The Last Beginning Read online

  From: Clove

  To: Ella

  Subject: I’M GOING OUT OF MY MIND

  Date: 4 July 2058 22:06:14 GMT

  Ella,

  I miss you a lot and I wish you were here so I could listen to your unnervingly well-thought-out ideas for perfect murders and snuggle with you under the duvet.

  You’re always so good at calming me down when I get a bit angry at everyone and everything. Like today. Without you here I feel like I’m going to snap everyone’s heads off just for existing.

  I walked past someone wearing your perfume today at uni and almost started crying. Every time I have a class in the physics lecture theatre where I first saw you (two years ago, can you believe it?!) I remember all that eyeliner you were wearing – way too thick because you hadn’t got the hang of it yet.

  St Andrews is full of you, everywhere, but you’re not here. This long-distance thing sucks. Please fix the known laws of time and space so we can make out again sooner.

  Clove

  P.S. I like you a lot too.

  File note: Email from CLOVE SUTCLIFFE to ELENORE WALKER, sent on 4 July 2058

  ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND 2056

  In the afternoon Clove got into a fight with one of the undergraduates. Clove knew instinctively that Tom and Jen would not be impressed when they found out about it.

  She tried to hide in her bedroom after work, but Tom called her downstairs so they could “talk”. Taking her anger out on the stairs, Clove stomped down them and then swung into the living room with a thump of her fist on the door frame. Her parents watched her with identically unhappy expressions.

  Clove was practically jumping with nervous energy: her whole body was alight with twitches. She nearly upset her chair with her flailing limbs when she sat down. “What do you want?” she said, moodily.

  “Clove,” Tom said in his “Or Else” voice, “I want you to go and drink a glass of water and calm down. Then we’re going to talk.”

  Clove rolled her eyes with so much emphasis her whole head tilted towards the ceiling. His comment had annoyed her even more because she realized he was right. She did need to calm down. She cleared her throat and stood up with as much dignity as she could muster.

  Once in the kitchen, she poured a glass of water. She couldn’t stop hopping up and down on the spot. It felt like all of her emotions were flowing through her nerve endings, firing up and releasing kinetic energy that she couldn’t control.

  She drank the water in one long, ice-cold gulp and then winced, feeling it on the back of her teeth. She’d forgotten to turn on the light, so she watched her reflection in the window, staring until her pupils were almost completely dilated in the dark room. Eventually she felt steady enough to behave normally, and went back into the living room.

  Her parents exchanged another glance. It had always annoyed her how they used their “Couple Bond” like some sort of superpower to win arguments against her. Was that how you knew you had found The One, when you could have a whole conversation with them, without saying a word?

  “I got an email from a very upset student today, Clove,” Jen said, flourishing her watch in the air as if it were a rather underwhelming bullfighter’s cape. “What’s going on?”

  “I got in an argument.”

  Tom sighed heavily. He wasn’t very good at emotional conversations − he was better at distractions. When she’d come out as gay, he’d just hugged her tightly and then bought her a rainbow strap for her watch. “What about?” he asked now.

  “Him being an idiot! I was eating lunch in the common room when he started going through a homework problem on the whiteboard with his friend. He was getting it totally wrong, so I just … I just pointed out his mistakes to him! That’s all! And he told me to stop interrupting because I was ‘still a kid’ and didn’t know what I was talking about!”

  “Well – that was very rude of him,” Jen said. “But it says here that you said, ‘I don’t know which is more embarrassing, your ignorance or your algebra.’”

  Clove smirked at the floor, unrepentant. “Well, it’s true. Mum, he was talking about quantum mechanics and he refused to even mention the Many-Worlds Interpretation. He said it was pure science fiction! He doesn’t know anything and he refused to admit his ignorance. And he’s a fourth year!” Clove took a deep breath. She was getting riled up. She tried to stop herself from emphasizing quite so dramatically.

