Shadow Over Sea And Sky

by K H Middlemass

  “Mum,” Emily said. “What did you think of him?”

  “Who, darling?”

  “Who do you think?” Emily was exasperated. “Mr Volkov!”

  “Oh,” Victoria said, her voice suddenly slipping back into a faint, sickly whisper. She lay back on the pillows, eyes drifting away. “Not much, darling, he barely said a word to me.”

  This was strange. Victoria was the sort of person that could get a conversation out of anyone, either through charm or sheer dogged determination. It was a gift of hers, one that she was intensely proud of. Had Volkov’s otherworldly ways caused her to clam up, the way Emily had? Had his eyes fogged her mind and twisted up her soul, leaving her mute and confused and unsure of everything she thought she knew? That wasn’t the Victoria that Emily knew, and it scared her.

  “Mum,” she said softly. “Why can’t you tell me?”

  Victoria slid further down the bed, looking like she was about to be swallowed up by the pillows. “I promise you, Emily, it’s nothing untoward. He’s just…” she searched for the words, “He’s complex. Distant.”

  “Not the sort of man you’re used to?” Emily guessed. Christopher, her father, was a warm and kind man above everything else, the sort of man you could always talk to no matter what the situation. Victoria’s face was creased in a quizzical expression, as if trying to figure out the answer for herself.

  “I suppose I just don’t understand what a man like that could possibly want in a place like this,” Victoria said. “It was strange, seeing him in Hugo’s house. He didn’t look right, like he didn’t belong.”

  Emily wasn’t expecting something as candid as that to come from her mother’s mouth or that her thoughts could be so close to her own on something. She had barely shed a tear at Hugo’s funeral despite having known him for years and for much longer than Emily had herself, in fact she had maintained a glacial composure throughout the entire affair. It wouldn’t have been unfair to assume that Victoria hadn’t cared about Hugo’s death in the slightest, but then the face she put on for the outside world was all most people saw of her, and the cracks that inevitably formed were only seen by those who knew her best; her husband and her children. She could have cried a river of tears behind closed doors, and she would be the only one to know it.

  “Do you miss Hugo?” Emily asked. She moved and hesitantly perched on the end of the bed; the smell of sleep and sickness was stronger here.

  “I do, darling,” Victoria sighed. Her hands idly smoothed down the rumpled duvet. “More than you realise. He was a friend of the family for years; I’d have to have a heart of stone not to miss him.”

  “It’s just…” Emily began hesitantly, “You don’t really show it.”

  Victoria blanched at that. “Just because I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve the way you and your father do doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings, Emily.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “You think it though, don’t you? Don’t lie. A mother can always tell.”

  “Are we having the same conversation we had yesterday all of a sudden?” Emily said indignantly. “I’m not trying to have a fight with you, mum.”

  There was a short, tense silence. Victoria shifted and turned on her side, bunching up the pillow beneath her hands.

  “Yes, Emily, I miss Hugo,” she said quietly, in a voice far too small for her. “I thought that having someone else up at the manor would be a good thing. For the town, I mean. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “But you’re all right with me working for him?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” Victoria said, shutting her eyes against the light. “I’m just being silly. You have to do what’s best for you.”

  Silence filled the room once more, broken only by the sound of Victoria’s even breathing. Emily looked at her mother for a while, feeling the time trickle down like sand through an hourglass. Again, she felt like she was being evaded; ‘Silly’ was not in her mother’s vocabulary. She wondered if the two of them would ever be compatible, or if their relationship was meant to be as combative and difficult as it often seemed.

  “We’ll arrange a dinner date soon,” Victoria whispered sleepily, and Emily wondered for a moment if this was Victoria speaking or simply unfiltered dream talk. The idea of dinner with Volkov, with her mother and father no less, was suddenly one of the least appealing things she could think of. She envisioned Victoria’s attempts to hide her distaste, Christopher’s authoritative stiffness, and shuddered.

