The first time it ever happened, I had just turned twelve years old.
Those days were foggy with upset and confusion
My bedroom, normally crammed with photos and posters and colourful mess, was bare, swept up carelessly into pale brown boxes. The thought that I’d never sleep in there after tonight made me feel so strange – hot and cold and so nervous that I’d been to the toilet about ten times that day.
‘Why do we have to go?’ I’d asked him so much that even I was tired of hearing the same beaten words, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
Nicholas smiled sadly, and I loved him for not losing his patience with me. ‘We just do. And we’ll be fine, you know. Mum said that our new house is five minutes from the sea.’
I wrinkled my nose. My best friend Claire had been to Blackpool for the day last summer, and she said that the sea was brown and smelt horrid. But Nicholas was trying to help me, so I stayed quiet.
‘Dad will come and visit us, you know. And Mum might be happier there. She always said she loved it.’
I thought of our mum, her mouth pulled downwards, her eyes blotchy. She never used to be like that.
‘I wonder why they ended up being so unhappy,’ I said, picking at the corner of a label on one of the boxes.
‘They fell out of love,’ Nicholas said, as though it was quite simple.
I sighed, frustrated, ripping the label off and tearing it into sad little pieces in my hands. ‘That makes no sense.’
‘Well, you fall in love. And then you fall out of it.’ Nicholas sounded like he was okay with all of it, like it was a fact of life. But I wasn’t so sure. I’d always thought that falling in love sounded nice, like falling into a giant comfy duvet or perhaps a warm pool full of chocolate. But falling out made love sound like a speeding aeroplane or a broken hammock or something at a great height that you could suddenly fall from and hurt yourself.
‘Remember ages ago, when Dad used to go to work and give Mum a kiss on the cheek?’ Nicholas said, seeing that I wasn’t satisfied.
I nodded.
‘Well, he stopped doing that. Did you notice?’
‘So just because he stopped kissing her goodbye, they fell out of love?’
Nicholas looked a bit confused.
‘Or did he stop kissing her because they fell out of love?’
Nicholas didn’t answer me because my bedroom door opened, and Dad appeared. His face, like Mum’s, was grey and tired. He stood awkwardly by the door, his hand resting on the top of his head as though there was nowhere else to put it.
‘All ready for tomorrow?’
I turned away. What a stupid question that was.
‘Erica, don’t be like this. I might not see you for a few weeks now. I want tonight to be nice. Please know that this isn’t my fault.’
‘So it’s Mum’s fault?’ I was surprised to hear Nicholas ask, and I turned back to our dad to see what he had to say.
But Dad was calm, sad, still, as he had been for ages now. There hadn’t been many words at all. Philip Myers in the year above me kept having fights that year and someone said it was because his parents were getting divorced. I’d imagined divorce to be all shouting, yelling, screaming – so many words that you’d have to cover your ears or listen to your Walkman the whole time you were at home. But it hadn’t been like that for us. Mum had told us last week that they were having some time apart, and that we were going to be moving to Blackpool, where she grew up, to give Dad a bit of space. Dad had been fading for a while, saying less and being at home less. He reminded me of the receipt for the cinema that I left on my windowsill the summer before, which started out with bold black letters and now looked like I never went to see any film at all, as though that night had just been erased.
‘It’s nobody’s fault. It couldn’t have been avoided. There’s just no other way,’ Dad said. He took something from his pocket and came and sat on my bed between me and Nicholas. My mattress sagged in the middle and I pulled up my knees to give him more room.
He held out what he had in his hand. It was an old photograph. ‘Here, you’ve probably never seen this, have you? I brought it to try and help explain things to you. Sometimes words aren’t quite enough.’
I wanted to roll my eyes at him, at his English teacher spiel. He was acting like this was a lesson, bringing a prop and planning it all out as though he could make us understand everything and get straight A’s. But when I glanced at Nicholas, and saw him trying to co-operate by staring at the grainy photograph of some wedding, I tried to do the same. ‘No, I’ve never seen it.’
