Adam couldn’t recognise the person in the car twenty-five years ago, when it mounted the pavement and collided with his mum as he watched. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t know who they were. It could have been a friend, a teacher, a neighbour – all faces look the same to him. Imagine not knowing if someone you knew was responsible for killing someone you loved. No wonder he struggles to trust people, even me. If my husband didn’t suffer from prosopagnosia, his whole life might have unfolded differently, but he wasn’t able to describe who he had seen to the police. Not then, not now. And he still blames himself. His mother was walking his dog when it happened, because he was too lazy to do it.
It makes me feel sad how he idolises a ghost.
By all accounts, Adam’s mother was a nice enough woman – she was a nurse and very popular on the estate where they lived – but she wasn’t perfect. And she definitely wasn’t a saint. I find it strange how he compares every other woman in his life to her. Including me. The pedestal he put his dead mother on isn’t just wonky, it’s broken. For example, he seems to have conveniently forgotten why she was wearing the red kimono. It’s what she always wore – along with the matching lipstick – whenever male ‘friends’ came to visit the little council flat that they lived in. The place had thin walls, thin enough for Adam to hear that his mother had a different ‘friend’ stay in her bed almost every week.
Memories are shapeshifters and dreams are not bound by truth, which is why I write everything he chooses to remember down. I want to fix him. And I want him to love me for it. But not everything that gets broken can be repaired.
One day he might remember the face he saw that night, and the unanswered questions that have haunted him for years might finally get answered. I’ve tried so hard to make the nightmares stop: herbal remedies, mindfulness podcasts before bed, special tea… but nothing seems to help. When everything is written down, I turn off the light so that we are in darkness again, and hope he’ll be able to get back to sleep.
It doesn’t take long.
Adam is soon gently snoring, but I can’t seem to switch off.
I swallow a sleeping pill – they’re prescription, and I only take them when nothing else works – but I’ve been popping more than usual lately. I’m too preoccupied with the growing number of cracks in our relationship, the ones that are too big to fill in or skim over. I know exactly why and when our marriage started to unravel. Life is unpredictable at best, unforgivable at worst.
I must have dozed off at some point – the pill finally kicking in – because I wake up with an unsettling sense of déjà vu. It takes a few seconds for me to remember where I am – the room is pitch black – but as I blink into the darkness and my eyes adjust to the light, I remember that we are in Blackwater Chapel. A sliver of moonlight between the window blind and the wall illuminates a tiny corner of the room, and I strain to see the time on the face of the grandfather clock. Its slender metal hands still suggest it is only half past midnight, which means I haven’t been asleep for very long. My mind feels fuzzy, but then I remember what woke me because I hear it again.
There is a noise downstairs.
Robin
Robin can’t sleep either.
She’s worried about the visitors. They shouldn’t have come here.
When she looks out from behind her curtain and sees that the chapel is in complete darkness, she knows what she needs to do.
It looks farther away than it is. But Robin thinks the distance between places can sometimes be as difficult to perceive as the distance between people. Some couples seem closer than they really are, while others appear further apart. When she watched them eating their frozen dinners on trays on their laps earlier, the visitors didn’t look especially happy together. Or in love. But marriage can do that to the best of people as well as the worst. Or perhaps she was just imagining it.
The walk across the fields from her cottage to the chapel would normally take no more than ten minutes. Even less when running, as she discovered earlier. But now that so much snow has fallen, it takes longer than it should to navigate a path for herself without slipping over. It doesn’t help that her wellington boots are several sizes too big. They’re second-hand: she doesn’t have her own. She would have had to drive all the way to Fort William to buy a pair, there are no shoe shops selling footwear near Blackwater Loch or even in Hollowgrove. She could have bought some online but that would require a credit card instead of cash, which is all she has nowadays. Robin cut up all her cards a long time ago. She didn’t want anyone to have any way of finding her.