by Lucy Clarke
I can taste the fresh salted air – but as it breathes into the room, it angers the flames, and the smoke and heat seem to be sucked towards the glass wall.
‘We’ve got to jump,’ I yell.
Peering down, I can see the balcony off my bedroom. It overhangs the writing room, but there is a gap of a few feet. We need to jump out far enough to ensure we reach it. If we get it wrong, the drop is onto the jagged rocks below.
‘I can’t!’ Fiona cries.
I grab her hand, pulling her to the edge, glass crunching beneath our feet.
‘When I say, we’re going to jump! You’ve got to launch as far as you can, okay?’
Fiona doesn’t respond. Her eyes are glazed with fear.
I help her into position at the edge of the glass wall, but it is awkward; we are half crouched among the shattered glass, smoke pouring around us. I reach for the metal frame to steady myself, but it is searing hot against my palms.
There is no time – we must go.
‘Ready?’
I grip my sister’s hand tighter.
‘One … two … three!’
In the moment that my feet leave the building, I feel Fiona’s hand slipping free. The night rushes at me. I hear a scream leaving my throat. Another behind me.
I am alone as I fall through the darkness, the writing room lit up behind me with flames.
I land badly, the breath punched from my lungs.
It takes me a few seconds to come around, to feel air filling my chest again. I stagger to my feet, dazed, a hand pressed into my hairline feeling for blood.
When I look up, at first, all I can see is the roaring blaze. The flames have spread across the room, swallowing my reading chair, my bookcase. I cannot see my sister …
‘Fiona!’
Has she jumped – and missed?
Please, no …
And then, slowly, slowly, my eyes begin to focus. I can just make out a figure crouched at the edge of the shattered glass wall, arms clamped over her head. The flames are right behind her, a black stream of smoke pouring into the night.
‘You have to jump!’
Fiona makes no sign of having heard.
‘Please, Fiona! Now!’
A gust of wind pours from the sea, pushing over the cliff face and billowing into the writing room. The flames seem to reach out of the broken glass wall.
Fiona screams, a burning cry.
It all happens so quickly. Suddenly Fiona is on her feet, stepping out into thin air.
Immediately, I can see it is wrong. The angle of her body is tilted too far forwards, her limbs are flailing. She hasn’t pushed hard enough. Gone far enough.
I can only watch as she falls through the night, hair lifting from her face, eyes wide, terror-struck.
Her legs pedal empty air.
She’s dropping, reaching out – and then somehow, somehow, her foot just reaches the balcony rail and catches there. All I see is Fiona falling forwards, crashing to the balcony floor – knees first – with a sickening crunch of bone against wood.
A scream rips through her.
She is down, splayed on the balcony, head turned to the side, face bleached in the moonlight. I lurch to her and see blood on her lips, the whites of her eyes as they roll.
‘Fiona!’
She groans, a deep wail resonating from the base of her throat.
I look over my shoulder, through the bedroom. Beyond the door I can see smoke filling the landing, billowing towards the stairs. We need to move.
Hooking my arm around Fiona, I try and heave her up – but she screams, her legs unable to bear weight.
I lower her again, catch my breath. Above us, a burning piece of material drops from the writing room, soaring downwards. It catches the edge of the balcony, showering us with embers. I dust at them frantically. There’s no time. I’ve got to get Fiona out.
I circle my arms around her chest and, using every reserve of strength, I drag her backwards, heaving her from the balcony and into the bedroom. My arms and back scream with the strain, but I clamp my teeth and continue to drag her until we’re in the hallway.
I pause, just for a second to catch my breath, but the smoke is too thick and heavy, I’m choking, coughing. I sense the blaze above is penetrating doorways, moving through unseen structural shafts, spreading through the interior walls.
Gripping Fiona tight, I haul her down the stairs using the momentum of the descent. With each thud of the wooden steps, I expect to hear fresh screams – but she makes no sound at all now.
Finally, we reach the ground floor. I pause only to grab my phone from the bureau, then I yank open the front door and, with a final surge of effort, I pull Fiona through it, out of the house and onto the fresh, beautifully cold driveway.
I call 999, talking as I press my fingertips against Fiona’s neck. Her pulse is faint – but it is there. My coat is still heaped on the doorstep from earlier, and I fetch it, draping it over Fiona. I crouch beside her, talking softly as I wait to hear the wail of the ambulance, for blue flashing lights to streak the dark lane.
Beyond the dancing scorch of flames, the sea wind twists and sucks, waves groaning and echoing against the cliff. I adjust the coat tighter around Fiona’s shoulders.
My sister lies motionless on the ground, her skin deathly pale.
I squeeze my eyes shut, willing the ambulance to hurry. Out to sea, the relentless surge of waves continues to pound.
I think of my mother’s dream: a place to write with a view of the sea.
Her dream.
My dream.
My sister’s dream.
Opening my eyes, I see the dead moth pressed against the clavicle of Fiona’s throat, and beyond her, the writing room burning red.
Epilogue
One year later
I hear the creak of the letterbox as something is pushed through the metal mouth. There is a low thud as the package hits the doormat, followed by the snap of iron as the letterbox hinges shut.
