And Your Girl Can Sing

Chapter 99: And Your Girl Can Sing

I keep having these dreams, these dreams where I'm flying. Where I'll climb out of my window and leap off of my windowsill and stay balanced in the air, soaring past through the decades, through 2000 and OJ Simpson and Bill Clinton and Peace Protests until I touch down into the 1960s where I belong. Where John will meet me by the water and we'll go out to eat at a cafe and then the mood is right and we go home and put our shoes in the nook by the door, and maybe we'll take some ice cream from the freezer and eat it while looking out the window or while we read next to each other in bed.

My room is like an asylum, but I do not want to leave. It looks even more like an asylum that all the Beatles things are gone—Paul, who now has a rip down his beautiful face, the books, CDs, everything. I've been living in the skinny jeans and band tee that I wore to the doctor's office, and now that I'm lying in bed, I am wearing nothing but the band t-shirt, the jeans flung somewhere in the corner of my colorless room. Fleetwood Mac, the shirt says. They are back in their places, the game has reset.

There is a knock at the door. I grunt accepted entrance.

My mother comes inside, wearing a Cath Kidston apron. "Cora, do you really want to get rid of..." she hesitates, knowing I've been touchy about this in the past few days. "...All these Beatles things?"

I nod.

She comes over and pulls at the covers gently. "Cora, love, you really did a one eighty. What happened here? I'm concerned about you."

It would take so long to tell her and it hurts whenever I try. "It's fine, mum."

"I'm doing some cleaning. I could take the Beatles things to the charity shop if you want. Although perhaps you might be able to sell them online or something of that sort."

"Thanks, mum. Leave it."

She turns to leave. I think about it. The thrift store seems to be a good idea. Then I wouldn't have to think about—! I nearly scream, my heart pounding with excitement, so hard and fast that I sit bolt upright, eyes wide. The thrift shop.

Martin. Martin. He would have to tell me that I am not crazy.

And then I stop and think, a cold fear creeping up my spine. What if he tells me that I am crazy? That he has never seen me in my life and that...

I stand and pace, needing to get this sudden energy out. If I did go and see Martin... If I did go out and risk it all... what if it never happened? Then I was a lunatic, it was all in my brain.

But if it did happen...

I exited my room and walked into the washroom, staring at my reflection in the mirror. I did not look any different, but I knew that there was a light in my eyes that I did not see in myself before. I reached out and took the small metal backed brush from its glass and ran it through my hair, and then tied it up with a scrunchie.

What the fuck is a scrunchie?

"Shut up, Macca," I scold into thin air.

On the tube to the thrift shop, clutching my CD player and a Rubber Soul CD, hands fiddling nervously with everything. I sit like a rock, holding onto the pole. In the olden days, I would have taken the bus. But this is not the olden days. The thrift shop approaches with every step I take. I stand before the door and it's open, inviting, advertising a sale.

"Cora," someone says as I walk inside.

It's Danny. I haven't seen him since the 1960s, and it's startling. I walk inside, he looks so, so familiar it aches. But he's not wearing the coat he was wearing in 1961. He's dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, a long skinny tie randomly hanging from his neck.