I watch them leave, listen to the BMW’s engine until it’s swallowed up by the city. When I look back at the window, Ross is gone. But I still feel like I’m being watched. I walk to the gate, look up and down the empty street. Stand in the sun until I feel warm again.
‘Maybe she just doesn’t know how to undo it,’ I whisper. Because buried under twelve years of anger and hurt and resentment is the memory of all the times we’d lie in the Kakadu Jungle holding hands, fighting to stay awake so we wouldn’t be the first to let go. ‘Maybe she just doesn’t know how to come back.’
CHAPTER 5
I wake early and lie in bed, staring up at the Clown Café ceiling, trying not to hear the house. El and I would lie for hours inside our forts and castles, listening to it groan and shudder all around us, and she would hiss hot against my ear: The house is full of ghosts. We both believed it. But ghosts were never as scary as monsters. You just pretended you couldn’t hear them.
I get dressed and creep downstairs, uncertain why I’m creeping, why I’m frightened. Because I am. I’m gripping the bannister too hard. My heart is jumpy and too fast, too erratic, but at the same time I feel weary, spaced out, as if I’ve broken through the surface of a deep cold lake and swapped drowning for slow hypothermia instead. Bad things happened in this house, as well as good. But that was a lot easier to forget when I was an ocean away from its walls.
I run my fingers against the stairwell’s wallpaper of Grecian urns and thorny vines, think of all the long wires, pulleys, and cranks winding around the house behind plaster and cornices like a hidden city of spider webs. Spun threads of copper, patiently waiting to shorten, to shake, to awaken those silent bells below.
The kitchen is empty, but there’s evidence Ross was here: a used coffee cup, cereal bowl filled with water in the sink. A note on the table:
No news. Couldn’t sleep. Gone for walk to clear my head. Police station after prob. Help yourself to whatever you want x
Ravenous, I stand at a counter and chew my way through two bowls of cornflakes, milk running down my chin. Mum turns around from the ugly range, pats the crown of her head, drives her wrinkles deeper. Don’t slitter, Catriona. Grandpa looks up from his Daily Record. Ye’re bein’ a stander, lassie. Sit the shit doon. Today, I miss them both so badly it hurts.
After two strong coffees, I go upstairs, fetch my laptop. I check my email at the kitchen table, hoping that this will somehow bring me back to that safe and glossy life in California. Instead, I work my way through three form rejections for on-spec pitches, and a final eviction notice from the owner of the Pacific Avenue condo: a bikini model called Irena, who spends her winters in Palm Beach, and promised me she wouldn’t be back until June.
I close my eyes. Rub the heel of my palm against my breastbone. I have almost no money. I have no career. I live hand to mouth, lurching from one flat-fee gig to another. No awards, no recognition, no Pulitzer, no great publishing deal. Nothing has panned out the way it was supposed to. The way – after running away from Scotland – I imagined I deserved it to. And now I have no home to go back to. It’s all slipping away from me. Slowly but surely. And I blame El. For all of it. Then and now. I blame only her.
I’m on the verge of shutting the laptop when I see the subject line of the last unread email. I stop, my fingers hovering over the keyboard.
DON’T TELL ANYONE
Who would I tell? is my first stupid thought. I look at the sender’s address: [email protected]. It doesn’t mean anything to me. More American marketing probably, they’re pretty ingenious at dodging spam filters. But something in me already knows it isn’t. Something that feels new and familiar at the same time. Indifferent and afraid. The Wi-Fi is slow. As the email downloads, I hold my breath hard inside my throat, and that same something in me says delete it. Delete it now.
The body of the email, when it finally appears on the screen, is only two words.
HE KNOWS
I push my chair away from the table. And then I’m standing at the window, looking out at the apple trees swaying in the breeze, their big branches and heavy leaves moving, restless. I look down at the sill and the half-dozen nails that have been hammered into it, just like in the Clown Café. My fingers bump over them. Back and forth until it starts to hurt. Because I don’t know why they’re there. I can’t think of any good reason at all. And even though I’m inside a swathe of trapped and glass-warmed sun, I’m cold enough that my teeth chatter, that I can feel goosebumps through the sleeves of my shirt.
The beep of a new message makes me jump. I step back into the shadows of the kitchen, eye the laptop screen with distrust.
It’s john.smith120594 again. No subject line this time. Just one sentence.
CLUE 1. WHERE OUR TREASURE HUNTS ALWAYS STARTED
I close my eyes. El. Of course it is.
The comically huge mortice key is in the scullery back door just like it always was, and when I turn it, it’s just as stiff. The old gravel yard is gone, replaced by flat paving and ugly concrete plinths supporting uglier concrete urns. I stand on top of the high staircase leading down from the scullery to the back garden, and I can see El and me marching around and around that gravel yard, kicking up its silver and grey chuckies, trying not
