Chapter 10 Adam “Starstrukk” #2
The name is already familiar to him from that one song of theirs he knows, “A Horse with No Name,” but at this point in his life, Adam doesn’t realize just how big they are globally.
He taps their name into his new iPhone’s Notes app to remind himself to check them out and download a few of their albums. He’s already planning on getting a subscription to that new music service Spotify when he gets back home.
A treat for the half-hour commute he does daily to the small start-up in Lewes where he’s just been made project manager for a mobile phone game to be rolled out through Apple’s new App Store.
“Your boy…he’s good,” the busker says, looking up at Adam. “Talentoso. One day he should be a singer too.”
Little Liam blushes at the compliment, but somehow not dismissively. Like he thinks this too.
Halfway back to the apartment, Jules calls their mini platoon to a halt outside the Codfather fish and chip shop. Adam sheds the beach bags one by one, like a Buckaroo! in slow motion, as she takes the kids inside to get them a bag of chips to stop them whinging about going home so soon.
Adam paces back and forth outside in the Saharan heat, wanting to sit down and wanting a cold shower, shattered from the exertion of carrying all this gear. He scratches at his belly, wishing he wasn’t so unfit.
“Oi, watch where you’re going, lard-arse,” someone says, bumping into him.
“You what?” Adam looks up.
The young man staring down at him has an athlete’s heavily muscled frame and is a good foot taller than Adam. I recognize him too. This bastard’s face is one I’ll never forget. Like the two thugs flanking him, both of them equally ripped.
“What, you deaf as well as fat?” The man cackles, leering in so close that Adam can smell the acrid stink of lager on his breath.
He waits for Adam to speak. Daring him to. But Adam doesn’t. Like I didn’t. As the three young men walk off sniggering, an impotent rage rises inside Adam and his cheeks burn with embarrassment.
Turning, he then sees that Jules, Nelly, and Liam have witnessed this altercation as well. He catches his reflection in the chip shop window. Koala. Adam hasn’t heard the nickname yet, but the shape is already there.
“Just ignore them. They’re morons,” Jules says, tight-lipped, slipping her arm reassuringly around his waist.
All Adam can see is that the kids’ cheeks are red with embarrassment and neither of them can hold his eye.
He turns to look for the men, but it’s too late. They’ve vanished into the nearby square full of tourists, leaving Adam to pick up his clutter of bags and beach toys and follow Jules over the road.
“You’re not worrying about what that drunk boy said, are you?” Jules asks him a minute later, as he continues to glare into the distance.
Boy. Her calling him this only makes things worse.
“No.” But he is, and not just him, me too. That photo Meredith sent glares back into my mind’s eye. That chubby little koala on the beer tap. Then comes Darius, with Jules in the pool at his party. Darius, with his flexing, bronzed muscles. Darius, making her laugh.
Real rage pumps through him then and pumps through me. I try to fight it, but it’s no good.
Instead, I just do it. Going full Nike, fucking the consequences, I quickly impose myself on Adam. Unlocking his phone, I get him to send himself another note. I use all the reasoning and language I know will hurt him and spur him into action. I don’t give a shit if what I’m doing is wrong.
“What is it?” Jules asks, staring down at my phone.
“Nothing. Just…something I need to remember,” I make Adam say.
Already I can feel the words he’s just typed getting etched into his mind. Leaving me certain he’s going to act on them, because this is something I know he wants too.
Quick as it came, the rage passes. Pulling back, I let Adam take over again. Trying not to think about what I’ve just done, I block it out, in case I freak out.
Instead, I look at the kids. Marveling at them.
The way they eat, like chips have never tasted this good.
How they lean into each other as they giggle, with Liam throwing a chip to a tiny bird and Nelly “aw-ing” as it snatches it up and darts away.
My love for them stretches inside me. But with it comes fear.
Only not just Adam’s. This time, mine too.
“You’re looking at them like you’re never going to see them again.” Jules smiles.
She’s right, because I won’t. Or not like this anyway.
Not ever again. Because this Nelly here, who likes Gossip Girl and algebra and Rollerblading and Black Eyed Peas…
and this Liam, who loves guitar and Spirited Away and climbing walls and space adventure stories and building secret dens around the house…
I never will get to see them again, because there are no more CDs or tapes that can bring me back right here to this very day.
It feels like a death.
Two deaths.
