In Her Shadow Read online

  Julia’s voice was quiet and calm. ‘All right, Hannah. That’s a lot of “what if”s. We’ll jump those fences if we get to them. One shaky moment doesn’t make a breakdown any more than one swallow makes a summer.’

  ‘No,’ I said, but I was thinking of how real Ellen had seemed to me in the museum, how present she had been.

  Julia asked: ‘How have you been generally, up until now?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Everything’s been going along at an even keel? You’re eating well? Exercising?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sleeping OK?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Stressed? Anxious?’

  ‘Not really. Not until yesterday.’ I took a deep breath and leaned my head back against the wall. Lily was weaving around my ankles.

  ‘OK …’ I could hear Julia’s fingertips tapping on her desktop. ‘Listen, Hannah, I don’t think there’s any need to worry. This event, although I appreciate it was unpleasant and frightening, was most likely a one-off, a flashback. They happen to the best of us.’

  I closed my eyes. ‘It didn’t feel like a flashback. She was so clear and so real and—’

  Julia interrupted. ‘That’s how you described your hallucinations last time, Hannah. They feel absolutely real to you, of course they do, that’s why they’re so frightening.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So for now, let’s hope this doesn’t happen again, but if it does, I want you to stay calm – you remember the breathing exercises?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do those. And stay in touch. I want to speak to you every few days until things have settled down. Call me any time you need to, day or night.’

  I picked up the cat and held her in my arms, up close to my face. I could feel her heart beating beneath my fingers. ‘Thank you, Julia,’ I said. ‘I will.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WHILE JAGO, ELLEN and I were growing up, the situation next door at number 10 Cross Hands Lane deteriorated. The Cardells’ fights became more frequent and more vicious, until one day Mrs Cardell left the house wearing her slippers and carrying an umbrella and never returned. Mr Cardell responded by bringing home young women he’d picked up at the docks and holding round-the-clock drinking sessions with his mates. Jago missed school more often than he attended. The dog, exhausted by whelping, became stiffer and more cowed until finally my father decided to take matters into his own hands. He put on his best jumper, combed what was left of his hair over the shiny pink dome of his head, went down our garden path and up the Cardells’ and knocked on their front door. Caleb opened it. He was wearing a pair of filthy jeans and nothing on his top. He had a can of beer in one hand and a roll-up in the other and he was swaying on his feet, red-eyed and nasty. It was dark inside the Cardells’ house because their front-room window had been broken and was boarded. Dad could only see the men in the pit of a living room by the flickering grey-blue light of the television screen reflected on their faces.

  He took a deep breath and said, ‘I’ll give you fifty pounds cash for the dog, Caleb.’

  The money was in his hand, where Mr Cardell could see it. Caleb looked at the money and then back at my father. He took a drag on the cigarette.

  ‘I make twenty-five a pup each time she whelps,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad, ‘but she’s past it now. You and I both know it. Next pregnancy’ll finish her off.’

  Caleb Cardell thought about this for a moment.

  ‘Seventy-five and you’ve got yourself a deal,’ he said.

  Dad nodded. He had expected this. He took five more notes out of his back pocket and placed them into Mr Cardell’s hand.

  Caleb put the cigarette in his mouth while he counted the money. Then he leaned over the stair banister and shouted up: ‘Jago! Get down here, you lazy bastard, and fetch the friggin’ dog.’

  Jago came downstairs warily. He didn’t look at my father, but dodged past his uncle and went into the kitchen. Dad heard the back door open. He took a couple of steps away, into the fresher air, clasped his hands together behind his back, rocked on his heels and stared into the middle distance. Jago reappeared a few moments later with the dog following timorously, her ears flat and her tail between her legs. She was attached to Jago by a piece of green garden twine. As he reached the front door, Mr Cardell kicked Jago’s backside with the flat of his boot. Jago stumbled and fell forward, past Dad, onto his hands and knees on the front path, which was filthy and full of nettles and broken glass.

