Our Version of Events

There is a certain tone to the voice of a person who is talking on the phone with a practical stranger who just so happened to live through the initially believed end of the world with their daughter. It was a discovery I made in the first week back at home that summer. I could hear my Mum pacing around my Dad’s room – her old room – on the phone, and I knew instantly from that tone of voice that she was on the phone to him. It was sympathy and empathy; which I also learned that summer were two vastly different things; with a hint of awkwardness over how little they knew each other, despite how heavily involved in each other’s lives they may now have been. I took a chance letting the twins out of my sight and crept outside the door to listen.

She spoke a lot about me when her voice was at its most sympathetic and laced with worry. I felt the anger and guilt and sadness and frustration grumbling at the pit of my stomach whenever she said I just hadn’t been myself or that I had “really been struggling.” Mostly because I was stuck between expecting more of myself but blaming her for expecting anything more of me after what had happened. When she asked how he was getting on, I pressed myself closer to the door in the hopes that I might actually hear his reply, instead of having to figure it out from whatever she said in response. It was easy enough to do: she was two parts relieved and one part sympathetic, meaning that he was at least as bad as me. Now she knew I wasn’t any more broken than him.

They spoke on the phone about once a week for the month that I was restlessly staying at my Dad’s. Every time, she relayed to him exactly how desperate I was to get back to Singapore. “I think she feels like she’ll be safer there,” she said, twice. I knew what she meant was that she felt like I’d be safer there. My Mum had been her own version of restless since we got back, too. I could tell she was just existing, like I was, in the lead-up to getting back there and things going as back to normal as they could. I was in a constant state of temporariness as I slept on the floor of my sisters’ bedroom and made someone sit on the other side of the shower curtain any time I took a shower. It was easier than I anticipated to get the twins to comply without an explanation. If anything, it was harder with my Mum and James, who knew the basics of what had happened just seven weeks ago - who knew the truth of why we were home now.

Everyone had their own version of events of the last seven weeks. My Dad was unique, at least as far as our family went, in his version. He could only go by the global narrative that had made the news, in which Singapore had experienced a huge governmental security breach and, as a result, all communication with the rest of the world had been terminated. Flights were grounded, business deals put on hold, families like ours were left unable to get in touch. According to what he told us at dinner every night, he did the same as everyone else: initially wondered why his texts weren’t reaching us, panicked when a day had passed and he couldn’t get anyone on the phone and then spent the next fortnight glued to the news for updates on when Singapore would open again. The twins shared some of his, telling him that whilst he was glued to the news, they had been swimming in the condo pool, going to the beach with us, living as normal. To them the only difference was that they couldn’t FaceTime with Daddy for a while. I listened when they told him this, my head hurting from knowing that it wasn’t real, yet it was the truth. To Lily and Mia, at least, it was the truth. My Mum and James shared the same version as them, with the crucial difference that my Mum and James knew that that version was fake. They knew what was really going on at the time, or at least the basic shell of what was going on, even if their planted memories seemed equally as real to them as that. ‘Knew’ was a term I used lightly. They really didn’t know anything at all. I was alone in my version of events. I didn’t have the planted memories that I could connect to my Dad’s side of things, which meant that dinner that first week we got home was a lot of nodding and letting James answer for me when asked about what I thought of the beach or what I was doing when the twins were learning how to swim underwater. To no surprise, my Dad didn’t notice my lack of knowledge. I wondered then how I could come from him: me who noticed everything. I didn’t share a version of events with anyone, family or otherwise – except from him. Which is why I stood outside the door listening every time that tone of voice came through the wall.

At last, the night before we flew back to Singapore came. The ceiling of the twins’ room at my Dad’s house was still covered in stars. I had spent every night that I had been here lying on the floor, staring up at them. I knew every detail of them; how there was a mark in the corner by the door where the first of them had fallen; how the big one in the middle was starting to lose a leg, which led to me wondering for hours whether the leg of a star is still called a ‘leg’ if it’s just a star and not a starfish. The stickers that were directly above where my mattress was pushed up against the wall had been put up last, I had decided. They were the smallest, filling in the final gaps of ceiling that all of the big, main-feature stars had missed, but they were holding on the best – and at night when the twins had fallen asleep and I could finally turn off one of the two bedside lamps, I was certain they were still shining the brightest in the semi-dark. They had outlived all of us in our time in this room.

