The Upper World

by Femi Fadugba

  ‘OK … just relax, Rhia,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘He’ll do the explaining.’

  ‘You know I can hear you, innit?’ he said. ‘As in, I’m right here.’ He was staring at me like I’d gone stupid, like he wasn’t the one about to look a fool when I confronted him. ‘You’d be amazed how often this happens to me, you know. People think just cos I can’t see their lips moving, the sound dodges my ears as well.’

  He reached across the desk to hand me my homework. ‘Full marks,’ he said. As if any of that shit mattered now. ‘I told you you’d enjoy the time-travel aspect of –’

  ‘Just get on with the lesson,’ I spat out.

  His head sprang back, almost snapping clean off the hinge. After a pause, he got back some balance. ‘Umm … cool.’

  By the time he started speaking again, I already had my phone in my hand and was tapping on the video icon. It was one of the many Q-encrypted files that had made the download at Linford’s house take so long. According to the readout, this single file download would take 84 seconds. A wait that’d be even more unbearable than the first time we endured it on the bus.

  ‘Before we get into everything, I just wanted to say I’m proud of you. I know you’re getting more match time, which is sick. And, school-wise, I see you smashing these subjects by the time summer exams come round.’

  His words were pure air to me. I was too busy reminding myself that the broken goalpost on the floor should not be used as a weapon on him. After what we’d watched together, Olivia really hadn’t wanted me to come tonight – but she’d been fearing for Dr Esso’s safety almost as much as for mine.

  ‘I won’t lie, Rhia – exam results matter. Without good maths and science GCSEs, half the subjects at uni are off limits, and a lot of career options disappear after that as well.’

  While half listening, I watched him hide his hands under the table before continuing in the same careful tone. ‘But it’s even deeper than all that. If you don’t get numbers, you can’t see through the lies they’re spewing on the socials. And them man there will just keep feeding you with bookie stats, convincing you your community’s broken beyond repair, and that, without their help, we’d rip ourselves apart. I grew up more scared of the boydem on my estate than the paigons who crammed us all in there, then moved us all out. I didn’t know any better.’

  Whatever he was saying was coming from the chest now.

  ‘Look, there are things I’m trying to teach you …’ He pointed his finger at the window that was clapping to the beat of the rain. ‘Things that no one out there understands. Stuff I’ve been wanting to explain since we met.’

  My ears perked up.

  ‘Rhia, have you ever stopped to think about what maths really is?’

  Just as I thought he was about to fess up about Mum, he’d veered back into his standard nonsense. Sixty seconds left on the download. Sixty whole seconds listening through this bullshit.

  He leaned forward, gut pressed into the table. I leaned back. ‘In one sense, maths is just a weird-looking language we made up in our heads to help us do useful shit. Some diggers not too long ago found a 43,000-year-old bone with 29 cuts on it buried in a mountain in Swaziland. Turns out, the first humans to ever use maths were some African ladies trying to track the moon, for God knows what reason.’

  He was so smart. And yet sometimes … so, so dumb.

  I felt a line of sweat down my side. Somehow the wacky ideas and hopes he’d planted in my mind still had some grip on me.

  Forty-five seconds left.

  ‘Then you have the equations the Ancient Egyptians used to build the pyramids,’ he droned on. ‘The same line of maths that Pythagoras made famous centuries after. Look at the Fa prophets who communicated with 256-bit binary code centuries before computers were invented.’ The words were rushing out almost uncontrollably. ‘Or take the Muslim mathematician who invented the numbers 1 through 9 so traders would have a way of talking money, then turned everything he learnt into a subject he named al-jabr. We invented maths as a tool to make our lives easier, but then something happened: our creation started walking and talking all on its own. It started doing unreasonable, unnatural things.’

  I looked up from my phone to see him almost levitating off his seat, his voice getting shakier with each word.

  ‘Just think for a second how insane it is! A guy like Albert Einstein jots down some random equations about light and time – the same ones we’ve been working through – while working at his desk job. Then some men who needed bigger guns took his doodles and created an atomic weapon that killed over 146,000 people.

