The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  I arrived, so Lindsay tells me, in the middle of the Thursday evening. My train had got in late, having sat for a couple of hours outside Newcastle for no reason anyone had ever thought to tell us. The McBrides had held dinner for me—which was easy because, it being summer, dinner was a cold chicken curry salad, one of Elsa’s specialities. We sat around the table long after we’d finished eating. I said no to the port Connor produced, because I wanted to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for my meeting with the Sitemaster people the next day. And then off down the garden path I trotted . . .

  “You were really energised when you got home the next day,” says Lindsay. She’s stroking the back of my hand with her thumb, the kind of gesture longstanding lovers make. “You said the meeting went really well and you were certain the job was yours.”

  When I got home, she tells me, it was about one o’clock and she was alone in the house. Connor and Elsa were still out at work, and weren’t expected home until seven. Lindsay, who’d completed her finals in biochemistry a couple of weeks earlier, was basically just having fun lolling around the house and relaxing with books.

  “Nothing for it but you were going to take me out to lunch at the Haddon House to celebrate, which we did.” She has the very clear, almost accentless voice you sometimes find in Scots people, with the same timbre as a choirboy’s singing. She doesn’t say why it was we both ended up in the “guest chalet”, just that this was where we went when we got home from lunch. There’s no embarrassment about her, no girlish blushes. She’s quite matter-of-fact, and amused more than anything else.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen. It was a monumental abuse of hospitality. Your dad’ll be wanting to beat me to a pulp.”

  She chuckles. “You didn’t have any choice in the matter. It was my idea. Do you remember that time when we were both wee, Nick, and we were taken for a long ride in that awful old boat of a car Dad used to have?”

  “I remember it.”

  “I fell in love with you then, Nick, and I’ve never completely fallen out of it again.”

  “I know what you mean. But—”

  “But what, Nick?”

  I was about to say to her that all my life I’ve felt that same way, except that it’s the eight-year-old boy who’s loving the five-year-old girl, and the situation, and the memory of an encounter that was special and shining and greater than life, and can never be repeated. But I bite the words back, realising how cruelly they might strike her, as if the grown-up Lindsay was valueless.

  I mumble something vacuous about the past being hard to recapture.

  “Oh, we had our merry moments, you and I,” she says after a pause. “The room was full of sunlight and there was a sea gull in the garden telling all the other birds this was his own special territory. And then, finally, I realised what time it was and that I’d better run inside and have a bath to wash the smell of sex off me before Mum and Dad got home.” She chuckles again.

  I can’t imagine what her face would look like in passion.

  Her eyes are serious once more. “And you can remember nothing of this, Nick?”

  I play the gallant. “I wish I did. You’re a very lovely woman, Lindsay.” I almost called her a young woman, but caught myself in time.

  “Nor the evening? I think Mum was fairly sure something had been going on, but she didn’t know what and she wasn’t about to ask. And Dad—well, you know Dad. All evening long it was a secret that just you and I shared.”

  Once again I’m struck by how badly this doppelgänger of mine behaved. Connor and Elsa are old and trusted friends, the closest thing I have any longer to family. I suppose that makes Lindsay family, too. And she was old enough to be making her own decisions about what she did. Even so, I’ve betrayed their trust abominably, adulterously banging their darling only daughter in the garden shed. Or my doppelgänger did. I’m finding this very confusing to think about.

  “Late at night,” she says, “after the folks had gone to bed I tiptoed out to you in my white nightie and we made love for the one last time. If anyone had looked out of a back window and seen me in the garden, they’d have thought they were seeing a ghost.”

  The waiter sidles up to us. Neither of us has finished our meal. We indicate to him to take the plates away. I ask for a coffee, Lindsay for a tea. “Don’t bother bringing milk,” she says. “I like it the way nature intended.”

  He goes away.

  I’m shaking my head. I know there are tears in my eyes, tears I don’t want her to see. There’s a part of me, and it isn’t the eight-year-old boy any longer, that desperately, desperately wishes I could remember what Lindsay so clearly remembers. If it weren’t for my nutbrown maid in Bristol, the person who is everyone to me, I could imagine myself falling deeply for Lindsay and even believing it was love. Her beauty and her air of reserve are tugging at me. I’ve never once thought of two-timing Dverna—it’s an impossibility, like water running uphill—and I’m not thinking about it seriously even now, but the fact that I’m thinking about it at all says something about the effect Lindsay is having on me.

  “And you say it wasn’t you?” Her voice is very quiet now, so low I can barely pick it up amid the waves of other people’s conversation.

  “It wasn’t. It can’t have been. I was at home nursing my head and feeling sorry for myself. A summer flu. Dverna remembers it well.”

  “Dverna,” says Lindsay. “Who’s Dverna?”

  It’s later in the day. We’re out in the middle of the Serpentine on one of those rowing boats you can hire by the hour. I’m rowing. Lindsay is sitting in the stern looking as if she should be wearing a straw boater and wielding a parasol. I’m not going to catch the six-oh-three.

