Viv has already gone to work by the time Sunny wakes up with a foggy head, a slightly fuzzy recollection of last night, and the comforting weight of a cat on her back. There's a crumpled note on the pillow that says, in Viv's elegant looping handwriting, I could really have done with having today off! I really enjoyed last night. See you later, love you xx
It makes Sunny smile. She folds the note in half and rolls over to find the diary on her bedside table – that's a thing now, she has her own side of the bed and a bedside table covered in her crap – and she slips the note between the pages for today's date.
The fourth of May. Shit. That means it's her birthday in two days. As if she's about to turn twenty-five. A quarter of a century, gone. She can't help but think of Margaret, who lost almost that much time in the blink of an eye, and for a moment Sunny can't do anything but lie there staring at the ceiling and thanking her lucky stars that the universe didn't treat her so cruelly. She rolls onto her front. Breathes in the smell of Viv, a scent that has swiftly become a comfort. Forces herself out of bed.
This is not nearly as bad as the night she went to Lickety Split. Yes, she over-imbibed last night but aside from the slightest of headaches, the kind that can be vanquished with hydration and a dose of paracetamol (because sometimes Martha's cure is bang on the money), she feels fine. She feels even better when she shuffles to the kitchen and finds that Viv has laid out everything for breakfast: two slices of bread are loaded into the toaster; there's an unpeeled banana sitting on a plate next to a peeled orange; a mug sits by the kettle with a spoonful of instant coffee inside.
There's another note, too. One that says don't forget to eat breakfast! xx scrawled on the back of a receipt from the CD place on the seafront. The one where Ravi works. Sunny has been in such a Viv bubble all week, hardly spending any time in Jupiter Court, and she hasn't seen her boys for – god, what is it, nearly two weeks?
"Be a good girl, Britney, okay?" she says as she squeezes a sachet of kitten food into a bowl on the floor and scratches Britney between the ears. In ten minutes she has managed to eat her breakfast – all of it, including every last segment of the orange – have the world's quickest shower, her unwashed hair scraped up with a few gaudy butterfly clips, and throw on a fresh outfit to go and see her best friend.
There are several CD places in Black Sands but she knows the one Ravi must be working at, the one that looks over the sea and is stocked with every possible genre of music, thousands of CDs and hundreds of vinyls lined up in flappable stacks that they used to spend hours looking through in search of their next obsession. It's no wonder he's working there when music runs through his veins and imbues his spirit. He is a walking encyclopaedia of random music information, spitting out factoids like a machine, and he is so easy to talk to. He must be the perfect employee.
After a jerky bus ride and a blustery walk, Sunny makes it to Vinyl Countdown. The owner has kept the name despite the decreasing popularity of vinyl in favour of CDs, and Sunny has always appreciated the dumb pun. It reminds her of being eleven, when Europe had just released their third album, and she listened to it so much that it started to jump on the first track. It became something of a joke in the Shelley household: any time any one of them had a task to complete that they didn't want to do, another would put on The Final Countdown, and the task had to be started before the song came to an end.
It got Sunny through a lot of undesirable projects, from getting stuck into an essay for GCSE English, to tidying her bedroom after putting it off for weeks. Well. Months. Now, like Pavlov's dog, she cannot listen to the song without feeling like she has to start being productive. She wonders if Viv knows that. It would probably make for a good relationship hack.
There are only two other customers inside. A skinny white guy with an eighties perm is scrolling through the rock vinyl records and a tall Black guy is looking through the compilation CDs. Sunny looks twice before realising it's Luke. He looks up and recognition dawns instantly with a wide, toothy smile.
"Hey, Tenny! Long time, no see," he says, and Sunny knows it's been way too long since she saw Fenfen because she doesn't even know if they're still together.
"Hi, Luke," she says. Ravi's nowhere to be seen. She doesn't even know if he works today. "Yeah, it's been a while. I've been staying with my girlfriend a lot."
"Yeah, Fen mentioned. She said she hasn't seen you recently." He puts down the two compilations he was reading the backs of and gives his full attention to Sunny, who is kind of intimidated by his height. It's ridiculous, really, that this behemoth of a man is with tiny little Fen. He chuckles and says, "I think she's just waiting for you to announce that you're moving out."
