The Infinite Page 10

  Maybe when I think I’m sad or scared, really I’m angry. I should have gone to the Mind Full workshop this morning. It was run by the E-College-E teacher with purple hair who teaches philosophy. They learnt how to empty your mind, how to breathe when you feel angry. You have to count and hold on to each second, day, month, year. I need to learn how to do that.

  But sometimes I’m happy.

  Big Ben’s been holding my hand for the last half-hour, like I’m a little child and would get lost if he didn’t. Or maybe he feels lost, like a child. He wasn’t like that yesterday; he was happy to run. I smile at him. ‘That was nice but I don’t want to hold hands any more.’ He nods, and walks on ahead with Ama. I look up at the trees and feel the drazzle on my face. Is this really happening, 2048, or has it not happened yet? Is 2020 really the present or do we just think it is?

  We’ve stopped to look at a different type of mushroom that could kill you. They have very long stalks and purple heads speckled with white dots. They’re more like flowers than mushrooms. GMT comes over to me.

  ‘You all right, kid?’

  ‘I’m ok.’

  ‘Really?’ she says.

  ‘Maybe,’ I say.

  ‘What’s bugging you?’ She sees me frown and carries on. ‘You don’t have to TELL me. You could text.’

  Text? Maybe she knows. I shake my head. I’m not going to text GMT about SOS L. But I like her. The sound of her voice is a warm shower. I think of something to say that relates to time. She’s an expert on time.

  ‘If we’re in 2048 now, what happens when it really IS 2048?’

  GMT sits on a tree stump. ‘Ever heard of multiple futures?’ I shake my head and she continues. ‘The future’s a story we’re constantly rewriting. Every second someone in 2020 does something, it changes the future. Every nanosecond.’ I think of Big Ben when she says that word. ‘There’s an infinite number of futures.’

  I don’t like the idea of all those futures. Too much to get my head round and the thought that ANYTHING could happen. Maybe that’s why they keep changing the timetable here, why they can’t predict the weather. Maybe someone will do something the next second in 2020 and there’ll be an earthwave or a heatquake here. Or maybe we won’t exist at all. I don’t want to think about it. But GMT does.

  ‘Think about it. Everything you do now affects the ever after.’

  ‘But NOW is the 1st of March 2048, 3 p.m. How can that affect things if it hasn’t happened yet?’

  ‘We’re bissextiles. For us, time’s not linear, it’s all over the joint. We can change things any place, any time. It’s a Gift from God.’

  I’m not sure Grandma would agree. She tells me to keep quiet about my birthday, pretend I was born on the 1st of March. But I think she’s secretly proud of my Gift. She knows I can use it to do something good. Maybe the good thing is telling the group about SOS L. If Kwesi sent it, we could help him. He may be hiding here in the grounds and will send the text in two days’ time. Or maybe he already sent it in another version of the future and I received it and it won’t happen again. Either way, I have to tell the others. Not here. Not now. But soon.

  I’m thinking this whilst GMT’s talking. Telling me how she got too obsessed with the two watches, spent her whole time checking the time rather than seizing the day. Carpe diem. Where have I heard that before? Right now, it’s the 1st of March 2048, 3:01 p.m. I’m alive. Breathing fresh air, smelling the grass, the mushrooms, GMT’s petunia oil. And she’s still talking like a song lyric.

  ‘Tomorrow never happens, man. Don’t live for tomorrow, live for now. Whenever now is.’

  Big Ben, GMT, Ama and I are in the Common Room before dinner, talking about the hat. Big Ben and I are on the sofa, Ama’s crouched in a chocolate-brown beanbag and GMT’s lying on a rug. Ama thinks Kwesi dropped it deliberately. As a clue.

  ‘He didn’t have time to graffiti his tag, so he left that instead.’

  ‘Not logical,’ says Big Ben. ‘He didn’t know we’d see it.’

  ‘Big Ben’s right. It doesn’t make sense.’ My tummy feels like I have a clenched fist in it. I’ve been thinking all day about SOS L, ever since I saw the writing in the hat. ‘Maybe he sent a message to someone.’

  Ama gives me the bull’s-eye. She has a way of staring, that girl, like a teacher about to exclude you.

  ‘Elle. Sorry I shouted this morning,’ she says.

  Oops. A nice one. I’ve almost forgiven her but I like that she said sorry. She wiggles about in the beanbag till she’s sitting more upright. Maybe she wants to be my friend again.

