All About Us: Escape with the bestselling, most gorgeously romantic debut love story of 2020!

by Tom Ellen

  ‘Yeah …’ This comment touches so sharply – so precisely – on everything I’ve been worrying about over the past twenty-four hours that I can’t help picking at it. ‘Do you really think so?’ I ask her.

  ‘Of course.’ She looks up at me. ‘Don’t you?’

  I shrug. ‘I feel like we’re good together now. But I mean … how do I really know that we’re right for each other? In the long run?’

  She shakes her head and laughs. ‘For God’s sake, Ben. You’re only twenty years old. All that matters right now is: do you make each other happy?’

  ‘Right now we do, yeah.’

  ‘Well, there you go, then.’ She nudges the dice back across to me. ‘You can think about the long run later. But the truth is: if you want a relationship to work, you have to work at it. And to me, you and Daphne seem to have a relationship that’s worth working at. I don’t know why, but I’ve got a feeling about you two …’

  I roll the dice, and out of nowhere, I hear myself say: ‘But you must have had a feeling about you and Dad too, at some point.’

  She’s halfway through counting out a wad of banknotes, but that stops her in her tracks. I’ve never said anything like that to her. Ever. I don’t really know anything about her relationship with my dad, except for the way it ended: with him running off with another woman. We never talked about it beyond that. I don’t know why. Maybe I was waiting for her to start the conversation, and she never did. But I suddenly, desperately, want to find out more about it. For some reason, I’ve been given this insane chance to see her again, and I’m burning with the desire to actually talk to her. To ask her the things I always wanted to, but never got the chance.

  I can tell she’s taken aback. There’s a beat of awkward silence, which, helpfully, our car tape steps in to shatter, as Joni Mitchell’s mournful guitar is rudely smothered by the clatter of NWA’s ‘Fuck tha Police’. We lock eyes and start laughing.

  ‘A perfect edit from us there,’ she murmurs.

  I reach over to turn Ice Cube down slightly, and Mum rolls the dice and starts moving her counter. For a second, I think she’s going to pretend she didn’t hear what I said. But then she rubs the bridge of her nose slowly with her thumb and forefinger, and says: ‘The truth is, Ben, I don’t know if I ever did have that feeling about your father and me. Even after we got married. Even after we had you.’

  My heart starts pounding like a kick drum. She looks up at me, her mouth crinkling softly at the sides as she smiles. ‘I know I was … taken with him,’ she says, rolling her eyes at the idea of it. ‘He was very charming and talented and all that. But we hadn’t known each other long before we got married. Six months, something like that. And I suppose in the back of my mind, I did always worry that he was more interested in himself than he was in me. That his ambitions and his career meant more to him than anything else.’ She exhales slowly through her nose. ‘And he proved me right there, in the end.’

  I feel my face getting hot, and that lump starting to work its way back into the bottom of my throat. ‘But what about you?’ I say, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘What about your ambitions?’

  She swats my comment away with her hand. ‘I had ambitions too, thank you very much. I always wanted to teach, and that’s what I did. I love doing it. And I’m OK at it, I think.’

  ‘You’re brilliant at it,’ I say. And as I do, I realise that I’m exactly mirroring her comment earlier to Daphne, about my writing. She always supported me, without question, one hundred per cent. And in the real world, in 2020, she’s gone. At one minute to midnight, all this will disappear, and she’ll be ripped away from me all over again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle that.

  God, I’ve missed her so much.

  ‘Ben? Are you … Oh, darling, what’s wrong?’

  I swipe my hand across my cheek to stop the tears that are suddenly spilling down it.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ I mumble.

  ‘Ben, don’t be silly! What’s got into you? You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.’

  But I do – she just doesn’t realise it yet. I’m sorry for the awful things I’ll say to her before she dies. I’m sorry for the screw-up of a son that I’ll become. But I don’t know how to tell her these things, and it’s only making the tears fall faster.

  I speak into her shoulder, my words coming out thick and muffled. ‘I’m going to let you down, Mum. I know I am. I’m going to let everyone down.’

