by Hannah Emery
And then suddenly, the car stopped. Dr Barker tugged at his handkerchief until it came loose from his pocket, and wiped his face with it. Louisa felt a sudden urge to take the handkerchief and keep it forever, but she didn’t tell Dr Barker this and she didn’t tell him that she almost loved him, and that if she had been allowed to stay with him and his daisy plate with ham sandwiches on it for longer she would have been almost happy. Instead, Louisa looked up at the house that loomed over them.
Maybe, just maybe, Louisa’s mother had known all about this house, and had sent Louisa here. Maybe it was all planned. Maybe her mother would be inside.
Louisa let herself be pulled from the car by Dr Barker. He held her hand as they ascended the steep, green hill. The front door was shiny and tomato red. When it opened, Louisa stared at the man behind it.
Her father.
He was a grey man: grey hair and grey clothes and grey skin. He looked down at Louisa and gave her a half-smile. She gave him a grim smile in return. He would, she decided, have to work for a real smile.
‘Well,’ Dr Barker said brightly. The word hung in the air like a sheet out to dry, flapping this way and that, getting in the way of things.
‘Well,’ Louisa’s grey father repeated after a while.
They stood for a few moments.
‘It happened, then. You knew it would,’ her father said to Dr Barker, looking over Louisa’s head and directing his words only at him, as though that would make Louisa unable to hear them. Dr Barker bowed his head slightly, his hands held together in a steeple.
They all shuffled through into the hall. It was a pretty hall, with an umbrella stand and a huge framed painting of a girl and a dog on the wall. Louisa looked up at the girl. She looked sad, and Louisa wondered why. Louisa’s mother would have been able to tell her. If her mother was here, she would stare into the painting and hold Louisa’s hand and tell her a rich, beautiful story filled with colour and happiness and sadness. But Louisa could tell by now that her mother wasn’t here after all. Tears burned the backs of her eyes, but she would not let them fall. Not now.
‘So, you’re all ready for her then?’ asked Dr Barker.
‘Yes, yes. I have a bed made up. Thank you, Gregory. For everything.’
Louisa watched Dr Barker’s face droop in a sad smile as her father said this, and knew then that Dr Barker liked her father, and had met him before, that he knew him more than Louisa did. Then she looked at her father. Did she like him? The man who had an umbrella stand and grey hair and grey skin?
Not yet, no. But she knew that one day, she would.
Just a year after Louisa had gone to live with her father, a silent, steady drift of snow began to fall one Monday afternoon and continued on and on, until nothing could be seen from the highest window of the house but a blue-white world with no boundaries.
The day Louisa had arrived at her father’s the previous autumn, he had enrolled her at the local school that smelled of scrubbed potatoes and old shoes. Louisa had liked school in Blackpool and she’d had good friends there who adored the fact that Louisa could see into the future, and who had given her sweets in return for a clue about what might happen that day. But in her new town, with her new father and her new school, things were different.
Oh, how different, Louisa thought each night as she lay underneath a cool eiderdown and listened out for the sound of the sea that never came. Louisa’s gift was stronger than ever: she knew exactly what the teacher would be wearing every day, and she knew whose knuckles would be rapped and what would be served for lunch. But she said nothing now. If she ignored the visions, then perhaps they would eventually go away. Her vision of her mother had been too late. No good could come of them.
So, because Louisa had apparently nothing to offer them, and perhaps because her face was plain and her hair a little too dark for her pale complexion, the other girls at her school made no real attempts to befriend her, or to poke fun at her. They simply let her be.
At weekends, Louisa and her father took little outings. They walked to the park, the duck pond, the high street. Her father spent more money than her mother ever had done and Louisa’s tummy swelled ever so slightly with a weekly bag of fudge from Spencer’s sweet shop. The outings were strange at first, and Louisa and her father spoke little. Words seemed to be difficult to find now, and when Louisa did push a word from her lips, her father might simply nod, or shake his head, or give a small smile.
After a year, Louisa’s life still seemed to be colourless. And the snow that fell that Monday made it even whiter, even more unreal. School was out of the question, Nancy the maid said that morning as she cleared away Louisa’s toast crumbs. And Louisa’s father would stay at home too.
