Secrets in the Shadows

‘It was just old stuff. Not really what we’re going for.’

‘I would have liked to have seen it. Did he leave a number?’

‘No,’ Elsie replies simply as she pops a piece of cucumber into her mouth. Just like that, as though the matter is closed. As though she is the boss.

‘Elsie, we’re meant to be a team! Why didn’t you at least take his number?’

‘Why don’t you trust the decision that I made? Who would buy horrible dusty books from a hundred years ago?’

‘They were from a hundred years ago? There could have been all sorts in his collection, Elsie. There could have been first editions that we could have made actual money from! Why do you think that you are the one in charge? Why can’t we both be the adults here?’

Elsie shrugs and screws up her sandwich paper, soggy with tomatoes that she has delicately removed.

‘I thought I made the right decision. People want new stuff these days. Even if they’re buying second hand, they want it to look new.’

‘No, they don’t all want new stuff. Don’t be so narrow-minded,’ Grace shoots back.

Elsie scowls at her sister as she grabs the ball of tomato-smeared paper and pushes past her. Grace picks up her own sandwich and bites into it. She frowns as Elsie’s words are finally processed in her mind. Maggots of the sea. She swallows her first mouthful uneasily, poking at the remainder of the sandwich’s pink, veiny innards before pushing it away.

The apology comes the next day, just as Grace knows it will.

‘I really am sorry.’

Grace looks up from her pile of pound coins to her twin’s apologetic saucer eyes. ‘It’s fine, Elsie. Honestly, I’m over it. As long as you promise we can decide things as a team in the future.’

‘I will, I will. I promise. I was just feeling stubborn yesterday. I thought I could handle things on my own. But today I can see it all a bit more clearly. I know I was out of order,’ Elsie says, her voice slightly high-pitched as though she has sucked an old helium balloon. ‘So, I’m going to leave you to it for the afternoon. To show that I trust you.’

‘You’re taking the afternoon off?’

‘Well, not exactly. I’ll start some stuff for the tax return. Boring stuff.’ Elsie gives Grace an impulsive hug over the counter, her earrings catching on her sister’s glossy black hair. ‘I’m not skiving. I just want you to know that I trust you.’

A few minutes after Elsie has left, Grace drums her fingers on the counter. She takes a sip of the hot chocolate she has made herself, even though it’s too hot to taste the sweetness. She watches a lone man in a brown suede coat browse the small selection of biographies they have stacked near to the doorway. When was the last time Elsie hugged Grace before today? She can still smell her sister’s perfume: a leathery, almost manly scent. A scent that makes her seem like the boss. She has been worse since their mother left. Elsie seems to think that telling Grace what to do might fill in the horrific, inexplicable gap in their lives that they are forced to step over each day. Elsie seems to bound over the gap easily, like an exuberant Labrador, and has done since they were sixteen. But Grace, even now, constantly finds herself edging over it cautiously, trying not to fall.

The twins’ mother vanished on their sixteenth birthday: a day when she should definitely have stayed until the end. In many ways, she had gone long before the day she disappeared, but the traces of her at least made Grace feel as though they had a mother. Sticky hairspray wafting through the hall. Perfume. Brandy. All toxic fumes, seeping into their skin, making the twins’ faces grey and their thoughts jumbled. She had been even more distracted in the days leading up to the twins’ birthday, and Grace had felt as though something might be the matter with her. There had been more of the nightmares than ever before. Twice in the night, Grace had heard her mother moaning and crying. Those blue, anxious hours of thirteen years ago came back to her now, as she stood in the shop.

Grace had woken up suddenly on her sixteenth birthday. She’d had a frightening dream that she was drowning, pulling for something to grab onto, her mouth and eyes and nose filling with stinging seawater. She had clawed at her duvet, gasping, and shot up in bed, disorientated and dizzy with breathlessness. She’d looked over at Elsie, who lay still as a corpse, breathing deeply and steadily. Although the curtains were shut, Grace could tell it was still early.

But not early enough.

She sat up, feeling a suffocating pain in her chest, tasting salt and fear and loss. When she went downstairs to find her mother, she found sixteen fairy cakes with silver balls on top, two glasses of cloudy lemonade, a blood red bottle of wine from a neighbour, presents wrapped in pink foil paper, cards stacked up in the hall. A lone balloon.

