by Katie Khan
‘More art,’ Thea says, apprehensively. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve found me in another painting?’
‘Ha very ha,’ he says. They walk into the Turbine Hall, the sloping, descending floor of the cavernous entrance space covered with a plush, brightly coloured striped carpet. Visitors lie across the floor at various angles, their eyes on the ceiling. Isaac and Thea glance at each other in confusion, before looking up.
‘Oh, my,’ Thea says, as she spots the giant metal pendulum above their heads. The mirrored sphere swings steadily back and forth across the Turbine Hall, reflecting the faces from the striped carpet, unceasing in its movement.
‘It’s a commission by an artists’ collective called Superflex,’ Isaac reads. ‘Did you ever come here when it was a giant setting sun?’ But Thea is mesmerized by the swinging pendulum, and doesn’t answer. ‘Theodora?’
She watches the motion with a slight frown, tracing the arc with her finger.
‘Earth to Thea.’
She repeats the movement, her hand hovering at a particular moment in its swing. She’s startled as a fragment of a thought comes to her, then realizes her phone is ringing with a video call. ‘Urvisha is FaceTiming me,’ she says, showing Isaac.
But as she slides to answer the call, she can hear her own voice saying, ‘Hello,’ and Urvisha asking her what she wants for breakfast.
‘What—’
She shows Isaac what’s happening, and he hurriedly disconnects the call, putting his thumb over the camera. ‘What happened?’ she asks.
‘Thea answered.’
‘How is that possible?’ she says.
‘Haven’t you ever had it where your phone and your laptop both ring with the same call because they share a number?’ he says. ‘Multiple devices synced to the same telephone number, the same email address, the same account in the cloud.’
‘But my number is mine,’ Thea begins, then realizes that in a parallel world, parallel Theas would have parallel phone numbers. ‘God,’ she says, disgusted. ‘Is nothing my own any more?’
He holds her phone, trying hard not to blink when she tells him her four-digit pin so he can unlock it and unsync it from the other Thea’s phone. ‘One nine zero eight,’ he repeats. ‘Did you change that recently?’
A blush creeps across her cheeks. ‘I wanted to remember our day in London.’
He snorts, secretly touched.
They don’t talk much as they walk through the brightly lit rooms upstairs, bypassing the most famous pieces in the collections as they head straight for the reason Isaac has brought them here.
‘Oh,’ Thea breathes, taking in the sculpture in front of her. ‘It’s the curlew.’
Barbara Hepworth’s Stringed Figure (Curlew), Version II stands in front of her, regal in its prominence. The green brass picks up the ambient light from the huge white gallery room and shows off the patina.
‘In real life you can see it’s an abstract bird,’ Isaac says, pointing to the folded corners of the triangle that form the wings. But Thea is staring with terrifying intensity at the intersecting strings of reddish-brown cotton.
‘Forget water – this is how I imagine time,’ Thea says, her voice a whisper. ‘Multiple strands of tight cotton strings, held in suspension – crossing each other but never meeting.’ She looks up at Isaac, the happiest he’s ever seen her. ‘Timelines. Spools of string, connected but all separate.’
He marvels at how she uses metaphors, from the ripples in the water by the Thames to the twanging of strings as spacetime. Perhaps it’s part of a genius mind; the ability to visualize a metaphysical concept as a physical entity.
Thea leans in so that Isaac has to stop her from touching the strings in case one of the guards sees her. ‘Isaac, do you believe an artist could imagine time like this if she hadn’t seen it?’
‘Isn’t that what artists do?’ he says.
‘Look at it. Doesn’t it strike you as weird that this is so exactly what we’re experiencing? I mean, this strand could be my leap to your world –’ she follows a taut string with her finger – ‘and this could be yours, crossing mine the other way, converging. And here is Thea, in a tandem opposite me …’ She trails off, entranced. ‘If only the strings were suspended within a round shape, you could ostensibly say it was the Earth—’
‘Hepworth made a sculpture exactly like that,’ Isaac says quietly. ‘There’s a picture in the book. Round, like a world made from split wood. It’s called Pelagos.’
