You Let Me In

by Lucy Clarke

  In the photograph, he’s smiling, the corners of his eyes creased as he grins at the camera, a look of contentment filling his expression.

  ‘Who?’ is all I manage.

  ‘Me and my dad,’ Phoebe answers. ‘He died when I was four.’

  I don’t say that I know this. That I know he drowned in the Gower during an unusually warm October. That I learned of his death from a newspaper article.

  I was on a train to Bristol with Flynn when I found out. We were sitting opposite each other, talking about our plans for Christmas. We could escape somewhere – hole up in a B&B in the Lake District.

  I’d glanced out of the window, picturing walking over a frost-jewelled hillside, or going to a thatch-roofed pub for lunch. In the train window, an open newspaper, discarded by another passenger, was reflected at me, a face smiling into the dark glass.

  I snatched up the paper, surprising Flynn.

  There he was. A black-and-white picture of him sitting behind a desk, dark eyes peering through that thick hair, one leg crossed over the other. I hadn’t seen his face in years.

  A man’s body washed up on Llangennith beach in the early hours of Sunday morning. He has been identified as Luke Linden, a lecturer at the University of Wales, Cardiff.

  I skimmed over the rest of the article, each word sharp and dangerous, like broken pieces of glass: accidental drowning; dangerous currents; leaves behind a wife and child.

  I began to shake. It was the unexpectedness of it. I’d been so careful not to allow him into my head.

  Flynn had called my name as I’d pushed away from the table, running through the carriage. I slammed my palm against the illuminated exit sign. Let me out!

  The door remained locked. The carriage began to move, rocking over the track, sliding out of the station.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I’m saying to Phoebe – and then I am moving, stepping backwards, my hands feeling for the doorway, my eyes not able to leave the photo until I am on the landing, pulling the door behind me.

  Blood roars in my ears as the realisation hits: Luke Linden was Maeve’s first husband.

  My feet seem disconnected from my body as I take the stairs, legs trembling. A voice somewhere within me is giving concise instructions. Coat. Keys. Leave.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I can hear chatter from the lounge, the bark of my sister’s laugh, the clink of a wine bottle against the lip of a glass. Tugging my coat from the stand, I pull it on, digging in the pockets to retrieve my car keys.

  I should tell Maeve that I’m leaving, I know I must, because otherwise it will be cause for speculation. I take a breath, force a smile to stretch across my face, then I lean my head around the door.

  ‘Sorry everyone, but I’ve got to slip off early tonight. Deadline looming.’

  There is a collective murmur of surprise. Really? But you’ve only just arrived.

  Fiona is saying, ‘I’ll come with you.’

  But I am shaking my head, holding up a hand, saying, ‘No, I’ll be fine.’

  And then I am out of the lounge, reaching for the front door, stepping out into the night.

  I feel the pavement beneath my feet, air in my lungs.

  At my car, I pause, heart hammering. I place my hands against the cold bodywork, breathing in deeply. The wind has got up, gusting through my unbuttoned coat.

  It feels as if the ground is spinning, veering. I lower my head, concentrating on breathing.

  ‘Elle.’

  I tense, as if my name on Maeve’s lips is a blow.

  Slowly I turn.

  Maeve is standing behind me, her head tipped to one side. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Fine. Sorry for rushing off. I just need to get this book finished.’

  Her gaze is steady as she looks straight at me, something knowing in her expression. ‘Thought I heard you talking to Phoebe.’

  I swallow. ‘Wrong room.’

  Maeve looks at me for a long moment, then nods. ‘Go safe, then.’

  I turn and fumble with the key fob, setting the alarm firing to life – the pavement flashes orange, a staccato of beeps bursts into the night. I swear beneath my breath as I press it again, managing to silence it.

  I climb into my car, pull the door hard.

  As I push the key into the ignition, Maeve’s cool expression is sealed in my mind. I realise: Maeve knows exactly who I am.

