Limited Wish

by Lawrence, Mark

  Either way I was done looking like a penguin. I just wanted to get back to my room and change into some normal clothes that didn’t smell of the River Cam.

  Trinity is one of those colleges that draws tourists by the thousands in the summer months. It has the iconic sort of Oxbridge architecture that features in Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire. It’s hard to get more Cambridgey without a punt beneath your feet and a straw boater on your head.

  The room that Professor Halligan managed to secure for me was, at once, both immensely sought after and deeply unpopular. It was sought after on account of allegedly being part of Isaac Newton’s rooms when he was a Trinity student, or perhaps his butler’s room . . . I was never clear on that. But it was unpopular owing to it being positioned directly over the porters’ lodge. The night porter, Mr Chardwick, a man with mutton chop sideburns, looked to have stepped straight from the pages of a Dickens novel and had zero tolerance for parties, loud music or anything else that might possibly infringe the long list of college rules, some of which appeared to date back to the reign of Henry VIII.

  I crossed the great court in blazing sunshine, white-winged butterflies rising around me with too much energy for the day. Students idled in the shadows, strains of Vivaldi or Iron Maiden reaching out from various windows according to taste. I slipped through one of the main doors and hurried along the corridor, up a flight of stairs, along another corridor. I tried to reach my front door unseen, but there’s always someone hanging around in a college hall of residence. On this occasion it was Crispin Waugh who spied me through his open doorway as I passed.

  ‘Lose a shoe, Hayes?’ Waugh claimed a famously witty novelist as a relation, but his own wit seemed to begin and end with offering up the obvious as though it were a question.

  ‘No, I went out barefoot but was lucky enough to find a shoe.’

  ‘Run along, you little oik.’ Waugh waved me away. He was the typical 80s Cambridge student, a generation late to the unchallenged privilege party and deeply troubled by the idea that the ‘rights’ his family’s wealth and station accorded him were visibly eroding at the edges with students from comprehensive schools and the working classes starting to appear on the benches of lecture halls. From the lofty heights of his Eton education my position in the lower reaches of the middle class seemed to make me one with the children of factory workers to him, or perhaps it just pleased him to treat me that way.

  I reached my door and fumbled the key into the lock. Waugh moved in the same social circles as the puntload of aristocracy who had been chasing me earlier. My life was complicated enough without inviting more trouble into it.

  Moments later I collapsed face-first onto my bed and lay there unmoving while the first strains of Blue Monday swept out of the ghetto blaster beside me at a volume judged loud enough to annoy the porter but not sufficiently loud to make him climb the stairs to silence me.

  I groaned. My body still felt the damage from all those chemo sessions, even months down the line. The day’s efforts had left me aching and bone tired. I lay for a minute unspeaking. Then another.

  ‘I organised your bookshelf.’

  ‘Fuck!’ I leapt up at the sound of the unexpected voice, then slumped again as I realised who it was. ‘Simon . . . I’d forgotten you were here.’

  Simon sat in one of the large over-stuffed armchairs that had come with the room. I’d say he was hard to spot in its embrace but that would be letting myself off the hook. Simon, being somewhat overstuffed himself, was fairly visible. I’d just missed him.

  ‘How was the garden party?’ Simon had refused point-blank to go with me. His mother had frogmarched him to the train saying that it would do him good to give Cambridge the once-over, since he would probably be coming to the university to study mathematics in two years’ time.

  ‘Awful.’ I didn’t look up from the bed. ‘And it’s the Master’s thing next. You’re coming to that.’

  ‘I don’t want—’

  ‘You’re coming. It’s not a party and there won’t be any girls.’ I wasn’t completely lying. It was a soirée rather than a party, and girls would be in a minority as they were at almost every Cambridge student gathering. ‘The Master invited you himself!’

