On the Other Side

  ‘None,’ Evie said firmly.

  ‘None?’ Jim pressed once more, just to be sure.

  ‘None. Now you know them all.’

  13

  the single greatest adventure

  The escalator rattled upwards into an all-consuming darkness that made Evie wonder if she was still conscious or whether she’d slipped into sleep without realising. She stepped forward when it flattened out, but caught her heel and stumbled. A train in the distance sounded its horn in one short burst, then again but this time it seemed much closer to Evie, lost in the dark, until the driver blew the horn so loudly and for so long that Evie was sure she was going to be squashed flat. She balled her fists over her eyes, bracing herself for the excruciating pain that she thought would be inevitable but the sound flew past her. A gust of wind from the train rushing by made her lose her balance, and when she threw her arms out to steady herself, she uncovered her eyes and saw that she was at the station she used to change platforms in when heading home from The Teller offices. Not only that, but she was stood opposite Vincent’s old busking spot. An old man was playing there now. His violin was black like Vincent’s had been, but this man was very obviously in his eighties. He played sitting in a little green canvas fold-out chair, presumably because his legs wouldn’t hold him up for as long as he’d want to busk which, judging by the amount of coins in his case, was a long while.

  Evie wandered towards the entrance to the platform, but something about the violinist caught her eye. Something that was out of place and yet completely familiar. His eyes were closed as he played a beautiful soft tune, and at his feet was a little silver bowl filled with individually wrapped, hard boiled sweets. Orange ones, to be precise. Propped up next to it was a small handwritten cardboard sign. It read:

  Great adventures can start small.

  Even as small as a sweet.

  Help yourself to an adventure.

  Evie read those words over and over until the violinist stopped playing. Then she looked up at him, his violin resting on his lap, and although he seemed an entirely different person, his hair short and grey, his skin leathery and sallow and his weathered hands trembling, those green eyes hadn’t changed at all.

  ‘Vincent.’

  Vincent Winters packed up his violin and his sweets, folded away his chair and slowly trundled out of the station to make the walk home. The weather wasn’t cold, but the pavements were wet from earlier rain, so it took him a long time to get to his house, making sure every step was placed correctly so he wouldn’t slip. Evie walked with him, and even though he didn’t have a clue she was there, she was glad he wasn’t alone.

  Together they walked across a bridge to a quaint part of town where the houses were joined together in neat little rows, the fronts painted in various pastel colours. Vincent hobbled up the steps, holding on to the railings with one hand, his violin in the other and his chair under his arm, and Evie wished she could lend a hand with her restored and capable twenty-seven-year-old body. Instead she just watched, helplessly, praying that he didn’t fall.

  The house was small but clearly worth more than the Vincent she once knew could have afforded. Evie felt proud. He must have done well for himself in the end. She slipped in through the black front door before he closed it, and watched as he took off his coat and hung it on the stand in the hallway. The black coat swung open, revealing its purple silk lining, and Evie smiled.

  Vincent steadily trudged into the sitting room so Evie took a moment to look at her surroundings.

  The hallway walls were covered in framed photos, mostly of Vincent when he was younger with a woman Evie didn’t recognise. She looked small and happy, and she fitted perfectly next to him, like they were jigsaw pieces that slotted satisfyingly together. A pang of jealousy shot through Evie’s stomach, but she was glad Vincent hadn’t wallowed in their failed relationship, as she so easily could have done herself. He’d moved on and found someone who clearly brought him happiness. The photographs showed adventure after adventure, the pair of them doing extraordinary things against foreign backdrops. In one, they stood either side of a lion, their arms around his thick mane and the lion licking its lips. In another, they were balancing on the wings of an aeroplane, thousands of feet in the air. They stood atop mountains, knee-deep in snow. They held hands on a tightrope above an audience of hundreds. They sat in the lotus position on beds of needles with calm faces.

