by Alice Feeney
Amelia doesn’t reply, but her breathing is getting louder behind me. I hear her little sharp intakes of breath, as she stands and starts coming closer. I wish she wouldn’t, but I turn to face her.
‘Did you get arrested for death by dangerous driving when we were both thirteen?’
‘I think you need to calm down,’ she wheezes, twisting my mother’s ring round and round her finger. A nervous tic. A tell. I stare at the sapphire, twinkling in the dim light as if to taunt me. A small but beautiful blue rock. That ring should never have been on Amelia’s hand.
‘Did you go for a joyride in the rain one night?’ I ask.
‘We both need to stay calm and… talk.’
She starts to sob and gasp at the same time, but I still can’t look her in the eye. I just keep staring at the ring on her finger.
‘Did the car mount the pavement?’
‘Adam… please—’
‘Did it crash into a woman wearing a red kimono while walking her dog? Did you leave her for dead and drive away?’
‘Adam, I—’
‘Did you think you’d get away with it forever?’
I look up and stare at Amelia’s face. For the first time, it looks familiar to me. She takes the inhaler from her pocket, and starts to panic when she realises that it is empty.
‘Help me,’ she whispers.
‘Were you the person in the car the night my mother was killed?’ I ask, fighting back the tears in my eyes.
‘I love… you.’
‘Was it you?’ Amelia nods and starts crying too. ‘How could you keep something like this from me? Why didn’t you tell me who you were? This is… sick. You’re sick. There’s no other word for it. Everything about you, us, it’s a… lie.’
She can’t breathe. I stare at her, no longer knowing what to do, or say, or how to react. This feels like one of my nightmares: it can’t be real. Despite everything, my instinct is to help her. But then she speaks again, and I only want to do one thing: Shut. Her. Up.
‘I’m… not the only one who… lied.’ I don’t know what my face does when Amelia says this, but she takes a step back. ‘I’m sorry. I only ever… wanted to make you… happy,’ she whispers, gasping for air.
‘Well, you didn’t. I was never really happy with you.’
Then I see Amelia’s face clearly for the first time. And as soon as I do, it changes, darkens into something ugly and unfamiliar. Her eyes are suddenly wide and wild as they dart around the kitchen. It all happens so fast. Too fast. Her hand drops the inhaler, and reaches for the knife block instead. She’s coming at me with a shiny blade. But then another face appears behind my wife, and I see another flash of metal, and this time it’s a pair of extremely sharp-looking scissors.
Scissors
Word of the year:
schadenfreude noun pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.
16th September 2020
Dear Adam,
It isn’t our wedding anniversary, but it has been six months since I came home, and I couldn’t resist writing you a letter. We’ve managed to put the past behind us, and we’re a family again: you, me, Bob, and Oscar the house rabbit. Sometimes when you set something free it comes back. Nobody knows what happened in Scotland and nobody ever needs to.
It was hard at first, for both of us, returning to London to find so many traces of her in our home. But it was nothing that some bin bags, the local rubbish tip, and a lick of paint couldn’t solve. We’ve been returned to our factory settings, and everything is back to how it used to be. Almost. Working at Battersea Dogs Home seemed out of the question – too many reminders of all the things I would rather forget – but that’s OK, I have a new job now: I’m a full-time writer.
Not that anyone knows, except you.
It’s been a busy six months. Rock Paper Scissors is going to be published next year. It might not be my name on the cover, but it’s my book, and it’s hard not to feel anxious about people reading it. So much of our real lives have gone into this novel. The screen rights have already been sold – to a company you have always dreamed of working with – and there is a watertight clause in the contract stating that you will be the only screenwriter on this project. Henry signed the deal himself, or at least I did. Sometimes I think it’s the fear of falling down that makes people trip up. We’re not born afraid. When we’re young, we don’t hesitate to run, or climb, or jump, and we don’t worry about getting hurt or fret about failure. Rejection and real life teach us to fear, but if you want something badly enough, you have to take the leap.
When the box of advance author copies arrived today, I cried. Tears of joy, mostly. I opened it using the vintage stork scissors I brought home from Scotland. I’d had them since I was a child, my mother bought two pairs – one for me and one for her. They were almost all I had left to remember her by, and they looked good as new once they’d been in the dishwasher made the experience extra special for me. I kept one pair and deliberately left the other set behind at Blackwater Chapel, because it’s time to move on, and some things are best left in the past. Those scissors marked the end of an unpleasant woman chapter in our lives, and today they helped to reveal our new future, by opening a box of books. The novel has already been sold all over the world – twenty translations so far. I don’t care whose name is on the cover, we know it’s our story, and that’s all that matters to me.
Nobody needs to know that Henry Winter was my father.
Or that he is dead.
Or what happened to your second wife.
It still upsets me that she was ever your wife at all. It made me so happy when you took off your wedding ring while we were still in Scotland and threw it in the loch, as though you wanted to leave the past behind us too. I tried to remove your mother’s sapphire engagement ring from Amelia’s lifeless hand before we left. Not because I wanted it back, but because she never deserved to wear it in the first place. It wouldn’t come off her finger, no matter how hard I tried to twist or pull the damn thing, and it bothered me more than it should have. Some people are as stubborn in death as they are in life.
