The Shadow Year

by Hannah Richell

  ‘I thought it was the best things in life are free?’ says Freya.

  Kat sees Simon throw Freya an irritated look.

  ‘I think it’s both,’ says Kat, finding her voice again.

  Simon ignores her and reaches into his jacket pocket. ‘Well you can forget the sloes for now. I think you’ll find that these are both free and instantly more exciting than Mac’s little berries.’ He pulls his hand out of his jacket to reveal several stringy white mushrooms nestled on the flat of his palm.

  Ben leans in for a closer look then lets out a long, low whistle. ‘Where did you find these beauties?’

  ‘Down in the meadow.’

  ‘What are they?’ asks Carla.

  ‘Magic mushrooms,’ says Mac, his voice flat.

  ‘Magic mushrooms?’ Carla leans in for a closer look.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ says Ben with a broad grin.

  Kat glances about the group. Simon and Ben are grinning from ear to ear but Carla and Freya look less thrilled, and Mac, as ever, is hard to read, standing further back in the shadows now, allowing Simon his moment of glory.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asks Carla. ‘You have to be careful with wild mushrooms . . .’

  ‘Positive,’ says Ben. ‘They’re liberty caps . . . the best kind. He rubs his hands together. ‘Well this has just improved tonight’s prospects somewhat.’

  Simon beams at them all. ‘So who’s up for a little trip?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Freya says an hour or so later, eyeing the squares of mushroom Ben is carefully cutting up and laying out for each of them. ‘How do we know they won’t make us sick? You do hear of it, don’t you? What if something goes wrong?’

  ‘Cold feet?’ asks Kat and the words sound more than a little unkind, even to her ears. She’s still struggling not to blame her for Simon’s reaction to her hair.

  ‘Out of everyone here, I’d have thought our resident art student would be up for it.’ Simon glances at Freya, the faintest edge to his voice. ‘Anyone else having second thoughts?’

  Kat takes a breath. She can feel the spectre of her parents there in the room with her and knows Freya feels it too. But this isn’t heroin, cooked in some seedy den, sold on a street corner. These mushrooms are natural, grown in the meadow and picked by Simon’s own hand. She can feel him watching her and she raises her chin slightly. ‘Not me.’

  Simon gives her a nod. ‘Carla?’

  She sighs. ‘No.’

  ‘Mac?’

  Mac shakes his head. ‘I’m in.’

  Ben slides the pieces of mushroom across the table towards them in turn. Mac reaches for his and puts it straight into his mouth. Kat follows suit and chews quickly. It tastes horrible, like a mouthful of sweet, damp earth.

  ‘Freya?’ asks Simon.

  Freya doesn’t seem to hear. She sits curled on the sofa, her hands hidden in the sleeves of her cardigan as she watches Kat, as if anticipating an adverse reaction at any moment. Kat smiles back at her and chews carefully.

  Simon swallows his piece of mushroom straight down then reaches for the Zippo and lights the roll-up between his fingers.

  Freya continues to look around at them all nervously.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ she hears Mac say to her sister, his voice low, ‘. . . not if you don’t want to.’

  Kat notices her own foot tapping restlessly on the floor and makes it go still. She’s only ever smoked a bit of a weed before and she still has Freya’s words ringing in her ears. What if things go wrong? What if she has a bad trip, or worse, the mushrooms poison them all? She looks across to Freya again. ‘Go ahead,’ she says, feeling Simon’s gaze on her, ‘it’s fine. After all, you said you were bored . . .’

  Freya gives Kat one final glance, then reaches for a piece of the mushroom and swallows it down with a slug of beer. ‘So what happens now?’ she asks, looking around wide-eyed at them all. ‘How long does it take?’

  ‘Dunno, really,’ says Ben. ‘We just hang out. We wait. We go with the flow.’ He picks up his guitar and strums the opening chords to a Pink Floyd song. ‘The most important thing is not to panic. Just enjoy the ride.’

  Kat smiles at Simon. Go with the flow. Enjoy the ride. That shouldn’t be too hard.

