In Her Shadow (8 page)

I waited until Jago had used the bathroom, then I tapped on the boxroom door.

‘Jago, it’s me.’

‘What?’

I pushed open the door. The boxroom was a sparse, narrow space in the eaves. It smelled of mothballs and the stinky oil Dad used to clean his fishing rods. Jago was sitting incongruously on the deep pink chenille coverlet on the bed. His face was blotchy where he had been crying. I looked down at my feet so he wouldn’t know that I knew.

‘What?’ he asked again, more aggressively. He wiped his nose with his forefinger.

‘What’s the dog called?’ I asked.

‘I dunno. She don’t have a name.’

From next door, we heard the sound of glass breaking and Caleb Cardell’s roar.

‘He’s a wanking bastard,’ Jago muttered.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘He is.’

Jago sniffed. He made a gobby noise in his throat that both disgusted and excited me, a boy noise.

‘Is it all right if I call the dog Trixie?’ I asked.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Jago. ‘It don’t bother me.’

Jago never returned to number 10 Cross Hands Lane. Caleb was evicted by the council soon after Jago moved in with us, and he never called round to say goodbye. We all
acted like that was a good thing. It took a while, but eventually Jago settled into our family as if he should have been part of it all along. He adored both my parents, especially my father, and Dad could not have been more proud, or closer to Jago, if he had been his blood son.

That was how Jago Cardell, my childhood friend and neighbour, the first boy who ever kissed me, became my brother.

My almost-brother.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

AFTER I’D SPOKEN
to Julia, I walked across the city to my work. The sun was low in the sky still but there was a smell of summer in the air and I knew it was going to be a lovely day. I arrived at the museum at the same time as Misty, the intern, only I was on foot and she was climbing out of a snappy little black car.

‘Bye, gorgeous, have a good day!’ A young man waved at Misty from the driver’s window. She sneered at him in a way that wasn’t exactly unfriendly, which was about as good as you could hope for with Misty, and raised a hand in greeting when she saw me.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘Some loser.’

‘Your boyfriend?’

‘In his dreams.’

I smiled at her. I envied her confidence.

Misty and I went into the museum together, via the staff entrance. I hung my jacket on the rack in the corner of the educational-resources room and then checked the calendar pinned to the noticeboard.

‘It’s going to be a busy morning,’ I said. ‘Two school parties.’

‘Kill me now,’ said Misty.

‘Make some coffee first, would you, Mist?’

I was determined to keep things light that day. I didn’t want my colleagues to realize how out of sorts I was. I didn’t want them talking about the previous day’s turn, or knowing that I had hardly slept that night or wondering about my mental state. It would be best to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and to act casual.

The light was on in John’s office. I knocked on the door with my knuckles, and pushed it open.

John was sitting at the desk, rubbing his eyes with his fists. He sat up straight when he saw me and put a smile on his face, but he looked as if he had slept even less than I had.

I smiled as warmly and as normally as I could. ‘I just wanted to say thank you for last night.’

‘No, no, I should be thanking you.’

‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘You have some great ideas for the annexe. Perhaps you could write them down, Hannah. Email me a few bullet-points …’

‘Of course.’

He looked up at me then. The whites of his eyes were pink with tiredness but the pupils were grey, almost silvery. I hadn’t noticed that before. I wanted to say something to him, to strengthen our connection, but I couldn’t think of anything that would not sound insincere or like a platitude.

‘Have a good morning, John,’ I said. Then I left the office, closing the door gently behind me.

I busied myself with administration work, keeping my head down, shoulders straight, repelling any well-meant enquiries as to my well-being with body language that gave the message I was fine, and had too much to do to indulge in small talk.

I don’t think anybody noticed how I kept glancing around, to see if anyone was watching me. I don’t think they were
aware that I was keeping my back to the wall, avoiding dark corners.

The first tour was a class of eleven-year-olds from Bristol Grammar School. They were cheerful, bright children who looked as if they had been fed plenty of vegetables and orange juice in infanthood, with shiny shoes and clothes that had been bought a little too big, for them to grow into. I remembered Jago when he was their age, how the cuffs of his sleeves never reached his wrists, how his jeans were worn through in places, and the scabby tracksuits he wore, his uncle’s cast-offs. I remembered the cracked skin on his lips and his generous, crooked smile, his breath, sour because he never had a toothbrush, and one of his top front teeth was already missing – knocked out by Mr Cardell probably. It gave a rakish look to his grin, although my parents took him to have it fixed after he moved in with us.

