Before You Go Page 2

  Could I be in hospital? Perhaps that’s it. I fell, hit my head and now I’m here, in a hospital bed, safe.

  It makes sense, but somehow I don’t think that’s what’s so different about today either.

  I keep my eyes shut a minute longer and listen carefully to the sounds around me. I can hear a radiator banging as though the heating has just come on. I can make out the distant rumble of a radio and noises like someone clattering around in a kitchen, the hum of an electric shower, someone whistling. It’s familiar, and yet not quite, and it certainly doesn’t sound like a hospital.

  Finally, I try to open my eyes and a blurry world slowly swims into focus. I can make out a white ceiling, covered with the same swirls and semicircles as the ceiling in my childhood bedroom. Odd, I haven’t seen that pattern for years. There’s even a small pink mark just the same as the one I made on my bedroom ceiling at home when I’d thrown a lipstick at my sister and missed. I shake my head, confused by the memory. The grey lampshade hanging from the middle is familiar too, tugging at my mind like a child pulling at my coat, desperate for my attention, desperate for the memory to fall into place.

  I flick my eyes to the right. There’s a chest of drawers there, pine, with stickers covering it and a mirror on top, surrounded by bulbs. It’s empty of toiletries, but it’s still so familiar.

  I sit bolt upright in bed, my heart pounding. I can hardly catch my breath.

  I’m scared to look round any more, but I have to. Twisting my head I see the pine wardrobe that I knew I’d see, one door open, a row of empty coat hangers inside. In front of it sits a black suitcase, and a cardboard box with Zoe’s stuff! scrawled on it in black marker pen, and a smiley face sticking out its tongue. On top of that is a wine box with Threshers printed on it, stuck down with white tape with the word Warning repeating all the way along it in bright red letters. I know without looking that it’s packed with my precious CDs, all lovingly sorted the night before.

  I move my eyes around the room. An empty hook on the back of the door where a dressing gown would normally be; my old CD player on the floor, wrapped in bubble wrap; a desk stripped of papers and pens, just one lonely pot with a couple of blunt pencils and a marker pen sticking out of the top. It’s my old bedroom, and it looks exactly as it did on the day I left for university.

  My heart’s still hammering and I take a few deep breaths, trying to calm it down. This is nothing to worry about, it’s just a dream. Your mind is playing tricks. Go back to sleep and when you wake up everything will be back to normal, whatever normal is.

  I settle my head back down on the pillow and close my eyes. But I can’t resist, and when I peek again, nothing has changed.

  What the hell is going on?

  I yank my duvet off and swing my legs over the side of the bed and pad cautiously towards the mirror. It’s about waist height, and I can already see my short pyjamas and vest top reflected back at me as I approach – pyjamas I haven’t worn for about eighteen years. I’m not sure I’m ready for what I’m about to see, but I sit down carefully on the edge of the stool anyway, and peer into the mirror.

  I gasp. Not because it’s awful. It’s me. But it’s not the thirty-eight-year-old me, with dark circles and fine lines under my eyes and a deep V etched into my forehead, that I’m used to seeing. It’s an eighteen-year-old me, with flushed cheeks and no lines – and black make-up smudged under my eyes that makes me look like Alice Cooper. My hair is dyed a strange reddy-purple colour and sticks out all around my head like a halo. Hand shaking, I reach up and pat it down, then squint at my reflection and pull a face. My forehead doesn’t wrinkle and pucker like it usually does, but stays smooth and strangely springy.

  I laugh out loud. The sound is unexpected and makes me jump. It’s a sound I’ve not heard for a while. But it seems appropriate because this is utterly ridiculous.

  How can this be happening?

  I consider going back to bed, burying my head under the pillow and pretending none of this is happening. But I’m curious. Terrified and confused, but curious to see what might happen too. Because the truth is I know this is more than just a dream. I don’t know how I know, but I can just tell. It feels – real. It feels as though I’m really here, however insane that might sound.

  I’m clueless as to what to do next, though. What do you do when you wake up in your old life? Is there an instruction leaflet, a set of rules to follow? And how long will it be until it ends and I’m back in real life again? A day, a week, a month? Forever? I shudder at the thought.

