Chapter 15 Jules “Across the Universe” #4
“Or whether that even matters?” I quickly add. “So long as he’s still out there kicking arse for a better intergalactic future for us all?”
And—finally—finally, I see I’ve got my nerdy husband hooked.
“How the hell do you know that I’ve—”
“For the same reason I know about cosmic strings and traversable wormholes and even the Alcubierre drive, because you told me about them when you were trying to explain time travel to me,” I say.
Next thing I know, I’m babbling at him and telling him everything all at once, about the old tapes and CDs, and how he put one in the old Sony and went back into his seventeen-year-old self, and then I went back too.
Not pausing for breath, I explain how we changed things, at first by accident and then on purpose, and then sneakily behind each other’s backs, and how I got so totally cross because of him changing Liam that I set fire to the tapes and CDs right here in this garden and then went back and stupidly kissed Darius and started a whole new life with him in San Francisco.
“Oh, but Adam, you’ve got to believe me, it was the biggest mistake of my life,” I tell him.
Apart from little Phoebe, I can’t help thinking. Apart from little Phoebe who’s not mine, and who belongs to this other, new Jules, whose love for Phoebe I can feel flooding me.
“Yeah, well, everyone knows that,” he half jokes in answer to what I just said about leaving him being a mistake.
But his frown deepens. His thinking face I know so well.
“Theoretically,” he ponders, “for time travel to be possible, you’d need an insanely complicated machine and an enormous amount of energy. ”
“Ha! Adam, my Adam, on my original timeline, in my original universe, he said almost exactly the same thing.”
“Ah, yes, well, no doubt all great Adams think alike,” Adam says, shooting me a bashful little smile.
“Because he didn’t get it either,” I explain. “How the tapes and CDs and the stereo kept sending us back. There. That. The Sony.” I point to the familiar machine that’s now in its own compartment of a sleek new shelving unit but only there to look retro and hip.
“Well, you know plenty of musicians claim it’s love that makes the world go round,” he says, before staring at me curiously, and for a glorious second, I think he’s seeing the real me here inside.
“And who knows? Maybe it does. Not, of course, that any of this, what we’re talking about here, is real. ”
“Love. Yes, Adam, love. Because it has to be, right? And if it is something like love that’s driving all this, then what if it can undo bad things too?
Everything that I…that we’ve done? Because I need to get out of this universe, Adam, to make another one—or somehow remake my own.
And maybe it really is love that will get us back to us. ”
He stares at me. Like I’ve just told him I still love him. Which in a weird, messed-up way, I suppose I have.
“Please, Adam…I’m begging you to help me. I need you to go upstairs and get another one of our old mixtapes or CDs. You know, the ones in that box in the loft?”
“Ah.” Adam grimaces. “Well, I’m afraid that’s going to be a problem. You see, I chucked them all out.”
“What? But…but you can’t have? You never throw anything out.”
“I needed a fresh start. With Meredith. And so I got rid of…well, pretty much everything.”
I feel like the breath has just been sucked out of my body.
“But if there’s no tapes or CDs, then there’s no multiverse machine,” I finally manage to say. “And if there’s no multiverse machine, then…then I can’t get back. To my Adam. To me.”
Adam shrugs in a fatalistic kind of a way. Like maybe that’s just how the universe is.
I feel a well of tears building up. A torrent of tears for Nelly, for Liam, for us and our family. Tears for Adam, who won’t ever take this new Jules back in this new universe. Adam, who new Jules could never go back to anyway, because she has her own new husband and child and life.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help,” Adam tells her, before steering us kindly but firmly toward the shed door.
—
Having picked up Phoebe from riding, a seriously dazed Jules—now back in control—stands at the marble island in the kitchen, absent-mindedly chopping courgettes and onions for the pasta sauce she’s making. Helga, the maid, is on the other side of the room, vacuuming the giant sofa.
Outside, through the glass, Darius chases Phoebe across the green lawn in the sunshine, doing that zooming-airplane thing they both love.
Jules is still pretty shaken up by her encounter with Adam, although she’s blurry about most of the bits where I was fully in charge. She’s not going to tell Darius how upset she is that Meredith is moving into her old home because anything to do with Adam is taboo in this house.
It’ll just be another secret she keeps.
Like how at least half the time, she fakes orgasms, so the sex can be over. Or that sometimes she weeps so much, she can’t stop, because she’s trapped in a marriage where they have no way of talking about the past.
