Chapter 7
The gate’s hinges squeaked as Eve swung it open, then she took a deep breath and stepped through, reaching around to close it carefully behind her.
Twenty-four years too late. The front door opened before Eve had the chance to ring the bell.
Her mum stood in the doorway, wearing a white shirt tucked into belted khaki trousers.
Her dark hair was liberally streaked with grey and pulled up in a clip.
Her green eyes swept over Eve, taking her in.
“You look tired,” she said bluntly. “Come in. The kettle’s on. I only have mint tea, I’m afraid.”
Eve knew her mum only drank mint tea, and that she liked it because it reminded her of her time in Morocco.
Her mum had never told her this herself, but Eve had read it in an interview in a photography magazine a while ago.
She subscribed to several of them, although she had no particular interest in photography herself.
But from time to time, one of her mum’s photos would appear, or—even better—an interview.
And through these Eve would glean little tidbits about what her mum was doing now, or what she liked, or what she thought about things. It was like discovering gold.
“That’s fine,” she said now.
They had to walk through the lounge to get to the kitchen and Eve couldn’t help glancing at the walls where the family photos used to hang.
Her mother had taken them all down at some point and replaced them with her own photographs of far-off places—the pyramids in Egypt, sloths in Costa Rica, golden temples in Thailand.
An entire wall was taken up with her favourite subject to photograph—abandoned buildings.
They were both eerie and fascinating, and Eve would have liked to stop and look at them properly, but her mum was striding ahead too quickly.
She glimpsed what looked like the deserted cooling tower of an old power station, a ghost town in America, and the inside of an abandoned shopping mall.
Looking at her living room now, you’d think her mum didn’t have a family at all.
A few minutes later, Eve and her mum sat across the table from each other in the pristinely clean kitchen with cups of mint tea, steaming and fragrant. A clock on the wall ticked too loudly and Eve could already feel a headache starting behind her eyes. She wanted to be anywhere but here.
“Thanks for fitting me in,” Eve began, then winced.
She’d made it sound like they were having a business meeting. It was always so difficult to know what to say to her mum and often it felt as if every single word was somehow wrong.
“It’s nice to see you,” her mum said with a brisk nod. They both knew it was a lie. “So you wanted to know about the White Octopus Hotel?”
“Did we visit during the Switzerland trip?” Eve asked.
“I’m surprised you remember. You were only three.”
Eve’s breath caught in her throat. Her dad must have been mistaken after all. “How long did we stay there?”
Her mum raised an eyebrow. “Stay there? We didn’t. It had been closed for years.”
“But…” Eve frowned. “I can remember things about it. The afternoon tea. There were peppermint creams.”
White and sparkling and perfect on the silver plate, so cold and tingly as they crumbled on her tongue…
“You must be thinking of somewhere else,” her mum said. “A different hotel. Maybe somewhere you went on holiday with Glen and Suzy.”
It was hard to know what her mum thought about her dad’s new marriage, but then it was hard to know what her mum thought about anything.
There had been long periods after Bella’s death when Eve hardly saw her at all.
She was just…absent. Shut up in her bedroom upstairs, or else she would go out and not return for hours—sometimes days.
Eve had been looked after by her dad and her auntie Pam more than her mum back then.
About a year after Bella’s death, her mum had started spending a bit of time with her again.
It usually began well enough, with a book, or a game, or an outing, but always seemed to end in tears and shouting, and afterwards Eve would never be entirely sure what she had done wrong.
She would be put in front of the TV or distracted with a snack, and then she’d hear her dad in the kitchen, speaking in a low, even tone, and then her mum’s replies, her voice raw and breaking.
She came to dread her mother walking into a room.
It was a relief when her parents’ marriage finally broke up and Eve left for good with her dad.
“You can see the photo,” her mum offered now. “It was my first one.”
“First what?” Eve asked, confused. Her mum couldn’t mean the first professional photo. She’d worked as a wedding photographer for a few years before she met Eve’s dad.
“The first photo I took of an abandoned place.”