Now Jago lived on the other side of the world. God, how I missed him.

He had been working, for several years, as a sustainability adviser with the fishing community in a small Newfoundland port. He stayed in close touch with my parents and had bought them a transatlantic cruise for their Golden Wedding anniversary, meeting them off the ship in New York and treating them to what Mum described as a ‘slap-up holiday’. It was Jago’s way of making up for living so far away. The last time I saw him had been a couple of years earlier, after my father’s heart attack. I’d arrived at the hospital in Truro in the early hours. A nurse showed me to the ward. My father was in a private bay at the end. Mum was asleep in a chair. She had been covered over with a blanket, and a pillow had been placed tenderly beneath her cheek to protect her neck from cricking.

A rugged, broad-shouldered man wearing ill-fitting denim jeans, a scruffy grey T-shirt and a leather string around his
thick neck was sitting on a stool on the far side of the bed, with his arms resting on the knees of his splayed legs. The man needed a shave, he looked dog-tired. His hair had been cut very short, his forearms were tattooed and his face was lined. I did not recognize him at first, but as I came into the room he stood up and we held one another’s eyes, and it was as if we were children again.

‘Jago!’ I said, wondering how he, who lived thousands of miles away, had managed to reach my father’s bedside before me. I stepped forward to embrace him, but as I did so he stepped back, away. The rejection cut me like a knife.

‘How are you?’ I asked.

Jago ignored the question. ‘Dad’s doing all right,’ he said. ‘They reckon he’s going to pull through.’

I looked at my father, who seemed childlike lying, as he was, on his back, in the bed, with an oxygen mask covering his nose and mouth. He was terribly pale, and quiet. I thought he would be appalled if he knew that Jago and I found it painful even being in the same room as one another.

‘You don’t mind if I sit with you?’ I asked, and now my voice was cold.

Jago shrugged. I pulled up a chair and we sat on opposite sides of the bed, with Dad in between us, his gnarled hands resting on either side of the mountain beneath the bedclothes that was his stomach, to the soundtrack of Mum snoring gently on the chair. It was the first time we had all been together in the same place as a family since I was eighteen and Jago twenty, and yet we had nothing to say to one another, Jago and I; nothing at all.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IT WAS DIFFERENT
when we were young. There was a time, a brief time, when nothing was wrong in our world and we were happy. Jago was living with us, Caleb Cardell was gone, I was losing my puppy fat and my teeth were straight, Ellen’s father was still charming and funny and her mother, although poorly, was managing her condition.

Every morning, during that time, I woke up feeling happy and excited because Jago brought an energy into our lives that hadn’t been there before. Dad threw himself into being a father to his new son. He encouraged Jago to join the cricket team he coached, he took him fishing and he ‘rescued’ the rusty old shell of a Ford Escort from a corner of the Williamses’ cow barn, brought it home on a borrowed trailer and set it on bricks in the front garden of our house so he and Jago could restore it together. When it was fixed, it would be Jago’s car and because he had rebuilt it from scratch, Dad said, he would always know what to do if something went wrong. Restoring the car was a project that lasted years.

Mum cooked Jago a hot meal every night, did his laundry, and he showed his affection for her by moderating his language and doing little jobs, unasked. He fetched in the
coal, moved leaves from the gutter, unblocked the drains, cleaned up after Trixie.

It was less straightforward for me to change the foundation of my relationship with Jago from friend to almost-sister. I was fascinated by Jago, but my feelings for him were confused and contradictory. I loved him, but I didn’t know why, or how. Even today I’m not sure if I saw him as a brother, a friend, or as a potential lover. It was probably a combination of the three, exacerbated by the hormones of adolescence and combined with a genuine affection for the boy who had always been part of my life and who had suffered so much in the house adjoining ours.

I can’t say how he felt about me. How would I know? We weren’t the sort of family to talk about feelings.