  “Not everyone has parents who are physics professors, you know,” Jen berated her. She folded her arms in a manner that expressed perfectly how completely unimpressed she was with Clove’s behaviour.

  “I bet he thinks Schrödinger’s cat is a real cat,” Clove added sulkily, hoping his complete inadequacy would persuade her parents to stop being cross with her. It didn’t work.

  “Clove, you can’t keep doing this,” Tom said. “You can’t take your problems out on other people.”

  “I know you are frustrated about Meg,” Jen added. “But that’s no reason to abuse the students. That poor boy can’t have known what hit him.”

  Clove felt angry suddenly. At her mother, for assuming Meg was the only thing Clove cared about; at Meg, for being the only thing Clove cared about; at everyone, for not living up to her expectations.

  “No! No, this isn’t about Meg. This is about me. I’m just— I don’t know.”

  “We want to help,” Tom said.

  “If you really want to help, you’ll let me use your time machine to stop me ever kissing Meg and destroying my entire life.”

  “Clove.” Jen sighed. “Look, maybe you should talk to Meg.”

  “Maybe…” Clove agreed sullenly. She was never going to talk to Meg ever again.

  “I know it’s hard right now,” Tom said. “You’ve got a lot to deal with, and it’s difficult to know how to handle it. Being rejected hurts, especially the first time. I was a teenager once. I know how awful everything feels, like the world’s going to end. But it isn’t. It’s going to get better, darlin’.”

  “Right.” Was he saying that this was her fault? “So the next time I find out I’m adopted, it’ll be easier?”

  “You know what I mean. I was talking about Meg.” Tom reached out to run a hand across her hair.

  He meant that she was handling this wrong, because she was a “hormonal teenager”. He meant that she needed to calm down and control herself. Clove pulled away. “I don’t want to talk about this any more.”

  Tom and Jen exchanged a glance. “Well, if you won’t talk to us, we think you should go to therapy,” Tom said bluntly. “You’re clearly struggling with the adoption, and this Meg thing is just a smokescreen.”

  “Tom!” Jen exclaimed. “That’s not how we… Don’t put it like that.” To Clove, she said, “Sweetheart, we know it might sound hard, but plenty of people have counsellors to help them through difficult times. We want to be there for you as much as we can, but there are professionals who’ll understand what you’re going—”

  “What? No! I’m not going to a shrink!” Clove said, horrified.

  How could they think that she needed therapy? She was fine. Nothing was wrong. They didn’t understand her. They didn’t get what she was going through. This wasn’t about the adoption. This wasn’t about Meg. This was just— She didn’t know what it was.

  “We think it’s for the best, love. You won’t talk to us—”

  “I’ve got nothing to say! Why can’t you just leave me alone, Jen?”

  Jen swayed backwards like she’d been slapped.

  “Mum,” Clove corrected quickly. “Mum. Why can’t you just leave me alone, Mum?”

  Jen had turned away, and Clove was horrified to see that she was crying. The sight of it crawled somewhere deep inside her chest and started tearing at her insides.

  “Mum. I’m sorry, Mum. I didn’t mean it.”

  Now Clove was crying, again, and Jen was curled in on herself as if she was in physical pain. Tom wrapped a hand
around Jen’s shoulders. Jen turned her face into him, away from Clove.

  “Clove, you can’t take this out on your mother,” Tom said.

  Clove looked at them, her parents, and didn’t know what to do.

  “I didn’t mean to—” she said, voice cracking. “I—”

  “You need to talk to someone about this, and if you can’t talk to us, then it will have to be a therapist.”

  “What I need,” Clove burst out, angry again, “is my real parents back − the ones you left for dead!”

  The only sound that followed her words was the clock ticking, louder than it had any right to do. When Tom spoke, it was in a hard voice she’d never heard before. “Go to your room.”

  She ran upstairs in tears.