  29

  Elle

  ‘Endings are one of the greatest challenges for the author. But remember: the clues for the ending are always there, tucked within the pages of your earliest drafts. One must simply look for them.’

  Author Elle Fielding

  I pull into my driveway and park facing the house. I remain in the car, lights turned off, keys in the ignition, the engine ticking as it cools.

  The cliff-top house looks lonely, imposing. The security lights cast gnarled shadows of the potted bay trees framing the front door, shapeshifting the coastal entrance into something gothic.

  Looking up, I can see the lights are on at the top of the house. I think of my empty writing room live on Facebook, the lid of my oak trunk hinged open in the background.

  I don’t want to leave the car, go inside.

  Everything is tangling together: the house … my book … Maeve … Linden.

  He should have been my lecturer, me his student. That is all.

  Forked-tongue. False allegation. Liar.

  In the depths of a Cardiff police station, I’d turned a corner and seen Luke Linden and his wife moving towards me. I’d known he was married in that vague, faceless use of the word, ‘wife’. I’d heard a rumour that she was older than him, petite, attractive. I noticed her purple ankle boots first, suede, a stylishly placed zip, a flat heel. Her hair had been different back then – dyed raven black, pixie short. As she came nearer, I saw the round, distended bump of her pregnant stomach. One of her hands rested beneath it, as if trying to support some of the weight. She was talking to her husband, but a shift in atmosphere must have alerted her to my presence, as suddenly her gaze was swinging towards me, a blast of ice coming from her pale stare.

  It was new to me – the feeling of being hated by another woman. I thought about that look for a long time. What did Luke Linden’s wife think of the student with the narrow hips, her wide fawn-like eyes licked with mascara?

  What did she think of the same girl who swooped into her life just four weeks before she was due to welcome a baby into the world, making an earth-tilting claim about the man she’d chosen to begin a family with?

  What did Luke Linden’s wife believe?

  What would she be prepared to do for justice?

  I sit forward, eyes lifting to the rear-view mirror. A car is approaching, headlights bouncing as the driver navigates the potholes in the dark, narrow lane. I watch as the vehicle passes the entrance to Enid and Frank’s driveway. They are headed for my house.

  The car pulls up directly behind me, sealing off the exit.

  My heartbeat quickens.

  Behind me, the headlights flick off. The driver’s door opens – the wind snatching it wide. An interior light is triggered, illuminating the driver as they step out.

  Maeve.

  A cold feeling of dread reaches down into the pit of my stomach.

  There is the slow crunch of gravel beneath feet. I’m pinned to my seat.

  But the footsteps continue, passing my car.

  Maeve hasn’t seen me. She is heading towards the house. The hem of her red coat is lifted by the wind. She pauses on the floodlit doorstep, raps on the knocker.

  It was Maeve, I think. Maeve who vandalised the library copies of my book, branding the word Liar beside my name. And, it must have been Maeve who, on the day of my library talk, circled the two words in my novel, subtle but pointed: You Lied.

  As I watch her standing on my doorstep, chin lifted, I think about the lone figure Enid saw in my writing room. Something is unravelling from my memory, a thread of conversation … Maeve had talked
about returning from a week-long retreat at the end of October. That was during the same period I was in France.

  But what if there was no retreat? What if she’d discovered that my house was available on Airbnb? What if she’d set up a fake profile, called herself Joanna?

  Trapped here in the dark box of my car, blood pulsing thickly through my veins, I see it all now.

  I left out a key. I left her flowers and a welcome note. I let her in.

  Maeve lifts her fist to the door and knocks. Then she returns her hand to her pocket, rooting for something.

  A key?

  I wait, barely breathing, pressed into the seat.

  My mobile phone flares to life, rattling across the dash, its flashing light reflecting in the windscreen. I snatch it up in a bid to silence it – and catch the name of the caller.

  Maeve.

  Slowly, I lift my gaze.

  On my doorstep, Maeve has turned. Her face is in shadow, but I know her eyes are fixed on me.

