Unstitched (16 page)

But Lucas caught me, slid out slowly and spun me, holding me up in his arms. I nestled my head against his shoulder as we breathed hard, the hot, damp flesh of our chests heaving against the others.

‘Holy shit,’ I said.

His shoulders shook as he chuckled. ‘Couldn’t have said it better myself.’

***

Lucas

I sat on the lounge while Anthea lay with her head on my lap. I stroked the hair from her forehead, her eyes closed, and I sang softly. I loved the simplicity of this moment. Sure, I loved what we just did in the shower, too, but this was so beautifully intimate.

A tear rolled down the side of her face onto my jeans. My heart heaved and my shoulders were weighted with guilt. It was like a blow to the guts each time I saw her vulnerable side, knowing that, even with all the lengths I had taken to find her and be here for her, I wasn’t early enough. There wasn’t anything I could do to erase the pain from her past; I could only help soothe it.

I stopped singing, took her hand and rolled it in mine. Anthea opened her eyes and looked up at me. ‘Why’d you stop? I love that song.’

I strained to control my voice. ‘I’m sorry.’

She smiled and rubbed quickly at her tears with her free hand. ‘You don’t have to apologise. I love it when you sing. It makes me feel all the feelz.’

I shook my head, brought her tattooed wrist to my lips and kissed her scar. ‘No, I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you when you needed me most.’

She narrowed her eyes, still glossy. ‘You can’t be thinking like that, Lucas. My past is my past, and it’s something you have no control over.’

I nodded slowly, but looked away, unable to meet her eyes. ‘You felt the way you did because of me.’

Anthea sighed and sat up, one leg curled up under her body as she faced me. ‘I’ll admit that I’ve suffered for a long time with this,’ she pressed her fist to her heart, ‘aching inside. And I know now that it is you I was aching for. But that’s not why I attempted suicide.’ Her voice was weak as she said the word. My stomach tensed to hear it, to have it undoubtedly confirmed. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Why, Anthy? How did you get to such a low place?’

Anthy’s bottom lip trembled, but she said nothing.

‘Please. I need to understand.’

She pulled on a piece of hair, curling it around her finger. ‘I was twenty. I’d broken up with yet another boyfriend. Relationships never worked for me. Ever. I know why now. But back then, you must understand that I thought I had a problem. I thought there was something horribly wrong with me. That I wasn’t loveable.’

I leant my mouth toward Anthea’s and kissed her. ‘I’m sorry.’

Anthea shook her head. ‘Don’t be. I know why now — I was waiting for you. That’s all.’ She managed a smile. ‘If I knew back then that I’d only have to wait a few more years, it would’ve been easier. But it was the not-knowing, the second-guessing, the thinking, thinking, thinking that was my enemy. But my true downfall was mistreatment.’

My eyes widened. ‘Mistreatment?’

Anthea’s shoulders drooped as she sighed. ‘My mum thought she was doing the right thing for me. She thought I had some kind of mental illness. I can’t blame her, really. She talked me in to seeing a psychiatrist who diagnosed me with depression and a personality disorder. I was prescribed anti-depressants. But they made me worse. So I was switched on to another stronger medication — a drug that has since been banned.

‘I began to lose all sense of myself until I knew I wasn’t me anymore. I became paranoid. Life lost all meaning. I couldn’t finish my final year of uni because I couldn’t cope. I told my therapist this and she just said it was part of my illness. I told her I was worse on the medication than I was off it, but she said I needed to give it a chance to work and that abruptly coming off the drugs would be detrimental. So I gave them a chance to work. And I never did get better. Then one morning I woke up in hospital, my arm stitched and bandaged, because I’d tried to end the pain with a paring knife.’

My guts twisted. ‘Oh, Anthy…that’s…’

She shrugged. ‘It’s a time in my life I truly regret, but also a time I feel so much anger about because I felt that knife was put to my vein by another’s hands. And no matter how much I tried to fight against the knife, it always hovered there.’

‘So what happened?’