  She grips me even tighter and says, ‘Ben, you couldn’t let me down. It’s just not possible.’

  I dissolve, then. Everything liquefies.

  Some time passes, I’m not sure how much. But when we pull away from each other, Mum is red-eyed and damp-cheeked as well.

  ‘Look at the state of us,’ she says, wiping her face. ‘You’ve got me going too. This is hardly very Christmassy, is it?’

  I laugh and sniff. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Anyway, come on. Enough of this. We’ve got a game to finish.’ She points down at my dog counter, which is sitting on Pentonville Road. ‘And don’t think all this crying is getting you out of that.’ She holds her hand out, grinning. ‘You owe me rent, young man.’

  The Monopoly game grinds to a halt pretty quickly after that. I find I can’t concentrate on my fictional property portfolio when I know that my time with Mum is slipping away, second by precious second.

  So instead, I put on two more of our long-distance car tapes, and spend the next three hours asking her all the things I’ve never thought to ask before. I hear about her childhood, her school days, university. Her early twenties, when she worked on a kibbutz in Israel. All this crazy stuff I never knew. She even tells me about the night she met my dad. It was at the opening of an N. F. Simpson play at the Royal Court. Their interval drinks orders got mixed up, they got talking, and the rest was history.

  ‘What’s got into you this evening?’ she chuckles at one point. ‘You’ve never showed the slightest bit of interest in my life before, and now you’ve turned into Michael bloody Parkinson.’

  It’s meant as a joke – I think – but the truth of it stings me to my core. I never did show any interest. I was completely self-absorbed. I just thought of her as Mum, rather than a real person with hopes and fears, who’d had adventures and made mistakes.

  Finally – after a lot more laughing and drinking and story-telling, all soundtracked by our excellent folk/hip hop compilation albums – we pack the Monopoly set away and slump in front of the TV.

  The closing moments of some Seventies James Bond film flicker before us, and despite everything, I feel exhaustion bite right into me. The emotional whirlwind of the last few hours – not to mention the copious red wine – is beginning to take effect.

  I glance over at Mum as she watches Roger Moore prancing about on the screen, and feel so full of love for her. I don’t want this moment to end.

  But it will. The clock above the telly reads ten to midnight. Which means I have exactly nine minutes before all this evaporates and I find myself in another place, at another time.

  I know I should be grateful that I got even one more day with Mum, but I can’t help it: I want more.

  I sit up straight and take a deep breath. There must be a way to make it happen. There has to be some kind of loophole. The watch-seller told me I’d jump again at one minute to midnight – but when it happened last night, I was asleep. Maybe the jumps can only happen when I’m asleep?

  Maybe, as long as I can keep my eyes open, I’ll get more time with Mum …

  I have no clue if it’ll work, but it’s worth a try. Unfortunately, at that exact moment, she tosses the remote control over to me and stands up.

  ‘Right. I’m bushed.’

  ‘No, wait … Don’t you want to stay till the end of the film?’

  ‘I think I can guess what happens,’ she yawns. ‘Roger gets his end away after delivering an appallingly sexist one-liner.’

  I stand up too. I’m suddenly desperate not to let
her go. ‘Well, we don’t have to watch the film, then … We can just talk or play another game or something.’

  She laughs. ‘Ben, it’s late. I’m exhausted.’

  ‘I know, but … Let’s stay up a bit longer. Please. Just a few more minutes.’

  I make a decision on the spot: I’m going to tell her. I’m going to tell her what’s happening to me! It’ll sound insane, obviously – ‘The thing is, Mum, I appear to be travelling back through time’ – but I’m sure I can convince her. And then, once I have, I can apologise properly. I can tell her I won’t mean all the awful things I’ll say to her in the future. Maybe there’s even a way to change the future. To stop what will happen to her.

  My heart leaps at the thought of it. There’s still time!

  ‘Let’s just stay up until midnight, OK?’ I say. ‘Just till Christmas Day.’

  Mum glances up at the clock. ‘Well, that thing’s slow anyway. It might even be midnight already.’

  She pulls out her phone to check. And that’s when everything goes black.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The feeling is one of being hurled backwards with extreme force.

