“Are you alright?” I have to look away, hiding the lump in my throat and the pulse beating wildly under my skin. There’s something in her tone that makes me think that she’s not asking about my ankle. “Think you can walk?”
I nod, embarrassed, and she holds her hand out to pull me up. Our feet slide together on the ice, and she clings to my coat for support. Our breaths merge together in the cold air, cloudy trails spiraling up and away.
Once we’re steady again, we pick our way across the frozen ground, treading carefully. When we get there, there’s no-one else in the lecture theatre, not even the lecturer. We settle into the benches together, coats laid out to dry behind us.
“Guess we’re just too keen,” I mutter, embarrassed. She laughs, and leans back against the hard wooden seat, stretching her legs out into the aisle. “Dunno why we bothered today.”
“This is my favourite lecture,” she says. “It’d take a lot more than snow to put me off.”
“Really?” It’s hard to believe: clinical biochemistry is no-one’s favourite subject. “Why?”
She blushes, and stares into the middle distance, clearly weighing her words carefully.
“Because,” she starts, “it’s the one I share with you.”
I pull her in, and kiss her. And immediately wonder why we haven’t been doing this all along, because if there’s anything in the world better than kissing Kate, I don’t know what it is. As we pull apart I press my fingers to my lips, trying to recover some of my bravado. Her hands are still fisted in the material of my jumper, and she looks as flustered as I feel.
•
9 years, 3 months and 29 days
“Trafalgar Square? Really?” Kate sits up in bed, and her movement forces me up too. The duvet slips down across her bare shoulders, and I follow its path lightly with my fingertips.
“What’s wrong with waiting to zero in Trafalgar square?” I’m crosser than my tone indicates, not wanting to be mocked.
“Nothing, babe. Nothing.” She pushes wisps of hair from my face. “It’s just—isn’t it a bit clichéd?”
“Well, perhaps I’ll be there,” she says, “right in front of you as you zero.”
“I don’t think it works like that. I’ve already met you.”
“I know, Immy.” She pulls me back, bringing my head down to rest on her shoulder, rubbing her nails in circles across my scalp. “But perhaps, if you want it, you can change your fate.”
•
8 years, 1 month and 15 days
“Did you hear,” Kate says one day, quite out of the blue, “about that woman whose clock stopped the day she gave birth?”
I lean on my spade, stopping for a moment to admire my work. The rose—a belated birthday gift from Kate—sits firmly in the earth against the fence under the shade of the apple tree.
“Well? Did you?”
I heard. Clocks are less newsworthy, these days. They’re a bit old hat, really, and only make the front pages when something weird happens, or something goes wrong. Like the woman and the baby, or other, less happy, stories. There was one, a few months back, where a man found his clock mysteriously frozen, stuck at 18 months. He’d tapped it, and shaken it, even wondered if a battery had gone. It wasn’t a faulty battery, the clock manufacturer said, but a car crash a thousand miles away.
I keep my own clock hidden under wide watch straps and chunky bracelets and try to ignore the constant countdown.
•
7 years, 2 months and 2 days
The hospital corridor is cold, the chair they give me hard and uncomfortable. I shift, rolling my shoulders, feeling as the bones click together in my neck.
The clock on my wrist keeps ticking, but I love my daughter anyway.
•
4 years, 2 months and 2 days
“I can’t do this anymore,” Kate says. Her voice is quite low, calm and collected. Her face, too, is expressionless as she watches Ellie pull the wrapping off her presents.
“What?”
“Mummy, look!” Ellie efficiently cuts us off, waving a new doll excitedly. I force a smile for my daughter, pulling her up onto my lap and burying my face in her hair.
The afternoon passes quickly, as they always do, and before I have a chance to stop and think I find myself ready for bed. I sit perched on the edge, staring down at my feet as Kate rustles behind me, getting ready to sleep.
“Have you met someone else?” The words are large in my throat, sticking to the roof of my mouth. I don’t turn around, but I hear her shake her head.
“No, but you will.” There’s little arguing with the logic. My watch covers the clock, but it doesn’t remove the fact that I’m still counting down. I peel off the strap, watching the numbers tick over. There’s still more than four years to go. “Ellie and I need someone who’s not going to run off and leave us.”
“I won’t,” I say, “soulmates aren’t always a romantic thing. You said yourself, about the woman and her baby.”
“But I know you, remember. Trafalgar Square, Imogen, is not a platonic gesture.”
It’s the kind of answer that isn’t really an answer, and it’s the only answer I’m likely to get.
The lights go out with a click, sending us into darkness. As I slide under the cold covers, I feel her warmth come creeping towards me through the mattress. She’s close enough to touch, close enough to roll over and hold, to bury my face in her hair as I have done almost every evening for six years.
My hands stay by my side, the gap between us unbreached.
•
2 months and 2 days
“Happy birthday, miss mouse,” I say. The garden is decked with bunting and balloons, full of Ellie’s excited school friends. The plants, now, are well established; my rose twines right up through the apple tree, too fixed in place to ever move.
My daughter squints up at me, creasing her eyes against the sunlight.
“I’m not a mouse,” she says.
