I turn to her. ‘I saw him.’
‘Shit.’
Taking a sip from the bottle of Coke she offers me, I try and recall what it felt like to be near him, but that feeling has gone, like it was a dream and it troubles me that being near him affected me so slightly. I wanted him to be a blueeyed monster with a tail and horns, a beast that I could easily destroy. But he was just a man. Soon, I think, soon, if I’m not very careful, I won’t know which place is which or where I am supposed to be.
‘I had this idea that seeing him would give me this kind of power, or direction. That it might even weaken my resolve, that I’d see myself in him and hesitate. But … there was nothing.’
‘These last few hours …’ Pea slides her entwined fingers between her knees, and for the first time I realise that she has been doing more than just waiting for me. ‘They’ve been awful for me, terrifying. Not knowing if you were coming back, not knowing what you were going through, waiting from second to second of this reality for it to shift. It’s freaky.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t think.’
‘I went to a bar.’
I start, turning to her but she shakes her head.
‘The one across the street. I went in and I ordered a shot, and I sat there on the barstool and I thought, what does it matter if I drink this, and the next one and the next, because in the next five seconds everything could change forever, and nothing I do now will mean a single thing.’
‘Did you … ?’ I almost can’t look at her.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No, because even if there are only five seconds of this life left, I won’t throw away what I’ve worked so hard for. But God, I wanted to. Luna … I thought I could do this with you, but I’m a coward. Please just stop. Let’s go home. Just accept, like everyone else, how life has been, and let’s live the rest of our lives the best we can. That’s what she would want for us, you know. Please.’
Pea slides down one step, twisting to face me.
‘Please, let’s just go home.’
‘I saw her,’ I say instead of replying. ‘I saw Riss. I tried to warn her …’
Her head dips so that I see her dark roots and the white of her scalp beneath; she looks almost as if she might be praying.
‘It’s not fair that you get to see her and I don’t,’ she says.
‘Do you know today is the day that Dad asked her to marry him?’ I reach out to stroke her hair. ‘I wonder if he remembers, while he’s at home in the garden or shut away in his darkroom. I wonder if he remembers the way she looked on the day he took her down to the shore and gave her a ring? I think, if he did, he’d want me to stay. To see it through.’
‘But why, when although the life we have isn’t perfect, it is at least ours?’
I should tell her about Michael. I should tell her about how when I’m there the last twenty-nine years seem like nothing, like twenty-nine seconds, breathing that air, being with Riss and Michael. I should try to explain that it’s more than just saving her, than simply paying the price for the debt the man that made me owes. It’s about really living, living much more in a few minutes there than I could ever do in one whole lifetime here. I should, but I don’t. I’m afraid she will try and talk some sense into me.
‘Because something this miraculous has to have a purpose,’ I say eventually. ‘There has to be a reason for it to happen, and … I just don’t see that walking away and pretending it hasn’t happened is possible. After all, Mum never managed it.’
Pea turns her back on me, and for a moment we stare at an unexpected edifice erected in the narrow strip of land alongside one of the houses over the road. A huge glass cabinet, as tall as me, framed with carved wood that would have been painted gold once, but now all rotted away, and filled with tiny models, animals, people, buildings, windmills, gnomes, populating a scale model of Crete. A whole tiny world, created with pride, designed to be seen, tucked away down this street where only the same people would see it every day.
‘Today is the eleventh, right?’ I ask her. She checks her watch and nods. ‘The attack happens on the thirteenth, the same night as the blackout.’
Only two more days before it’s too late, but if I fail, then at least I can live with knowing that I tried.
Pea is quiet for a moment. ‘I just wish I could come with you.’
‘I wish that too,’ I say.
‘You know, I was thinking. The movies, they’re all the things she cut out of the films she showed at home. Her perfect Christmas edit of our “perfect life”. In this box, this is all the bad stuff, the stuff we never talked about. She packed it all away and sent it back to the place where it all went wrong.’
‘I think you’re right,’ I say.
‘So shall we watch movie number three?’
