Chapter 13 Jules “The Way It Is” #3
“Ah.” He pulls a wincing face. “Well…there’s been some big news. A restructure,” he says. “I’m afraid Adam and his entire department are now…” He sighs and places his feet flat on the floor, staring up at me with a look of pity.
The penny drops.
“You’ve fired him?”
“Well, no, not me. Obviously not me. The board. It’s just business, Jules.”
Something twists in the pit of my stomach as I compute what he’s said.
Adam’s going to be gutted, not to mention how betrayed he’ll feel.
Also, it means that all the plans that he and I have just discussed are now totally out the window.
All that money he’s just made from those toys, it’ll have to be our income now.
What about our mortgage? All our bills? Christ, to think he’s wasted however much on that bloody car.
And as for the pop-up? Well, that’s a joke. There’s not a chance in hell it can happen now.
“I’m so sorry I had to be the one to tell you,” Darius says.
I open my mouth to defend Adam, but then a horrible thought occurs to me. Perhaps Adam did know. Was that why he went rushing off on a bike ride? If indeed that is where he is.
“Look, Jules, you’re the last person in the world I’d ever want to get hurt. You know that.”
“So why have you fired him? You know that’s going to hurt me. Not to mention Adam. What about loyalty? Honesty? Don’t they mean anything?”
“To me, maybe. But maybe not so much to Adam,” he mumbles.
“What do you mean?” I feel my head scrambling. This conversation feels like I’m on quicksand.
He sighs. “I tried to warn you on Monday.”
“About what?”
“Meredith.”
“What about her?” I ask, but my voice is shaking.
“Look, you know how they’re always together, always playing volleyball, but there are rumors that it’s more than that…”
I stare at him, remembering how jealous it made me just watching the two of them together in Darius’s pool. All those niggles about them hanging out down at the volleyball court start clawing at me too and suddenly I’m trying very hard not to cry.
Darius steps closer. “I know it’s upsetting to hear, but I saw them myself practically kissing down at the volleyball court on Monday morning.”
“Practically…?”
“Whether they were or they weren’t is not the point. They were…intimate.”
A tear falls down my cheek and I swipe it away.
“Jules…darling…” Darius says.
I try to speak, but my chin wobbles and the tears fall faster. It’s just too humiliating. Then my phone buzzes. The tow guy has arrived.
—
I drive home in a daze.
Adam is having an affair…
Adam’s been made redundant…
And he’s lied to me about it all?
It can’t be true. It can’t.
I want to confront Adam right now, but he’s out on his bloody bike.
Inside, Groucho Barx scratches at the back door and I let him out, promising that we’ll still go for a walk.
Adam’s laptop is on the kitchen table and I eye it warily, then sit down and open it, my hands trembling. It doesn’t take long to figure out his password—GrouchoBarx1972—and suddenly his home screen is right there.
I click on the WhatsApp icon, but I don’t even need to search for Meredith’s name, because she’s at the top of his messages.
Where are you? Call me, the last one reads from an hour and a half ago. It’s urgent.
I guess that if she’s been made redundant along with the rest of his team, she’d be anxious to talk to him, but the effusive kissing emojis at the end give her away.
Is that where Adam’s really gone on his bike? To see her? Is that what he’s been doing all the other times he’s been out on it too? Do Marcus and Fin and all his other stupid cycling buddies even exist?
My breath leaves my body in a sudden exhale, as I scroll down the cascade of flirty messages between them.
Christ! Is Darius right?
The threat of betrayal makes me feel physically sick. I stagger to the sink, but just as I’m filling a glass of water, a movement in the shed window catches my eye and the glass freezes in my hand.
What the hell?
I open the back door and march down the garden path. I wrench open the shed door. Adam is hunched over the Sony.
Only suddenly seeing me, he now looks like the one about to puke.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I demand.
Even though it’s glaringly obvious what he’s doing. He’s still wearing what he was wearing this morning. He’s been nowhere near his bloody bike. And now he’s about to use the machine.
Hurrying over, I snatch the CD from his hand. It’s labeled Smashing Pumpkins—Halloween 1995.
“I’m…trying…” he stutters, “to make everything okay because I’ve been made redundant. Which means”—he stares at me with bloodshot eyes—“that now I can’t afford to…”
“You think this is the answer?”
