And So It Begins Read online

  ‘How would you like to take this forward?’ she asks, her smile genuine for the first time since I arrived. I hadn’t thought of it before, but after what happened to Marcus maybe people sometimes come into the gallery to try to catch a glimpse of him, to see if tragedy is written all over his face. But it seems Cleo believes my interest is genuine.

  ‘I need to meet Marcus to understand how he works, to see if his ideas match mine and – a potentially much more difficult challenge – meet my father’s expectations.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure they will. Let me have a word with him, and I’ll get back to you.’

  I pull a face. ‘I don’t want to hang around for too long. If he’s not interested I’d prefer to know now rather than waste time. I’d like to meet him today, if that’s possible.’

  I can see this idea worries her, but finally she agrees to speak to him there and then to arrange an appointment, and picks up the phone. I can tell from her expression that he’s not happy about the idea. I turn away, as if I haven’t noticed. She tries to keep her voice smiley and cheery, and I wander down the gallery so she can work her magic on her brother in private.

  Finally she hangs up and gives me a smile. ‘He knows you want to see him today, and he’s agreed. He gets quite engrossed in his work and sometimes can seem a bit aloof, but that’s all part of the artistic temperament, I suppose.’

  She’s making excuses for him before I’ve even met him, but I give her an understanding smile as she hands over the address.

  I say my goodbyes, knowing it’s far from the last I’m going to see of Cleo, and decide to walk to Marcus North’s home to give myself time to get my thoughts under control and plan how I can convince him to take this commission.

  As I climb the steep track that leads to his house, I look down at the beach. Children are playing on the sand, laughing and screaming as they go into the chilly sea, splashing their more cold-averse mums and dads. I am envious of their carefree spirits. I don’t remember ever feeling like that as a child.

  I plod up the incline over rough gravel until I see the huge expanse of white wall that is Marcus North’s home, although I know it’s not his photography that has paid for it. There isn’t a window in sight, but I am sure that on the other side of the wall it will be a different matter. The house is perched on the edge of a cliff, and the views will be stunning.

  I approach the big wooden door and raise my left fist to knock. I beat down on the door, and the pain in my hand is excruciating, unbearable. And yet I keep knocking and screaming at the same time. I know I need to stop – to hold my hand safe. But I can’t and the more I hit the door, the more agonising my hand becomes.

  As the fierce pain drags me out of my drug-induced sleep, taking with it the last remnants of the dream, I realise that nothing except the agony in my hand is real. I’m not standing outside the door of Marcus North’s house. Instead, I’m inside it – lying in bed in a dark room with a huge window overlooking the sea. From wrist to fingertip, my left hand is encased in plaster and it hurts like hell. The drugs must have worn off and I feel an aching throb and a desire to scratch an itch on skin that I can’t reach.

  My eyes feel sticky. I must have been crying in my sleep as I remembered that day. Every second of my dream was a rerun of a day nearly two years ago, accurate up to the point when I raised my hand to knock on the door. At that moment the stabbing pain that is now making me gasp became one with the dream, the sensation embedding itself into the story, disrupting the final moments.

  I want to dive back into that moment – to remind myself of what happened next and convince myself that all the decisions taken since that day were the right ones. But the gossamer threads are snapping one by one and I know that even if I could fall asleep again there is little chance that I would be back outside that door, waiting for it to be answered. The dream has floated away.

  ‘Evie?’ The voice, usually so confident, sounds hesitant, worried.

  ‘I’m awake. You can come in.’ I keep my eyes closed. I don’t want to see Cleo’s perfection when I know how I must look. ‘Is Lulu okay?’

  ‘She’s fine. She’s having a nap, but she’s been as good as gold. What can I do for you?’ She walks over to the bed and I can feel her hovering above me, but still I don’t look at her. ‘Your eyes are all gummy – where’s your cleanser? I can clean you up a bit, if you like.’

