The Upper World

by Femi Fadugba

  I was so surprised by the casualness of her words that I forgot to respond.

  After waiting a moment, she added, ‘Please nod if you understand what I’m saying to you.’

  ‘Yeah, I understand,’ I replied, a little anxious.

  ‘Rhia, there’s this old theory in psychology …’ She unclipped the earpiece and lobbed it on her desk. ‘It suggests that, when you experience a traumatic event in your childhood, a part of you gets stuck at that age. It’s like, on one hand, you’re too afraid to face that extraordinary moment in your past, but, on the other hand, you’re too afraid to move forward from it. And so you just stay there, trapped in time.’

  I hated when people used words like ‘extraordinary’ to describe horrid things. But that didn’t explain why my heart was hammering and why I could hear my teeth screeching. I looked down at my feet, making sure they didn’t twitch or find another way to expose how I was feeling.

  ‘Take your old tutor, Dr Esso, for instance. From everything you told me in our last session, he clearly hasn’t accepted what happened that night. He’s still trying to change events that took place when he was sixteen, as if years haven’t passed since then.’ She paused to take off her glasses. ‘And sometimes when I look into your eyes, Rhia, I see an infant.’

  I turned to the window, wrapping my arms round my ribs in a tight hug. All of a sudden there was a long list of places I needed to be.

  ‘I see an infant who dreams about her mother’s embrace and refuses to let go. That small child in you is afraid of the future. And rightly so. But she’s wrong to tell you that you have no say in it.’

  ‘You’re chatting shit,’ I said, eyes shifting to the side. The thought of her words being true terrified me. Because, if I was responsible for my future, it meant I’d been responsible for my past too. All those foster families who had passed on me, everything that had happened to Dr Esso, to my mum. ‘You don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘I don’t know much about physics if that’s what you’re accusing me of. And I’m not sure anyone’s figured out who wins the match between free will and determinism. But what I do know and believe – with every atom in my soul – is that just because you feel stuck right now doesn’t mean it has to be that way forever.’

  I’d had enough. Enough of adults telling me about my life before disappearing from it. She was in the middle of jotting something down when I walked over to her chair and smacked the notepad off her lap.

  ‘I swear if you write one more word about me in your fucking notepad, I’m gonna tear this room apart.’ I pointed my finger between her eyes. It shook along with the rest of my arm.

  Without breaking her gaze, Anahera stood up and slid off her heels, before rolling her sleeves up one careful fold at a time. I stretched to my full height over her, clicking my knuckles one after the next.

  She looked at me dead on. ‘What do you want to tell her, Rhia? What have you wanted the younger you to understand all these years? What does she want to say?’ She opened her bronze arms in a show of surrender. ‘The words might be there. Or they might not, and that’s OK. Just give her a chance.’

  It was such an illogical request. And yet it was ripping me in two. I wanted to storm out, but something was wrapped round me and fixing me in position.

  I broke free and turned to cover the three metres back to my seat when the room started spinning. Even the ceiling looked the wrong way up. My legs went weak, and before I knew it, I was on the floor. And then it was like fifteen years of hurt were raining down on me all at once.

  One day, I thought. It was all I’d ever wanted. One day when I got to go to sleep knowing that when I woke up I’d be enough. I couldn’t do this any more. It was too much. I tipped over on my side, chest aching, sobbing on the carpet.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, finally piecing together the courage to speak out loud. ‘I’m sorry I messed this all up, Mum.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry for,’ Dr Anahera replied a few seconds later. ‘Just confusion to work through.’

  For the next hour, she watched me cry all manner of lies into her carpet. Some of them were buried too deep inside me to dislodge. But the few that came out dissolved into the nylon fibres with no way back. I was lying on my side, my fingers curled up like a T. rex, my bottom lip quivering and my flared nostrils trying to sniffle up two snot trails slimed over my cheek. Anahera couldn’t hug me – she’d broken enough rules already. So, instead, she knelt next to me and stayed silent when the next girl banged on the door. And the next.