‘It’s one of our wedding photos. The fact you’ve never seen it speaks volumes, doesn’t it?’ We were silent, Nicholas nodding. ‘All of our wedding photographs were forgotten about, stored away in a box in the attic. We always meant to put them in frames and hang them up downstairs, but we never got around to it. In fact, we never got around to most things we planned.’
He passed the picture to me and I stared down at the orange-tinged figures. My dad wore huge, strange glasses and had a moustache that hung down either side of his mouth. My mum looked so young I hardly recognized her. She smiled at the camera, holding tightly onto a huge bunch of roses.
‘You don’t even look like yourselves,’ I said eventually.
‘Exactly, Erica. We’re different versions of us. We were so happy then. We loved being with each other. We were excited. But that changed. We changed. So there was nothing to be done. If you compare the people in that photograph to us now, you can see that. Can’t you?’
I nodded this time, because I could see it, even though I didn’t really want to. Where did that leave anyone who wanted to get married? Why did anyone ever bother if this could happen to them? I didn’t realise I’d asked these questions out loud until my dad put his arm around my shoulders and kissed me on the side of the head.
‘There’s so much you don’t understand yet, Erica.’
His words lodged themselves in my mind, and I heard them again and again, long after he had closed my bedroom door softly behind him for the last time and creaked down our stairs, out of our red front door forever. He was right. There was so much I didn’t understand: why they’d given up on each other, on our house and my bedroom and being my parents together, on Friday nights when we always had sausage and mashed potatoes, on watching TV all squashed together on the sofa in our dressing gowns on Saturday mornings. It worked for me, and I didn’t see why it couldn’t work for them anymore.
But I also didn’t understand how those faces in the photograph would suddenly mean so much to me that the world as I knew it would split, changing into something that had a completely different shape, a different feeling.
And I didn’t understand that this wasn’t the last time I would be in our house; that at some point, way in the future, I would see it again.
***
That night, anxiety prickled at my skin as I lay wondering what the next day would bring. I left my window wide open so I could smell the last of the Yorkshire air – the warm scent of bright green fields and sweet manure and haystacks ripened by the sun. Soon, I’d be starting a brand new school where everyone else already had best friends, and I knew nobody. I’d be wearing a uniform different from Claire’s, and going home to a bedroom I’d never even seen yet in a town that had a brown sea covering everything in a bitter, invisible salt. I shuffled underneath my duvet and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block it all out, but my nervous thoughts jerked to the front of my mind and my head pounded. Amongst those thoughts about my new home and new school, the photograph that Dad had showed us flitted about like a moth. I recalled my parents’ faces in the picture, hopeful and happy. As I thought about them, something that felt like a dream pulled at me, making me dizzy. I tried to sit up but I was pinned to the soft mattress by something much, much stronger than sleep. I tried and tried to force my impossibly heavy limbs to move but I couldn’t even open my eyes. Time seemed to suspend, to hover over me, until my eyes flew open and my body was suddenly free again. My legs and arms flailed wildly, tangling themselves around each other. My bed, my room full of pale brown boxes, everything, fell from beneath me.
And then I found myself standing on a street in winter, as though I’d never been anywhere else.
***
I didn’t know the street. I’d never been there before. I licked my lips and tasted salt. I tried to ignore my shaking legs and pounding heart, so that I could take in the shops and the people, to try and work out where on earth I was and what had happened. My breaths were fast, my head hammering, but somehow, my eyes managed to work and the street around me shimmered and eventually settled into focus.
I was dreaming, that was all. I had to be dreaming. Nicholas had told me about something like this once, a boy he’d heard about who could direct his own dreams, as though they were plays. I was like that boy.
I shivered, the winter air biting my bare skin. Glancing down, I saw that I was still in my pink and white nightie. I ached with cold. Everyone else on the street was bundled up in hats and woollen coats and scarves, their breath clouding the air with little puffs as they spoke to one another. I tried to breathe out too, but my breath didn’t make a swirling cloud like everyone else’s. I tried again. Nothing. It was like I wasn’t really there, but I could see everyone else, and hear their conversations. A woman with long ginger hair stopped just beside me, so close to me that I could smell her perfume – sweet and sharp, like the stalks of fresh flowers. She didn’t seem to notice me, but headed beyond where I was standing, where she threw her arms around a man.