  ‘Bathroom.’ Speaking suddenly seems hard work and now I know that Lulu is okay I just want Cleo to go.

  ‘I can’t see it,’ she shouts from the other side of the door.

  ‘It’s called soap,’ I answer.

  I don’t need to see her face to know that she will be tutting, appalled at my low standards. Sometimes I just like to wind her up.

  Cleo wears her perfection as armour, like the hard, shiny cowrie shell I picked up on the beach for Lulu last week – impenetrable, but beautiful. Everything about her on the outside is bold, bright – from the bleached white hair and perfect makeup to the vivid colours of her clothes. I’ve seen people stare at her in the street, wondering who this flawless creature can be, not realising that, however hard they tried, they would not be allowed to get close. Only the chosen few are permitted access to the real Cleo – and I’m not one of them.

  I can hear her moving back across the room towards the bed.

  ‘I’ve got some damp cotton wool. That should do the trick.’ She wipes my eyes gently, and I hold myself still. I don’t want her to touch me. We’ll never be close but we do our best to pretend, and right now I can feel her genuine concern. She sits gingerly on the edge of the bed and pauses before asking the question I knew was coming.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to call Mark?’

  At the mention of his name, I am back in my dream – outside the tall door in the long white wall, rapping on the wood. This time I’m there in my memory, though. Sadly, I’m wide awake and I wonder where the time has gone. How much of all that has happened since have I blocked from my mind?

  The man who answered the door that day looked a wreck – grubby, dishevelled, with three or four days of beard growth that owed nothing to style.

  ‘Marcus North?’ I said.

  ‘No I’m not. My name is Mark. With a K. Always has been – always will be.’

  I’d already known that, but hadn’t realised he wasn’t part of the whole pretence at a background more prestigious than the reality.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Mark North, then, I presume?’

  He rubbed a hand over his greasy hair, making it stand on end. ‘Sorry. My bloody sister thinks being called Marcus makes me sound more interesting. I thought it was the quality of my photographs that mattered, but there you go.’

  My brief memory of that day is disturbed again as Cleo pushes me to respond to her question about whether she should call Mark. Even she’s stopped calling him Marcus now, because in the end he refused to answer to it.

  ‘No, of course you shouldn’t. You know he’d find any excuse to come straight home, and you worked hard to get him this commission. I can manage.’

  Cleo stands up from the bed, and walks towards the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out over the view to the sea. She glances back at my hand and turns away again.

  ‘I don’t understand how you did it, Evie. It doesn’t make sense to me.’

  For a moment I picture my hand, held firm on the lower weights of the multi gym, six blocks each weighing five kilograms hovering high above. I see another hand, holding the bar that keeps the blocks in the air. The hand lets go, and in the split second it takes for thirty kilos to shatter my bones I’m waiting for the pain, knowing I will probably have broken carpals, metacarpals and phalanges. I know the names of most of the bones in the body.

  ‘I told you. The bar slipped out of my fingers at the wrong time. Stupid, but they say most accidents happen in the home.’

  ‘But it could only have been moments after Mark left. Why didn’t you call him to come back?’

&
nbsp; I sigh at this. I can’t think of a sensible answer, or not one that Cleo would believe.

  ‘It’s done now. There’s no point bringing him back. If you don’t mind helping a bit with Lulu, we’ll be fine. I’d rather he didn’t come back.’

  She looks at me sharply.

  ‘Don’t, Cleo. You know he’ll be stressed by it and I can’t deal with that right now. By the time he’s back I’ll be feeling much better – much more able to cope.’

  And I will be. I have to be.

  2

  When I first met Mark, I tried to make Cleo like me. Her influence over him in those days was so great that I couldn’t afford for her to be my enemy, but when the balance of power shifted in my favour I could feel her resentment, and there developed a relationship of superficial tolerance. Mark is immune to it all. He sees me welcoming Cleo to our home, inviting her to eat with us, never appreciating how much she detests the fact that her welcome is at my behest.

