Page 6 of For One Moment With You
‘Tilly? We’re taking you for a scan.’ This time, it’s a woman’s voice with the same Greek accent.
I’m aware of my bed jolting slightly, before it feels as though it’s moving. Suddenly I’m thinking of the boys.Oh my God… Will anyone have told them?But no one I’ve met in Crete knows about them, let alone how to contact them.
Panic fills me. I should have left an address with someone. No one will know that something’s happened to me.
My heart starts to race, as the bleeping sound that seems to accompany me speeds up.
The woman speaks again. ‘She’s tachycardic. We must hurry.’
I’m not sure what tachycardic means, only that whatever it is, from the urgency in her voice, it isn’t good.
‘Has someone called her husband?’
No…I try to whisper.You mustn’t call Gareth. He’s the last person I want here…It’s my last thought before the beeping sound grows louder.
Then everything fades again and my mind goes blank.
3
A Grey October Day at Selham Railway Station
This time, I find myself back at Selham railway station, that cold October afternoon just a few weeks ago, watching myself sitting on a rickety bench just moments before my life was about to implode. I like Selham railway station. It’s like stepping back in time, one that’s confined only by the limits of your imagination. You see, there are no trains here. In fact the last one went through several decades ago, making it the perfect place to sit, daydreaming about how things used to be.
I was lost in nostalgia that afternoon, gazing at the track overgrown with brambles, the platforms lost under banks of bracken; the air carrying echoes of trysts and assignations – if only I knew how to listen to them. Of course, I can see now, it didn’t actually start that day. I mean, what happens in our lives is usually the consequence of everything that’s gone before. And what was about to happen that day had so far remained invisible. It was also unexpected; filtering in like the softest whisper of a breeze – or something less perceptible than a whisper, because that afternoon, I was completely and blissfully unaware that anything in my life was about to change.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked my life. But just for a moment, as I sat there, I wished I could peel back the veil of time, slip through it into a ghostly carriage of one of those trains and let it speed me back through the years to a time when nothing bad ever happened, when my mum and Lizzie were still here. Losing my mum was one thing. But three months ago, Lizzie died too, stranding me at a derelict station, without a signpost. That’s what sisters are, aren’t they? Guiding stars, signposts?
I knew what Lizzie would have said.Stop looking back, Tilly! You can’t change the past. It’s about the future… Now the twins have grown up, you could have an adventure! Think about it. What do you really want from your life?
Lizzie’s belief in following her heart led her to embark on many adventures. But in my ordered life, responsibility won out over impulsiveness. And I was the one everyone needed. I was a wife and mother. My widowed father’s helpful daughter. There was my part-time job as a legal assistant with a fairly smart law firm. In other words, I was one of those people whose role in life was to be a hub. The holder of many threads leading to other lives, which floated around me like vibrant, multicoloured balloons, as I liked to think of them. In my case, mostly male ones. Gareth’s, for example. The twins, even though they were away at uni and hardly ever came home. My crotchety father’s. But it gave me a sense of purpose in my life.
Since Lizzie’s death, Rick had become another. Rick was her broken-hearted husband. He hadn’t expected to lose his wife any more than I was ready to lose my sister, but men don’t cope with loss as well as women do. My father was a case in point. His life locked down, never to evolve after my mother left this world. It meant that now, he depended on me. But it was kind of how it was meant to be, wasn’t it? I mean, when our parents raised us, it was only fair that as they got older, we were there for them.
But while Lizzie was the shining star in his life, the looking-after role had fallen to me. I glanced at the dying bouquet abandoned on the platform, that was once a joyous declaration of love; the withered flowers a reminder. Nothing lasts.
Shivering, I pulled my jacket more tightly around me. Then as I gazed across towards the trees, the barely perceptible breeze suddenly became a powerful gust sending a swirl of golden leaves cascading around me, before they settled again and the first raindrops started to fall.
The rain rapidly became a downpour and as I drove home, I was still thinking about Lizzie. The bright, vivacious, go-getting one, she started an interior design business in her twenties that went from strength to strength; had a gorgeous husband who adored her. They’d never had children – Lizzie was younger than me; parenthood consigned to a future that neither of them dared to imagine wouldn’t happen, both of them believing time was open ended.
But even the best planned futures could go off-piste. On reaching the house, I ran inside and closed the back door behind me. The rain was lashing against the windows and standing for a moment, I looked around our kitchen that was an homage to Lizzie’s design skills with an artfully battered wooden table and pale floor tiles, the walls painted white, bold splashes of green and blue from carefully chosen pieces of china.
On the table were the scores of cards that had kept arriving since Lizzie died, holding anecdotes and memories of the sister I wanted to remember from before her illness; triggering memories of our childhood, our parents, how our lives used to be when we were younger.
Looking at them, I suddenly felt much older than my forties.At least you’d never know how that feels, Lizzie… Being old and rather pointless. Though not entirely so because as I sat there, my mobile rang and Dad’s number appeared on the screen.
‘Hi, Dad. How are you?’
‘I’m er… I’m not calling about me. It’s the cat.’
It was Lizzie’s idea for Dad to have a cat after Mum died. Another heartbeat in the house, was how she put it. And Dad was rather taken with Moses. He just wasn’t terribly practical about cat ownership. A sense of alarm filled me. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He’s had, um… a bit of an accident. On the carpet. I don’t have a clue what to do about it.’
Can’t you clean it up, Dad?But knowing he wouldn’t know where to start, I don’t say that. Forgetting my plans to start repainting the kitchen a bright and cheery shade of yellow, I sighed.‘Would you like me to come over?’
He paused. ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
* * *
