‘Luna, you’re a physicist.’ Brian is anxious, I can hear it. ‘Time travel is impossible, you know that. So you had imaginary friends as a kid, like thousands of other kids. There isn’t a portal to an alternative reality in your brain, and if you are seriously considering just for moment that there is, then, well, you really are ill. And I am worried about you.’
‘In less than a year from now they will switch on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN,’ I tell him. ‘And maybe, just maybe, they’ll discover the God particle, maybe even the secrets of dark matter, ideas that once seemed like fantasy could become fact. Incredible discoveries happen all the time. The only thing that is impossible is the thing that no one imagines.’
Brian sighs, his frustration and anxiety audible. That he cares enough to be cross with me, touches me. We are still friends.
‘Are you quoting Einstein?’ he asks. ‘Luna, this isn’t funny. This isn’t you, this person who isn’t seeing the facts, the reality of what is happening. Please get some help. I’ll find numbers; I’ll get them to you. You never wanted me to take care of you when we were together, let me take care of you now.’
‘Thank you, you’re a good friend. Thank you for your help. I’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise.’
‘Good,’ Brian hesitates. ‘Whatever this is, once you know what you’re dealing with, you can face it, fight it. As long as you know.’
Going to the window, I see the darkness of the night already giving way to another fierce summer day. I should be afraid, frightened for my health, my sanity and my life, but I’m not. Instead, as the sun burns a path into the sky, I am filled with a curiosity that is just as hot and intense.
Brian is right about one thing – I’m a scientist. I have to know the truth, whatever it may be. I have to know what happened to my mother, and what she did that she could never recover from. And the most wonderful discoveries that have ever been made by mankind always happen when someone decides to believe in the impossible.
8 JULY
‘The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light, nothing once known that may not become unknown.’
—Sophocles
CHAPTER TWELVE
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‘Are you sure this is a lawyer’s office?’ Pea says as we stand outside the strange, store-fronted practice, after a few hours of fitful sleep. It had felt like I’d be up for a whole day by the time she emerged from her room, but it was only just nine. I’d been waiting for her to wake up, sitting on the edge of the unmade sofa bed, working out ways to explain to her that I probably had a brain tumour, but just before I got that checked out I wanted to test the theory that I might be able to travel through time.
The minute she had finally appeared though, in an outsized T-shirt, lost behind a cloud of hair, her legs covered in the bruises that she gets so easily, I had changed my mind. Every scientific experiment needs a control. Something that isn’t influenced by external factors. I can’t tell Pea what’s happening to me, I have to show her. She can be my control.
‘What?’ She looks at me now over the frames of her sunglasses.
‘What do you mean “what”?’ I shrug.
‘You’re looking at me as if was me who wandered off last night and didn’t come back for hours, and then burst into my room raving about a necklace, but it wasn’t. It was you, madam. Are you OK? You seem a bit … off. And I know I mostly make everything all about me, but you know, you can talk to me if you’re having a breakdown about Mum or what she told us. Or if you’re thinking of scoring crack or something. I know all the best spots.’
‘Nothing so exciting,’ I say. ‘Just sleep deprived, and emotional, being here. It’s driving me a little bit nuts but, yes, this is the lawyer who is handling the sale’s office.’
‘Really? Because frankly, if it is, then I’m worried for our safety.’
‘That’s his name on the sign,’ I say, pointing up at the hand-painted, peeling signage. ‘WATKINS GILLESPIE, ATTORNEY AT LAW’.
‘So you’re not worried that it looks like a junk shop that’s gone out of business?’ Pea says, and she has a point. The display unit behind the grimy plate glass is painted black. A thick film of dust dulls its surface, and a sizeable dead spider lies huddled against the glass.
‘Well, he’s the lawyer who’s been appointed to sell the property; Aunt Stephanie chose him, I suppose. If we want a sale to go through, there’s nothing else for it; we have to go in.’