  ‘146,000 people,’ he repeated, snapping his fingers. ‘Gone in a flash. Physics has this godly power. It can explain the past, predict the future. It can give life. And it can snatch it away.’

  Five seconds left. My heart was banging against my ribs.

  ‘You have that kind of power in you, Rhia. And, once you realize it, there’s –’

  ‘You knew my mum, didn’t you?’ I placed the phone face up on the table. And, after waiting too long for his lower jaw to rise, I pressed on. ‘You two were at that murder scene together that night fifteen years ago.’

  ‘How on earth did you –’

  ‘Answer the question,’ I butted in. ‘And don’t you dare try lying.’

  I hit play on the thirteen-second CCTV clip and let him listen to the gunshots. To the screams. Only God knew how anyone could have survived that scene. And yet here he was.

  ‘Turn it off.’ He couldn’t see the flash of red light that flooded the screen midway, but he was clutching his temples like he could feel it. ‘Please.’

  But I didn’t lift a finger. I’d had to suffer through it to the end. He would too.

  A final glance at his feet was all the confession needed. I waited for silence to charge the room before speaking again. ‘I want an explanation. And I want it now.’

  He sat up. ‘Fifteen years … That’s how long I’ve spent waiting for this. And I still wish I could have had another week to get you ready for it.’

  Ready for what?! I’d have screamed if I wasn’t already paralysed with anger.

  But, despite his wish for more time, sitting in front of me was a man who now looked scarily prepared. No. More terrifying than prepared – he looked … eager.

  ‘I guess it’s time for me to tell you why I’m here,’ he announced. ‘And about what happened to Nadia.’

  He slid a notebook from his rucksack as he spoke – the same tattered notebook I’d seen in his bag the night I met him.

  ‘I wasn’t even sure you were alive. I was about to give up. On you. On everything.’ He exhaled as he lifted the book. ‘I thought about burning this thing every other day. Even put my lighter to it a couple times. But then one night, I heard the TV next door switch on and a Scouser news lady reporting from the other side of my bedroom wall. She mentioned a young sports prodigy from Peckham. Apparently this ‘future football legend’ – her words, not mine – had never played club football before but scored two screamers on her debut. The presenter described how the girl had been in care for pretty much all fifteen years of her life. And that her surname was Black. And I knew straight away it was you.’

  He stared down at the table. ‘So, I tracked you down, and figured a couple hours of tutorials each week would be the best way to get to know you, to be sure you were her. But, from the first moment we met outside, when I heard your voice, my heart almost exploded.’

  That was when his feet had gone dodgy that first night. I’d been right all along. But that only cranked up the fear already paralysing me.

  I wasn’t here for an easy time, I reminded myself. I was here for answers.

  ‘What about my mum?’

  He gulped. ‘Your mum and I went to school together. We were in the same year at Penny Hill Secondary, before it turned into a science academy. Nadia was the first person I properly talked to about this time-travel stuff.’ He paused, and a sombre smile came to his face
. ‘She loved you, Rhia. She loved you more than sci-fi films or TikTok dance challenges or Moesha reruns. And, trust me, that last one was a big deal to her, still. She was tough. Smart. Sometimes even kind.’

  He couldn’t see the tears rolling down my cheeks but one sniffle was enough to turn his head towards me. Somewhere between his words, I’d gone from knowing I once had a mum, to actually knowing her. Apparently she was obsessed with cheesy retro TV. She loved me. My mum was bursting with dimensions, and, for the first time, she felt real.

  ‘So, what happened to her that night?’ I said, my stomach now touching the desk. There’d be time to sort through my emotions when I got home. Right now I had to focus on the facts. The details. ‘My mum got checked in to St Jude’s Mental Health Care Home on 25 October –’ I double-checked the date stamp on the video – ‘the Monday after this was taken.’

  His feet hadn’t flinched one bit. ‘There was a flash of light in that video, wasn’t there?’ he asked. ‘Right after the first gunshot?’

  ‘Yeah, lit up the whole screen.’