Flynn continues his story. He is telling me about one of the apprentice tree surgeons he is training as he fills a water bottle at the tap, a stream of clear liquid locked within the twist of a lid. He tosses it into the backpack along with an apple and a packet of biscuits.
He bends to kiss me. Our lips connect, and I feel the charge between us. Neither of us will forget our separation – how close we came to losing each other for good. I grasp the neckline of his T-shirt as I pull him deeper, cotton bunched within the heat of my palms.
I’ve told Flynn everything – each tangled thread. It’s taking time, but we are slowly unravelling things, working our way around the knotted centre of it, in the hope that we can begin stitching our relationship together again.
I listen to the heave then stamp of work boots being pulled on, the clatter of keys as he fishes them from the windowsill, the suck of the door as it opens.
‘Package for you,’ he calls, before the door shuts.
Then he is gone, disappearing into the blue thrust of the morning.
As I look out through the window, I contemplate the day that lies ahead. There, beyond the stretch of farmland, is the glimmer of sea. North Island, New Zealand, is where we’ve chosen. We will move on eventually, but for now I find I am happier than I have been in a long time. I write, I swim, I fall asleep beside Flynn.
I think back, as I often do, to the night of the fire. I’m working hard to own the memory of it, to not push it into a corner of my mind where it would fester. So I think about it, I talk about it with Flynn.
I wonder if Fiona ever talks about it, too.
She, Bill and Drake are still living in Cornwall. We’re not in touch, but I’ve heard on the grapevine that her recovery has been good. She broke both her legs jumping from the writing room. I can still hear it, her burning cry, the terrible crunch of bone.
The cliff-top house is gone. Sold to a wealthy buyer from London who I hear has rebuilt the destroyed writing room and turned it into a gym. I’ve disc
overed that I don’t miss the house. Perhaps that’s telling – the clearest indicator that it was never meant for me.
After the fire, my editor got in touch. She was sympathetic about my novel being destroyed in the blaze, although I could tell she was surprised there was no back-up copy on a remote server somewhere. But how could I explain? I suppose I could have grovelled, asked for an extension, a chance to rewrite the book. But I didn’t. That story was a piece of time, a piece of me, and I must let it go.
So I’ve begun a new novel. Just loose seeds of ideas, not something that has rooted into a full narrative yet. But I am cutting my teeth, learning my craft, and I will get there. I’m enjoying writing without a publishing contract, without a deadline. The pressure has lifted, and I feel uninhibited, free to create.
Nowadays I don’t have a desk: I write sitting cross-legged on the lounge floor, or at a café table, or leaning against the peeling bark of a eucalyptus tree. I care little where I am. Writing feels almost like a form of meditation, a way of working my way through the pages and out of myself.
Deciding I’ll work in the garden this morning, I’m passing the hallway when I remember the package on the doormat. We do not get much post out here – I’ve only given our address to a handful of people.
I bend to retrieve the padded envelope, feeling the familiar weight and shape of it: a book. An advance proof copy, most likely. A British postmark. My agent still sends these with waning frequency. I rip open the package and look for the publisher’s typed letter, but there is none. Strange. I pull out the book and examine its jacket. A proof copy, published by HarperCollins.
The cover is unsettling. In stark grey and white tones, it depicts an empty staircase running through the centre of a house. Only when I look again do I notice the shadow of a figure lurking at the edge of the stairway. Watching. Waiting.
Hackles of fear rise.
Tucked into the dark edge of the image is the author’s name.
My heart skips, then accelerates; my breath quickens.
It can’t be.
The letters swim and waver, shimmering in the heat of my shock. Hesitantly, I open the cover. The pads of my fingertips are damp as they grip the book, pressing into the weave of the paper.
As I begin to read, I experience something like déjà vu – a vague familiarity, a reality slightly distorted as if it is being held at a distance or seen through a lightly fogged lens.
The words have a rhythm to them that I know. My gaze snaps through the sentences, paragraphs, pages. I barely blink. I find my legs have carried me to the bedroom, lowered me onto the edge of the mattress. My concentration is directed solely on the book.
The story is about a woman who lives in a cliff-top house. A woman whose first novel was not her own. A woman who has lived a kind of fiction for years because of one startling event in an English lecturer’s office that changed her sense of who she was, of what was believable and what should be omitted. That story – the one I had written – is tucked within these pages.
As I read with my head bent, the story unfolding before me, I remember each of these words as I wrote them. I can almost feel the firmness of my desk beneath my forearms, the wooden floorboards against the soles of my feet. I’d spent hours in my writing room, attempting to create something worthwhile, a novel to stand shoulder to shoulder with my mother’s manuscript, a novel to absolve me.
This is my story, the deleted manuscript.
Except Fiona has kept a copy of it.
But it is not solely my story about Luke Linden. Blended within my deleted manuscript is a second narrative – one I did not write – but lived.
Everything is in here. The discovery of a jagged shard of glass from a broken paperweight; the carving of the word Liar on a desk leg; a walk on a beach with a little boy who wore a beard of sea foam; the way the Cornish coast holds a particular quality of light in the early morning.
