Wrong Place Wrong Time(26)

‘I don’t need to ask you if you believe you are telling me the truth,’ Andy says after what looks like a moment’s consideration.

The somewhat passive-aggressive if you believe rattles Jen. The parlance of doctors, legal opponents, passive-aggressive relatives, Slimming World leaders …

‘I do,’ she says. ‘For what it’s worth.’

She rubs at her eyes for a minute, trying to think. Come on, she tells herself. You’re a smart woman. This isn’t so hard. It’s time as you know it, only backwards.

‘You win an award in two days,’ she says, thinking of the story she saw about him when he hadn’t answered her. ‘For your work on black holes.’

When she opens her eyes, Andy has paused, his coffee halfway to his mouth, the Styrofoam cup made elliptical by the pressure of his grip. His mouth is open, his eyes on hers. ‘The Penny Jameson?’

‘I think so? I saw it while googling you.’

‘I win?’

Jen feels a petty, triumphant little spark light within her. There. ‘You do.’

‘That award is embargoed. I know I’m shortlisted. But nobody else does. It isn’t –’ he gets his phone out and types quietly for a second, then replaces it, face down, on the table. ‘That information is not in the public domain.’

‘Well, I’m glad.’

‘All right then, Jen,’ he says. ‘You have my attention.’

‘Good.’

‘How interesting.’ Andy sucks his bottom lip into his mouth. He drums his fingers on the back of his phone.

‘So: is it scientifically possible?’ she asks him.

He spreads his hands wide, then repositions them around his cup. ‘We don’t know,’ he says. ‘Science is much more of an art than you’d think. What you say violates Einstein’s law of general relativity – but who’s to say his theorem should control our life? Time travel isn’t proven to be impossible,’ he says. ‘If you can get above the speed of light …’

‘Yes, yes, a gravitational force a thousand times my body weight, right?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But – I didn’t feel anything like that. Can I ask – do you think I went forwards, too, in time? So, somewhere, I’m living the life where Todd was arrested?’

‘You think there may be more than one of you?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Hang on.’ He takes the knife from the cutlery pot sitting next to them. ‘Can you use this?’

‘Use it?’

‘A tiny papercut.’ He leaves the rest implicit.

Jen swallows. ‘I see. Okay.’ She takes the knife and makes – quite honestly – the most pathetic shallow cut along the side of her finger. Barely a scour.

‘Deeper,’ he says.

Jen directs the knife further into her cut. A bead of blood escapes. ‘Okay,’ she says, blotting it with a tissue. ‘Okay?’ She looks down at the wound, a centimetre long.

‘If that cut isn’t there tomorrow … I’d say you’re waking up in yesterday’s body, each day. You move from Monday to Sunday to Saturday.’

‘Rather than time-travelling?’

‘Right. Tell me.’ He sits forward. ‘Did you experience any kind of – compressing sensation when this happened? Or only the déjà vu?’

‘Only the déjà vu.’

‘How curious. The panic you felt for your son … do you think it caused that feeling?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jen says softly, almost to herself. ‘It’s mad. It’s so mad. I don’t understand it. I haven’t yet telephoned you. I do – later in the week. I leave loads of messages.’

‘It seems to me,’ Andy says, finishing his coffee, ‘that you do, actually, already understand the rules of the universe you are unwillingly in.’

‘It doesn’t feel like it,’ she says, and he allows a smile to escape again.

‘It’s theoretically possible for you to have somehow created such a force that you are stuck in a closed time-like curve.’

‘Theoretically possible. Right. So – how do I – get out of it?’

‘Physics aside, the obvious answer would be that you will reach the inception of the crime, wouldn’t it? Go back to what made Todd commit the crime?’

‘And then what? If you had to guess?’ She raises her hands in a gesture of non-confrontation. ‘Nothing at stake. Just a guess. What do you think would happen?’

Andy bites his bottom lip, eyes to the table, then looks at her. ‘You would stop the crime from happening.’

‘God, I so hope so,’ Jen says, her eyes wet.

‘Can I ask a question that might seem facetious?’ Andy says. The air seems to quieten around them as Andy’s gaze meets hers.

‘Why do you think this is happening to you?’

Jen hesitates, about to say – indeed, facetiously – that she doesn’t know: that is why she has forced him to meet her. But something stops her.

She thinks about time loops, about the butterfly effect, changing one tiny thing.

‘I wonder if I – alone – know something that can stop the murder,’ Jen says. ‘Deep in my subconscious.’