Chapter 8 Adam “The Rockafeller Skank” #2
True, because as with any bit of techie kit, Darius’s eyes have been drawn to the decks like ball bearings to a magnet. No way is Adam letting him wriggle out of it either, because he knows this is his way to give Darius a shot of that cool his best friend so clearly feels he lacks.
“But I can’t…”
“Won’t, more like. You can do anything you want, Darius. You’re a bloody genius, remember? An IQ higher than the sun. Go on. Try it. What’s wrong with taking a bit of a risk?”
For a second Adam panics that he’s pushed him too far.
But next thing, Doodles and Darius are hunched over the decks together…
and then, ten minutes later, Darius has got a pair of earphones clamped to his head, with his glasses half steamed up, and is already looking like—well, not like he feels he belongs, not yet, but not like he totally doesn’t either, as everyone starts chanting along to Fatboy Slim’s “The Rockafeller Skank.”
Darius…who’ll DJ at our wedding in a year’s time, where he’ll also be my best man, playing “All the Daze,” by Troubadours d’Amour, as our first song…
Adam’s so happy to see him like this…but me, I feel this nip of bitterness rising up inside me, because I’m the one who launched him, aren’t I? I launched Darius Angelopoulos out into the world—onto fortune and fame—and I got nothing back.
But then Jules and Adam are dancing like they just can’t stop and I’m swept up in it too, loving every precious second as the time flies by…
until, suddenly, Jules is dragging Adam away, up onto their flat’s secluded little roof terrace for some fresh air, while down below, a mix of “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” by Will Smith is belting out and Adam can’t help but grin, thinking it’s probably Darius playing it.
But not like I’m now grinning inside. Me, who suddenly realizes what is coming next.
“Good party?” she asks.
“The best. I don’t want it to ever end. I don’t want—” But he stops himself.
“What?”
Brave. Be brave, he’s telling himself—because the ring, it’s calling to him like he’s Bilbo bloody Baggins. “I don’t want us to ever end,” he finally spits it out, “because I…I…”
Go on, do it! I think.
“You?” Her blue eyes are staring hard into his.
“…I love you,” he says.
“Well, thank God for that.” She laughs. “Because I love you too.”
“No, I don’t just mean the words,” he says, because of course they’ve said them many times before.
“Or even the feeling that goes with them. More…everything else that might go with it too…The future that I want to spend with you.” And now he’s found the words, he can’t stop.
“And all this…” he says, grinning, throwing his arms outward to encompass the entire starry sky, “…everything this whole wide world has to offer. I want us to share it all. To go traveling. And live crazy places. And live crazy bloody lives.”
“Me too,” she squeals. “Like I did in Paris!” And it’s like he’s pulled a cork out of a bottle, because she can’t stop grinning too.
“So let’s make it happen,” he says. A drunken declaration. “No matter what.”
Laughing now. Because he’s high. And because she is too, on spliffs and on life.
But I’m not laughing. Because it was me, I put the idea of moving abroad into Jules’s head.
Meaning it was because of me that Mum and Dad drove us to Gatwick Airport that day. It was me who caused them to crash…
But before I can think about changing what he’s just said, Adam reaches into his pocket, nerves yo-yoing up and down inside him, like he’s about to be sick.
And, whoa, here it comes…He’s getting down on one knee and fumbling with the little black box and finally popping its lid—panicking that this ring’s not big enough or expensive enough to prove his commitment to her, this woman he loves with all his heart…
She beams the second she sees it and even as he starts to say, “Jules, will you—” she’s already answering, “Yes, yes, yes, yes!” and kneeling down in front of him. As he slips the ring onto her engagement finger, she holds it up to the stars.
Then they’re kissing, not stopping. Like they’re each other’s oxygen.
Until WHOOOOOMPH! They feel it like a bomb going off beneath them. What the hell? Adam thinks.
But I already know.
As he jumps up and rushes over to the ladder that leads down through the hatch into the corridor below, I hear that rising rushing sound.
And as the jeers start up below, and everyone crowds round the bathroom door to stare in at poor Dave and Joy grabbing for their discarded clothes, half buried in plaster, I catch sight of the nearby clock tower of St. Nicholas’s Church and see that I’ve already been here an hour and a half—and before I can even look back at Jules for just one more precious time, I’m sucked back down into that crazy kaleidoscopic whirlwind again…
***
I wake in the shed, blinking into the light, to see Jules holding my hands. My Jules. Not the 1998 twenty-six-year-old Jules who Adam just asked to marry and said he wanted to move abroad with. Not the Jules who was just trying to kiss my face off under that twinkling, starry sky.
