Chapter 12 Adam “Happy” #3
There’s still time, right? To play some more with my boy.
So I let go and sit back and enjoy it as Adam, Darius, Liam, and Max get building…
with blankets, old bits of corrugated iron, wooden posts, and anything else they can find.
They make quite the space-crash-landing survivalist team too, don’t they?
We’ve been playing this new game of ours, Earth Twin, all summer.
A game I’d not just been playing with the kids out here in the garden but had started storyboarding as a potential concept for pitching to Darius too.
What I hoped might even one day be the first Totally Sirius nonviolent survivalist game to hit the stores.
They end up rigging up the old tent skin over the clothesline and reinforcing its perimeter against freak dust storms, a regular occurrence here on Proxima Centauri, which is what they’ve decided to call the garden for now.
Then they discuss what rations Liam and Max are going to need to get them through the night—and, luckily for them, Proxima Centauri has plenty of nearby natural deposits of Pot Noodles, Tangy Cheese Doritos, and Diet Cokes.
Right in the corner shop, aka NASA Supplies Depot, at the end of the road.
God, it’s fun too. Just playing again. With Adam and Darius every bit as involved as the kids. No rules. No ideas too silly. Just egging Liam and Max on to keep on building from the sandpits of their minds.
All four of them end up howling with laughter and Darius doesn’t even freak out too much about the grass stains on his tailored skinny jeans. But just when they’re finalizing their planet evacuation rules, he steps back, as his iPhone pings.
“Shit. Sorry. Time’s up, lads,” he says. “I’ve got to go and meet Lucy.”
Another new girlfriend. The boys wolf-whistle and pull grossed-out faces.
It’s all Adam can do not to roll his eyes too, because none of Darius’s squeezes ever last long.
Then Liam and Max start shrieking as a fluffball of a puppy—bloody hell, it can only be Groucho Barx—tears yapping down the garden toward us with a chewed-up teddy in his mouth.
Shit. I remember what I’ve actually come here to do. How long have we been playing? Bollocks. I need to move now, before my time’s up. To fix our bloody finances…and find a way forward…instead of just doing nothing.
Quickly imposing myself again on Adam, I hurry for the kitchen doorway, reaching it just as his Jules is stepping out.
“God, I love watching you playing with Liam,” she says.
“Just Liam?” Nelly asks from behind her.
Nelly. Aged—what?—fourteen. Seeing my little girl knocks me back out of imposing myself on Adam and leaves me just staring again instead.
“And of course you too,” Adam says, with a slight slur of confusion, wondering why the hell he just walked up here.
Then he’s wide awake and dadding, chatting, because these last two years that Jules has been doing the Chef Marcel French courses that her mum bought her, Adam and Nelly have spent more time hanging out.
He’s got her into both running and cycling even sooner than on our last timeline, so that one day she might end up making the county team.
They even have a special complex high-five round-the-side handshake that they perform seamlessly right now.
Younger Jules watches with, it has to be said, more than a little envy in her eyes.
“Did you get your logo sorted?” she asks, nodding toward the shed, as Nelly runs out to scoop Groucho up.
“Getting there.”
She grins, clearly just as excited by this progress with his and Darius’s fledgling business as him.
Tapping into Adam’s more recent memories, I now see the hundreds of hours that he and Jules have spent discussing Totally Sirius too.
Something else I’ve forgotten. How much she supported me.
How much she wanted to make my dream come true.
But that’s why I’m here, right? To do the same for her.
Only then Adam’s watching Jules smile right past him at Darius, who’s howling and prowling around the kids’ den, like he’s a one-man cosmic storm.
I want to tell her. About Liam. About how what I’ve just done will save him. Because as much as I never forgave myself for him getting hurt, I’m now not sure she ever forgave me either.
I want to tell her it’s fixed.
But I can’t. I never can.
“Do you think he’ll ever settle down? Have kids himself?” she asks, looking at Darius. Said wistfully, like it’s a waste—something the younger me misses entirely.
“Maybe,” Adam answers. Only when he looks down the garden toward where Darius is staring back up at us, I recognize that same look in Darius’s eyes from when he watched Jules walking from his Ferrari to our front door.
