The Imposter

by Anna Wharton

  Claire Sanders walks behind them, so close she’s practically inside their footsteps. Chloe tries to pretend she’s not there at all, but it’s not easy when she’s interrupting constantly, pointing out different facilities before they’ve even stepped inside. Chloe concentrates instead on ignoring the ugliness that collects inside her veins.

  The women are introduced to the matron, Miriam, and they follow her along a burgundy carpet peppered with yellow diamonds, around a giant glass window that looks out onto a small courtyard filled with tropical plants.

  ‘Park House opened around twenty-five years ago, and we’re currently home to thirty-one guests . . .’ Miriam explains as they walk.

  ‘It’s pretty here, isn’t it?’ Nan says.

  Chloe doesn’t need to turn around to know Claire is smiling behind her.

  ‘We’re just starting a major renovation, extending the site to incorporate some of the land either side of us. We will be adding six new bedrooms, and an adapted kitchen to support residents to be independent for as long as they can – for some, just being able to keep making their own cup of tea can make a real difference.’

  Claire smiles and nods. ‘The facilities here are what makes Park House one of the top ten specialist dementia care homes in the region,’ she interjects.

  Chloe ignores her.

  They’re back where they started. Chloe glances at the matron, confused.

  ‘We understand that people with dementia like walking,’ she says, ‘so this circular corridor with the garden in the middle means they can walk for hours safely and enjoy the view while they do.’

  Clever, Chloe thinks. Not that she says it. She’s been determined not to like this care home since Claire had told her she’d found the ‘perfect place’ for Nan when they got her back home.

  ‘She doesn’t need a perfect place,’ Chloe had snapped at her. ‘She’s got one, right here with me.’

  Not that it had made any difference.

  ‘Grace needs twenty-four-hour care, Chloe,’ Claire had said, ‘and you have a job, it’s impossible for you to be there for her all the time, as much as I know you’d like to be.’

  She wanted to say that’s what Nan had always done for her, that it had always been the two of them. But what was the point? It would only sound saccharine and sentimental to a social worker. Instead, she’d swallowed it down and so here they were.

  The matron shows them a couple of bedrooms. They remind Chloe of ones in motels – not that she’s ever stayed in one, but she’s seen them on television or in movies. These rooms have nice touches: bedside tables and vases, black and white pictures of the city in years gone by. Claire points out to Nan that the resident in this particular room has covered one of her walls in photographs of her grandchildren. Chloe tries to move her on by taking her elbow and leading her out the room.

  ‘Hasn’t she got it nice, Chloe?’ Nan says.

  Chloe nods, quickly, and Claire smiles at her as Miriam leads the way. Claire lingers in the room and catches Chloe’s hand as Nan follows Miriam.

  ‘I think she likes it, do you?’ she asks.

  ‘Let’s not be too hasty,’ Chloe replies.

  By the time they catch up with Nan she’s in the communal room chatting to two residents who ask her to join them in a game of cards.

  ‘Will you come back for me a bit later, dear?’ she asks. ‘I just want to have a chat to these nice old folk.’

  Claire looks from Chloe to the matron. ‘I think that’s settled it,’ she says.

  Chloe wants Claire to hurt, as much as she is hurting now. Her hands twist inside the deep pockets of her coat, her fingernails cutting crescents into her palms.

  Nan sits happily with her new friends as Chloe walks over to a huge window that overlooks the grounds. There’s a small wooded copse beside the care home. An area of it has already started to be felled – presumably this is where Park House will be extending, Chloe thinks. Beyond that, she can just make out a lake. It’s a bright day, despite the cold, and the sun twinkles in golden silvers on top of the water. As she turns around, a nurse is bringing a cup of tea to an old man in an armchair beside her.

  ‘Excuse me, where’s that?’ she asks her.

  ‘Ferry Meadows,’ the nurse answers. ‘Lovely view, isn’t it? On a clear day you can even see the steam train running along the back of the park.’

