Chapter 7 Jules “Alright” #2
“Hey, Nelly, right?” she says with a Californian lilt, flashing us both a crisp, professional smile. “Welcome. I’m Anastasija, Darius’s day-to-day. You’re right over here.”
Nelly’s desk is in the far corner by the window. She has a view overlooking the gaudy chocolate-box Royal Pavilion and down onto a row of hip clothing boutiques and coffee shops in the Lanes, and gives me a stern look like I’m fussing, as I start commenting on how cool it is.
“You’re here,” Darius booms, sauntering toward us from a glass-fronted private office. He hugs Nelly and then me, kissing me on both cheeks. He’s wearing dark blue designer jeans, a dazzlingly white T-shirt, and a smart black jacket.
“Come and check out my office,” he says.
Nelly doesn’t thank me, or even look at me, as I leave her by her desk with Anastasija to get “on-boarded.” I follow Darius across the vast, gray-carpeted floor, feeling the same rejected pang I had when I left her on the first day of primary school and she was the only kid who didn’t wave goodbye.
Unsurprisingly, the corner office is big and show-offy, the kind you see in TV shows like Succession, with low leather couches, a designer coffee table, and potted plants that look so healthy, they must be fake.
Except that a surreptitious squeeze of one of the fleshy leaves reveals that they’re not.
I fiddle with the ?koda’s car keys in my hand, feeling underdressed in my ancient jeans and hoodie.
Darius sits on one of the couches and points to the one opposite.
“Take the weight off,” he says. “Go on. Just for a minute.”
I perch on the arm of the couch, remembering that bit-too-much eye contact we had back at the party. “So, you liked it so much, you bought the company,” I Victor Kiam riff, peering round.
“Yeah, it looks like a good business. Or, you know, we’ll see…”
Whatever the hell that means.
“I thought you were leaving all this to your management team?” Wasn’t that what Adam said?
“Yeah, but still. I want to be close to the action. Plus, work’s what turns me on.
” He laughs. “But you know that feeling. You’ve always been passionate about what you do.
I mean, I’d forgotten how easily you can rustle up something completely delicious like that pasta dish on Sunday.
Just like that.” Darius kisses his fingertips.
“So.” He claps his hands. “On that note, I’ve got these French guys coming over next week.
Investors,” he says. “They want a dinner to discuss how we all might work together, and I suggested we do it here. There’s an amazing kitchen and dining room through there. ” He waves toward a door.
“Right?” I say, still confused as to what this has to do with me.
“And I figured you’d be perfect. You know, to cater the event. Chat them up with a little explanation of the menu, that sort of thing.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, I’ll make it worth your while. Money’s no object,” he says.
Enough for me to square away the credit card bill in my pocket? My mind can’t help going there as he talks.
“They’ll want high end, though. I know you can do anything, but I think it’d impress them to serve something properly French. And you’ll get to dazzle them with all that French you learned in Paris too. You know, show them we’re on the same page as them. You can do that, right?” he asks.
I swallow hard, already feeling out of my depth, but he looks so enthusiastic, so pleased with himself, I find myself mumbling, “Sure. Yeah.”
“Great.” He grins, then stands up and I realize that my little meeting with him is over. He puts his hand on my shoulder, guiding me to the door. “I know you won’t let me down.”
—
Wednesday evening is the first “alone time” Adam and I have without the kids.
Liam took the bait—and the tickets Adam bought on a resale site—to see Brighton band Town of Cats at the Hope & Ruin tonight with Max.
And Nelly is blow-drying her hair, ready to go and meet Eva for a burger at Salt Shed opposite Brighton Dome before heading up to the Windmill for a dance.
I’m in the kitchen, slouching around and pretending to be preoccupied as I watch the clock, itching for her to depart so we can do our thing again.
The second she does, Adam appears in the kitchen, clearly raring to go too. He’s showered and changed into his nice jeans and short-sleeved Ben Sherman shirt. And, yeah, I get it, because this does have something of a date night vibe about it, even if our glamorous destination is the shed.
I grab a bottle of wine from the fridge and some glasses, because I’m betting even time travel goes better with Tesco’s Finest half-price chardonnay.
I’ve spent all afternoon trying to fathom out which tapes correspond to which months and days from the clues in my diaries and making a list, since Adam reckons that each new tape we play sends us back to the day it was given.
Or that’s how the first two tapes seemed to work, anyway.
As we hurry down the garden path in the fading light, it feels illicit.
