Chapter Forty-One
I find Flick chatting to some guy with bad teeth and an alarming love of tweed. She casts me a desperate look and I rush to rescue her.
Once we’re safely away she turns to me. ‘Thank you! Jeez, Monty is such a dick.’ She shivers. ‘He told me I need to come to my senses and go out with him before all my value is lost to time.’
‘Gross.’
‘Yep.’ She takes a step back and looks at me carefully. ‘Something’s happened – you look all flushed.’
‘It’s just …’ How can I explain to her that I’ve had a breakthrough idea about my predicament? ‘I need a favour,’ I say instead.
‘Is it about a man?’
‘I need you to give me a lift somewhere.’
‘Where?’ She narrows her eyes as she tries to puzzle out what’s going on.
‘To Tyler’s.’
She squeals. ‘You dirty little minx.’ She sounds thrilled.
‘Oh no—’ But I cut myself off. I can’t explain why I really need to talk to Tyler and so why does it hurt if she thinks she’s taking me to a booty call?
It’s almost dark when Flick pulls up in front of Tyler’s apartment building. I wonder if I should have messaged him, let him know I was coming. But it’s too late now.
‘You go get him, tiger,’ Flick says as I open the door and slide out of the car. ‘Call me in the morning, okay?’
I nod and go to thank her. And then a wave of emotion rushes over me and I sit back down to pull her into a hug. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper into her hair.
She squeezes me back. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you recently,’ she tells me. ‘But I’m here for you, okay?’
And then I break away and walk up the steps towards the row of buzzers. I think I’m really going to miss her.
She waits until the door opens and Tyler appears and then I hear the rev of the engine and she’s gone.
He’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, his feet bare. He reaches out and pulls me inside the building, pushing me gently up against the wall as he kicks the door shut. ‘Jesus, Bethany,’ he breathes into my neck as his arms circle my waist. ‘I had no idea you were coming over tonight.’
‘I …’ But the words die on my lips as he presses himself against me. He seems very pleased to see me. His fingertips graze the hem of the – admittedly kind of short – dress I’m wearing.
‘Damn, Bethany. You look sexy as hell.’ He steps backwards to take all of me in.
There’s a mirror behind him and I spot my reflection.
I look dishevelled, my hair wild and eyeliner smudged, cheeks blushing pink.
I look like I’ve spent an hour deliberately curating a look to turn up on a fuck buddy’s doorstep.
Tyler leans in to kiss me and I pull away, trying to tug my dress down to provide a modicum of coverage. A small voice in my head asks what the actual fuck am I doing. This Bethany obviously booty calls this Tyler so why can’t I just enjoy it? But it still isn’t right.
‘Tyler …’ I put my hand on his chest with just enough force to keep him at arm’s length. ‘I need to tell you something and I need your help. This is going to sound batshit, but I promise it’s true and I’ve not taken any drugs or anything and I’m one hundred per cent not having a mental breakdown.’
He sighs. ‘Shall we go upstairs?’
I’m about to say something about how I am absolutely not going to go upstairs with him when I realize we’re still in the hallway and he’s probably just inviting me to his flat and not straight to his bedroom. ‘Right. Yes. Please.’
I follow him up the stairs, trying not to look at the shape of his arse in those jeans.
He takes the whole ‘not this Bethany’ thing very well, especially given that he thought he was about to get laid and instead I’ve battered him over the head with an impossible scientific quandary.
‘I’ve always wondered if it’s possible,’ he says.
‘This idea that you could end up in the wrong universe. There could be loads of people wandering around in universes that aren’t theirs.
Probably thinking they’re going crazy.’ He pauses.
‘Hundreds displaced in space and time and all of them thinking they’re losing the plot but no one ever wanting to admit it. ’
He has a point there. There are a lot of things like that.
Things we think are weird, ticks we assume exist only to us and so we never talk about for fear of judgement.
But it’s a fallacy – this idea that everyone else is normal.
No one is normal. I read something recently about this woman who thought she was making a hot take by saying she was in her thirties but still thought of herself as twenty-two.
‘Guess I just don’t want to grow up,’ she’d tweeted, as if everyone else in the world was just desperate for adult responsibility and all its inevitable disappointments.
