I almost collapse through the main doors out into the night air, breathing deeply and trying to fill my lungs with oxygen.
I missed it! I missed the jump. It must have happened at 6 pm. The bloody professor was wrong. It happened without me. I've just missed my last, and only remaining opportunity to go home.
I am stuck here. I will never see Keira and Nicole or Sarah again…Never!
Sarah…?
I look at my watch…it's 11.15 pm. Blast!
Two minutes later, I am in the back of a cab, heading towards Richmond.
Chapter Forty Nine
No Mercy
.
The taxi pulls up in front of the hotel and I get out, leaving the driver with a fifty euro note. His lucky day. Collecting the change is the last thing on my mind.
12.05 am.
The door to the outside of the hotel is closed, so I ring the doorbell. The receptionist behind the desk looks up, presses a button behind the desk, and the door slides open in front of me.
I walk over to the lift confidently as if I am a guest and press the call button. The little red indicator above the door takes an age to change from '2' to '1' to '0', and when I walk in I press '3', urging the doors to close and the lift to hurry up.
Rushing along the corridor to room 320, I start to wonder what I am going to say to her. I know Sarah. She hates people being late and she can't stand being kept waiting. And the fact that I didn’t call her to apologize in advance for not managing to make it, is totally inexcusable. I can just picture her, lying on the bed, checking her watch every few minutes and calling reception to ask if I have left any messages. No, no, no. Nothing yet Mrs Sanchez. We'll let you know if we get anything.
As I knock on the door, I fear for the worst.
No reply.
I've blown it.
Sarah will never talk to me again.
I knock again.
Silence.
I knock again, and this time I speak.
"Please Sarah, it's James. If you can hear me, please let me in. I need to apologize to you. Please. I'm so sorry."
I put my ear against the door. I can’t hear anything.
"Sarah? If you can hear me please open up. I can explain…"
Nothing.
One of the doors further down the corridor opens up and a large American steps out into the corridor.
"Hey Sonny, can you keep it down? Some of us are trying to sleep!" He stops and stares at me. "Hey, don’t I know you? You're the one that still owes me an apology!"
It's the American from the Jubilee Line. The one that had blocked my exit and I pushed aside.
"I'm sorry, sir," I lie. "I'm having one of the worst days of my life. It's nothing personal."
"Well, keep it down out there, or I'll call the manager."
Go home, yank…
I put my mouth against the doorframe and call Sarah's name a few more times. Nothing.
After ten minutes, the American opens his door again and walks towards me.
"Sorry," I pre-empt him, lifting my hand up, and showing him the palm of my hand. "Listen, I'll go. But could you do me a big favour? Any chance you could give me a pen and some paper? I have to write a note to the lady inside this room…"
He looks at me as if I am a Martian just about to abduct him, then he steps back into his room and re-emerges with some hotel stationery.
"Here. But please, keep it quiet. The wife can't sleep. "
I thank him, and start to scribble on the pad.
"Sarah,
I am so, so sorry I didn't make it on time. I didn't get here till just after midnight. I tried to wake you, but you were fast asleep. I can explain. I got stuck in a lift at work as I was leaving the office, and no one noticed I was there until the night watchman did his rounds. I haven't eaten or drunk anything since lunch, but I came straight here. You are important to me, and I do respect your time! Please, please forgive me. I know how important punctuality is to you, and I know that you split up with your third boyfriend at university because he stood you up one night. Please don't do that to me! Please call me and give me another chance. I really want to see you again.
James."
I slip the note under the door, and leave.
--------------------
The next morning I am back at the hotel by 7.30 am, determined to catch her as soon as she wakes up. Too impatient to wait for the lift I run up the stairs, and am soon once more outside the entrance to Room 320.
The door is ajar, so I push it gently open and call Sarah's name.
A female voice answers me coming from the toilet. A woman steps out into the bedroom. The maid.
"I am sorry sir," she replies in a Spanish accent. "The lady left. She checked out already."
"What?"
"She eez not here. She gone."
--------------------
Sitting in a café in Richmond, I ponder the course of events that has taken me from one of the highs of my life, yesterday afternoon, to how I feel now. Without doubt, one of the worst feelings I can ever recall.
Yesterday afternoon I had a choice of two futures to look forward to. Each one with its own merits.
But now I have none.
Sarah is gone, and I have no way of contacting her. Stupidly, stupidly, I never got a contact address for her in the UK, and the hotel refused to give me her details when I asked for them. Unless she calls me, I will not be able to contact her until she goes back to Spain. I've blown it.
As for the 'jump'? What fucking 'jump'? I missed the last opportunity to get home. Now I'm stuck here. Stuck. And without Sarah, there is no life for me here!
