Move (4 page)

‘Maybe. Although I think nirvana is a place you reach after you have left all cares behind. It’s not really a question of
making
the right choices within this world.’

‘But it would be close right? It would be like living in a world full of true Buddhists.’ I could see Tara was taking me seriously. She studied the eraser in my hand and then wondered aloud, ‘A world where all the people had only ever done positive actions? It would still be part of samsara, the cycle of life and death. But more people would be at a level that would allow them to
escape. That would be good.’

We sat for a moment, in shared contemplation. We were
talking
about something important, and I really liked the feeling. Then she looked up with a frown. ‘When I move universes, what happens to the one I leave behind, the one where they made a bad choice?’

Ahh, sharp. Way ahead of me, who could actually move. ‘They are still there. It’s just that you are no longer experiencing them.’

‘Well then, you’ve not really solved anything. In fact, a true Buddhist would probably stay in the darker world and learn how to let go of suffering rather than escape to a happy
Teletubby
land.’

For a moment my gaze met her shining grey eyes and I felt lightning crawl around the inside of my head. This was a whole new perspective on my life and my ability.

‘I need to talk about this,’ I stated earnestly. ‘I have to think about these things, they are important.’ With one sentence she had made me reconsider the entire direction of my life. What was I going to do with my skill? She began to laugh, that I was taking what to her must have seemed idle conversation so seriously, but then she looked at my face and, after a moment’s hesitation, she gave a small nod.

‘We can talk about it in Café Paradiso after school, if you like.’

That Wednesday, after P.E., I hurried down to Café Paradiso, to find Tara waiting for me, a glass of orange juice on the table in front of her. She smiled when she saw me come in. The café was already filling up with kids from our fifth and sixth years.
Meeting
Tara here wasn’t a big deal, like a date. This is where a lot of us hung out after school. But still, here she was, waiting for me. And she looked pleased that I’d arrived.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked her, throwing down my bag. Tara had put her book face down on the table and I picked it up.
The Handmaid’s Tale
. The spine was broken in several places and I ran my finger over the ridges.

‘You know there are two types of people in this world,’ I spoke solemnly as I settled into an uncomfortable metal chair,
‘those who treat their books well and the other kind, the brutal kind. You can tell a lot about someone by how they treat their books.’

‘Yeah? Show me one of yours.’

I didn’t usually bring books in to school, so I moved in order to get one. Curiously, the book that I was most likely to bring with me was
The Catcher in the Rye
. This said more about the fact that I wanted to make a good impression than my true reading interests, which were usually biographies about footballers or science fiction. Taking it from me, Tara was genuinely amazed at how unmarked it was.

‘Have you started reading this? It’s like new.’

‘Finished it.’ Which was true in this universe. I’d rather liked it. It made me wish I had a little sister.

‘No way.’ She laughed again. ‘You are right, you can tell a lot about someone by their books. In your case, beneath your
disguise
as a troubled hooligan, you are really a repressed nerdy type.’

Her grey eyes were sparkling and I was smiling happily back at her.

‘You know, I really can move universes.’ It just came right out. I hadn’t planned on telling her, but then again, I was getting lonely, being able to move but not sharing it with anyone. I had been thinking of a way I could explain it to Zed and I guess that led me to just blurt it out, like a fool.

Tara’s expression instantly changed to one of mistrust,
perhaps
anticipating an attempt by me to mock her. She looked down and seemed to need to adjust the straps on her leg.

‘I’m not making it up. I can prove it.’

‘Really?’ She frowned.

‘Easily. Write down a number between one and twenty.’

She got out a pen and was about to write in the back of her book.

‘Wait, use this.’ I gave her my school rough book. I couldn’t bear to see her mark a real book.

Before Tara put away
The Handmaid’s Tale
, she folded down the corner of a page to mark her place. My involuntary wince caused the hint of a smile to weaken the sternness of her expression.

‘Look.’ I produced a bookmark, put it in the right place and unfolded the page corner. ‘These were invented for a reason.’

‘Thanks.’ Her pen was poised over the page of my rough book. ‘All right, turn away.’

