All Sorts of Possible (11 page)

In the kitchen, he was cooking pasta, a red sauce overheating in a pot, bubbles popping, freckling the worktop red. ‘Where’s the bloody colander?’ he turned round to ask and
then stood waiting until he faded like a ghost with Daniel still leaning against the door frame, shaking his head.

In the bathroom, his father was standing in front of the mirror, shoulders draped in a towel like a boxer, uprooting black hairs from his nostrils then suddenly tilting his head to one side and
smoothing a hand through the thinning hair above his forehead. When he caught sight of Daniel watching in the mirror through the half-open door, he froze. ‘Don’t you dare say a
word,’ he grunted with a smile.

‘I won’t,’ whispered Daniel to the empty bathroom and drummed his fingers on the wood in time to his heart. When he turned round, something swilled unexpectedly in his head and
he paused, thinking he was still woozy from the whisky. But the sensation didn’t pass. It filled out into something more, an inkling of a memory at first, and then it began spooling through
him like a snippet of film and suddenly he was . . .

. . . running towards a door, along a landing laid with deep-pile white carpet, the fluffy threads bulging up over the rims of his brown lace-up shoes.

When he gripped the door handle, it slipped through his fingers and pinged back up because his hands were oily with blood.

After the moment vanished, Daniel stood trying to place it in his life. But he couldn’t. He opened his bedroom cupboard and inspected all the shoes lined up along the
floor, singling out a pair of brown lace-ups that might . . . or might not . . . have been the same ones. Frustrated, he began toying with the idea that the universe had taken so much from him
recently it might want to give him something tiny back, allowing him at least to place one moment in his life. But he recalled nothing else about the memory or when it had happened.

The whisky and sunshine felt heavy on him so he took a shower, inhaling the steam to try and rinse out his lungs. When he stepped out and wrapped a towel about his waist, he wiped the mirror
clear and studied his flat, bony chest, trying to look through the wet skin and the stringy blue veins to see what might be deeper down. He stared harder at his reflection, fingers tightening round
the edge of the basin, trying to invent an explanation that made sense of everything. It was only when he remembered the tramp on the train, and what he had said, that Daniel rocked back on his
heels and let go.

Dressed and with his damp hair drying, Daniel stopped halfway down the stairs and watched through the balustrade as the front door opened then shut. His father stood in the hallway, hanging up
his suit jacket on a peg, his work tie loosened and the top button of his white shirt undone. He plunged his hands in his trouser pockets and looked up. ‘How’s things, Dan?’

‘Not great,’ whispered Daniel and as he watched his father fade he spoke again. ‘I’ll help you, I will. I’ll find out what to do.’

He flinched when the door suddenly opened for real, letting in the evening sunlight. But it was his aunt that looked up at him, her shadow stretching down the hallway, pointed as a blade.

‘How are things, Daniel?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ he replied.

After supper, Daniel went to bed. He lay blinking at the ceiling, unable to sleep, as he thought about his father and Lawson and what Mason had told him he must do. Through
some cranky, twisted thinking, Daniel began to wonder if he had actually died underground and never found a way back to the surface at all, his body left stiff on the rock with the water lapping
beside it, while the rest of him had slipped into some other place without realizing it until now. A hell maybe? Or some inbetween world?

But the bed felt real enough. And the long, uncomfortable silences during supper with his aunt had seemed authentic too.

The only other solution Daniel could imagine to explain what was happening to him was that he had dropped through a hole in the fabric of one universe into another where everything was familiar,
but where his life was not quite the same. He sat up and looked round his bedroom, checking carefully for anything that might seem odd or out of place. But nothing was any different that he could
see.

As he slumped back down, he remembered the strange memory that had come to him before his aunt had returned home. It was difficult to recall it entirely, but there were just enough details for
him to ponder:

the deep pile of a white carpet on a landing . . .

brown lace-up shoes . . .

his hands covered in blood and a door handle slipping through them.

