissing, popping static.

  Summer lowered the phone and stared at it. She looked over at the clock again. One minute to midnight now. She put the phone back up to her ear.

  ‘Mum?’ Summer choked, her voice thick and salty.

  There was a gentle click and the connection was broken.

  Summer shook the phone, pressed the buttons, all of them, any of them, to try to get the call back; shouted, ‘Mum! Mum!’ over and over.

  Nothing.

  She pressed ‘call back’. The screen remained blank. Frantic now, she whizzed through the list of received calls. There was no number listed that she did not already know. No sign of an unregistered number even.

  So. Definitely a prank call. Must have been.

  Impossible: it would have shown up at least as an unknown number.

  Summer’s hand quivered as she replaced the phone on the windowsill. She slumped against the wall and slid down so that she was sitting with her back to the radiator beneath the window, its metal frame cold through her T-shirt.

  She told herself, sternly, to get a grip.

  Mum’s in hospital.

  She was on a ventilator, tubes and drips coming out of her like tentacles. She couldn’t lift the phone to make a call. She couldn’t talk the last time Summer had seen her. Didn’t know her own daughter. Didn’t know anything any more.

  Summer cursed herself for not having the phone number for the hospital stored in her mobile. Jess’s mum would have it in hers. But Summer knew she couldn’t go creeping around the house at midnight trying to find it. She wasn’t going to wake anyone to tell them about the call either.

  They’d give me that look with their heads on one side. All concerned. They’ve been looking at me like that anyway. Since the accident.

  She sighed, shuddering. The phone was not going to ring again. She pushed herself up off the floor and went back to bed.

  She turned out the light and lay completely still, on her back, staring at the shadows cast from the street lights, listening to the house shifting and creaking in the heat.

  Did I dream it?

  She thought afterwards that she must have lain awake for a long time. In any case, she did not remember falling asleep before the light crept in around the edges of the curtains. A glance at the clock told her it was 5 a.m. Had she really lain there, staring and listening since midnight?

  Someone tapped on the door. ‘Summer?’ A whisper, as though unsure whether to wake her or not.

  ‘Yes?’

  The door opened and Jess’s mum peered through. ‘I – I’m so sorry, Summer.’ Her face was anxious, her kind eyes ringed with red, her soft, blonde hair bed-ruffled.

  Sorry for what?

  ‘It’s all right, I was already awake,’ Summer said.

  Then she saw how her friend’s mother clutched at the doorframe, how she seemed uncertain whether to enter the room.

  Her chest lurched. She sat bolt upright.

  ‘NO!’ she shouted. ‘NO! It isn’t true. I SPOKE to her.’

  Rachel took a step towards her, but seemed to think
better of it. ‘The hospital rang a couple of hours ago. I wanted to let you sleep for a bit longer . . .’ She broke off and frowned. Then: ‘You spoke to her? When?’

  Summer was rigid, sobbing; tears and snot mingling in a hot wet film, blurring her vision, pinching her voice, causing it to rise. ‘It was midnight. She called. I thought it would wake you. I thought . . . It rang and rang . . .’

  Jess had appeared behind her mum. She saw her friend’s distress and rushed to Summer’s side, throwing her arms around her, crying herself now.

  Jess’s mum was shaking her head, her eyes glassy, her mouth crumpled. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘You must have been dreaming. You know she couldn’t have called you. And certainly not at midnight because . . .’ She paused. Her lips trembled. Then, with a shuddering breath she said, ‘Cat died. At one minute before twelve. That’s what they said: “Time of death 23:59.”‘

  Summer saw herself push Jess aside, run to the window and pick up her mobile. Saw her arm jerk forward as she hurled the phone against the wall. Heard it shatter.

  Heard herself scream.

  It was the will which changed everything.

  ‘I, Catherine Jones, appoint Tristan Trewartha of Bosleven, St Gerran, Cornwall to be the sole Executor of my Will and the sole Beneficiary of my Estate. If my child, Summer Lamorna Jones, survives me, I appoint Tristan Trewartha as her guardian.’