She got up and fetched a leatherbound album, which she set in front of Eve.
When she flipped open the cover, the photo on the first page showed a hotel’s abandoned lobby.
There were tall white pillars and a sweeping double staircase with intricate iron grillwork leading up to the floor above.
A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, cobwebbed and cocooned.
The tiled floor was scattered with leaves, lumps of plaster, and bits of rubbish.
Eve’s eye was immediately drawn to the three-tiered marble fountain in the middle of the room.
It was long dry, covered in algae and watermarks, but still a striking structure.
A white marble octopus sprawled in the largest basin at the bottom, its tentacles twisting upwards to wrap around the fountain all the way to the top.
Eve felt the same electric flash of pleasure she always experienced upon seeing an octopus.
They were so endlessly fascinating and strange.
Beneath her jumper, she could feel her tattoo drifting slowly over her stomach.
And right there, just visible in the corner of the photo, was three-year-old Eve herself. Her image was blurred, as if she’d suddenly stepped into the shot.
“I told you to stay behind me,” her mum said, “but you didn’t listen.”
Did you close the gate?
Eve looked up at her mum. Were they to be forever haunted by the unspoken words between them?
After that first time, her mum had never mentioned the gate to her again.
But the question seemed to hang over them always, and it was one they both knew the answer to.
Eve had thought of finishing their conversation many times.
I’m sorry, she would say. I didn’t close the gate. It was my fault. If I could go back in time and switch places with Bella, I would.
But she’d never quite been able to summon the courage—perhaps because she already knew what her mum’s response would be.
It wasn’t your fault.
But.
But.
But.
I wish you had listened.
Just that once.
“Is this the only photo you took of the hotel?” Eve asked. The photos on the opposite page were of somewhere else—an abandoned amusement arcade, from the looks of it.
“Yes.”
“Why were we even there? Dad said we stayed in a B&B.”
“We did. The White Octopus was on the other side of the lake. I thought it would be interesting to see, so I took a boat across to explore. I thought you might like it too, so I took you with me the next day.”
Eve’s fingers itched for a cigarette, but she knew her mum wouldn’t like it if she smoked in the house. “Did Dad come?”
“No, it was just you and me. We didn’t stay long. Just explored the lobby.”
“Did you explore further on your own the day before?”
“I did. There was a key….”
She trailed off, frowning slightly, as if she’d forgotten what she was going to say halfway through.
“A key?” Eve prompted. “You mean a room key?”
Her mother nodded. “It was just lying there on the reception desk. Like it was waiting for me. The key to Room Seventeen. I went through all the floors, but no such room existed.”
Just like the key to Room 27.
“What happened to the key?” Eve asked. “Do you still have it?”
To her disappointment, her mum shook her head.
“I lost it somehow. I didn’t notice at the time.
Too busy taking photos. The hotel was…” She trailed off.
“I’m not sure how to describe it. There was this atmosphere there.
Echoes of the past. A lot of the original fittings and some of the furniture was still in place.
There’s something melancholy and fascinating about an abandoned hotel.
” She gazed out the window, towards the road that Eve wished she never had to see again. “They remind me of sunken ships.”
She wanted to ask more questions about the hotel, but then her mum spoke abruptly. “Listen, I don’t want to hurry you, but I have a flight to get ready for.”
Eve stood up, the chair legs scraping harshly across the floor. “Of course.”
“Why did you want to know about the White Octopus anyway?” her mum asked.
“It doesn’t matter. I just suddenly remembered it.”
Her mum paused, then said, “Is everything all right?”
Eve knew she’d never quite be free of this question. Not after what had happened at university.
“Everything’s fine.”
It wasn’t true, of course. Not anymore. As Eve let herself out of the house and fished a cigarette from her pocket, she supposed that most people had some kind of “before” and “after” in their lives.
A defining moment, a point at which everything changed.
There had been periods, here and there, where Eve had felt a muted sort of contentment in the years after her fourth birthday.
But happiness—the real, bright, shining kind—was something she’d only ever known in that brief “before.”