Come Again

by Robert Webb

  ‘Right. So,’ he said, looking around his room for inspiration. ‘Certain level of self-consciousness here. We should probably make some small-talk.’

  Kate realised that if she were still eighteen she would agree about the self-consciousness and there would now follow a long and ironic conversation about not knowing what to talk about. But she was forty-five and didn’t have the time. ‘So like I say, there’s something—’

  ‘I haven’t actually got any coffee,’ he interrupted. ‘That’s not to say it wouldn’t be great to have “coffee” but I don’t have any actual coffee.’

  ‘That’s very flattering but I’m actually fine for both kinds of coffee.’

  ‘Sorry – I didn’t mean to assume—’

  ‘No worries. But it’s worth saying that we’re not going to be doing any banging tonight, Luke.’

  ‘Aren’t we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Drat.’

  ‘At least I’m not.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m not really in a banging mood.’

  ‘Fair enough. First night and everything.’

  Kate was amused that he was putting this down to her being ‘not that sort of girl’ when, as it happened, she most certainly was. But this would do for now. ‘Yep,’ she said.

  He looked pleased: the weird but interesting girl had introduced the possibility of sex and her ruling it out was somehow nearly as exciting as her ruling it in. The point was that sex was now in the room. He drew a leg up onto the bed and started to massage his foot absent-mindedly. ‘Let’s just get to know each other. You’re a good talker. You were amazing in the bar. Oh, I know! We can take a short cut by—’

  ‘What’s wrong with your foot?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re rubbing your right foot. Have you hurt it?’

  He glanced down in surprise and reflexively withdrew his hand. ‘Oh God, no. Just. It gets numb sometimes. Weird.’

  ‘Pins and needles?’

  ‘Yeah, sometimes. Anyway, I know a good short cut for the getting-to-know-you routine …’

  Kate took a breath and tried not to focus on Luke’s symptomless tumour, now actively trolling her by presenting its one and only symptom. She glanced up at Kurt Cobain, who apparently didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Luke’s action was so utterly characteristic it had hidden in plain sight. She tried to give herself a break: she might as well have called an ambulance every time he fingered the mole on his neck or sounded the ‘d’ in ‘Wednesday’.

  Don’t panic. There’s no rush. Let him talk and then gently bring the conversation round to medicine or thinking about the future or … anyway – look at him – he’s otherwise completely healthy. Nothing to get upset about.

  She tuned back in and realised Luke was talking about his English course.

  ‘… because you can’t be much of a writer unless you’re a devoted reader, don’t you think?’

  She tried to concentrate. ‘I expect that’s right. I mean, I’ve never really tried to—’

  ‘So, do you want to read my book?’

  Kate swallowed hard. ‘Book?’

  ‘Not all of it, obviously. It’s not finished but it’s already quite long.’ He was up on his feet and opening a desk drawer. ‘Think of it like a trust exercise.’

  ‘Trust,’ Kate repeated as if in a daze.

  ‘Yeah, like the thesps do.’ He produced what Kate recognised as an early version of many first drafts of Whatever – about two hundred A4 pages of manuscript, written in longhand, bound together with a couple of treasury tags Luke had pinched from school. He thrust it towards her and she received it like a hand grenade with the pin missing. Luke registered her expression but now his enthusiasm was bordering on mania. It was enough to overcome his modesty: ‘Of course, you don’t have to.’

  Kate momentarily wished she was American so that she could take that statement at face value. In the original English, he had just said, ‘Obviously, you have absolutely no choice in this matter.’

  ‘No, no – it looks …’

  ‘Cool. I’ll go and make us that coffee. I’ll nick some from the kitchen, rebel that I am.’ He marched towards the door and then turned back. ‘It’s only a first draft – be gentle with me! It’s like I’m letting you see me naked, but less disgusting.’

