The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘If you feel that way, then this is where you get help, where you look around you and see how important you are to a lot of other people. It’s not the part where you …’ She can’t finish the sentence.

  ‘Pea.’ I take her hand. ‘Don’t feel sad, don’t feel frightened, because if you do, then I will too, and I don’t want to. I want to feel brave and strong, and like I can do this. Have faith.’

  ‘Faith in what?’ Pea asks me.

  ‘In me, I suppose,’ I say.

  ‘Well, I have faith you will turn heads in this …’

  She sweeps the towel covering the full-length mirror away, and I see my reflection. Except that it doesn’t seem to be me that I am looking at, but rather someone I only know in passing, someone I’d like to have the guts to be like now and again. This woman in high heels, wearing a dress with a plunging neckline, her blue eyes shining brightly, intensified by expertly applied eyeshadow, cheekbones highlighted, lips glossed. Then again, perhaps it’s just another version of what I feel like when I look in the mirror usually, like I am looking a stranger. This strange woman, she is just a change from the other strange woman I usually see.

  ‘You look beautiful, sis,’ Pea says. ‘I mean, like a crazy person in two thousand and seven, but good for nineteen seventy-seven. I’ll get the bus up there with you, OK? Can’t have you wandering around looking like that on your own.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, I bloody do.’

  ‘Right, then,’ I say, gripped with nerves. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘No, you aren’t,’ Pea says. ‘Here.’

  She hands me a few moth-eaten-looking dollar bills.

  ‘What this?’ I ask her.

  ‘Money from nineteen seventy-seven. Well, some is nineteen seventy-six, but anyway, Milo had some, so I bought it. It wasn’t very expensive. And you might need to buy someone a drink. Hell, you’ll probably need several drinks yourself. Ask for a Seven and Seven, it was all the rage back then.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I am worried. ‘Have you been talking to Milo?’

  ‘No, you idiot; like you keep telling me, I’ve seen Saturday Night Fever like a thousand times. John Travolta orders it in the club. Take it.’

  ‘Pea, thank you.’ The few crumpled notes somehow mean much more to me than anything else she has ever given me.

  ‘Now I’m ready.’

  ‘I’m glad you are,’ she says. ‘Because I’m not.’

  ‘This feels wrong,’ Pea says as we stand on the corner of 64th Street. ‘It feels wrong to just leave you out here, in the arse end of nowhere, dressed to the nines. It’s a really long walk home, and you won’t find a cab to take you back if anything goes wrong.’

  Nodding I look up and down the empty street, a commercial area of town. Maybe during the day it’s pretty busy, but for now, it’s silent, perfectly still.

  ‘I’ll be OK.’ I don’t really believe that, and it sounds in my voice, which in turn echoes loudly in the empty streets; too loud, loud enough for the shadows to overhear us talking. ‘What will you do?’

  I’m asking her if she will go to a bar again, although I don’t need to say it out loud.

  ‘I said I’d meet Milo,’ she says. ‘I like him. If you have to completely change the universe tonight, try and keep him and me somewhere in the same vicinity.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I promise. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.’

  We hug, and she squeezes me so tightly it hurts.

  ‘Take me with you, Luna.’ Pea takes my face in her hands. I know that she means it. ‘Please take me with you. Let me try, please. I saw her too, Mum. I saw a little bit of her. Maybe … maybe if you hold on to me or something I can come with you, I can see her too. I don’t want to stay here on my own, take me with you.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can,’ I say. ‘I don’t think it works that way.’

  ‘You have no idea how it works,’ Pea reminds me, and she is right about that. ‘You can try, at least,’ she says. ‘I’m wearing my platform sandals and everything.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, ‘let’s try.’

  I hold her hands in mine and look at her, and we stand there in the near silence.

  ‘What happens next?’ Pea whispers.

  ‘I sang an old song once, that seemed to work …’ I said.

