Don't Be Afraid Read online

  Also by Daniela Sacerdoti

  Glen Avich novels

  Watch Over Me

  Take Me Home

  Set Me Free

  The Sarah Midnight Trilogy

  Dreams

  Tide

  Spirit

  For children

  Really Weird Removals.com

  First published 2015

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  This electronic edition published in 2015

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 029 5 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 001 1 in print format

  Copyright © Daniela Sacerdoti 2016

  The right of Daniela Sacerdoti to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

  To Francesca Meinardi, my sister

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  On Gullane Beach

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Candle

  Chapter 2 Over the edge

  Chapter 3 Black flower

  Chapter 4 Lie to me

  Chapter 5 Voices

  Chapter 6 Useless love

  Chapter 7 Brothers

  Chapter 8 Two rivers meet

  Chapter 9 Dreamscape

  Chapter 10 The roads that lead to nowhere

  Chapter 11 The way I simply love you

  Chapter 12 Weaving

  Chapter 13 Prison

  Chapter 14 Behind the scenes

  Chapter 15 Denial

  Chapter 16 Love, long ago

  Chapter 17 A world without you

  Chapter 18 Wrench

  Chapter 19 The winding road

  Chapter 20 Respite

  Chapter 21 The memory of colours

  Chapter 22 What I leave behind

  Chapter 23 Because nobody knows you like I do

  Chapter 24 The flowers inside (2)

  Chapter 25 White is for happy

  Chapter 26 The scent of colours (2)

  Chapter 27 Butterfly

  Chapter 28 Dancing with butterflies

  Chapter 29 Poison

  Chapter 30 Life in a fishbowl

  Chapter 31 Cinnamon

  Chapter 32 All about your colours

  Chapter 33 When I'm not with you

  Chapter 34 Other people's lives

  Chapter 35 Deception

  Chapter 36 Dusk

  Chapter 37 Within

  Chapter 38 Perfumed rain

  Chapter 39 Roses

  Chapter 40 Fire

  Chapter 41 The time we turn around

  Chapter 42 It's you I love

  Chapter 43 Don't take her away

  Chapter 44 If I lost you

  Chapter 45 Sunflower

  Chapter 46 Alchemy

  Chapter 47 No place for forgiveness

  Chapter 48 The way we lived

  Chapter 49 Sliding

  Chapter 50 Gillian

  Chapter 51 The hand that holds mine

  Chapter 52 Roses in winter

  Chapter 53 Maze

  Chapter 54 These days are mine

  Chapter 55 Undying

  Chapter 56 Snow angels

  Chapter 57 Isabel

  Chapter 58 Love eternal

  Chapter 59 Warmth

  Chapter 60 The truth about love

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks from the bottom of my heart to my families, the Sacerdotis and the Walkers. Mamma, Beth, my lighthouses in every stormy sea – thank you. And Beth, thanks for the proof reading!

  Thank you to everyone at Black & White, in particular to my editor Karyn Millar, to the goddess of foreign rights Janne Moller (that’s her official title), and to Campbell Brown. Thank you Ariella Feiner, whose emails and calls from London leave me with a scent of oranges and a sense of sunshine all around me.

  Many thanks to my friends, who put up with me and my writing obsession: Irene Parfimon, Joan Grassie, Roy Gill, Phil Miller, Simona Sanfilippo, Giancarlo Ferrari and Alison Green. In particular, many thanks to Phil Miller, wonderful poet, who wrote ‘On Gullane Beach’ for Don’t Be Afraid. Phil: it’s a privilege, thank you.

  Thank you Sorley MacLean for the quote “but if I had the choice again”, from the splendid poem “An Roghainn”, “The Choice”.

  Thank you Scotland, my dear, dear Alba, and all the people I met and loved and laughed with these last fourteen years. You’ve been an adoptive mother to me – I feel like Ruth, who was welcomed into her husband’s tribe. As the time comes for the family to go home – my birth home – to look after our elders, I turn back and promise I will never, never forget.

  I always leave you last, Ross, Sorley and Luca: but only because you are the foundation of everything. A special thanks to Ross for the image of the long journey on foot and the deer keeping watch. I hope that one day you recognise your own talent for writing.

  Daniela

  On Gullane Beach

  Raising a ghost with a brief touch of the sand,

  there is a map, contours carved by a finger’s print.

  Or a frail guide for sound – score lines for unheard music,

  rhythm, keys and notations. Holding that hand,

  joins the pulse and beat of the waves on the land,

  hears what you sung with your song, homesick

  for the silence between waves and the soft tick of the clock

  pacing blood, tides, the shot and return of our planet.

  The pulse goes out and is returned, the echo in the seashell

  a memory of light caught, rewritten and redrafted. We

  are that ocean – presence and an absence in a small home of bone.

  The distant waves float memory and deepen the well:

  driven with mind, bounded by fingers, together and alone.