  ‘The Master as in—’

  ‘No, not as in Doctor Who, although it would be rather handy to have a chat with a Time Lord right about now.’ Simon sometimes let the line between imagination and reality blur. It was a touch worrying but usually short-lived. ‘The Master as in Sir Andrew Huxley, Master of Trinity College. He also happens to be a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and the half-brother of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, a man who famously spent a fair bit of time pondering the future!’

  ‘And Sir Andrew invited me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. Getting Simon to any social function involved lying. A lot of lying for a party, a modest amount for a soirée. Actually, Sir Andrew had invited me. I guess, having been leaned on by Professor Halligan to admit me, the Master wanted to see what kind of oddity he had acquired. ‘So, you’re coming then?’

  A long silence ensued. I may have fallen asleep in it.

  ‘OK, I will.’

  Simon’s voice startled me out of my doze.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘Hoorah!’

  ‘We should get ready,’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t start until seven. I thought I’d just lie down for a bit first.’ I kept my face firmly in my pillow.

  ‘You’ve been doing that for hours though.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ I tilted my head and cracked open an eye. The sun was no longer streaming in through the net curtains. I patted the bedside table hunting my alarm clock. 6:52. ‘Shit! Shit!’

  The bed proved narrower than I remembered and my roll to the side dumped me unceremoniously onto the floor. ‘Shit.’

  I got up, shrugged off my dinner jacket, and began fumbling with the button of my river-soiled trousers. ‘Shit. You’ve just been sat there watching me sleep?’

  Simon shook his head. ‘Only for the first hour. Then I slept for a bit too.’

  ‘Crap. We need to move.’

  ‘I thought it was fashionable to be late,’ Simon said.

  ‘Halligan told me to get there early. Wants to show me off or something.’ I cast an eye over Simon. He was fairly smart, which was good since none of my clothes would fit him and I had precious few that came anywhere near smart anyway. Simon’s mother had convinced him to come by framing the visit as practice for future university visits and interviews, so Simon had taken her at her word and worn his interview jacket and tie.

  ‘So what happened to you?’ Simon asked as I kicked off my shoe. ‘And where’s your other shoe?’

  ‘I met her,’ I said. ‘That girl. The anomaly.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ He frowned. ‘You saw her for what, five seconds, four months ago.’

  I straightened up, trousers still around my ankles, and looked past Simon to the shadowy half of the room behind his chair. My bookshelves were empty, all the books now standing on their pages, half opened, their spines to the ceiling, like a scattered range of tiny mountains. ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’ I kicked the trousers off and walked over to stand among the range of mountainous maths books. ‘Unless this is how you organised my books while I was out?’

  After the business of the books moving while we both slept there was no way Simon was going to stay behind by himself. We got to the Master’s soirée a mere ten minutes late and inserted ourselves into the mixed crowd of staff and select students. It was supposed to be a black tie affair but I was happy for them to throw us out if they wanted to adhere to the letter of the law.

  The day’s heat had lingered and the soirée was held in the open out on the Fellows’ Bowling Green before the old King’s Hall, a part of the college that looked positively medieval, and actually was.

  Waiters – probably students earning some spare cash – circulated with silver trays sporting canapés a
nd champagne flutes, and a long buffet table had been laid out with more silverware on white linen. I looked around for Halligan but saw no sign of him. He wasn’t any more reliable than I was when it came to appointments and meetings. His secretary joked that since the two of us expended so much brainpower on the subject of time we should be better at keeping it. My answer was that we were working on ways of making it so that we didn’t have to. Time would eventually dance to our tune rather than we to its.

  Simon and I gravitated towards the buffet table. Free food has an allure all its own. We stood there, both of us too uncomfortable to really tuck in, gazing over the arrayed elite – the sons and occasional daughters of old money: confident, well groomed, erudite. I felt out of place, a dirty schoolboy at the opera. Simon looked rather like I felt. Both of us wondering how long we had to stay before we could retreat to the safety of my room. The fact that my room was haunted was probably all that was stopping Simon making a break for it right away.

  ‘Hello, Nick.’

