The Light Between Us

by Katie Khan

  Rosy nods, full of empathy, letting Thea speak about this because it’s so rare.

  ‘I don’t know if my mum loved my dad, or was exasperated because he made her up sticks to live on a farm. I like to think she did.’

  ‘But at twelve,’ Rosy says gently, ‘you must remember how they were with you.’

  Thea smiles, wistful. ‘I didn’t pay enough attention, Rosy. I didn’t bank enough memories – I didn’t know I’d need them so soon. On the day of the crash … I’d gone out to the Hanging Stones without telling anyone where I was going. I was angry because I’d told my parents I didn’t like boarding at my new school, but they didn’t listen – they said everything would get better with time.’ Thea looks at the dark outlines of the trees around them, the branches forming shapes like the silhouettes of scarecrows. ‘It’s dangerous to go out on the fell in bad weather. There was a fog over the moorlands, but I marched on, regardless.’

  Rosy puts her arm around Thea, moving away from the initials so they can talk and walk together.

  ‘My dad was working the harvest so my mum took a bicycle down to Whitendale Farm, to try and catch up with me that way. When my dad heard I’d gone missing in the fog, he took the car. But there was so much mist by then, it was impossible for him to see …’

  ‘Oh, Thea, no,’ Rosy moans, realizing what’s coming.

  ‘My father hit my mother’s bike. She went into the dry-stone wall. The screech of brakes – followed by the crunch – could be heard across the fell, I’m told. I must have been crossing the weir at the time, gushing water covering the horror.’

  ‘But your dad …’

  ‘He couldn’t forgive himself – when it was me he should have been punishing. It was my fault, I was so stubborn. He hanged himself near here soon after.’

  Rosy doesn’t dare breathe, doesn’t dare to ask where. She understands now why she feels so much sadness in the landscape; the brutality of the rolling hills can be beautiful, but there is also a tangible menace emanating from the moors. Confronted with what she now knows, she can understand exactly why someone would study Physics and Philosophy, asking the biggest questions of our known universe. In one fell swoop, Rosy can see why somebody who’d lived Thea’s experience and every subsequent trauma might dedicate her life to working out how to rewind time.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ is all she can say.

  Thea shrugs. ‘There are two ways to move on from something like this: you push it down and suppress it, or you use it in everything you strive to do with your life.’

  ‘It’s strange,’ Rosy says, as they step over a fallen branch. ‘Honestly? I always would have thought you were the first type of person. But perhaps I was wrong.’

  They reach the far side of the wood, away from the farm. The remaining visible light is masked by the trees. ‘We should think about heading back,’ Thea says, her arm around Rosy’s waist as the two women return to the house – where Isaac and Thea sit at the kitchen table, having a cup of tea.

  Twenty-three

  Rosy and Thea walk up the drive towards the front entrance of the farm. Cyril trots in front, the light now entirely gone from the sky. But as they arrive at the gravelled courtyard, a streak of headlights coming up the drive behind nearly blinds them. The car pulls into the courtyard, reversing awkwardly over the turning circle, and Rosy and Thea look at each other in confusion.

  ‘Where in holy hell are we?’ Urvisha says, getting out of the passenger side.

  Thea pinches the pressure point behind the bridge of her nose. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘You’re early,’ Rosy says. ‘Days early.’

  ‘Surprise!’ Ayo rolls down the window and makes a face at her own driving. ‘I’m a bit out of practice.’ She gets out of the car, leaving it parked awkwardly. She remembers at the last moment to turn and lock the rental, looking proud to have been so conscientious.

  ‘Interesting parking,’ Thea says as Ayo walks inside with her, looking round at the dusty farmhouse.

  ‘This is quite a place you’ve got here – very shabby chic.’

  ‘I like it!’ Rosy says.

  ‘Very Miss Havisham,’ Thea says at the same time, appreciating that although two parallel worlds may split and go their own separate ways, some things will never change.

  Isaac comes into the hallway from the kitchen, meeting the group by the door. ‘What are you doing here?’ Urvisha says, then looks at him closely. ‘Are you sick?’ She breezes past him. ‘Don’t give it to me, I don’t want it.’