‘How lovely to see you!’ she said as she disentangled herself from him. ‘Are you still coming for the fireworks party at mine tonight?’
I turned to look at the man she was talking to. He had a shaggy beard and long hair, and wore blue trousers that flared out at the bottom. He looked familiar, like one of the men I’d seen on Mum’s old records.
He frowned. ‘I’m not sure I can come, actually. I—’
‘Oh, please do!’ the woman interrupted, touching him on the arm, her long nails making a mark on his leather jacket. ‘Mary’s already cancelled. I can’t have people dropping out. I’ve bought enough potatoes for an army! Thank goodness Laurie can come in her place. You know her, don’t you?’
Laurie? My mum? I frowned, watching closely.
The man nodded. ‘I went to school with Laurie. Okay then, Jules. I’ll be there. Can’t have wasted potatoes.’
‘Oh, great. You know,’ Jules said with a wink, ‘I was excited about sitting you with Mary for dinner. I thought you’d get along very well. But she’s ill, poor thing.’
The man grinned through his beard, then stopped, as though he knew that he shouldn’t, and managed to look worried instead. ‘Oh dear. What’s the matter with her?’
‘Food poisoning, apparently.’ Jules gestured down the road, and I followed the man’s gaze to a window with a dead pig hanging in it, and for the first time I noticed Blackpool Tower’s outline above it and something burst inside me, like a small explosion.
The man I was watching was my dad, and he was about to go to a party and meet up with my mum. This was years and years ago, before I had even been born.
Panic flared inside me. How was this happening? And how was I going to get back home, to the version of my dad that I knew with less of a beard and more lines and sadness on his face?
It was okay, I reminded myself as my breaths began to speed up and my heart began to shiver again.
‘It’s okay, because it’s a dream,’ I whispered, then I covered my mouth. I didn’t want Jules and my old-fashioned dad to hear me and know that I was listening to them, to have to try and begin to explain myself and why I was there in a pink and white nightie. But they didn’t hear my whispers. They were in their own world, both looking down the street at the butcher’s. Or maybe I was in mine.
‘Mary was silly enough to buy cheap sausages from Henderson’s,’ Jules carried on. ‘But everyone knows he lets them hang about in his window all day. It’s all well and good getting a bargain, but I wouldn’t buy my meat from there if it was the last shop on earth. She’s been up all night, apparently. Can’t keep anything down!’
‘That is a shame,’ said my dad. ‘But it can’t be helped if she’s ill.’
‘Are you here for long? Maybe once she’s recovered I could get you and Mary together again. Set you up. You can’t stay single forever, you know. You’re one of the last ones not married.’
‘I’m off to London again tomorrow,’ my dad said. ‘I only came to visit my mother. She had a fall. But she’s better now, and so I need to get back in the morning. Maybe some other time.’
His words burned through everything I knew: my grandma who used to live in Blackpool but who died when I was a baby; my Dad never mentioning London; my parents never even talking about a life before they were together.
‘Ah, well that is a shame,’ Jules’s voice cut into my flaming thoughts. ‘Poor Mary. Still, at least the rest of us will see you at the bonfire party tonight. Maybe Laurie might even do for you! I’ll see you at seven,’ she said as she gave his arm one final pat. ‘Wrap up warm!’ she called as she dashed away down the street. But her words were quiet to me, as the street suddenly broke into jagged pieces and I was flung away from her, away from the street, back into the soft mound of warm sheets on my bed.
I sat up and blinked. The curtains rippled in the breeze, my window still wide open. The late summer sun had soaked my room in golden warmth, yet the hairs on my arms stood on end, my toes stiff with the cold of winter.
My stomach swirled with fright and for a second I thought I might be sick.
From downstairs, I heard Nicholas’s voice, the engine of a van outside, the beep of a horn, Mum yelling.
It was moving day, and my twelfth birthday.
I wanted to believe that I was going to go downstairs to a cake and balloons and presents that were stacked precariously on top of all the boxes, that Mum and Nicholas would want to hear all about the strange dream I’d had, that we’d have time to have the birthday breakfast of fried eggs on toast that we had every single year. Mum had even left the frying pan and the toaster out of the boxes, because I’d asked her to so many times. She was going to pack them last.
