I screw up the diary page inside my fist, watch the sky above Westeryk Road grow lighter. Today there are no what ifs. No shame or guilt or worry. Today, I’m angry. I offered El an olive branch, I offered her help, and all I got back was another clue, another page of her diary. It’s so childish. Like she’s trying to reboot me, restore old files she imagines are deleted. Does she really think I’ve forgotten our lives in this house? Choosing not to think of something is not the same as forgetting. The past is past. It’s done and gone. I listened when Mum told me to see the good instead of only the bad because I saw how miserable seeing only the bad had made her. Since leaving this house – since running away from it – I’ve lived by that philosophy. And the closer those diary extracts get to September the 4th, 1998, the closer they get to the day – the night – that Mum and Grandpa died, that El and I ran, the more I’m glad I have. It’s taken a lot for me to get to where I am, to shake off the weight of my first life in this house. And I won’t let El manipulate me, for whatever reason, into picking it back up. Or into having to explain the sad and bad story of our childhood to someone else – and definitely not the police.
The tracker. I run back downstairs to the kitchen. Open the laptop, and get the password wrong twice before I can finally access my inbox. ‘Come on.’
I click on the email, tick the small mail-tracker box. ‘Email opened once 1hr 14 mins ago.’ My heart is beating slow and heavy as the page starts to load. ‘Come on.’
And then there it is:
John Smith 1hr 14 mins ago
EL
Location: Lothian, Scotland
City: Edinburgh
iPhone 7 secs, 1 view
I press the palm of my left hand against my cheek. My face is burning. Here. She’s still here. I don’t know what I expected. The Outer Hebrides? The Bahamas? But she’s here. El is still here.
*
The graveyard is old, perched high on a bitterly cold hill. Ross and I have to pick our way through haphazard rows of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graves: huge drunken stones chiselled into skulls and angels, vast grey slabs on stony stilts dressed in white and yellow lichen. The newer graves are far more modest and close together; most house only interred ashes.
It takes Ross a while to remember where the plot is, but when he does, I feel suddenly nervous. For a moment, I stand as still as the wind will allow, looking down at the black headstone, its ornate gold writing, so much like those cards left on the hessian mat. I wonder who put it there, who paid for it. Ignore the shiver that skates between my shoulder blades.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
ROBERT JOHN FINLAY
AGED 72 YEARS
AND HIS DAUGHTER
NANCY FINLAY
AGED 36 YEARS
WHO BOTH DIED 4th SEPTEMBER 1998
GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN
‘You know they’re called lairs?’
‘What?’
‘The graves.’ Ross nods down at the grass, mouth a grim line. I wonder if he regrets agreeing to bring me here. ‘Pretty appropriate.’
I turn towards him. ‘Why did you always hate him so much?’
He gives me a sharp, almost suspicious look. And then he shakes his head, looks down at the neighbouring gravestones instead. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
I think it does is on the tip of my tongue. But Grandpa was always grumpy bordering on mean, I can’t pretend he wasn’t. A flash of Mum standing at the kitchen table, dishing out stew as she described in a careful monotone the cleaning job she’d seen in the paper. Grandpa looking up from his plate. Ye’re better aff doin’ whit ye’re good at, hen. Giving us a nod and a wink that made him look no less pissed off. Lookin’ efter the hoose and these fine wee lassies, eh? And so, of course, she had. Grandpa never got the sharp end of her tongue. He never had to run around the house fleeing from imaginary fires or intruders or apocalypses.
I’m bending down to put the white roses that I picked from the garden into the grave vase when I realise it’s already full. Pink gerberas. Mum’s favourite. Strangely, I find this even more disconcerting than the fact that they’re no more than a few days old.
‘Who left them?’
Ross looks down. Shrugs.
‘Don’t you think that’s weird? That someone would leave fresh flowers at their grave? I mean, who?’ Even though I suspect I know exactly who.
I’m rewarded only with another unconcerned shrug. Ross seems different today. Lighter. Perhaps because he’s finally given up on trying to carry both hope and grief around in the same bag and has plumped for the latter. I don’t entirely blame him, and I still don’t think for a moment that Vik is right about him, but his unwavering grief both irritates and unnerves me. As if he’d rather suffer it than entertain even the possibility that El has left him voluntarily. As if he’d rather believe she was dead. It’s a nasty thought, I suppose, a snide one. That probably has more than a little to do with the memory of that stark look of horror on his face. And the long-fallowed fields that El’s diary extracts are ploughing through, churning up sour dirt.
‘I saw spare vases by the main gates,’ he says. ‘I’ll go get one.’
As I watch him march away, I try to ignore my resentment, my regret. We haven’t spoken about the kiss, haven’t even mentioned it, but we can barely look each other in the eye, and our uneasy truce is just that: uneasy. Untrustworthy. I look down