  She’s not sure how long it takes. One minute she is sitting next to Carla, talking about plans for the vegetable garden while Ben strums quietly on his guitar, then the next instant the evening has taken on a strange, shifting quality and nothing feels very fixed or real any more. Time bends and stretches in a new and curious way. Freya is lying on the floor in the middle of the lounge. Her hands are raised and she twists and turns them in the candlelight, as though they are the most fascinating things she has ever seen. Kat watches her, half listening to Carla’s talk of pumpkins, watching the strange, swirling dance of her sister’s hands. She turns to Carla and asks, ‘Do you feel it?’

  Carla gives her a wan, wispy smile. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Kind of trippy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Simon sits in the corner on one of the beanbags, his head tilted to the ceiling as he smokes a cigarette. Mac is on the sofa, watching Freya’s strange horizontal dance. After a while Simon stubs out his cigarette and moves across to lie beside Freya on the floor. Freya turns to grin at him as he begins to copy her strange dancing movements. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’ she asks.

  Simon grins back and then clutches Freya’s right hand and raises it to his lips before they continue their strange hand dancing together. Kat smiles to see them – her two favourite people in the entire world – and feels her love for them swelling to fill the room.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ asks Carla, leaning in towards Kat.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The music?’

  Kat shakes her head. ‘What music?’

  ‘Listen.’ Carla tilts her head to one side. ‘Hear it now?’

  Kat shakes her head again but then, from out of nowhere, she hears it; a sort of dull drumming noise, beating down on them from all around. ‘The drums?’

  Carla laughs. ‘You hear drums?’

  Kat nods, a little confused. ‘What do you hear?’

  Carla sighs and smiles beatifically. ‘I hear rain.’

  Kat stares at Carla, utterly confused. Rain? How can rain sound so rhythmic, so tribal? Suddenly Carla bursts out laughing. ‘Come on,’ she says, grabbing her by the hand. ‘There’s something I want to do, upstairs.’

  It’s a little like being inside a kaleidoscope. She is one fixed point while all around her scenes shift and slide in colourful new directions. Now she is up in Carla and Ben’s bedroom. There is an oil lamp on the floor casting the room in a strange, flickering glow. She sits cross-legged on the mattress watching as Carla performs a crazy dance across the blank, white wall in front of her. As she watches, pictures take shape amidst the shadows, strange smudged images drawn in vivid purple paint.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Kat, peering at the wall, realising that the dripping purple paint isn’t paint at all, but the smears of sloe berries.

  ‘Look,’ says Carla with sudden solemnity, ‘it’s us. I’ve drawn all of us here at the lake. See?’

  Kat peers at the wall and slowly she sees the scrawls transform before her eyes until, yes, she can see it is them, not smudged at all but clear and precise, almost their exact likeness; the six figures are suddenly as identifiable as if drawn from a photograph. There is Ben, with his straggly goatee and smoking reefer in hand, and Simon with his broad shoulders and beautiful black eyes, a wide-eyed Freya with her tangled plaits and her arm linked through Carla’s who wears her fuzz of hair like a halo around her head; behind them comes Kat herself, skinny as a boy and with her short new haircut, while last of all, trailing in the distance comes the spindly shape of Mac. Kat is fascinated. She peers more closely and before her eyes the figures suddenly seem to come to life and dance across the wall in a jaunty, impromptu conga. Kat watches them and smiles. They all look so happy. ‘You’re really good at paintin
g,’ she says, turning to Carla, but Carla has gone.

  The kaleidoscope turns again and Kat is lying on a mattress, watching the ceiling of the bedroom undulate like a huge piece of fabric. In a moment, she thinks, it will just lift off and there will be nothing left between her and that vast canvas of sky. And sure enough, as she watches, the roof of the cottage lifts up and floats away like a giant white sheet caught on the breeze. Kat stares at the fizzing stars dotted high up in the night sky; she watches as they move closer and closer, and fall one by one down into the room, exploding like fireworks all around her.

  It’s so beautiful, she thinks, so very beautiful.

  He has come to her. Simon is there. He moves on top of her and she wraps her arms around his neck, feels his skin against hers, draws her nails down his back.

  Simon, she says.

  He stares into her, his eyes deep, black wells.

  I love you. I love you. I love you. She doesn’t know if she says the words aloud but she feels her heart expand and open until she is nothing but that one throbbing, beating organ, pulsing and alive.

