‘Wilf,’ I say, after a while. ‘I wanted to ask... if there’s any chance the pill can be reversed.’
He takes a few moments to respond. ‘Is that why you’re really here?’
Up to a point, perhaps. But it wasn’t my sole motivation. ‘No. I wanted to seeyou. To check you were okay. Like I’ve been trying to do for the past four years.’
‘Fine.’ He drags then exhales, shakes his head. ‘You can’t reverse the effects. I did make it clear they’d be permanent.’
I try to ignore the wrenching feeling inside me, as if someone is trying to crowbar my heart from my body. ‘But that was nearly eight years ago. Could the science not have moved on since then?’
‘You’re forgetting that “the science” doesn’t technically exist, Josh.’
‘It does in your brain. Please, Wilf.’
‘What – you want me to mix something up in my rented kitchen-cum-pharmaceutical lab?’
‘Just tell me if it can be done.’
He retrieves an ashtray from the floor, taps a long worm of ash into it. ‘Is this to do with Rachel?’
‘Partly,’ I admit.
After Rachel made it clear – again – that she wasn’t interested in taking the second pill, my mind drifted once more to the idea of reversal.
I think this might be my only chance, Wilf.
‘Are you saying you regret taking it?’ He sounds indignant, as though I flew all the way out here with the sole aim of affronting his genius.
I frown. ‘It’s not as simple as that. I’m grateful it saved me, but...’ It’s hard to admit I’ve been questioning again lately the reality of that long-ago fear. Whether it was all in my head. A bit like waking in the night to see a hooded figure in your bedroom, then snapping on the light to realise it’s just a chair piled with clothes. ‘Sometimes I think that if I’d just hung on, everything would have been okay.’
Wilf shrugs. ‘Or you might be dead in a box.’
Touché.
‘Do you ever worry about the future?’ I ask him.
‘What about it?’
It’s hard to articulate, exactly. The idea of still being here a hundred years from now, all the people I love, dead. Just me and Wilf... doing what, exactly? What if we are both tired of living by then?
It’s ironic, I sometimes think. That I swapped fearing one future for another.
So maybe the hard truth of life is that there is always something to fear.
It’s not long before Wilf asks me to leave. He says he’s got things to do, poker to play. I decide to comply, since my vision of sitting reconciled together in pavement cafés was evidently just fantasy.
I can’t stay here any longer. I feel too bruised to hang around. So I buy an extortionately priced last-minute plane ticket home, then head to a beach bar to fill my last few hours of time. I take an outside table, order avino tintoand watch the sun melt into the Mediterranean. The fronds of the palm trees turn to flames, the warm air cooling against my arms.
Of course, I then get drunk, miss my flight and kiss goodbye to hundreds of euros I did not have. I end up aimlessly wandering the back streets of Torrevieja as the alcohol burns off and its various toxic by-products kick in.
At the airport the next morning, while I’m waiting to board the third flight to Luton I’ve now bought a ticket for, a message comes up on my phone from an unknown number.
Try Hester Carver, if you must. She’s the only person I trust. But you’d need to give her the other pill. Assuming Rachel hasn’t taken it.
Head pounding, I text a reply – saying thank you and sorry – but my message bounces straight back.
51.
Rachel
