The chances are I will simply cease to exist.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
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‘You’re very quiet,’ Pea tells me as she unpacks the box, setting tins of film carefully on the coffee table. ‘You hardly said anything at dinner, you hardly ate and you look like shit. It’s bound to get to you, Luna. I know what you said before, about being brave for Mum, but you don’t have to be, not about this. Not right now, at least. Look, I spoke to Dad while you were out, and he misses us. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him anything, I couldn’t bring myself to, he sounded so low. And so lonely. There’s no real reason for us to stay here now. Shall we just go home?’
‘I can’t,’ I say, drawing the curtains, and moving the print from the wall where Pea is training the projector. ‘Not yet. A few more days and I know I can get my head round it. Here, I feel like we’re close to her; I don’t know why.’
‘Neither do I,’ Pea says a little testily, plugging the projector into an adaptor. ‘We didn’t know her here. The person Mrs Finkle and Gillespie talks about is someone we never met. We knew Mum at home, bare feet, secretly chain-smoking, creating her own little universe for us to live in. That’s where our mum is, that’s where our memories of her are. Not here. I really want to go home, Luna. At least right after we’ve visited the sight of 2001 Odyssey.’
‘You can go,’ I say, although the thought fills me with dread. ‘I just need to stay here a little while longer.’
‘I’m not going to leave you,’ Pea says at once. ‘What kind of a cow would that make me? Which film are we going to watch?’
‘Well, these last ones, the ones that came with the projector, seem to be the ones that she wanted us to watch. I guess we watch them in order. Number two.’
‘Do you think she’ll tell us who he is? Your … that man.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I say, taking a seat on the floor. ‘Play the film.’
A blur of brown and blue are the first images we see, and then next, incredibly, it’s Henry, our father, his face coming into focus as he backs away from the camera. Young features that he hasn’t quite grown into yet, thick-framed glasses, and his dark hair long on his shoulders. He adjusts the angle of the camera a little, by propping something underneath it, and backs away, disappearing out of frame, probably to the window to adjust the curtains, as suddenly the light flares and the room brightens. There are pink balloons, tied with bits of string to light fittings, and on the table in the near-distance a dessert bowl full of crisps – potato chips, Mum always called them.
‘Ready?’ Dad asks to someone off camera, and as I see his smile, his dark eyes crinkling behind his glasses, I realise he’s talking to me. Five years old, wearing my sun-yellow maxi dress, waiting for my baby sister to come home.
‘Yes!’ I skip in front of the lens, hopping bouncing.
It’s still the London flat where we lived for the first four months of Pea’s life. I remember the paisley-patterned wallpaper, and the swirls on the carpet in which I used to sometimes spend ages looking for monstrous faces. A buzzer sounds, and I bounce up and down on my bare feet as Dad goes to answer the door.
‘It’s you,’ I tell Pea, as I watch myself, finger clasped together, balancing on one leg as I peer around the door. I hear footsteps on the stairs and run back to my position by the side of the camera.
‘Here she is, here’s baby Pia.’ Dad grins as Mum walks in, and I gasp at the sight of her. I have never remembered her this way, thin and grey-looking, as if the pregnancy drained away half of her life.
‘Oh my God, she looks awful,’ Pia says. ‘She looks so sad.’
‘Luna!’ Mum sits down, with my newborn sister in one arm, beckoning me to her side with the other. Up until this moment, if you’d asked me what my earliest memory was, I would have said this. Mum bringing Pea home from hospital, but this is nothing like what I remember. I remember Mum, soft and full of light and love, her gentle voice in my ear as she encouraged me to hold the tiny, crimson little person that I quite unexpectedly fell in love with at first sight. Not this, not the brittle stiffness in the arm that encircles me, or the tension and anxiety in my dad’s shoulders.
Grandma Pat enters, bringing with her a tray of three small glasses of sherry and the bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, which she sets down on the coffee table.
‘Got to wet the baby’s head,’ she says, and she and Dad each take a sip, toasting my baby sister.