  One second I’m standing upright, the next I’m lying flat on my back on a soft mattress, the entire room shaking around me.

  I try to sit up, but I can’t. My head is spinning and I’m gasping for air.

  And then, suddenly, the shaking stops. Through the window opposite, I can see exactly what caused it: an orange-and-white Overground train, now thundering off into the distance.

  I look around me, and with a sickening jolt I realise that the living room is gone – Mum is gone – and I’m somewhere else entirely.

  I shoot bolt upright, my heart hammering like crazy.

  Was that it? Is it over? Was that the last time I’ll ever see her?

  A tight, cold panic seizes me. There was so much more that I could have said. That I should have said.

  The watch is still fixed firmly around my wrist. Clearly, there is no loophole. Asleep or awake, I will jump at one minute to midnight, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Regret begins to swell painfully in my chest, but there’s no time for it to properly take root, because as I stare wildly around the room, I suddenly realise: I know where I am.

  This is Dalston. 79 Kingsland High Road, Dalston. The flat Harv and I rented together after we left uni.

  I stagger out of bed, still trembling like mad, my eyes darting from one side of the room to the other. It’s all exactly as I remember it: the fire extinguisher slumped in the corner by the wardrobe, the laminated safety codes stuck to the back of the door, the horrible strip lighting on the ceiling that – when activated – gave everything in the room a sickly yellowish tint.

  Both floors of the flat had previously been the offices of an Albanian law firm, but at some point the Albanian lawyers had given up trying to wage their legal battles over the constant roar of the London Overground, and the landlord had taken the opportunity to rebrand the place as a ‘bijou apartment space’. He’d not even bothered to redecorate – just squeezed in a couple of cheap single beds and a sofa, and left everything else as it was, right down to the jaundiced lighting and the fire safety accessories.

  The room starts quivering again as another train bursts out from behind the building, making the window panes chatter like wind-up teeth.

  If I remember rightly, Harv and I had allocated who got which bedroom by playing an extremely competitive game of FIFA, which he had won. Both rooms were ridiculously loud, but the one Harv chose, at the front of the flat, picked up only random, sporadic street sounds – the howl of a fox, the scream of a drunken argument, the glassy explosion of a car window. And Harv apparently preferred all that to the meticulously scheduled sleep deprivation of the back room – my room – which had the train tracks running literally right beside it.

  We were in this flat for just over three years, and I don’t think I ever slept more than four hours consecutively in that whole time.

  Which suddenly makes me wonder: what date have I landed on now? We lived here from, what … 2008 to 2011? So I might just have jumped five years in the blink of an eye.

  The thought makes me drop weakly onto the edge of the bed.

  My head is ringing with confusion, but I can’t exactly stay sitting in this room forever. I start getting dressed, picking up clothes at random from the floor. Harv’s bedroom door is shut, so I creep downstairs, nostalgia prodding me sharply with every footstep. I pass our boxy living room and spot the grimy fish tank next to the TV that contains two goldfish we named after members of the Wu-Tang Clan, though right now I can’t remember exactly which ones.

  I open the kitchen door and walk in. There is an incredibly attractive girl standing at the sink, sniffing an open carton of milk with a look of pure disgust on her face. She’s wearing only a baggy grey T-shirt, which ends just above the knees on her long, tanned bare legs, and her sandy-blonde hair is pulled up into a messy topknot.

  The shock of seeing her is enough to make me flinch. ‘Oh my God! Liv!’

  She looks up, her nose now wrinkling at me instead of the dodgy milk.

  ‘Er, yeah? Hi?’ she says, in her ridiculously plummy accent. The bewilderment that floods her face tells me I’ve made a big mistake here. We definitely met for the first time while I was living in this flat. So is this it? Is right now the first time that I’m meeting her?

  ‘I’m Ben, Harv’s flatmate,’ I explain quickly, but her beautiful face remains puckered and wary.

  ‘Right, OK. I’m Olivia. Liv. But you already know that, apparently?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry, that was a bit random, coming in like that and just … shouting your name out.’