‘What does that mean?’ Thea asks.
Isaac smiles: finally the Linguistics part of his degree has some worth. ‘It means “sea”,’ he says, surprised. ‘That’s so odd – you’re talking about strands of time and the ripple effects in water. And so is one of the best sculptors who ever lived, who died long before you were born.’ He takes her hand. ‘Do you think …?’
‘Oh my God,’ Thea breathes, admiring Hepworth’s sculptures, tracing the tensile strings with her fingers, a physical representation of the entanglement she and her friends are causing. ‘This is telling – no, showing – us something.’
‘What?’
‘It’s saying …’ Thea follows three strands to where they converge in an intricate cross-pattern, light shining through the strings. ‘Our timelines are about to get seriously fucked up.’
Isaac can’t even laugh at her swearing, because she’s right.
Twenty-four
They take the same route back up to Lancashire, drawing lines on an invisible map of the country, tracing every road they’ve travelled on this quest. Isaac is at the wheel while Thea naps beneath his jacket. Some of her best thoughts come in the state between dreaming and waking, but it’s hard to clasp them without falling into deep sleep and forgetting everything you’ve conjured.
As they drive north, Thea is thinking about seeing her friends again: Ayo, Urvisha and Rosy, all waiting at the house. Her house.
She can’t imagine what it’s like for the alternative Ayo and Urvisha back in the other world, who’ve lost their Rosy – she can’t imagine what it would be like not to have seen her, not to have felt the sweet respite from guilt, spending time together yesterday in the wood. She must fix this, for everyone’s sake.
Rosy is a prisoner of time and Thea holds the key to her release.
‘Isaac?’ she says sleepily, and he turns down the ancient car radio, which is playing some obscure indie rock. ‘You said Thea remembered everything?’
‘I did – she does,’ he says, his eyes on the road.
‘Did she wake up on the floor of the barn, too, after our jump?’ she says, and he flicks a look at her because she sounds mournful.
‘Yes. Before the others even went to Dunsop Bridge. You were there on your own.’
Thea bites her lip, envisaging the timeline. ‘Oh yes. I was looking at the grandfather clock pendulum, and you messaged me something about ghosts. Then I went out to the barn …’
‘Sounds right.’
‘It was before Rosy jumped,’ she said.
Isaac nods.
‘I lost her. The other Thea was here.’ She’s quiet for a moment, before she speaks again. ‘If only I could go back and change it so that Rosy never jumped,’ she says. She rests her face in her hands for a minute, before the rocking motion makes her feel travelsick, so instead she watches the horizon.
∞
Isaac is unnerved by her comment, remembering a conversation he’d had with the other Thea, and what she had said – somewhat more brutally – when they’d discussed quantum entanglement. ‘I wish there was a way to go back to the point when the timeline split,’ she’d said, ‘and undo every deviation that has happened since.’
But Isaac doesn’t want to undo everything that’s happened since. And he hopes this Thea doesn’t want that, either.
The spanner in the works is Lady Rosalind de Glanville, missing somewhere in time. He wishes he could be okay with leaving her out there, potentially lost somewhere in the deep vacuum of space.
&
nbsp; ‘Do we really have to go back?’ she says, and he nearly swerves off the road.
‘To – Dunsop Bridge?’
‘Yes. Where did you think I meant?’
‘Never mind,’ he says, returning his focus to the motorway.
‘Hey – red car.’
‘What?’ Isaac says, reaching to turn off the radio.
She gives him a sleepy smile that makes him melt. ‘Yellow car,’ she says, and he scans the nearby vehicles for the offending colour. ‘Damn,’ he says. ‘If I’d have known—’
‘Red car. Come on, Mendelsohn, you’re losing three-nil.’
‘This is a stupid game for two people,’ Isaac grumbles, crossing his fingers he can prove his reactions aren’t entirely dulled. ‘Aha! Red car,’ he says, and they debate the position of burgundy on the colour wheel – if it’s a valid red – past the Midlands, into Lancashire and all the way to Dunsop Valley beyond.
