Page 65 of Love and Other Paradoxes

Rob patted Joe’s head reassuringly. “Sounds like a plan, Greeney. Sleep well.” He closed the door, leaving Joe in darkness.

He dreamt of forking paths in a garden. Every time he reached a junction, he split in two, watching another Joe walk decisively off while he lingered, lost.

When he finally woke, he was exhausted. He blinked up at the ceiling. For a blessed, quiet moment, he had no idea who or when he was. Then it all came back to him: first, the pain in his leg, then, the memories. The caption of the photograph in the fuzzy light. The shattering realisation that everything he’d done to fulfil his destiny had only been pushing it further off course.

We’re not supposed to meet for another twelve years.He wanted to kick against it, scream that it wasn’t true, but part of him had recognised the truth of it the instant he spoke the words. It made sense of so much. The feeling he’d had since he first spoke to Diana, that they weren’t right together, that they were too different to make any sense. The nagging conviction that in a universe without time travel, they would never have met. Because they weren’t supposed to meet: not now, not as they were. They were supposed to meet when they were different people, twelve years of experience shaping them into the right fit for each other. He would have come to her clean, all his embarrassing mistakes nothing but stories to share with her, instead of scars across theirpersonal history. Cambridge would have been a shared reference point, instead of two separate worlds that just happened to occupy the same physical and temporal space.

But now, this jagged, mistaken attempt at a relationship whose time hadn’t come would haunt any future they tried to build. When her eyes met his across a room, she wouldn’t see an intriguing stranger. She would see Joe, who had convinced himself he was in love with her and then rejected her.

It hit him with full, crushing force. He would never feel the love described in the poems. He had lost that chance, and in doing so, he had unmade them, scribbling over their perfection like a toddler with a box of crayons. Now, they were a relic from a lost reality. The future he had thought was waiting for him was gone, and there was no way of getting it back.

The enormity of the disaster was too much for him to process. He remembered what he’d said to Esi, the judgmental words he’d thrown at her about rewriting history. They sounded so hollow to him now. If there had been a wormhole he could walk into that would reset everything, he would have done it in a heartbeat.

Wincing, he reached down inside his shoe to retrieve his phone. He had blocked Diana’s number, as if that would have the same effect as rewinding time to before they had met. But it had still given him a measure of relief.

A mad impulse seized him. Maybe if he offered the universe a symbolic walking-back, an undoing of everything he’d done since meeting her, then destiny would take pity on him and give him another chance.

He sat up, pivoting his leg off the bed. He was still dressed in the clothes he’d worn to the poetry reading, one leg of his jeans cut off above his bandage to make absurd half shorts. He wriggleddisgustedly out of them and flung them in a corner. He got dressed in his old, shabby clothes, the jeans with holes in, the jumper Esi hadn’t known what to say about. He took another dose of painkillers, hoisted the crutch they’d given him at the hospital, and made his slow way down the stairs.

He undid everything he could think to undo. He gave the shirt he’d bought with Esi back to the charity shop and threw the ruined trousers into a Burleigh Street bin. He went to the street corner where he’d first seen Diana, where he had spoken the words of a poem that would never be written. Now, he spoke them in reverse, then walked solemnly backwards towards college, to the baffled amusement of the watching tourists. No time travellers: they were gone. “Nothing to see here,” he muttered as he climbed backwards up the steps. “Not anymore.”

He revisited everywhere he had been with Diana, each backward step taking him into a better world, a world where he hadn’t ruined everything before it had even begun. He hired a punt and poled his way backwards from Magdalene Bridge to the Mill Pond, nearly falling in several times, until the punt guides started working him into their patter, talking about the superstitious things Cambridge students did to keep from failing their exams. He really should have climbed out to the secret terrace and backed his way along the ledge to the battlements, but he was no longer immortal, and dying while undoing something reckless felt even stupider than dying while doing it.

Finally, weary and aching, he walked up King’s Parade in the darkness. He propped himself up outside the door of Whewell’s Court and waited.

By the time someone opened the door and he slipped in after them, it was almost midnight. He climbed up to Diana’s room,the stairs creaking, his leg screaming. He paused outside her door. He wanted to focus on the ceremonial moment of undoing, but his attention kept drifting to her neighbour’s painting: the endless bifurcating paths, like his dream, the path that ended in his future obliterated now by a fire he had set himself.

He should leave. If Diana was home, she could open the door at any second. He began to manoeuvre himself backwards down the stairs.

He was navigating the tricky corner when he bumped into someone coming up. He was so terrified it might be Diana that when he turned and saw it wasn’t, he forgot to pay attention to anything else. He registered a girl with wide, surprised eyes, her hair tied up under a red silk headwrap. She looked vaguely familiar. He wondered if he’d seen her coming out of the ACS meeting with Esi. She seemed to be on her way back from a late-night study session in the kitchen: she was holding a mug of hot chocolate, a pile of political science textbooks in the crook of her other arm. She was looking at him like he was certifiably insane.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t see you there.”

“That might be because you were walking backwards.” Her voice was low, her tone precise. Her brow furrowed delicately. “Why?”

“That’s a good question.” He gestured up the stairs. “I’m un-visiting Diana Dartnell.”

She nodded slowly, as if this made complete sense. “I should have realised Diana would have something to do with it.”

His heart thudded. He didn’t want one of Diana’s friends telling her he’d come looking. “You know her?”

“Sort of.” Her eyes darted up the stairs. “She’s my neighbour.”

“Neighbour. Right.” The painting, the soft singing, the crying through the wall, reassembled into the person standing in frontof him. He smiled, like he had bumped into an old friend. “Is that your art on the door?”

She tilted her head up. Something about her manner, shy but assured, caught at him. “Yes.”

He had stared at the painting so many times that he couldn’t resist asking. “What’s it about?”

She rolled her eyes. “Come on. Isn’t it obvious?” As he flailed, a smile broke across her face. “No, I’m messing with you. I don’t really know what it’s about. I just made it.” She gave a small half shrug. “I guess you get to decide.”

Having to decide for himself felt overwhelming. He wished she could have just told him.

They hovered a step apart. She shifted her grip on the stack of books. In the middle, he spotted a slim paperback that didn’t belong. White script on a pink spine.The Earl’s Wilful Wife.

She saw him looking, and drew the stack defensively up to her chest. On the folder underneath, a coffee spill had made a dark splodge. She had drawn around it, turning it into a starry, crosshatched portal.

“Excuse me,” she said.

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