by Jeff Povey
There’s no one.
No Johnson.
No Non-Ape.
And definitely no Ape.
SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE PHONE
We’re still in the car at the school, and as much as they want me to be ‘normal’ and go into the building, somehow Dad and New-Mum can’t bring themselves to let me out of their sight. She, especially, seems scared rigid. That part I do understand. My dad opened doors to new universes and walked through one of them, disappearing for twelve years, so I get her fear. But not his. I know he was desperate, driven near insane on his quest to find a daughter he thought he’d lost, but he won’t get one drop of mercy or understanding from me.
I have opened the box with the phone and there’s already a text message for me.
It’s from New-Mum.
Have a gr8 day hon
She’s sitting beside me, staring at me, willing me to smile at the message, which I do, but just for her sake. They mustn’t ever know that I’m planning to ditch this world just as soon as I find a way out.
But who calls their kid hon?
‘Both our numbers are in there,’ she tells me.
They’ve even put a photograph of them holding hands together and smiling on as the screen background.
‘That’s us,’ my dad says unnecessarily.
‘Thanks for clearing that up, I’d never have guessed,’ I mumble.
I stare out through the windscreen and watch kids wandering into school. I recognise most of them from my original world. They look the same, but something feels odd. All of them seem quiet and subdued somehow. There’s no running or noise, even the younger boys who usually spend all their time bombing around jumping all over each other seem blank and vacant.
Into school they trudge and I know exactly how they feel.
I turn and look at New-Mum.
‘Do I have to go?’ I ask.
‘Learning is everything,’ my dad responds. ‘There is nothing more valuable than knowledge.’
It’s still strange to see his face, hear his voice, be around him after all this time. He’s not quite how I thought my dad would be. He seems like a copy of a dad; he’s got the look right, and the sense of the fatherly off to a tee, but I can’t detect a soul inside him. All the things that make a person a person, the dreams, the fears, the natural essences of whatever it is that makes us tick, in him they seem forced, unreal. Maybe that’s what happens when you cross dimension after dimension after dimension. You leave a piece of yourself behind in every world you visit.
For the last two weeks he’s been deliriously happy and yet I know there is something missing, something less than human about him.
‘Do her proud,’ New-Mum suddenly says.
Which stops me for a moment. ‘Her?’ I ask. ‘Who’s her?’
‘You,’ Dad whispers.
‘The you I lost,’ New-Mum says, and her eyes suddenly moisten.
Is she talking about her real Rev?
Dad again whispers in my ear. ‘Bear with her,’ he says quietly.
I immediately disobey his instructions. ‘Are you saying I’m not your Rev?’ I ask New-Mum.
‘Of course you are.’ New-Mum wipes her eyes. She’s trying not to get too emotional. ‘Of course you are.’
Dad whispers in my ear again. ‘She gets confused. But it’s understandable. Lots of shocks and surprises these past two weeks.’
If I didn’t want to get out of the car before, I am now ready to smash through the windscreen. They are weirding me out big time.
New-Mum seems to be talking as if she knows there are more Rev’s than just me. Did this dad tell her he’d go and find me and, if he couldn’t find their original daughter, did he promise he’d bring back something similar?
‘Am I or am I not her?’ I ask.
New-Mum smiles through her reddening eyes. ‘You are my Rev and I still can’t believe it,’ she offers. ‘So do her proud,’ she then repeats confusingly.
I’m no psychiatrist but even I can see that New-Mum is scarily unhinged.
‘Her little Rev never grew up in front of her, so she thinks of you as being different, even though you are the same person,’ Dad whispers. ‘But don’t worry, your mum is working through it all. One day at a time.’
