Secrets in the Shadows

by Hannah Emery

  Suddenly, Mags’s words were nothing but a hum, as all Louisa’s senses were snatched by what she saw ahead of her.

  The house, her house, her mother’s house. For Sale.

  ‘—So I really do think that with me being so tired, and of course Noel up so much, that it’s bound to affect even the smallest … ’ Mags was saying, her words suddenly reaching Louisa’s ears again.

  ‘Mags,’ Louisa said, putting her hand on her friend’s arm and suddenly knowing why the day seemed so unwilling to be like all the others. It was to be the day she had snagged her cardigan and the day she had been given her house back. ‘I need to go to the bank.’

  Mags frowned. ‘What for? It’s miles away.’

  ‘I’m going to buy that house.’

  Mags scrunched up her long nose. ‘Isn’t that the boarding house you stayed in for a few weeks when you first came to Blackpool?’

  ‘Yes. I used to live there.’ Louisa had told Mags that she had lost her mother a long time ago. She had mentioned that she used to live in Blackpool. But Mags didn’t always listen properly: she was always looking for her lighter or rummaging in her purse or wanting to talk herself, or these days patting Noel’s back and talking about burps and naps. She didn’t appear to know she was doing it so Louisa didn’t mind too much. Louisa just knew to tell her friend things that she really wanted her to know more than once.

  She had told Mags about her past only once.

  ‘You lived there? And you never said?’

  ‘Well, no, I’ve not said much about it. It was where I lost my mum. That’s where we lived before she went missing. It was my home.’

  Mags shook her head. Noel, who was now back in his pram and had been quiet for a few moments, began wailing again. She picked him out of the pram and jiggled him about.

  ‘I don’t understand why you want to go back there then, if that’s where you lived when your mum left. It might be upsetting. Are you sure about it? Why don’t you have a think?’

  So Louisa did. She stood for almost a minute, and watched Mags jiggle Noel, and listened to the gulls crying to one another over the screams and lurches of the roller coasters at the Pleasure Beach round the corner, and tasted salt on her lips. She thought of the blackberry stain on the kitchen floor and Mrs Williams’ curtains that didn’t quite meet in the middle, and the ghost of her mother and the thousands of pounds from the sale of her father’s pretty house on the hill that were still sitting in the bank, untouched. She thought of running her own little boarding house, and calling it Rose House, after her mother.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, when she had thought for long enough. ‘I’m sure.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Grace, 2008

  When Grace arrives at the shop on Monday morning, Elsie is lost in another world. Her eyes don’t move from their fixed spot as the bell above the door tinkles and Grace moves towards the counter.

  ‘Elsie?’ Grace says, waving her arms in front of her sister’s glazed eyes. The twins haven’t spoken since Saturday, the night Grace went out alone with Eliot. Yesterday, Grace left Mags’s house without speaking to her either. The day was lonely and empty, and Grace wishes now that she could snap her fingers and take back all the things she did at the weekend that seemed to upset everyone so much.

  Elsie suddenly breaks out of her trance, eyeing Grace warily.

  ‘Hi,’ she says, before turning around to shuffle some papers behind the counter.

  ‘Elsie, I don’t want to fall out with you. If this—’ Grace is interrupted by a female customer dashing in through the door. After the customer has browsed the children’s books and quizzed Elsie and Grace about their stock of a series about a talking duck, she leaves without buying anything. Once the customer has gone, Elsie looks at Grace expectantly.

  ‘I was going to say before, that if this is about Eliot, then I’m sorry,‘ Grace begins. ‘I’m sorry that we went out without you on Saturday night. But the point is, we did invite you to join us. I’d never go behind your back, Elsie.’

  Grace puts a hand on Elsie’s. She half expects Elsie to shake off the contact, but she doesn’t. Her sister’s hand is cool, her skin silky. They have both painted their nails a glossy black and their fingers are exact. It’s impossible to tell which fingers belong to which twin. They stand there quietly for a moment, hands interlocked.

  Elsie squeezes Grace’s hand. ‘I’m sorry too. I suppose I just worry, because I know how much you think of each other. I really love him, you know. And I love you as well. I don’t mind you spending time together, but I just worry that it might all end badly.’

