If you could change the past, would you?
It is only after her mother’s death that Luna begins to discover her secrets.
While in New York to settle the estate, something impossible happens to Luna. She finds herself in 1977, face to face with her mother as a young woman, in the week that changed her life forever.
If time can be turned back, can it also be rewritten? Luna becomes convinced she can save her mother from the moment that will eventually drive her to suicide.
But in doing anything – everything – to save her mother’s life, will Luna have to sacrifice her own?
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Memory Book, this is a beautiful, lush novel about love, courage and sacrifice, The Time Traveller’s Wife for a new readership.
Rowan Coleman lives with her husband, and five children in a very full house in Hertfordshire. She juggles writing novels with raising her family. She really wishes someone would invent time travel.
To find out more about Rowan Coleman, visit her website at: www.rowancoleman.co.uk, Facebook or Twitter: @rowancoleman.
To Lily, who is so clever, kind and courageous, and has the whole universe at her feet.
Time is a curious thing. We all know how it seems to trickle through our fingers when all we want is a few seconds more.
A few seconds more to hold the ones we love, savour that longed-for sleep, watch the sun go down or the moon rise. And everyone has endured a lesson, a meeting or a sermon, and wondered if the clock on the wall had stopped, or even starting ticking backwards, and that perhaps they might be forced to sit there forever, time’s hostage.
When I was younger, I thought I had forever to start my life for real, and it’s not until half of it slips you by, in a blink of an eye, that you realise it has all been real, it’s been all you will have had. All those years of waiting when you could have been doing.
It’s well documented that in moments of extreme danger, your brain slows time down, or at least that’s the way you perceive it, allowing you the time and space to react to what is happening around you, a chance to avoid that high-speed collision or pull back from that cliff edge. A chance to make a life or death decision that will alter the course of events.
I’m a writer. I try to capture emotions, moments, on the page, and hold on to them forever, captured in words. It’s that desire to keep hold of those rare golden seconds that makes me human. Our very machinery is built to make time stand still.
Many scientists now believe that the moment of death, though physically instantaneous, unravels itself in the mind in slow motion, flooding the brain with neurochemicals that can trigger hallucinations that, to the person experiencing them, can seem to go on for hours, days – maybe even years. We can only guess at why this happens, a sort of inbuilt anaesthesia to protect us from the shock of dying, perhaps. Or, as some people believe, a glimpse into heaven. Or maybe that tunnel with the light at the end of it leads to another universe entirely.
How time works within us is something that is only partially understood; how time works across the whole of the universe is something we can only comprehend by the set of rules we impose on it. We need years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds to make logic from entropy, the decay that began the moment both the universe and we were born; to make sense of our lives passing and to understand why we can’t have back what we have lost. Time passes, flowing away from us never to return, impossible to revisit. Past, present and future – that is how we make sense of the world. But sometimes, the one thing we forget, for all of our rules, theories and ideas that we impose on this strange unfathomable place we miraculously exist in, is that we didn’t make the universe.
The universe made us.
Rowan Coleman, 4 August 2016
‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’
Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
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Watching my mother’s face for the first time since the night she died, I am altered. I am unravelled and undone – in one instant becoming a stranger in my own skin.
There is a theory that just by looking at something you can transform the way it behaves; change the universe and how it works at quantum level, simply by seeing. The observer effect, we call it in physics, or the uncertainty principle. Of course the universe will do what the universe always does, whether we are watching or not, but these are the thoughts I can’t shake out of my head as I watch my mother’s fragile image, flickering as it’s projected on the wall. That just by looking at this film of her, I have changed the fabric of everything I thought I knew.
Just seconds ago my mother told me and my sister that my dad – the man I grew up with, and whom I love – is not my biological father. Yes, the universe around me shifted and reformed for ever; and yet the second she said it I understood that I have always known it to be true, always felt my incongruity, in every beat of my heart, and tilt of my head. In my outsider’s blue eyes.
There is no choice now but to watch on: the course is set and I am travelling it. I have to see, no matter what, although looking will change everything. It’s simple physics, the mystery of the universe encapsulated in these intimate, pivotal moments.
But there is no equation to express how I feel, looking at the face of the woman I have missed every second for the last eight months.
She sits in the Oxfordshire country garden of the house I grew up in. The same garden is in full and glorious bloom outside the creaking barn door now, the roses still bear the scars from her pruning, the azaleas she planted are still in bud. But the garden I am watching her sit in may as well be on Mars, so far away from me does she seem. She is so far away now, out of reach for good. A light-grey, cotton dress blows against her bare brown legs, her hair is streaked with silver, her eyes full of light. There’s an old chair from the kitchen, its legs sinking slightly into the soft grass. This must have been recorded in late summer because the rose bushes are in bloom, their dark glossy leaves reflecting the sun. It was probably last summer, just after Dad got the all clear, after a few terrifying weeks in which we thought he might have bowel cancer. That means that as long ago as last summer, months and months before she died, she knew already what she was going to do. I experience this realisation as a physical pain in my chest, searing and hot.