  Each picture was another pang in Evie’s gut. It was the life she’d wished she’d led. The life she’d given up for her own security and that of her brother. The life she’d never known.

  She turned away from the pictures, unsure of what else this happy house had in store for her, but all the same, she followed Vincent into the sitting room, where he sat down in a large armchair. The room had many shelves, all covered in books, mainly fiction, but next to Vincent’s chair, they held sheet music and biographies of great musicians he admired. There was a silver music stand by the front window that looked out onto the street. The stand was set to around the height Vincent was when sitting in his armchair. Evie remembered how her own back used to ache in her seventies when standing for more than a few minutes at a time, and how she’d wished there was something she could do to ease that for him.

  She spent the evening sat on the sitting room floor watching Vincent read, yawn, play his violin, yawn, drink a small glass of port, yawn and then finally concede to the idea of going to bed. He seemed so alone, so quiet, and she wondered whether he felt that himself as much as she did from observation. Even when Evie was older, she got agitated if she sat still for too long, and had to find things to keep her busy. She’d learned to knit and crochet, and made scarf after scarf to keep her family warm during the winter, while during the summer she’d crochet cushion covers and tea cosies. She’d write letters and cards to her friends back in the little village they’d lived in after she and Jim had married or she’d bake for hours in the kitchen. She was always busy and bustling, even when her old body resisted. Vincent, however, seemed calm and quite content to sit and do nothing, but then, she thought, he’d always been that way. While she frantically drew or cooked dinner or made tea, he would sit on the sofa with a book in his hand. She’d leave him in one place knowing he’d still be there when she got back.

  He took the stairs carefully, bringing both feet together on each step before moving on to the next, but Evie loitered in the hallway. She wondered if the girl from the photos was still alive, and if they were still together. The stillness of the house suggested that Vincent lived here alone, but the presence of the photographs told her that it hadn’t always been that way, that they’d once lived in this house together. A thought struck her. Looking at the pictures again, she realised they were only ever of the two of them. Vincent had never had children.

  Her eyes fell on the single picture that wasn’t of Vincent and his girl. It was a face she recognised, and she laughed when she saw the image of Sonny Shine kissing Vincent’s cheek so hard that Sonny’s face was squashed and distorted. It was Vincent how she’d known him, looking fed up with Sonny but smiling nonetheless. His hair had fallen in front of his left eye, but the brilliant green had caught the flash of the camera and shone through the dark strands. He didn’t look like a model, a Greek God or a fictional character dreamed up by a woman to make women lust after him. His nose was round and crooked, his teeth were slightly stained from smoking through his teenage years and from drinking too much tea, and his facial hair had always been scruffy and untamed … but he was Vincent. Evie had loved him for everything he was, not only the parts of him that were universally accepted as beautiful. The parts that weren’t conventional were the bits that set him apart from everyone else. She remembered how he used to sleep with his hand resting on her fleshy stomach, how he told her she was beautiful even when she wasn’t wearing any makeup, how he’d kiss the bridge of her nose between her eyes, even though she always said it was slightly too wide and made her eyes look funny. Individually, th
e two of them had been flawed, as all people are, but together they had been perfect, because they’d embraced the parts of each other that weren’t quite as they wanted them to be. She touched Vincent’s nose in the picture with a single finger, missing him more than ever. The Vincent upstairs wasn’t a man she knew. She hadn’t been there through the years that had created him.

  She tiptoed up the stairs and carefully pushed herself through two closed doors before she found Vincent’s room at the end of the corridor. The door was propped open by a doorstop that looked like a black cat. Vincent was already tucked up in bed and lightly snoring. The room was dark, but in the moonlight Evie could make out the floral duvet cover, which looked too well matched to the room’s decor to have been Vincent’s doing. There was a desk in the corner where he had left his wallet and pocket watch, and a wardrobe stood against the wall, but aside from the bare essentials, the room seemed cold and empty. None of the character that Evie knew Vincent once had shone from any corner of the house, and Evie wondered how long the woman from the pictures had been gone. A long while, she assumed.

