Chapter 15 Jules “Across the Universe” #2
Even though I’m feeling increasingly nervous about this coming moment, it’s not enough to stop me appreciating simply being here too, under this beautiful blue sky with my friends, enjoying a mind so clear compared with my own.
A mind not yet faced with the consequences of finding a portal to the multiverse.
And all the shit that will bring.
The song comes to an end and I reach for the CD player.
“Aha. That reminds me,” Doodles says, through a puff of cigarette smoke. “Adam left this for you. To play on that old piece of crap.”
He hands over a new CD and Jules takes it. Beach Party 2016, she reads, grinning. She slides it out of its sleeve, glad Adam finished it in time. It’s got one of Doodles’s mixes of Tinie Tempah at the start, she sees, popping it on. Jess Glynne singing “Not Letting Go” blares out.
“Choon.” Doodles nods and Ngozi high-fives him, agreeing.
Meanwhile, I’m concentrating hard. The CD handover has happened, which means I only have thirty-four minutes left.
I feel my heart thump right alongside Jules’s as she spots Darius searching the crowd and she stands and shouts his name.
Waving, he works his way over, dressed in shorts and a stylish black shirt.
It’s always been Darius I associate with this CD, because he now picks it up and stares at the photo of me on the front cover and grins.
“Beautiful. You really look beautiful on there,” he says quietly just to me, before catching himself out and blushing, fully blushing, as he quickly turns away to greet the others.
There, that was it. Why I’m here. The first moment I knew, really knew, that he liked me like that…
Recovering his composure and acting like he never said anything, he kneels down and takes the last beer from the cool box.
“Hmm. Why don’t I get us some cold ones?” he offers, putting the warm beer back.
Jules feels it as a criticism. She’s done her best to make a perfect picnic for Ngozi, but she knows Darius has increasingly high standards these days.
It’s only two weeks until he emigrates to America and Jules feels a shard of deep envy. She should be going too.
As Darius gets up and smiles down at Jules, I take over.
Because I’m doing this.
I am.
“I’ll come with you,” I say, causing Jules a little inadvertent thrill of surprise. “You guys want anything?” I ask Doodles and Ngozi.
“Cornetto,” he says. “Double choc.”
“And for the grown-ups, some ice,” Ngozi adds, rolling her eyes at him. “I’ve got prosecco going warm in my hamper.”
Jules pulls on her red-checked sundress and flip-flops and Darius picks up the cool box, holding her arm with his other hand as they gingerly step between the tourists.
They head up the steps by the bandstand and up Sillwood Road to the Waitrose at the top. It’s a treat to be in the air-conditioned aisles browsing the shelves with Darius, who thinks nothing of going for the most expensive brands instead of searching the shelves for what’s going cheap.
“Let’s not go back just yet,” I make Jules say once they’ve queued, paid, and everything is packed under the ice in the cool box. She likes the idea and even thinks it’s her own. “Pint in the Robin Hood?”
As they wander down through Norfolk Square, they talk about Darius’s mum and how much he’s going to miss her and worries about her.
She’s always been sharp as a pin, but recently she’s been forgetting things.
That must have been the start of the onset of her dementia, I realize, thinking of his poor mum now.
Once inside the pub, they wait at the bar as the landlord serves them, and They Might Be Giants’s “Birdhouse in Your Soul” plays tinnily over the speakers. Jules sees there’s a bench seat over in the shadows, where the daylight hasn’t properly penetrated.
Heading over, they sit side by side on a prickly velvet banquette. Darius takes a sip of his lager. He’s going to give up drinking when he gets to California, he says.
“You won’t miss it?” Jules asks. Drinking has been so much a part of our group’s culture, but of course Darius has already started his metamorphosis into Californian Tech Giant.
“No,” he says. “I’m actually looking forward to it.”
“And…are you going to miss me?” I make Jules ask, because I already know that in a week, at his leaving party, he’ll ask her to leave Adam and go with him.
So, he must already be thinking about it.
“Because…because I wish I was coming with you,” I make her continue. “I hate Adam for pulling the plug.”
Jules knows this is a dangerous, dangerous conversation to be having and she can’t quite believe she’s having it, but already the world—this world—is turning, and she’s slipping, sliding, moving with it…to where, she doesn’t yet know…
“What if it wasn’t too late?” he asks.
“You mean…leave Adam?” I make her say. Even though she’s already thinking it. I can sense how shocked she is by this turn in the conversation, every bit as shocked as I really would be a week from now on my original timeline, when he suggested the exact same thing.
