Page 24 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“Oh,” he said aloud, feeling deeply, transcendently stupid.

He left Whewell’s Court and crossed the road, waiting by the Great Gate until a column of late-night revellers spilled out

and he could slip inside. In the Porters’ Lodge, he went back to the column of E s, the blank pigeonhole he’d passed over, assuming it belonged to a student who’d dropped out. For the second time, he peeled

back the tape covering Efua’s name. Her pigeonhole was empty, except for a blank notelet that read, With Deepest Sympathy .

He staggered back, the pain in his leg surging with the rhythm of his pulse. Why was her name covered up? Clearly, she hadn’t

dropped out; he’d just seen her in her staircase, carrying textbooks back to her room. He couldn’t shake the feeling that

it meant someone didn’t want them to find her. His thoughts went to Vera, standing watch outside Whewell’s Court. Had she

somehow figured out why Esi had come to the past, covered up Efua’s name to stop her changing the future?

He reeled in his spiralling thoughts. It didn’t matter. Vera was gone. What mattered was that he knew where Esi’s mum was,

and he had to tell her.

He limped back to college in the frozen dark. He couldn’t face her directly, not with the things they’d said to each other still ly ing between them raw as open wounds. But there was no way he could keep this to himself. Even though he didn’t want her to leave; even though the thought of her overwriting herself made him feel sick to the stomach. This was more important than what he wanted.

He ripped a leaf from his notebook and sat down at his desk. At the top of the page, he wrote her mum’s room number: F6, Whewell’s Court .

He meant to leave it at that. But given her last words in the café, he doubted he’d get the chance to speak to her again.

If he had something to say to her, he had to say it now.

He didn’t set out to write a poem. He just thought, and wrote, and the words turned gradually into a poem, because that was

the only honest way to tell her what he was feeling. He wrote, without thinking about whether it would be good, about whether

anyone other than Esi would ever read it. He thought only of her, and what he wanted her to understand: all the things he

hadn’t been able to tell her, because his fear and his pride and his obsession with the future had got in the way.

When he was happy, when the shape of it was a close enough match to the shape of his heart, he tore a new sheet of paper from

his notebook and copied it out clean.

F6, Whewell’s Court

I found her. And in her, I found

you:

your eyes,

your laugh,

your sometimes-wickedness,

your love of casual, accidental beauty,

your love of love, and your defensiveness

at being seen to love it—

you, alive

in her;

her, alive

in you.

That little girl was never lost.

She grew up, turned into

a butterfly,

a hurricane,

a traveller with her mother’s eyes

who danced through years

like they were moments,

unwound the springs

of time itself

to save the one she loved.

We are more than what made us,

and our paths through time

are never straight lines.

The footprints you leave

will stay,

even if you unmake

the one who made them.

Through all my broken, overwritten days,

I will remember:

not who you were meant to be,

but you, as you are,

on a rain-swept beach,

shivering, laughing, alive.

He folded the paper in half. On the outside, he wrote her name.

He walked: one last, agonising walk through the cold to the long, straight road that led from the university out to reality.

The window of the café was empty. A light was on in the back; through a half-open door, he caught a glimpse of Esi moving.

He hovered, torn by the compulsion to talk to her. But the poem was better than he was: he didn’t want to hobble it with his

embarrassment and his explanations and his excuses. He had to let it speak for itself. He posted it under the door and turned

away to limp his slow way home.

The next morning, his leg hurt too much to get out of bed. Two mornings after that, his leg felt better, but despair had settled

on his mind, weighing him down. For days, he left his room only to forage from his dwindling stock of food, until he was eating

a heel of bread coated in the wipings from an empty pot of jam. Bear broke off from washing to stare at him judgmentally.

“Why don’t you go back to the future,” he said sourly, and rolled over to stare at the wall.

Finally, Rob barged into his bedroom and flung open the curtains. “Greeney. Get up. You’re coming with me.”

He cringed away from the daylight. “What? Where?”

“Queens’. Got a target there.”

