A Year Abroad

When the kids arrive to school that morning, some with strips of red sunburn across their noses, they excitedly jump into their allocated seats and throw their hands up.

‘Miss Greene! Look at my bracelet – it’s from Turkey!’ Charlotte screams, hopping up and down in her chair like a baby rabbit.

‘Miss Greene, I got you chocolate from Belgium, I ate one of them but-’

‘Miss Greene-’

I clap my hands together three times. They clap back twice, the noise quickly softening as they sink into their chairs.

‘Boys and girls! I know you’re very excited to be back from summer and tell everybody all about what you did, but we mustn’t talk over our friends. If you would like to come to the front and tell your class how your summer was, please put your hand up.’

A sea of hands appear in the room, and I scribble a list of names on the whiteboard.

‘Okay, Alfie first.’

The kids are distracted for the whole day, and I’m not sure quite what the head mistress expected when she asked us to have a careers lesson on the first day back from school. I flick through the PowerPoint lighting up the board, landing on a slide with a cartoon picture of a policeman.

‘So, this is a policeman as I’m sure you all know. What do policemen do, can anybody tell me?’ I open the question to them.

‘They help us!’ I hear from the back of the room.

‘Yes, that’s right, but please remember that we put our hands up if we know the answer in Miss Greene’s class.’ I scold.

Charlotte’s hand shoots up. ‘Yes, Charlotte?’

‘Did you ever want to be a policeman, Miss Greene? Sorry! Policewoman.’ She giggles.

I look at Charlotte for a moment, her red ringlets bouncing as she laughs and her freckled cheeks blooming with colour.

‘No, not a policewoman.’ She giggles again. ‘I actually wanted to be a writer when I was a little girl.’

‘Why aren’t you?’ she asks, her round face turning to the side like a confused puppy.

‘Well, Charlotte…I had a baby when I was just a bit too young. And I couldn’t do all of the things I wanted to do when I was little, because my baby needed a lot of love and attention and time. Which is why lots of people wait and do everything they want to do before they have a baby.’ I answer, dragging my words out carefully so as not to say anything that will send a flurry of angry e-mails from parents my way.

She seems satisfied with this answer, slumping back in to her chair and turning to chat to Louisa next to her. I think about it for a while longer though, as it wouldn’t be the first time that I have wondered what my life would look like now if I had been more careful when I was seventeen.

My thoughts are interrupted by the shrieking of the bell.

‘Okay, boys and girls, please put your books back in your tray and get your coats on!’ I shout, my voice drowned out by the screeching of chairs gliding on the floor.

When I arrive home that evening, the flat is empty. My fingers dance across the screen of my phone, and I hit send on a text to my daughter: ‘Where arw you?’ ‘are*’

The screen lights up almost immediately. Gracie<3: ‘dads’ ‘gna stay here tonite in case beth has baby and they need me to look after frankie’

I sigh, sending a thumbs up emoji and setting my phone on the kitchen counter.

Love Island is paused on the TV when I jolt awake on the sofa later that night, and rock music is blaring through the flat. I groan, rubbing my eyes with the palm of my hands. I open my phone to no new messages and see that it’s one o’clock in the morning. Sighing, I stand up and follow the trail of music, ending up at Gracie’s bedroom door. She must have come home after all.

‘Gracie!’ I yell, pounding my fist on the door. ‘Gracie! Turn the music down!’

She ignores me, and that’s when I see a whisper of smoke trail under the bottom of her door, highlighted by her blue LED lights.

‘Oh my god, Gracie!” I scream. My phone crashes to the floor. I grab the handle and throw the door open.

As soon as I do, I am shoved back by some kind of force that makes the walls shake. The music stops.

‘What the fu-’ I stumble back, almost tripping over my own feet, and stare at the entryway of the door in disbelief. Gracie’s room isn’t there. I can only see bright blue smoke, wisps of gold light flickering through the shades of periwinkle and navy and sapphire. A soft yet deep sound, almost like a cello but not quite, fills the corridor of my flat.

‘Gracie?’ I whisper in a rushed breath. ‘Gracie, are you in there?’ No answer.

I bring my shaking hand up to my face, and slowly take it to the blue light. As soon as my hand is past the threshold, it feels like something grabs me. It pulls me in with ease, and I am surrounded by nothing but blue and gold and the music. For a moment, I am the blue and the blue is me.

And then everything goes black.

When I wake up, my vision is blurry. I blink a few times until my sight returns, and I am met with a dimly lit bar, jazz music pouring from the band in the corner. The bar is full of people – couples kissing, young women prancing in front of the band, and some older men in well-pressed suits sitting on stools with glasses full of amber liquid.

