We scrambled up over the stile into the field, the forest looming ahead of us, the small fan of torchlight ahead of us, darkness and shadow all around.
‘Quick. Let’s get to the trees.’
Rain was running into my eyes and down inside my collar; my hair stuck to my face. Billie ran ahead and disappeared among the trees, but sprinting after her with a rucksack was impossible. I lumbered forward and tried to force my heavy legs to hurry. As I reached the edge of the trees my ankle caught on a root and twisted and I lost my balance, falling heavily, the weight of the rucksack dragging me down. As I hit the ground the air was knocked out of me and my head flashed with light and shock at the blow.
I lay on the wet ground, not knowing where I was for a few seconds. Gradually my breath came back and I began to reorientate myself. But I had no energy to lift myself up. I lay on the wet ground, the rain pelting down on me.
‘Fuck. Fuck fuck FUCK.’
Tears of pain and self-pity stung my eyes, mingled with the icy rain. It was too much. I couldn’t go on. It was just all too much.
I swear you’re so dramatic when you’re hungry, I heard Mischa say.
I’m not being dramatic, I answered back. I’m in pain. I think I’ve broken something.
You’re fine, she said. Come on, Clem. Get up now.
I clambered painfully to my feet, wincing as I put weight on my ankle, looking around for Billie. ‘B, wait for me.’
I pointed the torch after her and saw the flash of her red coat as she disappeared into the trees.
‘Billie! Wait!’
I started to limp after her as quickly as I could, which was not quickly at all, gasping with pain at every step. When I reached her I had to pause and lean against the enormous tree we were under so I didn’t lose my balance again.
‘I thought I lost you,’ Billie said and started crying. ‘I looked round and you weren’t there.’
‘Sorry, B,’ I said. ‘I fell.’
She sank down between the roots of the tree. ‘I want to go home,’ she said, her voice small. She leaned back against the tree and closed her eyes.
‘Mustn’t fall asleep, B,’ I said, trying to stop my teeth chattering. ‘Not yet. In stories, if you fall asleep under an ancient tree in the middle of a forest, do you know what happens?’
Billie ignored me.
‘You get taken off to the Otherworld. And when you’re there it’s like one big party, but then you get tired and you want to get home. And when you do it turns out hundreds of years have passed.’
She looked at me.
‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I just want Mum. And Dad.’
But she let me pull her up.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Hold my hand. It’s not much further.’
The noise of the wind and rain all around us was loud, like the sea, and I felt as though the forest was tilting and tipping around us like the waves of the ocean. I rested my hand against a tree to steady myself. I blinked hard, trying to focus my vision.
Billie was watching me. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
But I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, that anyone or anything could be hiding behind every tree. A sick shakiness rose inside me. I wanted to run.
We carried on, and all the time I was looking out for something – anything – lights, something familiar, a thinning out of the trees, that would tell me where we were. But there was nothing. I had no idea whether we were even heading in the right direction. It was so dark, and everywhere looked the same in the small patch of torchlight. I couldn’t go on much longer. I was just wondering what would happen if we decided to sleep in the woods when we came to a dip, almost falling down into it. I stopped. Something about it was familiar.
‘Wait!’ I said. ‘I know this place. I know it. Just down here…’
I scrambled down the slope, holding on to tree roots as I went to steady myself.
There it was.
A small wooden shelter, almost hidden unless you knew it was there. A kind of hut, made of wood and branches. Grandpa had found it when Mum was little, all falling down and rotten. He’d replaced some of the boards, made it waterproof and patched up the holes. Mum had played there as a kid and then ‘got up to no good’ there when she was older. It was her place to escape to, Granny said, when she wanted to get away from everything. Relief flooded through me.
I pushed open the door cautiously and flashed the torch inside. It was empty.
‘Let’s just go in out of the rain for a minute,’ I said.
I opened the rucksack with clumsy, cold-numbed fingers. Rain dripped from the end of my nose and my hair as I felt inside, trying to identify what things were. I found us dry jumpers and the fold-away raincoats. As I rolled the wet clothes up in a plastic bag and stuffed them in the rucksack, I remembered the food the woman at the station had given me and fished it out of the side pocket. We stabbed at cubes of unidentifiable fruit with a plastic spork. It tasted like the most delicious food we’d ever eaten. I found Dad had stuffed some cereal bars into the rucksack too. It was like a feast. I felt euphoric, in a light-headed, unreal way. Everything hurt a bit less. I wasn’t as cold.