He pulled the covers over his head. “I’m not in the mood to help you pretend to murder someone.”

“Of course you won’t help . You’re deeply unqualified. We’ll be lucky if you don’t get us both killed.” Rob pulled the whole duvet off Joe’s bed. “But

I refuse to let you sit and stew in whatever’s bothering you. You need to rejoin society.” He sniffed the air and wrinkled

his nose. “Correction. You need to have a shower first.”

Washed and dressed for the first time in days, he followed Rob outside. A dense fog had descended, colleges looming out of

it like spectres from the past. As they crossed the river, he looked out at the ghostly timbers of the Mathematical Bridge.

He remembered drifting under it with Diana as she spoke about Crispin, feeling for the first time like he was seeing her real

self.

Crispin. He had thought how odd it was, that she would leave him for Joe only to turn around and marry him later. But she

wasn’t going to leave him. She was going to stay with him and get engaged to him and walk open-eyed into two years of misery

with a man who couldn’t tell her he loved her. Even if the future could change, Joe doubted a fling with a provincial nobody

would be enough to throw that off course.

He followed Rob into Cripps Court, a 1970s block that sat across the river from Queens’ original fifteenth-century court like

the aftermath of a time-travel accident. Rob unzipped the bag he was carrying and pulled something out.

“Why are you brandishing a poster tube?”

“It’s a sword. Clearly.” Rob indicated the base of the tube, where SWORD was written in neat black letters. He put a finger to his lips and started climbing the stairs.

Joe followed wearily, his leg aching, up to the third floor. Rob crept along the corridor, poster tube held high, and took

up position behind the second door. As he followed, Joe tripped on the doorstop and banged his bad leg on a fire extinguisher.

“Fuck.”

The second door flew open. Something hit Joe’s jumper, and he fell back instinctively against the wall. It took him some time to register that he had been shot.

The assassin lowered his water pistol, staring at Joe. “Who the hell are you?”

Rob looked from Joe to the assassin and back with an expression of utter devastation. “You killed Greeney! Now it’s personal ,” he growled, and launched himself at Joe’s assailant, who retreated hurriedly back into his room.

Joe looked down at the spreading wet patch on his jumper. So this was what it felt like to be dead. It wasn’t as bad as he

had expected: in some ways, it was a relief. Joseph Greene the poet was dead already, his ashes blown to the wind. A water

pistol to the chest seemed a fitting way to mark the end of all his hopes and dreams.

Rob emerged from the target’s room, the front of his hoodie dark with water.

“Jesus,” said Joe, momentarily distracted from his own predicament. “Are you okay?”

“No, Greeney. I’m dead.” Rob thwacked the poster tube against the floor in frustration. “That’s what tends to happen when

you bring a sword to a water pistol fight.”

Joe stared over Rob’s shoulder, his mind still turning on wormholes and second chances. “Maybe you could go back in time and

fix it.”

Rob laughed. “Not in this universe.”

As usual when Rob talked about time travel, Joe was immediately confused. “You mean because time travel isn’t possible in

this universe?”

Rob was too preoccupied by his death to answer. “The worst thing is, it scuppers my chances of getting a PhD.”

“What are you on about? You’re the most likely person to get a PhD I know.”

“Not that kind of PhD. Paranoia Hardened Death-Master. It’s the title awarded to Assassins who win the Game twice. Now there’s

only the May Week Game left, so it’s Master Assassin or nothing.”

Joe was barely listening: he only heard the end of the academic year rushing down on him, inexorable as time itself. His guaranteed

2:1 was gone. In its place was a blank sheet of paper, and the fact that he hadn’t done any serious work since before the

Christmas holidays. He could have been making an effort—unlike the rest of the book’s broken promises, this one was in his

power to fix—but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to try. If his original future was gone, he might as well have no future

at all. He saw it bleakly laid out before him: moving back home, where his failure would become a running joke, working in

the pub and paying rent to his parents until he died and was utterly forgotten.