  She believes me now. At first she was incredulous that I could be married without her knowing anything about it, even more so when I told her she was at the wedding. It was only when I produced the little digital picture frame I carry with me and showed her the picture Dverna and I persuaded an old Frenchman to take of us the weekend we went to Cologne that she began to be persuaded. That was just before I paid the bill for our lunches. After we left the restaurant we ambled around the park, both rather selfconsciously not looking at the pairs of young lovers sprawling on the grass. Then, on an impulse, we hired this boat. It gives us a space that’s separated from the rest of the world.

  “I had this dream, Nick,” she’s saying, trailing her fingers in the water. “This very presumptuous dream. I wasn’t going to put any pressure on you, but I thought that maybe, just maybe, you’d say some of the things were true that you told me in Edinburgh, and you’d suggest we raise the bairn together. I’ve always thought you and I would end up together. Oh, I’m not saying I’ve been entirely chaste while I was waiting for our hour to come, but there haven’t been that many I’ve bedded, either. I don’t make a habit of throwing myself into men’s arms, the way I did with you. I seduced you—not that you needed much seducing—because I believed this was the way the script was written, and I was just following it. And now I find you already have your own lovely lady, that you’re following your own script. A different script. One that doesn’t have a part for me in it.”

  A silence falls between us. Then: “Do you remember,” I say, trying not to sound too puffed from the rowing, “you told me you and your parents thought I seemed a bit odd, a bit artificial, not really myself . . . ”

  “I think it even more now.” She lifts a hand to stop me misunderstanding. “No, what I mean is, you’re yourself today. It makes the person I was with in Edinburgh seem even more unlike you. You were like a sort of perfect CGI animation of yourself—it was a precise replica of you, but still we could sense there was something awry. You were too real, in a way.”

  I didn’t notice until we climbed into the boat that she’s wearing little black sandals. All the rest that she’s wearing is either white or nearly so. She’s staring at those little black sandals now.

  “Like someone in the
wrong world,” she says.

  “Do you think that can be it?” I say nervously.

  “That it was the you from the next-door universe?” She gives a little, unconvincing laugh. “It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, but it’d open up a whole lot of new questions, too.”

  She ignores my comment. “You talked about a doppelgänger earlier, but that wouldn’t make sense. I could believe, if I believed in supernatural beasties, that a spirit could . . . could, you know, make me believe it and I were having carnal knowledge.” She rolls the old-fashioned term on her tongue, relishing it. “But I can’t believe it would leave me pregnant after.”

  I try not to think of Rosemary’s Baby.

  She sees me not thinking about it. “I told you, Nick, I don’t believe in ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, and that goes for devils too.”

  For half a minute or longer the only sound between is the creaking of the rowlocks.

  “We should have a DNA test done,” I say. “That would prove it one way or another. If the testing shows the babe has my DNA, then your idea about having encountered a stray from a neighbouring universe . . . but, no.”

  I raise the oars from the water and we drift for a few yards.

  “I’ve been worrying about that too,” she says. “Why have I never before today heard of Dverna?”

  It’s not till we’re back on dry land that I think of phoning home. I glance at my watch and find it’s just a few minutes before six. Dverna probably won’t be home yet—most days she stays on late at the school, marking papers or supervising clubs, and it’s especially likely tonight that she’ll stay on, knowing I won’t be home for hours. She doesn’t carry a mobile, so the only number I have to phone is the landline. Even so, I give it a try.

  No answer.

  I’m tempted to stay overnight in London. I feel I should face Connor and Elsa, try to explain to them that really I’m not the cad they must think I am—even though Lindsay has told me they don’t think about it like that. Because, you see, they too don’t know I’m married. So far as they’re concerned it’s just fine their darling daughter is getting it together with someone they’ve known all his life. Of course, perhaps said daughter shouldn’t have got herself knocked up by him in the interim, but modern days, modern ways . . . So Lindsay says. How they’re going to feel about me when she tells them the new version of history, I can hardly bear the thought of it. They’re going to think Lindsay is the craziest fool in the world for believing my obvious lies. What whoppers I’ve been telling. Land her in the pudding club, then pretend it was my mysterious Evil Twin . . .

  I should be with her, so we face the music together. But I also need to be with Dverna. If I could speak to her on the phone, maybe it’d be different, but she has to have the option of deciding whether or not I go home to Bristol tonight.

  I explain something of this to Lindsay. As we stand there, the light beginning to fade from the sky, I see a young guy who’s passing helping himself to an eyeful of her. It’s far from the first time it’s happened today. She’s exquisite, a jewel cut by a master craftsman, just as she was when she was five. And I think to myself yet again how very easy it would be, if things were different . . . But things aren’t different. I’ve never felt that each of us has only one soulmate out there in the world. If anything were ever to happen to Dverna, I wouldn’t resign myself to never finding someone else to whom I’d feel equally close. But I cannot figure Lindsay as a soulmate. I love her in that almost-family way. I think she’s beautiful and wonderful and amazing, and I’m fascinated by her presence the way I’d be fascinated by the over-brightness of a jewelled automaton, and the streak of lust I have for her right now is like a guitar string being tightened too far, but she’s not the person I’m meant to spend the rest of my life with.

