Oh, there’s a piece of paper with the year written on it sitting on the arm of the chair right in front of me. It’s just next year. That’s my handwriting.
The baby’s name is Alice, the writing continues. You don’t need to go any further to hear that. Please make this your last trip.
Alice. That’s what we were planning to call her. Thank God. If it was something different, I’d now be wondering where that idea came from.
Oh, I can feel it now. This mind has made room for me. It knew I’d be coming. Of course it did. She remembers what she did with the crown last year. But what does this mean? Why does future me want me to stop doing this? I try to reach across the distance between her and me, but I can only feel what she’s feeling, not hear her thoughts. And she had a year to prepare, that note must be all she wants to tell me. She wants me to feel that it’s all going to be okay … but she’s telling me it won’t be.
Ben comes in. He doesn’t look very different. Unshaven. He’s smiling all over his face. He sits on the arm of the chair and looks down at his daughter, proud and utterly in love with her. The room is decorated. There are tiny presents under the tree, joint birthday and Christmas presents the little one is too small to understand. So, oh, she was born very near Christmas Day. We must make such a perfect image sitting together like this. I don’t think I can have told Ben about what I know will be happening to me at this moment on Christmas Day. I wouldn’t do that. I’d want to spare him.
But … what’s this? I can feel my body move slightly away from him. It took me a second to realise it, because it’s so brilliant, and a little scary, to be suddenly in a body that’s not weighed down by the pregnancy, but … I’m bristling. I can feel a deep chemical anger. The teenager is in here again. But I look up at him and smile, and this mind lets me. And he’s so clearly still my Ben, absolutely the same, the Dad I knew he’d be when he asked and I said yes. It’s not like he’s started to beat me, I can’t feel that in this body, she’s not flinching, it’s like when I’m angry but I don’t feel allowed to express it.
Is this, what, post-natal depression? Or the first sign of me doing unto others what was done to me? A pushed-down anger that might come spilling out?
I don’t care what my one-year-older self wants me to do. She can’t know that much more than me. I need to know what this is.
* * *
ALICE IS ASLEEP in her cradle. She’s so much bigger, so quickly, two years old! Again, that bursting of love into my head. That’s reassuring. Another year on, I’m still feeling that.
But the room … the room feels very different. Empty. There’s a tree, but it’s a little one. I make this body walk quickly through the rest of the house. The bathroom is a bit different, the bedroom is a bit different. Baby stuff everywhere, of course, but what’s missing? There’s … there’s nothing on that side of the room. I go back to the bathroom. There are no razors. No second toothbrush.
Where’s Ben?
I start looking in drawers, checking my email … but the password’s been changed. I can’t find anything about what’s happened. I search every inch of the house, desperate now, certain I’m going to find a funeral card or something. She knew this was going to happen to me, so wouldn’t the bitch have left one out in plain sight? Why doesn’t she want me to know? Oh please don’t be dead, Ben, please—!
I end up meaninglessly, uselessly, looking in the last place, under the bed.
And there’s a note, in my own handwriting.
I hate you.
She’s deliberately stopping me from finding out. I can’t let her.
Alice is looking straight at me this time. “Presents,” she says to me. “I have presents. And you have presents.” And I can see behind her that that’s true.
That rush of love again. That’s constant. I try to feel what’s natural and not be stiff and scary about it, and give her a big hug. “Does Daddy have presents?”
She looks aside, squirms; she doesn’t know how to deal with that. Have I warned her about me? I don’t want to press her for answers. I don’t want to distress her.
I need to keep going and find out.
* * *
I’M FACING IN the same direction, so it’s like the decor and contents of the room suddenly shift, just a little. Alice, in front of me, four now, is running in rings on the floor, obviously in the middle of, rather than anticipating something, so that’s good.
Ben comes in. He’s alive! Oh thank God.
I stand up at the sight of him. Has she told him about me? No, I never would. He looks so different. He’s clean shaven, smartly dressed. Did he go on a long journey somewhere? He hoists Alice into his arms and Alice laughs as he jumbles up her hair. “Happy Christmas birthday!”
Alice sings it back to him, like it’s a thing they do together. So … everything’s all right? Why didn’t she want me to—?
A young woman I don’t know comes in from the other room. She goes to Ben and puts a hand on his arm. Alice smiles at her.
“We have to be gee oh aye en gee soon,” he says to me.
“Thanks for lunch,” says the girl. “It was lovely.”
The fury this time is my own. But it chimes with what’s inside this mind. She’s been holding it down. I take a step forward. And the young woman sees something in my eyes and takes a step back. And that little movement—
No, it isn’t the movement, it isn’t what she does, this is all me—
I march towards her. I’m taking in every feature of her. Every beautiful feature of that slightly aristocratic, kind-looking, caring face. I’m making a sound I’ve never heard before in the back of my throat. “Get away from him. Get your hands off him.”
She’s trying to put up her hands and move away. She’s astonished. “I’m sorry—!”
“What the hell?!” Ben is staring at us. Alice has started yelling. Fearful monkey warning shouts.
