Chapter 14 Adam “American Boy”
Adam
“American Boy”
For a second, I just stare at the tapes and CDs. Like my brain’s fractured. Split.
On one level, she’s right. I shouldn’t have given Liam a new future behind her back and deprived this new her of the old him, and all he achieved. Like overcoming all that teasing at school and teaching himself how to play bass again—albeit against my advice.
God knows I want to make it up to her, but here’s what she’s missing, damn it, and won’t even listen to: he’s happier now, isn’t he? Off in Kyoto with a shot at becoming a star.
I’ve given back what I took away from him by building that zip wire in the first place. Given him back his true path. Haven’t I?
Only now this new timeline’s been wrecked too, because of Darius shooting his mouth off telling her I was fired before I could fix it, sending Jules storming down into the shed to catch me out.
No matter how bloody perfect I try to make things, he keeps undermining what we already have. Or offering her even more.
I snatch my phone from my pocket as another upset message pings in, from Kylie this time, who along with the rest of my team got the same Dear John email last night telling them they were fired.
Punching in Darius’s name, I press “Call.”
“Adam,” he answers.
“How could you?”
Silence.
“Jules told me what you…what you insinuated,” I snap.
“Ah, the volleyball court.” I’m expecting an apology, but instead he simply adds, “I just told her what I saw.”
“Yeah, well, you got it wrong.”
Another pause. “Did I? Because you and Meredith, you looked pretty close to me.”
“So you should have checked with me first.”
“Jules is my friend too, Adam. I thought she had a right to know.”
“Friend!” I scoff. “Like that’s all you want her to be.” I picture him again outside the house with her in his Ferrari. And her face when I accused her of cheating at learning French just to get closer to him.
“Now look who’s insinuating,” Darius says.
“This is my bloody wife we’re talking about.”
“And therefore someone you should have shown a bit more respect to—”
“How fucking dare you—”
“What? Tell you what you should already know? And would know, if you hadn’t been too busy flirting with Meredith. In the pool at my party. And for God only knows how many months, or even years before that.”
“But that’s—” Not me, I want to shout. Because it’s not.
Not the me from my original timeline, anyway.
Only…only I was already flirting with Meredith too then, wasn’t I?
At work. After work. On WhatsApp. Even if only ineffectively.
Even if she did think I looked like a koala. Maybe I did have eyes for her too?
“But that’s what, Adam?” Darius says.
Only I don’t know anymore. What if he’s right? What if I really have brought this on myself?
“I’m sorry,” he says, “but not everyone gets to have a happy ending, you know.”
More Hallmark-level bullshit. Who the hell does he think he is? But…but also he is wrong—isn’t he? Jules and I, we are so close to getting just that. To being happy. To making everything right again.
Only not now. Sodding Darius has screwed that up too, hasn’t he? I haven’t even got a job to have a sabbatical from.
“Is that why you fired me? Because of Jules? To put the boot in on me even more?” I demand.
“I already told you. That’s nothing to do with—”
“Right. That’s just your management team. Because you’re so bloody hands-off.”
“It was nothing personal.” It. Like he’s talking about some scuffed footprint he’s left on my hall rug. Not my entire fucking future.
“Well, it sure as hell feels it.”
“Then maybe we should call this conversation off. Until you calm down,” he says.
“And what about the others?” I snap. “The rest of my department. Doodles, for Christ’s sake.” Not to mention Kylie, Greg, Daniella, and, of course, Meredith too.
“It’s just down to how the industry is changing, Adam. These new AI narrative engines mean we just don’t need our own in-house story dev teams anymore.”
I can’t believe his tone of voice. How he’s switched into industry chat, like he’s not torn my life apart…Or maybe this is how he deals with it, how all business honchos deal with this kind of thing. By pulling back.
“Look, in the long run, it’ll probably do you all a favor,” he says.
“And it’s not like you were ever interested in senior management, is it?
You’re still young too…well, ish. Certainly young enough to retrain.
The same with Doodles. Although, hey, who knows, he might even get to become a full-time DJ now?
” he adds, trying to inject, of all things, a note of levity into his voice.
“Plus, it’s not only cuts in your department. It’s promotions too.”
“Promotions?”
“Yeah, Meredith,” he says. “The new directors were really impressed with that report I got her to do. In fact, it’s thanks to her that we’ve been able to restructure things the way we have.”