  ***

  Emily spent the rest of the morning curled up in her window seat with her sketchbook propped up on her knees, the pages lifting lightly in the breeze coming in from her open window. She could smell the salt in the air, the sharp, cleanness of it, and found herself finally relaxing. She was holding a freshly-sharpened granite pencil, poised only inches away from the paper, but she was struggling to get started, finding her hand halting of its own accord whenever she tried to make that first mark on the page.

  She began to flip through the pages, hoping for some inspiration. The sketchbook was an old one, a gift from her parents for her eighteenth birthday. It was probably her favourite thing they had given her, one of the first real attempts to engage with her interests and show support in their own way. It was designed like an old journal, bound in dark leather with sheet after sheet of thick, creamy drawing paper. After four years, there were still plenty of pages left waiting to be filled. Emily only used it for the projects that she felt were deserving of being recorded there, the ones that meant the most to her. Looking back through it now was like looking through a window into the past, seeing herself growing up and away from her old self in every black smudge of pencil. Her style refined before her very eyes; the lines became smoother, the hand more self-assured as she progressed from simple still-life to more complex landscapes and more complicated figures. As she reached the middle of the book, the pages fell on either side of a crease in the spine, leaving Emily staring down at a sketch of Simone, her old best friend.

  She had drawn it one hazy weekend in her first year at university, on the single occasion that Simone had come to visit her. They had stayed up into the small hours, drinking cheap scotch and reminiscing about times gone by. Simone was sitting up, shoulders rounded and back hunched, rolling a joint between her skilled fingers. She was going through a punk phase back then. Her silky blond hair was cut in a short and spiky style, streaked with faded blue dye, and as a rule she favoured torn jeans, brightly coloured Doc Martens and liberal amounts of eyeliner. She was a fierce sort of beauty, Simone, the kind that Emily would never be, because she didn’t care how she looked. If anything, her decidedly nonconformist appearance only added to her allure. Emily was struck by her friend then, watching her rolling the thin paper around the tobacco, nose stud glinting under the light of the lamp on her dresser. Suddenly possessed, she picked up the nearest pencil and began to make a quick outline, trying to capture Simone’s pose as accurately as she could before she moved. Later, she added details through a cloud of smoke, the pencil wriggling across the page like a worm. Simone crawled along the bed and watched over her shoulder, passing the joint to her when required. When it was done, she rolled another, and another. Emily had never been so high in her life. She felt detached from the hand and the pencil completely, more like she was watching someone else, looking over her own shoulder the way Simone had done. Sometimes, when she drew, she got lost in herself like this, but the weed and the alcohol fuelled something new in her, something powerful.

  When it was done, the two stared at it in silence, the only sound the sound of each other’s breathing. Simone leant over Emily’s shoulder and traced the pencil with her finger. Her black nail varnish was chipped and peeling.

  “Damn, I look good,” she said, voice thick with smoke and scotch. “Really good.”

  It was one of the best pieces Emily had ever done. Looking at it now, she could see the immaturity of it, a rawer version of her more practiced hand, but it had mor
e worth than most of the things she had created in her time. Though it wasn’t an exact immortalisation, she had managed that rare thing: she had captured the essence of the subject. It was more than a reflection. It was Simone.

  Simone.

  Emily returned to the blank page. She lay back against the windowsill and closed her eyes. In her mind, she tried to conjure an image of Volkov, tried to remember him as clearly as she could. He began to form behind her eyelids, taking shape like a phantasm shifting form. She was struck suddenly by a flash of something, a pair of eyes staring into her own. Volkov’s eyes. She saw him standing in front of her, so close that they were almost touching. It came to her unbidden like a memory, and yet she could not recall how he had come to be so close to her, how she had come to be so close to him. Had it been the wine that had repressed it? Had it even happened? She opened her eyes again and found that her arms were pimpled with gooseflesh, the fine thin hairs standing upright. There was a faint scent permeating around her, the smell of what she could only describe as oldness, a familiar, nauseating odour that she couldn’t place. Her fingers were tingling with something indefinable, sparking in the fingertips. She put the pencil to paper and began to draw, silent but for the sound of the scratching of lead against paper. She worked carefully, hesitantly.