Something gives inside me. I rush at her. She runs.
* * *
I CATCH HER before she gets to the door. I grab her by both arms and throw her at the wall. I’m angry at her and at the mind I’m in too. Did she set me up for this?! Did she invite them here to punish me?! So she could let her anger out and not be responsible?!
She hits the wall and bounces off it. She falls, grabbing her nose. She looks so capable and organised I know she could hit me hard, I know she could defend herself, but she just drops to the ground and puts her hands to her face. I will not make her fight. She can control herself and I can’t.
Ben rushes in and grabs me. I don’t want him to touch me. I struggle.
“What are you doing?!” He’s shouting at me.
I can feel this mind burning up. If I stay much longer, I’ll start damaging it. I half want to.
* * *
I RIPPED THE crown from my head and threw it onto the ground. I burst into tears. I put my hands on my belly to comfort myself. But I found no comfort there.
But my pain wasn’t important. It wasn’t! The mistakes I’d made were what was important. What happened to Alice, that was what was important.
I got up and walked around the room. If I stopped now, I was thinking, the rest of my life would be a tragedy, I would be forever anticipating what was written, or trying … hopelessly, yes, there was nothing in the research then that said I had any hope … to change it. I would be living without hope. I could do that. But the important thing was what that burden would do to Alice … If I was going to be allowed to keep Alice, after what I’d seen.
I could go to the airport now. I could leave Ben asleep, while he was still my Ben, and have the baby in France, and break history … No I couldn’t. Something would get me back to what I’d seen. Maybe something cosmic and violent that wouldn’t respect the human mind’s need for narrative. That was what the maths said. Alice shouldn’t have that in her life. Alice shouldn’t have me in her life.
But the me who wrote the first note wanted me not to try to visit the future again. When she knew I
had. Did she think that was possible? Did I learn something in the next year that hinted that it might be? Why didn’t I address that in future notes?
Because of anger? Because of fatalism? Because of a desire to hurt myself?
But … if there was even a chance it might be possible …
I slowly squatted and picked up the crown.
* * *
I’VE MOVED. I’M in a different house. Smaller. I walk quickly through the rooms, searching. I have to support myself against the wall in relief when I see Alice. There she is, in her own room, making a wall out of cardboard wrapping-paper rolls. Still the love in me. I don’t think that’s ever going to go. It feels like … a condition. A good disease this mind lives with. But what’s she doing alone in here? Did I make her flee here, exile her here?
She looks up at me and smiles. No. No, I didn’t.
I find the note this time on the kitchen table. It’s quite long, it’s apologetic. It tells me straight away that Ben and … Jessica, the young woman’s name is Jessica … understood quite quickly after I left her mind and she started apologising. She apologises too for not doing anything to stop what happened. But she says she really wasn’t setting me up for it. She says she’s still working at the Project. She says she’s still looking for a way to change time, but hasn’t much hope of finding one.
I put down the letter feeling … hatred. For her. For her weakness. For her acceptance. That whole letter feels like … acting. Like she’s saying something because she thinks she should.
From the other room comes the sound of Alice starting to cry. She’s hurt herself somehow. I feel the urge from this mind to go immediately to her. But I … I actually hesitate. For the first time there is a distance. I’m a stranger from years ago. This isn’t really my child. This is her child.
* * *
THE NEXT FEW visits were like an exhibition of time-lapse photography about the disintegration of a mother and child’s relationship. Except calling it that suggests a distance, and I was amongst it, complicit in it.
* * *
“YOU GET SO weird!” she’s shouting at me. “It’s like you get frightened every Christmas that I’ll go away with Dad and Jessica and never come back! I want to! I want to go away!”
* * *
BUT THE NEXT Christmas she’s still there.
* * *
“WILL YOU JUST listen to me? You look at me sometimes like I’m not real, like I’m not human!” The mind of the future learned that from her memory of my experiences, I guess, learned that from her own experience of being a teenager with added context. Alice has had to fight for her mother to see her as an actual human being. I did that. I mean, I did that to her. I try now to reach out, but she sees how artificial it looks and shies away.
“Do I … neglect you?” I ask her.
She swears at me, and says yes. But then she would, wouldn’t she?
* * *
AND THEN THE next year she’s not there.
A note says the bitch arranged for her to stay with Ben and Jessica, and it all got too much in terms of anticipation, and she’s sure she’ll be back next time. She’s certain of that. She’s sorry, and she … hopes I am too?!
I go to the wall in the hall. I’ve always used bloody walls to do my fighting. I stand close to it. And as hard as I can I butt my head against it. I love the roaring of the mind I’m in as the pain hits us both. Feel that, you bitch, do something about that! I do it again. And then my head starts to swim and I don’t think I can do it again, and I get out just as the darkness hits.
* * *
THAT WAS WHY she “hoped I was sorry too,” because she knew that was coming.
I wonder how much I injured myself? She couldn’t have known when she wrote the note. She was so bloody weak she didn’t even try to ask me not to do it.
I am such a bully.
But I’m only doing it to myself.
