The Summer of Impossible Things Page 4

  ‘Hey, Riss.’ The good-looking boy winks at me as he addresses Mum with a nickname that either I didn’t know I knew or I must have invented for myself. Riss. I like it; it suits her. ‘Let me get our guest a drink. How often do we get any visitors round here, right? Let’s show her we’re good hosts.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ She turns back to her friends. I sense Stephanie bristling at my side. No one asked her for her opinion.

  ‘Is that OK with you?’ I ask my aunt, politely. ‘It would be so nice to meet some people, I’m going to be around for a while.’

  I don’t know why I said that, a vain hope I guess, a wish to spend more time lost in this fantasy.

  ‘Makes no difference to me,’ she says, turning her back on me. ‘Do whatever you want.’

  Hanging back, I watch as Riss laughs, sharing a private joke with the other girl, whose bottle blonde hair is tight with curls. They are whispering secrets to each other behind cupped hands. As Riss leans in closer, her bangles slide down her arm, and the other girl says something that makes her laugh out loud, throwing her head back. I’ve seen that laugh a million times, but never like this, not without that trace of sadness that always seemed to linger in Mum’s eyes, the promise of the fall that always came after the high.

  ‘So what do beautiful English girls drink?’ the handsome man – I soon learn is called Michael – asks, and I force myself to look at him. Beautiful, that’s not a word anyone uses to describe me, except in a fantasy of my own construct; some part of my subconscious must have always secretly longed with it. The other guys are watching us, their interested naked, and he takes a step between us, his back shielding me from their view.

  ‘Don’t mind them,’ he says, his smile dimpling. ‘They got no idea how to talk to a woman, only how to look at one.’

  ‘We know what you want to do to her,’ the blond one calls over. ‘And it ain’t talking.’

  Michael sighs and shakes his head.

  ‘I’d love a beer,’ I tell him. It interests me that I am still hot and thirsty in my fantasy world, my mouth dry, my heart pounding. My eyes return to Riss. I want just to be near her. How to go over there and talk to her? How to find a reason just to stare at her, a reason to ask her not to go, not to leave me behind?

  ‘Come with me?’ Michael asks. ‘If I leave you here, those guys will be all over you like bees on honey.’

  ‘I can look after myself,’ I tell him.

  ‘I bet you can,’ he says. ‘I just want to talk to you some more, that’s all. Come with me, Luna. Luna, like the moon.’ He sees my look of surprise and laughs. ‘What, you think we don’t go to school round here, or something? I like space, as it happens. You know in a couple of months’ time NASA will launch its probe, Challenger, and it’s going to take photos of everything it floats by and send it back to earth. Isn’t that something?’

  Lord, I really did create my dream man: green eyes, muscular shoulders and an interest in astronomy.

  ‘Imagine if it keeps on sending back data,’ I say, ‘even when it’s left the solar system and is travelling into deep space.’

  He laughs as if I’m a little foolish. ‘I doubt it will keep going that long; it would take it, like, twenty years or something to get to Uranus.’

  More like forty, actually, I think, but I don’t say it out loud.

  I follow him into a small kitchen, crammed with freestanding units, packets and tins visible behind frosted-glass sliding doors. There’s also an ancient-looking cooker and a huge refrigerator that looks as if it could withstand a nuclear blast. Michael inches around a central table with a wipe-downable table cloth of green-and-white gingham, where it looks like intimate family dinners take place, to get to the giant, purring appliance.

  ‘You sure you want beer?’ he asks over his shoulder. ‘We got rum and Pepsi if you’d rather? The girls, their pop is staying over at his mother’s house; she lives in Queens. Otherwise there’d be no rum. He don’t like his girls to drink, don’t think it’s ladylike. Don’t think he knows his daughters at all.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, sounding more interested than I should. I knew that my mum lost her own mother young, but I didn’t know that I knew anything at all about her grandmother – my great-grandmother. Certainly not that she’d lived in Queens, or maybe I made that up too. ‘Beer, please.’

  ‘One thing you should know about Leo Lupo.’ Michael lowers his voice leaning into me, and I smell the sweet, sharp, pungent scent of his aftershave, and I realise with a rush of recognition that it’s Old Spice. ‘He acts like he’s a small-time businessman, but there’s nothing small about him, word is he …’

  ‘Bellamo!’ A voice shouts out from down the hall. ‘What you doing in there? Is it legal?’