‘Would you like a cup of tea, love?’ Dad asks Mum, who shakes her head.
‘I need a minute,’ she says. ‘To feed her.’
‘She isn’t crying,’ Grandma Pat says indignantly. ‘You know, nobody breastfeeds these days. Formula has got all the nutrients you need.’
‘Would you like Grandma to read you a bedtime story?’ Dad asks me.
‘I want to stay with Mummy,’ I plead. ‘I want to help her feed baby Pea.’
‘Just go with Daddy,’ Mum snaps, and I watch, as the girl I once was recoils as if she’s been hit.
‘I’ll come in a minute and kiss you goodnight.’
‘Come on, sweetheart.’ Dad and Grandma Pat lead me out of the room.
The camera rolls. For several seconds Mum stares over Pea’s head, her fist clenched in a fist and then, slowly, she unbuttons her blouse. It takes a moment for the baby to latch on and begin to feed. As she does, Mum fumbles in her bag with her free hand, puts a cigarette in her mouth and lights it, inhaling deeply, tipping her head back to blow the smoke away from the baby, and then after a moment she drains one glass of sherry and then the other, fills one glass again, drains it again, and again, and again, until eventually, as the baby falls asleep on her breast, she leans back into the cushions and closes her eyes, the ash from her cigarette growing longer and longer. And the film keeps rolling. Pea and I keep watching until Dad comes back in, takes the butt out of her hand, stubs it out, and turns off the camera.
‘Why is she showing us that,’ Pea asks, her voice trembling. ‘Do you think … do you think she thought it was her fault, my addiction? Do you think the fact that she didn’t care enough to stop smoking or drinking when I was born, or maybe even while she was pregnant with me, is the reason that I’m the way I am?’
‘We’ve only seen this one moment,’ I say.
‘But it’s a film she chose.’ Pea turns to look at me, hugging her knees tight to her chest. ‘It has to mean something. It has to be that she’s showing us something. She thought it was her fault, the drinking, the drugs, the failed degree … and … and maybe she was right, Luna, because that look on her face, when she closes her eyes after she’s drunk enough to numb the pain? I know that look. I feel it; every second of every day I long for it.’ Pea springs up, pacing to the wall and back. ‘Christ, I want a drink.’
‘You don’t,’ I say. ‘Look … OK, maybe Mum did think it was her fault …’
‘So is that one of the things she couldn’t live with? Am I one of the reasons she killed herself?’
As she paces, Pea’s voice becomes more tightly stretched, her fingers knotted and tangled. ‘It was me, I did it to her. I made her feel so guilty, it was me.’
‘No, Pea.’ I grab her by the shoulders, stopping her.
‘I ruined my life and it ruined hers, stopped her from being able to move on …’ She shakes her head in slow horror, her black eyes filling with tears.
‘No. No.’ I pull her into me and hold her tightly. ‘No. Mum isn’t blaming you, she’d never blame you. She’s showing us how her ghosts dragged her down. Do you ever remember her being cruel or unkind?’
‘Just then she—’
‘Yes, but I don’t remember that. I remember her and I singing you to sleep, I remember lit candles in the woodland, and turning our dolls’ games into motion pictures. I knew she smoked, she smoked all of our lives, but I don’t remember her smoking around us, do you?’
Pea shakes her head
.
‘And she drank sometimes, those times when the depression got really bad, when Dad couldn’t get her out of bed, when we had sandwiches for tea. But I don’t ever remember her being drunk around us, do you?’
‘No, but …’
‘Don’t you see?’ I say, feeling her body slowly relax into mine. ‘Mum was a brilliant mum, a loving mum, the best and funniest and kindest mum, despite what happened to her, what it drove her to do. And she was that way because of us. She fought that ghost for us, to be with us. She didn’t put this film in the box to blame you; she put it in the box to say sorry.’
‘She never had to be sorry,’ Pea says. ‘I never wanted her to feel sorry about the choices I made.’
‘I don’t think we could have changed how she felt, the demons she fought,’ I say. ‘Once that had happened to her, once she’d … done what she did, and run. I don’t think there was ever a way back for her, a way back to who she used to be.’