  Kate, currently two years older than Luke’s mother, looked up from the title page and said, ‘I’m sure you look very nice naked. But like I say …’

  ‘Understood!’ He seemed to have second thoughts about letting her read the masterpiece and said more quietly, ‘You only get one chance to read it for the first time, of course. And it really isn’t at all finished. You won’t take the piss, will you?’

  ‘It’s all about trust, isn’t it?’

  Luke looked relieved. ‘Exactly! Couldn’t have put it better myself.’ He opened his door. ‘Won’t be long.’

  Not for the first time in her life, Kate was left alone in a room with nothing left of Luke save for his awful book. She gingerly turned the title page. Here it was, then: her enemy. The lunatic in the basement. The portrait in the attic. Despite Luke’s claim, she knew that this first paragraph had been rewritten countless times already: he had started just after his GCSEs. She was more interested, now, in his handwriting. It was soon – during this first term at York – that he had switched to digital. He wouldn’t own a computer for years but this was where he had started to type the thing up on a shared Mac Classic II in Benedict’s Computer Room. Naturally you need a Computer Room. Where you keep the Computers.

  She marvelled like an archaeologist at the ancient scroll before her. So much of his ink, so much of his hand. Where Kate came from, artefacts featuring Luke’s handwriting were a scarce resource. Old love letters, the early ones written from the pad of Basildon Bond probably in the drawer next to her – the same one he had taken the book from. A shopping list or two; the stubs of an old chequebook. But here were all the sloping ‘l’s and flourished ‘f’s – the angry crossings-out and urgent notes written vertically in the margin. All of it in careless abundance, as if the ink would never run out and the hand would never be still.

  Kate read, politely ignoring what was scribbled out and trying to re-examine what Luke was currently trying to achieve.

  The sky-high heels of Jessica Zed tick across the asphalt, transporting the pneumatic breasts of their mistress and telling their own story as the multi-storied roof shimmers in the heat-blur like a slab of sorbet grateful to melt. Her mind is empty. Light as a plastic turd. Empty like this car park roof; proof positive that Gary Disposal has made the grade. Oh, he’s chosen the place to meet alright. He’d abused the sheets of his fetid bed (they wreaked) but he’d hung up the mouthcan exulted. She’d agreed.

  And now she comes: clipping toward him.

  – featherweight

  – jailbait

  – checkmate.

  Is it her perfume that makes him so digress? JuJu at £80 for 100mls of vinegar tokes. Distressed, he watches with his high and his low, his grey matter and his won’t matter: id-dipped and ego-tripped, Disposal’s ying and yang are fucking in the sun and you can sniff out the rutstench from Jupiter’s moons.

  Here she is at last: degged in Ju, dappled in Ju, are the tips of the nips of her tits shown through.

  Her vagina is the first to speak—

  Kate sighed and mildly shook her head. He wasn’t really going to keep this up for two hundred pages, was he? But of course he was. He was going to keep it up for twenty-eight years. She flipped impatiently to the middle. She tried – not for the first time – to look at the thing objectively. So then: there was a sense of rhythm and that was good. There was an enjoyment of language and that was good. There was a total absence of any point to any of it and that was bad. There was a weird misogyny, which was bad. There were idle literary allusions which went nowhere: these could have been half-good if they had anything to do with the story but they didn’t and so were fully bad. This wa
s mainly because there was no actual story. Luke wasn’t writing a story. He was having a wank. One where neither he nor the reader would ever come. Kate reflected that if Luke taped himself having an actual wank there would at least be a market for that. And at least it would end.

  She flipped the pages again. Something caught her eye.

  … but that isn’t the deal with Morlock.

  Morris Morlock surveys the playground like what the hell what the hell it’s happening again. Not happening but presuming. And always there. Like something growing, brainside. Some tiny cock in his head like an itch, like a stitch you can’t scratch. Stealthy and wealthy, like Veronica Void. She made him feel like the chemo had already shaved his strength. Like she’d tied him to a kitchen chair and—

  Kate had long forgotten this passage. The image of something cancerous growing in a person’s head had been discarded by Luke years ago. She read on.