‘Although the watch keeps ticking on my wrist,’ her captured image is saying, the breeze lifting the hair off her face. ‘I am still trapped back there, at least part of me is. I’m pinned like a butterfly to one single minute, in one single hour, on the day that changed my life.’
There are tears in her eyes.
‘To everyone around me it might have seemed that I kept walking and talking, appearing to be travelling through time at the allotted sixty seconds per minute, but actually I was static, caught in suspended animation, thinking, always thinking about that one act … that one … choice.’
Her fingers cover her face for a moment, perhaps trying to cover the threat of more tears; her throat moves, her chest stills. When her hands fall back down to her lap she is smiling. It’s a smile I know well: it’s her brave smile.
‘I love you, my beautiful daughters.’
It’s a phrase that she had said to us almost every day of our lives, and to hear her say it again, even over the thrum of the projector, is something like magic, and I want to catch it, hold it in the palm of my hand.
Leaning forward in her chair, her eyes search the lens, searching me out, and I find myself edging away from her, as if she might try to reach out and touch me.
‘I made this film as my goodbye, because I don’t know when – or if – I will have the courage to say it in person. It’s my goodbye, and something else. It’s a message for you, Luna.’
When she says my name, I can feel her breath on my neck as she speaks.
‘The truth is, I don’t know if I ever want to you to see it, to see any of this. Perhaps you never will. Perhaps here, in this moment, in this way, is the only time I can tell you and Pia about my other life, the life I live alongside the one I have with you girls and your father, the life I live in a parallel universe, where the clock’s second hand never moves forward. Yes, I think … I think this is the only place I’m brave enough to tell you.’ She shakes her head, tears glisten, whilst behind her head the ghosts of long-dead bees drone in and out of the foxgloves, collecting pollen over the brickwork of a derelict building.
‘You see, once, a long time ago, something really, really bad happened to me, and I did something terrible in return. And ever since that moment, there has been a ghost at my shoulder, following me everywhere I go, waiting everywhere I look, stalking me. And I know, I know that one day I won’t be able to outrun him any more. One day he will catch up with me. One day he will have his revenge. One day soon. If you are watching this –’ her voice hooks into me ‘— then he already has me …’
She draws so close to the lens that we can only see one unfocused quarter of her face; she lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘Listen, if you look very hard and very carefully you’ll find me in Brooklyn, in the place and the moment I never truly left. At our building, the place I grew up in, that’s where you will find me, and the other films I made for you. Luna, if you look hard enough – if you want to look after you know what I did … He wouldn’t let me go, you see. Find me … please.’
‘This distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion.’
—Albert Einstein
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We travel in a kind of bubble, my little sister Pia and I, sheltered in the quiet, cool interior of an air-conditioned cab, while outside the searing summer streets of an unfamiliar landscape unfold ever outwards as we make each turn. We slip past bridges and buildings that are a kind of second-hand familiar, the relics of the tales that we grew up listening to; a constantly increasing map of a world neither of us have ever visited before, but which is written into our DNA.
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is nothing like I imagined it would be after a lifetime of watching movies set in New York State. It’s a low, two-storey landscape of wide avenues and neat, wooden-clad houses; small-town America, on the edge of a huge borough that lives right next door, the greatest city on earth. New York seems to peer at Bay Ridge over the expanse of the Hudson with an uninterested shrug.
There is an air of quiet certainty unfurling in the searing July sunshine. Even the people meandering down the sidewalks have an innately serene look about them, as if this place is made only for them, a safe place, a place where the rest of the world never looks, a place where secrets might never be discovered if you know where to hide them. This is where life and love and death can quietly play out, without barely making a ripple on the surface of the planet. It’s almost as if when you cross the Brooklyn Bridge time slows down just a little, right at its zenith.
This is the world where our mother grew up, the world she ran away from, never to return. It never occurred to us that one day it would be us travelling back here, all the way back to her starting point. Officially we are here to finally settle her estate, and begin the sale of the long derelict, boarded-up building she co-owned with her sister, a woman she hadn’t spoken to in thirty years. The building had once been her home, the centre of her universe. Unofficially, secretly, we came because she told us to. To look for her, and to look for clues about my biological father, whose existence still seems like a mangled dream to me.
‘She could have just got it wrong,’ Pea had said after the film ended, disturbed dust still settling in the light of Dad’s projector that we’d had to borrow in secret. ‘I mean, in her darkest moment, she had delusions. She had fantasies. She could have just been living a nightmare out loud, that could be it.’
‘Yes,’ I said, slowly, uncertainly, letting her words seep into me through every pore. ‘Yes, it could be that … but …’
I looked at my sister, and I knew she was beginning to see what I already knew. My bright-blue eyes, the only blue eyes for generations on either side of the family, as far back as anyone can remember.