  By the time she was done, she had created a respectable likeness of her subject, but the critic inside her found it to be lacking. There was something missing, something indefinable. It wasn’t like when she’d drawn Simone; her movements hadn’t come as naturally as they should have, like she was fighting against herself to create it. She knew that she was lacking in confidence but couldn’t place the reason why. She tapped her pencil against the paper impatiently, practically staring a hole into the paper as she tried to figure it out. She looked at the drawing from every possible angle, inspected it closely and from a distance, holding the pad out at arms’ length, but no answer came. There was just something not right about it.

  Sighing heavily, she closed the book and let it drop to the floor in frustration. Not matter what she tried, her mind kept returning to Simone. She chewed the end of her pencil absentmindedly, feeling it crack slightly beneath the pressure of her teeth, and wondered what would happen if she and Simone were to meet again, what kind of feelings would be inevitably dredged up from it. They hadn’t parted on bad terms exactly, but that was the problem worrying at her insides. They hadn’t parted on bad terms; instead they had parted on no terms at all. Their friendship was in a bizarre state of suspension, neither here nor there, and to Emily that seemed far worse than if their friendship had been severed through anger or unhappiness. After all, Simone had been her one constant friend through everything; if it hadn’t been for her fearlessness, her wicked sense of humour, Emily would not have made it through school with her sanity intact. It was Simone that helped her to loosen up, encouraged her in her art when everyone else seemed unwilling, that helped her not to take herself so seriously. Simone was rebellious and dangerous and funny and everything Emily wasn’t; it was why she had been drawn to her in the first place, though even after all this time Emily couldn’t figure out what it was about herself that Simone found worthy of attention.

  Emily took the pencil out of her mouth and observed the imprints that her teeth had left upon the granite, tracing them lightly with her finger. She still knew Simone’s house number, each digit ingrained in her memory like a brand, but she didn’t know if that number still belonged to her. She could have moved on years ago despite dropping out of university with no qualifications to her name. There was no guarantee that she would have been pulled back here, kicking and screaming, the way Emily had been. Simone had lived in a small house with her single father, a grizzled and surly man named Pete who, for the most part, stayed out of his daughter’s life, and she returned the favour. They were less father and daughter and more housemates that merely tolerated each other’s existence, and Simone always answered the phone, or at least she used to whenever Emily called. Emily had spoken maybe ten words to the man in the years of their friendship. If she were to call now, maybe Simone would pick up. It seemed a risk worth taking. Emily was spending too much time alone these days and she knew it. Her behaviour was becoming increasingly solitary, preferring to while away the hours with her books and pencils, creating worlds and places she’d rather be than here. She could count on one hand how many times she had ventured out of the house since the funeral, and even then it was never to do anything more than stock up on supplies to aid her escapism. Even her visit with Volkov had been escapism too, of a sort; the dream-like way things had presented themselves as she drank the wine of gods in the house of a dead man. She hadn’t been out with people her own age since before she’d left the city, her leaving party, a fevered blur of an evening that presented nothing but vague shapes and colours in her memory.

  Emily tucked her pencil behind her ear, pushed herself off the window seat and forced herself out of her room. She checked in quickly on Victoria, peeking through the crack in the door so as not to disturb her. The water she had left for her had been drained from its glass, but Victoria was in the same position Emily had left her in. Her shoulder peaked and dropped with every breath, sleeping the sleep of the dead. Satisfied with what she saw, Emily took herself downstairs. Her parents kept the phone on a table by the door, a surprisingly old-fashioned thing where the receiver was still connected by a thick coil of wire. Emily passed a few, silent moments simply staring at the thing like it might metamorphose into a fanged beast that would sooner take her hand off than let her touch it. She felt ridiculous and though her arms were like lead, unwilling to be lifted and moved, she forced herself to confront the monster in front of her and dialled the number, slowly and methodically punching in the keys. The phone felt heavy in her hand as the tinny ring sounded once, twice, three times. Emily waited anxiously as each ring sounded, sitting herself in the middle of the bottom step. Finally, there was a click that broke the incessant, tinny claxon, opening a void to be filled.