  She walked around the bed to get a better look at Vincent’s face, and found that in sleep, he looked more like the man she had known. He carried his burdens on his face but when he slept, his face relaxed into the face Evie knew. He had been relatively carefree and untroubled when she had first met him, but when she’d seen him in the station, now an old man, his careworn face had been like a mask she couldn’t see past. Now, in sleep, she had found the Vincent she’d fallen in love with, just a little more wrinkly.

  ‘Vincent?’ she whispered, the name feeling strange on her tongue. His eyebrows rose a little, like a dog’s ears pricking at the familiar sound of its name. ‘Vincent. It’s … it’s Evie.’ She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something changed in his face, and he looked inconsolably sad. Her voice must be affecting his dreams, and she wondered what he was seeing in his mind to make him so upset. She wanted nothing more than to touch his face and smooth out the valleys of worry that had formed in his brow. ‘Vincent. There’s so much I could say. So much I have wanted to say for so many years. Firstly, you should know that Eddie became the man I always hoped he would. He found a loving partner and is living a happy life. Our ending wasn’t for nothing, but not a day has gone by when I haven’t wondered what would have happened if we’d gone against everyone and everything. I wonder what our alternative ending would have been. I wonder if Eddie would have found happiness without having the security we gave him, and I wonder whether our lives would have been any better or worse than they actually turned out to be.

  ‘I did find happiness, eventually. I found it in my two children. They became my world and I would never wish to change anything that would mean they didn’t exist, because a world without August and Isla would be a far less brilliant place to live. But I did still go through each day wishing you were by my side and wondering where you were and if you were missing me too. It’s hard living with “what ifs”, but living with one so big was unbearable. The weight on my heart became so heavy that I … well, I took it out and buried it in the garden on my wedding day.’

  Vincent’s face crumpled, and a single tear rolled down the bridge of his nose and soaked into his pillow.

  ‘Out of my heart grew a tree. A giant tree, taller than all the houses for miles, and it bears this strange fruit that no one can stand the taste of except me … and possibly you, I don’t know.’ That thought hadn’t occurred to Evie before now. ‘Will you visit it? I think if you saw it, you’d understand. You’d know how much I missed you each and every day, and you’d see that I never stopped loving you. Not once.’

  Vincent suddenly whimpered and rolled on to his back, tears streaming down the sides of his face and into his grey hair. He mumbled something, and Evie thought he’d said her name, but she couldn’t be sure. Then he sniffed in his sleep and seemed to compose himself and Evie wondered if he was dreaming of her.

  ‘Evie …’

  This time it was clearer. She was sure he knew she was there, and oh, how she wished he would wake up and see her, so that they could talk and reminisce and be together again, even if only for a short while. But Evie could feel that pull on the back of her neck. The world of lost souls was calling her once more. She didn’t feel like she’d said all she needed to say, but then there was so much she wanted to tell him that if she carried on, she’d never leave.

  She closed her eyes, and was just giving in to hands that were dragging her back to Dr Lieffe when she heard Vincent whisper, ‘Evie,’ and she opened her eyes to watch him say, ‘You were my single greatest adventure.’

  The noise of a train whizzed through Evie’s brain and rattled her ribcage like the tracks it rode on. She pushed through the wall all at once in a great whoosh! but then halted abruptly, suspended in the air, and was gradually lowered to the floor, as if she was standing on an invisible escalator.

  ‘Well that was a lot more pleasant than it has been before!’ she told the wall, which rippled its surface in reply.

  ‘How was it?’ Lieffe helped Evie off with her coat and wheeled the chair behind her so she could flop backwards into it.

  ‘It was … Well, it just was. I’m not entirely sure how I feel, but I know I’m feeling.’

