Chapter 10
Eve had always enjoyed drawing, but she first realised her art wasn’t like other people’s when she started university.
She desperately craved a fresh start where nobody would know her or her story.
Throughout school and college, she had always felt like there was a spotlight shining over her wherever she went.
She’d started primary school just two weeks after Bella died.
Everything was so strange and frightening at home and then, suddenly, Eve was at school—this alien place where she didn’t know anyone, but everyone seemed to know her.
She was famous. The girl who had killed her sister.
The other kids whispered about her, and the teachers spoke to her in weird overly soft tones they didn’t use for anyone else.
University was a chance to finally leave her past behind. Or so she hoped.
But when she got there, she found it a struggle to make friends.
It didn’t help as much as she’d thought it would that no one else knew about her past. Eve still knew.
She still knew everything—even the part that she’d never breathed aloud to another living soul.
She enjoyed her art course, though, and was getting good grades.
It was a relief to be away from the family home.
She even started dating a nice boy called Daniel and this felt like something normal, like she was finally getting her life back on track to where it was supposed to be.
Until one day they were in a café talking about Christmas and Daniel said, “My youngest sister is nuts about Christmas trees. I guess most four-year-olds are, right?”
Eve remained silent. The year she was four, they hadn’t had a Christmas tree. She still remembered how furious her mum had been when her dad suggested they try to celebrate Christmas for Eve’s sake.
I can’t! her mum’s cry of despair still echoed down the years inside her head. I can’t bear it, I can’t, I can’t! Oh, please, just leave me alone!
Eve hadn’t told Daniel about Bella. There had never been the right moment to reveal that she had killed her sister.
She supposed he must have assumed she was an only child.
And she wondered whether he would ever know her—the real her.
After all, how could he when there was a wall between them?
It was still there, it had never gone away—that wall that stood between her and the rest of the world.
She broke up with Daniel before Christmas arrived.
In the days and weeks that followed, she found herself thinking more and more about her sister.
For years after the accident, Eve still hadn’t properly understood what had happened or her role in it.
But now that she was so far away from home, it seemed that she could look back with more clarity.
She saw with new eyes what she had done.
And if life wasn’t easier here, then perhaps it never would be?
She couldn’t sleep, no matter how hard she tried.
She started skipping lectures. She stopped going out and trying to make friends.
The exhaustion and the guilt hollowed her out until it felt like she wasn’t actually a person at all.
She was only a shell. Then one drizzly December afternoon she found herself standing on the edge of a motorway leading out of the city.
There were massive lorries thundering past and she thought how easy it would be, to just step out in front of one.
She was soaking wet from the spray and her face was streaked with grit and she trembled and trembled as she gripped the fumsup in her pocket and tried to remain rooted to a world that was spinning away from her.
Eventually, a police car pulled up and then she was being bundled into the back seat and a calm, gentle voice was speaking to her and asking if she was all right. It was a relief to have someone finally ask. To ask and actually listen to the answer.
“No,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I’m not.”
She wondered whether this would be an appropriate moment to cry—whether the act of doing so might bring some relief and make her feel better.
She tried to summon tears, but there weren’t any.
There never were. Her studies were put on hold, and she moved back home with her dad and Suzy.
Yet another failure. There were doctors’ visits and therapy and antidepressants.
Her stepmum took care of her every day, bringing soup and magazines and cheerful chatter.
Her mum came just once. It was weird seeing Suzy usher her into Eve’s bedroom.
Her mum was clutching a bag tight enough to make her knuckles turn white, so tense and uncertain.
“Would you like some tea or anything?” Suzy asked.
Eve shook her head and her mum declined, too.
“Right, I’ll leave you to it then.”
Suzy disappeared and Eve and her mum were left staring at each other across the silent room. Eve immediately wished that Suzy would come back. She was always good in social situations, always able to effortlessly fill those awkward silences.
“Do you want to sit down?” Eve asked her mum.
It was only after she’d said it that she realised there was nowhere to sit, meaning her mum had to perch awkwardly on the edge of the bed. She handed over the bag.
“Here. I got you a sketchbook.”
“Oh.” Eve was startled. She no longer had any interest in drawing and couldn’t imagine ever wanting to pick up a pencil again. “Thanks.”
“I got you some pencils too. It’s the charcoal ones you like, right?”
“Yeah.” Eve was surprised her mum knew this, but it was hard to care in that moment.
She wished her mum would leave. This was exhausting and making her feel worse. Her mum hardly ever touched her, so she was surprised when she reached out and very gently laid her fingers over Eve’s hand where it lay on the bed.
“Sometimes it can get very dark,” her mum said, gazing fixedly at a spot on the floor. “I know. Our minds set dreadful traps for us.”
At any other moment, Eve would have been both astounded and pleased to hear her mum speaking to her in such a way—opening up a little, letting her in.
But now she couldn’t be bothered. With any of it.
They might have been in the same room, but Eve was in one place and her mum was somewhere else and there was that wall again.
“I don’t think I will ever be happy,” she heard herself whispering.
In the seconds that followed, she wondered if she had actually spoken aloud.
Eve and her mum didn’t have conversations like this.
And it couldn’t be allowed, surely, to complain about the difficulties of being alive when Bella was very much dead?
