by Lucy Clarke
I make myself turn the lock – then give the door a quick, hard shove.
It swings open with a loud clang. Light flares – it’s on a sensor – and the brightness is momentarily blinding. It takes several seconds for my eyes to adjust, then I am looking down concrete steps, into a gloomy, narrow space. Cold air breathes from the deep.
I need to step inside, to check the alcove, be certain.
As my feet press the cold concrete, my heart is stumbling and tripping. Phone still gripped, I take three steps down into the cellar, and angle my head so I can see into the alcove.
Clear.
In the corner I notice a cluster of rat or mouse droppings and a shredded newspaper. Is it possible that that’s what I heard upstairs – rodents climbing between the walls, tiny feet racing over pipework and timber?
There is nothing here. Just darkness and the earthy damp smell of below ground. I want to laugh, to say, See, Elle, nothing! But the fear doesn’t abate. I am alive with it.
I turn, begin to ascend the steps. That’s when I see it on the concrete step. A menthol cigarette, unsmoked. The brand he liked. You rarely see them sold any more.
The smell of cigarette smoke, overlaid with mint, fills my nose.
I close my eyes, hear the roar of blood in my ears. Panic tears through my body and I feel like I am sinking within it.
I know – I KNOW – it can’t be him. Not here, in my house. Impossible.
Breathe.
The cigarette could have been in the cellar for weeks, most likely tossed to the ground by a builder. I know all this. I honestly do. And yet, it feels like a threat …
I can’t even make myself pick it up, dispose of it.
I don’t want to touch it. A cigarette. A fucking cigarette!
Because of him.
I need to get out of the house.
I need to get out of my fucking head!
I pull the door shut. Lock it.
Keys, coat, bag. I grab all three, then push open the front door, and then I am sprinting through the darkness to my car.
I slam the door behind me, depress the central locking button.
I start the engine, headlights beaming across my house, illuminating it like searchlights. I swing out of the driveway, heart thundering, with absolutely no idea where I’m going.
*
Thank God for twenty-four-hour supermarkets.
I drift down aisles, placing items I don’t need into a metal trolley. There is something immensely reassuring about the day-bright overhead lighting, the orderly stacked shelves, the glossily packaged products I associate with cheery chefs, grinning models.
My knee-length coat is buttoned to my neck, but my pyjama bottoms are on show, the soft pink cotton juxtaposed against stiff leather boots.
A woman passes me in the aisle, her white plimsolls squeaking below a blue uniform. A nurse, I think. She smiles at me shyly, a collusion of sorts, because here we both are, in a supermarket, at this strange hour of the night.
Eventually, when I can stretch out the shopping trip no longer, I steer my trolley to the till.
‘Working late, or just about to start?’ the girl on the checkout asks as she scans my items. She hasn’t noticed my pyjamas. She’s banded me with the group of legitimate late-night shoppers who work unusual hours – not, I think with relief, the other group who use this store, with its well-lit aisles and centrally controlled temperature, as a safe space. Somewhere to run to.
‘Late,’ I answer with a smile.
‘Well, you enjoy your sleep then.’
I unload my shopping onto the passenger seat of my car, then climb in, lock the doors.
Now that my fear has dissipated, I can feel tiredness washing in. A tide of it, heavy and full. I pull a French baguette from one of the shopping bags, break off the crusty end, and chew it with a dry mouth. I open a carton of milk and swig it back, moistening the bread.
Wrapped in my coat, I sit here in the floodlit car park, allowing my head to tip back, my eyes to close.
Tiredness beats against my eyelids, sleep rising, towing me under. Here, in a supermarket car park, locked in my vehicle, I finally sleep.
A man’s face is pressed to the window, inches from mine. I can hear the rattle of the lock as he tries the door handle.
I scream, startled. I try to rear away – but I am pinned to my seat, restrained.
Disorientated, it takes me several moments to remember I am in my car. It is daylight. I’m strapped in by my seat belt.
The man is waving. Saying something.
Blinking, adjusting, I realise it is Bill. He is talking to me through the glass.
Heavy-thumbed, I fumble to locate the central locking button and release my seat belt, but eventually I am opening the door, stepping out of the car into daylight. I am trying to smile, to arrange my face into an expression that looks normal.
‘I saw your car,’ Bill is saying. He’s dressed sharply in a navy suit, on his way to work. Shaved. Freshly showered. ‘Are you okay? Were you … asleep?’
‘Just taking a moment out,’ I say, heat hitting my cheeks. I glance down, noticing the breadcrumbs dusting my coat. I brush them away.
Bill looks at me for a moment. ‘Are you … wearing pyjamas?’ He’s half-smiling, bemused.
‘I dashed out first thing. Didn’t bother to change.’
‘Let’s hope the literary paparazzi don’t spot you. They’d make all sorts of assertions about your writing habits.’
I make myself smile.
It must be unconvincing as Bill looks at me more closely. ‘Is everything okay?’
I nod vigorously. ‘Fine.’
‘Well, okay then,’ he says, sounding unsure. Bill tells me to have a good day, then hugs me. He holds me tight in his arms, the strength of his embrace squeezing the air from my lungs.