I’m not saying everything is perfect, there’s no such thing. Marriage is hard work sometimes. It can also be heartbreaking, and sad, but any relationship worth having is worth fighting for. People have forgotten how to see the beauty in imperfection. I cherish what we have now, despite it being bloodied and a little torn around the edges. At least what we have is real.
We still have secrets, but not from each other anymore.
I always think it is best to look forward, never back. But if we hadn’t got divorced, then next year would have been our thirteenth anniversary. The traditional gift is meant to be lace, and I already know what I’m going to give you. Although I’ll be the one wearing a new wedding dress, it will be for you. Everything I do always has been.
Your Robin
xx
Adam
Books can be mirrors for whoever holds them, and people don’t always like what they see.
The last six months have been good, and I feel as if my life is back on track. Robin is home again, and has redecorated every inch of our house; it’s almost as though Amelia was never here. I’m so happy that Robin is back, so is Bob, I think we both needed her far more than I ever realised. I might not be able to see what she looks like on the outside, but my wife is a beautiful person, inside. Where it matters. Nothing she could ever do will change the person I see when I look at her. Rock Paper Scissors is finally getting made, and even though the opening titles will say ‘based on the novel by Henry Winter’ I can live with that. Dealing with difficult authors is so much easier when they are dead. It turns out my wife is just as good at writing thrilling horror stories as her father was. Perhaps it isn’t surprising. The scariest haunted houses are always the ones in which you are the ghost.
I think there comes a point in everyone’s life when you just have to do what you want to do. Chasing the dream beco
mes involuntary, you have to, because we all know time is not infinite. And I’ve been chasing this for so long, didn’t I deserve to catch up with my dreams eventually? I like to think so. I have the best job in the world, but writing is a hard way to make an easy living. If I thought I could be happy doing anything else, I would absolutely do that instead.
Despite everything, I’m sleeping better than ever before. My nightmares have stopped completely since we returned from Scotland, almost like I left the pain of my past behind. Perhaps because I finally have some sense of closure about what happened when I was a boy.
I still think about my mother and the way she died every day. And although the nightmares have stopped, the guilt has never gone away. It was my fault and nothing will ever change that. If I’d walked the dog myself – like my mother asked me to – she wouldn’t have been out on the street that night, and the car wouldn’t have hit her. But thirteen-year-old me was angry because he watched my mother do her hair, spray her perfume, paint her face, and wrap herself up in the red kimono like a free gift. She only wore it when a man was coming to stay the night at ours. She said they were friends, but the flat had paper-thin walls, and none of my friends made noises like that.
Different men stayed over a lot. I. Didn’t. Like it. So when that evening’s friend knocked on the door – another face I didn’t recognise but was sure I’d never seen before – I stormed out. Thirteen-year-old me met a girl in the park that night, behind the tower block where I lived. We sat on the broken swings and shared a large bottle of warm cider. It was the first time I drank alcohol, the first time I smoked a cigarette, and the first time I kissed a girl. I was in no rush to go home. It made me wonder how many firsts a person can have before life only offers them seconds.
The girl tasted like smoke and bubble gum, and she said that I could do more than just kiss her if we could find somewhere to do it. She taught me how to steal a car – she’d clearly done it before – then she taught me how to drive it behind a disused warehouse. She taught me how to do other things for the first time too in the back seat, we made noises of our own, and teenage me thought he was in love.
That’s why I did what she said when she told me to drive around the estate. I remember the sound of her laughter, and the rain bouncing off the windscreen making it almost impossible to see. Faster, she said, turning up the car radio. Faster! She put her hand on my crotch and I looked down. I took the corner too fast and we started to spin. When I looked up, I saw my mother.
And she saw me.
It all happened so fast: the sound of screeching brakes, the car mounting the pavement, my mother’s red kimono flying in the air, the smash when her body hit the windscreen, and the thud of the wheels rolling over the dog. Then the silence.
I couldn’t move at first.
But then the girl was screaming at me.
When I didn’t respond, she pushed me out of the car, climbed into the driver’s seat, and drove away. Some of the neighbours came out not long after that, they found me leaning over my mother, crying, and covered in her blood. Everyone presumed I’d been walking the dog with her when it happened.
I didn’t even know the girl’s name. And I’d never been able to recognise faces. When the police asked me to ID some pictures of a teenage girl they suspected of driving the stolen car, I genuinely couldn’t help.
I thought I’d never see her again so it was a shock to discover we were married.
Do I feel bad about what happened to Amelia?
No.
Sadly, people die every day, even the good ones. And she wasn’t one of them. None of us know when we’re checking out, life isn’t that kind of hotel. I’m happy now. Happier than I thought I could be again. I just want to put everything behind me, and now I finally can. Sometimes a lie is the kindest truth you can tell a person, including yourself.
Sam
Samuel Smith is not a happy man.