  ‘It was a little bit, yeah.’ Like a caricature of a posh person, Liv actually pronounces ‘yeah’ as ‘yah’.

  ‘It’s just that I’ve, erm, heard so much about you from Harv, that’s all.’

  An indignant voice comes from behind me. ‘What? No you haven’t!’

  I turn around to see Harv appearing through the kitchen door in his T-shirt and boxers, glaring at me.

  ‘I’ve barely mentioned you,’ he says to Liv, who – quite rightly – doesn’t look convinced by this statement. She knows full well that she’s the kind of girl men do mention to their mates. ‘I mean, no, that sounds bad,’ Harv gabbles on, his neck starting to turn bright red. ‘I mean, I probably did say something about you, in passing. But only that we work together or whatever. It’s not like I’m just going on about you all the time, is it, Ben?’

  Thankfully, Liv interrupts this torturous monologue by pouring half a pint of thick, gloopy white liquid down the sink.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ she says to me, unsmiling, as she slaps the empty carton back down on the counter. ‘You guys need milk.’ She squeezes past us and walks out, back up the stairs.

  ‘Mate, what the fuck?’ Harv hisses at me. ‘What are you doing telling her I can’t stop talking about her? Are you insane?’

  ‘Sorry, I just—’

  ‘I’ve liked this girl for ages, man, and then you start …’ His eyes suddenly light up and a smile splits his face in two. ‘Ah, no, screw it. I literally, physically, cannot be angry at you right now.’ He drops his voice to a whisper. ‘So, last night, right. Work Christmas party. We finally … Yeah. And it was, like …’ He slaps both hands on my shoulders, puffs his cheeks out, rolls his eyes and exhales slowly into my face.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I ask. ‘Exhausting?’

  ‘What it means is, we had actual sexual intercourse. And it was really quite something, Benjamin.’ He gazes up at the ceiling and shakes his head. ‘It was really quite something.’

  He looks so joyously, heartbreakingly happy that I’m not sure what to say. I mean, what can I say?

  Olivia Woodford is, without a doubt, the worst thing that will ever happen to him.

  From the start, their relationship was so dangerously unbalanced that I could hardly
believe it lasted six weeks, let alone four years. Four whole years of Harv jogging along a few steps behind her, never being quite rich enough, or cool enough, or … anything enough for her.

  They met at this music marketing company where Harv had a low-level admin job. Liv was employed there – as far as I could understand – on the sole basis that her dad had been in the same university drinking club as the CEO. After weeks of me listening to Harv moon on about her while we played PlayStation, they finally hooked up at the office Christmas party.

  And that was it. I pretty much lost him for the next four years.

  It was partly because I didn’t much like Liv, to be honest. She seemed to have that thing a lot of ridiculously hot people have, where they assume their ridiculous hotness is an acceptable excuse for extreme unfriendliness. Talking to her was a constant battle for eye contact; she always seemed to be looking over my shoulder for someone more interesting. But more than that, I didn’t like who Harv became as their relationship intensified.

  In an effort to fit in with Liv and her rich hipster mates, he became colder and harsher and more sarcastic. He seemed to lose all the things I’d liked about him at university: his self-deprecating humour, his goofy charm, his infectious excitement for life. He was besotted with her – ‘besotted’ really is the perfect word – and in her presence he would dial his confidence up and his self-awareness down. To me, it always seemed obvious that he was trying so, so hard. And I guess I’ve always thought that real love is about not having to try at all.

  But then look where that’s got me.

  Anyway. Over the next four years, Harv drifted gradually away from me until he was completely absorbed into Liv’s friendship group. We’d almost lost touch altogether by the time everything came crashing down around him.

  He found out that Liv had been cheating on him with a stupidly handsome start-up millionaire who’d appeared in one series of Made in Chelsea. They broke up, and I naïvely assumed I would get my best mate back. But he didn’t magically change back into the bloke he once was; instead, he seemed to move even further away from him. He became suddenly and terrifyingly fitness-obsessed; I guess out of concern that his slight chubbiness had been the reason Liv had gone off with the Made in Chelsea guy (who, as I recall, was built like Zac Efron).