‘Yes, just … I just need to see something.’
Pea follows me as I walk, breaking into a trot, beads of sweat trickling from my hairline as I run the last few yards and come to a stumbling halt across the street from where Michael’s bakery was, where we bought our doughnuts.
It’s gone, long gone by the looks of it. Now in its place stands a guitar store specialising in Gretsch guitars, one particularly beautiful model revolving around and around in a class cabinet in the window. There’s a banner across the window celebrating twenty-five years in business. I can see beyond the faded fliers deep into the shop, where racks of instruments are pinned to the walls.
‘It’s changed.’ I speak softly, sadness and joy mixing sharply. ‘He got out.’
‘What are we looking at?’
‘One of the people I met in seventy-seven,’ I say, trying to sound casual. ‘Michael, he used to work here. This used to be a bakery and now it’s gone.’
‘Does that mean something?’ Pea walks into my frame of vision to make me look at her. ‘Is he important?’
How wrong it feels, how disjointed, to wonder what ever happened to someone who, as far as my heart is concerned, I was so close to just minutes ago. Perhaps it was something I did or said that meant he left Bay Ridge and changed his life for the better. I hope so. And yet even as I hope, I feel how much I miss him, the very possibility of him. All I can do is brace myself against the searing hot pain of only understanding what it means to really want someone at the very moment you know they can never be yours.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
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The light is a pale gold, and one that I don’t immediately recognise. Paint peels away from creamy wooden shutters, flung outwards to reveal a landscape made up of buttermilkpainted buildings and ancient terracotta roof tiles.
‘France,’ Pea says, her legs crossed as she sits at my feet. ‘That amazing old house we stayed in somewhere near Bordeaux, do you remember? With bullet holes in the wall from the Nazi occupation, and you told me that after the war the locals hung all the collaborators from our balcony? Dad was working on a war film somewhere nearby, and he arranged for us to come over for a week or two. Mum hated it because we weren’t at home, and we didn’t see him anyway.’
‘Yes,’ I say. I remember spending hot afternoons in a small bright-blue pool, the dog of the house following Pea and I as we laboured from end to end, as if he were intent on keeping us from drowning. But when I think of it, I don’t feel warm and sunny like my snapshot memories are. I feel cold.
Mum comes into frame, wearing a loose, turquoise kaftan. Her hair, wild with washing and sun, has silvered a little and, when she approaches the lens to refocus, I can see the first traces of lines, a little paler that her normal skin tone, etched around her eyes – she is around thirty years old and so beautiful.
‘What will they say,’ she speaks into the camera, her tone confidential. ‘Let’s see.’
‘Girls!’ She takes a few steps back as she calls us, mild afternoon light flowing through the silk of the kaftan to outline her legs. ‘Luna! Pea? It’s time!’
Pe
a arrives first, of course, bounding in to the room with such gusto that the camera trembles as she springs off the floorboards.
‘I’ve arrived,’ she says with a flourish, bowing towards my mother, who curtsies in return. I am second, hovering in the corner in shorts that I have almost outgrown, crossing my arms across my chest, self-conscious in the blue-and-white-striped halter-necked top that Pea had chosen for me.
‘Pia Sinclair –’ Mum makes a hand of her fist, pretending to hold a microphone ‘– please tells us what you will be when you grow up.’
‘Easy,’ Pea says, her hands behind her back, chin up, just as she had seen the von Trapp children do in The Sound of Music. ‘I am going to be a singer, a dancer and an artist, mainly an artist, more famous than anyone else, and I will draw with all of the colours every time, and not care if I colour over the lines and sometimes go through the paper a bit. Also I’ll be very rich and buy Mummy a house with gates that lock, and roses that grow up the wall and ivy that covers the window like Sleeping Beauty, so that no one can see in.’ She nods emphatically, and turns to Mum. ‘Can I go back in the pool now?’
Mum nods, her hand covering a smile.
‘Bella Luna?’ She turns to me, and I stay in the corner, half in the shadows.
