Sometimes what we don’t know can teach us more than what we do. I get a nonalcoholic cocktail from the bar and make myself listen while the solicitor sips a ginger beer and tells a story about me that includes a few missing chapters. Hope Falls used to be home a long time ago, I knew that already. It’s where we lived when I was a littlegirl, it’s where my mother died when I was ten years old, and I have never been back since. What I didn’t know is that I had a grandmother living in the same village. And what I want to know now is why I was sent into care at the age of ten and forced to endure a series of foster “homes” when it turns out I still had family. Finding this out now, when I have spent my whole life feeling so alone, is nothing less than devastating.
“Your grandmother and mother were estranged,” the solicitor says in a matter-of-fact tone. He does not say why. I didn’t know my grandmother, but I knew Mum, and I can’t help thinking that she must have had a good reason for cutting her own mother out of her life. Home isn’t always where the heart is; sometimes home is where the hurt lives.
When I think about my childhood before Mum died—and I make a conscious effort to rarely do so—I remember the sound of the sea outside my bedroom window in Hope Falls. The watery lullaby was the soundtrack of my dreams, and my nightmares. She used to say that we were both mermaids and that one day we would return to a secret world beneath the waves where nobody could hurt us. Then she went there without me. The memory of the sea frequently wraps around me like a blanket of comfort all these years later, and strange as it sounds—even to me—it has often felt as though something about Hope Falls has always been calling me back. Like an unfinished story you just have to know the ending to. The last page torn out of the book of me. Lost. Missing. Incomplete.
I named my dog Sunday because that’s my favorite day and he is my favorite everything. The following morning, back in my flat, he sits on the bed and watches me while I get dressed and I feel bad about leaving him again so soon. He’s smart enough to know that the clothes I am wearing mean I am going out, and I can see him wondering if he is coming too. My wardrobe contains ten white shirts, five identical pairs of jeans, three pairs of polished brogues,and a selection of very similar tweed jackets. I am a creature of habit, as is my dog. I have always preferred dogs to people. Dogs are loyal and can be trusted. Humans are the ouroboros of the world. Going in circles, eating themselves, making the same mistakes over and over in history as well as in our own puny, pointless lives. Humans may have evolved but humanity has not. We do not learn. Instead, we self-destruct on repeat until oblivion, and we’re too stupid to see it.
My dog normally goes everywhere with me, but this is a journey I need to make on my own, so I leave Sunday downstairs in the bookshop. I have never been good at trusting people—but the booksellers always take excellent care of my dog when I can’t. Booksellers are almost always the best variety of humans. I worry about the last-minute nature of it all—I am not a spontaneous person, I am someone who likes a plan—but I guess sometimes life takes us on unexpected detours that we simply cannot plan for.
I don’t do cars, and Hope Falls is too far away for the scooter, so I head to Paddington Station and take a train. It isn’t until I am far away from London and my job and the life I have made for myself that I start to feel afraid. Away from my little flat above the bookshop. Away from my dog. Away from what the doctor told me yesterday. Away from everything familiar. Heading toward the unknown and a house called Spyglass, which apparently now belongs to me. The time passes surprisingly quickly; I’m lost in my own thoughts and regrets, and as the train hurtles through Blackmoor National Park things start to feel strangely familiar.
The park is huge. Over fifty square miles of open moorlands dotted with sheep, craggy granite hills, hidden valleys, and waterfalls. Its beauty stretches far and wide in every direction, and I stare out of the train window, trying to take it all in. Blackmoor is also home to a handful of small, fairly isolated villages, and none of them are more remote than Hope Falls. The nearest train station is in another town, miles away. There is only one road in and one road out of Hope Falls,so when I get off the train I take a taxi, and by the time I finally arrive it is getting late. The harbor wall protects the village from the Atlantic Ocean on one side, and ancient moorland borders it on the other. Blackmoor cannot be built on, so the village is protected in lots of ways. People are harder to protect than places, I think, and then I wonder if that is true. The view of the sun setting over Hope Falls is breathtaking, and I am hit by an unexpected wave of memories and a tsunami of emotions.
This was where my mother abandoned me.
I’ve been alone ever since.
Even when I wasn’t.
My mother’s voice used to narrate my life. She lived on inside my head long after she stopped living. It was only when I got older I found the off switch, and learned to dictate a life of my own. My views of parenting have changed over the years. These days I think part of a parent’s job is to figure out how to hurt you so that you can learn how to heal yourself.
The village still looks exactly as it did when I was a child and I can remember the house on the hill called Spyglass even though I have never set foot in it before. It’s an iconic part of the skyline above Hope Falls, with its oversized eye-shaped windows and curved white walls, built into the cliffs it sits on. I climb out of the taxi and stare up at the house I have just inherited from a grandmother I never knew. She must have known I existed. She probably saw me. From up here on the top of the hill, you can see everything and everyone down below. The sun sets fast in this little corner of the country, and by the time I reach the front door it is almost dark. I look up and glimpse the first stars shining down on me from light-years away. A variety of time travel I find astonishing and comforting at the same time. I have never visited any other place where you can see so much sky; it’s beautiful.