Inside, the shop is dusty and still, except for a woman behind a rickety-looking desk, sitting at a very old-looking PC, her lips pursed in concentration as she types.
‘You gonna just stand there all day?’ she says eventually. ‘Or you gonna tell me why you’re here?’ She raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow at us over her monitor.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I say, ‘I thought you were busy … We have an appointment with Mr Gillespie?’
‘You’re the Sinclairs,’ she tells us. ‘Here about the sale of a property jointly owned with one Stephanie Coulson née Lupo.’
‘That’s us – ta-dah!’ Pea says, waggling jazz hands, and I stare at her. She shrugs. ‘Just injecting a spot of levity.’
The woman’s stern countenance melts into a warm smile, and she chuckles as she extends her hand over the desk.
‘And they tell me you Brits are always so uptight,’ she says. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Lucy Cortez. I’m Mr Watkin’s paralegal. You go right on through. And don’t mind him. He may come over like he’s drunk or mad, but he’s still the best lawyer there is in Bay Ridge. Well, on Third Avenue anyway, unless you count Cynthia Curzon, which I guess you better.’
Pea smiles at me as we go through and knock on an office door with smoked glass; Mr Gillespie’s name is etched on it in gold lettering.
‘Ah, you must be Luna and Pia Sinclair,’ he says, standing up with some effort in order to greet us. White shirt, grey suit, well made, if a little worn and shiny at the seams. He is older than I expected – in his seventies, I am guessing – but he carries himself as if he’s not, making a noticeable effort to square his shoulders and straighten his back. Something about him speaks to me at once; I know that at the very least I want to like him. ‘Via Scotland, I do not doubt, but before that sons of Normandy and the St Clair dynasty, who came over to your fine country with William the Conqueror.’
‘Um. Via Oxfordshire, actually,’ Pea says, pushing her shades into her hair.
‘Recently, perhaps,’ Watkins Gillespie says, gesturing at the two plastic garden chairs that he seems to have arranged for us to sit on, opposite his desk. ‘But everyone is via somewhere else much more ancient that we remember. All of us via the plains of Africa if we travel far enough back in time. Imagine that, you and I, we share a common ancestor.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Pea says, smiling, ‘and I read somewhere that about one in two hundred of all men are directly related to Genghis Khan.’
‘The cranky ones, I imagine.’ Mr Gillespie chuckles. ‘So, you’re here to sign some papers, to allow the sale of the property known as three zero two one, Ninety-Third and Third, also known as Lupo’s Tailoring and Alterations, that your late mother jointly owned with her sister, my client, after their father’s death in nineteen eighty-three. Is that correct?’
‘Yes, but we want to see the building too,’ Pea adds. ‘As you know, we lost Mum recently, that’s why we are here. We want to see the place she grew up, find out more about her life before she left America.’
Mr Gillespie pauses, his blue eyes rising to meet mine. ‘I knew her, your mother, Marissa. I knew the whole family; they made my suits, you know. But I had a soft spot for Marissa, so beautiful, so full of light. She had always seemed to me like one of those people who were born on fire, you know what I mean? Burning for something more. I wasn’t at all surprised that she left Bay Ridge, but I think maybe I wa
s the only one that wasn’t. I was sorry to hear of her passing.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, and Mr Watkins nods.
‘We’re keen to see inside the place that she grew up,’ I tell him. ‘Afterwards, we want to get the building on the market as soon as possible.’
‘Do you know why your mother never agreed to sell while she was alive?’ Watkins asks me.
‘We don’t know, only that she wouldn’t even talk about it. Maybe she hoped she’d come back here one day,’ I tell him. ‘So, how do we get things moving?’
Watkins smiles. ‘We simply take a stroll.’
‘I don’t know why, but I feel like Mum will be there, waiting for us,’ I say, more to myself than the room.
‘Ms Sinclair … May I call you, Luna?’ Gillespie asks. I nod. ‘I lost my darling wife, Serena, a whole lifetime ago. Every day since I’ve felt like she’s in the next room, or waiting for me on the corner, every day for so long that I could only reach one logical conclusion.’
