by Holly Miller
I just don’t know how Joel and I could hope to build a life for ourselves, with so much to fear.
But Joel carries all that with him already, and he has nowhere to stow it. If I truly loved him, maybe I’d be encouraging him to say what’s in his heart, agreeing to share the load. Because love isn’t only about the easy choices, the simple solutions—it’s about the hard graft and the tough calls, the sacrifices you don’t actually want to make. Nothing worth having ever comes easy, my dad always says.
I stare down at the furrow of my initial next to Grace’s in the tree bark before scrabbling for my phone and dialing her, waiting for the beep.
“I’m just in our tree, thinking about you. Well, thinking about Joel, actually. I wish I could talk to you, Grace. I’m pretty sure you’d know what to do—or, at least, you’d know what to say. I think you’d tell me to stay blissfully ignorant and keep living for the moment. Am I right?
“You always said you wanted to die doing something you loved. Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to do that. But you died without knowing it was coming, which has to be the next best thing, at least.” I shut my eyes. “Look, Grace, just give me a sign or something, will you? Just something—anything—so I know what I’m supposed to do . . . You’d have adored him—Joel. I know you would have loved to see how happy he makes me. It would have made you happy too, I think.
“So, don’t forget, all right? Just . . . give me a sign.”
Pressing end call, I lean back against the rigid spine of willow bark for a few more moments. Stupidly, I’m already looking out for it—the signal from my friend to let me know she’s heard me. But the air remains quiet, and the river stays still.
58.
Joel
A fortnight since my dream. Two weeks of paralysis. I’ve been turning the pages of Callie and me over in my mind, like a book I was always afraid to open. I know I’m at risk of losing her, but I can’t just wait for the tide to take her. I have to try everything.
Steve’s out of breath when he answers the phone. “Joel?”
I’m walking Bruno. It’s only now I think to check my watch, and it’s nearly nine p.m. “Sorry, mate, were you—”
“Just some push-ups before bed.” He punches out excess breath like an army sergeant. “You’re alive, then.”
“Yeah, sorry, I’ve been—”
“Ignoring my messages.”
I feel momentarily like a client he’s chastising for dropping out of boot camp. “I think I’m ready to see Diana.”
“That was a long time coming.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“And you’re serious?”
“Very.”
“How’s the—you know—dreaming been?”
“As bad as it could possibly be.”
He goes quiet for a few seconds. “This to do with Callie?”
“I can’t explain right now. Just . . . can you set it up for me?”
“Of course, mate. Of course.”
As I hang up I realize, perhaps too late, that friends like Steve are hard to come by.
59.
Callie
Sitting up, I let my eyes find the clock. It’s two a.m., and I’ve been jolted into consciousness by the buzzing of my phone.
Joel is comatose next to me. I reach over with my free hand and gently slide the headphones from around his face. He must have fallen asleep with them on.
I stare at his shut notebook for a moment, imagining the words it must contain about me. I consider how easily I could change the course of my own future just by turning a page.
“I checked Grace’s voice mail,” Ben says. “What was all that about you and Joel?”
Oh, no. He checks her messages.
“Sorry,” I whisper, performing a tiny face-palm. “You can just delete it.” A couple of weeks have passed since I left that message, and I’d forgotten about it.
I climb out of bed and pad through to the living room, Murphy at my heels. The night air is congested with humidity, like a swimming-pool changing room. I perch between the pots on the windowsill and tilt the blinds so I can see the night sky.
“I need to know you’re okay,” Ben says.
“I’m okay.”
He waits a beat. “You were right, you know.”
“About what?”
“What you said in your message. When people say they want to die doing something they love, what they really mean is they don’t want to know it’s coming.”
It was true that Grace had always said that, which is why I sometimes wonder if she should have died while she was climbing Table Mountain with Ben, or running that half marathon in Lanzarote. I still don’t know the answer—though I do know she shouldn’t have died at the hands of someone else as she was rushing along that awful backstreet, late for Pilates. But I guess that’s life’s disquieting reality—you don’t get to choose.
I curse my own insensitivity. “I’m sorry, Ben. I didn’t think.”
“Cal, tell me to mind my own business if you like, but . . . what’s going on with you and Joel?”
His question, though well-intended, feels sharp as a dart. “It’s complicated” is all I say, a feeble oversimplification.
“All right. But let me just say this. If you’ve found true love, Cal, don’t let it go. You have no idea . . .” He skips a breath or two. “None of us know what we’ve got till it’s gone. Yes, it’s a cliché, but that’s because it’s true.”
My mind a cyclone, I think of Joel. “Ben, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you really believe . . . do you believe it was better Grace went quickly? Or do you wish you’d had more time, you know, to . . . prepare?”
“Prepare like . . . cancer?”
“Sorry,” I murmur. “You don’t have to answer, if you don’t want.”