  * * *

  Friday was Clove’s last day of work experience. She was sad to be leaving, despite everything that was happening. She had enjoyed her time at the university, not only because the campus seemed to be entirely filled with complete babes. There was one girl in particular whom she kept seeing around. Clove would look up from the queue in a cafe at lunch to find her watching her, and it always made Clove’s heart skip a beat because she was gorgeous, all long violently curled hair and thick black eyeliner. But then the girl would turn away and not look back, and Clove’s pulse would settle in her chest.

  Clove was spending her last day shadowing one of the physics professors, who Clove was 86% certain was the teacher that Jen had kissed as a student. She was glad not to be working with either of her parents. Things had been strained between them since their arguement the night before.

  The professor was teaching the undergraduates, which meant that Clove got to listen to lectures about the time machine. This class was going to be learning about the possible commercial uses of time travel, and specifically how it could be useful in rescuing lives in disaster zones. During the lecture, though, all Clove could think about was her argument with Jen and Tom. She hadn’t meant to upset them. It was just all so difficult.

  The list of things Clove wasn’t letting herself think about – Meg, the adoption – was getting longer every day. Her heart panged.

  She tried to concentrate on the lecture, telling herself that she wasn’t thinking about Meg, who had been so disgusted by Clove’s kiss that she had cut off all contact with her. She wasn’t thinking about her parents, who had lied to her for years, never trusting her enough to tell her the truth. She definitely wasn’t thinking about how she didn’t really know who she was any more. She wasn’t thinking about any of that.

  She wasn’t.

  In the last lecture of the day, Clove burst into tears in front of a hall full of students. She had been helping the professor to project her watch screen onto the wall, so she could give a presentation. It should only have taken a few minutes to set up, but first the software needed updating, and then a plug-in crashed, and then the watch turned out to be low on battery. Clove could feel the students watching her – and to make it worse, that girl was in the audience, the cute eyeliner-wearing one − and this wasn’t even Clove’s job, why were they making her do this?

  Suddenly it was all too much. She found herself in tears.

  The professor blinked at her. “Oh no, why don’t you go on back to the office? I can sort this.”

  “But—” Clove said, frantically brushing tears off her face, as even more appeared.

  “Let me call your mum,” she said, not quite sure how to deal with a weeping sixteen year old.

  “She’s not my mum,” Clove said, and then let out another loud sob.

  “I’ll … I’ll call her anyway,” the professor said, and patted her gently on the shoulder.

  Keeping her head turned away from the class, Clove ducked out of the lecture theatre. The students were sitting in a terrible, horrified silence, which was somehow worse than laughter.

  I’m clever, Clove wanted to shout. She wasn’t just a stupid kid. She’d been waiting her whole life to come to the university. She was meant to be here. So why was this happening?

  She leant her head on the wall outside the hall, trying to stop the tears. She didn’t even know what she was crying about. What was wrong with her? She never used to be this crazy.

  The professor must have called Jen straight away, because she arrived only a few minutes later.

  “Clove,” she said. “Let’s get you home.”

  Clove followed her in silence.

  When they got home, Clove could tell Jen wanted to talk, but Clove didn’t feel ready, so she bolted upstairs to her room.

  CHAPTER 9

  From: Ella

  To: Clove

  Subject: The One with All the Emotions

  Date: 15 October 2058 16:17:07 GMT

  Clove,

  A girl in one of my classes started crying during an exam today, so I’ve been thinking all day about your work experience, when you broke down during that lecture. I know it was years ago now, but you looked so defeated and tired, and I just wanted to give you a huge hug, even though I didn’t know you then.

  I wanted to wrap you up and feed you hot chocolate and fancy pastries, and tell you that everything was going to be OK, and soon you’d have solved all your problems.

  I wish we’d met then, instead of when we did, so that I could have done.

  Ella xx

  P.S. I’ve been thinking about what my aesthetic would be, and I’ve decided it’s “cultured magical queen”. Before you say it: I am very cultured! I can speak Latin and everything? I don’t know why you’d say otherwise, Clove, I really don’t. I’m hurt.

