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  CHAPTER NINE

  ********************

  Location: Yeast of Bodmin

  Radio station: NBC Radio

  Track playing: ‘All By Myself’ by Celine Dion

  Miles travelled: feels like a million

  Miles until Captain Poldark: still 4

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Ray asked, pouring them another strong cup of tea.

  Lisa nodded, ‘I am. Can’t say the same for my car. Or your poor face.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ Ray said, briefly touching his taped-up nose. ‘He just threw a lucky punch …’

  ‘Mate,’ Abby said, ‘your car died a hero’s death.’

  ‘I think it’s more critically injured,’ Ray said. ‘I think it’s mostly on the surface. She’ll be on the road again in a few days maybe. In the meantime we’re in Bodmin. Kirsty’s with her aunt. Social services and the police are taking care of that scumbag. And it’s only four in the afternoon. Shall we go and find Captain Poldark?’

  ‘How?’ Lisa said. ‘No car? A bus maybe, but you never know what kind of nutters you might meet on a bus …’

  ‘You might meet us, for starters,’ Abby said.

  Ray held up a set of keys.

  ‘Alison lent me her van, said it was the least she could do,’ Ray said, holding up a set of keys and nodding at a battered old Jeep. ‘Come on, people. This mission is not over.’

  ‘Copy that,’ Abby said.

  ‘Well, maybe it’s not too late,’ Lisa said, with a faint smile. ‘We’ll never know unless we try.’

  The crew were still there, sorting things out after a day of filming that had begun at dawn. But the lights in the trailers were out and the word was that the cast had left about half an hour earlier. A small crowd of onlookers were still gathered, wrapped in blankets, with flasks of tea. They watched as the crew took down the lighting and packed away the catering. But any chance of finding Captain Poldark here had gone.

  ‘We were soooo close,’ Abby said. ‘It’s like I can still smell his sweat in the air.’

  She inhaled deeply, and Ray and Lisa exchanged a look.

  ‘We’ve got to see all this,’ Lisa said. ‘This is quite exciting.’

  ‘This is like turning up at Glastonbury when everyone else has gone home,’ Abby said.

  ‘Well, this isn’t the only location,’ Ray said. ‘They’re filming again tomorrow, and the day after that. I was chatting to one of the riggers. She used to be in my regiment. We didn’t find Captain Poldark today, but we will find him tomorrow. I promise.’

  Lisa smiled and walked away from the little crowd of spectators, feeling a sudden need to be alone. The landscape unfolded before her and she stood, with the wind in her hair, looking out at miles and miles of heather trembling in the breeze. The thought struck her that for so long now, she had felt lonely, terrified, lost and trapped. And yet now, she knew she was OK. More than that, she knew that she could be alone and she would be OK. And she knew something else too … she could be with other people and still be OK.

  ‘What’s a pretty maid like ’ee be doing out ’ere?’

  Lisa turned round to find Ray in his full Captain Poldark costume, with the scar on the right side of his face this time. He still looked ridiculous.

  ‘Oh my word,’ she said, chuckling. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Well, I knew you wanted to find Captain Poldark out here tonight, and I knew you were let down so I thought at the very least I’d give you a laugh.’

  Lisa smiled and took a step closer to him.

  ‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I’m not let down at all. Because I found him. I found Captain Poldark. Or at least the spirit of him. I found him here, in the wind and the land. And here. In my heart. I was flipping hard as nails today. I was brave. I was Captain Poldark. I don’t need an imaginary hero to keep me safe, and make me feel OK about the world. I just need me. I am Captain Poldark.’

  Ray looked deep into Lisa’s eyes. For one dizzying moment she thought he might kiss her, and she thought she might like it. Then he checked himself, as Abby sniffed loudly near to them.

  ‘I think you’ll find that I’m Captain Poldark,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Er, no,’ Abby said, as she joined them, shouting into the wind. ‘I’m Captain Poldark!’

  ‘Actually,’ Ray said suddenly, ‘I think you’ll find that’s his job.’

