Then, she stopped.
Her mind was whispering again.
Go,the whispers told her.
You need to go.
She didn’t want to listen to them.
Not again.
Not any more.
And yet, they kept on.
On and on.
Go.
‘All right,’ she found herself saying to Heaton. ‘If you’re sure.’
‘I’m sure,’ he said. ‘It’s the least I can do. Driver won’t be a tick.’
‘Road accidents still happened, even in wartime,’ Tim tells me. ‘It was foggy, icy, and the bus Iris should have been on skidded off the road. Everyone was killed. But because of Heaton, Iris lived. She broke her wrist when Heaton’s driver swerved to avoid the bus, but that was it.’
I only half listen.
I’m remembering that other dream I’ve so often had: of me, in Iris, talking to that colonel.
Go, I’ve kept telling her, on and on.
You need to go.
I’ve always believed, until this moment, that I was trying to make her run away.
But I wasn’t.
I wasn’t doing that at all.
I was making her stay.
My head spins with the realisation.
I stare into Tim’s face, picturing the colonel again, wondering how,how, I knew to make Iris go with him.
An instinct from another of my own stages?
The warning memory of a parallel me, failing to help her before?
I’m too distracted to think.
Because whatever the truth of that, there’s one thing I no longer have any doubt about: Ididhelp Iris.
Just like I stopped her from falling down those stairs.
And although I still don’t understand where this connection between us has spun from, I’m now thinking of my father again, how he saved me from my own death on these Yorkshire roads, and wondering whether Lord Heaton and Iris were connected too.
‘Were they any relation?’ I manage to ask Tim.