Louisa sat and watched her father eat the last of his eggs. He ate slowly, and neatly. Her mother had always made eggs that oozed orange onto the plate and the bread. Her father’s eggs were more like foam and he cut them carefully so that there was no mess on his plate. He could, Louisa supposed, have just eaten them off the table.
‘What will we do, then?’ he asked Louisa once he had swallowed the last of his breakfast.
Louisa shrugged. She didn’t think they would be able to go for a walk in this weather.
‘Come with me,’ he said, as he stood and pushed his chair back. He took Louisa’s hand, led her to the coat stand in the hallway, and offered her the red wool coat that he had bought her a few weeks ago. Louisa put it on. The buttons were gold, and made her feel as though she was a queen.
When they both had their coats and shoes on, Louisa’s father opened the front door. The snow was piled so high that they could see nothing beyond it. Louisa’s father pushed at it with both of his hands and then, as though he was a boy of ten, launched himself on top of it. Snow puffed out from underneath him, and his face turned red.
He’s gone mad, Louisa thought.
And then she threw herself into the snow too.
Freezing water raced through her shoes and her wool coat, and Louisa shivered. She felt a strange laugh escape her mouth. Guilt coursed through her immediately: she had vowed that she would never laugh again, not unless she found her mother.
But then her father laughed: a deep, loud laugh that made Louisa giggle more. She choked and wiped her eyes with her cold, wet sleeve.
‘I’m not used to snow. We hardly ever get any in Blackpool,’ she said.
Her father didn’t correct Louisa’s present tense. He smiled and wiped a piece of ice from his rounded jaw. ‘It’s because of all the salt near the sea. It stops the snow from settling.’
Louisa nodded, her face frozen and all her words used up, for now. But it had been a start. A very good start.
When they had thrown snowballs, and made a tall snowman with currants for eyes, a stone nose and a shoelace mouth that insisted on falling and dangling on one side, Louisa and her father went back inside. Louisa changed into some dry clothes and her father asked Nancy to make them some hot chocolate.
‘I don’t often have hot chocolate,’ Louisa’s father said as they sat sipping.
‘It’s nice,’ Louisa said.
‘Nancy is good to me.’
‘Yes. She’s nice.’
There was a stretch of silence dotted with sipping. Louisa looked out of the window. The sky hung down heavily, yellow grey. The snow would continue forever, it seemed.
‘Mum talked about somebody,’ Louisa said all of a sudden, leaning forward a little, her heart racing. ‘She talked about a boy with purple eyes. She talked about finding him. But I don’t know who he was.’
Louisa’s father scratched his chin and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said sadly, ‘I don’t know who he was, either.’
‘Perhaps if I could find him, he would be able to tell me where Mum went?’
Louisa’s father put down his hot chocolate and Louisa saw that he hadn’t finished it. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Is somebody else living in my house now?’ Louisa asked. Her toothbrush and clothes and a couple o
f dolls she had outgrown had been parcelled up and sent to her a few weeks after she had moved into her father’s, and she still hadn’t looked in the box properly. She felt that if she did, a sorrow too deep to recover from would pull her in. So the things that had been sent were still untouched, in Louisa’s big fancy wardrobe next to her new, soft bed.
Her father sighed sadly. ‘Yes. It’s being used as a guest house now.’
Louisa swallowed a big gulp of chocolate and scalded her throat. So that was it. She couldn’t go back. ‘It feels strange to think of somebody else brushing their teeth at my sink,’ she said, wondering if her father would understand.
He nodded, and sighed again.
‘I can’t sleep at night,’ Louisa said next. It was as though her words were suddenly dripping out with no control now, like her mouth was a broken tap. ‘I can’t seem to sleep without the sounds of the sea.’
‘I see. And a girl needs her sleep.’
Louisa nodded, pleased that her father appeared to be listening to her and thinking about what she had said. It seemed so long since she had had a conversation, a real one where she felt like something had happened at the end of it.
‘You know,’ her father said after a little time, ‘if you hold a seashell up to your ear, then you can hear the sea.’
Louisa raised her dark eyebrows, interested. The idea reminded her of something her mother would have said, and made Louisa’s insides tremble a little with grief.
