I slam into the wall of the alleyway, grazing my cheek so sharply that I cry out.
It is pitch black. There is no moon, no stars. There is just a sky that is low and purple-black with rain and darkness. When the first fat, cold drops start to fall I pull my coat around me. There’s enough loose change in my pocket to catch a tram, so I walk to the tram stop, the rain stinging as it pounds against my throbbing cheek. I pass the coffee shop that I ran from and hear the metallic hammering of rain on the shutters that were pulled down hours ago. The tram is silent, with only one other passenger who sleeps and snores gently. When I get off, it’s raining even harder and frozen water pounds at me, soaking through my clothes and skin into my bones.
When I finally reach home, I have to knock quietly on the front door because I have no key with me. It swings open almost immediately, and behind it is Diane. She holds out her arms to me, then helps me out of my soaking coat, gesturing for me to take off my shoes.
‘Go and put something dry on,’ she says. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea.’
***
Daniel is in bed, and I whisper his name as I stumble through the darkness to find some pyjamas. His breathing changes so subtly I might have imagined it.
‘Daniel?’ I say again. My voice sounds weaker than the version of it that I have become used to in such a short space of time. It’s quieter than the other Erica’s, I realize, and I long to tell Daniel because the Daniel from Before would have sat up in bed, switched on the light and asked me to tell him more, fascinated by the difference.
But from this Daniel, the Daniel of After, there’s nothing.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sorry for everything. I missed you. I wanted to come back. I only had to think of you,’ I begin, but then I see the other side of the sentence, flashing red: when I was kissing Mike. I stammer, and wonder how to finish, or even start, but then Daniel shifts under the covers and sighs.
‘It’s late, Erica. It’s too late for this.’
***
Diane hands me a steaming cup of tea that I can’t face as soon as I walk into the lounge. I should go back upstairs with it, stay distant from her. She knows nothing of my disappearances, and so trying to explain where I’ve been for the past who knows how many hours will be impossible. Usually, it would come naturally to me to avoid her. But everything is on its head these days, grotesque and foreign. And so I press myself onto the sofa next to her, unable to stop myself from shivering. My body pulses with confusion, is hot and cold, exhausted and stimulated all at the same time.
‘He’s mad with me,’ I say, my teeth chattering. ‘And he should be.’ I face her. ‘I’m sorry. It was awful of me to go off like that when you’ve come to help out. I know you must be thinking that I should be there more for Daniel. And I think so too. I’m just finding it so—’
Diane holds up her hand in gentle interruption. It is delicately lined with age, her wedding band solid and fuss-free. ‘No more. I don’t want you to spend energy explaining yourself to me. You’re entitled to grieve in whatever way you need to.’ She cocks her head to the side, frowning as she sees my cheek, then stands up. ‘Let me get something for that.’
She is back in a few minutes, pressing warm cotton wool against my skin, and I feel like a child. Tears spring to my eyes, and guilt floods me, pulling at every single nerve. ‘I should have looked after him,’ I say.
Diane looks down at the cotton wool, speckled with blood from my graze. ‘Yes. And you did.’
‘Joshua, I mean.’
‘I know. And you did.’
‘No. Not enough. I didn’t look after him enough.’
Diane shakes her head, placing the cotton wool in her small, neat lap. ‘This is exhausting for you. But I won’t tell you not to do it to yourself, because I know you can’t help it. We just need to hope that one day, it will end for you and you will somehow accept it.’
I nod, unable to look at her.
‘Daniel seems to think he knows where you went before. But I won’t ask you because it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you came back, and you’re safe, and even though you are going through the worst thing that life could possibly dole out, you’re going to get through it somehow.’
‘Do you think I am?’
Diane laughs. It’s a short, sharp burst of a sound that I’d forgotten people could make. ‘Well, Erica. What choice do you have?’
I swallow, busying myself with gathering the soggy rounds of cotton wool. Choice. The times I have disappeared since we lost Joshua have been almost animal urges, too strong to fight and too sudden to think over. And I reached out to touch the other Erica without even thinking about it.
‘I came back,’ I say out loud. ‘Just thinking of Daniel made me come back. I didn’t want to leave him, you know.’
Diane puts her steady hand over my jittery one. ‘I know,’ she says.