  ‘Take the fucking kid as well,’ Caleb Cardell said to my father. ‘You can fucking have him for fucking fuck all,’ and he laughed and slammed the door shut.

  Back at our house, Mum, who had been listening from behind the front-room window, buttered some extra bread for tea. Dad came in with Jago and the dog. Nobody said anything about what had happened. Jago and the dog both looked ashamed, as if it were all their fault. Jago sat at the table with us to eat his dinner, though – and he ate plenty. He cleaned his plate in about two minutes flat. He ate uncouthly, scooping food onto his fork and shovelling it into his mouth. If I’d eaten like that I’d have been told off, but my parents merely exchanged knowing glances, and then Mum heaped up Jago’s plate again. I had never seen anyone eat so much, so fast, in all my life.

  ‘It’s nice to have someone with a good appetite at the table,’ Mum said. She smiled at Jago. He wiped his mouth with his hand, burped and said, ‘Thanks very much.’

  Mum nodded. She was pleased, I could tell.

  I kept looking at Jago from under my fringe. I could not think of a single thing to say that would not make me sound like a baby or an idiot.

  After a while, we heard raised voices next door. The dog cowered behind one of the living-room chairs and peed on the carpet.

  ‘I’d best be going,’ Jago said. He stood up. He looked dirty and scruffy and big, and out of place in our little front room that was neat as a pin.

  ‘Going where?’ Mum asked.

  Jago shrugged. ‘I dunno. Anywhere. I’ll find somewhere.’

  Dad turned up the telly to mask the sounds from number 10 and said it would be helpful if Jago stayed with us at least until the dog settled down. Mum latched onto what Dad had said as if that had been the plan all along.

  ‘You can’t go and leave us to cope with her while she’s so unsettled,’ she said. ‘You just can’t.’

  Jago looked dubious but did not know how to refuse.

  Mum went upstairs to make up the bed in the boxroom. Dad told Jago to sit down again in the kind of voice that brooked no argument.

  I could hardly wait to tell Ellen about all this – she would, I was sure, be mad with curiosity.

  For the rest of the evening, Dad and Jago sat together on the settee, awkwardly, with their arms crossed, watching the football, and I sat on the rug and tried to feed cheese to the dog to make her feel more at home. Then Dad said it was getting late and time for bed.

  I waited until Jago had used the bathroom, then I tapped on the boxroom door.

  ‘Jago, it’s me.’

  ‘What?’

  I pushed open the door. The boxroom was a sparse, narrow space in the eaves. It smelled of mothballs and the stinky oil Dad used to clean his fishing rods. Jago was sitting incongruously on the deep pink chenille coverlet on the bed. His face was blotchy where he had been crying. I looked down at my feet so he wouldn’t know that I knew.

  ‘What?’ he asked again, more aggressively. He wiped his nose with his forefinger.

  ‘What’s the dog called?’ I asked.

  ‘I dunno. She don’t have a name.’

  From next door, we heard the sound of glass breaking and Caleb Cardell’s roar.

  ‘He’s a wanking bastard,’ Jago muttered.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘He is.’

  Jago sniffed. He made a gobby noise in his throat that both disgusted and excited me, a boy noise.

  ‘Is it all right if I call the dog Trixie?’ I asked.

&nb
sp; ‘Suit yourself,’ said Jago. ‘It don’t bother me.’

  Jago never returned to number 10 Cross Hands Lane. Caleb was evicted by the council soon after Jago moved in with us, and he never called round to say goodbye. We all acted like that was a good thing. It took a while, but eventually Jago settled into our family as if he should have been part of it all along. He adored both my parents, especially my father, and Dad could not have been more proud, or closer to Jago, if he had been his blood son.

  That was how Jago Cardell, my childhood friend and neighbour, the first boy who ever kissed me, became my brother.

  My almost-brother.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AFTER I’D SPOKEN to Julia, I walked across the city to my work. The sun was low in the sky still but there was a smell of summer in the air and I knew it was going to be a lovely day. I arrived at the museum at the same time as Misty, the intern, only I was on foot and she was climbing out of a snappy little black car.

