The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

07 : Blaire

B L A I R E

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When I wake up on Saturday morning, my window's banging against the wall outside after being wrenched off the latch by the wind, and my room is freezing cold after last night's raging storm. The glass is streaked with rain, though it has settled from pelting pellets to a dreary drizzle, and there's a wet patch on my floor where it's come through the clattering window.

My whole body's covered in goose pimples as I lug myself out of bed to tug the window shut, the damp wood swollen out of its frame, and open the curtains wider to let in the weak morning light.

It feels more like January than the middle of April. This is winter weather, cold and wet and grey, and it's doing nothing to help heal my heart, which is just as cold and wet and grey behind my ribs. I need the sun. I need an aunt who lives in New Zealand, or Florida, or Los Angeles. Why, of all the places in the world, does she live in a desolate valley in the north of Scotland?

It's only eight o'clock. I fell asleep early last night, after listening to a couple more episodes of The Anchor Lakey once I'd endured a stilted supper with Elizabeth, and when I woke up at two a.m., I only managed to get back to sleep when I put the first episode on again.

There's something about Sukie that's so compulsively listenable. She's a siren, her words her song luring me towards the rocks, and I know I'm being lured yet I'm willingly following anyway. When her words are feeding straight into my ears, I can't do anything but lie there prone, listening to every syllable.

Once I'm dressed in the same outfit I wore yesterday, the same outfit I will continue to wear until I run out of clean black leggings and my favourite jumper needs washing, I head downstairs and close my eyes when I pass the sitting room. Mum's ashes are in there, the urn sitting on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. It seemed like the most fitting place for her to wait, while I figure out what to do with her.

"Good morning," Elizabeth says the moment I enter the kitchen. I jump, my heart racing. I didn't see her there, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and a streak of blue paint in her fair hair.

"Hi."

"Did you sleep well?"

I cross the kitchen and sink into the chair opposite her, tucked against the radiator, and revel in the warmth. "Not too badly."

With a pinch of my palm, I implore myself to be nicer to her, to make an effort. None of this is her fault. She's just unlucky enough to be the only person around, the only one there to absorb me.

"I like my room," I manage to blurt out at last. It's not much, but it's all I can do right now.

Elizabeth smiles. I think it's a smile, at least. Her lips hardly move, but I think they're a fraction more curved than they were before. "I'm glad to hear that. Do you want something to eat?"

As if to reply before I can give the wrong answer, my stomach lets off a thundering rumble and Elizabeth stands in response. She tucks loose strands of hair behind her ears, most of it tied up, and I see the acrylic flecks of red and orange and brown under her nails, caked into her knuckles. Her clothes are always flawless, her skin always specked with paint.

"Toast?" she asks. I nod. "Coffee?" I nod. She holds up a banana, just on the right side of green, and I nod again. I take the slightest ounce of comfort in this moment, watching as she drops bread into the toaster, and from the back, she is Mum. From what she's wearing – a loose lilac tunic over leggings, slippers on her feet – to the way she does her hair – twisted into a quick bun, the ends sticking out like the bristles of a paintbrush – the resemblance is uncanny.