Two axe blows to my heart. These two little people who are about to vanish, as I feel that hissing vortex whipping up around me, cutting me off from so much that I love…
***
This time it’s me with tears in my eyes as I open them back in the shed.
“What’s the matter? What happened?” Jules asks, glancing down at her diary. “I thought you were going back to the first day of our holiday. I thought it would be fun.”
“It was. We were on that beach in Port de Pollenca with the kids and I was teaching them to dive. But it’s just that it’s always goodbye, isn’t it? With the kids. Each time we leave them there in the past.”
“You make it sound like we’re abandoning them. But we’re not. They’re still here.”
“No, not like that, they’re not,” I try to explain.
“Those little people are gone. And…and normally it would all happen so gradually, wouldn’t it?
Them growing up. All those thousands of days passing.
But jumping back, just like that, like clicking our fingers…
it’s too much like fast-forwarding. Like they’ve been ripped right out of my hands. ”
She blanches. She’s felt it too?
“It’s okay.” She presses her forehead against mine. “It’s just new, that’s all. We’ll find a way to wrap our heads around it in the end. We’re still us,” she whispers, her eyes big as saucers as she kisses my nose. “We’re still you and me?”
“Of course.”
“I mean, we are, aren’t we?” She pulls back, looking me dead in the eyes.
“Huh?” Oh, right. Our debrief. “Yeah, of course.”
“You didn’t change anything?”
“No.” Only, yeah, now I remember that little note I sent myself. “Nope. Nuh-uh,” I repeat, avoiding her eyes.
I shift on my chair, ready to get up. Then I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror. Only it’s not the crappy old shed mirror that was propped up by the bench before, it’s one of those wide, floor-to-ceiling wall mirrors you see in gyms.
Then there’s the reflection. Of course, I know it’s me, because of the face, but from the neck down…bloody hell. What is this? Some kind of optical illusion?
Shit. Holy, moly, pissing shit.
I’m ripped. As in totally, utterly. Vin Diesel-y, Dave Bautista-y. With pectorals, obliques, and deltoids. Oh, triple shit. How do I even know the names of all these different muscles? I swear I never did before.
That note I just sent myself back in 2009—about losing weight, and getting fit, and toughing the hell up so that no one would ever speak to me like that again in front of my kids—without turning I somehow know that it’s there behind me, printed and framed on the wall.
I clutch at my stomach. Or, rather, my not stomach.
Because where the hell is it? Where’s my spare tire?
I lift up my skintight white sports singlet to check.
Then almost gasp out loud, because instead of my customary dad-bod ripples, I’ve got abs.
A six-pack. Rock-hard. Like a washboard.
Like I could play fucking squash against it.
“All right, Mr. Muscles. It’s not like we’ve not seen it all before,” Jules says, rolling her eyes, looking bored.
But I just continue to stare. At my toned legs. My hamstrings and glutes. Not to mention my overly snug little gym shorts. Before finally turning to gawp back at her.
“What is it? Did you pull something this morning?”
On my bike ride, she means, as a new memory hits me—the fifty-mile hill ride I pushed myself on over the South Downs just after dawn.
“Um, yeah, maybe,” I answer, my mouth dry.
“But everything else here looks okay to you?” she asks, looking around vaguely. “The shed? Me? Nothing weird or unusual to report?”
“Er, nope. Everything looks…just dandy.” Dandy? A word I’ve never used before. A fakey word. One I can barely get out, because everything doesn’t look bloody dandy, does it? Not even just me from the neck down. Or this giant snazzy gym mirror. Or my slinky little shorts and tight singlet.
The shed is also filled with a ton of other professional-looking gym equipment.
Free weights. A multigym. A rowing machine and a running machine.
Road bikes and mountain bikes. Even a frigging exercise bike.
Only nothing like that crappy one I had before.
This one’s got an iPad clipped to it that I already know rolls out cool environments like the Tour de France stages and the Serengeti National Park for me to virtually meander through while I train.
“Okay, well, that’s good,” Jules says.
Good? Of course, because none of this is remarkable to her, is it? In this new alternative timeline and parallel universe I’ve created, her Adam has been fitness-obsessed like this since he came back from that Mallorca holiday in 2009 and unexpectedly joined a gym.
This is my chance to come clean to her and admit what I’ve done. A choice that couldn’t be any clearer if there was a flashing neon sign pointing one way to Lies and the other to Truth.