But somehow, as I shuffled shakily over to the window and saw the removal van that had been booked for 1pm, and I smelt the hint of winter frost on my skin, I knew that none of this was going to happen.
***
I could tell that Mum wanted to believe me. But would you?
I disappeared to a different time.
She frowned at me, her forehead creasing, her whole face drooping as it did so often these days. She asked me why I was lying, over and over again. Nicholas stared at me like I was a magic eye poster: closely at first, then jerking his head back as if seeing me from a different angle might help him to understand me. I wished that he could understand me, that he could explain it like he always explained everything else to me. Fear had darted around inside me ever since I woke up, or came back, or whatever it was that happened. I’d been gone for hours. Mum had come into my bedroom at nine, and again at ten, and I wasn’t there. I’d listened to her shout about the wasted time hunting for me, ringing my friends, going sick with worry, but the words hadn’t been processed in my mind, because there was way too much other stuff, bigger stuff, for it to deal with. It raced through what I’d seen over and over and over again, trying to find some kind of sense. How had I disappeared? Had I gone back in time? My fingers trembled as I zipped the last of my things into my battered Nike rucksack, frightened that it might happen again at any minute, that I might just fall from the world somehow, to another place where nobody knew how to find me.
The delivery driver packed everything into his huge cavern of a van, and Mum cracked eggs angrily, slamming them onto the side of the pan, muttering about us needing to follow them, about having five minutes to eat our breakfast.
We ate on the floor of the dining room in silence, even though I still felt sick, as though I had been on too many fast fairground rides after too much food.
‘I know how to make you believe me,’ I said, putting my toast down and wiping the crumbs from my fingers on my shorts.
Mum chewed slowly, swallowed. ‘How on earth you expect me to believe that, Erica, I’ll never know.’
‘I saw Dad.’
‘Dad? So you sneaked out?’ She was hurt, and her mouth drew down even lower than usual.
‘No. Not Dad as he is now. It was Dad, but a long time ago.’ My breaths were dangerously short, and I felt like I might faint, but I had to get my words out. I had to make her believe me. ‘I watched him. He was going to a party. His friend who was having the party was called Jules. It was a fireworks party, and it was going to be that night. He had a moustache and was wearing blue trousers, and a leather jacket, and—’
‘How did you know about that? The fireworks party?’ Mum had put her toast down too now, and Nicholas had stopped eating. They both stared at me.
‘What fireworks party?’ Nicholas asked.
‘That’s the first night I got to know your dad properly. We knew each other because he was in the year above me at school in Blackpool. But I didn’t see him once we’d left. We got chatting at the party and that was that. We were never really apart after that. We stayed in Blackpool for a bit, then got married, moved here and had you two. That party was where it all started. Did he tell you? He must have done.’ She shook her head and muttered to herself. ‘But he’s awful with names. He wouldn’t have remembered Jules. We haven’t seen her for years.’
‘Dad didn’t tell me. I saw it because I was there. It was like I went to see the past. But I don’t know how, and I wanted to think it was a dream, but now I know it wasn’t, because you said I wasn’t in my bed this morning when you went into my room. And it was freezing in this other place, and when I woke up – or got back – I was so cold, even though my room was warm. I probably wouldn’t believe someone if they were saying all this either, but I promise it’s true.’ I wiped my eyes because I realised there were hot tears running down my face, and suddenly Mum was rushing over to where I was sitting and putting her arms around me, squeezing me.
‘Erica, it’s okay. I really thought you’d run away. I’m sure there’s an explanation. But if you didn’t mean to leave then that’s the main thing.’ A step closer to believing me, but still so far from understanding what I was trying to tell her, she cupped my chin in her hand and looked into my eyes. As I looked back into hers, bright blue and sad, everything I’d seen whipped through my mind. There had to be something I could do. Surely there was a reason for me seeing what I had. And if I could work out the reason, untangle it from the knot of confusion in my mind, then maybe I could undo everything that was making us all so unhappy, everything that had led up to our home standing empty around us and all of our things whizzing towards a town we didn’t really want to live in.