Time's Echo (3 page)

Wrapping my sarong around me, I made my way down to the kitchen, switching on lights as I went, and so fuzzy with exhaustion that I kept bumping off the walls.

The kitchen tiles were cold beneath my bare feet. I filled a glass at the sink and drank the water as I stood there in the glare of the ceiling spotlights. One of the lights was angled directly
at a plate that hung on the wall between the two windows. It was decorated with a childish impression of breakfast: a splodge of yellow for an egg, a red, vaguely sausage-shaped smudge, some green
blobs.
To Lucy
was printed around the top edge in a wobbly hand and, below,
Love Grace
.

It’s odd how moments we think we’ve forgotten can slam back as perfectly detailed memories. I was five, and breathing heavily through my mouth. We were in some kind of sunny
workshop. I remembered the smell of the paint, the clumsy feel of the brush between my fingers, the pots of bright colours.

‘What are the green things?’ my mother asked.

‘Peas.’

‘Peas for breakfast?’

I shrugged. It didn’t seem strange to me. Lucy, I knew, wouldn’t think it was strange, either.

Now I felt a twist of regret that I hadn’t known that Lucy had liked the plate enough to keep it for more than twenty-five years. I’d sent the odd postcard over the years, but
otherwise had assumed that I had faded out of Lucy’s life, just as she had faded out of mine.

Thinking about the past, I gazed absently out of the window in front of the sink. I had been too tired earlier to bother pulling the blind down. Now the window was black and blank and smeary
with rain, and I could see my own reflection superimposed on the darkness outside. My hair was pushed behind my ears, and my shoulders were bare above the sarong. The reflection was so clear that I
could even make out the darker patch of the port-wine stain on the slope of my breast, a small purple splodge, like a baby’s hand-print. When I was younger I was very self-conscious about
wearing bikinis, but later I was quite proud of it. I told myself it was distinctive.

I looked younger in the glass, I remember thinking that. Younger and wide-eyed.

I’d almost forgotten the nightmare, in fact, when my eyes focused on my reflection in the glass, which had doubled oddly, almost as if my shadow had stepped slightly to one side.

An icy finger dragged down my spine. That wasn’t a shadow. There was someone standing right behind me. Someone who had dark hair and pale eyes like me, but who wasn’t me at all.

The glass slipped from my fingers and smashed into the sink as I whipped round, my heart jamming in my throat, blocking my breath. My hand went instinctively to my neck as if to push it back
into place.

There was no one there. My pulse roared in my ears, and for a moment I thought I would faint. My knees were so weak I had to lean back against the sink and make myself take some deep
breaths.

Enough, I thought. I was overwrought and overtired. All I needed was some sleep.

I left the broken glass in the sink and found another one. My hands were still shaking slightly as I filled it with water, but when I turned to take it back to bed with me, my eye snagged on an
apple sitting on the worktop. Its skin was yellow and wrinkling, just like the one I’d thrown away earlier.

Puzzled, I put down my glass and picked up the apple instead, grimacing a little at the saggy feel of it between my fingers. I couldn’t understand how I had missed seeing it before, but I
was half-asleep still and, frankly, spooked by the apparition in the window, so I tossed it in the bin with the other apple and thought no more about it.

‘I don’t know
where
I’m going to be, all right? Somewhere you aren’t!’

I was standing on the doorstep, fumbling with the unfamiliar key, when Drew Dyer’s front door was wrenched open and a girl stomped out. She was fourteen or so, perhaps a bit older, and
ungainly, with intense, sullen features half-hidden by a tangle of chestnut hair.

Hoisting a heavy bag onto her shoulder, she slammed the door behind her with such force that Lucy’s door trembled too. It was only when she turned for the gate that she saw me.

‘Oh.’ She stopped dead and eyed me warily from beneath her fringe.

‘Hi.’ My head was pounding after my broken night, and tiredness throbbed behind my eyes, but I was feeling much more myself. In the daylight I was embarrassed to remember how rattled
I had been by my nightmare.

