The Imposter by Anna Wharton (i have read the book txt) 📕

‘That’s a nice colour on you,’ Chloe tells her.

‘It’s not mine, it’s Edna’s. She lent it to me because I haven’t got any of my own clothes here. I must have left them in my old house.’

This happened the other day, when Nan couldn’t see the fitted cupboard doors in her room. She’d been wearing the same clothes for three days before anyone thought to show her the clothes hanging neatly inside her wardrobe. In the end one of the care assistants took a photograph of them and stuck it on the outside.

‘Do you not have a photo stuck on your wardrobe door anymore, Nan?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Do you—’ she sighs. ‘Nothing.’

Chloe also knows that we all have reasons for ignoring the truth sometimes, when a story we tell ourselves or others sounds better. The Kyles must have done it over the years, told themselves a story to make the truth more palatable. She wonders where they might have started.

Chloe hasn’t been back to the cemetery for four days. She’s done what Hollie said. But she hasn’t been to the recruitment agencies either. Instead, she’s been here, hiding in this timeless no-man’s land.

‘It’s your move, dear,’ Nan says. ‘Dear?’

‘Oh, sorry,’ Chloe says.

Nan doesn’t look up from her cards. She has a look of concentration on her face, the same, Chloe decides, as she had when she studied her word-search book while Chloe sat cross-legged at her feet as a child, gazing up at her cartoons until her neck ached and she switched to lying on her front. Stella must have been out working then; she had a job in a local pub so Chloe stayed with Nan and Granddad on those nights. She’d sometimes hear her come in late at night, whispers from the hall floating up the stairs. ‘Has she been OK?’ she’d ask, and then, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mum.’ Then a few moments later, a perfumed kiss in the dark.

Or that’s how Chloe likes to remember it.

She puts down a card and looks up at Nan again.

‘I’ve been working on a story at the office recently,’ she says, forgetting for a second she’s meant to be the cleaner.

‘Remind me, what is it you do, Chloe, dear?’

Chloe is relieved to realize Nan has forgotten too.

‘The newspaper,’ she says.

‘Oh yes, a reporter.’

‘Yes, and I . . . I’ve been working on a new story.’

‘What’s that about then, dear?’

‘It’s quite sad really, a little girl who went missing.’

‘Oh, how dreadful.’

‘Yes, she was only four.’

‘Where did they lose her?’

‘At a park. Not far from here actually.’

She looks up. ‘London?’

‘No, Nan, we’re in Peterborough.’

‘Yes, that’s it. Are you going to help them find her?’ Nan looks up from her hand of cards and Chloe feels that seed of an idea that she’s been tending unfurl a little further. Nan’s blue eyes are bright. She thinks of Maureen and Patrick Kyle, and wonders whether a disease like dementia would grant them the gift of living in a world where Angie is still alive.

‘Do you think I should?’ Chloe asks.

Nan breaks into a great big smile. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, reaching out and taking her hand in hers, cards fluttering down to the floor. ‘Those poor parents.’

‘OK then,’ she says, ‘I’ll find her.’

Nan smiles.

‘It’ll mean I’ll be busy at the office, I won’t be able to visit so often.’

Nan looks up. ‘What could be more important than finding a lost child?’ she says.

Nan studies her then, for that second longer until Chloe looks away. Then, suddenly Nan looks down at the floor.

‘Oh, I’ve dropped all my cards,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘How are we going to finish our game now?’

‘It’s OK, Nan,’ she says, ‘you’d won already.’

Her cheeks pinken, complementing her blouse.

‘Had I?’ she says, clasping her hands together. ‘How wonderful.’

Chloe puts the cards away in the packet as Nan chats to one of her new friends. She walks across the room to place them back in a drawer when the view from the window catches her eye. She wanders over and stands in front of the huge window; another resident is sitting in a recliner beside it, her wrinkly hands on the lace doilies that cover the arms of the chair.

‘I took my Sarah there the other day,’ the old woman says, seemingly to the glass.

‘Sorry?’ Chloe says.

‘Ferry Meadows,’ she says. ‘My little girl. She did have a lovely time on the swings.’

Chloe smiles at her. Someone else trapped inside a memory.

‘Oh, right, lovely.’ She starts towards Nan but then she has an idea. She glances back out the window; it’s a nice day, the sun dipping in and out of the clouds, casting shadows across the lake. It’s windy, crisp, spring starting its annual and inevitable tussle with winter.

When she reaches Nan she puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘I tell you what, Nan, I’m just going for a quick walk. I’ll leave you with your friend and see you back here in half an hour.’

‘OK, dear,’ she replies.

As Chloe walks away, she hears Nan say to her new friend, ‘What a nice young lady.’

A short path leads from the back of the care home directly into the park itself. There’s a quiet bit of road to cross where drivers are warned with a bright triangular sign of elderly people crossing, but there’s no traffic today and so within a few minutes Chloe is standing in front of the lake she could see from the window of the recreational room. It’s a park she’s been to many times before, and in that instant a thousand sunny days come back to her: picnics with egg and salad cream sandwiches; school trips canoeing on the lake; a spring walk searching for ducklings. Always making a special guest appearance in other people’s families. But never during any of those times had she known what else this place represented. On cue, as if she were part of a film set, a gust of wind picks up, and there’s a sudden chill sent