On the night of Joshua’s first birthday, I dream that I am twelve again and that we are in the car on the way to Blackpool. The smell of the toast and eggs that we had for breakfast is sticky, lingering on our hair and clothes. Nicholas is bony and teenaged, his skin smooth and for now unmarked by acne or stubble. He stares at me from his position in the front, craning his neck around awkwardly.
‘What?’ I say in the end.
‘I just can’t believe you time travelled.’
Nausea and fright shoots through me and I shake my head. ‘I don’t know what it was.’
Maybe it was a warning, I think, and maybe I should say more to Mum. Maybe I should make her turn around.
Mum clutches the steering wheel, leaning so far forward she’s barely in the same car as us. I try to reach her, to reach the steering wheel and change the direction but it is too far away and no matter how much I stretch myself out, I don’t get any nearer.
‘Mum?’ I say. She is crying. Her tears fall and fall. I hear them drip onto her legs, and then I see that she has Daniel’s legs and is wearing Daniel’s black jeans. Then she has Daniel’s face, and he is crying too, and the passenger seat is empty.
I wake up and gasp for air, my hands still reaching out for the steering wheel that Mum gripped in my dream.
I sit up dizzily and pull the duvet around me. The superficial heat of spring faded at sunset and it’s cold now. I stare down at Daniel, oblivious in sleep, the faint trace of a smile on his lips. It will disappear as soon as he wakes. When will be the next time he smiles?
He can’t take any more. He has reached the end, the same end that I reached months ago.
***
I need to do more this time.
I should have done something, somehow, to save my parents from such sour disappointment, from walking down the wrong road, all those years ago.
I should have done something to save Joshua’s life, to save Daniel and myself from what has happened to us.
But I did neither.
Being strong, putting Phoebe’s pictures on the fridge, clearing up shards of broken china, is something. But it isn’t enough.
I need to be fearless like the other Erica. Daniel is wrong about her because he hasn’t seen her. I need to be more like the version of me I would have been if I hadn’t seen my family fall apart, if I’d had my dad supporting everything I did, if I’d kept my friends and not disappeared all the time and not missed half my life when I was young.
I reach over and kiss him lightly on the cheek before stepping softly out of the room.
It happens easily. I am forever ready to escape these days. As soon as I leave the bedroom, I disappear to the other world.
Erica is sitting up in bed, a lopsided lamp giving her a warm glow. She is typing quickly and quietly on a wide silver laptop. The air is balmy and as I glide silently towards her, I smell lemons and a sharp, unpleasant tang of garlic.
Oh, Erica, buy some mints, I think, and then feel strangely guilty. I reach out my hand and it wavers. I see our skin together, hers glowing, mine pale.
I pull it away, doubt simmering inside me. Once I am there, Daniel will be alone. I might be gone for days. Do I really want to leave him for so long? I don’t even really know what will happen to the world I’ve left behind when I become the other Erica. The last time was only a second, but what if this time is much longer? Can I really expect Daniel to just wait for me, for hours and days on end, when I know how much he hates me going?
And then I remember. He is not Daniel now. I could find another Daniel, one who isn’t broken, one who smiles and laughs and can keep up with the pace of his own mind. I could make him a reality, and the other one a dream, an alternate reality that was never really lived out.
I have to try to help him. Otherwise, what has all this been for? I can do something. Even if he doesn’t think I should, he won’t be real soon, will he? I could get the old Daniel back. I have to do something this time.
I reach out, close my eyes, and feel the sting of becoming somebody else who is not quite myself.
***
Straight away, I feel the clear absence of grief that has been dragging around my neck and my bones, the pleasant lack of pain that has twisted around my soul too tightly.
The smell of garlic and lemons is gone, my senses immediately used to them.
I lean forward to read what is on the laptop in front of me.
is spread across the top of the screen on a red banner, and underneath is a blog entry.
I sit back and stop reading for a minute as a memory comes to me. Our house in Yorkshire. Leaving for work at the travel agent’s on winter mornings and scraping a thick layer of ice from the windscreen of an old Fiesta that’s mine. My dad coming out and pouring a full kettle of hot water onto the glass, us both watching nervously, waiting to see if it would crack.
I push my hair from my face, the long strands that I’m not used to anymore wrapping themselves around my fingers.
So I have new memories.
