The Start of Us

‘Drink?’ An impatient waiter who has already been over once looks down at me again, pad and biro poised.

I order a glass of water and thank the waiter as he brings it over and pours it over the crackling ice. I take a sip of it and check my phone. I remind myself that he was about ten minutes late to pick me up the day we went to the Tower. Maybe he’s just the kind of person who is constantly running behind.

And then before I can wonder any more, in a rush of fresh air and apologies, Daniel is standing in front of me.

‘I’m really sorry,’ he says a little breathlessly. ‘I promised myself that I would try to curb my lateness for you. But then I had a flat tyre. Had to change it. Then I got oil on my shirt. So I had to change that.’ He laughs. ‘What a start to the night. Anyway. How are you? Everything okay?’

Even as I look up at him, the person I was when I was with Mike, the Erica who sat back and let everyone else talk, who never gave much away, seems to fray at the edges. Electric excitement pulses through me as the words I’m about to say float around in my mind like dancers in the wings. I’m staying here. I have already told Nina that I won’t be joining her, and felt the soft ripple of distance between myself and the other Erica. I don’t know if it’s the right decision. But in the end, the decision was the best kind to make: the kind that won’t go away and is impossible to ignore. The kind that you just have to make, whether it’s the right one or not. Still, now, as he shrugs off his jacket and tosses it over his chair, the excitement is laced with fear. I swallow it down.

‘I’m great,’ I tell him, standing up and kissing his cheek. ‘You’re cold.’

‘There’s going to be a storm tonight. The wind’s really picking up,’ he says as he sits down. ‘You liked it in here when you came with your brother then?’

‘Yes. It’s lovely,’ I say, but my words are suddenly slurred, blurring together. Daniel frowns at me and I take a gulp of water.

Frustration climbs inside me as I realize what is happening, that this is stronger than anything I ever felt when I was a teenager. Then, being with people was enough to stop it. Not here, I tell myself firmly. Not tonight.

‘Erica? Are you okay?’

I nod, smile, and ignore the hammering in my head, Daniel’s face flashing before me.

‘I’m glad you asked me to meet you tonight. Today’s been a bit of a strange one for me, actually,’ he says.

‘Why?’ I manage, but even one word is difficult to get out.

He sighs and opens his menu. ‘The funding for that office block in Preston’s been pulled. It was a big job, and we were lucky to get it. I’m sure something else will come up though. There’s actually another one in the pipeline, so really we might even …’

I try to listen as he talks, but his words tear into fragments and lose all meaning because dizziness rages through me and I have an overwhelming, animal urge to run. I can think of nothing but leaving Daniel and our little table with its red chequered tablecloth, and going somewhere by myself so that I can be lost to another place and time. I grip the table so hard my knuckles turn white. Stay calm, I tell myself, trying to quell the frenzied flutter of panic that rises inside me. It has never happened in front of someone before, so surely it won’t now. I see Daniel frown, pause, but I can’t speak to him. I am fading, and I wonder fleetingly if he can tell, if my skin is turning translucent and ghost-like in front of him.

I force my eyes to focus on what’s around me – the Charlie Chaplin prints above the table, the soft flicker of the candle, the basket of rustic bread that has been placed down in front of us – trying to take it all in and somehow pin myself to the present. I try and try to force myself to stay. I nod as he says something and reach out for my water, my hand like lead. As my fingers touch the tip of the cool glass, I am brought back from the brink of disappearing, my head rushing as my senses return and the ringing in my ears is replaced with Daniel’s voice.

‘So yeah, I’m glad that you said about meeting because I really wanted to—’

I stand up before his words begin to blur again. I know this won’t go away. ‘I’m so sorry. I need to pop to the ladies’,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

But I’m not back in a minute, and when I do return to where I was sitting, Daniel has gone. The restaurant is empty and closed. It’s the end of the night. I must have been gone for hours. I hear a member of staff in the kitchen and creep to the locked front door, turning the latch and slipping out silently as I think about what I saw.

Chapter 9

I was in my old house, the soft green backdrop of Yorkshire hills outside the kitchen window.

The Erica who I saw for the first time the other day sat on a wooden dining chair that I recognised from Mum’s house, that I categorically knew had been packed up sixteen years ago onto a van and taken to Blackpool. She wore the same travel agent’s uniform as she had when I had seen her last time and typed on a PC which was set up in the corner of the lounge.

That lounge. I breathed a silent, invisible sigh. I had been longing to return to that room ever since I’d been pulled away from it all those years ago. It was the lounge of my childhood: of cartoons and play fighting and dens with Nicholas, of sleeping on the sofa when I was off school with the flu; the lounge of Christmas mornings and first-day-of-school photos. It looked predictably smaller than I remembered it and fuller somehow: a glossy fire surround took up the centre of the room where a smaller gas fire used to hang from the wall, DVDs lined shelves above the television, and the walls were busy with photos in frames. I tried to pull myself towards the photographs, but my body was as dull as in sleep. I could make out two figures in most of them, blurred in orange-tinted film. Although I had only ever seen one of them in my life, as I squinted hard at the pictures, I realised that they were my parents’ wedding photographs.

I was forced to tear my eyes from them when my dad appeared in the room with the other Erica and crouched next to the computer where she sat, his hair dotted with grey.

What was this life?

‘More job searching?’ he asked. His voice made my eyes sting – not just the sound of it which I have barely heard in so long, but the casual closeness that we – they – seemed to have.

Erica nodded, clicking on a link that had caught her attention. ‘This one’s fine, look. A bar job.’

‘In Phuket?’

‘Yep. I told you I was serious about going away.’

My dad took hold of the mouse and clicked off the job advert, moving the cursor to another link. ‘Plenty of jobs here in the UK. Look.’

Erica laughed and snatched the mouse back, rolling her eyes and scrolling straight past the job I know so well.

Assistant curator at Blackpool Museum

‘No way. No backing out now. You’re the one who has always told me to make the most of my life, and see the world. God, if I had a pound for every time you told me you’d have gone travelling if you’d been free and single for longer! You can’t go back on all that now I’m actually going ahead with it.’

‘I know, I know. Ignore me. I just can’t believe you’re actually going to leave.’ My dad laughed, put his hand to his heart in theatrical mourning and I smiled at his humour, something I’d forgotten. How easy it is to forget all the little things that people do when you don’t see them anymore: the way they yawn or write or hold their car keys. I ached to move closer to him, to see him, this version of him who never gave up on us.

‘Yes, ignore him. Whatever he’s saying, ignore him.’ The tone was light, and Erica glanced up and smirked as my mum walked into the room.

‘Always,’ Erica replied drily as she typed quickly into another search box. I stared at her, the identicality and otherness too strange to process. My side profile that I hadn’t particularly liked before, was now somebody else’s too: chin a little too emphasised, eyes squinting at the screen, black hair with an annoying kink hanging down her back. She glanced up, and I followed her gaze to my mum, who was talking again.

‘He says he’d have gone away and had adventures. But really, would he have coped without us all?’ she said, picking up a cup from the table and wandering from the room.

‘Obviously not,’ Erica said absently as her eyes returned to the screen and she clicked on another bar job.

As I stood, like a ghost watching over its loved ones, I felt the ground shifting beneath my feet. I wanted to hold on, to stay and somehow melt into this other life where there was so much that I’d spent so long grieving for when I was younger, so much I didn’t understand, but I couldn’t grasp anything to hold on to. I slipped away, and plunged back into the deserted toilets of Luigi’s.

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