We watch an incredible sunset together.
I put on a little music, which plays beautifully through the expensive sound system on the patio.
I ask Sarah to dance with me.
As soon as I do, I know it was a mistake.
I can see the light in her eye change.
She says something, which I don’t hear.
The music which is playing is one of her favourite pieces. I know it is. I remember. And I put it on deliberately.
“James…” she says, standing slowly… “I think… maybe…”
“Just one dance. Just one.”
“Then what…? What next?”
I hold out my right hand to her, leaving it hang in the air in front of her, waiting for her to accept it.
“James…”
“One dance…”
“I can’t…”
“Dance with me Sarah.” I ask. “Please.”
Slowly, she extends her hand out towards me, and my fingers hook hers slightly, and draw her towards me.
She comes close, rests her head and a hand on my shoulders, and I take her other hand in mine and hold it out to our side.
I feel her waist move against mine, and I draw her backwards towards me, then spin slightly with the music.
Slowly, we begin to dance.
To move together.
To unite.
When the music to the first dance stops, it moves quickly on to another of her favourite tracks.
Sarah does not pull away.
We continue to move together. To dance. As one.
Our faces get closer. She lifts her head. I turn towards her.
Our eyes meet. Her lips open.
My lips find hers.
We kiss.
Her mouth widens, I feel the warmth from her throat, the saltiness of her saliva.
Her tongue meets mine. And together they begin to explore each other.
I can feel her heart beating faster against my chest, and I am sure she can feel how I am reacting, physically, to her.
The hand that comes between us and which pushes me away from her with significant force is not anything that I expect.
Neither is what follows next.
“No! Stop… I CAN’T DO THIS!” she says loudly, not shouting, but nevertheless with significant force.
Her hands fly to her face, cupping her reddened cheeks in each hand.
Her eyes are wild.
There is confusion written all over her.
“I have to leave, James. I have to go!”
“Please, don’t. Stay a little longer.
“James, I CAN’T!”
This time her voice is raised.
“I’m MARRIED James. Married!”
What do I say?
“I love you Sarah!”
“And I love you James. I love you too. But I love Brian. A LOT! And I can’t do this. It’s wrong. It’s not fair on Brian. On what we have together… He trusts me, James. He TRUSTS ME, and look what I’m doing!”
“Sarah, I admit… things are really complicated. But, for me, there’s never been anyone else but you… “
“James, I thought you were gone. Forever. You broke my heart. Ripped it out and shredded it. It took me years to get back some semblance of life. And when I was ready to love and live again, Brian rescued me. He rescued me from the memory of you…”
“But I’m not a memory. I’m here. And I’m standing here now… just a simple love sick time-traveller telling the woman of his dreams that he loves her. And hoping that…”
Sarah closes her eyes, lifts up her head and tilts it backwards, breathing deeply. With her eyes still closed, she speaks again, but this time her voice has changed. It’s stronger, more resolute. “Stop. Enough. James. Please. Can you get someone to take me home now please…”
I recognise the voice. The move. The exercise in self-control when Sarah blots out the world, and resets. I’ve seen her do it many times, and I know, I know, there is no point in fighting it.
--------------------
When I return from the lounge where I call Sue, who agrees to arrange for another female officer to pick Sarah up and take her back home, I find that Sarah is standing by the patio wall, looking down at the river.
She’s already wearing her coat and is holding her handbag.
She turns and looks at me, her face blank. She nods at me, then walks past me, through the apartment to the hallway.
“I’ll wait downstairs,” she says. “I think it’s best.”
“Stop… wait…” I beg.
She’s already opened the door and is standing in the doorway, half-in the apartment, and half-out.
“Sarah… you said you love me still…”
“I do, James. I still love you. I never stopped. But now I love Brian too. I love you. And I love him.”
“But I’m the father to your… our… son Kenneth. He needs me too.”
“He also needs Brian. Brian has given us his life. He didn’t go back to America. He stayed here to marry me, to care for us both, to love us both. And he needs me. Just as much as I need him. Maybe more. And he’s a good father. An excellent father.”
“But I’m his father!” I hear myself insist.
“So is he, James. Kenneth now has two fathers.”
“But you love me, Sarah!”
“I love you, AND I love Brian. I love you both.”
She pauses, and in that moment, I can sense that something changes. Her confusion… that look on her face… is gone. I know Sarah. I know her. She’s made a decision.
“James… when you went through the portal, when you stepped through that door on the tube train… you’d chosen to go back to the other Sarah, hadn’t you?”
I hesitate, but there’s only one real answer I can give to her question.