‘But you have to find out if it might be true,’ Pea finished for me. ‘They loved each other so much, especially back then, when she left Brooklyn, left her family to be with him. It just doesn’t make sense that there would be another man … But even if there was, it doesn’t change anything. You’re still you. You’re still our Luna.’
She couldn’t know that I had always felt a little bit like a stranger in my own family, a little bit out of step with them. That, somehow, what Mum said was strangely comforting.
Dad had wanted to come on this trip, but we’d persuaded him to stay at home. Even now, months later, he was so fragile after losing her, his blood pressure still high, and the doctor didn’t recommend flying. We didn’t tell him about the film, even though we could have. We could have asked him outright if it was true, and taken him at his word, but we didn’t. It seemed too cruel for him to lose a wife and a daughter in the space of a few months, even if we loved each other in just the same way as we always have. I think him knowing that I knew would hurt him. So we begged him to stay at home, be taken care of by his friends, and let us sort out the paperwork. And maybe uncover secrets, and part of me. The part of me that was most like my mother truly believed she might be waiting there for us.
Her sister, Stephanie, had wanted to sell the minute their father, our grandfather, had died in 1982. Lawyers’ letters came in the post thick and fast and, although I didn’t really know what they were about, I could see how just the sight of the distinctive airmail envelope would make my mother’s hands tremble. Mum had refused to sell, she wouldn’t budge. She had her reasons; we never knew them, but whatever they were, perhaps she had planned it this way, because she had left her half of her family home to Pea and me. And now – just when we need it – there is money waiting to be accessed. One trip to Bay Ridge, put the building on the market, and there should be enough from the proceeds to get my sister back on her feet, this time for good. And perhaps I can find answers to questions I’ve always had, even if I haven’t quite known what they were.
Pea – I’ve called her that since she was born – sits nervously; her fingers twitch in her lap, her nails are broken and bitten down, knuckles pink and grazed, with combat, but not a fist fight. These are the scars of her daily battle not to reach for a drink or a pill. Twenty-four years old and eight weeks clean this time. Last time she stayed sober for eighteen months, and I thought maybe she had cracked it, but then Mum died, suddenly and shockingly. I fought so hard to hold on to her, against the tsunami of grief and chaos that we could both see was coming to sweep her away, but I wasn’t strong enough.
This time I won’t let my sister down.
This time, I will keep her safe. If I can just hold on to what matters, what is real, then I will be able to save her.
Resting the weight of my camera on my thigh, I reach out and take her hand, stilling it. She looks at me from behind the pink, heart-shaped sunglasses she bought at the airport.
‘What did you bring that old thing for, anyway?’ she asks me, nodding at the camera, my dad’s old Pentax, the one he was looking through the very first time he set eyes on Mum. ‘You couldn’t even get fifty quid for it on eBay. I know, because I tried once. It’s all digital now, you know.’
‘I know, but this is more than just a camera, it’s a … relic. It’s a little piece of Mum and Dad’s story, and besides, I like looking at things through a lens. I thought I could shoot the places that Dad shot, recreate the images for him. He might not have been up to making the trip but his camera could, I thought he’d like it.’
‘He will like it.’ Pea nods. ‘You should have been a photographer, not a scientist; you’re too artistic to be a scientist.’
‘I’m a physicist,’ I remind her. ‘And actually a lot of what I do is art. How are you feeling?’
‘Like I’d really like a drink, a hit or both,’ she says. ‘But then again, I’m awake, so nothing new there.’
We let the road slip under us in silence for a few moments.
‘But how are you?’ she asks finally. ‘I mean really.’
I hesitate; if I were to answer that question accurately I’d say full of rage and grief, terrified and lost, unsure and unable to find a sure-footed place to stand. But I don’t. Our beloved mother died from an overdose, and, even after a lifetime of a family that revolved around her depression, we didn’t see it coming in time to save her, and I can’t forgive myself for that. And more than that, there’s a stranger inside me, a stranger who is me, a crucial part of me I don’t have any reference for, and that unnerves me.
‘I think it will be a challenging few days, being here without her,’ I say instead, choosing my words carefully. ‘I’d always thought we’d come back here one day all together, you, me, Mum and Dad. I always thought there would be an end, like a resolution, and she’d be better, be happy. I never thought the ending would be that she’d—’
‘Kill herself,’ Pea finishes.
‘Christ.’ I bow my head, and the now-familiar surge of sickening guilt rises in my throat over the fact that I didn’t see what she was about to do. ‘How can it be real? How can that be what’s really happened? I didn’t see it coming. I should have seen it coming. I should have … but she seemed, better, brighter. Free. I relaxed, I shouldn’t have relaxed.’
‘Maybe it’s better that you didn’t,’ Pea says. ‘That we didn’t.’
‘Pia, how can you say that?’
‘Because. Because it wore her out, all that effort at being happy. For our whole childhood, painting on smiles just for us and Dad. She was exhausted by it, but she saw it through, because she loved us. I’d been clean for more than a year, you’d got your doctorate, and were going to move in with Brian. Dad was through the cancer scare. Don’t you think she finally thought that now we were all OK, she could just go? Just stop feeling the pain, and go. Don’t you think that’s why she seemed happier? The end was in sight.’
