by Hannah Emery
It was as though Dr Barker knew exactly what had happened. He didn’t make an urgent attempt to reach for his big leather bag that he kept by the door. He didn’t swoop his big brown cloak over his gigantic shoulders. He just held out an old, papery hand and stroked Louisa’s head kindly, and gave her a grey handkerchief to dry away her seawater tears.
Louisa stayed in Dr Barker’s living room whilst he went out to try and find her mother. She sat alone with his half-eaten cheese sandwich (that explained the crumb, then), his ticking clock and his scratchy carpet. She kicked her heels against his fuzzy green chair, and realised that whenever she saw a cheese sandwich from now on, she would think of her lost mother wading into the sea.
She lifted a leg and kicked the plate from the table so that the sandwich split and fell to the ground.
Had her mother seen that from wherever she was now?
Louisa sprang to her feet and reassembled the soft spongy bread and waxy cheese. She put it on its plate and back onto the table, muttering something about kicking it by accident.
Just in case.
When Dr Barker returned, his face was puckered into a strange, sympathetic bundle of features. He took Louisa’s hand in his.
‘Louisa, my dear.’ Louisa waited for him to say more, for more words to come out from the depths of his beard. But none came. He shook his head and his eyes filled with grey water and turned pink around the edges. She looked down at his paper hands and at hers inside them.
‘You shall sleep here tonight,’ Dr Barker eventually said. ‘I’ll find you a blanket.’
So Dr Barker found Louisa a blanket and she found herself thinking about how much her mother would have liked the blanket because her mother loved colours and the blanket was made of hundreds of different colours, all wrapped around each other.
Louisa’s mother used to speak in colours. She used to ask what Louisa’s mood was, and Louisa would answer in a colour. It was a game Louisa liked and was good at. ‘Red’, she might say, if her day had made her angry; ‘blue!’ she would shout if she was cold; ‘yellow!’ she would holler if she felt happy and the sun was shining.
As Louisa lay wrapped in all the colours of the blanket on Dr Barker’s couch, she tried to think of a colour to describe how she felt now. But no colour came. Her mind and her thoughts were clear, like ice.
The next day, Dr Barker took Louisa back to her house. As they walked towards the front door, Louisa looked up at the grey building. It seemed different somehow: taller and more intimidating. Louisa could hear the sounds that she had always heard from the Pleasure Beach, but the squeals of joy now sounded more like screams of terror. They came in waves, like the waves of the sea.
The pie that Louisa had knocked over the day before was the only thing out of place. Its purple innards spewed out over the grey stone floor in a bloody mess and its sour scent drifted up around Louisa like a ghost.
‘Get together anything you want to bring with you, dear Louisa.’ The way Dr Barker spoke made Louisa want to cry. A lump of pain appeared in her throat. She tried to swallow it down as she climbed upstairs to her bedroom. The summer holidays had filled the small, square room with shells and books and socks, and Louisa had planned to tidy it up before she returned to school. Her copy of Bunty lay on the floor where she had dropped it after the vision of her mother the day before, making her feel sick and hot.
‘I don’t know what I’ll need.’
Dr Barker didn’t seem to know what a twelve-year-old girl with a missing mother might need either. But that didn’t matter. He knew to take Louisa’s hand, and to offer her his handkerchief and to walk beside her as she left her house behind.
Louisa stayed with Dr Barker for a time. She couldn’t remember how long. Those days were misshapen and blurry in her memory, as though they had been left outside and rained on. One day, while she was sitting in Dr Barker’s lounge, there finally came a moment when suddenly she felt a tiny crack of space opening between that terrible day when she had lost her mother and her life now. Dr Barker’s eyes twinkled when Louisa told him that she felt a little better and that she might be hungry. He slipped out of the room, leaving his newspaper and his reading glasses to peep at Louisa from the little table next to his chair. When he returned, he handed Louisa a plate with daisies around the rim and a ham sandwich stacked together in the centre. Louisa took a bite and focused on the daisies.