“Yes. Yes. If I can just get back to ’95, I can nip down to that old toy shop that used to be in town and buy up more collectibles.
See…” He brandishes some price lists he’s printed out with an auctioneer’s logo at the top.
“Even though they won’t be worth anything like as much as my original Star Wars figures, I still think at today’s prices, they’ll be…
Or I could go back later, to say 2010, and buy Bitcoin, right?
But either way I can use the machine to get us more money to—”
“Whoa. What do you mean, more?”
As I see his cheeks coloring, suddenly the truth dawns. My instinct on first seeing that car was right. He has been time traveling behind my back.
“The Star Wars figures…?”
“Well, I always hoped they were going to be worth a fortune, but then Liam trashed them with Max. On the barbecue when he was a kid back on our original timeline.”
“He did what?”
“I know. Exactly,” Adam says, like I’m now somehow onside.
Which I’m bloody not.
“And Han and Boba Fett and the rest…they were always going to be my rainy-day money…our rainy-day money,” he wheedles on, “and I just wanted to make it so that Liam never did get hold of them. So that I’d still have them to sell for you now.”
He nods vigorously at me like one of those lucky-money statuettes they sell in the Chinese supermarket on Preston Street.
“So, you see, I went back and hid them before Liam could open them so I could find them again on Thursday night…”
Find them? Another lie he’d planned that just came tripping off his bullshitting tongue.
I rub my forehead. So, the car, the hotel, him suddenly having the money to back my business…
that was all only possible because of this?
I can’t believe that he’d lie to me about something so huge and then whisk me off to a hotel and decide not to tell me?
Even when we were talking about being honest with each other, he was lying.
I know it’s a bit hypocritical to feel so betrayed when I went back to fix things without telling Adam too. But maybe that’s the point. It was all so easy. So easy to justify it to myself, like Adam’s trying to justify himself now.
Oh my God. What the hell is this machine doing to us? What’s it turning us into?
“What else?” I demand, my tone icy. “What else have you changed? Tell me right now.”
“Nothing. Nothing…” Only then he closes his eyes and exhales. “Okay. You remember back when we had that holiday in Mallorca and that guy said that horrible thing to me in front of the kids…?”
“And?”
He opens his eyes, wincing. “I left myself a note—a really persuasive one—to join a gym, so that no one would ever speak to me like that in front of the kids and you again. So that I could get fit, and ripped, and stay that way.”
“So, what are you saying? On our original timeline, you weren’t…?”
“No, I was…” He coddles his six-pack in his hands, miming what I can only presume is a belly.
“Jesus, Adam! We had rules,” I shout, furious that we’ve both broken them. That neither of us could be trusted. That neither of us was strong enough to resist. “I don’t even know who you are anymore! Who we are!”
I push him hard in the chest, but he catches my wrists in his bogus muscly grip.
I wrench myself away and stumble back against his dad’s workbench and—No! No! No!—accidentally knock the box of sandpaper to the floor.
Then out it rolls. It. My guilty little secret. Now trundling toward Adam, with a rainbow spectrum of light flickering off its half-burned back.
“What the hell?” he says, pouncing on the CD before I can snatch it away. He stares down at it before holding it up so I can read what’s left of its label…See You Later xx May 2012…
He narrows his eyes at me. “Oh. I see. Care to explain?”
Shit.
“All right,” I admit. “I popped back to the food festival so I could sign up for a cookery course and French lessons.”
“Oh! Oh! Did you now? Right.” Adam is practically dancing from foot to foot.
“Don’t you dare take that sanctimonious tone with me,” I snap. “It was nothing that affected you.”
I feel my cheeks burn, because that’s a lie. It did affect us. I think guiltily of Nelly’s food issues and how distanced we’ve become, but this is not the moment to bring that up.
“So, let me get this straight,” he says, sounding even more pompous. “On our original timeline, in our original universe, you couldn’t speak French, let alone cook all that ‘frou-frou’ stuff you’re so precious about?”
“Oh, fuck off, Adam. At least I’ve been solving real problems that we actually had. Paying off my credit card bill.”
“What credit card?”
Too late, I see what I’ve done.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I think it kind of does.” I know…just know…that now he’s back on his moral soapbox, there’s no way he will ever come down.