The blog continues:
You know nothing of darkness, I think fleetingly, but as I do, I feel a strange thud of something that isn’t quite sadness, but a kind of longing, a vague unease. I try to pinpoint it, to recognise it. What does she want? It always seemed when I was watching her that she wasn’t that homesick, that she was doing what she’s always wanted to do. I expected to feel a sense of achievement, a pleasant bloom of satisfaction. Has she just been pretending?
As I stare at the screen, trying to look for answers that I know probably aren’t there, a message lights up the phone next to me. I scoop it up, feeling somehow like I am being intrusive. It’s your phone, I tell myself. Yours. Mine.
There is a passcode, and I enter it instinctively because it’s the same as on my phone that I left behind: the year of my birth.
The message is from Mike.
I’d forgotten that Mike called me E for a brief time when we first met. I can’t think now why he stopped, or if maybe I told him not to.
Mike had been staying at the cottage last time I saw this version of my life, but now he doesn’t seem to be. I wonder where he is now, and where he’s going. I stare at his message for a minute, trying to beckon a memory of where he is and what he’s doing. Nothing comes.
I reply, hoping it’s not too obvious that I don’t know what he means. Faint guilt, edged with panic, ripples through me again as I think of Daniel in bed at home, waking up to find me gone. Perhaps there, I have already been gone for a few days.
But I’m doing this for both of us, I remind myself. I have to find the other Daniel. Get us together so we can start again.
And then what? What will happen to the other version of him? I squeeze my eyes shut then open them as I hear Mike’s reply ping in. And as I read, I feel things fall quietly into place.
I reply without even thinking.
After I have replied, I scroll through the photos on the phone, trying to ignore the niggling feeling that I have stolen someone’s property. There are a few of me and Nicholas. As I sit and look at the images, vague memories of when they were all taken begin to wash over me, fuzzy and remote as though they were from childhood even though the pictures look recent. Some are of colourful groups of travellers. Most of them are of places: turquoise seas, oriental buildings and vast green fields. The new memories that slot into my mind are bigger and brighter, more adventurous than any of my own, but even as I stare and stare at them, my emotions remain flat.
The final photo is of Mike. He is in a bright white shirt which makes his tan look even darker, his hair blonder. A new string of memories from when I took the photo flashes into my mind: sweet red wine in a tiny cafe, hot pizza in a box, long kisses as we stood on an elaborate bridge. This version of me likes Mike, I realise as something finally stirs inside me when I look at the photo. But there’s no love. The feeling seems shallow and slightly unfulfilling, a clear rockpool without ripples or tides.
I think of my own ocean of feelings that I’ve left behind. I picture my phone, left on my bedside table at home. I have to try hard to recall the photos on there, to replace them in my mind with the ones I’ve just seen. I think they are mainly of Joshua but my mind won’t let me recall specific ones. It will only let me think of the ones I’m looking at now. Anxiety flares inside me, the feelings of the old version of me taking over momentarily those of the new. I suddenly feel like I can’t do this.
I take a deep breath, and put the laptop down on the stone floor. I think of Daniel, of my own bed with its warm, crumpled covers; the sound of the gulls screeching as they bounce on the wind outside the window; the scent of coffee and the rainbow cake from the party of my old yesterday; the memory of Phoebe’s drawing of Joshua, of home. But it does nothing. I shut my eyes and open them again. I am still here. My panic ebbs in a way, somehow becomes detached, like the kind you feel for a character who is being chased in a film. How could I have been so sure that this was the right thing to do?
I look down at the phone again. Could I phone Daniel? Do mobile phones somehow reach alternative worlds? Maybe I could try. But would it be this Daniel, or the new one? Would he know who I am? I frown, staring at the numbers on the keypad, but they are meaningless. His number is lost in the confusion of my mind and I can’t remember it.
As I stare at the phone, another text from Mike appears, brightening the screen.
I type quickly.
I jump up from the bed and open the chunky wardrobe door in front of me. A mass of colour greets me: red cardigans and pink dresses and blue skirts. I have never worn colour before; I’ve only ever worn black. I pull a short magenta dress with spaghetti straps from its hanger and pull it on, staring at the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door. I move closer to look into my own eyes that I know so well, that are exactly the same. Then I step away again and see the subtle differences. I stand taller, and my skin is darker. My hair is longer. My shape is different: curvier in some places from a summer of Italian cheese and wine, flatter in others from the lack of pregnancy. But there is a difference more elusive than any of that. I flatten the dress against my skin, and turn away from the mirror.
