The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

03 : Blaire

B L A I R E

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My room feels like it hasn't been touched in twenty years and it smells like two decades of musty air disguised with a spritz of air freshener, and I have hardly left it for days.

I don't know where the time has gone. It's been swallowed up by the gaping silences when my path crosses Elizabeth's – it feels wrong to call her Aunt Elizabeth, or even my aunt – and we don't know how to talk to each other. She's like a lion that has learnt English – we're talking the same language but it makes no sense. We can't communicate. Our references are poles apart, and so much has gone unsaid for so long that we don't know where to begin. Which thread do we unpick first? Which will lead to revelation, and which to sorrow?

My bags are still packed in the corner of the room. I can't bear to go through my things, to hang my clothes and shelve my books, to admit that this is my life now. This creaking cottage is my home; this silent, sullen woman is my family. The entirety of it. My father was an only child, and both of his parents died within two years of his suicide. I don't remember them, or him.

And as for my mother ... I don't know what to think anymore. I thought she was an orphaned child, the story she always led me to believe, but I don't know what's real and what was whatever fiction she had to tell herself. Why hide Elizabeth from me? Why send me here when she's not around to answer my questions?

I don't know what time or even day it is when there's a knock on my door and it eases open on an ancient hinge in need of oiling.

"Blaire?"

I don't say anything because I don't know what to say, every word hitting my ears wrong when I test them out in my mind. I'm lying here with my head pressed to my pillow, my mouth open as I search for the right combination of consonants and vowels, when Elizabeth pushes the door further open. One hand curls around the edge of the cracked wood when she steps into the room.

"You haven't left the house in four days," she says. I suppose it must be Friday, then.

I look up at her. She looks down at me, fingers curled over her ribs as though she's holding herself together. I notice an ugly bruise mottling her forearm, shades of purple spreading from her wrist to her elbow, and morbid fascination forces me up.

It's only when I'm sitting on the edge of my mattress that I realise it's a streak of paint, mauve and lilac cracking where they've dried over fine blonde hairs and the contours of her arm.

There's paint on her face too. That striking slice of red across her cheek isn't a bloody gash but a smear of crimson acrylic that matches a smudge on the back of her left hand.

"Are you left-handed?" I ask. She looks down at her hands as though she needs the visual to recall which she uses to grasp a paintbrush.

"Yes." She pauses before let's go of the same words tracking across my mind. "So was your mother."

Another trait they share. But no matter how crushingly similar she looks to Mum, she has none of the warmth and passion and generosity; I see none of Mum's humour and radiance, the way she lit up every room. Elizabeth is the opposite. She's a dark cloud, an ominous grey fog lingering at the edge of my vision; she's the heavy promise of a storm.

She shifts her weight. A floorboard groans. "I think it will be good for you to get out. It's a nice day." When I say nothing, she unfolds a crisp orange note that looks all wrong. Then I remember where I am; I realise it's a Scottish ten pounds. "I need a few things from the shop. Do you think you could go out and get bread, milk, and tea?"