In Her Shadow Read online

  A few days later, during our school break-time, I asked Ellen outright if she could play any instruments. I expected her to lie, but she shrugged and said, ‘Yeah. Piano.’

  ‘How long have you been learning?’ I asked.

  Ellen frowned. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just don’t, OK?’ She narrowed her eyes and looked at me with an intensity that was a warning to me not to pursue the subject.

  ‘I don’t see why it has to be such a big secret,’ I said. ‘It’s only a stupid piano.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Ellen hissed. She pushed me, hard, in the chest, so that I stumbled backwards and nearly fell over. ‘Shut up, Hannah, you’re so stupid. You don’t know anything!’

  We didn’t speak to one another for the rest of the day. Ellen was furious with me and I couldn’t work out what I had done wrong.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BY THE TIME John dropped me back at the flat after our meal, the soporific effect of the alcohol was kicking in and I was tired. I made some lemon and ginger tea and took the mug, and Lily, into the living room. The red light on the answering machine was winking at me and the display informed me I had three messages. I pressed the button. Rina had called to see how I was, and there was a confused message from my mother, who obstinately refused to grasp the concept of talking to a machine. I felt a pang of guilt at having missed her, deleted the message and moved on to the third one. A woman’s voice said, ‘Hannah, it’s me …’

  Was it Ellen? I stepped away from the telephone with my hands over my mouth and my heart pumping. The cat, alarmed, fled the room. Time seemed to stand still. Panicky thoughts careered through my brain, colliding with one another and shattering into myriad smaller anxieties. I was so terrified, I could not bring myself to reach over and switch the machine off. It crackled and whirred, there was the sound of a cigarette-lighter clicking, an inhalation, and the voice returned. ‘It’s me, Hannah, Charlotte Lansdown.’

  I sank down into a chair and put my head in my hands. It sounded as if Charlotte were pouring herself a drink. I heard the gurgle of liquid, the chink of ice, and then: ‘I just got back from singing and John’s not here and the idiot has forgotten his phone.’ She took another drag on the cigarette. ‘Would you get him to call me and …’ More rustlings, more crackles. ‘Oh, it’s all right – he’s back! Ignore this message, babes. Hope you had a good evening.’ And she hung up.

  I exhaled the breath I’d been holding and steadied myself against the wall, pressing my forehead against its cool surface.

  I needed help. I couldn’t cope with this on my own. This was how it had started before; the beginning of my breakdown had been just like this, only the fear was worse this time. It was a cold fear, like the dead fingers of winter inside me, and it was encroaching faster. Less than twelve hours had passed since I saw Ellen in the museum, and already I felt as if she were standing behind me, breathing her chill, dead breath down my neck, watching, listening, waiting.

  I rummaged in a drawer, found my address book and looked up the number of my psychiatrist, Julia. I wrote the number on a piece of paper, and tucked the paper beneath the telephone.

  ‘Eight hours,’ I told myself. ‘Eight hours from now you can reasonably call her.’

  One night, that was all.

  I went to bed but I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t make myself comfortable – my body seemed to be all bones and awkward angles and trapped nerves. A cat howled outside, in one of the gardens down the street. It sounded like a child in distress, and each time it made its banshee wail, the dogs in the neighbourhood barked in protest. I could hear the drone of traffic on the M32 as a distant background irritation, like a wasp in the room, and emergency sirens repeatedly pierced the night somewhere in the city. Worst-case scenarios chased one another through my mind: I imagined bombs going off, buildings collapsing, madmen with guns, fires, people dying. I was too hot, and then too cold. I was parched, dehydrated, so I drank a glass of water and then felt too full. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw Ellen’s face. Every time I drifted close to sleep, a memory would jump into my mind, a flashback to the earlier nightmare or some part of real life that I had forgotten.

  At 5 a.m., in the cool, grey pre-dawn light when the birds began their chorus and the cat finally stopped its yowling, I gave up and climbed out of bed.