It was soon after the sandwich that Louisa found herself in Dr Barker’s car, which smelt faintly of leather and fish. Dr Barker was very quiet for most of the journey. It was after almost an hour when he turned to Louisa, his big hands settled on the steering wheel, and said:
‘Louisa, today is a very special day. Because today, you’re going to live with your father.’
Chapter Three
Grace, 2008
‘A toast is definitely in order!’ Grace says as she struggles with the cork of a champagne bottle.
It’s the evening of the opening of Ash Books and the twins and Eliot are at Rose House, the old guest house that Elsie lives in by herself. The three of them ate at the pub across the road from the shop for dinner, Elsie warning them that they wouldn’t be able to eat away their profits every night and Grace rolling her eyes and pointing out that they deserved a treat.
‘Was it a huge success then?’ Eliot asks.
Grace avoids eye contact with Eliot. Tonight needs to be simple. She nods and allows herself a congratulatory ‘whoop!’ as she finally manages to pop out the stubborn cork.
‘Yes. A lot of people came in and looked at the second-hand stuff. And the head of English from a high school in Lytham came in and we did a deal with him on a collection of the classics we’d put on offer. He ordered about two hundred pounds’ worth of stock.’
Eliot strokes the peppering of stubble on his chin as though he has a full beard. It makes an unpleasant scratching sound and Grace wants to prod him, to make him stop.
‘Two hundred pounds is great,’ he says. ‘If you make that much every day you’ll be heading for world domination in no time!’
‘World domination?’ Elsie says, and grins at Eliot. ‘You’re ambitious.’
Eliot smiles back. ‘I’ll bet the free cupcakes had something to do with it. Good work on those, by the way, Grace.’ He bites into a leftover cake, and Grace sees a faint trace of pink icing line his mouth.
‘More champagne, anyone?’ Grace asks loudly as she fills up her own glass. Elsie doesn’t answer, but looks at her own glass, which sits on the battered coffee table, untouched.
‘Go on then, Grace. I’ll have a top-up,’ Eliot says, leaning forward and jostling Elsie, who sits up and rearranges her hairclip.
‘I think I’ll go to bed actually,’ Elsie says.
‘Bed?’ Grace asks incredulously. ‘You’ve hardly had any champagne. I thought we were celebrating?’
‘Yes, bed,’ Elsie answers simply as she stands and stretches. ‘Night.’
There’s silence for a few minutes after Elsie has clomped upstairs. Grace and Eliot hear Elsie’s bedtime ritual float downstairs and through the open lounge door: aggressive teeth brushing, cupboard doors opening and clothes being tossed onto the floor.
Grace sighs and downs her champagne. It’s cheap stuff, not even really champagne, and tastes woody and too sweet.
‘I’m so relieved that the opening day went well,’ Grace says after a moment. ‘I started to worry this morning.’
‘About what?’
‘About opening the shop. It all seemed a bit overwhelming. I was worried we’d perhaps done the wrong thing.’
Eliot shakes his head and loosens his tie. Eliot always wears a tie, even if he’s not at work.
‘Taking a risk like this is never the wrong thing. You’ve both been talking about opening a bookshop for a while, so it was the obvious thing for you to do. You can’t have any regrets about that.’
‘I hope not,’ Grace says. She shivers. ‘It’s always freezing in this house. Don’t you make E
lsie put the heating on when you stay over with her?’
‘I hate being too hot. I’d rather be cool,’ Eliot says. Grace sees him start to reach for the blanket on the arm of the sofa to give her, then watches as he thinks better of it. If only things weren’t this complicated.
‘Elsie’s the same as me. She hates being too hot as well,’ Eliot finishes. Grace thinks she detects a look of defence in his slim, stubbled face.
‘So you’re staying over here tonight?’ he asks.
‘Yes. Elsie and I are going into the shop together tomorrow. She’s made one of the spare beds up for me.’
‘You’ve not slept over here for ages.’