Exciting. Like the old days. Me and Adam against the world.
Or maybe “worlds” would be more accurate, if what we’ve been theorizing is right.
Me and Adam against the multiverse. When he reaches the shed door and asks if I’m ready, just for a second, I glimpse him again, that bright-eyed boy from 1993 who’s since got lost inside a man.
I’ve always rather resented the shed. Adam’s made it clear that this is his man cave, full to bursting with stuff he won’t throw out. But it’s taken on a different perspective now it houses the machine. It feels somehow sacred and silly all at once. Like the Doctor’s TARDIS.
Groucho Barx gives us a funny look and cocks his head as I tell him to shush and to wait outside. I close the shed door and lock it.
As Adam opens the wine, I show him my list detailing the dates that the tapes and CDs might match and I want to squeak with excitement. This is already giving me an off-the-clock buzz.
“We could get back into it,” I suggest. “You know, the mixtape thing. Or sharing playlists anyway. I kinda miss it.”
“Me too.”
He looks at me and I shrug and smile apologetically. “Okay. I know I wanted you to throw them out, but I do appreciate that I couldn’t have been more wrong.”
He raises an eyebrow at my apology. “Just as well I never throw anything away then, isn’t it?” he says, and we both laugh.
“So, come on then. Who’s going first?”
He waggles his eyebrows. “Well, we both want to, obviously, so let’s flip for it. That seems fair, right?”
I nod, grinning. Just the idea of it is so bloody intoxicating. He takes a fifty-pence piece from the pot on his dad’s old workbench, and I call heads before he flips it. The late Queen Elizabeth’s face sparkles as he catches it on the back of his hand. Good old Liz. I clap my hands, delighted.
“Okay. So…where to?” I say, digging through the box. “How about May-hem 1995? I found a mention of it in my diary from when I gave it to you.” I open the tape box and step toward the machine.
“Wait,” Adam says.
“What?”
“Just that…Look, it’s a TDK 90.”
“So what? All the more room for more great tunes, right?”
“But maybe not just that…”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that when you went back to ’93, you were there for exactly sixty minutes. I know, because I timed it. And that was exactly the length of that tape. And when I went back to ’89, that was a sixty-minute tape too and I reckon that sent me back for exactly an hour.”
“So this one,” I deduce, “means I might get to stay back for an hour and a half?”
“It makes sense. Well, as much as any of this does,” he admits.
“And you still reckon it’ll take me back to the same day it was handed over? Which in this case was”—I open my diary and show him where I found a mention of it—“Sunday, May 21.”
“Yeah, but maybe these work even more accurately than that. What happened to me is Young Adam handed that first tape over to Young You in the Peregrine about halfway through my trip back.”
“And the same with me,” I quickly work out. “I started my trip back half an hour before I gave you the ’93 tape and then stayed on maybe another half hour with you on the beach at the Troubs’s gig, before I got hauled back into that whirlwind again…”
“Meaning this should take you back to around forty-five minutes before you give me the tape.”
“And spit me out forty-five minutes after.”
“Okay.” He nods toward the open tape deck of the machine. “But remember our promise. You can’t change anything. Not one thing.”
“I won’t.” I reach up and kiss him quickly, desperate to get going.
I bang in the tape and hit “Play.”
Grinning at Adam, as the tinny piano chord riff of Supergrass’s “Alright” blasts out into the shed, for a second I think that nothing’s happening, but then—the floor vanishes and I’m screaming down into that tornado again…
***
Darkness.
Then pale warm light.
I’m in the kitchen. Our old kitchen. In our first flat.
Oh my God. This is amazing.
It’s worked and I’m back and I’m dancing.
I mean, she’s dancing—the young me—with Supergrass still playing.
My—her—hips are swinging to the now familiar guitar riff, although to her this song is refreshingly new.
I Should Coco, Supergrass’s debut album, is a recent purchase, bought just three days ago in Across the Tracks on Gloucester Road, a flash memory pops into her mind.
It’s playing on the kitchen radio, with its dial covered in crusted flour, because she—the young me—always listens to the radio when she’s baking.
The reason she’s grinning is because she just yesterday recorded it onto a new mixtape she’s giving to Adam today. That same mixtape that I just put into the old Sony.
And my heart is fit to burst too. Because whenever I hear this song, it transports me back to a memory I can’t quite grasp—the way music so often does. Its chorus has always conjured up an intangible atmosphere of the past, and I realize it’s this. This moment right here right now.