I don’t know how to answer, so I don’t speak.
‘Seen Brian?’ With ease Pea changes the subject from one thing I can’t bear to talk about to another.
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘I’m glad I haven’t seen him. He isn’t the sort of person you want to see when you’re … conflicted.’
Pea snorts. ‘Conflicted. Yep, our mum tops herself and we’re “conflicted”. I take it back, you are the perfect scientist – analytical to the last.’ The spasm of hurt her words cause must show on my face, because she takes off her glasses, and leans into me. ‘You know I don’t mean it,’ she says. ‘And, anyway, it was a good job you found out what a flake Brian was before you ended up marrying him. It’s good to know if someone will be willing to stick by you in a crisis. And he, well … you know.’
I do know. I’d discovered Brian was on a minibreak in the Lake District with another woman on the day of Mum’s funeral. It should hurt me more than it does; after all, we’d been together for two years and talked about making it official. But somehow I am numb to that petty betrayal. It took me leaving Brian to realise that, as much as l liked him, and respected him, I was never in love with him, and he knew that. When I think back, I doubt that he was ever in love with me either; it was more that I fascinated him, I was atypical, an anomaly, and, as a neuroscientist, he liked that about me. I was a woman immersed in the most rational of sciences, determined that my sex wasn’t going to hold me back, even though most of the rest of the world I moved in tried to.
I can see, now, the reason I was drawn to him was because I thought he understood me. I thought he was like me, but that was a mistake. It wasn’t our similarities that he enjoyed about me; it was our differences that he liked to study.
It probably didn’t help that I told him my secret. I shouldn’t have told him. That just after Mum died something started happening to me that hadn’t happened since I was a little girl. That sometimes, more and more just recently, I see things; people, places … things.
Impossible things. Things that are not there.
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You don’t have time to go mad, is what I tell myself. Too many people need you. So just don’t go mad. Just don’t. It’s an inelegant solution, but it’s the only one I have. To seek help would be impossible. The news that I had a psychiatric problem would spread through the research community in a matter of hours, and it’s hard enough to do the work I do as a woman, a young woman not yet thirty, without there being another reason to call my judgement into question. The mad woman in the attic, that’s what they’d call me behind my back. And even if I did get a diagnosis of some kind of psychosis, Brian had already told me the sorts of drugs I might be prescribed and what they’d do to me. They’d stop me thinking.
And if it isn’t madness, if it’s the side effect of some physical disease, then … well, I don’t have time to be sick either. Best not to think about it, best to put my faith in mind over matter, or anti-matter. That’s a physicist’s joke.
No, everything is fine. These moments when they happen come and go quickly. They’re nothing more than flashes of reflected sunlight on glass. If things get worse, then I’ll think again, but for now everything is fine; it’s not like there are voices in my head. It’s some kind of epilepsy, Brian thought, although I wouldn’t let him put me in an MRI machine because I didn’t want to know any facts that would have to be acted on. He told me the story of a young French man who’d suffered so many tiny but relentless brain seizures that he lived in a constant state of déjà vu, as if he’d experienced every moment that he lived before. The universe inside our heads holds more mysteries and secrets than the one I’ve spent my life trying to understand, and yet I know that at its most basic level they are one and the same thing. I won’t be partitioned from what matters by medication.
Focus, that’s what I have to do. Focus on each single second as it happens; keep hold of what is real. Focus on Pea, and being here, and everything we need to get done. I will try and spend as much time as I can looking through the lens of Dad’s camera, because – and I don’t have a theory as to why – the … episodes … don’t seem to happen when I’m looking through the camera, almost as if the lens filters out delusion.
So focus on now, focus.
Because I really don’t have time to go mad, we have arrived at our destination.
Our cab slows down and comes to a rest outside our lodging house, the only place we could possibly stay when we decided to make this trip, a set from the love story of my parents. It’s in this very house that my dad stayed when he first came to Bay Ridge, on his first major freelance-photography project, embedding himself in with the film crew and shooting behinds the scenes of the first movie he was ever involved with: Saturday Night Fever. A film my little sister and I have watched at least a thousand times since we were kids and, in actual fact, far too young to see it.
‘Mum and Dad must have walked up and down these streets a million times,’ Pea says as we climb out of the cab, stretching our tired and travel-cramped bodies hard against the sky. ‘They probably kissed right there, on that piece of sidewalk, under that tree – hey, is that the tree?’
‘No, wrong street,’ I tell her. I know the exact location of the famous tree, because it’s at the top of my list of locations to find, to see if it’s still standing, and to take a photo of Mum and Dad’s names carved into its bark.