Jules…my God…is it her he’s been holding out for…for all this time?
“Where are you going?” she says.
I don’t let Younger Me answer as I impose myself on him again.
I don’t let him stop this time until I get to the living room.
Keeping Adam firmly under my control, I march him right up to the old glass-fronted wooden dresser Marcel Proust just smashed the shit out of in my future.
Only the glass here is of course still intact, and I quickly open the bottom double wooden doors.
And look—just look!—they’re all right here waiting for me, alongside Mum’s old Royal Doulton china tea set. My old buddies. Bought for me by Dad during those childhood Christmases when Mum was giving me knitted jumpers, a new Cub Scout uniform, and the Good News Bible.
Luke, Han, Leia, Chewy, and C-3PO. My collectors’ items. All still sealed in their boxes.
All in pristine condition before Liam and Max get hold of them in just a month’s time and “sacrifice them” to the ancient spirits of Earth Twin on a pyre built on top of the Weber Interstellar Observation Station, aka the barbecue.
Even more important, the Mandalorian bounty hunter Boba Fett’s here too, and I jarringly know an identical boxed figure will sell nine years from now to a New York collector for over twenty thousand bucks.
Quickly getting Adam to grab them all, I march him upstairs to our bedroom and make him conceal them behind our heavy wooden wardrobe in the recess where I always used to hide as a kid, somewhere nobody ever goes.
I leave a message for him on his laptop too, in case the act of doing this is too blurry for him and he wonders where the hell they’ve gone. I remind him that they need to stay hidden in case the kids or the new puppy finds them and messes up their value by opening them or tearing them apart.
***
Fifty-two years old I may be, but finally—at last!—I’m getting my Ferris Bueller’s Day Off moment, as I turn off the motorway and drive down Dyke Road Avenue and back into town.
Granted, this car is not a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT Spyder California like the one Ferris convinces his best friend, Cameron, to boost from his father’s glass garage in the 1986 John Hughes classic.
Nor is it a 2021 Ferrari SF90 Stradale V-8 Turbo like the one Darius currently bellends around the streets of Brighton. But it is at least red.
It’s a Triumph Spitfire convertible, the same car Jules has shouted out the name of throughout the course of our twenty-five-year marriage whenever she’s variously spotted it in episodes of Murder, She Wrote, Doctor Who, and Killing Eve. It’s her favorite car. One she’s always coveted.
And one she now owns. Even if it is a bit shonky, and with only a three-month guarantee.
Admittedly, my motives for buying it are not entirely honorable.
It’s not just for her, is it? It’s for me too.
Partly because I also get to drive it, and feel deeply Matthew Broderick–level cool in it, like I do right now with its top down and the sun beating on my flexed biceps and scuffed black knockoff Ray-Bans.
But also because, in Freudian terms, what I’m doing here is hopefully eradicating a clear case of chronic penis envy. A subtext unavoidable even to me, insofar as I am literally, or metaphorically, giving Jules another dick. To put her off Darius’s.
And while spending five K on anything would normally bring me out in hives, Jules is worth it.
I mean, why else would I have caught the train up to London first thing this morning to sell my unsullied Star Wars figures to a collector who probably stiffed me ten percent more than I might have made at auction? Because I wanted to make Jules’s dreams come true.
Here, in reality.
Even if this might now be a significantly different reality, indeed universe, from the one I left last night.
One where Liam never did get the opportunity to cremate Boba Fett, FX-7, C-3PO, et al.
Meaning they were all still safely tucked behind my wardrobe when I snuck in last night after getting back from 2014.
Even more important, here in this alternative universe, Liam didn’t have his accident.
When I got back last night, the very first thing I did—before looking for the figurines—was to rush upstairs to his room to see how he was.
Gone, was the answer. In Japan, my new memories quickly informed me.
Where Liam, Max, and Kai’s band, Grass Stain, are touring.
Yep, my boy has only gone and made it, goddamn it!
Not only did he not have his accident on this new timeline, he also pursued his dream.
Relentlessly. Getting signed to a label just after his eighteenth birthday, then happily dropping out of uni and moving to London to buy a flat.
Leaving him now on the verge of real success.
If not yet quite a household name, then certainly well on his way.