B L A I R E
•
My room feels like it hasn't been touched in twenty years and it smells like two decades of musty air disguised with a spritz of air freshener, and I have hardly left it for days.
I don't know where the time has gone. It's been swallowed up by the gaping silences when my path crosses Elizabeth's – it feels wrong to call her Aunt Elizabeth, or even my aunt – and we don't know how to talk to each other. She's like a lion that has learnt English – we're talking the same language but it makes no sense. We can't communicate. Our references are poles apart, and so much has gone unsaid for so long that we don't know where to begin. Which thread do we unpick first? Which will lead to revelation, and which to sorrow?
My bags are still packed in the corner of the room. I can't bear to go through my things, to hang my clothes and shelve my books, to admit that this is my life now. This creaking cottage is my home; this silent, sullen woman is my family. The entirety of it. My father was an only child, and both of his parents died within two years of his suicide. I don't remember them, or him.
And as for my mother ... I don't know what to think anymore. I thought she was an orphaned child, the story she always led me to believe, but I don't know what's real and what was whatever fiction she had to tell herself. Why hide Elizabeth from me? Why send me here when she's not around to answer my questions?
I don't know what time or even day it is when there's a knock on my door and it eases open on an ancient hinge in need of oiling.
"Blaire?"
I don't say anything because I don't know what to say, every word hitting my ears wrong when I test them out in my mind. I'm lying here with my head pressed to my pillow, my mouth open as I search for the right combination of consonants and vowels, when Elizabeth pushes the door further open. One hand curls around the edge of the cracked wood when she steps into the room.
"You haven't left the house in four days," she says. I suppose it must be Friday, then.
I look up at her. She looks down at me, fingers curled over her ribs as though she's holding herself together. I notice an ugly bruise mottling her forearm, shades of purple spreading from her wrist to her elbow, and morbid fascination forces me up.
It's only when I'm sitting on the edge of my mattress that I realise it's a streak of paint, mauve and lilac cracking where they've dried over fine blonde hairs and the contours of her arm.
There's paint on her face too. That striking slice of red across her cheek isn't a bloody gash but a smear of crimson acrylic that matches a smudge on the back of her left hand.
"Are you left-handed?" I ask. She looks down at her hands as though she needs the visual to recall which she uses to grasp a paintbrush.
"Yes." She pauses before let's go of the same words tracking across my mind. "So was your mother."
Another trait they share. But no matter how crushingly similar she looks to Mum, she has none of the warmth and passion and generosity; I see none of Mum's humour and radiance, the way she lit up every room. Elizabeth is the opposite. She's a dark cloud, an ominous grey fog lingering at the edge of my vision; she's the heavy promise of a storm.
She shifts her weight. A floorboard groans. "I think it will be good for you to get out. It's a nice day." When I say nothing, she unfolds a crisp orange note that looks all wrong. Then I remember where I am; I realise it's a Scottish ten pounds. "I need a few things from the shop. Do you think you could go out and get bread, milk, and tea?"
The unpainted hand holds out the money like it's a carrot on a stick and I'm a donkey. Like she can't bear to step closer to me. I lean as far forward as I can without losing my balance and toppling off the bed, and I take the cash.
"Where's the shop?"
She nods at the window. "About a mile and a half away. In the centre of Anchor Lake. It's a nice walk, but there's a bike in the shed, if you'd rather cycle." There's a moment's indecision, like she's teetering on the edge of an abyss, before she says, "You can take my car, if you want."
Because when you've lost everything and everyone, who gives a fuck if you're not insured to drive?
"I don't drive," I say. "I haven't learnt yet."
"Oh. Okay."
We hover. I stand; she steps back.
"I'll see you later, then," I say, each word an effort. Speaking to her is like squeezing blood from a stone, and my body aches from the strain. I don't know how long I can keep this up, how long I can exist in the same space as a woman who barely wants to acknowledge me, let alone accept me as her niece. I didn't think it could get worse than the moment I saw my mother's lifeless body, but somehow I was wrong.
*
I haven't ridden a bicycle since I was eleven years old, but once I've rescued an old five speed from the shed and coughed up two lungfuls of dust, it comes back to me. My feet find the pedals and I wobble as I set off, convinced that Elizabeth's watching from behind a crack in the curtains of whichever room she holes herself up in all day.
