For all my bookishness, I just loved soccer. Saturday was easily the best day of the week. Mum would bring me home from having played a game; I’d jump in the bath to bring life back into my half-frozen body and to let whole clumps of mud peel away from my legs. Then, warm again, I’d lie on the couch watching the soccer preview on TV at 1pm, daydreaming that it was me slotting home the long-range volley to the rapturous cries of the crowd and the astonished superlatives of the commentators.
One Saturday morning, and I can’t now remember the name of our opponents, the ‘C’ team were in action again. At half time we had been losing six-nil and the only question was whether our opponents would get to double figures or not. It was a typical ‘C’ team game, a mismatch; the other side were much bigger and much more surefooted than us. For most of the second half we chased the ball like a starving pack of dirty mongrels after a rat. If, by chance, one of us did get the ball, the rest would be yelling: ‘pass, pass, give it to me! Pass it!’ All of us, in our daydreams, were stars. To be fair, we were all so starved of the rush that comes with being in possession of the ball that our desire to get the briefest touch of it was understandable.
***
A drizzly grey Saturday morning. The game is being played entirely in our half of the field. No sooner do we kick the ball away than it comes straight back at us. That is, until the moment when Rory hoofs a mighty clearance high in the air, up towards the left wing. There are three people with any chance of getting near the ball as it lands: Deano, who has been living in his own world somewhere in the middle of the field, their defender, and me. I’m left-footed and having been assigned the position of left back had loyally stuck to it, even when I was entirely on my own in that particular muddy patch of the field.
All three of us chase hard and Deano wins. This isn’t too surprising, because he is actually quite athletic and does orienteering for Leinster. What is astonishing, however, is what happens next. The ball is descending fast towards him. Since I’m pretty close, he probably should try to head it, or even better, chest it towards me. But everyone on our side knows what would be the result of that. Deano may be fast but he’s got no co-ordination. The ball is going to bounce off him and fly away in an almost random direction.
As the ball lands, Deano swivels, sticking out his leg with his foot held up, making an L-shaped cup to catch it in. The momentum of the ball is deadened. Perfectly. It rolls to the side, right in front of me, about two yards away. There is an audible gasp of awe from some of our players, although perhaps that is just in my head. I nearly stop running in surprise. Deano sprints off ahead of me, down the left wing. I look up to see the defender hesitate. Should he cover Deano or come for me and the ball? The problem is, none of his teammates are close; they’ve all been caught out, pushing up, looking for their own moment of glory, a goal.
With a look of resolution, the defender bursts into action and charges towards me. I boot the ball past him and it’s not a bad pass in that at least it doesn’t hit the defender or go out of play. Then I tear off towards their goal, while the defender turns to chase the ball and Deano. This is fantastic. We are in the opponent’s half, with a real chance of scoring. All their team are streaming back; our own players are standing still, watching, wondering. Is it possible? Can it be that we have played so sweetly for once that it is us bearing down on their goal?
My legs are driving me on, my breath is ragged. I’ve got to get to the goalmouth. Deano laughs aloud with excitement as he kicks the ball onward and chases it. Their defender can’t keep up with him. So it’s up to their goalkeeper, who starts to come forward. He must have spent the entire game until now trying to keep warm on his own. He is tentative, crouched. Deano kicks the ball again, to the side of the goalkeeper, away from the goal. He’s trying to take it around the keeper, but I wince, it’s too close. They both chase the ball towards the left-hand corner flag and Deano gets there first. He hoofs it across towards me with a cry ‘Liam!’, and then he falls on his back from the twisted shape he had to make to get the ball over to me.
This is the moment: a muddy spinning ball, coming fast, almost, but not quite, going into the goal. It takes one bounce, then another and it’s here. I’m here. I’m in front of an open goal, a yard away. No opponents are anywhere near. The goal beckons. I’ve seen it so often on television: the triumphant moment when the net stretches, receiving the ball. I’ve done it so often myself, when there was no one else watching, whacked the ball into the goal, to listen to the sighing, rushing, sound it makes as it hits and slides down the white cord netting. But never in a real game, never when the hopes of a team who have not scored a goal in eleven matches are resting on me.
I stick out my foot; the ball hits my knee and flies up over the bar. The goal is still empty, the net flaccid.
I’ve missed.
The shame is indescribable. It was far, far harder to miss in this situation than to score. If the ball had hit me in the stomach, the face, anywhere, if it had hit my shin, my foot, I would have scored. But somehow I managed to scoop it up and over the bar. I’ve let everyone down. That goal should have been the culmination of the most beautiful football we had ever played and instead the whole opportunity serves to illustrate more than any scoreline the fact that the ‘C’ team are the school’s donkeys. Losing is expected of us, but for a moment we dreamed of scoring. Look and laugh at the collapse of our hopes. Look at how we had the easiest scoring chance ever to come about in a game of football and we missed it. I honestly didn’t care for my own part, well, only a little. What was really stinging and making hot tears come unwanted to my eyes was the feeling that I had ruined everything. My team were all at the point of leaping about, cheering and celebrating, a pent-up eleven games worth of celebration; I could sense it. Now those feelings were to be driven back, a big heavy lid put on them with a slam.