  We just rested there. Weightless.

  At one point, I even spared a thought for Dr Esso. I’d abandoned him the same way I’d been abanoned. I pictured him lying on the floor somewhere else, weeping for the same reasons. Where was he now? I wondered. Did he still care about me, about my mum? Did he still believe that he could save her? As if reading my thoughts, Dr Anahera spoke up.

  ‘If there are past wrongs in your life that you think you can right, be my guest. But just know that there’s a wild and precious future out there waiting for you as well.’

  I rose to my feet and said thank you. And, as I walked out the door, I knew the first person I needed to see.

  CHAPTER 23

  Esso · Now

  ‘Breathe, bredda, just breathe. Thaaaat’s better.’

  It was the same man who’d eye-harassed me on my way in, but his mood – and his accent – was totally different now. Gone was the cold stare he’d given me, replaced with a look of concern as he took in my violent shaking, the fear on my face.

  ‘That’s much better,’ he repeated in his calming patois baritone, one hand on my shoulder.

  I wiped the sweat from my chin and forehead, inhaling as he’d instructed until the pub came back in high resolution. ‘How long was I out for?’

  ‘Not sure. I came upstairs just now and, man, I thought ya having a fit. But I seen plenty fits, I seen plenty panic attacks. You? Definitely having da latter.’

  ‘Panic attack?’ I whispered. It was the kind of thing I’d thought only white people got. ‘Is it permanent?’

  He grinned. ‘Nah, bredda. It’s a stress ting. Extreme stress, in fac.’ He paused a moment, letting the smile slide off his face before continuing, ‘Tell me, what’s a handsome yute like you doing stressin at ya age? You should be out playin wit your mates, chattin up girls, eatin dinner at home with your madda.’

  I fake-chuckled. ‘Stress’ was a wicked underestimation of what I was going through. Where could I even begin to explain everything to him? I could start with the premonitions I’d had after the car crash, then move on to the bullet-filled vision from lunch, then tell him about how I’d just got expelled and had a price on my head, and that all my friends were scheduled to get shot tonight as well.

  ‘I can see ya got a lot on your head,’ he said, sparing me the misery of putting my worries into words. ‘Listen, young yute. I ain’t no doctor, but I have some understanding for you: tings are what they are, and only a fool worry about tings him cyaan’t control.’

  He raised a cheeky eyebrow. ‘But then again –’ he paused another second – ‘if ya do have control, you gotta rise to dee occasion.’

  After checking me up and down one more time to make sure I wasn’t about to have a panic attack again, he reached for the flimsy paper on the table with ‘£9.49’ written on it and scrunched it up. ‘It’s on me. Ya good to go.’

  He went back downstairs to attend to his bill-paying customers, and I sat alone with the words he’d left me. There was some hidden hope in them; I could feel it. And they were timely to the point of being almost … prophetic.

  I thought back on all the visions I’d seen over the day. Some of the details seemed to have been replaced with static. But I remembered enough – I remembered D and Bloodshed walking towards me in a hailstorm with Peckham Library looming in the background. And I remembered the bullets aimed at everyone in the last vision I’d seen at lunch.

  One sight st
ood brighter than the rest: D lying dead on the ground. I tried to shrug off the gory image of the hole in his head, but it came out as a cold shiver.

  I thought back to the D I used to know. The D in the baby photo above the TV in his mum’s front room. The D before he became head of T.A.S., before his brother, Xavier, became Bloodshed. Life had stolen away the little they’d started with.

  As I was getting ready to spare a similar thought for everyone else I’d seen in my visions, a revelation flashed in front of me: I’m the link. When it swung round the second time, it stung like acid to the face. I’m the one connecting it all. I had been there when the Peckham boys slapped up Bloodshed in West End, kicking off this whole road beef. I went to school with D and humiliated him at lunch, before basically getting him expelled. And it was my snitch sheet the T.A.S. boys found that escalated things further. It was my warning text to Spark that morning in the loos that meant his boys would be strallied up in Narm waiting for T.A.S. And Nadia, Kato and Rob were heading to the same place to meet me.