  While Nan plays cards Claire and Chloe unpack her things, hanging her clothes in the small wardrobe and putting photographs on her new bedside table.

  When they’ve finished, they call Nan in to have a look. She wanders into her room with one of her new friends and picks up a photograph of Granddad taken just a few months before he died.

  ‘My Hughie,’ she says, holding up the picture frame. ‘You’ll meet him, of course, when he’s back from the war. Doesn’t he look handsome?’

  Her blue eyes turn paler when she talks about him, as if they become a window back to her youth. What good does it do to pull her back into a world where they’re separated by death? Right now he’s as real to her as Chloe is standing in her doorway. Nan looks up and sees her.

  ‘Oh, hello, young lady,’ she says. ‘Are you here to take the drinks orders? I like a drop of Drambuie in the afternoon when I’m on holiday.’

  Claire tries to comfort Chloe with clichés on the drive home. Chloe answers her by gazing out of the passenger window.

  ‘She’s in the best place, Chloe,’ Claire tells her.

  Chloe wonders why she has to make it sound like Nan is dead already.

  She starts pressing buttons on the door – she needs to get some air in the car. Claire sees and puts her window down by pressing a button on her steering wheel. Her hatred of Claire is only increased by this gesture, and the fact that Claire doesn’t seem to notice only irritates her more. But what does she expect? How would Claire like it if she had taken the one precious thing she has in the whole world? She’d seen it once, on her keyring, a boy – or girl – with ginger hair, around eight or nine. On the back of the keyring it read Best Mum Ever. Chloe doubted it. It didn’t seem fair that her kid was at home, waiting for Mummy to come and play house when she had spent her day destroying another. Not that Claire would understand her loneliness, her loss. For some reason it’s the photograph of Angela Kyle’s parents that pops into her head, and she feels that connection again, as if they are the only two people in the world who might understand how she feels.

  Claire drops Chloe outside Nan’s house. She turns to wave until Claire has driven away. But she doesn’t go inside, not yet.

  Instead she waits until she sees the car go round the bend and then she puts her keys back in her coat pocket and walks in the opposite direction.

  Chestnut Avenue is a long, broad road curved at each end, disguising both where you came from and where you’re headed. Neat brown-brick semi-detached houses stand two-by-two and small front gardens peer out from behind short walls topped with privet hedges. Beside each house is a driveway, some still with the original garages; others have expanded and swollen, giving birth to extensions and extra bedrooms over the years. Between the pavement and the road there are grassy verges and planted occasionally within them, guarding each pair of houses, are the great trees that give this street its name. Throughout the decades, these trees will have seen it all. It is in many ways an unremarkable street, but to Chloe, its symmetry has a certain perfection to it.

  Chloe walks towards the curve in the road, crossing a junction, onto the next part of the street. All the time she walks, she tries to picture it twenty-five years ago. She passes a Catholic church on a junction and peers inside the thick wooden door. In her mind’s eye she sees the younger versions of Maureen and Patrick, the ones in the black and white photographs that filled the newspapers that autumn back in 1979, and she imagines them just a few years before, filing into this very church each Sunday, a tiny Angie in their arms and a congregation made up of neighbours who cooed over the new baby while her parents took communion.
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  She counts the numbers down from the hundreds and finally she’s standing in front of number 48 – the address she’d checked in the earliest cuttings.

  She looks up at what is still quite obviously a child’s bedroom – Angie’s bedroom? No, surely not after all these years? There isn’t much to see: a thin strip of what looks like pink curtains peers out from behind double glazing, and the outline of a light shade hanging from the middle of the room. She looks harder, tries tiptoes, but the reflection of the trees in the window blurs the lines, and she can only just make out the shape of the paper light shade in the shadows cast behind the glass. A car rushes by and when she looks back, the outline is gone.

  There’s no movement behind the front door of number 48. There is no car on the drive either. Chloe steps forward, drawn to the house as if it were a magnet and she was metal. The Kyles know what it’s like to lose something, a family member, or have them snatched away. She doesn’t know why she came here to find comfort; instead she thinks of Angela Kyle and feels a pinch of guilt. At least she knows where Nan is now, even if it isn’t with her.