  ‘Do you know something? Speak, Elle. I won’t be cross. Promise!’

  Speak? I want to speak but the words are buzzing round my head like bees. If I tell her about SOS L, she might get cross again. Or people could trace my illegal solo leap via my phone after I got the text and I might get arrested and never get back to 2020, and Grandma won’t have anyone to prepare her pepper soup. But if I don’t tell her, someone could die and it would be all my fault. The buzzing stops but the words are still moving. I know once they stop moving I’ll have to say what I see in my head. The words stop moving.

  ‘I got an SOS.’

  Someone takes a deep breath. I don’t know who. But the room’s gone quiet, like everyone else did the same thing. If they don’t breathe out, they’ll die. I know they’re all staring at me. I know it, even though I’m looking at the floor.

  ‘On your phone?’ says Ama.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did it say? Is it still on your phone?’

  ‘SOS L,’ I say to the floor. ‘I deleted it.’

  ‘You did WHAT?!’ Ama starts pacing. I’m sad I told her now. She’s going to start shouting at me. GMT walks over to the settee and sits down beside me.

  ‘Chill out,’ she says, looking up at the ceiling. ‘We don’t need to see it. Elle doesn’t lie.’

  ‘No. She’s just good at concealing the truth,’ Ama says quietly.

  I shuffle away from GMT on the sofa. The smell of petunia oil is too strong. Big Ben holds out his hand for me to take but I shake my head. Ama takes a deep breath, like she’s about to push out of the blocks for the 100 metres.

  ‘Can you remember the phone number?’ Her voice is odd, like she’s reading the sentence out loud and she just learnt to read, each word an effort. At least she’s not shouting.

  ‘No. It wasn’t on my list. It was someone I didn’t know. I thought they might be a criminal.’

  Ama puts her head in her hands. Big Ben says, to the floor:

  ‘When did you get it?’

  ‘The 27th of February 2020. In double geography. Pete LMS snatched my phone from my hand and read out SOS L to the whole class. I thought he sent it.’ I start to cry.

  ‘Sent by a criminal AND someone in your class. Which one? Can’t be both.’

  Ama’s walking round the room now, going round and round in circles. I wish she’d sit down, she’s making me dizzy.

  ‘Impossible is nothing,’ says GMT. That’s on a poster of Muhammed Ali, a boxer-poet, on the wall of our athletics club. ‘Coulda been both.’

  ‘Then there would have been two texts, not one,’ says Big Ben.

  ‘I meant the person in your class coulda been a criminal,’ says GMT.

  ‘Pete LMS? He’s too young. But he IS a bully,’ I say.

  ‘MC2 was a criminal at 12,’ says Big Ben, and GMT rolls her eyes clockwise 360°. I think she’s in love with MC2.

  ‘MC’s no more a criminal than my cat.’

  I imagine a burglar dressed as a cat with a long black tail, leaping through time, stealing watches. A cat burglar.

  Ama’s still walking round the room. Her eyes are shiny with damp and her cheeks are wet.

  ‘Kwesi’s missing and you’re talking bullies and crims. Wake up, Leaps!’

  But we’re not asleep. I wish I WAS asleep, the cover pulled over my head, the world disappeared.

  The room’s gone quiet again. You can hear the
weather trying to get in through the windows. Ama stops pacing, then starts again. Big Ben looks out the window.

  ‘What date was it sent?’

  ‘Sent Tue 3 Mar 2048. 23:00.’ I’m replaying the image of the text in my head.

  ‘Two days’ time,’ says Big Ben. ‘It hasn’t happened yet.’

  ‘Yes, it HAS. I got the text last Thursday.’

  ‘Sent from the future,’ says Big Ben. ‘So it’s not fixed. It’s a Predictive. Only the text is fixed.’

  It’s GMT’s turn to get up and walk round the room. Except she doesn’t walk in a circle, she walks up and down. At some stage, she and Ama will crash into each other. She talks as she walks.

  ‘We got time. We got the power to change it. I’ll tell MC. You just gotta be prepped, Elle. You’ll be cool.’

  ‘Two days,’ says Big Ben. ‘And six hours.’

  ‘To save my brother,’ says Ama.