  ‘Yes?’ I whisper into my mobile.

  I hear the crunch of footsteps as Maeve moves towards my car, her voice strangely distended on the phone as she says, ‘There you are.’

  I could hit the central locking button. I could end the call and dial 999.

  I don’t.

  I can feel something hardening in my chest.

  My fingertips find the handle of the car door. Pull.

  I step out into the bitter darkness, heart thundering. The wind whips my hair across my face.

  The two of us eye one another. Maeve’s lips are pursed. There is no smile in her expression.

  ‘You were in Phoebe’s room.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her tone is steel. ‘You saw his photo.’

  ‘Luke Linden.’ I’ve not spoken his name aloud in a decade.

  Maeve must have known who I was since the day I arrived in town. But she said nothing. She watched. She waited.

  For what? I wonder, panic beating in my chest.

  The events of the past have become so distorted, I’m no longer sure of anything. The truth is something murky and changeable, a winding river, never still.

  Did I lie?

  Did he?

  The security light flicks off and the driveway falls into sheer darkness. Behind me the sea rolls and shifts, churning waves breaking against the beach with a booming roar. If I turn, I know I’ll see the grey-black expanse seething with white-water, smell the edge of a storm on the salt-wind.

  Then I feel the grip of a leather glove against the bare skin at my wrist. ‘I know the truth.’

  The words buckle me, send me hurtling back, through year upon year, to when I was a different girl, living in a different city, believing that truth was just one thing: a single line, either black or white, not anything in between.

  2004

  Why would anyone book a meeting before midday with a student? Elle had thought idly as she weaved towards the humanities block, her fingertips working through her bag to locate a stick of chewing gum. A burst of mint filled her mouth and she tossed her hair back as she climbed the stairs towards Luke Linden’s office, practising the feeling of sobriety.

  She knocked once, then sauntered in, still high on the effervescence of partying through the night, toxins rushing through her bloodstream.

  She closed the door behind her.

  Luke Linden wore a fresh shirt, his hair was clean, he smelt of aftershave and cigarettes. He seemed markedly older than the boys she’d left at the house party.

  From behind his desk, he considered her, perhaps noting last night’s dress, or the smudges of kohl beneath her eyes, or the fading scent of perfume on her skin.

  ‘Good night, I take it?’ A smile in his voice.

  ‘Absolutely,’ she’d said, twisting her lips around each syllable. ‘Welsh reggae was only the start.’

  She slouched in the plastic chair, like she was sitting with a friend in a coffee house: intimate, relaxed. There was a discord in the change of environments – just an hour ago she’d been lying on a sofa beneath a light projection on the ceiling, while around her people danced into the morning, and now, somehow, she’d been transported to the formality of her English lecturer’s office.

  She was aware of his gaze on her.

  She looked up, met his eye.

  ‘You’re smiling to yourself.’

  She touched her lips. Linden was watching her intently, mouth parted, eyes alert. She saw then what she had only half-guessed before: he was attracted to her. The certain knowledge of it was strangely deflating, like at a fairground, when the playing for a prize is more exciting than the winning of it.

  He smiled slowly, revealing long incisors. The image of a wolf came to mind.

  Her head had started to pound, and she wished she had skipped the meeting, gone straight home to bed. She wanted to eat something, shower.

  The airless confines of the room were causing her head to spin. Pushing to her feet, she moved to the far wall, which was dotted with black and white prints of Shakespearean quotes. She looked at the nearest one.

  “And though she be but little, she be fierce.”

  A Midsummer’s Night Dream

  ‘Are you?’ he asked.

  She hadn’t heard him move, slide out of his chair, come around his desk so that he was standing right behind her, his mouth close to her ear.

  Uneasiness spread through her: the proximity of him, the shut door, the suggestiveness of his tone. She wanted to step back but was hemmed in by a filing cabinet to her right, a wall to her left, and behind her, was him.

  She could feel his breath against her neck.

