by Ian McDonald
“I hate you, Everett Singh,” Ryun said in the changing room after the whistle had been blown and the teams had trudged off through the slanting rain. Fresh from the shower, he screwed water out of his ears with a corner of towel.
“You cannot beat me,” Everett said, trying not to look at him scrubbed and shower fresh. “My kung fu is too strong. There's a way you look around to clock everyone else, then lean back from the ball just before you hit it. You do it every time. Every. Single. Time. And that's how I get you.”
“What if I didn't?”
“You'll do something else and I'll see it. I know you, Ryun.”
Ryun Spinetti was Team Gold's best striker, but in the two years since Everett came on to Team Red he had never been able to get a ball past him. He was also Everett's oldest, closest, and best friend. Football enemies, nerd friends. Team Gold. Team Red. Team Sky Blue. Team Lilac. What kind of name for a team was Team Lilac? Everett suspected that the sportswear manufacturer that made the shirts had had a load of lilac fabric they couldn't get rid of. Stupid names for phony teams in a made-up competition with no real sense of the things that made competing meaningful. Things like place or history or tradition or shared loyalty. Things that got you roaring on a Saturday at White Hart Lane.
The boys' changing room hissed with the sound of Lynx body sprays. Everett refused to shower in the presence of others. Home was only fifteen minutes away down the poo-smeared walkway known as the Dogs' Delight and through the tree-shaded peaceful gloom of Abney Park Cemetery. He customarily pulled on a blazer and, in this weather, his Puffa jacket over his goalkeeper's strip and clumped home in studded boots for a wet-room shower and death metal on the waterproof mp3 player. Luxury. Privacy. Just Everett and cascading hot water. He could spend a long time, shut away from the rest of the world by the heat and the sound of the rushing water. Laura asked what he was doing in there all that time. The answer was nothing. Everything. Thinking. Not thinking. Letting the ideas come.
“See you.” Everett was always the first out of the changing room.
“Hey! Everett!” Abbas called as Everett headed out the door. “So, more Thursday afternoons with the Gob.” The Gob—Mrs. Packham—was the school counsellor. Everett had spent three months of last period Thursday afternoons in her office after his parents split. It got him out of Religious Education.
“I'll just have to think up some new lies to tell her.”
It was always too much to hope that Tejendra's disappearance could be kept secret from Bourne Green Community Academy. Facebook to tweet to text; it was round everyone even as Everett was sloping up the Dogs' Delight that morning. Year Ten knew better than to prod him and poke him, make jokes about his dad having run off with another woman or another man. Everett would never be one of the hip or the jock or the slacker tribes, but everyone had seen the dark anger that could explode out of him when provoked and as quickly subside. They didn't welcome him, but they respected him. You did not bully Everett Singh.
The text chimed as he turned out of the Dogs' Delight on to the curving cemetery path. NAT HIST MUS. SOON AS. He broke into a run. Rain stained the faces of the Victorian grave memorials.
Call it pattern recognition. Call it goalkeeper's instinct. Call it weird quantum stuff. Call it just something about the Renault Megane—the way it came a little too slowly up Rectory Road; the way the woman driving and the man beside her were a little too well dressed, sat a little too upright; the way they both looked a moment too long as they drove slowly past Everett at the Number 73 bus stop. Call it a sense for suspicious cars. The Renault turned into Gibson Gardens. Everett kept watching. His breath caught as he saw its nose come out from behind the white van parked on the double yellow lines on the corner. It had turned on the side street. It pulled out on to Northwold Road. No mistake. It was looking for him. They weren't afraid to act in plain sight. The Renault was in a stream of slow-moving traffic. It stopped at the pedestrian lights while a kennel-maid tried to guide ten tiny dogs on ten different leads across Northwold Road to the Common. Everett watched the Renault out of the corner of his eye. The man in the passenger seat was a skinhead with sharp cheekbones. His suit looked uncomfortable on him. The woman driver had a young face but old, dark eyes. Blonde curls fell to her shoulder. She looked like a rock star. She wore gloves, which she tapped on the top of the steering wheel as she waited for the girl in the Wittle Wascals Dog Hotel windcheater to untangle the darting dogs. The lights changed. The Renault moved smoothly off. Where was the bus? It was always late, the Number 73, at this time of the afternoon. The driver just sat at the terminus doing sudoku. Everett could see it across the small triangle of open ground that was Stoke Newington Common.
