The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  We stand back as Mr Green opens the gate, and then, taking an electric screwdriver out of his toolkit, he begins to unbolt the steel shutter that covers the door.

  ‘Would you mind?’ It’s Pea who steps in and braces her slight form against the metal door as he takes the last bolts out, until, taking the weight of the door off her, he slides it to one side with some difficulty, the metal screeching as he drags it along the rough brick work, finally laying it to rest on the floor.

  A fizz of adrenalin charges through me from my chest to my fingertips, like lightening, as the side door is revealed. The vivid-green side door, although now faded and peeling, is exactly as I saw it last night, including the strange lion’s-head door knocker and the out-of-place handle. Hefting the weight of the package on to my hip, I reach out, closing my fingers around it; it’s real.

  Is there a photo somewhere of this doorway, forgotten in one of Dad’s stacks of albums? Did Mum tell me stories of the lion’s-head door knocker when I was a little girl, and the colour of the door? Logic says this information had to have come from some dark corner of my memory, but what is logical isn’t always what is correct. My heart has just found a reason to start beating again.

  ‘When was the last time anyone was in there?’ Pea asks, gently removing my hand from the door.

  ‘Early nineteen eighties,’ Mr Gillespie tells us. ‘Stephanie and her husband moved your grandfather down to Florida. I think that was eighty-one … Yes, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘But we make routine inspections of it, every couple of months,’ Mr Green adds. ‘Last time in the log book just a couple of week ago, when Stephanie told us you were coming. She wanted an inventory.’

  ‘So, no big secrets or surprises in there then?’ Pea asks.

  ‘Not unless you count spiders, and maybe some rats.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Pea’s laugh flashes like a burst of light in the shaded alley.

  ‘Here’s the keys and a couple of flashlights, you’ll need them.’ Mr Green holds out the items in the palms of his hands, almost like offerings, and Pea takes them.

  ‘You have access now for the duration of your visit,’ Mr Gillespie says. ‘You know where to find me if you need assistance of any kind. Are you sure don’t want me to keep hold of that box for you, until you’re done?’

  ‘No, but thank you.’ We exchange nods and wait for what seems like an age as the two men reach the end of the alleyway and turn the corner at last.

  ‘Luna …’ Pea looks at me. ‘A box of packages from Mum, what the hell?’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘Let’s deal with one thing at a time. Shall we go in?’

  Pea looks long and hard at the door, and nods.

  ‘There’s no turning back now.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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  As soon as we step inside, the door swinging to a close with a soft thud, darkness engulfs us. Standing perfectly still, I let the spaces around me slowly reveal themselves. Mixed in with the smell of dust and mildew there is just a little syrupy drizzle of light filtering in, from under the door and around the edges of one tiny boarded-up window. Despite what Mr Green told us, Pea tries the light switches.

  ‘Torches,’ I remind her, edging my way to where the pattern-cutting table was, a spike of adrenalin sends a fizz of energy to the tips of my fingers. I knew exactly where the table would be. I stand still, searching for that tell-tale surge of electricity that seems to proceed these mysterious events, certain my sense of déjà vu is a trick of the brain, but there is nothing. Just a dark and dusty room.

  Easing the box down onto the surface, I slide it through a thick carpet of dust and fine debris.

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Pea passes me a flashlight and two haphazard beams bounce around the room, dazzling me before skipping away again.

  ‘Point your torch somewhere sensible!’ I complain, shielding my eyes as she points it right at my face again.

  ‘Like where?’ Pea asks, demurely.

  ‘At things, not me!’ I say. ‘Come and stand by me, we can operate a sweep system.’

  ‘You’re hilarious.’ Pea’s grin is exaggerated by the shadows the torches cast. ‘Everything has to be orderly. Everything must be scientific.’

  ‘Not everything, just important things, and anyway just do as you are told for once.’

  ‘Or what, you’ll terminate the experiment?’

