Chapter 6 Adam “The Passenger” #2
“I think they’re both all right,” she finally gasps, breathless, catching up with me in the hallway again. “Both exactly as I remember them from our last timeline.”
“Thank God.”
Hurrying through to the kitchen, shutting the door behind us, she cracks open a bottle of white.
I’m still hyperventilating. Can’t stop myself.
Because yet another hideous thought has just occurred to me.
Because it’s not just the kids who could have changed, is it?
Either one of us still could have too. Only in some way that the other’s not yet noticed or pointed out.
And not just physically, but psychologically too.
“It’s okay,” Jules says, handing me a glass of wine and watching me glug it down. “They’re okay. We’re okay.”
“But are we? Am I?” I say.
“Well, yes…apart from the beard.”
“But nothing else? Nothing else about me has changed?” I check. “You’re really sure?”
“Nothing,” she confirms. “Unless it’s so subtle that it doesn’t even register and probably doesn’t even matter. And when you got back from 1989, I definitely remember you telling me that, apart from my tattoo, everything else was the same too.”
“Meaning it is only the tattoo and the beard that have changed from our original timeline,” we say in unison.
“And everything else, right up to me discovering this damn machine and you then trying it out, that’s the same too?”
“Yes.” She grins.
It’s like a wave crashing over us—the relief. Or at least for a second.
“But equally,” I point out, “this means we’re not the same us. Not the exact same Adam and Jules who started out on this whole weird adventure on our original timeline.”
“Shit.” She looks at me strangely. “You’re right.” She slowly turns and stares at herself in the mirror. “And what about them? Jules with the tattoo and Adam with the beard. Where are they now?”
“I guess still back there in those previous universes?” I hazard. “Like maybe there were versions of us where we traveled back in time but didn’t change anything? So they then returned to their original timelines? Leaving them now just living out their lives.”
It sounds right. And comforting.
But hopefully also true.
“But apart from not being them, we’re pretty much still us?” Jules says.
“Well, yeah. Or close enough,” I say, and seriously, is that really so much of a big deal if we’re not exactly the same, because didn’t I read somewhere that every cell in our bodies is constantly dying and replacing itself anyway?
Meaning our bodies don’t contain a single atom we were born with.
So who we are, isn’t it something slightly flexible, not fixed?
“Okay.” She nods. “But either way, we’re going to have to rely on each other’s observation and honesty from here on in, aren’t we, if we’re going to do it again?”
“Again?” I can’t keep the panic from my voice. After our freak-out about the kids just now, and ourselves, how the hell can she be thinking about even going near that damned Sony again?
But she’s not listening. “Which is why we need to make a pact,” she says.
“To change nothing in the past. To create no new alternative timelines. So each time we come back, it will be to exactly the same universe. This one right now. Where you, me, and the kids and everything else are the same. But if we do accidentally change something, and then notice something’s different, no matter how little, then we’ve both still got to tell each other, okay? ”
She holds out her hand—like it’s a deal.
But before I get a chance to answer—to tell her that the risks are just too big, and that we still don’t know the first thing, really, about how any of this works—we both hear Liam yelling.
“Hey, Dad. Uncle Dar has just pulled up in a shit-hot red Ferrari outside.”
Jules and I rush to the living room window just in time to see Darius alighting from his flaming-red chariot, in a linen jacket and white panama.
Like the man from bloody Del Monte. But he’s also got a wistful look on his tanned face as he stares around, no doubt remembering how much time he used to spend here as a kid.
“What’s he doing here?” I hiss at Jules. Not that I’m pissed off to see him. I’d be annoyed if the Pope himself turned up right now, because me and Jules have currently got bigger fish to fry.
“Shit. I forgot.”
“You invited him?”
“More he sort of just said he might come round,” she says.
We lock eyes, both panicking. Groundbreaking multiverse wanderings aside, we’ve been caught with our proverbial middle-class pants well and truly down. The house is a pigsty.
“You stall him,” she says, pushing me toward the door as she snatches a line of drying knickers and socks off the radiator. “Jesus! He can’t see this mess.”
I hurry out to intercept Darius and he spreads his arms out wide. “Mate,” he says. That slight American twang. “Didn’t see you leave last night.”
There’s a lump in my throat. “I…I…we…” I stumble, because, well, because me and Jules have just discovered a bloody multiversal time travel machine in our shed and he wants to chat about his party?