  ‘Nice to see you, too,’ Isaac murmurs, then looks to where Thea is standing by the front door, smiling at her friends. ‘Why don’t you put your luggage upstairs?’ he says loudly to Urvisha and Ayo.

  ‘Good idea,’ Rosy says, taking up the mantle of playing host. ‘Let me show you to your rooms.’ She leads the two new arrivals upstairs, past the white dustsheets lying across the bannisters, and Isaac hurries out of the front door.

  ‘Have we gone back in time?’ he says to Thea quickly. ‘They’ve all turned up, just like in the other world.’

  ‘We haven’t time travelled,’ she says. ‘It’s a coincidence – similar personalities making similar decisions. Friends will be friends, whatever universe they’re in.’

  ‘We should get out of here,’ he says, ‘before they see there’s two of you. You’re wearing a coat – that’s good, they might presume Thea in the kitchen has taken it off. Where should we—’

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she says, resting the back of her hand on his forehead, and he startles at the compassion, feeling again the kick between them, their shared warmth and affection.

  ‘Like I’m building up a childhood’s worth of antibodies in a day,’ he says, and her eyes widen.

  ‘Of course, that makes sense.’ She looks wistful. ‘Did the other Thea tell you that?’

  He takes her hand from his forehead and holds it in his. ‘Yes – but you’d have figured it out, too. She’s had longer to mull things over, because she remembers the jump.’ He pulls her out into the darkness of the courtyard, leading her to one of the farm’s old cars. ‘We have to get out of here – before it gets too messy.’

  ‘Sure,’ she says, though she’s tired and wants to sit for a moment among friends. ‘Where shall we go?’

  ‘Start driving,’ Isaac says, ‘and we’ll find our destination on the road.’ She opens his door and takes the key from the glove compartment. ‘Risky,’ Isaac says.

  She waves at the remoteness of the landscape around them. ‘Who’s going to steal an old banger from here?’ She starts the engine and as it turns over it chugs, before they pull away, down the drive towards the village.

  There are hardly any streetlamps as they wind past the Lancashire villages, along roads edged by the omnipresent dry-stone walls, the trees and ferns watched over by electricity pylons looming large in the dark.

  ‘Where am I heading?’ Thea says.

  Isaac opens the glove box in front of him and pulls out an ancient A–Z. ‘London,’ he says, throwing a glance at her reaction.

  ‘At this time of night? It’s already dark.’

  He opens the A–Z. ‘There’s something I’d like us to look at.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ she says, diverting left as she sees a sign for a motorway. ‘You can’t tell me … you can only show me?’

  ‘Something like that,’ he says good-naturedly, ‘but I promise it’s not such a dramatic revelation this time.’

  They drive in silence for a while, finding the quiet companionable as they watch the landscape roll by.

  ‘I waited by the bridge for you for an hour, you know.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Thea – she made me join her for a four-mile hike.’

  Thea’s alert to the significance of the distance. ‘She took you out to the Hanging Stones?’

  ‘Yes.’ Isaac winces as they pull onto the motorway, the bright lights harsh after the darkness of the countryside. ‘We talked a little about what she could remember
after the jump, since she landed here.’

  ‘She knew you were … from her old world?’

  ‘Yes. She said perhaps she can remember everything because she instigated the jump.’

  ‘Well. How was it?’ Thea says, hoping her question isn’t quite as transparent as it feels.

  He rests his hand on where hers sits on the gearstick. ‘It was just like the old days,’ he says, ‘and when I say “old days”, I mean the very platonic old days when we were just friends.’

  ‘Oh,’ Thea says. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  She looks down at his hand on hers, relieved. ‘Did you walk by Whitendale Farm? Did she tell you what happened there?’