Chapter Fifty
How green is my grass now?
.
I don't make it into the office that day. By lunch time I am slightly drunk.
By three o'clock in the afternoon I am very drunk. Too drunk to remember the Professor’s number, so that I can call him and shout at him over the phone, and definitely too drunk to try and spell his last name to the patient operator in Directory Enquiries, who hangs up on me after offering the telephone number for Alcoholics Anonymous.
By nine o'clock I am in the cells of Richmond Police Station. A comfortable cell, so comfortable, in fact, that I sleep through the evening without stirring, oblivious to my cell mate, a down-and-out - much like myself, really - who wakes before me and is staring keenly at my face when I eventually begin to come round.
The smell hits me first. A combination of the tramp's unwashed clothes and the stench of the vomit in the corner of the cell, vomit that must have appeared from my stomach at some time during the night, the clues to the fact that it was my stomach contents and not the tramp’s being that the rest of the vomit seems to have made a trail down the front of my suit, down my trousers, and across my shoes.
The next thing to hit me is the pain. Not only does it feel as if the sky has fallen on my head, but the rest of the universe too. Talk about hangovers.
But don't talk too loud.
By eight o'clock in the morning, I am back out on the streets, thrown out of the cells with a caution, a warning, and an Alka-Seltzer, kindly provided courtesy of Her Majesty’s constabulary.
Thankfully, my cellmate had resisted the urge to steal the rest of the change in my pocket, and I have enough to catch a cab home.
When I get home I shower, and make myself the strongest cup of coffee I have had in a long, long time. I sit in the front room and absorb the caffeine into my system, and slowly I begin to feel the lift. Mercifully.
I look at my watch. It's 9.15 am.
I consider calling the Professor, but decide against it. For two reasons: firstly, I’m very angry with him. He raised my expectations, led me to believe that last night was the night…that I was going home…and he was wrong. And because of him I spent last night fucking around on the underground whilst I should have been with Sarah. And now I’ve lost Sarah in this world too… I’ve lost everything.
And secondly, I’m
just not in the mood to talk to anyone.
So, instead, I sit by myself, quietly, staring into space, hardly able to think, let alone move, nursing the hangover from hell.
As the hours pass, the devastating feeling of loss intensifies, and I find myself feeling scared and very alone. So alone. Alone because I have lost Sarah, for a second time.
And alone because of another loss. Another loss that I can no longer run away from. Another loss that I have been running away from for far too many years now and that I no longer have the strength to ignore.
A loss that is intrinsically linked to Sarah, and why I lost her the first time.
Weak, and with no more strength within me to fight it, or suppress the sadness from somewhere deep inside of me, a long, guttural moan begins to emerge, working its way up from my stomach, through my chest, and out through a wall of tears into the world beyond. Dropping the empty coffee cup onto the floor before me, I slip from the edge of the sofa to my knees, my shoulders shaking uncontrollably, my body racked with grief.
Tears flow freely as I cry louder and more intensely that I have ever cried in my life before.
At last, after all these years, the healing has begun.
--------------------
The phone rings. I blink and reach slowly for the phone, but it stops before I make it.
I look at my watch. It is 12 noon.
Reaching up, I wipe both my hands over my face, and then wring them through my hair.
I was crying for over an hour. Then afterwards, when there was no more emotion left within me, I simply lay with my back on the floor. Quietly. Empty. Completely alone. But more at peace with myself than I have been for a long, long time.
I have begun to accept his loss.
The phone rings again.
Jane?
I pick it up, almost dreading the voice at the other end of the phone.
"James?" A man's voice.
"Professor Kasparek?" I ask.
"Yes, it's me. Oh no. You're still there then. I was hoping that since I had not heard from you, that the theory had worked and you had made the jump. What went wrong?" he asks me.
I sit up straight, pulling the phone onto my lap. Suddenly I am brought rushing back to the present.
"What went wrong? What happened on the Jubilee Line?" he asks me again.
"You tell me," I reply, angrily. "Nothing happened, that's what! Nothing…"
"Understandably you are upset. But please tell me about it. Tell me everything. I need to know everything, my boy…"
So, trying to contain my anger and frustration, I tell the Professor what happened, or didn't happen, and when I come to tell him that Jane is away for the weekend and how crap I feel, he suggests that I get the afternoon shuttle and fly up to Edinburgh to talk things through.
And why not? I've got nothing else to do. No life. No wife, no kids. I'm not only Billie-No-Mates, I'm Billie-No-Life!
--------------------
"So," the Professor asks as we drive out of Waverley Station in Edinburgh. "How do you feel?"
"How about knackered, fed up, pissed off, scared, heart-broken, disillusioned, angry. And thirsty. So let's go straight to the nearest bar for a belated hair of the dog," I reply.