“We, er, weren’t expecting you,” I say, trying to buy Jules some more time.
“Come round the back a minute. I was just, er, finishing something off in the garden…”
I lead him through the side gate and into the back garden, watching as he surveys our overgrown lawn with his hands wedged into his pockets like a disappointed cricket umpire, before his eyes light up.
“Ah, the old shederoonie.” He grins, acting like he hasn’t noticed Groucho Barx quivering mid-shit on the patio.
As he follows me inside, he looks genuinely misty of eye, running his manicured fingers along the back of our old gaming sofa and even picking up the burned-out Move Your Body! 1993 mixtape I left on Dad’s workbench. I have to summon every ounce of willpower I possess not to snatch it right back.
He stares at a framed photo on the wall of me, him, Jules, and the kids on a picnic rug in front of a sunny stage at the Love Supreme Festival we all used to go to together every year before he left.
Jules is in that mad daisy-patterned De La Soul hoodie I bought her from the merch stand after we’d all danced ourselves stupid to “The Magic Number.”
“Nice,” he says, smiling. “Now, take me to your leader.”
Unable to put him off any longer, I lead him slowly back up the garden and in through the back door, whistling loudly to give Jules a heads-up, and then on past the heaps of washing still to be sorted in the utility room, and into the kitchen, where she slams the crammed dishwasher shut behind her with a swing of her hips in the nick of time.
“And here she is, the karaoke queen,” Darius says, advancing toward her and giving her a hug.
In comes Nelly, smoothing her hair behind her ear.
“No way,” Darius says. “Even more grown up than before.” He embraces her too. “So I guess you’ve graduated college by now? Edinburgh, wasn’t it? Sociology?”
“Economics.”
“Even better. But still living at home?”
“Working from home,” she corrects him. “And saving for a flat of my own. Back up in London, but not getting ripped off sharing with a bunch of random people like I was before.”
“Cool. And what is it you do?”
She talks him through her marketing job and the two of them start picking apart the pros and cons of today’s hybrid economy.
Then Nelly’s asking him about his work and coming home, and he tells her he’s got new offices in town and there’ll be some spare space, which of course he’d be happy to let either of our kids use for free.
“Wow, that’s a great idea,” Jules says, no doubt thinking about our dining room and how nice it would be to get it permanently back.
“Oh, and if you need any mentoring, I’m up for that too,” he adds.
Leaving Nelly looking at him like he’s Father Christmas, who’s just popped out of the chimney in a flurry of soot.
“I didn’t know you already had an office here,” I say.
“Oh yeah, and some news too, mate. But let’s save that for later,” he tells me with a wink.
Then it’s Liam’s turn to behold Darius’s munificence, bouncing down the stairs in trainers that he’s even laced up for once, and wearing clean jeans and an actual buttoned-up shirt.
“I see you finally got your Ferrari, then, Uncle Dar,” he teases, still easy in his company from when he was a kid, even though he’s not seen much of Darius this last decade. “Any chance of us going for a quick spin?”
“Sure. Why the hell not?”
I feel a pang of jealousy. Not just for the Ferrari, but the way Liam’s looking at him. But then my mind flies back to the shed. To what’s just happened. To how my whole world’s just been shook.
“What’s for dinner?” Nelly asks.
“Dinner?” Darius feigns shock. “Oh God. I suppose it is that time. Do you want me to leave?”
“No, no,” Jules says, “we’d love you to stay. But it’ll be half an hour or so,” she adds, looking at me awkwardly, a look that says, Shit. Have we even got any food?!
“Okay, so let’s do this,” Darius tells Liam. “Ferrari time.”
As the two of them march outside, joshing like old mates, the rest of us wander out onto the driveway like the bloody Waltons to wave them off, to a fanfare of twitching curtains from the neighbors.
“God, he’s so charismatic,” Nelly says, as the Ferrari purrs out onto the road.
“And he looks so good for his age, doesn’t he, Mum?
Were you really the same year group as him at school, Dad?
Because you could definitely do with a bit of whatever he’s taking,” she goes on, gently prodding me in the gut.
The bloody cheek.
I turn to Jules, embarrassed, but she’s not even looking. She’s watching the Ferrari rev off out of sight.
“It’s only Darius,” she says—but whether to herself or me, I can’t tell—before hurrying back inside.