As a young boy, he was obsessed with horror and crime novels. He devoured books by Stephen King and Agatha Christie, and dreamed of being a detective one day. Becoming a private investigator was as close as he got. When Sam celebrated his fortieth birthday alone, drinking warm beer and eating cold pizza in his London flat, he made a confession to himself: this was not living the dream.
But the next day – when Sam was feeling rather worse for wear – an elderly man called. He asked for Sam’s professional help to keep an eye on his estranged daughter. The old man was reluctant to tell him his name at first, but being a PI was a job that required facts, so Sam had to insist. Eventually, the caller confessed he was Henry Winter, and Sam’s disappointing career suddenly became a lot more interesting.
He thought it must be a joke, a belated birthday wind-up by a friend, perhaps, but then remembered that he didn’t have any. Reading books was how Sam spent most evenings. His favourites were the creepiest ones, and Henry Winter was the king of horror in Sam’s eyes. He had been reading the author’s stories since he was a teenager. Once he had checked a few facts, and made sure it was the real Henry Winter who was asking for his help, Sam would have been happy to do the work for free.
But a man has got to eat.
It wasn’t as though the elderly author was short of a bob or two: quite the opposite. But Sam still started to feel bad about how much he was charging him. Following Henry’s daughter and keeping tabs on her husband was easy money.
Sam likes to think that he and Henry became friends over the years that followed, and in some ways they did. Sam even managed to persuade the old man to get a laptop, so that they could email from time to time. He would follow Robin or her husband twice a week or so – when they walked the dog, or on their way to work, or sometimes he just sat outside their house in Hampstead Village – just to keep track of things. Then he sent a monthly report Henry’s way. But their exchanges weren’t all work-related. They often chatted about books, or politics, instead of Robin and Adam. Sam took great pride in the fact that Henry trusted and confided in him, even though they had never met.
They spoke at least once a month, so when he didn’t hear from Henry for a while, Sam started to get a little concerned. First, the phone calls stopped and were never answered or returned, but back then Henry still replied to emails occasionally. He was surprisingly keen to see pictures of the dog all of a sudden, and wanted to know every detail when his daughter’s home was redecorated after she moved out. Sam’s long-lens camera came in very handy on those occasions. But the author never used the same friendly tone he had before, and then all communication came to an abrupt end, along with his regular payments.
Sam had been keeping an eye on Henry’s daughter for more than ten years, and it made him sad when his relationship with the author ended suddenly and with no explanation. He drank more beer, ate more pizza, and didn’t buy the latest Henry Winter novel until the day after it came out, in protest. Sam had been a silent part of the family since Robin married Adam. He was there when her husband started having an affair, and he felt a bit down himself when they got divorced. Digging around in the dirt of their marriage was easy work, but that wasn’t the only reason why he did it for as long as he had. They were an interesting couple to keep tabs on: him with his writing, and her with a famous father, and a secret past. Sam had even grown rather attached to their dog, having watched Bob since he was a puppy. So he was genuinely sad when things went wrong for Mr and Mrs Wright.
When the daughter moved back in with her ex-husband a few months ago, after disappearing from the face of the planet for a couple of years, Sam decided to drive to Scotland and tell Henry about it in person. The author had always been painstakingly private and had refused to ever share his home address, but of course Sam knew where he lived. He might not have made it as a detective, but he still knew how to find out most things about most people.
Newspaper interviews with Henry Winter were rare, but Sam had kept one from a few years back. It was about where the author liked to write, and showed a picture of Henry in his study
, sitting at an antique desk that once belonged to Agatha Christie. It didn’t take long for Sam to find out which auction house the desk had come from. Or to bribe a delivery driver to give him the address where it had been sent.
Henry’s Scottish hideaway was still harder to find than Sam could have imagined. The drive up from London was painfully long and slow, and without directions the postcode he’d been given proved close to useless. After driving around in circles looking for the mysterious – possibly non-existent – Blackwater Chapel, and passing endless mountains and lochs that had all started to look the same, Sam went back on himself to Hollowgrove, the only town he had seen for miles.
There was only one shop, it was getting dark, and Sam spotted the woman putting up a CLOSED sign in the window as soon as she saw him climbing out of his car. He knocked anyway, and she pulled a face that was even more unpleasant than the one she had been wearing before.
The woman opened the door and Sam noticed her name badge: PATTY.
She had a face like a carp and it was as red as her apron. Her beady eyes glared and she barked the word ‘what’ at him with venom-like spit. She was clearly a woman who was good at making people feel bad. Sam resisted the urge to offer his condolences for Patty’s sister, who he was sure had been murdered by a girl called Dorothy near a yellow brick road. But Patty’s distinct lack of kindness turned out to be very helpful.
‘Nobody has seen Henry Winter for a couple of years, and good riddance, I say. He fired his old housekeeper with no notice – she was a friend of mine. The new housekeeper used to pop in now and then to get supplies – odd woman with a sweet tooth for baked beans and baby food – but even she stopped coming to town a few months ago. I don’t know if I should tell you how to get to Blackwater Chapel. I don’t want you coming back here and blaming me if something bad happens. That place isn’t just haunted, it’s cursed. Ask anyone.’