  I had an idea that if I found a picture of Ellen, if I looked at her face, then the memory of her would lose some of its power. She had only been a girl, after all, a girl who died young. What was so frightening about that? Why had she turned into something so monstrous in my mind? I made some tea and pulled out the shoe-box beneath my bed where I kept the few items from my past that had survived my psychotic purges. I curled up on the white easy chair in the living room, listening to Holst with the cat on my lap, and I opened the box.

  I used to have hundreds of pictures of Ellen, but after I came back from Chile, I destroyed most of them. I did not want memories, or to be reminded. I riffled through the items in the box until I found the first of the only two images that remained. I picked it up and looked at it by the light of the reading lamp. I had only kept this particular photograph because Jago had taken it. Because he was out of reach, lost to me now, and because I had so little left of him, I had kept the picture.

  It had been taken on my thirteenth birthday outside the comprehensive school while we were waiting for the bus home. The camera had been a present from my parents. I’d taken it to school with me, in my bag.

  That November afternoon, Jago had been standing at the bus stop, as usual, with the Williams twins. I was a little afraid of them. They were older boys, and they spent their free time roaring around the lanes on motorbikes that spewed fumes, and shooting foxes. Mum had seen them drinking cider in the field behind the church with some holiday girls. The tone of her voice implied that this was shocking behaviour. Sometimes when Jago was with them, he ignored me, but that day he smiled. I said, ‘Hello.’ I was wearing a badge on my jumper that said: Birthday Girl.

  ‘Is it your birthday, then?’ Jago asked.

  ‘He’s quick!’ Ellen said. We all laughed and he pushed his hair back out of his face from embarrassment and shifted from one foot to another.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t get you a present.’

  I shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  Jago jiggled about on his feet.

  ‘I’ll give you something better than a present,’ he said.

  Right there, in front of all the kids queuing for buses, he put his boy-arms around me and leaned down and pressed his lips against mine. Jago gave me a birthday kiss. Cheers rippled round the bus stop. I burned with delight and embarrassment.

  And then, flushed and happy, I took the camera out of my bag and asked Jago to take a picture of Ellen and me. We stood together, side by side, in our black tights and winter coats, while Jago bounced about in front of us, trying to find the best angle for the shot. Ellen’s head was leaning against mine, my blonde hair tangling with her darker, longer hair. At thirteen, I still had puppy fat, my tummy bulged against the coat waistband. While I looked awkward, Ellen looked coltish. Our postures were different. I was standing face-on to the camera, my feet at 45 degrees to each other, my arms by my sides, smiling shyly from under my fringe, my cheeks dimpled and the metal brace on my teeth just visible. The scarf my mother had knitted was tied in a knot around my neck and the red woolly cuffs of my gloves were sticking out of my coat pockets. Ellen was side-on, next to me, one arm around my shoulder, the other bent at the elbow with the hand on her hip. Her chin was pointed upwards and her lips were pursed in a pretty pout. I’d never noticed before that she was posing, but in the cold light of that morning, as an adult, I understood. Jago had kissed me and now Ellen was flirting with Jago because she could not bear to be left out.

  I put the photograph, face down, on the floor. The postcards Ellen had sent me from Magdeburg were still in the box. I flicked
through them. Her handwriting was uneven and messy, there were crossings-out and scribbles. I didn’t read the cards, but dropped them on top of the photograph. I tipped out some school reports, Jago’s old school tie, a picture of Snoopy he had drawn for me, a metal dog tag in the shape of a bone with Trixie inscribed on the front, a discarded watch without a strap, seashells and some dried flowers the origins of which I no longer remembered.

  At the bottom of the box was the second photograph of Ellen. It was a small square snap that I had taken with the same camera. I picked the photograph up, turned it over. The colours had faded a little, washed with time, but the image took me back there, to the garden of Thornfield House, on Ellen’s eighteenth birthday. She was wearing the silver-grey dress her father had given her the year before and was standing beneath an arch made of wrought iron that Adam Tremlett had erected as part of the garden restoration; it was wound through with climbing roses. Anybody who looked at that picture and didn’t know might have thought it was an innocent, commemorative snap, but if they looked closer, they would have seen that something was wrong with the image. It wasn’t the tiredness and stress that showed clearly in Ellen’s face, the tight smile on her lips. It wasn’t that the garden was decorated as if for a party, but she was the only one there. No, the problem was the climbing roses trained to weave through the metalwork arch. The plants had grown well, but they had been neglected, left to run wild. Untamed stems of feral dog-rose wove amongst the cultivars. It wasn’t the weedy offshoots that unsettled me. What made my blood run cold was remembering that the photograph had been taken in August. The arch should have been full of flowers, filling the warm evening air with their scent.