‘Miss Luna Sinclair.’ She holds the invisible microphone again, and I am lured out into the sunlight that streaks the honey-coloured floorboards. ‘Tell us what you will be when you grow up?’
As I watch myself squirm, under the camera, I am inhabiting that version of my body once more. Feeling the smooth, warm oak under my bare feet, the trickle of icy pool water, dripping from my hair and down my back, and I try to remember why it is that I don’t want to be there, why it is I don’t want to see Mum, but I can’t. Whatever it was that gave me that sense of confusion and unease that radiates from the film, it will not reveal itself.
‘What will you be?’ Mum asks me softly.
‘Honest,’ I say so softly it’s barely audible, perhaps even not audible, and I am only able hear it because I am reciting what the girl I was once said under her breath. ‘Honest, happy and good.’ Anger mounts as my tone rises, my small fists balling at my sides as I glare at her, as I glare at the mother I love. Still the reason why won’t present itself. ‘Grateful and loyal,’ I add, ‘and I will never, never ever, ever leave my children alone. Never, ever.’
Mum kneels down on the hard floor, the sun at her back, and reaches out to touch me. And in that moment what I remember is spent; everything else I see feels like the film of someone else’s life.
‘You weren’t meant to see that,’ she says softly. ‘It wasn’t real, I didn’t mean it,’ she adds.
Still the nine-year-old girl in the blue-and-white stripes says nothing.
‘I would never, I could never, leave you, especially not like that. It was wrong, stupid, more of an accident that anything. I was cutting my hair and the scissors slipped and you happened to come in just when there was the most blood, that’s all. That’s all it was, an accident, but it’s healing now, see?’
She holds up her arm and the long medieval sleeve of the kaftan falls back to reveal her wrist neatly bound with a bandage.
‘Everything is fine, Luna,’ she says, holding me close to her. ‘I’ll try harder, I promise. I won’t ever let you down. I’ll be braver, I will. I’ll be brave.’
The girl trembles, suddenly freezing cold in the pool of sunlight, and Mum gathers her up in her arms, sinking to the floor as she holds her daughter, muttering something soft and safe, rocking them both gently in one lulling moment.
‘It wasn’t about wanting to leave you,’ Mum says at last. ‘It was about wanting to hurt myself. I just needed to feel something else, enough of something else to let me feel how much I love you.’
‘Do you promise?’ the girl asks her.
‘I promise you that I will be honest, kind and good and true, always, and never leave you while you need me, ever.’
Pea and I sit transfixed, watching in silence as, for several minutes more, the girl and the woman sit on the floor, holding each other, rocking back and forth, until eventually the girl’s thumb steals into her mouth and she stares out of the window at the passing white clouds.
And then, quite suddenly, the girl gets up.
‘I’m going to swim, too,’ she says, and for one moment I remember how the cool stone of the marble stairs felt beneath my bare feet.
Mum sits there on the floor for a few seconds more, before getting up, and glancing out of the window, pulling the kaftan off, and grabbing a pair of shorts to put on over her bikini bottoms, taking a raft of bracelets from her bag and fastening them on her wrist, one after the other, until the bandage is completely concealed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
‘The key is going to be the centre parting,’ Pea says as she looks from me to an illustration of Ali McGraw on the cover of an old copy of Time she had found in Milo’s store. ‘And really, really dim lighting. Aren’t you afraid they might think you’re somebody’s mum, come to take them home?’
‘That magazine was printed in nineteen seventy-one,’ I tell her. ‘What if I look out of date?’
‘Are you kidding me?’ Pea has her brave face on, being cheerful, trying to pretend that she isn’t worried about her crazy sister who is about to go and loiter around a derelict car lot, wearing a ripped-off Yves Saint Laurent gown, waiting to travel back in time to go clubbing. And I am grateful.
‘And, I’m not,’ I say. ‘They didn’t worry about sun cream or fancy face serums back then, and I’ve always, always looked after my skin. I don’t drink much or smoke. I can’t help it if I’m naturally youthful. I hold up pretty well in the nineteen seventies.’
