I felt weak with nerves. I pressed my hands into the door frame behind me to steady myself, and waited, heart thumping wildly.
Something brushed against my skin and I flinched. But when I opened my eyes, there was nothing there. I reached my hand out and swiped it through the air in front of me. Could I feel the crackle of something? Did the air feel different, charged?
I held my breath and listened. I had no idea what I was waiting for. If this did work and we did manage to cross time, what would it feel like? When Nick and I were together in the bandstand everything felt normal until we touched. Would I simply feel his presence, or was I able to conjure him somehow?
I checked my phone. Two minutes had passed.
I inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly. Right now, Nick was standing in this exact spot, twenty years in the past. Perhaps if I just concentrated harder, really focused on his presence, we’d make the connection. It had to work. It had to.
I closed my eyes and waited, the wind whipping through my cardigan, creating goosebumps on my skin.
But nothing happened, and when I checked my watch again, five minutes was up. I was reluctant to move from the spot, just in case, but eventually I had to. Disappointment lodged in my chest like a heavy weight as I stepped back into the kitchen and closed the door behind me.
I wished I could ring Nick and ask him how it had felt for him; whether he’d felt anything at all. But instead I had to make do with checking the list and trying the next thing we’d agreed.
7.10p.m.: Sit on the sofa in the living room, with your back against the wall by the door. Try to be roughly one metre away from the door. Stay for five minutes.
I topped up my wine and walked through to the living room. We’d worked out we had our sofa in the same place, up against the wall with the window to the left, so I sat right in the middle and tucked my feet up underneath me, Nick’s wallet in my lap. I tried not to think too hard about what might or might not happen, watching the clock tick closer and closer towards 7.10p.m.
And then, it was time.
I placed my hands on top of the wallet, palms down, scrunched my eyes shut and willed Nick into being. Tried to picture him in exactly the same spot doing exactly the same thing. Hopeful, waiting.
Nothing.
7.13p.m.… 7.14p.m.… Still nothing. Not even a slight tremor or crackle in the air.
7.15 p.m.…
Five minutes was up.
I sat for a moment, letting the realisation that it hadn’t worked – again – settle. Then I looked down and checked my notes once more.
7.20p.m.: Sit at the table in the kitchen, facing the window.
7.30p.m.: Stand in front of the sink in the upstairs bathroom and stare into the mirror. Stay for five minutes
7.40p.m.: Lie on the bed in the main bedroom.
Despite the mundanity of our actions, all the talk of cosmic strings and wormholes had given me some hope that this really could work. That we really could somehow achieve what scientists had so far failed to achieve.
How naive we’d been.
But I couldn’t give up, not yet. I owed it to Nick to at least try to complete the list, and so for the next half an hour I dutifully made my way round the house, to the kitchen, the bathroom and, finally, the bedroom. And it was here, as I lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, that I let myself properly think about Nick. I tried to imagine him here, lying beside me. Imagined a life where we were here, together, in this house. I stretched my arm out and let my hand rest on the other side of the bed: the side where Greg had always slept, and the side Nickhad told me he slept on too. The stone of disappointment was mixed with a feeling of guilt that, in all of this, Greg had barely been on my mind. He’d been my whole life for so long and yet now here I was, not only thinking about another man, but letting him fill all my thoughts.
I turned my head to the empty space. A tear trickled down my face.
Time was up. It was over.
It hadn’t worked.
And I needed someone to talk to.
‘The boys wanted to see you, can you nip up and kiss them goodnight?’ Rachel said as I stepped inside her house half an hour later.
‘Course.’
I ran upstairs and into Aiden’s room. A night light glowed dimly on the bedside table and all I could see was a head peeking out the top of the duvet. I sat on the end of Aiden’s bed and he peered at me bleary-eyed.