  Lisa and Abby looked to where he was pointing. A brooding, familiar figure appeared over the ridge, sweat sheening his bronzed skin.

  ‘Um, hello,’ Lisa said.

  ‘All right, mate,’ Ray called.

  ‘Please may I lick you?’ Abby said.

  Captain Poldark, or Aidan Turner, raised his three-cornered hat in greeting before striding away across the moor to the crew who were waiting for him.

  ‘That is one very gorgeous and talented Aidan Turner,’ Lisa whispered under her breath, ‘but I am Captain Poldark.’

  She began to laugh and once she started, she couldn’t stop.

  CHAPTER TEN

  *******************

  Location: 23 (a) Parker Street, Leeds

  Radio station: Heart FM

  Track playing: ‘I Got You Babe’ by UB40

  Miles travelled: 0

  Miles until Captain Poldark: 0

  ‘So, what’s new?’ Lisa asked Abby when she telephoned a few days after the trip.

  ‘Quite a lot actually,’ Abby said. ‘I was telling my brother – you know the one that isn’t a dick – about our trip and about how I wished I was closer to Mum. Well, we went to see her together. It was OK. I mean it was like really awkward. I talked too much, and she didn’t talk much at all and I thought it was all going to go wrong, again. But then at the end, she hugged me, really hard. And she said, I’ll see you next week, love. So that’s new.’

  ‘Abby, that’s great!’ Lisa said, as she paced up and down her flat, her stomach knotted with tension. Eventually she paused by the window, pulling back her curtain to peer down the street.

  ‘And what about you? It’s today, right?’

  ‘Yes, any second actually.’

  ‘Excited?’

  ‘Terrified,’ Lisa confessed.

  ‘No need to be. When you’re basically SAS-level trained like me, you learn to read people. And I can tell you … that one, he’s one of the good ones. And gingers make the best lovers. That’s fact.’

  The doorbell rang. Lisa made her excuses, hung up and ran down the stairs to the front door. And then she stopped, wondering about what might be waiting for her on the other side. What might happen if she opened the door, she thought? Maybe things that might hurt, or things that might make her sad or scared. But just as likely things that might make her happier than she’d ever been, things that would bring her joy, hope and a future full of promise. She’d learned a lot from watching Kirsty find the courage to start a new life with her family in Cornwall. And from Abby, who got up each day determined to let nothing frighten her.

  All of those things waited for her on the other side of the front door, and if she opened it she’d be letting them all in. Good as well as bad.

  ‘Life,’ Lisa said. ‘Life is waiting for me on the other side of the door, and it’s about time I lived it.’ She slid back the bolts and flung the door open.

  ‘Hello, Ray,’ she said.

  ‘Lisa,’ he said. ‘Look, the thing is, I haven’t stopped thinking about you and I’d really like the chance to get to know you and …’

  ‘I know,’ Lisa said, taking him by the hand and pulling him into her arms. ‘Me, too.’

  And as they kissed on the doorstep in that quiet street in Leeds, it felt as if the wild wind was blowing in off the sea, surrounding them. And as if miles of beautiful Cornish landscape was stretching out all around them as far as the heart could see. Because, at last in each other’s arms, they both felt at home.

  Read on for an extract from Rowan Coleman’s powerful new novel

  THE SUMMER OF IMPOSSIBLE THIN
GS

  If you could change the past, would you?

  Thirty years ago, something terrible happened to Luna’s mother. Something she’s only prepared to reveal after her death.

  Now Luna and her sister have a chance to go back to their mother’s birthplace and settle her affairs. But in Brooklyn they find more questions than answers, until something impossible – magical – happens to Luna, and she meets her mother as a young woman back in the summer of 1977.

  At first Luna’s thinks she’s going crazy, but if she can truly travel back in time, she can change things. But in doing anything – everything – to save her mother’s life, will she have to sacrifice her own?

  ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

  Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

  PROLOGUE

  ********************

  OXFORDSHIRE, 6 JUNE 2007

  Watching my mother’s face for the first time since the night she died, I am altered. I am unravelled and undone – in one instant becoming a stranger in my own skin.

  There is a theory that just by looking at something you can transform the way it behaves; change the universe and how it works at quantum level, simply by seeing. The observer effect, we call it in physics, or the uncertainty principle. Of course the universe will do what the universe always does, whether we are watching or not, but these are the thoughts I can’t shake out of my head as I watch my mother’s fragile image, flickering as it’s projected on the wall. That just by looking at this film of her, I have changed the fabric of everything I thought I knew.

  Just seconds ago my mother told me and my sister that my dad – the man I grew up with, and whom I love – is not my biological father. Yes, the universe around me shifted and reformed for ever; and yet the second she said it I understood that I have always known it to be true, always felt my incongruity, in every beat of my heart, tilt of my head. In my outsider’s blue eyes.

  There is no choice now but to watch on: the course is set and I am travelling it. I have to see, no matter what, although looking will change everything. It’s simple physics, the mystery of the universe encapsulated in these intimate pivotal moments.

  But there is no equation to express how I feel, looking at the face of the woman I have missed every second for the last eight months.

  She sits in the Oxfordshire country garden of the house I grew up in. The same garden is in full and glorious bloom outside the creaking barn door now, the roses still bear the scars from her pruning, the azaleas she planted are still in bud. But the garden I am watching her sit in may as well be on Mars, so far away from me does she seem. She is so far away now, out of reach for good. A light-grey, cotton dress blows against her bare brown legs, her hair is streaked with silver, her eyes full of light. There’s an old chair from the kitchen, its legs sinking slightly into the soft grass. This must have been recorded in late summer because the rhododendron bushes are in bloom, their dark glossy leaves reflecting the sun. It was probably last summer, just after Dad got the all clear, after a few terrifying weeks in which we thought he might have bowel cancer. That means that as long ago as last summer, months and months before she died, she knew already what she was going to do. I experience this realisation as a physical pain in my chest, searing and hot.

  ‘Although the watch keeps ticking on my wrist …’ her captured image is saying, the breeze lifting the hair off her face, ‘I am still trapped back there, at least part of me is. I’m pinned like a butterfly to one single minute, in one single hour, on the day that changed my life.’

  There are tears in her eyes.

  ‘To everyone around me it might have seemed that I kept walking and talking, appearing to be travelling through time at the allotted sixty seconds per minute, but actually I was static, caught in suspended animation, thinking, always thinking about that one act … that one … choice.’

  Her fingers cover her face for a moment, perhaps trying to cover the threat of more tears, her throat moves, her chest stills. When her hands fall back down to her lap she is smiling. It’s a smile I know well: it’s her brave smile.

  ‘I love you, my beautiful daughters.’

  It’s a phrase that she had said to us almost every day of our lives, and to hear her say it again, even over the thrum of the projector, is something like magic, and I want to catch it, hold it in the palm of my hand.

  Leaning forward in her chair, her eyes search the lens, searching me out, and I find myself edging away from her, as if she might try to reach out and touch me.

  ‘I made this film as my goodbye, because I don’t know when – or if – I will have the courage to say it in person. It’s my goodbye, and something else. It’s a message for you, Luna.’

  When she says my name, I can feel her breath on my neck as she speaks.

  ‘The truth is, I don’t know if I ever want to you see it, to see any of this. Perhaps you never will. Perhaps here, in this moment, in this way, is the only time I can tell you and Pia about my other life, the life I live alongside the one I have with you girls and your father, the life I live in a parallel universe, where the clock’s second hand never moves forward. Yes, I think … I think this is the only place I’m brave enough to tell you.’ She shakes her head, tears glisten, whilst behind her head the ghosts of long dead bees drone in and out of the foxgloves, collecting pollen over the brickwork of a derelict building.