  She will do her duty, now that I’m hurt, knowing what Mark will expect of her – but I’m relieved to have an hour or so of respite from her ministrations while she takes Lulu out. I can see she’s worried. Am I so clumsy that I shouldn’t be left in charge of her brother’s child? Because Cleo knows it’s not the first time I’ve had a painful accident. The obvious answer is one that she’s not even prepared to consider.

  More and more often I catch a glimpse of her looking at me as if she’s not sure why I’m here, trespassing in their lives.

  I close my eyes. Until the painkillers kick in again I have no chance of sleeping, and even when I do I know I won’t be back in my dream. But I can remember and wonder at the way fate works its magic.

  That first day, when Mark opened the door in the long white wall looking as if he had just got out of a bed he had been buried in for several days, he was angry. He was too thin; it made him seem even taller. His eyes, grey like his sister’s but twice as cold, glared at me. He said he’d had time to think about it, and decided he had nothing to give, so I should leave and not come back.

  It wasn’t the best start but neither was it unexpected. I went back to the gallery and explained what had happened. I had no intention of giving up, but I wasn’t going to let Cleo know that.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Would you consider giving me a bit of time to see if he might reconsider?’

  I’d raised my eyes to the heavens as if thinking deeply about it. ‘Okay, but my dad’s keen for me to confirm the details. If I can’t have Marcus, I’ll have to find someone else.’

  It had taken Cleo twenty-four hours, but she finally managed to persuade him to at least talk to me, so the next day saw me trudging up the track again. This time, though, it was wet and windy, the summer weather typically changeable, as it often is in the south-west of England. A few people were on the beach, trying to fly kites without much luck, but most families were probably either hanging out in the amusement arcades or in one of the numerous cafés.

  I couldn’t believe Mark was the same man when he opened the door. His hair, which yesterday had looked thick and dark, was newly washed and a warm russet brown, and he had shaved off most of the fuzz. His eyes had lost their fury, and now looked almost mystified – as if he had no idea how he had been talked into this. It wasn’t until months later that I discovered Cleo had threatened to close the gallery and move away if he refused to take on new commissions.

  He held out his hand to shake mine.

  ‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ he said. ‘I’d been working on some pictures and they weren’t going well.’ He dropped his hand and looked me in the eye. ‘Actually, that’s total bollocks. I was just being obnoxious and I apologise.’

  I liked him in that moment, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  He lifted an arm to welcome me to his home, and I stepped in front of him through the huge wooden door in the blank white wall.

  ‘Oh… my… God!’ I walked forwards slowly, staring at the spectacular sight in front of me. I knew this was the upper level of the property – nobody would call it a house – and it appeared to float above the ocean with a massive rain-splattered sheet of glass forming the only barrier to the wild sea below. Even on a day like that the view was breathtaking.

  Mark showed me to a sofa that faced the window, and I could barely concentrate on what he was saying as he talked about his pictures, his influences, his approach to each new subject and the techniques he would like to use for my photographs. I was constantly distracted by the view: by the sight of a gannet soaring above the sea, or the waves crashing onto a rock that protruded high above the water in the bay.

  He offered me a cup of coffee and walked over to the kitchen, set along one wall of the living space. There was the sound of beans grinding and the air was filled with the delicious aroma of freshly ground coffee.

  I glanced around the rest of the room, which until that point had hardly registered with me. I turned my head in all directions, expecting to see more huge photographs like those in the gallery. But there was only one, hanging on the wall behind me, facing the window where I realised it would catch the changing light of each day. It was a portrait of a woman with short dark hair brushed back from a thin face dominated by thick pale lips. But it was the small, slightly narrowed eyes that drew me. They seemed to watch me, judge me, and as I turned away I could feel them on my back.