Spyglass is at the end of a lane with no name, high above andfar from the other houses in the village. The way it has been built into the cliff gives it a slightly unreal quality, and although it is still very striking, up close it looks a little tired and broken. But then I have always felt there is much beauty to be found in imperfection. Lavender bushes line the path that leads to a wooden front door with a shiny, brass bird-shaped knocker. The sight of it stops me in my tracks, though I’m not sure why. It’s beautiful. This place is so peaceful and still and quiet, the contrast to London is profound. There are no neighbors. No traffic. No one and nothing at all. Other than the calming sound of the sea in the distance, it’s completely silent.
I can’t quite get my head around the idea of owning this place. I go to put the key the solicitor gave me in the lock but then stop. For some reason it feels wrong, so I tentatively knock on the door, my fingers flinching at the touch of the cool brass bird, but nobody answers. The solicitor did say it was empty and that it was mine, but life has taught me that when something seems too good to be true it almost always is. I have a word with myself and use the key he gave me.
It fits and turns and the door opens.
I hover in the dark doorway, unsure what to expect. Surprised because I feel scared and I don’t know why. It is not a familiar feeling for me. My feet seem to be stuck to the spot, not ready to go in, as though my body knows something I don’t about this place. But it’s too late to turn back. I’m here now. So, for lack of a better idea, I reach for a light switch in the gloom, and am relieved when I find one. The lights flicker to life and although I can now see, the first thing that really hits me when I step inside is the smell.
It’s not unpleasant, it’s just so overwhelminglyfamiliar. Even though I thought I’d never been here. I recognize the hallway and the staircase too, and I feel as though I have been pulled back in time or tumbled down the rabbit hole. Ihavebeen here before. Evenif I don’t remember it. I don’t know if all homes have a distinctive smell, but this one definitely does. It smells of old books, wet dogs, Shake n’ Vac, chocolate brownies, and tea.
It smells like my mother.
It smells of my childhood.
But we didn’t live here and I didn’t think I had ever set foot in the place until now, so I don’t understand what I am remembering.
I hesitate in the hallway, lingering in the shadows of forgotten memories, still uncertain about going any farther inside. Stepping into the hall feels like stepping back in time. The decor is faded and old, the furniture looks as though it belongs in a museum, and the elderly, elaborate carpet is threadbare in places. The wood-paneled walls are covered in framed photographs of what I suspect might be family. But when I venture closer, I see that every one of the expensive-looking frames contains a photograph of a dog. Some big, some small, all different. Every frame has two dates engraved into the bottom of it, and I’m guessing they were all beloved pets that lived here. I had presumed we would have little in common but my grandmother was clearly a dog person too. One picture is of a huge husky that looks the spitting image of Sunday, but according to the date on the frame the dog died over thirty years ago. I don’t recall the dog, or the house, or the woman who owned them, but now I’m here, I’m almost certain I spent time in this house as a child. Maybe I was just too young to remember it. Memories and feelings coexist in a close relationship. They’ll lie to you if it means they can stay together.
I close the front door, sealing myself inside the house in a way that makes me uncomfortable. When I do, I notice that there is a large, untidy pile of unopened post on the floor behind the door. I experience a lightning bolt of pain through my body when I stoop to pick it up. The pain is getting harder to ignore. I wish I knew exactly how much time I had left—the doctor was predictably vague—itwould make it so much easier to plan and make decisions if I knew how long I’ve got.
I try to forget about the future and focus on the present, but everything about this situation feels peculiar, as though I have been dragged inside an unfamiliar version of my past. I feel off-kilter and uncertain, and am uncomfortable looking through a dead woman’s mail. She might have been family, but to me she was a stranger and I can’t help thinking I am intruding. I also can’t shake the feeling of being watched, but when I look outside there is nobody there.
The post I have picked up consists mostly of unopened envelopes and far too many flyers. Several of them are for retirement villages, funeral homes, stair lifts, and hearing aids, and the way advertisers target the elderly sparks a small flame of fury inside me. I’m about to leave it all on an antique bureau by the front door that is already covered in papers when something catches my eye. The envelope looks fancy. It’s like a wedding invitation, except that it’s black, with pretty rose-gold foil letters printed on expensive-looking card stock. There are just two sentences on the front:
Everyone knows their birthday. If you could know your deathday, would you want to?
“For fuck’s sake,” I say beneath my breath. What a terrible thing to be sending to elderly people. Some scam, no doubt, to relieve them of their savings. The cruel things people do to other people never fail to shock me, even after all the years I have spent doing what I do and seeing what I have seen. I know it’s nonsense but the envelope has still managed to pique my interest and it’s already been opened, so I pull out the letter inside.
At Thanatos we believe thateveryonedeserves to live their best life.
The only way to do that is to know how long you’ve got.
Millionsof people spend their lives saving for a future they’ll never know.
Millionsof people pay into pensions they’ll never receive a penny of.
