The Upper World

by Femi Fadugba

  ‘Honestly, I ain’t got no explanations yet. I’m not even sure I can say it any better than I just did.’

  ‘And you’re sure you ain’t got concussion symptoms? No problem remembering who the current Prime Minister is?’

  ‘Nadia,’ I groaned. ‘You gonna chat to me about this or what?’

  ‘You’re lucky, you know.’ She was gazing up at the sky. ‘Time travel is, by far, my favourite sci-fi theme, so I’m actually overly up for a chat on it.’

  Of course she was. This was the same girl who’d told me she was thinking about applying to a redbrick uni to study physics. Nadia, who, when she wasn’t babysitting her little brothers, had her head stuck in a 400-page novel. I was kicking myself for not thinking to ask her sooner, then got hit with an idea that might just about make up for it.

  ‘How about this: if you can explain how time travel works in all the movies and books you’ve read, then, after our revision session tonight, I’ll tell you everything about the mad shit I saw when I time-travelled. Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ she responded, shaking my outstretched hand.

  Her face went tense. She pressed a finger against her lips. One second passed. Two. Three … Five … I begged myself to keep quiet so she could think in peace. Finally she came back.

  ‘So, on a basic level, there are two types of time travel.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, dubious about how far she’d get with the little I’d told her.

  ‘The first kind of time travel is the kind you get in films like Hot Tub Time Machine or the Avengers: Endgame movie. Although,’ she said, trailing off, ‘I’m not really sure if anyone understood what the hell was going on with the science in Endgame … Anyway, with this first kind of time travel, you can go forward or back in time and change things. So, like, in Hot Tub Time Machine, they travel back to the eighties, and one of them uses his knowledge of the future to invent Lougle, which is just his shameless copy of Google, and he goes on to become, like, a multi-gazillionaire.’

  ‘Yeah, I watched that film after you recommended it. Was funny, still.’ My phone vibrated a few more times in my pocket, but I ignored it. Nadia was still going.

  ‘The second type of time travel is the kind you have in the Harry Potter book Prisoner of Azkaban.’

  She could probably tell from my hanging jaw that I was waiting for the details like my life depended on it.

  ‘So Hermione and Harry use this magical device to travel back in time, but they eventually realize that, even though they can travel to the past, they can’t change things they’ve already seen happen. In that version, it’s like, once you see any part of your past or future, it’s kinda set in stone.’

  ‘What about the bits of the future that you haven’t seen,’ I said. ‘Are those set in stone as well?’

  ‘If you asked the ten smartest physicists in the world that, they’d disagree on the answer.’

  What hope do I have then? I wondered. We weren’t far from Camberwell Green – I could tell by the finger-shaped branch that leaned over the park fence as well as the strengthening smell of barbeque ribs. I still had to grab the bus, but Nadia lived only a few minutes’ walk away. I was working on borrowed time.

  ‘The weird thing is,’ she continued, ‘a lot of the famous scientists who’ve gone proper deep into time travel end up going … kinda mad. No one knows for sure how fixed the future is or which of the two types of time travel is right.’ She peered up at the clouds. ‘I can’t believe we’re having a practical conversation about time travel right now –’

  ‘I’m worried it might be the second one,’ I replied, my voice shaky. I wasn’t exactly keen to share the details of the near-violent vision I’d had with her. Those details could wait.

  ‘Worried?’ she asked, now looking a bit worried herself.

  ‘Well, you said the past and future are “set in stone” … When I got hit by that car and woke up in that dreamworld, I’m pretty sure I saw it – that stone. I swear down, there was this giant structure that reached up into the sky, and, when I went into it, I saw flashes of my life … of the future. Get me?’

  Her eyes darted back and forth as I spoke, her brain ticking even faster than when we’d started. After a few moments, her face lit up again.

  ‘What you just said about this big “structure” thing … it kinda reminds me of the block universe.’

  ‘The what-a what-a?’ I asked.