‘Luna, let’s just go. Let’s just go home, and leave the box here and be with Dad, who loves us more than anything, and forget that any of this week happened, because until we watched that first film, none of it did.’
‘We can’t, not yet,’ I say.
‘But why?’ she pleads. She’s almost begging; she is so afraid of not being strong enough.
‘Because …’ It’s almost there, the reason why. I almost tell her, but I don’t have the courage, not just yet. ‘Will you trust me, please? Just a little bit longer and I think … I think I can make everything better for you.’
‘Just a few days,’ she says. ‘Will that be enough?’
‘It will have to be,’ I tell her. ‘It’s all the time we have left.’
10 JULY
‘We all have our time machines, don’t we? Those that take us back are memories … And those that carry us forward are dreams.’
—H.G. Wells
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
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Pea is sitting on Mrs Finkle’s steps, contemplating the Virgin Mary as she drinks coffee from an oversized mug. We talked a lot last night, or rather she did, about almost everything, everything that has ever happened to her. She told me about the first time she drank wine in the park when she was eleven years old. And when, at nineteen, she did something called an eight ball with the bass player from a college band. He’s a lawyer now, she never finished her degree.
She wanted me to talk, too, about how it feels to know what Mum went through. To know that the man that raped her makes up 50 per cent of me. She wants me to tell her what it makes me feel like knowing that after Mum was brutalised she caved the man’s head in on the corner of the wardrobe. But I didn’t talk. I didn’t tell her of the grief that threatens to overwhelm me whenever I think about the fact that I am not part of the good, kind man I love so much who is waiting for both his daughters to come home. Or that the idea that this other man lives on in me, makes me want to claw my own veins out of my body. I don’t say that I am proud of my mother for doing what she did, and if I had known I would have done my best to absolve her of any sense of guilt a long time ago, and that I hate myself for feeling that way. I wouldn’t say any of that, not out loud. Because I believe, I have to believe, that I can erase all of that pain, all of that anguish, perhaps even my sister’s addictions and disease, if I am right about what is happening. If I can go back to 1977, and stop the attack from happening at all. And if I do that, then this miracle that I’m living will be worth it, even if it means I erase myself in the process.
‘Mrs Finkle says there’s a photography studio on Eighty-First and Fourth,’ I tell her. ‘She doesn’t know if they have a darkroom, but I thought if it’s on the way to your next pilgrimage sight, we could drop in. I’d love to see if I can develop the film I’ve taken so far.’ Of course, I don’t mention this theory I have that I might have captured moments played out thirty years before I was born. That I’m looking for tangible proof to the single greatest scientific breakthrough of all time, or my own mental-health issues, one or the other. Or that, either way, I’m looking for something, anything, that might give me an easier way back to where I need to be and a less rough ride home, because I do want to come home again. I want to come back to the people I’m doing this for.
Leaving 1977 last night had been harder than I wanted it be; I’d walked for almost an hour, weaving my way in and out of strangers long gone, stepping over the garbage that collected in the gutters, remnants of a summer of strikes and an almost-bankrupt city on the verge of ceasing to function at all, avoiding the drunks as the sun went down, and the lights came on. Then the streets had filled with a different sort of person, and as the last of the day faded away, I wondered if maybe I would ever make it back to my own time, and I was filled with such a painful longing to see my sister, at least once more, that I cried out loud, a half-moan, half-shriek. It was enough to make a group of guys turn and look at me; one minute they were peeling themselves off a wall to check me out, the next they were gone and I was back, my skin feeling as if it were on fire, as if a layer had been burnt away in an instant. I’d thrown up into the gutter, my eyes filling with tears, but at least this time I was still standing.
‘Everything is on the way to 2001 Odyssey,’ Pea says. ‘It’s miles away, why are there no cabs in Brooklyn? You know, we’ve been a subway ride away from Manhattan for a few days now. Why don’t we just get on one, and go and see what all the fuss is about. Have breakfast at Tiffany’s or dance on that giant piano from Big.’