  Your hand’s song will be read; sung and forgotten by

  the beating sea.

  Philip Miller

  Prologue

  Memory

  We were all flowers in bloom

  There was softness in my body

  And in my eyes

  The promise of you

  A woman stands in a field of swaying grass, a red handkerchief in her long, wavy hair and her skirt blowing in the breeze. The light of spring dances on her face. She is smiling, wrinkling up her nose, her eyes like half-moons as she squints in the sun. Not far from her, a little girl is trying to stay upright in the grass, which comes up to her chest. Her cheeks are red; her face is like an apple, fresh and pure and new. She is laughing and waving her dimpled hands like a little windmill, overwhelmed with joy at something so simple, so special: standing in a field of grass for the first time in her life. Suddenly, she loses her balance and falls sideways – the blades of grass have overtaken her now, they cover everything from view. She is frightened. Her face is about to crumple, tears are gathering in her eyes, her lips begin to form the only word she can say, the only word that matters for now, in her baby life – Mummy – but two white arms appear from nowhere and lift her upwards, towards the blue sky, then against a soft chest that smells just right, that smells like everything is good, everything is fine. “Isabel,” the woman says, tasting her daughter’s name, sweet as a song, “don’t be afra
id.”

  1

  Candle

  But if I had the choice again

  Where I was, time did not exist. My heart did not beat and I did not breathe – so I couldn’t even measure it in heartbeats and breaths.

  It took me a while to fully comprehend that the fog around me would never go away, that I would always wander lost and alone in the mist. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of another lonely soul in my same predicament, sweeping close to me and yet so far. Solitude was my choice for refusing to go, solitude and despair. The absence of love.

  And then, one moment in this multitude of moments that followed one another, each identical to the one before, I felt something shifting. At first it was like the tiniest whirlpool around me, in this windless place – and then a trembling all around, ripple after ripple in the mist. Suddenly, something began enveloping me and wrenching me backwards: it was pulling, pulling, like a rope tied around my waist. I was frightened, but the force dragging me began to feel more like a ribbon, a gentle, velvety ribbon that grew bigger and embraced me, a mantle of warmth, a mantle of love. I began to cry – Do dead souls cry?

  And then, in the fog, a soft mother-of-pearl light appeared, and I saw the one who had been pulling me. She stood in a sea of little flames, some glowing feebly, some strong, some dancing to a mysterious wind, some still, all surrounded by light. Her words resounded in my mind – she was thinking inside my head. Her voice was so warm and full of love it made me cry: cold, dry tears that only I could feel and nobody could have seen. Another gust of soft wind came, and a faraway sound, a sound like slowly moving wings, invisible in the shimmering light and mist.

  She told me everything, her voice a chorus of voices, some male, some female, in a perfect symphony.

  They told me why I needed to return, and what I had to do. It was what I had been waiting for all along.

  I couldn’t find my voice – I couldn’t even find my mouth to reply. Did I have a mouth? I looked down, searching for my hands – and there they were. I searched for my lips and I found them, and they felt cold. I looked down at my feet, and they were there too, bare and white. I smacked my lips together and prepared to speak, but nothing came out – I tried again, and in a croaky, feeble voice that hadn’t been used in a long time, I said the word I’d kept in my heart all that time, all the time I’d spent in the misty, silent, lonely place: “Isabel.”

  2

  Over the edge

  Plucked out from peace

  Second chance or condemnation

  And the terrible, terrible knowledge

  To bring with me as they force me off the brink

  That the end

  Could be sweet

  Isabel

  I blinked, my eyes sticky with sleep and tears, and in a few bleary, desperate moments, I realised I was still alive, unless heaven looked like my bedroom. Shadows danced in the corners – a soft noise of fabric flapping – the window was ajar. I had a vague memory of opening it last night, to drink in the view of the loch one last time, to take it all in before I did it. Before I fell.

  My plan was perfect, or so I thought – Angus was away on a gig and Morag not due to check on me until the evening. When she brought in the groceries, she would see that I was asleep and let me be – I often slept during the day, because I struggled to sleep during the night.

  Except this time I would not be sleeping.

  And then Angus would try to get in touch with me once, twice, but even if he became alarmed by my lack of reply, I would still have time to do it before he sent someone to see if I was all right. Then, the morning after, Morag would stop by again with milk and eggs and bread, and she would notice that I was still sleeping, that I was exactly in the same position as the night before – and then she would know.

  It was all set up so that it wouldn’t be Angus who found me. It couldn’t be. I couldn’t allow my husband to see me like that, dead on the bed we shared – I could never, never do such a thing to him. Weird, isn’t it? I was ready to put him through the torture of losing me, but I didn’t want him to be the one to find me dead. Even in my despair I could still follow some strange logic that didn’t make sense to anyone but me. It was hard to find lucidity in my thoughts. It would be hard to find lucidity in just about anything, if you had not left your house in a year and every day when you woke up you wondered why you weren’t dead already, you wondered why the black hole in your heart hadn’t swallowed you whole yet.