I smile, and I feel a bubble of relief burst in my chest. This one feels too real, but I have been a lucid dreamer since I was a child, and I know that it is often easier to just settle in to the dream.

‘Camilla,’ a man sitting opposite me grunts with a rich American twang in his voice. ‘Camilla, are you even listening to me?’

My eyes focus in on his face. He sighs, lowering his gaze to the tall glass in his hand. He brings the rim to his pouty, full lips, gently taking a sip that softens the hardness of his jaw for a moment.

‘Yes, sorry – what were you saying?’ I offer him an apologetic smile.

The man, who I have now identified as Jack Thurbon from the credit card he used to pay the bill, walks me home. I quickly realise that I’m in New York City, and I’m not surprised that my dream has taken me here considering I’ve always wanted to live here. We weave through clusters of people, lights and music until we land at a prestigious apartment complex. A man dressed in a dark green uniform with red trimmings opens the door to the both of us.

‘Goodnight Mr and Mrs Thurbon.’ He nods.

The apartment is huge and covered in framed pictures of Jack and I in various places of the world. He walks through to the bedroom, and I follow. As I begin taking in the plush velvet bedsheets and thick carpeted floors, he turns to me and presses a kiss gently on my forehead.

‘How many pages did you write today?’ he queries.

‘Huh?’ I look at him, slightly distracted as he begins undressing for bed. I start doing the same, as falling back to sleep in my lucid dreams is usually how I end them.

‘For the sequel? You said you were in the flow of it while I was at work today.’

‘Oh, uh…yeah, loads. Can’t wait for you to read it.’ I stutter.

‘Me neither, Mrs New York Times Bestseller.’

I wake up on that same memory foam mattress every day for three hundred sixty-four days. Panic hummed in my stomach when I rolled over on the first morning to Jack’s dark curls, and I bolted up from the pillow, grabbing the first phone that I found. When I shakily dialled the house phone in my flat, I was met with nothing but a flat line. I opened an Instagram account and searched through almost every ‘Gracie Reed’ on the app, with no result. I have tried every day since then to no avail. I even tried to book a flight home, but no matter how many times I tried to checkout, an error page would appear. I miss Gracie all the time.

On the three hundred sixty-fifth day, I finish writing the sequel to the book I attempted to write a hundred times back at home. When Jack gets home, he drops a plastic bag of Chinese food on to the glass coffee table in the living room. He dishes noodles and orange chicken on to China plates, planting a kiss on my head and placing a plate into my palms. I join him on the leather sofas and crack my chopsticks apart.

Watching him carefully scoop noodles into his mouth, my heart gently thuds in my chest.

‘What are you looking at?’ He chuckles, unscrewing a bottle of wine and pouring the juicy red liquid in a glass that he sets in front of me.

‘Nothing.’ I smirk. ‘I really do love you.’

‘Well, I hope so. We’ve only been married for five years.’ He laughs again, the slight wrinkles at the corners of his dark blue eyes deepening. My eyes are a different colour here. At home, they were a dreary brown but here they’re a mystical grey blue.

We make love when we get in to bed that night, and afterwards he rolls me on to my side and holds me tighter than he’s ever held me. ‘I love you,’ I whisper, but he’s already snoring softly into my ear.

When I wake up on my sofa, I know immediately that something has changed. Love Island is frozen on the TV. Rock music is blaring through the flat, but light is pouring through the curtains.

I jump to my feet, running through splinters of glass from my cracked phone next to Gracie’s door, and shove the door open. She is sitting up in her bed, her beautiful blonde hair spilling down her back, her beautiful eyes looking up at me through a blanket of thick lashes.

I run to her, practically diving on her bed, and wrap my arms around her shoulders.

‘Mum, what’s wrong?’ she shrieks.

‘Nothing, shh. I just missed you while you were at Dad’s.’

It is some three months later when I’m told that there will be a new pupil in my class. I’m often distracted in class, still shaken up by the dream or psychotic episode I had. When she walks in, she declares that her name is Sarah and shyly tucks a dark curl behind her ear. She quickly becomes best friends with Charlotte, who spends the rest of the day following her around.

At home time, Sarah glues herself to my side and is the last to be picked up. I am talking to a colleague about the weather when I hear a shrill ‘Daddy!’ from my hip. She lets go of my hand and sprints to a man who is crouched to the floor. When he catches her in his arms, he slowly stands up and begins walking over to me with his hand out.

I almost collapse. His eyes are a grey-blue now instead of the dark blue I remember waking up to, but his hair – his hair is as dark and curly as I remember. I feel like I’m going to throw up when he offers his hand to shake.

‘Hi,’ he says with a rich American twang. ‘I’m Jack Thurbon, Sarah’s dad.’