As Pea pays the fare, I lift the camera to my eye, searching for the same frame as one of the photos I’ve pored over so often in Dad’s albums. Then this decaying building was neat, pretty, full of pride and house rules, even in the way the geraniums grew so neatly in the window boxes. Now Mrs Finkle’s lodging house looks fatigued, slouching into the ground. The once-pristine blue-and-white paint is peeling and cracked, the blue turning grey, the white yellowing like smoker’s teeth. Even so, it is a house that someone still loves; you can feel that radiating out of it. I lower the camera when I see something that wasn’t in Dad’s original photo. A statue of the Virgin Mary greets us. She is about two feet high, balanced on the window sill nearest the door, inclining slightly downwards, towards a considerable drop. She has clearly been in exactly that perilous position for some time, her paint faded away almost to nothing, her benevolent hands chipped and broken, her eyes white and unseeing. With the lens, without the lens; yes, she is definitely there.
‘Luna and Pia, right?’ A woman, who can only be Mrs Finkle, opens the front door and stands on the top step. I’d expected a housecoat and maybe rollers, but I am wrong. Mrs Finkle is truly elegant. Her hair, which might once have been blonde, is still glossy but now silver and pinned behind one ear. Wearing a cool white shirt over light denim capri pants, she looks more like a Lauren Bacall than a Mrs Finkle, which makes me smile. I like being wrong; being wrong always leads to something more interesting than being right.
‘Yes, hello,’ I greet her. ‘We’re Luna and Pia Sinclair.’
‘You’re here!’ She briefly clasps her hands together in obvious delight as she trots down the steps and hugs me so tightly I can feel the Pentax press into my ribcage. ‘Let me look at you!’ She takes a step back, her hands on my shoulders, her hazel eyes scanning my face.
‘Oh, but I see her in you, I do. I see her in your nose and your ears, and this hair. You know, when your mom left I never thought I’d see her again, but here she is, in you, oh, and you too!’ She leaves me to embrace Pea with equal warmth, and I know that I instantly love her. I love her for not noticing my blue eyes or wondering aloud who I take after, and best of all for saying that I look like my beautiful mother.
‘You’ve got your father’s crazy hair,’ Mrs Finkle says, smiling fondly at Pea’s cloud of curls and frizz, which should be as dark as mine, but which she insists on bleaching to oblivion every chance she gets. ‘But I see her in you, too. Marissa Lupo lived her life with her chin lifted just a little bit higher than anyone else. You’ve got that.’
‘I have?’ Pea’s hand rises to her chin, and she smiles too. ‘Cool.’
‘So, what are we doing standing out here? Come in, come in out of the heat.’ Grabbing her bag, Pea follows Mrs Finkle up the neatly swept steps and past the Virgin Mary. ‘It’s been unbearable this year, I haven’t known it so bad since … Well, I suppose since the year your dad and the rest of the film crew guys came to stay here. The heatwave of nineteen seventy-seven … Now that was a year.’
It’s like a little power surge to my brain; that’s always the first sign that something is about to happen. Then I sense someone watching me, eyes grazing my skin. I could look away, go inside and ignore the buzzing in my brain, but that doesn’t work. Only looking right at an anomaly makes it stop.
As Pea follows Mrs Finkle inside, I turn and make myself see. Searching down to the end of the not-quite-empty street. At its end, in something like a halo of yellow sunlight, there is a young woman watching me. The light dances and dazzles, so that she is out of focus, almost not there. I see her for a split second before she is gone, a cool, blue shadow filling the space where she stood. My head swims as I close my eyes and I feel my knees weaken. Someone walks over my grave. That’s what my mother always used to say. Lifting the camera, I look again. The street is empty.
Focus. I need to focus on the here and now.
‘Luna, what are you doing?’ Pea asks me impatiently from the doorway, which is code for ‘please come in here and help me make small talk with this woman’. With one final glance at the empty sidewalk, I follow her up the stairs.
Our apartment is at the top of the house, the border between Mrs Finkle’s territory and her guests’ clearly marked by where her procession of framed photographs ends, and a clean, white-painted staircase begins. It’s bright and light, one small bedroom, bathroom, and an all-purpose living area with a sofa bed and a functional kitchenette.
‘Your father will have told you I used to have rooms,’ she says. ‘All rooms, one bathroom; that was amusing at times.’ She smiles fondly. ‘These days people want more though. I don’t normally have tourists in here. Tourists don’t come to Bay Ridge. Normally it’s young people looking for a cheap place to stay that’s not much of a commute to work. I was so pleased when you called. My last girl just moved in with her boyfriend and I was about to advertise. It was kind of like fate, to have Marissa and Henry’s girls here with me. I loved them both, you know.’
‘Dad speaks so fondly of you,’ Pea says, and she means it, although she doesn’t mention Dad’s colourful tales of how Mrs Finkle fell for one of the younger men staying with her, and seduced him with the skills of a noir femme fatale. ‘He’s only sorry not to see you. I think after a life travelling around the world, taking photos of the world’s most famous and beautiful, he’s finally glad to be at home in his garden, talking to the bumble bees.’
