I narrow my eyes. “That seems dramatic, even for you.”
“Of course people slept in your bed,” Artemis laughs brightly as I take a swig of my new wine. “It’s a room, not a bloody mausoleum. And you didn’t die, by the way, Cass. You got on a Megabus in a mega strop.”
My wine goes straight up the back of my nose.
I choke until I can swallow again.
“See.” Art beams at me, clearly delighted. “I can still make you laugh. That hasn’t changed, at least.”
“I wasn’t laughing,” I lie in irritation, wiping wine off my chin. “I just forgot I can’t breathe and swallow simultaneously because I’m not a dolphin.”
Now it’s Art’s turn to laugh loudly and chuck a coaster at my head.
When the noise fades, we look at our drinks.
“Did you think about me at all, Cass?” Art’s colors shift again. “Because I thought about you constantly. Everything reminded me of you. I still go into paint shops and collect all the color chips, just to bring them home for you.”
Pain flickers. “No, I didn’t think about you.”
“Oh.” She looks down and now there’s a translucent shade of jade. “Fair enough. Of course. What I did was truly awful. I understand.”
The width of her sadness knocks the wind out of me.
“That’s not true,” I say a lot more gently. “Of course I thought about you, but I had to try and...compartmentalize you. It was too painful not to. You know what I’m like, Art. It’s exactly like you said at the exhib—” Nope. That didn’t happen in this timeline. “I have to put everything in my head into Tupperware boxes, keep my feelings and my memories neat and tidy and stored away. I have to control when I access them. Otherwise...it’s just too much.”
She nods, and her sadness ebbs slightly. “You’re a human filing cabinet.”
“Yes,” I admit softly. “Although it doesn’t always work.”
Even now, I can feel the containers in me starting to rupture: everything threatening to spill everywhere. Too many emotions and memories. Too much mess. I can feel my brain responding by preparing to close down. Getting scared; ready to cut the pain away at the base. Because all this time, I allowed myself to believe that I was the victim and my sister was the villain—black and white, good and bad—but what if that was never true? What if she was just a drunk nineteen-year-old girl, screwing up? What if I made a decision in unbearable pain and heartbreak and didn’t know how to undo it? What if I became so rigid, so focused, so unyielding that I made a plan and couldn’t bring myself to change it?
What if the biggest mistake was actually mine?
And suddenly I understand why Athena felt the need to destroy Arachne’s tapestries in a fit of rage: anger is one of the simpler colors, and the truth in its complex entirety can be overwhelming.
“Ooooh!” Artemis hiccups. “Shall we get cheesy chips?”
“Art—” I begin, just as my phone starts ringing. I stare at it for a few seconds, but I’m unable to not answer it. If texts make my bag feel heavy, a phone call feels like its own gravitational force field.
“Cassandra,” someone says as I hit the right button after three attempts. “I can’t help but notice that you abruptly left our meeting and have not returned. Sophie says you’re unwell and had to leave. Is everything okay?”
I hold my phone away from my face and stare at it, momentarily stunned into silence. Admittedly, I think I’ve drunk two-thirds of a bottle of wine now, but I’m not sure I’m drunk enough to be hallucinating quite yet.
I put the phone back to my ear. “Barry?”
“Yes, Cassandra.”
Artemis mouths who is it?, so I mouth back my boss, I think and then stifle a hiccup against my hand.
“Hi, Barry. I had a...family emergency.” I glance at my little sister. “But thank you for asking if everything is okay, because people say how are you and the scripted reply is I’m fine, thank you, and how are you, and they say I’m fine, thank you or not bad, what about this weather we’re having and you’re not allowed to be honest because it’s this weird social interaction that’s a token question, not a real one, but now you’ve asked, Barry, I am not sure I’m okay at all.”
There’s a pause. “Cassandra, it’s lunchtime. Are you drunk?”
“Oh.” I look around the pub: everything glows and wobbles slightly. “Very.”
“Okay.” There’s a sigh. “Let’s have a chat tomorrow.”
I glance at my sister again.
