We’ve already reached the office, even though I’d taken her the long way round. ‘It’s in here,’ I say, and I’m about to tell her that I’ll wait for her, that I’ll show her around after if she wants, but she’s already moving away. ‘OK. Thanks, yeah?’ she says. ‘See you later.’
The door swings shut behind her. Edie. Eedee. I turn the word over and over in my mind on the walk home, trying it out for size, tucking it away for safekeeping like it’s a precious locket on a fine gold chain.
‘Heather … Heather … HEATHER!’ My head snaps upwards and I look around my bedroom in a daze. How long had it been this time? ‘Heather!’ My mother’s voice, its note of irritation rising as she calls me from the kitchen, propels me to my feet. I look around myself for clues. I’m dressed in my school uniform, my bag of books by my desk. It’s light outside, but definitely an evening sort of light, I think. Slowly it comes back to me. It had been the last day of term before exams started. I had returned home from school and come up here to begin my revision and then … it must have just happened, the way it sometimes does, and I never know why. Almost as though I fall asleep while I’m wide awake. It usually happens when I’m upset or angry, like the time with Daniel Jones, the boy who’d bullied me all through primary. I hadn’t even known I’d hit him till I saw the blood. A jumble of my classmates’ voices, past and present, crowds in on me, mingling to make one long mocking hiss. What’s wrong with you? Why do you stare like that? Weirdo. Fucking freak. I shake my head to clear it.
My dad collects clocks and there are hundreds of them in our house all ticking at once, like the air is shivering, chattering its teeth. I listen, and sure enough after a few moments, there it is: the clanging jangle of dings and dongs as they all strike the hour at once. I count to seven. Teatime, then. My mother’s never late. The thought of her downstairs sat at the kitchen table waiting to begin grace jolts me into action. ‘Coming!’ I shout. ‘I’m coming!’
Downstairs, Dad sits at the kitchen table reading aloud from a newspaper article about geological engineering. Mum moves around the kitchen not listening to him, transferring plates of food from the worktop to the table in front of us. I watch her, trying to gauge her mood, but she puts the last plate down and without looking at me, sits and begins to pray.
Sometimes Mum reminds me of the lake where we used to go camping back home in Wales. I’d wade through its water on hot summer days, occasionally chancing upon inexplicable pockets of ice-cold, before blundering further into a shallower, warmer patch. I’d stay there for as long as possible, wallowing in the sunny warmth until the touch of slimy seaweed or the thought of eels or dead fish slipping past my ankles would make me panic and press on. Being with Mum is like that sometimes: you never know where the cold pockets are, or what’s there waiting for you in the warmer spells.
‘Heather!’ My mother stops mid-prayer and I realize too late that I’d been absent-mindedly picking at the tomato salad.
‘Sorry,’ I say, and feel myself redden.
Sometimes I do this thing to help me sleep: pretend that everything’s as it was before, that I am six again and Lydia three, and we’re all still OK. I imagine Lydia’s hand in mine as we run together in the garden of our old house and hear her laughter as I fall asleep.
As if to rescue me from my thoughts the face of the girl I’d met that afternoon pops into my head, and I feel a sort of light, lifting in my heart. Edie.
Fremton’s a horrible town. I shouldn’t say that, but it’s true. We moved here from Wales when I was ten – a fresh start, Mum said. After what happened, people in our village who I’d known all my life suddenly looked differently at me when I passed them in the street, or else swooped down on my parents like big black greedy crows, cawing sympathy, pecking for answers.
Eventually Mum and Dad stopped doing the things they used to do. Slowly, bit by bit, Mum pulled out of choir practice, her book group, organizing school fetes. Except for church on Sundays, she barely left the house at all. Dad carried on teaching at the boys’ school across the valley but at home he found refuge in his study, mending his clocks and reading his books. I guess from the outside it might have looked like we were shutting out the world to find comfort in each other, but it wasn’t like that at all. My mum and dad cleaved like a stricken tree, me like a lost squirrel hopping between the two halves. Dad had never looked at me in the same way after it happened and Mum didn’t either, but it was different with her. With Mum I knew in my heart that she wished it was Lydia who had come home safe and sound that day, not me.
So when they told me one evening after supper that Dad had been offered a new job in an English town 160 miles away, that it meant a promotion and a bigger house, I knew the real reason for the move: we would be going somewhere nobody knew about us, about what had happened, and what it meant. And a month later here we were. But nothing changed, not really. My mum found a new church to go to, but apart from that she still hardly ever leaves the house. These days her focus is on me. My schoolwork, my weight, my piano practice, my future. She’s trying to make me better, I think.
Now that the exams are over I have seven empty weeks to fill, so when I’m not helping Mum around the house or doing my volunteering work there’s nothing much else to do but walk. Fremton’s right next to the motorway, so wherever you are you can hear it, the never-ending rush of traffic on its way to somewhere else. The whole town feels like it’s been forgotten somehow, like everyone upped sticks and left years ago. There’s a canal that runs through the middle but no one goes down there very much and the shops in the square are mostly empty since the superstore opened on the Wrexham road. There’s a big statue of a miner in the centre of the square, carrying a sack of coals on his back, but someone’s spray-painted a big orange willy on his head. Then there’s just streets and streets of council houses till you get to the Pembroke Estate, three high towers pushed right up against the motorway, like they’re standing guard, warning outsiders away.
Wherever I go I look out for Edie, my eyes scanning the faces I pass, hoping that one day one of them will be hers. I think about her smile and her brown eyes and how nice she’d been to me and I wonder what she’s doing and where she lives, whether she’s bored or by herself like me. Then, out of the blue, I see her again. I’m walking home through the square when I spy her sitting on a bench by the statue, smoking a cigarette. I stop in a shop doorway to watch her. She’s wearing a short denim skirt and her legs are long and tanned, stretched out in front of her, a silver chain around one ankle. Her hair hangs loose around her shoulders and she smokes her cigarette like she’s deep in thought. She looks beautiful. It’s as if she shines against the greyness of this town, I think, like she’s full of light. I hesitate before half raising my hand to wave and I’m about to call her name when someone cuts across in front of me and reaches her first. My hand falls to my side, her name catching in my throat.
I can’t see him properly, whoever he is, this person who’s come between the two of us. I only know that his effect on her is instant, her face and neck flushing pink, her eyes wide and bright. She listens to what he says, laughs and glances away, but only for a second, as though her eyes can’t quite help being drawn back to him. And then he sits down next to her, so close that their arms touch. He says something and she shakes her head, a smile hovering upon her lips, and I don’t know what it is, this strange heat that’s there in the crackling, held-breath space between them, I only know that it has no place for me.
As quickly as it began, it’s over. He leans in close and murmurs one last thing in her ear that makes two red spots appear high on her cheeks before he gets up and walks away. I get a clearer look at him now. He’s dressed in tracksuit bottoms, a zipped-up jacket with a hood. He’s about twenty or so and very handsome, I suppose, though I don’t like his face at all, its roughness and its smile that shows he knows she’s watching him still. I wait for a few moments more, in the shadow of the shop’s