  ‘Bye, gorgeous, have a good day!’ A young man waved at Misty from the driver’s window. She sneered at him in a way that wasn’t exactly unfriendly, which was about as good as you could hope for with Misty, and raised a hand in greeting when she saw me.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Some loser.’

  ‘Your boyfriend?’

  ‘In his dreams.’

  I smiled at her. I envied her confidence.

  Misty and I went into the museum together, via the staff entrance. I hung my jacket on the rack in the corner of the educational-resources room and then checked the calendar pinned to the noticeboard.

  ‘It’s going to be a busy morning,’ I said. ‘Two school parties.’

  ‘Kill me now,’ said Misty.

  ‘Make some coffee first, would you, Mist?’

  I was determined to keep things light that day. I didn’t want my colleagues to realize how out of sorts I was. I didn’t want them talking about the previous day’s turn, or knowing that I had hardly slept that night or wondering about my mental state. It would be best to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and to act casual.

  The light was on in John’s office. I knocked on the door with my knuckles, and pushed it open.

  John was sitting at the desk, rubbing his eyes with his fists. He sat up straight when he saw me and put a smile on his face, but he looked as if he had slept even less than I had.

  I smiled as warmly and as normally as I could. ‘I just wanted to say thank you for last night.’

  ‘No, no, I should be thanking you.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘You have some great ideas for the annexe. Perhaps you could write them down, Hannah. Email me a few bullet-points …’

  ‘Of course.’

  He looked up at me then. The whites of his eyes were pink with tiredness but the pupils were grey, almost silvery. I hadn’t noticed that before. I wanted to say something to him, to strengthen our connection, but I couldn’t think of anything that would not sound insincere or like a platitude.

  ‘Have a good morning, John,’ I said. Then I left the office, closing the door gently behind me.

  I busied myself with administration work, keeping my head down, shoulders straight, repelling any well-meant enquiries as to my well-being with body language that gave the message I was fine, and had too much to do to indulge in small talk.

  I don’t think anybody noticed how I kept glancing around, to see if anyone was watching me. I don’t think they were aware that I was keeping my back to the wall, avoiding dark corners.

  The first tour was a class of eleven-year-olds from Bristol Grammar School. They were cheerful, bright children who looked as if they had been fed plenty of vegetables and orange juice in infanthood, with shiny shoes and clothes that had been bought a little too big, for them to grow into. I remembered Jago when he was their age, how the cuffs of his sleeves never reached his wrists, how his jeans were worn through in places, and the scabby tracksuits he wore, his uncle’s cast-offs. I remembered the cracked skin on his lips and his generous, crooked smile, his breath, sour because he never had a toothbrush, and one of his top front teeth was already missing – knocked out by Mr Cardell probably. It gave a rakish look to his grin, although my parents took him to have it fixed after he moved in with us.

  Now Jago lived on the other side of the world. God, how I missed him.

  He had been working, for several years, as a sustainability adviser with the fishing community in a small Newfoundland port. He stayed in close touch with my parents and had bought them a transatlantic cruise for their Golden Wedding anniversary, meeting them off the ship in New York and treating them to what Mum described as a ‘slap-up holiday’. It was Jago’s way of making up for living so far away. The last time I saw him had been a couple of years earlier, after my father’s heart attack. I’d arrived at the hospital in Truro in the early hours. A nurse showed me to the ward. My father was in a private bay at the end. Mum was asleep in a chair. She had been covered over with a blanket, and a pillow had been placed tenderly beneath her cheek to protect her neck from cricking.

  A rugged, broad-shouldered man wearing ill-fitting denim jeans, a scruffy grey T-shirt and a leather string around his thick neck was sitting on a stool on the far side of the bed, with his arms resting on the knees of his splayed legs. The man needed a shave, he looked dog-tired. His hair had been cut very short, his forearms were tattooed and his face was lined. I did not recognize him at first, but as I came into the room he stood up and we held one another’s eyes, and it was as if we were children again.