“No, it’s all right. If I’m honest, Cal, where Grace was concerned, I’d have to say ignorance was bliss. Yes, it was a shock when she died. Brutal. It felt as if that bastard had plowed into every one of us. But I don’t think Grace could have handled a death sentence.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“You’re not ill, are you?” Ben’s voice becomes a plucked string of fear.
“Not as far as I know.”
“I might be wrong,” he says then. “Maybe Grace would have preferred a few months’ notice. Maybe she’d have made even more of her life, if she’d known.”
I smile. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“Yeah, me either.”
60.
Joel
Diana’s invited me to meet her at the university where she’s based. It’s mid-September, just before the students return. I try to see that as a good omen. A fresh term, a new page. The chance to begin again.
“Take a seat.”
The office we’re in is cramped and airless, with breeze blocks for walls and not enough light. The whole place feels distinctly correctional, so I angle my chair toward the door. Just in case.
She introduces herself, asks how she can help. Though not unfriendly, her tone’s brisk and she speaks at a clip. She must be midfifties, yet she doesn’t seem nearly eccentric enough to be a professor. She has an ergonomic chair, for one thing. And with those Buddy Holly glasses, black skinny jeans, and canvas high-tops, she could easily have just clocked off from brainstorming straplines at an ad agency.
“Steve said he spoke to you. About my . . . condition.”
Unnerving: she’s scribbling on a notepad already, not looking at me. “You say you’re psychic?”
“Well, I don’t ‘say’ I am. I am.”
She nods just once. Doesn’t comment.
I shift awkwardly in my very un-ergonomic chair. “Is this . . . anything you’ve come across before?”
“Not personally. Ca
n you tell me a bit about what you experience?”
In my mind again, a cliff edge. That doctor at uni, a sneer on his flaky lips. But I’m here now. So I take a breath, remind myself Steve’s already told Diana everything. And still she agreed to meet me.
I start with something simple. My dream last night. Tamsin, Neil, and Amber on a half-term trip to the local safari park in six weeks’ time. (Lions and tigers no credible threat, though monkeys cause minor damage to Tamsin’s car. I guess I’ll use YouTube to help forewarn them nearer the time.)
I keep talking, move on to Luke and my mother. To Poppy and the car accident, my sister’s pregnancy. I tell her about the not-sleeping and the tortured nights. About my dad. And then I tell her about Callie, about what I know will happen a few short years from now. Unless Diana can help me. Unless she can do something.
“I only dream about the people I love,” I reiterate.
The scientist in her flinches.
“Steve mentioned something about . . .” I look down at my notebook. It’s open in my lap, for prompts. “. . . my temporal and frontal lobes. And my right hemisphere?”
“Have you ever had a head injury, or a serious illness?”
“Never.”
“Does anything ever slip through the net? I mean, do significant things happen that you haven’t dreamed about?”
“Yes. All the time. I can’t see everything. There’s so much I don’t know.”
“Have you ever dreamed anything that hasn’t . . . come true?”
“Only if I take some sort of action. Do something to stop it happening.”
She doesn’t delve into what that might entail, asks instead about my medical history.
“Well.” Eventually she looks down at her notes and circles something (I’d kill to know what). “I’ll make some inquiries with my colleagues. We could potentially explore funding to carry out some research, subject to ethical approvals.”
“How long would all that take?”
She sidesteps the question slightly. “We’d have to look at funding cycles, decide whether to make an interdisciplinary application. That’s if you’re happy for me to share your information with my colleagues, make some initial inquiries?”
“Yes,” I say dully. But though I came here to ask for it, I feel strangely wrong-footed by the idea of scrutiny. Like I’ve been trapped somewhere dark for so long, I need easing into the dazzle of daylight. I try to refocus. “So . . . you think you might be able to help?”
After all these years, I’m still not sure I dare believe it.
Diana leans back in her chair as far as ergonomically possible. Bafflingly nonchalant, she glances again at her notes. Taps the tip of her pen against them. “Well, that depends on what you mean by help. Evidently we can’t change the future for you. But perhaps we could do something with the dreams themselves.”
“You mean, stop them happening?”
“At this stage, I really couldn’t say.” She clearly won’t promise something so outlandish as restoring me to normal.
A thought toboggans through me. I’ve been so fixated on preventing the dreams, I’ve barely stopped to consider what that would actually achieve.
Because if Diana can’t help Callie, is there even any point? Ever since I dreamed about her death, it’s Callie I’ve been worried about. Not my own jumble of lopsided brain cells.
“Something I haven’t asked,” Diana’s saying. “Does anyone in your family share your . . . condition?”
Inside my mind, a key begins to turn. “I . . . I’m not sure.”
“I’d like to run through your family history as a starting point.”
My breathing becomes rigid, mechanical. Why hasn’t this occurred to me before now?
I’m not even your father!
“Actually,” I say suddenly, shutting my notebook and getting to my feet, “don’t share this with anyone just yet. I’d like some time. To think everything over.”
“Take all the time you need.” Her tone implies she’s got a ton of other research on her desk that she’d frankly find far less of a ball-ache.