  ‘You see, once, a long time ago, something really, really bad happened to me, and I did something terrible in return. And ever since that moment, there has been a ghost at my shoulder, following me everywhere I go, waiting everywhere I look, stalking me. And I know, I know that one day I won’t be able to outrun him any more. One day he will catch up with me. One day he will have his revenge. One day soon. If you are watching this,’ her voice hooks into me, ‘then he already has me …’

  She draws so close to the lens that we can only see one unfocused quarter of her face; she lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘Listen, if you look very hard and very carefully you’ll find me in Brooklyn, in the place and the moment I never truly left. At our building, the place I grew up in, that’s where you will find me, and the other films I made for you. Luna, if you look hard enough – if you want to look after you know what I did … He wouldn’t let me go, you see. Find me … please.’

  ‘This distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion.’

  —Albert Einstein

  CHAPTER ONE

  ********************

  We travel in a kind of bubble, my little sister Pia and I, sheltered in the quiet, cool interior of an air-conditioned cab, while outside the searing summer streets of an unfamiliar landscape unfold ever outwards as we make each turn. We slip past bridges and buildings that are a kind of second-hand familiar, the relics of the tales which we grew up listening to; a constantly increasing map of a world neither of us have ever visited before, but which is written into our DNA.

  Bay Bridge, Brooklyn, is nothing like I imagined it would be after a lifetime of watching movies set in New York State. It’s a low, two-storey landscape of wide avenues and neat, wooden-clad houses; small town America, on the edge of a huge borough that lives right next door, the greatest city on earth. New York seems to peer at Bay Ridge over the expanse of the Hudson with an uninterested shrug.

  There is an air of quiet certainty unfurling in the searing July sunshine. Even the people meandering down the sidewalks have an innately serene look about them, as if this place is made only for them, a safe place, a place where the rest of the world never looks, a place where secrets might never be discovered if you know where to hide them. This is where life and love and death can quietly play out, without barely making a ripple of the surface of the planet. It’s almost as if when you cross the Brooklyn Bridge times slows down just a little, right at its zenith.

  This is the world where our mother grew up, the world she ran away from, never to return. It never occurred to us that
one day it would be us travelling back here, all the way back to her starting point. Officially we are here to finally settle her estate, and begin the sale of the long derelict, boarded-up building she co-owned with her sister, a woman she hadn’t spoken to in thirty years. The building had once been her home, the centre of her universe. Unofficially, secretly, we came because she told us to. To look for her, and to look for clues about my biological father, whose existence still seems like a mangled dream to me.

  ‘She could have just got it wrong,’ Pea had said after the film ended, disturbed dust still settling in the light of Dad’s projector that we’d had to borrow in secret. ‘I mean, in her darkest moment, she had delusions. She had fantasies. She could have just been living a nightmare out loud, that could be it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, slowly, uncertainly, letting her words seeps into me through every pore. ‘Yes, it could be that … but …’

  I looked at my sister, and I knew she was beginning to see what I already knew. My bright blue eyes, the only blues eyes for generations on either side of the family, as far back as anyone can remember.

  ‘But you have to find out if it might be true,’ Pea finished for me. ‘They loved each other so much, especially back then, when she left Brooklyn, left her family to be with him. It just doesn’t make sense that there would be another man … But even if there was, it doesn’t change anything. You’re still you. You’re still our Luna.’

  She couldn’t know that I had always felt a little bit like a stranger in my own family, a little bit out of step with them. That, somehow, what Mum said was strangely comforting.

  Dad had wanted to come on this trip, but we’d persuaded him to stay at home. Even now, months later, he was so fragile after losing her, his blood pressure still high, and the doctor didn’t recommend flying. We didn’t tell about the film, even though we could have. We could have asked him outright if it was true, and taken him at his word, but we didn’t. It seemed too cruel for him to lose a wife and a daughter in the space of a few months, even if we loved each other in just the same way as we always have. I think him knowing that I knew would hurt him. So we begged him to stay at home, be taken care of by his friends, and let us sort out the paperwork. And maybe uncover secrets, and part of me. The part of me that was most like my mother, truly believed she might be waiting there for us.