The Start of Us Read online

  ‘Because the building will collapse,’ I finish, my breathing more even now, my tears suspended.

  ‘Well, yeah. Or it might just not be the best version of itself. You have to move with the changes and build something else.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ I say slowly. ‘But it’s frightening when your whole plan changes.’

  He nods. ‘I know. Especially when you’ve invested so much. You know, he’s making a big mistake.’

  ‘You don’t even know me.’

  ‘I know. I’m talking about Cardiff.’

  I manage a smile, try to block non-boring Kath from my mind.

  ‘You don’t have to sit here with me,’ I tell him. ‘Weren’t you going home? You came in here looking for your coat, didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t have to go. I’m working tomorrow so was going to head off, but I might stay for a bit. What are you going to do? This is Em’s room I think, and she’s passed out in the living room. I doubt she will make it to bed. So I think you can stay in here for a bit if you want.’

  I nod. I can’t face the party again yet, people looking at my swollen eyes and tracks of mascara and wondering what’s happened to me. But then I picture my flat and feel like it belongs to somebody else who had everything worked out. I don’t want to go there either. I want to press pause.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want a drink?’

  I sigh. ‘It’s my birthday on Friday,’ I find myself saying in answer, even though I’m not entirely sure why.

  ‘Well, that kind of answers my question,’ he says. ‘Tell you what, I’ll stay for a bit. I’ll get you a drink and if you don’t want it, I’ll have it.’ He’s gone before I can protest.

  He returns to the bedroom a few minutes later with a glass of Champagne.

  ‘Thank you. I don’t even know your name. I’m Erica. I don’t really know anyone here. Mike’s friends with Kevin, which is why we came.’

  He grins. ‘Daniel.’ He sips his own wine, red, and makes a face as if to say it tastes better than he thought it would. ‘I used to work with Em years ago, and she’s Kevin and Sophie’s housemate. I barely know anyone here. I wasn’t going to come, actually.’

  ‘I didn’t want to either. But I’m glad you did.’ I take a sip of Champagne. ‘I’m not sure I’m glad I did though. And I’m not sure I should be drinking Champagne. It hardly seems like the time for celebration.’

  ‘It’s the perfect time for a celebration. You’re looking for your other life, remember. Your new building. It’s the beginning.’ He clinks his glass against mine and the sound rings in my ears, making me feel dizzy.

  ‘Cheers, then,’ I say. Tears threaten again, so I down the drink. Daniel takes the empty glass from me, disappearing back to the kitchen. He brings me more Champagne and then says he will come back in a bit to see how I’m doing. I sip at it and close my eyes, but dizziness pulls at me again so I sit up and then wander out into the kitchen where I help myself to some lemonade, gulping it down until my mouth is fuzzy with sugar. There is hardly anyone awake now: bodies huddled, limbs tangled, breathing heavy and even. I make my way back to the room that belongs to Em, the girl I don’t even know, who has a purple duvet and doesn’t make her bed, then I lie down.

  That’s when it happens. I have lost control. I’m not strong enough to stop it, and even if I were, it hasn’t happened to me for years so it takes me by surprise. The duvet collapses from beneath me, the purple walls cave in and the world as I know it spins and shifts.

  Chapter 2

  I am thrown into the other world so hard that I can feel my insides slam against my skin. It’s like a rollercoaster multiplied by a million. My breaths are sharp, fast, painful.

  As I always used to be, once I reach where I’m going I am glued to the spot. I force my senses to catch up with the rest of me, and try to look around, take in where I am. Glossy brochures are lined up on the shelves, the air is sweet with a manufactured scent of coconut, and posters of yellow sands and palm trees and aeroplanes swooping through blue skies line the walls.

  It’s been years since I was thrown into another time and place. It first happened to me when I was a child: a terrifying visit to the past where I could hear people and smell their perfume but they couldn’t see me. I wanted to believe it was a dream, but my mum’s anger at my unexplained disappearance from our house the whole time I was in the other world told me otherwise. I know that the bedroom from the party I have just left behind will be empty, the purple bed as though I had never sat on it. The powerful dizziness that washed over me tonight should have been a warning because that’s how it always used to start. But the breakup with Mike, the alcohol and the fright at the prospect of a different life without somebody all masked the feeling that I always used to recognise within seconds.