  I spun around, arms raised defensively. Helen stood there, champagne glass in one hand, jeans and T-shirt replaced by a flowing evening dress, a work of blue silk that made her look twenty-five rather than seventeen. With a talent any chameleon would envy, Helen had transformed seamlessly from someone who could be selling Goth and punk clothes from one of those alternative shops on London’s King’s Road to an English rose who looked as born to privilege as any of the Master’s guests, and from whose painted lips you might expect to hear about her Swiss finishing school or Daddy’s new yacht.

  ‘Er . . . hi.’

  ‘Look at these tossers.’ She spoke in a low voice through a smile. ‘It’s like leafing through the pages of Who’s Who. Takes a bit of getting used to. I might be the only one here from a state school. Present company included.’

  ‘I . . . uh.’ Something about her dress had stolen the words from my tongue. I would say that all my cool deserted me, but I’d never had any in the first place.

  ‘Keeping dry?’ she asked, her grin teasing now.

  Beside me Simon looked up at the sky with a puzzled expression as if expecting rain.

  ‘This is my friend Simon,’ I told her, glad of something to talk about. ‘Simon, this is Helen. I met her earlier today just after falling in the river.’

  ‘Oh.’ He stuffed a miniature sausage roll into his mouth. ‘The anomaly.’

  Helen narrowed her eyes. ‘What did you just call—’

  ‘And here’s our own little celebrity.’ A voice that managed to be both loud and bored at the same time cut across her. Crispin Waugh broke through the crowd trailing a number of slightly drunk-looking friends behind him, typical of the breed. ‘Our darling of the tabloids. Grubbing for fame and playing with his sums while greater minds consider deeper matters.’ Waugh was reading PPE, a popular choice among the toffs. Politics, philosophy and economics. Much of the diplomatic service comprised old Etonians who had read PPE at Cambridge. Their backsides warmed a fair length of the benches in the House of Commons in Westminster too. It was the philosophy that they liked to roll out on social occasions though, finding that it demonstrated their intellectual superiority most effectively. Waugh reached for it now, standing face to face with me, a sardonic smile hanging from the corners of his mouth. ‘Popularity with the masses is so tacky. I heard that the Daily Mail want to dress you up as Doctor Who for their next piece, Hayes.’ Waugh shook his head, sorrowfully. ‘As Schopenhauer said to Hume, “The man who performs for fools is always popular.”’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said.

  ‘And what would a creature like you know about it, Hayes?’ He was almost nose to nose with me now, still affecting disinterest, but there was no hiding the malice in those pale blue eyes of his. ‘You’re an uneducated little worm, a jumped-up schoolboy yanked out of the classroom because of some freakish ability to push numbers around the page. There’s no real learning in it, no culture. What does a little toad like you know about Schopenhauer?’

  ‘Well . . .’ I looked at the ring of hostile faces, at Simon studying his shoes, at Helen, her face unreadable, seeming as likely to laugh at me as to deck Waugh with a punch to the mouth. ‘Well . . . I know that Schopenhauer was born twelve years after Hume died in 1776 and is therefore unlikely to have ever said anything to him. I also know that you got the quote wrong and that it is actually, “The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.” And I know that the main thing Schopenhauer and Hume share is that their first books sold pitifully, which likely explains the sentiment.’

  Waugh’s mouth worked, but for a moment nothing came out. I knew he considered himself an expert on Schopenhauer and was supposed to be doing some sort of thesis on the man. The thing is, though, that it’s very easy to appear to be an expert on something that hardly anyone knows about.

  He sneered, finding something to say at last. ‘Go back to your equations, Doctor Who! Leave the big questions for the philosophers.’

  ‘“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”’ I shrugged.

  Again the sneer. ‘What lolly stick did you read that off?’ He turned to his cronies. ‘Gentlemen, I present Nicky Hayes and the wisdom of fortune cookies.’

  ‘Actually Schopenhauer said it. Those were his exact words.’