  Presently, a noise at the door made her guiltily turn the page as Luke elbowed his way into the room with two mugs of coffee.

  ‘Think I got away with it!’ he said in a stage whisper. ‘I’ll get them a replacement jar in the morning. I’m afraid it’s instant and made by Nestlé. Is that all right?’

  ‘I promise I won’t tell Amy.’

  ‘Ha! Yes, phew! God, that woman can talk.’ He moved an old exercise book to the end of the desk and set one mug down on it next to Kate, trying to make the movement as natural as possible so it didn’t look like he was doing what he was obviously doing: protecting the desk and giving her a coaster. Kate knew Barbara had packed a couple of actual coasters featuring tasteful watercolours of Salisbury Cathedral in his rucksack. Luke was happy to use them when alone.

  ‘So,’ he said, sitting on his bed and cradling his mug in both hands, ‘did you have a chance to … read a few bits?’

  Kate took a breath and closed the manuscript. She found herself fighting a muscle memory – a long ingrained urge to protect him, encourage him: to give him what he wanted rather than what he needed. It was the act of a bad parent. But that shouldn’t have been the deal in the first place – she wasn’t his mother. She carefully put the book to one side and focused on the boy opposite, weighing his mass and dimensions as if he were a bone that needed to be broken before it could be reset. This was going to hurt.

  He took her stillness for hesitation. ‘It’s okay, I’m actually amazingly arrogant so I won’t be offended.’ He took a nervous sip of coffee. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I think you need your head examining,’ she said evenly.

  A wry grin took slow possession of his face. ‘Blimey. I mean, don’t sit on the fence, Kate. Tell me what you really—’

  ‘You’re going to die when you’re only forty-seven years old. I know because I was there and it broke my heart. Luke, my love … I’m your wife. I’m from the future and I’m here to save you.’

  Chapter 15

  His expression didn’t change. He stared at her for a few seconds with an air of sceptical amusement. He took another sip of coffee and placed the mug down carefully by his bare feet, the toes of which had briefly contracted into prehensile claws trying to grip the carpet but which he now relaxed.

  ‘Right. Quite a lot to unpack there,’ he said.

  ‘Obviously you think I’m nuts.’

  ‘No! Erm … well. A bit, yeah.’

  ‘Yeah. So look—’

  ‘I mean, if you don’t like the book then just—’

  ‘It’s really not about the book.’

  ‘I mean, it’s only a first draft so—’

  ‘Luke, will you kindly shut up about the book.’

  He did shut up. It wasn’t so much the rebuke but the easy familiarity of it, as if she’d been occasionally telling him to shut up for a very long time. And there was something else in her tone – not just intimacy but authority. It was as if he was being told off by a benign teacher or some other figure twice his age.

  Kate read as much in the furrows that briefly crossed his brow – the creases appeared and vanished like the shadows of fast-moving clouds across a sunlit field. Like her own, those lines would grow deeper and permanent with time. But in his case, not deep enough.

  She pushed on. ‘If I was that desperate to change the subject I’m pretty sure I could have come up with something surprising but more plausible. Like, y’know … “The book’s great but did you know I’m actually Belgian?” or “I like the book but let’s talk about my dad, who invented The Wombles.” That kind of thing.’

  ‘Right?’ he said, cautiously.

  ‘But I didn’t. I made a series of completely mad claims.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  ‘So you’ve got to ask yourself – why would I do that?’

  ‘It beats me.’

  Kate remembered she was asking the impossible and stilled a ripple of impatience. Surely, he was being rather lazy. She had a nuclear arsenal of facts that could blow this kid’s brain apart but she wanted him to meet her at least part-way first. He could do some of the work with logic if he just got off his arse. ‘Right, let’s play a game. You like games, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, you’d know, wouldn’t you? You’re my wife.’ Dismally, Luke accompanied the last word with full air-quotes.

