The Upper World

by Femi Fadugba

  ‘It turns out,’ he continued, ‘that’s what an electromagnetic wave looks like.’ He leaned closer to the device. ‘What light looks like.’

  A final hologram appeared – a diagram.

  ‘Light is just a series of electrical and magnetic waves, each ripple creating the next ripple, then the next, and moving the whole beam of light forward in the process.’

  ‘Just fascinating,’ I responded flatly. To be fair, his comparison wasn’t that awful, and neither were his gadget’s pyrotechnics. Any other night, I’d have even complimented him. But not with two minutes left before I had to dust or potentially face lifelong consequences.

  As if the gods were hell-bent on seeing me wait and suffer, his phone rang again.

  ‘My bad,’ he said, facing me. ‘I’m gonna answer this proper quick in the corridor. I’ll be back in two minutes. Promise.’

  Before I could protest, or renegotiate for my early exit, he was out the door. Whatever he was discussing was dodgy enough for him to take the call a full twenty metres down the corridor. I sat in the room alone, bored, frustrated. Angry. It was the perfect storm of emotions to lead to the most brazen of ideas. Criminal, was actually the closer word.

  As I got up and moved towards his manbag, I wondered what the odds were of him having cash in there. Decent, was the answer for anyone born that near to the millennium.

  It’s only a tenner, I assured myself while sliding the zip down, hands shaking slightly. I’ll 1,000 per cent pay him back this time next week. In fact, when you think about it … he basically owes me this money. It’s his fault I’m late, so it makes sense that he’s subsidizing part of the fare.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d stolen anything from anyone, let alone a complete stranger. I was wrong, and I knew it. I felt like shit. A fly-covered, steaming pile of shit. And the only thing sleazier than coming up with the twisted moral logic I’d used to justify my actions, was forcing myself to believe it.

  The first item I saw was a tattered brown notebook. I’d not seen anything like it before, not in any stationery shop I’d ever walked in. It looked even older than Dr Esso; one corner was scorched black and the other split apart by time, with writing on the cover so smudged I could barely make it out.

  ‘Blaise Adenon?’ I mumbled. Same surname as Dr Esso.

  I got some small comfort from knowing I’d hear the tutor’s footsteps before he walked in. But the time I’d spent fiddling about with his diary had probably used up some cushion.

  Further in I found a wallet. And tucked in the main fold – a crisp set of bills.

  I pulled out the twenty-pound note and stared at it. It was like King George, printed in purple on the front, was looking back at me. Like he was peering into my soul and damning me to hell.

  This ain’t you, Rhia, I imagined him telling me with a royal shake of the head. And he was right.

  I couldn’t go through with it. I refused to. Whatever consequences were gonna come from me arriving late, I’d just have to ride it.

  It’s just one social, I thought while stuffing the cash back into the wallet. Another convenient lie I was forcing myself to believe.

  I heard trainer soles squeaking on the polished floor outside. I had just seconds.

  My fingers were clasped round the zip, ready to pull it shut and sprint back to my seat.

  Then I saw it.

  It was a photo – scratched-up and tucked into a side flap – of four kids at a lunch table. One was a skinnier, fresher-faced version of Dr Esso, and to his right sat a girl the same age.

  A girl who I knew instantly – because there was a photo of her tucked away in my drawer at home.

  ‘Thanks for your patience,’ Dr Esso said, as he opened the door and strolled back to his seat mere milliseconds after I’d shut the bag.

  What! The! Fuck! I wanted to shout. How was I meant to act normal with my eyes burning from what I’d just seen? I gripped the pen in my hand so hard it snapped in two and Dr Esso, none the wiser, picked up where we’d left off.

  ‘The sickest part is that, the guy who figured out that light is an electromagnetic wave, did it the same way we just did: with some quick maths. He then had to wait two decades till someone finally did an experiment proving he’d been right all along. Can you imagine how insane he must have felt?’

