Come Again

by Robert Webb

  Kes said, ‘Very well, then. Mocktails at the Ritz! Who’s coming? Toby?’

  Toby kept his seat on an upturned wooden crate and gave an apologetic shrug. ‘That sounds reassuringly expensive, but I’m staying for the main event.’

  Danielle began tidying paper cups. ‘You really don’t have to stay, Toby darling. Bad enough Kate has to hang around to watch the old fossils being interred by Dame Lip Gloss of ArseTube – you should go and have fun.’

  Toby had drained his Prosecco and gave a complaisant smile. ‘I stand with my shipmates.’

  Kate leaned over and cradled his shoulders from behind, whispering, ‘In that case, Mr Spock, go upstairs and help Betty with the chairs.’

  ‘Surely.’ Toby stood and turned to her, wrapping his arms round her waist. ‘But I think you should know,’ he said, ‘that if you thought I was quoting Spock in The Voyage Home then it was “Captain” Spock by then. Not “Mr” Spock.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Kes announced. ‘It’s a match made in Geek-O-Vision.’

  Kate kissed her spy-geek lover.

  ‘Come, Josh!’ Kes continued. ‘Not five minutes ago we were surrounded by lesbians!’ He put an arm around Danielle, who pursed her lips and reached up to straighten his hat. ‘But now Toby and Kate are violently reasserting the orthodoxy. I am totes triggered by that and we must no-platform ourselves in the direction of—’

  ‘Stop talking shit, babe. Let’s go.’

  ‘Quite right, Joshua. Just trying to keep up.’

  Josh gave an all-purpose goodbye smile to the others and led the way upstairs. Kes followed him, walking backwards and tipping his hat. ‘Since I am literally at the foot of the stairs, I will leave no hostage to l’esprit de l’escalier and merely say: see you soon, you lovely bastards.’

  Toby waited until they were out of earshot and then said, ‘Another six months or thirty years?’

  Kate elbowed him. ‘You’re such a gossipy old lady! But yeah … with them it’s obviously one or the other. I’d say thirty years as long as Kes stays off the sauce and is able to maintain a viable erection.’

  Danielle was leafing innocently through a stock delivery list. ‘A thirty-year erection,’ she said. ‘There you are, Toby. You can’t say you haven’t been told what’s expected.’

  Toby genuinely blushed and murmured, ‘Right, well, I’m not sure there’s much I can add to this conversation so I’ll go and help upstairs.’

  ‘See ya later, boyfriend!’

  Toby gave a courteous nod to Danielle and went upstairs, on the way giving Kate a firm slap on the backside.

  Kate and Danielle exchanged a frowning smile. Danielle returned her eyes to the manifest but said quietly, ‘You two are wonderful.’

  Kate couldn’t help asking: ‘More wonderful than last time?’

  Danielle unfocused her eyes as if looking through the list to the floor. This was the first time Kate had even obliquely referred to Luke since her awful rant all those months ago. She said carefully, ‘Differently wonderful.’

  Kate approached and touched the older woman on the arm, a gesture which immediately turned into a warm hug. Danielle held her tight and then disengaged, keeping her hands on her friend’s shoulders and beaming at her. ‘Look at you,’ she said. After a moment she added, ‘Thank you for looking after this old place.’

  ‘It’s an honour.’

  ‘But you didn’t always want to run a bookshop.’

  ‘No, I wanted to beat up Skeletor. But you didn’t always want to run a bookshop either and you seem to have done a pretty good job.’

  ‘Pretty good! I’ll take that as high praise.’ Danielle dusted a non-existent speck from Kate’s shoulder. ‘I remember you saying that I had ended up in retail by accident and was actually a born teacher. I rather liked that.’

  ‘All booksellers are teachers.’

  ‘HA! Idealism!’ Danielle gleefully broke away and picked up her clipboard. ‘The public will soon beat that out of you.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Just try to love them. It’s not hard – they’re you.’

  ‘What if I don’t especially love me?’

