Joshua arrives three days after his due date with a squashed, wise face, eyes the colour of a stormy summer sky and curled, wrinkled fingers.
‘I wonder,’ I say to Daniel as I stare at Joshua in his hospital cot, ‘if he will count as company?’
‘You mean someone who can see you and stop you from disappearing? I don’t think you will now, do you? It hasn’t happened for so long.’
I shake my head, unable to take my eyes from Joshua: this strange, precious bundle that I am now in charge of. The mere thought of my disappearances, of leaving him for an unknown amount of time, of being in a world where he doesn’t exist, terrifies me. The fear is liquid and hot inside me, a physical entity. ‘I just worry that now he’s here, and not inside me, I am sort of free to go again. But surely I won’t go when I’m with him?’ I hear desperation in my voice. I thought, before Joshua, that I knew the taste and feel of fear more than most people. But now, I realize that I didn’t.
Daniel crouches down and kisses Joshua’s tiny cheek. ‘I would think he counts as a person,’ he says, and I feel the knot of dread in my stomach loosen slightly. ‘He’s still a person, after all. He’s just a very small person. But he still counts, probably more than anyone has ever counted before.’ He looks up. ‘So there are two of us now. Two of us to keep you here.’
I nod again, reaching out my hand to touch Daniel’s, my eyes never leaving Joshua.
‘You can look away from him,’ Daniel says, his voice amused, affectionate. ‘I’m here too. You won’t go anywhere.’
I peel my eyes away from Joshua, to Daniel’s face and his creased shirt that he threw on during the night when I went into labour, only hours ago but already strangely timeless. He holds out his arms and I move stiffly, sorely, towards him, letting myself be enveloped my him. ‘I really hope he does keep me here,’ I say quietly. ‘What if he doesn’t, and I—’
‘Stop,’ Daniel says, and his voice is forceful and different and I realize that he is already different to the Daniel of a few hours ago who wasn’t a father, that this Daniel is firmer because he has to be and because he wants to be, that the other Daniel has melted into the past. And I think, as I turn my head ever so slightly to steal a glance at Joshua who is still safe in his cot, I am different too. I am a mother now. That will change everything because it has to and because I want it to.
And so I push the worry away.
***
Once we are released from the hospital, the days with Joshua and Daniel pass sweetly and quickly. I feel the other Erica ebb again, bobbing gently away in the sea of my consciousness. I spend lazy showers alone in a blissful haze of vanilla bubbles, lie in bed and listen to Daniel chat and sing made-up songs to Joshua downstairs as he gives him his last milk of the evening. I am alone, and I go nowhere.
‘You’re going to be fine when I go back to work, aren’t you?’ Daniel asks the night before his return.
I nod, sit Joshua on my lap and hold his tiny chin in my hand, rubbing his soft little back in my other. ‘I will be more than fine,’ I say. ‘I feel like a different person compared to when it used to happen. Everything has changed for the better.’
I spend my mornings walking along the endless promenade, climbing up to the grassy slopes and looking across at the sea with my Silver Cross pram bouncing gently in front of me. I tell Joshua about the snowdrops and clouds and the changing colours of the sky and he watches me curiously, his sharp blue eyes following my every move, his mouth making little o’s in response to my words, bubbles escaping from his tiny pink lips. As we turn and see our house in the distance, I feel a thrill that it belongs to us.
Each night when Daniel gets home from work, we stare at Joshua in his Moses basket, stunned by the way he has changed since the day before, and the day before that. We settle on our grey sofa, flicking through the television channels lazily, eating stews and curries to warm us from the eternal cold that has settled in our house. Pip the cat curls up with us, always on my lap. The days are laced with a kind of magic that comes only with new beginnings.