  ‘Stay with me on this one. So, Einstein pictured the universe as a massive block that’s made up of everything. And not just the space that the planets and stars and you and I sit in, but all of time as well. And it’s all just mashed up together into a single block.’ The look of confusion on my face must have told her it wasn’t quite clicking, so she went back to the start. ‘Basically, in this block universe, if you went to one corner of the block you might find yourself in Persia in like 5000 BC. Go to another edge, and you’re in Thailand in the year 2090. But every part of the block, every bit of history and our future destinies, already exists, it’s all just sitting there, waiting to be explored and understood.’

  It was impossible to miss the resemblance between what she was describing and what I’d seen up there. ‘I think that’s it,’ I announced.

  The air twitched with honks from black cabs and red buses, each fighting for room in rush hour. The interlacing roads of Camberwell Green were less than a hundred metres ahead.

  ‘I’ve gotta go get dinner ready for my little brothers,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the neeky chat, though.’

  Bun your little brothers! I wanted to say. The worst thing that could happen to them was they’d go hungry for an extra hour. There was so much more at stake for me, maybe even for her, if I couldn’t manoeuvre us into a better track for the future.

  ‘Promise me you’ll get your head checked if you start feeling sick, yeah? See you at the library tonight, otherwise.’

  ‘Cool,’ I replied, biting my lip. ‘Man’s there.’ I was so busy sifting through my new worries I almost missed the word ‘library’.

  I’d planned to tell her, Kato and Rob at lunch to stay as far away from that place as possible but hadn’t found a decent explanation. And maybe I didn’t need one. There was no way Rob and Kato still wanted to chill out after our dust-up. So, the only thing left for me to do was use the twenty-minute bus ride home to pick a different venue for me and Nadia to ‘revise’, then convince her to come anyway.

  Meanwhile, Nadia was ready to say bye and searching for signs of life from me. I reached out to spud her, not realizing she’d started coming in for a hug … which meant I punched her in the middle of her chest by mistake. From the look on her face, she must have been wondering exactly how many times I’d hit my head. Desperate to fix the situation (and not lose my chance of having my chest against her boobs), I quickly wrapped my arms round her. But by that time she’d already dropped her hands, which meant we spent the next few seconds with her strapped down like she was in a straitjacket, my BO swirling round her like a pack of homeless dogs.

  I watched as she walked off. It was the fastest I’d ever seen her move. You clown, Esso.

  Desperate to distract myself with anything but the thought of our final moment, I pulled out my phone to check who’d texted me earlier.

  GIDEON:

  Fam get sumwere safe quik. D and mandem r lookin for you! AVOID CAMBERWELL

  The final words in the text made it clear I was fucked.

  The fact the text had come from Gideon, rather than Rob or Kato, made it clear I was fucked and alone and had no one to blame but myself.

  CHAPTER 20

  Rhia · 15 Years Later

  It had been almost a year since I’d last had the dream.

  It always starts out blurry … I see a greyscale outline of someone in front of me. I squint harder and realize it’s a woman on her knees with both arms raised up to me, crying out my name. It’s Mum. I have no proof of it, but I know it’s true in the way you just do in dreams. But, as things come into
focus, I notice that the smile I’ve seen so many times in that photo in my drawer is gone from her face. And where her eyes are meant to be, there are circles filled with inky blackness. She’s not weeping any more. She doesn’t even seem to recognize me. The world starts spinning round me, and I wait to wake up in my real-life bed, drenched in sweat and crying.

  Two weeks had passed since Tony and Poppy evicted me, and it still felt fresh. But I had a new house, new strangers and a new life to get on with. Today felt especially new – my first match on the SE Dons premiership pitch. The groundsmen had mowed the grass up into an emerald chessboard, the angles switching every five-odd metres. And the smell of it? The only proof I had left that there might still be a God out there and that she did, sometimes, give a crap.