‘Do you think little things are important? Things like candles and blankets and making cups of coffee for each other?’ I ask next. It’s like I have taken a drug. My thoughts collide into one another, erupting from my lips before I can stop them. ‘And do you think our old selves are still underneath all of this? Could doing the little things that we used to do get the old us back? Or are we gone forever?’
Diane isn’t the kind of person to dwell on philosophy, on the mysteries of hypotheticals. But she will do anything to help me, so she furrows her thin brow and tries to look as though she’s debating it. ‘Maybe,’ she says in the end.
‘I hope so. It scares me that we might have changed too much.’
‘Everything changes anyway,’ she says. ‘It’s just that this change was a little too fast.’ She stands up, swiping the cotton wool from my hands. ‘Come on. Drink your tea, and then we can get some sleep.’
I get into bed next to Daniel a few minutes later, but there’s no way I can sleep. The room spins, my senses still ringing the way they do long after you’ve left a nightclub.
I throw off the duvet again and step quietly across the floorboards, through the crooked corridors of our house, and down the groaning stairs to the lounge, clutching my phone.
I don’t sit down, but pace from one side of the room to the other as I dial, waiting for him to answer.
‘Erica?’
‘It’s different now,’ I say. ‘I suppose I probably knew on some level I could do it.’
Nicholas is silent. He doesn’t bring up the fact that it’s the early hours of the morning, or make us do hellos, for which I am grateful. I wonder fleetingly about Amelia, and if she’ll be annoyed that I have phoned at this time, but then my bigger thoughts take over.
‘You know the girl from the 1980s, Helen Boswell?’ I ask breathlessly.
‘What about her?’
‘She said she had learnt to ride horses, didn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Nicholas says after another minute of silence. ‘She did.’
‘Did you realise? At the time? Were you waiting for me to realise too?’ I know as I’m asking that he knew. I know that, ever fair, he gave me the information but didn’t point me directly to it, was perhaps even hoping it would always escape me. ‘You should have told me, Nick.’ I am digging through the dresser in the lounge now, papers and bills and receipts and photographs fluttering out like moths onto the fraying carpet beneath. ‘It’s here somewhere,’ I tell him, and just at that moment my fingertips touch the firm, yellowed paper. I pull it out, squinting in the weak light of the lamp.
‘In the article, Helen says: “I am lucky enough to have a pony in my other life, so I’ve had to learn to ride”. So she actually lived her other life sometimes. She somehow managed to dip in and out of her two worlds. If she’d only watched her other life, like I always have, then why would she have said she’d actually learnt to ride horses? It’s been there, all this time. I’ve had a feeling that there’s something more, ever since you gave me this newspaper, but with everything that’s happened it’s kind of been locked away in my mind. What’s happened has almost made me go crazy with grief, but it’s led me to this. I reached out and touched her, and then I was her. So this means that I could live a different life sometimes. I could have a break from the grief. And that would be better for Daniel, wouldn’t it?’
‘Okay, Erica. We have to clarify right now that you disappearing, no matter what reason you have for it, will never make things better for Daniel. You have to forget this. It’s not fair on him,’ Nicholas says. ‘It’s too much of a risk. This isn’t riding ponies, Erica. It’s bigger than that.’
I close my eyes. ‘I know. It’s too big. That’s why it’s so impossible.’
‘Not impossible. Just difficult. There’s a huge difference.’
‘You’re so awkward, you know.’
‘I’m right though. Promise me you’ll forget what happened? Don’t even tell Daniel. Don’t think about it. Just get through each day.’
I sigh, my pulse finally slowing. Nicholas’s voice, his tone with me takes me back to being a teenager and reminds me of a time when he was my number one person, the one who would slowly and gently pull me back down when my disappearances and everything that had changed for us sent me sailing off into the heights of panic.
‘By the way,’ Nicholas says, a yawn stretching his words. ‘Phoebe got star of the week in assembly. She wants to phone you and tell you about it.’
The thought of Phoebe with her pure, bright laugh that is as clear as a bell, her eager questions, her luminous skin that is as yet not darkened by life, isn’t as difficult as it was in those first few days. So maybe I am moving on, after all.
‘Put her on,’ I joke, glancing at the clock. It’s just after 3am.
‘I’ll get her to ring you tomorrow. So don’t go anywhere.’
‘I won’t. I promise.’
As I hang up, and the promise of sleep finally washes over me, I realize that if the teenage version of myself is still in me somewhere, brought back by talking to Nicholas, then maybe the one I think I’ve lost forever might still be somewhere too.