My head hurts as I try to make sense of this impossibility. That’s why the shadows are lengthening. This light isn’t coming from straight overhead, but hitting things almost sideways, casting long shadows in every direction. The white tiles covering the floor are shrouded in darkness now and I’m almost afraid to step on them in case this is something to do with the emptiness outside.
But I’ve got to find out what’s happening here.
Climbing down off the toilet, I grab hold of the edge of the basin, clinging on to it to keep myself upright as the bathroom seems to spin like a fairground ride. I can see my reflection in the mirror, wide-open eyes staring in fear as strange shadows fall across my face. A wave of nausea rises up inside me and it’s all I can do to stop myself from throwing up in the sink.
Then I watch as my hair slowly lifts from my head, fanning out to create a blonde halo that frames the look of terror on my face. When Mum and Dad took me to the Museum of Science and Industry they had this thing called a Van de Graaf generator. It was like a silver globe that you could hold and, when you did, the static electricity it generated made your hair stand up on end. Lily couldn’t stop laughing at me as my blonde shock of hair stuck up in every direction like the worst haircut ever.
But I’m not laughing now. Reaching up, I try to brush my hair back down, but it just keeps springing up again. It feels like someone’s tugging at the end of each strand, the sensation getting more painful with every second that passes. Then I hear a rattling noise.
Looking down, I see the chipped mug standing on the corner of the basin, our colour-coded toothbrushes rattling around inside it. Then I watch astounded as my yellow toothbrush rises into the air, closely followed by the others. Dad’s blue toothbrush rotates as it rises, its spin sending a spray of minty-fresh droplets on to my face.
I rub my eyes, still clinging to the basin with one hand as I lift my head to see the objects that are orbiting the room. Above the bath, the shower head is rising like a snake charmed from its basket, showering me with spray again as it twists towards the ceiling. The towels are being dragged upwards too, their primary colours now changing shade as the light seems to stretch around them. Shower gel, shampoo bottles, toilet rolls and pots of moisturising cream – everything is spiralling in ever decreasing circles towards the same point, a pinprick of dark in the centre of the light.
At the supermarket when I was little, Mum always used to let me put her spare change in the money spinner. This was a charity collection box that was shaped like a giant lollipop. I used to lay each coin flat in exactly the right spot on the clear Perspex dome, then let go and watch as the five-pence piece swirled round and round the curved track, its circles getting smaller with every orbit, before it finally fell through the central hole into the coin container.
My insides twist as I feel this same falling sensation. I grab hold of the basin with both hands again, trying to resist with every ounce of strength I’ve got left.
That’s what must be happening here. This isn’t some invisible force pulling everything to the ceiling, but space itself being curved. That’s why the Earth orbits the Sun – it’s just falling in a curving path around the dent in space that’s caused by the Sun. This is Einstein’s theory of gravity. The bigger the object, the bigger the dent and the more space is curved. And gravity doesn’t just change the shape of space, but the pace of time as well. That’s because Einstein worked out that space and time aren’t separate things, but a single thing – space-time. The clock on the wall isn’t running slow – it’s gravity that’s causing time to dilate.
I feel my feet lift from the floor. Looking up, I can see everything stretching around a central sphere of darkness, the light beams looping back in a sudden flare of brightness. I can barely hold on any more.
Only something super-massive could cause space-time to warp like this.
There’s something huge above my head.
But there’s only one room up there.
Lily’s bedroom.
As my fingers start to slip, my mind races to make the connection. Einstein thought that if you could bend space-time enough, you could bring two separate locations together – like folding a piece of paper in half to join the top and the bottom. This creates a wormhole – a tunnel – and Einstein said if you could travel through this wormhole, you could take a shortcut across the universe. Or maybe even take a trip to another universe completely.
The dark sphere hangs suspended, a frozen point in space and time as chaos swirls around it.
I don’t know if this is a way out of this nightmare or a one-way trip to oblivion. I remember that infinite blackness devouring everything in its path and then hear the echo of Lily’s voice whispering in my ear. I’m so sorry.
I can’t wait for Lily to put things right. I’ve got to do this on my own.
Feeling gravity’s pull, I lift my head high.
And then I let go.
10
Swinging into the kitchen, I see Mum bent over a mountain of sandwiches that are piled high on the kitchen table.
“Lily, I need you to get me some paper plates from the shop,” she begins, trying to balance the last cheese-and-ham triangle on top of sandwich mountain. With this in place, she looks up to see me standing in front of the table. “Oh, Maisie, it’s you. Where’s your sister?”
“She’s just getting ready,” I say, remembering my promise to Lily.
There’s a smudge of cream near the corner of Mum’s mouth, the freshly baked smell of cake making my own mouth water.
“You’ve got something on your face,” I tell her, lifting my hand to the corner of my mouth to show Mum where this is.
With a guilty expression, Mum reaches up to wipe her cheek.
“The other side,” I say.
Finding the right place, Mum dabs the cream with her fingers and then licks the evidence away.
“Making all this party food is hungry work,” she says with a grin. “Do you think we’ve got enough?”
