by Lucy Clarke
This view. I feel like I’m standing suspended mid-air. It makes me draw my shoulders back, stand a little taller, a little lighter.
Feeling a stirring of hunger, I wonder absently whether there will be any food left in the fridge, or whether I’ll need to supply everything myself. Opening the vast door, I can see you’ve arranged your food items onto the top two shelves, leaving space for my things. You have expensive tastes: orange-infused biscuits with a thick chocolate coating; a tub of garlic-stuffed olives; a generous slab of smoked brie, unopened; two small tubs of organic coconut yoghurt.
Your freezer holds half a dozen ready meals. You like feta, spinach and pine nut pie, and chicken breasts stuffed with pesto and mozzarella. I slide open the bottom drawer and laugh: you have three lobsters in here. Most people have fish fingers and a bag of peas in their freezer – but you have lobsters! There are other fish, too; a whole bream, or perhaps it’s a sea bass, and a bag of line-caught seafood mix.
One must be so careful with frozen seafood, I think, sliding my hand around the back of the freezer until it reaches the plug socket.
13
Elle
I am standing very still, barely breathing. I’m acutely aware of my own skin, the feeling of it pulled tight over my collarbone, the goose bumps raised on the backs of my arms, the pressure of my fingernails against my palms.
My hearing is alert, amplified.
Footsteps again, heavy, above me.
Blood throbs in my ears. Do they know I’m inside?
I need to get out of the house. My car is still parked in town, so I’ve got to go on foot. The tide is already coming in – I can’t risk the beach again. That only leaves the laneway. It is half a mile long, flanked by hedgerows. There’s nowhere to hide.
Slowly, slowly, I back down the stairs, my hand gripped to the bannister. Everything feels dangerously acute, the slide of the wood beneath my sweating palm, the tick of my pulse in my throat. I want to run, scream, but I force myself to move slowly.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, I pause, listening.
Above, the tread of footsteps crosses the landing outside my writing room. Fear sparks in my veins. This is not my imagination: it is real.
Their footsteps pause.
I imagine the intruder standing still, listening.
Have they heard me?
Then there is the groan of wood as they begin to descend the stairs, moving down through the house towards me.
Suddenly I am spinning away, racing towards the kitchen. I skid across the wooden floor, grabbing at the handle of the back door.
Shit! I locked it when I came in. My keys! Where are my fucking keys?
My heart hammers as I scan the kitchen side. No keys.
Is there time to double back, go out the front door?
I hear the change in the footsteps as the intruder reaches the bottom of the stairs. They’ve cut me off.
Firing on instinct, I grab a knife from the cutting block, the cold metal handle fizzing in my grip.
Fight, not flight, this time.
The tread of feet is growing louder, moving towards the kitchen.
Towards me.
Fear solidifies into rage, tightening my muscles, pumping blood hard through my veins.
I am strong. I am capable of anything.
I keep the knife close to my side, muscles coiled, ready.
They are coming.
As the figure fills the kitchen doorway, I lunge forward, knife raised. ‘Get the fuck away!’
The figure stumbles backwards, hands raised. ‘Elle, it’s me. It’s me!’
My name sounds so distant, so unfamiliar, that it takes me several seconds to realise it is Flynn.
‘What are you doing?’ I pant, knife pointed at him.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I tried calling. I waited in the car for an hour. But I had my key still, so I …’ He lowers his hands. ‘I’m so sorry I scared you. I didn’t think. My car’s parked outside. My shoes, my coat, it’s all in the hall.’
‘I came in the side door.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologises again. ‘I didn’t hear your car.’
‘I left it in town.’ I stare at him, heart still hammering in my chest.
‘You’re shaking, Elle.’
‘You were in my writing room.’
‘I was looking for our photos.’
‘Why?’ I ask, finally lowering the knife. Looking at him properly, I notice that his eyes are red-rimmed, the edges of his lips mottled.
Flynn squeezes his eyes shut, pinches the bridge of his nose.
I set down the knife and step towards him, my hands on his arms. He smells of wood shavings and something musky.
‘What’s happened?’
I sit back on my heels, arms hugged around my knees, watching Flynn as he selects another log from the basket. He turns it in his thick hands, then places it in the log burner. The flames stretch and flicker as he adjusts the spin wheel, light dancing across his face.
‘I’m pleased you came,’ I say, as he settles on the floor beside me, so that we are both leaning against the foot of the sofa.
‘Looked like it when you came at me with a knife.’
We watch the weave of flames, listening to the crackling, sparking wood and embers.
When Flynn speaks, his voice is lowered, his gaze pinned to the fire.
‘A heart aneurism. I’d never even heard of it. I was out on a job when the call came. The cutter was going, and I couldn’t hear properly. I kept on saying, What? What? It wasn’t the hospital that rang. It was James Fells, do you remember? The butcher.’
I nod.
‘That’s where it happened. He thought Mum had fainted as she just slumped against the counter. He called an ambulance. Said they were there in minutes – but it was all over.’
I picture Alison sliding against the curved glass counter, pink meats gleaming on ice; James’s blood-stained apron as he fumbled with a phone; the clink of the shop’s chain curtain as the paramedics rushed in.