  She turns her head. Freya is on the far side of the room and Mac is there too, beside her, kissing her, one hand resting clumsily on her breast. She smiles. It’s funny. Mac and Freya. Look, she says to Simon, look at them, and she closes her eyes and is carried away.

  When she opens her eyes the kaleidoscope has shifted once more. Now she is alone . . . and she is cold. She reaches for the covers, pulls them up over her naked body, rolls over onto her side. In the darkness she sees that Mac and Freya are still there, Mac now curled away from Freya and Freya lying on her back, her long hair fanning out across the floor in a golden halo and her eyes closed. She looks like a doll. What Kat’s brain can’t understand, can’t grapple with, is the image of Simon hovering above Freya. She watches him for a moment. What is he doing? She watches him move over her sister, his dark hair shifting in time as he moves forwards and backwards over Freya. Simon and Freya. Simon and Freya. Kat shakes her head and watches. She is frozen, her body ice-cold, but somewhere deep inside, right at her very core she feels something open up, something hot and acid, burning deep in the pit of her stomach. Simon and Freya.

  No, she says. She looks up at the ceiling, where the stars no longer fizz and fall through the sky. There is nothing but darkness, looming over her, drawing her up into its cold abyss. No, she thinks, but the blackness still comes and it fills her up.

  It is late when she wakes, the pale sun already slipping back towards the horizon. How long has she been asleep? The room is cold and empty and she can feel beneath the sheets that she is naked. A drumbeat begins somewhere deep inside her skull and slowly, in time to the dull thud of her headache, fragments of the night return to her. The rain. The music. The mural. The stars. Her and Simon. Simon and Freya.

  Simon and Freya.

  Kat swallows. Too late, she realises that she’s going to be sick and she leans over and heaves a stream of hot bile onto the bedroom floor.

  9

  LILA

  November

  As the days shorten and winter descends over the valley, stripping trees of their last leaves and covering everything in a fine, white frost, Lila wonders if she has bitten off more than she can chew. She is making some headway with the cottage but she’d be lying to herself if she didn’t recognise that every day since she started has been a struggle. She’s still not sleeping well – still haunted by nightmares and desperately wracking her memory for details of her fall – and on top of that, she’s beginning to miss the little luxuries of home she’s always taken for granted: warm baths and carpet underfoot, wi-fi and proper espresso. More than once she’s considered throwing in the towel and heading back to London, but whenever she’s come close, it’s the thought of admitting defeat to Tom and returning to their empty house that has kept her stubbornly in place.

  If she is honest with herself, there is a small part of her that is becoming more accustomed to the place – to its strange, lonely atmosphere. At night, the creaking sounds of the cottage and the rustlings and calls of the wildlife outside are growing more familiar. No longer does she tense at the shriek of a fox or the echoing hoots of an owl; and while she’s still a little spooked by the idea of who might have walked the floorboards or stoked the range or slept in these rooms before her, and still wrestling with the uncomfortable feeling that she’s not always alone in the hidden valley, she can at least put her disquiet down to the extreme solitude.

  Sometimes, when the weather allows, Lila downs tools and heads outside to sit beside the lake. The moss-covered tree slumped across the grassy bank is the perfect spot for contemplation. She likes to watch the reflection of the clouds drifting across the flat grey surface of the water and finds that the fresh air helps to clear her head. Even just stepping away for an hour or two helps to push things into perspective and remind her why she is there and what she is trying to accomplish. Someone watching her? It’s laughable, really. Out there in the wilds it’s far too easy to let her imagination run away with itself.

  It’s easy too, she’s discovering, to lose track of the days. Lila finds she has no real need to keep pace with dates but it’s as she’s carrying an armful of junk up to the growing pile of rubbish at the end of the garden that it hits her: Bonfire Night. It’s the fifth of November. She has been so distracted with her work that the significance of the date has almost passed her by. Tom is due at the cottage that evening and as Lila stands there in the shadow of the hills, gazing at the pile of detritus mounting up before her, it suddenly strikes her as nothing short of serendipitous that it should be today of all days that they are to be reunited. It has taken him several weeks but Tom has finally resolved a structural problem on a bridge down south and has called to say he will be joining her later that day.