  Ellen should have been surrounded by roses, flowers about her head and petals at her feet, but there were none.

  Not one single bud.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE BEST MEMORIES of my life were of the times I spent with Jago and Ellen at Bleached Scarp, when we were young teenagers, before everything became complicated and started to go wrong.

  Bleached Scarp was a beach that Jago had found and that nobody knew about apart from the three of us. It was our own private heaven, tucked in a horseshoe cove between the cliffs beneath Goonhilly Down. Jago had found a secret way down to the beach via steps hewn through a cleft in the rock. To reach it, we had to climb over the fence that separated the cliff edge from the coastal footpath, and tramp through some marshy ground where the gley-soil was spongey with sedge and black bog-rush. After a few yards, we reached a little scree path winding between rocks leading to the cleft. The first time Jago took us there, he scampered down the dark hole but Ellen and I hesitated, afraid to follow him. The rock walls were wet and black as night, and the sound of the sea echoed up from below, slapping against the cave walls. I didn’t like the smell of wet sand and seaweed that blew up through the tunnel.

  ‘Come on! What are you waiting for?’ Jago called from the bottom. There was an echo to his voice.

  Ellen and I exchanged glances. The wind was blowing in from the sea, whipping our hair across our faces and, 30 feet below, the waves were choppy, the water green-blue. A single seal was bobbing up and down, its head poised above the splashing waves.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Ellen. Her eyes were bright. She sat down and took off her shoes. ‘Come on, Hannah!’ And then she too disappeared. After a while, I followed.

  We never told anyone else about the little beach. It was our private place, the place we loved.

  It was where we always went, and although I missed going to Thornfield House and being teased and complimented by Mr Brecht, I was happy to be with Jago and Ellen. We weren’t three individuals at the beach; we were three parts of one whole. And it wasn’t as if I never saw Ellen’s parents. Mr Brecht was always there with a smile and a wink when I went round to call for his daughter.

  I remember one autumn … I was almost fourteen, Ellen nine months younger and Jago sixteen. His body fascinated me. He was growing tall – his feet and hands were huge, but the rest of him hadn’t caught up yet. Soft, gingery hair grew under his arms and acne spread over his chest and back. His shoulders were broad and muscular but he was still a boy, still so young.

  We had an Indian summer in Cornwall that year. The leaves on the trees had turned red and gold, and the sun shining through them made exquisite colours. We were halfway through the autumn term and it was still warm enough to swim. In my mind’s eye, I can see Ellen and Jago standing in their swimsuits on the rocks that slabbed out over the water, counting down, jumping in and emerging, shaking their heads, shouting at the cold and laughing. They were like two muscled, sleek sea-creatures. They raced each other up the rocks, agile as monkeys, and jumped from higher and higher, their arms held out wide as they fell. And when they tired of jumping, they dared one another to swim further out to sea, across the cove from the bottom of one cliff-face to the opposite side. I sat on the rocks on the beach, amongst the spiky little cockle pyramids, and worried about them, hugging my knees and watching the dark shapes of their heads, fearing if I lost sight of either they might drown, and wondering how I would explain that they were gone, and I was still here.

  I was never a bold child. I had been spoonfed caution by my doting parents and I knew people drowned along that coastline every year. I used to beg Jago and Ellen not to take so many risks, but they took no notice. They acted as if they were immortal. They ran, shrieking like banshees, towards the sea. They dived into crashing waves and were pushed and pulled along the pebbles, scraping their knees, their hands, their stomachs. They spent hours together in the sea. When I tired of watching them, I combed the beach for pieces of drift-glass made soft and cloudy by the abrasion of the water and the sand, or collected driftwood to make beach fires on which to cook the small yellow crabs and shellfish that Jago fetched up from the seabed.