“Thank you for seeing me.”
“Give my regards to Steve,” she says. But I’ve already disappeared.
* * *
• • •
I walk back through the concrete maze of the university campus toward the car park. The place is eerily quiet, except for the whistle of an autumn breeze between the buildings.
Questions are strobe-lighting through my mind.
I’ve been focused on finding a cure for so long that I’ve never stopped to think about what would follow. Maybe cutting off my dreams would leave me worryingly adrift. Like the implausible anti-climax of a lottery win, the fingertip fear of a house offer accepted. Be careful what you wish for.
Because maybe what I’m actually wishing for is a way to stop the future from happening. And no academic in the world can help me with that.
The only person who can do that is me.
61.
Callie
On the same day as Joel’s appointment with Diana, I have a near-miss at work. A plastic felling wedge springs from a tree I’m helping to cut down just as I’ve lifted the visor on my helmet. Thick and squat, like a doorstop but sharper, it misses my face by millimeters. Any closer and I could have been blinded—or worse, if it had struck me in the neck. It’s a stupid, careless error and it rattles me.
I wonder if I’ll always be jumpy, now that Joel’s dream has alerted me to my own mortality. Maybe this is what it’s like for stroke or heart attack survivors—forever afraid a tight chest or headache is the beginning of the end. Perhaps it will always be there now when I wake in the morning—that caged bird in my stomach, a small but insistent quiver of fear.
I must be young when the end comes, I’ve realized that. I can tell from the intensity of Joel’s distress. A vision of me dying gray-haired and weary-boned, peacefully in my sleep, would hardly have tormented him to the degree he’s now experiencing.
I run through all the ways it might happen—being crushed by a tree or falling from the shoulders of one I’m felling, drowning, suffocating, a clot or a tumor, a smashing of bones . . . I wonder if there is pain, and whether Joel is there, and where there is . . .
Closing my eyes briefly, I attempt to steady myself. Stop. You’re just in shock. This agitation will pass. The fear will fade.
“Hey, Cal,” Liam calls, lowering his own visor again in preparation for the next cut. “Don’t overthink it. Seriously—happens to the best of us.”
Liam’s being nice, but I’m shaken, and I wonder if perhaps it would be best to sit Joel down and ask him to tell me everything. But then I remind myself that a permanent ticking clock would be far, far worse than the occasional brush with mortality. It would be the most ominous of pendulums, counting down the sunsets, the summers, every kiss.
I can see why they say ignorance is bliss. Because if the end was revealed to be imminent, brutal, or both, I know I couldn’t live with the dread.
* * *
• • •
Minutes later, Liam and I stand back to watch the tree finally fall. It’s a diseased oak, dangerous and close to a public footpath, so it had to come down. We say nothing as it descends, felled like a king on an ancient battlefield. It first saw sunlight in the era of Queen Victoria, its acorn wriggling through soil to become a bright green sapling under the watch of Charles Dickens, George Eliot. And now, nearly two centuries on, the whisper of leaves crescendos to a roar as it topples to the ground with a crack louder than thunder. I feel history exhale, a thousand kept secrets decimated, and I’m suddenly overcome.
“Awful, isn’t it?” I say to Liam, as the fen falls silent once more and the storm of stirred-up undergrowth settles. Birds have scattered from the boughs of trees still standing, like seeds blown off the head of a dandelion. “
Watching something so old meet its end.”
“Yes and no.” Liam removes his helmet, rubs sawdust from his hair. “Worse if a limb falls and kills someone.”
I say nothing.
As Liam and I begin sawing the felled oak into logs, I try to envisage how my life would look if I let Joel tell me what he knows. Though he truly is blameless, I wonder whether I’d start eventually to resent him for filling in the one gap we all take for granted, for snuffing out the warm glow of possibility. For giving me the full stop I never really wanted.
But we are where we are, and maybe I love him enough to surmount all that. Grace always used to say, I’ll either find a way or make one.
* * *
• • •
I’m late home after staying to help quad-bike logs back to the yard. Though Murphy’s in his usual spot by the hearth, the flat feels empty, still as a stopped clock.
I spot a note against the kettle on the kitchen worktop.
Gone to Newquay for a couple of nights. Explain when I’m back xx
I sit unsteadily on the sofa, stare at the scrap of paper I’m holding like it’s a ransom note. Murphy nudges his nose onto my lap, looks up at me with eyes of liquid woe.
I know Newquay’s the area code for the number in the book Joel found. All I can hope is that whoever lives there might be able to help us, before it’s too late.
62.
Joel
He looks like me, just twenty years older. I recognize the dint of my own chin. The crow’s feet and Cupid’s bow. His eyes, dark as galaxies.
“Steady, steady . . . Hey, you okay?” He must think I’m about to pass out, because he’s making that face people do when they’re watching a natural disaster unfold on the news. He grabs me by the elbow, steers me inside.