‘I was so sorry to hear about your mom. And I’m sorry not to see Henry again,’ Mrs Finkle says, her smile enigmatic. ‘Those were fun times, the crew, the actors, the filming. Yes, Bay Ridge sure got a little stardust sprinkled over it that year! I loved being a small part of it. You know, Travolta nearly came to my house once.’
‘Did he?’ Pea grins from ear to ear, her love of the subject of Dad’s first major photographic assignment knows no bounds. Once she had had a framed copy of every one of the photos he took on the set of Saturday Night Fever adorning the walls of her flat. When we were girls she watched it at least once a week. ‘Did he stay here?’
‘Probably a good job he didn’t.’ Mrs Finkle covers her heart with her hands. ‘I wouldn’t have been responsible for my actions; that man, so handsome. Like a Michelangelo in blue jeans. Well, get settled in. You can see me as much you want, or as little. I’d prefer the former, but I guess you have a lot you want to do and see, and you’ll finally get the Lupo building sold?’
‘That’s the plan,’ I tell her. ‘It’s seems like the right time at last.’
‘I think it is.’ Mrs Finkle nods. ‘That place, it’s been boarded up and crumbling away for so long, it’s like that little corner of the avenue is stuck right there, the day your mother left. Though, now that I think of it, your grandfather lived there a couple more years after she left. But every time I’ve looked up at it in the past thirty years, I could almost see her there, leaning on the fire escape, smoking and waiting. Waiting and smoking. I’m glad she won’t be waiting anymore.’
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‘Can you imagine her, walking these streets?’ Pea asks me as we trail back along 4th Avenue, after a late dinner of burger and fries. ‘Young and sexy, like in those photos Dad took of her in hot-pants and wedged heels. She was quite something back in the day.’
‘I can,’ I say, thinking of one particular photograph, the first photograph of her that Dad ever took, one that is carefully tucked into the back pocket of my jeans right now.
In it, Mum is twenty years old; the light of a sunny Brooklyn spring evening dapples her tanned skin, her slim arms shielding her eyes. Half of her face is in shade, revealing slightly parted glossed lips. She is wearing a striped singlet, no bra underneath; her throat is bare, effortlessly sexy in a way that seems out of reach to me. I’d first found the photo when I was twelve years old, awkward and plump. I’d been so beguiled, so envious of the ease with which she had inhabited her skin, that I’d stolen it from between the pages of a rarely-looked-at album and kept it ever since. After Mum died I’d remembered it with a start, fearful that I hadn’t taken enough care of this precious image of her, that it would be lost. But I’d found it, at the bottom of a shoebox of old photos and drawings that I’d collected over the years. From that moment on I never went anywhere without it. And, as the night sets in, I’ll be content to simply look at it until I fall asleep, hoping to dream of her here, in the very place the photograph was taken.
‘She always wore the most beautiful clothes,’ I say. ‘Always turned heads.’
‘Like you would if you stopped dressing like a teenager,’ Pea says, pulling at the hem of my habitual white T-shirt, which was paired with my usual faded jeans and one of three pairs of Converse I own. ‘And looking like one; it’s embarrassing that my older sister looks younger than me. You should drink more, smoke … I don’t know, do something to look your age!’
‘I dress how I dress because in my job the less men notice you’re a woman the better. I can’t help the fact that I look younger than I am, it’s no fun getting asked for ID when you’re twenty-nine!’
Pea stops in the street.
‘I can’t believe that she’s dead, Luna. How can it be true that she left us like that? I can’t believe it. How can it be true that she wanted to die and we didn’t notice?
‘Do you know what frightens me the most? That one day it will be me, it will be me who can’t fight life anymore, and who feels that pain so deeply that it’s easier to die than live for the people that love you. You, you’re more like Dad, everyone always says so – and I don’t care if he’s not your biological dad, he raised you and you’re just like him. But me, I’m just like her. Luna, what if one day that’s me?’
‘It won’t ever be you,’ I promise her. ‘I won’t lose you too, just know that. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.’ I don’t tell her that I worry that one day it might be me who can’t fight anymore.
The moment of doubt seems to pass like the clouds over the moon; my mercurial sister has her second wind. She sprints up the steps that lead to Mrs Finkle’s front door, and down again.
‘We should just go, let’s just go there, now.’
‘Go where?’ I am moments behind her as she accelerates through her own thoughts at light speed.
‘Mum’s place, the building, it’s nearby, right? Let’s just go and see it and explore! Come on, I can’t sleep now, I need to do something, we could just go and see it now.’
The buzzing starts, the surge rising up through my feet, and I turn away from her, somehow managing to keep my feet on the ground.
‘I don’t want to there right now,’ I say.
‘But why, just for a little walk?’
‘Because …’ Even if I wanted to explain this feeling that has suddenly gripped me, I couldn’t; it’s like a kind of fear mingled with the certainty that something awful is about to happen. I don’t know why the building terrifies me, but it does.
In my mind’s eye it’s a desolate place, blackened and decaying. And somehow this terrible, ridiculous idea has gripped me hard; this feeling of certainty that Mum is still there, trapped inside. Lost, looking for a way out, rattling frantically at window latches and door handles. And if I go there now, I’m afraid I will see her, peering out from between the boarded-up windows.
