The house is as lost as I am, its shutters banging softly in the September breeze. I run to the door and hammer on it, tears streaming down my face, sobs bursting from me.
There is no movement from inside, no sign of anyone having lived there. The front window shows an abandoned room. A kaleidoscope of memories flashes into my mind: spilt Champagne on carpet, a hundred tealights and a ring twinkling in the centre of them; a bowl in the sink; a piano and a record player in the lounge; a book holding closed the window in the bedroom. A cot and a pram and a yellow highchair.
I am trembling so much that it takes me minutes to grip the paper from my pocket in one hand and my phone in the other. As I try to type, my fingers slip and flail and my phone falls to the ground. I pick it up, crouching as I finally press the search key. I can’t put it off any more. It’s the only way I’ll be able to find him.
There are over twenty people who meet my search, but when I see his profile picture I know it’s him. My heart leaps. He’s grinning, his wide, beautiful grin that starts from his eyes, the one I haven’t seen for so long. Maybe this is the right thing.
I click.
And then I scream, and the world stops spinning.
***
There is no sound: no gulls sobbing above my head, no gentle rush of the tide, no rustle of the overgrown grass around me. Just the beating of my heart and the gasps of my breath.
Then the sounds all rush back at once. I see a man in a yellow coat running towards me from the promenade.
‘Is everything all right?’ he asks, panting slightly from the unexpected sprint towards me. I can see a few other people staring from across the roads, dog walkers and cyclists with gaping mouths.
‘Is there somebody you want me to phone for you?’ the man in the yellow coat asks when I don’t reply. His eyes crinkle in concern and I see a sheen of sweat twinkling on his forehead. I feel like I have seen him somewhere before but my mind won’t move from one thought to another. Nothing makes any sense because a black dread, a fear so big it has eclipsed everything else, is all I can feel.
‘Can I get you home?’ the man asks next. ‘Where do you live?’
I sob, holding my hands to my face. ‘Here,’ I tell him, as he looks around at the neglected house in confusion.
‘I live here!’ I shout again. I stumble to my feet, and hammer on the soft, rotted wood of the back gate until it finally gives way. The man follows me as I stagger over to the shed at the back of the garden.
‘My pram,’ my voice is clotted with tears. ‘It’s in here. It’s my house.’
But the man only looks sadly at me.
‘Look in there! Get my pram! I want my pram!’ I scream at him, and he takes a step back. I’m scaring him, I realise. I am scaring myself. I am a madwoman. I have a madwoman’s shaking hands. I hold them out, and they seem so bare.
‘Something is missing,’ I mumble, and then the kaleidoscope is back, glittering memories shifting in and out of focus in my mind. ‘It’s my wedding ring,’ I tell him. ‘I’m not wearing my ring because I never got married.’ I choke with sobs, and the man steps towards me again, placing a firm and heavy hand awkwardly on my heaving back. ‘I don’t want these hands!’ I wail. ‘They have never even held him! They have never touched him! I held him and gave him his milk and cuddled him to sleep. I loved him so much.’ I look up at the man, my eyes streaming. ‘They aren’t my hands!’
He nods, patting my back. ‘I think I’ll go and get more help,’ he says, cocking his head on one side. He hauls me back to the front of the house and perches me on the crumbling front wall. ‘Stay here.’
But the dog walkers and cyclists have moved on now, and as soon as the man disappears from view, there is nobody else to see me. The house slides and blurs and the wall dissolves beneath me. Time loops and twists around me and back on itself, coiling and spinning so fast I can see nothing at all but a blur of blue flashing lights.
***
I am calm now, my blazing feelings burned to still, cool ashes.
I am with Daniel in his car. His edges are smudged, but I can tell he is younger. His hair is blacker at the sides, his skin slightly tighter, his movements sharper. I can’t move, or speak, or reach out to touch him and I know he can’t see me. I should be out of my mind with relief, with confusion, but I have no real mind. I know, somehow, that I don’t exist to anyone in this moment. I am in a strange state of flux where all my memories of both worlds are within my grasp. I could steadily reel off Daniel’s habits, and Mike’s; I can visualize my teachers from school in Yorkshire and Blackpool; the precise leaf-green of the lampshade in my bedroom in Blackpool and the beige of the stone floor of the cottage in Italy. I can coolly recall every detail of my life with Daniel and Joshua; every detail of my life without them. But there is a vague question fighting to be seen through the robotic certainty: what is this?
As though he’s trying to help, Daniel turns up the radio and the newsreader reels off the date.
September 7th, 2013. My twenty-eighth birthday. The day I went to the Lake District with Daniel.
I have seen the moments of this day more than once in my original life: the ice cream on Daniel’s lip as we sat by the glittering lake, the way I felt light and happy because I had been with him all day, as though Mike ending things a few days before might not have been so terrible after all. The memory I recall of living the alternate version of that day in the other life is vague and unimportant. It seems I was working at the travel agent’s in the village and saving for one of many trips abroad. I think I went for drinks at the local pub with Claire.
But which version of life is the one I can see right now? I try to look up, at the road, to see where we are, but I can’t move. This isn’t like the disappearances I’ve become used to, where I can silently follow who I’m watching. I am stuck, my eyes fixed on Daniel.
He is glancing at the bag beside him on the passenger seat. And as he does, my strange state of being nobody caves in, giving way to an avalanche of emotion. I am me. I am the Erica who knows everything about Daniel, and who knows what is about to happen.
But I still can’t move.
I try to scream, but as in all the worst kind of nightmares, I am mute with paralysis, my voice ripped from me.
I try and try, but I am still and silent as a corpse. Keep your eyes on the road!
He is always doing more than one thing at a time. The posts on his Facebook page that I have just seen at the house are blood red in my mind, flashing and darting. But my limbs are dead.
We’ll miss you.
Gone too soon, mate.
So tragic.
I watch him fiddle with the navy rucksack, which isn’t zipped shut and is stuffed with what looks like a change of clothes. My heart is torn by the sight of his clothes, pushed in his bag in a hurry because he’ll probably have been late, busy in that Daniel way of his that means he always crams too much into minutes that are always shorter than he thinks they’ll be.
I try to move, to be, but I am powerless. All I can do is observe.
The horrified squeal of brakes.
The smashing of glass.
The smell of blood.
The chilling, heart-stopping silence.