by Lucy Clarke
I want her to make a joke, something dry and barbed to cut through my anxiety, but instead her gaze slides away from me – and that’s when I realise.
I stiffen, my voice lit. ‘You don’t believe me.’
She turns slowly, looks right at me. Her gaze is searching, as if she is looking for something recognisable in my face.
‘You think I pinned a dead moth to my own coat? Deleted my own manuscript?’ My fingertips turn white as I press them into the granite counter.
After a moment she says, ‘Why, Elle? Why would anyone do these things to you?’ She is looking at me expectantly.
Because, I think, I deserve it.
Tears threaten to spill from the corners of my eyes. ‘I don’t want to stay here tonight.’
She nods slowly. ‘I’ll make up the sofa bed.’
‘Thank you.’
She takes out her phone, sends a quick message to let Bill know I’ll be coming, then sets her phone on the counter.
‘Do you want me to drive you?’
‘I’ll follow. I need to pack a few bits.’
Fiona looks at me. ‘It’s going to be okay, Elle.’
I swallow, nod.
She hands me the wooden spoon. ‘Now, stir that. I need to pee.’
I lean against the range cooker, stirring methodically. The smell of warming chocolate reaches me and is followed by a wave of exhaustion. All I want to do is shut my eyes, sleep, let everything else fade away.
Ringing cuts across the kitchen. It’s Fiona’s phone.
‘I’ll get it,’ I call, swiping at the screen. ‘Hello?’
‘Is this Fiona Henley’s number?’
‘Yes, it is. I’m her sister, Elle.’
‘Elle with the cliff-top house?’
‘Yes …’
‘Joanna Elmer. From Airbnb. I was meant—’
‘Joanna?’ I say, staggered. I’m filled with a burst of sheer and brilliant relief that she is real, that she exists. ‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you,’ I rush. ‘I messaged you, but your account has been closed down.’
‘Yes. That hacking problem. Very frustrating.’
Her voice is crisply articulate, well-educated – a voice that fits her profile picture exactly. All those dark-winged thoughts about the mystery person who rented my house scatter. Joanna and her family stayed here, in this house.
‘I’m pleased I got through to you,’ Joanna says, and I notice the tightening in her tone. ‘I’ve been talking to some friends who’ve used Airbnb a great deal, and they’ve led me to realise that it was incorrect for me to pay the full amount. I don’t want to be difficult – and I should have thought of this at the time, but with everything that was happening, my mind was elsewhere, as I’m sure you can understand – but anyway, I’ve had a chance to look back through the terms and conditions, and they do clearly state that in the case of a cancellation more than twenty-four hours before, that fifty per cent of the original balance should be paid.’ She draws a breath. ‘It was more than twenty-four hours before, by the way. I checked. It was twenty-six hours if we’re being pernickety.’
‘A cancellation?’ My heart stalls.
‘Yes. When I rang to cancel, your manager didn’t tell me that I was entitled to a partial refund.’
I’m staring into the pan, a milky skin forming on the end of the wooden spoon.
‘Are you telling me that you didn’t stay in the cliff-top house?’
‘I explained it all to the manager,’ she says, a hint of exasperation in her tone. ‘My sister-in-law had appendicitis, so we had to go up to the Midlands to look after her children and …’
‘And you told all this to my … to Fiona?’
‘She was very sweet about it, said it wasn’t a problem. But there was no talk of a refund or rescheduling. In the heat of the drama, I didn’t question it. It’s only now that I think it was, well, rather unfair.’
I turn very cold. If Joanna and her family didn’t stay here, why hadn’t Fiona told me? Had she kept the rental money for herself?
No, of course she hadn’t – the payment had come directly into my account. I’d seen the transaction on my online statement.
Why, then?
I recall the evening I arrived back from France. The house was clean and much as I’d left it, save for a few items Joanna’s family had left behind – a pot of nappy rash cream, a toy giraffe, and some hair wax. If they hadn’t belonged to Joanna’s family, whose were they?