I wrestled Billie into her raincoat and did up the zip.
‘Better?’ I said.
She said nothing.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s not far now, I promise. And it’s all going to seem better once we get there.’
I shut the door of the hut carefully behind us. The rain had eased off and I wasn’t scared now. It was as if the forest had shown me the hut, that it had known that was what I needed. And I felt a connection to Mum – that for once, somehow, Mum had been there for me when I needed her. It was her hut after all.
As we set off again I told Billie how pleased Grandpa would be to see us. I told her he’d fry us up some bacon and we’d find hot-water bottles, and there’d be a big crackling fire to get warm by and Grandpa would toast bread on a toasting fork and maybe he’d let Billie do it too but she’d have to be careful not to set it on fire. All the things I remembered about trips there when I was a kid. I told her about how Grandpa used to teach me card tricks and how we used to play duets on the piano and he’d get it all wrong on purpose. How he was accompanied at all times by Merlin, his dachshund, and, in the evening, a tumbler of whisky which smelt like smoke and tasted like fire.
Then I told Billie about the stories of the forest Grandpa used to tell me when we’d come walking here together, about thieves and knights and kings and wizards, and magical stags. About children lost in the forest, or princesses hiding there, and trees that turned out to be people put under a spell and owls that turned out to be witches in disguise.
Her eyes were glassy with exhaustion and she was silent.
And then, at last, the trees began to thin and we weren’t in a proper fairytale wood any more. There was a bike path, a dog poo bin, a playground where everything was made of logs and rope that looked smaller than I remembered it. And at last—
‘Look! Can you see it?’
Through the tree trunks, a light.
I opened the wooden gate at the end of the garden. In the dark it looked strange, wild, unfamiliar. It wasn’t the dark, I realized, as I made my way slowly through the long grass. The garden didn’t look how it should. What had been the lawn was a meadow up to my knees. Grandpa’s vegetable patches, usually neat with rows of canes for runner beans and sweet peas to grow up, were thick with thistles and weeds.
The light turned out not to be from Grandpa’s house but one of the houses further along the track. Grandpa’s house stood in darkness, all shadows and blank windows.
I felt a flash of anxiety. What if Grandpa wasn’t here?
I clenched my teeth to stop them from chattering and limped round the side of the house and up to the front door before I could really start to panic. I pressed the old-fashioned bell and expected to hear it jangling inside but perhaps it was broken. I knocked, gently, so as not to wake any neighbours.
Billie sank down and sat at my feet, her head against the rucksack.
I listened carefully for footsteps inside but heard nothing. The only option was to knock louder. The taps rang out, sharp, into the stillness of the garden, echoing down the track. I saw a light go on upstairs in the house next door and a crack open in the curtains. Minutes passed. Could he really not have heard?
Then I remembered Granny used to keep a spare key under a little ornament shaped like a frog, round the side of the house. I felt my way round through the shadows, stepping carefully in the dark, to where I thought the frog should be. As I got closer I could see its pale shape in the dark, and when I lifted it up there was a rusty key underneath on the damp soil. I was so relieved I felt dizzy.
I hurried back, wincing with the pain of my twisted ankle, put the key in the lock and turned it.
I pushed the door slowly, braced for an alarm or at least a barking dachshund—
Silence. I stepped inside and felt around for the light switch, then blinked at the too-bright hallway: the tiled floor, the chest of drawers with Granny and Grandpa’s wedding photo in a silver frame, the painting Granny did of Mum when she was a kid, curled into an armchair, sleeping. All so familiar and safe it felt like a dream.
No point in waking him now, I decided. I’d leave a note on the kitchen table and explain everything in the morning. I crept to the downstairs shower room to find a towel, dried us off as much as I could, dug pyjamas out of the rucksack, lay Billie down on the sofa.
‘I’ll make us some tea,’ I said, but she was asleep before I’d finished speaking, Luna tucked under her arm. I tiptoed into the kitchen to put the kettle on, still shivering. The kitchen was a mess, dirty plates in the sink and a clutter of food packets and old milk cartons on the food-crusted counter. Granny would always say, ‘A tidy house, a misspent life.’ But Grandpa had always kept everything spotless. I was too tired to wonder too much about it and certainly too tired to clear it up, but it did make me uneasy. I made tea, and even though I had to have it without milk because the milk had gone off, the warm bitterness of it was comforting. I was just about to settle myself on the sofa that Billie wasn’t on when I heard footsteps overhead.