  We’d gone into the second period tied one all, and Gibbsy had made a half-time speech so gangster it made me wonder what she’d done for a living before coaching. She roasted Maria for not taking more pops at goal and the entire midfield for not sticking to our patterns. The only words she saved for me were: ‘Cracking finish,’ but then, ‘Don’t stop working.’

  I’d got lucky with my goal and she knew it. After running back lazily from a clearance, I’d somehow found myself on the end of a through ball, which I’d then finessed into the corner.

  If I hadn’t been so knackered, I’d have done a backflip or at least a quick slide to the corner post – it was a cup final, after all. But I’d slept barely an hour the night before and had had to wake up extra early to get to the stadium since the commute from the girls’ home took so long. Chuck in the leg cramp threatening to pull me out the game, and I was funding the second half on debt.

  The key was focus. My job was to push through the pain and, more importantly, not let anything that happened last month distract me. Not Olivia’s Judas kiss, not Tony and Poppy ditching me. Not even Dr Esso’s promises, which now felt hollower and more distant than ever. Getting attached was too risky, I’d learnt. There’s a famine in Scotland right now, I kept reminding myself. Real shit. Now get over yourself. In Gibbsy’s words, this game would define our lives. This was what the season had been building up to: a hundred suicide runs, a thousand passing drills, close to a million crunchies, and it all added up to this match against Arsenal Girls’ Academy.

  This team, this game, this chance at a contract was all I had left. But, as tempted as I was to think forward to the full-time whistle, when everything would be sealed, I couldn’t yet.

  There were twenty minutes left, the game was still drawn, and there was enough heat pouring from the home crowd to fry an egg on the crossbar. The Bayer Neverlusen manager was watching on from the north stand. So were the Tottenham scouts, although no player with working feet should have to sink that low. I rushed towards the touchline to get on the end of a goal kick and had to squint to see the ball as it cut through the sun. I plucked it out of the air, letting it fall to a weightless stop on my laces.

  It didn’t take much to skip past the first player. I cut a line towards goal, ready to sky up the final two defenders. But, before I could decide which foot to put it on, their blonde captain in centre-mid nabbed the ball from me. Again.

  It was maybe the tenth time she’d done it that game, and I still hadn’t figured out how. Her legs were half the length of mine, yet always managed to find their way to the spot I was cradling the ball. It was like she knew what I wanted to do even before I did. Each time she stole the ball, she’d pass it back to her sweeper, pretend not to hear the crowd applauding, then swing back round and smack my bum, teasing, ‘Unlucky, love’ or something just as patronizing.

  ‘Pass it!’ Maria shouted the next time I was on the ball, throwing her hands up when I got tackled instead. Mio, our left wing, made the same complaint a minute later.

  ‘Easy now, Rhia,’ the captain taunted. ‘Everyone’s watching you. Remember?’

  I un-balled my fists, refusing to face her. Don’t do it, I told myself, feeling my shoulders lumping up. By the time I got back to halfway, the adrenaline in my veins had mostly watered down. A minute into injury time, I couldn’t let anything or anyone confuse me into second-guessing myself. None of this other stuff mattered – all I needed was one more shot at goal.

  Then, out of nowhere, an unusual pattern emerged on the pitch – a constellation of moving bodies about as rare as all eight planets lining up. I almost pinched myself to make sure my grogginess wasn’t making me see what I wanted to see. But, sure enough, the tide of our midfield was drifting forward; the opposition’s offside line was drifting back; and Maria’s hips were square in my direction. The hairs on my arm stood on end as my core stiffened. Even the air felt thicker, like a hurricane was approaching, ready to sweep me up if I was ready. This was it.

  I opened a long, arcing run down the left flank, pointing to a spot a few metres ahead, so Maria had no doubt where I needed the ball to land. And, despite all our petty passa that season and her having a lane to go alone, she passed it – a perfect cross to put me one-on-one with the keeper.