  Pea begins to hum ‘Disco Inferno’, but nothing happens, we just stand there, holding hands in the middle of nowhere, and I get this image of us, as if I was looking down at us from the moon, a couple of crazy women who think they might be able to travel through time by humming disco tracks, and I laugh.

  ‘What?’ Peas asks me, and then she laughs too. ‘Oh god, we’re nuts.’

  ‘I think I have to go it alone,’ I tell her, and she nods.

  ‘It kills me that there is something you can do and I can’t,’ she says. ‘It’s like when you got the stabilisers off your bike all over again, only this time I definitely won’t catch up with you.’

  ‘At least you’ll get to see Milo,’ I say.

  ‘What if it’s now,’ she asks, her voice barely more than a whisper in the dark.

  ‘What if what is now?’

  ‘The last time I ever see you,’ she says. ‘The last time I ever know you.’

  It’s a question I don’t know how to answer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

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  There have been moments in my life before when I have felt excruciatingly out of place: my first day at work in a room full of men, who looked at me as if I’d arrived from out of space; the time I turned up for a blind date in my habitual jeans and a T-shirt to meet a guy at a quiz night and it turned out to be a black-tie event. But I think climbing my way through the rubble and rubbish of a disused parking lot in red imitation-silk probably beats the lot.

  It seems impossible to find a way in at first and I wonder if I’m in the right place at all, but I’m sure I am. Pea would never get a Saturday Night Fever location wrong. I just need to get close enough; at least that’s what I tell myself. As if I have any idea how this works, or what triggers it, but getting close enough is all I can control, so I focus on that.

  Feeling my way around an old, makeshift chipboard fence, put up around the derelict site some time ago, I presume, I keep going until I find a weakness, a board that’s partially rotted away. I half tear one corner away, working it loose, and the noise of the wood splintering jars against the still night. The space it leaves is just enough for me to be able to squeeze through, although a stray needle of wood drags at my upper arm as I pass through, leaving a thin, stinging, trail of blood behind. Once inside I shove the panel of wood back as far as it will go, offering me some small amount of security from the great, vast silence that watches me from the other side of the fence.

  Whatever I thought I might find on the other side, it wasn’t this … nothing. None of the building that housed the 2001 Odyssey club remains, I knew that, but I expected that there would be something here, something that I could focus on and draw from. Instead, all I can see in the near dark is more rubble, and weeds. Taking a hesitant step forwards, broken glass crunches under my feet, and an empty fast food wrapper snags at my toe. There I was, beginning to believe in resonance as a fact – the feelings I got inside the place where Mum used to live and work, the experience I had at the church, and at the park, the sense of thousands of moments stretching out side by side in the same space, each one existing separately, but somehow, sometimes, influencing another. But this place has none of that. It is empty and it feels it; it feels dead.

  For a few years after the movie came out, this very spot that I’m standing on, which smells faintly of dust and dog shit, had been the epicentre of disco; the whole world wanted to come here, to be seen here. But only a few years later Bay Ridge’s moment in the spotlight was over, and that’s what it feels like as I stand here, alone, like this crazy adve
nture I have been on has come to an abrupt, pathetic end.

  Dad must have taken hundreds of photos of the outside of the club and the interior, but I can’t find any visual clues as to how the building might have been positioned on this corner. At a loss, I pick my way through the stiff, dead vegetation and over lumps of stone and concrete, and then I stop and close my eyes.

  If I listen very carefully, I can hear the traffic from a few blocks over. On a busy night here there would have been a lot of cars, a lot of engines revving, girls laughing, guys talking. I imagine all of that until I can almost hear it, and then into that I insert my own imaginary bass beat, a distance thud, thud, thud. Once, on one of her sunshine days, Mum told us how the guys would always stand outside, no matter what the weather, in their thin, fake-silk, patterned shirts; that couples would make out – and more – in the backs of their cars; that there was a guy on the door called Sandy, who’d look you up and down when you came in, and turn you around again if he didn’t like your face or the way you were dressed. I take all these details and set them loose in my imagination, like a series of spinning plates, concentrating really hard, and yet nothing happens, and all my efforts crash to the floor.