I recall Bill saying that Fiona was busy working on a new project – but that was long after the brochure copy had been finished. I realise that this book I now hold in my hands was Fiona’s project. She has been biding her time, working out her narrative, structuring the plot, waiting – with a journalist’s instinct – for the full story.
Fiona has always been the one who can see three steps ahead, a master chess player with each move thought out. Of course an author only controls part of a story: they have an idea of its arc and direction – but there is a point at which they must allow their characters to step forward and direct things. When the characters begin to live and breathe.
Fiona has watched. Waited.
The story in this book is a depiction of us both. The names are changed, the details have been altered, the locations are fictional – but the truth of us lies in the pages.
I wonder at what point Fiona decided that she would use part of my manuscript to blend with her own? It would have appealed to her unwavering sense of fairness: to have taken my words and put her own name to them.
An eye for an eye.
I feel the echo of it, the pull that would have drawn Fiona with its neatness, the symbolism, the payback.
After all, who owns a story? The person who tells it? The person who reads it? The person whom it is about?
Or all of them?
As I finish the final page, I turn back to the beginning in search of a notecard or a message from my sister.
But there’s nothing.
Looking out through the window where the day now burns away, a sense of stillness settles within my chest. This story has been threaded together from a series of moments belonging to me, my sister, our mother. It is a story about choices and mistakes, truth and fiction, dreaming and failing – and all the other messy things that life delivers and removes, waves falling and receding.
My words haven’t been deleted or lost. Those truth-lined pages have been set free – just like my mother’s – to soar in someone else’s imagination.
Dusk presses close to the window causing me to reach for the lamp. Light hits the pages of the book – and that’s when I notice the dedication.
As I look at the three words that frame the novel, I wonder whether they were typed with venom, Fiona’s parting shot, her final word?
Or perhaps, I hope, as my fingertip runs beneath them, they were fuelled by a deeper curve of emotion.
Understanding.
For my sister.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my editor, Kim Young, who heard this story idea when it was no more than a suggestion in a phone call, and told me, ‘I’ve got goosebumps.’ Kim, and the brilliant Charlotte Brabbin, have worked with me on every draft, raising questions, encouraging me to dig deeper, to explore further. This book is so much better because of you both.
I am fortunate to have the most wonderful literary agent, Judith Murray, along with her team at Greene & Heaton. I’ve worked with Judith from the moment I stepped into this author life, and her advice, support and friendship are invaluable. Thanks also to Kate Rizzo for handling my foreign rights – and for providing such insight and thoughtfulness on her read of this manuscript, and many before.
Thank you to my early readers – Faye Buchan, Becki Hunter, Laura Crossley, Maria Evans and Rachel Trotter. Your thoughts were so helpful in shaping the story.
A big thank you goes to YOU, my readers, for cheering me on and recommending and sharing my books. Honestly, it’s your excitement that keeps me lit.
Thank you to my parents and parents-in-law for being such a brilliant support team while I write. When deadline time was fast approaching, and stress levels were high, they simply asked, ‘What can we do?’
My husband, James, is my frontline in every way. On hand for brainstorming ideas or chatting through issues, he knows each layer of every book I’ve written. He also makes it possible for me to be both a writer and a mother – and I’ll always be grateful for that gift.
Finally, my children, Tommy and Darcy. Thank you for the mid-scene cuddle br
eaks, the noise and chaos and colour. You are my very best creations.
If you enjoyed You Let Me In, don’t miss these other breathtakingly gripping novels from Lucy Clarke
‘Impossible to put down’ Clare Mackintosh
Seven years ago, two boys went missing at sea – and only one was brought to shore. The Sandbank, a remote stretch of coast dotted with beach huts, was scarred forever.
Sarah’s son survived, but on the anniversary of the accident, he disappears without trace. As new secrets begin to surface, The Sandbank hums with tension and unanswered questions. Sarah’s search grows more desperate and she starts to mistrust everyone she knows – and she’s right to.
Someone saw everything on that fateful day seven years ago. And they’ll do anything to keep the truth buried.
Twisty, pacy, and superbly plotted, Last Seen is the perfect psychological page-turner for fans of Clare Mackintosh and Sabine Durrant.
Click here to buy now
‘A thrilling page turner … a beautifully written, compelling mystery that you won’t want to put down’ C.L. Taylor
*Previously published as The Blue*
You think you’re in paradise.
You’re on a boat sailing around the remote islands of the Philippines. Travelling with strangers, miles from home.
You can’t trust anyone.
And when death creeps silently on deck, you know you might be next …
Click here to buy now
The truth is, it was all a lie …
There were so many times I thought about telling you the truth, Eva. What stopped me was always the same thing …
When Eva’s husband Jackson tragically drowns, she longs to meet his estranged family. The journey takes her to Jackson’s brother’s doorstep on a remote Tasmanian island. As strange details about her husband’s past begin to emerge, memories of the man she married start slipping through her fingers like sand, as everything she ever knew and loved about him is thrown into question. Now she’s no longer sure whether it was Jackson she fell in love with – or someone else entirely …