  ‘Mind your own,’ Michael shouts back. ‘So, English Luna. Tell me about yourself.’ He takes a bottle, clipping open the lip on the table top in one practised move. ‘You got any Italian in you?’

  I wait for the rest of the crass chat-up line, but it doesn’t come. He is actually asking me a question.

  ‘My mother’s family,’ I say, leaning my head out of the door, so that I can watch Riss in the other room, my heart pulling towards her. How many precious seconds have passed in the real world, while I’ve been making small talk with a figment of my imagination. I need to get back to her, before this all blows away, taking me with it. Riss is on her feet now, acting out some incident, perhaps from earlier in the day. Just by watching her I can tell it’s the story of some stuck-up customer who thinks she’s all that. The whole group is watching her now, howling with laughter as she skips from part to part, her can of Pepsi still in her hand. Even Stephanie is smiling.

  Could it be one of these boys? The thought strikes me swiftly, and sets me spinning. Could one of these young men be my biological father? The fair-haired one, he has blue eyes; could it be him?

  ‘Hey, Luna – look at me for a moment, would you? You’re giving me a complex,’ Michael speaks.

  ‘It’s just that … shall we go back in there?’ I suggest, and he shrugs.

  ‘Sure.’ He seems a little disappointed. ‘Whatever you want, Luna-like-the-moon.’

  In another world, in another universe, where this is the only reality, I’d like to lean against the door frame and look into his green eyes for hours on end, but now, every stretched-out dream-second I have, I want to spend with her, with my mother. I want to know what happened to her to make me.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

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

  ‘Bellamo struck out, there’s a woman who can resist his charms after all!’ The fair-haired guy smacks Michael hard on the shoulder.

  ‘Ah, can it, Curtis,’ Michael says, blushing across the bridge of the nose. ‘We were just talking about outer space, actually.’

  ‘The space between your ears, you mean.’ Curtis laughs, and Michael takes it in good humour.

  All the same, he stays in the doorway as Riss finishes her tale.

  ‘So I said to her, lady, if you think you are a size six then you need to see a psychiatrist and a math teacher.’

  Turning, she catches me watching her.

  ‘Hey you, what’s your name again?’

  ‘Luna,’ I say, suddenly shy, right back in the shoes of eight-year-old me, pinned into the corner of the playground by one of the cool kids, who didn’t bully me so much as simply didn’t get me. Unlike my gregarious sister, I was a curious specimen to be prodded, poked and peered at.

  ‘You always dress like a guy?’ She looks me up and down. ‘Don’t you want men to notice you?’

  ‘I … er … no, not really.’ I shrug, and suddenly Riss is simply that, a beautiful young woman who is baffled by my unbrushed hair and make-up-free face. ‘My job means that … well, the men I work with are so easily distracted by … bits and bobs.’ She laughs and I blush.

  ‘What is your job?’ she asks me.

  ‘I’m a research scientist
,’ I tell her proudly. ‘Quantum physics, the study of neutrinos, to be precise. They’re like these subatomic particles that are everywhere, but you can’t see them; we only know they exist from the way they interact with other particles … actually, a lot of the time they don’t exist, they sort of pop into existence when …’

  I trail off into silence as the girls just stare at me, and eventually my gaze drops to the scuffed toes of my shoes. I’m not enjoying my delusion anymore, not since it made me feel like that little girl who had to hide her brains to get through each day at school – alive, anyway. ‘It’s a pretty boring job, to be honest,’ I say at last, ‘mostly typing.’

  ‘I’m a secretary too,’ the girl with the bottle-blonde hair tells me brightly, and I don’t correct her. ‘I can do ninety words a minute. What about you?’

  ‘Nowhere near,’ I assure her.

  ‘Linda’s big plan is to marry her boss,’ Riss tells me. ‘That’s why she’s dyed her hair blonde, because she afraid Son of Sam will kill her before he proposes otherwise!’ She grins at my blank expression. ‘You know who Son of Sam is, right?’ She doesn’t wait for me to answer. ‘But he only kills brunettes, so you’d better watch out. Half of Brooklyn’s gone blonde.’