Sunny gives the most pathetically awkward half laugh in response. Luke winces.
"Oh. You are, aren't you?"
"Don't say anything to her, please. I need to talk to Fen first. Do you think she'll be mad?"
He shrugs. "Couldn't say. I mean, I've only known her a few weeks. I'm sure there are sides to her I haven't seen yet. But it sounds like the sort of conversation you should get over and done with, right?"
"Right." Sunny grimaces, gritting her teeth. "Is she home at the moment?"
"To the best of my knowledge, yeah. We've been out the last few nights and she said she needed a day to recuperate."
"Wow. So you two are still, like, a thing?" She laces her fingers together as though the question needs an illustration. Luke's eyes crinkle and he nods, mimicking her action.
"Yeah, we're still a thing. She just can't get enough of me. Must be these magic hands." He wiggles his fingers and Sunny grimaces again, unable to hide her disgust at the thought of Fenfen and Luke and whatever they get up to. Whatever it is, it must be fucking amazing because Fenfen has been quick to ditch plenty a lovely guy because of his performance in bed. Not that she's known for sleeping with the same guy more than once. Luke is an anomaly for certain.
"On that note..." She steps to the side and glances over at the counter, but Ravi's still not shown his face. Must be his day off. "Nice to see you, Luke. I promise that by the next time you see Fen, I'll have told her I'm moving out."
"Better hop to it, then," he says. "We've got a date at eight."
"Whoa."
"I know." He grins. "So don't waste any time, else I might let it slip."
"In the middle of all the sex?" She quirks her eyebrows at him. He pulls his face.
"No. That's more of a foreplay conversation."
Sunny's not sure how the hell she has ended up having this conversation with Luke, a man she barely knows and has only met twice before, usually in a state of undress in her flat, but she would like for it to be over so she gives him a polite smile and heads to the disc-covered till. Greg, the owner, makes her jump when he appears as if by magic. They've been on first name terms ever since Sunny and Ravi came here together once and, after two hours of browsing, spent nearly a hundred quid on music – an insane amount anyway, made even crazier by the fact they were boracic students at the time.
"Sunny! What can I do for you?"
"Hey, Greg," she says with her sunniest smile, hands planted on the counter. "I was looking for Ravi. Is he here?"
"Sorry, love, he's not in today."
"Like, he doesn't work Thursdays? Or he's off sick?"
"Hidden option number three," Greg says. "Annual leave. He took today and tomorrow. I think he said he was going to see his parents? Can't remember exactly, to be honest."
"Oh, okay. Cheers, Greg." Sunny makes a mental note to call Ravi later to see if he's around for a catch up over the weekend, and a second mental note to not let so much time pass without seeing him.
As she's leaving, she casts a glance at the small selection of books that hang out near the door, and when she spies The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, her thoughts are thrown into a frenzy thanks to the Margaret who has taken up so many of her thoughts. Her brain skips over everything she has ever gleaned from Astrid and Celeste but there is so much she still does not know, and she is armed with only one and a half names of people who have been through this before. Isabel Beecham (she is pretty chuffed with herself for remembering that) and Margaret, who could be anyone.
The entire day stretches ahead of her and she's in the mood to dig her teeth into something, fully equipped with the understanding that she will probably – almost definitely – find nothing, so she swings back into Vinyl Countdown and waves at Greg for his attention.
"Any chance I can borrow your phone?"
"Go ahead." He nods at the door to the back office, the walls of which are plastered in layers of band posters and CD artwork and record covers. Sunny ducks inside and finds the landline under a dirty mag, and rummages through her purse for the half of a book page that has Celeste's number on it. After five rings, someone picks up.
"Celeste Cholmondeley-Parker," Celeste says, crisp as ever. Sunny still finds it a bit scary, even though she knows now that deep down, Celeste is as soft as a cinnamon roll. "How may I help you?"
"Hey, Celeste, it's me. Sunny."
"Sunny, darling, how are you?" Her tone does a one eighty, flipping from severe schoolmarm to sweet grandmother.
"Pretty good, thanks! Viv and I really enjoyed last night, thanks so much for having us."