No, it couldn’t be. There had to be an alternative.
That’s when I first consciously saw them – awareness breaking through the barriers of perception, driven by desperation and shame. There were hundreds, thousands of alternatives. Universes were constantly splitting away from this moment. I picked one nearby and moved into it. It was like holding a balloon in front of your face and squeezing it. I could feel something stretch and I screwed up my eyes, knowing that if it did give way, the rupture would be explosive. There was no sound, but something very serious snapped. Somewhere there was a bang, a meteorite destroying Siberia, the trees all lined up along the ground for hundreds of miles, radiating away from the impact. That’s a metaphor by the way; I’m just saying what it felt like and how even then I knew what I had done would have repercussions.
***
The ball was in the net. I’d tapped it in with no difficulty. My new memory confirmed the simple kick. Just like the first time I’d moved, I felt disorientated, having two memories of the same moment. But the old one, the miss, quickly faded, not that it disappeared. It became rather grey and unreal, like a daydream.
‘Yaaay!’
‘Goal!’
‘Yes!’
‘Get in there!’
‘Goal!’
The shouting, cheering and general happiness was everything I had anticipated. It really did make the difference. Not only did the team play much better after that but our opponents also showed us respect, at least to the extent of keeping defenders back and marking us. I’m sure that every one of the ‘C’ team went home happy that afternoon; it didn’t matter that we had lost 8:1.
‘Mum.’
‘Yes dear?’
‘I scored a goal today.’
‘Did you dear? Well done.’
She was right, the goal wasn’t that important. What really mattered was that I’d learned that the ability which had come to me in the barge accident had not gone away. I’d learned how to move.
3
Steering Towards Trouble
That night I lay in bed, looking at the stars, the dayglo ones I had put up in pretty good approximatio
n of real constellations. When you lose a tooth, but before the new one grows through, you have a place in your mouth that your tongue keeps coming back to, until you get used to it. For a while it is raw and ticklish. Well, my whole body was like that. I was that space and I felt uncomfortable, like the universe was licking me, getting used to me.
There was something more.
The closest you can get to visualising infinity is to put two mirrors together and examine the way that the reflections echo back and forth. It’s not actually possible to see an infinite number of images though, for two reasons. One is that your own eye gets in the way of a perfect alignment. The other is that each time light bounces off the silver behind the glass a few less photons come back. Eventually, even if you had a light as bright as the sun, the images would become sluggish and peter out in darkness. In reality, in your bedroom say, the best you can do is shine a bright light on two mirrors that are not quite opposite, and then you see long corridors of reflection, sinking into the depths.
That is exactly what I felt as I lay in bed. All around me, in every direction, were other universes. The nearest ones were bright and they were very similar to the one I was in. Here, I had left my socks on the floor; there, my duvet was upside-down. I didn’t focus on them all, because I could sense there were millions of them. All around us, all the time, the universe was seething with alternatives. How had I not seen it before? It seemed very natural to me now, to exist in a particular universe whilst being surrounded by all the other ones, millions of echoes.
You remember that when I told my story about the barge accident to Zed, my version was slightly different to his? Well, I realised excitedly, I could now see why. All the universes around me were slightly different. I hadn’t moved from the barge to home that time; I’d moved to a different universe where I’d been too sick to go on the school trip. That other universe had been slightly different to my original one in lots of small ways.
With my eyes closed, I tried to see more clearly into the alternate universes. It was hard work to reach out with my mind for the ones that were further away, but they did exist. I found one in which Mum came up with a glass of water. Since I was thirsty and I wanted to talk to her, I made the effort to go to it. Again, resistance. Trying again, I didn’t have shame or desire to help me and I stopped before I felt the rupture open, but then I got a little angry with myself for being frightened. Was I going to give up on something amazing because of some vague feeling that it was wrong? What was I afraid of? This time I tried I gritted my teeth and pushed hard for the universe I wanted; sweat broke out all over my body, but I felt something tear and I fell through.
‘Liam.’ Mum tapped softly on the door. ‘Are you awake? Would you like a drink?’
‘Yes please, Mum.’
She put it beside the bed.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can you move universes?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Like, can you see lots of alternative universes, all spread out around you? And can you move to the one you want?’
‘No.’ She got up to go, a little distant now. I knew she worried about me, wondered if I spent too much time indoors on my own. But this was important, so I tried again.
‘It’s like you are in a bright light and there are other places beside you, in the shadows, but you can move to them, bringing the light with you. Don’t you get that?’
She put her hand on my head.
‘You are hot, Liam. Drink your water.’
I drank some.
‘No, but, Mum, do you?’
‘No, Liam.’ She was cold, deliberately discouraging me from this kind of chat. She wanted me to be normal, to talk about normal things, whatever they were. I gave up. In a way it was good that she didn’t understand me; the discovery was my own. And I was going to keep it that way. This was my chance to become someone else, someone admired and strong, a hero. I resolved not even to tell Zed any more about it, not until I was ready.