  Nevertheless, Pea picks her way over an accumulation of trash and bits of fallen ceiling to come and stand by my side. We start a sweep left to right, tracking our torches over the room inch by inch. As every beam of yellow light passes over the dirt and decay, I see glimpses of what I somehow already know is there, and each discovery fills me with more fear and something else; something like excitement, something like hope.

  What if?

  An image of Riss as I saw her last night, laughing and talking, fades into one of Mum, testing the water with her fingers as she runs the bath that she doesn’t plan to ever emerge from, and I wonder what she saw when she thought about this place. When she was writing out those labels, sending missives to an empty building. I’ve always believed that nothing on earth, not even the burden of the pain and secrets she carried, would have let her leave us unless she thought we would be OK. As the bath filled with warm water, as she topped up a glass of red wine, and unscrewed the cap on her antidepressants, she must have been picturing our lives without her, and she must have thought that we would manage, that perhaps we might even do better without her. But we aren’t doing better, not really. Dad wanders around from room to room, like a lost dog. Pea is on the brink of disaster every second of the day, and I … I want Mum back so badly that it feels as if I’m turning the universe all around me to dust, just to be near her again.

  ‘Funny how a room becomes something else completely when there have been no people in it for a very long time.’ Pea breaks my train of thought, her voice amplified in the dense quiet. ‘Like a negative of a print, full of the absences. Take some photos, Luna – we should record every moment of this.’

  ‘It will be tricky in this light,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t have a flash, the right speed of film or lens – most likely nothing will come out, but I’ll try.’

  Lifting the Pentax to my eye, I adjust the aperture to let in as much of the light as possible, shooting into dark corners and deep shadows, uncertain of what I am taking an image of: perhaps nothing; maybe everything.

  ‘I guess the shop must be through there,’ Pea says, stepping over a broken and rotting floorboard to pull open a door, forcing it a little, ploughing a path through crumbling plasterboard and rotting wood that has built up behind it. She vanishes into another room, and all I can see of her is the light zig-zagging beyond the crack in the door.

  ‘Luna, get in here, there are still a couple of mannequins standing in the window! It’s really creepy.’

  I don’t reply, every detail I take in, even by torchlight, confirms something that simply cannot be. As old, empty and broken as it is, this is the same room that I walked into last night, exactly the same physical space. Brian would say the world and people and places are not nearly as different or unique as we think they are; Brian would say it’s not so much an extraordinary coincidence as much as life being intrinsically quite samey, and my injured brain turning that into something that seems magical. But that’s not what I see. I see a thousand impossibilities that are somehow now within my reach.

  ‘Luna?’ Pea’s head appears round the door that leads into the store. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head, turning off the torch, doublefolding the dark in an instant. ‘Whatever’s in the box, it’s a message from her; it’s answers. Maybe a reason why she did what she did? Maybe about who my father is? I mean my biological father. We need to open it, and I think we should do it here, in her room, now.’

  ‘How do we know which room is hers?’ Pea’s tone is reluctant
. She’d much rather play at Scooby-Doo and delay opening the box for as long as possible and I don’t blame her, but the number of seconds between now and peeling back the tape that holds it shut are irrelevant. Sooner or later it has to be done.

  ‘Mrs Finkle told me how she used to sit out at the top of the fire escape and smoke,’ I say, thinking of the girl I met last night and how she leant on the slender iron railings without the slightest fear of the drop below. ‘Whichever room leads out onto that will be her room.’

  Pea shrugs, lighting the way for me as I pick up the box and test the bottom stair. It groans under my weight but seems sound.

  ‘I’m scared all of a sudden,’ Pea says, just as I reach the second step, her voice sounding very small and very young.

  ‘Of a spooky old building?’ I try to sound teasing, patronising.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Of what’s in the box. Of knowing the truth.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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  The first-floor rooms feel as if they haven’t been occupied for a hundred years. The windows are brutally secured, as on the floor below, but unlike the workshop, a fair amount of daylight makes its way through the iron cladding, casting narrow bolts of sun across the room, each one revealing a universe of dust particles. Somewhere I hear faint music playing. I turn to look at Pea.