"It was our pleasure. I'm glad to hear that Astrid's homebrew hasn't poisoned the two of you. I'm not sure she realised quite how potent it is."
Sunny scoffs a laugh. "We survived the night," she says. "We'll have to do it again sometime."
"We must," Celeste says. There's a second's silence. "Now, I'm sure you aren't calling purely to thank us for our hospitality."
"No, not quite." She perches on the edge of Greg's messy desk, nudging an ashtray out of the way. "I wanted to do a bit of my own research and I was wondering if you could remember Margaret's surname?"
"Yes, of course," Celeste says, and then, "Gosh what was it?" Quieter, the phone pulled away from her ear, she says, "Astrid! I have Sunny on the phone. What was Margaret's surname?" A pause. "How is that spelt?" Another pause. Her voice is louder again when she returns to Sunny to say, "Gastrell. Margaret Gastrell."
"Awesome. Thanks, Celeste." She's about to say goodbye and hop off the line before Greg starts to charge her for the call, but Celeste stops her.
"Sunny, dear?"
"Mmm?"
"Be careful, won't you? It was so wonderful to see you so happy, and you and Viv make such a charming couple. I'd hate for you to get yourself down. I don't know what good can come from wrapping yourself up in what happened and who else it happened to. You know that—"
"I know Margaret's dead. I know the universe shat all over Isabel," Sunny says. "I just need to know who they are. Who they were."
"Okay." Celeste sighs. "Please know that just because their lives didn't turn out the way they wanted them to, that has no bearing on your own experience. You have been handed an opportunity and all you can do is make the best of it."
"I know. Don't worry." She coils the telephone wire around her finger, not quite ready to say goodbye. "Did you ever look them up?"
"No. No, we didn't."
"How come?"
"We have found, over the years, that life is complicated enough without dwelling on the grief and tragedy of others. After I heard that Margaret had died, I couldn't bear to look deeper into her story. I couldn't bear to know who she had left behind."
"What about Isabel? You knew her after, right? After she'd been forward and come back again?" She lowers her voice when she remembers where she is. This is not the comfort of her own home: this is the grimy, slightly seedy back office of a record shop, and she does not need anyone to overhear her conversation and piece together what she has said.
"Yes, that's right. She came to us after she lost her son and found herself back where she started," Celeste says. There is such sorrow in her voice, each word soft and cracked. "We offered to keep in touch but she didn't want to. She wanted to change everything about her life to ensure the same thing didn't happen to her again; she left the country, I'm sure."
"But she could still be alive?" A bud of hope blooms in Sunny's chest at the thought that there could be someone in the world who has been through what she's gone through and survived.
"I don't know, darling. It was a long time ago. She was in her twenties when we met her, nearly thirty, if I recall correctly. But that was so long ago. She'd be in her seventies now."
It's something, Sunny thinks. Even if all she finds is an obituary, it will tell her how long Isabel lived after she fucked with time. And yes, there is a voice in her head telling her to back off, to drop all of this, to relish in the life she has and recognise how damn lucky she is – and she knows how damn lucky she is, because she is with the woman who will become her wife one day – but she can't pretend this didn't happen to her. She can't avoid these two names that rattle around in her skull, cannot put them to bed until she has read their stories with her own eyes, no matter how little of their stories she is able to find.
"Celeste?"
"Yes?"
"Do you believe in fate?"
"Absolutely." There isn't a flicker of hesitation in Celeste's answer. "The universe is a powerful creature, Sunny. We should do our utmost to respect her. You're here for a reason. All of us are."
"Thank you." It comes out quiet. Like a sigh. "Okay, I'm going to go digging."
"Don't go too far," Celeste warns. "The deeper you dig, the higher the risk of being buried alive."
Goosebumps erupt all along Sunny's arms. The hair on the back of her neck stands on end and she shivers like someone has just walked over her grave.
Greg knocks on the door. "Sunny? You done?"
"Yeah, coming!" she calls. "Bye, Celeste. I won't dig too deep."
Celeste lets out a quiet chuckle. "You're a tenacious young woman, Sunny. Don't make promises you can't keep."
*
oh i do love to write a bit of celeste!