The Imposter

by Anna Wharton

  Nan is crying. Chloe knows it is her who has made her cry. Another care assistant, Gemma, rushes into the room.

  ‘I heard the alarm,’ Gemma says, breathless, assessing the scene.

  Chloe looks between the three women. What has she done?

  ‘I didn’t . . . I just . . . I just wanted to see her,’ Chloe says.

  The matron gives a nod to the care assistant who replaces her next to Nan, then Miriam leads Chloe out of the room gently.

  ‘Come with me, Chloe,’ Miriam says. ‘Why don’t you have a cup of tea in my office while Gemma takes care of your grandmother?’

  Chloe nods. She looks back at Nan but she’s crying, her knuckles white where she’s gripping the nurse’s hand. Chloe knows then she’s lost her. Today to Gemma, tomorrow to whoever else she happens to trust more than her. It’s over.

  She follows the matron out of the room, a cavity in her chest where her heart should be. The disease has won. It’s over.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘Oh God, Chloe, are you OK?’

  Chloe peers around the door frame, daylight streaming through the three-inch gap. She squints.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. How did you—’

  ‘I’ve been calling and calling.’

  ‘My phone’s been off. I lost my charger.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Chloe reaches for her stomach.

  ‘Oh, you know, twenty-four-hour bug, something like that. I’d invite you in but . . . germs.’ She shrugs. ‘Should have a red cross painted on my door!’

  Hollie laughs a little, more to be polite, but Chloe can see she’s worried. ‘You sure you’re all right? You don’t seem yourself.’

  ‘I’m fine, honest. Just haven’t had any fresh air in twenty-four hours, it’s making me feel a bit . . . woozy.’

  ‘It might make you feel better?’

  Hollie tries to peer around the door. Chloe lifts her arm towards the top of the frame, the sleeve of her dressing gown hiding much of the hallway, but she still sees it, Hollie’s eyes roaming the gaps: the busy, patterned carpet, the hall table, Nan’s shoes by the front door.

  ‘Do you need anything from the shops?’ Hollie turns to point as if to remind Chloe where they are. ‘I could go grab you some supplies. Honestly, it’s no bother.’

  Chloe sighs. Hollie isn’t going to leave.

  ‘Give me two minutes to pull some clothes on and I’ll come out with you. You’re right, I need the fresh air.’

  Hollie goes to lift one foot inside, but Chloe pushes the door just a little. ‘Two mins,’ she says, closing the door shut.

  When Chloe reappears, Hollie is sitting on the low wall at the front of Nan’s garden. She’s looking up at the house. ‘Nice little places these. Me and Phil looked at one round the corner from here.’

  ‘Did you?’ They start walking. ‘Hey, how did you know which one was Nan’s?’

  ‘I came over that time just after you moved in, don’t you remember? But Nan was ill, so we went to the coffee shop instead. Shall we see if it’s open today? You could have some dried toast or something?’

  Chloe looks like she might be sick and Hollie looks concerned.

  ‘What do you think it is? Something you ate?’

  Chloe shrugs. ‘Best not to get too close, though.’

  They walk in silence for a while, Hollie glancing this way and that up and down the road.

  ‘It’s a nice road, I remember thinking that last time. Quiet.’

  ‘Nan’s lived here since they were built.’

  Hollie looks surprised to hear this.

  ‘Surely she must know everyone round here? Or rather they must know her – know her family, I mean.’

  ‘Here we are,’ Chloe says as they arrive at the coffee shop. Actually, it is more of a greasy spoon and if Chloe really had been ill, the chip fat odour alone would have been enough to turn her stomach.

  Suleyman brings over two laminated menus, putting them down on the table, and Chloe studies the black hairs on the back of his hands.

  ‘How’s your nan, feeling better?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah, thanks, Suleyman.’

  He walks away and Chloe whispers to Hollie, ‘I can’t be bothered to explain.’ She nods. ‘How are you anyway?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine. No news. More worried about you really, I couldn’t get hold of you . . .’

  ‘Yeah, like I said, I lost my charger, I’ll have to buy another one.’