‘You’d really rather do actual sightseeing than go and stand in an abandoned car lot that used to be a night club from the movie that you have watched eleven thousand times … this year?’ I ask her. ‘Do I know you?’
‘Fuck it, you’re right, let’s get going to that abandoned car lot. Who knows what other magical things we might see on the way.’ Pea leaves her mug on the windowsill next to Mary, giving a cheery wave to Mrs Finkle, who we both know is watching us from behind the curtains.
‘I got a darkroom, kinda.’ The woman who owns the studio studies us from behind the counter; she’s fair and tanned, with skin that looks like she spent a good deal of her life outside. It suits her, though; laughter lines are etched around her face, giving her an air of permanent happiness. She gestures at the portraits that line the walls, girls in prom dresses, couples in wedding attire, misty-eyed-looking dogs. ‘But I don’t usually let people walk in off the street and use it. Anyway, I don’t really use it myself anymore. It’s all digital now; I’m thinking of converting it to an office. I’m not even sure if I have any developer or fixing agent …’
‘Can we look? Please?’ I give her my best smile. ‘I’ll pay you for your time, of course.’
‘Well, it’s nice to see someone who is still interested in film, I guess …’ She purses her lips as makes up her mind. ‘I’m Christie Collins. Come through, see what you can find. I’ll be out here giving a beautiful bride the perfect smile, if you need me, but hopefully you’ll find what you need in there.’
The darkroom is very small, scarcely bigger than a cupboard, but after a few minutes of searching I find everything I need: developing tanks, fluids – although probably only just enough – and agents. There are even pegs on a line that stretch about the darkroom. Taking the Pentax, I manually rewind the film, and opening the camera I take out the roll of film. Switching the lights off, I work by the glow of the red light, winding the film on to a developing roll, and placing it into the tank. As I pour in the sharp-scented chemical, I’m careful to avoid air bubbles, trying to remember everything Dad has taught me over the years.
‘How long?’ Pea asks me.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘Dad always says about six minutes. Can you see your watch in here?’
‘No,’ Pea says. ‘I’ll count to sixty, six times.’
It’s the best that either of us can come up with, and we wait, Pea tapping her finge
r against the counter as we count in our heads.
‘About now,’ she says.
Carefully, I pour in the stop agent and shake the film again, before adding the fixer.
‘OK, so we need to dry this,’ I say, hanging the film from the line. ‘I have no idea what we are going to get.’
A few minutes later, I switch the lights on, and Pea and I stand side by side as we examine the film. The shots that stand out at once are the ones I took on the journey from the airport, houses and streets framed by the cab window. And Pea, posing in the various locations she has taken us to. One of the Virgin, white-eyed and blind, and Mrs Finkle standing in her doorway.
Jangling with nerves, I take a magnifying glass to more closely study the shots of the building, afraid of seeing a face peering through one of the gaps in the shutters, but there is nothing out of the ordinary. On film the building looks sedentary, sedate. Simply an empty ruin, hollow of secrets and mystery.
And then five almost-black-shots in a row, the ones I took in the workshop on our first visit. As I suspected at the time, hardly anything recognisable appears, a blur of torchlight, nothing in focus, nothing that makes sense. I trace my way down to the end of the reel, feeding it through my fingers, holding my breath as I come to the shots I took with Riss and her friends. Nothing. No, not nothing; in the first and the second shots there are colours, a myriad of colours, blurred and out of focus, like a rainbow bled into the paper. I am stunned, because I shot something with enough light to make these coloured patterns where there should have only been dark.
And the very last shot slips through my fingers and I gasp.
‘God!’ Pea gasps, covering her mouth with her hands. ‘Oh my god!’
I stare at the photo: clear, crisp, perfect. It’s the smile that Riss gave me before she told me she was going to make me beautiful. It’s her face, that light in her eyes, the last of the day’s sun edging her cheek. That moment that should be impossible has somehow imprinted perfectly onto this film.
The Summer of Impossible Things Page 13