  More misery washed through my veins as I sat back in my seat. I was the reason my two best friends, a dozen kids from Brixton and Peckham, and a girl I was almost sure I loved, were all about to go. There was no coincidence or luck about it – I, Esso Adenon, was the why behind it all. And by making fearful decisions based on what I’d seen in that stupid fucking Upper World, I’d only made things worse.

  Looking at my two options, I realized that if I teamed up with Spark and his boys and we clapped back at T.A.S., people would die. If I ran and hid people would die.

  It was lose-lose. And not just losing a game – losing my friends.

  Nah, I thought. That can’t run.

  That. Can. Not. Run.

  The thought of any harm coming to my people snatched me from the doom and gloom I’d soaked myself in, and up to my feet. There had to be a third way. Some path where everyone, including me, went home tonight with our bodies untorn and our souls intact. It was wishful thinking; I knew it was. But I had no choice but to think wishfully, to hope. If I’d single-handedly created this situation, I was the only one who could fix it.

  I was the only one who personally knew both D and Spark, and they were the only ones who could call back their boys. As poor as my chances were of getting through to them, I had better odds than anyone else in the known universe. And, if the Upper World had confirmed anything, it was that some version of tonight existed where I could find D and Spark in the same place – Peckham Library.

  I knew by going to Narm now, I was risking it all. Even thinking about it felt dangerous. But the risk of not going felt even deadlier.

  These weren’t Superman fantasies I was having. I didn’t care about being a hero; I just couldn’t tolerate a situation where anyone got killed. Every one of their lives was worth ‘rising to dee occasion’ for.

  I’d been taught that people like D and Spark, who lived by the sword, almost always deserved to die by it. But I knew both of them. I knew neither of them had ever asked for swords in the first place. We’d all grown up with the same choices: survive or die. There had to be more.

  Surely there was a part of D that wished he’d never touched the roads in the first place; a part of Bloodshed that wished he could go back in time and stop his mum from ever meeting the stepdad he’d been forced to harm. My heart started racing – maybe that was the revelation that could change everything.

  Maybe – just maybe – I could offer them something in exchange for laying down arms: a different future; a better one. It required me to believe that we lived in a universe forgiving enough to, once in a while, let us change our mistakes. A world operating on the first type of time travel Nadia had explained. But more than just believing in it, I would have to make it happen. And that meant figuring out how to get back to the Upper World or – better yet – finding a way to bring the Upper World to me, so I could use the same power it had given me in the dining hall.

  It might work, I told myself as new branches of possibility sprouted in my mind. It has to work. I found myself standing taller, burning with fresh purpose. Everything I’d worried about the whole year at Penny Hill felt like vanity now. Even getting expelled didn’t matter any more. Not next to our lives.

  I swiped my phone off the table. In my new, almost reckless mood, I decided there was one more thing I had to do, words I’d held in too often that needed to be shared.

  Esso:

  Sorry mum. I love you.

  I still felt bad about the things I’d said to her during our argument. But, after the day I’d had, I could see things much clearer: she’d been trying her best all along, just like I had. She worked her ass off every night for me. She cooked for me, prayed for me, cleaned up for me – on second thoughts, I actually did most of the cleaning up, but the fact remained she was the best mum in the world. The sacrifices she’d made so I could have it better might never earn the interest they deserved. But the one thing I could do in return, just in case I bowed out, was to let her know I saw her. And, though her words still stung like hell, I saw those differently as well. I probably was on the same downward spiral as my dad, and if I didn’t find a way out ASAP, I was going to end up dead, just like him. Maybe she’d given me his notebook so I could better understand his choices. So I could better make my own. For the hundredth time that day, I wished I had his diary with me, that he could be here to help.