I gave her a moment to write down her number.

‘Seventeen,’ I announced. ‘Write down another.’

Her eyebrows rose a little.

‘Four. Write down another.’

This time she looked over her shoulder, checking if there was a reflection or some other means by which I could see the number. Before setting down the next one, she hunched up over the book, shielding it with her hand and a cascade of red hair.

‘Twelve.’

There was a curious interplay of emotions on her face. Doubt was giving way to puzzlement and, thankfully, amazement. She was not rejecting me but was growing curious, entering into my
world. We filled a page of the book with numbers, before I stopped the game. I was tired of moving now and a pain was growing in my mind that was manageable until I came at it the wrong way, when it stabbed me in the side of my head.

‘How are you doing that?’ she whispered, leaning forward in complicity.

‘I can see hundreds, thousands even, of nearby universes. I’ve been moving to the ones where I guessed right.’

‘So all those philosophical questions of yours, they were not hypothetical?’

‘No.’

‘You could really find a universe where people have only ever been kind to each other?’

‘Well, I could keep moving in that direction. I’m not sure if I’d ever reach it though.’

‘Why don’t you do it?’

‘I might. But I kinda like it around here.’

It was such a relief to have someone to confide in, that for the next few days I was walking around with bright enthusiasm for life. Hail and cold rain may have been assailing the windows of our classrooms, but summer had come to my heart. Yet this
glorious
happiness lasted no more than two weeks, ending with the arrival of Valentine’s Day.

The previous year I had moved to a universe where I had, anonymously, sent everyone in my class a Valentine’s Day card.
I thought it would cheer everyone up. Hopefully it did. But this year to do the same would have felt disloyal to Tara. We were getting on well now, meeting once a week after school. Our growing intimacy had not escaped the notice of Zed and Deano, but they didn’t slag me about it. Perhaps they had
recognised
how serious I was about her; that Tara was not a subject for teasing. Perhaps also we were all getting a bit older.

The first sign something was wrong was the way that Jocelyn Doonan walked past me in the corridor outside our class, face white with fury.

‘How could you?’ she hissed as she marched past.

Odd. Jocelyn and I got on fairly well.

On opening the door to our classroom, things got even stranger. The whole room went quiet. Tara rushed out past me, her gait awkward, face down. Two of her best friends hurried after her.

‘What’s up?’ I asked Debbie, but she just turned away. So did everyone else. They were all leaving the class, on account of the fact that I had come in. It was slightly frightening, like being in a zombie film or something, but I held my nerve and went over to my desk, giving Deano a rueful shake of my head, showing him that I thought the situation was crazy.

‘Not cool, Liam. Not cool.’ Deano stood up and joined those walking out of the classroom.

Just a few minutes had passed since I had entered the room. Only Zed was left, and even he was looking at the door, as if making up his mind to go.

‘What is it I’m supposed to have done, Zed?’ My heart was
racing, as far as I knew nobody in our school had ever been given this treatment; it had to be serious.

‘Aww, man.’ Zed handed me a Valentine card. The envelope simply had ‘Tara’ written on it. Inside there was a card that looked like it had come from a gift shop, all shiny and colourful. On the outside was a cute looking cherub. The headline was ‘You are my angel!’ Inside it read ‘Awkward, Nightmarish,
Grotesque
, Elephantine, Lopsided!’ The accompanying cartoon was of a one-legged girl jumping across the card from left to right, with a voice in a bubble shouting ‘Hop off!’

Fire and rage seethed through me.

‘Who dared make this card? I’ll find them and kill them! How could they?’ It didn’t take much imagination to picture Tara opening the card, probably with some pleasure and excitement, only to be crushed by the message and the evidence that
someone
held a savage hatred towards her. Never since her accident, and probably never before then either, would anyone have taunted her in such a vicious and cruel manner.

Zed was studying me carefully. ‘Look at the handwriting.’

I did. It was a very good forgery; the lettering looked exactly like my own.

‘I see. It looks like mine, but I never sent it. Jaysus, Zed, how could I?’

