Back in bed, River pulls out the fresh selection of books he got from the library, while I continue to tap away on my laptop, Cassidy’s story now unfolding so rapidly my fingers can barely keep up.
For the next few hours we read and write in companiablesilence, occasionally stopping to kiss, or laugh, or grab a snack or just look at each other as if we can’t quite believe what’s happening.
‘Hmmm,’ River muses, reading from a thick hardback calledThe Fabric of Reality. ‘This one says that trees, caves, stones and waterfalls can all be possible interdimensional portals. Which is chafin’ my chaps because the other book –’ he picks up another hardback, this one calledQuantum Mechanics and the Cosmos– ‘says that black holes are the only possible pathway between parallel universes. It’s all so confusing. Every single one of these has a different theory.’
I close the lid of my laptop. ‘Even if we read every single book on earth, we’d never really know for sure what’s happening, how any of it works. All we’ve got is the best evidence in our world, right now. The books, yeah, but also the stories on the forums, what Bridget told us about her client. I promise you I’m going to try so hard to finish this book and get you home. If it’s happened before, it can happen again.’
‘I know,’ River murmurs, fluffing the pillow up behind him. ‘I just wish the pressure wasn’t all heaped onto you. I wish I had some control over any of it … Hey, listen to this bit. “Every quantum transition taking place in every star, in every galaxy, in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on Earth into myriad copies of itself.”’
‘Myriad?’ I say. ‘Jeez. So there could be more versions of us out there? Oh God, what if there’s an author in another universe writing about us? Channellingus? What if there’s a universe in which my hair doesn’t frizz the minute it senseswater in the vicinity? Or a universe where I know exactly how to say no to people without feeling like my insides are going to rot with the guilt of expressing a single boundary?’
River chuckles. ‘I like it.’ He scratches his chin. ‘I like the idea of other versions of me somewhere out there in the ether. Making other choices. Better ones and worse ones. Growing in different directions, but all from the same root. Like one lifetime ain’t enough for any single human to experience every single possibility, so the universe is willing to split to accommodate us. I don’t know. It’s comforting. I like it.’
‘I like it too,’ I say, leaning my head on his shoulder. ‘But the thought of it is giving me anemoia.’
‘What now?’
‘It’s a Greek word. It’s when you get a feeling of nostalgia for a time you’ve never experienced, a life you’ve never lived. Or lives, in this case.’
‘Anemoia. Huh.’
River closes the book and plants a kiss on the tip of my nose. ‘Well, if me and you exist in multiple universes, I hope we’re hanging out together in every single one of them, having as much fun as we’re having now.’
I startle at such an unexpectedly sweet sentiment from a decidedly unsentimental man. I sit up and look at him quizzically.
River blinks then, what he said seeming to echo back at him. He runs a hand over his stubble and laughs, ears turning a little pink. ‘Fucking,’ he corrects himself quickly. ‘I just meant I hope the other universe versions of us are fucking.’
‘Oh, I bet they are.’ I grin, pulling myself out from the tangle of sheets and climbing astride him. I wrap my arms around his neck and lean down to whisper in his ear. ‘And I bet they’re excellent at it there too.’
*
Over the next few days, River and I fall quite quickly into our own unlikely but delicious routine. We start the day with sex, reasoning that because the time in which we get to enjoy each other is temporary, we should make hay while the sun shines. Sometimes the sex is slow and deliberate, sometimes it’s verging on feral, but each time makes me feel bolder, brighter, happier than I thought sex had the power to do. Afterwards, River makes a pot of black coffee for himself and a cup of tea for me. The tea is always terrible and I always have to re-make it, but he’s trying hard to get it right, which makes me feel a little bit like crying for some reason.
Then, sometimes picking Squish up from next door, often on his own, and twice with Aled the Librarian, River journeys his way around the architecture, museums and galleries of London. While he’s gone, I write. I write and I write and I write like a fiend, allowing myself to enjoy the feeling of being a conduit for a story that is happening in a world other than my own. And then at the end of the work day, just when I think I haven’t got anything left to give, River returns from his jaunt and somehow I miraculously get a fresh surge of energy, leading me to pounce on him as soon as he appears.
Today when he returns, I cannot pounce because he’s carrying a parcel wrapped neatly in silver paper.
‘Ooh! A toy soldier? A guide to London’s bridges? Or did you get one of those cardboard King Charles masks, because I’m afraid that’s not going to work for me.’
‘A gift for you.’
‘Oh!’
I jump up from my desk and take the gift. ‘I like the silver paper,’ I say.
‘I thought you would.’
I quickly unwrap it and gasp when I see one of the most moving oil paintings I’ve ever seen. It’s a silhouetted man and woman, desperately clinging to one another, wrapped in a dotted swirl of silver stars against sky so inky-blue it’s almost purple. They look like they’re suspended together in another world.
‘Wow,’ I breath, pressing a hand lightly to the ornate pewter frame. ‘This isbeautiful.’
‘It reminded me of us.’
I look up at him in surprise because there is no denying that the people depicted in this image are in way,waymore than a temporary celestial situationship.
River, as if reading my mind, goes slightly pink in the cheeks, like he did yesterday when he said he hoped we were hanging out in all the universes. ‘Yeah. I saw it at the library, it was part of an exhibition,’ he explains, voice now a little too casual. ‘Painted by a local artist, Delphie something? And uh, yeah! It made me think of that insane manifestation ceremony you made me do!’
I break eye contact, feeling suddenly shy.