  ‘When it comes to self-respect – fake it till you make it!’

  Kate blinked and looked down at her trainers.

  Danielle sighed. ‘Right. Upstairs for chairs and vol-au-vents. Make sure the delivery checks out, would you?’ She thrust the clipboard at Kate. ‘It’s such a bloody boring part of the job, I can’t believe I didn’t make you do it in the first place.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Ooh, I could get used to that.’ Danielle began trudging up the stairs. ‘Betty! Kate just called me “ma’am”! I strongly suggest you should follow her example.’

  A croaky Canadian voice carried from the shop upstairs. ‘You can dream, honey! You can dream.’

  Kate smiled and glanced at the delivery list. She decided it would be more fun to start with the stock and then tick off the list, imagining it was like opening presents and then making a note of thank-you letters. She took a case-knife and pulled out the nearest cardboard box.

  This was how Kate had decided she would ‘do her bit’. She would try to help people understand each other in the form of lies. When it came to fiction, the contract was complicated but stable. The novelist said: ‘None of this happened, but this is what I think is true.’ And the reader said: ‘Okay, buster – you tell me what you think is true. But I want to believe it did happen, at least for a while. So, y’know … good luck.’ The success of the enterprise varied but author and reader were in good faith. That was the only way it could possibly work – with an agreed innocence.

  She slit the two ends of the box and ran the blade lightly down the centre. The opening cardboard flaps revealed the top layer of books: six copies of –

  Kate dropped the knife and staggered back, bumping into the opposite shelves and causing an avalanche of greetings cards to fall on her head. Stepping gingerly forward, she stared at the covers of the books before warily taking a copy from the box.

  It was a standard hardback with a colourful dustjacket featuring an unidentified young woman – an unknown actress or model in her early twenties. She was looking off at an angle with a distracted expression, a breeze blowing her dark brown hair to the side, partly obscuring her haunted blue eyes. But it wasn’t the image of the girl that made Kate’s heart beat so loud it could be heard from the moon. It was the book’s title and the name of its author.

  The Girl From the Future

  by Dr Luke Fairbright

  She flipped the book over and read the blurb.

  It’s a strange thing to have lived an impossible story …

  In this startling and original memoir, Dr Luke Fairbright tells of his invention of Photon Imaging Therapy and how it was inspired by a mysterious woman he met as a student at an English university.

  I lose my balance at the top of the stairs. She reaches to save me but I’m already falling, falling …

  Fairbright shares for the first time the story of how the unaccountable disappearance of the Girl from the Future led him to a career in medical research in the United States and a revolutionary cancer treatment that would save the lives of millions …

  Kate quickly opened the back cover to reveal the inside of the dust-jacket. Here was a picture of Luke with what appeared to be his family. Luke was in his forties but with all the signs of American middle-class grooming: blue-white teeth illuminating his confident smile; deep tan and fully grey hair in a prosperous bouffant. He had his arm around a neat-looking woman of nearly the same age, the sensible bob of her blonde hair tossed into disarray as she laughed at something apparently hilarious. Between them they wrangled three absurdly photogenic children – two boys and a younger girl – also captured in near-hysterical mirth. It must have been an exhausting photo-shoot. Kate read the caption: ‘Dr Luke relaxing at the ranch with his wife, Anne, and their children – Richard, Rodney, and Katherine.’

  Kate stared at
the photograph.

  Oh my God. You really did find an Anne, didn’t you? Not just a blonde but someone who let you name your kids after your dad, your goldfish and me.

  Kate dropped the book and reached for her phone. She thumbed Luke’s name into Safari and there he was – three preview images and another six links on the first page. She tapped the Wikipedia link.

  Dr Luke Fairbright

  FRS MD PhD

  (born October 20, 1972) is a noted neuro-oncologist. He is chair of the Neuro-Radiation Dept. at

  Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix AZ…

  Kate scrolled down to ‘Early life’:

  Fairbright was born in

  Salisbury, England.

