by Femi Fadugba
‘I know,’ he said, his voice broken. ‘I’m sorry.’
The world was caving in around us, and I had to let it. ‘I know you don’t like talking about what happened to my parents that night. I know you blame yourself.’ I didn’t bother sniffling back the tears. ‘And, for a while, I blamed you too.’ I let my head rest on his shoulder while finding my words. ‘But I forgive you. And my mum, if she was half the woman you say she was, she’d forgive you too. She’d have wanted me to tell you that it wasn’t your fault; you did your best. She’d have wanted you to know there’s a future out there that’s worth living for, that’s worth fighting for.’
‘I’m trying,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know how.’
‘But what if you do?’ I replied. ‘What if, deep down, you’ve always known? What if you never forgot what happened that night, you just turned away from it? Sometimes you have to look back before you can move forward. So look back, Esso. Look back through your WINDOW.’
‘Rhia – I’ve memorized every word in that notebook. It ain’t changed a thing.’
‘Yeah, but there’s a difference between knowing it up there – in your head –’ I stood back, then pressed my hand to his heart – ‘and feeling it in here.’
My words stood taller. ‘When you fully believe in something, it flows from your heart, soaks into your blood. It makes the unbelievable … real.’
The moment I finished my sentence, the main window ripped clean off its hinges and went flying through the air. I ducked just in time, turning to see the square dent it left in the wall.
What the –
Another vicious wind soared in, sweeping the radio off his armrest. The one after lifted the sausages out of his meal tray, along with a folder filled with scrap paper, and hurled them into a manic swirl above our heads.
‘It was there all along.’ His voice was an inch above a whisper. And shaking. ‘My mind just chose to forget it; it had to.’
I turned my gaze to his ankles, saw them twitching. Then I looked up to see an unholy whirlwind of objects defying gravity above us. He was causing this.
‘But I’m not afraid any more.’ He gazed wide-eyed towards the ceiling, reciting from memory the same words I’d just read in his notebook: ‘The WINDOW is a memory from the past or the future. A memory unique to each individual, often so severe or traumatic that our minds force us to forget it.’
As he opened his mouth to speak again, the strings of spit lining his lips snapped one by one like cracked jail bars. ‘The WINDOW is where we see the Upper World.’ He paused, faced me. ‘But the why … the how … that’s always been you.’
I took another step back and watched his eyes widen further. It was like he was looking through me, through everything, like he was staring into a world beyond.
‘There’s hail,’ he continued. ‘Lightning, bullets.’ I’d never seen so much pain on his face. I’d never seen him weep.
As he raised his voice, a crack ripped open in the wall, exposing the sparking copper lines running inside. A sharp buzzing noise came from the power outlets and, without anyone touching it, the radio on the floor turned on and started pacing through the stations.
‘Nadia’s next to me,’ he added, ‘and Devontey’s dead.’ It was my first time hearing both my parents’ names in the same sentence, as one connected possibility. ‘We’re all about to die.’
Everything I was seeing was impossible. But impossible was just a word now; a matter of perspective; a trick of relativity.
‘Rhia will tell you,’ he said, finally, recounting what Mum had predicted. ‘You did.’
He raised his arms to the sky, and his T-shirt rode up, exposing a stomach lined with long, thick scars. The swirl was moving faster, and the living room became a blizzard of heat and static. I could hear Olivia screaming behind me, trying to drag me away as the feds smashed through the front door. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Dr Esso – his face steadier than a leaf crossing the surface of a placid lake, his eyes beautiful and clear.
CHAPTER 32
Esso · Time Undefined
I wake up with one aching knee resting on cracked dirt, the other knee raised forward. A straggly bolt of lightning lands dangerously close by, illuminating a single file of projections behind me and another row in front. I’ve traded the anarchy of the alleyway for the unruliness of the Upper World. But I don’t dare get up. I’m still bleeding out – the agony even more peak now than it was when I lost sight of Katie’s. Worse, I still have the memory of the red dot on Nadia’s forehead and the assault rifles trained on Rob and Kato. I can’t forget the armed police, the dozen Peckham and T.A.S. boys pointing their guns at each other, or the exploding gunshot ringing in my ear. And, in my thoughts, I can still see D lying on the ground dead. Dead, because of what I did, what I failed to do. I have to remember. For them.
Fifteen years have gone since I last ran my feet along the grooves of this sooty ground. But to say I’m glad to be back in the Upper World would be half lying.
I think about Rhia and Olivia, left panicking in my front room. I hope I make it out of here and back to them. But, if I can’t get through to him first, there’ll be nowhere to go back to. In my head, I start to recite all the shit I’ve learnt about time and, most importantly, energy.
I hear rubble scraping the ground in the distance. Footsteps?
Someone’s definitely approaching. And bare-toed. He looks like … nah, that can’t be right.
I can hear him coughing on the thick air. I’m close.
Every step he takes forward is lit up by some red light, seeping through the cracks in the dirt below. It’s almost like there’s a molten trail of energy bubbling up inside this place. Following him.
‘Are you –’
‘Yeah,’ I reply. ‘I’m you. Well, I used to be you, anyway.’