“If you must know, Carpe Diem is the name of a horse. That’s what I wrote on the calendar. Then I put a grand on, knowing it was going to win.”
“You put a grand on a horse?” he squeaks, apoplectic.
“It was twenty to one. A done deal,” I tell him. “It just meant I could pay everything back.”
“You used this machine—that you claim God or some bloody faeries gave us—to pay off debts you’d never told me about and then went behind my back to learn French and French cooking just to…to what? To impress Darius? Because it sure as hell isn’t impressing me.”
“Oh, don’t you bring Darius into this. You and your pathetic jealousy.”
“Jealousy?” His eyes blaze.
“When you went back to get yourself all fit and buff for free, I bet you didn’t mind coming back to a new universe where you and your pretty little Meredith were suddenly volleyball partners, did you? Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to, Adam. Darius told me.”
“Told you what?”
“About seeing you and her at the volleyball court. Kissing.”
“What?” He looks genuinely shocked. “I’ve never kissed her.”
Yet there’s a hesitancy…self-doubt. “But you wanted to?”
The fact that he doesn’t answer tells me all I need to know.
“This was supposed to make us happy,” I tell him, my voice catching with tears, “but it’s only made things worse.”
“Not everything is worse.”
I can’t believe it. Is he really going to start talking about sex again? Then I see his eyes are closed, his lips tightly shut. When he finally meets my gaze, all I see is pride.
“What?” I ask him.
“When I went back to get the figurines, I took down the zip wire,” he says.
That old zip wire we used to have in the garden? The one I always hated. “So?”
“So I fixed Liam,” he says.
“What do you mean, fixed?”
“His hand. His left hand. He had an accident on our original timeline. On the zip wire. He lost two of his fingers, and…and there was nerve damage too. But now, now he’s living his dream.”
I stare at him, aghast, as he smiles as if I should be pleased.
“You changed Liam?” I clarify. “You deliberately altered the past for him?”
“He couldn’t play, Jules. After the accident. Now he’s back on lead guitar. That’s all he ever wanted. He’s famous.”
My brain is on fire. All of Liam’s success? That’s new?
“But…but my Liam would have achieved so much anyway,” I say. I simply know in my heart that it’s true. “Because of, not in spite of any injury,” I tell him. “I bet he did. Didn’t he? On our original timeline. I bet he did incredible things.”
“He was starting to learn the bass. To start a band,” Adam admits. “But he’d already dropped out of uni and was living at home with us, Jules, smoking weed and playing video games all hours. He was never going to make it.”
“How do you know he wouldn’t have?” I demand. “That’s the whole fucking point, Adam. You don’t know. Yet you still changed our little boy.”
“For the better. It was the only way,” Adam says, his voice cracking. “I had to. Don’t you see? I built that zip wire. It’s my fault he had that accident.”
So he did it to assuage his own guilt?
I lurch away from him, trying to wrap my head around the enormity of what he’s done, my heart twisting with this new knowledge of what I’ve lost. My son. In this new universe, he’s simply not the same. My boy who once was. My boy I never even knew.
“You were the one who said this could be a force for good, to change things for the better…” Adam pleads, clutching my arm, but I shake him off.
Because it’s not just Liam who’s changed, is it?
It’s Nelly too. Who I’ve changed because of what I did, and who Adam has probably changed too, with all that cycling he did when she was younger and I wasn’t around.
My chest actually hurts as I think about all the other versions of our kids.
The ones I’ll never know. These ones who aren’t who they should be.
I don’t tell Adam this. I’m too ashamed. Too guilty.
This has to stop. Now.
I snatch up the box of tapes and march out of the shed.
“Where are you taking them?” Adam shouts, panic in his voice.
“Anywhere you can’t get your hands on them.”
“Jules. Don’t.” He rushes after me. “Why the fuck should you decide?”
“This is wrong. Can’t you see? I don’t want this in our lives, Adam.” I drop the box on the grass and start loading the tapes and CDs onto the barbecue. “Just burn them, okay? Right. Fucking. Now.”
Groucho Barx starts jumping up at me, clearly thinking this is some sort of game. He’s got his lead in his mouth and cocks his head pleadingly at me.
“Jules,” Adam starts, as I snatch the lead and storm toward the garden gate, but I don’t turn round.
I’m too furious.
At him.
At me.
At us both.