  He is the son of Barbara Jane Fairbright (née Walters; 1946-) and Richard Maddox Fairbright (1943-), a

  General Practitioner

  of medicine in

  Salisbury, England …

  The photographs didn’t leave much room for doubt that this was the same Luke but the details of his background confirmed it beyond question. Kate clicked impatiently on ‘Recent work’:

  In Spring 2020 Fairbright published

  The Girl From the Future,

  a memoir of his early life and an account of the development of his pioneering work in

  Photon Imaging Therapy.

  The book has been critically well-received and entered the

  New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller list

  at number 4. The book is notable for the way Fairbright structures his story around the encounter with, and the sudden disappearance of, a young woman to whom he gives the

  pseudonym

  ‘Jess Larsden’.

  Despite her state of shock, Kate snorted. Jessica Zed was alive and well but Luke couldn’t help making her second name rhyme with the real thing.

  He describes a meeting on the first night of his

  Freshman

  term at the University of York, England, in

  1992.

  Fairbright recounts conversations on that night with Jess Larsden and how she claimed to be not only from the future, but from a future where she was Fairbright’s grieving widow. Her insistence that Fairbright’s brain was harbouring a

  meningioma (see: brain tumour)

  led the two into an altercation resulting in Fairbright falling down a flight of stairs at a student discotheque.

  Kate sighed through the inevitability that one of the most important documents she had ever read had to be written by a stuffed-shirt Wiki-geek with his ‘altercation’ and his ‘discotheque’. She scanned down.

  A subsequent

  MRI

  scan confirmed the existence of the

  tumour.

  Fairbright ascribes his memory of Jess Larsden to a retro-active

  Fugue state,

  caused by the injury to his brain in the staircase fall.

  Kate put her phone away and picked up the book. She sat down on the upturned crate recently vacated by Toby and turned to the beginning.

  Introduction

  It’s a strange thing to have lived an impossible story. But then, I like stories. Believe it or not, I used to want to be a writer. I’d gotten used to the idea by the time I hit college. Looking back, I guess a lot of it was pretty painful stuff – youthful scribblings with a big bag of I.O.U.’s to my teenage “influences”. That’s where I was headed when I signed up for a course in English Literature. I’m from England, by the way. You don’t hear it so much when I do talk shows. Sometimes the host gets me to do my home accent and the audience indulges me. It’s kind of them but I’ll level with you – these days it’s only an impression. Phoenix, Arizona has been my home for twenty-eight years and I’ve been an American citizen for twenty-five. I like the sunshine. You ever been to Salisbury? It’s beautiful but it rains. A lot.

  So I’m going to tell you a story. I’ve been aware while I was at home writing this book, when Anne would bring me a coffee or little Kate would wander in and demand that Daddy tie the bow in her hair, that my story is literally unbelievable. Unless you believe in God, which I’m afraid I don’t. Or unless you understand Quantum Theory, which nobody does.

  Reader, you might know the easier parts – the stuff that is public knowledge already. I worked for a long time with colleagues at Barrow to develop a new treatment for cancer. The best way I can describe it is that it’s a way of getting photons to … take a photograph. But an active one. You know that old idea that we have about Native Americans? That they used to believe that taking someone’s picture removed a part of their soul? Well, Photon Imaging Therapy is kind of like that but benign. In recording the image, the image is changed. Specifically, a cancerous tumor, say, is exposed to light in places the tumor doesn’t want to get lit. And that causes problems for the tumor. Big problems. Since the technique started rolling out in 2012 there are varying estimates about its impact on the treatment of brain malignancies and its potential for other parts of human anatomy. But allow me to be an Englishman again for a second and pick the most modest assessment (I’m not really modest! I’m crazy about what we’ve achieved!). The 2019 UN Report on Global Medical Advances estimated that P.I.T. had saved at least three million lives. And there’s so much farther to go …

  Kate paused. The account of the science was all very well but the re-existence of Luke was another matter entirely. Her gifted but essentially primate brain was doing its best to keep up with the 4D possibilities. She was suddenly irritated that she’d never taken an interest in quantum physics and privately blamed 1990s playwrights for constantly going on about it and putting her off.

