‘Are you dead?’
‘I hope not!’ I laugh and after a moment she reaches up and touches my face. I try hard not to recoil from her cold fingers.
‘Are you real?’
‘Yes.’
She lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘Don’t let him hurt me.’
I stare at her, fear tracing a cold finger down my spine. Her eyes are watery and pale and she looks at me with utter conviction. I think of that twisted line of stitching running up the side of her skull, the way her thoughts seem tangled in each other. Alex told us to expect confusion, but it’s still jarring to hear her talking about her husband, Edward, a man a long time dead, or for her to whisper to me with her nails digging into my cheek. I’m opening my mouth to respond when Alex walks back into the room, a box held beneath his arm.
‘You saying hello to Frances, Mum? We’ve got some pictures in here of their wedding. You’ll like to look at those again, won’t you?’
Mimi’s hand drops away from my cheek. She turns back to the window and says, ‘Where’s that robin?’
I’m making tea when Alex comes into the kitchen an hour or so later. William is upstairs setting up his laptop, turning his dad’s old study into a temporary office. I wonder if he has brought the memory stick with him. Maybe I’ll find a way to make it disappear. Maybe I’ll find the old well and toss it down.
‘Don’t worry about Mum,’ Alex says. ‘The doctor said this is normal after a knock to the head.’
‘What’s the deal with Edward? She thinks he’s still here?’
‘Yeah.’ He sighs, scratching the back of his head. ‘I was hoping she’d have got past that by now. She doesn’t seem to remember that Dad’s dead. That’s, like, the ninth time she’s mentioned him. Sometimes she talks like he’s just walked out the room.’
He takes a seat at the breakfast bar, the box of photos in front of him. He starts flicking through them, still talking. ‘I’m just glad it isn’t more serious than it is. Head wounds bleed a lot. It’s a good job I wa— Hey, look at this! I knew I’d find it in here somewhere.’
He holds up a photo. It’s William and me stood with our arms around each other in front of our first car. It was taken right outside Thorn House in the spring of 2010. We’d been together just a year, and bought ourselves an old Volkswagen to drive through Europe in. That’s where William would propose, four months later, outside a restaurant in Lisbon surrounded by orange blossoms. I take the picture from Alex and feel a lump in my throat as the room blurs and wavers through a prism of tears.
‘Oh! Oh no, Frances, what is it?’
His arm around me, I wipe my face with my hands but still the tears come. I’m shaking with them, choking. I can’t believe how happy we look there. It crushes me, our wide-open faces, our anticipation. It turns me to stone.
‘I’m sorry. Oh God. This is embarrassing. It’s okay, Alex, I’m okay.’
He squeezes my arm and releases me almost immediately. I’ve always liked Alex, with his faded old shirts and ripped jeans, round face beneath his crown of curly black hair. He looks so young, even now, still chubby, dumpling-shaped. Where William is dependable and sturdy, Alex flickers like a flame in a draught, unable to keep focus. It’s why he’s still here, living with his elderly mother in this big, rambling house at the age of thirty.
‘Let me do that. I’ll get the tea. You sit down.’
‘I’m not an invalid.’ I laugh, but my legs feel watery and I’m relieved to slide on to one of the stools. I put the photo back into the box and pick up the one beneath it, blotting my eyes with my T-shirt.
‘Is this your dad?’
Alex comes and looks over my shoulder. ‘Yeah. Campaigning. It did his heart no good, that.’
The picture is taken in front of the stile leading to Thorn Woods from the access road. Edward Thorn has his jaw set, his arms crossed, his mouth drawn down into a frown. Propped beside him is a placard reading It’s MY way, not the BY way.
‘I’d better take that one,’ Alex says, easing it out of my hands. ‘If Mum sees it and remembers, she’ll have a fit. She hated him doing all that stuff.’
‘Was this about the public access to his land?’
Alex rolls his eyes. ‘Yes, but don’t ask for details, it’s too boring to tell you. Just know that he got his way in the end because we Thorns are tenacious motherfuckers.’
I smile, flicking through the rest of the pile. Something catches my attention. It’s a photo I’ve never seen before. A group of people – teens, I suppose, although the ages are difficult to judge. They are standing in front of a low wall and squinting into bright sunshine. There are long shadows at their feet and their smiles are tight and self-conscious. All the girls – I count four of them – are wearing black. Not in a stylish, minimalist way, but wild and gothic: dark shaded eyes with slices of black liner, long lace veils. One of them has hair so black it appears to shine inky blue. When I see William on the end in his skinny black jeans and low-slung studded belt I actually gasp aloud.
‘Is that – it’s Will, isn’t it? Oh my God. He was a goth?’
Alex peers over, laughing. ‘Nah, not really. We just hung out with a bunch of people who were for a while. We all went through weird phases. You should see the photos of us from when William and I were going out raving.’
‘I can’t believe it. His fringe! He’s wearing nail varnish! Look at this! This is amazing, I’m going to have to get a picture.’
I take out my phone and snap a quick photo of the picture, still smiling.
‘Brilliant!’ I say, and then I notice the girl William has his arm around in the photograph. I have a strange feeling then – like the way it feels to miss a step; that lurch in the stomach, a moment of bright and fleeting anxiety. I hold the photo closer to my face. She’s shorter than William by quite a way, her hair dark and wild, eyes tilted slightly upward like those of a cat. She is looking into the camera with such stubbornness it is almost aggression. There is a tight, hungry expression on her face. I’ve got all I asked for, it seems to be saying, but I want more. It’s William who has put his arm around her but it’s her that’s clinging to him; both her hands are tightly gripping the one he has draped casually over her shoulder. Her hip is pressed against his leg, leaning into him almost, like she is trying to fuse herself to him. Even in this snapshot, this captured moment, her expression is so familiar to me it makes me catch my breath. I’ve seen it before, in Samira laughing in that throaty, dirty way she had, pupils wide and inky, cheekbones jutting. I’ve seen it in Kim, in the photographs hidden on the memory stick, looking back at the lens of the camera with an arch, knowing smile. Pay me. Pay me. My hand is shaking slightly but I’m pleased that when I finally manage to speak my voice is not.
‘Who’s that girl he’s got his arm around? The one with the lace gloves?’
‘Ah, shit. You found it.’ Alex laughs slightly uncomfortably as he takes the picture and studies it carefully. ‘That’s her. That’s Edie Hudson.’
‘Who?’
‘Edie. Elizabeth, really. But she hated that name.’