Limited Wish

by Lawrence, Mark

  ‘No? Perhaps we should stand here breaking fingers until you do know. You can do your work with one hand – you don’t strictly need two for mathematics.’ He bent my finger, forcing me to cry out again and drop to my knees. ‘You’re going to tell me all you know now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes!’ I shouted. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’

  There was a loud crack and suddenly he did stop. His grip slipped, nails tearing at my hand as it fell away.

  I thought for a moment that my finger bone had snapped, but as Rust gracefully folded on to the dog-soiled earth around the base of the tree, I realised I wasn’t hurt. Demus stood there with a broken branch in hand.

  ‘It was lying in number 15’s drive.’ He shrugged apologetically.

  I stood, still shaky, and looked down at Rust. He was clutching his head and cursing softly, dazed but already trying to get to his feet.

  ‘Come on!’ Demus made off towards his car.

  I followed, bundling into the passenger seat. Looking back, I saw that Rust had managed to stand, though was still bent double, one hand on his thigh, the other pressed to his head wound; and that Mother had come to the door, still in shadow so I couldn’t see her face to read her expression.

  Demus drove off swiftly, but managing to avoid a squeal of tyres. ‘What the hell was that about?’

  Twisting in my seat, I saw that Rust was staggering across the road, presumably aiming for his own car. That was good, as it meant he wasn’t going to turn on Mother, but bad for us. ‘Drive faster!’

  Demus slung his BMW around the corner into the next street. ‘So? Who did I hit?’

  I looked down at my aching finger, still bleeding from where Rust’s nails had torn the skin. ‘That was Ian Rust’s older brother, Charles. He works for Guilder and—’

  ‘Yes, I know all about Guilder. My memories of me coming back didn’t include me telling you, though. So I didn’t. But now we’ve gone totally off script, I don’t suppose it matters any more. I know Charles Rust. Just didn’t recognise him from behind.’

  ‘He’s the shit who broke in and went through the house.’

  ‘He’s done a lot worse than that.’ Demus sounded nervous. ‘I’m glad I hit him. Wish I’d done it harder and knocked his eye out.’

  ‘Eye?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘You mean eyes?’

  It was Demus’s turn to look confused. He covered one eye with his hand. ‘Charles Rust wears an eye patch. Always has.’

  I shook my head. ‘Nope, he has a full set.’

  A frown. ‘Things must have started to diverge when Eva came back.’

  ‘Eva! So you’ve met her now.’

  ‘I have.’ Demus turned into a residential street close to Richmond Park and pulled over. There was no sign of pursuit. ‘I met her in Cambridge. She’s a remarkable young woman.’ He sounded proud of her. ‘Cleverer than us, but let’s keep that one quiet.’

  I nodded. If I was going to be upstaged mathematically, then having the person to do it be my daughter was the best option. That still didn’t mean I had to like it, though.

  ‘So,’ I asked. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Well, I think they’re going to have to repair a few electricity substations and replace an awful lot of burned-out wiring. Let’s just say that the meeting wasn’t gentle on the timeline. We actually managed to call down lightning!’ He shuddered. ‘Not fun.’

  ‘I mean, how did it go? You know . . .’ I didn’t think I should have to explain what I meant to myself.

  ‘Ah, right.’ He grinned. ‘Well . . . she’s something. It’s pretty weird to discover you have a fully grown daughter. I mean, weirder for you, being as she’s your age.’

  ‘Older than me, in fact.’

  ‘Right. A year or two either way doesn’t seem like such a big deal in your forties. You’re both kids. Anyway, I guess for me it was no stranger than those sperm donors who suddenly have an unknown young man or woman showing up on their doorstep saying, “Hi, Dad.” But that’s not to say it wasn’t strange.’

  I wanted to ask Demus if he had kids with Mia, but I knew it was better not to know, even if his past was no longer my future. Instead I asked about Eva’s work. ‘Can her paradox stuff help us sort this out? I mean, even if you do save your Mia by going back to January, the whole timeline she exists in is going to get ripped to shreds along with Eva’s . . . according to Eva.’