The ground is damp. I can smell rain in the air, that thick, fresh scent that clogs up the atmosphere, and I gasp when I splash through a puddle I didn't see. Muddy water soaks the ankles of my leggings and there's probably a murky streak up the back of my jumper from the spin of the dirty wheel, and I aim straight for the next puddle I see.
The way to the centre of Anchor Lake is dense with trees packed along the sides of the narrow road, the kind of road with occasional dips carved out of the steep sides as designated passing places. In the other direction, it slopes its way up a steep mountain that Elizabeth, thank god, lives at the bottom of, her house one of only three I see in the first five minutes on the bike.
I didn't take any notice of the route last night. I didn't clock the town we drove through or the buildings we passed, and it doesn't take long to see why it made no impression – there's hardly anything here. I cycle straight down the same road for fifteen minutes until I reach a crossroad: straight on takes me to the lake; turning right will apparently set me on an eight-mile path to the station, and left takes me to Anchor Lake.
There's no-one around when I turn left too sharply and almost fly off the bike, and I pass a florist and a bakery and a couple of boarded-up shop fronts before I find somewhere to buy what Elizabeth needs. It's the epitome of a village shop – small and independent and probably extortionate, the kind of place where it'll cost the entirety of my ten pounds for a list that would be less than two quid from Lidl.
A bell chimes to announce my arrival. The man behind the counter at the front looks up with a bright smile that fades when he sees me and realises I'm not one of his regulars. I'm a new face in the kind of town where I'm sure everyone knows everyone, though I can't imagine Elizabeth's made much of an impression on anyone here if she treats her neighbours the way she treats me.
"Hello," the man says, once he's got over the shock of a newcomer. He glanced at the clock on the wall. "Good afternoon."
I didn't realise I'd slept through the morning.
"Hi," I say, because it seems rude not to, and I'm conscious of his eyes on me as I disappear down a claustrophobically narrow aisle in search of the three items on my list. I'm the only one in the shop and it's painfully silent in here, though I bet everyone else gets a warm welcome and friendly conversation.
The only bread is from a local farmhouse, more than two pounds for a loaf, and the milk is so fresh I can virtually hear the moo. It's only when I find the tea aisle that I lose my way. There are at least twenty different flavours, from English breakfast and Earl Grey to fennel and ginger, but the only instruction I was given was tea.
Itchy panic rises up my spine, along with the uncomfortable fluster of the unknown, and logic flies out of the window when I walk into a spiral like this – rather than call Elizabeth, I grab the first two boxes I lay eyes on and hand over the cash once I've dumped my armful onto the desk.
There's no conversation, not a word until I leave and he wishes me a good day, and I feel the need to wash myself of his penetrating gaze when I get back to my bike. In my state of bewilderment, I take off the wrong way down the high street and instead of ending up on the road back to the house, or even to the lake, I find myself deeper in this strange settlement. Town is too generous a word. There can't be more than a couple thousand residents, if that.
My feet and brain are disconnected and I don't know how I end up standing in front of a decrepit library at the far end of the street; I'm working on autopilot at the moment, not fully engaged in anything I'm doing for the maximum conservation of energy to be spent on my exhausting emotions. The door swings open when I push it, leaving my bike leaning against the wall outside and trusting that this isn't a town of thieves.
I've been to my fair share of libraries, from the vast expanse of the New York Public Library and the Seattle Central Library all the way across the Atlantic, to the quirky Library of Birmingham and the ancient Bodleian just a few hundred miles away. They're safe places I used to hang out in when Mum had to go to a talk or meet a journalist or host a charity event. I've always felt at home in libraries, no matter the size, and this is certainly one of the smallest.
There's only one floor, and I can see all the way across to the other side with only a few rows of books in between. It's a far cry from the fifty million books kept in Manhattan's iconic library – there are no more than five thousand here, if that – but it has that smell. Books, old and new. Uncracked spines and worn pages; crisp white sheets and yellowed paper.
It's quite in here. This whole town is so eerily quiet, so few people to be seen, as though they all took one look out of the window and saw the bulging clouds weighing down the sky and thought, not today, Satan. I'm breathing too loud; it feels like I'm disturbing the books with every breath. A sinking feeling anchors my stomach to the floor and crawls over my skin, some distant alarm bell telling me to get out and go home before the storm.