Meaning she’s keeping her job. He’s taking her from me too.
Not that it matters. Not now. And good luck to her.
But then I picture myself in the Spitfire yesterday and that look in her eyes when I told her to get out.
Her cold fury. I pulled the rug out from under her when I really could have—should have—made more of an effort not to hurt her, and to let her down easier.
But isn’t that the problem with this whole time-machine thing?
With each new universe that gets created, there’s some new narrative already playing out by the time I parachute into it, and it’s impossible to get the nuances right.
Because these people, these Adams I keep becoming, they’re simply not the original me.
“Yeah, so it’s not all doom and gloom, mate,” Darius concludes.
“Mate?” I say. “We’re not mates. Not anymore.”
“Yeah, well, that’s a funny one, Adam, because that’s exactly how I felt back in 2016, when you chickened out of signing our deal.”
There. Finally, he’s spat it out. What he really thinks about that. About me.
“But then time passes and the betrayal, it stops hurting,” he says. “You move on.”
I don’t believe him, because he never did, did he? Or not from Jules, anyway. I can see that clear as crystal now.
I’m so angry, I hurl the phone at the shed and pace, my heart racing. What now? Do I just let my former best friend Darius Wankopoulos get away with this? With wrecking my life and trying to break me and Jules up?
Staring back at the tapes and CDs, my eyes focus on one in particular. My heart stutters as it glints in the sun. Like it’s maybe another sign. In fact, Jesus, I can almost hear Doodles, Greg, and Kylie now cheering me on.
Picking it up, I read Born in the USA in Jules’s handwriting.
2016.
Yep. This is it. The one that really could put everything right.
Yeah…fuck you, Darius, and the Ferrari you rode in on.
Fuck you very much.
***
And…hhhhSSSSSSSSSSSHHhhhhhh… I land smoothly back in 2016, with the whirling guitar riff of “American Girl” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers still ringing in my ears…
Before, snap. I come round inside my forty-four-year-old body. Right away I’m sweating, because I’m doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t. Playing God. Or a god. Because isn’t this exactly what marks deities out from everyone else? The power to change whatever they want?
To make everything better again.
Adam’s nostrils flare as he breathes in the delicious smell of freshly baked salmon blinis and those tiny little baked puffs stuffed with melted goat cheese that probably do have a name, but which Adam and I both just think of as plain yum.
It’s Jules who’s responsible for them, of course, fussing over them now as she plates them up in the kitchen. Flashing me a smile and a twinkle of those bright blue eyes as she ties her hair up with that blue-and-gold French Hermès silk scarf Ngozi gave her last Christmas.
“Don’t even think about it,” Jules warns, slapping Adam’s hand away.
Fresh on the back of his twenty-mile cycle ride less than an hour ago, Adam’s flat, muscular stomach is growling so loudly that even she can hear it.
As Adam steps back, he watches his wife of seventeen years mixing a vinaigrette in the Provencal shaker she picked up at a car boot sale down at the marina last month.
Even though he’s told her otherwise, I feel his pang of regret over how she’s been slowly staking her claim in here during these past four years, since she’s got her French vibe fully on.
Simultaneously continentalizing Mum and Dad’s tacky eighties English kitchen and replacing it with these trendy shabby chic—or retrouvé, as Jules calls them—French units we’d been assiduously hunting down on eBay.
But he’s not half as annoyed as I will be when I discover eight years down the line that this is all bullshit too. All rigged by future Jules when she snuck back to Frenchify her life.
To impress Darius.
But was it? Was it really just about that? I can’t help asking myself as I continue to stare. Because this French-cheffing Jules fussing around so happily right now, she looks like she was always destined to be this way. Like she could have only ever truly done this for herself.
“The kids are so excited,” she says, shooting Adam a wide smile.
Hardly surprising either, because she’s already got so much planned for them, hasn’t she?
In San Francisco. Where she’s already been in touch with Darius’s uncle and has got Nelly and Liam enrolled in high school for the fall.
Where she’s also been FaceTiming the owner of a hip French bistro in the super-cool Inner Sunset foodie district, who’s a former student of Chef Marcel, and who says he might be able to give her a job.
“I’m so proud of you,” she adds, leaning forward and kissing Adam.
I remember this too now. How well we were getting along in the run-up to this, our second attempt at emigration—so well that the years that followed felt like a landslide from which I don’t think we ever truly recovered.