‘I’ll try to get you a shell so that you can listen to it each night before bed. We need you to sleep well.’ Her father stood and left the room, and Louisa finished her hot chocolate, and when she was sure that her father wasn’t coming back, had the rest of his too.
That night, even though going out was out of the question, and even though Louisa and her father were goodness knows how many miles from the coast, Louisa saw that there was a small, shiny seashell on her pillow. It was cream, with tiny pink veins running through it. It was beautiful.
Louisa held the shell to her ear to hear the crashing of the sea, and wondered how her father had managed to find it for her.
And as she sank into bed, and listened to the waves, a little bit of colour seeped back into Louisa’s world.
Chapter Five
Grace, 2008
‘I’m going to go and get us some lunch,’ Grace says.
Ash Books has been busy on its second morning of business, making the whole venture seem real and feasible. Two groups of Eliot’s students have already responded to an email from him promoting the shop by turning up and wandering around the small section of plays, giggling and jostling each other and fighting over the only copy of Talking Heads.
‘Tuna salad sub for me please,’ Elsie says, rooting in her purse.
‘Don’t worry about the money. I don’t think we need to split things down to the penny now that we have a business together.’
Elsie looks up at Grace and smiles. It’s an excited smile, full of the promise of success. Grace smiles back, seeing her own face reflected by Elsie’s: pale skin, an angular cat-like grin, dark arched brows over kohl-lined violet eyes.
Grace tugs her coat around her tightly as she steps out of the shop to protect her from the icy whip of the sea air. She has lived near the sea all her life and still the salty wind can take her breath away. People used to visit Blackpool for this clean, fresh air; it was good for their health and their souls. The stretch of promenade a few miles north of Ash Books is still stuffed with the same old attractions as it was in the 1960s. Blackpool Tower stands over the promenade that it has spawned: the south of the promenade is filled with the sounds of clicking, whirring Pleasure Beach rides and the screams of tourists’ rickety descents down roller coaster tracks. In the summer season, Central Pier is gaudy with lights and colour, and amusement arcades and cheap food shacks squall for custom. From north to south, a string of giddy illuminations hover over the line of cars that queue to see them.
Grace squints into the distance and sees Blackpool Pleasure Beach. When half term is over, the rides will stop and the park will fall silent. There is always something dead about Blackpool in winter. Grace’s whole life has peaked and fallen with Blackpool’s peaks and falls, as the town has breathed in and out over summer and winter. The dazzling attractions and pleasant weather used to make Rose House bustle with loud, excitable overnight guests for the first few summers of Grace’s childhood. But the guests dwindled over the years. Eventually, they stopped coming altogether. Grace’s mother didn’t seem to care.
‘It’s all too much trouble. We’re better off with no guests. We’re better off just us,’ she said to the twins when they were about fifteen, an empty brandy glass beside her.
Of course, it wasn’t running the guest house that had caused trouble. It was the other thing their mother did for the guests, night after night, behind the closed door of the dining room. The twins listened sometimes, kneeling on their bedroom floor, ears pressed to the musty-smelling, swirling green carpet and hearing nothing but muffled voices. Their mother used to come upstairs afterwards, clinking coins and smelling of smoke and grown-ups. That’s when she’d come into their room, and think that they couldn’t hear her. Grace will always remember the sound of her mother’s sleep. It’s mixed in with the sounds of the night sea. Shallow breaths, hoarse with alcohol.
Grace and Elsie never understood what their mother was doing in the dining room until the day of the car crash. That was the day that changed everything.
‘Yes, love. What can I get you?’ Grace’s memories are interrupted by the deli assistant, poised over her clean white chopping board.
When Grace arrives back at the shop, a tall, chubby man in a green waterproof jacket is just leaving.
‘Another cold day, eh?’ he says politely as he lets Grace pass. As she does so, she sees him rapidly scanning her face, hesitation clouding his own. She smiles.
‘I think we confused that customer who just left,’ she grins at Elsie as she plonks the sandwiches down on the counter. ‘I don’t think he was expecting to step out of the shop and see a carbon copy of you.’