  Kate didn’t know whether it was a good sign that he seemed to be enjoying this, but at least he was still listening. ‘Yup,’ she said. ‘So you get to ask me any question about the future and I’ll give you an honest answer. Five minutes only. Starting now.’

  Luke shifted position and sat cross-legged on the edge of his bed. He looked off to the side, some humour returning to his lips. ‘Okaaaay … when in the future?’

  ‘The start of the third decade of the twenty-first century.’

  Luke’s smile widened. ‘So the year two thousand and twenty.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re not dressed as a spaceman. Where’s your hoverboard?’

  ‘We don’t have hoverboards.’ She remained patient but began to feel that this was cruel: the more she let him dick around, the bigger the idiot he was going to feel if she convinced him.

  ‘No hoverboards. Bummer. So who’s the president of America?’

  Kate sensed danger. Answering questions about the future of American politics was no way to convince someone she was sane. Or British politics for that matter. ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Can’t be worse than George Bush.’

  She used to love talking to him about politics. She couldn’t resist saying, ‘He really can. In fact, George Bush’s son was worse than George Bush but the current guy makes even him look like Gandhi.’

  ‘George Bush’s … son?’

  ‘Move on.’

  ‘So who? Who’s the current guy, then? You said you’d answer.’

  ‘You won’t have heard of him.’

  ‘Try me.’

  Kate sighed. ‘Donald Trump.’

  ‘Donald …?’

  ‘You see? Nobody in 1992 is interested in—’

  ‘What, that American twat?’

  ‘Well, presidents of America do tend to be American but—’

  ‘The property prick with the wig?’

  Pleasantly surprised to find a gap in her knowledge of Luke’s knowledge, Kate nevertheless found this deeply inconvenient. When the hell had he first heard of Trump? ‘Yes.’

  ‘… Is the President of the United States of America?’

  Kate looked at her watch. ‘Four minutes. Let’s move on.’

  Highly sceptical, Luke was still enjoying himself. ‘So what’s it like generally? The future where you’re from?’

  Kate refocused: she obviously wasn’t going to get anywhere with the abstract future. She needed to bring it closer to home. ‘It’s shit. My husband just died.’

  ‘And that would be me.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What did I die of?’

  ‘Cancer. Brain tumour called a meningioma.’

  The smile was fad
ing from Luke’s face. Whatever the hell this girl was doing, cancer clearly didn’t make it to his Top Ten Whimsical Conversation Topics. His eyes narrowed into a shrewd stare. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did I get that, then?’

  ‘You’ve got it now.’

  He blinked.

  ‘Just here.’ Kate had never known Luke to be violent but ultimately he was a big guy and she was about to seriously upset him. She kept her distance and demonstrated with her own head, reaching up to a place two inches above and behind her left ear. ‘It’s about the size of a grain of rice but it grows every day.’

  He folded his arms, apparently resisting the urge to feel for himself. ‘Very funny,’ he said.

  ‘Actually it wasn’t funny at all. I loved you very much and I blamed myself. I was devastated and suicidal.’ She said it so simply, compressing nine months of agony into a statement of fact. For the first time, a look of fear darkened her husband’s face. It was almost a relief when he pushed it away and converted it into dumb sarcasm.

  ‘Yes, it must have been very upsetting for you. It’s “Kate”, isn’t it? Must have been awful, Kate. Because we’d been married for … how long?’

  ‘We got married in 2003.’

  ‘Of course we did. It must have been quite an occasion.’

  ‘It was. I won’t describe the whole thing but—’

  ‘I suppose you had to be there.’

  Kate was momentarily winded by that one.

  He kept going. ‘And when did we first start going out, Kate?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tonight’s Kate’s big night, is it?’

  ‘It was, yes. And yours.’

  ‘But not any more?’

  ‘No.’

  He made a performative big deal of crossing one leg over the other and cocking his head to one side. Kate could see that she had spooked him, and that it was bringing out some of his less loveable defences – the showboating pillock was back. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m sure I’m being very dim—’