  ‘Well, something happened to both me and Nadia in that moment. I don’t know what. I blacked out, and I only have foggy glimpses of the place my mind went to. But I remember waking up and knowing everything had changed.’

  ‘Changed how?’ Rain was tapping against the window, hammering in the silence between his answers.

  ‘There’s still so much about that night I can’t remember. In the end they were rolling me into an ambulance, and I could hear her screaming behind me. I lost my vision that night, and she lost her mind.’ He shook his head. ‘I wish I could explain it better.’

  I had the same wish. I was hanging on his every word, clawing at them for meaning and finding nothing.

  He took another deep breath in. ‘From then on, it was like Nadia was only partly there. I mean, you could tell she knew exactly what was going on around her, but her mind was clearly lost in something way too big for the rest of us to understand.’

  I knew how it felt not to be understood. I wished I could go back to be there for her; I wished she could be here right now for me.

  ‘Only two per cent of the UK died from the mutant virus strain that year. But almost a third of the patients at Dulwich passed away. She had you by some miracle. But, not long after, she …’

  ‘She died,’ I finished, drawing a hesitant nod from him.

  ‘I saw her a week before that. She was writing peacefully at her desk, but I could tell she was unwell … like, really unwell. She said she wanted to take a photo somewhere nice.’

  My mind went straight to the one tucked away in my drawer.

  ‘I couldn’t see, so she lined up the camera for me, then sat on the bench and spent a whole minute settling herself down for it.’ He was sniffling. ‘She said she was taking the photo for you. I don’t know where it is, but I know it was her last gift to this world, Rhia. And she gave it to you.’

  I sat in shock as the dots connected: everything he was saying was true. From his feet to his face, it was obvious.

  ‘I’m sorry for not telling you this straight away. I know the way I’ve gone about all this is proper dodgy. I was shook that if I just came out with it – with no time to walk through things step by step beforehand – you’d run a mile.’

  Even at the rate he was filling them, there were still so many gaps. So much to process.

  ‘I should have been there when they sectioned her. To tell them the pain she was feeling was real … as was the strange world her mind kept drifting to.’ He shook his head, looking more distressed than he had at any point so far. ‘But, by the time I got out of hospital, they were more interested in locking me away for agreeing with her than they were in listening to my reasons.’ He choked up again. ‘After a while – like her – I stopped talking about it to anyone. But I knew I had to find you so I could tell you what I know. I know that the world my dad wrote about in this book is the same one I saw that night, Rhia. The same one your mum, Nadia, saw. And I know the only chance I had of getting you to see it too, was by getting you to believe the physics first.’

  It’s one of those things you have to believe to see – the exact words he’d used in our first tutorial.

  Then he decided it was time to tell me about a place he called the Upper World. That was when I stopped crying and sat up.

  He described it like it was a place that still existed. The Upper World – according to Dr Esso – was a place where the thread of human consciousness stitched into the fabric of space and time. A world where understanding the mathematics of reality could let you see it. All of it: your whole life laid out in front of you from start to finish. It was where space, time, energy and all the physics he’d taught me in our lessons came from.

  ‘My memories from up there are still choppy. So I’m partly going off this notebook, which I scanned so I could listen to it,’ he confessed. ‘But I’ll never forget the heat I felt – like a cloud of hidden energy was following me.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I asked, pushing my chair back an inch. It was too much to take in even before he’d started on this new path. ‘None of it makes sense.’

  ‘And yet it does. Doesn’t it?’ he replied, steady as stone. ‘Rhia, have you ever had déjà vu that was so strong you could have sworn you’d actually experienced the moment before? The kind of déjà vu that makes you wonder if there’s more to reality, to time, than you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, repressing the memories of the many occasions I’d felt exactly what he was describing.

  ‘Then I’m guessing you never questioned why déjà vu can feel so real to us.’

  In fact, I had. And the only half answer I’d got was from Olivia. She once said that the reason we get déjà vu is because, when we’re born, we see our whole lives flash across our eyes. And that it happens one last time when we die.