When people tell so many lies, there is absolutely no way of knowing where the truth is hiding. But every lie starts in fact. So somewhere in this deeply disturbing conversation is a truth. But I just can’t figure out what it is. Through the windscreen I spot GG. For a split second I imagine that it’s really him. That he is still alive. I almost call his name. But the thud of hope crashes quickly down around my ears. It might look like GG, it might walk and talk and dance a little happy jig like GG, but it’s not him. My GG is long gone. But the sight of someone who looks so much like one of my friends is enough for me to reach for the door handle. If there’s a GG version, the others could be here as well.
My parents see me make what they obviously think is a very sudden move and New-Mum’s hand darts out and grabs my bicep through the material of my new blazer.
‘Hon.’
‘Don’t want to be late,’ I say. I can already see GG leaping on the back of a large boy. It’s not the Ape, but this GG clings on, riding him like a horse and laughing hysterically. He’s the only person I’ve seen so far who is remotely animated.
‘We’ll be right outside when the end-of-school bell goes.’ New-Mum pats my knee again.
‘You really don’t need to.’ If only they knew how capable I have become.
‘We want to,’ she tells me warmly.
‘So we will be,’ Dad offers. And I sneak a look at him in the rear-view mirror and I’m not sure but something starkly sad crosses his face. ‘Promise you.’
‘Off you go,’ New-Mum smiles. My shoulders are tingling like crazy. It’s not both of them it’s warning me about, it’s her. When she kissed me on the cheek, my shoulders turned electric. She might be more of a problem than I first realised.
MY OWN PRIVATE EVEREST
I’m hanging on for dear life to the iron rung, but I need to start climbing again before all of my strength bleeds away and we are torn back down into the swirling, violent river. Above us are more iron rungs driven deep into the leg of a bridge that rises high above the Thames. I am still eating air like it’s the best steak bake ever made. And, as I breathe in, the Thames squirts out of my nose. I cough hard, retching up more river, and most of it projectile – vomits into Carrie’s bruised face. I must have swallowed litres of it as the knifing pain accompanies every rasping heave.
My vision has cleared enough for me to see that the iron rungs lead all the way to the top of the bridge. I can’t imagine they are an actual ladder so they definitely must be there to reinforce. Either way I am climbing up them. My arms will give out if I don’t get moving.
‘I don’t know if you’re in there or not, but I need you to cling on to me,’ I tell Carrie, who is really Evil-GG. ‘I could try swimming for the bank but I’m a rotten swimmer. I can barely keep myself afloat, let alone the two of us.’ I cough more Thames into her face just for good luck. ‘The torrent will sweep us away.’ I cough again, and wonder why I’m bothering to explain.
Carrie doesn’t nod or show any sign of understanding. Her eyes remain open though and I’d swear on my life that there is definitely something behind them.
‘Hang on,’ I whisper. ‘Just hang on tight.’
I try and wedge Carrie’s skinny arms and legs around me and reach for the rung above my head. But she has no grip or purchase and I almost lose her. I hate myself, but with my free hand I drag her right arm around my neck and wrench as hard as I can, dislocating her left shoulder so that I can shove that arm down into the back of my collar. I wince. This is not a good moment for me.
With Carrie ‘tied’ around me, I steady my foot on a slippery rung below the waterline and push upwards.
The climb is exhausting. I think the bridge must be fifteen metres or more above us and i
t doesn’t help that we’re both soaked through, meaning our clothes feel like chain mail.
I keep going, one slow rung at a time. Telling myself I’m not in a race and that we have all the time in the world. My arms grow weaker and number by the second until I can’t feel my fingers any more. I blow on them, gnaw on them, bite deep into them, anything to keep the blood pumping through them. One slip and we’re back in that deadly river.
I don’t think of anything but the climb. All other thoughts and thinking can be done once we’re safely on solid ground.
One rung after another, slow as slow can be.
Up we go.
I don’t look down, just up.
Down is where death is and I’m all about life.
I have no feeling in my fingers and hands and the numbness is starting to creep along my wrists. Every single last drop of strength has been used up.
