The Shadow Year

by Hannah Richell

  Carla rolls her eyes. ‘Ignore him, Freya,’ she says. ‘He wouldn’t notice if you’d knocked through a wall and built a huge extension out the back. It looks great.’

  ‘It really does,’ says Simon, putting his book down and staring across at the small jug of purple flowers in the window. ‘It’s the little things, isn’t it,’ he says. ‘It’s what we’ve been missing without even knowing it: the touches that really make this place feel like a home.’ He smiles warmly at Freya.

  Kat turns to Simon in surprise. She has never taken him for a man to be impressed by flowers and soft furnishings and she shakes her head and throws her sister a little wink of congratulation, pleased that Simon is accepting her sister’s presence while at the same time trying to bury the tiny, irrational flicker of jealousy that has sprung from nowhere. They’ve been here nearly two months and she doesn’t remember Simon ever praising her efforts in that way. She takes a sip of Ben’s caustic homebrew and swallows it down with a grimace.

  ‘So, is he like your leader or something?’ Freya asks later that evening as she and Kat lie side by side on the mattress, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘Who?’ asks Kat, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Simon.’

  Kat gazes up into the emptiness above their heads. ‘No. What makes you say that?’

  ‘I just noticed that you’re all pretty quick to defer to him.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Yes it is. Whatever Simon says goes.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Think about it, even me staying on here was his decision in the end.’

  Kat considers her sister’s suggestion for a moment then shakes her head. ‘It’s not like that. We decide things as a group. No one person is the boss here. We’re a team.’

  The silence stretches in the darkness. ‘You like him though, don’t you?’ Freya says at last. ‘You can tell me. I’m not a kid any more.’

  ‘I know you’re not.’ Kat thinks about telling Freya. She wonders what it would feel like to say it out loud; to speak her desire for Simon and acknowledge it to someone other than herself for the very first time. The words burn on the tip of her tongue but she can’t release them yet, not even into the darkness of the room, not even to Freya. ‘Go to sleep,’ she says, ‘I’m tired.’

  But Freya seems far from sleep. She wants to chat. ‘Ben and Carla are fun, aren’t they?’

  ‘Mmmm . . .’ agrees Kat.

  ‘Have they been together long?’

  ‘For ever. Three years or so.’

  ‘And what’s Mac like?’

  Kat sighs. ‘I don’t know. Nice. He’s quiet though . . . sometimes he can come across as a bit odd. He likes to keep himself to himself, but I think he’s a good guy deep down.’

  ‘He seems sweet. Maybe he’s just a little shy?’

  ‘Maybe,’ agrees Kat.

  Kat thinks Freya is falling asleep but a moment later she starts up again. ‘It’s OK, me being here, isn’t it? You don’t mind?’

  ‘No,’ says Kat, ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Because I could always—’

  ‘Shhh . . .’ says Kat, ‘go to sleep. We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.’

  Freya huffs but she rolls away onto her side and finally goes quiet.

  Kat lies there in the dark on her back with her eyes open listening to the distant rumble of Ben’s snores coming from the room next door. She feels the mattress holding her body, the quilt like a warm cocoon wrapped around her; but after a while the pitch black becomes strangely disorienting and she begins to feel that she is no longer lying on a solid floor, but rather floating – a tiny particle drifting through space.

  She swallows and closes her eyes and tries to rid herself of the unnerving feeling. What she would really like is to have Simon’s arms wrapped around her, to feel his skin pressed against hers, his breath on her neck. What she would really like is to anchor herself to his warm body. But she knows he won’t come to her – not while Freya is there – so she comforts herself with her memories of him: the taste of warm blackberries on her tongue, hands moving across her skin, lips pressed hard upon hers, fingers tangled in her hair, until gradually she surrenders to the slow pull of sleep.

  7

  LILA

  October

  The baby is crying. Lila stirs beneath her woollen blanket as the piercing cries ring out. One more minute, she thinks from deep within her fog of sleep, just one more minute, please little one.

