Chapter Eighteen
I choose not to think about him. About Tyler.
About Tyler and his girlfriend. About Tyler and his perfect girlfriend who is everything I’m not.
Blonde and gorgeous and absolutely not skipping from one universe to the next, unable to hold on to anything, feeling time slipping beneath her fingers like sand on the beach.
I eat tapas and drink wine.
I swim in the sea and lounge by the pool, my skin growing more and more tanned as the days slide past.
I sleep and read, eventually feeling the worry and stress dissipating into the ether around me.
I sit on the terrace as the sun sets and the stars prick to light and I contemplate the sheer enormity of this universe and every single other one in which another Bethany is living her life, millions of Bethanys just getting by each day as it comes.
The only concession I make to my situation is to write the theorem in the notebook inside the suitcase in my room.
I haven’t slipped for three days.
I exist outside of time itself.
Until I go to bed in Spain, the air con on full blast against the still sweltering heat, and wake up in London.
My tan has disappeared, replaced by a sallow face I almost fail to recognize as my own. I suit a tan; pale and interesting is not a good look for me.
In the kitchen I find another reason for my awful complexion.
This Bethany is a proper drinker with at least three empty bottles of wine in the recycling – and not good ones, I notice.
A pizza box sits on the kitchen counter; so this Bethany likes junk food too.
I feel queasy at the sight of congealing cheese on the cardboard, the hint of garlic still on my breath.
I have a shower and clean my teeth, leaving me feeling a bit more human.
But I can’t forget the feeling of the sun on my face, the languid motion of the sea as it lapped at my toes.
Perhaps this Bethany should just hop on a plane and go back to Andalusia?
But then I remember that you don’t normally get to wake up and be there.
You have to pack and get to the airport and make it through security without getting arrested – I have a fear that somehow someone will have hidden something in my suitcase despite it having not left my sight for the entire journey – and then get on the actual plane.
Actually that’s the bit I don’t really mind.
There’s something oddly therapeutic about not being able to go anywhere, being trapped in a tiny seat seventeen inches wide, knees tapping the seat in front, and knowing exactly where you need to be for the next few hours while someone brings you drinks and snacks and you can even buy your favourite make-up from a little trolley.
But anyway. There’s no time for holidays, no time to step back. That is done, I shouldn’t even have indulged for the past few days.
Although, with that world’s Tyler having a girlfriend, something tells me he wouldn’t have been particularly receptive to helping me.
I type out the email, using the same wording – thank you, photographic memory – I used before. Last time he instantly recognized I was telling the truth and came running. Hopefully it will have the same response today.
It does. And so by midday I am once again meeting this universe’s Tyler Adams, albeit in a coffee shop down the road from Imperial College.
Or least I’m meant to be meeting him. He’s late.
It’s already quarter past and I’m getting anxious now, envisioning a hundred ways he will somehow humiliate me.
Has he decided not to come? Is he waiting down the road with a concealed camera waiting to leap out and surprise me like a bad episode of Pranked?
It’s gone twenty past when a gust of cold air around my legs notifies me of the door opening. And there he is. His face flushed, his chest rising up and down quickly as if he’s been running.
‘Bethany!’ he exclaims and rushes towards me. ‘Oh God. I’m so, so sorry I’m late. Whatever must you have been thinking while I left you waiting?’
‘I …’ I don’t know what to say. I’d prepared a dozen ripostes while I waited for him. Thought of a hundred ways to tell him he was an arsehole. But I wasn’t expecting he was just going to turn up and actually apologize.
‘My sister flew in this morning from Paris and the whole family is scrambling to see her.’
‘Oh,’ I say. Wow, I am being truly verbose this morning.
He places his phone face up on the table and I steal a glance at his lock screen. Her smug blonde face grins back at me from where she’s standing with her arm around his waist.
I feel my heart constrict. He’s dating her in this life too. Fuck.
‘That’s Nessie,’ he says when he catches me staring at his phone screen, mouth a little slack in the jaw like I’m a dribbling imbecile.
‘Your …’ I falter. Nessie? As in— but he interrupts my thought.
‘Sister. I have three.’
‘Helen. Penelope. Clytemnestra.’
‘Yes.’ He looks puzzled and sits back in his seat to appraise me more fully.
‘I’ve met Helen.’
‘You have?’
‘Not your Helen. A different one.’
‘Ooh,’ he says and rubs his hands together, ready for some gossip on another version of his sister. ‘Spill!’
‘She was dating my sister, Cesca.’ I tell him, omitting the part about how the relationship was far from perfect and Helen was the perpetrator in the scenario.
‘Oh,’ he says and asks for no further information. But I ignore his reticence. Because if Nessie is his sister, then perhaps he doesn’t have a girlfriend. Perhaps.
No, no, no, no, I admonish myself. That is absolutely not the play here. I need his help, to continue to build on the theory the other Tylers and I have been working on. Chipping away at the problem bit by bit in the hopes we can figure out the answer and find a way to get me home.
I push down my feelings for him, the thoughts about how nice his arms look in that shirt, how his hair suits him in that style.
‘Shall we have some lunch?’ I ask, my stomach growling.
Why am I always hungry here? Here? Anywhere.
It’s like slipping through space and time is eating calories like they’re going out of fashion.
Or perhaps other Bethanys don’t eat as much as me, don’t make sure they eat right before bed like I do to make sure I’m not hungry when I wake up.
Apparently that’s not normal behaviour – or at least according to the awful ex-boyfriend Nick who used to get so weird about it. I guess every Bethany has her quirks.
My burger comes in a purple bun and I stare at it as if it’s going to bite me.
‘Something wrong?’ Tyler asks as he smears some green sauce onto his plate.
‘My bun is purple.’
He frowns. ‘Yes.’
‘Why is it purple?’
His frown deepens. ‘What other colour did you expect it to be?’
‘Are you telling me that in this universe burger buns are purple?’ I’m shocked and horrified and for a brief moment I can feel the world shifting.
Is it going to be a fucking burger bun that finally breaks my mental hold on my situation?
A fucking burger bun that finally makes me say nope, this has gone too far now, the world is mad and I want to get off, please.
‘Hey.’ He places his hand gently on my arm. ‘You didn’t read the menu, did you?’
I shake my head, willing the tears not to come. I do not want to bawl my eyes out in front of him. And especially not over a fucking burger bun.
‘It’s a beetroot bun. This place is famous for them,’ he says eventually.
‘But elsewhere—’
‘Normal buns, I promise. Everywhere else just has normal green buns.’
‘Green!’ I shriek and a dude at the bar turns to look at me, I flush and duck down in my seat.
‘Hey. I’m kidding, I’m kidding.’ He looks mortified. ‘Burger buns here are just bog standard, like the colour of sand.’
‘Promise.’
‘I promise,’ he says.
I pick up the beetroot burger – which, spoiler alert, is delicious and I would highly recommend if you find yourself in a universe where they’ve discovered them – and we eat in silence. Although I do ask him what the sauce he is dipping his chips into is.
‘It’s just chimichurri mayo.’
‘Oh,’ I reply. Whatever differences this universe has, the food isn’t one of them.