‘The refund?’
My attention is jolted back to the call. Joanna is waiting for some sort of answer.
‘Yes … yes, you can have the refund. I’ll organise it right away.’
I end the call and set Fiona’s mobile on the counter.
Directly above me, I can hear Fiona’s footsteps. Hadn’t she said she was going to the bathroom? Only the bathroom isn’t above the kitchen: my bedroom is.
My heartbeat gathers pace as I listen to her crossing the landing, descending the stairs. I am still standing by the counter when Fiona returns to the kitchen.
‘Did I hear my phone go?’
‘It was mine.’
I glance up and find Fiona looking at me carefully. ‘Everything okay?’
I force myself to nod, smile. I move to the stove, keeping my gaze on the pan.
‘You get off. I’ll drink this, pack my stuff, and follow on.’
Fiona steps closer, so that she is standing at my back. She leans her head over my shoulder, so our cheeks are almost touching.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You ruined it.’
I freeze.
‘The hot chocolate. You let the milk burn.’
I take the stairs, keeping the lights off. I pause at the landing window and watch my sister cross the driveway towards her car.
Air leaves my lungs in shallow puffs. My face is pressed so close to the window that a small cloud of condensation forms on the glass.
Why didn’t Fiona tell me that Joanna had cancelled her reservation?
Someone stayed here, that I am certain of. Had Fiona double-let it? Taken the money from a second family and kept it?
Another possibility comes forward: Drake had been staying with Bill’s parents the same week that I’d been away. Fiona had been on her own. When she learned that Joanna was cancelling the booking, maybe she had decided to stay here instead.
As I watch Fiona climb into her car, I recall Enid’s remark that she’d seen someone in the room at the top of this house.
Fiona?
As a child, I remember the way Fiona would wander into my room, casually looking through my things, her fingers flicking through the pages of my exercise books or turning over my pencil case to examine the doodling on the back. She’d pluck free a letter I’d written to a friend, reading it with her back against the wall as if my property were hers.
If Fiona had found her way into my writing room, her curiosity would’ve been piqued. I picture her moving across the room, glancing at the titles on my bookshelf, pulling open my desk drawers. And then what? Where did she stop?
The skin across the nape of my neck tightens as I picture the word carved into the leg of my writing desk. Liar.
A single thought ticks back and forth: She has found it.
I race to the top of the house, taking the stairs two at a time.
My palm smacks at the light switch. I rush straight to the oak trunk, yank open the lid, and begin pulling out journals, diaries, old notebooks. I’m looking for a tan leather cover, timeworn and soft.
I cast aside the bundle of cards from Flynn, an old mix tape, a notebook covered in Polaroid images, a file with a geometric pattern of daisies.
Where is it?
It should be right here at the bottom of the trunk, hidden beneath photo albums and notebooks. I haven’t looked inside the file for months – it makes it easier to pretend it doesn’t exist.
The floor around me is a spill of letters and photos and diaries. Then I spot it – an edge of leather
, the mark of time showing in the softened corners of the file. It is still in the trunk! My heart skips with relief.
I draw out the file, but as I do, I’m aware that something is wrong. The weight of it in my hands is off-beat, the thickness incorrect.
My breathing is shallow as I open the cover.
No …
The file is completely empty.
I turn sharply, alert. I haven’t heard the crunch of gravel beneath tyres.
Getting to my feet, I cross the writing room, moving swiftly down the dark stairway. Reaching the landing window, I pause there, leaning close, hands pressed to the cold glass.
Fiona’s car is still parked in the drive. The interior light is on and I watch as Fiona takes out her mobile, the screen casting a cool glow on her face. She is checking something on her phone.
Then my sister lifts her gaze, until she is looking right up at the house, as if she knows I am standing here against the dark window.
A beat later, the car door opens.
Fuck!
The floodlights burst to life. A shiver peels down my spine as I watch my sister approach my front door.