Eve knew if she’d said this to Suzy, her stepmum would immediately have insisted: Don’t be silly, of course you will be happy. Of course you will.
Eve’s mum withdrew her hand. “Maybe happiness is too much for some of us to hope for,” she said.
Eve flinched. She realised that, deep down, she’d been hoping her mum would say something different—that she could be happy, that she deserved to be, that she wanted her to be.
“I’m not trying to be cruel,” her mum said, noticing her expression.
“It’s just that…aiming for happiness can be a heavy burden to put on yourself.
Even if you do manage to reach it, happiness doesn’t last. You might find things a bit easier if you accept the possibility that there can be peaceful, contented moments in a life that’s quietly sad. ”
Eve said nothing. Her mum’s words had a ring of truth, but she didn’t know if she could make the huge effort required to return to normal life if she could expect so little in return. What was the point?
“There are almost always some lifelines around us,” her mum went on. “You just have to grab on to the right one.”
Still, Eve remained silent. Eventually, her mum stood up. “I should go. Perhaps I’ll see you again soon?”
Eve shrugged. She didn’t especially want to see her mother again. She didn’t really want to see anyone.
“Mum?” Eve asked, just as her mum reached the door.
“Yes?”
“What was your lifeline?”
Her mother paused, with her hand on the doorknob, and Eve thought for a moment that she would evade the question, but instead she said simply, “It was my camera.”
Eve felt a dull, throbbing ache in the pit of her stomach.
She would have so loved for the lifeline to have been her.
Surely it should have been her? Bella may have been gone, but her mum still had one daughter who was there, and alive, and needing her.
She supposed if it had been someone else’s fault, then perhaps it might have been that way.
But Eve was the one who hadn’t closed the gate.
The drawing pad and pencils lay untouched for months.
Until, finally, one April morning, the sun was shining and the fresh air coming in through the window smelled so inviting that she went out into the garden.
She was sitting at the patio table, enjoying the feeling of the sun on her face, when Suzy came outside and silently set down an iced tea. And her sketchpad and pencils.
And Eve found herself picking up a pencil, testing the weight of it, and then opening the pad and gazing down at that blank, white page.
The clean newness of it was calming somehow and then suddenly, she could see it.
The octopus. Its essence was already there on the paper, begging her to bring it to life.
So she did. The tentacles curled and sprawled across the page, and the pencil felt good and right in her hand, and the birds were singing, and things weren’t unbearable.
They still weren’t good either, but they weren’t unbearable.
Eve looked down at her first octopus and smiled, pleased with how it had turned out. There was something still missing, though, some detail that wasn’t quite right…. She reached out and coloured in the tip of one of its tentacles.
“There,” she muttered. “There you are.”
And at that very moment, the octopus began to move—drifting up and down the page, exploring the blank corners with its curious tentacles.
Eve stared at it, wondering whether she was supposed to scream or slam the sketchbook shut, but she did neither of those things.
She didn’t feel scared, or horrified, or alarmed.
She was even more pleased with her octopus than she had been before.
She knew it was a possibility—in fact, a probability—that it wasn’t actually moving around the page at all.
Perhaps she was imagining it. Perhaps it was a side effect of her medication.
But more octopuses followed—page after page of them.
After a while, Eve started to take short trips out of the house to draw.
She’d go to the park or a local café. And one day she was sat at a table by the window when a young man stopped beside her and said, “That’s cool.
It looks like paper but it’s, what, some kind of tablet? ”
Eve glanced up. “Excuse me?”
“The animation technology. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Eve looked back at her sketchpad and the octopus drifting around the paper, exploring the edges of the page with its tentacles.
“You can see it?” she whispered.
“Er…yeah? How is it moving around the—?”
“It’s a prototype,” Eve said, quickly closing the book. “Not available in the shops yet.”
She gathered up her things and left the boy frowning after her.
“How was it?” Suzy asked when she got home. Eve was a little out of breath and Suzy looked at her more closely. “Is everything okay?”
Eve nodded but couldn’t summon the words to say anything. Her mind was on fire with the knowledge that the octopus drawings really were moving, alive.
“I’d love to see your art one day,” Suzy said.
Eve tried to imagine Suzy’s reaction, but she couldn’t picture it at all.
Suzy was so normal. So balanced. It didn’t seem like there would be space in her life for impossible tentacles and staring eyes that looked deep into your soul.
For a moment, she was tempted to show her the sketchbook anyway, just to see what would happen and to share the extraordinary wonder of it.
But this was a secret that couldn’t be unshared, and she was too afraid of what Suzy and her dad’s reactions might be.
It wasn’t possible for a drawing to come to life, and an impossible thing was bound to make them nervous.
What if they looked at her with unease and fear?
What if they insisted she stop drawing and give up the octopuses? Eve already knew that she couldn’t.
“I’m…I’m not sure you’d like them very much,” Eve said. “They’re not really for show. They’re just, you know, for me.”
They’re my friends.
Eve didn’t know how or why her octopuses moved, but the mystery of them made them yet more precious to her.
And with each one she drew, she felt them becoming more alive and felt herself getting a little better until, at last, she was well enough to come off her medication and go back to university.
Still broken, still always broken and tainted, but stitched back together again for the time being.
Her mum had been right about lifelines, after all. The octopuses had been Eve’s.