There were two knocks on the door, quiet but sharp. I didn’t bother replying, knowing he was already on his way in.

“You alright?” he asked. I looked at James where he stood just inside the door, towering higher from where I was lying. I had to look away quickly, remembering all too well the last time I had seen him from this angle. I didn’t turn away quick enough to miss that he had one hand on the door like he was keeping an escape route at the ready. My chest ached at the realisation of it.

“Yeah. Just got bored,” I assured him. James craned his neck to look at the twins, checking they were both asleep as he came inside, letting go of the door. He sat at the foot of my mattress, next to my feet. I sat up beside him.

“Mum thinks she’s upset you,” he said eventually.

“I know.”

“Did she?”

I sighed. “No. It’s not because of her, I just don’t like it being pointed out or referred to or whatever. I already think about it enough.”

“I think that’s why she brought it up, Nadia.”

The empathy for my Mum laced into his voice suddenly made me wish he had utilised his escape route. A month was an eternity for my brother and I not to talk as we normally would, especially about something as monumental as this. Somehow, though, the longer we had gone not addressing it, the more difficult it was to get into it, and the less I wanted to.

“Why?” I asked, reluctantly.

“Because it’s obvious that it’s all you’ve been thinking about. But you never talk about it. It’s like a massive elephant in the room all the time.”

“Exactly. I can see the elephant, too, James. I am the elephant!” I said it louder than I meant to. We both glanced over at the twins. Neither of them flinched. It was things like that that plunged me further into the isolation of my own awareness.

“So?” continued James.

“So, I don’t need it pointed out to me. That’s the point of the saying: there’s nothing subtle about an elephant, just like there’s nothing subtle about the fact that all you and Mum think about whenever I’m with you is what happened. I’ve noticed.”

For the shortest of moments when I noticed laughter in his eyes and a tiny smirk on his face, I could vaguely feel something familiar between us. “You noticing something?” he joked. “What a surprise!”

“It’s not funny,” I said solemnly, but I was trying not to smile too. “See what I mean though? That’s exactly the point. It’s like that all the time for me. Coyly asking me if I have any idea what the big twist in the movie could be is like asking a metal detector if it noticed the gold.”

“Good one." I thanked him flatly. “She was just trying to understand it, Nadia. To see what it is like for you.”

“The same as it’s always been,” I replied defensively. “I just know about it now.”

In the silence that followed, I could practically hear James’ thoughts. He still hadn’t said what I knew he wanted to.

“She wasn’t there to know what happened,” he said eventually. I became very aware of my palms sweating and the pulse in my neck. I was no more prepared to talk about it now than I was on that day when we first properly saw each other again. If anything, they had more questions now than they did then. James continued:

“And you don’t want to talk about it. So, we’re kind of just filling in the blanks ourselves, based on how you’re acting…”

He was red in the cheeks, the way he was when he was embarrassed or in a blind panic. I had seen this face when he smashed an ornament at an uncle’s house or spilled a jug at a restaurant that the waiter had to clean up. I wondered which of the two he was feeling now, embarrassed or panicked.

“How am I acting?” I asked, surprised by how quiet I was.

“Come on, Nadia. You’re not the same,” James admitted finally. “You’re quiet and distant and you won’t spend any time by yourself. You haven’t slept in your own room in a month. I mean, you’re basically sleeping on Lily and Mia’s floor!” He prodded at the mattress beneath us.

“You know why,” I reminded him. I tried to ignore the feeling that he was mocking me.

“I know,” he said, “but they told you it wasn’t guaranteed to happen again, especially not this quickly after the last time.”

“But that it probably would,” I cut in. “At some point. The odds are that it will.”

“See?” said James, pointedly. “When have you ever paid attention to any odds that you didn’t like?”

I dropped my head, battling with the brutality of the déjà vu. James took a deep breath.

“Did…did something bad happen to you when we were all gone?” he asked. It sounded strenuous for him.

“What? Worse than the fact that you were all gone and I was basically alone with no idea why, and the one time I actually saw someone I knew – who, to the best of my knowledge, could’ve been dead up until that moment – was because you were in my room, completely vacant and just looking at me like you didn’t know who I was – so not you at all? Worse than that?” I challenged. It was difficult to understand if my anger was coming from my fear or the fear was manifested anger.

