I stopped, knowing I had omitted to include the largest of all the tragedies I had created in my imagined nightmare world.
‘Why did I think that you had been killed?’
He was quiet for a very long time. So long in fact that I thought he wasn’t going to reply at all.
‘Perhaps your real life was, or rather is, your perfect reality. You were already living it. So you manufactured something that was the exact opposite. And as for me being…’ he hesitated before saying the word, ‘dead. Maybe that’s because I haven’t been a part of your life for quite some time.’ His voice was full of sadness. ‘We grew apart; we hadn’t seen each other for a very long time. Perhaps it was more symbolic of the death of our friendship?’
Or perhaps it was more than that, I thought. Perhaps my subconscious mind had realised something that the rest of me had refused to acknowledge. That a life without Jimmy was like a living death and suffering through it was the worst sort of hell I could ever imagine.
The plates had been cleared, and the wine we had drunk had effectively taken the edge off the anxiety that had threaten to overwhelm me when we’d left the magazine offices. Jimmy too, seemed to have allowed the alcohol to relax his guard. I didn’t know if he was aware of his hand absently playing with mine as we spoke. But the electric charge I felt as his fingers entwined and circled about my own was a real and physical thing. His hand and mine must have been linked together a thousand times before in our lifetime. Why was his touch only now able to ignite my flesh? Why was I suddenly overcome by these feelings; why now, when I belonged to another man?
‘So tell me, Rachel. Now that we think we have sorted out the mystery, what explanation had you come up with to explain away your dual past?’
I plucked a breadstick from the container on the table and began to twist it, baton-style, between my fingers.
‘Nothing really. Nothing that made much sense.’
The stick rolled and twirled; I kept my eyes upon it, knowing he would probe further.
‘Come on then, tell me what you had figured out.’
I rolled the stick back and forth between my thumb and forefinger, so fast I could feel the generated heat.
‘It’s all a little silly, really.’
‘I promise I won’t laugh.’
The breadstick rolled faster.
‘I thought that something had happened on the night of the accident. Something to do with time. I thought that reality had…’ I hesitated; this was sounding really stupid now I was saying it out loud. ‘That reality had somehow split in two.’
There was a snap, as the fragile breadstick broke at that precise moment into two pieces. I didn’t dare look at Jimmy to see his reaction. He’d spent the whole of the evening patiently pointing out that I was not, in fact, insane, and I had a feeling that my own theory of what had occurred was going to get him doubting me all over again.
‘Split in two?’ I couldn’t tell from his tone if he was incredulous or horrified at the idea.
‘Yes, you know, as though my life, all our lives, had somehow… fractured… at the moment of the accident.’
‘Fractured?’
‘Uh-huh. And in one life we were all OK, and everything continued as it should have. But in the other… it was the exact opposite. I was maimed, and everything was ruined from that moment on. And you, well, you…’
‘Died.’
That one word gave it away. I looked up and saw the agony he had been in to suppress his hilarity at my theory. I threw both the breadstick pieces at him as he burst out in laughter so hearty that half the other diners turned to look at us in amazement.
‘Shut up,’ I hissed, acutely embarrassed at the attention he was drawing upon us. ‘It was only a theory.’
Eventually, when the tears had stopped rolling down his cheeks, he managed to control himself long enough to say, as though in dire warning: ‘And that’s what happens when you spend your entire youth reading nothing but Stephen King novels!’
There was a tension in the car that couldn’t be ignored. It sat between us like a third passenger all the way from London to Great Bishopsford. In the end we both abandoned conversation, preferring instead to pretend that the silence we were travelling in was companionable, rather than strained and awkward. But we were just fooling ourselves. For the first time in… well, actually in for ever… I couldn’t speak freely or easily with Jimmy. If I’d have known that my actions would tear so deeply into our friendship I would never have done or said anything. But that wisdom only came with the benefit of hindsight.
And it had all been going so well. How did everything get ruined in such a short period of time?