‘Who’s there?’ It was Grandpa.
‘Grandpa, it’s me,’ I called back. ‘It’s okay! It’s me, Clem.’
I went out into the hallway and waited for Grandpa to come downstairs.
I tried not to let my smile falter as I saw him. He looked so much older than when I last saw him, so much thinner and frailer.
‘Grandpa, I’m so sorry to wake you up,’ I said. ‘I was going to explain everything in the morning…’
He was staring blankly at me.
‘What are you doing in my house? Who are you?’
I felt like I’d been punched.
‘Grandpa, look!’ I said. ‘It’s me.’
My mind was whirling, trying to make sense of it all. It’s the middle of the night. He’s still half-asleep. I knew, though – I knew something wasn’t right.
‘I’m so sorry to turn up like this in the middle of the night, Grandpa,’ I tried again. ‘Why don’t you go back to bed now and I’ll explain it all in the morning?’
I heard myself talking to him like he was a kid, like he was Billie.
He peered down at me. Was it his eyes? Maybe he was losing his sight? I moved closer so that he could see me better and he took a step back. He cowered away. Sick panic rose inside me. He could see me, but he didn’t know me.
As he stared at me, for a mad moment I thought maybe it wasn’t Grandpa at all, because there was something about his face that wasn’t like him, a kind of emptiness. He just stared at me, his eyes wide with fear, no hint of recognition. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
‘What do you want?’ He sounded like a little kid. He looked scared.
‘Grandpa’ I said again, desperate. ‘It’s me. It’s Clem. Your granddaughter.’
Grandpa looked at me curiously now, as if there was a flicker of something, some connection he couldn’t place.
‘Clem…’ He said it like it was a word in a foreign language he’d heard once a long time ago and he was trying to remember what it meant.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s me. Clem. Remember, Grandpa?’
The blankness in his face cleared.
‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ he said, his voice worried but somehow calmer. ‘I didn’t know…’
I climbed up the stairs to him and held his hand. It felt fragile as a bird’s bones in mine.
‘It’s okay, Grandpa,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine. It’s a surprise.’
‘A surprise?’ he said.
‘That’s right. Lucky you, eh?’
‘Lucky me!’ he said and smiled back at me. I gave him a kiss on his thin cheek.
‘Come on,’ I said, leading him up the stairs. ‘You go back to sleep and I’ll explain it all in the morning.’
When we’d said goodnight, I sat on the top stair looking down at the hall, the tiles, the painting, the wedding photo on the chest of drawers.
I cried, silently. I thought I would never be able to stop.
I slept late the next morning. I had no idea what time it was when I woke. The alarm clock on the bedside table had stopped at ten past three who knows how long ago. The light coming in through the curtains of the spare room was filtered to a pale apricot-pink glow like the inside of a shell. This room used to be Mum’s. I tried to imagine her here, the ghost of her when she was my age. I pushed the thought away. I didn’t want to think about her. I closed my eyes. I felt safe in this room. I didn’t want to step through the door into the real world. I remembered the empty look on Grandpa’s face and felt the hollow fear of the night before. I wanted to stay here, perfectly quiet, perfectly still, in my safe, enchanted shell where it would always be ten past three a long time ago.
I knew I couldn’t though. I sat up slowly, wincing with the pain in my shoulders and neck from carrying the rucksack and the stinging of my heels where the raw bleeding skin had scabbed over. As I got up, stiffly, every muscle ached. This must be what it felt like to be old. I carefully tried putting weight on my twisted ankle. Sore but not unbearable. I limped to the window and opened the curtains. I remembered pinning the hems of those curtains for Granny when she made them years ago. It was easier for my small fingers, she’d said, than hers with their swollen knuckles. And I remembered Grandpa telling me bedtime stories in this room, sitting by the bed, his eyes bright, filling my head with monsters and magic. Now it seemed he couldn’t even remember who I was. I didn’t think I could bear it.
Out in the wilderness of the garden, Billie was already exploring, still in her pyjamas with a sweater pulled over the top. I waved but she was too busy making a track through the overgrown grass with a stick to see me.
I turned away and took clothes from the rucksack. Before I put them on, I breathed them in. They smelt like home.
‘Dad,’ I said, as if he might hear me. ‘I need you.’