“No? Then who are you?”
“I’m Ellie, of course.” Then she’s gone, running down the lawn to the knot of children, poking at a bucket of water and flower petals with a stick. I stand and watch them from the patio for a while, until a shadow moves down the kitchen steps behind me.
“Glad you could make it,” Kate says. “Nice to have some adult company for a change.” I can hear the smile in her words, even if I can’t see it.
“Where’s Alice?” I can’t quite keep the bitterness from my voice, and I hate myself for it. Kate comes to stand beside me, shoulders almost touching. She shakes her head, hand rubbing self-consciously at her wrist, scratching through her sleeve.
“Right now? I don’t know,” she says. “Could be anywhere at all.” She seems to catch herself, glancing down at her hands, stopping the scratching and crossing them in front of herself defensively.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“No you’re not, Immy.” She’s right. I nod, not speaking. I don’t trust my voice to stay calm and steady, and I really don’t want to cause a scene. Not in front of Ellie, not in front of her friends and their parents. My hand’s reaching for the garden gate, resting on the latch, ready to leave.
“You must be almost zeroed these days.” Her words check my footsteps, but I don’t turn round. I stop, inches from the stained wood.
“That’s really none of your business anymore, is it?” Then the gate is open, and I’m out on the gravel driveway, crunching towards my car. Her words are faint, and I have to strain to hear them.
“Good luck.”
•
4 hours
“You’re really not going to go?” Jen’s voice down the phone line is tinny.
“No, I’m really not.”
“But you’ve had this planned, the whole time I’ve known you.” I shrug, even though she can’t see me.
“I’m done with dreaming, Jen. And I’m done with the clock.” I swallow, and close my eyes. “It cost me you. It cost me Julia, and…Kate.” My thro
at closes around my words, and Jen is silent until I can breathe again. “I want to decide for myself, this time.”
I put the phone down on the desk. The computer’s gone to the screensaver and I watch the photos of Ellie flicker past. I try to imagine, without the years of romanticized planning, how my zeroing will go. I list every person in the building. I suppose there might be visitors, corporate guests, but sat in my office I’m hardly likely to meet them.
What would happen, I wonder, if I locked myself in? If, when my numbers finally stilled, I was sat alone, staring at the computer screen. Would that mean the internet was my soulmate, or just that I’d missed my opportunity?
I remember Kate’s words, from half a lifetime ago. Perhaps, if you really want, you can change your fate.
I stand up, pulling my coat from the hook on the back of the door. I call for a taxi as I rush down the stairs, two at a time, and stand fidgeting in the High Street until it comes.
“Where to, love?” says the cabbie.
In movies or books they’d have something clever to say, something pre-prepared and romantic.
“The station, please. And I’m late.”
The cab accelerates away, and I’m still not sure it’s the right thing to do.
•
10 minutes
The escalators are full at Charing Cross, and so I take the stairs, dodging the crowds that pour in the opposite direction. It’s hot on the platform, close and stifling. The collar of my work shirt sticks close to my neck, and I have to peel the material away from my skin.
I’m starting to feel a little nervous. No-one wants to meet their soulmate pressed sweatily between strangers on the underground.
I check my wrist. I’ve got time. The pillar by the ticket machines is mirrored, and I stand in front of it, ignoring the press of people moving around me. I push the hair back from my face, straighten out the creases in my shirt front, make sure my necklace is the right way round. As I raise my hands to my neck, the ring on my finger flashes gold. I consider taking it off. After all, I’m no longer technically supposed to be wearing it.
It’s tight around my finger, unmoving. I pull uselessly for a moment, then give up. My soulmate, I think, will understand.
•
3 minutes
The sky is as blue as I ever dreamed it could be, the air as warm. In all my imaginings, I couldn’t have wished for a more perfect day than I’ve been given.
The square is heaving with tourists, all kitted with cameras. As I cross the road, hurrying between taxis, I scan the faces of the crowd. I look for anyone checking their wrist, or scanning for my face in return.
•
1 minute
There’s boot covered feet in front of my face. Legs lead up and away, and I turn my head to trace their lines. Over a slim waist, a tattersall shirt, and up into a face I already know. Her shape is outlined in the sunlight, her hair a halo around her head. My heart flutters tightly in my chest, and I remember this feeling.
“I couldn’t not be here,” Kate says, “not when….”
She holds out her hand to pull me up, and I clasp her wrist, her pulse beating slow and strong under my hand. Against her skin a newly-fitted clock counts down the seconds, in perfect time with my own.
Zero.
•
The
Other Bridge
Alex Jeffers
Somebody told me about the other bridge. I don’t remember who. It was a party, one of the parties my new friends insisted I attend although they invariably abandoned me without troubling themselves to present me to the host, a count or baron of the ancien régime. Everybody smoked, which I had not since university in a different country. Hired waiters in antique livery bore trays of glistening flutes filled with bitter sparkling wine from the count’s vineyards in the hinterland. In every other chamber stood a buffet of lavish abundance, either so beautiful nobody cared to spoil the arrangement or already wrecked so that the food appeared to be rotting. In one salon a string quartet could not be heard over the grumble of conversation and disputation. In the grand ballroom, where dark oil portraits of the count’s ancestors glowered from walls festooned with plaster cornucopias spilling plaster fruit, a deejay programmed hit after hit but nobody danced.