‘And what’s that?’ Pea asks. Mr Gillespie beams at her.
‘Quite simply, that she is,’ he says. ‘You see, our physical bodies, they break down, eventually returning to dust, but energy, energy is never destroyed. And what is love, if it isn’t the most powerful energy we know of?’
‘Yes, the first law of thermodynamics.’ I smile. ‘Although I’m not sure you could technically describe love as a form of energy …’
‘Of course you can.’ Mr Gillespie grins at me. ‘Love is life, and life is the very definition of energy.’
‘Well, that’s poetic but …’
‘It’s so amazing to meet people who knew our mum then,’ Pea interrupts me before I can start a scientific argument. ‘Every time we do we’re building up this picture of her, of this girl, this woman, that we never really knew.’
‘If you have any questions at all while you are here, or need any help, come by. No need to call first, my door is always open to you. I’d enjoy talking about the old days, and about Marissa and the Lupo family again.’
‘Thank you. Mr Gillespie, would you mind if I asked you a question about Stephanie?’ It’s Pea that asks.
Mr Gillespie nods his assent.
‘Have you been in touch with her all of these years?’
‘On and off,’ Gillespie says. ‘I’ve known her and her husband for a long time. I guess that’s why she asked me to handle this sale.’
‘Well, maybe you don’t know – but was Stephanie sorry to hear of my mum’s death?’ Pea’s dark eyes become still and serious.
Watkins Gillespie observes us both for a moment.
‘Well now, young lady,’ he says. ‘I think your aunt never wanted your mother to leave Brooklyn, maybe never forgave her for going. And I guess she’s made a lot of difficult choices in her life, choices she might regret and, what I know is, she’s angry and … well, to tell the truth, an unhappy person. And angry and unhappy people are always sorry about something. But if it helps, I happen to know that she bitterly missed your mother every day of her life.’
‘Then why did she never get in touch again?’ Pea asked. ‘Why did Mum never hear from her, except via a lawyer every time she wanted to try and sell?’
‘That I don’t know.’ Gillespie looks thoughtful. ‘What I will say is, from what I know of Stephanie, she wasn’t ever the sort of person to admit she was in the wrong, no matter how much it cost her. Maybe that was it. But anyway, once the sale is completed, you won’t ever have to think about her or Bay Ridge again if you don’t want to.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I think we’ve only just started our journey of discovery.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Watkins Gillespie regales us with tales of local villains, felons and their many misdemeanours, as we take the short walk to the corner where Lupo’s Tailoring and Alterations is situated. With every step I take, I find I have to check myself, slowing down to match his more leisurely gait, trying not to show that I already know the way there.
‘Of course, round here, you paid your respects to the people that mattered,’ he tells us, as we finally cross the road towards our destination. I stare at the building, halted in my tracks by what I can see of it above the fences that imprison it. Under the glare of the noonday sun it seems to squint, blinded and boarded up, the brickwork crumbling and collapsing into itself, so fragile-looking that it might only be held together by the roots of stubborn weeds that grow from the cracks in the mortar.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Pea says.
‘It looks so different.’
‘Different from what?’ Pea asks me, turning her face to the near ruin.
‘Er … from what I expected,’ I say. The building I thought I’d visited was old, but was cared for, maintained. I couldn’t have mistaken that home, full of life and people, for this shadow of a building.
‘I don’t know why, but I feel nervous.’ Pea takes my hand. ‘Seeing the place that Mum grew up in, we’re expecting it to mean something, but what if it doesn’t?’ Her eyes track back across the street, searching out a noodle bar, a health food shop and finally drawing her gaze with its siren call, a dark and narrow bar. ‘I’d kill for a beer now, anything to take the edge off how I’m feeling.’
