Miniature faces of the Darker family past and present, painted inside the tree’s giant black leaves, permanently look down on the mistakes we’ve all made. It makes me feel an overwhelming sadness; the idea of this one day being a place I can no longer visit whenever I want to. We all have roots in this family and in this house. It isn’t something I think any of us can just walk away from.
Conor and I head up the creaking steps to the first floor, and only when we reach my old childhood bedroom, and the door is firmly closed behind us, do I whisper:
‘Why did you have to come here?’
There is an ivory-coloured metal daybed against the back wall of my old bedroom. Nana bought it second-hand, for all the times when she slept in here, too scared to leave me alone in case my heart stopped in the night. Sometimes I would wake up and see her staring at me in the darkness, whispering words I couldn’t quite hear. Conor puts his bag on the daybed as though marking his territory, then starts to change out of his wet clothes, with his back to me. I sit down on the very edge of my bed and turn away. Maybe sharing a room wasn’t such a great idea after all. It takes a lot of courage for me to ask the question.
‘Could we maybe just talk about what happened?’
But Conor doesn’t answer. It’s been like this between us for a long time. No matter how sorry I am, he can’t seem to move on, just like my sisters. I know he’d probably rather never see me again, but I’m glad that he chose to come anyway this weekend, for Nana. What happened certainly wasn’t her fault.
The rest of the evening is a blur at best. I’m exhausted, but I never seem to be able to sleep these days, and the atmosphere in the house feels even more polluted than before. We heard the others decide to turn in and call it a night too, almost as soon as we left the kitchen. Nana’s room is the largest bedroom at the back of the house, and she whispers goodnight as she passes my door. Lily and Trixie take the room that Lily and Rose used to share as children. My mother is the last person to come up. I only know it’s her because I hear her talking to someone in a hushed voice at the top of the stairs.
‘We’ll get out of here as soon as it’s light. I knew the old witch wouldn’t leave us a penny.’
I listen at the door as she scuttles along the hall to the guest bedroom she used to share with my father. Rose stays downstairs, choosing to sleep on a sofa in the library. Dad also said he would rather stay downstairs, sealing himself in the music room that was his sanctuary as a child. He always needs to disappear inside his music when the real world gets too loud. But Seaglass is no longer noisy, it has returned to its own variety of silence.
I can hear the sea outside my window, and Conor’s slow and steady breathing. I can tell he’s still awake. I keep completely quiet when I hear him get up and tiptoe across the room, and I listen as he opens his laptop on the desk in the corner. There’s no internet here, but it seems that Conor still can’t resist doing a little work this weekend. He’s become a workaholic since getting the crime correspondent job at the BBC. Perhaps because when you work that hard for something, sometimes you live in constant fear of losing it.
He creeps out of the room – presumably to use the bathroom down the hall – and while he is gone, I get up, cross the threadbare carpet to his side of the bedroom, and stare at the laptop screen. What I see is nothing to do with work, it looks more like a poem. Which is odd, because Conor has never been one to dabble with fiction or anything creative, he is a man who only likes to deal in facts. Or at least he was.
I hear footsteps in the hallway, creaking floorboards telling tales on anyone out of bed, and know I have to hurry. In a childish attempt to get Conor’s attention and make things less awkward between us, I type a Halloween-inspired message with my index finger. I can’t type properly and am dreadful with modern technology, but I smile to myself as the letters appear on the screen.
Boo!
Then I return to my side of the room, watch and wait. Conor stares at the word when he returns, then spins around, frowning in my direction. I wish he’d say something, anything, but as usual, he doesn’t. Conor stopped speaking to me around the same time as Rose, and nothing I say or do seems to change things. Sometimes the way he stares so hard at me seems to physically hurt. I’m like a word he can’t read, or a puzzle he can’t solve, just like the Rubik’s cube he couldn’t work out as a kid, no matter which way he tries to twist me. Conor lies back down on the daybed and faces the wall. I turn my back on the disappointment I feel, wondering why he still can’t see me for who I am now, or talk about what happened then. Nobody can run away from their own shadows, but he’s always been determined to try.