“I’m not okay, Barry,” I continue, more firmly now. “And I don’t think I have been okay for quite a while. So I’d like to take a few days off while I work out what I need to be okay again, if that’s okay with you.” I hiccup. “I’m saying okay a lot, but I’m okay with that. Also, may I just add that I like bulldogs. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
Another pause, then Barry says: “Cassandra, take all the time you need.”
“Thank you,” I say in surprise. “Although, while we’re being candid, Barry, that’s exactly what I’ve already been doing.”
Beaming, I aim for the right button until the call ends. Maybe that’s all Barry needed too: the whole truth, instead of tiny dribbles of it.
“Hey.” Artemis is tipsily studying her palms. “Do you think sheep know they’re fluffy? They don’t have hands to feel their own fluff, right? Do you think they look at other sheep and say wow, I wish I was fluffy like him?”
I watch my sister for a few seconds: the tiny broken baby hairs around her hairline that she’s always had, since she was little. The dark freckles on the end of her faintly turned-up nose, exactly like every single summer holiday. The slightly pointed ears that give her an ethereal, graceful quality even as she’s burping loudly and at length, which is exactly what she’s just done.
Time is strange: it moves so quickly and so quietly that sometimes it feels like it hasn’t moved at all.
“It’s three minutes to one,” I announce, glancing at my watch.
“Oh.” Artemis visibly flattens. “Bollocks. That came around fast, didn’t it? I kind of wish I’d spent a little bit less time talking about sticking straws up my bum now.”
My nostrils flare. “Me and you both.”
My sister’s colors have shifted and bloomed into an orange panic now, and she glances around the pub, desperately looking for something to hold me here: as if she’s casting a net and hoping I’ll stay caught in it.
“Quiz machine!” Her eyes widen. “We could do a quiz machine! You love quizzes, Cass. Remember? Any opportunity to get something right and for other people to get it wrong and for you to win. It’s, like, your favorite thing in the world.”
She’s correct: it very much is.
“I said two hours. I’m afraid time is up.” Pointedly, I take off my watch and put it on the table between us. With my fingers, I gently pull out the stiff little gold stem on the side of it. Then, carefully, I wind it back two hours and click it back in again. There’s more than one way to time travel, after all. “So now it’s eleven o’clock again.”
Artemis hesitates, works out what it is I’m saying, then lights up; I feel her colors in all of me.
“Cheesy chips?”
“Yes,” I agree. “But only if you eat all the creepy ones.”
33
There are infinite things you can do with time.
You can save it, spend it, stitch it, kill it.
You can beat it, steal it and watch it fly.
You can do time and set it; you can waste it and keep it; it can be good or bad, on your side or against you. You can have a whale of it; be in the nick of it or behind it; you can have it on your hands.
Memories are time travel, and so are regrets, hopes and daydreams. When we die, the people we love carry us forward into it. So if we’re all just moving forward and backward, living all the times at once—if time is an arbitrary concept that we can bend to our will—then what does 11:00 p.m. last orders mean, anyway?
If time belongs to all of us, how can you possibly close it?
And it’s saying this kind of drunk shit that gets both me and Artemis thrown out of the pub.
“Have you ever wondered,” Art hiccups as I rummage through my bag, “what the innards of a toilet roll are called? Like, it’s not a toilet roll anymore. Because the bit that rolls is gone. But it doesn’t have its own name, right? Which is tragic, because it works so hard and unites so many of us.”
“Thassa vey, very good point,” I agree, pulling out my key card and holding it up to the square thing with the lights. “In old Greece, they had ceramic pieces called possois, and they scraped their poo off with that instead.”
I slap the key card again: it hits the side of the door.
We’re both completely hammered, despite my insistence on sensible breaks for some soft drinks and food. I guess that’s what happens when you pretend it’s lunchtime in a pub for fourteen straight hours: drunk carnage.
“Amazing,” Artemis burps enthusiastically. “How sustainable. How environmental. Ahead of their time, those classicals were.”
Focusing, I slap the card: a light finally goes green and the door clicks.