Chapter 5 Jules “Groove Is in the Heart” #2
“I mean it. The quest for perfection is a fool’s errand.” Another T-shirt right there. “He’s a good egg, your Adam,” she continues. “It’ll all work out.” She brushes my cheek affectionately with the end of her plait. “You’ll see.”
She’s usually right, but this time, I’m not so sure.
—
In the bland council office building, I set up the lunch table in the gray function room and Eva arrives, shrugging off her leather jacket to help me.
She’s got rosy cheeks, short dark hair, twinkly brown eyes, and is always so cheery, she instantly makes me feel better.
She’s an old friend of Nelly’s from school, and they used to be close, especially when they won places on that organized trek in the sixth form to Kenya, an adventure I thought would be the first of many for Nelly but turned out to be her last.
Eva’s worked on and off for me for the last four years to help pay for her studies and I hired her today to help with the lunchtime rush. Not that there’s any need. Unsurprisingly, half the people haven’t turned up. The ones who have pick at the food, looking miserable.
“Just think of it. Not long until I’m actually there,” Eva tells me. She’s been saving up for her trip to Costa Rica, where she’s going to be working with a charity to build a school. She gets out her phone and shows me pictures on the scheme’s website. “Look at that sloth. Isn’t it cute?”
“Have you told Nelly you’re going?” I ask, handing back the phone. “She always said she wanted to do more traveling.”
“But she’s a highfalutin executive now.”
I pull a face. “It’s not that glamorous, believe me.”
“She’s always so busy. I ask her to come to things, but…” She shrugs.
“Do you mind doing me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Can you try once more? Get her out. Tell her what you’re doing. I know it’s what she needs.”
“There’s a DJ thing that Cody’s doing at the Windmill on Wednesday. I could invite her to that?”
“That would be amazing. But promise not to tell her I asked you to.”
I hate doing this and asking Eva to keep a secret, but Nelly is so spiky with me these days, what choice do I have?
“You might as well go,” I tell Eva. I dig out my wallet and pay her for the full shift. It feels a little like bribery. “I’m so jealous you’re off,” I add, as she’s leaving. “If I could catch that plane with you, I would.” She laughs like I’m joking, but right now I’m not.
After she’s gone, I check my phone. I’m not sure what I’m expecting but there’s nothing from Adam. Instead, there’s an email about my latest missed credit card payment and I beat down a rising sense of panic that everything is sliding off a cliff.
How the hell am I going to get out of this scrape?
Obviously, I was going to tell Adam. I was just waiting for the right moment.
Only now it appears that I can’t talk to my husband.
About anything. Maybe ever again. The promise of the inevitable chat we need to have about last night hangs like a thundercloud above.
—
Back home, Liam’s music is thumping out from his room—“Deceptacon” by Le Tigre, a record he got into via me—and Nelly is competing with the much more mellow “A Messenger” by Liza Lo in the dining room.
I wonder if she’ll be cross if I ask her to take Groucho Barx out for a walk, because Adam and I are going to need some serious privacy if we’re actually going to have “the chat.” Probably fifty feet of soundproofing as well.
“Where’s Dad?” I ask.
She shrugs. “He went to Waterstones in town. Came back with lots of books. But apart from that, he’s been glued to the internet all day.”
“Books?” I say, confused.
“He was acting kind of weird.”
I remember how he was this morning. That glassy-eyed, loopy stare. So not just drunk or stoned, then, because surely both would have worn off by now.
I head to the back door. On the way, feeling sweaty, I sniff my T-shirt, then take it off and drop it on the laundry pile. I adjust the racer-back tank I’m wearing and twist my hair up, stabbing it with a pencil from the pot. Then I take a breath and head for the shed.
If anything, Adam looks even more deranged than he did this morning. There are books open all over the sofa and papers with his handwriting scrawled across them.
“Sit,” he says, pointing to his dad’s favorite wingback leather chair. No How was your day? No I’m sorry. No bloody contrition at all. Like in his apparent madness he’s mistaken me for Groucho Barx.
“Adam. We need to talk,” I tell him, still standing. “Last night was horrible and…and I think we need to go to counseling.” Christ. This is so much harder than I thought. “Or couples therapy.”
“Therapy?” he scoffs, like I’ve asked him to join clown school.
“We need help, Adam. You’ve clearly got issues with me that you’ve been festering on for years and, well, maybe”—I take a shuddery breath—“maybe last night needed to happen. If we’re both being really honest, things haven’t been right for a while.”
It hurts to say this. To admit that something is broken.