  My heart was thumping. I had to beg my nerves to simmer down. The goalie was screaming for backup, but there was no way it would arrive in time. She turned her feet to the spot I was eyeing, and, after seeing me fake in that direction, threw her body at the far post … leaving an open goal for me to caress the ball into. The crowd were already on their feet, screaming. I grinned as I cocked my foot back.

  But when I looked down the ball was gone. It took me a second to figure out what had happened, but, by the time I had, the same girl who’d been robbing me all afternoon was one-two-ing with her team-mate towards the opposite goal.

  I didn’t have the space or time to calm down, to think through a rational plan. All I had was the resolve to make myself an unbreakable promise: I. Am. Not. Having. This.

  Not after faffing an open game-winning shot at goal. Not with the month I’d just been through. Nothing was going to stop me from stopping her. Not this time. I was ready to push my legs till they broke, to demand that time itself snap in two; whatever it was going to take to get her.

  I carved a straight line down the field and watched the world get blurrier each time I found another gear. Relative to me, everyone else on the pitch might as well have been going backwards. When I reached the box, the blonde was back in possession and shaping to shoot. All I had to do was nudge the ball away, and, most importantly, nudge it before I hit her.

  Even if I shattered both her ankles while sliding in, the ref would call it a clean tackle as long as I’d clipped the ball away first. I thought about slowing down, knowing if I mistimed it this close to goal, it would be a sure penalty for the opposition and certain death for me. But I rolled the dice instead, sped up and let my weight fall until I was as low as the shears that had mowed the pitch before kick-off.

  It was way closer than I would have liked; so close that, the entire time I was sliding in, I was convinced I’d messed it up.

  But I did it.

  I actually did it.

  I clipped the ball away from her feet a split second before cutting her down to size with my new boots. I couldn’t believe it. I’d actually saved the day.

  I let a smile cross my face as I rose to my feet, but then watched the referee sprint past me and towards the penalty spot, pointing manically at it before sounding her whistle.

  This doesn’t make sense, I thought, not able to move or even blink. What’s happening?

  To my disbelief, the ref was marching back towards me, stopping once she was close enough to shove a yellow card in my face.

  I was frozen on the spot, unable to say a word in response. I thought back to when their captain had tackled me. I’d promised not to have it, not to let what was happening right now, happen. And as a giant cloud stormed forward above, covering the pitch in darkness, I realized that that promise was all I had left.

  Then it was like a switch flipped in me, and before I knew it I was sprinting after the ref. ‘Miss, that was a legal tackle,’ I shoute
d at her back. ‘Everyone saw it!’

  She pretended she couldn’t hear and stepped away. A few of my team-mates ran in to form a barrier between us, genuine pity in their faces. Even Maria looked like she felt bad for me. But none of them spoke up in my defence.

  The ref was wrong and I was right. It was as simple as that. What was happening was unreasonable. Unimaginable. Unjust. And this was coming from someone whose life up to that point had been nothing but one broken domino crashing into the next.

  I’d lost enough already; I couldn’t lose this.

  ‘Nah,’ I shouted, breaking free from the half a dozen grips on my arms. I was livid with the blonde, but no word could describe how I felt about the referee, who, in that moment, embodied everyone who’d left me with this piss-take of a life.

  ‘That’s not a bloody penalty. Change the call, bruv – I’m not having this.’ My words were sharpened with hate and hardened by the certainty I was right.

  Finally I pressed my nose against hers. ‘CHANGE THE FUCKING CALL!’

  She took a long, pained look at me, the same pitying face as everyone else. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a second yellow card. Then a red.

  Game over.

  I’m not proud of what I did next.

  Without pausing to think I loaded a ball of phlegm on to my tongue and spat it on her face.

  The assistant coaches had to run on, each one tugging me away from the referee with all their strength. Meanwhile the ref drew the string of phlegm from her right eye, her face turning from shock to disgust to fury. I was shouting like a jackal, fighting to break free so I could run after her again and spit in her other eye.

  In the end, it took six grown women and men to pull me off the field and I spent the entire drag to the sideline shouting threats at the opposition.