‘I know. I don’t like sleeping here. But Elsie wanted me to stay over so that we could celebrate our first night and go in together first thing tomorrow. I’m trying to do things right at the moment. I want us to feel like a team again. I barely even feel like we’re friends at the moment. And that’s surely bad for business,’ she finishes with a weak smile. An unexpected lump lodges in her throat like a boiled sweet.
‘Yeah. She said things were a little tense between you both.’
The reason for the tension hangs in the air, between Grace and Eliot. Grace won’t say it. Eliot doesn’t know it.
‘Let’s have another drink,’ Eliot says, filling their glasses.
The next morning, Grace shuffles further under her blanket as wisps of her sister’s voice drift into the lounge like smoke. She wonders where she is for a moment when she opens her eyes, then remembers that she is in Elsie’s lounge.
When Grace and Elsie were younger they were never allowed in this room. It feels forbidden to Grace, even now. This was the guest lounge, only to be used at Christmas. Grace can still feel the visitors in the air. It’s like they never really left. Elsie has redecorated, trading the 1970s velour orange curtains and swirling gaudy carpet for classic beige carpet and blinds and chocolate brown leather sofas. But in the weak winter light of the morning, the new decor changes nothing. Grace can hear the sea here, and, for some reason, can’t bear it. She can hear it now: the clashing of the monstrous grey waves against each other. The more she tries not to listen to it, the more she hears it, until it feels as though the shards of water are crashing against her head.
Elsie is shouting at Eliot in the kitchen. The words blur into meaning. Grace can’t help but listen.
‘I’m not asking much, am I? My boyfriend in my own bed instead of downstairs with my bloody sister!’
There’s only a silence in reply.
So Eliot obviously didn’t make it upstairs to Elsie’s room last night.
Bad move.
Grace feels a tug of guilt. They got through quite a bit of champagne in the end, and Eliot had meant to go upstairs to Elsie. Grace remembers asking him to stay until she fell asleep in the lounge. She didn’t want to be alone in a spare room upstairs. She remembers her eyes closing slowly as they talked, the room in a blur around her. She wouldn’t have asked him to stay with her if she’d been sober.
The front door slams, the stained glass rattling in its splitting frame.
Sleeping here was a terrible idea. From now on, Grace will only ever sleep in her brand new flat, surrounded by brand new furniture and brand new other flats. There are too many memories here at their old home, creeping into Grace’s body and mind like damp. And it’s too cold. Rose House has always been horribly cold in winter. Even though the central heating clunks and bangs its way around the rooms like a metal snake, the old windows let all the heat out and all the outside air in.
Grace can remember being cold every single winter of her childhood in this house. She shared Room 5, the smallest, with Elsie. Their mother never came upstairs to bed until the very middle of the night. She would often come into Room 5 instead of her own room. Grace would wake as her mother banged around the bedroom, knocking over the twins’ things and whispering to herself. There would be further noise and cursing as their mother tried to undress; sometimes she didn’t bother, and Grace would wake to the sight of her mother, fully clothed, complete with jewellery and shoes, lying open-mouthed on top of her sheets.
Those nights, in the early days, had been quite easy to bear. It was the later nights that were the haunting ones. Elsie always claimed that she couldn’t remember, that she must have slept through it all. But how could she have slept through such potent alcohol fumes, such sickening screaming as their mother awoke from yet more nightmares?
Grace gets up and stretches her long pale limbs.
‘Eliot?’ she shouts.
He appears in the living room, his wavy, dark brown hair still crumpled on one side from where it has rested on the arm of the sofa all night. ‘Elsie’s gone to the shop—’
‘I know. I heard,’ Grace interrupts as she pulls her creased cardigan over her shoulders. ‘I’m going now. I just wanted to say sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have said I’d stay over, because I never feel relaxed in this house. It was my fault we both fell asleep down here.’
Eliot shrugs and looks at the table of empty bottles and toast crusts. Eliot always makes toast when he’s drunk. Grace remembers him fiddling with the toaster in the early hours and burning the first two slices. The sickly smell of charred crumbs still lingers in the air.
‘I know Elsie’s mad with you now but she’ll get over it.’ Grace says, then sits back down on the jumble of blankets and cushions.