  ‘She didn’t mention anything in particular. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered.’ She brakes as a car pulls into their lane in front, and in the pause as she takes her hand back, she looks at Isaac, his profile lit by the streetlamps outside. ‘This is all getting terribly complicated,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’

  Isaac knows he needed to get them away from Dunsop Bridge, but really what he’s doing is buying time as he thinks about his and the other Thea’s last conversation. He’d shown her the path he’d mapped through time; from the sitter in the Portrait of an Unknown Woman, wearing the three rings that both parallel Theas wear on their hands, to the sales docket of Admiral Joseph Coleman – later Colman – and his great-grandson, Thea’s grandfather. But he hadn’t been greeted with the smile of delight he’d expected. Instead, Thea had frozen as he’d shown her the photos on his phone of the supporting documents, including her own bank statements with the payment for the painting in 1908.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ she’d said. ‘This is bad – very bad.’ She’d paced around the kitchen, pulling the white sheet from the table and throwing it irritably to one side, a sparkle of dust motes flying up. ‘The painting, the seller, the sitter … We’re getting entangled in time.’

  ‘Entangled?’ Isaac had said.

  ‘I know you probably think this is charming,’ she said, sliding the postcard towards him. ‘It bears all your hallmarks. But we’re messing with timelines outside our control. This is a history which wasn’t meant to be changed.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Isaac had asked.

  Thea had pulled out a notebook, starting to map their chronology. ‘We have to detangle our timeline, leaving as little out of kilter as possible. Which will start with us both going back. We’ll have to go home, you and me.’

  Isaac stares out of the window as they move from motorway to motorway, progressing down the country towards London. They stop at a neon-bright service station, every poor bastard there sporting a greenish tinge as though they were all travelling after some hellish bender.

  ‘We’re going to arrive in London at crazy o’clock,’ Thea says, sipping her thick milkshake as they sit overlooking the road, the rhythm of the passing cars slow at this time of night: a flash of headlights every five to ten seconds, the bending of the engine noise in a red shift.

  ‘That’s good,’ Isaac says. ‘We can watch the sunrise.’ His phone rings, but it cuts off before he can mute the call, so he puts the phone back in his pocket.

  They enter London from the north, past empty retail parks and a huge shopping centre surrounded by uninhabited car parks. There’s little traffic as Isaac directs them using the ancient A–Z; there’s no rush as they discover new ring roads and one-way systems not marked on the well-thumbed pages. They laugh, following wherever the road takes them, finding themselves further east than either of them has ever been. ‘Take that road,’ Isaac says, pointing across her so she doesn’t miss it. ‘We need to head west into central London.’

  They move on a relatively straight route from the east of London towards the river, passing Tube stations closed for the night and corporate-looking hotels. ‘I spent some time with Rosy today,’ Thea says quietly. ‘It was so good to see her.’

  Isaac is gentle. ‘Of course, she’s your Rosy from this world,’ he says. ‘But she’s not the Rosy we lost – the Rosy from my world is still missing.’

  ‘I know,’ Thea says, forlorn. ‘I feel guilty every day.’

  ‘Thea,’ he starts, ‘did someone swap places with Rosalind, like how you swapped places with the other Thea?’

  It’s a good question, and she thinks about the answer. ‘I don’t think so, no,’ she says. ‘During Rosy’s experiment, we used an optic prism. I don’t think it was powerful enough, and it had no personal connection to Rosy. You and I – we only got here by using my family heirloom.’

  This chimes with what the other Thea had told him about diamonds, so he’s quiet.

  ‘Do you think she’s trapped somewhere, then?’ he asks. ‘If it was enough to make her disappear, but …’

  ‘… Not powerful enough to make her reappear.’ Thea nearly crashes the car, so she pulls over. ‘Shit. I’d always presumed she was trapped somewhere in the past, you know? Like London in the 1980s or something. Not trapped … between worlds.’

  They look at each other in horror.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Thea says. ‘She could be in the glass house somewhere …’

  ‘Calm down,’ Isaac soothes, ‘I’m sure she’s not. Don’t imagine the worst-case scenario—’

  But it’s too late: both of them can’t stop imagining Rosalind stuck somewhere, unable to return.

  ‘We have to help her,’ Thea says fervently.

