Grabbing the remote, I run down the corridor, glancing at our wedding photo on the stairs. We had a fruit wedding cake, my mum made it and was offended when everyone was too full to eat it. The photo of Felix on the hall table, it was taken in Crete, after the boat trip where we didn’t see any sharks. I need to stop looking at things, I need to stop remembering – I have to get to London before it’s too late.
Jumping in the car, with nothing but my wallet and the remote for the lava lamp, I speed towards the school. Logic tells me that Felix’s project doesn’t matter, that if I’m going back, none of this matters. But I can’t help feeling that it does. It matters to Felix, right here, right now, in this reality, so it matters to me.
On the drive to school, I see the street where Felix learnt to ride a bike. There’s the tree he fell out of and broke his wrist. Memories, memories, too many memories. I drive faster. Stan sternly tells me to slow down.
At the school, I park right in front of the steps, leave the engine running, then sprint in.
‘Visitors need to scan in, Mrs Rutherford,’ the receptionist calls after me.
‘I’ll only be a minute!’ I call back, searching desperately for the main hall. Worryingly, I now know the way.
Bursting through the door, I see I’m just in time, because my son, my beautiful boy, is standing at the front of the room. A crowd of staff and pupils, including Molly Greenway and the headmistress, surrounds his display. He looks pale, as though he’s about to burst into tears, because he’s realised there is something missing.
‘I have it!’ I shout, running across the hall to him. ‘I have it!’ His head whips up, the tears vanishing.
Mrs Barclay, the headmistress, gives me a strange look as I catch my breath, taking in my wild hair and mismatched clothes. If coming here ends up costing me sixteen years, the smile on Felix’s face is worth every single day. He presses the button on the remote and the heart beats into life. Pupils ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ in delight and Mrs Barclay says, ‘Felix, how on earth did you do that?’ as she moves closer to inspect the pulsing sculpture.
I need to go. I wave to Felix as I back out of the classroom, but he runs around the desk to throw his arms around my waist.
‘Thank you. I love you,’ he says, eliciting titters from his classmates, but he doesn’t care.
‘I love you too, and I’m so proud of you, sweet boy. Goodbye, Felix,’ I say, and for a moment he won’t let go.
Then he looks up at me with tear-stained cheeks. ‘Good luck, Mummy. Don’t worry, I’ll see you next time around.’
In the car, I find myself asking Stan for help. ‘Stanley, please help me, I don’t think I’m going to make it in time.’
‘Lucy, I am here to support you in any way that I can. Would you like some words of affirmation?’
‘Yes, yes please.’
‘Your goals come to fruition at the right time,’ says Stanley. ‘Taking time to rest fuels your creativity and stamina.’
Not hugely helpful, but it’s enough to distract me from all the new memories vying to push their way in. The tyres screech as I pull into the train car park, my vision blurred with tears.
‘Goodbye, Stanley, I’m going to miss you,’ I tell the car, hugging the steering wheel. ‘Look after everyone for me.’
‘Have a productive day, Lucy!’ says Stan.
Sprinting for the nine-fifteen train, I make it by less than a minute. Once, coming back on the last train, I picked Sam up a takeaway from his favourite Mexican in Covent Garden, bringing it all the way back home, then dropping it down the gap between the platform and the carriage. On the train, I hold my head in my hands, trying to distract myself from thinking, to block out the memories that keep coming, unbidden. Stop. Stop. I need this to stop. In the next carriage, a tiny baby cries, and with the high-pitched sound a new heaviness envelops me, like metal filings filling my blood, the ground morphing into a giant magnet. A tiny hand curled around my little finger. Cannulas and oxygen tubes, the endless beeping of an incubator. A part of my heart sheared off, forever. Loss. Such overwhelming loss, but steeped in another feeling – love, too big to fathom. Chloe.
When I finally reach Southwark, my pace slows. I must be too late. I must be. The rough sketch of this life is being rapidly painted in, making this my reality, this my present. My feet drag, heavier with every step.
At the bus stop ahead of me I see three women laughing. They are in their twenties, all with matching fringes and heavy eyeliner.
‘Becca, you gotta come tonight. It’s the last night they’re playing,’ says one girl.
‘I’m too tired, look at these bags under my eyes. I need sleep,’ says another.
I feel like telling this girl she doesn’t know the meaning of the word tired, not until she’s lived off three hours’ sleep for months on end, dealing with a baby with reflux and a boy with night terrors. She doesn’t know the meaning of eye bags either. She is beautiful, so fucking beautiful, but I can see from her posture she doesn’t feel it, not fully.
‘You can sleep when you’re dead,’ says the third girl, pulling her friend into a messy, long-limbed hug.
That’s what Zoya used to say.
Zoya.
I start to run.
The shop is empty, as always, and I call out ‘Hello!’ as I run through the door. ‘I’m back.’ I pull back the beaded curtain into the back room, but no one is here, though the door was open – the shop unlocked. Whether the Scottish lady is here or not, I have to try, have to know if I’m out of time.
My hands shake as I look for the coins I put in my purse especially. I slot them into the machine, hold onto its sides and say aloud this time, ‘I want to go back. Please, I want to go back. I want to live every messy day – the good ones and the ones that suck – where I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know where I’m going or how to get there. I want to go on all the shit dates, because then, when I meet the right person I will know how special he is. And when I find him, I don’t want to miss a minute. I don’t want to miss making him laugh for the first time, I don’t want to miss discovering that his eyes look green rather than blue when he wakes up in the morning. I don’t want to miss our first kiss, our first fight, our first anything. And I’ll take the heartache and the horror and the losses too, the fear of not knowing how it will all come to be, because that is life, in all its glorious, messy Technicolor. And I know I am so lucky to be here, and that every breath I take is the good part.’ I shake the machine, because nothing is happening, the lettering stays stubbornly dark. ‘Let me live my life. Please, let me live my life.’
Then I’m crying, because it isn’t working, and I sink to the floor, my head against the machine. Physically and emotionally spent, because I know now, too late, that even if I remember everything, remembering is not the same as living.
Just as I’m about to accept that the window of opportunity to choose has closed, I feel a clunk, and look up to see the old woman kicking the machine.
‘Sometimes it needs a wee nudge,’ she says. ‘Like me, it’s rather old.’
The machine bursts into life, illuminating like a Christmas tree. Cogs whir, and I see the words pressed onto the copper coin.