Elsie smiles weakly. ‘He wasn’t a customer,’ she says as she pulls a sandwich towards her and begins to unwrap it.
‘Who was he then?’ Grace asks over the rustling of the sandwich paper.
Elsie shrugs. ‘A salesman.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘This one’s yours. I don’t know how you can eat prawns. Didn’t you know that they are the maggots of the sea?’
‘A salesman of what?’
Elsie shrugs and bites into her own sandwich neatly. ‘Books and stuff.’
‘So, did he have anything good? Did he give you any ideas of any other stock it might be worth ordering?’
‘No. He wanted to sell us a load of old stuff.’
‘Like what?’
‘It was just old stuff. Not really what we’re going for.’
‘I would have liked to have seen it. Did he leave a number?’
‘No,’ Elsie replies simply as she pops a piece of cucumber into her mouth. Just like that, as though the matter is closed. As though she is the boss.
‘Elsie, we’re meant to be a team! Why didn’t you at least take his number?’
‘Why don’t you trust the decision that I made? Who would buy horrible dusty books from a hundred years ago?’
‘They were from a hundred years ago? There could have been all sorts in his collection, Elsie. There could have been first editions that we could have made actual money from! Why do you think that you are the one in charge? Why can’t we both be the adults here?’
Elsie shrugs and screws up her sandwich paper, soggy with tomatoes that she has delicately removed.
‘I thought I made the right decision. People want new stuff these days. Even if they’re buying second hand, they want it to look new.’
‘No, they don’t all want new stuff. Don’t be so narrow-minded,’ Grace shoots back.
Elsie scowls at her sister as she grabs the
ball of tomato-smeared paper and pushes past her. Grace picks up her own sandwich and bites into it. She frowns as Elsie’s words are finally processed in her mind. Maggots of the sea. She swallows her first mouthful uneasily, poking at the remainder of the sandwich’s pink, veiny innards before pushing it away.
The apology comes the next day, just as Grace knows it will.
‘I really am sorry.’
Grace looks up from her pile of pound coins to her twin’s apologetic saucer eyes. ‘It’s fine, Elsie. Honestly, I’m over it. As long as you promise we can decide things as a team in the future.’
‘I will, I will. I promise. I was just feeling stubborn yesterday. I thought I could handle things on my own. But today I can see it all a bit more clearly. I know I was out of order,’ Elsie says, her voice slightly high-pitched as though she has sucked an old helium balloon. ‘So, I’m going to leave you to it for the afternoon. To show that I trust you.’
‘You’re taking the afternoon off?’
‘Well, not exactly. I’ll start some stuff for the tax return. Boring stuff.’ Elsie gives Grace an impulsive hug over the counter, her earrings catching on her sister’s glossy black hair. ‘I’m not skiving. I just want you to know that I trust you.’
A few minutes after Elsie has left, Grace drums her fingers on the counter. She takes a sip of the hot chocolate she has made herself, even though it’s too hot to taste the sweetness. She watches a lone man in a brown suede coat browse the small selection of biographies they have stacked near to the doorway. When was the last time Elsie hugged Grace before today? She can still smell her sister’s perfume: a leathery, almost manly scent. A scent that makes her seem like the boss. She has been worse since their mother left. Elsie seems to think that telling Grace what to do might fill in the horrific, inexplicable gap in their lives that they are forced to step over each day. Elsie seems to bound over the gap easily, like an exuberant Labrador, and has done since they were sixteen. But Grace, even now, constantly finds herself edging over it cautiously, trying not to fall.
The twins’ mother vanished on their sixteenth birthday: a day when she should definitely have stayed until the end. In many ways, she had gone long before the day she disappeared, but the traces of her at least made Grace feel as though they had a mother. Sticky hairspray wafting through the hall. Perfume. Brandy. All toxic fumes, seeping into their skin, making the twins’ faces grey and their thoughts jumbled. She had been even more distracted in the days leading up to the twins’ birthday, and Grace had felt as though something might be the matter with her. There had been more of the nightmares than ever before. Twice in the night, Grace had heard her mother moaning and crying. Those blue, anxious hours of thirteen years ago came back to her now, as she stood in the shop.