  That was it. Two sentences written by her mother, spoken by a stranger. Two sentences of cold impersonal words over which she had no control, no say whatsoever.

  In a whirlwind of preparation, packing and farewells, Summer found herself on a train out of Paddington, heading for Penzance. She had checked it out on a map and been appalled when she had seen how far away it was.

  ‘It’s right at the bottom of the country! Almost as far as you can go,’ she had said to Jess. ‘And then this Bosleven place isn’t even in Penzance – look!’ She had traced her finger along the southwest coast line and stopped at a small cove where the village of St Gerran was marked.

  ‘Land’s End,’ Jess had said quietly. She pointed to the tip of England, a couple of centimetres to the left on the map.

  The train journey was so long. Rachel had told her it was nearly three hundred miles from London to Penzance. Talking about it had been easy: experiencing it was very different. She was trapped. Stuck on the same train for five, slow hours with only her iPod and a magazine for company. Going all the way; to the end of the line.

  She closed her eyes and ran through the events of the past couple of weeks; they were as unreal to her as if played out by actors on a stage. Who were these people hugging her and offering empty words? They could not be the friends she thought they were if they were happy to hand her over to a family she had never met before, never even heard of.

  ‘She must have trusted them,’ Jess’s mum had tried to reassure her. ‘Tristan sounded lovely when I spoke to him. He has a wife called Becca and a son. You’re going to a good family, I’m sure.’

  How can you be sure?

  ‘If he was so special to Mum, so lovely, why wasn’t he at the funeral? Why has he never been to visit us with his lovely family? Never asked us to stay in his lovely house?’ Summer had thrown the questions like spears.

  Jess’s mum had reddened. ‘I – I don’t know . . . All I know is they’re your uncle and aunt. It’s better that you go to be with relatives.’ She had sighed, exasperated. ‘I can’t do anything about this. I’m sorry. I don’t suppose your mum ever thought she would . . .’

  ‘Die,’ Summer had said. ‘Go on, say it!’

  Why am I being such a cow to her?

  ‘Summer . . .’ Jess had tried to intervene, but Summer pushed her away.

  She had not been able to stop shouting, being horrible. It had been easier than giving in to how she really felt – that she wished it had been her in that coffin instead of her mum.

  ‘My uncle and aunt? For crying out loud! Why don’t I know them? Why can’t I live here?’ she had cried.

  Jess’s mum had made a conscious effort to sound controlled. ‘I wish you could, Summer. But if your mum had wanted you to stay with us, she would have said.’

  Summer opened her eyes as a large man struggled into the aisle seat next to hers. The train had stopped at Exeter. She already felt as though she had been travelling for hours.

  She turned away from the man, wrinkling her nose as he unwrapped a burger, packed with fried onions and oozing ketchup. Summer’s stomach churned.

  She had not been able to face food for days, had had to force herself to swallow the careful meals Jess’s mother had put before her.

  ‘You’ve got to eat,’ Jess had said.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  Summer found herself hardening towards her best friend and her family as she watched them accept her fate and go about organizing her departure. Jess, in her turn, had withdrawn, backed away from the lashing out and the hasty words which poured out of Summer, unchecked.

  ‘So you’re just going to let your mum hand me over to these people like – like a parcel?’ Summer had demanded, as the day to leave drew closer.

  Jess’s eyes had welled up and she had turned away.

  Her mother had tried to pacify Summer. ‘Your mum was my best friend. I trusted her judgement. It’s true, she never talked about family. Look, it’s not as if I didn’t ask her over the years, out of pure nosiness! She always made it very clear she didn’t want to talk about family. In the end I had to respect that.’

  Summer had not wanted to listen. ‘Too right she never said anything about family,’ she had snapped. ‘It was always, “It’s just you and me, Summer! Just you and me.”‘ As she had sung the words out, her face had crumpled again. ‘Not any more.’