I do remember. It does me no credit to feign otherwise. Likewise it would do me no credit to record her name. She was a minor aristocrat, her rank indecipherable to the foreigner, not landed or landed only meagerly although her ancient jewels were very fine. In daylight hours she pretended to the civil service, a desk job that afforded her handsome clothes, the latest fashionable devices, the drugs her coterie preferred. And gifts, pretty tokens, flowers, chocolates, for the naïve exotic from the far side of the world.
Myself.
She offered me one of the glasses she had appropriated from a passing waiter, trailing her fingers across my hand as I accepted it. “Tell me,” she said, “tell me again—no, it’s noisy here—come!”
Across the ballroom I followed the artificial but very beautiful flame color of her hair, through an open door, onto a balcony. The smell of the Sja came up, choking—but not, I reflected, as sickening as Father Bodo’s where he flows through the center of my city. “I didn’t realize Count ______’s house was right on top of the river,” I murmured.
She glanced back. Raised eyebrows above her pale, pale eyes told me the count’s name was exceedingly venerable. The surprise would be if his house stood in one of the pleasant, airy, healthful parvenu quarters. They are slaves to tradition, the Sjolussenes, even now.
Disposing herself decoratively against a column of fluted marble to which clung flowering vines not fragrant enough to dispel the river’s odors, she drew a cigarette from her bag, lit it at the candlestick burning on the balustrade, and beckoned.
“I wish to hear again about your…chowas?”
“The chueie?” I made a false little laugh as I approached, not as closely as she desired. “Not mine.”
“Of course. But your country’s. Chueie? Am I saying it right?”
I was not so naïve as she—as her friends and my friends—believed. Exotic? It was half a century since people of her class had any cause besides curiosity to suffer the inconvenience of a sea or air voyage to my homeland. She was not an overly curious woman. Still, immigrants from former dominions outre-mer were scarcely uncommon in this capital of squandered empire. I had no doubt at all she daily purchased trifles and staples from vendors who resembled me as much as she resembled any of her tall, ungainly fellow citizens of the no-longer-new republic.
But the shopkeepers she patronized were common, she might tactlessly protest…if it were an argument ever conducted except in my own head. Whereas I (the image in my mind’s eye of this deliberately useless woman fluttered prettily), I, she was quite sure, outranked her.
It was possibly true. It had suited Sjolussa’s purposes very well not to dismantle the native hierarchies of annexed realms: my titles, such as they were, and my ancestry were legendary where my erstwhile lover’s were merely historical and now, by republican statute, merely decorative. When the sad, imbecile last Empress of Sjolussa, Katothtet, the Nearer Isles, and Outre-Mer was deposed and the new government renounced her dominions overseas, the apparati of state continued running like balky clockwork in Dothe, in Piq, in U, in my Aveng, in all the others. Suitable candidates of the ancient dynasties had always been ready to dispossess the Sjolussene vicereines. My family stood not within four steps of the Jade Stool in Defre, else I should be at grave risk of betrothal, but within five.
“I am quite certain,” I said, “I told you the chueie were a foolish legend, a tale to frighten stupid girls.”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Tell me. Were you frightened?”
“Of course! More frightened than many girls, I suppose.”
Enthralled, she sucked at her cigarette and breathed out smoke scented with Avengi spices, flicked a coal over the rail. I pretended to imagine I heard its hiss when it struck
the Sja’s swift waters, and sipped from my glass.
“Tell me.”
I had told her of the chueie on that first occasion to signal I was not averse to her subtle courtship. Sjolussenes regard desire differently than my nation. The story had continued from the entertainment where we met to her small, not exquisite apartment, into her bed. I had tired of her perfectly adequate lovemaking almost the moment it commenced. Already, although I found her beautiful, I realized she was relentlessly unfascinating. That was six months before, early in my residence in Sjolussa. Until this night she had appeared content with being my first seducer in her city, unjealous of the more interesting women whose affections succeeded hers, undesirous of repeating the feat. Her occasional gifts were mere trifles.
“When Defre-ua-Bodo was still a very small place, capital of nothing,” I commenced, “long before your people came to us, before we were properly a people, there was a small lake that had no name. Now it does: Kittan-e-Chuei. Now it lies within the royal precinct, but then deep in the forbidding forest, half a day’s walk from Mother Flame’s first shrine. Nobody had cause to visit it. Its waters were stagnant, unwholesome—Father Bodo provided all the water anybody needed, fresh and clean in his hurry from the mountains to the sea.
“There was a girl recently become a woman. She was meant to marry a boy, a playmate of her childhood. His family owned a bull buffalo and two cows, a year’s surplus of rice in their granary—oh, it was an advantageous match, and his mothers and fathers were kind, generous, fond of her. But the girl—shall we call her Naï?—Naï had listened too well to the wrong parts of old stories and never looked around herself at real people: she believed the fairy tale that marriage was the reward for passion.
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