***
Once I had got the hang of moving, I did it all the time. Of course I did. I was nearly sixteen and I had discovered an amazing way of solving all life’s difficulties. That there was a price to pay for this awesome ability should have been obvious to me. After all, I did have a growing sensation that somewhere I’d awoken a beast with an appetite the size of a planet. It crept into my dreams.
There was a recurrent nightmare I had where I was a wolf and I was starving. But no matter how often I killed and ate, I just couldn’t devour enough to keep hunger from driving me on in a frenzy of desperation, even to the point where I ate my own young.
My worries, however, were less important than the fact that I could mess around as never before, because whenever anything went wrong I simply moved to a different universe.
Like when Michael Clarke was in the cupboard.
***
It was a boring Thursday lunchtime. Zed was hunched in the little wooden press underneath the blackboard at the top of the class.
‘Hey, Liam, close the door a sec.’
A moment later his muffled voice came out.
‘It’s really dark in here.’
‘Let’s see.’ Deano came over and took a turn. ‘Yeah. It really is.’
At this point I looked up and caught Michael Clarke’s eye. He was sitting at his desk, doing his homework, like a good boy. He hid his interest in what we were doing with a sneer and looked down quickly, not wanting to draw attention to himself. He was, after all, a little afraid of my friends and certainly of me.
I’d changed a lot since discovering that I could move. In the past, I would have been just like Michael. Now, I was a devil. And the funny thing was that nobody else could see the change, not even my mum, because for them, in this universe, I’d always been a bit of a terror. I liked the fact that my mum no longer worried if I was spending too much time alone on the computer. Instead her main concern was that I was going to get into serious trouble at school. She didn’t know that my cockiness was based on my knowing for certain that whatever I got up it, it would turn out all right.
When I looked back to the cupboard, I winked at my friends, in the hope we could play a trick on Michael.
‘You know, most human beings can’t tolerate being in a dark confined space for very long. It’s called claustrophobia.’ My voice was just loud enough that I was certain Michael could hear me. ‘Zed, I bet you can’t stay in there a minute.’
‘A minute? Sure I can.’ Zed climbed in and we pushed the door shut. After about thirty seconds, he banged it open. ‘Let me out! That’s horrible.’ When it comes to devilment, Zed is really quick on the uptake. I’d learned it all from him.
‘OK, that’s thirty-five seconds for Zed.’ I was pretending to look at my new digital watch. ‘Your turn, Deano.’
By now Deano had got it. He didn’t last much longer.
‘Forty-four seconds,’ I announced and looked around the room. ‘Anyone else?’
I’m sure that Tara appreciated the psychology of the situation, because she looked up from her group of friends, disgusted. But as far as Michael was concerned, here were three of the most admired boys in the class, behaving feebly in the face of a challenge that any idiot could succeed in. He stood up, put his pen cap properly back on his pen – he was the first to have a real ink pen – strode over full of confidence and sat in the cupboard.
‘Time me.’
‘Thirty seconds. Keep going, Michael.’
‘A minute! Go, Michael!’
‘Two minutes.’
At three minutes, Zed couldn’t help letting out a snort of laughter and we heard the faintest of whimpers.
‘Oh no.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
No sooner had he got inside and pulled the door shut than I had silently lowered the latch, so he couldn’t get out. For a while he pleaded with us, but we weren’t even listening. We were at the back of the class designing logos for ‘Inextreme’, the band we intended
to form. Then Michael banged on the door for a few minutes, fast at first, becoming more intermittent as he became disheartened.
Towards the end of lunch break, two teachers came into the classroom, the usual dinner patrol to check everything was all right. We went silent and Michael must have sensed the change in atmosphere, because he started kicking the side of the press.
If you ask everyone in my class what happened next, nobody will remember how it first went, which is that the teachers let him out and he blamed me. Locking Michael in a cupboard was pretty harmless really, but my mum and dad were getting fed up with complaints from school. I didn’t want them to get another. So even as the teachers were about to get involved, I searched out other paths. No one in this universe remembers the version where I got in trouble because I moved, to a universe in which, just as the teachers entered our classroom and the talking stopped, I began drumming with my ruler on the desk. Zed picked up the beat. Deano thumped the covers of a textbook together for the bass. Lots of my other classmates joined in. It was like a samba band. The teachers could tell something was up, from our grinning faces, but they didn’t care enough to investigate and left us to it.
‘Close one,’ muttered Zed.
‘No kidding.’ In more than two-thirds of the possible universes they’d heard the noises from the cupboard and released Michael, who vented his annoyance by getting me into trouble.
Before long, in twos and threes, the rest of our class returned and we were all sitting in proper silence when Miss Nolan came back in from lunch. After she had sat down and opened a textbook, she took a steady look around the class. It wasn’t long before she noticed Michael’s empty desk.
‘Where is Michael Clarke? He was here this morning.’
There was this tense feeling in the room. Most of us knew he was in the cupboard. He must have felt the attention of thirty eyes on the door of his dark prison. But he didn’t make a sound. Strangely, even though it clearly wasn’t his fault as he was locked in from the outside, he was so terrified of getting into trouble with Miss Nolan that he didn’t bang on the door or anything. Presumably he was now hoping to wait it out; that we’d let him out after the class was over.
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