  She looks up at the child’s bedroom again. A cloud has crossed the sky, obscuring the view through the glass with its reflection. Now she can’t even make out the light shade. She turns on her heels and heads home to Nan’s.

  NINE

  Chloe hasn’t been in the office for two days, so she arrives early, hoping to creep in and camouflage herself among the filing cabinets.

  Alec is already there when she arrives, his nicotine-stained fingers working through a pile of brown envelopes. Her first thought is that one of them might be the Angela Kyle file, but no, it’s there waiting on her desk, just as she left it on Monday.

  She mutters good morning. Alec coughs in response, then he picks up a pile of envelopes and heads deep into the archive. His clothes leave a stale breeze. His silence unnerves her. Should she follow him into the dense forest of filing? She closes her eyes and tries to think what would be happening if her life were a TV show, but nothing comes to her.

  She turns on her computer, wishing she could muffle the fanfare it makes as it loads. As the office starts to fill, she casts glances over both shoulders in turn, the weight of the Angela Kyle file feeling reassuring in her hands. She peers inside, the spine of every single cutting so neatly folded; her fingernails pluck at them as if they’re tiny guitar strings.

  She empties the file and spreads the cuttings out on her desk, every so often aware of Alec passing by and glancing in her direction. Smaller cuttings offer tantalising tasters, words leap up from the melamine: missing girl, heartbroken parents, search, desperate, hope fades. But she knows the real story – the whole story – is folded away within the larger cuttings. She hasn’t been able to stop thinking of the Kyles, especially not last night when she had returned home alone, when she’d felt the silence in the walls of that empty house. Is that how it has felt to these parents since the day Angela went missing? She feels she must be the only person who has some idea of what they are going through, and that likewise, they would understand her, and in many ways that made her feel less lonely, just the thought that someone would understand.

  She picks one of the articles at random, opens out the double-page spread on her desk.

  LOCALS JOIN SEARCH FOR MISSING GIRL

  She starts to read, but Alec limps past again so she quickly presses the article underneath the scanner. Her heart races as the pixels begin to appear on her computer screen.

  There is a picture of Angie in this one, a grainy black and white reception class photo, a milk-tooth grin, hair in two bunches.

  Missing: Angie, four, the caption reads.

  The main picture is of locals searching through long grass alongside police, watched over by her parents, and underneath: Heartbroken: Parents Patrick and Maureen Kyle. She lingers on this picture of them, their fingers knitted tightly together in gripped hands, the two of them united in their grief for their precious missing child.

  A reporter enters the archive and, thinking it’s Alec, she quickly labels and closes the file. Then she picks another:

  MOTHER: ‘HOW CAN MY GIRL JUST DISAPPEAR?’

  This time a colour piece from a feature writer who hasn’t worked at the paper for ten years. She had gone back to the family for a revisit:

  MAUREEN Kyle sits opposite me on the sofa in their cosy sitting room. There is not a thing out of place and yet, it’s very clear that something is missing from this tableau. She appears poised, collected, but as her eyes rest on a photograph of her missing daughter, little Angela – or Angie, as her mum and dad call her – that calm exterior cracks, and the tears flow. ‘One minute she was here, playing in this living room, and the next she was gone. It doesn’t seem right. How could my daughter just disappear like that? How can any child disappear without trace? Somebody somewhere must know something.’ Her husband, Patrick, inches closer to her on the sofa and reaches for her hand . . .

  Footsteps around her, Alec’s uneven gait. The scanner greedily eats up detail she herself longs to consume. The office is getting busy, Chloe knows she needs to look busy too. She picks another cutting from the pile.