  P.P.S I think yours would be “cantankerous lesbian superhero”, but I’m open to other suggestions before I make a final decision.

  P.P.P.S. Spart is “sassy trash sidekick” and we both know it.

  File note: Email from ELENORE WALKER to CLOVE SUTCLIFFE, received on 15 October 2058

  ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND, 2056

  When Clove got to her bedroom, there was a message waiting on her computer screen.

  > CLOVE, I need to speak with you as a matter of urgency.

  “How’s it going, then, Spart?” she burst out angrily. “Since you apparently can’t live without all of my attention, all of the time? I do have a life, you know.”

  > I must repeat my last message, which you ignored. Can you please confirm the birth dates of your parents KATHERINE FINCHLEY and MATTHEW GALLOWAY? I have detected multiple records that suggest a 95.6% probability of referencing your parents. However, logic suggests that this is not possible, as many of the records are outside of the expected time range. The earliest dates back to 1745.

  Clove’s anger deflated. She read the message twice, then restarted her computer and read it again.

  “What? What? Spart?” Clove flicked to the task manager to check that he was running properly. “Have you gone crazy with a lack of memory?”

  > I am absolutely certain that my results are accurate.

  “What kind of result is that? What are you even talking about?”

  > I have obtained images of your parents from records dating back to nearly 300 years before their birth.

  > There are multiple photographs that are undeniably of MATTHEW GALLOWAY and KATHERINE FINCHLEY.

  > You can check the Folios for yourself, if you wish to confirm this.

  “Can’t it just be their ancestors? Like my great-aunt and -uncle?”

  > The chances of DNA lines producing identical offspring repeatedly over such a long time period is almost nil.

  > The likelihood of them being born simultaneously, marrying each other, and having the same names in each case is even more improbable.

  She scrubbed her hands over her head. “What are you saying? That … it’s them? Like, they’re immortal or something?”

  > Immortality is one of several possible explanations. However, I have found multiple birth records, which suggests that it is unlikely.

  > All I know for certain
is that I would bet my favourite USB port that it’s really them.

  “I don’t— There’s absolutely no way I believe this!” she said, in exasperation. “This isn’t the answer!”

  > Determine the truth for yourself.

  Spart pulled up the Folios and opened the series of photos he had found. The first was of her parents as teenagers, at university. The next showed them in lab coats. They looked older than in the previous photo. Clove knew from the dates that this had to be her great-aunt and -uncle. They did look very similar to her parents, but were they so similar that they must be the same people? She didn’t believe it was possible.

  Then more images filled the screen, photo after photo. A young man and woman sitting on some sort of grassy knoll and squinting into the sun, holding hands. The date said 22 November 1963. The next photo was in black and white, but it showed the same man and woman posing by a huge piece of machinery, with a man who Clove recognized as Alan Turing. Clove knew her gay scientist icons, and that was Alan Turing. He had helped the Allies to win the Second World War by cracking the Germans’ Enigma code.

  In another, blurry photo, the pair were carrying a banner that read VOTES FOR WOMEN. They were part of a protest march, and surrounded by women wearing sashes and wide-brimmed hats.

  Then they appeared in a formal, posed photograph, taken under a tree. Behind them were rows of tents and a campfire ringed with lounging soldiers. This time the man and woman were dressed in shirts and waistcoats, and were holding onto pens and notebooks as if they were about to start taking notes. The woman’s hair was cropped short. She looked like a boy.

  Then there was an oil painting of them in red uniforms, standing behind a man with white hair and a bicorne hat. The caption said ADMIRAL NELSON AT THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR.

  In an ink sketch, they were firing a cannon from the fortifications of a castle. Their roughly sketched features were still identifiable as the couple from every other photo.

  The pictures were all of the same people. It was almost undeniable. Their outfits changed with each photo, covering a huge range of fashions, but the people stayed the same − and so did the way they gazed at each other, as if they couldn’t bear to look away.