The Summer of Impossible Things Read online

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  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 c
olours, 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 …’

  ‘It don’t.’ A girl with short hair, cut into the nape of her neck, leaving it to curl on top, takes two swift steps towards me, clearing my view of the other young women in the group. ‘This building don’t belong to your family. It’s my dad’s – he owns it, every brick of it.’

  ‘And don’t we know it,’ the blond guy says, digging the green-eyed hunk in the ribs.

  The short-haired girl is standing very close to me, her brown eyes fixed on mine.

  ‘Look, I don’t mean to intrude,’ I tell the girl, wondering where I recognise that soft snub nose from, but knowing that I do, because it seems a little out of place in such an angular face. ‘I can tell you’ve really made an effort. It’s just that I’d really appreciate it if you could leave the place the same way that you found it.’

  ‘Can you believe this chick?’ The girl jerks her thumb in my direction as she steps aside and addresses someone sitting behind her.

  Then I feel it again, the siren call, singing its way to me and through me. And finally I focus on the figure behind the snub-nosed girl. Another young woman sits on the back of a brown sofa, her bare feet digging into the seat cushions, toes clenched.

  It feels as if all the breath is sucked from my body in one second, the same second as my heart stands still and I stare at the young woman. Her long, slim legs are crossed at the knee, her long, dark hair is like a sheet of black ice, collapsing over her shoulders.

  And then tears spring into my eyes, which I hastily blink away.

  Because the woman I am looking at is my mother. Not as I last knew her, but younger than I have ever known her. This is the woman my father first photographed back in 1977.

  Remembering the camera around my neck I lift it to my eyes and search for her through the lens. She’s still there.

  And she sees me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

  I’m dying, that must be it. It must be that, what has seemed like several minutes to me, has really taken less than a nanosecond to unravel. A dream world conjured up by endorphins and neurotoxins, death’s last gift to me. Maybe the ‘visions’ I’m seeing are a symptom, perhaps an embolism or an undiagnosed tumour, and, suddenly, something has given way in my head. That has to be it. It’s the only explanation. But I can’t die now. I can’t leave Pea and Dad now; they need me too much. And yet, and yet, look at her. I look at my mother, and she’s smiling. I want to be with her so badly.

  All the fear that’s coursing through my body burns away in one bright flare, and I can almost see it floating away in slowly cooling, greying embers. There’s no need to be afraid. Just be here in this moment, I tell myself, silently, for as long as you’re able to be. Just be close to her, in all her fierce, unfamiliar glory. Whatever this is, if it’s a dream … even if it’s death, welcome it. It’s worth it to see her like this, so saturated with colour, so vivid, so unlike the colours from the old, faded photo albums and movies at home, she seems to inhabit that world that I’ve only ever seen trapped behind clear plastic or projected onto a screen.

  Everything here is brighter and more intense. Edges defined, shadows deeper, with the clearest resolution I have ever seen.

  My brain must have created this image of her from a thousand forgotten fragments, because even though I clearly never knew her at twenty years old, I know that this version of her is exactly right, down to the bump on her slightly asymmetrical nose, the little crescent scar at the top of her shoulder, which she said she got when she fell off her bike, aged eight. The mole beneath her ear, the tilt of her head as she registers my gaze on her and challenges me with a returning stare. Even the Catholic medal, a gift from her late mother for her confirmation, that she’d told me she had worn every day for years until the day she lost it, glints on a chain around her neck. All these things I know about her, all these things I might have dragged from the furthest corners of my memories, all accessible to me now, but this is so much more than just a patchwork of old thoughts stitched together in haphazard squares. Here she is, as I have never known her – Marissa Lupo; confident, strong, jaw set with determination, holding court while sucking a Pepsi through a red-and-white straw, about to pass judgement on this strange gawking older woman in her midst.

  ‘Who are you?’ the first girl asks me, and now I recognise her. She’s Stephanie, the older sister. Aunt Stephanie, who didn’t even come to the funeral.

  ‘No one,’ I say. ‘I mean, my name is Luna. I just arrived today, I’m staying nearby at Mrs Finkle’s …’

  ‘Mrs Finkle’s?’

  She speaks – my mother speaks to me – and the sound of her voice, young and unpolluted, fills me with elation. An idiot’s grin spreads out across my face. I feel my cheeks stretching tight; to hear the sound of her voice again, to see her sharp dark looks, her uncanny perception. ‘Can’t be, her place is full up, I know because—’

  ‘Oh yes, that’s right, not her,’ I scramble for words, fearing that if I let my cover drop, I’ll do something to dissipate this vision. ‘Yes, I’m actually staying with someone else she recommended because her place is full.’

  ‘The Obermans’, on ninety-first?’ the good-looking guy with the shoulders nods encouragingly at me.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ I grab the lifeline, wondering why it’s been thrown my way; maybe my mind created him too, maybe just for this reason.

  ‘Yeah, her and Finkle tip each other off all the time,’ he says, backing me up, and I am grateful to him, this strange handsome creation I have made up for myself. ‘And we all know Finkle’s got her hands full keeping all those men happy.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Michael, you’re disgusting,’ Mar
issa Lupo says, dismissing his comment with a wave of her hand. Leaning forward she looks at me long and hard.

  ‘I seen you before?’ she asks. ‘I know you from somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say, because if I say what I want to say, if I say, yes, yes, I’m your daughter, your little girl, the one you left behind when you died, all of this will vanish. The other girls watch her, waiting, their faces turned to hers, and I see she is the northern star in this group, the compass that sets their direction. Marissa Lupo is the leader here, the alpha girl. This is a version of my mother than I must have conjured up from the photo in my pocket, a fantasy version I never met in reality. Stephanie is the only one who resists, walking away from the girls to the boys and taking the hand of the fair-haired man, as soon as she sees that Marissa is in charge now.

  ‘You’re from London? I know someone from London.’ My mother’s glossed lips curl into a smile. ‘He’s my boyfriend actually. He was on assignment photographing the movie, and then, after it wrapped, he stayed behind to be with me. We’ve been going together three months already. His name is Henry Sinclair, would you know him?’

  ‘I don’t.’ I sound apologetic, and I feel it too. With a sudden pang of sharp sadness, I think of Dad sitting at home, abandoned by his daughters, probably sitting in his old chair, opposite the one where Mum would sit and sew and talk, while he read and wrote. Probably looking out into the garden where the flowers she planted will be cramming the border with colours and scents. Henry Sinclair, the man that Marissa Lupo smiled about so sweetly just now, sitting all alone, lost in the glory of an English summer thirty years and an eternity away.

  This must be what it’s like, the final unravelling of a mind, a kind of beautiful chaos, no order, no rules, anything is possible. I’d love to tell Brian about this; it would make him smile and crinkle up his eyes, while he worked out what it all means.