I take a deep breath but can’t quite inhale the craziness of what he’s telling me. It doesn’t help that he’s staring past me as he tells me, rather than looking me in the eye. ‘Prove it,’ I tell him. ‘Prove you’re me.’
‘Well, I know you had that weird dream again two days ago.’ I give him a few seconds to stop me. ‘You know … the one where Nadia’s holding the giant ice cubes and wearing those night-vision goggles and –’
‘OK, that’s enough. I believe you.’ I’ve seen so much madness over my day that my ability to properly doubt is worn out. ‘Tell me one thing, though.’
‘Go on.’
‘How’d you let my hairline slip that far back, bruv? Your forehead is running tings now.’ My laugh turns into a cough. Specks of blood dot my hands.
‘You don’t need to make light of this, Esso.’ I’d forgotten how much of a dickhead I used to be. ‘I know how that knife felt going in. And I know you’re scared to die. I know you just left a scene where a bullet’s headed for Nadia, and a lot more are aimed at your mates.
‘I know, because I remember.’
As much as I’m terrified, I feel exhausted. What I’d love most is to just lie down and sleep. But I can still see their faces. Every time I consider letting go, I see them. Still loud in my mind is the clap of Spark’s gun, the red mist filling the air around Devontey.
‘D?’ I ask, voice shaking.
‘You can’t save him.’
‘What d’you mean I can’t save him?’
‘The moment he got shot, it’s already passed. Not just for me, but for you as well. And you can’t change something you’ve already lived and seen.’
‘Nah, that’s rubbish. We have to try, innit. We can’t just let him die.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s possible to be sorrier than I am.
‘Listen – I’ve done the maths a hundred different ways, and it can’t be changed.’ I keep my voice as steady as possible. Him panicking will only make things worse. ‘Life, the universe, God – whatever you wanna call it – doesn’t let us change the past. It’s the only way to prevent the carnage and contradictions we’d cause if we could. I’v
e spent the last fifteen years pretending I didn’t know that, trying to deny the obvious, so I wouldn’t have to face the truth.’
I can tell from his sniffling and the breaks in his breathing that he knows I’m right. He’s seeing what he’s been blind to all day, what only the Upper World can show him: D was never his enemy. Enemy is the label we give to someone whose past and future we haven’t seen yet, someone whose story hasn’t been told. Everyone is better than their worst act. D was redeemable, because, in time, we all are.
‘You can do something about the present, though,’ I say down to him. ‘In fact, you have to or everyone dies. You, our friends, Nadia … Rhia will never be born. She’ll never teach me what I needed to know to get here. It all comes undone unless you go back to your Now and fix it.’
I scrape my nails through the rubble, before bringing the dust to my face. As much as I want him to disappear, as much as I want him to be wrong, I know he’s here to help me. And I know everything he’s saying is true. Even if he’d said nothing, I’d have known. Fifteen years are meant to separate us, but up here he’s in touching distance.
If I manage to ‘fix it’ like he’s demanding, there’ll be more time to ask why all this happened, to find meaning, maybe even forgive myself. But, for now, all I can do is make sure D’s death doesn’t lead to more death.
‘So what now?’ I ask, dangerously close to vomiting again. ‘What am I meant to do?’
‘Remember in Dad’s notebook how he said that what you see in the Upper World reflects the language you understand?’
‘Yeah.’
‘The maths you’ve learnt in school, plus the basic sense we all have for how time flows, is what’s letting you see your world line in this place. That’s also what let you interact with it when you came here after the car crash.’
‘World line?’
‘Everything and everyone leaves a trail in four-dimensional space–time. That’s all a world line is – a trail of moments. Physicists draw them as squiggly lines on a chart. But up here – in this realer reality – your world line is a long line of projections starting from the day you were born and the last one being the moment you die. I’m guessing you can see a section of it behind you.’
I wonder why he needs to ‘guess’. The thing is ginormous and it’s right there! It gets me questioning why he’s still not facing me, and I land on a bleak conclusion.
‘You can’t see, can you?’
He doesn’t respond to my question, so I turn round to him and wave. No reaction.
A future without sight. While imagining it, I see a twitch in his face that’s so faint I wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t my own twitch. He’s holding something else back.
‘Listen, we both got here through our WINDOW – that moment when D got shot in the alleyway – a distant memory for me, but a fresh one for you.
But the two head knocks you got – the car crash and, later, when D hit you – must have cracked our WINDOW open in some way, maybe even enhanced it. Because, when you were laid out in that dining hall, you managed to somehow skip through time and tap into the hidden energy around you.’
‘But I can’t control it.’
‘That’s because it starts with you believing you can.’
‘Bro, I’m in an imaginary world right now, and, if I’m not dead already, I’m minutes away from bleeding out. Please, please, give me something realer than that.’
‘You want real?’ I step forward until there’s no gap left between us. ‘Remember when you asked about Pythagoras in class this week and got called a neek for it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You remember what Mum said last night? ’Bout how you’d end up dead … just like Dad?’
I don’t respond.
I think back to other moments that made us.