Tears swelled and she swallowed hard. ‘Seeing the pain on my mum’s face was what saved me. I couldn’t hurt her like that again. So I dug deep within myself to find that strength I knew I had somewhere. Once I left hospital, I refused my medication. I refused to see my psychiatrist. And after a while I felt a little better. I took vitamins and exercised every day. I changed my diet and began looking after my body. I grew more confident and eventually I found a part-time job and went back to uni. I still wasn’t capable of having a lasting relationship, and my body was wracked with this endless yearning, but I’ve never since felt my life had absolutely no purpose.’

Anthy shook her head and clicked her tongue. ‘It seems so stupid now because my future had brightness. My future had you and my friends and my great job. I just needed to be patient and wait for the sun to rise. But the medication took all that sun away. It changed me on the inside.’

I took her in my arms and held her against my chest, stroking her back. ‘I want to tell you that it gets so much better, Anthy. That the human race evolves and these primitive methods of pill-popping and psychotherapy are replaced with workable solutions. I want to tell you that this quest for money dies and people start truly caring for others and finding real ways of helping instead of scams and quick-fixes. You live in a very difficult time, where capitalism, greed, drugs and body-worshipping is king…’

Anthea pulled away and looked at me with a weak half-mouth smile.

I lowered my eyes and stood, fists balling at my side. ‘I-I’m sorry, but hearing that. That your life was nearly taken because of such barbaric stupidity by a so-called professional —’

‘Lucas, please don’t get upset about this.’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you. It’s difficult for people to understand.’

‘That’s not it,’ I said, voice raised. I rubbed at my jaw. ‘You know I’ve read so much about the sociology of people in this time period, but it still doesn’t stop the mortification I feel living amongst it when I hear things like that.’

Anthea narrowed her eyes, forehead lined. ‘Pardon?’

‘How is it that there can be such broad variations amongst you all? Such different levels of evolution? On one hand, here you are.’ I sat down again on the lounge beside her. ‘You’re such a beautiful soul — creative, intuitive, ethical. You’re everything I want. And then there’s others walking around who seem to still act on barbaric impulses, devoid of any self-control or awareness.’

Anthea’s eyes widened. ‘Why are you talking like that?’

I focused on the lounge, ran my finger along the stitching. ‘I’m sorry. I’m angry.’

‘Lucas,’ she said, taking my hand in hers and pressing it to her cheek. ‘Please don’t be upset or angry. I’ve cried and raged enough for both of us. I meant it when I said it was in my past. It doesn’t have to impinge on us now at all, except for a little pink scar reminding me that I once had a tough time. But it also reminds me that I was strong enough to get through it.’

I kissed her, holding my lips to hers for a long moment, before pulling away. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry for reacting like that. It’s just — it’s all starting to get to me.’

Her lips parted as she pointed to her chest. ‘What? Me? Us?’

I shook my head. ‘No. No, I didn’t mean you.’

‘Then what? What’s going on, Lucas? You’re sounding really strange.’

I frowned deeply. ‘I know.’

***

Anthea

I leant over and kissed his cheek, in an effort to calm Lucas down, but also as affirmation that this anger wasn’t because of me, because of what I stupidly did years ago. I sat back and stared at him. His face was lined with worry as he frowned. I’d never seen him like this — rattled. This reaction ran deeper. His non-sensical talk was for something more.

‘Lucas, what’s going on?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

‘It’s not nothing. You know it isn’t, and I deserve an explanation.’

Silence.

‘Has this got to do with what you still need to tell me about?’

A deep sigh.

‘I know whatever it is you’re keeping from me is a big deal. I know that. But I also know that you’re only keeping it from me to protect me somehow. But right now, you’re really worrying me. You’re speaking as though you’re completely detached from this time period. Whatever it is, you just need to tell me. I love you and, no matter what you say, I’ll still love you.’

He stood again, pacing back and forth across the floor. He stopped abruptly, took a ragged breath as he turned to face me. ‘This is going to be really difficult to believe.’

My heart thudded wildly. ‘I’ll try my best.’

‘Promise me,’ he demanded

‘I-I promise.’

‘Firstly I want to let you know that I love you so much, and I’ll always love you. Forever.’

My stomach was knotting. Nothing good ever followed those words, but I managed a nod.

‘Remember you told me about your concept of us living many lives together, not just this one?’