“You know how I feel about you, Jules, how I’ve always felt about you,” Darius says gently, reverently, tucking her hair behind her ear, as if it’s the most precious thing in the world. “You must do.”
Having another man touch her like this is so new. So shocking. Something inside her already knows that by not moving away or saying no, she’s crossed a line from which she can’t come back.
A line I’ve never crossed. Not on any timeline before.
But I can see what I couldn’t see then. That he really wants me. That he even loves me.
Because in that other universe Adam created when Adam signed the contract—Darius and I were together, weren’t we? We’d somehow made it work.
Imposing myself, I make Jules take his hand in hers.
“Do you mean it?” she says, but her voice is already a whisper. It’s not me making her say it, just her.
Darius nods, his hand still touching her hair, his face close. “Let’s go, Jules. You, me…and the kids.”
He clasps his other hand over hers and Jules looks at the union of their fingers. She’s terrified and her instinct is to snatch her hand away, but I override her.
Instead, slowly…deliberately…I make her lean forward and finally kiss him on the lips.
***
Darkness.
Where am I?
I stretch. I’m in bed. I can feel the soft mattress below me.
My fuzzy brain comes round as if from a deep, dark oily pool and, as I surface, I grope for the details of my astonishing, mind-bending dream…
Wow. That was far-out. Me, half drunk in the Robin Hood, coming on to Darius and then accepting his pass…Jesus, even kissing him on the lips…
My thoughts are interrupted by a long, disgusting fart.
“Close the door,” I mumble, turning on the soft pillow.
After such a weird but oddly blissful dream, the last thing I need is the sound of Adam being gross.
“Sorry,” followed by a flushing sound. “It’s those French lentils you cooked.”
I freeze.
That’s not Adam’s voice.
Sitting bolt upright, I rip off the eye mask I’m wearing just in time to see Darius coming out of a giant en suite bathroom and buttoning up his shorts.
“I got you a coffee,” he says, nodding to the large mug steaming on the bedside table.
He grabs his golf putter and marches whistling out of the room.
My heart is thundering.
What the hell is happening?
I shut my eyes. Shake my head. It’s got to be a dream. I’m definitely still in a dream.
Only then someone’s shaking my shoulder.
“Mommy…” A young girl’s voice. An American accent.
A child is standing next to the bed. Maybe six. Maybe seven. No, six. Born November 12, 2017. And for her last birthday party, she went to see Matilda in New York. She has my face shape and eyes, but Darius’s mouth, and his little gap between her teeth.
Holy mother of God.
Me and Darius.
We have a child.
New memories start hitting me like arrows.
“Hi, baby,” I hear myself say, my face breaking into a smile and feeling a swoosh of love, as I lean in to grab her, tenderly rubbing the tips of our noses together, something she still finds funny.
Oh, she’s beautiful. Her favorite silver love heart necklace that I bought her last week at Posh Totty glints at her neck.
“Get up. We’re gonna be late,” she says.
Phoebe. This is Phoebe. I know this is Phoebe.
Just as I know that she’s my entire world and that my day will revolve around her, just like every day does.
Starting with her riding lesson in half an hour.
Which is why she’s already dressed in jodhpurs and a hacking jacket as she scampers back out of the room.
What the hell is happening?
My stomach—I mean, the real me’s metaphysical stomach—is dropping through the floor, but this other me, this new Jules doesn’t even notice. Even though I’m joining with her here on this new timeline.
She gets up, patting her flat real stomach, before touching her toes twenty times. She’s got my fantasy middle-aged body. Nothing like any real body I’ve ever actually had.
Then she’s hotfooting it into the bathroom. The giant bathroom that looks like it belongs in a hotel. And quickly opening the window—automatically—pinching her nostrils and counting to ten, because this is sometimes just what married life is like.
Married?
They’re married. I’m married. I’m Mrs. Angelopoulos. I look down at my ring finger. The little diamond engagement ring Adam gave me on one knee up on that roof in 1998 is gone, along with my wedding ring. Instead, I’ve got this massive rock of a diamond that I could probably trade in for a house.
Only not this house because that would cost a lot more.
The very same house up on Tongdean Avenue where Darius threw his pool party in another life, another universe.
Only now I live here too, after moving back here to the UK with him a month ago, after he exited Totally Sirius in the States for a cool fifty million.