  What is the use of this superpower if I can’t control it? If I have to wait for it to take me when I don’t expect it, when I don’t have a plan or a strategy? There has to be something more, something more important that just wanting it to happen; there has to be a bigger mystery, a reason for every shift. A clue that’s waiting for me each time I travel that is going to show me what I need to do. There’s always been something that seemed important the other times I’ve been back: the medallion, the tree carving, hearing Delaney’s voice outside the church, meeting Riss in the park. Each moment had something, a piece of the puzzle to lead me to what I have to do, but I can’t see it now. I can’t see any answer except that I have to stop what happens to Riss one way or another, and save my mother’s life. I’m running out of time. And standing on a lump of concrete in an abandoned car lot isn’t going to change that.

  Closing my eyes, I try harder to visualise what it would have been like here on a typical busy club night. I picture the cars lining up on the road, the groups of friends gathering in the warm night air. The sounds of the chatter, the laughter, car horns maybe, engines revving.

  The world seems to tip a little, and a swarm of luminous dots swims before my closed eyes. An unexpected rush of warm air whooshes past me, and for a moment I think I hear a voice, smell the scent of beer and perfume in the air. I can do this. Focus, listen, think, be ready.

  But it’s Michael I am thinking of, and a guitar shop that used to be a bakery. And then there is this thought, this sudden knowing that I won’t know what to do until I am in that precise moment when something can be done, and I won’t know who I truly am until I’m that person no more.

  Just as that strange and disconnected thought appears, it happens, as quickly as before, and even more violently. My head swims and it takes a moment to adjust, as I find a wall to lean against. The second I make contact with the brickwork, I feel the bass vibrate along my spine, followed closely by the noise, the smell, and finally the terror of being here, and what it means. And then I laugh, and whoop, and shout at the sky.

  ‘I did it! I did it!’ I whirl around, taking it all in, but this is perhaps a bad idea as I stumble and fall, shoulder first, back into the wall, just about staying on my feet.

  ‘Hey, sweetheart.’ An older man, who seems to be manning the door, cocks his head and looks at me. ‘If you’ve already had that much, maybe you want to go home, huh? I can take you. Happy to help.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I tell him. ‘What I really need is a drink.’

  He gives me a long, admiring glance, and I feel myself flush.

  ‘Well, there won’t be a queue at the bar. You’re early, no one gets here for at least another hour. This your first time?’ There’s an air of innuendo that comes with the comment. I wonder if this is Sandy from my mother’s stories.

  ‘No, I’m meeting friends. I am with the movie production, sorting out some final details.’

  ‘Yeah? You should have brought your camera. Want to get a couple of shots of me?’ He grins and gives me his profile, turning one way and then the other. ‘Which is my best side, huh?’

  For a moment I wonder how he knows I have a camera, and then I dismiss it; I’m becoming too sensitive, imaging that everything that happens has meaning.

  ‘That’s fine, thank you,’ I say, and when he slaps me on the backside I just keep walking into boogie wonderland.

  It’s surreal and terrifying and wonderful all at once. A live band is sound-checking somewhere, probably in the main dance hall. The crash of the high hat, the thrump of bass as they tune up, sends a thrill down my spine. Looking around for anything that might be familiar, I find a small horseshoe bar; it’s the one in the movie that a stripper dances on. A crazy sense of vertigo almost sweeps me off my feet as I enter; I feel as if I’m stepping into a reel of film. Thankfully there is no exotic dancer now and it’s virtually empty, apart from one man, who already looks like he’s had more than enough.

  ‘You the dancer for tonight?’ the barman asks me, the look on his face clearly showing he wouldn’t be impressed if I was.

  ‘Er, no, I just want a drink please … just a Coke.’

  ‘Don’t you got enough money?’ the drunk asks me, leaning dangerously forward on his stool. ‘I’ll buy you a drink, baby. You can sit on my knee.’

  ‘I’m OK, thanks,’ I say.