  She’s convinced Kwesi sent the text. I’m not so sure but I don’t say anything. Now’s the wrong time to speak. But just now was definitely the RIGHT time to speak. SOS L was a storm in my head and now I’ve let it out, like releasing the tightest cornrow into the biggest, yellowest, sunniest afro ever. I received a Predictive and Predictives don’t lie. SOS L is going to happen and it’s going to happen on my TwentyTwenty. I don’t know how but I do know when.

  I’m ready.

  Like on the starting line for the 100 metres. You kneel on the track and settle into your blocks. You rise when they say ‘set’, but you have to wait for the gun. Sometimes they make you pause for ever but jump the gun and you’re out. I could leap two days ahead, I feel so ready. But no. I must wait. You have to wait for the nanosecond the gun goes off and the trick is, when you hear the gun, to run like a bullet. Like it’s life and death.

  Chapter 13:00

  RITE OF PASSAGE

  I know what’s going to happen tonight. Storytelling. I LOVE the pattern of stories: you start with a problem and you have to solve it before the end. Bob Beamon’s story started with him being born and his mother dying and no one wanting to claim him in the hospital. He had a hard life because he was black and poor and couldn’t read. But 8 metres 90 changed his life. It didn’t happen straight away. It took time. He said if you don’t succeed the first time, you have to try again and again, until you get it correct.

  The most important thing about a story is WHEN it happens. When Bob Beamon did his jump, it had to be that exact moment otherwise he could have done a foul or gone from 0 to 10 and been disqualified from the Olympics for swearing, or jumped 8 metres 50. Instead he jumped ahead in time because no one jumped that far for 23 years. That’s why Bob Beamon’s an honorary Leapling.

  Tonight, we’re doing storytelling by the campfire with the criminal MC2 who speaks in rhyme. I don’t know why he’s called it Twice Upon a Time instead of Once Upon a Time. He does like speaking in riddles.

  There’s a minor Oops. The session’s being run by MC2 AND Le Temps. Le Temps says he has to be here in case one of us Leapers decides to take off into the future on a whim and besides, it’s his job to look after the fire. He mumbles something about Health and Safety and rolls his eyes clockwise 360°. I don’t think he likes Health and Safety very much. He prefers Death and Danger.

  He takes us to a clearing in the woods. Mrs C Eckler comes too. I’m surprised to see her here because I thought she’d still be doing her meditating, which is taking a deep breath like you’re going to run the 100 metres and humming ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. We haven’t been to this part of the woods before. When we get there, Noon says one word:

  ‘Beautiful.’

  All the trees have been planted in a circle and carved into chairs so we can sit down as an audience. The trees have lots of rings on the bark. That means they’re old. You can tell the age of a tree by the number of rings. I look at the tree opposite more closely. It can’t be. A symbol. Unmistakeable. . The infinity sign. The sign of MC2’s tattoo. And it isn’t just one tree that has it. It’s three!

  We sit in a circle like we’re going to leap but we don’t hold hands. The fire is in the middle and it’s not raining. This is fun. I like the smell of the smoke and the spitting noise the fire makes when you put logs on it. Not that we’re allowed to put anything on the fire. Le Temps does that.

  At 7 p.m. exactly, MC2 appears at the edge of the circle. He’s wearing the same outfit he wore to our school, the top and jeans with writing on.

  ‘Greetings to The Round,’ he says.

  He leads a voice warm-up. We have to say our names, then everyone claps the rhythm of the name. When I say Elle Bíbi-Imbelé Ifíè, some people get it wrong.

  Then he says he’s going to drop a rhyme about storytelling. When he was in school, everyone said he had no imagination. But he thinks he’s got the best imagination of all.

  ‘Cos I had the A the D the H and the D, peeps made fun of me. Had to magic a better world. Had to write my own story.’

  Big Ben puts up his hand.

  ‘What if you can’t write but you liked writing numbers?’

  ‘It don’t matter,’ says MC2, ‘whether it’s words, numbers, pictures, symbols. x+y=z. Beginning, middle, end. Whether it’s writ or spit, it’s still lit. Literature hatched on the lip. Story’s about sequence. Chronology. Repetition.’

  I put up my hand. ‘Is that why you called it Twice Upon a Time?’

  ‘Yeah. The best stories got echoes, chimes, doubles. Leaps an’ Annuals like that spit.’

  We all look at Mrs C Eckler, wondering how she’s going to react. But she’s just staring at MC2 like she’s hypnotised. It’s OK for MC2 to swear because he’s a tutor but we’re not allowed, even though it’s outside school. Le Temps is nodding his head like he likes the swearing. MC2 disappears, appears on the spot.