  I could. I was feeling pretty fucking insane. This man knew my mum. And well enough that he apparently carried a photo of her wherever he went, which he couldn’t see. My hands were shaking even harder now under the table, my ankles wobbling at the same speed on the ground.

  ‘I guess you’ve gotta go now, innit,’ he said after a moment of silence. ‘Since it was my fault we started late, I’ll sort you a taxi so you can hopefully get there on time.’

  Yes, I do need to go. I wasn’t even thinking about the social any more. I just needed to get out of this room. Get myself back under control.

  My whole life I’d wondered who my birth mum was, and the faded Polaroid under the sports bras in my drawer was all I’d ever got in response. No matter how often she appeared in my dreams, in the real world she only existed as a three-by-three print on a long-dead leaf of time. I thought back to an ancient memory – I must have been four or five, sitting on a gum-pink stool and gazing up at the first foster carer I remembered having. ‘Where’s my mum?’ I would ask her, followed by, ‘Well, then where’d she go?’ Sitting in that claustrophobic room a decade on, I had the same questions. Only now, an answer was sitting opposite me in a tracksuit.

  I sat, dazed, studying the shifting contours of his face and wondering who this guy was. I’d known something was off about him from the beginning but could never have guessed it would be this. And I still didn’t know where, when or how he’d got hold of a photo of my mum, Nadia Black.

  ‘Yeah,’ I responded, sending a loud gulp down. ‘I’ll definitely take you up on that taxi.’

  CHAPTER 5

  Esso · Now

  FRIDAY (TODAY)

  When I woke up on that fateful morning, my first thought was the argument I’d had with Mum the last night. I still felt proper shit. I couldn’t unsee her outline at the door, pulling on a cigarette while the hem of her nightgown chased the wind outside. I also couldn’t forget how fragile she’d looked when I’d left her – a life’s worth of burnout in her baggy eyes. With everything going on with D and Bloodshed, I wondered when we’d get a chance to fix things … if we’d ever get a chance. The violent finality of that ‘if’ sent a shiver up my spine.

  And, to make things extra awkward, tonight was Friday: Fish & Chips & Film Night! I was still chuffed with my seven-year-old self for coming up with that tagline. Once 8 p.m. swung round, me and Mum were on for two hours of solo time.

  But today it would be two hours of chewing silently and avoiding eye contact on our tiny couch, instead of our usual laughing while shouting, ‘Run, you idiots!’ at the telly.

  I sat up, and a slim tan-leather notebook sitting on the corner of my bed shook loose a memory from the night before – Mum coming in and placing it there. The name, written in felt tip on the front, made me sit up extra straight:

  My dad’s full name.

  I wondered what had prompted Mum to give it to me now – the harsh words I’d spat at her the night before or something else? Something deeper? If this really was his notebook, it meant she’d been hiding it from me my whole life. And yet I was too excited to even care.

  In fact, in that moment I felt grateful. The only other testimonies we had of him were a pile of tax forms she kept in her bedroom and an unpaired sock of his that I kept in mine.

  Seeing the surname – ADENON – written in block print got me the most gassed, though. It wasn’t just his name; it was ours. It was a portal to my past, my roots spelled out in ink. The man responsible for the other half of my DNA was just sitting there on my duvet. He was finally in arm’s reach. Here was my chance to know the kind of man he was, maybe even catch a glimpse of the man I could become.


  I reached for it hungrily. A part of me genuinely believed that, after reading the first page, I’d be zapped with a magical link to him. Failing that, I’d at least get some closure before a new day started. And the two first words I read only amplified those hopes.

  To Esso.

  But in the end, instead of magic, all I got was the shivers.

  Once upon a time, a group of prisoners lived in a cave …

  It got even weirder from there. ‘Flickering shadows on a wall’, ‘the Upper World’, a guy named Socrates getting executed.