  ‘Where’s that coming from?’

  Lost in her own thoughts, she wanders into the space where at some point last night I saw my mother as a young woman, sitting on the back of a sofa, digging her bare toes between the cushions. She was here, as real as the weight of my camera in my hand, she was here.

  In quantum physics, two atoms can exist in more than one place at once, changing their behaviour depending on the way that we look at them. Two particles can interact instantaneously, even if they are a million light years apart. There’s a theory called the quantum multiverse, where an infinite number of universes coexist in exactly the same place. What if this is something like that? A universe where all moments of time exist at the same time, for all time? And while we’ve been arguing over the paradox of time travel since H.G. Wells, what if it isn’t a machine we need to travel through time? What if the apparatus already exists in our minds? My heart rate picks up at the possibilities I’m allowing myself to consider, and the distant music grows louder.

  ‘Pea?’ I prompt her. ‘Where’s that coming from?’

  ‘Where’s what coming from?’ Her tone is vague, her eyes sweeping over the mouldering decay, tracing the darker patches on the walls and floor where once pictures and furniture stopped the sun in its tracks. I match one dark patch to a 1977 Elvis calendar, in the corner where I somehow know a TV used to stand.

  ‘I … I don’t know, must be a car radio or something.’

  Shrugging, she listens for a moment, shakes her head and moves on.

  ‘Kitchen’s through here,’ Pea calls, as she explores the other two rooms that radiate off the small landing. The music fades as I follow her into the small space, replaced by the more natural sound of creaking floorboards and passing traffic. There’s a damp gap, filled with thick, black mould, where the sink used to be, and brutal scars left by longgone shelves on the wall. Hard and rotting lino bubbles and cracks under our feet.

  At the bottom of the second flight of stairs the music breaks through again, this time loud enough for me to be able to pick out phrases of melody, a bass line. I listen hard trying to make sense of it; it doesn’t seem to be a song I know.

  ‘You don’t hear that?’ Pea doesn’t even register my question.

  ‘My arms are getting tired, carrying this box around. I’m going up,’ I say, stumbling up the second flight of stairs. The air feels charged, electrified, as if a storm is about to break. The music grows in intensity with each step I take, until suddenly it fills every corner so loudly that it deafens me, boring into my eardrums, enough to cause me pain. I catch my foot on some fallen debris and trip, staggering past the door that I know leads to Riss’s room, thudding into the one opposite. Putting the box down, I place my palms against the rough surface of that door, where the music is coming from. Peeling paint crumbles away from my fingers, and the rotten wood vibrates in time to the bass line.

  And yet, the moment I touch the handle, the music stops. No, not stops; it jumps like a stuck needle on scratched vinyl, repeating the same five words over and over again, ‘The year of the cat, the year of the cat’, so loud I can’t hear the sound of my own short, panicked breaths. Every single moment that has ever happened, or ever will, feels like it’s all existing in this one space.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I shout, pushing the door open hard enough to make it bounce off the wall, leaving a puff of plaster dust in its wake.

  For a fraction of a second I see a young woman sitting there, as clear as the daylight streaming in through a clean glass window. It’s Stephanie, I realise, sitting at a little ornate, cream, dressing table, its drawers and edges gilded with gold, carefully applying lipstick, her mouth an open ‘O’, a frown of concentration reflected in an oval vanity mirror. A heady, heavy perfume mists the air, maybe from the bottle of Charlie that has rolled onto its side. In the very fraction of a second that I see her, our eyes lock as she catches my reflection in her mirror and screams.

  And then there is silence, darkness and dust. The room is empty, nothing of what I just saw remains, except a single broken drawer, probably from a dressing table. A drawer that I know, if I took it to the light and wiped it clean, I would find was edged with gold.