The grey clouds seem to hang lower and the warm September day has disappeared as a chill sets into my bones from the damp clothes I’m wearing. But there are thousands of empty shops with dry clothes. Assuming the tidal wave didn’t reach all the way into the centre of London. There are cafes with food and drink. The city is a paradise of free offerings just ripe for the taking. All I need to do is reach the top and the thought of that gives me strength.
One rung after another.
I try not to look at Carrie’s staring eyes.
But I do talk to her. ‘This is going to make us even,’ I pant. ‘This will undo all the bad I did to you.’ Not that I actually did anything bad, despite what Billie made me yell.
I mean, I was totally unaware of Carrie’s crush on my boyfriend Kyle back in our world. We’d pretty much cleared that up anyway so Billie was way out of order making those insane demands.
‘You’ll thank for me this,’ I tell Carrie.
The top of the bridge is coming into view.
‘We’ll laugh about this one day.’ I say, even though I only ever remember her laughing cynically. Usually at people rather than with them.
‘You won’t be the same,’ I pant. ‘None of us will be. But we will be alive. I guarantee that. That’s a Reva Marsalis promise.’
There are no more iron rungs.
I have reached the top.
Mount Everest has been conquered.
My arms are numb all the way to my shoulders, but I give one last heave and together we topple over the bridge wall and fall over a metre on to stone paving slabs. I land hard on top of Carrie and I think I hear one of her ribs crack. I disentangle myself from her and roll away, glad to be free of those deadly eyes, and press my forehead into a paving slab as I lie there, drenched, but so grateful to be touching land again.
Carrie lies on her back beside me. Still very much dead but that’s OK. That’s good. There’s a healer thirty miles north of here. She can fix Carrie and she can fix the Ape.
All I’ve got to do is find him again.
Which is going to be impossible. I can’t dredge the entire Thames.
I get to my feet and peer over the wall and watch the furious river churning violently underneath me. I hate it with all my heart as I glance back at Carrie, and see her big brown eyes locked on to mine.
‘What are you looking at?’ I scowl.
But really I just want to cry.
YOU CAN CALL ME MALICE
I’m sitting in a classroom, zoning out of a maths lesson because I’m working on a theory.
Imagine this scenario for a second. Imagine that you are four-year-old me and you are watching your handsome young father with his sleek black hair and finely chiselled features. He is excited. He has been working on a theory, writing notes on a whiteboard, maybe jotting them down or even dictating them into a recording device. He’s discovered something. The eighth wonder of the world. He’s opened a portal into new earths. A white light beckons to him, maybe pulls at him, and the hair on his forearms stands on end because this white light has the tug of a small black hole. It calls to him, but because he’s a scientist he knows he can’t just blindly walk through it. He needs to run tests; he needs to make calculations and record his observations in a notebook before anything else can happen. A notebook that will come to be the scientific papers that the Moth eventually ends up reading and, incredibly enough, understanding. My father jots it all down because that’s what scientists do, and maybe he puts a heavy weight on those papers because the portal is still tugging at the world that has opened before it.
My dad has a problem though. He’s opened the portal, but how does he close it? And if he can’t manage to do that how does he make it safe? Does he leave the room and lock the door behind him? I have no idea where the portal is, it might be in a laboratory; or it might be in the tiny cramped flat that he shares with his wife and four-year-old daughter. You see the girl is a bit of a wimp and has made a bed on the floor at the foot of her parents’ queen-size-bed because she’s scared of sleeping on her own in the dark. Little Reva has been pretty stubborn about this and her mum and dad indulge her. So maybe her dad is in Reva’s bedroom because it’s the only spare room in their tiny cramped flat, and he’s so close to making a discovery he often goes in there and works at night while Reva and her mum are sleeping in the the main bedroom.