  Never in my life had words taken me so high, then so low, so quickly. The next few letters, all addressed to me, had notes on everything from time travel to atomic bombs to dimensions you could only see through maths. It was all in there, and half reminded me of the Pythagoras stuff I’d dug up in Purdy’s class on Monday – just more cultish. The kind of stuff I’d sooner see in the sci-fi novels Nadia devoured most weekends.

  ‘Disappointment’ was too weak a word to describe how I felt. ‘Alarmed’ was close, but still fell short. The most obvious verdict was that I’d just read the rantings of a three-quid lunatic who, if he were still alive, would be preaching about the end times from a megaphone in Trafalgar Square. His words were so serious, like he actually believed what he was writing. Maybe Dad wasn’t all there in the head, and that was why Mum had kept it from me. What Mum had said about him the night before – about her not wanting me to turn into him – still stung like chilli pepper on a cracked lip. And I was feeling much less forgiving now about how long she’d kept this from me.

  I really can’t get into this right now, I decided. My daddy issues and questions would have to wait till the evening. To get out of here on time, I’d have to figure out how to take a crap, shower, brush my teeth and eat cereal all at the same time. I’d have to accept my dad had probably been mad, and think about the day in front of me.

  Before I left my room, I slid the notebook under my pillow.

  As I walked towards the stairs, my first sniff of the morning came cold and wrapped in jollof rice. The scent must have escaped from that flat downstairs where the Ghanaians lived. The rice was at the stage where each tomato-soaked grain at the bottom of the pot was starting to char, and, after skipping breakfast, I wanted to kill the lucky bastard who would get to scrape it up.

  Back-to-back texts from Nadia paused my scheming thoughts.

  Nadia:

  Yo E. Heard some mad shit about u and Ds brother.

  Nadia:

  Everything OK? How come you never told me?

  Nadia:

  Anyway text me yeah? xxxx

  I was surprised she’d been paying such close attention. Kinda touched, actually. My thumb hovered over the screen, waiting for the right words to arrive. I waited. Then I waited some more. And then I gave up.

  No, everything’s not OK was the obvious response, but also the one requiring most explanation. I would have to tell her about how, by accident, I’d parachuted myself into the middle of a live-o road beef. And how I was now one demerit away from getting kicked out of school. I thought about all the work I’d put in over the last few months to project the perfect blend of mysterious yet fun to her. I didn’t want to give up the illusion I was too cool for fear. As much as I was dying to share my fears with someone who cared, it just felt too soon.

  A part of me wondered whether I’d ever stop thinking it was ‘too soon’. I’d had a golden opportunity the week before, when we’d gone to watch another sci-fi film Nadia had insisted on seeing. I could have gone full romantic – opening doors, paying for overpriced popcorn, then coming clean about how I’d obsessed about her every day since she’d transferred to Penny Hill … Or I could have taken Rob’s typically useless advice to ‘just be myself’. I hadn’t even risked asking Kato. In the end, I picked something halfway between the two terrible options I had in front of me: I did nothing. I genuinely wished I didn’t fancy her as much as I did. I even fancied the bits of her I was meant to find ugly. That snort when she laughed too hard. The oversized birthmark on the darker side of her wrist. The steel braces framing her smile …

  By the time I got down to the second floor, my phone was back in my pocket and I’d boiled my focus down to two words: survive today. Once Friday was over, we’d have the weekend, then half-term – a whole week to lay low at home and figure out how to smooth things out with D, Bloodshed and any other Brixton yutes who had me on their hit list. I just needed to stay out their way over the school day. That was all.

  Generally the faster my mind raced, the slower my legs tended to move. It was like I’d been born with a maximum amount of speed that I had to ration between my brain and lower limbs. And my watch was now telling me that, because of that rationing, I was on track to miss the next 36 bus by at least a couple minutes.