  I stand up. There’s a pile of clothes dumped at the end of my bed, crumpled from being kicked in my sleep. I clearly remember having spent ages choosing what to wear today, for my first day at university. I was moving to Newcastle and I’d been so excited. Scared too, but mostly excited.

  ‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’ I’d told my best friend Amy. But it was all bravado. The truth was I loved my home in Doncaster with Mum and Dad and my little sister Becky. I moaned, of course. But I knew Mum and Dad loved me and it was all I’d ever known. Moving to Newcastle, where I knew no one, was going to be a huge change. It was hard to believe I was ever that scared little girl.

  I step out of my pyjama shorts and slip on the clothes from the end of the bed: a pair of black-and-white-striped tights; a fitted black dress, short; and a scruffy, oversized cardigan. I look down at myself. Weirdly, it feels pretty good.

  I flick my eyes over to the bedside table. I’m looking for my mobile and I tut (I wonder whether I’m tutting in my sleep too and smile at how funny I’d look if there was anyone there to see me). This is 1993. I didn’t have a mobile in 1993. Nobody did, apart from businessmen with their enormous clumsy bricks attached to the sides of their heads. Instead, my clock radio shines the time back at me: 08.10.

  I head downstairs to see what’s going on.

  I remember Mum once telling me that when I left to go to university she’d cried for three solid days. I’d never believed her. She wasn’t much of a crier, my mum, always too busy looking after everyone to have time to be self-indulgent. It just seemed so unlikely.

  But when I get downstairs and peek through the crack in the kitchen door, I watch Mum for a minute before she knows I’m there. She looks so young, her hair no longer grey but a deep, dark brown. She’s slimmer too, and is wearing a blouse instead of the endless M&S sweaters she prefers these days. She looks so pretty. I’d forgotten she’d ever looked like that. A voice on the radio drones on in the background. Mum slowly takes dishes and pots out of the dishwasher with one hand, and in the other she clutches a tissue which she dabs round her eyes every now and then. My heart surges with love for her.

  Then Becky comes crashing down the stairs and breaks the spell.

  ‘What are you standing there for?’ she says. I stare at her, unable to reply. Now, when I see Becky, I’m always shocked at how grown-up she looks. At four years younger than me, I’ve always thought of her as my baby sister, and seeing her as a proper grown-up throws me every time. This, right here, is the Becky I always picture in my mind.

  Plus, of course, this proves something else too: Becky can see me, which somehow means this whole thing is real.

  Without waiting for an answer, Becky barges past me and into the kitchen. ‘Mu-um, where’s my hockey kit?’ she whines.

  Mum straightens up. ‘Over there, love,’ she says, pointing to a neatly ironed pile of clothes on the worktop. Bless her, she’s got the patience of a saint.

  Mum then notices me and smiles weakly.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart, all ready, are we?’

  So Mum can see me too, then. Right. I take a deep breath and smile at her falteringly. Normally I’d have said something flippant like, ‘Yeah, I can’t wait to get out of here.’ But having seen how upset she was a minute ago, I don’t have the heart. ‘Yep, everything’s packed,’ I say, noticing Mum’s puffy eyes for the first time. I step forward and give her a hug. She seems surprised and it takes her a few seconds to respo
nd. But as I breathe in the scent of her lily of the valley soap, I feel a pang of nostalgia for how simple life used to be. If only it were still like this. If only all I had to think about was leaving home, what I wanted for breakfast, and making new friends.

  I pull away and notice a frown briefly cross Mum’s face. She’s probably wondering why I was hugging her. The teenage me didn’t behave like that – she was far too busy worrying about herself to notice Mum was feeling sad, far more likely to ignore her completely and mess up her nice clean kitchen than stop and hug her because she looked upset.

  Behaving like a teenager is going to be tough. I’m just not that person any more. But I’m going to have to try.

  I step away and fill the kettle with water.

  ‘Tea?’ I say to the room.

  ‘Yes please, love.’

  ‘Yeah,’ grunts Becky, who’s standing by the cereal cupboard shovelling Cheerios into her mouth from the box like she hasn’t been fed for a month.