They arrive mid-afternoon to find an unexpectedly sunny day up north. After the rains of London and the chilly night they’d spent in the car, turning stiff from the cold and sore from sleeping in the seats, it’s a delight to see the rolling moors lit with all the different shades of autumn. ‘Where shall I head?’ Isaac says as they reach the turning for the farm, and Thea squints towards the house, looking for signs of life.
‘I don’t know. We need to sit and draw the timeline, I think, and work out what to do – maybe we could use your jazzy drawing app.’
‘Only if you repeal the use of the word jazzy,’ he says, parking the car outside the farm. ‘We’re probably best going back out to the barn,’ he says apologetically. ‘Keep a low profile.’
‘Okay,’ she replies easily.
She gets out, stretching her legs before walking round the side of the farmhouse to the kitchen garden, nipping quickly behind the wildly overgrown plants in case she’s spotted. They make their way across the three paving stones, past the dovecote, then turn towards the barn—
‘So you see,’ the other Thea is saying, ‘I built a replica of the Beecroft laser, right here in the barn.’
‘Fuck,’ Isaac says, backtracking.
Ayo, Urvisha, Rosy and Thea stand by the open door of the barn, letting the afternoon sunshine light up the dark wooden interior as they examine the setup.
Thea stands rooted still, as though she wants them to turn and see her. But Isaac nudges her, then tugs at her arm, and after a beat she reverses back a few steps and shelters by the dovecote, a tall, cylindrical brick building from the eighteenth century. Thea quietly kicks at the low, rotting door with her toe until it gives, and they hurry in.
The inside of the round building is filled with small stone nest holes at every height around the walls, with a central wooden pivoted post supporting a revolving ladder.
‘Wow,’ Isaac says, looking up and turning round.
‘My father used to keep pigeons.’ She eyes the pigeonholes as though they might still be inhabited, not rotten and long empty. She hops onto the ladder with such familiarity that he almost reaches out to stop her, in case the wood splinters, but he realizes he’s being irrational as he watches her climb the ladder with ease, up to the oak arms at the top where she peers into the nearest nest box. ‘There might actually be some squabs living in here,’ she calls, and he makes a surprised face.
‘Squabs?’
‘Young birds.’
Isaac stares up at Thea, his back to the door. ‘Do they produce eggs? Eggs would be nice for breakfast,’ he says.
‘You’re always thinking about your stomach,’ a voice says from behind him, and he whirls round to see Thea standing in the door.
But she’s up the ladder.
Two Theas.
‘Hi. What are you doing h …’ she says, but her voice trails off as she sees Thea at the very top by the conical ceiling, climbing the ladder in the exact way her father used to when she was little. ‘Who … what … the hell?’
‘Oh, fuck.’ He looks from Thea to Thea in dismay.
Thea looks down from the ladder at her doppelganger standing in the low doorway. ‘Hi,’ she says, her voice echoing gently inside the brick holes.
‘This is … Oh. I’m officially lost for words.’ The Thea in the doorway pulls the rotten wooden door shut behind her. The light inside immediately drops, the small bird holes creating shafts of sunlight across the dovecote.
‘First time in your life, I’d expect.’
Both Theas scowl at Isaac, and he mouths ‘Sorry.’
‘So this was the secret you were keeping – why I couldn’t quite make your story add up?’ Thea says from by the door.
‘Yes.’
She scratches her head. ‘I suppose it stands to reason that, in two parallel worlds, two versions of the same person would make the jump.’
Thea climbs a little way down the ladder, clearly not yet willing to come all the way back to the ground.
‘This is – weird.’ She looks down at Isaac and he looks up at her, a pleading expression in his eyes. Please don’t make this weird.
She’s wearing a white top, the same one she slept in last night – looking down at a version of herself wearing a navy top.
Light and dark, Isaac thinks, yin and yang. She’ll be bad cop, you be good cop.
‘It’s really nice to meet you,’ the bad cop says from by the door, and the good cop on the ladder wears a look that says: damn.
‘You, too.’
‘Statistically speaking,’ Thea continues, walking a little further into the dovecote from the door, ‘we might be the only people in our parallel worlds ever to meet ourselves.’
