 A terrifying story of ghosts and grief, perfect for fans of Shirley Jackon's The Haunting of Hill House and M. R. James The Turn of the Screw, in award-winning author Lisa Heathfield’s first adult novel. Clara and her younger brother Stephen are taken by their father to stay with their aunt and uncle in a remote house in the hills as their mother recovers from an accident. At first, they see it as a summer to explore. There's the train set in the basement, the walled garden with its secret graves and beyond it all the silent loch, steady and waiting. Auntie has wanted them for so long - real children with hair to brush and arms to slip into the clothes made just for them. All those hours washing, polishing, preparing beds and pickling fruit and now Clara and Stephen are here, like a miracle, on her doorstep. But the reality of two children – their noise, their mess, their casual cruelties – begins to overwhelm Auntie. The children begin to uncover things Auntie had thought left buried, and Clara can feel her brother slipping away from her. This hastily created new family finds itse?lf falling apart, with terrifying consequences for them all. Such Pretty Things is a deeply chilling and haunting story about the slow shattering nature of grief, displacement, jealousy and an overwhelming desire to love and be loved. Such Pretty Things Extract:
‘What are you doing, Stevie?’ she asks, using the material of her dress to brush the crease at the back of her knee. ‘It’s an antler,’ he replies. ‘You saw a deer?’ ‘It was on the road,’ he says. Clara doesn’t remember the animal, although she’s sure she would have seen it if it had been there. There’s been nothing to do for hours but stare out as the world changed; the streets she’s always known – the close-knit houses, the lamp-posts, the bus stop – disappearing behind them until the homes and shops were replaced by endless, endless fields and trees. She hasn’t even been able to draw, the jagged lines of her pencil in her sketchbook making her ill. ‘Stop kicking my seat, Stephen,’ their father says. ‘ I’m bored.’ Stephen’s scowl is instant, exaggerated, his feet a steady pendulum beating a rhythm that Clara knows must grate between their father’s teeth. Her father takes his left hand from the steering wheel and wipes his palm across the back of his neck. The speckled line of dirt on the fold in his collar makes her suddenly, crushingly sad; if the fire hadn’t happened, then their mother would have washed it. She’d have been able to stand in the kitchen, pressing the iron flat onto the shirt. Clara thinks of the heat in the hospital room, the starched bed-linen, the tubes unceremoniously pushed into her mother. The degradation of lying motionless as strangers prodded her skin. ‘You must do as you’re told when you’re with them,’ their father says. He grips the steering wheel again, Clara feeling his tension in her own shoulders, a subtle grasp of fingers that aren’t there. ‘It’s good of them to take you on.’ He’d told them only yesterday, how he couldn’t keep working and look after them. How someone had to pay the bills. Your aunt and uncle have the time and the space. I don’t know who else to ask. Stephen’s tantrum. Their home filled by their father’s resulting bellow, the echo of which Clara still feels deep in her core. ‘I don’t want to stay with people I don’t know,’ Stephen says. ‘They’re not just people. They’re family.’ Who we haven’t even met, Clara nearly says. She looks out of the window as their car breaks free from the trees, at a marshy stretch where the grass slides into darkened dips and purple thistles rise up in hazy clusters. Beyond that, there’s the silent roar of mountains, their outline picked out in thick, grey ink. ‘See those, Stevie?’ she says. ‘They’ll be ours to explore.’ He forgets his anger. ‘Did mummy go there?’ ‘Maybe.’ But it’s impossible for Clara to grasp, their mother as a child, her footsteps running in and out of the heather. Their father steers the car from the road, stops in front of a gate. On a post, the name Ballechin is written in faded blue paint, yet there’s no sign of the house from here. The children watch as he gets out, arches his back with his arms above his head before he opens the gate, pushing it far enough so that it catches in the long grass. He brushes his hands together as he gets back in. ‘Let’s go and meet them.’ It’s a narrow drive and their father curses as he steers around ruts that threaten to scratch the vehicle. On either side there are thick branches with early blackberries twisting and looping among them. ‘Can we pick some?’ Clara asks, wanting to have the sweet taste of something she knows. ‘We can’t,’ her father replies. ‘They’ll be waiting.’ Clara catches glimpses of brick between the trees, sees the elbow of a window’s edge through parted leaves. From here, she can tell that Ballechin isn’t a small house and as it steps out from behind the shadows of the pines, she loves it immediately – the window frames with glass cut neatly into separate squares, the curved porch supporting a honeysuckle, surrounding a front door made of dark wood. Roof tiles slant down, holding two tall chimneys and a pair of round windows nestled so far back that they’re almost impossible to see. Gravel crunches under the car’s wheels before it stops and, as their father turns off the engine, silence takes over the air. ‘Did mummy really live here?’ Stephen asks. ‘Yes.’ Their father laughs and Clara notices how his shoulders relax, as though strings that have been forcing them up have been cut. ‘What’s that?’ Stephen is pointing to a small footprint of grass with a stone column at its centre. It’s no higher than Clara’s waist, with a metal fin balanced on the top. Part of her wants to lick the metal, to taste it on her tongue. ‘It’s a sundial,’ their father says. ‘Although I doubt it works very well, surrounded by so many trees.’ ‘It tells the time,’ Clara tells Stephen, but already he’s looking elsewhere, at a vegetable patch that runs away around the corner of the house. ‘There she is.’ Their father’s seat rubs quietly as he turns to his children and they all look to the woman standing on the front doorstep with an apron tied tight around her waist, the red poppies on it smothered by the folds of the material. ‘Come on,’ her father says, pushing up the middle of his spectacles. ‘We can’t keep your aunt waiting.’ Stephen scrambles from the car, the blur of his eight-year-old self already rushing towards Ballechin, his arms reaching forward. Clara wants to follow him, but for a moment she finds it difficult to move, instead watching the flower bed nestled along the length of the house, where fuchsia bushes reach high enough to touch the windows. She feels a need to pop the red buds between her fingers. ‘Clara?’ It’s her father’s voice, bent slightly with irritation. She picks up her satchel, puts it over her shoulder and gets out of the car, to see Stephen standing close to their aunt. Clara ambles over the gravel to them, struck by the mismatched smells of honeysuckle and soap. ‘They’re beautiful,’ Auntie says. She crouches as though to hug Stephen, but his wide eyes make her hesitate and embarrassment settles among them all. Their father’s cough breaks through it. ‘That’s kind of you,’ he says, his hand on Clara’s shoulder. Auntie seems to struggle with the right thing to do and her smile begins to falter with the effort. ‘Do you have any luggage?’ ‘The suitcase is in the boot.’ And their father steps away from them to return to the car. Clara looks towards the vegetable patch, where the runner beans overstretch their bamboo sticks, slumped leaves interspersed with almost glowing orange flowers. She’d like to go and sit among the plants, to draw a picture of their stillness. ‘I’ve brought my toys.’ Stephen stands so close to Auntie that his fingers brush against the material of her skirt. ‘We’ll find space for your things.’ She watches them in a way that Clara has never seen before, as though she and Stephen are some sort of miracle standing on her doorstep. The feeling slips under her skin and she thinks that perhaps she can be happy here. ‘I’m Clara,’ she says, almost laughing at her desire to curtsey. ‘Clara,’ Auntie echoes. ‘And how old are you?’ ‘I was fourteen two weeks ago.’ ‘Of course,’ Auntie says. ‘And here’s Stephen.’ ‘Does anyone else live here?’ he asks, and Clara knows he’s hoping somehow for other children, secret cousins to appear behind the windows. ‘Only my husband Warren,’ Auntie says. ‘We’re so happy you’re coming to stay.’ ‘How long can we be here?’ Stephen asks. ‘I’ve already told you,’ their father tells him. ‘A few weeks. Perhaps a bit longer.’ Clara only realises she’s biting her nail when she takes her finger from her mouth, reaching over to squeeze her brother’s hand. ‘It’ll be fun,’ she tells him. As Auntie stares at them again, Clara studies her face, but she can’t find any trace of their mother. Perhaps that’s a good thing. It’ll be easier to stay here if she can pretend that there never even was a fire.  Lisa Heathfield is the author of SEED, PAPER BUTTERFLIES, FLIGHT OF A STARLING and I AM NOT A NUMBER. Lisa has won numerous awards, including the North East teen Book Award, the Southern Schools Book Award, the GDST Award, the Fabulous Book Award and the Concorde Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Prize (twice) and the YA Prize. She lives in Brighton. You can find her on twitter @LisaHeathfield
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