“About bloomin' time,” said the Caribbean woman in the shelter with a dozen orange Sainsbury bags slumped around her ankles. Across the Common the driver folded his paper. The bus pulled out into the traffic. It sailed around the corner of Stoke Newington Common on to Northwold Road. But here came the Renault. Rock-Star-Blonde woman saw him, but a VW people-mover ahead of her saw a parking space, stopped dead, and signalled. The constant traffic streaming up Rectory Road in the opposite direction trapped the Renault. The Number 73 swung in to the stop. Everett leaped aboard, pushing ahead of Too Many Shopping Bags Lady.
“'Scuse me, ‘scuse me,” he muttered as he plunged towards the backseat. The stationary bus held up the traffic and opened a gap ahead of it. The Renault pulled into the gap and overtook the VW. Everett ducked low on the seat. He glimpsed Rock-Star-Blonde check out the bus. Then they were past and the bus pulled out from the stop. He scrambled round in the seat to look out the rain-smeared rear window. The Renault had stopped dead in the middle of the road and was making a three-point turn. Traffic hooted; white van drivers leaned out of their windows to shout and wave their fists.
The Renault clung to the Number 73 all the way down Albion Road and long Essex Road. Stop start, start stop. Doors open doors closed. Beepings and bells and warning and robot announcements. Passengers on passengers off. Jerking down through northeast London: and there it was, the Renault, sometimes four cars back, sometimes two, sometimes right on the bus's taillights. Several times Everett saw the Renault pull out and go past. Within a minute he would feel a prickle, a presence like the tip of a blade on the back of his neck and knew that Rock-Star-Blonde was back behind him again. They could follow the bus route street by street, stop by stop, on the downloaded route map. They were watching to see at which stop he got off.
The bus ground down Upper Street and into Pentonville Road. Everett felt a surge of relief when the Number 73 swung out of the traffic into a bus lane. Then he glanced behind and saw the Renault follow. Only taxis and police were allowed to do that. And cyclists. So these were police, or the people who ordered the police. The Renault sat on the bus's taillights. He had to get away. He had to shake them before the Natural History Museum. Everett slipped out his mobile, flicked the flash off and shot off fifteen photographs of car, passenger, the ice-cold driver. The bus ground across the chaotic junction at King's Cross. People, traffic, confusion, and ready access to other modes of transport. A good place to lose his tail. Everett jumped up and hit the bell. The bus swung in to the stop opposite the stations; St. Pancras, towering and Gothic, seeming to tip over on top of him, King's Cross low and aloof, standing back from the street ruckus. Everett leaped from the bus and ran, headlong and crazy, into the grind of afternoon traffic. Cars and vans bounced to a halt. Horns blared. Fists shook. Mouths yelled silently behind wind-screens. A moped swept around him, the rider throwing back a stream of swearing. Everett made it to the central traffic island. He glanced back. Skinhead-in-a-Suit was out of the car and in pursuit. A little G-Wiz city car stopped level with his toes and parped its silly little horn. Skinhead-in-a-Suit turned, glared at the woman behind the wheel, grabbed the fender, and lifted the front of the little car off the ground. Machinery creaked and cracked when he dropped it, but the diversion was enough for the lights to change an
d Everett make it to King's Cross plaza. He plunged down the Underground, elbowing commuters out of his way.