  Demus pursed his lips and gazed over the steering wheel. ‘She certainly has a better grip on it than I do. I knew something was missing from my equations. All those strange effects when we first met, for example. None of that was in my calculations. But I never understood that it was down to paradox, or that my timeline was bound to a second one.’

  ‘Can you explain the ghosts?’ I asked.

  ‘Ghosts?’ He frowned. ‘You mean the time echoes we see when we meet?’

  ‘No – like poltergeists, book-throwing, writing on windows, honest-to-God ghosts! You don’t remember being haunted?’

  Demus shook his head. ‘I’m out of my time, out of my timeline, caught in paradox. I’ve edited my memories. I barely know what’s real any more, Nick. I see the world but it doesn’t stick. All I am is this scrapbook of memory, fading, twisting as if it were written in smoke. I guess that’s all any of us are, but for me it seems more tenuous each day.’

  I think that might have been the first time I really understood, at the core of me, that Demus and I were the same man. He talked to me as if he were talking to himself, maybe even as if he were running the lines in his head without any intention to speak them aloud.

  ‘I guess they’re like stronger versions of the time echoes,’ I volunteered.

  ‘Could be. Leakage from timelines very close to ours. Frustrated possibilities given reality by the stray energy of the paradox. Let’s leave the proof to Eva.’ Demus grinned again, recovering his humour. ‘Anyway, she and I were able to pinpoint the moment of paradox and, unsurprisingly, you’re at the heart of it, Nick.’

  ‘Should you be telling me this?’

  ‘I don’t think it matters. It might even help. It all boils down to the upcoming May Ball at Trinity.’

  ‘I’m not even going to that.’ I had already decided to pass on the chance to watch Helen twirl around the ballroom with Piers Winthrop. He looked like a male model who also happened to captain the rugby team. Even his name sounded as if it was shaken out of Debrett’s having formerly belonged to Biggles’s wingman.

  ‘You’re going. You do it in both timelines.’

  ‘I don’t even have anyone to go with.’

  ‘You invite your friends, duh.’

  ‘Well, I guess John would come, and then while Helen slow-dances with Piers, I can also watch John get off with the second prettiest girl at the ball. Whoop.’

  ‘The big picture here is slightly larger than your . . . our . . . unrequited love and sulky teen attitude. Besides, you’re a rock star, albeit of mathematics. And this is Cambridge. You’ll have to take a stick along to beat off the nerd girls.’

  ‘Now I know you deleted your entire memory of going to university . . .’

  ‘Anyway, you’re inviting Mia and Simon too.’

  ‘Mia who hates me and Simon who would rather die than socialise?’

  ‘She doesn’t hate you. They both just need the right motivation to go.’

  ‘Like a gun to the head for Simon?’

  ‘Like knowing you need his help. You have Charlie Rust on your case, after all. Though I’m not sure why.’

  ‘It’s all to do with . . . actually, best you don’t know. Though I’m not sure why you would go ahead with your plan any more. You could just go back to your time now. Everything’s messed up.’

  ‘Ah!’ He quirked his mouth in that way I sometimes do, a strange mixture of sad and excited. ‘Well, the thing is that we might just be able to put everything back on track.’

  I guess I made that same quirk of the mouth. I was due for chemotherapy that evening and if I had to go through that sh
it again, a guaranteed twenty-five years seemed the very least I wanted to accept as pay-off, rather than dying by degrees and finally checking out aged twenty-one or even earlier. On the other hand, some part of me had relished being free of Demus’s life, especially having to know when and roughly where my life would end. ‘How could everything be fixed?’

  ‘Eva calls it a phase shift, but you and I are going to call it a time hammer.’

  ‘That does sound . . . more impressive. What is it?’

  ‘Well, you take this big hammer and hit time with it just at the right moment and bingo, two paradoxical timelines untangle. And the shake-up sets both back to how they would have been.’

  ‘What’s the hammer?’

  ‘It’s the difficult part.’

  ‘How difficult?’

  From Demus’s frown, my guess was ‘very’. ‘I’m going to have to break into a nuclear power station.’

  ‘Fuck that! The guards there have guns!’ I didn’t know if that were true, but they probably did, and if they didn’t then they should.