“At the point I’d started to move, the answer to that question is yes. Because I was going back to Sarah, to you, but not you, and our two children… I didn’t know then that you were pregnant… and I didn’t think at that point that we had a future together because you had run off from me earlier… and by the time I knew about Kenneth… and that you did love me… it was too late…”
“But you chose her. You were in love with two women, and you chose the other one… Why?”
“Because in the end, I think, perhaps, because I knew her longer than you… and I thought she needed me more than you did. It was an impossible choice to make…but I think in the end, yes, it was because of Keira and Nicole and a Sarah who needed me more. We’d built a life together already, and in the position I was in, where I loved you both just as much, but where she needed me more, that tipped the balance of the decision in her favour…”
As soon as I say the words, I know what will happen next.
I watch Sarah turn away from me, step through the door, and walk away.
One moment she is in my apartment, the next… she is gone.
Chapter Forty Four
A big mistake
.
I stand for a while facing the door to my apartment, now closed.
I am numb.
What just happened I am not completely sure… How did it go from being so good, so promising, to this… ? What did I do?
Though, deep down, I know the truth is, that this is always the way it was going to go.
Sarah is a decent, honest person. Loyal to the core. Assuming that she loved her husband, there was no way she was ever going to leave him: in all the scenarios that I could possibly have imagined, she would never have chosen me over him.
I lean against the wall, and slide down against it, until, yet again, I find myself once more sitting behind my front door.
My emotions are all over the place.
I’m still very turned on. Sexually aroused.
I’ve been like that ever since she walked in.
I can still taste her on my lips. And when I close my eyes, I have this lingering sensation of her leaning against me, of her chest and her breasts pr
essing against mine. I can still smell her perfume on my clothes. The same perfume now that she wore the last time I slept with her, and the same perfume she wears in our other world, where she is my wife, and not someone else’s.
I stand up, steadying myself against the wall, and walk through to the patio. I stand there, close my eyes again, and remember how, just minutes before, we were dancing.
Holding each other close.
Our arms around each other.
Like lovers.
Like man and wife.
But when I open my eyes, she is gone.
Fuck!
There is a half-empty bottle of wine on the table. And Sarah’s glass is half-full.
Sitting down where Sarah sat, I pick up her glass and drink the rest of its contents.
Inside, I feel empty.
Hollow.
There is a terrible … nothingness…
I am numb.
I sit here, like this, not thinking, not feeling, just existing, for almost an hour.
It’s like a cloud has come down upon me, and the world around me has faded away.
Slowly, however, it seems to lift.
Two thoughts creep into my mind.
One very positive, and one negative.
I decide to consider the positive one first. Which is, that Sarah obviously has strong feelings for me. She still loves me. I am not nothing to her.
I decide, after much thought, that this is the most positive thing I can take away from this evening.
I know Sarah… and I know that tonight she made a decision that she will not go back upon, and it is one that there is no point in fighting.
The most positive thing I can do in reaction to her decision is simply to respect it. Accept it. Live with it.
Which, means, basically, that in this world, I have lost Sarah.
She chose Brian. And not me.
Fuck.
Wonderful, even the ‘positive’ thing didn’t last long.
And that leaves me now only with the ‘negative’ thought to play with, which is, that I forgot to discuss with Sarah if and when I can ever see my son.
For a while, when she was kissing me, or in my arms… there was an opportunity perhaps to come to some agreement about how I could get to spend time with Kenneth, and get to know him…
But now that opportunity is gone.
For now.
Though perhaps not gone forever.
Sarah is a good mother. With luck, if I leave it for a few days, and don’t press it now, if I take the pressure off her a little, and give her time to get used to the idea of me being here, then, yes, I think that she may consider letting me have some sort of access to Kenneth.
It is my only hope.
I blink.
For a moment I look at the bottle of wine on the table, and I consider drinking it.
Getting drunk.
After all, what’s left for me now in this world?
There will be no Sarah.
It’s a good question.
What’s left for me now in this world?
Standing up, I look at the wine, but ignore it. Instead, I go back through to the lounge and retrieve the photographs of Kenneth which Sarah gifted me.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I look at them again. One at a time.
And I realise that I have the answer to the question in my hands.
What’s left for me now in this world?
The answer is Kenneth.
--------------------
When I awake the next morning, I find that I am lying on the bed, still fully clothed, and exactly where I was when I curled up in a ball last night, hugging the photographs of Kenneth.
I shower, shave, move around the apartment and clean up from the night before.
The wine… I pour down the sink in the bathroom. The dirty glasses I put on a tray and leave on the table in the lounge knowing that they will be taken away by the room service at some point.
At 9.a.m., having eaten a full English breakfast that is delivered to my door after a simple phone call to the front desk, I close the door to my apartment and leave the building.
It’s a wonderful day. The sun is shining and it’s already warm.
The numbness I felt last night is receding.