  ANGIE LATEST: POLICE DIVERS DREDGE RIVER

  The next one:

  BOGUS SIGHTING WASTES POLICE TIME

  Another:

  LOCALS RALLY FOR ANGIE VIGIL

  The next couple of hours pass as the news rolls in from the wire. Reporters empty their shorthand pads at the news desk, and the editor’s office door opens and shuts as the day’s splash is decided upon. Among the chaos of the newsroom, Chloe works diligently through the Angela Kyle file. She knows it wouldn’t ordinarily take this long, that she doesn’t need to read all the cuttings. There are some she manages to resist, especially when she feels Alec’s eyes on her. But when he’s lost among the metal filing cabinets, when she hears the clang of the drawers as he removes and replaces files, she takes those few precious seconds to find out more.

  ANGIE’S FATHER IN SHOCK ARREST

  Her stomach turns under her desk. This one she has to read.

  POLICE swooped last night on the home of missing city girl Angela Kyle, arresting her father in a shocking turn of events. Patrick Kyle was taken to the city’s Bridge Street police station and questioned for two hours after an anonymous tip-off from the public. But the bungling act by police proved to be the result of nothing more than a prank call, and Mr Kyle was released without charge. The city’s police chief has since apologized unreservedly to the Kyle family.

  Speaking exclusively to this newspaper, Patrick Kyle said, ‘Yes, it was upsetting, but it also reassured us that the police are taking our daughter’s disappearance very seriously. We welcome every lead being followed up, we support the police in investigating every suspicion, it’s the only way that we will get our Angie back.’

  There’s another picture – the same again. The pair of them united. Impenetrable. Their loyalty to their daughter constant, steadfast, intoxicating.

  By mid-morning the sandwich man arrives and Chloe tears herself away from her desk to buy a tuna baguette from the trolley. She keeps her eye on the file all along for fear that Alec might take it. He still hasn’t spoken to her, but she comforts herself with the thought that she’s insignificant enough for yesterday’s absence not even to be noted.

  Eleven thirty rolls around, the newspaper is put to bed, and the editor’s office door opens. Alec approaches her desk.

  ‘Er, Chloe . . .’ he says, coughing a little into his hand, ‘Malc would like a word in his office, if you’d like to . . .’

  His sentence trails off, but he gestures for her to follow him.

  She gathers up her notepad and pen, as if trying to convince the both of them that Malc might need archive material for a big story. Alec glances at the stationery in her hand but says nothing.

  Inside the office Alec closes the door. Malc is behind his desk, elbows spread wide behind his head. He doesn’t ask either of them to sit.
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  ‘Chloe,’ he begins, ‘this isn’t the first time you’ve been in this office, is it?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Sorry?’

  He has pockmarks on his cheeks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No,’ he repeats, ‘and I think the last time you were in here, we talked about the same things: time-keeping, unauthorized absences from the office, general tardiness in your performance . . .’ He checks each felony off on fat fingers. ‘Am I right?’

  She nods.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He knits those same fingers together and leans forward on his desk. ‘So my question to you is, what are we to do about this?’

  There is silence in the room. Chloe looks at Alec, who straightens up as Malc starts to speak again.

  ‘Alec tells me you were absent during office hours three times last week, then this week—’

  ‘I . . . I know it looks bad—’ she starts and instantly regrets interrupting him because when he speaks again, his voice is so loud it startles the sound of her own blood from her ears.

  ‘—and today’s Wednesday, and you’ve only just decided to “pop back in”?’

  He leans back abruptly on his office chair, bobbing back and forth a little. There is enough silence then for her to decide to fill it. She’s good at talking herself out of situations, she knows what people want to hear.

  ‘It’s just my nan,’ she says.

  Both men roll their eyes a little.

  ‘She’s got dementia and I’ve been trying to care for her . . . she gets confused, you see . . . and she went missing . . . and the police, well, they found her in London . . . and I had to go and get her . . . now she’s in a home and—’

  Alec interrupts this time. ‘Chloe, we’ve been as patient as we can be. How many times have we heard—’

  ‘Yes, I know, Alec, and I’m grateful, I really am, but now she’s in a home and I won’t have to—’

  ‘Until the next time,’ Alec mutters.

  Chloe wraps one arm around her middle and bites her fingernail.