  Demus shrugged. ‘I was going to have to use a power station anyway, just to jump me onwards . . . or backwards . . . to our first meeting in January.’

  ‘So . . . you break into a nuclear power station and . . . do what?’

  ‘I’ll need to reconfigure the reactor. I have to put it into overdrive to generate a pulse of current big enough to power the electromagnets that I’ll have ready.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re planning a meltdown. Jesus, this isn’t going to be another Chernobyl, is it?’ It had been eight weeks since the explosion and the papers were still full of the fallout drifting from the Soviet Union. Apparently we had radioactive sheep in Wales now.

  ‘Let’s just say that the needles will be heading into the red. Should be fine, though.’

  ‘This gets worse and worse . . .’

  ‘Well, I remember myself turning up in January, so it must work,’ said Demus. ‘At least the part of it that throws me back another six months must work. I’ve been planning that bit for quite a while now. And I do have loads of money. Which helps.’

  ‘So that’s the hammer. Where does it have to hit, and when?’ I asked.

  ‘Bradwell is where.’ Demus set a finger to the dashboard as though there were an invisible map there. I’d never heard of the place. ‘It’s going to be the first nuclear power station in the UK to be decommissioned. By 2010 it’s just a collection of highly dangerous nuclear waste in a bunch of holding pools and glorified warehouses. But right now its main benefit is that it’s close. On the coast halfway between Cambridge and London. We need to strike as close to the event as possible.’

  ‘And the when?’

  ‘That’s tricky.’

  ‘I thought the breaking into a nuclear power station and reconfiguring the reactor would be the tricky part.’

  ‘Well, the thing is that in one timeline you leave the Trinity May Ball with Helen, marry her at nineteen and five months later become the proud father of young Eva Hayes. Which is all fine and dandy, except for the part where you die two years later. And in the other timeline you leave the ball with Mia and twenty-five years later she has a terrible accident that sends me back here to make sure she recovers her mind.’ Demus checked the mirror and put the car back into gear. ‘So the tricky part is determining the crucial moment where that choice exists and hangs in the balance. Plus you have to remember that it may not be your choice that causes the paradox. And having determined the exact moment, we need to get it to coincide with the hammer blow that I’m striking against the universe down in Bradwell. On the scale of the universe, that blow is almost nothing, so it only has a chance of untangling two things as vast as timelines if it is struck close, both in time and space, to the event that tangles them. So yes, the whole thing is . . . tricky.’ He drove off smoothly. ‘I guess we’d better get you back to Mother now.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said unenthusiastically. ‘I’ve got to get to my chemo session.’

  Demus turned the corner and winced. ‘Sorry about that, mate, but I had to do it, too. It’s shitty but you endure it, not because you’re a hero, just because there’s no better choice.’ Demus set a hand briefly to my shoulder. I guess it was a form of self-pity, but actually it did make me feel a bit better.

  ‘Anyway, chemo isn’t the only thing on the to-do list,’ he said. ‘You’ve also got to arrange the most important double date in the history, and future, of mankind.’

  CHAPTER 17

  Demus dropped me off at the end of my street and watched for any signs of Charlie Rust as I walked back to the house.

  ‘What on earth was that all about?’ Mother didn’t let me get as far as the stairs.

  ‘Academics,’ I half-lied. ‘My work is getting quite well known now. I think we might be getting a lot more of these sorts of visits. Those two I don’t want to speak to again. I’ve answered their questions and have nothing more to say to them. Best to just not open the door to anyone you don’t know.’

  ‘I didn’t get a good look at the man who drove you away, but something about him seemed very familiar. I rather feel I do know him.’ Mother frowned. ‘Anyway, it all seemed very odd.’ She was anything but stupid, but who knows what fame entails until it actually happens to them or to someone close to them?

  I left her puzzling in the hall and went up to my bedroom. I no longer had an appetite for the self-indulgence of angst-laden new wave bands. The mood had not survived the harsh-edged reality of Rust’s threats or Demus’s can-do refusal to quit. Instead I returned to my work.