I find a suitcase under the bed and throw the tangle of clothes into it. As I do, the phone rings. I grab it and swipe to answer.
‘What’s the rush?’ Mike says. His voice is lazy and slow.
‘I just want to get back. There’s only so much olive oil I can stomach,’ I say, attempting to keep things light. It’s the first time I have spoken as this version of myself and I am surprised at how it feels: louder, but without the confident ease I’ve come to expect.
I close my eyes and slump down on the bed, listening to Mike’s voice as he talks about flights and prices and tickets and London. I can hear him tapping away at a keyboard as he speaks. I want to know why he’s not living here at this cottage anymore, and where he is. The journey back to the UK with him won’t work if it’s clear I know nothing about him.
‘So do you want to come to me?’ he asks. ‘Or are you going to meet me at the airport?’
‘Airport,’ I say, even though I’m not entirely sure which airport I’m near to. ‘Will you do me a favour? Will you book my ticket for me? I’ll, um, pay you back.’ I feel worry pulse through me; I don’t even know if I have any money. Surely I will be able to access her bank account, which is now my bank account?
‘How come?’ Mike wants to know.
‘I just have a lot to, uh, do if we go in the next few days, It’d be doing me a huge favour.’
‘You’re the one who said this week. We could stay a bit longer if it’s too much of a rush. I’m easy. And Joel doesn’t care when we leave, as long as we’re gone by October when the house is being used.’
‘I know,’ I say, even though I don’t know anything. ‘Look, don’t worry,’ I tell him. I pull the bag that’s slouching at the end of the bed towards me and empty it onto the duvet next to me. In there is my passport, and a bank card. I exhale. ‘I can book it.’
‘Nah, don’t worry. I might as well do two clicks instead of one. You sure you’re okay though? You seem a bit on edge.’
As I flick through the passport, and pull out a tatty makeup bag that contains a lip balm and a cracked powder compact, my head pounds and sudden memories dance around like flames. Mike moving because of a job. Something to do with cars. He’s nearer to Rome now. I open the compact, and more new memories wash over me gently. It was a temporary contract that’s nearly up.
I snap shut the compact and turn it over. It’s the same one I always use, just a shade darker. ‘By the time I see you at the airport, I’ll be fine.’
‘Okay. If you say so. So are you going to stick around in London for a bit too?’
‘I don’t think so. I think I want to go home.’ But as I say this, I remember that my home now is Yorkshire where I watched myself last year, and that Daniel will probably be in Blackpool. Won’t he? ‘Actually, I’d love to go to Blackpool.’
Mike snorts, ‘Yeah right. You’d never survive there.’
‘No,’ I say slowly. ‘Maybe I wouldn’t.’
***
I don’t speak to Mike much before I see him a few days later in the chaos of the airport. I spend my time wandering from place to place in the Italian cottage: from my bedroom to the terrace, where I watched myself laugh and drink with friends with whom I now live, who share bathrooms and cutlery with me and who I have short bursts of memories about. Joel, who owns the house and plays the guitar at inappropriate times of the night, always makes me have another beer when I probably shouldn’t. Sophie is the one with the pink hair, and she always borrows my dresses without asking and then drapes them over my bed when she’s finished with them, leaving them smelling of peaches and cigarettes. I wander through the sweet heat of the mornings to the cafe where I work; I remember I have left because Luca, the owner, tried to kiss me when we were alone in the storeroom together a few weeks ago, and keeps messaging me even though I have made it clear I’m not interested in him. I stand outside looking in, and the memories – frayed around the edges and incomplete – become stronger and more colourful. I’m surprised by the way the new recollections make me feel. I thought the colour of this life would be enough to fill my mind and my heart, but when I think about the people I’m surrounded by, I feel strangely empty, as though I am waiting for something more to happen.
***
It continues as we pull our huge cases through the throng of people, as we are herded through customs and we wander around the duty free. The surprise at how unexpectedly dissatisfied I feel softens and shifts its shape into a vague feeling of disbelief that I can’t really place and don’t understand. New memories rush at me from my childhood and teenage years, covering the old ones like thick grey smoke, fading them forever.