‘I hope so. I told her nothing happened between us. But she won’t believe it.’
‘Well, I’ll tell her later as well.’
‘She’ll believe you even less than she believes me.’
Grace stares into space. She supposes that’s true. Is this what things have come to? There used to be a time when Elsie would believe anything Grace said, and vice versa.
But not now. Never, now. The time when things were straightforward between the twins glints beyond the darkness of the past, and Grace can’t work out how to grasp it.
She stands up, suddenly unable to stay in the house any longer.
‘See yourself out,’ she says to Eliot as she grabs her handbag and heads out to the hallway.
When Grace arrives at the shop, Elsie is standing stiffly behind the counter.
‘So did you have fun with Eliot last night?’ she asks as soon as Grace has closed the door behind her.
‘Yes. I did. Surely you don’t think I should apologise to you for that?’
Grace watches as Elsie drops her eyes to the wooden counter. They have splashed out on oak. The joiner who made it for them claimed that oak was a hard wood and would be able to survive a little better over the years. If only their sisterly bond was made from oak, too.
‘For God’s sake, Elsie,’ Grace replies. ‘We had a few drinks and crashed on your sofa. Honestly, you should be pleased that we get on. It’s you who Eliot wants, you know,’ she continues, her tone softening a little. ‘I’m his friend. That’s all. You were the one who went to bed. We wanted you to stay up with us.’
Grace moves forward and traces a line along the oak counter with a purple fingernail as she speaks. She thinks back to last night as she waits for Elsie’s answer. Surely Elsie doesn’t blame her for staying up. Early nights aren’t for everyone. Old ladies and children. But not Grace. Not Eliot.
Elsie follows Grace’s finger with her eyes and sighs, relenting. ‘Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s forget it. Do you want a hot chocolate?’
‘I might have a coffee,’ Grace says, relaxing at Elsie’s truce. ‘Ugh, I won’t be drinking champagne again for a while. I hope I don’t look as rough as I feel.’
‘You’re so gorgeous that you couldn’t possibly look anything but amazing,’ Elsie assures her twin with a smirk.
‘It’s funny that you of all people should think that,’ Grace laughs, returning an identical smile. ‘I’ll make the drinks, shall I?’
As Grace stirs cheap coffee granules into two new mugs, she sees the vase of flowers that Mags brought the twins the day before. Sh
e wonders if Noel will come and see them again today. Her stomach tightens at the thought. She squints out of the window to the square beyond as she wanders back to the front of the shop. Noel never wanted to stay in Blackpool. Grace remembers him reading about other worlds, other people, for the whole of their lives. Wherever they were when they were all young, Noel was usually tucked away in a corner, head deep in a book full of facts. The moment he could, he bolted from Blackpool to university in London. Grace was mad with him, for a time. She was mad that he had left her alone with a sullen Elsie and a distracted mother. She was mad that he was seeing new places and meeting different people, while Grace was stuck in her green bedroom that she knew every single inch of. She was mad that Noel suddenly wasn’t always just there, reading in the corner, in case Grace wanted him.
But then, as Noel phoned Grace every week and sent her cards and the occasional gift: a keyring, some sweets, she began to forgive him for leaving. She began to miss him a little, and look forward to his phone calls and visits home.
But somewhere, somehow, between Grace wandering around town with her friends, being in plays after school and being out when Noel made his phone calls, and Noel getting his first job in London and wearing shirts and suddenly being important, the cards and gifts faded. Their phone conversations became less frequent, and when Noel visited Blackpool, Grace felt like she knew him less.
And then her mother disappeared, and it all changed again.
Chapter Four
Louisa, 1960
Along the bumpy road they went. Dr Barker didn’t say any more and Louisa didn’t ask him to. She had never met her father before, and the news that she was going to live with him made the ham sandwich she had eaten hours before at Dr Barker’s house feel heavy in her stomach, as though she had eaten a dollop of glue. It swerved around the corners as the car did and threatened to come up into her throat.