She was called out, thousands of people adding their view that they also saw themselves as much younger, a decade, multiple decades.
Not one person said, ‘Oh yes, I’m thirty-five and I feel thirty-five and I do not know what the rest of you are talking about. ’
Anyway, it makes me wonder what else we don’t say. What else we keep bottled up inside for fear of being judged or misconstrued or treated like we’re lepers to be avoided at all costs.
‘We should get some food,’ Tyler says, breaking me from my reverie.
My stomach growls audibly at the idea and makes him laugh.
‘I take it that’s a yes?’ He grins.
‘Yes. But it’s my treat,’ I tell him picking up my phone and opening Just Eat.
I have a message in the app from a restaurant called Turkish Delite.
They promise diet-conscious kebabs and it appears I order from them a LOT.
In the message they’re apologizing for the misunderstanding and mix-up with my last order.
You’ve had onions in your salad every other order for the past six months but we apologize for assuming the request for no onion was an error.
I lift my feet onto the footstool in front of the sofa and settle back into the cushions to scroll through the options for this evening. The Louboutins have created a groove above my toes.
Oh.
Ooohhh.
What if … the edges of it are so close I can almost touch them.
What if … I’m almost there.
I close my eyes and try to float outside of myself, allowing my subconscious brain to take over and bring the answer to the surface, to find the words to bring my idea into reality.
There it is.
What if they are all moving? Just a tiny bit.
To another world that is almost theirs but with just one tiny difference, something small most people wouldn’t notice.
Like the wrong colour Havaianas. Something innocuous you could convince yourself was just you making a mistake.
We’ve all felt that, haven’t we? The story we thought we’d told a friend but they claim to never have heard.
The feeling of having been somewhere we’ve never been before.
The new jar of coffee in the cupboard that turns out to be decaf, even though we’re sure we picked up regular roast last time we went shopping. Don’t tell me you’ve never had that?
How many of these inconsistencies do we shrug off, blaming a late night, or that extra glass of wine, the stress of work, not enough iron in our diets.
But what if they are signs? Signs we’re in the wrong place.
That we’ve shifted to an adjacent universe that is so similar to our own, but just not quite perfect.
What if that’s what’s happening to the Bethanys? What if they are all shifting just a teeny tiny bit, so I can slot in the middle as I take huge leaps along the timeline.
It all sounds bonkers. Maybe I’m going mad.
Or maybe …
Maybe I’m on to something.
We eat our pad thai and then I explain my new theory to Tyler.
‘So, picture all the different worlds lined up from left to right,’ I tell him. Luckily he’s got a lovely whiteboard and so I’m able to sketch my thoughts as I go. I draw a series of blobs across the middle of the board. ‘And I’m here.’ I tap the far-right blob. ‘That’s me in my home world, okay?’
He nods.
‘And then I skip.’ I draw an arrow across the top of three of the blobs and then point to the next one along. ‘What happens to that Bethany?’
‘I don’t know.’ His voice is serious even though the question was basically rhetorical given I’m trying to explain my idea.
‘What if she shifts along. What if, to make space for me, all the other Bethanys have been shifted to an adjacent world? But the skips are tiny, the differences so small most of them don’t even notice.’
‘That would make sense.’
‘The Bethany in this world has been acting a bit odd recently. There was a thing with her shoes. Those shoes,’ I say, pointing to the Louboutins. ‘They’re patent. But last week she was convinced she chose the matt ones.’
‘Back up a sec,’ Tyler says and my heart drops. Is he about to pick holes in the only theory I’ve got? ‘What is patent?’
‘Oh. Shiny.’
‘Got it.’ He nods a few times. ‘Continue.’
Phew, that was his only question. ‘And there was a mix-up with a takeaway. So in this world this Bethany chose shiny shoes and has onion with her salad. But suddenly there’s a different Bethany here who chose the matt shoes and doesn’t have onion.’
‘Because of this displacement effect,’ he confirms.
‘Exactly.’
‘So, what does it mean? How does it help us to find you a way home?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I’m forced to admit.
But we need to figure it out quickly. The leap I don’t want to experience is looming closer and closer on the horizon.