Taking a breath, I push my heels into the asphalt. Focus on now.
‘Maybe I could make you some tea?’ Mrs Finkle says as she opens her door, and I’m grateful to focus on her, her long, silk negligee, and her elegant hands adorned with rings that catch the streetlight.
‘Mrs Finkle!’ Pea grins at me, raising her eyebrows.
‘I’m not spying on you,’ Mrs Finkle assures us. ‘I just heard your voices outside and I can’t sleep either. I have some camomile somewhere. Come in and have tea, and I’ll bore you with stories of your mom and dad until you’ll be begging for sleep.’
‘Cool, come on, Luna, tea!’ Pea takes the lifeline with both hands and bounds up the steps.
‘I’m just going to …’ I don’t know what to say. ‘I just need a minute.’
‘OK, I’ll leave the key with the Virgin here,’ Pea says, and Mrs Finkle steps back to let her in.
‘Your sister will be OK with me,’ she tells me. ‘You take your time, dear.’
The city is quiet at last, just me and the half-moon, the same moon that Dad used to walk Mum home under. The same moon, watching everything unfold and never altering itself.
I thought the electric charge in my head had subsided, but suddenly it flares, lighting me up from the inside, and I know there’s something out there. Something small, registering in the very periphery of my vision. Something so minor I would normally pay no attention to it, hoping it would go away. This time, though, there is no ignoring it; I can’t because it’s a call, a beckoning.
Something impossible is about to happen.
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I notice how the halo around the street lights suddenly flares, with a vicious ripping sound, and, when I look up, I can see the stars spinning overhead, see them burning, brighter than the city they cover.
I’m moving, I’m torn away from where I was, and I don’t know how it’s happening, only that it is. Reaching out for an iron railing, my fingers seem to pass right through it, and I no longer know what is real and what is imagined. I’m moving, but I don’t know the why or the how. Then I see – no, I feel – the where. I feel it like a punch in the gut.
Mum’s building, her home. Its crenellated outline cuts into the night sky, windows blank and expressionless, covered with boards, a chain-link fence with security warnings skirting it. It’s nothing like I imagined it before, a dark and ruined castle full of ghosts. It feels like a haven.
A narrow alleyway dissects the property from the others in the row so that it stands slightly apart – a lone sentinel on the corner. Forcing my mind to focus on it, as I will my distant body to move towards it, I discover that I can almost taste the bricks and mortar on my tongue. It takes just a few seconds to reach, but in my head each second seems to pull me slowly further apart, as if I’m leaving a trail of crumbs of my consciousness in my wake.
The links of the security fence dance around me, and I fall into it, so heavily that I feel like my weight could tunnel right through it, through the asphalt and into the mud and clay below. Feverishly, I hope some weakness in the fence will give and let me in and, amazingly, as soon as I think it, it happens, because I am tumbling through, stumbling down the narrow alleyway, careering into walls that scrape and bruise my shoulders and elbows. The ground disappears from beneath my feet and I half tumble, half stagger, into the narrow crevice between the buildings, where I find a tiny square of concrete paving outside a side door. After a moment that could have been a million years, my knees buckle beneath me as I fold heavily onto the floor. Looking up between the buildings I see narrow strip of sky. I’m not sure if it’s real or imagined, but I watch it opening inwards, upwards, fire pouring out of it. I taste burnt black ashes on my tongue just before the flames consume me.
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It’s the same moon. That thought writes itself out behind my closed lids.
I don’t know how long I have been unconscious or what’s happened, but I’m relieved that I’m not dead. Pressing my hand to my chest, I can feel my heart beating, fast and irregular, but definitely beating.
Lying there for a moment longer, I feel the cooling concrete register under my shoulder blades and buttocks. I must have been out for a while. As the fog gradually clears, I feel the tendons in my neck scream in protest against the way they have been twisted. It hurts to realign my vertebrae, but I don’t have much choice. Pea will be wondering where I am. I’m wondering where I am.
Is this the episode that means I finally have to go and see a doctor?
Cautiously, I slowly open my eyes, peeling back my heavy lids with some effort, searching for that thin strip of night sky, half expecting that instead of looking up at it, it will have claimed me, and I’ll be looking down on a network of Brooklyn streets instead. I breathe a sigh of relief when I see the sky is still where it should be.
Easing myself into a sitting position, my back against the side door, I wait for the blood to stop rolling in my ears and temples. If I dare to be honest, I know that I’ve felt like I might break ever since I got the news that Mum had died. That moment, that awful phone call with Dad, his own grief thickening the words he spoke, making them seem too impossible to be real. That moment was a kind of axis, a lever on which the rest of my life has been balanced ever since. Maybe now – after the film – I’m no longer bending under the pressure of her loss; maybe now I’m breaking.