It’s not gone completely, but with every step, it fades a little further away.
By the time I return to the apartment four hours later, there is even a slight spring in my step.
Sarah, I accept, is gone. She will not be my wife in this world, no matter how hard I wish it.
But with Kenneth there is hope.
Which means that ‘when’, not ‘if’ we meet, I must be someone that he will be proud of. Someone that he will want to get to know.
So, even though I currently have nothing and my existence in this world is supported only by the charity afforded to me by the Blue Pass, all this must change.
For the sake of Kenneth, if not also for me, James Quinn must now rise again from the ashes. I must once again become a success. And a good man.
The only question, therefore,… is how?
Chapter Forty Five
A rebirth
.
It starts to rain about five o’clock, and I am forced off the balcony with its amazing view of the Thames, and into retreat in my lounge.
For the past hour I’ve been sitting, thinking.
A pad of paper which I had taken with a cup of tea out onto the patio, mainly in the hope of filling it with ideas, is sadly, still blank.
I had hoped that by now it would be full of notes, ideas, and brilliant plans of how to turn my life around, to make it a success, so that when I rise from the ashes of my existence, I will burn brightly enough to one day inspire my son to want to spend time with me, to learn from me…and have respect for me.
Sadly, after another half an hour sitting with a third cup of tea, the page is still blank.
Not admitting defeat, but accepting taking a break is acceptable, I switch on the I-vision and begin to flick through the channels.
Unfortunately, as far as TV is concerned, there have been no great advancements. With over two hundred channels to choose from, I still can’t find anything to watch.
Luckily, BBC One still exists, and I retreat to it in the hope of finding the Six O’clock BBC News.
Discovering that the news still exists at that time, I quickly order some food from the reception manager, and settle back in the most comfy leather chair in the room.
The format of the news is almost exactly the same as when I last watched it in Jane’s house, ‘all those years’ ago. However, I don’t recognise the news presenter.
Surprisingly, very little of the news concerns the pandemic. I imagine it’s because the pandemic has been going on for so long, that it’s no longer actually news. Instead, it’s background noise. Just part of the monotonous drudgery that binds each day to the next.
I find the news boring. None of it seems real to me. Reports of this or that… they all still seem to relate to a distant world with which I have no connection. I know it should be relevant to me, but it isn’t.
At the end of the main news, it hands over to local studios, and with nothing else to do, I allow the “London News” to start washing over me.
It’s a little more relevant. But still not hugely inspiring.
I’m just beginning to fall asleep, when a face appears on the screen and I almost fall off my chair with shock.
It’s Richard Cohen! My old partner and friend from the advertising firm I was working in when I first jumped to this parallel world.
I’m now wide awake, hovering on the edge of my chair. I turn up the volume.
The news article is about how devastating the current lock-in has been to businesses in London, and questioning whether they will ever recover post pandemic. Or will home-working have taken off so much that no one will want to return to the city, which will slowly, or actually very quickly, die.
Richard is being intervie
wed via View Portal, and he’s talking from home somewhere in Knightsbridge. I’m listening to him speak, wondering what he’s got to do with any of this, when a title appears underneath his picture, announcing that he is Richard Cohen, Mayor of London.
?
WHAT?
And quite literally, I do fall off my chair.
“You’re KIDDING me!” I shout aloud, and laugh at the same time.
It’s not that I think Richard couldn’t do the job - I know he would probably be brilliant at it - it’s just that I can’t believe my friend is now the Mayor!
“How on earth did that happen?” I ask.
I listen to the rest of the article then immediately fetch my laptop and start searching for the website of the advertising firm where I was a partner, last time I was here in London in 2013.
I can’t find it. ‘Cohen Advertising’ is nowhere to be found.
Does it exist anymore? Or has the pandemic killed it off too, like it has done to so many other businesses?
I try running numerous different search patterns, combining the words ‘Advertising’ and ‘Cohen’ and London, along with any other word that I can think of that may be relevant.
Nothing comes back.
I decide to try something different. I type in ‘advertising agency’ and combine it with the address of the agency’s office, at least, the address it used to have in 2013.
“CQH Advertising” the title stares back at me on the screen, along with a link to its website. I click on the link.
It’s definitely an advertising company. In the same building that Cohen’s used to be in. I click the option advertising information about the “Management Team” on the tool bar, and the page immediately jumps to a new page showing pictures of two people, a man, and a woman. Both directors of the company.
The man is Richard.
The woman is someone I’ve never heard of before. A Rachel Holmes.
Both are listed as active partners in the firm. A third name is mentioned, but as a sleeping partner. Now retired. James Quinn. Apparently the inspiration behind the Olympics in 2016, the success of the Millennium Dome, and the launch of Scotia Telecom.
Am I Dead? Page 29