But he barely looks like he’s taking it in.
“Don’t you remember how we used to be?” I try.
“Yes!” He points at me like he’s a schoolteacher and I’m a student who’s just made an excellent point. “Oh my God. Yes, Jules. It was amazing. I was so in love with you. And you—”
“Adam, I’m being serious.”
“So am I. You see, what I was telling you about earlier—my dream that wasn’t a dream—honestly, the more I’ve been reading about it, the more I think what actually happened was I somehow traveled back in—”
“I don’t give a shit about your dream!”
He really isn’t registering this conversation, is he? In fact, he looks absolutely bonkers and suddenly my desire to get him to listen pivots into something else. Is he having a psychotic episode?
“Adam.” I squeeze the top of my head, flummoxed. I turn away from him and then back, but his eyes have gone wide.
“There!” Lunging toward me, he spins me round and pulls the shoulder strap of my tank aside. Then scratches at the skin on my shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing?” I pull sharply away.
“Your tattoo,” he gasps.
“What tattoo?”
“Your bloody ‘rattoo.’ That you got to impress Mickey twatty Ratty when you were going out with him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mickey Ratty,” he says. “The king of the bloody shell suits.”
“Yes, I do know who he is.” So Adam did see him last night at Darius’s? Is that what’s triggered this episode? Some kind of weird jealousy fit?
Only Adam’s not done. “You had a tattoo of a shitty cartoon rat,” he declares. “Right. There.” He jabs my shoulder, twice.
“Ow!”
“Only now…Now you don’t. Because of what I said when I went back. I told you how bloody stupid it would look.” His mouth hangs open, incredulous.
“Adam. I’ve never had a tattoo,” I point out.
“Well, no. Not now. Not in this future. Not in this new reality I guess I’ve just created. I must have stopped you getting one. Bloody hell.” He grins. Actually grins. “Seriously. I really did. Don’t you see what this means?”
That you’ve gone batshit crazy? I think. “No,” I only just manage to say instead.
“It means that I really did somehow travel back in time. Into my teen body. To 1989. Only, thank God, I didn’t change anything else,” he says.
“And I didn’t,” he adds, almost as if he’s checking this with himself, “because everything else”—he looks me carefully up and down, before peering around the shed—“it’s just as it was. ”
Right. Screw this. Enough’s enough. I clearly need to get him medical help before this gets any worse.
“O…kay,” I say, in the same kind of “time out” tone I used to deploy at kids’ parties when they’d come up with some wacky idea like smearing jelly on the wall.
“I think I should come back when you’re—” I begin backing away from him toward the door, already wondering if I’ve got the out-of-hours doctor’s number on my phone.
Only before I can get there, he rushes past me and twists the key in the lock, then shoves it in his pocket.
What the hell? My heart is now pounding for an altogether different reason. I’m locked in a shed with my husband who’s starting to scare me.
“Adam. Give me the key,” I say, holding out my hand, trying to sound rational.
“I will. If you give it a go.”
“Give what a go?”
“Going back.”
“Where?”
“In time.”
“Please, Adam. Just stop. Can’t you hear how crazy you sound?”
“But that’s just the point. It’s not crazy.”
He lunges for the papers on the sofa, which I now see are a bunch of seemingly random articles he’s printed off the internet. All over them are circled words and highlighted passages. Jagged exclamation marks abound.
“Because look. Time travel is one hundred percent already theoretically possible via cosmic strings and traversable wormholes and machines, like this one here. The Alcubierre drive, which is this really cool speculative warp drive that a spacecraft could use to achieve apparently faster-than-light travel by contracting space itself.”
Oh. My. God. What am I meant to do?
Grabbing another article, he holds it toward me with both hands with a saintlike expression on his face like it’s the Turin bloody Shroud, before thrusting it even closer, like I might have any interest in reading its incomprehensible small print.
“Or maybe it’s not even just time travel we’re looking at here,” he says, scratching at his beard, “maybe it’s the multiverse.”
“The multiverse?”
“Yeah. You know. Like in Everything Everywhere All at Once…”
“What?”
“That movie you fell asleep in front of.”
He’s right. I did. Which is probably why I don’t remember a thing about it. But he’s not done.
“Because once you accept the possibility—well, no, the probability, actually—of the multiverse being real—”
“Which I don’t,” I point out.
“Yeah, but if you did, when you do, then you’ll see that the existence of an infinite number of universes, of possibilities, also means that an infinite number of timelines is also theoretically possible. For us, for whoever, maybe even all going on simultaneously all the time.”