  She thought then of the oddness of being offered a lift home by Linden a few weeks earlier. Of the strange night she’d been followed to work and had turned and seen him. Of the shadowy figure down by the train tracks, his gaze on her window. Her stomach tightened with the sudden understanding.

  ‘I need to—’

  Her words were cut off by the twist of his fingers in her hair, wrapping the length of it around his fist.

  Her head snapped back. There was the sensation of burning across the centre of her scalp, the scrape of fingers against her thigh as his other hand lifted the hem of her dress, yanked down her underwear.

  Her throat was stretched so far back that her cry of ‘No’ came out as a whisper. She felt the sharp corner of the metal filing cabinet against her hip, smelt the spearmint bite of mouthwash, overlaid with cigarettes. Then pain, white and flooding.

  Her thoughts seemed to detach from her body, rise to the ceiling. Her eyes fixed on the edge of a strip light, where a moth lay trapped in its plastic casing. She felt the beat of its wings as it tried, over and over, to take off into flight, the soft fibres of its body working against the ungiving plastic. She was willing it to find the gap it had entered by, but it was trapped, useless. She imagined the light sticky grip of the moth’s legs as if it had landed on her chest, the dusty cover of its dark wings as they settled silently over her heart. It would die there, she knew.

  There was a grunt, a sigh close to her ear.

  A moment later, her hair was released from his fist. He stepped back. She heard a zip. A buckle. The squeak of leather as he re-seated himself behind his desk.

  There was a knock at the office door. Luke Linden looked at her, smiled, then held one finger to his lips.

  ‘Sssh.’

  He clasped his hands together on top of a sheaf of papers, before saying, ‘Yes?’

  A secretary had a message from a student’s mother. The secretary didn’t cross the threshold into his office. If she had, she would have seen Elle still pressed against the filing cabinet, her face white, the sleeve of her dress falling from one shoulder.

  ‘Thank you, Lynn,’ he’d said affably. ‘You can leave the door open, thanks.’

  What amazed her was that, after the secretary had left, Luke Linden had signalled to the seat in front of his desk and said, ‘So, about this essay of yours …’

&nbs
p; She drifted through Bute Park, every sound startlingly acute – the rasping voice of a passer-by talking into a phone, the yip of a small dog nosing a ball closer to its owner’s feet, the dig of a trowel through the dark earth of a flowerbed.

  Reaching her student house, she went straight to her room, locked the door. She heard the rattling of a train along the track beyond the house – and pulled the blind. She threw a scarf over her mirror, concealing the full length of it. Her whole body shook as she undressed. She put everything she’d been wearing into a bin bag: dress, underwear, shoes. Knotted it three times.

  In the shower she lathered soap over every inch of her body, while Claire banged on the door, yelling, ‘Hurry the fuck up!’

  Elle turned the dial further until water scalded her skin like hot needles. She angled her face up into the stream of liquid, letting it pour into her nostrils, her open mouth, the corners of her eyes.

  Afterwards, she dried herself carefully. And then … then there was no other plan. No what to do next. She took out a book, tried to read, but couldn’t. She sat in the lounge and stared at a day-time television show while her housemates went to and from lectures, in and out of the kitchen, made cheese toasties and countless mugs of tea. She told anyone who asked that she was hungover – and they laughed and said no more.

  That night, she didn’t sleep. The television kept vigil, repeats of Friends playing through the dark hours, canned laughter like a drill in her head.

  The following morning, she stayed in her room until her housemates had left for lectures, and then she pushed her feet into trainers and began to walk.

  There was no route, no plan, no direction. Just her feet against pavements, turning down paths, walking in the shadows of buildings, rising over a bridge, passing a dock, a cement yard, a parade of shops.

  The beat of her steps finally stopped. Her heels were blistered, calves tight. She looked up at the building. Grey breeze blocks, weather-stained and blunt. From the flat roof, a flag whimpered in the breeze. A sign read:

  Police

  Heddlu