Chapter Thirty-Seven
The note in the margin kicks my arse into gear and I quickly fire off the email to Tyler. I keep the opening the same, but tweak the part from the other Tylers. There are so many of them now, so many more snippets of information I could include to convince them that what I’m saying is all true.
Hi Tyler,
Six years ago we met in a bar and I told you all my secrets.
We promised to go on a date and I took your number with the promise of a call.
I never called. You cursed me, called me some rather rude things.
Hardened yourself to me and have treated me like your mortal enemy ever since.
But what you don’t know is that the morning after we met, you blanked me.
Blanked me hard in the lobby of the hotel, your eyes going straight through me as if I was no one, as if I meant nothing to you.
But don’t be mad at Zac. It wasn’t his fault he inadvertently created a nemesis for his little – by three minutes at least – brother.
Now. I need you to sit down (if you aren’t sitting already, of course). There is something you need to know.
I am not the Bethany Raven you know in this world. I have skipped a number of times, each time waking up with my own memories but inside the body of another Bethany in a world similar, but not identical, to my own.
This is not a delusion. This is a fact. One I am living with the recurrent nightmare of as I slip through increasingly diverging worlds.
Still reading? Good. Tyler said you would be. Not you, Tyler. Obviously. But a number of different Tylers scattered across many universes. This is a message from them:
You like to buy those days of the week socks and wear them on the wrong days.
Not randomly though, but in a very specific pattern of relativity to the actual day of the week.
At school you called the teacher ‘Mum’ and lived with the shame for the one hundred and sixty days of the rest of the school year until your parents agreed to let you move schools.
You would never admit it, but you have an irrational fear of oversized animals, especially those giant bunnies the papers like to trot out at Easter.
You really love those lychee pearls in your bubble tea and have been known to bulk-buy them from .
In public you eat the top part of the custard cream first and then the bottom with the filling.
But at home you use a knife to carefully separate them, scraping the filling into a pile on the corner of the plate, which you eat at the end, after all the plain bits of biscuits are gone.
I had to get you drunk to admit that one.
When you were seventeen you bought some Crocs because you thought they were cool.
They were not.
The person who sent you this email is Bethany. Not the Bethany you think you know in your world, who is probably annoying and uptight and ignores you at conferences. This Bethany is a good one. You need to help her.
You need to help her to get home. We’ve been working on it, but there are gaps, pieces missing that perhaps you can fill.
If you succeed. Bravo! If not, pass this on to the next Tyler, add to it. Perhaps it needs all of us.
Laters, dickhead
He messages back within ten minutes with instructions to meet him at Brixton Library.
It’s about forty-five minutes’ walk, but the weather’s nice and I think I could do with the fresh air.
Plus, this Bethany has a very fancy pair of L?CI trainers and I’m intrigued to see if they’re as comfy as people have been telling me.
I arrive to find him leaning against the wall of the library and he pushes off it to straighten up and greet me. ‘Bethany Raven,’ he says as he rakes his eyes over me. ‘Well, you certainly look like Bethany.’
‘I am Bethany,’ I reply, trying not to check him out quite so obviously.
He’s wearing a pair of distressed jeans, just on the right side of fashionable but without looking like he’s trying too hard.
His light grey T-shirt is slightly stretched out, as if he has worn it a hundred times.
He completes the look with a pair of white Air Force 1s, but I notice they’re accessorized with a pair of rainbow laces, which give a pop of colour to the otherwise fairly dull outfit.
He looks amazing. And he smells even better, his cologne dark and woody, and I can’t help the memory of that night in New York from bubbling up into my consciousness from where I had tried to bury it.
‘Coffee?’ he asks as he starts to head towards a café on the corner.
‘Please.’
He turns to look at me again. ‘So, it’s this Bethany in the physical sense, but everything else is a different Bethany?’
I nod.
‘Cool,’ he says as if I am just a simple curiosity and then turns to avoid walking backwards into someone as we approach the café.
Once we have our drinks we head to St Matthew’s Gardens. He magics a blanket from his backpack and lays it out on the grass for us to sit on.
‘All right then, alternate Bethany Raven. Tell me everything,’ he says.
So I do. I won’t bore you by repeating everything; you already know it all. When I get to this new skip, I finally take a sip of my coffee to signal that I’m done.
‘Okay. So now what?’ Tyler asks, a look of minor disappointment flashing across his features as he shakes his cup and discovers it’s already empty.
‘Is that it?’ I ask.
‘Is that what?’
‘You’re just accepting what I’m telling you? Accepting it’s all true?’
‘Why would you lie?’
He has a point there. ‘But,’ I start, ‘like not even a follow-up question? A point of clarification?’
‘Bethany, what you have just told me is not the first time you’ve described what’s happened.
I can tell you’ve had this conversation many times already.
I’m assuming with many other versions of me in each world you’ve passed through.
Between you and those other-mes, I’m pretty sure you’ve got everything covered. ’
‘Yeah.’
‘So, I don’t need to check the details or ask for proof, or whatever else you think I should do. I just need to know what you think we should do now. Because I’m pretty sure you and the other-mes have already worked out a plan of attack, a series of experiments and trials to figure this out.’
‘Well …’ I spread my palms out and I watch his face drop slightly.
‘You’re kidding me?’ He sounds so disappointed. ‘So what exactly have you been doing?’
There’s a headmasterly aspect to the question and I feel somehow disappointed in myself, as if I’ve let everyone down, but him most specifically.
‘I mean we’ve been trying to find the answers, but it’s been impossible to get any traction when I keep skipping every few days.
And the skipping is random, like one time it’s after a day, and then I wait four days before the next one.
It’s hardly been the most conducive set of conditions for making significant scientific progress. ’
‘There’s no need to be so defensive.’
I scrub my hand over my face. ‘Actually, there is.’ My voice is soft. ‘I should have done more. I should have figured this out sooner. Saved us all.’
‘Hey, hey,’ he says and reaches out a hand to touch my shoulder. ‘This isn’t all on you.’
But that’s where he’s wrong. ‘And who exactly else is it on?’ I demand.
The tables have turned and now I’m the one who’s berating me.
‘Let’s take a step back, okay? Think about this all from the very beginning again and then we make a plan.
A proper plan. One that I can help you start and then the next Tyler can pick up and onwards we go.
And we keep going until we figure this out.
’ He cracks me a smile. ‘After all, who else in the world could possibly be better placed to figure this out?’
His words sink in. What would have happened if I was just a normal person? If I wasn’t a physicist whose first thought was I had slipped into an alternate universe?
Imagine this scenario from the perspective of someone else.
So I wake up and my flip-flops are different. Faulty memory? Is that what I’d think? Well, of course it is. We know because that’s exactly what I did think. I didn’t look at the Havaianas and immediately jump to ‘oh yes, an alternate universe, what super fun’.
I struggle to remember when exactly I realized I was slipping through worlds. When did that become the default assumption? What was the thing that made me understand I had actually jumped and it wasn’t my mind playing tricks on me.
Cesca. That was it. When Cesca answered the phone that morning when we were supposed to be hungover – that was when I knew.
My sister would not go to the gym before it was barely light.
There are some things that change, some decisions we take that seem against the essence of who we are.
But that was taking the piss. That wasn’t my Cesca.
But where is my Cesca?