  Jess’s parents had become businesslike as the days rolled by, calling Summer’s new guardian, Tristan, on the phone, talking things through with him.

  Summer had watched as her life spiralled out of her control. She had tried to imagine what her uncle would be like. She had a snapshot of him that he had sent: a slim man with ruffled, dark hair and a shy, lopsided smile. At least he didn’t look like a monster.

  He hadn’t sounded like one either, when she had at last plucked up the courage to speak to him herself. His voice was deep, smooth, refined like a radio newsreader’s.

  The conversation had been stilted. He had offered his condolences, chatted haltingly about his home, his family (‘We have a son. Kenan. So you’ll have someone your own age’). He had been at pains to make it clear how welcome Summer was.

  Summer had responded with monosyllables at first, her brain buzzing with so many questions, she was incapable of asking any of them.

  Who are you? Why don’t I know you? How does your son feel about me coming to live with you?

  Instead she had remained quiet and listened to him.

  ‘So Monday then,’ her uncle had said finally. ‘No time like the present! Yes, er, great place to spend the summer holidays, down here . . . Right, well, I’ll come and pick you up, of course. It’s a long way from London . . . We can get to know each other on the journey! Lots to talk about!’ There was a forced note of jollity in his voice.

  Summer had insisted on getting the train, however, surprising herself at her boldness.

  ‘Penzance, right?’ she had said. ‘That’s what they told me. I’ve seen it on the map. I am fourteen. It’ll be easy. It’s direct, isn’t it? No changes. So. Jess’s parents can help me book the train, make sure I get on the right one and stuff.’

  ‘Well . . . if you’re sure,’ Tristan had agreed. All too readily, Summer had thought. He had actually sounded relieved. ‘I’ll send you money for the ticket, of course.’

  She had expected him to protest, to say she was too young to travel alone. She did not know why she had so rashly said she would go there under her own steam: she had never taken a train out of London on her own before. Her mum had only ever let her do short journeys on the Tube.

 
; But then, no one was acting normal.

  Before she left, Jess had made a last-ditch attempt at showing she cared.

  ‘You all right?’ she repeated, on a loop, a nervous grin fluttering on her lips.

  Yeah, I’m all right. My mum’s dead and I’m going to live in the back end of nowhere with some relatives I’ve never even heard of before. I’m so happy I could dance.

  Not long ago, Summer would have told Jess everything. Told her how frightened she was, how she could not stop thinking horrible thoughts.

  This guy – how do I know he’s for real, Jess? Has anyone actually, properly checked all this out? What d’you reckon, Jess, would you trust him? Everything’s moving too fast – I just feel so lost!

  Instead she had routinely responded to her friend’s repeated question with a small smile and a nod. ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Everything’s fine.’

  Jess had looked relieved when she had finally said goodbye.

  Now Summer was alone.

  She stared out at the dark landscape rushing past the window. If she cupped her hands to block out the light from the carriage, she could just make out the horizon in the gloom.

  ‘Cornwall is so beautiful.’ If I had a quid for every time someone had said that to me recently, I’d have enough money to buy my own place wherever I wanted.

  A voice broke into her thoughts and through the music she was listening to.

  ‘Penzance, this is Penzance. Your final station stop. This train terminates here. All change, please, all change.’

  She crammed her iPod into the top of her small rucksack, went to fetch her cases from the luggage rack at the end of the carriage and made her way off the train with the few passengers that were left.

  End of the line. All change.

  Couldn’t have put it better myself.

  Summer stepped down from the train. The cool night air hit her and she shivered.

  The station was not well lit. It took a few seconds for Summer’s eyes to adjust after the strong glare of the train carriage. She followed the straggle of passengers along the platform to the station concourse, watching as people were recognized by friends and loved ones; waving, laughing, hugging, kissing. She looked around, trying to find a man who matched the snapshot in her pocket. Would her aunt and – what’s-his-name – Kenan have come too?