  While I sipped coffee from the china mug that Mark handed me I tried to block those eyes from my mind and engage him in conversation. I needed him to like me. To trust me. I tried to draw him out, to smile at his attempts at wit and his obvious belief that he had to charm me, if only to keep his sister quiet. I didn’t fool myself that it was anything more. At least, not then.

  We agreed that he would start the project by working on six photographs, each taken on separate days, at different times so the light would vary. He had the idea of taking one shot of me amongst a mass of holiday makers, but only my image would receive the high-contrast treatment, the others faded to shades of grey so I would stand out – quite literally – from the crowd. He had another location in mind, where I could hang over the ramparts of an old derelict building, and it seemed as if, now he had accepted the commission, he was beginning to get excited.

  When I could think of no valid reason to extend my visit, I stood up to leave. But I couldn’t go without asking him about his home.

  ‘It’s so incredibly well designed. It must have taken years to build. Have you lived here since it was first built?’

  His face closed down. ‘No.’

  The eyes in the photograph were watching me, driving me to be reckless, and suddenly I was behaving as badly as any motorway rubbernecker.

  ‘So there’s another level below here – the bedrooms, I presume?’

  His jaw was rigid. I knew what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop. I knew the lower levels were cut into the rock, and like this room, the windows faced out to sea.

  ‘Another two levels, actually.’ His eyes didn’t meet mine as he spoke.

  ‘Gosh – is your studio in the basement?’

  For a moment he didn’t speak. ‘No. There’s a pool and a gym down there. But they’re closed.’

  He picked up both empty coffee mugs and they clunked together.

  ‘You don’t use either of them?’

  ‘I don’t go down there.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Not haunted, is it?’

  ‘Probably. It’s where my wife died.’ Mark’s eyes flicked to his left, to where the portrait was hanging.

  I looked shocked and apologetic, as if I – unlike everyone else who knew the name Marcus North – didn’t already know what had happened. I could feel the narrowed eyes of the portrait judging me.

  It’s twenty-two months since we had that conversation the first time I came to this house, and more than eleven months since I moved in. Even now I do everything possible to avoid the gaze of Mia North, Mark’s dead wife.

  3

 
; Cleo reversed into the steamed-up glass door of the café, pushing it open with her back and pulling Lulu’s buggy behind her, trying but probably failing to hide her surprise when a teenage boy with too many piercings jumped up to help her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said as the boy bent down to smile at Lulu, who seemed totally unfazed by the sight of all that metal sticking out of his face.

  She glanced around the half-empty room, her eyes seeking out the comfortable shape of her best friend, Aminah Basra. In a couple of months’ time the café would be overflowing with holiday makers and neither she nor Aminah would come near it, but this early in the season it was a pleasant and convenient place to meet. A mop of unruly black hair caught Cleo’s eye, and Aminah raised her arm in an enthusiastic wave.

  Pushing the buggy over to the far corner where her friend was sitting nursing a cappuccino, Cleo returned her wide grin.

  ‘Your face!’ Aminah said as Cleo sat down. ‘That’s what comes of pre-judging people.’

  ‘I know. I’m ashamed of myself. My natural reaction was to stop the poor lad getting too close to Lulu. How awful is that?’ Cleo leaned across the table and grimaced. ‘But I can’t understand how he blows his nose,’ she whispered. ‘Anyway, it’s good to see you. No Anik today?’

  ‘I left him with his granny, who will be trying to teach him some manners as she believes I’m far too indulgent with my children. It’s supposed to be the other way round, isn’t it? Grandparents being all-forgiving? And how come you’ve got Lulu, not that it isn’t delightful to see her?’

  A bored-looking waitress sauntered over to take Cleo’s order before she had a chance to answer, and it gave her a moment to consider her reply. Aminah had spent quite a bit of time with Evie over the past few months and had once or twice suggested that Cleo was a little hard on her brother’s partner, so she had been at pains since then to make sure she kept any hint of criticism from her voice.