These are exciting times and little Reva’s bedroom, with its electric-pink walls and all her piled-up toys, has become a sort of laboratory. Little Reva’s dad only works on paper, he’s not boiling liquids in test tubes or sending photons through a home-made hadron collider; almost all of it is words and numbers and calculations. I’m guessing here, but just say he creates the magic formula that opens a portal, a blueprint for building a device. I’m not sure if it’s an actual thing or something that exists outside the laws of ordinary physics, but it works. My dad builds a key on a molecular scale and it’s as much a shock to him as it would be to anyone. He’s discovered that the universe is a multiverse. He creates some form of key and finds that it doesn’t just unlock one door, but loads and loads of other doors. And the mind-boggling thing is, the portal opens and the white light pulls things towards it. Millimetre by millimetre.
Can you see where this is heading? Wimpy daughter is scared of the dark so in the night, when she thinks she needs her favourite stuffed caterpillar toy, she opens the door to her bedroom and sees the white light. And she thinks to herself, I like that light. That’s so much better than the dark. There was a moment I’d imagined my dad had used little Reva as a guinea pig, sending her through the portal with a rope tied round her waist. But you wouldn’t travel through dimensions to find a daughter if you were so careless with her life in the first place, would you? So instead I think this little Reva, who is scared of the dark, sees a white light and thinks to herself dark is not nice, but white is. I like white.
I don’t remember any white light in my bedroom, but I do recall sleeping on my mum and dad’s bedroom floor, in a nest of blankets and pillows, but without my favourite toy for a reason I can’t recall now. I also remember my father suddenly not being around and spending twelve years with an overprotective mum who could barely make ends meet. But does any of that make sense?
Wouldn’t I remember leaving my world? Did my dad make a mistake and hurry after me when he didn’t need to? Or does my theory suck?
‘Reva, perhaps you can answer?’ A teacher, female and butch, stands at the front of the classroom with a large whiteboard looming behind her. She holds a black Sharpie and uses it to point to the large writing on the board.
The equation she has written on the whiteboard is simple beyond measure.
1 + 1 =
One plus one. Is she kidding me?
The rest of the class sit quietly, more subdued than you’d expect over twenty teenagers to be. Even the teacher looks like she’s filling time before the bell rings for the next lesson.
‘Anything?’ The teacher, Miss Matson, emphasis on the Miss – in my world anyway – is a known and forthright lesbian who is usually very witty and confident. But this Mi
ss Matson is resigned and tired-looking.
‘One plus one?’ I ask her.
‘Take a wild guess,’ she says without any inflection or sign of humour in her voice.
At first I think it’s a joke, like the answer must be eleven as in 1+1 = 11. A tricksy little joke that was only ever clever when you were five years old.
‘Go on,’ Miss Matson cajoles. ‘See if you can get it right. Let the class see how smart the new girl is.’
No one in the class is paying any attention to me or Miss Matson or the equation on the whiteboard. They’re not ignoring her, they’re just putting up with the day. Waiting until they can crawl to the next lesson.
‘Three,’ I answer.
Miss Matson writes a big three on the whiteboard and nods her appreciation.
‘What a star. Brilliant. Shall we applaud?’
The class give me a small dull round of applause. I ‘know’ all of them, at least I know them from my real world, though I have to pretend not to because I’m meant to be new in school.
Miss Matson wipes the calculation from the whiteboard. ‘OK, let’s do a harder one this time.’ She’s trying to sound cheery and positive like the real Miss Matson would, but her writing gives it away. Her usual strident swishes of marker pen on whiteboard often bring a squeal of protest from the board, a sound that attacks your teeth every time. But these strokes are light, barely registering, and the black Sharpie pen stays silent.
She finishes writing a new equation on the board.
1 + 1 =
I fall silent just like the rest of the class.
BILLIE MADE US LOOK SILLY
I think I must be delirious. Swallowing all that river water has affected my brain. I’ve been searching for any sign of life for more than half an hour now when I hear the Ape’s voice.
‘You were down there hours,’ the Ape tells Non-Ape.
‘I can go days underwater.’
‘I’ve got to try that,’ the Ape decides.
They are talking as if nothing – and I mean absolutely nothing – has happened.