‘We apologise for the break in transmission, normal Luna will shortly be resumed,’ I whisper, and the sound of my own voice comforts me. I’m still real at least.
Resting for a moment, I hear two kids walking by at street level, accents so thick I’m not sure what they’re saying, perhaps they’re speaking … Spanish? Slowly, as my eyes begin to focus, I realise small but definite differences from what I thought I saw, just before whatever this is that felled me. The huge dumpsters, that I could have sworn I careered into on my way down, are gone. Instead a pair of old-fashioned metal garbage cans stand just to my left, stuffed full of rotting matter and trash, the acrid stink filling my nostrils. Whoever filled these bins doesn’t keep up with their recycling. Turning my head away from the stench, it dawns on me that the pounding isn’t coming from inside my head, but from inside my mother’s building.
Yes, the slow steady beat of a bass drum is vibrating on the other side of the vivid-green basement door. As my dizziness passes, I see the fence I thought surrounded the building is not here at all, and the alleyway, filled to the brim with oppressive dark, is wide open. I peer down its length as a car rolls past. It looks old – vintage even – like something you’d see cresting over hilltops in a Starsky & Hutch car chase. Its loose exhaust clatters along the road. The windows are rolled right down and young men spill out of every gap shouting, catcalling some poor woman I can’t see.
Turning back to the building I try to pin down the location of the noise. The first floor. Anger glues me to the spot. This isn’t their place, it’s hers.
There is no choice, I have to go in. My limbs still feel both weak and full of lead as I go to the door. It has a bizarre, lion’s-head brass knocker on it, and a handle that looks like it used to be on an internal door. It’s unlocked – whatever Aunt Stephanie pays the security company that looks after this place it is too much.
Two bright strips of flickering fluorescent lighting obliterate any shadows in what I guess used to be the workshop. I’m surprised that the interlopers have managed to connect the power. A wave of emotion sweeps through me as I stand looking around this room; I feel as if I know it. Mum often told us tales of growing up in this place, and how, when she was very small, her mother taught her how to use a sewing machine, just as Mum taught me at the same age.
Amazingly, as I look around the room, I can see several bolts of material – burnt orange, deep purple, patterns and stripes that sing – still stored on specially-built shelving units. Two sewing machines are sat on a long table, reflecting the glare of the light. They look so shiny; I wonder if they might still work. When Aunt Stephanie moved out in the early eighties, she must have left the building exactly as it was right then, a time capsule, a monument … maybe a memorial.
I find my way to the foot of the stairs, where ‘Hotel California’ gets louder.
Adrenalin propels me up the stairs, and I fling open the door to the room where the music is coming from, and the six or so people in there turn and look at me. In that moment I get it, and I laugh out loud, with relief more than anything. These aren’t hardened drug dealers with a fondness for progressive rock; they are young, younger than me, students maybe, and this is a 1970s costume party – everyone here is dressed to perfection. Everything that meets my eye shines out in bold and bright colours, like I’m looking at them through the lens of my camera.
‘Who the hell are you?’ A short, thick-set blondish guy asks me, half grin, half attitude.
For a moment I am not sure how to answer, I charged in here full of fury, but now … this whole thing, it’s kind of charming.
‘I was passing, I heard the music,’ I say, smiling, playing up my English accent. ‘The door was open so I just came up.’
Everyone watches me, curious but unconcerned that they might have been caught out. I count a group of seven. A few young men, drinking beers out of bottles, girls sipping something out white paper cups, divided by gender. This must be a pretty serious hobby for them. Looking around I see a sideboard cluttered with ornaments, a standard lamp that casts a warm, orange glow, a sofa with bright-yellow cushions, and, in the corner, a wood-effect veneered TV, its bulbous screen reflecting the room, takes pride of place. Tacked to a wall over it an Elvis calendar, opened to July 1977; the King is sweating and bejewelled, singing into a microphone. There’s a folded copy of the Daily News on the coffee table, proclaiming, ‘F.B.I. STEPS UP SEARCH FOR SAM’.
Every detail is correct; there’s even a circle around today’s date, with the words ‘Pops away’ scrawled inside the box in a scrawling hand.
‘That was an accent.’ A tall, young man, with dark, wavy hair and muscular shoulders, grins as he approaches me. ‘Right? You’re not from round here?’
‘No, I’m from London,’ I say, a little disarmed by his green eyes and thick, black lashes. I take two steps back, avoiding his curious gaze, which doesn’t seem deterred by my loose white T-shirt. Men, scientific men, I am very good at talking to. I’ve learnt the precise language they understand fluently, and when I impress them, attract them, it’s always by default, a by-product of me knowing what I’m talking about and also having breasts. Boys – men – who are simply hot, I’m not very good at talking to at all. The only reason I was good at talking to Brian was because for a very long time it didn’t occur to me that he was one. This one, though, he is definitely hot. And now so am I.
‘Well, I should be going, really,’ I begin, feeling my cheeks flush. ‘It’s just that, this building, it belongs to my family so … if, when you leave, you wouldn’t mind …’