Hannah Emery - Secrets in the Shadows

Louisa and Hatty stumbled along the promenade, the summer wind fresh on their faces. Louisa licked her lips and tasted salt, sand and loss.

Yates’s was just as Louisa had imagined it would be when she had stared up at it as a little girl. It was smoky, hazy and hot. Hatty bought them a glass of wine each, but the woman behind the bar misheard the order for two glasses of white wine and slopped two glasses of deep purple wine down in front of them. It tasted of wood and winter, not summers on the beach, and it burned Louisa’s throat as she swallowed. But after their first glass, they found they had a taste for it. So when a tall, rather hairy man wandered over to them and offered to buy them a drink, they asked for more of the same. Louisa stared at the man as he queued at the bar, waiting to be served. His shirt was unbuttoned at the top and his chest looked almost as though it wanted to leap out of his clothes. Hair sprouted from his chest, his neck, his face and his head. Later, when he stroked Louisa’s cheek and smiled at her, she noticed that he had hair on his fingers too.

‘What’s your name?’ Louisa asked the man, over the hum of voices and laughter and music.

‘Nicky. Yours?’

Hatty cleared her throat and leaned forward, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Never mind that. I think we’d better be getting back.’

‘I don’t want to get back,’ Louisa frowned. ‘What is there to get back for ?’ She liked how philosophical this sounded, and laughed. Nicky smiled appreciatively.

‘My parents. They’ll kill me if we’re much later.’

Louisa groaned as Hatty stood up.

‘Tell you what,’ Nicky said in Louisa’s ear, his yeasty scent floating around her as he spoke, ‘I’ll meet you under Central Pier in a bit.’

It was this thought that kept Louisa going as she stood up and the room lurched towards her, as Hatty dragged her back to the hotel, as there was a knock at the door of their shared room.

‘Yes?’ Hatty asked as she opened the door, her eyes wide at the unexpected drama of somebody visiting them in their hotel room. Louisa couldn’t see past the door, but knew exactly what news was going to come from behind it.

‘Yes, yes, she’s in here,’ Hatty said. ‘Hold on. It’s the manager. He’s asking for you,’ she said to Louisa, frowning in confusion.

Louisa clambered over the bed to receive the news that she was waiting for, the words that she knew would be spoken at this precise time, whether she was at home or in Blackpool, or drunk or sober.

‘Miss Ash? I’m afraid to say that I have some rather bad news for you. It’s your father,’ said the manager. ‘We’ve had a telephone call from your maid. I’m very sorry to tell you that he’s passed away.’

Louisa said very little and focused on not vomiting on Hatty’s unmade bed, on the jumble of clothes and bikinis and make-up. She thanked the manager, and then swung the door of Room 35 shut abruptly. The click as it closed seemed to mark the change in direction of Louisa’s life.

‘My father is dead,’ she said simply. ‘I’m going for a walk.’

Hatty wailed. ‘Oh Louisa! I’m so sorry!’ She fumbled in her bag for the room key. ‘I must come with you. Or do you want me to wake up my parents?’

‘No. Please. Just let me walk,’ Louisa said, and left the room.

At first, Nicky was more gentle than Louisa had expected him to be. He stroked her cheek again, and then he kissed her forehead. Louisa thought how strange this was, and remembered her mother kissing her forehead before bedtime. Nicky kissed her cheek next, and his fingers moved to her thigh. The sand beneath them was cool and uncomfortable: it seemed less welcoming than it had done during the day. She wondered what she should do with her hands, so decided to run them through Nicky’s hair, like she had seen in the film at the cinema last year. Nicky didn’t seem to like this. He swatted her hand away as though he was angry. Then he began tugging at her dress and all of a sudden Louisa remembered her father and wanted to cry. She pushed against Nicky with all her weight, but he just grunted and forced her back into the sand. The grains prickled into her like glass.

‘My father’s just died!’ Louisa shouted after a minute of grunting and pushing. ‘Please get off me! I feel sick, and I—’

Nicky straightened up for a moment and knelt above her. He looked as though he was about to say something, and Louisa felt relief flooding through her, mixing with the wine and sadness already coursing through her blood. But then Nicky lurched towards her again, even more fiercely this time. Louisa heard her dress rip and felt Nicky’s hands grip and burn her waist, and then she felt another pair of hands on her, gentler ones, and she saw Mr Kennedy above her and Hatty’s pale face floating somewhere behind him.

Louisa, 1965

The next day, as Hatty and Louisa waited in the reception of The Fortuna Hotel while Mr Kennedy checked them all out two days early, Hatty patted Louisa’s hand.

‘I’m so glad that I brought my dad with me to look for you last night. I had a feeling you’d run into that awful man. I’m just glad that we caught him before he … ’ The sentence skulked away, its content apparently unsuitable for the finery of the hotel’s foyer. ‘I know you’d had a terrible shock, Louisa, and so I don’t blame you for doing something silly. But the thing is, you were quite taken with that man before you’d even found out about your poor father, and it was clear that he was bad news. We were all lucky that nothing worse happened to you last night under that pier. You need to be more careful.’ Hatty saw that her father had finished at the reception desk and was heading towards the girls, so quickly wrapped up what she was saying. ‘You won’t always be lucky enough to have somebody to rescue you.’

Louisa thought of how Dr Barker had rescued her years ago, thought of her father, thought of Mr Kennedy’s gentle grip last night. She looked up from the red swirling carpet, at Hatty’s smooth clean skin and her sleek hair and neat black eyeliner.

The thing about being lucky enough to always have someone to rescue you, she thought, is being unlucky enough to always need rescuing in the first place .

It was as they were waiting for the train back home that Louisa saw her.

She had soft brown hair that hung down over her face, and a rounded jaw just like her mother’s. She stood alone in the midst of all the shrieking groups and families and couples. She held a fashionable rounded suitcase in her hand and her dress was bright, almost garish. She looked, Louisa realised with a creeping nausea, just like her mother would do now. Louisa banged her suitcase down on the platform and raced over to the woman, hearing vague calls from Hatty as she did so. The woman didn’t notice Louisa charging towards her. She stared down the empty platform, lost in her own world: a world that Louisa was certain she had once shared.

As Louisa reached the woman, she slowed down. She tried to stretch out that last glorious moment when anything was still possible for as long as she could by sidling up to her mother gradually. But closer, Louisa could see that she had been mistaken: that the woman’s hair was not soft, but hung in waves that would be sticky to the touch. As she moved closer still, she could smell a dark, exotic perfume. It wasn’t unpleasant. But was it how Louisa had imagined her mother would smell now?

Oh, how Louisa had imagined.

The woman turned, then, and the heavy scent wafted over Louisa, drenching her aching body. All at once, as nausea swept over her and the woman gave her a cool, unknowing glance, Louisa knew: it was not her. With sudden ferocity, the certainty that her mother was dead crashed over Louisa, and all the hot, sharp pain that she had tried to lock away for so many years engulfed her, burning and pinching her whole body. She began to sob: huge, heaving sobs that were too big for her lungs and choked her, twisting air out of her chest and making her shake.