I look at the jam-packed plates and bowls laid out like the Himalayas across the table. There are chicken drumsticks and mini-quiches, slices of pizza and sausage rolls, hotdogs, burgers, sandwiches of every description, bowls of crisps, and cubes of cheese and pineapple speared on cocktail sticks. And that’s just the savoury stuff. On the side I can see cupcakes, meringues, chocolate éclairs and fruit kebabs.
“Just a bit,” I reply with a grin, the excited smile on my face matching Mum’s own.
I sneak a crisp out of the nearest bowl.
“But I need more paper plates,” Mum says as I start crunching. “Just to make sure we’ve got enough for everyone. That’s why I want Lily to pop out to the shops.”
Leaning towards the door, she shouts up the stairs.
“Lily!”
Quickly swallowing my crisp, I interrupt Mum before she calls out again.
“Let me go and get them.”
At this suggestion, Mum’s face creases into a frown.
“Don’t be silly, Maisie – it’s your birthday. You can’t be running round getting things ready for your own party. Lily can get them for me.”
It might be my birthday, but that’s not the reason Mum doesn’t want me to go to the shops. She never lets me go to the shops. Not on my own anyway. The convenience store is only over the railway bridge, halfway down the parade, but Mum says it’s too far for me to go there on my own. I thought things would be different now that I’m ten.
“But I want to go,” I say, putting on my best “it’s my birthday” face.
Mum still looks doubtful. She glances over her shoulder towards the patio doors. Through the window I can see Dad pegging out the guy ropes, the gazebo now standing upright in the centre of the lawn. Too busy at the moment to give Mum the back-up I know she’s waiting for.
“I’m not sure, Maisie,” she finally replies. “I think it’s better if Lily goes. You see, I want you to help me choose what party games you want to play.”
I’
ve got three A levels and ten GCSEs. I’m studying for a degree in Mathematics and Physics at the Open University. I wish Mum would stop treating me like a baby.
“I don’t want to play any party games,” I snap. “I want you to let me go to the shops on my own. I’m ten years old.”
I nearly shout this last bit out and Mum looks really shocked. She’s used to Lily blowing her top, but I almost never lose my temper. I just need her to know how important this is to me.
“Please, Mum.”
A frown still creases Mum’s forehead, but as she looks at me I see the worry lines around her eyes start to soften and, for a second, I think that she’s going to say yes. But then Lily walks through the door and ruins everything.
“What’s up?” she asks.
Lily looks completely different to how I left her in the bathroom. Dad’s long-sleeved T-shirt is long gone and instead she’s wearing a tie-dye vest and denim shorts. The dark shadows beneath Lily’s eyes are now disguised with a layer of concealer and her pale skin shines like starlight, but I can just glimpse the plaster sticking to the underside of her wrist.
The frown on Mum’s face disappears at Lily’s appearance.
“There you are,” she says, dusting her hands on the front of her apron and then reaching for her purse on the side. “I need you to pick up some paper plates from the shop.”
I start to protest, but Mum quickly presses the twenty-pound note she’s pulled from her purse into my hand.
“And we need some more drinks too. Coke, lemonade, orange juice – you choose. It’ll take the two of you to carry it all.”
I’m about to carry on arguing, but Lily just plucks the twenty-pound note out of my hand.
“Come on, Maisie,” she says, giving me a pointed look. “It’ll be fun. We can chat about stuff on the way.”
11
My mind reels as I spin towards the dark sphere, the size of it growing larger and larger until it almost fills my vision. Everything is spiralling around this black hole in a kaleidoscope of colours, the shapes of things stretched and distorted as they curve around the void. Ahead of me, I see Dad’s toothbrush stretched impossibly thin, its colour shifting from blue to red as it seems to freeze on the edge of the darkness.
I can feel myself being stretched in the same way, the immense gravity pulling at every atom of my being. It’s like I’m being torn apart. All I can see is the darkness now; everything else a distant blur of distortion at the very edge of my vision.
Things are speeding up.
The dark globe surrounds me now. It’s as though I’m inside and outside of it at the same time, the confusion inside my brain stretched to breaking point as I slip over the edge. I’m falling into infinity and I don’t know if I’ll ever stop.
And then in the darkness I see a dome of light squeezed into a narrowing point. I’m hurtling towards it and now this blinding light is all I can see. I’m going to hit—
I close my eyes, waiting for an impact that never comes and then I open them again to find that everything has changed.
I’m standing on the stairs that lead to Lily’s room.
There’s no dark globe. There’s no point of blinding light. The crushing force I felt pulling me apart is gone.
There’s just the stairs that lead to my sister’s bedroom. And I’m halfway up.
Einstein’s theory of gravity explains the movement of every star and planet in the sky and predicts how wormholes could connect two points in space-time. A bridge across the universe or a shortcut from the bathroom to the stairs. That’s the only way I can explain how I’m standing here.
I start to bound up the stairs, desperate to see if Lily’s in her room, but as I look up I realise that this nightmare isn’t over yet.
At the top of the stairs I can’t see the door to Lily’s bedroom. In fact, I can’t even see the top of the stairs, just an endless sequence of steps stretching on forever.