  ‘It won’t,’ Grace says. She gestures to the counter. ‘Do you think we’ll take any more cash today?’

  Elsie smiles. ‘We might. We’re not going to be overnight millionaires, you know. And we’ve sold quite a bit since we’ve been here. I think we’ll do okay.’

  ‘It’s not as busy as I imagined it to be, that’s all. But I’m sure it’ll pick up. Perhaps we should sell some things other than books. You know, trinkets and stuff. Kitsch things. They could all be book related. Like bookends, or collectables of characters from novels and things.’ She waits for Elsie’s response, feeling as though things might have been patched over. If they have, then it happened more easily than Grace imagined it would.

  ‘That’s not a bad idea. We could trawl round some vintage fairs and have a look for things to sell. We could go to car boot sales on Sundays, too.’

  Grace laughs, relief washing over her at Elsie’s apparent forgiveness. ‘You’re full of ideas!’

  ‘Well, we can’t magic stock out of thin air. Do you have any more ideas?’

  Grace thinks for a moment, then grins. ‘Yes! I do!’

  It is late that night, after closing the shop and eating a stir fry that Grace threw together from the contents of Elsie’s fridge, that the twins balance a ladder up to the loft of Rose House.

  ‘There are a couple of boxes up here, but not as many as I expected,’ says Grace as she peers into the opening of the attic and climbs in carefully.

  Elsie follows a few minutes later. Both of the twins are shaky and a little breathless. ‘I don’t know if I like it up here,’ Elsie says, glancing around at the cavernous void, her head tipped forward to avoid banging it on the low beams.

  Grace frowns and pulls some boxes towards her, yanking the tops of them open. ‘Let’s get started, and then we can get out of here. These are just our old clothes,’ she pulls out the contents of one box and holds up a pair of jeans. ‘They’re tiny! I can’t believe we were ever that small.’

  Elsie gives a small smile and Grace stuffs the jeans back in the box, wondering if this is such a good idea after all. Nostalgia isn’t something that she and Elsie often engage in.

  ‘Right. You hold the torch, and I’ll see which boxes I think we should take downstairs and look in. There’s no point lugging it all down,’ Grace says, keeping her voice light and cheerful.

  She opens a few more boxes. One is full of meaningless bits: ashtrays, a chipped seashell, some fancy cutlery that was probably left over from when Rose House was a boarding house.

  ‘Suppose we can see if there’s anything in there,’ she says as she slides it towards Elsie. ‘All the others seem to be full of just clothes and stuff. Not really things that we can display or sell. I thought Mum would have kept all sorts up here,’ she says, glancing casually at Elsie to gauge her response at the mention of their mother. Elsie’s expression doesn’t change, and she continues to sit still, her long black denim legs dangling down through the ceiling hatch.

  ‘Oh, this one might be worth looking through. There’s all sorts of things in here.’ Grace kneels next to the box and the floorboards shift around her, moaning under her weight. She feels a shiver run through her body.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go back down,’ she says, suddenly wanting to be anywhere but in that loft. Grace passes a few more boxes that look promising to Elsie, who climbs down the ladder so that she is n
ear to the safety of the landing.

  The twins lug the selected boxes into Elsie’s bedroom. They dump them on the high, brass bed before clambering up themselves and sitting side by side. The bed is unmade: a knot of loose blue sheets that Grace wants to take off and replace with something neater and tighter. She tries not to think about Eliot in here with her sister, tries not to imagine what side of the bed he sleeps on when he stays over, but his things are scattered around the room. His forgotten watch is on the dressing table, tangled with some of Elsie’s hairbands. An empty Coke can is on one of the bedside tables, a puddle of sticky brown residue seeping from underneath it. Grace knows it must have been Eliot’s because Elsie only drinks Diet Coke.