  ‘Rite o’ Passage,’ he says, ‘is how the best tales hang. Most of you just gone 2-leaps to 3-leaps. Some just done your first fast-forward in the deep blue. When you do something big you ain’t done before, that’s Rite o’ Passage.’

  Big Ben puts up his hand again.

  ‘What if you can’t write?’

  He thinks MC2 said Write a Passage, like in school where Big Ben has an assistant to write the words down. But a Rite of Passage is like in Kenya when boys have to wrestle a lion to the ground to prove they’re a man and not a boy any more. I don’t know what the girls have to do but I’m glad I’m not a boy in Kenya. The lion would win.

  ‘Nothin’ to do with writing, Ben. I’m talking R I T E. Something you do to show you’ve learnt something hard, risen to the challenge, grown up.’ He seems to double in size. ‘Gimme a fairytale an’ I’ll drop a freestyle.’

  We all go quiet till we all speak at once: Babes in the Wood, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel. I picture them written one on top of the other. It looks a mess.

  ‘OK, gimme a split,’ he says, closing his eyes tight like clenched fists. ‘Listen up, peeps! Twice ’pon a time, the megamix.’

  ‘Leap in The Round an’ you’ll never be seasick,

  don’t lose your hood or your hat for the scenic,

  paint the trees red an’ you’ll end up anaemic;

  stay on the path, face the wolf and defeat it,

  sunny day night, don’t drop bread, birds will eat it,

  witch wants you fat, it’s a fact, don’t delete it;

  house made of toffee and pear drops and d-mix,

  mouth of the oven flared up like a phoenix,

  the fee-fi-foe . . .’

  ‘Bravo!’ says Le Temps, clapping with his huge hands. ‘Pure genius! Give him a round of applause; he deserves it.’

  We do as we’re told. But I don’t like MC2’s poem because it mixed up lots of fairy tales. Maybe megamix means you mix up lots of stories, pile them up one on top of the other till they look a mess. And there was no end! He didn’t tell us about Jack and the Beanstalk. And we never found out what happened to Hansel and Gretel. In the original version, th
e witch fattens up Hansel to roast him but Hansel pretends he’s still thin, so when the witch opens the oven to roast GRETEL, Gretel puts the witch in the oven instead. I don’t think Ama liked the poem much either. When everyone else is clapping, she has her hands stuck together like she’s praying.

  Le Temps helps us roast marshmallows by the fire. It doesn’t take very long and some of them go gooey. There are pink ones and white ones. Mrs C Eckler offers me the white ones, which are burnt on the outside and runny in the middle but they taste good. I have six! Then Mrs C Eckler brings us mugs of hot milk.

  After that, MC2 asks us to take an object out of our bags. I take out my white afro comb. Lots of people take out their Chronophones but MC2 says they should all be different objects to make the story work. I thought Big Ben would take out his new stopwatch but he takes out a white bread roll with meat in from the night before. He looks like he’s going to eat it and I tell him not to. It might make him sick or die.

  The game is to tell a group story. We each have to say a sentence in the story, including the object we took out of our bag. MC2 has a pen and he begins:

  ‘Once upon a time, a boy wrote a message on a tree.’

  Lots of pupils find it difficult and say sentences that don’t make sense to the story. They all manage to include their objects, though. I’m pleased with my sentence, which is:

  ‘His afro comb was white as a tomb.’

  I’m proud because comb and tomb is an eye rhyme and MC2 high-fives me.

  ‘Maestro, Elle!’

  Once the game’s finished, Le Temps takes Big Ben’s roll and throws it on the fire for Health and Safety reasons.

  ‘Hope you haven’t got any more of those in your schoolbag,’ he says. ‘We don’t want you getting ill.’

  Big Ben doesn’t answer, which either means he doesn’t want to talk to Le Temps because he doesn’t like him or he DOES have more in his bag but isn’t going to lie. Or both.

  Back in our chalet, Ama’s pacing the bedroom. GMT’s already in bed. Noon’s still out – I think she prefers being outside to in. She’s fallen in love with The Round. Maybe she likes the trees with the infinity symbols on them. Ama’s forehead is so scrunched up she looks like somebody else. I don’t like her looking like an old person when she’s 14. I want to look away but I keep glancing at her sideways.