I am in the back garden.
Nothing is remarkable, except the fact I am here.
For the last three days, the air has blazed with raw white heat. Our garden, normally a damp, dark green, is burned and dry. Zoe is coming round soon with her boyfriend, Ben. We’re having a barbeque, and Daniel has gone to the supermarket for the requisite charcoal, buns, and burgers.
I stretch lazily, languid in the furious sun for a few minutes before I find the energy to stand up. We’ve spent evening after evening pulling up weeds from the borders. I bend, pull more up now, the leaves crisp against my skin.
‘Hey,’ a voice says behind me, the back gate creaking open. ‘I thought I told you not to move?’
I grin and shake the weeds at Daniel, who is holding huge carrier bags in each hand. ‘I didn’t go far.’
‘Look who I found skulking around at the front,’ Daniel says.
‘Sorry we’re early,’ Zoe says, all pale, shapely legs in frayed denim shorts and huge wedge heels. ‘I was boiling to death in the flat. We brought beers,’ she says, lifting her sunglasses from the bridge of her nose and glancing at me.
‘I’ll get glasses,’ I say, ignoring Zoe’s expectant stare that follows me into the cool, relative darkness of the kitchen. I grab four glasses from the cupboard and then the strip of glossy photo paper that lies on the old-fashioned worktop.
‘I knew it!’ Zoe shrieks when I place the scan photograph in one hand and a glass for her beer in the other. She prods Ben. ‘Didn’t I say I knew it? Wow,’ she says, beaming, and I beam too. ‘This is so exciting.’ She bends and rummages around in the bag she’s brought. ‘Good job I got these non-alcohol beers, too. You know, just in case.’
‘So it was that obvious at the wedding?’ I ask.
‘Yes. Only because you’re normally so perfectly flat-stomached,’ she says, rolling her eyes, and an image of the other Erica pops into my mind for the first time in weeks, her stomach concave under her bright vest top, her body so different from mine already. ‘Plus, I saw you chuck your Champagne into a plant pot after one sip. Complete waste. You should have given it to me! So how far along are you? When are you due?’
‘Spring,’ I tell her. ‘The middle of March.’
She squints and looks at my stomach. ‘Boy or girl, do we think?’
‘Boy,’ I say.
‘Boy,’ Daniel says.
‘Girl,’ Zoe says.
We all wait for Ben, who says, ‘Boy or girl,’ then we laugh.
‘Well, cheers. To Erica and Daniel, and your new family,’ Ben says as the sun scorches down on us.
***
Once we’ve eaten blackened burgers and sausages and deliciously juicy slices of watermelon, we all collapse on the stretch of crisp lawn at the back of the house. The sound of the radio floats from the kitchen and competes with a distant thump of music that comes from somewhere along the promenade. We chat, our hands dangling over our faces to shield our eyes from the glare of the sun. Zoe and Ben quiz us on names we like and the nearby schools. I ask Zoe about work and she groans, telling me about how difficult the house market is.
‘What about the museum? How’s the job thief?’
Now it’s my turn to groan. I turn over onto my stomach, but that feels strangely uncomfortable so I flip back over and cover my face again. ‘He’s unbearable.’
When I didn’t make the interview because of the accident, Katie had no option but to offer the job to the other candidate, Carl. He is a tall, pin-striped, loudly spoken man who seems entirely at odds with the fragile elegance of the town that we’ve been trying so hard to highlight. Since he started, the museum has changed its opening hours, and the other day he called me into a private room, hands steepled, his face full of false sorrow, and told me that my hours would have to be cut due to a lack of resources and funding.
‘He’s already taken down the exhibition display,’ I say, frowning. ‘I’m really upset about it. It took so long to put it together.’
‘Don’t be upset,’ Zoe says, standing up and peeling a cold sausage from the barbeque. ‘Be angry.’
I sigh. I never told Zoe why he got the job over me, just that he did. She thinks I turned up and did my best at the interview but that the museum chose Carl, and that the accident, when I went out in the car and lost control, was unrelated, just another unfortunate event. I have never told Zoe about my disappearances. We met at school, when we were part of a huge friendship group that I tried my best to hide behind. It was only when we went to college and ended up in the same English class that I got to know her a little more. By then, my disappearances happened less often, so there was no reason to open up to her.
‘I think it’s good they’ve reduced your hours,’ she says as she takes a bite of the cold sausage, grimaces, then hands the rest of it to Ben. ‘I don’t think being with Carl every day would be good for you. Have you looked to see if there’s anything else around here?’
‘Yes, I have,’ I tell her. ‘There’s nothing similar. But Katie has been in touch a bit. She told me to bring all the exhibition stuff home, so I have.’
‘She’s going to be an author,’ Daniel says excitedly.
‘Well, we’ll see about that. I’ve written to a few agents with my idea of a book about families whose lives started as a result of a trip to Blackpool.’
‘That’s so cool,’ Zoe says. ‘Have any of them got back to you?’
‘Not yet. But it was only a few weeks ago. I think they can take a while to reply.’
Zoe springs up. ‘I have a good feeling about this, Erica. Cause for another beer, I reckon. Anyone else?’
There’s the clink of bottles, the blaze of sun on my skin and the tickle of grass beneath me. I close my eyes as a heavy tiredness washes over me, put my hand on my stomach and listen as Ben asks Daniel if he’s played football lately. I smile to myself; Daniel still hasn’t told his football-crazed friends that he doesn’t want to be part of their five-aside team. Because they are friends from university, they are all spread out over the country and he spends quite a lot of time travelling to different locations, because although he doesn’t particularly want to play, he likes to see them and be part of their group.
‘I only go for the beer after,’ Daniel tells Ben now, and Ben laughs.
Zoe sighs and looks at her watch. ‘Work tomorrow,’ she says. ‘We’d better go soon, Ben.’
But it’s one of those days that nobody wants to end and they are still here an hour later, as the orange sun dips in the sky and a gentle breeze begins to ruffle our hair. I stand up and brush strands of yellow grass from my skirt before clearing the plates.
‘You want some help?’ Zoe offers, but I shake my head.
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
I place plates in the sink, run the tap and stare beyond to the garden. After five minutes or so, Daniel comes into the kitchen, his hands full of bottles of ketchup and mustard, his face glowing from a day outside. He puts the sauces away in the fridge, then comes over to me and puts his arms around me. ‘How does it feel?’ he whispers.
It’s a question that would have made more sense, in a way, before. How does it feel not knowing if you will last a whole day in this life; how does it feel when your bones and muscles are slammed into a world that is not your own? How does it feel seeing yourself whole, not one angle in a mirror or a photograph, or self-aware, behind the lens of a video camera, but as a complete person?
But it’s not this he wants to know.
He wants to know how it feels for me to be alone and yet to feel safe; to watch my friends outside in the softening light of the garden after a day of lounging and food and sun; to feel full and happy and complete and like I’m never going to disappear into another world again.
I lean into him. ‘It feels like … someone has closed a door that was letting in a horrible draught. It feels warmer. Safer.’
‘Good?’
I close my eyes and listen to the low hum of Zoe and Ben’s voices from outside, their bursts of laughter, the wails of the seagulls that circle the house and the rolling of the waves beyond. ‘So good.’