Seeing Adam has brought it all back.
Adam. The Adam she knows she loved in a way she can never love Darius.
Adam, who isn’t hers anymore and never will be.
And that’s just her.
But what about me? What the hell am I supposed to do?
Let go of my sense of self fully this time?
Carry on blending into her memories until we really do become one?
Until there’s nothing left of me…of the me I once was?
Because already I can feel that happening, like this me, the me who doesn’t belong here, is gradually being erased.
But I can’t let that happen. I want my own life back with all its imperfections. I don’t want to be her—this other Jules—with her perfect house and servants to clean up her mess. I just want to be me. In my shabby house, on my own crummy sofa.
Jules jumps as Phoebe presses herself against the glass and pulls a face and Darius does the same. She smiles, looking at them both. She has so much, she reminds herself. A loving husband. A loving daughter.
“Daddy, please,” Phoebe says, as they fall, laughing, in through the gap in the glass doors.
“What do you reckon, Mummy?” Darius is staring at Jules.
“Ice cream,” Phoebe prompts.
“Sure, why not?” Jules says.
“I’ll buy some on my way back from visiting Granny,” Darius promises.
It’s already been decided that it’s too nice a day for Phoebe to have to visit Darius’s mother in the nursing home.
He winks at Phoebe and flips his Ferrari keys over in his hand. “Strawberries and cream H?agen-Dazs coming right up,” he says.
As Phoebe and Jules wave him off, and the electric gate starts to close, I spot a sleek black camper van parking up on the grass verge on the road outside and my heart jolts.
Adam gets out, holding something up that almost sparkles in the sun. Something small and rectangular.
My God. It can’t be. A tape?
I make Jules buzz him in through the gate, then watch him hurrying down the path toward me with one of those removal boxes under his arm, looking up at Darius’s mansion for what must be the first time—in awe.
Then his gaze rests on Phoebe, who stands shyly behind me.
I can’t read his expression. But alongside me, I feel Jules is watching closely too.
Adam has never acknowledged Phoebe’s existence before.
Jules’s nerves scrunch up inside her like a fist.
But all I want to see is what he was waving.
He doesn’t keep me waiting, thank God.
“Hey. So, I found this,” he says, clearly keen to get this over and done with as quickly as possible.
He holds up the solitary tape box. It says Jules Rules!
1989 on the spine in faded blue pen. “I think it’s the second one I ever gave you,” he says.
“One I forgot to throw out. I think me and Doodles used it for a livestream we did on old tech.”
“Oh, Adam.” I step toward him and take it. So relieved.
“And here’s the old Sony too.” He nods down at the box. “Because you can’t time travel without it, right?” he jokes. “Or, you know, because you kept talking about it,” he adds, seeing I’m not smiling. “Well, whatever, we thought it might help.”
We. So he and Meredith have been discussing this. They must think I’m nuts.
“Um, thanks,” I say, taking it from him.
“Well, then. Good luck.”
He stands there awkwardly for a second. Then, quickly, I put the box down on the marble porch and hug him. Tight. For what might be the last time ever.
He looks a little embarrassed but then smiles. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Jules.”
I’m looking for you…
A thought I only just manage to keep to myself.
Breaking away, he gives Phoebe a little wave—just a small one, but enough to make me think that they might not stay strangers forever on this timeline after this—before walking back up the path.
“Who was that man?” Phoebe asks, as the gates close.
“He’s called Adam,” I tell her, still imposing myself on Jules. “An old friend of Mummy and Daddy’s. But now I need you to do something for me, okay? Can you go and choose a movie to watch until Daddy gets back?
Even saying it brings tears springing to my eyes.
“Why?”
“Because I need to do something in the garage.”
Her big brown eyes look at me, confused. “Can I do it too?”
“No, it’s a grown-up thing. It’s really boring.”
In the cinema room, we put on Enchanted—which is still Nelly’s favorite, my Nelly’s, even after all these years.
Phoebe, just like Nelly, gets hooked by that most magical of moments, when Giselle falls through a portal from her kitsch cartoon world into the maddeningly real flesh-and-blood cacophony that is New York.
I’m left with my tummy turning from the giddy nostalgia of it all, remembering how Nelly was when she was Phoebe’s age.
Does she remember that, once upon a time, I used to sit with her too?
How she used to put her thumb in her mouth like Phoebe’s doing now?
How I used to stroke her hair? How I could just gaze and gaze at her for hours?