Back at the house, I place the bags of shopping on the kitchen counter.
I open the wine cellar door, the rhythm of my heartbeat barely altering. I walk right in, down through the cold. It’s not tomb-like or terrifying. It’s just a wine cellar.
To prove it to myself, I pick up the cigarette, snap it in two and throw it straight in the bin. It is done. It was never anything.
In the daylight, last night’s actions seem utterly ridiculous, inflated.
Yet, at night it feels like this is a different house.
I feel like a different person.
A reminder beeps on my phone, prompting me that it’s only fifteen minutes until my next Facebook Live author chat.
I drink a black coffee while putting on make-up, mask-thick.
Then I am in front of my computer, the camera on, smiling, talking.
‘I’m author Elle Fielding, live from my writing room. Today I’m going to be talking about writing twists.’
As I talk, I watch my own face on screen, lips moving, eyes bright and animated, and it’s as if there are two versions of me: the author I’m watching perform who seems so natural and confident, and the other me; the one who is awake through the night, who slept in a supermarket car park, who still wears her pyjama bottoms out of shot beneath the desk. The one who is slowly unravelling.
Previously
If one searches for, ‘How to pick a lock’, one hundred and nine million results pop up in 0.59 seconds, which seems marvellously efficient. I simply clicked on the first link and was taken to a website where I learned the precise skills required to pick a lock, and the tools needed to assist me.
So here I am, in your writing room.
Everywhere is light and ocean and sky. It breathes into the room. Just standing here, my feet on the wooden floorboards, I feel lighter. This is a space from which to create. Do you know – do you have any idea – how lucky you are?
I move to your writing desk. That’s where it all happens, after all. I pull out the limed carver chair, and lower myself down, tucking my legs under your desk. I look up – out to sea.
That view.
I run my fingers
along the smooth edge of the desk. There’s no laptop – you’ll have that with you, of course – but I can see where it rests on the desk, the slight scuff mark as it’s pushed into place.
There’s an old hardbacked thesaurus beneath the desk which you must use as a footrest. You have a beautiful water jug – it’s deep cream, glazed with a simple black fern. The pottery has that cracked, aged look, and I’m beginning to understand more of your style, the way you put things together. You like both the modern touches of minimalism, coupled with muted pastels and aged natural materials. It’s pleasing on the eye. Calming.
Strange to think that before you had almost nothing – and now you have all this.
I set my hands on the desk and allow myself a moment, just to sit here, to imagine what it must feel like to be you.
17
Elle
‘Write. Even when it feels like you have nothing left in you: write. You must keep going. Keep pushing yourself – and your story – to the limit. That’s when your narrative will rise from the page, alive.’
Author Elle Fielding
Time seems to stretch and constrict, the week passing in a blur of writing, of sleeplessness. Day and night have lost their boundaries, have become melded, indistinguishable.
My fingers hover just above the keyboard, waiting. I squeeze my eyes shut, blanking out the screen, and the silver shimmer of sea beyond it. The words are right there at the edge of my thoughts. I had them, just a moment ago.
What were they?
I open my eyes a fraction, re-read the half sentence on screen, willing the rest of it to come back to me. But it’s vanished, a puff of smoke.
Chair legs scrape against wood as I push to my feet.
I tip back my head, a deep growling noise of frustration leaving my throat. I’ve been up here all day, but it’s not flowing, not coming together. It feels like each word, each sentence, must be coaxed, teased, cajoled onto the page.
I’m fifty thousand words into the story – only halfway. I can feel the approach of my deadline as if I’m standing in rising water and it is reaching around my waist, climbing higher, until finally there will be no air.
I move to the glass wall, push open the window, letting cold, salted air blast through my writing room. My skin puckers with goose bumps, but the fresh bite of sea air doesn’t shift the fog in my head.
I know the havoc insomnia wreaks on your mental capacity – I’ve read the depressing articles in the desperate hours of the night. I know that a good night’s sleep is required for the consolidation of memories – and that without consolidation, there’s no recall. I know that my reaction times will be slower, my functioning dulled. I know anxiety increases, depression can set in. I know all this – but what can I do about it?
I want to sleep. I am desperate to sleep.
I need sleep to write. To finish this book.
Or, maybe that’s just another excuse to add to my list. It’s the house renovations. The book tours. My divorce. Insomnia.
Maybe it’s none of those things.
Maybe it’s me.
When I was writing my first novel, I’d carved out time on the hoof: in my car on lunch breaks, my notepad balanced on the steering wheel; in my head during slow shifts when I’d lose myself in a conversation between two characters; late at night with the noise of the street flooding into my room, thoughts buzzing with ideas. There was no publishing contract back then, no deadline, no expectations, no success to replicate. I had been writing for myself – and because of that I’d felt uninhibited.
But this book, this is completely different.
Food, I decide. I need to eat something. Fuel the body, fuel the brain, my mother used to say.
Downstairs, I dig through the freezer and pull out a bag of seafood mix, eyeing it half-heartedly. I’m guilty of cutting corners now that I’m only cooking for myself, and I’ve noticed that my cheeks are looking hollowed, my collarbone too prominent.