The cold air chilled the wet patch on his jumper as they came out onto Silver Street. Rob stopped on the bridge, leaning over

to watch a lone punt drift into the fog. “Greeney, what’s up?”

Joe hunched his shoulders. “What do you mean?”

“You had your big moment, then you ran away and got yourself run over, and since then you’ve basically been a shut-in.” Rob

looked at him, puzzled. “What happened? Was it something with Diana?”

He shuddered against the cold. There were so many ways he could describe what had happened with Diana, but only one that Rob

had enough context to understand: that moment backstage, when he had stepped out of her arms and turned away. “She invited

me to a sex cupboard and I said no.”

“Right,” said Rob slowly. He rubbed his face. “I’m sorry, why exactly did you say no to the sex cupboard?”

“Because I was in love with someone else.” He closed his eyes, swallowed, let the truth come out. “I am in love with someone else.”

“And you can’t be with that person because...” Rob left the question hanging.

She had told him a hundred times. She was a ghost, already drowning in a river of her own choosing, and she didn’t want him

reaching in his hand to help her out. “She’s not staying.”

“Ah.” Rob picked up a loose chip of stone from the bridge and threw it in the river. “It’s Esi, isn’t it?”

Joe gaped at him. “You saw us together once !” Months ago, at the very beginning, when he had barely known himself. “Was it that obvious?”

Rob chuckled. “Yeah, Greeney, it was obvious.” He reached into his bag and took out the throwing star Esi had made, turning

it admiringly in his hands. “And I don’t blame you. Nothing more attractive than a woman who can craft a weapon.”

“She also wiped the floor with me at Laser Quest,” he said miserably. “It was really hot.”

“Oh, mate,” said Rob, as if he’d witnessed a bereavement. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” He took in a long breath. Talking to Rob didn’t stop it hurting, but it made the hurt cleaner, like exposing

a wound to the air. He blinked back tears, feeling stupidly grateful for his friend, who didn’t know anything about his future,

but had come to his show anyway because he wanted to support him. “I never asked. What did you think of the poem?”

Rob paused. “Do you want me to be honest?”

He felt a lurching terror. “Go on,” he said lightly.

“It wasn’t very—you.” Rob wrinkled his nose, searching for the words. “It was like you were trying to be someone else.”

That’s because I was someone else . Will be. Would have been going to be. It was just as well he couldn’t tell Rob the truth: verb tenses weren’t really up to it. “Aye,” he said. “I think you might

be right.”

They fell silent, staring out into the fog. A group of blazered drinking society types passed behind them, talking loudly

about the lucrative finance jobs they were going to walk into after graduation. Dr. Lewis again, resonating in Joe’s mind.

I see too many students here who think they know the future.

He had thought he was so different. But his future as a poet had never been something he had really questioned. He had always

thought it belonged to him by right, even in the days when it seemed the world didn’t want him to have it. He had never considered

the possibility that it might not happen, not because of any great injustice, but because of a hundred arbitrary reasons,

fate and chance and chaos and simply not being good enough. Why should you be entitled to it, just because you had it before? The words Esi had thrown at him in the darkened coffee shop, the words he hadn’t been ready to hear. Now they unfurled inside

him like a bruise, painful but right. The world didn’t owe him anything. He owed back the sum of what he had been given: the

chance to be here, to strive, to try.

He apologised to Dr. Lewis. He poured himself into his degree, both because he had a future to salvage and because he hoped

the dry, abstract work of poring over philosophy would help him to stop thinking about Esi. He was coming out of the faculty

library, his rucksack weighed down with books, when he saw someone familiar lurking behind one of the building’s concrete

stilts.

He stopped dead, his heart in his throat. He must have been mistaken. But he wasn’t, because it was Vera, out of her official tabard, lounging against the pillar with her arms crossed.

He stared at her, not bothering to hide his astonishment. Any minute now, she would drop his gaze and hurry away. But she

didn’t. Instead, she walked right up to him. “Hello, Mr. Greene,” she said. “Think it’s time we had a chat.”