  Hollie looks back at her for a second. She can see Hollie’s unsure what to say next. She knows this look. But she knows Hollie well enough to know she’ll keep her confidence. That she knows there is no alternative.

  ‘Oh, that’s annoying,’ Hollie says, ‘they’re expensive as well. Especially when you haven’t got a job . . .’

  Chloe quickly looks down at the menu.

  ‘I’m going to have the sausage, egg and chips,’ she says.

  ‘Do you think that’s wise?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your bug.’

  ‘Oh yeah, you’re right.’ She turns her attention to the blander sides as Suleyman returns. ‘Just some toast for me,’ she says, handing back the menu.

  ‘Without butter?’ Hollie prompts. ‘It’s probably best.’

  ‘Oh, yeah . . . without butter.’

  Hollie orders a coffee and poached eggs on toast.

  ‘How’s the job search going?’ she asks when Suleyman’s gone.

  ‘Not bad, yeah,’ Chloe says. ‘I might have an interview lined up through one of those recruitment agencies.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Which one did you go for in the end?’

  ‘Oh . . . I . . . I can’t remember, I spoke to so many . . .’

  ‘Phil says he never heard from you about that job.’

  ‘Yeah, I just didn’t . . . it didn’t seem my kind of thing.’

  ‘It was filing, Chloe,’ Hollie says.

  Chloe starts fiddling with the pot of ketchup; it’s one of those giant tomato ones, the ones with the dark green lid that are always clogged with congealed tomato sauce. Chloe has always thought they were impractical.

  She sees Hollie biting the corner of her lip, glancing between Chloe and the menu. She’s looking down, her finger tracing the list of food as she speaks.

  ‘And what about Nan? How is she doing?’ Hollie asks.

  ‘Oh yeah, good. I’ve been visiting her.’

  ‘Chloe, I . . .’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t going to just dump her in that care home and—’

  ‘No, of course not, that’s not what I’m saying. I just think, well, maybe it all happened for a reason. Maybe it’s for the best.’

  ‘Anyway, what was it you were calling about? Just a catch-up?’ Chloe says, trying to take the heat out of the conversation, to veer Hollie into different territory.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You said you’d been calling me?’

  Hollie reaches down to the handbag at her feet. She rifles around inside before pulling out a newspaper cutting. It’s folded a couple of times, but Chloe can tell from the typeset it’s her newspaper, or at least it was. She knows what’s coming: the job pages, Hollie’s highlighter pen.

  ‘I was flicking through the jobs section, you know, having a look for you really – Phil’s old job is being advertised, but anyway – and I saw this.’

  Hollie unfolds the paper and lays out a spread on the table in front of her, ironing out the creases with her fist. The archivist in Chloe winces. She doesn’t recognize it at first, but then Hollie flips the page so it’s the right way up.

  ‘It’s that couple, the one who lost their daughter, and I just thought it was such a coincidence because you only mentioned her the other day to me, do you remember? You said you were working on the story and I guessed this was it, this update and . . .’

  As Chloe stares at the newspaper the rest of the cafe with its chequered red and white tablecloths retreats into the background.

  ‘It was her, wasn’t it?’ Hol
lie asks, tilting her head to read the name upside down. ‘Angela Kyle?’

  Chloe’s eyes dart across the spread, from headlines, to pull quotes, to the pixels of Maureen and Patrick Kyle until they finally collect in some recognizable fashion in her brain. She hadn’t known them at first, age and grief having taken their toll on their faces, weather and worry having beaten new lines into them, their hair greyer – and lesser in Patrick’s case. But these are the present-day colour versions of Maureen and Patrick. She reaches out just as Suleyman appears at the table with the food.

  ‘Here we go, ladies, one poached eggs on toast, and one plain toast no butter.’

  He puts the small plate down right on top of the headline. Chloe picks it up quickly and, as she does, she takes it in for the first time:

  WE’LL NEVER GIVE UP ON OUR ANGIE

  Chloe gasps then – a kind of half-gasp, half-laugh. An exhalation of disbelief. Hollie looks up.

  ‘It is them, isn’t it?’ Hollie says.

  ‘Yes,’ Chloe replies. ‘Yes, it’s them.’

