Hannah Emery - Secrets in the Shadows

Grace had woken up suddenly on her sixteenth birthday. She’d had a frightening dream that she was drowning, pulling for something to grab onto, her mouth and eyes and nose filling with stinging seawater. She had clawed at her duvet, gasping, and shot up in bed, disorientated and dizzy with breathlessness. She’d looked over at Elsie, who lay still as a corpse, breathing deeply and steadily. Although the curtains were shut, Grace could tell it was still early.

But not early enough.

She sat up, feeling a suffocating pain in her chest, tasting salt and fear and loss. When she went downstairs to find her mother, she found sixteen fairy cakes with silver balls on top, two glasses of cloudy lemonade, a blood red bottle of wine from a neighbour, presents wrapped in pink foil paper, cards stacked up in the hall. A lone balloon.

But no mother. Grace remembered her dream: remembered being pulled into the slicing waves, water filling her lungs until there was nothing but blackness.

‘She’s fine ,’ Grace said to herself, her voice too loud in the empty hall. She tried to make herself calm down a little, but her breaths had become short and sharp, and her heart was light and trembling.

She called her mother, but there was no answer. She looked all around the kitchen for a note, a sign that her mother might be back any moment, but all she found was a half-finished glass of brandy in the kitchen. She thudded upstairs, into all the empty rooms, into the one where Elsie still lay sleeping. Elsie couldn’t know that their mother had tried to leave them. She would never forgive it. Grace had to find her. She fled back downstairs to the kitchen, knocking the brandy from the worktop as she passed so that it crashed onto the stained stone floor. She rushed out of the back door into the whipping, salty air.

‘Mum,’ she tried to call. Her limbs dragged along as though they were being pulled back, and her shout for her mother was sucked back into her mouth. She could not speak. She could not yell. Come and find me , she pleaded silently.

Grace searched and searched and searched; she waited until her voice returned and bellowed for her mother over and over again; she wandered up and down the beach until her feet were numb and prickled with sand. Eventually she gave up and walked from the beach, back home to Elsie.

Now, Grace looks at her watch. Nearly half past two. She picks up her phone from the counter and pauses slightly before tapping into her caller list. Eliot finished work for the half term break the other day. He went on to a teacher training course after his degree and now he teaches Theatre Studies in a sixth form college. He is probably still in bed. Grace pictures his bare chest rising and falling with sleep, his mouth slightly open, his face immersed in a dream he won’t remember when he wakes.

Her hand hovers over his number, until she remembers the hug from Elsie, the feeling of their hair and earrings and scents being entangled. She locks her keypad and places her phone back on the counter. As she does, she glances up at the door, which has opened.

‘Eliot! I was just thinking you’d still be in bed, enjoying your break.’

‘Thought I’d come and check in here. How’s it going? Good day?’

‘Yeah. Pretty quiet, after a surge yesterday.’

Eliot nods then looks round. ‘Isn’t Elsie here?’

‘She’s taken the tax stuff home to work on,’ Grace says, not wanting to go into the reason why Elsie has left Grace to it. ‘She’ll be back in a bit. She won’t be able to stay away, although it seems to be going quieter this afternoon.’

‘I suppose with this kind of shop it will always be a little up and down. Have you had many students in? I was thinking if you did some kind of student discount then it might work in your favour.’

‘Yes, we’ve had a few, thanks to your promotional email. Student discount is a great idea.’

‘If you decide on the discount then I can email my students again, in case they’re thinking of buying anything.’

Grace laughs. ‘Did you used to spend your college holidays buying books?’

‘I certainly did! You know I did!’

Grace bites her lip. ‘I remember. You were always reading.’

‘Reading or drinking,’ Eliot shrugs. ‘But drinking’s a student’s prerogative.’

‘And what’s your excuse now?’

‘It’s a teacher’s prerogative too! Some of the banal things I have to teach and the misery that some of the students put me through are both enough to make me reach for a drink.’

‘I can’t imagine your lessons being banal.’

‘My lessons aren’t banal!’ Eliot retorts. ‘It’s the bloody curriculum that’s the problem. Bores the students to death. If I followed the lesson plans that I was meant to, as well as sticking to the set plays, then everybody would have slipped into a tedium-induced coma by the end of the lesson – me included.’

‘Have you got much marking to do over half term?’ Grace asks, remembering that Eliot normally spends most of his time off lamenting what he should be doing to keep in the head of department’s good books.

‘Nah. A bit of planning. Nothing that I can’t do on the day before I go back. So I’ll probably help out here a bit. I like the idea of reading all day.’

‘We don’t just read all day! We’re actually very busy,’ Grace says in mock outrage. ‘In fact, I have a load of new stock to put out. Mags found some of Noel’s old books we could sell at her house the other day, so I need to catalogue them and decide where to place them. I’m considering changing the window display at some point so I need to think of some ideas for that. And I have to cash up, too.’

Eliot rolls his sleeves up. ‘Well then. We’d best get started.’

Grace, 2008

When the phone rings in the shop, Grace knows who it’ll be. They have had a landline installed but it hasn’t rung, apart from now. Grace can’t even remember hearing the ring before, and the noise shocks her at first, a shrill shriek straight through her body. She takes a moment to register what the sound is, then picks up the receiver.

‘Grace? How’s it going there?’

‘It’s going well,’ Grace says perkily, ‘how’s your afternoon?’

‘Oh, you know. It’s fine.’

‘So what’s up?’

‘Nothing. I just wanted to check you’re okay. I could have come back to help if it was busy.’

‘Elsie, please. I’m fine here. In fact, I have some brilliant news. You know the teacher who bought all those books on our first day?’ Grace doesn’t wait for Elsie’s response before continuing. ‘Well, he came back in about an hour ago and bought a load of novels! So I’ve taken over £50.’

‘That really is brilliant!’ Elsie’s voice lifts.

‘So I was thinking we could go out tonight to celebrate. Dinner? On me?’

‘I’d love to!’

Grace smiles. ‘Great. Let’s go to that new tapas bar, you know the one—’

‘It’s called Sombra,’ Eliot interrupts cheerfully, as he places books on an empty shelf.

There’s a silence. ‘Is Eliot with you?’ Elsie asks Grace, her voice tensing.

‘Oh, um, yeah. He was looking for you, actually.’

Elsie relaxes a little. ‘I’ve been trying to call him.’

‘I think he left his phone at home. I’ll put him on.’

Grace hands the phone over to Eliot and tries not to watch him, tries not to take notice of whether his face lights up, or tenses, or changes at all.

‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘I didn’t realise I’d left my phone at home until I got to the shop. I was just going to ring you. I could come to yours now? We could watch a film or something?’