‘I dunno, mate.’ With a loud sigh, Zed sat in Deano’s seat, which was next to mine at the back of the class. ‘But Jocelyn says she saw you put this in Tara’s desk early this morning,
before
anyone was in.’

‘No way. Why would she say that?’ Really, that was the
question. Why on earth would Jocelyn make that up? I was totally bemused. With my head in my hands, eyes closed, I
began
to search the adjacent universes. Up until now, I had been upset, but not worried. If situations became crappy, and they didn’t get much more crappy than this, I could always use my ability and bail. Sod them all, if they thought so little of me. How easily they believed that I could do that to Tara.

Disconcertingly, though, there was no way around this
catastrophe
. As far as I could see, thousands of distant, dim universes away, there was the hated card. In many universes I was totally alone in the classroom, not even Zed was present. Ever since I had learned to move I had been able to escape difficult situations. Not this one. It was a terrible surprise and, at the same time, a little frightening, to have lost my control over the options available to me.

There was something wrong about the card itself. It was
glittering
black and evil in all adjacent universes, twisting them, drawing them around it, not letting me see any universe in which it did not exist. It was like the card itself was fighting me. Up until this moment, my fears about the consequences of moving had only been forebodings. Now, however, they were made tangible by this creepy card. What was even more
frightening
was my sense that this was only the beginning of even worse troubles.

‘Zed, you have to believe me. Somehow I’ve been framed.’ My voice was surprisingly even and I kept the tears back.

‘Are you callin’ Jocelyn a liar? She doesn’t seem like the type.’

‘No. She’s not a liar.’

He sighed, a long heavy sigh. ‘Maybe you were there, but put another card in. Some jealous guy swapped it on you.’

Nice one, Zed, to offer me a way out.

‘Thanks, mate, but nope. I made her a card, but it’s still in my bag.’

‘Show me.’

Opening my bag, I got a sinking feeling. There was no card, not even when I had tipped everything out on to the desk.

‘Dude.’ Zed got up in disgust and left me alone in the classroom.

When, eventually, everyone had to come back in for
registration
, no one spoke to me; they hardly even exchanged a word with each other. There was a very conspicuous space in the
middle
of the class: Tara’s empty desk.

Enforced solitude gave me a lot of time to think. Firstly, I was bitter with my entire class. If they thought me capable of sending such a card, then I was better off without them. I’d always felt myself to be a little apart, what with being able to move, so this unjustified hostility now created a massive
crevasse
between us where there had previously just been a crack. I was an island, or better still, a planet, with the vast black silence of space between me and any other life or colour.

Secondly, I wanted vengeance on whoever had done this. They had hurt me and they had hurt the best person I knew, the one person whom I knew was trustworthy, the one person who knew my secret. For two weeks I’d been happy. I had felt that I was not alone. But of course I was. Everyone was. Me most of all.

That night I had an alarming dream.

I was a demon in the realms beneath the universe and I was hungry. My whole body ached with insatiable desires. My appetite was not for food but for emotion: for guilt, pride, vengeance, anger and fear. A thousand years passed: a thousand years of constant motion, searching through the darkness for the heady emotions of human existence. Perhaps it was millions of years. They seemed to pass all at once, yet existence was a constant agony of unfulfilled desire. At last, I felt my time had come. Somewhere, there was a fraying of the fabric that separated the demon realms and the human universe. A tear, a wound, and I could smell food beyond it. I sniffed, circled, worried at it, feeling it widen, deepen, feeling the pressure build up against it. Finally, it was wide enough and, with an explosion of dark matter, I was through. Gods in the heavens tremble! For I was trapped no longer and could feast until my belly burst or there was nothing more on this earth for me to devour.

The first thing I did when I woke up was phone Tara. Surprisingly, her mother answered.

‘Who is it?’

‘Liam O’Dwyer.’

‘Don’t ring this number again.’ She hung up.

So I sent a text.

‘Tara. It wasn’t me. U no my secret. Sometin is goin wrong. I need 2 speak 2 u. Help me.’

After a short delay I got a text back.

‘OK whr + whn?’

Thank heavens. At last. A chance to turn this miserable situation around.