‘Well, at least you do somewhere,’ Pea retorts, as she aims the spray can at my head once more.
After the film had spluttered to a stop, I had carefully wound it back, putting it away in the tin and closing the lid.
‘I don’t remember any of that,’ I’d told Pea. ‘I remember the house, the pool, how Mum cried at night because Dad came home for dinner and then left again, but I don’t remember seeing what I must have seen. My mind has simply locked it away.’
‘We always knew she smoked,’ Pea had said, ticking words off on her finger as she talked. ‘And we knew about the anti-depressants and the tranqs.’
‘We knew that sometimes she’d go to bed as soon as we get home from school, and we’d be eating sandwiches for tea and breakfast,’ I’d continued. ‘We knew she cried and cried and cried until her skin was raw and her eyes were puffy, but never in front of us.
‘But I never knew she’d tried to kill herself before,’ I’d said. ‘Or didn’t remember it clearly enough. If we’d known … ?
‘She didn’t want us to know, not until now. It’s part of her way of explaining, don’t you see?’ Pea had insisted. ‘Explaining that what she did wasn’t out of the blue, and telling you that she kept her promise to you, the promise she made in this film. She didn’t leave us while we needed her. She’s telling us she chose her moment, and she’s asking us to forgive her.’
Afterwards, I’d carefully unwrapped the fragile paper parcel, and taken out the dress. The folds were set in the cheap, false silk, and the cherry-red fabric had darkened a little along the seams, but, of course, it was in great condition; it had never been worn.
‘Well, I guess this is what I’m wearing when I meet her at the disco tonight,’ I’d said to Pea. ‘Will you help me get ready, do my make-up the right way, and my hair?’
‘You want me to do your hair?’ Pea had been instantly suspicious.
‘I can’t very well arrive at a night club looking like this, can I?’ I’d insisted, gesturing at my jeans. ‘And besides, Riss made this for me; if I don’t wear it, she’ll be hurt.’
Now, as she does my hair, a faint smile plays around her lips. ‘There’s a boy.
There’s a boy you like in seventy-seven. Oh my God, Luna, you’ve got to see how wrong that is; you aren’t even born yet!’
‘There isn’t a boy,’ I say, maintaining a tradition of never talking about the men I like to my nosy little sister. ‘And even if there was, I’d be older than him there, not the other way around. Older than him there and younger than him here …’
‘The guitar shop!’ Pea hits her target with precision. ‘You were wondering what happened to him!’
‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ I say.
‘Why not, we can go in, ask about the previous owner? Someone must know where he is.’ Pea is excited, stepping away from me as she pictures some kind of Hollywood ending.
‘Because, I won’t be here, don’t forget. If I do what I need to do, I won’t be here. I can’t have him, not for more than a few hours anyway.’
Pea stops, her shoulders falling, cloaked in her hair, her teasing smile fading away as she reads my expression.
‘Well, let me make you truly beautiful then,’ she says. ‘And at least you can have him tonight.’
At last I am ready. Pea makes me stand up as she turns around the chair to face a mirror she has covered with a towel, because she has to create drama in whatever she does.
‘Ready for the big reveal?’
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘What happens if I go there and it doesn’t work. The club closed down decades ago. What if I go there dressed like a hooker and nothing happens? One more night will be gone, one more chance. I don’t have a plan, I don’t know what I’m doing. What if I’m doing it all wrong?’
‘Then you come home again,’ Pea says, curling a stray strand of my hair around her finger and spraying it into position. ‘And maybe by tomorrow you’ll change your mind about all of this, and just let the present be the way it is.’
‘Everything will be how it’s meant to be,’ I say, gesturing around the room. ‘This isn’t how it’s meant to be. This is the wrong version.’
‘How do you know that?’ she asks me.
‘Because I’ve always known it, ever since I was a child. I’ve always felt uncomfortable in my own skin, always felt out of sync with everything, everyone else. It’s not just having a different father. There isn’t a place for me here, or anywhere.’
The Summer of Impossible Things Page 20