I brace myself for the sound of the knocker. I don’t have to let her in. I could pretend I haven’t heard – that I was in the shower.
I need time to think. Need to get everything straight.
But there is no knock at the door.
There is the sound, faint and low, of a key in a lock. Then a cold breeze travelling up the stairway. I can hear the edges of the blinds in the hall move, the cord tapping against the window pane. And then it stops. The door has been shut.
Fiona is inside.
33
Elle
‘Have a sense of how your story will end – but allow yourself to step into your character’s shoes and be surprised.’
Author Elle Fielding
I wait by the window, barely breathing. Blood pulses in my ears as I listen to the rhythmic clack of boot heels as Fiona rises through the house.
I catch the swish of her long coat on the staircase, the slide of her bracelets against the polished wood bannister.
I move then, turning, lurching upstairs to the top of the house, reaching for the light. I stand in the illuminated doorway, arms outstretched, blocking the entrance of my writing room.
Fiona emerges slowly from the stairway: the crown of her head, the dark rise of her brows, the straight line of her nose, the black fall of her coat with her handbag strung from one shoulder. On the landing, she halts. She looks straight at me, eyes glittering, a white, pinched look to her face.
She says nothing.
Silence wraps around us, pulling us deeper into each other’s gazes. We are exactly the same height, I think, her eyes matching mine.
My heart is beating hard, fast. It feels as if something is straining beneath my skin, a pressure against a seam that is threatening to tear.
Eventually I say, ‘You let yourself into my house.’
‘I have a key.’ Her voice is nothing I recognise. Flat, emotionless. A dead voice.
‘I had the locks changed.’
‘You keep a spare in your bureau.’
My God.
Fiona places her long-boned hands into the wide pockets of her coat. ‘You answered my phone to Joanna.’
My voice emerges as something strange, thin. ‘She never stayed here.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Who did?’
Fiona’s mouth curves into the lightest of smiles. ‘I think you’ve already worked out the answer.’
I look at my sister. ‘You.’
A single nod.
‘Why?’
‘Joanna cancelled. The house was completely empty – all paid for. Why not?’
‘That’s not a reason.’
‘I need a better one, do I? Then, how about this: Drake was with Bill’s parents. I had brochure copy to finish and knew I’d be distracted working at home, so I decided to stay in your house. The writer’s house.’
The coldness of that last sentence hits like a spray of ice.
‘If you’d asked, I’d have let you stay.’
‘I called you in France. Three times.’
‘I didn’t have reception. But you could have told me afterwards—’
Fiona laughs, a sharp brittle note. I expect her to say something further, but there is nothing more.
I listen to the distant roll and crash of waves breaking beyond the house.
‘Your car wasn’t here,’ I pitch into the quiet.
‘I took a taxi. I wanted everything to be different. I wanted to walk into this house on my own – not as your sister, not as a wife, or a mother – but just as me.’ Her voice is emotionless, a knife turned blunt. ‘I wanted to come here, into this serene, quiet space, and experience the privilege which you live with daily: to sit at your own desk, looking out over the water, and write.’
‘This room was locked.’
Fiona shrugs, and in that gesture I understand that my sister thought nothing of breaking in. Dread tightens in my chest: once Fiona stepped inside my writing room, I know exactly what she’d have found.
She comes towards me – and I step back.
Fiona skirts me, hands pushed deep into the pockets of her winter coat. I watch her enter my writing room, and I’m reminded of the way she would wander into my childhood bedroom, her gaze sweeping along my shelves, moving across my wardrobe, running over the soft toys huddled at the head of my bed. She would seize upon something – a favourite picture book, a pen in a glittering shade – and decide to take it back to her own room, just to borrow it, because We must share, Elle. Had that been the assertion of an older, strong-willed sibling? Or had there always been a sense of entitlement – as if Fiona knew she could take whatever she wished from me?