  ‘Whore,’ he replies, mildly.

  Finding some of the cash that Pea gave me crumpled in my purse, I leave it on the bar, taking my drink and hurrying down the hallway where a pair of double doors vibrate and open slightly in time to the music, the band warming up. Holding my breath, I push them open and there it is, the Saturday Night Fever dance floor, squares of coloured light pulsating in time to the music.

  Something like joy, something like hysteria, overtakes me, and I run down onto the floor, into its centre, staring at my feet. How Pea would love this; I wish she could be with me now. I wish she could be here to feel how it jumps and fizzes under my feet, with every drum beat. The temptation to pull the same Travolta moves is amusing, but the grin on the guitarist’s face as he watches me, arms outstretched, feet apart, standing like a toddler experiencing grass for the time, dissuades me. After all, I have never been the one that dances.

  Clinging on to my drink, I try and find a quiet corner to wait for Riss and Henry to arrive. The cavernous room is practically empty; there is no one manning the turntables and just a handful of people sit at tables around the dance floor. Finding a table opposite the door isn’t hard. Slipping into my seat, I sip my drink and I wait, my foot tapping under the table.

  Clubbers start to trickle in just after the band starts in earnest, and, for a moment, I forget why I am there, as the rhythms of the music fill every corner of the room, my feet still moving, my shoulders swaying to the beat, as the band plays to an empty dance floor. Gradually the trickle becomes a flow. Young men, in pressed trousers and pattern Qiana shirts, all of them with their top buttons undone, giving off a confidence and peacockish preen as they strut down the stairs; small packs of guys, each one led by an alpha. A tall blond guy in a white suit arrives, followed by an older man who positions himself at the centre of the room as if he owns it, or the dance floor at least. Keeping my eyes trained on the door, I see a flurry of girls arrive, dressed to kill, but staying close together, careful not to look like they are looking at the guys, although they are. Before long it becomes harder to see who is making their grand entrance, as the flow and mass of young, hot bodies doubles and redoubles, eventually spilling out onto the dance floor.

  My heart springs into my throat as I catch a glimpse of Riss, her dark hair swinging smoothly against the white of her dress, and, at her side, looking utterly out of place, is Henry – tall, elegant and alien amongst the seething dancers. Not far be
hind I spot Stephanie and Curtis, but not Michael. It’s almost like he’s already left. Maybe it would be for the best if I never saw him again; perhaps that would be the safest way. To do this I need to focus on Riss.

  I’ve rehearsed and rehearsed what I’m going to say to her this time, and how I’m going to say it, again and again. But now that the moment is here, all the plans and practised words seem to have evaporated in the heat and the noise. I feel weak and scared, lonely and sad. And I wish that tonight she wasn’t the girl I’m trying to save; I wish she was my mother, holding her arms out, ready to wrap me in them and keep me safe.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

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  ‘You’re here.’ I feel him before I hear his voice, and I stand up as he approaches. ‘Wow, you look knockout.’

  ‘Oh, I … thank you.’ Glancing down at my dress, I feel suddenly ridiculously overdressed and exposed at the same time. I sit down again, glad for the coverage of the table. Michael slides into the seat next to mine.

  A little time passes as we watch each other, the sound of the music and the slowly intensifying heat of the bodies all around us disintegrating into a blur. Oh, it would be easy to forget everything, to forget Riss and Pea, the past and the future, and just stay here, running these few perfect seconds on an endless loop, knowing that sometime tonight I’m going to kiss him, and knowing that makes not kissing him now all the more thrilling.

  Breaking the moment is hard, but I must.

  ‘I’m sorry I just disappeared the way that I did,’ I tell him, leaning in close so that he can hear me over the music. He doesn’t know how close to the truth that is. ‘I just got a bit … overwhelmed. But I’ve been thinking about you, thinking about what you said and, you know? I just know that you are going to be OK. I know that you aren’t going to spend the rest of your life in a bakery in Bay Ridge. I don’t know what your future holds, but I know it’s much more than you think.’