  Another shrill cry breaks through the night air and then, as suddenly as if a bucket of ice-cold water has been tipped over her, Lila is awake. Her eyes snap open in the darkness. She lies still, hardly daring to breathe.

  There is no crying. There is no baby. It’s just a dream.

  The empty feeling expands in Lila’s gut, as cold and hard as stone. She wraps her arms around her body and blinks, searching for something to fix upon in the pitch black but it’s too late; the panic is descending. She can feel it pressing down on her, squashing the breath from her lungs, filling her up. Take a breath, she tells herself. Take a breath. Slow it down.

  She shifts slightly and the thin strip of canvas of her camp bed creaks beneath her. The sound tells her exactly where she is: upstairs in the musty old cottage beside the lake, lying on an uncomfortable camp bed, swaddled in a sleeping bag with a woollen blanket thrown over her for warmth. She nearly hadn’t bothered with the bed or the extra blanket when it had come to lugging them across the meadow and down over the ridge but she’s glad now that she did. The bed may not be luxurious, but she knows that it’s a damn sight better than the floorboards would be. She tries not to think about Tom, sprawled across their bed at home, illuminated in the neon wash of a street lamp – tries not to think about how very far away from him she is at that moment. Instead, she shifts again on the thin canvas and tries to find a more comfortable position before turning her mind back to her dream.

  She’s always been a dreamer, always been one of those people connected to the shadows of her inner-consciousness, that mysterious part of the brain that takes over when sleep comes and the body shuts down. Since losing Milly, however, she’s come to dread that sensation of going under. She lies in bed, teetering on the edge of sleep, then, just as her mind begins to numb and her breathing slows, she jolts awake, the sensation far too reminiscent of her sickening tumble down the stairs.

  Even worse, when sleep does eventually come, it is fitful and disturbed, her dreams now escalating into full-blown nightmares. Sometimes it’s the fall – she spirals through darkness, plunging endlessly towards the ground, waiting for an impact that never comes; sometimes, too, it’s the lake – she wades out through its still, cool waters, moving beyond the shallows until her feet can’t touch the bottom and she flounders and splashes until the dark water closes over her head; but tonight it’s the baby – she dreams about her daughter’s tiny curled hands and her navy blue eyes and she hears her heart-wrenching cries calling out for her in the night until she is filled with such an overwhelming need to hold her again that she could cry out loud in pain.

  She’d thought getting away from London might help. She’d thought a complete change of scene would allow her to rest and relax, maybe even retrieve some of her lost memories. But something about the deep silence and the absolute black of night there beside the lake seem to create a fertile ground for her imagination. The cottage, it transpires, is a place for dreaming deeply and instead of getting easier, Lila finds herself even more troubled than before. She gulps at the cool night air. Breathe, she tells herself again, just breathe.

  Gradually, her heartbeat slows. She takes another breath and closes her eyes. When the panic has eased a little, she takes a moment, lying there in the darkness, to do what she does every night now when sleep fails her. The doctor had told her that she might never fully remember the fall, but she simply can’t accept that; she needs to remember so that she can understand and, perhaps, begin to let it go. She screws her eyes shu
t against the night and begins to run through the few, fragmented memories she retains.

  She is back in her bedroom in London, sunlight streaming through the window, slanting onto the embroidered silk quilt spread across the bed behind her. She stands before the full-length mirror and reaches for a stretchy black top. She wrestles it on but it doesn’t fit properly – it’s too tight across her swollen belly and makes her feel even bigger than she is – so she pulls it off again, throwing it onto the growing pile of discarded clothes strewn across the bed. Impatiently, she reaches for another top and pulls it on, the pink silk fabric making her hair crackle with static. She turns back to the mirror and studies her face . . . her blue eyes shining with health and her cheeks plump with pregnancy hormones, a strand of blond hair falling free from her messy top-knot, the twisted gold earrings Tom gave her as a gift on her last birthday catching the light at her lobes. The details are all there, crystal clear . . . until they fade suddenly, like a mirror clouding over . . . and then there is nothing. Her mind is blank – nothing but blackness – until a connection rewires in her brain and she hears the steady beeping of machines, listens to fast footsteps slapping across a linoleum floor and breathes in the unmistakable disinfectant smell of a hospital ward. It’s all she has.