  Elsie doesn’t mind the mess. She leans over to the side of the bed nearest to where Grace sits cross-legged, and hunts for the remote for the old, boxy television in the corner. Nothing about this room is modern. Apart from the clutter: the strewn clothes, the hairbands, the spilling pots of make-up, the odd stuffed toy owl, it isn’t much changed from when it was Room 1 of the boarding house. It had been their mother’s room once, but their mother had moved rooms suddenly one night, saying that she couldn’t sleep in there any more. Grace had looked at her mother’s wild, scared eyes at the time and wondered if the room was haunted. But Elsie obviously has no concerns about ghosts, because since living in the house on her own, she moved her things into this room without question. It’s the biggest of the bedrooms, and although it’s also the coldest because of the huge bowing window, it’s the only room that you can see the sea from, if you crane your neck slightly and look out past the other tall Victorian terraces. Although Elsie has painted the room a bright, bubbled purple, and changed the furniture gradually over the years, she has kept the layout the same, so that Grace, through narrowed eyes, can see straight through the 90s decor and the confused heaps of Elsie and Eliot’s belongings to her mother’s bedroom, from those days that seem a lifetime away.

  Grace wraps her cardigan around her and watches as Elsie fiddles with the television remote, trying to get the ancient television to work.

  ‘Come on, Els. We don’t need the TV on. Let’s find some things for the shop.’ She delves into the box nearest to her on the bed. ‘Look at this! We could do some themed displays,’ she says, holding up a white porcelain rabbit who seems to have survived his time without being chipped or cracked. ‘We could put him with that big hardback of Alice in Wonderland we’ve got.’

  Elsie smiles. ‘I like that idea. It would make the shop stand out a bit more.’ She has a root through the box in front of her. ‘There’s an old Rupert Bear here. I remember him, he was mine.’ She hugs the bear briefly, then tosses him next to the rabbit. ‘We’ve got loads of Rupert Bear annuals.’

  ‘This is great. We can do a kids’ corner, with these displays and a couple of others.’

  They search through the remaining few boxes, finding nothing else for the shop. In one, Grace sees the edge of a postcard in the corner, the blur of writing. She starts to reach in, to pull it out, but something stops her. She opens the soft cardboard flaps of another box.

  Look at these!’ she says as she pulls out matching burgundy velvet headbands. She puts one on and plonks the other on Elsie’s head.

  Elsie grins. ‘You could probably get away with wearing something like this. I would look ridiculous.’

  Grace touches the soft headband and jumps to her feet to do a twirl. She lands back down on the threadbare carpet with a thud.

  ‘Hey, look what else is in here. It’s our old school ties.’ She attempts to put her tie on but overthinks it and gets it tangled. Elsie leans forward and ties it for her.

  ‘That’s impressive. It’s been ages since we had to do that.’

  ‘I tie Eliot’s sometimes,’ Elsie says, her face colouring slightly.

  There’s a silence, and Grace pulls the last box towards her. ‘I don’t recognise any of this stuff,’ she says. There’s an old red toothbrush with tired, yellowed bristles, three small knitted cardigans, a brown skirt and two baby dolls with eerie painted eyes and flaked pink mouths.

  ‘This must be Mum’s box,’ she says quickly. She realises that the headband is making her head ache, and she takes it off and drops it on the floor next to her.

  ‘I’m tired. I think we should call it a night.’ Elsie takes her headband off too and puts it back in one of the boxes. ‘You can stay over here if you want.’

  Grace thinks back to the last time she stayed over at Elsie’s. She barely slept: she never does, here. But then she looks at Elsie’s face, her own face, waiting patiently for an answer.

  ‘Yes, that’d be great,’ she says, banishing the sound of the sea from her ears.

  Elsie smiles, pleased. ‘I’ll get you some pyjamas.’

  After Grace has taken the spare pyjamas from Elsie, and brushed her teeth, washed her face and taken out her contact lenses, she lies under the ice cool duvet in what used to be Room 2 of the boarding house and waits for sleep to come. It takes time. Grace thinks and imagines and wonders, her mind whirring relentlessly. It offers her image after image; memory after memory. She thinks about the day her mother finally disappeared. Things had been strange for months. Their mother had been drinking more and more and wandering around from room to room each night. Grace heard her muttering jumbled things about love and babies, and Lewis and Mags and Noel. Grace knew that Lewis was hers and Elsie’s father. She had always wanted to ask her mother about him, but she didn’t dare upset her any more, or give her another reason to weep into the night. So she stayed quiet, and pretended that she hadn’t seen her mother stare endlessly at a postcard Lewis had sent. Grace didn’t see what was on the postcard, but it must have been something terrible for it to affect her mother so much.