Daniel wondered if it could be a clue that might prove he had indeed fallen from one universe into another. Closing his eyes, he tried to picture everything he could about that moment and
gradually it started coming back to him, and he was

. . . running towards a door, along a landing laid with deep-pile white carpet, the fluffy threads bulging up over the rims of his brown lace-up shoes.

When he gripped the door handle, it slipped through his fingers and pinged back up because his hands were oily with blood.

He got up and inspected the brown shoes in his cupboard again. They were definitely not the same. And then he looked at his hands. They weren’t the ones covered in blood
that had reached for the door handle. His own fingers weren’t as slender or as white.

Daniel tried to understand how he could have remembered something that hadn’t even happened to him. Unnerved by the strangeness of it, he lay back on his bed and closed his eyes, replaying
the moment over and over, trying to see if he could find out anything else . . .

. . . and then something clicked and he began remembering more . . .

. . . his bloody hands grabbing hold of the door handle a second time and turning it to let himself through into a white tiled bathroom . . .

. . . When he looked in the mirror above the white ceramic sink, he saw Lawson staring back, his bleeding nose cupped in his bloody hands . . .

. . . And then Mason appeared in the doorway behind him, looming like a storm cloud in the mirror over his shoulder . . .

. . . ‘Don’t try that again,’ he grunted, ‘or else I’ll break more than your nose.’

Daniel and Bennett sat on the low wall outside King’s College, eating chips for breakfast from yellow styrofoam trays, tourists glancing at them as they walked by.

‘What do you mean it was Lawson?’ asked Bennett.

‘In the mirror, it was his face looking back at me.’

‘But you just said it was like a memory. That you
were
him. How’s that possible?’ Bennett speared a chip and dipped it in ketchup. He moved his fork like a baton as if
conducting his thoughts. ‘Unless it’s to do with the fit? That bits of Lawson got stuck inside you when things went wrong.’

A passer-by looked down at them; Bennett smiled at her with ketchup teeth until she looked away. ‘Do you think you could remember anything else?’

‘I’m not sure I want to.’ Daniel cupped his hands round the styrofoam tray of chips, trying to warm them because even though the sun was out he felt cold.

‘But you might remember something that helps. If Lawson knew other people like him, maybe there’s somebody who could help you. You need to find someone to make this fit or who knows
what Mason’ll do?’

Daniel toe-poked a pebble as far as he could into the road. ‘Lawson’s dead, Bennett. It’s creepy, thinking bits of him are stuck inside me.’

‘Like starlight?’

‘What?’

‘When we look up at a star, we’re seeing how it was in the past because of the time it takes light to travel across the universe. We’re only watching a memory from an age
ago.’

‘I suppose.’

Bennett patted him on the shoulder. ‘It’ll burn out eventually.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do.’ Bennett speared another chip and watched it steaming in the sun.

He put the wooden fork down with the chip still attached when a woman with an American accent asked if she could take a picture of them sitting on the wall with the college behind them because
it looked so
cute.
Bennett asked for a pound. ‘I’m saving up for university,’ he said. ‘Thirty thousand pictures should do it. Or else I’m going to be trapped
in my socio-demographic fishbowl for the rest of my life, looking out at what
could have been
for me.’

When three pound coins were placed in his outstretched palm, he lit up like a slot machine.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Daniel as they walked away after the picture was taken. ‘You can do anything you want whether you go to university or not.’

Bennett beamed for a moment like he had won the lottery. ‘But I can’t find your fit for you though, can I?’ he said as they strolled among the tourists.

‘No you can’t.’

‘And Mason doesn’t sound like the kind of man to take kindly to bad news.’ Bennett slung an arm round Daniel’s shoulder and pulled him close. ‘Why not try to see
what else of Lawson is left inside you? It might help. Do you really think you’re going to find someone just by walking round town? Mason only gave you three days and it’s day two
now.’

‘Lawson was drawn to me when we met. Perhaps someone else will be too. The down-and-out on the train said the person I needed to make the fit will be wherever I am.’