  Lila shakes her head and starts again. She replays the scene over and over, willing something new – anything – to surface until eventually tiredness creeps over her, threatening to draw her down once more. She shifts on the canvas bed, pulls her blanket up closer to her chin. She will sleep now, she knows it. She can feel its warm pull and she is just about to surrender to it when the silence around her is shattered by a loud, bloodcurdling wail.

  Lila stiffens. The baby. It’s the same plaintive cry, the same shrill sound as from her dream; only this time Lila knows she isn’t dreaming. She is very much awake and the sound is not only very real, but also very close. Fear bucks in her belly as the cry echoes through the cottage then fades away into the night. Her blood runs as cold as the surrounding air.

  Fighting the urge to bury her head beneath the blanket, she untucks an arm from her sleeping bag and reaches out into the darkness, fumbling for her phone. She unlocks the screen and sees that it is 02:34 and that she has no mobile reception. There are still hours of night to get through.

  The cry comes again, closer now, echoing once more through the empty cottage. Lila stifles a whimper and thinks about her options. She could slide out of bed and grope her way towards the light switch over by the door. She could tiptoe downstairs and search for a weapon to hide beneath her pillow, something that would make her feel a little safer: a hammer . . . the bread knife . . . the metal poker from beside the fire? Or perhaps she should race out into the night and hurry up the ridge and across the meadow all the way back to her car. She could admit that she has made a terrible mistake and drive home to London and to Tom just as fast as she can.

  In the end, even the thought of leaving the safety of her sleeping bag, of tiptoeing through the cold cottage, of navigating those creaking stairs and creeping through the empty, downstairs rooms is terrifying. She realises that she would rather lie there paralysed on a bone-jarring bed in a falling-down cottage in the middle of nowhere and await her fate at the hands of some eerie ghost-baby or crazed axe murderer than confront whatever it is that is making that blood-curdling noise. Lila swallows a hysterical laugh. Why is she here, alone in this deserted place? Why did she ever think coming here would be a good idea? This is it, she realises: she’s finally lost it.

  Another haunting wail rings out in the darkness. It is such a strange noise, so raw, so primal . . . so animal; and all of a sudden it hits her: of course, she has heard this sound before. It’s not a newborn baby crying for its mother, but a fox shrieking out a warning: mine, stay away. She’s heard them once or twice in London, seen their scraggy silhouettes slinking round the council rubbish bins, crying to one another in the orange glow of the street lamps. Thank God, she thinks. Just imagine if she’d gone rushing home to Tom, all because of a fox. She lies there enjoying the sensation of relief washing over her. No need to leave, not just yet anyway.

  She shifts once more on the camp bed. It really is horribly uncomfortable and she is wide awake again, adrenalin coursing through her veins. If she were feeling brave she would get up. She would light a fire, make tea, sit up and wait for the sun to rise. She’d forgotten all about Tom’s warning of birds’ nests and fires when she’d arrived back at the cottage and the past two nights she’s enjoyed a roaring fire in the hearth and hasn’t burned the old place down yet. Perhaps she could invest in an electric heater as well, if she’s going to stay up here a little longer?

  She thinks about the logs in the basket beside the fire and wonders how many were left before she retired to bed. She should have refilled it earlier. This is the way she must think now, she realises; she can’t take anything for granted. Up here it’s a different kind of existence and she is on her own. She must plan and organise. Nothing is going to just fall into her lap.

  And then the thought is there, rattling with noisy insistence. The tatty wicker basket filled with firewood that had been standing so neatly, so conveniently beside the fireplace when she’d returned – had it been there that very first time, when she and Tom had visited the cottage together? With a shiver, she realises that she doesn’t remember. Or perhaps, if it had been there, it had been empty? She can’t recall. It is too confusing. She wracks her brain. They had been excited and distracted that first visit. She probably hadn’t taken in half of the cottage and its state of disrepair – but surely she would have remembered a basket with a neat pile of tinder-dry logs and kindling, just waiting for her to lay a fire? And if the logs weren’t there that very first visit, how on earth had they got there since? It’s almost, she realises, as if someone has left them for her . . . as if someone has been expecting her.

