Cold Water Page 5

  “He did,” I go along with it. “We didn’t go very far, though.”

  “I see,” she says calmly and then after a moment changes the subject. “Have you contacted your sisters?”

  “I’m sorry Jenny,” I apologise. I feel a momentary twang of guilt for still being here. “I can go and call them now if you want-”

  “Its fine, Hope,” she cuts me off with a placating smile. “They know you’re here, right?” I nod mutely, feeling ashamed now as well. I should have called them sooner. Jenny should not have to let me stay here and leech off her. I keep my gaze firmly latched onto the rows of petunias, just waiting for her to say it, to tell me to leave and go back to where -

  “Hope.” She stops walking. Turns to me. “You know I don’t mind having you here, right? In fact, it’s good to have company. You can stay here for as long as you need.”

  I falter, surprised, my words caught in my throat. “A-are you sure?”

  “It’s no problem at all,” she smiles. “I like having you here, and Ash seems to enjoy your company as well. Besides,” she pauses, uncertain. “You’ve been through a lot. I know it must be hard. I don’t know your situation obviously, but you must have run away from home for a reason. And depending on how things turn out, if you ever want to…we may even consider you staying here permanently.”

  I stand and boggle at her, almost speechless. I wonder if it’s a trick, but then reprimand myself for being so paranoid. “Why are you doing this?” I ask.

  “Because,” she says. “I want to help. And it seems like you need it.”

  I just nod at her explanation, silently accepting it. “Thank you,” I mutter. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything, Hope. Take some time; think it over, the offer’s always open.”

  “Thank you,” I repeat, and I have to squash a sudden urge to hug her. “Is there anything I can do, to repay you?”

  She shakes her head, smile still there. “I’m not doing this for payment,” she says, and there is finality in her voice. The matter is closed.

  ****

  The sky is blank today, like a plain canvas just waiting for someone to come along and paint a world onto it. The cool air calms me and I school my face into a neutral expression. My sisters told me once that I’m good at hiding my feelings. I don’t think it’s a unique talent at all, or one to be proud of. People are natural-born actors. They act like they’re unafraid of anything, go about their daily lives as if they are perfectly satisfied with their mediocre jobs and never-enough salaries, donate money to charity to fool others into thinking they are generous but really, it is all just layers upon layers of masks. Life is really just one big masquerade.

  I don’t wear masks anymore. I have come to a mutual understanding with life – it doesn’t like me and I don’t like it either. Maybe I pretended for a while in the beginning, just because I didn’t want people to worry (how naïve I was thinking people would worry). But one day, I woke up and decided that the life of an actress just wasn’t for me. Not everyone is perfect for their role. I’m the understudy who forgot her lines, the one who will never be perfect for the part she was given but is forced to play it anyway.

  I walk for a long time. I’m not sure how long, minutes or hours? My feet seem to know where they are going, so I trust them. Somehow I find myself in a field. It is a different field to the one that Ash had shown me. This field has trees, grass that is chopped short and is devoid of dandelion flowers. There’s no crickets here and the sun is still absent from the cloudless sky. I have a sudden urge to hit my head against something hard, to vent my frustrations on some poor, undeserving inanimate object. But that would be an unnecessary loss of brain cells. I keep walking until I reach a particular tree. It’s a large oak, with majestic branches for arms and sleeves of vivid green. My feet seem strangely drawn to it and it is only when I sit down at its trunk and hide myself behind the veil of leaves that I realise why. It’s the tree I had blacked out under, the one where Ash had found me unconscious.

  The things I remember from my childhood are silly and insignificant, but I suddenly can’t stop thinking about them. They are things like fish and chips on Friday nights, getting picked up from school for a doctor’s appointment, listening to Faith sing in her school concert, lying in the garden and staring up at the full moon when it was hot outside. Father told me once that if you looked hard enough you could make out a face on the surface of the moon, because of the man that lived there. He also told me that the moon was made out of cheese, but I didn’t believe that one quite so readily.

  I can remember the dreams I had during those nights clearly, for some reason. Despite being perfectly happy, I dreamt of darkness, of falling and of black crows with beady, black eyes that watched on in morbid silence as I screamed and fell into miles and years of nothingness. I would wake up very early in the morning after those dreams, gasping and disorientated. However, the oddest dream of all came the night before my parents’ deaths. It was nothing particularly grotesque or frightening. It was boring, and yet somehow terrifying in its simplicity. That night, I dreamt that a robin flew into the house through the window.

  Suddenly an excited bark pulls me back, out of my fabricated world and into the real one.

  It’s distant, but soon another follows, louder. A minute later the loud dog bounds into view, its tail wagging and its tongue lolling out of its mouth. It’s a golden retriever. I freeze as it sniffs at the ground and then pees on a tree – lovely. I hope it doesn’t notice me. As if reading my thoughts, it looks up and stares straight into my eyes. There is an almost human expression on its face as it springs towards me, merciless. I have no time to get up and run. When it reaches me it stops, as if asking for permission, and then it sniffs me. I stay still, wary. Then it lies down beside me and nuzzles my side. I notice the dog has a collar, it must belong to someone.