“No…I know all that,” James stuttered. “I just mean something you haven’t told us. Something…”

I noticed he had gone from flushed to chalk white whilst I hadn’t been looking. My insides squirmed in discomfort to be so mentally distant from him. I could hear my Mum proudly saying we must have been the only siblings who didn’t know how to fight.

“Did I hurt you?” he managed to ask. “When I was… That night that they sent me there. Did I hur…?”

“No,” I said definitively. I grabbed James’ arm and squeezed tightly, like maybe that would make him believe me. “You didn’t. You didn’t do anything to me.”

I saw the relief wash over him and took another kick to the stomach, this time from guilt. How had I left him stewing in this idea for a whole month? It really was true that the one thing I couldn’t notice was when something was wrong.

“It was just scary, James,” I explained. “You were there, but you weren’t. And up until then I really had no idea if you were even… It just... I thought something bad had happened to you.”

“Is that why you didn’t move into my room?” he asked. “Because it makes you think about it?”

I nodded and he took a deep breath, digesting. I felt like I owed him any and every explanation I could to make that look on his face go away.

“It’s just anything that replicates when it happened,” I told him shakily. “Can’t be alone because I was alone when you all disappeared. I still can’t fall asleep in case I wake up and someone’s here.”

“Like I was?” he concluded.

“Yeah,” I said, relieved that he understood. “It’s not about you, James. You didn…”

“It’s okay,” he cut in. “I get it.” We both relaxed for a second. I could feel it settling. Then he said: “Why are you so desperate to get back to Singapore, then? If that's where it happened?”

“Because it’s over there,” I said. “It happened. I can’t imagine lightning striking twice like that. Plus, Dad’s not even here anymore, and he was the whole reason we came back. So that he could see we were okay.”

“Actually, we came back so that you could tell him what happened…and you didn’t.”

“Look me in the eye and tell me he would believe me,” I challenged. He didn’t rise to it. “Would you even believe that was what happened? If you hadn’t been there when they told us?”

“Probably not,” he admitted. He became very thoughtful for a few minutes. Then: “You know Mum’s been speaking to him on the phone? To Tom?”

“I know,” I said. “I heard her.”

“I heard you tell her you didn’t want to speak if he called.”

“Yeah… I just can’t yet. Not over the phone.”

“So that’s why you want to go back then?” James realised. “To see him in person.”

I looked at him, finally feeling something of myself in someone I was related to. I shrugged. “I think so,” I said unsurely. “It’s hard to know what it is I want. I think about talking on the phone and I feel sick, but for some reason I’m scared we get back too late and he’s gone home again.”

“He seemed nice…and you obviously stuck together during all of it…so it makes sense that you want to know if he’s okay.”

“He was there, James,” I blurted out. “It was me and him and that was it. He knows what it was like to be there, and from what I’ve heard on the phone, he knows what it’s like now to live knowing that there’s this thing that’s been part of us forever but we’ve only just been able to see it. There's less than 0.01% who have it, and of them we're the only two who know we do. It’s right in there, deep in our DNA or our makeup or whatever. We can’t research it or ask questions about it or explain it to anyone. But he has it and I have it. We share a version of events. We’re the same.”

It was like from that moment forward everything became clear. Inside, I had unlocked exactly why I had been feeling so caged, but now I felt it more intensely than before. I stayed awake all night, still sat up against the wall, until the twins were awake and it was time to go. I rushed my way through the day in a blur; my heart hammered through the drive to the airport and the security and both of the seven-hour flights. I didn’t sleep or pay attention to anything I was watching or eat any of the stale food, until finally the wheels of the plane screeched onto the runway. In slow-motion, the five of us rolled through the long walk towards the arrival gates. In the crowd of people, I spotted her almost instantly. Though I had only met her once, I recognised her clearly. Blonde hair, with her son on her hip and her husband close behind her… and next to them was him.

He stood there, looking at me directly, seeing me clearly through the flood of people. I noticed how he looked older, more tired with a fuller beard and maybe thinner. But still him.

He wrapped me in the kind of hug that was deeply intentional – the way the uncles who hadn’t seen me since I was toddler did at Christmas, or the way my Dad had after spending the fortnight wondering if I was okay - and all of a sudden it was easier to breathe…