  Within seconds, Mum was ringing me, her imagination probably running rampant, wondering what kind of disaster could have caused her son – her desperate, defiant only son – to send that kind of message. I didn’t pick up, knowing she’d probably be more worried than helpful. And I had the beginnings of a plan to get on with.

  I walked out and into the night, refusing to look back.

  CHAPTER 24

  Rhia · 15 Years Later

  The plot was surrounded by green on all sides, and the mansion itself stood dully in the middle, most of its windows boarded up or broken. A fox was watching on from the long grass – probably wondering what the hell I was doing here; what anyone would be doing here. But I couldn’t stop staring at the bench in front of me. The same green bench from my only photo of Mum. It was right there in the garden of St Jude’s Mental Health Care Home. Just like Dr Esso had said.

  I had dared to believe it. Now I was seeing it.

  And seeing it in the flesh changed everything. In none of my dreams had Mum ever felt this close. Even standing there with my eyes wide open, I could hear her calling out to me with the same tender voice she spoke with in my sleep each night.

  She was still out there somewhere, begging for me to believe in her, to find her. She had to be. I felt inside my coat pocket to make sure the oil-stained envelope with Dr Esso’s return address hadn’t crawled out in the five minutes since I’d last checked. And, for the umpteenth time that evening, I said a quiet thanks for my decision not to throw it away.

  Gravel bounced in the distance behind me. Those were Olivia’s footsteps. I stepped back from the bench, reminding myself to keep my zoo of emotions at bay. If there was any chance of fixing our friendship, it would require my calmest words and undivided attention.

  Less than a week had passed since I’d peeled myself off Anahera’s carpet, and my head was still spinning. In fact it was only a few hours earlier that I’d womaned-up and got in touch with Olivia. I was lucky I hadn’t waited any longer. She’d messaged straight back saying their U-Haul was arriving in the morning, making this her last night in London; our last chance to see each other without spending eighty-four quid on a train fare. I didn’t know whether seeing her face would lighten the sting of everything that had happened with Tony and Poppy, or just rip that wound open again. Either this would be the night things went back to normal or when we both realized there was no normal to go back to.

  The most likely case, I figured, was that we’d make nice and promise to keep in touch. And over time we’d let weekly catch-up calls turn into monthly calls, then annual ones, until
all we had left was a faint twinge of guilt each time one forgot the other’s birthday. That might have to do, I thought to myself while picking a fir cone from the damp grass.

  The footsteps were only metres away now. Big smile, I reminded myself. Be nice. And just as I completed my half-turn Olivia collided into me.

  ‘Oooof.’ I was lucky to still be on my feet after the whip from her running hug. ‘You’re … choking … me.’

  She stepped back, stopping to check nothing on my face had changed in our weeks apart. Then she got serious.

  ‘Listen – I didn’t know Tony and Poppy were leaving till that same night they told you. And I never told them any of your secrets. I swear down. But still … I should have fought harder for you. I messed up. I was selfish and I was scared and I …’ She paused to clear her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Rhia. I’m so, so, so sorry for leaving you. If you ever need me again, I’m here. I’m on that next train no matter the time of day. I mean it, sis. I love you.’

  After hesitating as long as I could before it got rude, I replied, ‘Yeah … same here.’ The grudge had got too heavy to hold. And, imagining myself in her shoes, I wasn’t sure how much I would have done differently.

  She was screwing her heel into the pebbles and I noticed the beginnings of a smile on her face. ‘Not gonna lie, it would be pretty amazing to hear you say the actual words. I mean, you definitely don’t have to,’ she clarified. ‘It’s just … you know … I did call you 217 times over the last month with no answer. And, honestly, I’m not sure you’ve ever said “I love you” back to me before. I guess a verbal confirmation would just really help lock down the –’

  ‘Come on, Olivia.’ She knew I hated this soppy shit, which was partly why she was forcing it. But she also didn’t look like she was going to back down any time soon.