I’d found the broken glass in the sink, but when I wrapped it in newspaper and threw it in the bin, there had been no trace of the apple I thought I’d seen the night before. I must
have imagined it, I decided, along with that ghostly figure in the glass.

I smiled at Drew’s daughter. ‘I’m Grace, Lucy’s god-daughter,’ I said. ‘You must be Sophie.’

Sophie nodded. ‘She talked about you.’

‘Really?’ I was surprised. ‘I haven’t seen her for years. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d forgotten all about me.’

‘No, she liked you. She showed me the cards you sent her from all round the world. She said you were a free spirit,’ said Sophie with a touch of envy.

I was touched, and also rather ashamed. A postcard every now and then hadn’t required much effort. ‘If I’d known she liked them so much, I’d have sent her a card more
often.’

I finally managed to lock the door and dropped the key into the battered leather bag I’d slung over my shoulder. I’d bought it in a market in Jaipur years before and it went
everywhere with me. It was the perfect size, just big enough for a passport, a purse and a pair of sunglasses – everything I needed to jump on a plane.

‘I didn’t think Lucy was particularly interested in travel,’ I excused myself.

‘She used to say that she was a spiritual traveller,’ said Sophie.

That sounded like Lucy.

‘You were so lucky to have Lucy as a godmother,’ she added wistfully.

In truth, Lucy had always been an odd choice – Christianity being one of the very few spiritual paths that my godmother hadn’t tried. But she and my mother had been old school
friends, and Mum apparently thought Lucy would be more ‘interesting’ than more conventional friends and family. ‘It’s only a symbolic role anyway,’ Mum had argued when
my father pointed out that Lucy wasn’t exactly a churchgoer. ‘Lucy can broaden Grace’s horizons.’

I pulled open the gate and joined Sophie on the pavement. ‘You had her as a friend,’ I reminded her. ‘You knew her much better than I did.’

‘She was great.’ Sophie shifted her bag of books from one shoulder to another and looked sad. ‘I’m really going to miss her,’ she said. ‘She was the only
person I’ve ever met who actually
talked
to you and listened to what you had to say.’

I made a non-committal noise. I remembered Lucy as someone who talked
at
you rather than to you, but perhaps she had been different with Sophie.

‘Everyone thought she was weird, but she wasn’t,’ said Sophie. ‘She was a witch, you know.’

‘A witch?’ I fought to keep the scepticism from my voice. ‘Really?’

‘Didn’t you see her tools?’

‘I haven’t really had a chance to look round much yet,’ I said. ‘What did she have? A broomstick?’

Sophie didn’t approve of my flippancy, that was clear. ‘It wasn’t like that!’ she said, eyeing me with contempt. ‘Wicca is a serious belief,’ she told me
fiercely. ‘Witches revere the Earth. Lucy said we have to stop fighting nature and learn to live in harmony with it. What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing, I suppose,’ I backtracked, but my heart was sinking. Dealing with Lucy’s estate was going to be complicated enough, without adding witchcraft into the equation.

‘Lucy was teaching me wisecraft,’ Sophie went on. ‘I was going to join her coven as soon as I was old enough, but I don’t know if I will now. I’ve
found a new spiritual path,’ she said.

‘Oh?’ I zipped up my hooded cardigan against the chill. It was early April, but it felt more like winter than spring. I would have to buy myself a proper coat.

‘I’m a pagan,’ said Sophie proudly, and I suppressed a sigh. No wonder she had got on so well with Lucy. ‘I’m one of the Children of the Waters,’ she
continued, ‘or I will be, when I’m properly initiated. I’m not ready yet.’

‘Right,’ I said, running out of non-committal responses.

It was partly because I was distracted by the strangeness of my surroundings. The tarmac gleamed wetly after the rain, and a breeze was tearing the clouds apart to reveal straggly glimpses of
blue sky. It was going to brighten up. Perhaps that explained the jagged quality to the light, which made the street look so odd.