  ‘Not you, though,’ I say, nodding at her dark hair.

  ‘I don’t scare easy,’ she assures me, and I wonder where it went, that courage, the fire I see in her brown eyes. The woman that raised me always seemed to be scared of something.

  ‘Oh well … I’m sure they’ll catch him soon,’ I say. It’s fascinating, the vast ephemera of information my seizing brain is throwing into the max. I didn’t know I knew anything about Son of Sam, and yet here we are discussing this obscure detail of a serial killer case I’ve barely heard of.

  ‘So what are you doing in Bay Ridge?’ Riss asks me. ‘If you ain’t with the movie, what are you doing here? There’s nothing to see here, nothing to do.’

  ‘I …’ I don’t have an answer, and my mind scrambles to find one. ‘I’m just travelling for the summer. I wanted to see New York, but couldn’t afford to stay there, so …’

  ‘You came to Bay Ridge on purpose?’ Riss laughs. ‘No one ever does that. You’re kind of a freak. I like you.’

  I’m bathed in the sudden warmth of her smile, and it’s my mum’s smile, the one that could make everything all right again in an instant; the one I spent my whole childhood on tenterhooks for, dying to catch a glimpse of.

  ‘Come with me.’ She hooks her arm through mine, and I can feel the warmth of her skin against mine, even the beat of her pulse. It’s the strangest sensation as I walk hip to hip with her through the hallway and up another flight of stairs, to another tiny corridor that mirrors the floor below. I feel safe, and at home.

  Riss guides me through an open door into a tiny bedroom dominated by a huge, dark-wood wardrobe; the only furniture apart from a narrow single bed. A pretty, white, chiffon dress, off the shoulder with a cape-like neckline, hangs from the wardrobe’s ornate carvings that jut sharply out from its corners. I stop and look at the wardrobe, gothic and dark, like it should have gargoyles carved into it. Like you should be able to open it and a flock of bats might fly out, or you might also be able to walk right through it and into a wintery wonderland.

  ‘Crazy wardrobe,’ I say and she laughs.

  ‘It came over on the boat from Italy,’ she says. ‘I have no idea how, or why, but I’m the one stuck with it for some reason. Do you like it?’ she says, and I know she’s not talking about the wardrobe but the dress, which she carefully lifts down to show me.

  ‘Dad always lets Stephanie and me use off-cuts and remnants to make stuff for ourselves, but I saved up for this especially. It’s rayon chiffon – I paid for a whole bolt myself – with satin-look lining. It’s a copy of the dress that Karen Lynn Gorney wears in the movie. You’ve heard about the movie, right? Saturday Night Fever? She plays this girl that John Travolta chooses to enter a dancing completion with. She wears a dress like this on the big night! They shot it here. You won’t have seen it is yet, but it’s gonna be great and her dress is beautiful. Henry says they’ll have a premier, right here in Bay Ridge, at the 2001 Odyssey, the club where we go to, where they filmed a lot of the movie. If I’m still here, I’m going to wear it.’

  Henry; she’s talking about Dad. This is my mother in the summer she met my father, just before she ran away to London with him. It seems right, that this is the world my brain has created for me, this perfect time, this dream romance my mother would tell us about sometimes, where love was enough to save the day just before something terrible happened.

  ‘If?’ I prompt her.

  ‘I don’t know when it will be released,’ she says. ‘Henry says maybe not until next year and I’m not sure if I’ll still be here then. Come on.’

  Riss beckons for me to follow her as she climbs out of the narrow, open sash window at the end of her room and onto the fire escape. The metal creaks and sways as I ease my weight onto it, and I find myself gripping onto the window frame. Even now, as late as it is, the air is still thick with heat and exhaust fumes. A few streets away someone is shouting; a car engine revs at the stop light on the corner. Riss perches on the edge of the railing, oblivious to the three-storey drop below, and lights a cigarette. Smoking and waiting, that’s what Mrs Finkle had said.

  Everything here seems so real, if this rusty old fire escape gave way I feel like I’d plummet to the ground along with it. I grip the corroded iron railing even tighter, and try to look cool. I remember with sudden clarity how Mum used to look at me sometimes. When I turned my back on endless reruns of Scooby Doo to read a book about how the planets move around each other, her brow would furrow, her lips compress, as if she were trying to work out where she knew me from. That’s the feeling I am having now; it seems as if I’ve always wanted my mum to think I am cool.