‘Yes.’

‘I not only
believe
that, but I
know
that to be true.’

‘Are you like a Buddhist or something?’

He smiled. ‘No. I’m not a Buddhist.’

‘Do you remember your past lives or something?’

He hesitated with his eyes closed, then nodded. ‘Kind of.’

A deep wrinkle lined my forehead. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘I know that we live many, many lives. We’re born into a body, we occupy that body throughout its life, the body dies and we then move onto the next one. However, the person occupying all those different bodies is, in essence, the same person.’ He watched me, waiting.

I nodded slowly. ‘That’s how I believe it is.’

He blew out a long breath, his shoulders rolling. ‘This process of life and death has been happening for an immeasurably long time. It’s occurring now, with you and with me, in these bodies, and continues to occur into the future.’ Again he paused.

‘That sounds right.’

‘So what’s your understanding of time, Anthy?’

I shrugged, feeling like I was back in a schoolroom during a science class. ‘Um, time is a series of consecutive moments, consisting of the past and present.’

‘Do you think the future is a part of time as well?’

‘Yeah, sorry, of course, the future as well.’

He paced again, hands on his head. He finally stopped, just as I thought I was going crazy from the silence, and met my eyes. ‘Could you believe that the past, present, and future, are all occurring now at the same time, because time doesn’t really exist beyond the physical universe?’

I lifted a brow and it fell back into place. ‘Um, so you’re saying that all the consecutive moments of time are occurring
now
, including any future that I don’t yet have a concept of?’

He nodded quickly.

‘So
me
when I’m six, and
me
when I’m graduating high school, and
me
when I’m forty-two are all occurring now.’

Again he nodded. ‘Not only this lifetime, Anthy, but also
you
three thousand years ago and
you
one thousand years from now.’

My chest tickled and a laugh escaped. ‘I find that really hard to grasp. I don’t know how it can all be happening at once.’

‘Just try and think of it as — there is no time.’

‘But there is time. Otherwise I would still be six.’

‘Yes. Your physical body, the earth, things made of mass, anything you can see is governed by an illusion of time, so therefore you experience growth, change and physical death. But you, the awareness, the life force that is not your body, but instead gives your body life, for
you
there is no time,
only now
.’

My mind was reeling. I lowered my head and rubbed my temples. ‘So why do I only have a concept of this lifetime, if I’m currently occupying many different bodies in many different times?’

‘Your body and your mind have inbuilt mechanisms to make you forget that you’re anything more than merely a body. This body.’

What the?
This was getting well beyond me. ‘Do you not have those mechanisms?’

‘Yes and no. As long as I keep allowing myself to occupy new bodies and live in this universe of matter, I’m agreeing to have time, so I’m bound by those mechanisms. But I do have awareness, even memories of the different lives I’ve lived. More so, I have awareness of being a spiritual being, rather than just a body.’

‘Is that how you knew where to find me, because you can see into the future?’

He smiled. ‘No. I can’t see into the future, Anthea.’

I shook my head and wrinkled my nose. ‘So how does this explain how you found me?’

‘I’m getting to that. I just don’t know how to come out with it, without scaring you away.’

My heart jolted, my head light. ‘Just tell me! I’ll deal with the consequences later.’

He nodded. ‘You believe in evolution, right?’

‘Yes,’ I said slowly, wishing like hell he’d get to the point already.

‘Do you think that evolution of the species will continue in the future?’

‘Of course it will — if we don’t blow up or overheat the planet in the meantime.’

He shrugged, cocked his head to the side. ‘What do you see for man, when you imagine Earth, say, a thousand years from now?’

‘I don’t know. The future could be bright, or bleak. We could be half-mutated with three eyes, breathing in noxious green pollutants and drinking sludgy sea water, which we store in the humps on our backs. Or, it could be beautiful: clear blue skies, green energy, flying cars, strong healthy bodies and living until we are a hundred and fifty.’

He laughed. ‘I like the second one better.’

I tensed a smile too. ‘So do I.’

‘You’d think technology would be more advanced a thousand years from now?’

‘That’s a given. Like 4D television, intergalactic travel, miracle cures.’