Everett had the Oyster subway card out of his wallet before he realised the danger. They could find out where he'd been through his Oyster card. Gloucester Road, the station for both the Natural History Museum and Imperial College, was enough of a clue to who he was meeting, and why. But the ticket machines were slow, and there was the inevitable group of tourists peering at the instructions and randomly pressing buttons. Everett glanced behind him. Skinhead-in-a-Suit stood on the stairs, surveying the crowded ticket hall. Everett slipped his backpack from his shoulder and pressed closer to the tourists. His Puffa jacket was anonymous in the ticket hall, but his yellow football shorts and the even more yellow thermal compression gear he wore underneath were instantly identifiable. He moved the backpack to conceal his legs. The machine fired tickets at the delighted tourists. Everett stepped up and pressed buttons. The machine was so slow, so slow. Single. Yes. Select method of payment. Cash. Did he require a receipt? No thank you. Come on come on come on. Ticket and change rattled into the steel trough.
The ticket barrier was ahead of him. Don't run. It will make you stand out. Be part of the crowd. The machine scanned his ticket; the gate clanged open. Everett glanced behind him. For a moment, just a moment, his eyes caught Skinhead-in-a-Suit's, but for that moment, it was as if they were the only two people in King's Cross tube station. Skinhead-in-a-Suit bounded down the stairs and pushed through the crowd. A Transport For London worker in a peaked cap and an orange hi-viz vest moved to cut him off. Skinhead-in-a-Suit straight-armed the man away and vaulted over the barrier. Everett ran. Before him was the main escalator, as steep and deadly as a ski-jump. Everett took a deep breath and ploughed down the moving steps. “Excuse me, excuse me,” he shouted. Standers pressed in to the handrail; the less-quick walkers on the fast side of the escalator moved out of the way of the kid running like a madman down the moving staircase. The steps were steep, the steps were treacherous, the steps were endless. You hit a rhythm and you kept it. Keep moving keep moving don't look back if you look back you'll miss the timing and you'll fall and bounce off these sharp step edges all the way to the bottom. Everett's backpack bounced heavily against his shoulder. Behind him he heard a growing commotion. Keep moving. The escalator threw Everett on to the Circle line concourse. Now he could look back. Skinhead-in-a-Suit came down the escalator like a rugby player, casually sweeping anyone who might obstruct him out of his way.
A gust of warm air. The shriek and clatter of a tube train arriving. The Circle line was not the most direct route, but Skinhead-in-a-Suit would catch him in the warren of tunnel and staircases that led to the Picadilly line. Everett dashed through the doors as they were closing. Instants later Skinhead-in-a-Suit arrived. He banged his fists on the doors. They won't open for that, Everett thought. Whoever you are, they won't open for you. The man sought out Everett clinging to the pole in the open area by the doors. He put his hands flat on the window and stared straight at him. As the train moved off, Everett raised his hand: Bye. Lost you.
Everett made it into the Natural History Museum ten minutes before closing. The Museum Experience Colleagues harrumphed at his football studs on their tiled floor. Colette Harte was waiting for him underneath the dinosaur skeleton. Her hair was purple this week.
“You all right, Everett?”
He showed her the slide show he had taken from the back of the bus: the Renault, Skinhead-in-a-Suit, Rock-Star-Blonde.
“Do you know these people?”
“She's way overdone the eighties eye makeup,” Colette said. “And he looks like an extra in Grand Theft Auto. Sorry, Everett. No. Never seen them before.”
The first time Everett Singh had met Colette Harte, she'd terrified him. Thin as a stick, tall as a tree, with metal in her eyebrows and dyed pink hair, sculpted up with gel like an anime heroine. “Is that a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on your back?” he'd asked. She had leant towards him, seeming to come down from a huge height made huger by platform boots, and whispered in his ear, “I'm the Pirate Queen of East Cheam.” And winked. He had been six then, at a faculty barbecue Tejendra had thrown in the back garden on a summer Sunday. The wink made them friends. The wink said it would always be all right. Colette Harte had been a new graduate student. Eight summer barbecues on, she was a research fellow, working with Tejendra. Her face metal and platform boots only came out for nights at those clubs that sounded so strange and dangerous to Everett, and her hair changed colour every month rather than every week, but the skull-and-crossbones still nestled in the small of her back and she was now and forever the Pirate Queen of the Quantum Physics Department. Everett had texted her that morning as he pushed through the rain across Abney Park Cemetery. P McC came—thought I had sumfing. Help?
