The Shadow Year
Authors: Hannah Richell
For Matt
Contents
A Reader’s Introduction to the Book
Author Interview
Suggested Points for Discussion
Further Reading
A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
, 1854
It is the smallest details that come to her: the damp grass underfoot threaded with buttercups, the air humming with insects, the snap of her nightdress catching in the breeze. As she wanders out of the cottage and down towards the mirrored surface of the lake, her senses are heightened. She hears the splash of a duck hiding in the reeds and the slow drum of her heart in her chest. Just a few moments to herself, she thinks – to wash – to swim – to clear her mind and ready herself for what lies ahead. Soon she will be gone from this place.
Halfway down the ridge she stumbles on the uneven ground then rights herself, carrying on until she is at the water’s edge. The lake lies before her, a blue eye gazing up at the sky. Shadows of slow-drifting clouds shift upon its surface and, as she watches them, the image shimmers like a mirage conjured in the heat of a summer’s day. She blinks and the haze lifts.
She dips a toe into the cool shallows then wades out, thick mud and silt squeezing between her toes and a dark water stain creeping up the hem of her nightdress. Water ripples and disperses all around her and it must be the glare of the sun because increasingly it’s as though she’s looking at the lake through the grease-smeared lens of a camera – as if she wades not through a lake, but through a dream. The pebbles feel real enough beneath her feet, as does the cool water rising up towards her chest and all around the fabric of her nightie spreads out across the surface of the lake, floating like the petals of a flower. Real and yet not real. She shakes herself. Is this a dream?
Pushing off from the bottom, she swims out to where the water is dark and deep then stops to watch the breeze play across the surface, lifting it in choppy peaks. Her blood is cooling and she feels the weight of herself – her arms, her legs, the heavy tangle of her nightie, her slow-beating heart. Treading water, she sees the cottage tilt in the distance and the light waver across the treetops. It’s a dream, she tells herself and lays her head back upon the water, suspended there between earth and sky, floating for just a moment upon the skin of the lake.
July
Lila sits at one end of a deserted picnic bench with a takeaway coffee cup before her. Although it’s warm out – the warmest it’s been for a while – the park is half empty; it is that strange, quiet hour when workers have retreated back to their offices after lunch but the schools are yet to spill children out of their doors. From where she sits Lila can see through the picture window of the park café where a woman restocks the drinks fridge, and a little further away to where a council worker bends over a bed of ragged marigolds. An empty can clatters past him, caught in the breeze. Closer, in the shade of a tall plane tree, stands a pram.
There is a baby asleep inside. Lila can just make out the curve of her face above a pale pink blanket. Her cheeks are rosy and one dark tuft of hair escapes from beneath her cotton hat. Lila watches, fascinated, as the infant grimaces in her sleep, her eyelashes fluttering once, twice before falling still again. The baby’s mother is over by the paddling pool. She has taken off her shoes and socks and is splashing through the shallows with a young boy of about two or three. Lila sits on the bench and watches them from behind dark sunglasses, twisting her coffee cup in her hands.
‘Look, Mummy, a bee.’ The boy points to something in the water and his mother approaches and bends down next to him. Lila takes a sip of her coffee and allows her gaze to drift back towards the pram. She knows the model. She knows that the brake is on. She knows that to release it you have to flick that white handle up 180 degrees. She practised it only weeks ago in the shop. She swallows down the bitter coffee taste in her mouth. God, it would be so easy.
The mother and her son splash to the far side of the pool. They scramble out and head to a clump of bushes near the café and begin to search for something with which to scoop the bee from the water. The boy scampers across the concrete then cries out. He fusses over his foot and his mother moves closer, brushing the dirt off his sole, hugging him, then rerolling his already wet trousers.
A weak sun filters through the branches of the tree overhead, sending patterns of light dancing across Lila’s bare arms. From far away comes the sound of a football connecting with a boot, the delighted shriek of a child being pushed on a swing, the sound of a jet plane high overhead. The mother and boy enter the café. She sees them ask for something – a paper cup. Lila eyes the pram and then stands.
She ignores the pain in her ribs and focuses instead on the thud of her heart as she moves closer. The baby’s lips are pursed now, opening and closing, suckling in her sleep. A fly buzzes over the pram’s canopy, then lands on the pink blanket and creeps towards the baby’s face. Lila takes another step forwards, fighting the urge to swat it away. Somewhere inside she registers the cold hollow of her heart. It would be so easy.
She reaches out and allows her hand to brush against the handlebar of the pram. The plastic is warm to her touch. The baby stirs. Behind her she hears the splash of feet in the paddling pool, the little boy’s giggle. ‘Get it, Mummy.’ Lila gazes down at the sleeping baby and shudders. She lets out a long breath then steps backwards away from the pram, away from the baby. She turns and makes her way along the path leading around the pool where the mother and son work together to fish the bee from the water.
‘He’s alive,’ she hears the boy cry in delight.
‘Don’t touch,’ warns his mother, ‘he might sting.’
The woman glances up at Lila as she passes and throws her a smile. Lila gives the woman the slightest nod, the hot sting of her tears hidden behind her sunglasses as she follows the path out of the park gates and makes her way over the zebra crossing and up the hill, her heart hammering loudly all the way home. Get a grip, Lila, she tells herself. Just get a bloody grip.
The man is at her front door as she enters through the gate. He stands with his back to her, dressed in motorcycle leathers and helmet, with one finger pressed insistently on the doorbell. ‘I’m here,’ she says.
When he turns, all she can see of his face are two dark eyes peering through the helmet visor. A walkie-talkie crackles at his lapel. ‘Are you Lila Bailey?’
‘Yes.’
‘Delivery. You’ll need to sign.’
She nods and accepts the electronic pad from his hands, scrawls her signature across the screen then hands it back to him. In return he offers her a stiff cream envelope addressed in neat handwriting. Without another word, he moves up the path to where his motorbike waits in the street. It starts with a violent roar and speeds away down the hill. Lila tucks the envelope under her arm and fumbles with her keys in the lock.
Inside, she bends carefully to retrieve the takeaway menus and bills scattered across the mat, adding them and the courier’s special delivery to the growing pile of unopened mail on the hall table. It proves to be one envelope too many and the whole lot cascades to the floor in a splash of paper. She’s tempted to leave everything where it has fallen until she remembers the mess will be the first thing Tom sees when he arrives home later that evening. Holding her ribs gingerly, she crouches down to gather the envelopes and restacks them onto the table in two neat piles. The last one she adds is the cream envelope from the courier. As she places it on the pile she feels a strange weight sliding and shifting within. She hesitates then shakes it. There is definitely something in there, something small but heavy rattling inside. Intrigued, she moves away from the pile, the envelope still in her hand, and carries on up the stairs.
In the bathroom Lila runs a bath, as hot as she can stand, and watches as the steam billows into the air and mists on the mirror over the sink. She breathes deeply, then reaches for her pills, swallowing two before taking up the envelope again.
The handwriting is unfamiliar and the postmark smudged and illegible. She slides her finger beneath the seal and pulls out a typed letter and several folded documents. She gives the envelope one last shake and watches as a heavy silver key drops into the palm of her hand. She stares at it for a moment then turns it over, feeling the reassuring curve of it between her fingers, and when she is ready she reaches for the letter and begins to read.
Tom arrives home an hour later. She sees his distorted face come into view through the filmy surface of the bath water. She watches his eyes widen, his mouth open in alarm, before rising up through the surface with a gasp, pushing her hair out of her face.