The Shadow Year (20 page)

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 her 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.

‘Hello again.’ Sally greets her from behind the shop counter with a warm smile. ‘It looks pretty wild out there. Is it raining yet?’

‘Not yet,’ says Lila, grabbing a plastic basket from beside the door.

‘Won’t be long,’ says a tall man standing in front of the chilled foods cabinet, ‘you can feel it in the air.’

Lila gives the man a small smile of acknowledgement, then heads to the shelf at the back of the shop where the limited assortment of wine and spirits are housed. She stares at the labels, clueless. She supposes it’s a night for red, but she doesn’t recognise any of the names on the bottles.

‘How are you getting on out in the wilds, love?’ Sally calls. ‘Surviving up there?’

‘Yes,’ says Lila, ‘just. My husband’s coming up tonight – it will be nice to have some company.’

Sally gives a theatrical shudder. ‘Don’t know how you do it, all by yourself, day and night.’

‘I’m getting used to it,’ she says and tries to smile.

The woman turns back to her other customer. ‘She’s renovating an old place up near the moors, making it nice, you know, like one of those telly shows. She’s quite mad, if you ask me. I’d need more than a chat with the old bat running the local village store every few days to keep me sane.’

The man turns to Lila with a polite nod. ‘Is that right? Which place would that be?’

Lila smiles, embarrassed to have her news broadcast quite so publicly. ‘It’s about three or so miles from here . . . an old stone cottage beside a lake. I don’t actually know if it has a name. Do you know the one?’

The man shrugs. ‘Sounds like it could be an old shepherd’s cottage. There’s a few of them about.’

She hesitates. ‘Do you have any idea who it might have once belonged to?’ She regards him hopefully but the man just scratches his head. ‘No idea, sorry. If it’s the one I’m thinking of it’s been empty for years.’

‘Oh.’ Lila turns back to the wine, disappointed. She reaches for a bottle, swayed by the pretty leaf design on its label, and adds it to her basket.

‘It’s been a shocking autumn, hasn’t it?’ Sally continues, turning her attention to the man now standing at her counter. He nods politely as he piles tins of dog food next to the till. ‘My Stan says we might as well just give the livestock away at market if prices continue to slide like this.’

The man murmurs his response and Lila carefully tunes out their conversation, concentrating instead on the mental shopping list she has drawn up in her head. She adds a piece of Stilton, a packet of crackers, bread, cornflakes, coffee, biscuits, chutney and some ham to her basket, then throws in a bag of oranges and some milk too. She moves across to the till and stands patiently behind the man as he packs his own groceries into two large bags. His hair is grey and cropped short and he wears a long, wax jacket and heavy gumboots. She should invest in some proper outdoor gear like that, she thinks.