‘You looked different,’ I say.
It’s the day after Luigi’s. Mum sits at the pine table we’ve had for as long as I can remember, on the chair which I saw in our Yorkshire house only yesterday, her slim hands around her mug of tea as I talk.
‘Different how?’ She became used to me talking about my disappearances in the end. It happened in bursts when I was younger – I’d vanish again and again one month, and not at all the next. Eventually, as I talked her through her life with Dad – where they’d lived, the friends they’d had, the coats they’d worn – she’d had no choice but to believe me. And then it stopped happening and we all stopped talking about it. Now, it’s as though we are picking up something we put down years ago, remembering its shape, how to use it.
I gulp down bitter honesty. Better. ‘Just different. But from what I saw, things had been easier for you. We still lived in Yorkshire. And you were still with Dad.’
She nearly spits out her tea. ‘What?’
‘I know.’
‘And what about you? What were you doing?’
‘I seemed to be close to Dad. And it looked like I was pretty fearless. Not overthinking things, just doing them. You know, the exact opposite of how I actually am. I wanted to stay, and find out how you and Dad were still married, because that seemed to be the big difference. But I couldn’t. And it’s good that I didn’t, in a way, because I was gone for hours as it was.’ I look down into my mug of tea, which is going cold. I can’t face drinking it. I have felt the dizzy nausea of my teenage years since I returned from the other world last night.
‘I can’t believe that in some other life we stayed together,’ Mum says, incredulous. ‘What about Shelley?’
‘I presume Dad never met her. He was quite the family man with us for some reason,’ I say, and roll my eyes. ‘How could someone be so different when they are still themselves? How could your marriage be so different?’
‘Well,’ Mum says, standing up and taking the cup away from me, pouring the cold tea down the sink and turning on the tap. ‘There won’t be just one reason, I suppose.’
‘I think there was.’
She turns from the sink, wiping her hands on her jeans. ‘What?’
‘The day we left Yorkshire, and the first time this ever happened to me, I told you that I saw Dad on the day you two were going to get together.’
‘At the bonfire party? What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Everything. You must remember that I told you about Dad staying in Blackpool just for you?’
My mum’s face is blank. She blandly wipes a tea towel around the cup she has just washed and puts it back in the cupboard. ‘Right?’
‘He’d come back to see Grandma on that day because she’d had a fall. Then his plan was to go back to London. But then that woman who wanted him at the party told him you’d be there, and so he stayed on in Blackpool because he wanted to see you, and he never went back. He changed his whole plan for you. I told you this then.’
‘Did you?’
‘See? You don’t even remember! I should have made more of it. I shouldn’t have let it go.’ My voice is louder than I intended it to be. ‘You fell out of love with each other but maybe it never would have happened if you’d known how much he did for you at the start. I could have made you believe it before we even arrived in Blackpool. I tried to tell you on the way, in the car, but I gave up too easily because I was frightened of what had happened to me, and I thought talking about it too much might make it happen again.’
‘You were a child. You couldn’t have changed a whole relationship. There are so many tiny things that could have been different. That he stayed for me is only one of them. We did so much after that party. We made thousands of decisions. And they were already made by the time we split up. If we were already on our way here when you told me about it, then I don’t think anything you’d said would have made me turn around.’
‘Maybe if I’d tried harder … He never told you that he stayed just for you, but I could have kept on telling you. It could have changed the way you saw him. It could have changed everything.’
‘Erica,’ Mum grabs my hands from across the table, her sudden energy surprising me. ‘You’re not listening to me. Yes, your dad made a mistake not telling me, for all those years, that he changed his world for me. I don’t know why he chose to keep it from me. He was always preoccupied with a more adventurous life. He probably thought he’d go back to London at some point. Maybe changing his plan just happened, and he didn’t even think about it.’
‘If he had told you, do you think you would have seen things differently?’ Do you think you would have put your wedding photographs on the wall, and done your hair more neatly, and sighed less?
‘If he had told me what he’d done for me, when we first got together, of course we might have been happier. But you telling me that over and over again, or in a different way, or at a different time, wouldn’t have changed a whole marriage. You can’t put that responsibility on yourself.’
‘But I do feel a responsibility. I feel like all I’m doing is letting people down, when this thing I have should be making me do the opposite.’
‘Ah,’ Mum says, glancing at me shrewdly. ‘This isn’t just about Dad. It’s about Daniel, too.’
‘It’s about all of it,’ I admit, picking at a placemat. ‘I have a horrible feeling that history is repeating itself. Dad didn’t tell you the whole truth, and it meant that things went wrong. I didn’t tell Daniel that I was staying, so now things are probably ruined with him too. I really think I missed a chance to help you and Dad work it out. So maybe that means I could be doing more to make things right with Daniel.’ I shake my head, my thoughts lost in the fog of my mind. ‘I just don’t know how.’
Mum swipes the placemat from me, inspecting it for damage. ‘You always do make things more complicated than they need to be. You always have done.’
I frown at her. ‘What’s your point?’
‘My point is, think about telling him the truth about where you went last night, and why you never got the chance to talk to him properly. That’s probably all there is to it. Just stop shutting him out.’
I pull my hands from hers and stand up, gazing into the fading light of the garden. ‘I was going to tell him. When I decided to stay, part of that was knowing that I’d probably tell him. And I was tempted for a second last night. But it wasn’t like I imagined it to be, and I was so shaken and exhausted that I just kind of closed off. I couldn’t.’
‘You don’t want to, you mean. And you were so close,’ she says, sighing as though I’m a child who has failed a test for the fifth time running.
I am silent. I don’t want to keep disagreeing because I have moved past doing that. But I can feel my teenage self cloying under my skin, the familiar prickles of frustration and resentment that nobody really understands how I feel, because how can they?
‘I don’t want to tell him because I don’t want to be closer to him,’ I admit eventually. ‘He would be the only person who I’ve ever told who isn’t family. It would be huge. I would feel as though he was the closest person to me I’ve ever had.’
‘And that’s a bad thing?’
‘Of course it is. He’s going. I would gain something and then it would be gone.’ I stare at her, wondering how she can think like this when losing my dad to a new family broke her, made her grey and sad and tired. Was the pleasure in the beginning really worth all this sadness?
‘Being close to someone isn’t about where you live. It’s about how much you trust them and how they make you feel, whether you see them once a year or every day. Berlin isn’t the end of the world, and a year isn’t the end of time. You have to tell somebody one day, Erica,’ Mum says, ‘otherwise you’ll never have anything real with anyone.’