  The thought sends a shudder down her spine. Why was she sent the key to this cottage? Who is behind it and what can they possibly want from her? More to the point, why has she allowed herself to be led there, alone, in this strange and isolated place? First nightmares and crying babies, then foxes and mysterious gifts of firewood. Lila swallows and knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she won’t be getting any more sleep.

  Braving the cold, she stretches out one arm again until her hand connects with the bottle of pills standing beside the camp bed. She twists the lid off and shakes two of them out into her hand, and then, before she can change her mind, she swallows them down and pulls the blanket up over her head. If she’s going to be murdered in a random cottage in the middle of nowhere, she might as well be in a vaguely comatose state when it happens.

  When morning eventually dawns it is cold and pale. Her breath hangs as a white fog in the air, reminding Lila of the cobwebs strung across the corners of each room. She is tired and her mind is still groggy from the pills, but there’s a restless energy building in her limbs, too. She doesn’t want to lie on that bed a moment longer. She wants to get cracking. There is so much to do.

  She throws off her sleeping bag and blankets then sprints across the room to pull on jeans, woollen socks, two T-shirts, a fleece and a pair of sturdy leather boots, before descending the stairs and heading out the back door, across the grass frosted white like a cake, to where the horrible pit toilet looms. It would be nice to extend the cottage, to open out the kitchen and add a proper bathroom at the back. But those aren’t jobs for now; they are for the future, if she decides to keep the place.

  In the kitchen she slings cereal into a plastic bowl. As she wolfs it down, she looks around with a professional eye and begins to imagine the work she might do. There is no doubt in her mind that it is going to be an enormous project, but there are small things to celebrate already – the running water and the working electricity. She peers through the doorway into the front room and imagines the floorboards sanded and polished, the walls painted white and the windows gleaming in the sunshine, new curtains waftin
g in a summer’s breeze. In the kitchen she visualises the oak table scrubbed and the long wooden benches repaired, the old-fashioned kitchen range polished to a shine. Yes, she can see it all now, sparkling and clean, cosy and warm, with green apples in a bowl and tubs of herbs growing on the window sill. The transformation in her mind’s eye helps her to relax a little. This is what she does. This is what she’s good at.

  Above the range, she eyes the hole in the timber beam. She still can’t think of a single, reasonable explanation why a bullet hole would be there inside the cottage – nothing, at least, that doesn’t make her feel deeply uncomfortable – so she turns away from the shattered wood and focuses instead on the ancient cupboards and the blistered paint peeling from the window frames. The sight of fresh mouse droppings scattered across the floor gives her a moment’s pause and between mouthfuls of cereal she grabs a pen and scribbles ‘mousetraps’ onto her growing shopping list. If she could be bothered to light the range she would; it would be nice to have hot water for tea, but she is keen to get outside and take a proper look at the exterior of the property, so she eats the rest of her breakfast standing at one of the front windows, looking out across the lake, lying like a sheet of grey steel in the autumn light.

  Outside, a breeze has picked up. It sings across the water and whispers through the branches of the trees where leaves curl and crisp before tumbling slowly to the ground. She stares out over the lake and shivers. She just can’t seem to shake the feeling that the old place is trying to tell her something. It’s probably exhaustion, she thinks, but out here, all by herself, a person could definitely go a little crazy.

  The leak in the bedroom is the most pressing of all the issues she faces so it’s the roof she decides to look at first; until the cottage is watertight, there isn’t much point addressing anything else. She starts by studying it from below. Visible even to her untrained eye are the few slipped tiles around the chimney. That, and a crack in the flashing would probably be enough to create the cascade of water running into the bedroom on a rainy day. She’ll knows she’ll need to get a proper roofer out but she eyes the tiles and wonders where she’ll source a similar slate; she would prefer to restore the building to its original condition and use sympathetic, local materials where possible.