  ‘Jago!’ I said, wondering how he, who lived thousands of miles away, had managed to reach my father’s bedside before me. I stepped forward to embrace him, but as I did so he stepped back, away. The rejection cut me like a knife.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  Jago ignored the question. ‘Dad’s doing all right,’ he said. ‘They reckon he’s going to pull through.’

  I looked at my father, who seemed childlike lying, as he was, on his back, in the bed, with an oxygen mask covering his nose and mouth. He was terribly pale, and quiet. I thought he would be appalled if he knew that Jago and I found it painful even being in the same room as one another.

  ‘You don’t mind if I sit with you?’ I asked, and now my voice was cold.

  Jago shrugged. I pulled up a chair and we sat on opposite sides of the bed, with Dad in between us, his gnarled hands resting on either side of the mountain beneath the bedclothes that was his stomach, to the soundtrack of Mum snoring gently on the chair. It was the first time we had all been together in the same place as a family since I was eighteen and Jago twenty, and yet we had nothing to say to one another, Jago and I; nothing at all.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT WAS DIFFERENT when we were young. There was a time, a brief time, when nothing was wrong in our world and we were happy. Jago was living with us, Caleb Cardell was gone, I was losing my puppy fat and my teeth were straight, Ellen’s father was still charming and funny and her mother, although poorly, was managing her condition.

  Every morning, during that time, I woke up feeling happy and excited because Jago brought an energy into our lives that hadn’t been there before. Dad threw himself into being a father to his new son. He encouraged Jago to join the cricket team he coached, he took him fishing and he ‘rescued’ the rusty old shell of a Ford Escort from a corner of the Williamses’ cow barn, brought it home on a borrowed trailer and set it on bricks in the front garden of our house so he and Jago could restore it together. When it was fixed, it would be Jago’s car and because he had rebuilt it from scratch, Dad said, he would always know what to do if something went wrong. Restoring the car was a project that lasted years.

  Mum cooked Jago a hot meal every night, did his laundry, and he showed his affection for her by moderating his language and doing little jobs, unasked. He fetched in the coal, moved leaves from the gutter, unblocked the drains, cleaned up after Trixie.
/>   It was less straightforward for me to change the foundation of my relationship with Jago from friend to almost-sister. I was fascinated by Jago, but my feelings for him were confused and contradictory. I loved him, but I didn’t know why, or how. Even today I’m not sure if I saw him as a brother, a friend, or as a potential lover. It was probably a combination of the three, exacerbated by the hormones of adolescence and combined with a genuine affection for the boy who had always been part of my life and who had suffered so much in the house adjoining ours.

  I can’t say how he felt about me. How would I know? We weren’t the sort of family to talk about feelings.

  Not long after he came to live with us, Jago turned sixteen. Dad said it might be a good idea if he left school and did something useful that he enjoyed rather than being stuck in a classroom wasting the teachers’ time and his own. Jago had a natural aptitude for mechanics, and was accepted on an apprenticeship in marine engineering. He went to college two days a week; the other days he worked with Bill Haworth, a friend of Dad’s who owned a boat, the Eliza Jane, which fished out of Polrack. Jago enjoyed the work and Bill said he was good at it.

  When he received his first pay packet, Jago bought gifts: a box of After Eights for Mum, a fishing fly for Dad and a necklace made of tiny seashells threaded on a string for me.

  After that, he didn’t buy presents, but he gave most of his wages to Mum.

  Jago didn’t mind the weather. He liked the rain as much as he liked the sun. Mum and I sat on the harbour wall to watch the Eliza Jane come in and we squealed when we saw Jago standing on the deck, looking like a man, holding the rope between his hands, followed by a cloud of screaming seabirds. He raised his hand to salute us, and I was thrilled to the core. I played out a little fantasy in my head that I was his sweetheart and he was coming home to me. I was always imagining scenarios like that. I don’t think I really meant anything by it.