‘And you believe him?’

‘There are people coming from all over the world to visit here,’ said Daniel as groups of tourists bustled round them.

‘Hello!’ shouted Bennett at the crowds, pointing to Daniel. ‘Anyone here interested? He’s someone you can make the fit with if you want?’ But while some people
glanced up at them, most just looked embarrassed and walked on.

Bennett raised his hands in surrender when Daniel scowled. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I can see it might be uncomfortable finding out what bits and pieces of a dead person are stuck
inside you, so let’s walk a bit more and see what happens, until we meet someone or we up come with another idea. I can multitask anyway. Work off the chips at the same time.’ He
belched and smiled at all the disapproving faces passing them by.

They wandered among the crowds of shoppers and tourists like two pilgrims searching for a hidden, sacred place. But the only time anyone noticed Daniel was when a young kid
gawped at him, pointing him out to his mum, as if he had just stepped off the front page of the newspaper.

When a pack of girls from school recognized him too, they catcalled his name across the traffic, swigging from bottles of cider, their middle fingers raised, the sunlight flashing off their
varnished nails.

‘You’ve got to love ’em,’ said Bennett, blowing them each a kiss.

When Bennett spotted the down-and-out they had met on the train, he chased after him down the street, shouting that he wanted his hip flask back. But the man ducked down an alley, his mackintosh
flapping. When Daniel followed them, he found Bennett at the end of the alleyway, panting, his hands on his head as he stood pondering which of the three separate passageways to take.

‘Vanished like a bloody cat,’ he said and cursed.

Eventually, the two of them lay down in one of the parks on the sunburned grass. Bennett picked up a stick and turned it in his hands. ‘So much for meeting someone. All
we’ve done is go round and round this bloody town. People’ll start talking, you know.’ Bennett tossed the stick as high as he could and watched it cartwheel round and snap like a
bone when it landed on the dry brown grass. He stared at the two broken pieces and clicked his tongue. When he looked round, ready to say something, Daniel was staring at him.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll try it.’

Bennett bought a notebook and pencil from a kiosk in the park and sat quietly beside Daniel, waiting to write anything down that might be useful.

Daniel lay silently for a few moments, thinking about Lawson, focusing on everything he could remember about the man. What he had been like in the hospital. How the house he had lived in was set
out. Everything he had mentioned to Daniel about the fit and what he hoped they could do together. Ever so gradually, Daniel began to sense they were having an effect as little flickers of the
man’s memories – things he could not have possibly known about – revealed themselves to him, flitting like sparks through the black of him as he kept his eyes tight shut.

They were mundane moments at first – Lawson brushing his teeth or eating a meal or driving a car. But they had a momentum of their own that carried Daniel into a deeper thinking and he
started to remember other things in sequence from across the man’s lifetime. Most of them were short, coming too quickly for Daniel to appreciate, but there was the odd more detailed one he
saw clearly enough through Lawson’s eyes to describe to Bennett:

As a toddler, playing with a black Labrador, pulling its ears.

Lawson on his first day at school, just a young boy in grey shorts with a satchel on his back.

Lawson the teenager sitting in his bedroom, focused on an HB pencil striped red and black which suddenly rolled a couple of centimetres or so of its own accord, making him whoop in
delight.

In a cinema with a girl in the seat beside him, holding his hand in the dark.

As a young reverend, leading a church service, the pews containing just a few people.

Sobbing as he stood beside a new grave, the brown earth covered with wreaths of flowers, and swallows boomeranging round him.

Ripping out the pages of a Bible and letting them flutter to the floor.

As the older man Daniel had known him to be, standing in a dusty hallway of a stately home with a huge staircase winding upwards.

Being shouted at by Mason as they sat in a car.

Lawson, sitting in his living room, doodling a strange symbol on a piece of paper, practising it over and over on the page.

Standing in the hospital shop, looking at the photograph of Daniel in the newspaper.