  ‘Henry wants me to go back to England with him.’ Riss gestures at me with her cigarette. ‘Do you think I should?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, without hesitation and Riss’s eyes widen.

  ‘That’s the first time anyone’s said that. Everyone else is all “you should take your time, talk to your pops, don’t rush into anything”. Not you. I bet you’re real spontaneous, aren’t you?’

  ‘Um, yeah, sure,’ I say, although exactly the opposite is true. ‘So, is Henry the one? Or are there other guys you like?’

  Anger flashes across Riss’s face, like summer lightning.

  ‘I’m no slut,’ she says. ‘There’s never been anyone before Henry, not like him. Not even him yet; we’ll wait until we’re married.’ She makes the declaration with fierce pride, and it takes me my surprise.

  ‘You mean you’ve never—’

  ‘No!’ Riss shakes her head. ‘No, girls that give it up like that, they get used, they get hurt, passed around from boy to boy, you know that. That’s not me; it matters to me what people think of me. I’m not that girl, and Henry respects that about me. He’s happy to wait. It’s one of the reasons I love him. What about you? Is it different in England? Have you been with a lot of guys?’

  I wonder about how to answer that question, what constitutes a lot of guys? Does she mean fifty, fifteen or five, which is the actual answer, four of them as an undergraduate, when I was still reeling from the novelty that boys wanted to sleep with me, before I realised that boys want to sleep with anyone. Those four and Brian, who was kind and sweet in bed, and always made me tea afterwards, just how I like it.

  ‘I’ve had one serious boyfriend,’ I say, which is something like the truth.

  ‘You broke up?’ Riss looks appalled for me when I nod.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I tell her. ‘I wasn’t in love with him, not the way you love Henry. It wouldn’t have worked out.’

  ‘That’s what Stephanie keeps saying about me and Henry. Before she died, Mom used to take us to church three times a week,’ Riss tells me. ‘I still go, on Sundays anyway, because when I’m there, talking to Him, I fee
l … right inside, you know?’ She tugs gently at the medallion around her neck. ‘Which is why I wish I’d fallen for a Catholic boy. And why Pops doesn’t know that Henry and I are so serious. And why I don’t know what he’d do if I told him I was leaving for England. Get real angry, that’s for sure. God, this is such a mess.’

  Riss looks up at the half-moon, her face edged with silver, and I sense she is offering a silent prayer. In all of my life, I have rarely set foot inside a church except at other people’s weddings and christenings. Mum brought us up to think, to question, to wonder about everything, but she never brought us up believing in anything. I can’t help wonder, where did it go, that faith?

  ‘I seem to like English people,’ she says, regarding me through lowered lids. ‘I bet I’m going to like you. I don’t know why, but I can tell, there’s something about you that just says I am.’

  ‘I know that I am going to like you too,’ I say, offering my hand, and she smiles as she gives me a formal handshake.

  ‘Before the movie, nothing ever happened here. No one ever came here, we just lived. Doing what we do, being us, and it was like it was the whole world, you know? And then for a little while the whole world came here. I liked it. Now I’d like to see the rest of the world. Wait there a second.’

  She hands me her cigarette and disappears back inside. I can feel the heat of the ash, smell the smoke. I graze the lit end of the cigarette against the heel of my palm and my hand recoils from the burning heat. It’s so real, it’s all so real, but of course it isn’t. It’s a wonderful dream; it would be so easy to just stay here, forever. And perhaps I won’t have a choice about that, but if I can, I have to fight my way back to consciousness. Pea won’t manage without me right now, and Dad, he can’t take losing anyone else.

  ‘Here.’ She hands me something I recognise, something I know. My mum’s Super 8 camera, the one she seemed to document every second of our lives on, ending each year with an epic, highlights-of-our-family montage, played after Christmas lunch. The same camera she made her last ever film on. I can feel the weight of it, run my fingers over the smooth plastic and metal – it looks brand new – all created out of thin air. Brian was right, the brain really is remarkable. ‘Henry gave it to me.’ She grins, hugging the camera to her. ‘He makes life seem exciting.’