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‘Well, it looks like magic to me,’ Jen says.
Todd shrugs. They cross over the blue-carpeted hall, browsing the stands. It’s crowded in here, the high ceiling doing nothing to offset the claustrophobia, the artificial heat, the dichotomy of the people who want to be there inevitably paired with people who do not, who are indulging them, who love them.
Jen’s lower back is aching, just as it did the first time she lived this day. She’d wanted to go to the shop, the café, had looked at her phone too much instead of at the science exhibits and her son. She determinedly hasn’t looked at anything else, today.
‘That one looks good,’ Todd says now, pointing. A small marquee has been set up along the edge of the exhibition hall. An official-looking man in a hi-vis jacket is manning it. Through the throngs of people walking slowly, stopping to fiddle with things, buying cans of Coke at the various stalls, Jen can see its name: THE SCIENCE OF THE WORLD AROUND US.
Todd strides off ahead of her, and she follows. He goes towards a space exhibit, Jen towards a section called THINGS TO PLAY WITH.
‘Anything catch your interest?’ a woman in a blue T-shirt behind a glossy white counter says. Various science gadgets litter the desk in front of her. Something that looks like a crystal ball that calls itself a radiometer. Newton’s Cradle. A giant clock that has all of the world’s time zones on it.
Jen is hot, the veins in her hands swollen. There are too many people in here, in this all-white space. She feels like Mike Teavee. She looks around for Todd. He’s still in the headset, his shoulders shaking with laughter. He has a tote bag slung over his shoulder with various pamphlets and freebies in it. Soon, he will pick up some free mints. They eat them for months afterwards.
‘No, thanks,’ she says to the woman, moving away from the weird science toys.
She turns around in a slow circle, looking at the exhibitions. Surely, surely, surely, she could learn something here.
And that’s when she sees him. At a busy stand called WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME. Andy. It’s Andy, younger Andy, lither, and – very interestingly – more smiley, too. He’s handing out pieces of paper. ‘It’s part of my research into memory,’ he is telling a woman there with her twin boys.
Jen takes one. As his eyes meet hers, there’s nothing. Not even a flicker. Of course there isn’t.
‘Memory?’ she says.
‘Yes – specifically, the storage of it. How, in people with good memories, that storage is very organized.’
‘Do you study subconscious memory?’ she asks. She had no idea he had started out like this. He never said. She never asked. ‘Or’ – she gestures to the sign – ‘time?’
‘Same thing, aren’t they?’ he says with a small smile. ‘The past is memory, is it not?’
Suddenly, alone in a crowd, here in the past, Jen feels like she is almost at the end. Feels, instinctively, that this is the last time she will see Andy. The gruesome past is rushing towards her.
She takes one of his questionnaires, then leans her elbows on the counter in front of Andy. ‘We’ve met,’ she says.
Confusion flickers across his features. ‘Sorry – I …?’
‘It is in the future that we’ve met,’ she says. But then, actually, she thinks that is unlikely to be true. On the day she figures it all out, whenever that is, Andy seems to think it will play through from there, erasing everything, erasing all this backwards stuff, which really has just been research into the past, hasn’t it? So it’s truer to say that they have never met. How funny. Their truths are the same, here in the NEC, years back.
She holds a hand out to placate him. ‘I always ask you the same questions, but I’m hoping sometimes your answers will be different.’
He blinks at her, then slowly pulls the piece of paper back from her grasp. He’s still looking at her. His beard is darker and fuller. He’s slimmer. No wedding ring. Jen thinks of all the things she could tell him; the scant, few details she knows about his life in the future. Perhaps he wouldn’t go on to study time loops. Perhaps she’d change his future entirely, though she couldn’t make that change stick.
And that’s when she plays her trump card.
‘You told me – in the future … to tell you that your imaginary friend was called George.’
Before she’s finished speaking, he has interrupted her with a sharp inhale. ‘George,’ he says, his voice full of wonder. ‘That’s what I tell the –’
‘The time travellers. I know,’ she whispers, the hairs on her arms standing up. Magic. This is magic.
‘How can I help?’
Jen tells him again. She’s lost count of the number of times she has told this story. Andy listens intently, his face less lined than before, his demeanour less grumpy, too.
‘Sometimes,’ he says gently, when she’s finished, ‘the emotions of living something the first time prevent us from seeing the true picture, don’t they?’ He rubs at his beard. ‘If I could go back – the things in my life that I would just stand and truly, fully witness, if I knew how they were going to turn out …’
Jen stares at Andy, this younger, less jaded, more sentimental version of him.
‘Maybe it’s that …’ she says. Watchfulness. Witnessing her life, and all its minutiae, from a distance, in a way.