  So I’d decided to give the black hole a helping hand.

  But there I was. Alive. Though I wasn’t supposed to be.

  It had all gone terribly wrong.

  I shivered deeper than I had ever done before, three times, as if my body could not believe that it was still working. I had time to register the horrific pain blooming in my stomach, the strange chemical smell seeping off my skin and the little orange dots in the crook of my body, underneath me – the pills I had taken too many of, but still not enough – when I realised that someone was there. I blinked again and again. There was a pair of feet on my carpet. Attached to legs. Attached to a woman I didn’t know. In my bedroom.

  Nobody comes into my bedroom, apart from Angus and occasionally Morag. Nobody but us had crossed that threshold for a year.

  My heart started pounding, and it was sore – like it was learning to beat again. Like the heartache I’d felt for so long had become physical.

  I shut my eyes tight, as tight as I could, and tried to feign sleep – but the trembling of my hands must have given me away.

  “Isabel,” she said, and all of a sudden her voice came from somewhere closer to me – she was standing by my bed. I opened my eyes, but as soon as I tried to raise my gaze above the woman’s legs, a wave of nausea hit me and everything spun. A stranger. A stranger in my room, beside me. What did she want from me? The million imaginary fears that plagued my mind cut me again – imaginary, yes, but real to me. She would kill me. She would make me sick with the invisible illnesses she carried on her skin. She would tell me I had to pull myself together. She would tell me that if I had any decency I’d leave Angus to live his life. And on and on, the catalogue of fears in my soul unfolded, like entries from my own personal Book of the Dead. Somebody whimpered – it was me, deep in my chemical haze, somewhere between sleep and waking.

  I was alive; I was still to suffer.

  Why?

  Why?

  Why me?

  “Isabel,” the stranger whispered for the second time. I wanted to tell her to get out and leave me alone, but I could not form words. I tried to shape my lips around the syllables, but they would not move. A kitten noise came out of my mouth instead, and something cold and wet rolled down my cheek. I could see, but I was immobile and mute – come to think of it, maybe I was dead, after all, and the woman was an angel come to take me to heaven. Except people who do what I had done don’t end up in heaven, they go somewhere else: my father had always been clear on that, and on other things.

  The woman kneeled beside my bed and her face came into view. I felt too ill to be afraid any more, to be anything any more. “Isabel,” she said again – but this time, as she was so close, her voice did something to me.

  Something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

  It calmed me.

  My heart, instead of beating even faster until I couldn’t breathe, slowed down.

  I looked into her eyes, and I met a winter-green gaze. Her face was crowned by wavy brown hair and she smelled of cinnamon and sugar. How weird – she smelled of Christmas.

  “Who are you?” I managed to say finally, and it came out like a croak. My throat was burning, and oh, all down my chest was agony, and my side. A horrible chemical slush coated my mouth and I longed for water.

  “I came to see you. I came to help you.”

  I was ready to say I don’t want to see anyone, but as I opened my mouth a searing pain shot through my side again. My whole body was sore, my soul was sore, my heart was withered up, and once again I prayed for
all this to be over. I turned my head towards the wall and closed my eyes again. I was so tired.

  And then I felt something touch me – the woman was caressing my hair, so softly, so tenderly that something overflowed inside me. I sobbed.

  “Sleep now. I’ll come and see you again,” she said. As if her words had been a command, I felt myself drifting into sleep. For the first time in months my dreams weren’t full of terror and grotesque images, haunting me. I dreamt I was standing outside, in the sunshine, looking over to a pack of wild horses across a swaying field – there were little lochs of shimmering waters and multicoloured clouds dotted all around. It was like I had jumped straight into my palette and all the watercolours and paints that lay abandoned in my studio.

  It was a dream of hope.

  3

  Black flower

  Take me home

  Because the only way to be

  Is to burrow inside you

  Isabel

  I can’t remember much of what happened after. I had been falling, falling, when a stranger had come to see me and comforted me in a way nobody had been able to do in years, not even my Angus – and then I had fallen asleep. Except it was heavier than sleep, deeper – deadly.

  Things happened after that – people touched me all over and shouted in my ears, calling my name, and then there was something on my mouth and I couldn’t breathe, and the sky was purple, and there was the sound of a siren and all I could see was black . . . then nothing.

  I was at peace for a while, floating in a medicated haze, drifting in and out of consciousness, all the anxiety gone. I had a vague feeling of cool, cool sheets under my back and my legs, and a cool, cool liquid being pumped into my veins. I wanted to stay there, but I was somehow aware that things hadn’t worked out the way I had planned, that soon I would have to wake up. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t.