‘I’ll take the edge off,’ I say, dragging my eyes away from the crumbling bricks and mortar and onto her. ‘You and me, together. There is nothing to be afraid of in there, whatever we feel or find, even if it’s nothing, we came here together, we leave here together. Just coming here – it’s enough.’
Pea studies my face, trying to interpret my new certainty, and I know she senses it, the optimism I am feeling, the expectation; she just can’t figure out where it has come from. Pia knows it was here, or somewhere near here, that Mum did something she thought of as a terrible sin, something that ruined her life. And if Pia knew what Brian thought, if she knew what I’m risking just to test something that cannot possibly be, to try and find out, she’d probably want to kill me.
Mr Gillespie is still talking, seemingly unaware of our whole exchange, as we come to a standstill by the security fencing. ‘No, you never wanted to get on the wrong side of the guys who ran things, nobody wanted to pay a visit to The Gemini Lounge. That never ended well. Me, I stayed out of it as much as could, paid my dues, kept my head down. They thought I was small fry. I was, and happy to be, flying under the radar. Well, ladies, we have arrived. This is your inheritance, or half of it is, at least.’
A chain-link security fence, topped with spirals of razor wire, stretches around the circumference of the building, and behind that a plyboard wall has been erected, some time ago by the looks it. It’s weathered and worn, and covered in many layers of graffiti. Every window we can see is covered with solid, steel shutters, screwed to the bricks, preventing any hope of breaking in. Around the corner, as we walk down the alleyway, we find a heavily padlocked gate set into the external defences, and beyond that, another steel door covering the side entrance that I thought I walked through last night.
Well, I certainly didn’t wander through that in the grip of a delusion or an hallucination. I’d have been caught and cut up by the wire, stopped by the door.
‘Ah, here’s Mr Green, from Ridge Security Solutions.’ Mr Gillespie greets a heavily set man in a dark suit; a thick metal ring bristling with keys jangles against his hip. He’s carrying a tool box in one hand and has a large box tucked under his arm. As he approaches my eyes are drawn to the box. It is open and full of smaller packages. Even with the label partially obscured by the bend of his arm, I recognise the handwriting on the top one. It belongs to Mum.
‘Mr Green, are you a Reservoir Dog?’ Pea asks, and Mr Green smiles wearily; that’s not the first time he’s heard that joke.
‘Watkins.’ Mr Green nods at Mr Gillespie. ‘Are these the relatives?’
‘Yes, Mr Green.’ Gillespie no
ds back.
‘Well, then, I guess this belongs to you.’ Mr Green offers us the large box, and it’s Pea who takes it.
‘It’s heavy,’ she says, steadying it with one knee, seeing what I’ve already realised. ‘It’s Mum’s writing on the label.’
Pea and I look at each other, and I take the box from her.
‘When?’ I can’t seem to find the rest of a sentence, and fortunately Mr Green doesn’t seem to need one.
‘It arrived months ago. I didn’t feel like I could pass it on to Mrs Coulson. It’s not addressed to her.’
That was certainly true; the recipients written large, on this label at least, read, ‘My Daughters’.
‘I just held on to it. Figured that maybe one day the lady that sent it might come and collect. I never opened it, I don’t know what’s inside. When Gillespie got in touch and told me the other lady that owned the building had died, and that her daughters were coming out, it kind of made sense. So I brought it over.’
Seven months ago, around the time that Mum died. Does that mean this box contains the answers to everything we don’t know? Might it contain his name?
‘Thank you for keeping it,’ I say, because someone has to say something, and Mr Green smiles, satisfied that he’s done the right thing.
‘I could take that back to the office for you, if you like?’ Mr Gillespie offers. ‘You don’t want to be hauling that around.’
‘Thank you, but no.’ I shake my head. ‘Seems like this package has been finding its way to us for a while, I don’t want to let it go now. I suppose we’d better get on with this.’
As we wait, I wonder what we will discover inside, if anything. What frightens me the most is the prospect of finding nothing here, no answers, Just empty rooms.
The Summer of Impossible Things Page 7