Because of some conference or other in Edinburgh, all the flights were full, so I had caught the first train out of Kings Cross and sat in 1st Class staring out of the window for the past three hours and forty five minutes.
Not bad. That’s a twenty minute improvement in this world, over the fastest I've ever done the train trip from London to Edinburgh before. At least, now that I'm stuck in this world I can take solace in that fact. That the trains are faster. How fucking wonderful.
"Listen, I'm in a bad mood, so I apologize in advance for anything that I may say. I'm really short tempered, so go easy on me," I warn the Professor.
We drive in silence out of the station and park in the basement of the Caledonian Hotel at the end of Princes Street, where, a few minutes later, I check into my hotel room. I'm not carrying any luggage so we head straight out onto the street in search of alcohol and solace.
"Where are you taking me?" I ask.
"Somewhere quiet where we can talk. One of the pubs that only locals go to, which the tourists can never find."
We cross the square, walk along George Street, a large, broad, neo-classical road that runs parallel to Princes Street, then turn left at the first corner and walk down Castle Street. As I follow the Professor towards Queen Street, I find that there is a tiny cobbled road that acts as a service street between George Street and Queen Street. We turn into the little cobbled road, Thistle Street, and soon we are walking in through the doors of a very old, quaint, 'hostelry' that looks like it has come straight out of the nineteen twenties.
The pub is tiny. The Oxford. Two rooms, one where a large wooden bar props up a motley crew of locals who stare at us as we walk in, and another off to the side, where two wooden tables lurk beneath mustard nicotine caked walls. The words 'redecorate' or 'modernize' have obviously never crossed the threshold of the bar.
Truth be told, the bar is a treasure. It's amazing that none of the tour companies have promoted it or advertised it on television.
The Professor orders two pints of Caledonian 80 shillings, a delicious Scottish ale that I used to drink copiously during my student days, and we take a seat in the corner of the second room. The rest of the bar is relatively empty, save for a couple in the corner interested in nobody else save each other, and another man in the opposite corner, sitting alone with a pint of beer, and a 'nip' of whisky in a separate glass. His face is vaguely familiar. Where have I seen him before?
"Cheers!" the Professor raises his glass. "To the world we live in. Whichever one it is."
We take a much welcome sip from the beers, the frothy head leaving a moustache on both our lips. I wipe mine away, exclaiming "Aahhhhh. Good stuff."
"Tell me about it then. What happened?" he asks me.
"Nothing happened. And I mean nothing. I was on the tube from almost six-thirty till eleven at night. Almost two hours on either side of 8.12 pm. When it got to eleven, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I felt sick, and I just had to get out of there. It's all right travelling on the tube for half an hour, but I can’t believe that people actually work down there for hours on end. It's like working in a mine."
"So, you not only didn't see anything, but you didn't feel anything either? No dizziness, no sensations of time altering at all. Nothing?"
"No. Nothing. Honestly. If it happened whilst I was down there I would have seen it. It must have happened just before I got there, or after I left. The fact is, I'm trapped here now. I can't get home."
"No. No. I told you before. The time-space intersect cannot happen without you being there. You are the main event. Which means that it didn't happen! The question is why?"
"What do you mean? That I might still have a chance?" I ask, hope surging afresh.
"Yes. Yes. You must do. Our latest theoretical model predicted the other events so well, I can't believe we got it wrong. There has to be something else that we haven't considered. Something else…"
My pint is already almost empty, and I get up to go and buy another round. I leave the Professor lost in his thoughts, pulling out some paper from his jacket pocket and starting to scribble down some equations.
I'm standing at the bar when the man from the corner with the familiar face comes up and stands beside me. I look at his face again. I am sure I know him. I have seen his face before, often. But where?
"Anything else?" the barman asks, as he hands me over the two pints of 80-Shillings.
"Yes, two packets of crisps and some peanuts please," I reply.
The barman reaches underneath the counter for the crisps. "That'll be twelve euros please," he says, then turning to the man beside me whilst he takes my money. "And you Ian, another pint of the same?"
Ian? Ian who? I'm sure I know him.
I walk back and ha
nd the professor his pint, watching as he scribbles down some more calculations. From memory I recognize a few of the equations and symbols as being some advanced form of quantum wave mechanics, mixed with a couple of Hamiltonian operators, none of which I can understand anymore. Four years of studying, all forgotten. What a waste of time.
"Fancy some crisps?" I ask. "I'm starving."
The Professor shakes his head, not answering me verbally. He scribbles some more notes, lost in his thoughts. I look around me, but end up focusing on the man 'Ian' who has now returned to his seat.
Who Stole My Life? Page 41