‘I was sorry to hear about Lucy,’ said Drew. ‘It must have been a shock for you.’
‘Well, yes,’ I said doubtfully, ‘but to be honest, the bigger shock was finding out that she’d made me an executor. I hadn’t seen her for years. You probably knew her better than I did.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’ I could see him choosing his words. ‘We’d exchange good mornings and a comment about the weather if we met in the street, but that was about it. Sophie always liked Lucy, though,’ he went on.
‘Sophie?’
‘My daughter. She’s very into all of Lucy’s weird ideas,’ he said, and I gathered from a certain rigidity in his expression that his daughter’s friendship with Lucy had been the source of some conflict. ‘Sophie spent quite a lot of time with Lucy,’ Drew went on. ‘She was very upset when she heard what had happened.’
‘It’s nice to think that someone was,’ I said carefully. ‘I know Lucy was a bit eccentric, but she had a good heart, or so my mother always used to say, anyway. I certainly never expected her to entrust me with her affairs, though. I feel a bit bad I didn’t make more of an effort to keep in touch now,’ I confessed. ‘I sent her the occasional postcard, but that was about it.’
An enormous yawn caught me unawares in the middle of the sentence, and I wished it hadn’t, when Drew clearly took it as a signal that I wanted to go. He levered himself upright.
‘Let me find that torch for you.’
He came back a few minutes later with a serviceable-looking torch. By that time I was nearly asleep in the comfortable armchair and the house felt warm and safe.
Safe? Where had that thought come from?
‘Thanks.’ I mustered a smile as I got reluctantly to my feet and took the torch. ‘I’ll bring it back straight away.’
‘I’ll come and give you a hand,’ he said, dragging on a sweatshirt.
Of course I protested, but not too hard. I would go back to being independent the next day, I vowed. Until then, it was dark and cold and I was very tired and my knee hurt, so I let Drew Dyer be a good neighbour.
He fixed the fuse with a minimum of fuss and the lights sprang back on, revealing my heavy suitcase tipped over on the tiles, and the backpack, which lay abandoned where I had last tripped over it.
‘Like me to carry that upstairs?’ he said, eyeing the case.
I followed him up to the bedroom. Lucy had decorated in a deep, dark blue and there were stars on the ceiling. Just right for an adolescent. For a woman in her fifties it felt a little odd, but that was Lucy for you.
‘Thank you so much,’ I said gratefully to Drew and then broke off as a name drifted through the air.
‘Bess . . . ’
I frowned. ‘Who’s Bess?’ I asked Drew.
‘Who?’
‘Didn’t you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’
‘I keep thinking I hear someone calling for Bess.’
He shook his head. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Oh. Well, I must be imagining it,’ I said after a moment.
‘You must be tired,’ said Drew.
It was true, I was. Too tired to think clearly, that was for sure.
I thanked Drew at the door and, when he asked if I would be all right, I didn’t even hesitate. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’
But now it was the middle of the night, and the nightmare was still roaring in my memory and I didn’t feel so confident any more. Shakily I threw my legs over the side of the bed and sat up, dragging my hands down my face, as if I could pull the horror of the dream from my mind.
It had seemed so real: the churning river, the chime of the bell, the downward drag of my sodden woollen skirt. The desperation and the grief. My throat felt raw where I had tried to scream and, as I rubbed it, my fingers found the pendant I always wore, and I twisted the braided silver chain until it dug into my flesh. It reminded me of what was real.
‘Bess . . . Bess . . . ’
There was desperation in the whisper that trickled through the air, and my heart stuttered in alarm before I remembered that Bess was the child in my nightmare. I let go of the chain before I choked myself. The words were just a hangover from the dream, and the dream tied up with the voice I had heard calling earlier.
‘Bess . . . ’
There it was again. I rubbed my palms over my ears as if I could rub out the sound, and then pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. It was a nightmare – that was all, I reminded myself. I wasn’t properly awake. I was exhausted and jet-lagged and in an unfamiliar house. Small wonder my mind was playing tricks on me.
