Hannah Emery - Secrets in the Shadows

Elsie looks up at Grace and smiles. It’s an excited smile, full of the promise of success. Grace smiles back, seeing her own face reflected by Elsie’s: pale skin, an angular cat-like grin, dark arched brows over kohl-lined violet eyes.

Grace tugs her coat around her tightly as she steps out of the shop to protect her from the icy whip of the sea air. She has lived near the sea all her life and still the salty wind can take her breath away. People used to visit Blackpool for this clean, fresh air; it was good for their health and their souls. The stretch of promenade a few miles north of Ash Books is still stuffed with the same old attractions as it was in the 1960s. Blackpool Tower stands over the promenade that it has spawned: the south of the promenade is filled with the sounds of clicking, whirring Pleasure Beach rides and the screams of tourists’ rickety descents down roller coaster tracks. In the summer season, Central Pier is gaudy with lights and colour, and amusement arcades and cheap food shacks squall for custom. From north to south, a string of giddy illuminations hover over the line of cars that queue to see them.

Grace squints into the distance and sees Blackpool Pleasure Beach. When half term is over, the rides will stop and the park will fall silent. There is always something dead about Blackpool in winter. Grace’s whole life has peaked and fallen with Blackpool’s peaks and falls, as the town has breathed in and out over summer and winter. The dazzling attractions and pleasant weather used to make Rose House bustle with loud, excitable overnight guests for the first few summers of Grace’s childhood. But the guests dwindled over the years. Eventually, they stopped coming altogether. Grace’s mother didn’t seem to care.

‘It’s all too much trouble. We’re better off with no guests. We’re better off just us,’ she said to the twins when they were about fifteen, an empty brandy glass beside her.

Of course, it wasn’t running the guest house that had caused trouble. It was the other thing their mother did for the guests, night after night, behind the closed door of the dining room. The twins listened sometimes, kneeling on their bedroom floor, ears pressed to the musty-smelling, swirling green carpet and hearing nothing but muffled voices. Their mother used to come upstairs afterwards, clinking coins and smelling of smoke and grown-ups. That’s when she’d come into their room, and think that they couldn’t hear her. Grace will always remember the sound of her mother’s sleep. It’s mixed in with the sounds of the night sea. Shallow breaths, hoarse with alcohol.

Grace and Elsie never understood what their mother was doing in the dining room until the day of the car crash. That was the day that changed everything.

‘Yes, love. What can I get you?’ Grace’s memories are interrupted by the deli assistant, poised over her clean white chopping board.

When Grace arrives back at the shop, a tall, chubby man in a green waterproof jacket is just leaving.

‘Another cold day, eh?’ he says politely as he lets Grace pass. As she does so, she sees him rapidly scanning her face, hesitation clouding his own. She smiles.

‘I think we confused that customer who just left,’ she grins at Elsie as she plonks the sandwiches down on the counter. ‘I don’t think he was expecting to step out of the shop and see a carbon copy of you.’

Elsie smiles weakly. ‘He wasn’t a customer,’ she says as she pulls a sandwich towards her and begins to unwrap it.

‘Who was he then?’ Grace asks over the rustling of the sandwich paper.

Elsie shrugs. ‘A salesman.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘This one’s yours. I don’t know how you can eat prawns. Didn’t you know that they are the maggots of the sea?’

‘A salesman of what?’

Elsie shrugs and bites into her own sandwich neatly. ‘Books and stuff.’

‘So, did he have anything good? Did he give you any ideas of any other stock it might be worth ordering?’

‘No. He wanted to sell us a load of old stuff.’

‘Like what?’

‘It was just old stuff. Not really what we’re going for.’

‘I would have liked to have seen it. Did he leave a number?’

‘No,’ Elsie replies simply as she pops a piece of cucumber into her mouth. Just like that, as though the matter is closed. As though she is the boss.

‘Elsie, we’re meant to be a team! Why didn’t you at least take his number?’

‘Why don’t you trust the decision that I made? Who would buy horrible dusty books from a hundred years ago?’

‘They were from a hundred years ago? There could have been all sorts in his collection, Elsie. There could have been first editions that we could have made actual money from! Why do you think that you are the one in charge? Why can’t we both be the adults here?’

Elsie shrugs and screws up her sandwich paper, soggy with tomatoes that she has delicately removed.

‘I thought I made the right decision. People want new stuff these days. Even if they’re buying second hand, they want it to look new.’

‘No, they don’t all want new stuff. Don’t be so narrow-minded,’ Grace shoots back.

Elsie scowls at her sister as she grabs the ball of tomato-smeared paper and pushes past her. Grace picks up her own sandwich and bites into it. She frowns as Elsie’s words are finally processed in her mind. Maggots of the sea . She swallows her first mouthful uneasily, poking at the remainder of the sandwich’s pink, veiny innards before pushing it away.

The apology comes the next day, just as Grace knows it will.

‘I really am sorry.’

Grace looks up from her pile of pound coins to her twin’s apologetic saucer eyes. ‘It’s fine, Elsie. Honestly, I’m over it. As long as you promise we can decide things as a team in the future.’

‘I will, I will. I promise. I was just feeling stubborn yesterday. I thought I could handle things on my own. But today I can see it all a bit more clearly. I know I was out of order,’ Elsie says, her voice slightly high-pitched as though she has sucked an old helium balloon. ‘So, I’m going to leave you to it for the afternoon. To show that I trust you.’

‘You’re taking the afternoon off?’

‘Well, not exactly. I’ll start some stuff for the tax return. Boring stuff.’ Elsie gives Grace an impulsive hug over the counter, her earrings catching on her sister’s glossy black hair. ‘I’m not skiving. I just want you to know that I trust you.’

A few minutes after Elsie has left, Grace drums her fingers on the counter. She takes a sip of the hot chocolate she has made herself, even though it’s too hot to taste the sweetness. She watches a lone man in a brown suede coat browse the small selection of biographies they have stacked near to the doorway. When was the last time Elsie hugged Grace before today? She can still smell her sister’s perfume: a leathery, almost manly scent. A scent that makes her seem like the boss. She has been worse since their mother left. Elsie seems to think that telling Grace what to do might fill in the horrific, inexplicable gap in their lives that they are forced to step over each day. Elsie seems to bound over the gap easily, like an exuberant Labrador, and has done since they were sixteen. But Grace, even now, constantly finds herself edging over it cautiously, trying not to fall.

The twins’ mother vanished on their sixteenth birthday: a day when she should definitely have stayed until the end. In many ways, she had gone long before the day she disappeared, but the traces of her at least made Grace feel as though they had a mother. Sticky hairspray wafting through the hall. Perfume. Brandy. All toxic fumes, seeping into their skin, making the twins’ faces grey and their thoughts jumbled. She had been even more distracted in the days leading up to the twins’ birthday, and Grace had felt as though something might be the matter with her. There had been more of the nightmares than ever before. Twice in the night, Grace had heard her mother moaning and crying. Those blue, anxious hours of thirteen years ago came back to her now, as she stood in the shop.