‘Do you know,’ Fiona begins, chin raised, voice steely, ‘since you’ve had this house, I’ve only been up to your writing room once? It was before you’d finished it completely. You wanted to show me this desk.’
She sets her handbag on top of it. Her fingertips trace the grain in the wood.
‘I can imagine how hard Flynn must have worked to restore it. A writer’s desk – for his little writer. He believed in you so completely.’ She eases out the top drawer, as if admiring the smoothness of the runners, the craftsmanship. She doesn’t close it.
‘I wondered why you never brought me up here. I guessed it was because you felt awkward. Here you were with the ultimate writer’s room. The resplendent oak desk with the sea view. The wide, open space uncluttered by crap. The beautifully upholstered reading chair. It’s perfect, Elle. Truly. You’ve created a sanctuary. Perhaps you were being tactful in not wanting to shove this down my throat, that’s what I thought, because who wouldn’t feel a little whisper of envy?’
I stare at my sister, aware of the unevenness of my breathing.
‘I sat right here, at your desk. It was the first time since Drake that I’d had time to myself, to write. Of course, I don’t get the freedom to write what I want, like you. That – to pull a story together from images in your mind – that’s a magician’s trick. A privilege.’
She pauses, her gaze sliding to my bookcase.
‘Do you remember those books I used to make as a child? I’d take a pile of paper from Mum’s printer, and fold the sheets in half, stapling the centre to make the spine of a book. I’d write endless stories, then line them up on my bookshelf, imagining that they were mine, published.’
I listen closely, my senses keen to the inflections in her tone.
‘I finished writing the brochure copy in two days. It’s incredible quite how much one can achieve without distractions. Once I was finished, I sat at your desk, looking out, feeling a strange absence of purpose. It unsettled me – Drake being away, Bill working, you in France, Mum gone.’
She pauses again, as if her thoughts are wandering in a new direction. ‘When we cleared out Mum’s flat, I barely kept anything. A couple of pieces of her r
ose-gold jewellery, some photos, that peacock-print scarf I loved. I’m sure you thought I was ruthless when I boxed up the rest. But I didn’t want her clothes or her books or her furniture or her record collection: I wanted her.
‘I wish someone had told me that, later, I may want those things. I knew you’d kept more and so I went over to your trunk,’ she says, crossing the room towards it. ‘I wanted to look at some photos of Mum or see if there was anything special you’d kept.’
Fiona kneels in front of the trunk among the sprawl of photos and notebooks.
‘There’s an album in here that I hadn’t seen in years. It was from one of our trips to Cornwall. We came to this bay. Picnicked here.’
She reaches for a navy photo album, pale fingers turning through the sleeves until she locates the photo she is after.
‘Look,’ she says, holding it up. ‘You can see the original fisherman’s cottage that stood on the cliff.’
Fiona is right. I haven’t noticed it before and now feel a strange sense of connection, a gossamer thread running between our past and present.
‘Mum always wanted it. She pointed it out to us as girls, said how much she’d loved it, couldn’t imagine any better place to write.’
I blink slowly. Had she? I have a vague childhood memory of sitting on a red tasselled blanket in the bay below, our mother looking up at the cliff.
‘But you had to knock it down. Build something bigger, grander.’
I go to speak, but Fiona has picked up another photo. It shows our mother perched in the window seat of the caravan we used to rent, a notebook balanced on her knees, a curtain of hair falling to one side of her face as she writes. It is clear she hadn’t known the photo was being taken, and I can’t recall now whether it’d been me or Fiona behind the camera.
Fiona looks up, her gaze unflinching. ‘Mum always wanted to be a writer. It was her dream, wasn’t it?’
I say nothing.
‘I carried on looking through the trunk. There are so many precious things in here – photos and letters and diaries and notebooks. And then I came across something that caught me completely off-guard.’
My breathing is shallow now, harder to draw.
‘It was a leather-bound file. At first, I thought it was another photo album.’