  Lieffe nodded and left the room for what seemed only like seconds before returning with two freshly brewed cups of tea.

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but you know I’m here if you do.’ He handed her the tea and stood awkwardly with his own steaming mug. ‘Do you want some time on your own?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head immediately. ‘I’d be glad of company. All we do now, after all, is wait.’

  14

  impossible ideas before breakfast

  Vincent woke the next morning in a pool of tears. His pillow was sodden and his hair was damp. He’d dreamed of Evie, as he did many nights, but this time she had been so vivid, her voice so clear. He swivelled carefully out of bed and put his feet directly into his slippers. On his way downstairs to make some breakfast, he slid open a drawer in a chest in the hallway, pulled out an envelope and took it into the kitchen with him. Over porridge, he read the invitation to Evie’s funeral, or a ‘celebration of her life’, as it was described.

  The news that Evie had passed away had affected Vincent in a way he hadn’t imagined. After they’d parted all those years ago, he’d spent four years alone, mourning the loss of a woman he didn’t want to live his life without. He’d poured himself into his studies and his music, graduated with the highest grade, and was invited to play in an orchestra for a ballet that was set to travel around the world on a three-year tour. It was on that tour that one of the ballerinas, Cynthia Petal, fell in love with the handsome violinist. Truth be told, every ballerina fell in love with Vincent, but it was Cynthia he’d taken a shine to, because she was so unlike Evie.

  Cynthia was kind, of course, and well deserving of Vincent’s affections, but she was small and angular, and her laugh could shatter glass. Every time a girl had shown interest in Vincent, he’d found something in her to associate with Evie Snow. When she smiled with all her teeth, he saw Evie. When she had curves in all the ‘wrong’ places, he felt Evie, and when her laugh warmed the atmosphere ten feet around her, he heard Evie. He saw her everywhere except in Cynthia Petal. He could stand to be around Cynthia without feeling his heart break every ten seconds, and so he stuck close to her and she let him.

  Every stop they made on tour, in every foreign land, Vincent and Cynthia found an adventure. They had so much fun that when the tour ended, they saw no reason for their adventures to end too, so they carried on travelling, using the money they’d made from dancing and playing in the ballet. It was only when they stopped in Las Vegas and passed a drive-in wedding chapel that marriage was mentioned. By this point, Vincent hadn’t heard from Evie in nine years and knew he never would, and the four years he’d spent with Cynthia had been truly blissful. He saw n
o reason why they shouldn’t be together for the rest of their lives. He loved Cynthia in a very different way to how he’d once loved Evie, but he did love her all the same, and her feelings for him were never in question, for they were ever present in her eyes. So Vincent pulled hard on the wheel and swerved the car into the ‘Say I Do Wedding Drive-Thru’ to start a very new kind of adventure.

  Vincent and Cynthia spent their years together dancing and playing to make money and then splashing out on plane tickets and hotel rooms. It was only when they came home for a while that they realised they hadn’t been travelling, they’d been running. Running from the very real truth that they couldn’t have children. They’d been trying for so long, and not once had there been even a glimmer of hope. So to distract themselves, they would flit from place to place, pretending they were still young and had all the time in the world, denying their reality until it was too late. Now they accepted that there were to be no little ones, and finally settled down in their old home town, where they had first met.

  They were both offered jobs at a school for performing arts just outside town. Vincent taught violin and Cynthia taught ballet, and although they never had children, they had each other, and that was enough. At least Vincent thought so, until, at the age of forty-six, Cynthia started showing signs of pregnancy. Vincent would wake in the early hours to the sound of her vomiting and would rush to the bathroom, hoping she’d give him good news, but she’d maintain it was just something she’d eaten. After six weeks of holding back her hair most mornings, he insisted she go to the doctor to find out what was wrong. That was when she broke down and admitted that she was pregnant. Vincent was over the moon and tried to kiss her, but she turned away from him, tears spilling down her cheeks, and told him the truth.