  I flick the switch then put the teabags into the cups before sitting down heavily at the table while I wait for the water to boil.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ I’m dying to see him again.

  ‘Oh, he’s just popped out for a paper.’ She makes quotation marks in the air with her fingers. We all know that when Dad pops out ‘for a paper’ it means he’s having a sneaky fag. He comes back reeking of it, and there’s always a telltale fag-packet bulge in the pocket of his shirt, but we all pretend we don’t know, and he pretends we don’t know either. I don’t know why we bother. I roll my eyes and watch Mum flitting around the kitchen. She pulls open drawers, wipes imaginary stains from the worktop, bends and picks up Cheerios that had landed at Becky’s feet.

  ‘Don’t clear up after her, she’s more than capable.’ I nod at the trail of Cheerios that Becky’s leaving behind her like Hansel and Gretel.

  ‘Shut up.’ Becky looks furious.

  ‘It’s all right, love, I don’t mind. I’m cleaning anyway.’

  ‘But—’ I stop myself. I can’t bear to see Mum being treated like a servant, but I’m fully aware I used to do exactly the same myself, so I bite my tongue. Instead I stand and fill the cups with water, adding milk to each one as well as sweetener for mum, one sugar for Becky, just the milk for me.

  ‘Do you want some breakfast, love?’

  My head aches, and I rub it gently.

  ‘No thanks. I think I’m going to take my tea upstairs and finish getting ready.’

  ‘OK. See you in a bit. But don’t be too long, your dad wants to get on the road.’

  I nod and head upstairs, placing my tea gently on the floor next to my bed. Then I lie back down again. I need a moment to think.

  I don’t know how much of this day I’m going to see again, but it is strange knowing what’s going to happen next. In a couple of hours, Mum, Dad and I will bundle my few belongings into the car, wave goodbye to Becky, who’s being allowed to stay at home so she can go to hockey practice and meet her friends for lunch in town, then I’ll arrive in Newcastle, my heart hammering with terror as we drive through the unfamiliar streets. When we arrive at my house we’ll unload the car, and then I’ll be left all on my own, for the first time in my life, just me and my new housemates.

  And that’s when it hits me like a train, so hard I’m winded and can hardly breathe. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to remember.

  This day – the real one, at least – was the very first time I ever laid eyes on Ed. My Ed, who I’ve been grieving for endlessly over the last two months, whose death has left me broken and lost and angry.

  I roll over onto my side and clutch my stomach, my breath coming in gulps.

  Could this mean . . . I hardly dare even form the thought . . .

  Could this possibly mean that, after two months of grieving for him, of feeling as though my heart has been ripped from my chest; of dreaming about being able to touch the stubble on his chin, push the hair from his eyes, wrap my arms round his tanned neck and hold his body against mine, I’m going to get the chance to see him again?

  I feel faint with the possibility.

  I can hardly believe it, and yet I can hardly wait.

  The rhythm of the car must have sent me to sleep because when I open my eyes we’ve stopped and Dad has switched off the engine, and just for a moment, as Mum turns to smile at me from the passenger seat, I’m back in 1993 and everything’s OK, and I smile back.

  And then I remember and the breath is knocked from me once again.

  ‘You OK, love, you’ve gone awfully pale?’

  I sit up straight, wipe the dribble from the corner of my mouth and nod.

  ‘Yeah, just fell asleep, sorry.’

  Dad tuts. ‘Makes a change.’

  ‘John, leave her alone.’

  ‘What? – she’s a teenager, it’s what they do.’ Dad nods his head towards the window. ‘Look, it’s your new home.’

  I peer out of the window to check out the little house where I’ll be living for the next year. It’s as familiar as my own face and despite myself it makes me smile.

  The tatty door of the terraced house is open, and we climb out of the car as a familiar middle-aged woman comes bundling out of the house and walks down the path to meet us.

  ‘Hello . . . er?’ she says, holding out her hand to Dad and smiling warmly.

  ‘John,’ says Dad, shaking her hand firmly. ‘John Morgan. And this is my wife, Sandra.’