  Trying to figure out how to get Simon and Mia to the Trinity May Ball was beyond me, but on the subject of high-dimensional topological manipulation of space-time manifolds I felt much more confident. Eva had filled my head with new ideas and I was eager to chase them across the landscape of my imagination.

  ‘Nick!’ Mother’s voice reached me from downstairs to drag me from my thoughts. I looked up. A plate with an untouched apple, sandwiches, milk and crisps sat to one side of me. I didn’t even remember Mother bringing it in. ‘Nick!’

  ‘Coming!’ I stood, my legs aching from sitting too long. The clock said four. Hours had flown past.

  ‘Someone’s here for you.’ Mother met me on the stairs. She lowered her voice. ‘I don’t think he’s an academic. More musical theatre, if you ask me.’ A smile.

  I followed her to the front room where a dark-haired someone was sitting in the comfy chair that had its back to the door. My visitor got to his feet.

  ‘Sam?’ I blinked. Sam came a very long way down the list of people I might have guessed would turn up at my house. Though in truth it wasn’t that long a list. ‘What are you doing here?’ It was a pretty blunt question, but in my defence I was taken by surprise.

  ‘I’ll leave you boys alone,’ Mother said, heading off to the kitchen.

  Sam’s grin was a touch less confident than usual. He was dressed with his usual flamboyance – a mauve shirt with a slight sheen, tight jeans whose label probably would have impressed someone who knew about brands of jeans, boots with heels and toes sharp enough to get a whelk out of its shell, an earring glittering in one earlobe. His hairsprayed quiff bounced slightly as he nodded to the other comfy chairs, inviting me to sit.

  I took the hint and forced a smile. ‘So, what brings you to this neck of the woods?’ I sounded like my father.

  Sam waited until the chair had swallowed as much of me as it was going to take. ‘It’s a bit awkward.’ He hesitated and then, seeing that I wasn’t going to throw him a rope, ploughed on. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Mia.’

  I started to bristle, almost rising from my seat. ‘You want advice from me? About Mia?’ I thought that, all things considered, I’d gone above and beyond in my efforts to accommodate Sam. He was in our D&D game, for Christ’s sake, but I was damned if I was going to give him tips on keeping hold of my girlfriend. ‘I really don’t—’

  ‘I met Mia a couple of years ago through m
y friend Elton,’ Sam pressed on.

  ‘I know Elton.’ I used to know him, at least. Hadn’t seen him for months now. He didn’t trust me to keep his surviving family safe from all the crazy in my life. ‘I’m still not sure what you want.’

  Sam leaned towards me in his chair in that slightly over-intimate way of his. ‘Do you believe in love? I mean, in finding the love of your life?’

  ‘Uh . . .’ He was speaking in song lyrics as far as I was concerned. I didn’t believe in love, not the instant infatuation, the Disney fiction. But I could hardly deny it was powerful stuff. The adult me died for it. And according to my daughter, love had put the whole of Sam’s existence and that of the timeline he lived in at risk. Worlds hung in the balance simply because of the fact that a moment existed where I could turn one way and spend my life with Helen, or the other and spend it with Mia. ‘I’m not sure what—’

  ‘I mean, you should know, shouldn’t you?’ Sam said. ‘When you first see the person that you’re going to spend your life with. There should be a kind of electric shock. A thrill that runs through you.’

  ‘I guess. I mean . . . most of us are just wondering if we have a chance and how far we’ll get.’ Though even as I said it, I realised that I was channelling John. There had been something with both Helen and Mia. A cynic might say it was just because I met so few girls. But there had been something. Not a literal shock. Not calling the lightning down, like when Demus met Eva. But something, a spark, a moment of recognition . . . ‘Maybe you’re right, though. I really don’t know. I’m not exactly Mr Experienced here.’

  ‘Mia asked me out, you know?’

  ‘Uh, that must be nice.’ I still couldn’t quite get my head around the idea that Sam could be so self-absorbed as to come here seeking advice on his relationship from me.

  ‘But it’s you she’s always talking about.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I mean me and Mia, we’re not really . . . I mean, we’re good friends, but we don’t really do anything . . .’

  ‘You don’t?’ I wasn’t entirely sure what he was saying, and couldn’t quite bring myself to ask.