Hot tears spilled down my cheeks. I didn’t know where he was. I didn’t know when I’d see him again. All I could let myself think about yesterday was getting here. But now, here alone, the thought that I didn’t know when I’d see him again was unbearable.
‘I can’t do this,’ I said.
In Grandpa’s stories people often seemed to find themselves in the Otherworld. Babies left gurgling in their cradles near open windows were taken there and changelings left in their place. Or some innocent person fell asleep under the wrong apple tree in the midday sun and was stolen away to where time stands still, waking up years later to find that everyone they knew died long ago. Princesses were taken there as a payment because some stupid human didn’t follow a fairy’s instructions. Even goddesses could end up there, snatched away while picking flowers or else bitten by a snake while dancing, and then someone had to make a great journey to try and bring them back.
For a while after Mum left, I wondered whether maybe this could be where she’d gone. If so, who would go to get her back? Not me, surely? I knew from Grandpa that these journeys to the Otherworld tended not to go well.
‘Where is it though?’ I’d asked him, just in case. ‘The Otherworld.’
‘Well,’ he’d said. ‘Depends who you ask. It can be under the ground, or hidden inside the green hills, or faraway over the seas of the west, beyond the great Ninth Wave. Or it might be under a lake in the crater of a great volcano. Or it can be right here, lurking in the shadows or on the other side of the mirror.’
Later, I wondered whether maybe it wasn’t Mum who had gone to the Otherworld but me, without realizing, and I was living the wrong, Other life while someone else, a changeling, had taken my rightful place. I’d stare at the girl on the other side of the mirror. Was she me? Or was she someone living my life instead of me, with my real mum who hadn’t left, and my happy dad who was always laughing and was never worried or sad? I’d try to catch her out, the girl in the mirror, by sticking my tongue out suddenly. I’d scan her features, looking for the smallest sign that she wasn’t really me, earlobes, eyelashes, irises studied closely for discrepancies.
Billie changed all that. When Billie was born, I belonged in my life again. I knew it was my life, my real life, once Billie was in it. We were a family. Dad was happy. I was happy.
But now I had that feeling again, that I had lost my real life, become separated from it. I took from my rucksack the photo I’d grabbed from my bedroom of Mischa and me, the blue feather, the gold paper bird Billie and I had folded together, and put them on the windowsill next to my notebook.
Last I took out the small mirror, the present from Claudia. It had a crack running across the middle it. I hated myself for not having looked after it better. Seven years bad luck, babe, Mischa said. But luck didn’t exist any more, good or bad. There was just this. Just broken things.
I searched the face in the glass, as I used to do. In the house in the mirror, Grandpa might be downstairs making bacon sandwiches, Dad might be there too, chatting with Grandpa about the football or the garden, Granny might be about to knock on the bedroom door with a cup of tea and a story about something funny Merlin had done. The girl in the mirror watched me, fractured. I hated her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered to Claudia.
I made my way slowly downstairs, my ankle stiff and sore. My smaller self ran ahead down these stairs two at a time, calling to Merlin, singing.
I tried to prepare myself for Grandpa’s empty stare when he looked at me.
Focus on the plan, I told myself. This was what Claudia always said. When you’re scared or overwhelmed, make a plan. Put a couple of achievable things at the top so you can tick them off. Action will make you feel calmer and energized, success even more so. And then you’ll be less scared and overwhelmed and you can tackle the bigger things. This was her answer for everything from revision (me) to parenting a small baby while having a very important job (her) to hangovers (whoever needed to hear it). Obviously, I had always made a point of ignoring her in the past. Now things had changed. I had to be the Claudia of the situation. So my plan was, first, to get some fresh milk, and second, to tidy the kitchen, and then… and then, well, it was just to do everything else. I’d make the ‘everything else’ list later, when coffee and the energizing sense of achievement had kicked in.
I opened the door to the kitchen with a smile plastered on my face that even I could tell would look unconvincing. There was no one there. Through the sliding glass doors to the garden I could see Billie, crouched down, looking intently at something she’d found in a weed-filled flowerbed and singing to it. A snail probably, or a flower fairy, or a special stone. She looked up at me and waved but I could see she was far too busy to come inside.
The kitchen was even worse in the daylight than it had looked the night before so I hurried out again before the second item on my list began to feel impossible. I found Grandpa on the sofa in the sitting room, Merlin’s head on his lap. It all looked so normal and right that relief flooded through me. Maybe he really had just been half-asleep and confused last night. Maybe.