But the moment I turn around, I slam into a rake of a white haired woman whose sudden appearance makes me squeak. My hand flies to my chest, my heart galloping at three times its usual pace. She just smiles, not nearly as perturbed by me as I am by her.
"Hello, dear," she says, her voice sugar and cinnamon. "Is there anything I can help you with?"
"No, thank you," I manage to stutter. "I'm just looking around."
Her eyes twitch when she hears my voice. I must stick out like a sore thumb around here – it's clear I'm not Scottish. I've never stepped foot in the country before Monday. I learnt my accent from my mother: I learnt to be unplaceable, to sound quintessentially English without ever having lived in the same town for more than a couple of years.
"What brings you to Anchor Lake?" she asks, cloudy blue eyes and a watery smile fixed on me. "Are you on your way up north? Down south?"
I really don't want to rope myself into this conversation. I'm not going to stand here and tell my history to a stranger in a creepy library in a spooky town. So all I say is, "I just moved here, actually."
"Oh, how lovely! Welcome to town!" Her smile changes once she knows I'm not a tourist passing through, passing time. "If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, dear. What was your name, hen?"
"Blaire," I say. It comes to me more naturally this time. I am Blaire. It feels right. The name is a snug blanket around my shoulders, an extra layer of protection that comes from tweaking my identity.
"Well, I do hope you settle in here, Blaire," she says. "My name's Regina Hart and you can almost always find me in here, either behind that desk or checking the shelves. I'll get out of your hair now, but I recommend taking a look at the notice board by the door to see what's going on in town this month. We try to hold a variety of events and social clubs, maybe there'll be something that interests you."
She passed me, not without squeezing my elbow, and I continue towards the door. But I stop at the notice board. Anchor Lake Community Board, it reads along the top, above a variety of posters and adverts pinned to the cork. There's ballroom dancing in the village hall every Wednesday; the Women's Institute hosts a tea party on the first Saturday of every month; the cafe holds free tastings every other Sunday.
There's one that catches my eye. A white piece of A4 paper tacked up with glittery thumbtacks, mostly eye-catching because there's not much information taking up the expanse of white.
At the top, in bright blue Word Art that reminds me of primary school computer lessons, it says THE ANCHOR LAKEY! Beneath the title is a list of bullet points.
· Are you a fan of The Key to Anchor Lake?
· Do you love history and mystery?
· Are you interested in Anchor Lake's dark past?
· Do you like podcasts?
· Head on over to www.anchorlake.org/about-the-town/local-interest/the-anchor-lakey
There's nothing else. Just those bullet points and tacky fonts and garish colours on a crinkled piece of paper. But I'm intrigued. It's the first thing to hook my interest in over a week, the first thing that makes me dig out my phone from beneath the bread and milk and tea in my bag, and switch off airplane mode.
A flood of notifications pour in but I ignore the lot, swiping them out of the way to open up Google and type in the link on the page. It brings me to a basic town website, the kind that's more text that anything else, and the page for The Anchor Lakey doesn't give me much more information than the paper in front of me.
The Anchor Lakey is a podcast hosted by resident Sukie Watanabe, encouraging the discussion and exploration of the town's history as reported in The Key to Anchor Lake by Mary S Nesbitt.
I'm still snagged on the words dark past. I don't have a clue what The Key to Anchor Lake is so I can't be a fan, but right now I'm aching for something to distract me, something new. Something that Mum never knew about, never touched. Something that is just mine.
The bike is forgotten. My errand is too. I do a one-eighty and find myself sitting in a thinly-padded chair, folded over a table with a cracked plastic coating, as I click on the archives – there are over one hundred and thirty episodes dating back to the middle of 2016 – and I click on the first one.
My earphones are in a tangle at the bottom of my bag, looped through the handle of the milk and twisted in the bristles of my hairbrush, and it takes every ounce of patience to untie them enough to plug one into each ear. There's a quiet hum of static and vaguely amplified external noise as my finger hovers over the recording, the only thing on this page, and I wonder for a brief moment if it's a good idea to dig into the dark side of my new home.
And then I press play.