I freeze, swaying in confusion as a wave of nausea rises up inside me again. Glancing back over my shoulder, I see the same picture in reverse, the steps leading down in a never-ending staircase.
I turn back, fear thumping in my chest as I try to make sense of it all. I start to climb, thinking that this must be some kind of optical illusion – like that picture of an impossible staircase that I saw when Mrs Bradbury took me to the art gallery.
Most of the time, Mrs Bradbury taught me at home. We’d sit at the kitchen table with a textbook open between us as we talked about life, the universe and everything. But sometimes Mrs Bradbury took me on field trips too.
There was this exhibition on at the local gallery by an artist called M. C. Escher and Mrs Bradbury reckoned it would help me with my geometry.
“Escher said he was a ‘reality enthusiast’,” Mrs Bradbury explained as we walked around the gallery. “His art speaks in the language of mathematics and science to show us a picture of the universe.”
I think about the pictures we’ve seen so far – lizards crawling out of jigsaw puzzles, strange patterns of birds and fish, a single eye staring out towards us with a reflection of a skull inside.
“He had a pretty weird view of reality.”
Mrs Bradbury laughed.
“Well, the universe is a pretty weird place,” she agreed.
There was a group of schoolchildren standing around the next picture, so we had to wait for them to move on before we could see it. They looked about Lily’s age, all wearing the same maroon school uniforms, although some of the girls seemed to have found ways of accessorising these to make them look cooler. As their teacher finished talking about the picture and led them on to the next one, calling out to a couple of girls at the back to stop chatting and keep up, I couldn’t help feeling jealous of them. I mean, I love learning stuff with Mrs Bradbury, but sometimes I think being “academically gifted” means I’ve missed out on the chance to have friends.
“What do you think of this one then?” Mrs Bradbury asked as we stood in front of the picture.
It was a black-and-white drawing of an old-fashioned building, the picture showing a bird’s-eye view. My eye was immediately drawn to the central staircase at the top of the building, its steps arranged in the shape of a square. A group of creepy-looking men, all dressed in hoods, were walking up and down passing each other on the stairs. But as I stared at this scene, my brain started to rebel as I tried to work out what was wrong.
“Where does the staircase go?” I asked. “They’re walking up and down at the same time.”
Mrs Bradbury smiled.
“Well done, Maisie. The title of this picture is Ascending and Descending, but most people call it the impossible staircase.”
Stepping forward, her finger hovered above the surface of the picture, tracing the path of the hooded figures as they climbed the stairs. Each turn seemed to take them higher or lower depending on the direction they were facing, but as Mrs Bradbury’s finger finished tracing the fourth side of the staircase it arrived again at the point where she’d started from.
“The staircase is never-ending,” she explained. “Nobody will ever reach the top. It’s an optical illusion, but Escher based this picture on a shape that was created by a mathematician and a scientist. It’s an impossible object – something that can’t exist in the three-dimensional world in which we live, but geometry allows us to create shapes in four or more dimensions. We have to use equations to describe these shapes because we can’t draw them on paper or model them out of plasticine. But according to maths they’re as real as a triangle or a cube.”
Mrs Bradbury’s words echo in my head as my feet pound up the stairs. Real… Impossible… Neverending… I keep climbing, straining my eyes for a glimpse of the top of the stairs, but it never comes.
Panicking, I double-back on myself, desperate to find a way out. My feet thunder down the steps, the same sound I hear every morning when Lily gets out of bed and comes downstairs. But instead of arriving at the landing after a dozen or so steps, the stairs j
ust carry on, step after step after step. I can’t stand it.
I remember how, when the kitchen seemed to be expanding around me, all I had to do to escape was close my eyes and turn the door handle. Maybe that’s what I’ve got to do now. If what my eyes are showing me is impossible, then I need to trust my other senses to find a way out.
My hand is shaking as I grab hold of the stair-rail. Closing my eyes, I start to climb again, slower this time, counting every step as I go. One, two, three, four… If I’m right, I just need to focus on what must be real, the worn fibres of the carpet under my bare feet, the polished stair-rail sliding beneath my hand as I climb. Eight, nine, ten, eleven… Only a few more steps until I make it to Lily’s room.
I remember her voice echoing on the other end of the line. “I’m so sorry. I’m going to put things ri—” Lily’s words were cut off mid-sentence, but if I can make it to the top then maybe I can find Lily and she can keep her promise to me.
But the steps keep on coming. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen… My footsteps start to falter, the sound of my heart thumping loudly in my chest as I realise what this means. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one…
I can’t wait any longer.
I open my eyes and my heart breaks in two.
All I can see is an endless sequence of steps rising up ahead of me. The stairs go on forever.
Letting go of the stair-rail, I sink to my knees. I can’t stop myself from sobbing as a fresh wave of despair overwhelms me.
This is my house. These are the stairs to Lily’s room. But I’m never going to get there.
I feel like giving up and rushing down the stairs to surrender to the emptiness that’s devoured my home. But I can’t even do that any more as the stairs stretch endlessly in both directions. I’m going to be trapped here forever.
A fresh wave of sobs shake my body. All I want is my family back.
The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day Page 6