  ‘I’ve felt it, Rhia.’ He was hugging himself, like he had to stop his truth exploding out of him. ‘It comes from a place just beyond our fingertips. A place that sits on the other side of this one. Sits above it.’

  This isn’t how this was meant to go, I was thinking. My compass was drifting further and further away from the familiar. I was meant to still be angry. And he was meant to be giving me straightforward answers. But now I was too sucked in to go back.

  ‘Electromagnetism, the fixed speed of light, time dilation – everything I’ve taught you is real physics. You can confirm it in any textbook or any pop-science video online. But what I’m telling you right now – about seeing the world the way physics describes it, about tapping into that – you won’t learn anywhere else.’

  His phone went off, jolting him like he’d been jabbed with a needle. He tapped his feet while reaching into his pocket, and, by the time the noise stopped, he was preaching again.

  ‘In your last assignment, you used a special Tesla to describe how we travel through time.’

  I knew the metaphor he was referring to; I’d come up with it using what I’d scribbled on the napkin during my chat with Olivia at the stadium. But why was he mentioning it now?

  ‘You said that, at normal speeds, the Tesla has more than enough battery to power the engine and the clock on the dashboard.’ He was reciting the words I’d used in my homework from memory. ‘But once the car gets close to light speed – its max speed – the battery strains and there’s not enough juice for the clock. And so the clock slows down, which, for this make-believe Tesla, means time itself slows down as well. Time dilation, basically.’

  ‘I did,’ I mumbled. But I was also wondering: how on earth was I still going along with this? Why was I listening to the same man who’d spent the past month lying nose flat to my face??

  ‘And, finally, you said that if you ever managed to reach light speed in this special Tesla, time would completely stop. That the start, middle and end of your car journey would get squeezed into zero seconds: a single moment.’

  I jumped as a ball fell from the tab
le beside us. Even the kit was bugging out.

  Dr Esso didn’t flinch, though. And each notebook page he turned was like a guillotine falling, my sanity breaking off chunk by chunk. The man was dismantling my mind, because he wanted to reshape it.

  ‘We normally see life in three dimensions,’ he continued, finally settling on a dog-eared page. ‘But, at light speed, your whole life gets squished into a single picture, letting you see both ends of the fourth dimension as well – time.’

  He flexed the backbone of the notebook to make sure the opened pages stayed flat on the desk. And the longer I stared at the horrifying landscape sketched in pencil across the page, the fatter the goosebumps got on my arms.

  ‘Well, fifteen years ago,’ he said, ‘I managed to look out the window of your special Tesla, and this is what I saw –’ he placed his fingers at the base of the drawing – ‘the Upper World. The only place where I can stop your mum from getting shipped off to an asylum where she’ll die a preventable death. The only place I can prevent those bullets from ever reaching their targets and stop anyone from dying that night. And I need your help getting there.’

  CHAPTER 15

  Esso · Now

  The teachers knew the scraps and all-round ghetto behaviour usually happened at lunch. That’s why Mr Sweeney and Ms Russel sat on high chairs at opposite sides of the hall, sniffing for the slightest scent of beef.

  From the corner of my eye, I watched D walking into the dining hall. He was with his boy Marcus, the one who looked just like the season-three fugitive-version of Dushane (to me, but no one else). Marcus was one of those very rigorous guys: a straight-A student who only bopped with people who gave no Fs.

  He split away from D and walked to the end of the dining hall where Mr Sweeney was now patrolling. After glancing side to side with a devilish smile, Marcus dipped his hand in his pocket and yelled at the top of his lungs: ‘Scrammmmmmm-bllllllle!’

  For the uninitiated, scramble was a stupid, stupid game played at school. It started with the scrambler – and anyone could be the scrambler – throwing a one-pound coin on the floor, then shouting, ‘Scramble!’ as loud as they could. A horde of kids then dived, skull first, after it – using their fists, elbows, legs, everything they had to win the coin. On a bad day, you might smash your nose up or catch your finger under someone’s foot. On a good day, the game ended with a few minor scratches, plenty of jokes and a modest transfer of wealth.