‘You remember in primary school when Mrs Ewu told you you’d be lucky if you ever learnt to read? Or that one time, in PE, when Mr Aden told you your options were football, the wing or the roads? D’you remember getting beaten up on your first day of secondary school, Esso? And everyone telling you that you couldn’t fight?’
‘I remember,’ I say, knowing how long and hard I’ve tried to forget. ‘I remember all of it.’ I press my nose into the dirt.
‘And, each time, what did you do?’
‘Just stop.’ I clutch my ribs.
‘What did you do?!’
‘I believed them.’
‘We believed them. We knew no better, and so when they told us it was all true we believed them. Then it started to define us, started to become real.’
He’s right. And the moment I accept it, there’s a soft rumbling in the ground.
‘Believing is seeing, Esso. Without belief, there’s no hope. And without hope, there’s just an alleyway full of teenagers who’ll soon be hashtags on hoodies.’
The red light tracing the cracks beneath him shines even brighter. It’s like the surface of the sun is peeling away underneath us.
‘Rhia helped me believe, and now all the stuff that’s meant to be hidden isn’t any more.’
There is no time to explain everything I’ve learnt about energy, but I can tell he already senses it. Believing is seeing, and that might be enough.
‘Everything we need to do, everything we need to see and be, we have to start believing in right now. It doesn’t mean that life and the laws of physics won’t get in our way; it just means we won’t be the ones in our way any more.
‘Now stand up, Esso.’
My school shoes are stained with my own blood, and my head is getting lighter by the second. If I’m gonna try, it has to be now. I already have one knee raised. All he’s asking me to do is find the strength to push up and drag my trailing leg into place.
‘Everything you need to be, you gotta believe right now.’
‘Come on,’ I yell to myself through gritted teeth. I smack my thighs a few times, trying to jolt them out of sleep.
But I only make it halfway before cracking down hard on my knees again.
It hurts to hear him grunt and crumble. Then try and fall all over again. But, as much as I want to help him, I can’t. He has to believe the way I do.
But I can also hear the fear fading from his voice, replaced with the kind of lethal focus I’ve not heard from myself in years. Rhia was right, I realize, as he screams in exhaustion. I did do my best.
After minutes of groaning, I find myself wheezing, huddled over but standing, finally, on two wobbly feet. ‘Tell me something.’ I’m panting between the words. ‘The future.’ I take another few seconds to gather breath. ‘It’s worth all of this, right?’
He pauses for what feels like an eternity before answering.
‘Yeah,’ I reply, a surge of heat rising from under my feet. ‘It’s worth you fighting for. And, it’s worth me living for.’
I nod. It’s all I need to hear. Looking back at my day, my whole life, it was probably all I’d ever needed to hear.
‘Only one of us can go back to that alleyway. And, seeing as I can’t see shit and it’s your “now”, it’s gotta be you.’
He’s already baffled enough, and, if he survives, he’ll forget everything I’ve said up here. But I have to say it anyway.
‘One other thing – when it’s your turn, I beg you, go back and help the next kid, yeah?’
‘Safe, man. I reckon I can do that.’
Lightning splashes light on the projection behind me. I should have flinched from the impact and flash, but I just stand there, staring. It’s the image of me lying on the ground in my school uniform, cradling my gut. This is ‘now’ in the world I just left.
I step into it.
When my eyes flutter open, he’s gone and so is everything else. I look up and the sky unfolds above me, spreading out into a sheet decorated with clouds and stars and night, until it engulfs the horizon in every direction. I’m back in the alleyway. Everyone’s back. And a bullet is arcing through the air towards Nadia. Déjà vu, I think, knowing
for the first time everything it means.
The shell is eating up the metres quicker than I can think, so I focus in on it, imagine I’m tugging on whatever it is that connects us. I feel a tension, like an invisible string between my mind and the metal casing.
But it’s not budging. Even after a fourth and fifth pull, the bullet keeps running forward. And, when I reach out to it with the hand that’s not cradling my stomach, a sharp pain cuts through me.
I’m still human, I remember. Still proper close to bleeding out in this alleyway.
A fresh bullet spills forward from the barrel in Spark’s hands. And then another from a rifle in the distance, this time aimed at Bloodshed. I think about running into the path of the nearest one, but there’s no way I can get in front of it in time, let alone all the others.
There’s nothing to hold on to. Nowhere to go. No one to help. There’s only one place, I realize, left to look.
So I close my eyes and inhale deeply, giving myself space to think, to feel. Pain floods in with every breath, tearing the wounds further apart. But I push through it. I have to.
Another two rounds go off – each explosion is an orange flash on the wet side of my eyelids. But this time I give myself to the light and noise; I absorb the chaos instead of fighting it.
Believing is seeing, I tell myself, still not sure exactly what I’m meant to see.
I squeeze my focus tighter. This is the moment it’s all been leading up to. This. I’m ready to see. I’m ready to fight.
The answer seeps into my flesh like sun on skin.
‘Energy,’ I whisper.
When I open my eyes, I no longer see metal bullets; I see packets of fire criss-crossing the air, missiles of electric flame. Matter become energy.