  Lila has always loved Bonfire Night, and it isn’t just for those memories of her first drunken kiss with Tom. Ever since she was a little girl, she’s loved the whole irreverent occasion of it. Her parents hadn’t gone in much for committee meetings and garden parties, PTA meetings or dinner parties, but for some reason, when it came to Guy Fawkes Night, they’d pulled out all the stops. ‘We’re supposed to celebrate the fact that Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder plot was foiled,’ her father would say with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, ‘but I prefer to think of it as a celebration for the man himself. Now there was someone who knew about breaking a few rules, about shaking things up, no matter what the cost . . . even if he did pay the ultimate price for his ideals.’

  ‘The ultimate price?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he’d nodded, ‘hanged, drawn and quartered,’ and she’d shuddered as her father pulled his finger across his throat and stuck out his tongue in ghoulish imitation of a corpse.

  ‘Simon,’ her mother had admonished, ‘there’s no need to terrify the poor girl.’

  But Lila wasn’t terrified. She’d grinned and shivered at the thought, but mostly she’d just been excited. Bonfire Night meant sausages and baked potatoes cooked in the glowing embers of the huge pyre lit at the bottom of the garden; her mother in her glamorous fur-collared coat and brightest lipstick and her father at the centre of it all, topping up drinks and handing out sparklers. With everyone bundled up in hats and gloves and the heady tang of wood smoke hanging in the air, she and her friends would whirl sparklers in mittened hands and write their names against the dark sky. It had always felt so illicit, so dangerous, one of the few nights of the year when she was allowed to stay up late and roam the garden, the heat from the bonfire warming her face, the cold night air at her back, everyone waiting for the moment when her father would light the fireworks and send them fizzing into the night sky; all of them ooohing and aaahing at the extravagant pyrotechnics while her mother just stood there, quiet and stern.

  ‘Oh darling,’ he would say to her in that way he had, like he was giving the punchline to some private joke they shared, ‘you always used to enjoy a good party.’ He’d throw his arms around he
r in a rare gesture of affection and urge her to ‘live a little’. And he might get a smile from her then, in the warm glow of the bonfire.

  Her father was in his element on those nights, charming and outlandish, foisting mulled wine and whisky on the fathers, flirting outrageously with the mothers. Like a dry piece of wood put to a flame, he would suddenly and miraculously whoosh to life.

  Lila remembers it all, standing at the far end of the scruffy garden, and smiles. There is no way she can plan anything to match one of her parents’ extravagant parties, but she has enough old wood, broken furniture, mildewed curtains and mouldy mattresses to give the bonfire a good run for its money. She decides it then: she and Tom will set fire to the huge rubbish pile together. They will do it tonight, not just in honour of Guy Fawkes, but as a symbol of something else too, something unspoken. She imagines them standing side by side in the darkness, watching the heap catch alight, all of that detritus and decay disappearing into smoke and smouldering ash. It would be a shared moment for them, something symbolic.

  Then, perhaps they will wander hand in hand back through the garden to open a bottle of wine in front of the blazing hearth. There will be no other distractions. For once it will be a chance for them to talk about Milly and about where they go from here. Yes, thinks Lila, hurling a rotten plank of wood onto the growing pile of junk, her mind is made up. This is exactly what they need after all these weeks of distance. This will be the start of making everything better between them.

  She rummages through the pile at her feet, adds a broken balustrade, a chess board spotted with green mould, a mangy-looking sleeping bag and a sagging cardboard box to the bonfire. Her hands hover over an old Moses basket, an oval wicker thing, grubby and unravelling in places, with a moth-eaten blanket lying within. She’d found it with the rest of the junk under the stairs and had known instantly it was only good for the rubbish tip, but now that she has it up beside the unlit bonfire she hesitates. Chuck it on, she tells herself, get rid of it . . . declutter. But she can’t. She fingers a corner of the knitted purple blanket and whether it’s the idea of what the basket might have once contained, or thoughts of her own lost baby, she’s not sure, but she places it to one side and when she has finished throwing the last of the rubbish onto the pile, she picks it up and carries it back into the cottage, stowing the grimy thing under the stairs where she’d found it. With one last, uneasy glance she slams the cupboard door shut.