  ‘It says here they’ve moved,’ Hollie says between mouthfuls, ‘that’s what the piece is about. At first I picked it up thinking they’d found her or something, but it’s just a piece saying how they’ve moved to . . . oh, hang on.’ She leans forward then, over her eggs, rubbing one finger down the newsprint, blurring the ink as she reads upside down. Chloe winces as Hollie dabs her black-stained finger down, smudging the words. ‘There, there it is. Low Drove. That’s out in the Fens, isn’t it?’

  Low Drove. Chloe has never heard of it.

  Hollie chews on her toast, mentioning two more villages Chloe hasn’t heard of. ‘Yeah, it’s between them somewhere. Tiny place, I think me and Phil drove through it once when we were going to a garden centre. One road, blink and you miss it – that kind of place.’

  Chloe is half listening, half reading. Scanning and reading and mouthing the words to herself until she’s not listening to Hollie anymore at all because this, this is all the proof she needed.

  Chloe takes a bite of the toast but she can’t eat now, and not because of some fake stomach bug. It’s as if every hope she’d lost these last few days has been returned to her, as if wrapped up in this news cutting is a gift. But with the elation comes a horrid sickening feeling. She pictures all those torn and shattered cuttings, a feeling now that it was she who had let down Maureen and Patrick. It was she who had lost faith in them. The toast rolls around and around in her mouth. Finally she swallows.

  She picks the paper up and reads the headline again.

  WE’LL NEVER GIVE UP ON OUR ANGIE

  ‘Come on, eat that toast, it’ll do you good. Actually,’ Hollie says, ‘you’re looking better already, bit more colour in your cheeks. It must be the fresh air.’

  Chloe looks back at her friend, tearing her attention away from the newspaper cutting for a split second.

  ‘Can I . . . can I keep this?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’ Hollie fills her fork with another mouthful. ‘Keep it, Phil will only screw it up and use it for kindling in our wood burner. Did I tell you we had a wood burner installed? You should feel the heat it kicks out, we didn’t even have the heating on the other night and . . .’

  But Chloe is busy reading:

  A HEARTBROKEN couple have finally moved from their city home twenty-five years after their daughter went missing, but the pair insist they have not given up hope of her return.

  Four-year-old Angela Kyle disappeared from Ferry Meadows after her father Patrick took her to play at a park there in October 1979. Mr Kyle and his wife, Maureen, have appealed for information on their missing daughter, but despite an extensive police inquiry there have been no new leads. For the last twenty-five years they have stayed in the same house, even keeping her bedroom as a shrine to little Angie, should she return. But last week they swapped their Dogsthorpe home for a Fen village.

  ‘It doesn’t mean we have given up hope of Angie being found,’ said Maureen Kyle from their new home in Low Drove. ‘I’m still as sure today as I was twenty-five years ago that Angie will come home one day, but it’s been hard staying in the same place, surrounded by all those memories, every fresh lead and every fresh disappointment. We needed a new start.’

  Chloe looks up at Hollie. She can’t tell her what she’s thinking, that it feels to her as if Maureen is reaching out of the newspaper to reassure every doubt she’s had over the last few days. When she pictures those cuttings pulled from the wall and kicked under her bed, her temples throb and the cafe feels small and stuffy. She leans back and takes deep breaths, her forehead tingling with sweat.

  Hollie looks up at her, her knife and fork wavering mid-air.

  ‘Oh, you’re not right, Chloe,’ she says. ‘Look, you’ve gone all pale again, and you haven’t touched your toast.’ She wipes the last of her own toast around her plate quickly. ‘Come on, let’s get you home.’

  Chloe says goodbye to Hollie on the doorstep. She had to shuffle from one foot to the other, as if she needed the loo, until Hollie got the message.

  As soon as she closes the door she runs up to her bedroom. There, on her hands and knees, she pulls out all the photocopies she’d pushed under her bed, releasing them from the tight angry balls she’d screwed them into.