But my hand was shaking as I reached out for the light and clicked it on. It was only a small lamp, but I shrank back from the glare as the room leapt at me.
‘It was a nightmare,’ I said out loud, and I cringed to hear the quaver in my voice. ‘It’s over.’
It’s hard to fix the moment when a story begins. I used to think that you could lay time out in a straight line, see one event following another in a steady forward march. But it doesn’t work like that. There is nothing orderly about time. Sometimes the past loops forward, or turns back on itself, weaving present and future together, until the threads of time tangle into an impenetrable knot of countless choices and coincidences and consequences.
At first, I thought the nightmare was when it began, but it’s impossible to disentangle the stories that went back and back and back, endless turning points and decisions that led to me being wrenched awake in Lucy’s bed that night.
I wasn’t like Lucy. I liked fact, not fantasy. Given the choice, I would always go for the rational explanation. Lucy always revelled in the mysterious, but it made me uncomfortable. So when I woke from that nightmare I tried straight away to make sense of it. And it did make a certain kind of sense. I’d never been to York before, so I was in a strange place, sleeping in a strange bed. Even in my befuddled state it seemed obvious that my usual drowning dream was muddled up with thoughts of poor Lucy drowning in the Ouse, while the niggling disquiet of hearing someone calling for Bess had been transformed into the small girl (my daughter) I had imagined with her apron and her stiff skirts, her face bright beneath the linen cap.
As for the clothes in my dream – well, my brief conversation with Drew Dyer about Elizabethan York had clearly lodged in my subconscious. True, he had talked about rubbish collection rather than clothes, but dreams weren’t always logical, I reasoned. There was no reason to think it was anything but a nightmare.
Still, I’ll admit I was spooked enough to get up and find a glass of water. I was very thirsty and my throat was as sore as if I really had been screaming. I squinted at my phone. It was twelve minutes past three in the morning, the loneliest time of the night, and beyond the pool of light from the bedside lamp the world was dark and muffled in silence.
Wrapping my sarong around me, I made my way down to the kitchen, switching on lights as I went, and so fuzzy with exhaustion that I kept bumping off the walls.
The kitchen tiles were cold beneath my bare feet. I filled a glass at the sink and drank the water as I stood there in the glare of the ceiling spotlights. One of the lights was angled directly at a plate that hung on the wall between the two windows. It was decorated with a childish impression of breakfast: a splodge of yellow for an egg, a red, vaguely sausage-shaped smudge, some green blobs. To Lucy was printed around the top edge in a wobbly hand and, below, Love Grace.
It’s odd how moments we think we’ve forgotten can slam back as perfectly detailed memories. I was five, and breathing heavily through my mouth. We were in some kind of sunny workshop. I remembered the smell of the paint, the clumsy feel of the brush between my fingers, the pots of bright colours.
‘What are the green things?’ my mother asked.
‘Peas.’
‘Peas for breakfast?’
I shrugged. It didn’t seem strange to me. Lucy, I knew, wouldn’t think it was strange, either.
Now I felt a twist of
regret that I hadn’t known that Lucy had liked the plate enough to keep it for more than twenty-five years. I’d sent the odd postcard over the years, but otherwise had assumed that I had faded out of Lucy’s life, just as she had faded out of mine.
Thinking about the past, I gazed absently out of the window in front of the sink. I had been too tired earlier to bother pulling the blind down. Now the window was black and blank and smeary with rain, and I could see my own reflection superimposed on the darkness outside. My hair was pushed behind my ears, and my shoulders were bare above the sarong. The reflection was so clear that I could even make out the darker patch of the port-wine stain on the slope of my breast, a small purple splodge, like a baby’s hand-print. When I was younger I was very self-conscious about wearing bikinis, but later I was quite proud of it. I told myself it was distinctive.
I looked younger in the glass, I remember thinking that. Younger and wide-eyed.
I’d almost forgotten the nightmare, in fact, when my eyes focused on my reflection in the glass, which had doubled oddly, almost as if my shadow had stepped slightly to one side.
