(34) Erin Edwards: Economising
“Daydreaming is free, dear.”
That was what Mama always said.
At the start of every school year, I would sit and listen to another round of stories from my classmates. My ears would sing with adventure tales of ski trips to France, safaris in Africa, and cruises across the Mediterranean until teachers begged for us to return our attention to the board. Tanned and freckled students commanded the first few days of term.
Friends pressed trinkets from afar into my hands. I kept them safe in my pocket, dipping my fingers in to check they were still there every few minutes until I got home and lined them up in a neat row on my windowsill. Snow globes, woven bracelets, tiny animals made of shells. I had magnets from places I’d never been, novelty pencils from places I’d never get to go.
I spent my summers at the park down the road. Cassie gamely went with me, playing along with my made-up games in a way only older sisters could. We would stay until the sun set, until it felt less like a playground and more like the start of the horror films I wasn’t allowed to watch. Whenever Cassie saw dark figures at the tree line, she grabbed my hand and dragged me home.
There was nothing wrong with the park down the road, but it wasn’t a holiday. You couldn’t buy your friends souvenirs at a gift shop, and you didn’t leave with any stories that would capture an entire classroom’s attention for a whole lesson. So, every summer, I asked.
“Can we go somewhere?”
“Daydreaming is free, dear.”
It was difficult to imagine a place you’d never seen. I sat down in front of my windowsill and traced my finger over each collected trinket, trying to envisage the place they’d once called home, but the only home I’d ever known for them was my bedroom. The leather bookmark stamped with the image of a castle in Ireland could tell stories of my flute practises, but nothing of lush green landscapes and what was at the end of a rainbow. The wooden elephant encrusted with beads and mirrored shards of glass knew more about the books I read into the early hours of the morning than it did the other animals on the savanna.
When I cut my thumb on the elephant’s ear, a sharp edge of glass slicing through my skin, I had to explain to Cassie what I’d been doing while she cleaned off the blood.
“I wanted to hear their stories,” I said, my cheeks flushed as I realised how stupid it sounded.
“What stories do they have to tell?” Cassie asked, without missing a beat. She was deadly serious as she stuck a Little Mermaid plaster over the cut.
“Where they came from,” I explained. “Places that aren’t here. Mama said to daydream, but I don’t know how to visit places I’ve never seen, even in my head.”
Cassie gave me a strange look I didn’t understand, before pressing a kiss to my forehead and telling me to get my coat.
It was too close to nightfall for a trip to the park, and we’d already been out to pick up food for school lunches, but I didn’t ever argue with Cassie. I quickly did as I was told, shoving my arms into my coat sleeves and waiting impatiently by the door while Cassie laced up her boots and scribbled out a letter to Mama so she wouldn’t panic if she came back to an empty house.
We were right outside the doors of the library before I realised that was where we were going. Usually, Cassie would walk me there once a fortnight and wait while I exchanged one stack of books for another. She’d roll her eyes when I chose too many hardbacks, but she always helped me carry them home. I liked the library, but I wasn’t sure it counted as somewhere to travel. None of my classmates would be wowed by tales of plastic-wrapped new releases.
Cassie smiled at the librarian behind the desk and asked how long we had until the library closed. Apparently, half an hour was ‘perfect, thank you’. Perfect for what, I wondered. We hadn’t brought any books to return.
Depositing me at a large table, Cassie disappeared into the stacks with a secretive smile on her lips. I picked at the peeling laminate tabletop and ran my finger over the writing carved into the plastic. EM loved NH, apparently. Or they had done, once upon a time, intensely enough to permanently record the feeling on public property.
Cassie’s arms were shaking when she returned, straining under the weight of a tower of books. Not paperbacks, not even hardbacks, but the huge, glossy art books that no one ever read cover to cover. On top of the stack was one of the laptops you could borrow from the front desk.
“Okay,” Cassie said, dropping the books to the table with a thump. “We’re starting with New York.”
She started opening the books, flipping through them until she landed on a picture she liked. Eventually, I had half a dozen spread out in front of me, open to images of Manhattan – Rockefeller Centre, the Statue of Liberty, the Freedom Tower. Then Cassie turned on the laptop and loaded up a website with a video feed playing.
“This is Times Square right now,” she explained. “Right in the middle of the city.”
Tourists passed across the frame, oblivious to the camera as they read from their phone screens, sipped coffees, and swung shopping bags. Occasionally someone would stop and wave towards the lens, laughing into a phone as they talked with someone back home. I waved back at the screen.
Once she’d assembled everything, Cassie started to talk me through our day, flipping through the books when she needed new images for inspiration. We started with breakfast in Central Park, then a trip to the Guggenheim, with Cassie reading the tiny captions from the book with all the aplomb of a tour guide. We went on a boat trip, then a helicopter ride, then took the subway from Coney Island to Brooklyn. It was the longest twenty-four hours I’d ever known, but I was entranced, hanging on to each word of what Cassie said.
“And when we’re finished with dinner-”
“Don’t we have to pay first?” I asked.
“My treat.” Cassie smiled. “Even though you chose three puddings.”
“You said I could pick anything,” I protested with a laugh. We never went to restaurants. If I had the option, I was going to make the most of it.
“I did,” Cassie admitted. “And once you’ve recovered from how sick it makes you, we’re heading to a Broadway show.” She turned to a picture of a theatre auditorium, taken from the stage. “Right in the centre, at the front.”
She dug out her earphones from the bottom of her bag and untangled the cord, handing one to me and putting the other in her own ear. She pressed play on a YouTube video, and the beginning notes of a familiar overture burst to life.
We only made it three minutes in before the librarian came to let us know it was closing time. When we’d helped clear the books from the table and stepped outside into the cool air, so far from the busy streets of New York, I hugged Cassie tightly.
“Where are we going tomorrow?” I asked because there was a whole world to visit.
“How about Morocco? Australia? Paris? The choice is yours.”
I grinned, contemplating the possibilities. Cassie’s worlds were so much better than anything I’d ever seen able to conjure up in my own head. If I couldn’t go to these places in real life, her kind of daydreaming was the next best thing.
Erin Edwards is a dedicated Londoner and compulsive writer, most often found in an archive or at the theatre. She is currently working on far too many different projects at once. You can find her on Twitter.