  Grace had hoped that the twins’ sixteenth birthday might make things better. The twins would be adults, and surely that would help their mother survive whatever it was she was going through. She might confide in them; she might tell them about Lewis. They were all meant to be going to Wimpy for lunch, and then to Hounds Hill to do some shopping. Grace wanted a new black dress from Miss Selfridge to wear for the school leavers’ disco and Elsie wanted a curling iron from Argos. Perhaps over cheeseburgers, or in the queue at Argos, their mother would turn to them and tell them what was bothering her. Elsie would see that their mother loved her enough to confide in her, and everything would go back to normal. The spell that seemed to follow them all around like a long, oppressive shadow would be broken.

  But then she had gone.

  ‘She’s probably gone to buy you a last minute present,’ Mags had said when Grace phoned her.

  But Grace, who couldn’t shake off the frightening sensation from her dream of drowning in thick, polluted seawater, knew that wasn’t true. Elsie knew it wasn’t true as well.

  ‘She’s gone for good, you know,’ one of the twins had said to the other. Grace can’t even remember which one of them said it now. But, she supposes as she lies in the blue darkness of Room 2, it doesn’t matter who said it. Whoever said it was right.

  The twins stayed with Mags for a while after their mother disappeared, although it wasn’t long before they found out Rose House was paid for and belonged to them. They stayed there the odd night, after evenings out with college friends. But it wasn’t until they started at university that they lived properly in the house, together. Grace knew that Elsie preferred it in their own home. Mags’s house was always loud: Mags chatting, the television on full blast, fried eggs spitting out fat, the kettle boiling. There was always something to shout over. Grace didn’t mind that too much, and she liked Mags. But from time to time, Elsie struggled with Mags’s noise and her questions and her regular meals. Once the twins lived together in Rose House, Elsie began to talk a little more. She even laughed sometimes. Grace made them pasta with cheese on top and Elsie finished whole bowls.

  But while Elsie settled back into the empty, tall house, and managed to blot the memories of their moth
er and her vanishing act from her mind, Grace missed the warmth and chaos of Mags’s house. She struggled to sleep with the sea hurtling towards her, and then away from her again, and the sound of abandoned glass bottles rolling along the street. And then there was Eliot. Eliot, in Elsie’s room, his deep voice reverberating through the walls and his laugh echoing around Grace’s head, filling her mind with that agonising image of her own wedding day with her sister’s boyfriend.

  As soon as she had finished university, Grace found a job in a bookshop chain store in the town centre, and began renting her flat in Lytham. She left Elsie and Eliot alone in her mother’s house and tried to let fate run its course.

  Now, lying in the cheap bed Elsie bought years ago to replace the stained guest one that their mother left behind, Grace remembers her conversation with Noel. She wonders if leaving things to chance is really possible: if whether she did nothing, her future would still somehow hurtle her towards a marriage to Eliot. She wonders if her mother lost Lewis because of leaving things to chance, or if she was always meant to lose him anyway. Mags didn’t seem to think so.

  Grace always imagines that her father was dark haired, like the twins and their mother. She always wondered when she was growing up if their father had purple eyes, like the twins, and like the boy her mother always used to talk about. She wondered if they were related to the boy with the purple eyes who her mother mentioned sometimes. She wondered what his name was, and what had happened to him. But she never dared to ask.

  She shuffles out of bed and pulls the duvet around her shoulders. It’s thin, and the cool air seeps through it onto her bare arms. When she reaches the lounge, she flicks on the light and sits down beside the boxes of their mother’s things that she found in the loft with Elsie. Elsie didn’t want the boxes in her room while she slept, so they lugged them downstairs together before they went to bed.

  Grace opens up one of the boxes and reaches in for the postcard she saw before but didn’t mention to Elsie. As her hand rests on the shiny card, she realises that there is not just one card but a whole pile. A flutter of guilt lands in her stomach as she thinks of her twin asleep upstairs. Elsie wouldn’t want to see them, she reminds herself. That’s why it’s best to look at them alone, and not say anything about them yet.