Despite my lack of appetite, I fry up some garlic and shallots, then stir in the seafood mix, adding a generous glug of wine and a splash of cream. I used to enjoy cooking with Flynn, the two of us moving around one another in the tiny galley kitchen in our rented flat. There was no extractor fan and the windows would quickly steam up, so Flynn would insist on stripping to his pants as he cooked.
I smile at the memory.
I take out my phone and call him. We’ve spoken twice since his mother’s death, but the conversations were brief, perfunctory, distracted. Our dynamics have never been good on the phone. Flynn can seem reticent, and I prefer to see people’s expression when they talk, to pick up on the subtleties and nuance of the communication. Phone calls strip out too many sensory layers.
The call goes straight to voicemail. I leave a short message to say I am thinking of him and that I plan to arrive early at tomorrow’s funeral in case he needs me. I try to ignore the ripple of panic at the prospect of yet another day away from my writing desk.
I stir the seafood into the shallots and wine, then lower the heat and perch on the kitchen stool.
Fiona texts to ask how the book deadline is going – and I wonder if Bill has mentioned that he saw me last week asleep in my car. I type a quick reply, then scroll through my Facebook feed, looking at the post I uploaded this morning of my notebook resting on the shoreline, sunlight hitting the water in the background. It has over two thousand Likes and sixty-three comments.
SJBurns81: Wow! Beautiful beach.
DonnaG: Can’t wait for the new book.
Booklover101: My favourite writer at my favourite beach.
I hesitate. Re-read the last comment.
My favourite writer at my favourite beach.
Unease trickles through me.
I look out through the kitchen window, dusk closing the light from the day.
Booklover101 knows this beach.
I’ve posted countless photos of the view from my house. If Booklover101 does know this bay, it means he or she will also know exactly where I live.
I run a knuckle back and forth across my lip, beginning to see how incredibly foolish I’ve been.
Unsettled, I only pick at the seafood pasta while listening to the news on the radio.
I manage a few mouthfuls, before scraping the rest into the bin. As I’m leaving the kitchen, I catch a soundbite from a group of students being interviewed on the radio about the proposed rise in tuition fees and whether they think university is worth the financial investment. Their voices are bright and sparky, filled with the bravado of youth.
‘You’ve just got to weigh it up, y’know. Whatever’s right for you. But yeah, I’m loving uni. A degree certificate is only part of it.’
I picture myself at that age – hair to my waist, lips full, skin plump and unlined. What would I have said as a fresher when life still felt bright, untarnished?
I press that question into my thoughts, carrying it with me as I ascend the stairs towards my writing room.
I pause at the landing window, my attention caught by a movement at the periphery of my vision. I hover, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness outside. A fox perhaps, or a gull.
I’m about to move off, when I see a shadow at the edge of the drive, as if someone is sitting low to the ground.
I keep very still, aware of my breath quickening.
There. A person. Rising, then hurrying along the perimeter of the drive. Tall stance, broad shoulders. A man, almost certainly.
Blood pulses thickly in my ears. I remember the figure I saw on the shoreline weeks earlier, a pair of binoculars trained to this house.
Am I being watched?
My favourite author at my favourite beach.
I’m pinned to the spot, breath held, concentration fixed on the moving figure.
He is wearing a winter coat, the hood pulled up, a strip of reflective panelling at his collar. As he moves, the floodlight is triggered.
The figure freezes. For a second, he turns his face towards the house, as if h
e is looking right at me. In that moment, just before he jogs away down the lane, I glimpse his profile.
My breath catches in my throat with surprise.
I can’t be certain, but I think it is Bill.
My skin feels hot, head buzzing with confusion. What would Bill be doing outside my house? He would just come to the door, surely?
I squeeze my brow, trying to pinch clarity into my thoughts. I’ve been making mistakes recently, I know that. This is Bill, for God’s sake! There’s no reason for him to be lurking outside my house.
But something ticks, just lightly, at the back of my thoughts: Bill had been the one to suggest putting my house on Airbnb.
But what does that mean?
It means nothing.
Next time you rent it, give me the nod. Wouldn’t mind escaping the chaos of this place …
A quip, that’s all.
Yet I find myself taking out my phone, calling Fiona. It’s Drake’s bedtime, so Bill is probably home doing bath-time or stories. Just a quick call – to put my mind at ease.
I let the phone ring and ring.
Eventually Fiona answers in a rush of words. ‘Can’t talk! It’s chaos here. Drake just crapped in the bath and I’m currently using a plastic boat to try and scoop it from the water.’
I laugh. I can’t help myself. I’d forgotten how good it feels.
‘I’m pleased you find it so funny. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to enjoy a bubble bath again.’
‘Where’s the little poo monster now? Is Bill doing story-time?’ The question is so light, it’s almost as if it’s not been asked.
‘He should be – except he was in such a foul mood all afternoon that I sent him out to fetch a bottle of wine. He must’ve gone to France to pick the grapes, he’s taking that bloody long. The one time of the day when I could really—’ There’s a crash in the background, followed by a high-pitch squeal of delight. ‘Got to go,’ Fiona says with a sigh.
The noise and vibrancy of her house disappears as the phone goes dead.
