‘That’s fair,’ he says contemplatively. Then he laughs.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘All this time I just thought you were a stuck-up, emotionally unavailable bitch who had used me.’
‘Wow,’ I reply. ‘Don’t hold back on me. Jesus.’
‘Thatisme holding back. I have called you every name under the sun. And it was all just a misunderstanding.’
Two hours later, we’ve devised a list of things for me to tell the next Tyler, things guaranteed to make him instantly believe my story. I write them out carefully to ensure I’ll be able to remember the right wording; sometimes my photographic memory is a lifesaver and will be critical to making sure this works. He finally gets up to leave and I berate myself for not being brave enough to ask him to stay.
‘Tell me all those things. And then tell me about Zac and the coffee.’ His eyes are soft and he’s looking at me in a way that makes me feel like I’m melting, just slightly, just enough to want to stay here for a while longer. He smiles at me. His fingertips graze mine.
‘Goodbye, Bethany Raven,’ he says.
Chapter Fifteen
Another new day. Another new bed. Another new pillow, new sheets, new nail varnish on my toes. This time it’s sage green and I have to admit it does not look good. What was I thinking when I picked green? Didn’t I even consider it would look suspiciously like a fungal nail infection?
The Havaianas are black. With a functional strap at the ankle to keep them snug. Not that I’ll be wearing them with the vile toe polish; no one is seeing that.
The kitchen is tidy, but without the neurosis of the last Bethany with all her jars and boxes.
This Bethany, however, does have a lovely pillbox, like the one old ladies have, each section stuffed with tablets. For a moment my heart beats in my throat. Am I sick?
But on closer inspection the tablets reveal themselves to be vitamins. A hay fever tablet. Some green-coloured gummy that looks more than a little suspicious. I look it up online and discover it’s sea moss, used for fatigue and to treat iodine deficiencies – which I’m fairly sure I don’t have. I read some more about the pseudo-science underpinning it and then place the gummy back in the container. I’m not about to take it, thank you very much. This Bethany can keep her herbal shit to herself.
What else do I need to tell you?
She drinks coffee – thank God – and so I make myself a huge cup of gloriously bitter goodness.
In the living room I notice the shelves of special-edition books I’ve been carefully collecting for the past year or so have disappeared. I feel bereft.
The notebook is a pretty emerald green with a small dancing panda in the bottom corner. Every page shows him in a slightly different position and I flick through quickly, watching him leap and whirl across the pages. At least this Bethany shares my love of whimsical stationery. As expected – because some things do appear to have been a constant – there is no theorem within its cute pages. I write it out once more, carefully transcribing every symbol, making sure it’s one hundred per cent accurate.
There’s something I’ve been putting off, some sixth sense that I won’t like what I find when I look. But eventually I review my phone log to see when I last called my sister. Cesca and I haven’t spoken in two weeks and, even then, our contact seems to be limited to sharing an occasional cat meme. There’s a chasm between us and one I fear is growing with every skip I make. I look at her Facebook and discover she’s single, no trace of Helen. She seems happy. But in a way it hurts even more, that she can be so happy without me by her side. Why doesn’t she feel the loss of me? I feel like I’m missing a limb and she’s out having cocktails.
At exactly ten a.m., I send an email. I’m thankful that I wrote it out with Tyler so I could memorize the exact wording, the exact way he hoped another Tyler in another world would read it and go ‘Ah yes, of course, that makes perfect sense. Hello, Bethany from another world.’
Hi Tyler,
Six years ago we met in a bar and I told you all my secrets. We promised to go on a date and I took your number with the promise of a call. I never called. You cursed me and called me some rather rude things. Hardened yourself to me and then treated me like your mortal enemy ever since. But what you don’t know is that the morning after we met, you blanked me. Blanked me hard in the lobby of the hotel, your eyes going straight through me as if I was no one, as if I meant nothing to you.
But don’t be mad at Zac. It wasn’t his fault he inadvertently created a nemesis for his little – by three minutes at least – brother.
Now. I need you to sit down (if you aren’t sitting already, of course). There’s something you need to know.
I’m not the Bethany Raven you know in this world. I’ve skipped a number of times, each time waking up with my own memories but inside the body of another Bethany in a world similar, but not identical, to my own.
This is not a delusion. This is a fact. A recurrent nightmare I am trapped inside as I slip through increasingly diverging worlds.
Still reading? Good. Tyler said you would be. Not you, Tyler. Obviously. But a different Tyler in a different place. This is a message from him:
You like to buy those days of the week socks and wear them on the wrong days. Not randomly though, but in a very specific pattern of relativity to the actual day of the week. When you were twelve, you called the teacher ‘Mum’ and lived with the shame for the one hundred and sixty days of the rest of the school year until your parents agreed to let you move schools. You would never admit it, but you have an irrational fear of oversized animals,especially those giant bunnies the papers like to trot out at Easter. You really love those lychee beads in your bubble tea and have been known to bulk-buy them from Amazon.
The person who sent you this email is Bethany. Not the Bethany you think you know in your world, who is probably annoying and uptight and ignores you at conferences. This Bethany is a good one. You need to help her.
You need to help her to get home. We’ve been working on it, but there are gaps, pieces missing that perhaps you can fill.