“They tried to follow me down here,” Everett said. “I think they were waiting for me outside school, but they didn't know I was going straight from the changing rooms.”
“I like your use of ‘tried,' there,” Colette Harte said. Announcements rang out through the great Central Hall: the museum, cafe, and shop were closing in five minutes. Five minutes. “So, do you?”
“What?”
“Have something?”
Everett unzipped his backpack, pulled out Dr. Quantum, and booted it up. He expanded the Infundibulum icon. Colette bent close. Everett heard her swear under her breath.
“Close it down, Everett.”
“It's what they were looking for, isn't it? It's what Paul McCabe meant.” He powered down Dr. Quantum and slid it back into his backpack.
“Yes.” He'd never heard Colette's voice like this, never heard fear in it. “Not here, Everett. Let's go.”
Mingling with the slow drift of exiting visitors, they left the museum. Once she was in the open Colette lit a cigarette. Departing visitors put up umbrellas and pulled up their collars and hunched over against the rain.
“Are you hungry? Let's get something to eat. You fancy sushi? I know a good place up west.”
“Ya! Mama is right over there.” It was a good place. He'd been there with his dad and Colette enough times to learn the rules of sushi. Rule 1: no conveyor belts. They looked cool, but you never knew how long those little transparent plastic bubbles had been going around the track. Rule 2: fish in the wasabi/soy. Never the rice.
“A tad too close to my work colleagues, Everett.”
By the time they flagged down a taxi they were both soaked through. The restaurant was off the Tottenham Court Road and small and warm and family-run, with intimate booths where you could talk. The manager made Everett leave his football boots at the door. He sat cross-legged on the tatami mat, slowly drying out his many layers.
“Okay, let's have a look at it.”
Everett opened up the Infundibulum application and passed Dr. Quantum to Colette. The booth was quiet and dimly lit, and the light of the moving veils of light illuminated her face.
“So, do I have something?”
“You have more than something.” Colette set the tablet down on the low table. “You have everything.”
The sushi arrived. It was neat, the rice was glossy, the fish bright and firm. Good sushi. Everett mixed soy and wasabi with his chopsticks. The Maneki Neko cat in its niche on the wall waved its left paw. Right to attract money, left to attract customers.
“Your dad, me, Paul—we're all part of a long-term, big-budget project looking for experimental evidence of the existence of parallel universes,” Colette said.
“I know all about that.” Everett swiped a piece of sea bass through the soy-wasabi.
“You don't know all about it, Everett.”
Everett bristled. Everyone, everyone, everyone felt they had the right to tell him their opinion of him. What about his opinions?
“Dad taught me the theory. I can do the quantum field equations better than our physics teacher. I don't think he even knows what a quantum field equation is.”
“I know you
can, Everett. You can probably do them better than me, but you didn't listen to what I said. I said, experimental evidence.”
“Proof.”
“Physical proof. Yes. You have it on your pad there.”
Everett was the Shaolin master of chopsticks. Everett could eat raw seaweed with them, even slippery noodles. Everett never fumbled. He fumbled now. The sticks crossed; the little cylinder of rice fell to the plate.
“What you have is a directory of the multiverse. I didn't know your dad had given it a name. Infundibulum. Those are locations of the known parallel universes. Not all of them. You couldn't fit all of the ones we've discovered so far on to your computer.”
“How many have you discovered?”
“Ten to the eighty.”
Everett knew mathematical notation. His friends who were good with hardware had expanded Dr. Quantum's onboard memory to a terabyte. That was ten to the twelve bytes of information. As a number, taken out of the realm of computers and information, that was a one with twelve zeroes behind it. A thousand billion. A number you could still think. Ten to the eighty, a one with eighty zeroes, that was a number beyond imagining. You would run out of millions of billions of trillions. Everett's belly felt hollow; his head reeled. He was falling through the endless unfolding of the Mandelbrot set again. Big, exciting, terrifying numbers.