  I skipped down the last few sets of stairs, jumping off the third-to-bottom steps to shave off a second each time. With every stride, the jollof scent weakened, and as I raced past Homeless Dave he lifted his glass bottle and howled, ‘Ahhwooooo!’ Twenty metres on, I could still hear him cough-laughing like he had gravel in his lungs.

  My route to the bus stop was flanked by council flats just like ours on both sides. They were the same ones you saw in every ends in London. Each tower was wrapped in a scarf of white-and-blue plastic, their brick faces pimpled with idle TV dishes. People from every corner of the planet had their prayers planted under those blocks, waiting for their dreams to bloom out of the concrete once the never-ending British rain let up. Those blocks were all I knew. The Narm, Peckham, was all I knew.

  A clumsy sidestep was all that stopped me from smashing into a half-familiar little girl as I rounded the final corner on to the road where the 36 was scheduled to stop in less than a minute. She was holding her dad’s hand, and her puffy pink jacket was zipped up so far that only a tiny oval was left open for her eyes to track me as I skimmed past. Only on seeing how warm she looked did I realize I’d forgotten my own jacket at home. At the same time, I noticed the oniony smell seeping from inside my shirt. ‘Shit,’ I muttered. I’d remembered to spray deodorant all over my balls that morning but somehow forgot my armpits. I thought about going back but instead flapped my shirt a few times to let the nastiness out. The bus was slowing down at the stop across the road, meaning I had ten seconds, max, before it pulled away again.

  Just ahead, a slender woman in a light-grey jacket and matching pencil skirt was crossing the street, holding hands with two kids who flanked each hip. A dozen more kids in matching primary-school uniforms strolled just behind. I started a diagonal jay-sprint across the road, hoping to cheat space and time, and when I looked back for oncoming cars I saw a matt-black Range Rover with matching black rims speeding towards the crossing. A multi-ethnic-looking dude with a long wispy beard was driving, but he had his eyes locked on the phone in his lap, maybe assuming the pedestrians were watching the road for him.

  Meanwhile, the last kid in the group crossing the street, a primary-school version of Benedict Wong with a 360-degree bowl cut, was still inching across the road like he had nowhere safer to be.

  The chaperone lady turned back to the boy. ‘Hurry along.’ When he didn’t respond, she shouted, ‘I said, move it! We haven’t got all day.’ But her calm pose told me she clearly hadn’t seen the car and genuinely believed the biggest danger the child was facing was being late for registration.

  The tyre screeches came first, followed by a muffled yell from inside the Range Rover. The boy stopped cold in the middle of the road, and his eyes widened, finally matching the enormity of the moment, the biggest moment that might ever happen in his tiny life.

  A million thoughts crawled through my head, each climbing on top of the next until only one was left standing: Get him before the car does.

  I didn’t make the choice because I wanted to be a hero. It wasn’t really a choice at all – more a mindless reflex that I let take over because the terror waiting for me at school meant it didn�
�t really matter what happened right now.

  Looking back, I probably should’ve kept running for the bus.

  PART II: TIME

  * * *

  FROM BLAISE ADENON’S NOTEBOOK: LETTER 2

  To Esso,

  Little has been written about the Upper World – mostly because of how little we know. We do not know if all people can access it, or whether there are differences across individuals, cultures or even species. No one has ever seen where the Upper World starts and ends, assuming it ends at all. The only thing scarier than the thought of you going up there alone, is the tragedy of you not knowing it exists. And so the little I know, my child, I will tell you.

  Firstly, you have to speak it to see it.

  Language influences what we see. In Greek, for instance, there is no such word as ‘blue’. Either something is ghalazio (a lighter shade of blue) or ble (a darker shade of blue). Any Greek settling on this cloudy island will swiftly find their colour vocabulary cut in half; two vibrant colours tucked into a single English word, ‘blue’.

  But, as one curious study showed, Greeks who abandon their mother tongue also stop being able to distinguish between ghalazio- and ble-coloured objects. They literally see half of what they used to – because of language.