  They shake hands and then she turns to me. ‘So you must be Zoe,’ she says, shaking my hand too. ‘I’m Jane’s mum, Cara. It’s lovely to meet you.’

  ‘Hello,’ I mumble, trying not to let on that I already know who she is.

  We take my stuff inside and dump it in the first room we come to.

  ‘I’ll find the kettle,’ Mum says, ripping the tape from one of the boxes.

  ‘No need, I’ve already made a pot,’ says Cara, directing us all into the kitchen.

  While Mum and Dad chat to Cara I sneak upstairs to have a look around before anyone else arrives. But when I come to the second bedroom, I gasp. There, with her back to me as she hangs her jeans neatly in the wardrobe, blonde hair swinging in a high ponytail, is someone very familiar. She turns to see who’s there, and her exceptionally young, pretty face breaks into a huge smile.

  ‘Hiya, I’m Jane. You must be Zoe. Come in and sit down. Oh, if you can find a space.’ She pushes a pile of clothes to one side to make some room for me, and I sit and try to think about what to say to someone I know as well as I know myself, who I’m meant to be meeting for the first time. God, I wish there was an instruction manual – it would make things much easier.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you at last,’ I say, perching precariously on the edge of her single bed.

  ‘You too. I was hoping you’d arrive first.’

  Good, this is how it should go. No one else is meant to be here yet. I look round her room and smile. ‘So, it looks like we’re the only two girls. I wonder when the others will get here?’

  She shrugs. ‘God knows, but let’s hope they’re not axe murderers.’ She winks and I grin at her and for a moment the knot in my stomach loosens. This is Jane, my best friend for about twenty years. There’s nothing to worry about here. ‘What were their names again, the boys?’

  ‘Rob, Simon and Ed.’ I answer too quickly, my voice cracking slightly on the last name, and Jane’s smile falters briefly.

  But seconds later her smile returns full beam. ‘I wonder whether we’ll snog any of them? You know, a house romance that goes tits-up and ends up being awkward all year? There’s got to be one, hasn’t there? I think it’s the law.’

  My face flames. ‘Yeah, bound to.’

  Undeterred by my lack of enthusiasm, she squeezes onto the bed next to me and carries on. ‘So I know I sound like a walking cliché, but what are you studying? I’m studying drama. Mum and Dad wanted me to take a “proper” course, but I’m not clever enough. Anyway, I reckon it’ll be fun.’

/>   ‘French and marketing.’ It sounds deadly dull and I feel the need to elaborate. ‘I thought it would be useful to have a language and, you know, something I can actually do as a job too.’ I shrug.

  ‘Ooh, the girl has ambitions. I like it.’ She picks a jumper off the pile and starts to fold it. ‘So, what else? What about music, films, hobbies? Boyfriends? Are you secretly a lesbian karate champion with a penchant for jazz?’

  ‘Ha, if only I were that interesting,’ I laugh. ‘Nah, I’m quite boring really. I’m a bit of a rock chick – ’ I glance down at my clothes to prove the point – ‘and a bit of a swot, and my favourite film is Back to the Future because I think it would be awesome to travel back in time—’ I stop, realizing the significance of my words. ‘And no. No boyfriend. Or girlfriend.’ There have been boyfriends, of course, but it feels wrong to talk about them. ‘You?’ I add weakly.

  ‘Not much to report, to be honest. Mum and Dad would say I’ve had a bit of a misspent youth, drinking in the park and not doing nearly enough work for my A levels, but it’s OK because I’m here now and they can both be proud.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I had a boyfriend, Rich, but he’s gone to Plymouth and I told him there was no point in trying to stay together so I don’t suppose I’ll ever see him again. Anyway, it gives me a chance to meet some nice, sexy rugby player while I’m here, doesn’t it?’ She grins wickedly, but before I have a chance to answer we hear heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.

  My body tenses, even though I’m sure it’s not Ed. Seconds later a head appears round the door, a handsome face topped by a mop of floppy dark hair.

  It’s Rob, and at the sight of him the tension seeps from my body.

  ‘Can anyone join in, or is this girls only?’ he says, as the rest of his body follows his head into the room.