  I hear the owner calling the dog’s name a few seconds later. The dog, apparently named Raisin, sits up at the sound and its ears perk up. Tentatively, I reach out and stroke its head. We sit in silence, the dog and I, both of us waiting for the same person. Eventually, she comes into view. I catch sight of brightly striped socks that reach up to her knees, a scarlet skirt that doesn’t quite match, a baggy purple sweater with a smiley face on it and the handmade bag she carries. Her coal hair is long, braided in areas and it stands out against her pale skin. She looks like an outcast. Like me.

  I don’t want her to see me, but the dog gives away my position. She sees us, looks surprised and then cautiously walks over. Raisin jumps up onto her, muddy paws staining her skirt. She absently strokes him and pushes him off, offering me a small, shy smile.

  “Hello,” she greets in a quiet, melodic voice.

  “Hi,” I reply.

  “Raisin seems to like you a lot.”

  “Erm…I guess.”

  “Are you new here? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

  Bewildered by the girl’s bluntness, I nod. “Yeah, I’m.”

  “Welcome to Cleadon, then,” she says, and her azure eyes are friendly and welcoming. “I’m Claire.” She holds out her hand and I hesitantly shake it.

  “I’m Hope.”

  “You seem a little lost,” she comments.

  Somewhere nearby, the golden retriever has returned his attention to the trees. We are not interesting anymore, apparently. “No, I’m not lost. I know the way back,” I say.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she replies. “You seem a little lost in…life.”

  “I do?”

  She nods. “Is there anything troubling you at all?” Her expression is innocently curious, like a young child holding on tightly to a helium balloon.

  “I’m just confused,” I admit. “About what I’m going to do next.”

  She smiles in understanding. “When I’m confused, I normally come out here and just sit. I don’t think about anything, I just sit here and watch the trees until I figure something out.”

>   “And does it work?”

  “Every time.”

  I contemplate this stranger’s words and their elusive meaning. She’s an outsider like me I think to myself, and that is why I get the feeling that maybe she understands. “I like your socks,” I murmur after a while, the random thought coming to me suddenly.

  “They’re my favourite item of clothing,” she explains, an enthusiastic smile lighting up her eyes. “What’s yours?”

  “Jeans, probably.”

  “Oh, I like jeans as well. But they never seem to match anything else in my wardrobe. They suit you a lot, though.”

  “Thanks, but they can get pretty uncomfortable, not the best for hiking in.”

  “I know. I’ve tried it before.” She pauses. “Having interesting conversations with strangers is really great, don’t you think?” She has that faraway look in her eyes again that makes me think if I could label her, I would label her a dreamer.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I shrug slightly. “I’m not the most social person.”

  “Ah, I see,” she says, but I’m not sure she does. “People annoy me sometimes, too. I used to have a friend who thought like that a lot, and I guess in the end it was his downfall.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing too big. He’s okay now, I think.”

  “Oh,” is the most intelligent thing I can think of to say. I peer at this strange, new girl out of the corner of my eye. She’s playing with a stray lock of hair, absently curling it around her finger with a distant expression. She’s confusingly simple.

  “Where do you live?” she asks.

  “I’m only staying here temporarily. I’m living with Ash Falkland.”

  She nods in acknowledgement. “I see. Are you related?”

  “No, just a friend of the family. How do you know Ash?”

  “It’s a small village,” she chuckles. “Everyone knows everyone here.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Yeah, I think you’ll like it here.”

  After that the awkwardness between us dissolves into casual conversation. We talk about certain fluorescent, knee-length stripy socks, hiking boots, music, chocolate. She tells me she likes to clip coloured bits of paper in her hair sometimes just to be different and that her grandmother was the one who made her bag. She also tells me that she’s going to own a shop one day, one which sells everything from candy to craft kits. There’s a naïve but refreshing sort of innocence about her as she talks on absently to me about the things she’s going to do one day but probably never will. When they are young people have dreams, which age and wither slowly with them. You hear about florists who once dreamed about climbing Mt. Everest, secretaries who had always wanted to become race car drivers. But her dream isn’t too unattainable and there’s something about her sincerity that makes me hope that it will be different for her.

  I’m not sure how long we sit there for, but eventually she gets up and stretches, whistling for Raisin. “It was nice talking to you, Hope, but I really have to get home now,” she smiles chirpily at me as her dog comes trotting back through the trees. “Maybe we could do this again.”

  “Sure,” I say and offer her a small, hesitant smile in return.

  “I know it’s a bit sudden, but maybe we could go out shopping together sometime.”