  Waugh turned back and the look in his eye told me he was coming at me with more than words this time, but a moment later Professor Halligan found his way to the table, deploying sharp elbows, and Waugh retreated into the throng with his friends in tow.

  ‘Ah! Nick!’ Halligan clapped a hand to my shoulder. ‘Good, good, I caught you.’

  ‘Professor. Sorry I was late. I had—’

  ‘Never mind, never mind.’ He waved my excuses away. ‘I was late too and now I’ve got to go. Tempus fugit, as they say, tempus fugit.’ He grabbed a handful of vol-au-vents from the nearest plate. ‘Come to the Winston Lab tomorrow at ten. I have something to show you. Something remarkable.’ He retreated, cramming his mouth with pastry and making the rest of what he had to say hard to decipher. ‘Don’t be late this time.’

  ‘I see being Nick Hayes is a full-time occupation,’ Helen said beside me. ‘And you’re a student of philosophy now? When did that happen?’

  ‘Ah. Well, not really. But when you’re on chemotherapy you do tend to do a bit of navel gazing. In between throwing up anyway. Why am I here? What’s life all about? All that type of stuff. So I read a bit. And it turns out that “a bit” is enough to win an argument when your opponent is a dick.’

  ‘Can we go now?’ Simon asked on my other side.

  ‘Hello, Simon.’ Helen leaned across me to wave at him. ‘Nick’s told me nothing about you.’

  Simon immediately looked at his shoes again and muttered, ‘We shouldn’t be talking to her.’

  Helen narrowed her eyes, not at Simon but at me. ‘You might not have told me anything about Simon but you appear to have told him something about me. Why shouldn’t you be talking to me? And why are you calling me “the anomaly”?’

  ‘You’re causing time shocks,’ Simon said, unhelpfully. ‘And moving books around in Nick’s room.’

  Helen raised a brow. She really was outrageously pretty. Dark curls framed her face, one stray strand curving beneath the sharpness of her cheekbone. ‘I am, am I?’

  Simon replied with a vigorous nod.

  ‘I’m moving books in your room?’ She looked at me, amused. ‘Am I having any other odd effects on you right now, Nick?’

  She was. A dry mouth for one thing, and other things I wasn’t going to mention, but nothing like Simon meant. ‘No.’ I shook my head.

  ‘Well, you’re both scientists. Maybe you need to gather more data . . .’

  That sounded close to an invitation to me. My mouth grew drier still as I tried to gather the courage to use it to ask her out.

  Helen turned away before I managed to get the first word past my lips. One of the biggest guys I’d ever seen wa
s approaching, moving through the crowd like an icebreaker, head and shoulders above nearly everyone. He looked rather like John – blond, broad-shouldered, handsome, confident. But a John on steroids. John if John were captain of the rugby team. And not the school team, the national one. Heads turned as he passed. All the women watched him. Quite a few of the men too.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I murmured.

  ‘Piers Winthrop,’ Helen said. ‘My boyfriend.’ She glanced back at us. ‘I have to go. Nice meeting you, Simon.’

  And she was gone in a swirl of skirts, bound for the arm of Captain Fantastic.

  ‘Can we go now?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  CHAPTER 5

  An electronic beeping hauled me from the depths of my dreaming. By the time my flapping hand had managed to silence the alarm clock all memory of whatever had been entertaining my sleeping mind had been shed, water from a duck’s back, leaving just fragments. A dark brown strand of hair curving beneath a cheekbone. Helen then. Helen had been in my dreams.

  ‘It happened again.’ Simon’s voice came from beneath the heap of bedding across the room.

  On the floor between the two of us my books had been arranged in a series of short, twisting towers. Both the armchairs had been turned upside down. And the three balding tennis balls that had been left by the previous resident had been moved from the windowsill to my bedside table. Also, one of them had been turned inside out.

  ‘Crazy . . .’ I picked up the inverted tennis ball, its surface smooth and black. ‘It has to be to do with other timelines coming too close to ours. Isolated events leaking between them and our timeline.’