* * *
THERE’S NO SIGN of Alice for the next two Christmases. When the bitch was certain she’d be back next time. The liar. There are just some very needy letters. Which show no sign of brain damage, thank God.
* * *
THEN THERE’S ALICE, sitting opposite me. She wears fashions designed to shock. “Christmas Day,” she says, “time for you to go insane and hurt yourself, only today I’m trapped with you. What joy.”
I discover that Ben and Jessica are on holiday abroad with their own … children … this year. And that the bitch has done … some sort of harm to herself on each of these days Alice wasn’t here, obviously after I left. Is that just self-harm, am I actually capable of…? Well, I suppose I know I am. Or is she trying to offer some explanation for that one time, or to use it to try to hurt Alice emotionally?
“No insanity this year,” I say, trying to make my voice sound calm. And it sounds weird. It sounds old. It sounds like I’ve put inverted commas around “insanity.” Like I’m trying to put distance between my own actions, being wry about my own weakness … like Mum always is.
I try to have fun with Alice in the ten minutes I’ve got. She shuts herself in her room when I get too cloying. I try to enter. She slams herself against the door. I get angry, though the weak woman I’m in really doesn’t want to, and try to muscle in. But she grabs me, she’s stronger than me.
She slams me against the wall. And I burst into tears. And she steps back, shaking her head in mocking disbelief at … all I’ve done to her.
* * *
I SLIPPED THE crown from my head.
I was staring into space. And then my phone rang. The display said it was Mum. And I thought now of all the times, and then I thought no, I have a cover to maintain here, I don’t want her calling Ben … I didn’t want to go home to Ben …
I took a deep breath, and answered.
“Is there … news?” she asked. I heard that wry, anxious tone in her voice again. Did I ever think of that sound as anxious before? “You are due today, aren’t you?”
I told her that I was, but it didn’t feel like it was going to be today, and that I’d call her immediately when anything started to happen. I stopped then, realising that actually, I did know it was going to be today; Ben said “Happy Christmas birthday’ to Alice. But I couldn’t tell her that I knew that and I didn’t want to tell her I felt something I didn’t feel. “Merry Christmas,” I said, remembering the pleasantries, which she hadn’t.
She repeated that, an edge in her voice again. “I was hoping that I might see you today, but I suppose that’s impossible, even though the baby isn’t coming. You’ve got much more important things to do.” And the words hurt as much as they always did, but they weren’t a dull ache now, but a bright pain. Because I heard them not as barbs to make me guilty, but as being exactly like the tone of the letters the bitch had left for me. Pained, pleading … weak. That was why I’d slammed her against the wall, all those years ago, because she was weak, because I could.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Oh. I’m always sorry to hear you say that,” she said.
I said I’d call her as soon as anything happened.
Once as she was off the phone, I picked up the crown and held it in my hands like I was in a Shakespeare play. I was so poetically contemplating it. I felt like laughing at my own presumption at having opened up my womb and taken a good look at where Jacob Marley had come from.
I had hurt my own mother. I had never made that up to her. I never could. But I hadn’t tried. I had hated her for what I had done. And I could not stop. And in the future, the reflection was as bad as the shadow. I had become my mother. And I had created a daughter who felt exactly the same way about me. And I had created a yearly hell for my future self, making sure she never forgot the lesson I had learned on this day.
I would release myself from it. That’s what I decided.
I put the crown on for the last time.
* * *
I’M STANDING THERE with my daughter. She looks to be in her late twenties. Tidy now
. A worried look on her face. She’s back for a family Christmas, but she knows there’ll be trouble as always. She’s been waiting for it. She looks kinder. She looks guilty. The room is bare of decoration. Like the bitch … like my victim … has decided not to make the effort anymore.
“Get away from me,” I tell Alice, immediately, “get out of this house.” Because I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to stay inside this mind. I’m going to break it. I’m going to give myself the release of knowing I’m going to go mad, at the age of … I look around and find a conveniently placed calendar. Which was unbelievably accommodating of her, to know what I’m about to do and still do that. I will go mad at the age of fifty-six. I have a finish line. It’s a relief. Perhaps she wants this too.
“Mum,” says Alice, “Mum, please—!” And she sounds desperate and worried for herself as well as for me, and still not understanding what all this is about.
But then her expression … changes. It suddenly becomes determined and calm. “Mum, please don’t do this. I know we only have minutes—”
“What? Did I tell you about—?”
“No, this is an older Alice. I’m working on the same technology now. I’ve come back to talk to you.”
It takes me a moment to take that in. “You mean, you’ve found a way to change time?”
“No. What’s written is written. Immediately after we have this conversation, and we’ve both left these bodies, you tell me everything about what you’ve been doing.”
“Why … do I do that?” I can feel the sound of my mother’s weakness in my voice.
“Because after you leave here, you go forward five years and see me again.” She takes my hands in hers and looks into my eyes. I can’t see the hurt there. The hurt I put there. And I can see a reflection too.
Can I believe her?
Year’s Best SF 18 Page 6