Tears trail down the sides of Flynn’s face, disappearing into thick, dark stubble.
‘I’ve got to think about a funeral,’ he says, his eyes not leaving the fire.
‘Did your mum ever talk about what she wanted?’
‘A burial. Next to Dad.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m going to wait till Rea flies in. Then we’ll make plans.’
Flynn isn’t brilliantly close to his older sister, Rea; there are seven years between them. She studied archaeology in California and met a man there who she’d married and followed to his family home in Minnesota. I’ve always liked her; she is forthright and serious but shares Flynn’s sense of adventure.
‘When is she arriving?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Have you told many people yet?’
Flynn shakes his head. ‘I can’t. It doesn’t feel real.’
‘I wish I’d been in touch with your mum recently,’ I admit.
‘She knew how much you cared about her.’
Alison was an intelligent, loyal woman, who adored Flynn, but was also aware of the challenges of being married to him. She never interfered, never voiced opinions unless they were asked for, yet her support was always implicit. We visited her in Truro at least once a month, Alison working through a pile of recipes pulled from magazines, insisting that she’d gone to no trouble. After the meals, Flynn would wash up, and Alison and I would sit together on the wicker chairs in her conservatory talking about books. She had every foreign edition of my novel on show in her lounge.
A log crumbles, tiny sparks bursting skyward.
‘I know that everything is … different between us,’ I say, ‘but Flynn, I want to be here for you, okay? Even if we’re rubbish at being married to each other, you’re my best friend. That hasn’t changed.’
He keeps his gaze on the fire, but I can feel the shake of his shoulder against mine. I take both his hands in mine and sq
ueeze them.
I miss these hands. There is a scar across his thumb from where a chainsaw kicked back when he was cutting down a tree for Alison. I feel the raised ridge that stretches across his second and third knuckles where he’d punched a wall in a club toilet in a fit of frustration at one of the passionate arguments that glued us together in our twenties. I remember the slice to his fingertip from the spoke of my old bike he was repairing after I refused to give it up.
These hands, I think, holding them tight, how many times they’ve interlocked with mine. I’d once imagined his hands on the swell of my abdomen, feeling the kicks of our baby. I pictured them linked through a daughter’s arm as he walked her down an aisle or clasping a son to him. I imagined these hands wrinkled and gnarled, still holding mine.
I trace the empty space on his finger where his wedding ring once was. ‘Where do you keep it?’
He looks at me, gives me that lopsided grin. ‘In the glove compartment of the van.’
I raise an eyebrow, then laugh.
‘It’s perfectly safe.’
‘In amongst the car parking tickets, coins, CDs you don’t listen to, road maps that you insist on keeping.’
‘That’s right.’ He lifts my left hand, inspecting my ring finger. ‘Yours?’
‘In my jewellery box.’
‘You ever put it back on?’
I shake my head. ‘You?’
‘Some days.’
I run my finger down the length of his. There is something incredibly touching and devastating about it. Without thinking, I lift his hand to my mouth, place my lips to the empty space where his wedding band once was.
I can feel his eyes on me.
Something shifts in the air, as if it has become charged. I feel our bodies draw towards one another, magnetic and irresistible, our lips searching, mouths soft and hungry.
I’d forgotten the exquisite feeling of his lips on mine, the brush of stubble against my cheek, those large hands moving to the back of my head, my neck. I can taste the salt of his tears.
We sink into each other, losing ourselves in a place so beautifully familiar, that I have no idea why we left.
I wake early, alone. It is the first night in weeks that I’ve slept through the night.
Downstairs I can place Flynn in the kitchen, the creak of a cupboard door opening, a mug being removed, the run of the tap.
I lie still, listening to the drift of sounds in the house. After the months and months of work I invested into the build, it still surprises me that Flynn has never lived here. In the planning stages – when the words separation, divorce, unreconcilable hadn’t yet been spoken, when they were still words for other couples, ones who argued, ones who’d stopped making love, ones who’d felt a souring, of something turning bitter – I’d tried to picture the way Flynn and I would use the house. I’d imagined us padding down the rocky steps barefoot, still dewy at first light, to swim together in the bay. I’d imagined tiny wellington boots kicked off by the door, a trail of sand meandering across the wooden floors, a nursery filled with bright rugs, an under-stairs cupboard big enough to park a buggy. There would be barbecues in the summer, and roast dinners in the winter. There would be friends and family and laughter. And my writing room would watch over it all, a quiet space to retreat.
I snap the covers aside and climb from the bed. I slip on my dressing gown and go downstairs.
Pausing in the entrance to the kitchen, I watch Flynn who stands with his back to me, a screwdriver pressed into a cupboard hinge. I can see the veins on his forearms as he grips the door in position.
‘Thought I’d sort the door out,’ he says without turning.
I’d intended to fix the hinge myself with the aid of a YouTube tutorial and the oversized toolkit Fiona and Bill had bought for my birthday. But I’m grateful that Flynn is doing this small thing for me.
I move to his side. ‘How are you?’
He takes a breath as if to speak, but then says nothing. It is too big a question, I know.