  “Hello?”

  Emily’s heart jumped to her throat. It was Simone. That husky and confident voice, a little rougher from her years of hedonism, was so familiar, and she was there on the other end of the line, waiting.

  “Simone?” Emily said. Her voice cracked on the first syllable.

  “Speaking.”

  “It’s me. Emily.”

  There was silence for a few, painful moments. She gripped the phone tighter in her hand.

  “Well, hello stranger,” Simone said finally. “I was wondering when you’d call.”

  She sounded guarded, like she was choosing her words carefully. Emily swallowed nervously.

  “You knew I was back?”

  Simone snorted. “Of course I did. Nothing stays a secret for long. Not around here.”

  “It wasn’t a secret,” Emily said a little too fast.

  “Oh, wasn’t it?” Simone’s voice had an edge to it now. “How long have you been back?”

  Emily closed her eyes. “About a month.”

  “Oh, is that all?” The accusation was clear.

  “You know I didn’t want to come back,” Emily said. “Neither did you.”

  “I didn’t have much choice,” Simone retorted. “There aren’t a lot of opportunities for drop outs like me.”

  “About as many as there are for art graduates,” Emily said, realising with distaste that she was parroting her mother. Simone made a noise in the back of her throat.

  “Touché.”

  “I suppose I was just embarrassed,” Emily admitted, “Coming back a failure.”

  “Yeah,” Simone sighed, “I get that. Life’s a bitch.”

  And then you die. The rest of the phrase hung in the air, unspoken but keenly felt by both.

  “Anyway,” Emily said, as a diversion. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “For the same reasons you didn’t call me, I suppose.”

  There was silence again. Emily supposed it was too much
to expect that Simone wouldn’t hold any anger or resentment against her, but it hurt nonetheless. She didn’t deserve to feel pain, she knew. She hadn’t fought for Simone or her friendship; she had stood aside and watched the distance between them grow and grow. She was to blame for Simone’s hesitancy just as much as Simone was to blame for hers.

  “I’m sorry,” Emily said softly. “You’re right, I should have called sooner.”

  She listened to the whistling of Simone exhaling heavily through her noise, something she always did when she was considering something.

  “Yeah, you should have,” she said, finally. Her voice had softened now, the anger gone from her words. “I’ve been going out of my mind. I can’t remember the last time I spoke to someone from the outside world. You’re practically a celebrity.”

  Relief flooded through Emily as the conversation relaxed, thankful to know that despite everything else, Simone was still Simone. She had never been the type to hold a grudge for long.

  “I haven’t really seen anyone,” Emily said, coiling the phone cord around her finger. “Not since the funeral, and even then I only spoke to the reverend.”

  “Rock and Roll,” Simone said blithely. “You went to the Fairbanks funeral?”

  “Mayor’s daughter, remember?” Emily said. “Anyway, I liked Hugo. I wanted to say goodbye.”

  “What kind of girl in her twenties hangs around with rich old buggers and men of the cloth? You’re not so desperate you’ve turned to escorting, are you?”

  Emily laughed; it was full and unrestrained. “Not desperate. Just unconventional.”

  “I can dig that, but you’re clearly starved for female company,” Simone said. “Doctor’s orders. You doing anything today?”

  “That’s why I called,” Emily said. “Do you want to get coffee or something? It could be like a reunion.”

  “God, I thought you’d never ask. I’ve been dying a slow, painful death just waiting for someone, anyone, to phone me up and ask me out for coffee.”