  But this isn’t the same as it used to be. As I finally gather breath, I know that something is different. When this happened to me as a child, I always saw things that had happened in the past. People looked different and were surrounded by strange colours and trends that I’d only ever seen in pictures. Everything seemed as though it had been seeped in low light, as though I was watching a film that wasn’t quite tuned. But what I’m looking at now is bright, modern and clear. If it’s the past, it’s the recent past.

  The woman at the desk just in front of me sighs as she taps her keyboard. Her acrylic nails clack against the keys. She glances up before checking the silver mobile phone on the desk beside her. She obviously can’t see me. I try to think about who she might be, and why I’m here, watching her, but my mind is uncooperative: sticky and slow with the shock of being here, of what’s just happened with Mike.

  I have never been able to move or able to reach out and touch the people I can see, and I am stuck in one position now too. I turn my head slightly, the only movement I can make, to look out of the travel agent’s window. I can make out cobbled streets, and I don’t think it’s Blackpool but that only tells me where I am not.

  And then I see someone else who makes my heart stop.

  She leans against the counter of what seems to be a currency change bureau and flips through a brochure, her eyes flitting over words, focusing on the shiny images of creamy sands and fluorescent blue seas.

  It’s me. Or somebody identical to me.

  It’s another Erica who has the same bone structure, the same fine dark hair and long fringe that falls into her face and green eyes and one stray freckle on her left cheek, as I do. But this Erica has a coloured braid in her hair, a sign of a recent trip abroad, an urge to change her look and shout about the fun she had. Her face is relaxed, her skin glowing. The tip of her nose is slightly pink as though she missed it with the sun cream, which I always do.

  ‘Looking for your next trip already, Erica?’ asks the woman who still clacks away at her computer as she talks. The sound of someone saying my name jolts me. I want to shout out, to say something, but nothing will come out of my mouth. I am mute, not really here.

  The other Erica looks at her colleague and shrugs, a small sideways smile on her lips. Do I smile like that? Discomfort pulls at me as I watch her mannerisms that must be mine too. I can’t bear to see myself from so many angles at once but can’t stop looking either. How can you know yourself so well yet so little?

  ‘Maybe,’ she answers her colleague, her voice making me prickle with a self-awareness so intense I can barely stand it. It’s a sound that is foreign and mine all at once. ‘I’m thinking Australia. Or maybe Thailand. Just me and a backpack.’

  ‘You’ve only just got back to Yorkshire,’ the woman says, shaking her head and checking her phone again.

  Yorkshire. The sound of the place I left so long ago quickens my pulse and I take a deep breath. There is so much that I don’t understand, but Erica is talking again and I can’t miss a second of it.

  ‘So what? It’s my twenty-eighth birthday next week.’ Erica wrinkles her nose and I put my hand up to my own nose self-consciously. ‘It’ll be my present to myself. I’ve saved for years. And I promised myself I’d see as much of the world as I can by the time I’m thirty. So I owe it to myself.’ As she speaks, she looks straight at me, as though she knows I am watching her, as though she knows I haven’t done any of the travelling that seems so important to everyone else. I try to back away, panicked at the thought of our identical eyes meeting. My limbs won’t move, but still I try to summon the power to try to make them. I squeeze my eyes shut to try and concentrate all my energy on stepping backwards, and as I do, overwhelming dizziness drags me down, making me fall. As I plunge through different worlds, scrambling to try and place my feet upon something solid, another scene flashes before me. A flash of road. A motorway sign.

  And then I am flung back into Em’s bedroom, onto the soft tangle of purple that I left behind.