An icy finger dragged down my spine. That wasn’t a shadow. There was someone standing right behind me. Someone who had dark hair and pale eyes like me, but who wasn’t me at all.
The glass slipped from my fingers and smashed into the sink as I whipped round, my heart jamming in my throat, blocking my breath. My hand went instinctively to my neck as if to push it back into place.
There was no one there. My pulse roared in my ears, and for a moment I thought I would faint. My knees were so weak I had to lean back against the sink and make myself take some deep breaths.
Enough, I thought. I was overwrought and overtired. All I needed was some sleep.
I left the broken glass in the sink and found another one. My hands were still shaking slightly as I filled it with water, but when I turned to take it back to bed with me, my eye snagged on an apple sitting on the worktop. Its skin was yellow and wrinkling, just like the one I’d thrown away earlier.
Puzzled, I put down my glass and picked up the apple instead, grimacing a little at the saggy feel of it between my fingers. I couldn’t understand how I had missed seeing it before, but I was half-asleep still and, frankly, spooked by the apparition in the window, so I tossed it in the bin with the other apple and thought no more about it.
‘I don’t know where I’m going to be, all right? Somewhere you aren’t!’
I was standing on the doorstep, fumbling with the unfamiliar key, when Drew Dyer’s front door was wrenched open and a girl stomped out. She was fourteen or so, perhaps a bit older, and ungainly, with intense, sullen features half-hidden by a tangle of chestnut hair.
Hoisting a heavy bag onto her shoulder, she slammed the door behind her with such force that Lucy’s door trembled too. It was only when she turned for the gate that she saw me.
‘Oh.’ She stopped dead and eyed me warily from beneath her fringe.
‘Hi.’ My head was pounding after my broken night, and tiredness throbbed behind my eyes, but I was feeling much more myself. In the daylight I was embarrassed to remember how rattled I had been by my nightmare.
I’d found the broken glass in the sink, but when I wrapped it in newspaper and threw it in the bin, there had been no trace of the apple I thought I’d seen the night before. I must have imagined it, I decided, along with that ghostly figure in the glass.
I smiled at Drew’s daughter. ‘I’m Grace, Lucy’s god-daughter,’ I said. ‘You must be Sophie.’
Sophie nodded. ‘She talked about you.’
‘Really?’ I was surprised. ‘I haven’t seen her for years. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d forgotten all about me.’
‘No, she liked you. She showed me the cards you sent her from all round the world. She said you were a free spirit,’ said Sophie with a touch of envy.
I was touched, and also rather ashamed. A postcard every now and then hadn’t required much effort. ‘If I’d known she liked them so much, I’d have sent her a card more often.’
I finally managed to lock the door and dropped the key into the battered leather bag I’d slung over my shoulder. I’d bought it in a market in Jaipur years before and it went everywhere with me. It was the perfect size, just big enough for a passport, a purse and a pair of sunglasses – everything I needed to jump on a plane.
‘I didn’t think Lucy was particularly interested in travel,’ I excused myself.
‘She used to say that she was a spiritual traveller,’ said Sophie.
That sounded like Lucy.
‘You were so lucky to have Lucy as a godmother,’ she added wistfully.
In truth, Lucy had always been an odd choice – Christianity being one of the very few spiritual paths that my godmother hadn’t tried. But she and my mother had been old school friends, and Mum apparently thought Lucy would be more ‘interesting’ than more conventional friends and family. ‘It’s only a symbolic role anyway,’ Mum had argued when my father pointed out that Lucy wasn’t exactly a churchgoer. ‘Lucy can broaden Grace’s horizons.’
I pulled open the gate and joined Sophie on the pavement. ‘You had her as a friend,’ I reminded her. ‘You knew her much better than I did.’
‘She was great.’ Sophie shifted her bag of books from one shoulder to another and looked sad. ‘I’m really going to miss her,’ she said. ‘She was the only person I’ve ever met who actually talked to you and listened to what you had to say.’