He tests the cupboard door, opening and closing it smoothly. Then he turns to face me.
Instinctively, I reach out, put my arms around him.
‘Elle,’ he says quietly, his lips against my hair. ‘We shouldn’t have let last night happen.’
The words are a physical blow. I step back, pretending to examine the door hinge. ‘Yes, okay.’
‘My head is too full. I can’t complicate things …’
‘Of course.’
Neither of us speak for a time. I busy myself making fresh coffee, taking part-baked rolls from the freezer and warming them in the oven.
We sit at the breakfast bar looking out over the view while we drink our coffee.
‘The house looks good,’ he says, surprising me. ‘You’ve done an incredible job.’
‘It wasn’t just me—’ I begin, but he corrects me.
‘It was. You drove it. You were the one with the vision. I couldn’t ever see it. Wasn’t sure that I wanted it.’
Or wanted me.
‘Anyway, I just wanted to say – well done.’
‘Thank you.’ I think for a moment. ‘It’s funny. You think you want something – and then, when you have it – it’s nothing like you imagined.’
He looks at me, a question in his brow.
‘I still haven’t delivered my second book. It’s meant to be finished by next month.’
‘You’re not on track?’
I shake my head. ‘Maybe you were my muse.’
He doesn’t laugh. ‘Elle—’
‘I’m fine, honestly. It’ll be all right. Anyway, you’ve got much bigger things to think about.’
He draws air into his lungs. ‘I suppose I should get back. Start thinking about how to organise a funeral. You’ll come, won’t you?’
I go to the door with him, watch him shoulder on the coat I bought him two Christmases ago, which has a tear in the sleeve where it caught on a broken fence panel he’d been repairing for his mother. Will he remember that when he looks at the sleeve? Will it be one of a thousand triggers that will make him miss his mother?
He turns towards me. ‘Thank you for being here.’
We hug, my fingers gripping the tough fabric of his coat. My chest aches with the wrench of having to let him leave.
‘You’re always welcome.’
‘But maybe don’t point a knife at me next time.’
I laugh, the quip softening the tension. We release each other.
‘Flynn, really odd question,’ I say, needing to check something before he leaves. ‘Did you write anything on the stairway window?’
‘Write something?’
‘In the condensation on the glass.’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘There was a message there. It caught in the light last night. It could’ve been there for ages.’
‘What did it say?’
I hesitate. Somehow saying it aloud feels ridiculous. ‘I’m in your house.’
Flynn’s eyes narrow. ‘Which window? Let me see.’
‘I wiped it off.’
‘A visitor was probably having a joke.’
I nod, although the only people I’ve had round in the past month are my book club. Unless it has been there since the Airbnb rental.
There is the clang of iron behind us as the post is thrust through the letterbox. Flynn gathers the pile from the floor and hands it to me. Then he opens the door and steps out.
The sun is up; it promises to be a beautiful day. I’m pleased. Flynn needs it for the drive back. I watch the planes of his face as the sun hits. The press of time nestled comfortably into the grooves at his forehead, the sunburst of lines around his eyes.
His gaze lowers towards the bundle of post I hold. Mine follows, noticing the capitalised red words Final reminder stamped across a brown envelope.
‘Everything okay?’ he asks.
I tuck the post under my arm. ‘Fine. Everything’s fine.’
He looks at me w
ith his frank stare that says: I see you, Elle Fielding.
‘I’ve been wanting to say this for a while.’ He pauses, glances down at his feet.
I feel my heart rate increasing, hoping …
He looks up, right at me.
Yes?
‘Are you being careful with all this social media stuff?’
I blink. ‘Social media?’
‘I looked at your feed. You share all these details about what you’re doing, photographing corners of your house, or a place you’re visiting, or a walk you’re taking. You’re inviting strangers into your life. They have this … this intimacy with you.’
I think of Booklover101’s latest post and feel a shiver travel through me.
‘That’s what social media is all about,’ I say in my defence. ‘People want to have a glimpse of your life.’
‘What if they want more than that? You announce that you’re out jogging – then post a picture of the beach you’re running along. It doesn’t take much for someone who knows the area to work out exactly where you are – that you’re alone. Or that your house is empty.’
‘No one knows where I live.’
‘No? You’ve shared dozens of pictures of the view. Anyone could recognise the bay, work out that your house must be on the cliff top.’
‘What is this? Are you trying to frighten me?’
Hurt pinches his features. ‘Of course not. I just want you to be safe. Everything you write or share, it’s all out there for good. It leaves a trace.’
‘Thanks for the safety briefing, officer.’ I smile in a bid to lighten the conversation. ‘Anyway, what are you doing snooping around on Facebook? I thought you hated that sort of thing.’
‘What do you want me to say? That sometimes I like to check in, see how you’re doing?’
My heart wrenches at the thought of him having to access my life through a screen.
He pauses, shifting his weight. ‘It’s hard when friends of ours know more about your life than I do. I was hearing all your news from Heather and Nick. They kept telling me what you’d been up to – that you’d been out in France, that you’d joined a book club. That you’re doing live writing videos, or something. They kept saying how happy you looked.’