But no mother. Grace remembered her dream: remembered being pulled into the slicing waves, water filling her lungs until there was nothing but blackness.

‘She’s fine,’ Grace said to herself, her voice too loud in the empty hall. She tried to make herself calm down a little, but her breaths had become short and sharp, and her heart was light and trembling.

She called her mother, but there was no answer. She looked all around the kitchen for a note, a sign that her mother might be back any moment, but all she found was a half-finished glass of brandy in the kitchen. She thudded upstairs, into all the empty rooms, into the one where Elsie still lay sleeping. Elsie couldn’t know that their mother had tried to leave them. She would never forgive it. Grace had to find her. She fled back downstairs to the kitchen, knocking the brandy from the worktop as she passed so that it crashed onto the stained stone floor. She rushed out of the back door into the whipping, salty air.

‘Mum,’ she tried to call. Her limbs dragged along as though they were being pulled back, and her shout for her mother was sucked back into her mouth. She could not speak. She could not yell. Come and find me, she pleaded silently.

Grace searched and searched and searched; she waited until her voice returned and bellowed for her mother over and over again; she wandered up and down the beach until her feet were numb and prickled with sand. Eventually she gave up and walked from the beach, back home to Elsie.

Now, Grace looks at her watch. Nearly half past two. She picks up her phone from the counter and pauses slightly before tapping into her caller list. Eliot finished work for the half term break the other day. He went on to a teacher training course after his degree and now he teaches Theatre Studies in a sixth form college. He is probably still in bed. Grace pictures his bare chest rising and falling with sleep, his mouth slightly open, his face immersed in a dream he won’t remember when he wakes.

Her hand hovers over his number, until she remembers the hug from Elsie, the feeling of their hair and earrings and scents being entangled. She locks her keypad and places her phone back on the counter. As she does, she glances up at the door, which has opened.

‘Eliot! I was just thinking you’d still be in bed, enjoying your break.’

‘Thought I’d come and check in here. How’s it going? Good day?’

‘Yeah. Pretty quiet, after a surge yesterday.’

Eliot nods then looks round. ‘Isn’t Elsie here?’

‘She’s taken the tax stuff home to work on,’ Grace says, not wanting to go into the reason why Elsie has left Grace to it. ‘She’ll be back in a bit. She won’t be able to stay away, although it seems to be going quieter this afternoon.’

‘I suppose with this kind of shop it will always be a little up and down. Have you had many students in? I was thinking if you did some kind of student discount then it might work in your favour.’

‘Yes, we’ve had a few, thanks to your promotional email. Student discount is a great idea.’

‘If you decide on the discount then I can email my students again, in case they’re thinking of buying anything.’

Grace laughs. ‘Did you used to spend your college holidays buying books?’

‘I certainly did! You know I did!’

Grace bites her lip. ‘I remember. You were always reading.’

‘Reading or drinking,’ Eliot shrugs. ‘But drinking’s a student’s prerogative.’

‘And what’s your excuse now?’

‘It’s a teacher’s prerogative too! Some of the banal things I have to teach and the misery that some of the students put me through are both enough to make me reach for a drink.’

‘I can’t imagine your lessons being banal.’

‘My lessons aren’t banal!’ Eliot retorts. ‘It’s the bloody curriculum that’s the problem. Bores the students to death. If I followed the lesson plans that I was meant to, as well as sticking to the set plays, then everybody would have slipped into a tedium-induced coma by the end of the lesson – me included.’

‘Have you got much marking to do over half term?’ Grace asks, remembering that Eliot normally spends most of his time off lamenting what he should be doing to keep in the head of department’s good books.

‘Nah. A bit of planning. Nothing that I can’t do on the day before I go back. So I’ll probably help out here a bit. I like the idea of reading all day.’

‘We don’t just read all day! We’re actually very busy,’ Grace says in mock outrage. ‘In fact, I have a load of new stock to put out. Mags found some of Noel’s old books we could sell at her house the other day, so I need to catalogue them and decide where to place them. I’m considering changing the window display at some point so I need to think of some ideas for that. And I have to cash up, too.’

Eliot rolls his sleeves up. ‘Well then. We’d best get started.’

Chapter Six (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)

Grace, 2008