  A tidal wave of nausea doubles me over, my eyes filling with water as I struggle not to retch. Heat flushes through me, a droplet of sweat hesitates at the end of my nose, before smashing on the dusty floor. Everything hurts.

  ‘Were you shouting?’ Pea makes me start as she calls up the stairs. Forcing myself straight I take a couple of deep breaths, wiping the perspiration from my face with my palms in the seconds before she arrives. But when she enters it isn’t me she is looking at. Her eyes scan the empty room.

  ‘Who were you shouting at?’ She turns to me.

  ‘Not me,’ I say. ‘Outside, maybe.’

  ‘This place is so strange and quiet, I forget there’s an outside …’ She hesitates, grabbing me by the wrist and pulling me into what little light there is. ‘Luna, your nose is bleeding.’

  ‘Is it?’ I touch the back of my hand to my face and a drop of blood balances there. ‘Oh, it’s nothing, just one of those things.’

  ‘Here.’ Pea passes me a tissue. ‘Sure you’re OK?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I don’t think she sees the way my hands are trembling, or how I am having to fight to stand up straight. A nosebleed. Is this a physical side effect of some kind of growth in my head, or is stepping between dimensions taking its toll on my fragile flesh? With some effort, I gesture to the other room. ‘That must have been Mum’s room.’

  Pea shudders and grabs my hand, pulling me into the hallway.

  ‘What if we just leave the box here?’ she says. ‘Dad doesn’t know about it, about any of this, and we don’t have to tell him, we don’t have to know. We can just leave it here, where it belongs. Maybe she never meant us to see this stuff, maybe we shouldn’t look.’

  ‘It’s too late now,’ I say. ‘We know it exists now, everything has already changed. There’s no going back.’

  Very slowly she shakes her head.

  ‘Then let’s get it over with.’

  The heat seems to be pressing into every crevice and crack, thickening with dust so that I can almost taste it, like burnt air on my tongue. We push open the door to Riss’s room.

  ‘Oh!’ Pea’s hand flies to her mouth. ‘I didn’t expect there to still be stuff in here. Her stuff, Luna. The place where she slept!’

  I take in the single bed and its sunken, stained mattress; the same heavy, dark wood, gothic wardrobe that I saw last night, staggers against the wall opposite
the bed. I’m half expecting to see the dress she had made still hanging off one corner, covered in cobwebs, like a sort of updated Miss Havisham, but it isn’t there, and I’m relieved.

  ‘OK,’ I say, retrieving the box from the hallway and placing it on the bed.

  ‘Ready?’ Pea asks.

  ‘I’m ready,’ I say. Of course, that’s a lie.

  No one is ever ready for the world they thought they knew to burn down all around them.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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  Pea holds the torch, training it on the box.

  It’s padded with the crunched up sheets of our local newspaper. News of local fairs, and school choirs making regional finals seems so alien and out of place here. Pushing it aside with my fingertips, I search for the box’s contents. It doesn’t take me very long to find the first object.

  ‘Shit,’ I say, my finger resting on it, delaying the moment when I have to take it out.

  ‘What?’ Pea is insistent.

  Reaching in with both hands I carefully lift the first object out.

  ‘Mum’s old projector,’ I say. ‘I hadn’t realised that it wasn’t at home, I don’t know why I didn’t notice. She must have sent this here, knowing …’

  ‘Jesus.’ Pea stares at it as I set it on the bed. ‘What else?’

  Next something heavy and unfamiliar, but as soon as I see what it is, my heart breaks a little more. The forethought and the planning that went into this package. The intention.

  ‘It’s a power source, a battery, the one Dad bought for that disastrous camping trip we went on, the one where we all ended up in a hotel – something to run the projector from.’

  ‘She thought of everything.’ Pea’s voice is very small, very quiet.

  Finally I take out a tin, a biscuit tin, aged and dented; it must be one that Mum had had for a long time. Inside there are four numbered reels of Super 8 film.