That kiss I can still taste…only it’s my Jules I’m looking at now. Looking at the way Young Adam looked at his Jules in the bathroom—noticing her and being amazed.
And it’s my Jules I want to kiss. The woman I’ve been married to for twenty-five years, who’s taking my breath away all over again. Quickly leaning forward, I do. Softly.
But then it’s not just noticing, it’s wanting, and I can see it in her eyes…she’s feeling this too. Then we’re doing it. Tearing off each other’s clothes and having wild, hungry, animal sex.
I don’t care if she’s thinking about me then, or me now. Or whether this is the me who got better at sex sooner, or some new version of me that I don’t yet understand. Because it’s all one. We’re one. Until we collapse back onto the dusty shed floor in a shivering heap.
“Wow,” she pants, putting up her hand for a high five—because sex like that deserves a high five.
“Wow, indeed.” I glance across at the pocket of my discarded jeans. Thinking of—what? The ring Adam had inside his combats back in ’98? No. It’s his cigarettes I’m craving. Like that want has somehow followed me back here too.
That need.
“So what brought that on?” Jules asks.
“You,” I tell her.
“Me?” Her eyes narrow. “Me now? Or then?”
“Both,” I say, because why lie? She’s already guessed. But instead of calling me a hypocrite, she smiles. “What?” I ask.
“Getting tangled up like this…in this freaky interdimensional horniness, it is kind of weird, isn’t it? But in a really, really good way,” she quickly adds, taking my hand.
No denying that.
“It’s like”—I press her engagement ring to my lips—“being back there with you, at the start of us, it’s like”—I hesitate, wanting to find the right words—“it woke up those same feelings inside me. Feelings that must have got buried over the years.”
“Buried by all the shit.”
“The shit?”
“You know,” she says, “the million and one things about getting older, about parenting, being married, that make you feel un-horny. That make you forget the whole reason you got together in the first place.”
“Right. Only now all that early wonder, it’s like it’s just been jump-started.” Although, if anything, this is an understatement. Because now I just want to hold her. To hold her and be held. To not let go.
“Then maybe that’s what this is,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe this whole multiverse time travel thing isn’t just about reexperiencing the past. Maybe it’s also about using those experiences to fix the present…”
Said like there are still more things that need fixing.
“Maybe. But so long as we’re only learning from the past,” I remind her. “Not actually going back there to change things here just because we can.”
“And you didn’t, did you?” she checks.
“Nope. You still look like you.” I glance in the mirror.
“I still look like me.” But even as I say it, it occurs to me that this is not necessarily the same timeline either, is it?
Because me piggybacking on Younger Me kissing Jules back in ’98 has led to us having sex tonight.
We’re only stark bollock naked right now because of that.
Meaning maybe the future of this timeline has already been affected, because who knows how this will affect us from here on in.
Again, I notice that sparkle in her eyes, but what if it’s not just for me, but for the old us? What if it’s just more wanting to go back again? The sparkle of being hooked?
Only then someone’s knocking at the shed door and rattling the handle, but thank God it’s locked, because it’s Liam’s voice outside, asking to be let in because he’s forgotten his house keys, as Jules and I frantically scrabble around to pull on our clothes.
—
Friday afternoon, four o’clock, I’m signing in at the muskily perfumed reception of the swanky Soho House private members’ club that opened a few years ago on the seafront.
As I walk upstairs past the slick artwork, my self-consciousness grows. I’ve come fresh from the office and am wearing a pair of dusty old Nikes, sawn-off jeans, and a coffee-stained T-shirt bearing the legend Off My Tits on Aperol Spritz.
But Darius just smiles when he waves me over to where he’s sitting out on the sunlit terrace overlooking the sea.
“Ads, good to see you. Grab a pew. What would you like?” He orders us a couple of beers. “So what do you think?” he asks, flipping an iPad round to face me.
It’s a new logo for Quark Studios, with the word Quark aligned vertically with an S printed behind it. All in the shape of what looks like a space rocket. Or maybe an ice lolly. Or even a dick.
“Oh, I don’t know much about that sort of thing,” I hedge.
“No, I suppose not,” he agrees.
Ironic. Considering that it was me who first came up with the name of the sodding company that he’s just made millions out of. But I keep the thought to myself. Because my team has tasked me with something much more important.