  None of this do I say. Instead I say, “What’re you going to tell your parents this evening?”

  “Nothing.”

  “They’ll be wanting to know, won’t they?”

  “They respect my privacy, I respect theirs.”

  “Like I can believe that.”

  She gives my hand a squeeze. We’re approaching the bright lights and the noise of Marble Arch. “Do believe me,” she says.

  And suddenly I see things from her viewpoint. Here she is, pregnant by the man she believes she’s loved ever since childhood, and he’s saying, no, it was nothing to do with me, and planning to catch a train back to the wife he never told her about . . .

  “Aw, hell, Lindsay . . . ”

  I pull her into my arms, feeling her breasts against my chest, running my hands down her back to the curve of her behind, kissing her the way I’ve never kissed anyone in my life before except Dverna, holding her for an unadvisedly long moment before stepping away from her on the darkened grass.

  “I wish . . . ” I say.

  She touches my cheek with her fingertips.

  “So do I, Nick. So do I.”

  So by the time I get home it’s nearly ten. What I’ve had is about one more expensive can of beer than I should have had during the train trip down from London to Bristol. I’m not sloshed, but it would be kind of useful to find a bed for the night. The taxi drops me off at the gate, and I give the driver an extra-large tip because . . . well, because of that extra beer. Dverna hates it when I drink too much. On the other hand, Dverna hates it when other women accuse me of fathering their children. I figure she’ll forgive me, just this once, the lesser crime.

  I ring the doorbell and this guy appears I’ve never seen before. He’s wearing a grey vest, too many muscles, and a lot of tattoos.

  “Yeah?”

  “Who’re you?”

  He stares at me. “David Hamilton. You?”

  I’ve had about as much strangeness as I can manage today. “Where’s Dverna?”

  “Who?”

  Someone else who’s never heard of Dverna. “My wife.”

  “Who’s there?” a voice shouts in the distance. All the while I’ve been talking with this monstrous stranger there’ve been the cries of small children in the distance.

  “Just some nutter, love!” he yells.

  A small round woman appears, rubbing her hands dry on a tea-towel.

  “I think I may have the wrong address,” I say.

  Instinct suggests I walk the couple of miles, sobering all the while, to where I used to live. The house is in the slum part of Bristol’s outskirts. I had the upstairs. An ever-enlargening family called Mulligan had the downstairs—and obviously still have. Standing in front of the place, I can hear the usual Mulligan clatter from the brightly lit downstairs. Upstairs, the windows are dark.

  I go to the downstairs door and press the bell.

  Tim Mulligan appears. He looks more like David Hamilton than I would ever dare to tell either of them.

  I am horribly, horribly lost.

  “Hey, Nick!” says Tim, reeking of cheap beer. “Ye’ve forgotten yer fackin’ key again . . . ”

  He fishes in his pocket for his wallet, fishes in his wallet for the key, and gives it to me. It’s as warm as a kitten.

  I let myself in. The place is just as I remember it. All my books and CDs are just where I remember them being. My laptop opens up the internet with a password I haven’t used in years. The laundry basket has socks and underpants in it that smell freshly dirty. There are friendly personal messages on my answerphone from people I don’t remember ever having met.

  None of them is from Dverna.

  None of them is from Lindsay.

  All of a sudden I am far too sober. I wish I’d bought myself a bottle of the hard stuff on the way home.

  But, prithee, what is this?

  In the cupboard over the fridge I find there’s still a three-quarters-full bottle of Cutty Sark. I know where the glasses are, of course.

  Dverna.

  Where are you?

  When I wake up the next morning with a head like a building site, I reach out
my foot thinking it’ll stroke Dverna’s leg. Instead, it sticks out the side of a single bed into cold air.

  How inevitable, as we look back on it, the past can be made to appear. Yet, when we were living through it, inevitability was the last characteristic it seemed to have: life is an endless succession of resolved uncertainties. I’ve come to conclude that, as this universe of ours expands along its time axis, what it’s doing is telling itself its story. Like any other author, though, it never gets things quite right the first time, so it’s constantly having to readjust itself to iron out the minor inconsistencies in its tale. Ordinarily we never notice this continual process of self-editing; we remember the newly created past, not the one we actually lived through.

  But every now and then, because of that same habit the universe has of not getting things quite right, someone’s lucky enough to be aware of one of the changes the universe is making.

  Or unlucky enough.

  I wish I could persuade myself there’s a neighbouring universe where my doppelgänger and Dverna have found each other and their own happiness, but I don’t think there is. I think both of them, Dverna and the other me, were just minor errors that the universe, without trace of compunction, simply tidied away.

  Today Lindsay and I took the kids to the beach. Alice tromped up and down along the line of the breakers, squealing with delight whenever an extra big wave bowled her over. Ronnie is still young enough to be frightened by the sea’s sound and fury, so he spent the afternoon holding his mother’s hand and looking very solemn as he sucked his thumb. Then it was home for high tea, and bathtime and bed for the kids and finally the house was quiet.