  “Yeah, that sounds nice.”

  She looks elated. “I’ll call soon then, ‘kay?”

  “Sure. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  She leaves, walking away slowly and humming to some unknown tune with Raisin following closely behind.

  I stay in the same position, hands locked around my scrawny legs and chin resting on my knees for a little while after that. There’s a soft breeze blowing from somewhere and it ruffles the grass slightly. Above me, the sky is still a blank, grey monotone. The world isn’t sunny all of the time. And yet I think it is most beautiful on days like these, nothing-special sort of days where it seems the sun is just too lazy to come out and shine. I lean back against the rough tree bark and jam my hands behind my head, stretching my legs out. And then I sit. I don’t think, only sit and listen and watch.

  Somehow, it works. A long time afterwards when the sky is fading into a muddy indigo and the nightingales begin to sing, I finally realise exactly what I have to do.

  Chapter 5: Which is thicker, blood or water?

  Mr. Scott, my counsellor, used to joke that I had X-ray vision. ‘You can see through anyone’ he would say, chuckling. He said I would make a great spy, because I could tell if someone was lying just by looking at them. I think he was over-exaggerating a little. It is years of practice that has made me adept at what I do: reading expressions like books. I used to watch my schoolmates from the safety of a corner of the classroom, unmasking them with my eyes, playing games, imagining what they were really like. I used to wonder if the typically pretty-but-not-so-smart girls really were as shallow as they seemed, if the ‘emo’ group really liked to wear black all the time, if the hardcore, knife-wielding gangsters were actually very kind people on the inside.

  Labels are superficial.

  It’s an unsaid rule that everyone seems to know; when you get to secondary school, you are given a label and you stick with that group. There’s the Chavs and the emo, the Goths , the nerds, the geeks and the populars. It’s every person for themselves. You have to fit in, or be alone. I never quite fitted in. I didn’t have a label; I was just the wallflower, the anti-social one who people ignored, a footprint because footprints are a physical memory of something that used to exist.

  From what I remember, there have been three people who have tried to help me and none of them have succeeded. The first was a boy named Edward. I remember him vaguely. He was short, with pale hair and calculating eyes hidden behind large glasses. We were eleven at the time and he used to come outside and sit with me some lunches. Our conversations were a little awkward and I got the impression that to him, life was just one big maths equation. He stopped coming to sit with me one day though and that was that. I guess I should have expected it. In an exam, when you get stuck on a particularly hard question you have to give up and move onto the next one before you run out of time.

  The second person was a girl. We were twelve. Her name was Lottie and she was new to the school at the time. She had been ordinary, not especially pretty but not ugly either. She found it hard to fit in and hung out with me just because she didn’t have anyone else to hang out with. I didn’t mind much. We almost became friends. But then she finally found a group to fit in with – the sporty girls. And once again, I was alone and I liked it like that.

  The third person was Mr. Scott. He was the closest anyone has ever come, but even that was not enough.

  *****

  A twitch of the lips, a single blink, a strand of hair falling across two hollow, jade eyes that stare out of the glassy surface of the mirror. The room is dark, almost pitch black, only lighted by the slivers of moonlight that slip through the window like water slips through the cracks between fingers. I stand and stare, my breaths coming in slow, rhythmic rasps. In front of me, the girl in the mirror shadows my movements.

  I stare. She stares back.

  I scowl. She scowls back.

  I glare. She glares back.

  The girl in the mirror has my unkempt, dishevelled hair, my ashen skin and my gaunt, hollow eyes. She even wears my clothes. You see, in reality I’m her and she is me. But in my reality, we are completely different people.

  It’s only been a few days and already I can hardly recognise myself. My counterpart, trapped behind the glassy surface of the mirror, is the proof. She stares through me with empty eyes. I force myself to smile weakly at her. It is only a tiny upwards movement of the lips but to my satisfaction the girl in the mirror is forced to do the same by the invisible strings that tie us together. I wonder briefly what she would do if she had her freedom, if she were not trapped in the confines of the mirror and forced to shadow my actions. After all, we us
ed to be the same person. But now I’m here, living this new life and she is still trapped. It’s not fair. I think if the girl in the mirror was free, she would be angry.

  I know what I have to do. I have already decided on my plan of action, now it’s just time to follow through. Sparing the girl in the mirror one final glance for moral support, I close the closet door and pad stealthily out of the room and down the stairs. I’d make a great ninja, I think to myself. It is 2.47am. When I enter the kitchen it is not completely dark. The silvery light illuminates a shadowy, lean figure sitting at the kitchen table. His chocolate eyes gleam when they turn to catch my gaze and I scowl. So much for privacy.

  “Boo.” Infuriating smirk.

  I take the seat opposite him. He is lounging back in his chair, a mug in front of him. I realise that there’s two mugs. He pushes one towards me. “What are you doing up so late?” I ask, accusing.