  ‘Of course. That’s why we’re here.’

  They pull out on to Victoria Embankment and, with no forewarning, they’re suddenly next to the River Thames. Thea swings the car into a parking space near a glorious bridge and puts the handbrake on, turning off the engine. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘This looks like a good place to watch the dawn.’

  They’re parked opposite a pier, festoon lighting strung along the riverbank, the white structures of the bridge alight like sails of a ship. Preoccupied, they lean their seats as far back as they’ll go and Thea digs some old woollen blankets out from the boot of the car. She spreads the blankets across them, her legs tucked up by the handbrake, resting lightly against him. As they reach the coldest part of the night before dawn, she leans into him, her head on Isaac’s shoulder, and absently he strokes her hair as they move in and out of sleep.

  ‘Isaac.’ Thea shakes him awake gently, but he moans and rolls to the far side of the car seat, away from her. ‘Isaac, wake up.’ She leans over him, trying to get his attention, but after his bout of flu sleep has him in its grip.

  ‘Gerroff,’ he says, pulling the blanket over his face. ‘Five more minutes.’

  Thea shakes the stiffness out of her limbs, and climbs on top of him in the passenger seat. The windows are wet with the breath of condensation, but light is breaking across the sky so she pulls his ear. He moans again, and she laughs, sticking a finger in his open mouth.

  ‘You are really annoying,’ he grumbles, opening one eye.

  She pokes him in his open eye.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Wake up –’ she laughs quietly – ‘you’re missing the sunrise.’

  He lowers the blanket, looking at the windscreen but also at Thea, sitting on his lap being playful. He can’t bear for this to be over. ‘Come on, then.’ He opens the car door and they brace themselves for the cold, feeling the creeping chill as Thea climbs out of the door first, then pulls him after her.

  She takes his hand as they jog to the pier, the festoon lighting still ablaze, and after a second’s pause she hurdles the railings and indicates for him to do the same. They run down the pier, the wood creaking beneath their feet, and since no boats are moored they sit on the edge of the dock, watching the sky.

  As dawn finally emerges across the eastern sky they settle, her head on his shoulder, hand in hand. The light is totally and utterly yellow, the sky around the sunrise turning white.

  ‘It’s strange seeing London so empty,’ he says, and she agrees. There’s a silence while he tries to form hi
s next sentence in the right way. ‘What do you think would happen if I didn’t go back? If I stayed here, with you?’

  She widens her eyes, watching the blooming skyline. ‘I was thinking about this when I was with Rosy earlier,’ she says, the timbre of her voice even. ‘She’s the Rosy from my world, who’s been spending time with the other Thea, while I’ve been with you. And now she’s here, and you’re here, and I’m here, too …’ She looks down at the water beneath their feet, the tide beneath the surface of the Thames surprisingly strong. ‘I’m worried about the ripples we’re creating. They’re getting bigger and bigger,’ she says.

  He nods slowly, watching the same section of water beneath their feet ebb and flow. This was the answer he’d feared.

  ‘Actually, maybe water makes a good metaphor for time. Not only do the waves spread, rippling out far and wide, but also, if you put something into water that doesn’t belong there, precisely the same volume of water is pushed out of the way.’

  ‘“Something that doesn’t belong there” – like a person?’

  ‘That’s my fear,’ Thea says. ‘Me being in your world, or you being in mine, means we are pushing spacetime – or something else, something we haven’t grasped yet – out of our way. And where is that going? What are the repercussions of us both being out of time?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He considers the idea.

  ‘It’s wrong,’ she says. ‘So I don’t think you can stay.’

  The festoon lights click off above their heads, clearly programmed to do so during daylight hours, and they jump in surprise.

  ‘Why are we here?’ she asks. ‘In London?’

  ‘Let’s get breakfast, then I’ll show you.’

  The Tate Modern opens to visitors at ten o’clock and, after stashing the car in an all-day car park for an extortionate fee, a sleepy and rumpled Thea and Isaac head across the Millennium Bridge to the monolith of the gallery.