An agent has been in touch to ask me to complete my book, and so I’m spending any time that Joshua sleeps working on it. There are a surprising amount of stories to include, and within those, histories of buildings, homes and family businesses. I spend evening after evening surrounded by sprawling memories of Blackpool, faded photographs and scribbled phone numbers of people who might agree to tell me their stories. There is the eighty-four-year-old woman who met her husband on a holiday to Blackpool that she wasn’t meant to go on and the fifteen great-grandchildren who now exist as a result; the man whose mother, a performer with the Blackpool Tower Circus, left him wrapped in a blanket in the doorway of Blackpool Tower when he was just two days old; my own dad’s visit back to Blackpool that he extended so that he could stay with my mum, the visit that turned into his life and then mine.
***
It’s in the middle of this stretch of pleasantly repetitive days that I stand in the back garden, rocking Joshua gently and breathing in the sweet spring air. It’s been raining all day, and we’ve been inside, listening to the constant tapping of water on the windowpanes. As soon as the rain stopped, I unlocked the heavy back door and pushed it open, Pip winding himself around my ankles.
The sodden garden is gnarled and wild as an old witch, bypassed completely in the fruitless and seemingly growing pursuit to try and get the house done first. I brush some sticky cobwebs from the bench that has been sheltered by the house, and sit down with Joshua nuzzled into my arm. I hear the rhythmic whooshing of the sea, in and out. The gulls cry and cry. And then, the unexpected: footsteps from the back of the house.
It’s Daniel. He’s grinning, waving some papers around in his hand. I stand up to kiss him.
‘Why are you home so early?’ Usually, he doesn’t get home until at least six. It’s only about four in the afternoon.
‘Because,’ Daniel says, pressing the papers into my free hand and scooping up Joshua from me, ‘I have something important to run by you. You can say no if you want to.’
‘Yes,’ I tell him, and he laughs loudly so that Joshua is startled in his arms.
‘You don’t even know what I’m going to say!’
‘It doesn’t matter when you look this happy. How can I possibly say no? I think I have an idea of what you’re going to say anyway,’ I tell him as I look down at the papers in my hand. When Daniel came back from Berlin and we bought the house a couple of years ago, he got his job at Palms Architecture in Manchester. When he joined the company, it was only small. Daniel helped it to grow by expanding the client list and developing its reputation which is now strong, with businesses returning and encouraging others to do the same. Although the commute is long, and the work trails home with Daniel like a stray dog – into our bedroom, our kitchen table, our car – Daniel’s designs are consistently well-received and John, the owner, has become a good friend. He’s mentioned Daniel taking more of an active role in the business a couple of times now.
‘John wants to move offices,’ Daniel says, as we both sit back down on the bench. ‘The one we saw a while ago is still up for rent, and it’s in a much busier area of the city which would obviously mean more exposure and hopefully new clients. He says that whilst we do that, we could go for an expansion. We’ve been discussing me buying shares of the limited company. But it would mean using all our savings for the house, Erica. They’d be gone.’
‘Daniel, I really don’t mind. You need to say yes.’
‘At least think about it. We’ve lived so carefully for so long. In a way, it feels wrong to spend our money on something other than what we planned.’
I shake my head firmly. ‘It doesn’t. It feels right. You’ve said to me so many times that sometimes plans need to change. This is a big opportunity. You love working with John. You know this is what you wanted.’
‘Obviously, I’ll meet with the bank and I need to see a solicitor as well. We’ll probably just have to hold off on the windows.’
‘And the plastering.’
‘Carpets.’
‘Bathroom.’
‘Everything. I’m sorry, Erica. I really don’t have to do it if you’re not sure.’
‘Oh,’ I say, waving his worries away with my hand. ‘You know how much I love old stuff. I’m in my element.’
Daniel looks at me, and the house and its temperamental toilets that only flush sometimes, its rusty taps and cracked floor tiles, its crooked windows that don’t open or shut properly and threadbare carpets, seem like nothing – tiny dots, like boats on our smooth blue horizon. All I can feel is new beginnings. Our endings are a million worlds away.