  I remember it so clearly. Ellen, Jago and me, huddled around the fire, warming ourselves by the little orange flames that blew this way and that, cowering beneath the wind. Jago and Ellen’s teeth chattered; they were wrapped in threadbare towels that they tossed up into the gorse when they had finished with them. The smoke was in our eyes and hair, the inside of our mouths tasted of scalding hot cockle-meat and burning wood.

  I used to think that, away from the beach, Jago and Ellen would never do more than tolerate each other, and then only for my sake. Each, I believed, thought the other too distant and different. Jago was the rough, uncouth boy from the wrong side of the tracks, Ellen the kooky snob with the wealthy parents. When either Jago or Ellen was alone with me, they made unkind comments about the other. Ellen thought Jago was stupid, Jago thought Ellen was stuck-up. I was the buffer between them.

  We all played our parts so diligently, so well that I never realized we were acting. For a long while, none of us did.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE EARLY HOURS of the morning dragged on until at last it was eight o’clock, which seemed a reasonable time to call my psychiatrist. Julia Fortes da Cruz had told me, years before, that I could contact her at any time. As the phone rang out I closed my eyes and hoped that she had meant it. I was so relieved when she answered that it took me a moment to compose myself.

  ‘Julia …’

  ‘Hello! Who’s that?’

  I could hear a child in the background, a baby, squawking and laughing. Julia had not had a child last time I spoke to her.

  ‘It’s Hannah,’ I said. ‘Hannah Brown. I was your patient in Chartwell.’

  Julia flustered for a moment, but regained her composure quickly.

  ‘Hannah, how lovely to hear from you! Are you all right?’

  Her voice had changed. At the mention of the hospital, I imagined her tucking the phone under her chin, signalling her partner to take care of the baby, slipping from the kitchen. Julia was a small, lively, unconventional woman. I was certain she would have a study with plants on the windowledge and coloured glass dream-catchers, crystals and inspirational postcards pinned to the picture rail. />
  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not all right – not really. I’m sorry to call so early, Julia, but something happened yesterday and—’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s not a problem. I’m glad you called. That’s why I’m here.’ There was a rustle at the other end of the line and then the familiar elongated electronic note of a computer booting itself up. Julia was looking for my records, reminding herself of my case. I imagined her sitting down at a desk by a window, looking out on an overgrown garden full of children’s toys and pots hand-thrown by her arty, eclectic friends. ‘What happened, Hannah?’ she asked.

  ‘I was at work yesterday,’ I said, ‘and I saw Ellen Brecht.’

  ‘Right,’ said Julia, as if there were nothing unusual in this. I wondered if she remembered the details of my case, or perhaps just the bare bones of memory gave her the shape of my disorder as clearly as I could see the live Tyrannosaurus Rex fleshed out from its skeleton, hanging in the museum. She was probably scanning her computer notes right then, reminding herself. ‘Were you on your own, or with other people?’

  ‘There were lots of people there. I was in the museum, in an exhibition area. She – Ellen – was standing amongst the other visitors.’

  ‘And how did this make you feel?’

  ‘For a moment I was happy but then I realized what was happening and I was scared,’ I said, and the word was not big enough for the terror I had experienced, and which still lingered, like a hangover, in my mind and in my bones. ‘She seemed so real,’ I said. ‘It was raining outside and her hair was damp. Every detail was real.’

  ‘Or at least it felt real, Hannah,’ Julia said gently. ‘The mind can be very good at self-deception, especially under stress. What happened next?’

  ‘I had a panic attack.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And after that I came home but I couldn’t stop worrying. I couldn’t sleep. I keep thinking about Ellen. What if she’s come back, Julia? What if the same thing that happened before happens again and I keep seeing her everywhere? How am I going to manage if she’s always there, in my head? What am I going to do? I don’t think I could bear to go through it a second time, really I don’t.’