Not long after he came to live with us, Jago turned sixteen. Dad said it might be a good idea if he left school and did something useful that he enjoyed rather than being stuck in a classroom wasting the teachers’ time and his own. Jago had a natural aptitude for mechanics, and was accepted on an apprenticeship in marine engineering. He went to college two days a week; the other days he worked with Bill Haworth, a friend of Dad’s who owned a boat, the
Eliza Jane
, which fished out of Polrack. Jago enjoyed the work and Bill said he was good at it.

When he received his first pay packet, Jago bought gifts: a box of After Eights for Mum, a fishing fly for Dad and a necklace made of tiny seashells threaded on a string for me.

After that, he didn’t buy presents, but he gave most of his wages to Mum.

Jago didn’t mind the weather. He liked the rain as much as he liked the sun. Mum and I sat on the harbour wall to watch the
Eliza Jane
come in and we squealed when we saw Jago standing on the deck, looking like a man, holding the rope between his hands, followed by a cloud of screaming
seabirds. He raised his hand to salute us, and I was thrilled to the core. I played out a little fantasy in my head that I was his sweetheart and he was coming home to me. I was always imagining scenarios like that. I don’t think I really meant anything by it.

Each morning, when Jago went to work, I knelt on my bed and pulled aside the curtains to watch him leave the house. He perched his mug of tea on the lid of the water butt while he laced his boots. Steam rose in a thin curl from the surface of the tea. I looked down on Jago and I drew a smiling face on the patch of window glass made misty by my breath. Jago always looked up and waved to me. I held up my hand, and touched the tips of my fingers to the glass, bringing them closer together as he grew smaller as he walked away.

After he joined the crew of the
Eliza Jane
, Jago stopped coming to the beach with Ellen and me. He worked long hours and his free time was always taken up with working on the car or helping Dad. He told me he didn’t want to waste time playing with silly little spoiled brats like Ellen Brecht. After a while, I stopped asking.

Ellen and I still went to Bleached Scarp. It was still our place.

One day I remember in particular, because it was the day I realized that Ellen’s mother was going to die.

When I’d called for Ellen, I’d found Mr Brecht pacing the front garden, striding out and smoking, his shirt hanging loose about his hips. His hair was longer and wilder, and he hadn’t shaved for a while; his face was covered in a dark stubble that made him even more beautiful, if such a thing were possible. He was Heathcliff, Mr Rochester, Robert Downey Junior and Kurt Cobain rolled into one.

‘Hannah!’ he cried, when he saw me. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes!’

He put the cigarette in his mouth and held out his arms
and, dreamily, I’d gone to him, expecting to be enclosed and enfolded, held to his chest. He only held me by the shoulders. He only kissed the top of my head.

‘Is something wrong?’ I asked, and he said: ‘Everything is wrong, Hannah. I am losing her. My Anne is leaving me.’

I hadn’t known what to say. I looked up at the dark planes of his face. He was staring at the sky, watching the clouds chase one another, and the gulls drifting on the buffeting wind. He seemed noble and heroic, with his hair and his white shirt and the stubble on his chin. I had moved a little closer towards him. Had reached out my hand and touched his forearm with my fingertips. I felt the softness of his skin, its warmth. I felt a clutch in my stomach.

I wanted to tell him that I was there for him, always, and that I would help him and do whatever he wanted me to do. I would be loyal and true and I would never, never leave him. I would have said something, but Mrs Todd came out and she gave me an odd look so I moved away from Mr Brecht and pretended to do up the lace on my trainer.

‘The doctor’s on his way, Pieter,’ Mrs Todd said. ‘He’ll be ten minutes.’ She looked at me. ‘It’s best you don’t go inside, Hannah. I’ll tell Ellen you’re here.’

I nodded. And Ellen came out and we left to go to Bleached Scarp. The doctor passed us in his Land Rover as we walked along the lane.

The sun was hot that day, but there was a chill wind. Ellen lay on a striped towel close to the cliff-face where there was some shelter. I sat beside her with a sketch pad balanced against my knees. I was trying to draw the sea for a school art project, but it was proving too difficult a challenge. I shaded my eyes with my hand, to watch the progress of a small boat across the horizon. It rose on the swell of a wave, then disappeared.