I dragged my attention back to Sophie. ‘What do your parents think about that?’

‘They don’t understand.’ Sophie scuffed her boots against the wrought-iron gate in a reassuringly adolescent gesture. ‘Mum only thinks about the latest status symbol, and
Dad’s only interested in dead people.’

‘
Dead people
?’ Then I remembered that he was a historian.

‘And books.’ She made it sound like a perversion, and I had to smother a smile. Drew Dyer seemed an unlikely pervert.

I was surprised, in fact, by how vividly I could picture Drew and the amusement gleaming in his quiet face. I remembered how inexplicably familiar he had seemed. My palm had tingled where it had
touched his.

To my dismay I felt my cheeks redden at the memory, and I pushed it hastily aside before Sophie could notice and wonder at my blush.

I looked up the street instead. It was a narrow road, with cars parked on either side. At the end I could see a row of trees in front of the city walls, and behind them the great bulk of York
Minster. I hadn’t noticed it in the dark the night before, but now my whole body seemed to jolt with recognition, although I knew I’d never seen it before.

Sophie was watching me curiously. ‘Are you going into town?’

I pulled myself together. ‘Yes. I’ve got an appointment with Lucy’s solicitor.’ I half-pulled the piece of paper with the address out of my bag and squinted at it.
‘Coney Street.’

Coney Street.
I’d read the address before, but now the name seemed to pluck at some deep chord of memory.

Frowning, I stuffed the paper back into my bag. ‘I was planning on walking there. Is it far?’

‘Nothing’s far in York. I can show you a shortcut through the car park, if you like,’ she offered.

Sophie pointed me in the right direction before slouching off to school. I watched her go, troubled in a way that I didn’t understand, before heading for the car park.

The light was peculiarly intense, and I wished I’d brought my sunglasses after all. I walked past cars with fat yellow number plates, past street lamps, past houses, and the sense of
wrongness persisted. It was almost as if I had never seen bricks before, never walked along a pavement.

It was a long time since I’d been in England, I tried to reason with myself. Of course everything was going to look strange. I was used to the
gang
where I lived in Jakarta, to
the deep gutters on either side of a walkway too narrow for anything but the satay-seller’s cart, and to houses half-hidden behind high walls and lush banana trees.

A broken night hadn’t helped, either. Shreds of the nightmare lingered disturbingly in my mind, and I felt light-headed with lack of sleep.

I’d never suffered badly from jet lag before, but now the feeling of dislocation was overpowering. I found I was walking carefully along a path beside the car park, but I kept starting at
the sight of the high brick wall on my left and I slowed.

Ahead, children were being hustled into school by harassed parents. Two girls overtook me. One of them was talking on a mobile phone. The jagged light was intensifying, making the whole scene
waver, like a painted backdrop stirring in a draught. Behind it, I glimpsed a rough track between hedgerows lush with cow parsley and forget-me-not.

I stumbled, blinked, and it was gone, but the smell of long grass and summer sunshine remained.

My heart was beating hard and I put out a hand to steady myself against the wall, the brick rough beneath my fingers. I stared ahead, fixing my attention almost desperately on the two girls. The
one on the phone switched it off and said something to her friend, and they both laughed, and then the colour was leaching from the world around me, and laughter rang in my ears.

My laughter.

I am breathless with it. Elizabeth and I are running along Shooter Lane, with Hap lopsided at our heels, his ears flying. Our skirts are fisted in our hands, our sides aching with suppressed
giggles. We’re not supposed to run. We’re supposed to be modest and demure, to walk quietly with our eyes downcast, but it is a bright May day and the breeze that is stirring the trees
seems to be stirring something inside me too. I want to run and dance, and spin round and round and round until I am dizzy.

All day long we have both been giggly and skittish as horses with the wind up their tails. Exasperated, our mistress sent us off after dinner to gather salad herbs from our master’s garth
in Paynley’s Crofts, and my apron is stained and grubby. Elizabeth’s, of course, still looks as if it is fresh back from the laundresses in St George’s Field.