  I sit up and place my hand on my chest, trying to steady my breaths. My legs are weak and nausea swirls through me. I stumble over to the window, lifting the heavy patterned curtains. It’s still dark outside, but that tells me nothing really: I could have been gone hours or minutes. It felt like I was there for only seconds, but I know from when I used to disappear like this that seconds in one world can be hours in another.

  As I stare out into the backyard of the house I’m in, beyond to row upon row of terraced Victorian houses and bins and gates and children’s slides and cars all coated in the blue darkness of the night, I think about what I have just seen. The words I listened to whisper again and again in my mind until they take a shape and meaning of their own.

  I was in Yorkshire, the place that I left when I was twelve years old and have never returned to. But the other Erica who lived there said that it was her twenty-eighth birthday next week, which means that whatever world I saw, whatever parallel universe it was, it wasn’t the past or the future. It was now.

  I adjust my focus and see my reflection in the tall sash window. I see my puffed eyes and my pale skin, the fear from Mike ending things etched, somehow, into my features. I thought my disappearances that could happen any time I was alone, the blinding headaches and dizziness followed by the terror of the ground falling from beneath me, were behind me. The last one was years ago, and before tonight they had taken on the vague, uncertain shape of very first memories, the kind with no start or end or evidence for. I wonder, hot panic snaking its way through my body why they have returned here, and now. And I wonder when the other Erica’s life ended, and this one that I am living began.

  Chapter 3

  I’m woken the next day by the buzzer of my flat. My head is heavy, my mouth dry. My first thought is that last night my strange vision of the other me, and Mike ending things, was surely all a dream. A nightmare, I correct myself. I lurch the small distance from my bedroom to the front door. My eyes are sore with crying and the weight of anxiety and hurt slowly settles in my stomach like a rock. So, I realise, the Mike episode definitely happened.

  But the disappearance can’t have been real. I can’t be going through this all over again. I’ve grown out of it. I shake off the images of the other Erica in the travel agent’s that still float in my mind. I try to distract myself from seeing her tanned face, its every crease so familiar, by talking myself through what must have happened. I probably fell asleep for a few hours, because Daniel came back into Em’s room as I stood at the window. It was about 3am then, and he phoned a cab to bring me home. I fell into my bed still fully clothed, peeling my boots off and throwing them across the room. I slept some more, which made the events of last night seem even more surreal. And so now, as I twist open the silver latch, it seems likely that I just drank a lot at the party and had a strange dream. Nothing more happened.

  ‘Good night?’ my friend Zoe asks as she stalks past me into my flat. She turns back and frowns at me as I stand motionless instead of following her. ‘Why are you wearing yesterday’s clothes?’ She looks more closely at me: my crumpled black dress, yesterday’s makeup smeared by tears.

  ‘Oh, God, Erica. What’s happened?’

  I crumble, sobs forcing their way out of my aching body as I give an outline of the story Mike gave me. I need to let him go. He’s known for a while. Kath.

  Zoe’s face is white. Nobody expected this to happen. I can see that everybody I tell will gasp like Zoe, their eyes wide and their faces ashen as I tell them what I tell her: that Mike’s made up his mind, he’s living our life without me in it, he’s fallen for somebody else who won’t bore him by staying in one place for too long.

  ‘I honestly had no idea he’d do this. What a bastard,’ Zoe says as she makes tea. She shakes her head. ‘Well. Look at it this way. You can focus on your job now. And maybe get something similar when your contract runs out. You don’t need to go away. It was Mike pushing you to do that.’

  I think of the other version of me that I saw, or dreamt – surely dreamt – and what she said about travelling and try to ignore the nausea that accompanies the memory. I promised myself I’d see as much of the world as I can by the time I’m thirty. So I owe it to myself. Then I think of Daniel, the man at the party, making me toast my new future … So much happened last night that a lot of it is blurred together, but his words about buildings and changing plans are bright in my mind.

  ‘Well, maybe I will go abroad and see different places. Maybe it isn’t because of Mike that I want to go away. I could do it on my own.’