  She curses herself as she goes, curses herself for doubting Maureen and Patrick. Two parents who had proved time and again, year after year, how devoted they were to their little girl. She should have known them better. She knows, deep down, the past is always there, just under her skin. Life filtered through a lens of distrust is the best way of avoiding disappointment. But Maureen and Patrick are the first people who have ever proved her wrong. And surely that’s got to mean something.

  NINETEEN

  Out in the Fens the roads are long and straight. There’s often a camber each side which slopes into a grassy bank and then further still into a dyke, one side or the other, occasionally both. Through the windscreen of the bus, it looks as if the road is a giant grey play mat rolled out for a child to run toy cars up and down. The lumps and bumps in the road make Chloe’s stomach pitch up and down. Or perhaps that’s just nerves.

  It’s been a while since the bus left Peterborough, crossing over one anonymous roundabout after another until the buildings faded away into flat countryside. From the A47 Chloe had spotted the lonely little Eel Catcher’s Cottage abandoned in the middle of a field, its thatched roof still withstanding the elements. On school trips to the coast, kids had made up stories about a wicked old woman who lived there and ate children for her supper.

  The sky is bigger here. The grey clouds hang low, appearing, in the distance, to touch the tops of the trees that provide a windbreak for the crops – the only thing that breaks the Fenland for miles. The bus slows and stops to let people off as it passes through one village after another – Parsons Drove, Murrow – each little more than a string of bungalows with long neat gardens, interrupted only by the occasional empty petrol forecourt.

  Chloe shuffles to the edge of her seat as a cluster of houses appears. She wonders each time if this village sign will read Low Drove, yet time and again she is disappointed – or perhaps a little relieved.

  When she moves she feels the news cutting Hollie gave her crinkle inside her coat pocket. She’s brought it with her to make sure she’s got the right place. There it is again, that churning inside. Is today really the day she’s going to see Maureen and Patrick? Because that’s all she wants to do, just look. She’d already decided that before she left home. That’s why she didn’t take the same care when dressing. All she’s going to do is find the house, see where they live and perhaps – if she’s lucky – catch a shadow at the window, or a glimpse of them pottering in their garden.

  Time passes looking out the windows. The sky has darkened and black clouds hang heavy, threatening to burst. Her hand reaches for the cutting in her pocket and holds it there, tightly. In her other pocket is her mobile phone; she’d made sure to call Park H
ouse from the bus station before she left the city to check on Nan. It didn’t feel right to call from the road. One of the carers told her she was doing a still-life art class this morning. Chloe had never known Nan to paint.

  The driver applies the brakes, and she looks up just in time to see the next village sign flash past on the left. Low Drove. She stands up and a couple of the other passengers lift their faces. The bus comes to a halt and the doors open.

  ‘Are you sure this is the place you want?’ the driver says, looking up the empty road.

  ‘Low Drove?’ she asks.

  He nods, looking her up and down. She thinks of Angie.

  ‘Yes, then.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  She steps off onto a grassy verge. It’s only when the bus pulls away that she sees just how isolated this place is. The road is without markings. On the other side a weeping willow slumps across the tarmac. The back of the road sign is a hundred metres behind her and, in the opposite direction, the back of the bus receding into the distance, its indicator flickering as it turns right out of the village. She stands still and the wind whips around her. She pulls her coat tighter but it doesn’t make much difference. Further up the road she sees a few houses, and – she squints – a red Wall’s ice cream sign swinging in the distance. The only sign of life. She walks towards it, the edge of the road crumbling into earth. Why would Maureen and Patrick want to live here? Why would anyone? It offers nothing more than isolation. Is that what they want? To disappear? But then why do the interview in the newspaper, telling everyone that they’ve moved here? In case Angie comes home, she supposes.

  The photograph on the cutting shows them standing outside a yellow-brick detached Victorian house with a short privet hedge, but Chloe doesn’t see many houses at all, let alone this one. As the red sign gets closer she hears it creaking and, in that same moment, a string of four seventies bungalows comes into view. They are the same grey brick she’s seen in other villages, long gardens that run up to the road, windows with net curtains, a sensible car in the drive. She walks past and catches her reflection in the window. Inside, she sees tall armchairs topped with lace doilies. She knows that style. This is a place for the old.