I made a non-committal noise. I remembered Lucy as someone who talked at you rather than to you, but perhaps she had been different with Sophie.
‘Everyone thought she was weird, but she wasn’t,’ said Sophie. ‘She was a witch, you know.’
‘A witch?’ I fought to keep the scepticism from my voice. ‘Really?’
‘Didn’t you see her tools?’
‘I haven’t really had a chance to look round much yet,’ I said. ‘What did she have? A broomstick?’
Sophie didn’t approve of my flippancy, that was clear. ‘It wasn’t like that!’ she said, eyeing me with contempt. ‘Wicca is a serious belief,’ she told me fiercely. ‘Witches revere the Earth. Lucy said we have to stop fighting nature and learn to live in harmony with it. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing, I suppose,’ I backtracked, but my heart was sinking. Dealing with Lucy’s estate was going to be complicated enough, without adding witchcraft into the equation.
‘Lucy was teaching me wisecraft,’ Sophie went on. ‘I was going to join her coven as soon as I was old enough, but I don’t know if I will now. I’ve found a new spiritual path,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ I zipped up my hooded cardigan against the chill. It was early April, but it felt more like winter than spring. I would have to buy myself a proper coat.
‘I’m a pagan,’ said Sophie proudly, and I suppressed a sigh. No wonder she had got on so well with Lucy. ‘I’m one of the Children of the Waters,’ she continued, ‘or I will be, when I’m properly initiated. I’m not ready yet.’
‘Right,’ I said, running out of non-committal responses.
It was partly because I was distracted by the strangeness of my surroundings. The tarmac gleamed wetly after the rain, and a breeze was tearing the clouds apart to reveal straggly glimpses of blue sky. It was going to brighten up. Perhaps that explained the jagged quality to the light, which made the street look so odd.
I dragged my attention back to Sophie. ‘What do your parents think about that?’
‘They don’t understand.’ Sophie scuffed her boots against the wrought-iron gate in a reassuringly adolescent gesture. ‘Mum only thinks about the latest status symbol, and Dad’s only interested in dead people.’
‘Dead people?’ Then I remembered that he was a historian.
‘And books.’ She made it sound like a perversion, and I had to smother a smile. Drew Dyer seemed an unlikely pervert.
I was surprised, in fact, by how vividly I could picture Drew and the
amusement gleaming in his quiet face. I remembered how inexplicably familiar he had seemed. My palm had tingled where it had touched his.
To my dismay I felt my cheeks redden at the memory, and I pushed it hastily aside before Sophie could notice and wonder at my blush.
I looked up the street instead. It was a narrow road, with cars parked on either side. At the end I could see a row of trees in front of the city walls, and behind them the great bulk of York Minster. I hadn’t noticed it in the dark the night before, but now my whole body seemed to jolt with recognition, although I knew I’d never seen it before.
Sophie was watching me curiously. ‘Are you going into town?’
I pulled myself together. ‘Yes. I’ve got an appointment with Lucy’s solicitor.’ I half-pulled the piece of paper with the address out of my bag and squinted at it. ‘Coney Street.’
Coney Street. I’d read the address before, but now the name seemed to pluck at some deep chord of memory.
Frowning, I stuffed the paper back into my bag. ‘I was planning on walking there. Is it far?’
‘Nothing’s far in York. I can show you a shortcut through the car park, if you like,’ she offered.
Sophie pointed me in the right direction before slouching off to school. I watched her go, troubled in a way that I didn’t understand, before heading for the car park.
The light was peculiarly intense, and I wished I’d brought my sunglasses after all. I walked past cars with fat yellow number plates, past street lamps, past houses, and the sense of wrongness persisted. It was almost as if I had never seen bricks before, never walked along a pavement.
It was a long time since I’d been in England, I tried to reason with myself. Of course everything was going to look strange. I was used to the gang where I lived in Jakarta, to the deep gutters on either side of a walkway too narrow for anything but the satay-seller’s cart, and to houses half-hidden behind high walls and lush banana trees.
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