‘True,’ Thea says lightly, still standing on the rungs of the ladder. ‘And it only took a prism full of light years to do so.’
Isaac hides a smile. He thought it would be hard to tell the Theas apart, but it’s easy: one is his friend who sometimes talks like Spock; the other, the love of his life, who is becoming increasingly poetic.
‘I’m worried Rosy didn’t meet her – what do we call it? Doppelganger seems so predictable,’ Thea says from the ladder.
‘Counterpart,’ the Spock-like Thea suggests, then frowns. ‘I agree, I don’t think she made it this far. The methodology doesn’t sound quite right—’
‘It wasn’t,’ Thea says, coming down a few more rungs. ‘I was there, and we didn’t use the correct prism. It was a plain optic crystal.’ Colour floods into her cheeks at her own perceived failure. ‘I hadn’t made the connection then, like you had.’
The other Thea shrugs, nonchalant. ‘It was just luck I tried the diamond that day – and it probably was for you, too. We’d have got there with the theory eventually.’
‘Thank you. I agree,’ she says, and Isaac rolls his eyes – two Theas, puzzle-solving together? The dovecote is claustrophobic, and he wishes, as they both clearly do from the way they’re eyeing each other, that they had a larger space for this unexpected meeting.
‘Are the others—?’ he starts.
‘They’re heading back to the house.’ Thea walks from the door to a nest box, tipping out the contents from the pigeonhole, her navy top almost disappearing in the gloom at the bottom of the dovecote.
The other Thea hops from the lower rungs of the ladder until she’s also standing on the stone floor, covered with stray pieces of straw. ‘Each of these holes used to house a bird,’ she says dreamily. ‘Can you imagine?’
‘Yes,’ Thea says simply.
‘Imagine when they were all in flight, spooked perhaps, diving for the holes to the outside world. The squawking, the flapping of wings – their paths crossing in the air …’
Both Theas stand staring upwards, imagining an intersection of birdwings before they both look at each other. ‘The timelines have got so muddled,’ one says, and frankly it could be either of them.
‘I know.’
‘The ripples of us both being here – and Isaac …’
‘We don’t know what the fallout will be.’
The Thea
wearing white leans against the oak ladder, looking down at the loose straw covering the stone floor. ‘We jumped before Rosy; I fear she’s fallen between our split timelines, lost somewhere.’
‘I know.’ Thea examines a fossilized eggshell fragment, turning it round on her thumb. ‘I was saying to Isaac that I wish there was a way to go back to the split, and undo every deviation that has happened since.’
Isaac sucks in a breath; the thought of undoing everything he feels is too much to bear. But he sees the Thea in white jolt at the idea, and he recognizes the frown, how she rubs the baby hair at her temple, deep in thought. Somewhere a spark has been lit in her mind. It’s not yet a light bulb moment; more like the tiny flicker of a match being scratched.
‘If only it really was a time machine,’ the other, more pragmatic Thea goes on. ‘Not a portal.’
‘You want to go back to the split,’ the Thea in white repeats, ‘back to that particular moment in time?’
‘If it was possible, it would bring Rosy back. Wouldn’t it? Because she never would have jumped.’
Thea exhales. ‘Perhaps the original theory could help us out, here. If you travelled faster than the speed of light then, theoretically …’
‘… You could arrive somewhere before you left.’ Isaac nods, chiming in. ‘I know this one.’
They both look at him as though remembering for the first time he’s still there. The Thea wearing navy taps her foot. ‘But it wasn’t time travel. We were wrong.’
‘The theory still stands, though, doesn’t it?’ Other Thea says, still leaning on the ladder, her white top illuminated by the shafts of light coming in through the pigeonholes.
‘I suppose so.’
She moves away from the ladder, thinking hard. ‘We both got here by slowing the speed of light in a prism. And the trapped light inside that prism oscillates, like a pendulum.’
‘I see …’
‘Like a pendulum,’ the Thea in white repeats. She runs her hand along the rounded wall of the dovecote, thinking hard. ‘The trapped light in the prism is bouncing back and forth, interacting with more matter because it’s been slowed, oscillating between two states like a pendulum.’