  Zoe looks uncertain, takes a sip of her tea. ‘Do you really think it’s for you? No offense, Erica, but you only just moved out of your mum’s house a few years ago. You don’t really strike me as the lone traveller type. You were just going along with Mike, weren’t you?’

  ‘Maybe. To be completely honest,’ I say, looking down into my mug, because I feel like I’m never completely honest with Zoe, ‘I know I’ve always avoided moving. I hated it so much the first time, when we first came here to Blackpool.’ And I couldn’t trust myself to be alone in a strange place, I add silently.

  Until I met Mike, my disappearances were too frequent, too unpredictable and frightening, for me to be alone. As long as somebody could see me, I wouldn’t disappear. But when they started happening less often, and then stopped altogether a few years ago, I decided that I could finally move on and rent my own flat. I swallow down my anxiety. It was a dream. ‘But now,’ I continue quickly, ‘life is passing me by. I think it’s time for me to be a bit braver. I owe it to myself.’ I parrot the other version of me, feeling self-conscious, as though by speaking the same words she did, our two worlds will brush against one another and cause an electric surge, a jolt or a buzz of energy. But nothing happens. Zoe leans forward, oblivious, and bangs her mug down on the coffee table.

  ‘You don’t need to change just because Mike told you to. You two were really different.’

  ‘That’s what he said. I always thought that was a good thing.’

  ‘Well, whether it was or not, you’re fine as you are.’

  I smile. ‘Thanks. But thinking about travelling isn’t for Mike. It’s for me. I think on some level, I’m meant to be somewhere else.’

  Zoe rolls her eyes. ‘Oh no, don’t go all meaning of life on me. If you’re sure about it though …’ she thinks for a minute, then takes her phone from her bag, jabbing at the buttons before handing it to me. ‘Here you go. There’s Nina’s number.’

  ‘Nina?’

  ‘Yes, Nina. You know, my cousin Jen’s friend?’

  I try to think, to pull a memory of Nina to the front of my heavy mind. I picture her: white-blonde hair, even whiter teeth, a smattering of piercings.

  ‘She’s going to Thailand soon. Jen was saying the other day that Nina’s been trying to make Jen put off her nurse training for a year and go with her. She doesn’t want to go alone. But Jen’s set on staying here now. You could go with Nina instead, if you really wanted to.’

  I nod and press call.

  ***

  The conversation with Nina is short, slightly stilted at first, an awkward mix of silences and moments where we both speak at the same time so that neither of our words can be heard.

  ‘I heard you’re wanting a travelling bud—’

  ‘How’s the museu—’

  ‘Oh sorry!’

  ‘Sorry, go on,’

  It goes on like this for a few minutes, until Nina bores of the small talk.

  ‘Did you mention the travelling?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m with Zoe. She said you want someone to go with?’

  ‘Yep,’ she says simply.

  ‘Okay. Well, the thought of going alone scares me a bit too, to be honest. I’ve only looked into the basics before. I was going to go with, uh, Mike, my erm … Well anyway, now I’m not with him and so I don’t really know where to start.’

  ‘You split up with Mike? God, sorry. Why?’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, waving my hand in the air pointlessly. ‘Long story. But it’d be good to chat about where you’re going, if you’ve found anywhere to work and things like that.’

  ‘Yeah, okay. I’m working my last shift at Coffee Mansion next week. Everyone gets free coffee for friends when it’s their last shift. If you want, I’ll let you know when I get my rota and you can come in.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I will.’

  ***

  It’s Friday. My birthday.

  ‘I think I’d rather stay in tonight, you know,’ I say on the phone to my brother Nicholas when he calls to wish me happy birthday. Nicholas and his wife Amelia are driving up from Oxford today and we’re going out for dinner later on. The past few days have shaken me and I want to snap shut, refuse to let anyone in. I can’t really face the idea of going out where I might know people who will ask questions about why I’m not out with Mike on my birthday.

  ‘Not an option,’ Nicholas says. ‘I’ve promised Amelia a pub crawl around the finest of Blackpool’s bars. And Phoebe is looking forward to a night in with Mum.’