  But okay. Here was a parallel Luke – making at least two Lukes in total. There was the one she met the first time and loved and married. He died. Fine. Not fine, but – there it was. She was taking care of that.

  But now there was another Luke who was around because her involuntary freak-ride to 1992 had caused a split. Nobody else remembered this – her second appearance in 1992 – not Toby, not Kes, not Amy, or for that matter the rest of the world. As far as they were concerned, she might as well have dreamt the whole thing. She had begun to believe it too – it was easier that way.

  But Luke had remembered. This Luke remembered his encounter with her so well it had changed his life. And he in turn had changed the lives of many, many others. From his point of view, she was the dream. Kate read on: American Luke had a folksy charm but he was taking his time – she skimmed to the end of the introduction.

  … This, ultimately, is the harder part – the part you’d be crazy to believe. I know one or two things about the way a human brain works and I have colleagues who know a whole lot more. The best any of us can come up with is that the person I call Jess was a figment of my imagination. After my accident, falling down a bunch of stairs, Jess was a necessary invention that my recovering mind improvised in order to stay on the right side of sanity. What she knew about me was so impossibly accurate that my head did a somersault and the only way I could explain her was to invent her. It sounds a little out there but just about possible, right?

  Well, I don’t believe it. I know she was real. I know I met a time-traveler. But that’s not the kind of thing you say out loud when you’ve just moved to a new country. It’s not what you say when you’re applying to medical school and it’s definitely not what you say when you’re trying to get tenure as a scientific research fellow.

  But now? Sure, let’s go. Let me tell you. Some people will call me a crank. At this point, that’s fine by me – one way or another, I think I’ve earned it.

  Let’s believe in the Girl from the Future. I don’t mind if it didn’t really happen – it sure happened to me. Jess came back to save me and the consequences were real. You’ve heard wilder stories, I’ll bet. The fact that this was real for me is almost incidental. It’s what we believe about each other that counts.

  We are social creatures, we humans. We live in each other’s imaginations. We
save each other.

  Kate scrabbled back to the beginning: ‘… had saved at least three million lives …’

  She tried to sit back on her chair but realised just in time that she wasn’t sitting on a chair. She splayed her legs and flailed her arms, keeping her seat on the box. The slapstick movement made her snort out a laugh as she recovered herself and then slowly closed the book.

  Luke had changed her name and he hadn’t come looking for her. ‘Kate Marsden’ wasn’t exactly exotic but he could have found her by now if he was really looking. She smiled as she thought of him on his ranch with his three kids and his Anne.

  Quite right, Lukey. Why would you look? When your present has meaning, there’s no value in buggering around in the past.

  Kate’s friends knew no more about cutting-edge medical advances than she did. But the new-found celebrity of Dr Luke Fairbright was about to change that. Toby, for example. The second love of her life was about to notice that his girlfriend’s dead husband had just published a bestseller.

  Life, then … let it come.

  Kate sat and listened to the mumble of conversation and laughter drifting down to her from another room. She looked around the walls of the basement, amazed by gratefulness.

  Tenderly, she replaced the book in its box and rose.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks go to my wise and patient editor Francis Bickmore as well as the luminous Jamie Byng and the whole lovely team at Canongate, including superstars Anna Frame, Jenny Fry, Megan Reid and Neal Price.

  Thanks to my literary agent, Ivan Mulcahy for his continuing guidance and friendship. I am also indebted to others among Ivan’s excellent team – Sallyanne Sweeney and Samar Hamman.

  Thanks in advance to my theatrical, TV and everything else agent of twenty-three years, Michele Milburn for all the help she is about to give with co-ordinating the book’s extra-curricular activities. Also for her forbearance in carving out enough time for me to get it written. And let us not forget the general splendour of Tara Lynch and everyone else at MMB Creative.